Dhalgren

VII: The Anathёmata: a plague journal

[We do not know who typed this transcript, nor if every relevant entry was included, nor, indeed, the criteria for relevance. Previous publication of Brass Orchids possibly weighted the decision not to include their various drafts here. (The fate of the second collection we can only surmise.) Generous enough with alternate words, marks of omission and correction, the transcriber still leaves his accuracy in question: Nowhere in the transcript is there a formal key.]

it into her shoulder and tore /it/ out.

Dragon Lady let go all her breath in some way still not a scream. Nightmare danced back across the kitchen twisting his orchid, (jerking a little); as though/I think I think he was trying to under stand what he'd done. Dragon Lady threw herself at him, cutting for his face and kicking. (I kept thinking Thinking: There's an art to these Weapons I don't begin to understand.)

He fought himself away, bleeding from the jaw and neck.

She flung herself again. I thought she was trying to was going to /would/ be impale[d].

Her white jeans were bloody to the knee. A good deal of the blood was his.

Copperhead, like a in delayed reaction, said, "Hey…" with a voice I'd never heard: he was scared to death.

Raven, Thruppence, and D-t hit the doorway [and] one another/ anothe[r], peering, over each one another's shoulders. (Thinking:! used to break up Dollar's scuffles, but I would no more get into this than chop off my thumb.)

Nightmare flailed backward out the screen door, H his forearm/ going/ making a cracked the on the jamb.

Everybody poured after them — somebody knocked something off the sink. I heard a garbage bag fall and tear under someone's boots. Two of the little boys (Woodard and Stevie) were holding hands and butting their shoulders against each other, Rose, the youngest (seven?), and brightest girl, was right up there up trying to see with everybody else. She went through the door with me.

Horsing around in the yard with Nightmare, Raven, Filament, and Glass, tripped and scratched my calf on the edge of the steps. Later, Lanya came into the loft and saw me. "Hey," she said. "You should put something on that. Don't play with it that way. You've practically rubbed it raw. You don't want it to get infected."

Dragon [Lady] was snappinged her own bladed fist back and forth as though her arm were a whip. (Her elbow dripped. Nightmare spun away: gravel chattered against the bottom step. Drops splatted the ground.

The sky gleamed dull as zinc.

I looked up the alley — thinking: You can't /even/ see the end, when Thirteen came hurrying out of the mist. He stopped twenty feet away, Smokey and Lady of Spain behind collided with him.

Dragon Lady staggered, swayed — I thought she'd tripped.

But she shook her head, hard, gave a tiny cry, turned; and fled down up the street.

Smokey collided with Thirteen. Lady of Spain stepped back.

Nightmare stood, panting, both arms going wide and around, getting back his breath.

Among his chains, the optical one caught light. At first I thought it was lengthening… Broken, it slipped across his stomach and tinkled coiled made a tinkling/puddle between his feet/ beside his boot /against his boot where the sole had pulled off the upper. Not seeing, he lurched away. The chain slipped half over the curb.

Thirteen caught his arm him, "You're all right…?" and staggered with him.

Behind me the door creaked; two people had gone back in.

"You come on with me," Thirteen said, "now you just come on."

Back in the living room, California was looking at the wall by the door. He'd pulled all his hair in front of his shoulder and was sort of hanging on it "Jesus Christ," he said. "Will you look at that. I mean, Jesus Christ That's where she splattered when she went through." He started to touch one of the dime-sized spots, already dried brown dry, but shook his went back to hanging on his hair. "/I mean,/Jesus."

Raven, Copperhead; and Cathedral came in frowning at the constellations of her blood, but kept on going

"You see the way she went at that motherfucker," Pepper said somewhere out in the hall. "I thought she was gonna kill him. I wouldn't blame her, man. I wouldn't blame her one bit the way that motherfucker done. Did you see the way they were going after each other, man? I never seen anything like that before in my life. I really thought we was gonna have chopped meat for dinner the way he lit into her with those that orchid, man, I really thought…"

I went back [into] the kitchen.

Rose was looking out the screening, a brown fist up beside her face chin. I went up behind her and looked too. The other four children were outside.

Sammy was standing at the place where the curb cracked away into the street. With the toe of his sneaker, he touched the coil of Nightmare's chain.

Stevie, who'was sitting on the steps, stood up.

Sammy started to pick up the chain.

Stevie said, "Don't you touch that, nigger!"

Marceline laughed, but I don't think at that.

Sammy looked up and looked embarrassed, went to pick up a board lying out in the street, and played by himself.

I touched Rose on the shoulder and she jumped.

"Don't you want to play with the other kids outside?"

She just blinked. (Somebody should do something about the black spade confusion of her hair — cut it short, I guess.) Then She went out and sat on the steps as far away from the others as she could get

Only Stevie and Marceline are really friends. Woodard (who is sort of mustard colored, both his skin and his wooly top) merely hangs around them.

I feel sorry for them all.

Later that evening, I using a piece of pine plank for a writing hoard, I /went out to/ sitting on the steps /and/ was working on playing in my a poem. I had been there perhaps two hours when I noticed the chain /was/ had been removed gone.

I sat a few minutes more. Then I went inside.

Just after Denny went out this morning, Lanya brought hack my notebook — this one. The first thing I did was look inside the front cover. "What about the new poems?" I asked.

"Since they're all on loose sheets I decided I'd keep them in my desk drawer. If you want them…?"

"No," I told her. "That8['?]s probably better. They'd just fall out."

"Did you see the article /in the Times/ about you and the children?" [s]he asked when we went out into the back yard.

"No," I said.

So she told me.

It made me feel strange.

Once we went back /up/ into /into the loft/ to get something. She found a piece of paper down tween /between/ the wall and the mattress. "Are you finished with this one?"

I looked at it. "I guess so. It isn't complete, really. But I'm not interested in it any more."

"I'll just take it back to my place and keep it with the others," and she put it in her [-?] shirt pocket; then she jumped down, cried out when [she?] landed, "Owwww!"

I thought she'd twisted her ankle.

But it wasn't serious.

We went into the kitchen; she looked into the coffee pail on the stove and frowned at the mess.

D-t came in with a paper. "Hey, man, that's something, huh?" He had it folded back to the article.

It was on page three.

"What I want to know," Lanya said, looking through the living room door at Stevie and Woodard (Tarzan was trying to ride them across the floor like a horsie), "is what you're going to do with them."

I was leaning against I was leaning against the refrigerator door with my fingers hooked arounding at the rubber flange that goes around the inside of the door. "It doesn't even mention George." I was pullinged. "It makes it sound like I saved them all by myself. It was George's God-damn idea. I was just along—"

Rose walked in, banging the screen, and stared at Lanya on her way to the next room. Lanya smiled: Rose didn't and kept walking. At the doorway she stopped, looked at Tarzan and the boys, sighed, turned around, went back—bang! — onto the front steps.

Sammy was playing in the middle of the street and did not look at her.

D-t moved the junk aside on the table (Marceline in the room with Tarzan was calling out, "Let me! Let me…! Come on, let me!") and sat on the up-ended milk crate to read the article to us. The crate was so low the table top hit him just below the tit. /He read the part about: "…/ during the holocaust, broke into a wooden frame house adjoining a grocery store already in flames and let out five youngsters trapped in the second floor rear bedroom. It is reported the bedroom door had been clumsily secured by the back of a chair beneath the door knob—"

"It wasn't a chair," I said. "Somebody had taken a fucking piano bench and turned it on its end. The God-damn music had fallen out all over the hall rug. Why. doesn't it mention George?"

"Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing right there Watching you," D-t said.

I said' "There wasn't anybody," I said. A piece of rubber pulled free, only I dropped it and couldn't see where it had fallen between the refrigerator and the sink. "Just George."

"The[n] how did they know to write about it?" Lanya asked.

"I don't know," I said. "George actually got the door open. All I did was yank at the legs. The bench came open and all the music fell out On the rug. The top of the bench was still jammed up in there."

"Maybe George met a reporter later that evening," Lanya said. "He could have told the papers, Kid."

"…'The children are reported to be safe, but we do not know'…"

"Of course it doesn't sound like George to cut himself out." Lanya sighed and made a funny movement with her hand, grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. "Oh, Kid…"

Inside Tarzan neighed loudly and Woodard's hiccuppy laugh shrilled above it, covered in turn by Marceline's squeal.

"The real question—" Lanya looked up—"is what are you going to do with them. Are you going to keep them here[?]"

"You're out of your fucking head—" I said.

D-t said, "The guys like them—"

"How many days ago was it?" I said. "How many days ago, Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other? Look!" I went to the living room door. "There's blood all over the fucking God-damn wall—!"

Fist against his chin, Stevie was looking at me.

Tarzan had sat back on his heels and, concertedly, wasn't.

"Ride me!" Marceline said. "You rode Woodard before. Now you ride me!"

"Yeah," Woodard said. "You ride her now."

I stepped back into the kitchen.

"What are you going to do with them?"

I told her, "I don't know."

Tarzan neighed again.

True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual-

This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I'd gone to bed, they'd been laid out neatly on Raven's sleeping bag he'd opened up full for them by the couch:

Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers threat through a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out.shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead's back. who For some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.

I got them the kids up noisily (when we were ready to leave, Copperhead had rolled the bag around himself, head out one end, boots out the other, and wedged under the couch; there was a tuft of stuffing caught on his beard) and took them to the school.

I pushed the door open and herded them inside. Lanya was doing something with the tape-recorder and looked up, more startled than I'd thought she'd be.

"Nobody else here, yet?" I asked.

"Christ, you surprised me." She pushed the fast (forward? reverse?) button. Things clacked, crackled, and spun.

"I brought the kids."

Rose went and immediately sat on a chair in the corner. Woodard wandered toward the table.

Marceline said to Stevie, "You cut that out," only I wasn't sure /at/ what [he'd done].

"The other kids will be in soon," Lanya said.

I said: "Good. What you have to do is when the parents come for the kids in the afternoon, you have to farm these here out to them."

Lanya stood up fully and faced me. "God damn!"

"I can't keep them," I said. "I told you that."

She pulled her lips thin and looked angry.

I was surprised that I had been expecting her to be just that way about it.

"What am I going to do with — Yeah, I know what you said."

Stevie said sharply: "You better keep your hands off that, nigger!"

Woodard turned off the from the tape recorder, holding a spool of tape gingerly, blinking apple green eyes below his brush of mustard wool. He smiled uncertainly.

Rose began to cry. The knuckles of her fist pressed together. Her chin bobbed, sobbing, and tears tracked from the inner and outer corners of both eyes.

Sammy, move/ standing by the far wall, moved/turned/ the toe of his sneaker over/on/ the floor and blinked.

too dark to see.

So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside — and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing, and everybody was pouring in to see what was going on: "Night run!" I told them. "We're gonna make a night run!" Which we did — to the building with the stained glass windows (the lions of the city, a particolored flicker from our lights) with Lanya along, mouse quiet; and there was a funny almost-fight with three men on the street. But after they got as nasty as they dared, I guess it struck them how stpud [stupid?] they were being; a couple of times they got pushed into a wall, though.

At the nest, Denny filled up a bottle from the pail on the stove; I took it on the porch and wrote some more.

Lanya came to squat behind me, hands on my Shoulders, cheek on my cheek. ["]You're really up/ going/ aren't you? Maybe staying at my place wasn't such a bad idea?"

I heard Denny say: "He's asleep."

I opened one eye against my arm. The other stared With the other I could see the top of the doorway. Then her Then steps below / and somebody moving something to get by / were Lanya['s] I lay waiting for the circle of her hair to dawn at the loft's edge.

"You aren't sleeping." She grinned and came on over. "I got all the kids stored away."

"Good," I said. "Why were you so pissed off at me when I brought them in that morning?"

"What?"

I raised my head out of my arm and asked again.

"Oh." She turned around on the edge and slid her butt against my side. "I'm just lazy — almost, but not quite, as lazy as you. And I don't like imposing on people." She put her hand in the sleeve hole of my vest. "Besides, I thought you should have kept them." Her fingers, cool, were touched the chain.

"You did?"

She nodded.

That upset me. "I really misunderstood you."

"I know you did. I read what you wrote I said about it in the kitchen / about / when D-t brought in the article."

"And that's not what you said at all, huh?"

"What I said was: What are you going to do about them? What arrangements were you going to make about getting them over to the school, if any; getting a couple of changes of clothes for them; maybe a permanent mattress that was theirs — things like that."

"You really think they'd be better off here?"

"Where you found them, somebody was trying to burn them alive. I could always pack them off with the Richards—"

"What about some of the black families of the kids you've got?"

"You have a very funny picture of this city," she said. "There aren't any black families here. Some of my kids hang around the—

"It was a good idea."

She said, sweetly: "I was fucking pissed, you know, when Madame Brown told me you'd split. But when I got here and everybody said you were writing, it was okay." She picked up the sheaf of blue paper. "I'm going to steal these away to read. I'll bring them back in twenty minutes. All right?"

"Yeah," I said. "You know I feel better about these than any I've written before. Not that that means anything."

"Good enough to have a second collection?"

I grinned at her. "I think I'm even more anxious not to have one."

She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them,

Wrote till I

— George Harrison circus. Or whoever will put up with them. Some, as far as I can tell, are completely on their own."

"Where did you park them?"

"With the commune, mostly."

I lay back down. "They would have been better off here."

"Mmm," she agreed. "Rose went with a woman who's been keeping three girls for a couple of weeks. Everybody was pretty nice about it." Her fingers moved. "But you should have kept them."

I rolled over on my back.

Her hand dragged around my stomach.

"I didn't want them."

"Maybe somebody else around here in the nest would have. Everybody liked them… I wanted them."

"You don't live here," I said. "Except five days out of a week. And you've got them: in school."

"Yeah," she said. "Five days out of a week. But you have a point." She took her hand away. "Tell me, how do you do it?"

I asked: "What?"

"How do you — well, I was Just thinking about the article."

"Have you heard people talking about my article?".

"…yours?" That her smile held less mocking than it might was how I knew she mocked.

"About me. You know what I mean."

"Funny…" She drew her feet up cross-legged / wrinkling/ on the blanket; "Last night at the bar people were talking about you — as usual. But they didn't spend too much time on the kids' rescue. It jars with your image, I think."

I thought about that

She explained: "It isn't two-sided enough for you. It's just straight heroics."

I heard Denny come inot [into?] the room, move things under the loft looking for something and not find[ing?] it — Lanya glanced down — and leave[ing?].

"All the good gossip about you usually has that dualistic two-sided thing of being bad

was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the left loft where Denny was lying down already; we fucked on and off all night. Slept. Woke up before they did. Took all the pages I'd done out on the kitchen steps and in dawnlight almost too dim to read by, read them: made six more changes. Now they are finished.

Copied them out (and it was full day) but found I still [wanted?] to go on writing. So turned back to one of the pages with space left near the end. of the notebook (there are very few of them, and I have just started putting entries — like the beginning of this one — in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins) and wrote, this, continuing it on a page I found free here near the beginning.

I recall /and want/ this wanting;

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you've been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us /have/ come here by way of it.

and good at once — do you worry about your image?" she asked, suddenly.

"Sure."

"I'm surprised," she said. "You never seem to purposely do anything about it."

"That's because it never has any relation to what I actually do do. My Image is in other peoples' heads. Keeping it interesting is there [their?] problem. I worry about it in the way I could worry about the reputation of my favorite baseball team. I don't for one minute think of myself as a player."

"Maybe so." She picked up my hand and touched the / thickened thumb-knuckle I'd gnawed / raw /red pink again. "I mean some day you're going to wash your hands thoroughly and show up with a perfect manicure. And I'll leave you forever. You really are schiz, you know?"

Which made me laugh. "I just it [?] the article had mentioned George. I don't think it's/I it's leaving him out is—" I'd started to say fair—"good for my image." Which made me laugh again.

Here the correction marks — except for one entry further on — stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had annotated the final, rather than the first, few pages; there are half a dozen passages to come where even these attempts at variora might be preferable to the most informed supposition. As to the marks employed: Indications of authorial deletions are self-evident; we can assume brackets mean editorial conjecture. The bracketed question, mark, however, with or without additional word or suffix, seems totally arbitrary. After much debate, we can only suggest that words in virgules are probably interlinear additions; but even the quickest perusal reveals this accounts only for most cases. While he plies us with quaint descriptions of paperclips and staples, he fails to record date and letterhead material in the Calkins' letter (perhaps there were none?), nor does he mention whether any (or all) of the entries were typed or handwritten. Internal evidence (it is a spiral notebook, not a loose-leaf) suggest the latter. Corrections, however, such as: balnk [blank?], there8['?]s, and bendh [bench?] bray out for the former. Also, "Rose… a brown fist up beside her chin…" and, a few pages later, "Fist against his chin, Stevie…" suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent "entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins" — that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber's editional adieu ("Here one page, possibly two, is missing.") can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were — say — the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

"Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing

"The[n] how did they know

grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. (That superfluous 'n' again suggests a typing, rather than a handwritten, error.)

Are you going to keep them here[?]"

He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary 'sic'—Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other. — for the mere lack of an upper-case 'D'!

We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away- to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room-curious if she's ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

I can't smell it.

This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored sacks) and her friend Risa (who I wish looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys' jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

Jack the Ripper: "Little girl, you must have been fucking on a God-damn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!" at which Denny, perched on the table's edge, laughs the shrillest.

Gladis, under Spider's arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

The Ripper's laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinderblock yesterday).

Gladis leers and says, "Fuck you—" She's fifteen? Sixteen—?—"you big cocksucker!" with the inappropriateness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use "nigger" other than in rage.

Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: "You don't get no belly like that sucking a cock!"

"Well, Jesus Christ," Spider shouted, "well, Jesus Christ, if I'd 'a known that—" making much to get his fly open and his free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her, feet and lurched away.

I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of Orchids, leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn't look at me.

Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. "You like that?" I asked Risa.

When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.

"Uh-oh," from the Ripper. "What your girl friend gonna say when she come around?"

"Fuck her," I said.

"What's his boy friend gonna say?" Dollar asked from somewhere else.

I said: "Fuck him too."

Denny leaned across the table to pull the other jug over.

Gladis, turning and turning in her loose green (they regard her as their personal catastrophe, an awesome delight; she looks as if she will foal now; claims, however, it's months away), settled, giggling, again, beside Spider.

Then Spitt came in with Glass (some argument about where a building was) and we broke up from our backyard loafing and reconvened on the front steps. Standing beside Copperhead, I looked down the street: Thirteen was coming up:

"Hey!" called with the desperate good will of the seriously bored. "Any of you guys want to come on over? Hey, Kid, you ain't even seen my new place. You want to come over and meet some of the guy's. there?" In this city, where nothing happens, it is worth your sanity to refuse anything new.

Somehow, with the wrangling and wine and lethargy, me, the national guard (Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass), and Denny went with him.

Up a lot of dark stairs with Glass saying, "Man, I didn't know you were this close. You're just around the God-damn corner," and Thirteen saying: "I told you I was just around the God-damn corner; why ain't you guys never come over to see us?" and I looked up:

Smokey stood at the head; when we broke around her, she turned with Thirteen, to follow (at his shoulder) breathing as though she'd held her breath since he'd left.

Sitting on one of the beds at the end of the loft was a scrawny, shirtless guy in jeans — holes both knees — knuckling his eyes. He'd probably just sat up when he heard us on the stairs.

Two other guys stood at the window. Thirteen started bobbing around, very excited: "Hey! Hey, you guys, this is the Kid. Hey!" He motioned me over.

"Hi." A black guy in workman's greys got up off the window sill and held out his hand.

His friend, a stocky blond (short-hair) in denim and construction boots, had his hand ready for seconds. "Hear you got a thing going here."

The black guy locked thumbs with me in a biker shake.

I figured the other guy would do the same. But he just started, then he laughed, and his hand joggled awkwardly.

It isn't that the "heroic" incidents about me cullable from the Times are untrue (well… some of them), nor the "villainous" ones on the gossip round that distorted (well… ditto). But the six minutes here, the twenty seconds there, the forty-five minutes how-many-weeks later — the real time it takes to commit the "heroic" or "villainous" act — are such a microscopic presentage of my life. Even what can be synopsized from this journal — snatches gun from looter's hands; helps save children from flaming death; lead victorious attack (Ha! They were scared crazy!) on armed citadel; hobbles, half-shod, shrieking in the street; rescues Old Faust from collapsing ruin (and once tried to write poems—) are things that have happened to me, not that I have done. What you look like you're doing and what you feel like you're doing are disparate enough to mute any mouth that might attempt description!

So I caught it up for him and smiled. He was "Tom," from Thirteen, "and this is Mak. You guys rode in here, you say?"

"In a pickup," Tom explained. "We were up in Montana, running down this way… till we run out of gas." A cowboy truck driver, he wanted to be friendly.

"And that's Red," from Tom.

So I locked thumbs with Red (hair like rusted Brillo), who blinked sleepy, ice-grey eyes in a face dark as mocha — another mustard-skinned spade, and this one, for all his hunched shoulders, good-looking as the devil.

From the corner someone said: "Hello, Kid," and Tak, arms folded, stood up from the plank wall where he was leaning. He pushed his cap up and came forward, face visible from the pink crease on his forehead where his cap had been, down to bis gold chin. "I'm making my rounds again. I brought these guys here over to the commune and they felt about like you did. So I thought we'd drop in on Thirteen and say hello."

"A good excuse to smoke some dope," Thirteen said. "Now ain't that a good excuse?"

"Sure," Tom said. "Any excuse is a good excuse as far as I'm concerned.",

Smokey, who I hadn't seen go, came back with the jar.

Thirteen took it, raised it in his tattooed hand. "Now you'd think," he said, "with a water pipe like this, I'd at least put some kind of water in it, huh?"

"Or creme de menthe," Smokey said. "That's what you're always talking about."

"Yeah. You ever smoke hash through a water pipe filled with creme de menthe?" Thirteen asked. "That's really something."

Mak, still at the window, gestured toward the bed. "You got a bottle of… what's that? Mountain Red?"

"Naw," Thirteen said. "That ain't the same thing."

Thirteen's cheeks hollowed; the jar filled with smoke.

"You got any speed?" Tom asked.

"Oh, man—" Thirteen coughed and handed Red the jar. "You can't keep anything like that around here more'n five minutes. We don't get much anyway. Once somebody brought in a whole pillow case full, man! A whole pillow case with a plastic lining full of all sorts of speed. This Mexican guy."

"Was he Mexican?" Smokey asked. "He was thick-set, blond…"

"He talked like a Mexican," Thirteen said. "I mean that was a Mexican accent he was speaking. It wasn't no Spanish-from-Spain accent. Or Puerto Rican. They sound different."

I nodded.

"Anyway," Thirteen said, "it was gone like that!" He grinned back across his shoulder; "She was maybe five pounds lighter. But that's the only way you'd of known it was here. How we went through all that shit so fast — man!"

"You must have every kind of — Oh, thanks." Mak took the pipe from Red, sucked, and said: "It's out."

"Here, just a minute." Thirteen struck another match.

"You must have every kind of junkie in this city," Mak said.

Smokey, with the jar now, was handing it to Copperhead, who said: "I don't think I've ever seen a skaghead in Bellona, you know?"

"I have," I said.

Glass laughed.

Tak said: "We don't have much dope here. No money, no dope. To speak of, I mean."

"I think—" Thirteen said. "Wouldn't you say, Kid? I mean, you could say this about most of your guys, huh? Most people here have taken a lot of dope. But we don't got too many people here who need it If you know what I mean."

"That sounds pretty good," Mak said.

"I mean if you need it," Thirteen said, "there just ain't no place to get it. I've put everything in my arm, or up my nose, or down my belly I could, just about, one time or another. Liked all of it, too. But I don't need anything, you know? Of course—" he reached over and took the jar from me—"I do enjoy my toke."

Everybody laughed.

Me too.

And all the smoke loosed out my nose and stung.

"Now did you ever think what a specialized city Bellona is?" Tak was saying. He had come in front of the bed, fists in his scuffed pockets, holding the leather off his hairy stomach. The red quilt lining was torn in two places. "I mean Bellona's got a lot of some things and none of a lot of others. I used to know a guy who could not go to sleep unless he had a radio playing. He can't live in Bellona. There are people who have to have movies to go to; or they get twitchy. They can't live in Bellona. Some people must have chewing gum to survive. I've found stale candy bars, Life-Savers, Tums; but all the chewing gum is gone from all the candy-stores' racks. Gum chewers can't live in Bellona. Not to mention cigarettes, cigars, pipes: the tobacco in the vending machines went stale a couple of weeks after we got cut off and I guess the cartons and packaged shag was the first thing the scavengers cleared out. You never see a smoker in Bellona."

"Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days—" I said.

"They can't live in Bellona," Tak went on. "In Helmsford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car. They can't live in Bellona. Oh, we have a pretty complicated social structure: aristocrats, beggars—"

"Bourgeoisie," I said.

"— and Bohemians. But we have no economy. The illusion of an ordered social matrix is complete, but it's spitted through on all these cross-cultural attelets. It is a vulnerable city. It is a saprophytic city — It's about the pleasantest place I've ever lived." He grinned around at Tom, Red, Mak. "I'm curious to see whether you guys will like it enough to settle down, make it your home, become part of the community."

The jar circled Tak for the third time; he swayed at the center.

"Here." Tom, still leaning on the sill, held it out. "You didn't get any."

"Never touch the stuff." Tak waved the sides of his jacket. "No, I'm a poor, anti-social juice-head. Not a man of my times at all. Gets me in trouble, too."

Somebody suggested we go back to the nest. Tak, his three discoveries pretty well parked at Thirteen's curb, decided to drift-after Thirteen, in a flurry of patriarchal politesse, broke out his jug (same as ours; he must be rifling the same busted plate glass window on the street sometimes marked Lafayette, sometimes marked Jessie). The late afternoon got lost in the day's momentum.

"Why don't we go back to the nest," somebody suggested again. Which, again, everybody thought was a good idea.

Where Lady of Spain, with Raven, I guess it was, had gotten a big fire going in the yard and all sorts of canned shit, scalloped tops bent back, bubbling on the cinder-blocks, their labels blacked and bronzed by the flames. The tree trunks glimmered; and the fence; and the triangle of glass in the second floor window of the house beyond.

We stood around, listening to the fire. Red, still bare foot and shirtless, squatted, staring at the coals, the back of his jeans tugged way the hell down his ass. Circling his hips three times — he wore it down below the waist of his jeans so you couldn't see it normally — was the optic chain.

Just then he glanced back at me over his shoulder, surprised; maybe he thought I was staring at his crack.

"God damn, I burned fuckin' hell out of myself—!" Jack the Ripper shook his hand furiously on the other side of the fire, hopped and whirled. Fire glistened in his mud and sputum eyes.

I looked down at the beads across my chest, my stomach, around my arm; could feel them around my leg. I looked up and saw Red was looking too; then his eyes went down to the place below bis hip's blade pushing above the beltless loops. And up at me again. His hands, out for balance, were bloated the way some winos' get. He started to speak.

I said: "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know where you got it. I don't want you to ask me where I got mine. Fuck you, man. I just don't want to hear—" catching my voice lowering and a fury rising neither he nor I understood.

Black Mak watched me, frowning.

White Tom dug in a can of beans (hot on one side and cold on the other?) with his fingers.

Red swallowed.

"Sure I eat pussy!" California shouts and shoves Tarzan backward.

"Hey, man, hey—" D-t moves along with them.

"You God-damn right I eat pussy!" and shoves again.

"Come on, now, man, what you—"

"I'd eat your fucking pussy if you had one!" and Tarzan crashes back into the fence.

"Now come on!" D-t, a hand on either of California's shoulders, moves him away, and Tarzan, abandoned, suddenly starts to—

— but Gladis's laugh turned shriek, letting me hear (remember?) a second crash's echo. Among all the concerned "What's…" and "Who's…" and unconcerned laughter (mostly Dollar's, bright and insistent), it got figured out that somebody had hurled a hot can at Gladis, which tipped her shoulder and splattered on the steps.

Red wasn't at the fire any more. And a moment past the rage, I felt that surge of good feeling to rival those acid moments of unbearable friendship when the gates will not shut. Later, I went up behind Dollar and caught him across the back of the head, hard.

"What'd you do that for…?" he whined, lids crimped around eyes gone orange under the fire.

"For throwing that God-damn can."

His eyes crimped more and his mouth opened on that slate-chip laughter (clear, a little shrill, like a boy's on the short side of puberty) and he said: "Oh, man, did you see the way she hollered? I bet she was scared enough to drop it right here," and wheeled away, laughing, while D-t shook his head, watching, and said, gravely, "Shit, man."

Tom and Thruppence were arguing about geography which took us from the yard to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the front steps, from the front steps to the yard. Everybody was staggering and bending and belly-clutching with laughter.

Then this altercation with Denny: "Man, I don't like to go to bed with you when you're drunk," he explained, three times, sadly, only I knew if Lanya was there, he would have come; he did anyway. Woke up later to find him gone; woke again, even later, lying on my side, with his small hot butt pressed against my belly, the continent of his back, muscular and vertebral, going away in the grey. No hangover when I got up, but my gut was a little loose so that I knew the first coffee or even water I drank would make me shit like hell. I'd gone to sleep in my pants. Getting them back together, I stepped into the hall.

Red came from the bathroom, gave me a funny look, and went out on the service porch while I went on up the hall, trying to figure what had changed about him. Glanced out at him when I passed the door: there was a projector chain hanging around his neck; figured he'd gotten it off the mannequin in the bathroom. I opened the bathroom door: Check.

Shit now? I wondered.

Wandered back to the service porch instead.

"…you mean the one that's gonna have the baby?" Red was asking, which Dollar answered, as I stopped to watch them:

"Fireball, what's the matter with you! Not the pregnant one; the other one!"

"Oh. The other one. Sure."

(So some time while I'd been asleep, Red had acquired his first chain and a name.)

I leaned against the door frame. "Fireball?"

Red turned.

A half cup of wine spilled back and forth across the bottom of the gallon jug hooked on Dollar's forefinger. He lifted it to his mouth with both hands, dropped it again, and looked at me with eyes bright, wet, and pink. "Me and Fireball are gonna go get us some pussy, if she's still puttin' it out, you know? You comin'?"

I said to Red/Fireball: "Where're your friends, Tom and Mak?"

"They split."

"We scared 'em off, huh?"

"You know; they're pretty…" He gestured with his hand. It meant finicky/normal/unimaginative — the same hand-joggle one patient in a mental hospital will use to another to describe a third who's particularly out of touch that morning: palm down, fingers wide and waggling. "They're nice guys, though. They gave me a ride all the way down here. They treated me nice. Then, when the truck broke down, they didn't seem to mind if we hung out together, you know?"

"Come on," Dollar said. The jug clicked the doorframe as he stepped out.

We went with him up the hall.

I opened the door to the back room and went in first, Dollar and Fireball right behind me. It was very warm. California, squatting in the half-dark, stood up beside us and chuckled: "God damn! Copperhead and Glass are having themselves a fuckin' contest," heard himself and decided to change the emphasis: "A fucking contest, man." He chuckled again, swaying so close the hair over his shoulder brushed my arm.

Before the lion, rampant on the sill, scorpions slept or sat. Jack the Ripper, wandering around, stepped over sleeping Gladis and one of the non-members who occasionally crashes here.

Gladis and Mike, sleeping: knee to knee, forehead to forehead, his hair, long and light, lay over hers, tight and black, his arm over her brown collar, her arm above her belly. She snored. (Conceit: They curled, facing, like single quote marks enclosing an ellipsis pared to a unit point.)

Lady of Spain — black vest, black jeans, black boots, with black chains a-tangle over tightly folded arms and an intent, midnight frown — leaned against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with Revelation, who was naked, gold hair at his head a matted snarl and, down-sloping from gold-matted groin, what I guess was half a hard-on, deeper pink than the rest of his perpetual blush. He'd tucked his hands between his buttocks and the wall, his expression, though as intense as Lady of Spain's, empty of content.

Risa grunted: Copperhead… moaned? growled? on top of her, his freckled ass bouncing between her darker knees. The sleeping bag they'd started out on (Raven's, opened over the charred mattress) had bunched into a green python under her back. Her elbows came away from his (Copperhead still wore his vest), flapped, and fell, one hand slapping the mattress, the other catching his arm.

Glass sat in the corner, knees up, forearms over them, head back on the wall, taking long, loud breaths.

"Hey?" California put his hand on my shoulder and whispered: "You gonna get a piece?"

"Let's see how she's doing when he gets off." But my cock was about half-hard, and I could feel my heart in it for a dozen beats, till I shifted my leg.

"She's really wild," California said. "She wants everything you can figure out, man! Right now, most of the ladies except—" he nodded toward Lady of Spain who was saying something to Revelation who didn't seem to hear), then went back to watching—"are out now. But they were all in here working on her a little while ago! Black Widow, baby? Whew…! What a T-V spectacular that was—"

"Hey!" Lady of Spain said from her place on the wall.

Life in the Behavioral Sink, Episode Sixteen Thousand, Six Hundred and Thirty-Seven: Heavy Cathedral, who is getting heavier, squatted last evening with his back to the house, discussing the behavior of overcrowded rats, with a half-dozen of us who stood around, listening — Gladis had just come by cradling a poor, dead mouse that had to be flushed down the toilet. "Sure," counters astute, diminutive, and dark Angel, who is drunk, "the similarities between rats and people are very large. But the differences, I suspect, are on the order of the factor of the differences in body weight between an undernourished mouse and an eight-month pregnant woman!" (Is art and sex replacing sex and death as the concerns of the serious mind? Life here would make me think so.)

"Don't lay any of that shit on us." Her chin jerked up. "That wasn't nothing like what you guys are into."

"Yeah," Revelation said. He squinted, scratched his upper lip with nails you could see were clean from here. "That was something different." He put his hand behind him again. "That wasn't like this."

"Hell," California said. "They was having sex with the broad—!" He glanced at Lady of Spain who'd gone back to watching. "Well, they was playing with the broad in a… sexual way. Anyway, it turned me on." Suddenly he grinned, leaned closer: "Only this pig likes to get her pussy poked with a pecker. So — naturally — she called in the shock troops. Well, man, there ain't nothing I like to eat out better than pecker-poked pig-pussy!" California's grin grew huge; he began to shake my shoulder: "Shit, am I glad to see you, Kid: You get in there and there'll be something between her legs that won't turn my stomach when I get down there eatin' it out, you know?"

I raised an eyebrow.

The huge grin became silent laughter. "I mean some of these motherfuckers are animals, man!"

"Animals?" Jack the Ripper came up, intense and soft "You're a fuckin' hog! Every other time some nigger pulls his dick out of that hole, this Jew bastard's down there on his hands and knees—" and the Ripper stuck out his tongue, and scrunched up his face snorting and grunting: which made California laugh out full voice. "Shit," the Ripper said (on the traditional two beats), and went out the door.

"You want to do her both at the same time?" Dollar was saying, head together with Fireball. "See, I'll get it in her pussy, man, and you can work on her head. Course, if you want to do it the other way around—"

"Oh, man—" California turned—"the bitch is tired! She's been going all night!"

"She was doin' them freaky things before," Dollar said. 'Takin' on two guys at once—"

"Sure," California said. "But that was back — Aw, never mind!"

Copperhead finished, pushed back to his knees, stood slowly, then bent again to drag his green pants up around one leg; the other was bare. "Your turn?" he asked across the room to Revelation. Copperhead was breathing hard. "You better get your ass over here!"

"I already been, once." Revelation glanced at me. "Glass wants to go again. And the Kid's here…"

"You go on," Glass said from the floor. "It's gonna take me another five minutes to get my breath."

"Then, fuck it…" Revelation came forward, when I didn't move, leaving Lady of Spain by the wall. "It ain't gonna take me no five minutes." Chuckling, he stepped over Devastation, who turned over and dragged his forearm over his face. "Like I said, I'm an in-and-out man, you know?"

"Well, yeah," Copperhead said. "That's what you wanted seconds for, ain't it? Come on, white boy—" He stepped back, laughing. "You can fuck her. She ain't prejudiced."

Risa made a sort of hoarse and gravelly sound that went on, while her mouth opened and closed. Her hand slapped the mattress, her head came up. She looked around. (Her hair was stiff and long, like a spray of dark water that had shot from her head and frozen), still making that sound.

It gave me chills. My cock went from half to full hard. I had to move it over with my thumb.

"Man!" California said, watching me.

"Okay, sweetheart!" Revelation stepped over D-t, who looked solid out. "Okay, I'm comin', I'm comin'!" Some of the guys laughed.

"…shit!" Lady of Spain peeled forward from the wall and walked toward us, arms still folded, head shaking. Her frown had become a tough, ironic smile in which was a lot of disgust. She passed: I put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, you ever go after it like that?"

(Copperhead: "Get your tongue in her mouth, man. It ain't no fun if you don't tongue her… yeah, like that."

(Glass: "She nearly chewed mine off." And laughed).

Lady of Spain looked at my hand, looked at me, and, without breaking expression, said: "Get off my ass, cocksucker."

"Now hey…!" California frowned. "The Kid asked you a civil question. You don't have to go calling him no—"

Looking at me straight, Lady of Spain said: "Now have I just called you anything that ain't true, or asked you to do anything in a — what is it? An uncivil tone of voice?"

I nodded—"Right on—" and dropped her shoulder.

Lady of Spain shook her head, sucked her teeth.

"God damn," California said. "These bitches are always goin' around tryin' to cut a guy's balls off—"

"Aw, fuck off," I said. "What does it take to cut yours off anyway — A dull spoon? Look: first, I have sucked my quota of dick. And enjoyed it. Second, my nuts are strung up there with two-inch steel cable. It takes a lot more hatchet work than that to make them even feel loose," which California thought was pretty funny again and started laughing all over. "Your thing," I said, "just isn't some other peoples' and there's nothing you can do about it."

Lady of Spain shook her head again and pushed out between Dollar and Fireball.

I guess Revelation did come pretty fast. He was getting back up on his knees, already, face still blank, cock still half hard. Risa held his arm with both her hands. Revelation shook his head, sort of sheepishly: "Like I say, sweetheart, I guess I just don't take that much—"

But Glass was already down on his hands and knees, pushing Revelation aside, pants open, buckle dangling, cock flapping at his belly like a shy foot of over-sized garden hose.

Copperhead, holding his pants up with one hand, with the other helped Revelation stand.

"You see," Revelation said. "Even the second time, I go pretty…"

"A load is a load," Copperhead said. "How you wanna time it is your problem."

Revelation took an unsteady step that pulled him away from Copperhead's grip, said, "God damn…!" then started to the wall. Halfway, he glanced at me again, suddenly got a big, pink grin. "You better get some of that while there's still some left." At the wall, he turned to lean, hands once more rucked behind him, genitals still engorged, slick with common juice.

I stood, watching, wondering — when I could maneuver to see pussy:

With one hand, Risa held Glass's shoulder. Her knees splayed, sagged, recovered. His hips were going side to side as much as up and down. She was doing something with her other hand-trying to get his pants further down his legs, I realized. Finally he paused long enough to let her push them to his knees, and before she twisted back up beneath him he began to hump and flatten. She lifted one foot, dropped it, and for a moment her face turned from him to us, eyes and mouth wide, tongue crawling around her teeth, till it snapped back, then lapped at Glass's neck.

Copperhead squatted by them — to watch? But he leaned forward, said something. Glass slowed.

Risa said something I couldn't hear, put her hand on Copperhead's naked knee, raised her head a moment, said something else.

"God damn," California said. "Them two been going at her four, five times. Each."

Copperhead stood up and walked toward us. "Oh, man!" He put his hand on the wall to balance while he tried three times to get his other foot back inside his pants. Perspiration shone among the freckles and red hairs inside his thigh. Then green canvas slid over them. He jerked his chin toward the Glass and Risa. "That nigger can fuck!" His foot coming down, knocked D-t's shoulder (Copperhead: "Hey — sorry!") who looked up and said, "You ain't doin' so bad yourself," and dropped his face back into his arm.

Re-reading this, it occurs to me that the written words don't let you know whether Copperhead meant Risa or Glass. His tone of voice did, though.

Copperhead grinned, pushed his works, glistening like wet leather, into his fly and buttoned the top button.

"You want something to drink?" California asked; he'd taken the jug from Dollar.

"No." Copperhead rubbed the place between his beard and his thick, lower lip with the side of his forefinger. "But she does."

"I think," I said, "I am gonna get a piece."

"Hey," Copperhead said, "you better get some — before we kill her!" He shook his head. His beard was wet "Go on." Then he went out of the room.

I stepped across D-t and nearly tripped on a blanket tangled between two mattresses. California came over too; he stuck his forefinger in the lion's brass mouth, wiggled it there, then suddenly grinned at me as though he'd made a joke. I just leaned against the wall to watch.

Once Glass threw up his head, face bright with sweat, teeth and eyes minstrel white. Risa's head and shoulders shook like somebody was hammering the soles of her feet. She kept saying, "Ughhhh… Ughhhh… Ughhhh…" and sometimes closing her mouth. Glass's face slapped down and hid her unfocused blinks.

I squatted by the wall.

Glass's hips, smacking hers, made her thighs shake.

I got my hand under my belt to pull my dick over; it rubbed hard on a seam or something, which hurt.

Glass threw back bis head again, pushed himself up on bis hands, his ass going. Risa's hands bounced on his shoulders. She grabbed air, she slapped the mattress; then she hung on his neck. The heel of one foot dug the ticking, her toes wide, then curling down on their dark knuckles.

She was making a sound for all the world like a flannel torn near the ear. Glass finished.

I guess she didn't or couldn't or wouldn't.

Still up on his hands, bis head dropped. She kept pulling at his shoulders. He took a loud breath and sat back on bis knees. "Oh, shit…"

Risa dropped her hands between her legs.

I got up and stood just behind Glass. When Risa's knees went down, her foot slid by my boot. She rubbed her ankle back and forth on mine through the soft leather. Glass stood, unsteadily, so I gave him a hand. He held my arm with one hand, tried to pull his pants up with the other, and said: "Go on, man. Fuck that pussy. Yeah! Shit…" He looked very dazed and not quite at me.

I opened my fly.

Risa looked pretty dazed too.

Her breasts rolled on her ribs as she rocked. I had to bend my knees to get my crank out. She reached to scratch her hip; then her hand forgot what it was doing, touching her stomach all over; she was looking all around the room, moving just her narrowed eyes. I put my bare foot on her cunt. She rocked her hips till I pressed hard; then she held my dirty ankle and rubbed her hair on the calloused ball. The arched bone there slid around under its wet skin. What had leaked into the hair under my instep felt thick as clay slip. She opened and closed and opened her mouth, but breathing, loudly, through her nose. And her eyes were still moving around without fixing anything. A drop of water rolled sideways down her jaw.

I took my foot away.

She began to pull at herself, digging two fingers in, to open and close a raw canyon; she blew out her mouth, all her lips sticking and pulling apart.

(Did I think: Who am I standing here with a hard-on for? Me, her, or them? No, I didn't.) I opened my belt and kneeled down. She got an expression almost a smile and swung it all around her, head rolling; and still pulling. Christ.

I went forward. Holding myself up on one hand, I caught one of hers and got it down on my dick. (Lanya once told me lots of guys get up tight if a girl tries to touch their dick when they're putting it in; it turns me on.)

I remember I opened my eyes once and saw her brown neck stretching as her head turned away, then wrinkling as her ear hit mine, hard. She was pushing at my pants to get the belt buckle out of the way, I realized. Then she grabbed hold. I fantasized about eating her, some. And her blowing Dollar, for some reason; I remember thinking this was freaky enough that I shouldn't have to fantasize at all. At which point, without loosening her legs on my hips or her arms over my shoulders, she screamed. Loud. It scared me to death. I thought: There goes my hard. It didn't — but that was the first time I thought about the rest of the people in the room. Somebody was standing near us; because I could see his sneaker right in front of my face. When she began to drag air back into her chest, with some wet sound in her mouth (which, hunting for mine, finally caught it — I tried to lick her tonsils), I thought I was going to come. Only it took another minute and a half. When I come, sometimes, balling somebody I'm not too interested in (or having particularly uninteresting sex with somebody I am), I get some picture (or words) that stays a few seconds until it hazes to something hard to recall as a dream: This time, it was an image of myself, holding hands with someone (Lanya? Risa? Denny?) and running among leafless trees laced with moonlight while the person behind me kept repeating: "…Grendal, Grendal, Grendal…" which, while I rocked my face in her hot neck and the stinging in my thighs, chest, and belly went on, seemed very funny. (Specific and primitive?) I raised my face out of the moon-bright branches into a room lathered with the smell of smoke and scorpions. And grinning, man, like a tiger!

I sat back, dragging chains over her. She bit one, held it in her teeth so it tugged on my neck. I pulled, till it came out of her mouth, kneeled back, and bumped into someone — Dollar — who said: "Hey, man. Pretty good, huh?"

"Watch it," California said, trying to crowd in. "Come on, huh?"

Copperhead, holding a gallon jug, stooped down beside Risa. Glass stood just behind his shoulder. Copperhead got one hand under her neck. She held onto the knee of his fatigues.

I stood up while California clambered over her ankles. "Hey, Copperhead? Man, she's drunk enough already! She's gonna toe sick if you—"

"Get out of here," Copperhead said: "This is water. She asked me for a fucking drink of water before, that's all."

"Oh." California slid his hands up Risa's legs. A tendon in her thigh shook. California bent.

"Aw, come on!" Glass said, and punched at California's head. "Can't you wait until she has a fuckin' drink of water?" But Risa grabbed California's hair, grunting, and pulled him down. Glass sucked in his breath and watched her drink till Copperhead lowered the jug. Water ran down Risa's cheek. She got out, "…thank you…"

"You're welcome," California said, muffled in her crotch.

Which Copperhead must have thought was the funniest thing he ever heard. He just broke up. And spilled water all over the floor.

"You can take her in the mouth," Dollar was saying to Fireball. "If you want, you can take her mouth and I'll take her pussy. Or you can take her pussy and I'll…"

I walked to the door. Halfway there I realized I was going to shit within thirty seconds.

Siam walked in. "She still workin' out?"

"Party's still going," I said and pushed by him.

In the hall, Spitt was rubbing the scar on his chest "Them guys still messing around in there? Jesus Christ." He looked unhappy.

I asked: "You get your turn?"

"Yeah. Before. But they just on on and fucking on! They're gonna kill her or something."

"You're just scared it'll all be used up by the time you're fit for seconds." I grinned. "Why don't you go in there and see if you can finish her off?" Then I went in the bathroom, got my pants down fast, and sat.

My buttocks got wet from the splash, and there was six seconds of gut-cramp that started in my ankles. Then it eased. My crank hung down against the porcelain, so cold I had to slide my hand over it to hold it away. (Cold knuckles; better than a cold cock.) Through the bathroom door I watched Spitt, still standing in the hall. After a while, he went in the room.

"Grendal grendalgrendalgrendalgrendalgren…" still ran through my head. Suddenly, I realized I hadn't been listening carefully enough; I'd stuck the brake in the wrong place. The actual word I'd heard at orgasm and that, for the last few minutes had been repeating in my head was: "…Dhalgren…" I wiped myself with part of the second page of the Bellona Times, January 22, 1776.

Power is all. Another falsification: I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.

Going back to the loft bed, I thought it would be nice if Lanya had stopped by and was waiting with Denny (knowing she wouldn't because I'd thought about it); she hadn't.

Up in the loft, I lay on my back for a minute; then I rolled over and hit Denny on the shoulder. He woke up. "What?" "Smell my dick," I said.

"Huh…?" Then he made a disgusted sound, sat up, bent down, and sniffed. My fly was open.

Denny looked up, frowning. "You got dandruff in your crotch." He wrinkled his nose. "Who is it?"

I laughed.

"The girl they got in the back, Risa." I grinned at him. "You get some?"

"Oh… I went in there before while you were asleep. It was mostly girls in there then. I didn't do nothing." He settled again on the bed, his back to me.

Looking up at the ceiling, I began to fall asleep: the kind of falling where you watch yourself do it, and everything gets all tingly and you sink among the tingles.

And woke up with Denny on top of me, my arms across his back. He was breathing in short gasps, face against my neck, rubbing off on my belly. Wondered why I'd bothered to wake him up before with that routine which was pretty much calculated to turn him on. I didn't stop him, but I was annoyed; so when I began bad-mouthing him (growling into his hair: "…come on, you two-bit cocksucker; come on, you scrawny, shit-ass bastard…") it was real: he shot pretty quick. But by then I had a hard-on again. I was actually sort of digging him just lying there on top of it. But he got down to suck me off. I guess I'd wanted him to do that when I first woke him up; now I didn't. "Don't waste your time," I told him, dropping my chin to watch the top of his head. "Can't you just go to sleep?" But he kept working (and playing with my asshole which I'd mentioned Nightmare mentioning to me) and I shot. He crawled back up beside me, and I held him around his belly with his back to me (like a warm dog) while he occasionally squirmed like he'd be more comfortable on the other side of the bed (yeah, like trying to sleep with a dog) while I wondered: If I'm starting to have to fantasize girls in order to come with guys, maybe I'm not as bisexual as I keep telling myself?

I know: I'm a closet monosexual.

My speech changes when I talk to different people; I go from "ain't" to "aren't", "yes" to "yeah", from a fixed to a formless diction. With Lanya, a lot of the time, it gets playful, arch. With others, it flattens. When I'm upset, it punctures with dozens of noise nodes: "you know's", "I mean's", and "sort of's". I left behind me a whole vocabulary and syntax at the colleges I passed through, which began to come back with Newboy, Kamp, that interview, and with Calkins at the retreat.It's lability, not affectation; a true and common trait. But if I tried to write down what I say as I move from speech context to speech context, it would read like lack of character, not a characteristic. I note all the eccentric words around me: Glass used the word "…radically…" this morning and several times I've heard Lady of Spain refer to an "…entity…" while among the others I've heard "…sententious…", "…caravan…", and "…conspicuous…" go by. But when I transcribe the conversation around me, I find myself purposely playing down the verbal range of it, so that it does not read like post-literate affectation…which it isn't. George's speech can't even be written down for the common reader; Throckmorton (at the party) speaks only in inane combinations of serial phrases that become satires on themselves as soon as they are recorded but that, during utterance, make miracles of communication. I suppose I'm just getting frustrated by what written words can't do. This afternoon, Gladis, wholely pregnant and half smiling, said through the kitchen screening: "You got no…" paused and interjected three syllables of Jaughter "…know what I can see it in here. can I?" What marks of ellision, inflection, and melody could make that sound, or the sense of it, intelligible on paper?

Spent that afternoon trying to figure that one out.

I strip and bleach so the faint pattern-ings of a real voice will show through; and end with something artificial as a henna job. And Calkins, determined not to read, waits for my next book in this jargon called the written word I've been stuck with!

Oh yeah. While he was blowing me, I stopped him in the middle and asked him what he was thinking about — to be a bastard. Very honest and very surprised, he told me Dollar (I flashed on the moment with Risa when our pet murderer went through my mind) which got me a little mad. But that's what I get. I note here (because sex does have something to do with love) Denny's said he loves me six times now, admitted it almost under his breath with this hung expression as though he was daring himself to say it — it always comes off the wall when we're busy doing something else: moving the couch across to the other side of the front room, chucking junk into the yard across the fence, or when I was trying to help Cathedral bend the motorcycle's kickstand back into shape. I don't really know what I feel about him, but I'm glad as hell one of them stays here. (I guess I wish it was Lanya; she's more interesting, in or out of bed… which isn't really the point; really, I just wish she was here.) When I woke up, he had wriggled out of my arms and was curled up in the corner against the walls.

When I got up and went into the living room, most of them were still asleep. Fireball sat on the edge of the couch eating something out of a cup with a spoon. He stood up when I came in (Filament with, oddly, Devastation were tucked together on the couch behind him; the pale Black Widow, with the dark Lady of Spain curled against her, slept on the floor among Tarzan-and-most-of-the-apes) as though he wanted to speak to me. I nodded.

Walking with Lanya today, I told her that She beamed: "Yes, he's said it to me a half-dozen times too. It's charming."

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think so. I mean, I don't understand it. He loves you. He loves me. What the hell does that mean?"

She looked surprised, even hurt Finally she said: "Well — when somebody uses strange words to you that you just do not understand, you have to listen for the feeling and get at the meaning that way!"

"I think," I said after a moment, "it may mean, when he says it he's going to leave me before you do — who say it so much less frequently."

"You think he'll leave us?" Me/us — it struck like that "Give him a reason to stay. I've tried."

"That's a hard one, even in much simpler situations. I wonder if it just has to do with the kinds of people we're familiar with. To you, I'm replaceable. I'm a nice ape, who even happens to be more interesting inside than out I think one of the most interesting things to you Is the way the machinery jerks around by stops and starts. Like you say, though, you've known geniuses before. Ifs nothing new."

"Well!"

"Denny, I think, is the first Denny you've ever known. For you, he's unique — whereas for me, everything from the foster homes he's lived in to the rhythm he bucks his ass at, the protective brutality, and even that well of playful sweetness you can never touch bottom in, the hard-headedness good and bad: sweet and fucked-up as he is, there're many, many, many of him floating around." We turned the corner. "Now for me, you're the irreplaceable one: I've never seen you up so close before, and I do not understand you at all. You say sometimes I act like I don't see you? I don't even know where to look! Living with you around is like like living with a permanent dazzle. The fact that you even like me, or look at me, or brush by me, or hug me, or hold me,

He nodded back. He didn't seem to be able to start, though, so he ate another spoonful.

"Come here," I told him.

Still shoeless, he stepped over a confusion of feet — the Widow's dull black Wellingtons: Cathedral's floppy brown suedes. I put my hand on his shoulder. "You like Dollar, don't you?"

Fireball said: "He's a pretty funny little guy. But he's really okay, huh?" The scrawny, rusty-haired coon had a sleepy half-smile. His eyes looked like circles cut from our sky, tossed into the evenly milky coffee of his face.

"Good," I told him. "You look out for him. You make sure he doesn't get into any trouble around here, you hear?"

The smile wavered—

"Somebody's got to. And I'm tired of it. So you do it now. You hear me?"

— and fell.

He nodded.

"Good." With both hands I took off one of my chains, put it over his head, and hung my fists on his chest. I pulled one down, while the other raised, my knuckles sliding on his skin. Then I ran it the other way. "This'll go with the one you already took for yourself, right?"

is so surprising that after it's over I have to go back through it a dozen times in my head to savor it and try and figure out what it was like because I was too busy being astounded while it was happening."

"Really? That's marvelous!" She was silent the next quarter of a block. Then she said: "He's not going to leave. At least not for a while. Though you may be right about who leaves first, whenever that happens… if ever."

"What do you see?"

"That you are a whole lot of real person. And so, for that matter, am I. Someone who's had as little of that as Denny has just isn't going to run out before he's had a lot more."

"Sounds good," I said. "Hope it works. I like you two. I want you with me. Just don't let me start taking either of one of you for granted!"

"Not, dear heart, if I can help it."

Fireball blinked at me.

"It's yours." I let go.

"That mean I'm a member…?"

Raven, on the floor, propped his head on his elbow. "That's the way we play, sweetheart." He laughed, rolled over (into Cathedral who just grunted), and closed his eyes.

Fireball looked back at me. The sleepy smile returned. "Okay," he said. "Hey, thanks, Kid. Okay…"

"You look out for that crazy, pimple-faced white bastard."

"Okay," he repeated. "I will." Then he ate another spoonful out of his cup.

I went onto the porch.

Risa was sitting outside on a crate under a tree, reading. (Brass Orchids? I craned to see. Yeah.) Rubbing two fingers in the dusty corner of the screenless frame, I watched her, wondering if I should go down and ask her about what I was thinking, finally decided: Fuck it, if you're gonna do it, do it.

I went down the steps — the door clacked behind me — and crossed the yard. "Hey…" I squatted beside her, elbows and hands (wondering how can they get that dirty in just a day) a double bridge, knee to knee. "I wanted to know, I mean, about last night."

She looked up.

"You enjoyed that, huh? I mean, you were into it. Because some of the — one of the women seemed a little upset by it. So I wanted to… know."

She'd slapped her hand over the page like she didn't want me to see it. Which was odd. Her heavy legs shifted. She looked uncomfortable. I waited, thinking: Well, she's probably just not a very verbal person, or maybe she just can't get answers to questions like that together, just like that; or maybe it's a stupid question, or just an embarrassing one. I mean she could have always said: Look, asshole, why do you think I was doing it if I didn't like it? Also, I felt silly pretending, even to myself, I was speaking for Lady of Spain when, of course, I was speaking for me.

"I mean," I said, "I was curious: if you felt any one had… well, forced you?"

The top two buttons of her blue shirt were open. Her brown skin was creased between her neck and shoulder.

Last night, her eyes, half closed, had seemed so large. Now, wide, they looked small. What she said (a lot more together than I'd expected) was: "That was mine," and opened and closed her mouth to say something else, but ended up repeating: "That was all mine. You just can't have any part of that. That's all. It was… mine!"

"I mean—" I was surprised — but I just shrugged: "I just wanted to know if you… enjoyed it?"

She said: "You go find out yourself, if you want it!" Then, like she was jerking from an anticipated blow, her eyes slipped back to the page. Her fist slipped back to her lap.

I stood up, my mind jutting off on: Do I want to get gang-banged myself? Well, all right, consider. Considering, I walked across the yard. One: I don't like to take it up the ass because when I've tried, it's almost always hurt like hell. Maybe half a dozen times, it turned out not to be painful, just indifferent (one of these was two days ago with Denny and Lanya, and the emotional thing there, anyway, was nice). But, Two: I've had my own dick up the asses of enough guys who were obviously feeling no pain, and a lot of pleasure. And I've been in line and taken my turn in a guy's ass like with Risa's cunt last night. So (Three:) if Risa's right, maybe there's something wrong with me that every — well almost every — time a cat has tried to shove his dick into me, it fucking stings…? Anyway, if nothing else, she had said something that had made me think, which is one way I decided if people are intelligent.

As I went up the steps, Copperhead's head came out of the door; passed by me, went over, squatted by her (like he'd seen me do? Presumably not.) and put his freckled hand on the knee of her jeans. They bent close, conferring. She said something that made him laugh. (She didn't look too happy though.) I stepped through the screen door onto the porch, glanced out the window again.

As Copperhead stood, Lady of Spain (with Filament, just behind her), passed now on the other side of the fence, stopped with three fingers hooked over the chipped boards and asked — I could hear her chains click the wood but not really what she said — Risa something like, How was she feeling?

Risa twisted a little, frowned, and said: "My back is sore."

Spitt was on the porch, standing by the sink, his arms folded. "She's something, huh?" He looked resentful as hell.

I glanced out at Risa, looked back at Spitt." He was shaking his head. "How many times she get fucked? Sixty? Seventy-five times?"

"Aw, man," I told him. "You crazy? Would you believe sixteen, seventeen? Maybe twenty?"

"Huh?"

"There were only seven, eight of us doing anything. And half of us only went once."

Spitt thought a few seconds. "But, Jesus Christ… Look at her! She's just sitting there, reading your damn book like that!"

"Spitt," I said, "balling a couple of dozen people in one night is merely a prerequisite for understanding anything worth knowing." I mean I have done that. "That's just the way it is."

Spitt didn't seem to think that was funny, so I went back into the kitchen and left him looking. Somebody (Spitt?) had washed a lot of the dishes.

This is the last full balnk [blank?] page left.

Re-reading, I note the entries only ghost chronological order. Not only have I filled up all the free pages, but all the half and quarter pages left around the poems or at the ends of other entries. A few places where my handwriting is fairly large, I can write between lines. I'll have to do a lot more writing in the margins. Maybe I'll try writing cross-ways over pages filled up already.

Sometimes I cannot tell who wrote what. That is upsetting. With some sections, I can remember the place and time I wrote them, but have no memory of the incidents described. Similarly, other sections refur to things I recall happening to me, but kne/o/w just as well I never wrote out. Then there are pages that, today, I interpret one way with the clear recollection of having interpretted them another at the last re-reading.

Most annoying is when I recall an entry, go hunting through, and not find it find it or half of it not there: I've read some pages so many tunes they've pulled loose from the wire spiral. Some of these I've caught before they ripped completely free, folded some or them up and put them inside the front cover. Carrying the book around, though, I must have let them slip out. The first pages — poems and journal notes — are all gone, as well as pages here and there through the rest.

More will go, too.

I work the paper strips, edged with torn perforations, out of the [s]piral with my pencil point. And write more. Looking at the last page, I can't tell if it's the same one that was there a month ago or not.

was nearly too bizarre for comment:

Stopped into Teddy's. It was so early I wondered why it was open. Maybe five people there, among them — Jack. He sat on the last stool, hands (skin grey, cuticles wedged with black, crowns scimitared with it, half moons shadowed under cracked skin) flat on the counter. His hair feathered the rim of his ear (in the twisted cartilage: white flakes. On the trumpet's floor: dry amber) and went without change into sideburns that join around his chin in scrubby beard. His neck was grey — with one clean smear (where he'd been rubbing himself?). His lids were thickened, coral rimmed, and lashless. The short sleave of his shirt: torn on the seam over white flesh. Above the backs of his shoes, his socks, both heels torn, curled from ridged, black callous. The fly flap on his slacks was broken. The brass teeth roller-coastered over his lap and under his belt — the buckle tongue had snapped: he'd tied the belt-ends together. "You wanna buy me a beer?" he asked. "First night I got to town, I brought you and your girl friend a beer."

"Just ask for what you want," I said.

The bartender glanced over, pushed a rolled sleeve higher; from under his thick fingers the tattoed leopard stalked the jungle of his arm.

"I'd buy it myself," Jack said. "But, you know, I've been pretty down and out. You buy me a beer, man, and I'll do the same for you, soon as I get myself back on my feet."

I said to the bartender: "How come you won't serve him?"

The bartender put his knuckles on the counter and swayed. "All he gotta do is ask for what he wants." He looked around at the other customers.

"Give us a couple of beers," I said.

"Right up." The open bottles clacked the boards in front of us.

"There you go." I took a swallow from mine.

Jack's bottle sat between his thumbs. He looked at it, then moved his fingers a little to the left.

What he'd done was adjust the spaces so that the bottle was centered between his hands.

The bartender glanced again, pursed his lips — about as close as he would let himself get to shaking his head — and moved away, fist over fist.

"You don't have to pay here," I said.

"If I could pay," Jack said, "I really would; I mean, if I had it, I'd buy it myself. I'm not a skinflint, man. I'm really generous when I got it."

I considered a moment. Then I said: "Just a second." I reached in my pants pocket.

The dollar bill, in a moist knot, came up between my third and fourth finger. It was so crumpled, at first I thought I'd just found some dirty paper I'd stuck there (a discarded poem?). I spread it on the counter. One corner, from sweat and rubbing, was worn away down to the frame of the "1".

While Jack looked at it, I wondered what Lanya would do with hers; or Denny with his.

Jack raised his head, slowly. The corner of his mouth was cracked and sore. "You can have a pretty rough time in this city, you know?" His hands were still flat. Foam bubbled up his bottle neck and over, puddling at the base. "I just don't understand it, man. I don't. I mean, I've done everything I could think of, you know? But it just don't look like I can make it here no how. Since I been here—?" He turned to me. Bubbles banked and broke against his fingers. "I been nice to people! They got all different kinds of people here, too. I mean I ain't never seen all kinds of different people like this here before. I've been nice and tried to listen, and learn how to do, you know? Learn my way around. 'Cause it is different here… But I just don't know." His eyes went above and behind me.

I looked back.

Jack was looking at Bunny's empty cage. The black velvet curtain at the back swung as though someone had just brushed by on the other side. "Like that big nigger that they got his picture up, all over the place with his God damn dick hangin' out all over. I just don't see that. I mean I don't got nothin' against it. But, man, if they gonna do shit like that, why don't they put some pictures of some pussy up too! You know? If they gonna do one, don't you think it's right they should do the other?"

"Sure," I said.

"I mean, maybe somebody like me, or you—you got a girl friend — is interested in something else, huh? When I first got here, I knew things weren't gonna be like every where else. I was real nice to people; and people was nice to me too. Tak? The guy I met with you, here? Now he's a pretty all right person. And when I was staying with him, I tried to be nice. He wants to suck on my dick, I'd say: 'Go ahead, man, suck on my fuckin dick.' And, man, I ain't never done nothin' like that before… I mean not serious, like he was, you know? Now, I done it. I ain't sorry I done it. I don't got nothin' against it. But it is just not what I like all that much, you understand? I want a girl, with tits and a pussy. Is that so strange? You understand that?"

"Sure," I said. "I understand."

Jack pushed the corner of his mouth out with his tongue, trying to break the scab. "I guess he understood too. Tak, I mean. He's still nice to me. He talks to me when he sees me, you know? He asks me how I'm doin', stuff like that… Man, I just wish I'd see some pictures of some nice pussy up there, beside all that dick. I mean that's what I'm interested in; it would just make me feel better."

I drank some beer. "Make me feel better too."

"You been to that commune place — you know, in the park?" Jack looked at the wrinkled bill. "Tak took me down there. And I guess it was pretty nice, you know. I was talking to this one girl, who's one of the ones who runs it—"

"Milly?"

"Yeah. Mildred. And she's goin' on and on about my deserting from the army, and all about how good they all feel about deserters, and I guess she's tryin' to be nice too — but after a while, I mean after a couple of fuckin' hours of that, I had to say: Lady, how you. sittin' there tellin' me how bad the fuckin' army is when you ain't never been in the fuckin' army and I just been there for a God damn year and a half! She don't know nothin' about why I run out of the fuckin' army. And she don't even care." His eyes wandered to his hands, the bottle, the puddled counter, the bill, his hands… "I mean, she didn't know a thing…" He drew breath and looked up at me.

"I met Frank at the commune… the guy who's supposed to be a poet? He'd been in the army; and he deserted. He knew what I was trying to tell her. For a while there, him and me, we were pretty close. I can't talk as good as he can, and he knows all about a lot of stuff I don't. But we went around a lot together. He took me to that House where all the girls live. You been there?"

"No."

"Well, it's really something, man. Some of them girls are pretty nice — some are pretty strange, too. And the guys that come around there… well, some of those girls go for some pretty freaky guys. I guess some of them, the girls, even liked me. But only the freaky ones that I just wasn't interested in. I wanted to get me one, sort of little — they got some big women over there! — and pretty. And soft And smart. Now to me being smart in a girl is very important. If I could get me a girl who could talk about things and understand things half as good as Frank could, I'd be happy. And they got some smart girls over there too. In fact, I don't think none of 'em is stupid. Just a lot of them is pretty freaky, though. There was some there just like I wanted. And I could of used a girl friend! I mean I talked to them. And they talked to me. But I couldn't get anywhere. Frank could. He could get laid from Wednesday to next Thursday and start all over tomorrow. I wanted to get laid, but I wanted more than that, too. Now I know people around here is different from me; but that means I'm different from them, too. Only I guess if you're too different, nobody wants anything to do with you. I mean they don't care shit." His hands jerked in the puddle, to the bottle's base. He frowned for a while, and I thought he was finished. But he said: "You hear about the nigger — this black guy who used to come in here: the one who got shot off top of the Second City Bank building?"

I nodded.

"Do you know what they think—" Jack turned on his stool, one hand going to spread across the chest of his shirt—"John, Mildred, all them people over in the commune in the park — that I was the one who done it! And they tellin' all sorts of other people, too! They tellin' that to all them girls who live in that House together! 'Cause I'm white, and I'm from the south, and I don't know how to argue good and explain that they are fuckin' crazy — they are fuckin' crazy if they think I done something like that!" He looked as surprised in the telling as I was in the hearing. "I… I had a gun, you know?" His hand closed to a loose fist that slid, stopping and starting, down his shirt, leaving a wet stain.

I nodded.

"I always had a gun at home. They should have guns out there in the park with all the nuts wandering around in this city. And all they got to do is walk into a store and take one — like I did. They got people comin' around to the park all the God damn time, to take food away from 'em? And some of the people who come got guns. Get up on a damn building and shoot a damn nigger?" His hand, loose in his lap, twitched. "Jesus Christ, I wouldn't do nothin' like that! But I go around the park, man, and I hear them talking. I mean I heard people talkin'; then they'd turn around, and they seen me and shut up! Frank won't have nothin' to do with me no more. I mean he'd say hello or somethin' when I'd speak first and then walk away to do something else. But five times — five times I'd start over to find out just what'n hell was goin' on and he walks away soon as he see me comin'. I mean it's like they're afraid of me; only they got me so scared, I'm afraid to go back. Shit, I don't even believe Frank thinks I done it. Frank's a nice guy. He just don't want the others to think he's havin' anything to do with me. And I don't know what to do with that. I just don't know. I thought for a while, right after I first met him, Frank was like Tak. I know he goes after girls. But he writes that poetry and stuff and, sort of, well… if he liked me, I guessed maybe that was part of it. 'Cause I damn well couldn't see no other reason: he's smarter'n me, older'n me, and he's got about everything he wants. When all this stuff started, I thought maybe because I'd never done anything with him, like with Tak, that was… well, was why he was bein' so damn mean. That pretty stupid, huh? But this place puts ideas like that into your head. I told him, right out; I said, 'Anything you wanna do — Anything at all…!' I wished he'd been gay, man. I wished he'd liked me like that. Because then, after bein' with Tak and all, even though I ain't, I'd kind of known what to do. You know?" He looked at me, shook his head, looked at the bottle. "You know what I mean?" He took his hand out his lap and put it back in the puddle.

"Go on," I said. "You've got it too simple. But go on."

His jaw moved a few times, but he didn't speak.

"How come you don't come down to see us?" I asked.

"You get hungry, come on down to the nest. Tak'll bring you there if you ask him. Left over flower-power, in all this pollution, was never my thing either." I was wondering about him and the department store people but I didn't say anything.

"Well, you guys…" Jack turned a little from side to side. (Thinking: His palms are now glued to the wood, but he doesn't want to be noticed trying to tug them loose.) "You guys… I just don't know. All you got down there is niggers anyway, don't you? After what I done — what they said I done, what's a bunch of bad niggers gonna do when I come walkin' in? You guys play a little too rough… robbin' people in the street. And killin' people." He blinked inflamed lids. "I don't mean, personal. You're a nice guy. And you're their chief, huh…? But that's what I heard, you know? And I don't wanna get into shit like that. I don't got nothin' against it, but…" He frowned, shaking his head. "People talk. And people talk. People talk, tryin' to make you into something you ain't. And after a while, you almost don't know what you done and what you didn't do your own self. People talkin' about me, about what I done, that day when the sky was lit across with that funny kind of light, and that nigger they got in the pictures was after that white girl and the colored people had a riot and tore the hands off the church clock down in Jackson; they say cause I climbed up on the roof and shot the nigger, from the roof, I'm responsible for the riot, for the whole thing, for everything that happened here. Just for shootin' a damn nigger…" His lips, lined with brown, touched, parted, touched: "I had a gun. I didn't shoot…" He spoke slowly. "I didn't shoot that black man. I mean, I even met him three or four time. Right in this bar. With Tak. He was a nice man. I shot him…? I didn't shoot…" Suddenly he knuckled at his lips' scabbed corner. "I went down there. I did that. To check the place out. And with my gun! You climb up the steps behind the Second City Bank building and get up the rest of the way by the fireladder. You can hunker

I don't remember ever getting corrected in high school or college for writing who instead of whom. But except to be funny, I've never said whom in my life. Which makes me think there are two other words: who and who'—the apostrophe standing for the syncopated m. I've been using who' in this notebook for maybe a week, but it still looks funny. So I'll cut it out.

down behind the cornice and aim out over the whole damn street. Man, if you could shoot at all, you could pick off anyone! An' I shoot pretty good…" He looked at me, narrowing his thickened lids. "You think I done it?"

'That depends," I said. "Did you check it out before or after he got shot?"

Something happened on Jack's unshaven face: the skin between his eyebrows wrinkled, the skin below his jaw slackened. Something happened behind it too. "Oh God," he said as flatly as, once, I heard a man say "elevator". "Oh God…" He turned back to the bar. "They all want it to be so bad, they gonna make it be no matter what I done or not. They gonna make it be. Just by wantin' it."

"I know," I told him.

"What can I do? I don't know what to do."

"You have to know who you are," I said. "No matter what they say."

He didn't look at me. "You know who you are?"

After a second I said: "About two thirds of it; so I guess at least I'm on my way. Maybe I'm pretty lucky." I finished my beer. "You come down to the nest. Whenever you want. Just don't bring your gun."

"I wish," Jack said after a few seconds, "I could just get me some kind of job. A job where I could make some good money. Then I could get me a girl friend; then I could buy my own drinks. I don't like to sit in a bar and hustle nice guys for drinks."

"When I first got to town," I told him, "I had a job, moving furniture. Five bucks an hour. You'd've dug it. It was made for you."

But he was looking at the dollar bill.

Since the frustration was making me mean, I decided it was time to go. I stepped from the bar.

"Hey, Kid?"

"What?"

"Ain't you gonna take your change?" He put his middle finger on the wrinkled dollar and slid it over the wet wood.

I thought a second. "Why don't you keep it?"

"Aw, no, man — Naw, I don't like to take no handouts. I need a job; make some good money; pay my own way."

"You take this hand-out," I said. "You need it."

"Well, thanks, man…?" His finger, holding the paper to the counter, slid it back. "Thanks a lot! I'm good for it, too. You'll get it back, once I get some money. You're a pretty nice guy."

Comments anyway: I want to help. And feel help would be impossible. Almost. Which is simply almost forgetting how much help I've had.

I hope he comes to the nest.

Off his head about everything else, he's right on about the pussy. Despite George, and a city concecrated by twin moons, I know there must be some greater, female diety (for whom George is only consort) a sin yet to name her (as that sun is never, named); we have all glimpsed her, sulking in the forest of her knowledge — every tree a tree of that knowledge — and there is nothing but to praise

This afternoon Lady of Spain and Filament staggered through the front door in volcanic laughter, lurched up the hall supporting each other—

"Hey," I said. "What happened with you?"

Filament faced me, pursed her lips, inflated her cheeks, widened her eyes, and rattled her chains before her breasts, miming something I did not understand. Her cheeks exploded with more laughter. Lady of Spain, dragging Filament's arm, hauled her away.

Dollar pushed around me, grinning. "Hey!" he called, "What happened? Did you do it?"

Filament turned and repeated the mime.

Dollar — I'm not sure it meant more to him than it did to me — crashed back against the wall, holding his stomach and howling: "Oh, wow…! You mean…? Really…? Wow…!" and followed them up the hall, his laugh shriller than either of theirs.

Then Tarzan stepped in from the service porch and said: "Look, ladies, people are sleeping in the back room, huh?" There are twelve tones of voice in which you can say that: three of them would have gotten him an apology with muffled giggles. He chose, at random, from the other nine.

"Fuck off, man!" Dollar said, straightening. "It's their nest too!" His had actually been the only laugh with edge to wake.

"Now look!" Tarzan said.

Sex between nest members is rare enough — I can think of six, no seven exceptions, including me and Denny — to make me wonder if basically I don't have here an exandrous and/or exogynous totem group. Most sex comes walking in, invited or not — and even-

"These bitches come running in here yelling and shouting! Somebody's got to tell 'em to keep—"

"Now you look," Filament said. She had about as much use for Tarzan as he had for the other Caucasians in the nest. "You may be Tarzan. But I am not Jane!"

"I'd fuck him," Lady of Spain said. Black, and an occasional partaker in long, intense conversations with Jack the Ripper, for Tarzan she had acquired something of the apes' aura. (Because of this was she more tolerant of him?) "I really would. But Tarzan don't fuck nothin'." Only one of the twelve could make that come out right. She chose it with such ease, I hope he took a lesson.

"Aw, hey, now: I was just asking you to keep it a little—"

D-t, naked and half asleep, loomed in the back doorway, forearms high on the jambs, boney hips cocked askew, big hands (with their funny thumbs) and head hanging. The head came up and he blinked. "Tarzan, when

tually walks out. The seventh exception was Filament's surprising (to me, anyway. Lanya says, "Why were you surprised?" I don't know why I was surprised. I was surprised, that's all.) affair with a tall, Italian looking girl named Anne Harrimon, who, her first night here, took lights and chains and the name Black Widow. Always standing hand in hand, always sitting knee to knee whispering, running through the house giggling or asleep at any time in any room, one's head against the other's breast, one's breast beneath the other's hand, intense, innocently exhibitionistic, and almost wordless, they developed, within hours, a protective/voyeuristic (?) male circle that ran with them everywhere and that, incidentally, dissolved the apes for the duration (the two were not Tarzan's favorite people). After a couple of weeks, the Widow came to me and returned her chains. Those few minutes of conversation in the yard were the only time I really got to know her, decided I liked her; decided I would offer them back to her if I ever saw her again (recalling Nightmare and Lanya): she left. Filament was sad but did not talk about her; then returned to older ways. Seems to be the place to mention it: I once asked Denny why he had no nickname.

"Nightmare used to call me B.J.," he explained. "Until I told him to cut it the fuck out. So I'm just Denny."

"B.J.? What did that stand for?"

"I'll give you one guess."

"Oh," I said. "Hey, what is your last name, by the way?"

"For a while it was Martin. Once It was Cupp. Depended on the foster family I was staying with."

Does the onomal maliability here make my own loss more bearable?

I went to sleep, you was complaining about something. Here it is with the sky all light, and you still at it?"

"I was just telling them to be quiet so they wouldn't wake you up!"

"Time for me to get up anyway, boy. And they did not wake me."

"You see!" Dollar said. "You see, all your yellin' and carryin' on makes more noise than—"

Filament put her hand on Dollar's chest and lowered her head. "Now you just wait too." She looked up again. "Tarzan, you like living here, right?"

"What you mean?" Tarzan's chin jerked belligerently.

"She asked you," Lady of Spain said, "if you like living here. Or not."

"Yeah," Tarzan said. "Yeah. I like living here. What are you gonna do about it?"

"I'm not gonna do anything," Filament said. "But you better. You better do the same thing Dollar is doing."

"Huh?" Dollar said. "What am I—?"

"And that is: Since you like livin" here, you better make a real effort to stay."

D-t broke the silence with laughter. He shook in the doorway like a windy scarecrow.

"Man," Tarzan said, "now what are you laughin' at?"

D-t threw one arm around Tarzan's neck—

"…Hey, man!.."

— and, still laughing, dragged him down the hall, occasionally rubbing his knuckles on Tarzan's head, hard.

"…Hey, cut it out… hey, stop it; that hurts… damn it, nigger! Cut it out… hey, what are you… stop…!"

In the living room, D-t let Tarzan up.

"…what the fuck you doin'?" Tarzan rubbed both hands in his yellow hair.

"I'm just trying to see if your head is as hard as you keep on makin' out like it is, motherfucker! We got any coffee?"

Tarzan dropped one hand, rubbed harder with the other. "Yeah, I… I think so. Somebody made up a pail about an hour ago." He was still confused.

In the hall, Filament and Lady of Spain walked on. Behind them Dollar said: "He don't got no right to talk to you like that."

"He's got a right to talk any way he wants," Filament said. "He's just got to be set to listen afterward, that's all."

"That's what I mean," Dollar said; and so rarely do I agree with him about anything, I write this exception down so

idea around with me like a cyst on the tailbone for (how long is that?) and today (the known part of that) walking in the grey (grey, a grey I'm tired of noticing and noting; I'm exhausted with that grey; which is what that grey means to me) street, this memory: I was passing the table where somebody had left one of those transparent plastic glasses, three quarters full of white wine (in the back closet Raven found the saran tube full of them) with the window open behind it; the glare on the interface between plastic and wine suddenly diffracted like an oil-slick and the glass was full of color. If I moved one way or the other more than three inches, it became just greasy plastic full of urine-colored liquid. First I thought the prismatic movement would be lost as soon as I went. But for the next hour, whenever I walked through the kitchen, I could find the spot from which it looked like that again easily.

The idea stayed in my mind the same way, and I could find it just by passing near.

I thought it would be good to try on Temple Avenue, but I couldn't find any street with that name on the sign. So I walked down a street as wide and as clean, with gates and doors and window-glass so intact that only the pewter sky told our catastrophe. I saw a lady in a black coat and blue scarf cross at the corner; but she went into a side street; when I looked after her, she was stepping into a doorway. I walked, excited and hollow and knowing my shape-how my body moved, my head-a-jog on my neck, the stagger in my one-boot walk-from the inside. Lamp posts and doorways and fire hydrants came at me from the smoke—

I guess he was almost a block ahead, but for maybe a minute I wasn't sure he was there, in the smoke. So I hurried.

He had short, black hair and wore a brown corduroy

Writing this while taking a crap: small consolations-expected a really unhealthy turd, baloney yellow and spinach black after a node of mucus. Mercifully what came was mostly liquid and left the water too murky to examine.

coat with a woolly collar; it was cooler than usual, but because there was no wind, I was still in my vest. His hands were in his pockets. The coat's belt hung down on either side.

The belt was all I was staring at.

Just as I started to overtake him, I scraped my leg on some piece of crating or junk lying on the sidewalk — I never did look back at what it was. But it surprised hell out of me. I wonder now if I would have done it if that hadn't happened: I mean, trying to ignore the surprising sting across my calf, maybe I also ignored that part of my head that would have made me just hurry on past him, reflecting on how close I had come. (Does the City's topology control us completely?)

When I'd halved the distance, he glanced back. But kept walking. I guess he thought I was just going to walk past.

I grabbed his shoulder and spun him back against the fence bars.

"Hey… I" he said. "What's your problem!"

I put the orchid blades right up against his throat. He flinched and looked surprised.

"Give me everything in your pockets," I told him.

He took a breath. "You got it." He wore glasses.

I dug into his pants pocket while he held his hands up. I brought out three dollar bills. (I think an orchid point accidentally knicked his neck and he flinched again) "Turn around and let me check your back pockets." He turned and I felt around under the flap of his coat until I realized his pants didn't have back pockets. I thought I might hit him or cut him then; but I didn't.

I backed away and he turned to look at me. His mouth was pressed together. As I stepped away, I realized his side pockets were much deeper than I'd thought: I could see the clustered circles of change outlined low in the black denim.

He glanced past one raised hand to the left.

A guy was crossing the street, watching us. But when I looked, the guy looked away.

The man made a disgusted sound, dropped his hands, and turned to go.

I gestured with the orchid and said, "Hey!"

He looked back.

"You wait here ten minutes before you move," I said, and took another step backward. "If you call for anybody, or try to come after me, I'll cut your throat!" I turned and sprinted up the block; glanced back once.

He was walking away.

I made it around the corner, went into a doorway to take off the orchid and put the three bills in my pocket. Then I stooped down and rolled up my cuff to look at my leg. It was just the tiniest scratch, down the side of my calf and back toward my ankle, like a swipe past a nail or a broken board or a

out on the front steps, met Dragon Lady: Denim vest laced tight, arms folded (making the laces above them look a little loose), looking pensive.

Haven't seen her in a while.

Back now.

What's she been doing?

Nothing.

Where's she been?

Around.

I put my arm around her but she obviously didn't feel like being mauled. So I dropped it and just walked with her.

As we circled the house, she relaxed a little, dark arms still folded.

Baby and Adam with you?

Yeah, they'll be here.

Reached the yard (telling her, "It's good to see you back," and she smiled her stained-tooth smile) and delivered her up to the apes and Tarzan who were goofing around there. The atmosphere cedes us a day featureless as night. I didn't know what time it was; the noise and raillery surrounded her as she went to sit under the tree, fists between her knees, with a troubled look that did not stay on anything. Wondering how (late? early?) it was, I decided I would fix the sink in the service porch (because I'd gone into the cabinet under the kitchen sink for something else and seen some tools; again, topology preordinates) and after I'd turned off the water and wrenched off the first

I have to keep mentioning this timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time's passage registers, so that instants, seconds, minutes are painfully real; but hours-much less days and weeks-are left-over noises from a dead tongue.

nut, I decided I'd take the whole thing apart and then see if I felt like putting it back together.

I took the cap off the bottom of the elbow drain and lots of hair and purple gunk fludged out on the floor. Took the taps off. Should have done that before I took the cap off, because there was a little surge of rusty water out of each-that went down the drain and onto the floor. Then I unscrewed the collars from inside the taps.

D-t came out, squatted, and watched a while, sometimes handed me tools; finally asked, whimsically, "What the fuck are you doing?" and helped me whobble the sink from the wall (standing suddenly when it almost fell) on its enameled claw and ball.

I've lost a name. So? If the inhabitants of this city have one thing in common, it is that such accidents don't interest them; that is neither lauded here as freedom nor wailed as injury; It is taken as a fact of landscape, not personality.

"I'm putting the sink back together," I told him because I'd just decided to.

D-t grunted and shoved at the bowl-back. The fore-joints of his thumbs are both crooked; which I'd never noticed before.

There was some string on the window sill, and I brought in a can of putty from the kitchen. But when I'd pried up the lid with the screwdriver, the surface was cracked like Arizona. And I didn't know where any oil was. D-t came back with a bottle of Wesson, and I couldn't think of any reason why not. D-t settled back to watch.

"Now we could of got a place without no leaky sink," D-t said. "But then I guess there wouldn't be nothing to do."

I laughed as much as I could holding the cold-water pipe up while trying to screw the fitting back down over it.

I asked him something or other.

Don't recall his exact answer, but somewhere in it, he said; "…like when I first got here, I used to walk along the street and know I could break into just about any house I wanted, and I was just scared to death…"

We talked about that. I remembered my first walks in these streets (D-t said: "But I broke in, anyway.") While we talked I recall thinking: It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of then. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow, there is no way to conclude; but here, conclusion itself is superfluous. I said something to D-t about: "What this place needs is a good wind, or a lightning-storm. To clean it out. Or thunder."

"Oh, man," D-t said. "Oh, man—No! No, I don't think I could take that. Not here," and chuckled (like, I suspect, someone under sentence). We really got into some talk. In that quiet way where you're into the feeling, if not the information. Once he asked me how long I thought I could keep it up, here, and I said: "I don't know. How long can you?" and he laughed too. I was wrapping string around the joint and the fastening on the other end of the cold-water pipe when someone in the doorway said: "Hi, Kid."

I looked up.

Frank stood there looking like he didn't know whether or not to put his hands in his pockets.

"Hello," I said and went back to the fixture.

"How're you doing?"

I grunted.

"Glad I found you. Nobody seemed to know where you were: I wanted to know if I could talk to you about something."

I was mad at him for interrupting; also because, ignoring him, I had to sort of ignore D-t. "What do you want?"

The doorframe creaked; Frank shifted on the jamb.

Then the floorboards; D-t shifted his squat.

Reading over my Journal, I find it difficult to decide even which incidents occurred first I have hysterical moments when I think finding that out is my only possible hope/salvation. Also wonder at some of the things I have not written down: the day with Lanya when she took me to the city museum and we spent from before dawn to after dark sitting around in the reconstructed 18th century rooms ("We could live here, like Calkins!" and she whispered, smiling, "No…" and then we talked about a run here: and again she said, "No …" this time not smiling. And I won't But all the talking we did there, and wandering, growing hungrier and hungrier in the pearl light through the ceiling panes because we could not bare to leave), should make this the longest and most detailed incident In this Journal because it was where she showed me thing after thing and told me about them, to make them mean something for me; she became a real person, by what she knew and what she did, more than any way she ever could by what was done to her, done to her, done: which was so easily the way I've always wanted to define her. Wanting her to take Denny and the whole nest there; and-holding a small painting she had taken down from the wall to show me something about how the canvas was prepared In the seventeenth century ("Christ, I used to spend weeks making black oil and Meriquet! I'm surprised I didn't asphyxiate someone.")—

"Well," Frank said, settling with the idea of talking to me while I wasn't looking at him, "I was wondering — I mean: How could someone like me go about joining up with you guys?"

I looked around at him to catch D-t already looking, and looking away.

"I mean," Frank went on, "is there some initiation, or something? Does some-body have to bring you in; or do you guys just get together and take a vote?"

"What do you want to know for?" I asked. "Aren't you happy over at the commune? Or is this just research for an article you're planning to do for the Times?"

"An article on how to get into the scorpions?" Frank laughed. "No. I just want to know because

she said, "No, I don't think so. It's a gamble enough with you. Not just yet. Maybe later," and re-hung the painting, upside down.

We laughed.

So I hung seventeen paintings upside down—"Come on! Stop…" she insisted, but I did anyway. Because, I explained, anyone who comes along will notice them like this, frown, maybe turn them right-side up again. And will end up looking at them a little longer. "I'm only doing it for the ones I like."

"Oh," she said, dubiously. "Well, okay."

But it Is more memorable unfixed. And to me, that's important. (Only while I'm actually writing, for an instant it is actually more vivid…) So I'll stop here, tired.

Except to tell about that funny argument with Denny, which I still do not understand, where I thought I was going to kill the little bastard. And Lanya just seemed uninterested. Which made me so mad I could have killed her too. And so I spent an anfternoon with a bottle of wine and Lady of Spain, bitching about the two of them, and passing the bottle back and forth — she had taken to wearing many rings — and we staggered to the Emboriki, daring each other to break in, which we didn't do, but saying to her, as we strutted by, with our arms around each others' shoulders, "You're my only real friend here, you know?" all very maudeline, but necessary. Then we shouted: "Motherfuckers! God damn shit-eating motherfuckers!" echoed in the naked street "Come on out from there and fight!" We were hysterical, lerching up and down the curb, spilling wine. "Yeah!" Lady of Spain yelled. "Come on and—" then burped; I thought she was going to vomit, but no: " — down!" Her eyes were very red and she kept rubbing them with her ringed fingers. "Come on down and—" then she saw him: at the large window on the third floor. He was holding a riffle under one arm. The pigeon chest, the too-long hair, even the blue, blue shirt that, from the street, I could tell was too big: recognizing him made me feel odd. "Hey," I said to Lady of Spain and told her who he was. She said: "No shit?" I laughed. Then she said, "Wait a minute. Does he recognize you?" But I began to shout

…well, things are getting a little tight in the park." He glanced back out in the hall. "We got some real funny people around. Although it looks a little crowded here too." He decided on his pockets. "You guys getting hungry yet? I probably shouldn't mention it, but John and Milly are quite beholden to you since you quit hitting them up for care packages."

"An oversight," I said.

"Shouldn't have mentioned it."

I turned back under the sink, looked for something to do but couldn't really find anything. So I kept looking.

"You guys seem to have a real thing going here. I'm not happy with what's going on around me where I am. I want to know where I get my transfer, where I can buy a ticket—"

again. I called him every kind of name I could, between fits of laughing. Lady of Spain insisted: "Look, he's got a gun!" nowhere near as drunk as she'd been. "Kid, let's get out of here!" But I kept up. He watched. Once he moved to rest the butt on the sill, the barrol pointing straight up. I think he was grinning. Finally we left.

The city is a map of violences anticipated. The armed dwellers in the Emboriki, the blacks surrounding them, the hiss from a turned tap that has finally stopped trickling, the time it takes a group who go out to come back with bags of canned goods, packaged noodles, beans, rice, speghetti — each is an emblem of inalienable, coming shock. But the clashes that do occur are all petty, disappointing, minor, inconclusive, above all stupid, as though the city prevents any real anxiety's ever resolving. And the result? All humanity here astounds; all charity here is graced.

Lady of Spain and I reached the nest, still laughing, astounded we were alive.

In the back yard, Lanya told me she had taken Denny to the museum—"for a couple of hours. We looked at all the paintings you especially liked — and Denny turned them right side up. So he could see them, of course." "Smug butch," I said. She said: "Who? Me?" And Denny began to laugh as though somehow the joke were really on the two of us, which had us both wondering. Then he said they'd wandered around, he taking her out to a place called Holland Lake. They crawled into bed beside me, and we talked till it grew light, Denny being the only one of us who doesn't realize how much easier that makes liking one another. And when Denny did a lot of talking, it finally put me to sleep — though I wanted to stay awake — and woke a little later, with them asleep too, in the familiar position.

We can survive so much.

And crawling between them (more comfortable, I guess, than the familiar position when all is said and done) went to sleep again till Lady of Spain and Risa, laughing out in the hall, woke us up; I hoped they would come in. But they didn't.

"Oh, man," I said. "I can't talk to you about shit like that now. I'm busy."

"Sure Kid," came out real quick, and he stopped leaning on the doorframe. "Maybe later. I'll just hang around… till you have some time."

D-t handed me the string. "Hey, thanks," I told D-t, "but I don't think I should pack that grease trap." So I didn't, but it was pretty much all right anyway.

Glanced back.

Frank was gone.

So we scrubbed out the grease-streaked bowl, more or less quiet, questioning such idiot work and finding the value — a chance to do something with D-t-disappeared, defined. Well, the sink wasn't dripping.

Something (I heard it) was happening in front of the house. I listened, surprised (looking at D-t look up at me), to somebody get up in the front room, run out of the front door—

"Uh-oh," I said. "Come on." We went into the hall together. D-t got ahead; I pushed by him out the front door; stopped on the forth step.

"Jesus Christ!" Frank shouted. "Hey, watch it—!"

"You want a chain, huh?" Copperhead, crouched, wound the links once more around his fist, pulled back, and swung again. "I'm gonna wrap this one around your fuckin' neck!"

"God damn, man! Look, all I did was…!"

Some in the loose circle glanced up at me; so did Frank, then jumped back as Copperhead swung: "Hey—!"

Copperhead, concentrated as a pool player, raised his fist again.

"ALL RIGHT!" and I walked down the steps. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" which got everybody's attention except Copperhead's. "COPPERHEAD—! Cut It Out!" thinking: This is going to be the time when I have to tangle with him. Thinking also: It's just not worth it. But he hooked around and I snatched the end of his chain and yanked. He let go and snapped his fingers back. It must have hurt his hand because it sure as hell hurt mine.

I went up to Frank (who looked as scared of me as he was of Copperhead) and said, "What is this, huh? All right, what are you doing in this—"

"I didn't—" He started at some movement behind me.

I didn't turn. "I think you better get out of here." It must have been Copperhead in some feint. "Go on. Go on, now! Get going."

He started to say, "Um…" and I realized how used I was to people doing what I told them when they weren't doing anything else.

"Look," I said, "though you are making it harder and harder for me to remember it, so far, you have been my most accurate critic; therefore you deserve some consideration. I'm giving you that consideration now: Scoot!"

Frank turned, went gingerly between Fireball and Lady of Spain, who broke the circle for him.

I turned to Copperhead: "You must be really down on me, man. Because I'm always coming along to mess up your fun, right?"

"Aw, Kid—" Copperhead rubbed his beard with his wrist—"I was not going to hurt him."

"You were just going to scare him. Sure." I saw the story coming: Frank's annoying manner, too blunt questions, a jibe, a look; and a violence crystallized from the day's boredom.

Copperhead began to tell it to me, insistently. (I tossed him his chain and he caught and put it around his neck without breaking his sentence.) So I motioned him to come on and, half listening, went up the steps with him.

California came back this evening. Must have seen him three/five times before I noticed — we were on the back steps — he'd hung both a gold six-pointed star (Hebrew letters on it) and a black swastika (edged in silver) on his light-shield chain. Jack the Ripper, carrying on about something, started to call California "…a crazy Jew-bastard…" only he saw the star, the bent cross. I could hear the shape the unspoken epithet carved in the silence. Then the Ripper went on about something else. California, since he went away, has changed: his thin hands are tenser; his boney shoulders sit more forward; his blue eyes, between strings of his long hair, are wider and angrier. (How odd symbols are!) I think the change is like what I went through when I got my chain of prisms, mirrors, lenses… The Ripper's sensativity surprised me (he did call California a Jew-bastard five minutes later) but then, the derogatory terms we hurl around here with such seeming freedom are actually counters in a complicated game, and the point was the Ripper's. Penalties for misplay can grow huge — recall the beating Dollar took at Calkins'. The rewards? I suspect, in this landscape, they are just as huge. Am I just being pompous, or is the real and necessary information these epithets generate (making them a real and necessary part of Bellona's own language) the reminder that it is often just when we are most aware of the freedom of the field in which we move that our actions become most culture-bound?

D-t, who'd watched from the top, stood with Dragon Lady. They talked quietly and intently as the guys filed past.

Passing her, Copperhead tried to broaden his anecdote to include her. Maybe because of the small look she gave him (or maybe because her eyes didn't really meet his at all) he finally went on by, just dropping his hand on her shoulder, and she nodded. And went on talking to D-t. Which is a good introduction to why

over the charred grass stopped conversation. A climb across rocks and among green brush jarred it loose again. Cathedral told Priest the black stone building in the smoke was the Weather Tower.

I still don't see any vanes, aerials, or anemometers.

We came around a corner, left hips brushing head-sized stones, right hips (elbows up) scratched by bushes.

The man in the middle of the court was bent over a tripod. As we came toward him, he looked up: Captain Kamp.

Who still didn't recognize me until we were on top of him.

"…Kid?"

"Hello, Captain."

He laughed now. "Now you fellows looked pretty ominous coming across there." He debated whether to give his hand for shaking. Which Angel solved by giving his. They hooked thumbs.

"Angel," Angel said.

The pink and brown fists locked, shook. Kamp looked like he'd been expecting the biker shake; later he told me that was the first time he'd seen it.

"Michael Kamp," Kamp said.

"Cathedral," Cathedral said:

Shake.

"California," California said:

Shake.

"Priest… You're the astronaut, huh?"

Shake.

"That's right."

"Spain."

"That's Lady of Spain," Priest amended:

Shake. Kamp got a sort of funny smile but figured he best not say anything. Which was best.

"Tarzan."

Shake.

"Kid."

We shook.

And Kamp said, "Sure. I haven't forgotten you now," and everybody laughed. Because it had been so formal.

"What you gonna do with that?" Priest went to sit on the chipped steps. He'd been complaining about the sore on bis foot.

"That's a telescope," Lady of Spain said. "The kind with a mirror, right?"

"That's right." Kamp stepped to the other side.

"See," Lady of Spain said. (The telescope reminds me of a conversation with Lanya and a whole bunch at the nest I wanted to put down.)

"What are you gonna do with it?" Priest asked, leaning forward to bend the toe of his sneaker up and down. His chain swung against his brown sunken chest and out, clinking.

Kamp squinted at the clouds. "Probably not much of anything. Occasionally I've seen a few breaks in the overcast. It occurred to me, now perhaps I might get a look at your sky here. After all those stories about double moons and giant suns…"

In the quiet, I thought about all the times people had not said anything about them.

"After all—" you hear about voices breaking the silence? I learned how strong that silence had been from the way his After all snapped in my head—"I saw… some of it." How long, now, had that silence gone on? "I thought I'd bring the telescope down here to the park- they said the hill here was one of the highest points in the city — and perhaps see if I could just check whether any planets were where they're supposed to be. I found an Ephemeris in the library up at Roger's. Only my watch hasn't been working all week. None of you guys happen to know what the date is, now, do you?"'

When none of us answered, he sucked his teeth, turned back to the white aluminum cylinder (black rings around the middle) and looked down the open end. "Well, somebody'll come along who does, now."

I wondered if George or June knew.

"The paper said it was November ninth," California said, "this morning."

To which Kamp didn't even look up. "If the planets are where they're supposed to be, that more or less means the Earth's where it's supposed to be." He glanced aside long enough to grin. "In the face of all this cosmological confusion, finding that out should make everyone feel a little better."

"Suppose it's not?" I asked.

"I," Kamp said, "think it is. But knowing it will make us all happier."

"I guess that's a pretty good reason," Angel said. He stepped up and looked down into the tube. "Hey, I can see my face upside down in there!"

"I think it would be a good idea, politically, to be able to print in the paper, now, that we know that — much. It would calm things down — some people have gotten very upset. And I can see why." Kamp looked up the same time Angel did; their eyes caught. "Now you boys—" which he used as an excuse to look away at Lady of Spain and add an inclusive nod—"aren't interested in politics, I guess, but it seems to me…"

In the pause, Cathedral said: "You're into politics, huh?"

"I'm into… politics, I guess so now." His hands lay across the white tube. He moved the bones about inside his flesh as though it were a glove. "But I think your Mr Calkins is a pretty conservative politician. Now don't you?"

Cathedral, with dark thumb and forefinger, moiled his thick earlobe. A darker pucker where the gold ring went through meant he'd only had it a little while.

"I'm sure he thinks he's radical. But I think I'm the radical and he's the conservative." I thought he would laugh: he squinted at the clouds, at the telescope. "Now I guess that's what I've been thinking."

"You're so conservative," Lady of Spain suggested, "it comes out the other way and gets radical?"

"No." Captain Kamp laughed. "No. That's not it. Maybe I'm not really… into politics." He paused. "But it's just that this is such a big country now. Roger… well, I guess it's hard for anyone to know… that it's such a big country."

"Unless you've seen it," I asked, "from a space ship?"

"Rocket," he said. "No. No, that's not what I mean. The Megalithic Republic — now, the Megalithic Republics: the Republic of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the People's Republic of China — they're very different kinds of political entities from, say, France, Borneo, Uruguay, or Nigeria. The people who live in small nations know it, but they don't know why. The people who live in the Megalithic Republics simply look at the little ones as alien, exotic, bewildering, but aren't even sure why the little ones' histories read the way they do. Two hundred million people, ninety percent literate, all of them speaking one language! Now hold that up beside a country like…" During his pause, I wondered how many examples he had. "Greece, now. Only eight million people — less people in the country than in New York City. Guy from Macedonia can't understand a guy from the Pelaponnesus. Hell, the guy from the north side of Crete can't understand a guy from the south side. My wife, she said we should go there. And we stayed for six weeks. That was my first wife now. But there's no place in Europe where you can go in a straight line more than eight hours by mechanical transportation without running into a different language, different currency, a different culture! How do they expect to teach three thousand years of European politics to American kids in American schools, or Russian kids in Russian schools, in a land where you can go three days by car in any direction and not cross a border? You have to have been there to understand. I mean, have any of you ever been to Europe?"

Cathedral nodded.

Angel said, "I was in Germany, in the army."

"I never been there," California said.

"I've never been," I echoed, remembering Japan, Australia, Uruguay.

Lady of Spain said: "I haven't."

But even two had undercut Kamp's point. "Yes, well I guess you know what I mean now. America… America's so big. And Bellona's one of the half-dozen biggest cities in America. Which makes it one of the biggest in the world." He frowned, mostly at Cathedral. "But you guys here, Calkins too, just have no idea how big that is, and how different that makes the people in it."

"You going to be able to see anything with that?" I asked. "When there is a break, it doesn't last very long."

Kamp mmmmed in agreement. "You don't need much… information — like I was telling you once, back at the party? Mask out almost everything: still, even a little bit will tell you an awful lot." He looked at the sky again. The lines out from his eyes lengthened. His lips parted and thinned.

"Hey, we been in Europe," Angel said. "You gonna tell us about the moon? You the only one here's been there."

"Shit, I seen that on television," Lady of Spain said. "Live. I never seen anything in Europe on television. Except in pictures."

Kamp chuckled. "Now I was on the earth for thirty-eight years." He looked down. "I was on the moon for six and a half hours. And I've been back from the moon, well… a handful more years. But that six and a half hours is the only thing anybody is really interested in about me, now."

"What was it like?" Tarzan asked, as though that followed perfectly from what Kamp had said.

"You know?" Kamp stepped around the telescope. "It was like coming to Bellona."

"How do you mean?" Priest put both hands on the stone steps and leaned forward, waiting to see whether what Kamp had said was from hostility, or just a new thought; or both.

"When we got to the moon, now, we knew a lot about where we were; and at the same time, we hardly knew anything about it at all. And that's just what it's like here. After six and a half hours—" Kamp mused, his eyes narrowing in the smoke—"it was time to go. And if I can't figure, out where we are this evening, now, I think it will be time for me to leave here too."

Lady of Spain looked at the sky, then at me—"Where would you go? — " then at the sky again.

"Someplace where I can tell where I am."

The sky was fused, side to side.

"Good luck," Cathedral said.

"I guess that's good-bye too, then," I said.

Priest stood up from the steps.

Kamp nudged one leg of the tripod with the toe of his shoe. "Maybe it is." The metal tip scraped awfully loud.

"So long," Cathedral said.

We walked down the hill.

Angel wanted to know what Kamp had said about information at the party. I tried to reconstruct. Which turned Angel on, and he began a sort of dithyramb about how much everything, while we

Speech is always in excess of poetry as print is always inadequite for speech. A word sets images flying through the brain from which auguries we recall all extent and intention. I'm not a poet because I have nothing to give life to make it due, except my attention. And I don't know if my wounded sort is enough. People probably do hear watches go tic-tok. But I'm sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic… Why do I recall this in a city without time? What hairy men find on their bodies is amazing.

walked through brash and rocks and brushes, told him about the park; that was much fun.

We came out of the trees, talking a lot to each other just as somebody jammed a log into the furnace. Sparks went high into the late, grey afternoon; the smoke plume thinned.

"Hey!" John said and came over, through, and around the kids sitting and standing. "How are you guys? How you guys been?"

I watched the smoke.

Thinning.

Two kids (pink tank-tops; long, straw-colored hair) hauled sleeping bags from under the picnic bench.

Overtaking John, Woodard, yellow as a leaf and woolly as … well, Woodard, came to a dead stop and blinked at me (us?). I think at first he'd thought he knew us, but then wasn't sure.

I was going to say hello but John overtook him, now, ruffling at the boy's hair, and said, "Kid, I haven't seen you around for a long time." His hands were just as clean, but his blanket-vest looked like he'd actually done something in it since that last I'd seen.

"How's it going?" I asked.

John gave a tepid grin. "About as well as it can, I guess."

I felt something was wrong; as if I was looking at a place I didn't recognize but should — or did recognize, even though I'd never seen it.

"Kid!" which was Milly.

They went on talking without giving me a chance to introduce the others, which I thought was silly, but Milly and John did things that way. Talking the most, Milly stepped forward over a sleeping bag where an older guy sat up and began to rub his-glasses on the tail of a Sweet-Orr workshirt.

Then I figured, fuck it, they better know who everybody was so I just said, loud enough to make them stop talking: "This is Cathedral. And this is…" going down the line. While I was doing that, I saw this guy walk into the clearing with a gun under one arm, which was what started the fight.

And which, after going through all this, I don't really feel like describing again because I've been over it with so many people at that bar and at the nest already. Lady of Spain was all enthusiastic and kept asking where the guy was from. John and Milly I think were going to say they didn't know, but Jommy said he was from the God-damn downtown department store, and Milly said, "You don't know he's from the Emboriky for certain," and Jommy said, Shit, he knew, and that they'd already run them from one side of the damn park to the other; which I didn't even know about. "Man," John said, beating at my shoulder and grinning, "You're really crazy, Kid; you're really crazy…" He shook his head, laughing like something was very funny. "Man!"

Second thoughts: since there've been so many repercussions, I should go into it once more just to clear it up for myself. A few things stick with me: like, they had the box of food all ready for him, sitting up on the end of the picnic table (like it used to be for Nightmare). And he was wearing very high-waisted khaki pants, a khaki shirt (army? marine? I don't think so), and orange construction boots — shirt, pants, and boots all looked brand new. But I couldn't tell you the color of his hair Also: the riffle, which I mentioned right off, didn't strike me as odd at the time. Until he started talking and waving it around and once pointing at the guy still sitting in the sleeping bag. I was going through something about maybe he was some loner friend of theirs like Tak, and had I seen him before; and where? I've told a couple of people since that he was somebody I'd met before, to sort of explain that feeling away. I'm not sure now; but for one moment I was certain it was the guy who'd sat in the balcony that night at George's. But now I'm just as certain (however certain that is) it wasn't. Cathedral actually moved first-something no one mentions when they talk about it. I thought he was going to take the food carton for himself I guess the guy did too; that was what made him raise the gun.

What were the dozen people standing around thinking?

What was I thinking?

I grabbed the barrel with one hand and hammered the heel of the other against the stock so hard I thought my wrist had green-sticked. Thinking (all part of that first feeling of displaced familiarity): I've done this before… No … I've never done this before, but if I'm ever going to, I've got to do it now! And if I didn't get shot in the chest, it was because the guy was too scared or just not used to killing people. For which I'm very glad. I twisted, with my arm on fire, and

"You want the carton?" Milly was saying. "We should give that food to them, John. We used to give food to Nightmare."

"Shit," Priest said. "We got a whole cellar full of food."

"Come on," I said. Come on, let's get out of here and leave these poor-ass motherfuckers alone!" Which I delivered right at John (and it went right over his shoulder to Frank who was sitting on the table beside the food carton as if he was guarding it. And you know, all the bastards kept grinning right through). So we left.

Angel kept prancing around and started tugging on me just like John (Priest was carrying the rifle and had started examining it, and I said: "Man, throw that

watched his face go from surprise to pain as his fingers wound in the trigger guard.

The gun cracked! I thought the explosion had happened in my mouth. But the barrel was pointing over my right shoulder. (If you'd asked me then, I would have said I felt the bullet tip my ear-but that's impossible, I guess.)

The gun dropped/fell/slipped(?) from him; I swung it away, swung it back and wopped it against his hip. He staggered, grunting. I guess he thought 1 was crazy. (Was I crazy?) He started to come at me, but Lady of Spain grabbed him; then Cathedral.

I hit him again in the stomach with the butt of the gun.

Afterward, John kept saying: "Kid, you're crazy, man! Man, you're crazy, Kid!" in a paroxysm of gleeful hysteria, while Cathedral et the five other al kept their shoulders near mine. My thoughts were carbonated (Yes, I shouted after the guy, when he got up and limped away, "Get the fuck out of here and get your own food!" because it was the easiest thing to say that would give what I did a reason; but while everyone was standing there yakking about how tough it was getting hit up for food all the time, and maybe they wouldn't come back for a while and leave them alone, I kept thinking I should just take the carton of food with me [with the stash under the house we didn't need it] because we didn't need it) but the detrius was: Take it; because that was the only way to make them understand why my reason for doing it was.

I forgot it — the carton.

I was halfway back to the nest with Cathedra! and the others going on loudly about how cool the whole thing was when I remembered three times and forgot what I'd decided to do. I told them about it, which took a lot of energy to start. But they didn't understand ("Yeah! Yeah, that's what we should have done!" from Tarzan; and from Lady of Spain: "That would've been all right. They wouldn't of minded.") and kept yelling.

I'm not a poet

I'm not a hero.

But sometimes I think these people will distort reality in any way to make me one. And sometimes I think reality will distort me any way to make me appear one — but that's insanity, isn't it? And I don't want to be crazy again. I don't

fucker away! You hear me? Throw that fucker away — break it on something, nigger, or I'll break your black head!" He smashed the stock on a stone, "Yeah!" grunting, and twisted up the firing chamber so it was pretty much beyond use. I said: "That's no scorpion weapon! A scorpion's got a fucking sting!" and lifted up my orchid. They liked that.) just like John and saying, "Man, you're something else!"

"I should have taken their fucking carton."

"Yeah," Lady of Spain said. "Yeah. That's what we should have done."

Tarzan said: "Yeah. That would have been all right. They wouldn't have minded."

"You're too much," Priest said again, and Cathedral laughed and shook my shoulder.

They kept it up all the way into the nest. Tarzan and Priest came in with me. Cathedral, Lady of Spain, and Angel got stopped outside where they began to tell the story. Well, I guess that was all right. There were enough people around drunk — a bunch of nonmembers who were apparently friends of Devastation or something, I didn't care — to absorb it.

I was going down the hall when Denny swung out of the living room and grabbed my arm. "Hey—!" He was really excited.

I thought he was going to say something about what happened in the park. "Hey what?"

He just blinked.

So I started down the hall again.

He followed and said, "Lanya's in the room, in the loft but—" I looked like I was about to go in—"I think she's busy."

So I stopped.

Denny said: "You probably shouldn't go in."

"What's she doing?"

"Balling."

"Here?" I said, not that loudly. Beside being surprised, I remember I thought it was not very cool for someone as down as she was on the gang-bang bit (but basically pretty together when it came to keeping her thing in front of assaulting-type male personalities) to be making it with one of the guys from the nest in my loft.

Somebody was coming up the hall from the john.

"Come on," I said to Denny. We went out on the service porch. "Who's she fucking?" I knew the answer was going to be a surprise; and also that there were six-no, five guys I would particularly not like it to be: Spitt, Copperhead, Thruppence, Jack the Ripper, or Fireball; because they were all the sort who, through malice or ignorance, might try to make it into something unpleasant.

"Some guy I picked up downtown."

I was surprised. " — you picked up?" I hadn't expected to be relieved, though. "You balled him too?"

"Naw. Naw, it was her idea."

"This sounds very familiar," I said. "What do you mean, her idea?"

"She asked me to go out and find somebody who wanted to fuck her for money… for five dollars."

"Whose five dollars?" I asked. "His or hers?"

Tarzan and D-t came up the steps and through the porch door, Tarzan to listen, D-t to wait for Tarzan to finish listening.

"It's hers now." Denny grinned, "She said she was listening to us talk about hustling, I guess, a lot, and I guess she was curious. Christ, was it hard to find someone with any money at—"

"We didn't talk about hustling a lot."

"Didn't stop her from listening. She told me she was curious. She said she wanted to try it."

"Yeah, yeah. Sure." I cuffed his shoulder. "I just want to know why you're not in there doing your thing."

"Shit." Denny scowled. "The guy's a creep. He didn't seem so bad when I met him. But he's a creep, you know?"

"Jesus Christ." Tarzan leaned against the sill of the screenless window frame. "You let your old lady…?" and stopped; probably because of the way I looked at him.

I said: "Let her what?"

"You know, mess around with… well… you know."

"Tarzan," I said, "if my old lady wants to fuck a sheep with a dildo strapped to her nose, that is largely her concern, very secondarily mine, and not yours at all. She can fuck anything she wants — with the possible exception of you. That, I think, would turn my stomach. Yes, that, I think, I would not be able to

I took the orchid from the chain around my neck, I raised my hand and slipped it into the harness, and the sky darkened outside the windows, the sky roared outside the window screens, and I snapped the collar on my wrist, and the light split in two, each arm growing, ragged-rimmed, with magnesium bright edges, arching the sky, and I swung my hand up at Tarzan's chest.

take. I'm going to kill you." On my hand — it swung up at Tarzan's chest — was the orchid. "That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to play tic-tac-toe on your face, and then I'm—"

"Hey…" Tarzan whispered, "you're crazy…!" looking very scared, looking at Denny, then D-t; but they had stepped away, and he looked scareder.

"Yeah?" I nodded. "You didn't know I was crazy?"

I held the clutch of blade-points right in front of his left tit. While everybody held their breath, I thought: It would be easier here than any place else. Then I said: "Aw, shit! Run, motherfucker!"

Tarzan looked confused.

I dropped my hand. "I want to see you run! And that's the last I want to see of you till after the sun comes up tomorrow. Otherwise, I will beat the shit out of you, carry your broken, bleeding, and unconscious body back to your mother's and father's door sill, apartment nineteen-A, and leave you there!"

"They don't live in…" Then his mind clicked back to where he was; he sighed — I guess it was a sigh — and lunged for the door. He collided with a pigeon-chested man in the bluest shirt I've ever seen ("Hey, watch it! You okay…?") and fled down the hall.

The man looked confused too.

Not that his hair was long; but for the type of person he was, your first thought would naturally be: He needs a haircut "She said," he said, "I should go out this way…?"

"Okay," Denny said. "There's the door."

Dragon Lady had come up the steps and was standing outside it, watching.

"I gave her the money. Hey, thanks a lot. That was really nice. Maybe I'll be back." He looked at me, then looked just a little more confused.

Dragon Lady opened the door for him and he hurried down into the yard. She looked after him, then let the door close, but stood outside on the top step. I looked at the orchid.

It isn't despair. That vanishes with enough laughter and reason. I have both of those a-plenty. I guess most people, when all is said and done, lead lives as interesting as they can possibly bare. But I don't remember putting it on. I don't.

I don't remember putting it on.

I took it off.

"You like him," I asked, "D-t?"

"Who?" D-t said. "Tarzan? Man, he's okay. He just don't know when to keep his mouth shut. That's all."

"You made him piss all in his pants," Denny said. Then he laughed. "You see that? He was getting wet, all down the side of his leg." He gestured at his own thigh.

"Huh?" I said.

"He wet all over himself." Denny laughed again, sharp, and barking, like a puppy.

"I wish I'd seen it," I said. "It would have made me feel better."

"I… don't mind Tarzan," Denny said.

"Look, man," D-t said. "Tarzan's just a kid. He don't know anything."

"Shit!" I slipped the orchid back on my neck again. "He's older than Denny!"

"He comes," D-t said, "from a very strange family. He's told some of us all about them. You got to make allowances."

"They're not that strange," I said.

"I mean," D-t said, "they didn't teach him too much. I mean about the way things are."

"Yeah?" I took a very large breath. "Maybe what gets me is how much his family reminds me of my own."

Then I went down the hall and into my own room.

Lanya, visible down to her nose, looked over the edge of the bed like a cartoon Kilroy.

"Hello," I said. "How are you?"

"When I heard you come in," she said, "I thought Denny would keep you in the front room. That's why I sent the guy out the back."

I climbed up into the loft.

She sat up and made room; she was wearing her jeans, but they weren't buttoned yet. "You know what turned him on most? That I was a chick who balled scorpions," she said immediately. "That was all that really interested him. He was nice enough. But I could have been a piece of liver one of you guys had jerked off in; he would have been just as happy." She touched my knee, tentatively. "I mean, I don't mind being a… what do they call it, 'a homosexual bridge' if I enjoy both ends. Really — he was too funny."

"I was going to ask you," I said, "whether you had completely lost your mind. But coming from me, I suppose, the question is presumptuous to the point of quaintness."

"I don't think I'm out of my mind." She frowned. "To finish up the fantasy, I should turn this—" she pulled a five dollar bill from under her knee—"over to you. Or Denny…" She sucked in her lower lip, then let it go. "Actually I'd like to keep it."

"Fine by me," I said. "Just don't get into this money thing too seriously. You'll end up like Jack."

"It isn't the money," she insisted. "It's a symbol."

"That's just what I mean."

"I think you should take your own advice."

"I try," I said, "Hey — this wasn't intended as some kookie way to get back at me for mugging that guy in the street?"

"Kid!" She sat back. "You just shocked me for the first time since I've known you!"

"Tread delicately," I said. "Where do you come off with this shit about me shocking you?"

"I didn't even think of it. I mean, how are they even comparable? I mean what would… Wow! Is that what you thought?"

"No," I said. "I didn't know. So I asked." We sat for a few seconds, rather glumly. Then I said: "Was he any good?"

She shrugged. "It's five bucks."

Then, because there was nothing else to do, I began to laugh. She did too. I put my arms around her and she sort of fell into them still laughing.

"Hey!" Denny came up over the edge. "He was a real creep, huh? I'm sorry. Some guys you get, they aren't so bad. Some are even pretty nice. I figured, you know, if I'm gonna get some john set up for your first time, you know, I should find somebody nice. I thought he was nice when I brought him back here but — what's so funny?"

Which got us going all the harder.

Denny crawled behind us. "I wish you'd tell me what's so funny about trickin' with a creep like that?"

"While we're skirting the subject," I got myself together enough to ask, "have you balled any of the other guys in the nest?"

Lanya wriggled a little in my arms. "In the nest? Well, not here—"

"Where did you ball 'em?" Denny asked, rather sharply.

"Who," I asked, "did you ball?" I guess I was surprised again.

"Revelation," Lanya said.

I nodded.

"…and, well, Copperhead."

"Jesus," Denny said. "When?"

Lanya raised a forefinger to bite on the green polish. "You remember the night of Kid's party, when he went off to Cumberland Park, during the fire, and found those kids, with George? You'd wandered off somewhere, Denny, and I was just sitting around here talking with everybody. Gladis and I were telling them about the House — that place where all the girls stay? They were very interested. So finally Gladis and I took Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass over — that's where I pick up my birth-control stuff, anyway. The evening is a little hazy, but as I recall, Revelation wandered in just a little later—" She sat up, scowling at her lap. "Spitt retired early with a young lady he met right away — they just went upstairs. And Glass wasn't feeling well so he left to come back here. But Copperhead and Revelation stayed around downstairs with the rest of us — Dragon Lady had come there, and everybody was yakking about old times — and got incredibly stoned. And—" She paused, her expression between consideration and confession—"eventually, I balled them. And—" she nodded at Denny—"your little girl friend there balled them. And Gladis balled them. And Filament. And Dragon Lady. And, all in all, about—" she raised her fist and began opening it, finger at a time; raised her other fist—"nine other women balled them too. Not in that order: I was fifth or sixth."

Denny said slowly and wondrously, "Wow…!"

"It was very funny." Lanya dropped her

In the middle of a corrective complaint about Risa's/Angel's joint cooking effort, Lanya turned to me as I came into the kitchen and said: "Kid, I had a thought, about your memory thing."

"You all full of thoughts," Angel said. "Whyn't you shut up and let us cook?"

"She's just helpin'," Risa said.

"And she knows I'm just jokin'," Angel said. "Don't you?"

"I'll shut up," Lanya said.

I sat on a corner of the kitchen table. "What's your idea?" A piece of silverware fell on the floor.

"Actually—" Lanya picked it up—"you have an amazing memory! I was snooping in

shoulders. "I really thought the two of them had flipped out or something, at first. I was sort of scared for them. I don't think they could have stood up and walked. It was almost like they were in some sort of half-trance. Revelation was lying on his back crying through most of it. That part didn't turn me on too much. But it got some of the ladies off, and how! And he didn't lose his hard-on."

I was surprised and I was curious: "Did they come?"

"Maybe a couple of times at first. I think. But after that, they were just permanently up. Nobody gave 'em a chance to go down. You just did anything you wanted with them. And anyone who was interested did."

"All girls?" Denny asked.

Lanya nodded.

"Shit."

Lanya leaned against me. "I've never seen men in a state like that before. The whole thing was really very dyke-y." She crossed her arms under her breasts. "I dug it. It was a little scarey. But it was… an experience."

your notebook again — forgive me, and I know you will: but your memory for conversation is practically photographic!"

"No it's not," I told her.

"I said 'practically'."

"No," I said again. "About a third of any conversation I write down is just paraphrase."

"Being able to remember two thirds of what people say, even a few minutes after they've said it, is very unusual. Even your account of the night in the park; and you told me you hardly remembered any of that."

"I just wrote down what you said happened."

"If you don't have the lines right, you've certainly got the feeling! And with my hustling escapade, you've got all the lines. Those I remember."

I said: "You read that too?"

"And also your accounts of some of the talks we've had together. I don't know how they would stack up next to a transcript, but it's still impressive."

"So what's your idea?"

"Just that, maybe, since you've got such memory for details has something to do with your loosing track or whole periods of time or … well, you know."

"That's so interesting," I said, "I think I'll forget it right now."

"She's just tryin' to help!" Risa said from the stove, clashing pot tops.

"And she too knows I am joking," I said. "But even if you're right, so what?"

Of course I didn't forget it, witness this. Still, I suspect my highly creative renderings are more convincing than accurate, no matter what she says — I think (hope?).

"You're just having experiences one after the other, aren't you?" The first thing I thought of was what Risa had said to me that day out in the yard; what I found myself grinning at was that the possibility of a genital expedient for taking her suggestion left me just as dubious as an anal one about whether or not I wanted to go through something like that. Oh, well; maybe some people can't have everything.

Lanya grinned up at me—"Um-hm" — and kissed my nose.

"What does your Madame Brown think about all this?" I asked.

"That I lead a wild and fascinating life."

"Oh." I nodded.

"She just wonders how I manage to get to school every day on time."

"How do you manage to get to school every day on time?"

Lanya shrugged. "Just conscientious, I guess."

"Jesus!"

Denny sat back, his hands in his lap. "You gang-shagged Revelation and Copperhead! Hey — who was better, Pinky or the nigger?"

Am writing this comment on what Lanya said about the girls shagging the two guys at the house right after finishing putting down my account of our chaos and confusion with the Emboriki (with Jack, wouldn't you know, being that much help and making that much trouble!) because a lot of what happened there, what we said to them, what they said to us, pushed my mind back to it. I note that Copperhead and Revelation are pretty much exclusively interested-in-girls guys; remember from last night (significant in terms of today?) Revelation politely trying to tell a pretty drunken Angel. Really, it was nothing personal but, no, he didn't want to fuck around with him, and no, he had never really tried it before, and no he didn't want to, at least not now; and the two of them went on like this, quietly out on the service porch, for half an hour. The truth, of course, is that Revelation was vastly flattered by that much attention from someone that much quicker than he is and wanted to extend it as much as possible. (Did we think by paying them serious attention we were going to flatter them into getting their foot off our necks?) I think, sometimes, the difference is that they are sure that any social structures that arise, grow out of patterns inate to The Sex Act — whatever that is; while we have seen, again and again, that the psychology, structures, and acountrements that define any sex act are always internalized from social structures that already exist, that have been created, that can be changed. All right: Let me ask the terrible question: Could it be that all those perfectly straight, content-with — their-sexual- orientation- in-the-world, exclusive-heterosexuals really are (in some ill-defined, psychological way that will ultimately garner a better world) more healthy than (gulp…!) us? Let me answer: No way!

"Neither of them—" she leaned forward and kissed Denny's nose—"was as sweet as you."

"And by the way," Denny said, "where's my five bucks?"

I cuffed him.

"Hey, you want to hear what happened to me today?"

"It's my five bucks, babes!" Lanya said.

"Aw, shit! I went out in the damn street to pimp the fuckin' John—"

"Look, shut up!" I told them. "Listen." Then I described what had happened back in the park. I thought it was funny. But they both thought it was pretty serious, while we talked about it.

We talked about it a long time too.

Three conversations in which Lanya took part her last few days here. (Stayed overnight; which I liked. Maybe I'm ready to go spend some time at her place? The nesting instinct is not the same as the homing one. Which pales first?) She was talking with Gladis when I came into the yard:

"Oh&mdash!" and ran up to me, blocked me halfway down the steps.

I focused on her, as on a memory of mountain rain, autumn light, sea fizz.

(She has green eyes!)

The most natural thing, she turned me around on the steps and led me back to the porch — when I realized I was being led, she pulled a little harder; urged, "Come on," and took me into the loft room:

"Where's your notebook? Or your new poems, anyway."

"Huh? I thought you wanted to fuck."

"Oh, if you want—" imitating another kind of girl, then she laughed at the imitation's success—"here!" The notebook corner stuck over the loft's edge; she pulled it down. Two loose pages fell.

The active ones (of whichever sex) are dencer and crueler. The passive one (of whichever sex) are lazier and more self-satisfied. In a society where they are on top, they cling like drowners to their active/passive, male/female, master/servant, self/other set-up not for pleasure, which would be reasonable, but because it allows them to commit or condone any lack of compassion among themselves, or with anyone else, and that (at least in this society, as they have set it up) is immoral, sick, and evil; any madness is preferable to that. And madness is not preferable!

She picked them up. "Can I have these to take home?"

"Sure," I said, " — no; not that one," and took back the sheet of blue paper (from the package of stationery Raven brought home).

She folded the page I'd left her and put it in her shirt pocket. I put the other inside the cover and slid the notebook back up on the bed. "Why do you want these?"

"Why do you write them?"

"I don't know… any more."

"Ditto," she said, disturbed; which disturbed.

"Hey," I asked. "You haven't seen Mr Calkins again recently, have you?"

"No?" in a way that asked why I'd asked.

"I mean this isn't his idea… to get my new poems from you? You're not just keeping them for somebody else?"

"Of course not. I just thought I had less chance of losing them than you did."

"Mr Calkins talked to me about stealing them. I thought he was joking — you haven't showed them to anybody?"

"Of course not…" Then she said: "Would it be so awful if I had? I did read one — a few to Madame Brown. And a friend of hers who came over that night to visit"

"It wouldn't be awful."

"You look unhappy about it, though."

"I don't know. I'm just confused. Why did you read them? You just liked them?"

"Very much. Everett Forest — Madame Brown's friend — asked me to, actually. We were talking about you, one night when he had dropped over. It came up that I had some of your unpublished work; he was very anxious to see it. So I read three or four of my favorites. I suppose—" she said and sat down on the motorcycle's seat—"this is the part I shouldn't tell you: He wanted to copy them. But I didn't think he should… Kid?"

"What?"

"There's a lot of people in Bellona who are very interested in practically any and everything about you."

"There're aren't a lot of people in Bellona," I said. "Everybody keeps telling me this; what are they interested in me for?"

"They think you're important, interesting… maybe some combination of the two. Make copies of your poems? I know people who, if I gave them your laundry list, would type careful reproductions as if they were for some university library or something."

"I don't have a fucking laundry list. I don't even have any laundry," I said. "Who?"

"Well, Everett for one. When I told him you sometimes left your notebook over at my place he practically had a fit. He begged me to let him know next time you left it so he could look through it and maybe make a—"

"I'd break your head."

"I wouldn't do that." She moved on the seat. "I wouldn't."

"There's just not enough else for people to be interested in in this city."

"I think," she said, "you've got it. But even though I wouldn't let him go snooping in your journal, I still think your writing this down bores me; no, it makes me angry. It didn't make me angry when she and I were talking about it, it was flattering. Its rehearsal, however, is maddening. I enjoy having fantasies about these things, thinking about them — but as a game. (Haven't I?) There's no reason not to enjoy them that way any more. But since the publication of Brass Orchids I sometimes find myself saying to myself: "All right. I want to stop playing this game and go try another one for a while. Lord, let me think about something else!" And I can't. That's a much meaner version of the terrifying morning beneath the tree. But the truth is, most of the poems in the book were written before I came to the scorpions. (Which ones were actually written afterward?) The other irony is that the one time I really was their leader was when I made them help me get June's and Tarzan's brother out of the shaft. Everything since has been the concretizing of some

My sensibilities have grown inflamed as our giant sun. I am writing poems now because there is nothing else to read except the newspaper, discussing for pages the rumors and ephemera that fume through the city. How can this go on when such moons rise and such suns set? I am living this way because the horror here seems preferable to life in Tarzan's family.

Bullshit! Only I felt like that when I wrote it-no: I felt something, and thought those words the proper ashes of the feeling as I searched the smolderings. But they were only smoke. Now I cannot tell whether the feeling itself was misperceived or merely its record inaccurate!

fantasy begun then — and in their minds, not mine. Have I lost by the realization? For (arbitrarily?) precious sanity's sake I have to think at least I've learned.

When you get water from either the kitchen or the bathroom or the service-porch tap, bubbles form around the sides of the glass, but not evenly about the whole surface. They make a band with a definite bottom edge, but peter out up the side. Have noticed, over the last several days, the line starts higher and higher. Must ask Tak if this means something.

To the next conversation, then; maybe better luck:

I stopped outside the kitchen door because I heard them talking inside. Through the screening I saw Lanya sitting on the table, her back against the wall, Gladis and pretty much all the apes (no Tarzan); also D-t leaning against the icebox and Glass standing in the living-room doorway, and Spirt just behind him, to the other side. A loud discussion; and Lanya's voice cut over (she leaned forward, looking around): "I have never — no, wait a minute! Wait. I have never seen a bunch less interested in sex than you guys! No, listen! I mean for guys who don't have anything else to do. Really, I'm not kidding. When I was in college, or practically any place, any job I've ever had; or guys I've just known—seen a bunch who were less interested in getting laid—"

"I don't see why you're complaining!" from Jack the Ripper.

"I'm not," Lanya said. "But I mean, I spend maybe half my time here. Maybe more than half. And I think I know you guys pretty well—"

And D-t: "No, now you wait a minute! Hey, now you wait—"

Lanya finished in the silence: "I was just curious why, that's all."

"Now wait," D-t repeated. "We got a very strange and funny group of people here. And I guess we don't talk about it that much because you have to be very careful, you know? Very polite."

"I don't just mean making jokes about sex," Lanya said. "But even that, when you come down to it. You'll get really foul for ten, twenty minutes. Then nothing for a day, two days—"

"You mean thinking and figuring how to get laid?" Raven said. "Yeah, I know what she means."

Spitt said: "I don't have to talk about it. I get mine," and looked at Glass to corroborate him.

Glass, hands behind him on the wall, just leaned back a little more watching (Spitt and Lanya were the only whites in the room), curious, as though the discussion was going on all for him.

"There are just very different kinds of people here," D-t said. "For me, maybe, what she said is true. I just never been that interested in sex, I guess, compared to some people. I told a friend of mine once I jerked off about maybe two, three times a year. And got laid about the same. He said that was very strange—"

"Yeah, that's strange!" Jack the Ripper hollered, and people laughed.

"Spider over there, see — he's what…? Ten years younger than I am? And he's down at the park, practically every God-damn night it looks to me, getting his pipes swabbed out by the guys sneaking around the bushes—"

"God damn—" Spider said, uncomfortably.

"We just got very different people," D-t went on, "who like very different things. In very different ways. People like me and Gladis, say. We're pretty much exclusively interested in the opposite sex, and then, one at a time and rarely."

"Three times a year, baby," Gladis said, her inflection swinging down low as it could get, "now I don't know whether I'm all that much like you?" and up again.

Which tickled the Ripper.

"Shit," D-t said. "You know I used to think I was normal. But then we got guys like Jack the Ripper who are interested in anything."

Spider said, sullenly: "I'm interested in anything."

"Aw, nigger," D-t said, "you'd be interested in a clam if it smiled at you and promised not to bite!"

Spitt added over the laughter, "…and even then, I don't know!" which I don't think anybody really heard.

"Then we got the groupies—" D-t went on.

"Groupies!" from Glass, laughing for the first time. "Is that what you call us?"

"I mean you guys just aren't interested in anything less than a full scale encounter group-grope—"

"Aw, man," from Glass, "you just wish you could—" and I didn't hear the rest because:

Tarzan asked: "What's going on in there?"

I glanced back. "Nothing."

But some of the guys inside had seen us through the screen. A couple more turned to look. So I opened the door and went in, Tarzan following. Lanya was still laughing. Edging Thruppence over on the table, I sat next to her.

"With so many different types, see," D-t said, getting Lanya's attention back, "you have to be very polite: When we live this close. And that means you don't talk too much. You just do it when it's around to be done and the rest of the time you talk about something else."

Tarzan stayed in the doorway, his back to the screen, as outside now as Glass had been before.

Laughter spilled them into different subjects (food, wouldn't you know): Thruppence said we had stuff in the cellar that we hadn't known about till now because nobody had thought to look, till he'd gone down that morning. He took some of us out to show us. There was no real cellar door; just a trap-window, planked over, and a busted Yale lock hanging from the hasp. It let you into a damp, four-and-a-half foot dugout that went under half the house where, besides all the crates of tin cans — some with mildewed labels — was the fuse-box and the hot-water heater, which I re-lit.

Later a couple of people took baths.

I wish they'd continued the sex discussion. It hadn't felt finished. I wondered if it was the advent of me (the Boss) or Tarzan (the Oddball) that had shifted it; or simply the balance in the cream-to-coffee ratio. Out of conceit, I decided it must have been Tarzan.

Revelation, with his ash-pale hair, his gold chains, his pink, pink skin, polarizes a black bunch when he is the only white among them the same way Lady of Spain, blacker than Spider, high-assed, with little, low tits (from jokes the others make, she's of West Indian descent), polarizes a white group when she is the sole black: visually.

Tarzan, however, so often the only blue-eyed blond among the apes (now the official name for the sub-group of five out of the fifteen/sixteen blacks in the nest [Raven, Jack the Ripper, Thruppence, Angel, Spider]) polarizes them in a very different way. His fawning fascination, his near-belligerence, and general lack of use for anyone white makes it impossible to see him/them without a whole aura of sexual/political resonances, which they carry like their lights. (Two thoughts-First:) Even so, everyone seems more or less able to absorb the situation with tolerance and hardly a comment. (Second:) With all these wacked-out spades, there doesn't seem to be one among them, man or woman, in a similar position with a white group (Glass, triumvirate with Spitt and Copperhead, seems a very different thing. Why?) Perhaps the nest (or the House) would be a good place for June after all — after all, I can put up with Eddy. (Or can I?)

Pretty soon it broke up around the cellar window and got back together in the yard… But we never did get back to talking about sex. Oh, well: that politeness. I guess Lanya's right.

Third conversation started in the loft. I was on my back; Lanya was leaning on my chest, looking in my mouth while I talked about something. In the middle of a sentence, she got my mind off what I was saying, saying: "I could come from just the smell of your breath. It puffs out in a small hot cloud with each word."

"Pretty bad, huh?"

"It's not bad — please, don't stop talking."

But I couldn't think of how to go on.

She said: "Your mouth is like a flower. Each tooth is like a daisy petal, complete with calyx: You're getting a sort of green skin over the base of your teeth, up near the gum."

"Beautiful," I said. "Pretty soon I'm be ready for Bunny to come take me away."

"Hey." Denny rolled over. "Let me see?" leaning on my shoulder.

I said, "Oof!" and didn't smile.

"Smile," Denny said.

"I wonder if it comes off." Lanya reached up and held her hand like a claw, over my face. "Just a second," one finger coming down.

"Cut it out—!" I turned my head.

"I was just going to scrape at it with my fingernail."

Denny looked at his hand on my shoulder. "Man, my nails are filthy."

"They're rimmed with the exact color of black pearl." Lanya put her cheek next to his. "And he'll probably use it in one of his poems."

"Too fancy," I said, my hand on his. She covered mine. Then Denny closed his eyes tight and tried to wiggle between us like a basset puppy (which started us laughing) and sometimes she is a lorikeet. And sometimes he is a parrot; and she is an airborne borzoi.

I said: "Get up. I want to show you something," at which Denny laughed and Lanya grunted.

Denny told her: "That's all right. Well just get our clothes off right away, next time."

I said: "Aw, come on!"

We put on some clothes (Denny: socks, vest, chains. Lanya: shirt; her harmonica fell out; was returned to breast pocket; tennis sneakers. Me: pants) climbed down from the loft, put on more clothes (Denny: pants, boots. Lanya: took off sneakers to put on jeans, put on sneakers again. Me: vest, chains, boot), and went into the hall.

Baby, Adam, Priest, Devastation, Filament, the Executioner (who everybody usually calls: X–X) and Cathedral were pell-melling in and X–X told me they were really beat, had been running since sometime yesterday. I said three or four of them could go up and fall out in the loft bed because we weren't using it. Filament, the knuckles of one hand on her hip, the other hand waving (she chooses to wear only thin chains, some outside her breasts [nipples like puddles of Peptobismol on the upper slopes of soapstone breasts] some inside) told about what they done in the park: scared some children, unintentionally, and had some sort of loose, blurry confrontation with two men who might have been Tom and Mak. Three went to find mattresses in the back room.

(To try for accuracy is to risk awkwardness.) To find out who I am I've had to give up my name and who knows what part of my life. It wasn't a choice. But treating it like one seems the only way to keep my mind… "seems"? I am frightened because, in this City, I don't know where I am, I don't know where I can go. (To try for form is to risk pomposity.)

The trapdoor on the porch ceiling was open. Denny climbed up the ladder nailed against the wall; Lanya and me (wondering who'd opened the door and why) followed. Poked my head after her heels into the lead-colored sky.

Stepped up on the pebbly roofing paper and couldn't figure out how transition had occurred between the slab of runny metal three feet beyond the trap,

Asked Lanya if she'd reconsidered being a scorpion instead of just a scorpion's old lady. "Not," she said sweetly, "on your fucking life!" And then: "No, seriously. I've thought about it again, and it's just something I don't want to do. I like staying here for extended visits. But I like living with Madame Brown." Well, she's been here three days straight. And yesterday Denny, for a joke, put one of his chains around her neck and she kept it on till she went to bed. But she didn't put it on again this morning when she went to school.

and the football-Stadium-wide, muzzy balloon around us and the nearest buildings. Thought of climbing down and up again to watch this time.

Across the roof, Fireball — buck naked except his optic girdle — turned around and smiled, a little confused.

"Did you open the roof trap?" Lanya asked.

"Yeah. I just wanted to get out and walk around." He told us he liked to go around naked. To his unnecessary explanation, Denny explained (unnecessarily) that you could go around in the street stark naked if you wanted in Bellona "…and it wouldn't bother nobody." Lanya, by now, was taking off her clothes. So I took off mine. Denny said, "What the fuck," and took off his. (He left the dog's choke collar looped and re-looped on his ankle.) Lanya took her harmonica out of her shirt and began to play those discordant clutches. We all walked around and stared out at the edges of what we could see or each other when each other wasn't staring back; leaned on the roof rim; sat on the mansard things along the side. A long time.

Filament has a blue scorpion tattooed on her shoulder she said she got before she came to Bellona. She has probably volenteered more information about her previous life than anyone around the nest (most of her life sounds very dull); but, high on tact, she also manages to remain one of the most invisible. If one were writing about the place, she'd probably be among the half dozen people most likely left out, or whose one or two outstanding traits you'd fix for decoration on another character. A girl, and white, she still has the most typical scorpion personality, almost unbelievably so. In fact, I wonder if I believe that; so this note.

Then Fireball got on his pants and chains—

"So long," Lanya said.

Fireball grinned. "So long."

— and went down.

We came closer together at the far corner and talked about him a while, me and Lanya mostly, mostly Denny listening. Then I told them for the first time about mugging that guy last week.

Sort of awed, Denny said: "Wow!"

Lanya said: "You are kidding, aren't you…? Jesus, you're not!" She was sitting cross-legged with her back on the low wall. When she lifted her harmonica, there were two parallel dashes on her thigh.

"No, I'm not kidding. It was interesting."

"The awful thing is, I'm sure you did it to find out what it felt like, or for some other half-assedly commendable reason."

"The main thing," I explained, "isn't that I was so scared, but if you get off this very thin line, you get angrier than a motherfucker—"

"Look," she said, "you wouldn't kill somebody just to find out what it felt like."

"It would be easier here than any place else."

"Christ!" She looked up at the sky.

"Okay," I said. "So you don't approve. Why are you angry?"

"Because," and her eyes came down to mine, "in some funny way I think it's my fault. And don't ask me to explain that; or you'll get angry."

While I tried to figure out some way to get her to explain, practical Denny asked: "What'd you get?"

"Three bucks. For the work, it pays better than the Richards's." I reached over for my pants, took the bills out of my pocket, and gave them to him. "Here." I glanced at Lanya with a little smile. "I'd split it between you, but she wouldn't take one."

She got a tightish expression that let me know she certainly would.

Denny looked at the bills and repeated: "Wow!" Thinking: He would use the same inflection if he discovered something had been stolen from him. "Here." Denny handed one bill to Lanya and—"Here, you keep one. That way we can split it up right." — one back to me. "I gotta take a piss." He stood and walked away, palms facing back, the bill wrapped on the middle finger of his left hand.

Lanya watched me. "I suppose I'd find you dull if you didn't keep dropping stuff like that into my head. No, don't say anything. I'm still thinking." She pushed herself to her knees. "I've got to take a piss too." Her buttocks and one thigh were printed from the roofing paper.

At the corner drain, Denny looked back over his shoulder. "You going downstairs to the bathroom?"

"No," she said in a considered tone that, when the rest of their exchange was finished, should have made me realize she knew what it was going to be.

"Oh, yeah. I guess you can squat here." Denny finished and shook himself.

"What makes you think I have to squat to piss?"

"You're a girl. You can't do it st… I mean I thought girls had to sit down or something."

"Jesus God!" Lanya said.

"Well, how do you guide it then?" Denny asked.

"Same way you do."

"But you don't have a—?"

She held up two fingers in a peace sign, turned them down against her cunt and sort of pulled. "Like that, if you must know. Now would you please stop staring and let me pee?"

"Oh… yeah." Denny frowned. "Sometimes I can't piss in a john if somebody's staring right at my dick." He turned away, glanced back, away again. "Wow."

Like something had been given back to him.

He went to the wall. "Now I never knew that," he said.

When she came up, he was looking at the harmonica; turned and handed it to her across my shoulder.

"You know how to play it?" she asked.

"Naw."

"The scale starts here," she said. "See, at the fourth hole."

We went down (putting on clothes half here, half there), and in the living room got into the discussion with some of the people mentioned (Fireball, Filament, et al) that I wanted to write down some of the things Lanya said in it in the first place. (When I started this, I'd thought that the business about Lanya being turned on by all those funny thing about me, and what had happened on the roof would make a good prologue, because in the discussion she referred to them) but again I'm tired of writing it down, now that I've gotten to the substance.

It had to do with the differences (and similarities) between the girls who were scorpions and the girls who just hung around with us. With reference to the guys who were members and the guys who just hung. It was a good discussion to have and a dull one to reconstruct. And I guess it was mainly for Mike's benefit anyway (Mike is one of said guys who hangs, a long-haired friend of Devastation's; sleeps here most of the time but also doesn't want to join) and I guess/think/ suspect one difference between members and non-members

One of the things that also went down in the discussion was an arguement about getting food, which I guess was really what started the whole thing, and this other part just came up; but my mind follows funny tracks.

anyway is that members know the difference already and don't have to talk about them (that politeness again) though from some of the things Tarzan says, I wonder.

works them?" I asked.

But Faust was walking ahead between the shadowed presses. "Here," he said. "This is what you want to see, isn't it?"

I stepped up to the work table. Battleship linoleum glittered with lead shavings.

"There." He pointed at a full-page tray of type with a yellow index nail.

Raised grey-on-grey proclaimed:

"But…?"

"That's you, ain't it?" His cackle echoed among the ceiling pipes.

"But I haven't given Calkins the second collection! He doesn't even

an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and the twenty-second, bless. Grain, blabbed on slip-time, told its troubles to the tree (all runny in the oozey gyre's incarnadine). She won't run Thursdays. The underside of the little hand is tarnished; why is muk-amuk cononized so easy? Truck-tracks crow-foot crators drooling half-and half. She didn't remember how or when, last time. Pavement sausages split; the cabbage remembers. Lions with prehensile eyes pick up their paws, apocopate, and go to town. Get with-it, mauve-peanut! Make it, thing-a-ma-boob! You won't catch me slipping my sticktoitiveness under your smorgasborg. Fondle my nodule, love my dog. Lilting is all is easy. Knitting needles receed around the vision, baring his curviture, clearing her underwear. So that's not what it's for. French fried pickelilly and deep-dish-apple death won't get you through that wake up in the morning alive. Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won't move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphore if I ever heard one. Timed methods run out: coo, morning bird. I could stop before breathing marble basonets. Salvage a disjunctive, it's all you Middle of the ring around the Harley Davidson bush, blooming, blooming, shame, socks, derth and passion pudding, flowers, or Ms Crystaline Pristine. Her backwoods mystification is citified in the face. Penticle pie and hungar city, oh my oh too much, my meat and mashed potatoes pansey, my in the middle of it biche. Hart's blood is good fly-catching bait. So's fresh sheep-shit Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn't your running the mill broad loom, sword, or side. She's right on the guache circuit where a principle's a principle with all hell lined up to get paid. Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanley, Fibrilation, Factotum, Susquahana, Summer-fine-day. It's all the same

know there is one!"

"Maybe he's just making a good guess."

"But I don't want him to—"

"They're supposed to got obituaries too, prepared on all the famous people around here who might die."

"Oh, come on," I said. "Let's get out of here."

"You keep askin' me to show you where they printed the thing…

I started away from the desk. "But I don't see any rolls of paper around.

The presses aren't going. You mean a thirty-six page newspaper comes out of here every day?"

But Faust was already walking away, still chuckling, his white hair — sides, beard, and back — covering the bright choker.

"Joaquim?" I called. "Joaquim, when do they actually print it? I mean this doesn't look like anybody's been in here since before the

going out along Broadway. The smoke was as bad as I've ever seen it-rolling from side-alleys, gauzing the streets in loose layers. Down one block, the face on an eight-(I counted)-story building was curtained with it, leaking out broken windows, to waterfall to the street, mounded and shifting.

One section of pavement had been replaced by metal

In the bitch's kitchen. You look for the dice this time. Maybe you can wind up a winner. Summary, Mopery, Titular, Wisdom, Thaumaturgy, Fictive, Samoa and five hands over. When I grow up I'm going to get a vasectomy all my own. (A dendrite in the glans is worthy of the bush.) Why does he insist on winter all the time? You can stutter in the water but that's not the way to think. Not thinking but the way thinking feels. Not knowledge but knowledge's form. If there're enough raisins, splay feet, and guilded hornet-heads, you can wish, dream, lie like a Saxon though you only pravaricate like a Virginia ham. George! the inginuity I've expended to fill five missing days.

Conversation with furry Forest at Teddy's:

"What are you writing now?"

"I'm not writing anything," I said. "I haven't been writing anything and I'm not going to write anything."

He frowned, and I hoped a lot the lie had at least the structure of truth. But how can it? Which is why I haven't been able to write anything but his journal in so long. And thank the blinded stars, I feel the energies for that going.

What other days from my life have gone? After a week, I can't remember five. After a year, how many days in it will you never think of again?

plates (some incomplete repair) clanging when I crossed. After another half hour the buildings were taller and the street was wider and the sky grey and streaked like weathered canvas, like silvered velvet.

On the wide steps to a black and glass office building was a fountain. I went up to examine: Wet patches of color on the dusty mosaic at the bottom; rust around the pentangle of nozzles on the cement ball; I climbed over the lip to look in what I guessed had held plants: dried stem stumps poked from ashey earth; beer and soda-can tabs. I stepped once on a wet patch of green and yellow mosaic-tiles with my bare foot; took my foot away and left a chalky print.

The bus came around the corner. It didn't scare me this time. I vaulted the fountain edge and sprinted down the steps.

The doors flap-clapped open even, before it stopped.

"Hey," I called. "How far up Broadway do you go?"

Do you know the expression on somebody's face when you wake them out of a sound sleep with something serious, like a fire or a death? (Small, bald, oyster-eyed black man, obsessed and trundling his bus from here to there.) "How far you going?"

I told him: "Pretty far."

While he considered how far that was, I got on. Then we both thought about the last time I was on his bus; I don't know if the little movement of his head back into the khaki collar acknowledged that or not. But I'm sure that's what we were thinking. I also thought: There are no other passengers.

He closed the doors.

I sat behind him, looking at the broad front window as we shook on up the street.

A sound made me look back.

All the advertising cards had been filled with posters, or sections from posters, of George. From over the window his face looked down there; here were his knees. The long one over the back door showed his left leg, horizonal, foot to mid-thigh. A third of them were crotch-shots.

He feels the experience whose detritus is interleaved in the Orchids' pages/petals has left him a perfect voice with which he can say nothing; he can imagine nothing duller. (For that sentence to make sense, it must be ugly as possible. And it isn't-quite. So it fails.)

The sound again; so I got up and handed myself down the aisle, bar after bar. The old man — pretending to sleep — was so slumped in the back seat I couldn't see him till I passed the second door. One brown and ivory eye opened over his frayed collar slanting across the black wrinkle of an ear. He closed it again, turned away, and made that strangling moan-the sound, again, that till now I had suspected was something strained and complaining in the engine.

I sat, bare foot on the warm wheel case, boot on the bar below the seat in front. The smoke against the glass was fluid thick; runnels wormed the pane. Thinking (complicated thoughts): Life is smoke, the clear lines through it, encroached on and obliterated by it, are poems, crimes, orgasms — carried this analogy to every jounce and jump of the bus, ripple on the glass, even noticing that through the windows across the aisle I could see a few buildings.

The bus stopped. The driver twisted around; for a moment I thought he was speaking to the old man behind me: "I can't take you no farther," gripping the bar across the back of the driver's seat, elbow awkward in the air. "I got you past the store." He pauses significantly; I wish he hadn't. "You'll be all right."

Behind me the old man sniffled and shifted.

I stood up and, under George's eyes

The falsification of this journal: first off, it doesn't reflect my dayly life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous.

What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of my life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.

To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet… anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbane. They are moments when I had the intensity to

(and knees and hands and left foot and right tit), stepped on the treadle. The doors opened. I got out on the curb.

The pavement was shattered about a hydrant, which

leaned from its pipes. I turned and watched the bus turn.

From the doorway at the end of the block a man stepped. Or a woman. Whoever it was, anyway, was naked. I think.

I walked in that direction. The figure went back in. What I passed was a florist's smashed display window. At first I was surprised at all the greenery on the little shelves up the side. But they were plastic-ferns, leaves, shrubs. Three big pots in the center only had stumps. Back, in the shadow, by the aluminum frame on the glass door of the refrigerator, something big, fetid, and wet moved. I only saw it a second when I hurried by. But I had goose bumps.

The reason the bus driver hadn't wanted to go on was that Broadway grew ornate scrolled railings on either side and soared over traintracks forty feet down a brick-walled canyon. A few yards out, a twelve foot hunk of paving had fallen off, as though a gap-tooth giant had bitten it away. The railing twisted off both sides of the gash. From the edge, looking down, I couldn't see where any rubble had landed.

Beyond the overpass, to the left, a rusted wire fence ran before some trees; through the trees, I saw water patched with ash. To the right, up a slope blotched with grass, was the monastery.

Like that.

I walked up the steps between the beige stones. Halfway, I looked back across the road.

Smoke reeds grew from the woods and clotted waters to bloom and blend with the sky.

I reached the top of the steps with the strangest sense of relief and anticipation. The simple journey was the resolve that till now I'd thought suspended. The monastery was several three-story buildings. A tower rose behind the biggest. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling my leg muscles move as I walked; one finger went through a hole.

see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.

They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?

I don't really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

Thinking: You arrive at a monastery halfway through a round of pocket-pool. Sure. I relaxed my stomach (it had tightened in the climb) and ambled, breathing loudly, over the red and grey flags. Between dusty panes, putty blobbed the leaded tesselations. At the same moment I decided the place was deserted, a man in a hood and robe stepped around the corner and peered.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

He folded his over his lap and came forward. They were big, and translucent. The white-and-black toes of very old basketball sneakers poked alternately from his hem. His eyes were grey. His smile looked like the amphetamine freeze on a particularly pale airline stewardess. His hood was back enough to see his skull was white as bread dough. A sore, mostly hidden, like an eccentric map, was visible under the hood's edge: wet, raised, with purple bits crusted inside it and yellow flaking around it. "Yes," he asked. "Can I help you?"

I smiled and shrugged.

"I saw you coming up the steps and I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you, anyone in particular you wanted to see?"

"I was just looking around."

"Most of the grounds are in the back. We don't really encourage people to just wander about, unless they're staying. Frankly, they're not in such hot shape right through here. The Father was talking yesterday at the morning meal about starting a project to put them back in order. Everybody was delighted to get a place right across from Holland Lake—" He nodded toward the other side of the road. "But now look at it."

When I turned back from the lacustrine decay, he was pulling his hood further down his forehead with thick thumb and waxy forefinger.

I looked around at the buildings. I'd been trying to find this place so long; but once found, the search seemed so easy. I was off on some trip about—

"Excuse me," he said.

— and came back.

"Are you the Kid?"

I felt a good feeling in my stomach and a strong urge to say No. "Yeah."

His chin and his smile twisted in a giggle without sound. "I thought you might be. I don't know why I thought so, but it seemed a reasonable guess. I mean I've seen pictures of… scorpions — in the Times. So I knew you were one of them, but I had no way of knowing which one. That you were the…" and shook his head, a satisfied man. "Well." He folded his hands. "We've never been visited by any scorpions before, so I just took a guess." His wrinkleless face wrinkled. "Are you sure you weren't looking for someone?"

"Who's here to look for?"

"Most people who come usually want to see the Father — but he's closeted with Mr Calkins now, so that would be unfeasible today — unless of course you wanted to wait, or come back at some other—"

"Is Mr Calkins here?" In my head I'd been halfway through an imaginary dialogue which had begun when I'd answered his first question with: The Kid? Who, me? Naw…

"Yes."

"Could I see him?" I asked.

"Well, I don't… as I said, he's closeted with the Father."

"He'd want to see me," I said. "He's a friend of mine."

"I don't know if I ought to disturb them." His smile fixed some emotion I couldn't understand till he spoke: "And I believe one of the reasons Mr Calkins came here was to put some of his friends at a more comfortable distance." Then he giggled. Out loud.

"He's never met me," I said and wondered why. (To explain that the personal reasons which make you want to put friends at a distance had nothing to do with Calkins and me? But that's not what it sounded like.) I let it go.

A bell bonged.

"Oh, I guess—" he glanced at the tower—"Sister Ellen and Brother Paul didn't forget after all," and smiled (at some personal joke?) while I watched a model of the monastery I didn't even realize I'd made — the three buildings inhabited solely by the Father, Calkins, and this one here — break down and reassemble into: a community of brothers and sisters, a small garden, goats and chickens, matins, complines, vespers…

"Hey," I said.

He looked at me.

"You go tell Mr Calkins the Kid is here, and find out if he wants to see me. If he doesn't, I'll come back some other time — now that I know where this place is."

He considered, unhappily. "Well, all right." He turned.

"Hey."

He looked back.

"Who are you?"

"Randy… eh, Brother Randolf."

"Okay."

He went off around the corner, with the echo of the bell.

Beneath the chipped keystone the arched door looked as though (a slough of rust below the wrist-thick bolt) it hadn't been opened all year.

And I got back on my trip: I had looked so long for this place; finding it had been accomplished with no care for the goal itself. For minutes I wondered if I couldn't get everything in my life like that. When I finally worked out a sane answer ("No."), I laughed (aloud) and felt better.

"They're all—"

I turned from the miasmas of Holland Lake.

"— all finished for the afternoon," Brother Randy said from the corner. "He'll talk with you. Mr Calkins said he'll talk with you a little while. The Father says it's all right." (I started toward him and he still said:) "You just come with me." I think he was surprised it had worked out like that. I was surprised too; but he was unhappy about it.

"Here" was a white wood lawn chair on a stone porch with columns, along the side of the building.

I sat and gave him a grin.

"They're finished, you see," he offered. "For the afternoon. And the Father says it's all right for him to talk now, if it isn't for too long."

I think he wanted to smile.

I wonder if that thing up under his hood hurt.

"Thanks," I said.

He left.

I looked around the patchy grass, up and down the porch, at the beige stone; inset beside me in the wall was a concrete grill, cast in floral curls. Once I stood up and looked through it close. Another grill behind it was set six inches out of alignment, so you couldn't see inside. I was thinking it was probably for ventilation, when my knee (as I moved across the stone flowers trying to see) hit the chair and the feet scraped, loudly.

"Excuse me …?"

I pulled back a few inches. "Hello?" I said, surprised.

"I didn't realize you were out there yet — until I heard you move."

"Oh." I stepped back from the grill. "I thought you were going to come out here on the porch…" (He chuckled.) "Well, I guess this is okay." I pulled my chair around.

"Good. I'm glad you find this acceptable. It's rather unusual for the Father to allow someone seeking an understanding of the monastic community-as they describe the process here — to have any intercourse at all with people outside the walls. Converse with members is limited. But though I've been here several days, I don't officially start my course of study till sundown this evening. So he's made an exception."

I sat on the arm of the lawn chair. "Well," I said, "if it goes down this evening…"

He chuckled again. "Yes. I suppose so."

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I guess the best way to describe it is to say that I'm about to embark on a spiritual course of study. I'm not too sure how long it will last- You catch me just in time. Oh — I must warn you: You may ask some questions that I'm not allowed to answer. I've been instructed by the Father that, when asked them, I am simply to remain silent until you speak again."

"Don't worry," I said, "I won't pry into any secrets about your devotional games here," wishing I sort of could.

But the voice said: "No, not questions that have anything to do with the monastary."

And (While he considered further explanation?) I considered the tower exploding slowly, thrusting masonry on blurred air too thin to float brick and bolts and bellrope.

"I don't think there's anything about the monastery you could ask I wouldn't be allowed to answer — if I knew the answers. But part of the training is a sort of self-discipline: Any question that sparks certain internal reactions in me, causes me to think certain thoughts, to feel certain feelings, rather than rush into some verbal response that, informative or not, is still put up mainly to repress those thoughts and feelings, I'm supposed to experience them fully in the anxiety of silence."

"Oh," I said. "What sort of thoughts and feelings?" After ten quiet seconds, I laughed. "I'm sorry. I guess that's sort of like not thinking about the white hippopotamus when you're changing the boiling water into gold."

"Rather."

"It sounds interesting. Maybe I'll try it some day," and felt almost like I did the morning I'd told Reverend Amy I'd drop in on one of her services. "Hey, thanks for the note. Thanks for the party, too."

"You're most welcome. If you got my letter, then I must restrain from apologizing any more. Though I'm not surprised at meeting you, I wasn't exactly expecting it now. Dare I ask if you enjoyed yourself — though perhaps it's best just to let it lie."

"It was educational. But I don't think it had too much to do with your not showing up. All the scorpions had a good time — I brought the whole nest."

"I should like to have been there!"

"Everybody got drunk. The only people who didn't enjoy themselves probably didn't deserve to. Didn't you get any reports back from your friends?" First I thought I'd asked one of those questions.

"…Yes… Yes, I did. And some of my friends are extremely colorful gossips — sometimes I wonder if that's not how I chose them. I trust nothing occurred to distract you from any writing you're engaged in at present. I was quite sincere about everything I said concerning your next collection in my letter."

"Yeah."

"After some of my friends — my spies — finished their account of the evening, Thelma — do you remember her? — said practically the same thing you just did, almost word for word, about anyone who didn't enjoy himself not deserving to. When she said it, I suspected she was just trying to make me feel better for my absence. But here it is, corroborated by the guest of honor. I best not question it further. I hadn't realized you were a friend of Lanya's."

"That's right," I said. "She used to know you."

"An impressive young lady, both then and, apparently, from report, now. As I was saying, after my spies finished their account, I decided that you are even more the sort of poet Bellona needs than I'd thought before, in every way — except in literary quality which, as I explained in my letter, I am, and intend to remain, unfit to judge."

"The nicest way to put it, Mr Calkins," I said, "is I'm just not interested in the ways you mean. I never was interested in them. I think they're a load of shit anyway. But…"

"You are aware," he said after my embarrassed silence, "the fact that you feel that way makes you that much more suited for your role in just the ways I mean. Every time you refuse another interview to the Times, we shall report it, as an inspiring example of your disinterest in in publicity, in the Times. Thus your image will be further propagated — Of course you haven't refused any, up till now. And you said 'But…' " Calkins paused. " 'But' what?"

I felt really uncomfortable on the chair arm. "But… I feel like I may be lying again." I looked down at the creases of my belly, crossed with chain.

If he picked up on the "again" he didn't show it. "Can you tell me how?"

"I remember… I remember a morning in the park, before I ever met Mr Newboy, or even knew anyone would ever want to publish anything I ever wrote, sitting under a tree — bare-ass, with Lanya asleep beside me, and I was writing — no, I was re-copying out something. Suddenly I was struck with… delusions of grandeur? The fantasies were so intense I couldn't breathe! They hurt my stomach. I couldn't… write! Which was the point. Those fantasies were all in the terms you're talking about. So I know I have them…" I tried to figure why I'd stopped. When I did, I took a deep breath: "I don't think I'm a poet… any more, Mr Calkins. I'm not sure if I ever was one. For a couple of weeks, once, I might have come close. If I actually was, I'll never know. No one ever can. But one of the things I've lost as well, if I ever knew it, is the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to. I don't know… I'm just assuming you're interested in this because in your letter you mentioned wanting another book."

"My interest," he said, coldly, "is politics. I'm only out to examine that tiny place where it and art are flush. You make the writer's very common mistake: You assume publishing is the only political activity there is. It's one of my more interesting ones; it's also one of my smallest. It suffers

The advantage of transcribing your own conversation: It's the only chance you have to be articulate. This conversation must have been five times as long and ten times as clumsy. Two phrases I really did lift, however, are the ones about "…the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to…" and "… experience them in the anxiety of silence…" Only it occurs to me "… the vanes of my soul…" was his, while "… the anxiety of silence…" was mine.

accordingly, and there's nothing either of us can do about it with Bellona in the shape it is. Then again, perhaps I make a common mistake for a politician. I tend to see all your problems merely as a matter of a little Dichtung, a little Warheit, with the emphasis on the latter." He paused and I pondered. He came up with something first: "You say you're not interested in the extra-literary surroundings of your work — I take it we both refer to acclaim, prestige, the attendant hero-worship and its inevitable distortions — all those things, in effect, that buttress the audience's pleasure in the artist when the work itself is wanting. Then you tell me that, actually, you're no longer interested in the work itself — how else am I to interpret such a statement as 'I am no longer a poet'? Tell me — and I ask because I am a politician and I really don't know — can an artist be truly interested in his art and not in those other things? A politician — and this I'll swear — can not be truly (better say, effectively) interested in his community's welfare without at least wanting (whether he gets it or not) his community's acclaim. Show me one who doesn't want it (whether he gets it or not) and I'll show you someone out to kill the Jews for their own good or off to conquer Jerusalem and have it dug up as a reservoir for holy water."

"Artists can," I said. "Some very good emperors have been the patrons of some very good poets. But a lot more good poets seem to have gotten by without patronage from any emperors at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Okay: a poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they're a part of life. He's got to be a person who knows what he's doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing — the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they're interesting. But I don't want them."

"Are you lying? — 'again,' as you put it. Are you fudging? — which is how I'd put it."

"I'm fudging," I said. "But then… I'm also writing."

"You are? What a surprise after all that! Now I've certainly read enough dreadful things by men and women who once wrote a work worth reading to know that the habit of putting words on paper must be tenacious as the devil — But you're making it very difficult for me to maintain my promised objectivity. You must have realized, if only from my euphuistic journalese, I harbor all sorts of literary theories — a failing I share with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill (not to mention Nero and Henry the Eighth): Now I want to read your poems from sheer desire to help! But that's just the point where politics, having convinced itself its motives are purely benevolent, should keep its hands off, off, off! Why are you dissatisfied?"

I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and wondered how much of him I was losing behind the stonework. "What I write," I said, "doesn't seem to be … true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order." I meshed my fingers, which were cool, and locked them across my stomach, which was hot. "I haven't been given enough tools. I'm a crazy man. I haven't been given enough life. I'm a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it… When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who… When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one of them jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me — what in me can order gets exhausted before it all."

"You're sure you're not simply telling me — Oh, I wish I could see you! — or avoiding telling me, that the responsibilities of being a big, bad scorpion are getting in the way of your work?"

"No," I said. "More likely the opposite. In the nest, I've finally got enough people to keep me warm at night. And I can feel safe as anyone in the city. Any scorpions who think about my writing at all are simply dazzled by the object — the book you were nice enough to have it made into. A few of them even blush when descriptions of them show up in it. That leaves what actually goes on between the first line and the last entirely to me. The scorpions caught me without a fight. My mind is a magnet and they're filings in a field I've made — No, they're the magnets. I'm the filing, in a stable position now."

"You're too content to write?"

"You," I said, "are a politician; and you're just not going to understand."

"At least you're giving me a little more support in my resolve not to read your work. Well, you say you're still writing. Regardless of any personal preface you might make, even this one, I'm just as interested in your second book as I was in your first."

"I don't know if I'm about to waste any time trying to get it to you."

"If I must arrange to have it hijacked, ink still moist, from beneath the very shadow of your dark quill, I suppose that's what I'll have to do. Let's see, shall we?"

"I've got other things to do." For the first time, I was really angry at his affectation.

"Tell me about them," he said, in a voice so natural, but following so naturally from the archness, my anger was defeated.

"I… I want you to tell me something," I said.

"If I can."

"Is the Father, here at the monastery," I asked, "a good man?"

"Yes. He's very good man."

"But for me to accept that, you see," I said, "I have to know I can accept your definition of good. It probably isn't the same as mine … I don't even know if I have one!"

"Again, I wish I were allowed to see you. Your voice sounds as though you might be upset about something." (Which I hadn't realized; I didn't feel upset.) "I'm not oblivious to your efforts to keep our talk at a level of honesty I might find tedious if I didn't have the respect for truth a man forced to tell a great many lies for the most commendable reasons must. I'm not very satisfied with myself, Kid. In the past months, a dozen separate situations have propelled me to the single realization that, to be a good governor, if it is not absolutely necessary to be a good man, it is certainly of inestimable help. Bellona is an eccentric city that fosters eccentric ways. But the reason I'm here, of all eccentric places in this most eccentric place, is because I really want to—"

Dust or something blew into my mouth, got down my throat; I cleared it, thinking: Christ, I hope he doesn't decide my voice is breaking with emotion!

"— to remedy a little of that dissatisfaction. If he is not a good man, the Father is certainly a generous one. He is allowing me to stay here… Of course there's always an odd relation between the head of the state and the head of the state-approved religion. After all, I helped set up this place. Same way I helped set up Teddy's. Of course in this case, the biggest — if easiest — job, given my position with the Times, was making sure there was no publicity. In your present mood, you can probably appreciate that. But, no, my relation to the Father is not that of commoner to priest. On my side, at any rate, it is duplicitous, fraught with doubt. If I didn't doubt, I wouldn't be here now. I'm afraid the politics works through the spiritual like rot. The good governor at least wants it to be the best rot possible."

"Is the Father a good man?" I asked again and tried not to sound at all like I was upset. (Maybe that backfired?)

"Has it occurred to you, my young Diogenes, that if you polished up the chimney of your own lamp, you'd be a little more likely to find this mysterious and miraculous Other you are searching out? Why does it concern you so?"

"So I can live here," I said, "in Bellona."

"You're afraid that for want of one good man the city shall be struck down? You better look back across the train-tracks, boy. Apocolypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes. That simply isn't our problem any more. If you wanted out, you should have thought about it a long time back. Oh, you're very high-minded — and so, at times, am I. Well, as the head of the state religion, the Father does a pretty good job; good enough so that those doing not quite so well would do a bit better not to question — especially if that's all we can get."

"What do you think about the religion of the people?" I asked.

"How do you mean?"

"You know. Reverend Amy's church; George; June; that whole business."

"Does anyone take that seriously?"

"For a governor," I said, "you're pretty out of touch with what the people are into, aren't you? You've seen the things that have shown up in this sky. There're posters of him out all over town. You published the interview, and the pictures that made them gods."

"I've seen some of it, of course. But I'm afraid all that black mysticism and homoeroticism is just not something I personally find very attractive. And it certainly doesn't strike me as a particularly savory basis for worship. Is Reverend Tayler a good woman? Is George a good… god?"

"I'm not that interested in anybody's religion," I told him. "But if you want to bring the purpose of the church down to turning out people who do good things: When I was awfully hungry, she fed me. But when I was hurt and thirsty, someone at your gate told me I couldn't get a glass of water."

"Yes. That regrettable incident was reported to me. Things do catch up to you here, don't they? When you were unpublished, however, I published you."

"All right." My laugh was too sharp. "You've got the whole thing down, Mr Calkins. Sure, it's your city. Hey, you remember the article about me saving the kids from the fire the night of the party? Well, it wasn't me. It was George. I was just along. But he was down there, searching through the fire, seeing if anybody needed help. I just wandered by; and the only reason I stayed was because he told me the ones who'd started out with him from Teddy's had gotten too chickenshit and run. I heard the kids crying first, but George was the one who busted into the building and got the five of them out alive. Then, when your reporter got to him later, George made out like it was all me, because he didn't want the acclaim, prestige, and attendant hero-worship. Which, in the mood I am now, I approve of. Now is George a bad man?"

"I believe—" the voice was dry—"implicit in what you originally asked was that so necessary distinction between those who do good and who are good."

"Sure," I said. "But explicit in what you said was that bit about making do with what you can get. I can get George if I need him. He's genial enough for a god, with some nicely human failings like a history of lust."

"I think I'm still Judeo-Christian enough to be uncomfortable with expressly human demiurges."

"In the state approved religion, the governor is God's appointed representative on earth, if I remember right. Isn't that, when all is said and done, what makes the relation between the head of the state and the head of the church as ticklish as you were just telling me it is? You're as much of a god as George, minus some celestial portents and — of course, I'm just guessing — a couple of inches on your dick."

"I suppose one valid purpose of poets is to bring blasphemy to the steps of the altar. I just wish you hadn't felt obliged to do it today. Nevertheless, I appreciate it as a political, if not a religious necessity."

"Mr Calkins," I said, "most of your subjects aren't sure whether or not this place even exists. I'm not presenting any long considered protest. I wasn't sure there was a Father till today. I was just asking—"

"What are you asking, young man?"

What I'd intended to come back with got cut away by my realization of his real distress. "Um…" I tried to think of something clever and couldn't. "…is the Father a good man?"

When he didn't answer, and I began to suspect/recall why, I wanted to laugh. Determined to go in silence, I got off the arm of the chair. Three steps, though, and my blubbering broke into a full throated giggle that threatened torrents. If Calkins could have seen, I would have flashed my lights.

Brother Randy, robes blowing about his sneakers, stepped around the corner. "You're going?" He still wore bis methadrine grimace.

"Um-hm."

He turned to walk with me. The breeze that had been dull in my left ear now grew firm enough to beat my vest about my sides; it tugged Randy's hood off. I looked at the lone Australia on the South Pacific of his skull. It wasn't nearly as big as I'd imagined from the edge. He saw me looking; so I asked: "Does that hurt?"

"Sometimes. I think the dust and junk in the air irritate it. It's a lot better now than it used to be. Before, it was all down over my ear and the back of my neck — when I first got here. The Father suggested I shave my head; that's certainly given it a chance to heal." We reached the steps. "The Father knows an awful lot about medicine. He's made me put some stuff on it and it seems to be clearing up. I thought for a while he might have been a doctor or something, once, but I asked him…"

In the pause I nodded and started down. I'd swear he was on something, and the moment he'd started talking I'd gotten auditory visions of the endless rap.

"…and he said he wasn't.

"So long." He waved his big, translucent hand.

All the way across the broken overpass I tried to assemble what I had of the man behind the wall (my lights flashing through two flowered grills of stone, a web of light around his body); I even wondered what he'd felt during our conversation. The one thing that cleared when all my speculations fell away was that I had an, urge to write.

We didn't say all those things in that way; but that is what we talked about Reading it over brings back the reality of it for me. Would it for him? Or have I left out the particular, personal emblems by which he would recall and know it?

(Do you have that restless…? like it says in the back of the magazines. Sure.) But sitting here, in a back booth at Teddy's, tonight, while Bunny does her number to not-quite-as-many-as-usual customers (I asked Pepper if he wanted to come with me but he really has this thing about going in here, so I brought my notebook for company), I see all it has produced is this account — and not what I wanted to work on. (Bunny lives in a dangerous world; she wants a good man. What she can get is Pepper … no, an image Pepper at his best [when he can smile] consents to give, but he's usually too tired or ashamed to. Is it my place to tell her that, bringing my blasphemy to the altar steps, sharing with her the data from my noon journey? I just wish I enjoyed his dancing more.) This is not a poem. It is a very shabby report of something that happened in the Year of Our Lord it would be oh-so-nice to write down, month, day, and year. But I can't.

If Dollar doesn't stop pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will kill him. If Dollar stops pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will let him alone. If Copperhead is going to kill Dollar, then Dollar will not have stopped pestering Copperhead. If Copperhead lets Dollar alone, then Dollar will have stopped pestering Copperhead. Which of the above is true? The one with the fewest words, of course. But that's faulty logic. Why? Three times blessed is the Lord of Devine Words, the God of Theives, the Master of the Underworld, duel sexed in character, double dealing in nature, yet one through all defraction.

her elbow across his jaw.

John said, "Hey…!" and went back, hands up, palms out.

The sound she made was something I'd never heard out of anybody. She kicked at his leg, got him under the knee. He grabbed at her arm again but it wasn't there, so he pulled back.

And stumbled over a root, right up against the trunk. Which made him really mad: he swung at her again.

She jumped. Straight up. His fist landed against her arm. She came down raking at his neck. His shirt tore.

He hit her, hard. But it didn't matter; I thought she was going to bite his throat out. She bit something. He hissed, "Shit…!"

Denny grabbed my arm. "Hey, don't you wanna stop her…?"

"No," I said. I was scared to death.

John tried to punch her in the stomach.

Both of them twisted, missing.

Milly kept circling around them and Jommy started to say, "Hey, somebody…" and then saw the rest of us and just swallowed.

John pushed her away in the face. She grabbed his arm and yanked. Not pulled, yanked. His elbow hit the tree. He yelled, and hit her flat-handed in the jaw.

"FUCKER…!" she shouted so loud you knew it hurt her throat. "FUCKER…!"

Her right fist came down from her left ear and hammered his face. Like an echo his head cracked back against the trunk.

"Hey! Stop it… Stop…" Then I guess he really tried to break out. He shouted, grabbed her wrist…

She was meat red from the neck up, yanking her fist over, twisting his fingers; then grabbed one fist with the Other and swung it against his neck.

"Jesus…" Jommy said, to me I realized. "She's crazy…" But he stepped back from the look I gave him.

John tried to grab her in some sort of bear hug. He kicked out, and they both went down, him pretty much on top. Everyone stepped back together.

Flailing out, she came up with a handful of grass. Then there was grass in his hair and he yelled again.

His ear was bleeding. But I don't know what she'd done.

"Hey, look!" Milly said, loud and upset. "Why doesn't somebody…" Then it struck her that if somebody was, the somebody was going to have to be her.

She started forward.

I touched her on the shoulder and she looked sharply around.

"Fair fight," I said.

He hit her three times, hard, one after the other: "Stupid. Bitch. Stupid…" but she somehow got him off. And reared back. She came down with both fists on his face, once glancing off his ear and hitting the ground and coming up for another hit, bloody. When she hit him again — he was just trying to cover his face, now — I saw hers was scraped up bad.

About the sixth time she hit him — one knee went into his stomach — I thought maybe I should try and stop her. I thought about Dollar. I thought about Nightmare and Dragon Lady. But I wasn't as scared as I'd been at the beginning, when I'd thought her quivering, shaking rage would explode her.

Denny's mouth was open. He let go my arm.

She stood up, almost falling. "You fucking shit!" she said. It sounded like her jaw clicked between syllables. She kicked him in the head. Twice.

"Hey, come on…" one of the others said, and started toward her. But didn't touch her.

Thinking: Maybe a tennis sneaker isn't that hard.

Sure.

She turned and came, blindly, toward me.

As Denny fell back, she stopped, looked behind her and shouted, "You fucking shit!" and came on. Her face was all puffed on one side.

Two of the guys kneeled beside John. Milly hovered behind them as though she still couldn't make up her mind.

"Oh, wow!" Denny said. "You really creamed the bastard!"

"The fucking shit!" she whispered, wiping at her face and grimacing. "The fucking…" One eye was all teary. She started walking. We walked with her.

"It looks like he got in a couple too," Denny said.

"She's walking," I said.

"Hey, you did better than Glass did with Dollar," Denny said.

"I had—" She took a breath. "I guess I had more reason." She rubbed her shoulder with her palm, fingers strained wide. And left blood on the workshirt sleeve. I don't think she knew she was bleeding yet.

"Hey, Lanya?" Jack said. Frank stood behind his shoulder.

She stopped and looked.

She swallowed and I wondered if she remembered who he was.

I was probably projecting.

"Thanks," Jack said.

She nodded, swallowed once more, and started walking again.

"What's the matter?" Denny asked about twenty yards later. "Your eye hurt?"

She shook her head. "It's just that…" She really sounded upset. "Well, nice girls from Sarah Lawrence don't usually beat the fucking shit out of…" and gasped again.

I put my arm around her shoulder. She fitted like usual. Only she didn't adjust her step to mine. So I adjusted mine to hers. "Did you want me to lend you a hand in there?"

"I would have pulled your balls off!" she said. "I would have … I don't know what I would have…"

I squeezed her shoulder. "Just asking, babes."

She touched her jaw again, gently, realizing it hurt. And left blood there. "The school was my thing. It wasn't yours. You didn't have anything to do with it. You didn't even like Paul… Oh, the fucking shit—!" and stopped walking.

"I helped you with the class a couple of times," Denny said. "Didn't I?" and glanced back at the others.

"Sure," Lanya said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Then she winced and reached down to rub her leg. Not limping, she still favored it.

"I just don't understand why you lit into him," I said.

"Oh, fuck you!" She pulled away from me. "You don't understand a lot of things. About me."

"All right," I said. "I'm sorry."

"So am I," she said, harshly. But when I caught up with her, she put her arm around my shoulder. And adjusted her step.

"Hey," Denny said. "You wanna be by yourself for a while?"

"Yeah," she said. "Yes I do."

She walked with us to the park entrance, so that I figured she was going back with us to the nest. But by the lions she said, "I'll see you later," and just walked off.

"Hey …" I called.

"She wants to be by herself," Denny said.

I still felt funny.

She did come back to the nest, late that night after we'd been in bed (me half drunk) about an hour. Vaguely I heard her talcing off her clothes, then climbing the ladder pole.

She crawled across me, rolled me by the shoulder onto my back, and, a-straddle my chest, glared down, swaying like she was going to rip something out of me with her teeth. I reached between her legs and pushed two fingers through her hair between the granular walls; they wet.

She leaned both hands on my chest, her arms pushing her breasts together and actually growled.

Denny, wedged in the corner, turned over, lifted his head, and said, "Huh…?"

"You too!" she said. "You come here too!"

I've never been balled like that before — puffy eye and sore leg notwithstanding — by any one. (She said she'd spent the afternoon and evening with Madame Brown, just talking. "You ever ball her?" Denny wanted to know.) In the middle of a heavy stretch, Copperhead stuck his head over the edge of the loft and asked, "What are you guys doing up here anyway? You're gonna tear the loft down!"

"Get out of here," Denny said. "You had your chance."

Copperhead grinned and got

Walked around the streets this afternoon with Nightmare, listening to his reminiscences of Dragon Lady: "Man, we used to do some freaky things, all the time, any time, anywhere, right in the middle of the fuckin' street, man, I swear." We ambled; he pointed out doorways, alleys, a pickup truck parked on its axles—"Once with her sitting in the cab and me standing on the fuckin' sidewalk, a hand on either side of the door, and my head just in there, eatin' out all that black pussy — Baby and Adam running around someplace across the street-then I fucked her in the back there, on the burlap. Oh, shit!" — and where, by the park, she had pushed him up against the wall and blown him; where she used to make him walk down the center of the street with his genitals loose from his fly, "with her sitting on the curb and doing things with her mouth, man, before I even got there, so I had a hard-on out to here!" He talks out these celebrations as though they are religious rituals recently banned. Forty minutes of this, before it hit me how lonely not only Nightmare is, but all of us here are: Who can I discuss the mechanics of Lanya and Denny with? I don't even have the consolation of public disapproval. He probably has never talked about any of this before. On the marble steps of the Second City Bank building (he tells me) he made her take off all her clothes—"Just like Baby, man. I mean people can go around in the street stark naked here, and it don't mean nothing." — and urinate, while he stood behind her, one arm over her shoulder, catching her water in his palm. "And once she made me lie on my back, you know, in the center of the pavement—" the incident illustrated with much gesturing and head-shaking as we search his memories out of the dry mist—"naked, man, and she just walked around and around and around me, a big woman!" (He repeats this last a lot, as though her circling defined some terribly necessary boundary on this wild terrain.) "…made me eat her out for half an hour, I swear, right—" he looks around, surprised—"here, man. Right here! It was just getting light, and you couldn't hardly see her…" As my attention drifted from his account, I thought of all the cliches about how to act among violent people, current among the non-violent: Rise to the first challenge or you'll be branded a coward for the rest of your stay; a willingness to fight gains the group's respect; once you beat him, the bully will be your friend. Somebody coming into the nest with these as functioning propositions would get killed! (Thinking: Frank?) Nightmare's shoulders rocked. His fists, wrists bound in leather, bobbed. He recounted hoarsely: "She used to get me drunk and I'd have her suck me off, my ass up against any old, cold, God-damn wall, with my pants down around my fuckin' knees, and her tryin' to get two fingers up my ass — don't remember how she figured out I like that." Suddenly he looked up, frowning. "You think I was right?"

"Huh?"

"When we had that garden party back at the nest." His meaty hand returned to the fresh scars down his arm. "You think I done right?"

"Dragon Lady is her own woman," I said.

Nightmare asked: "What would you do if somebody pulled that shit on you?"

"I think," I said, "I would have cut their head off. Just messing up her arm for a couple of weeks — well, you both showed great restraint."

"Oh." His hand, knotting, slid down his chest to knuckle his belly, pensively.

"But nobody has ever pulled that on me," I said. "At least Dragon Lady hasn't, yet. So I still dig you both."

"Yeah," Nightmare said. "Sure. I understand. But nobody would do you that way. They think you're too smart. They think they can talk to you. Maybe that's why I gave you the nest, you know?"

That surprised me.

"Yeah," he went on, "like I said: It's time for me to get out of this mother-fuckin', sad-assed excuse for a—"

Behind his voice, children's voices: we were passing the curtained windows of Lanya's school. Nightmare looked. The door was ajar on darkness; laughter, juvenile shrieks, and chatter…

I stepped up the curb over the gutter grate. Nightmare followed. I glanced back: his thick forehead skin creased in a squint; his lips pulled up and down from the whole (and one broken) teeth.

I stepped through the door.

On the table, above the empty chairs, spools glimmered and spun on the tape recorder. We watched a while, waiting. Beside me, Nightmare mauled and kneaded his bald shoulder, listening to the recorded noise in the vacated room. Scars, chains, and office, some thrust away, some new received, habits without correlatives, jumbled in the great bag of him, as though his achievements and losses completed a design mapped in the layout of the streets around us. Thinking: I may never see this man again after today, if all

own eyes, for somewhere in this city is a character they call: The Kid. Age: ambiguous. Racial origin: same. True name: unknown. He lives among a group (whose alleged viciousness is only surpassed by their visible laziness) over which he holds a doubtful authority. They call themselves scorpions. He is the supposed author of a book that has been distributed widely in town. Since it is the only book in town, that it is the most discussed work of the season is a dubious distinction. That and the intriguing situation of the author tend to blur accurate assessment of its worth. I admit: I am intrigued.

Today I cut down the block where I'd heard the scorpions had their nest. "What kind of street do they live on?" In the grammar of another city, that sentence would hold the implication: What kind of street are they more or less constrained by society to live on, given their semi-outlaw status, their egregious manner and outfit, and the economics of their asocial position? In Bellona, however, the same words imply a complex freedom, a choice from hovel to mansion — complex because every hovel and every mansion sustains through that choice some remnant of our ineffable catastrophe: In any house here movement from room to room is a journey from a place where twin moons have cast double shadows of the window sills upon the floors to a place where once, because the sun had grown so immense, no shadow was cast at all. We speak another language here. Is the real importance of his pamphlet that I've been browsing over all morning that, unlike the newspaper, it is the only thing in the city written in this language? If it is the only thing said, by default it must be the best thing. Anyone sensitive to language, living in this mess/miasma, must applaud it. Is there any line in it, however, that would be comprehensible outside city limits?

Five were sitting on the steps. Two leaned against the wrecked car at the curb. Why am I surprised that most of them are black? The flower-children, whose slightly demonic heirs these are, were so emphatically blond, and the occasional darky among them such an emphatic mark of tollerence! They were not sullen. There were three girls among them, one an ebullient young black girl, capped with a large natural and vastly pregnant. They wore chains, some as many as fifteen strands, some as few as two. They were dirty and gregarious. They smiled and talked a sort of quiet half-talk to one another. Boots, leather vests — no shirts—

This remains with me from my last conversation with Tak about Calkins and the party: "I had the funniest dream last night, Kid. Not that I particularly care what it means — I interpret other peoples' dreams and just try to enjoy my own. Anyway, I had this little black kid, about thirteen or fourteen, up at my place — Bobby? I think you were catching a nap there once when he came by. In the dream, he was just standing there in a T-shirt, with half a hard-on. (Half a hard-on on Bobby goes out to here!) Suddenly I looked up and George was coming across the roof toward the door, as though he'd just come up for a visit. When he stepped in, he saw us. All the posters of him across the wall, I think but I'm not sure, were staring at us too. And he had this sort of mocking look that said, 'So that's what you're after.' And I felt very guilty. Oh, the point of it was that in the dream Bobby

and chains made them look like some 'cycle club in, Coventry. A tall, skinny, black boy on the top step had a gallon of wine between his boot heels which periodically passed on its way to the curb and back. The white

guy with no vest and the scarred stomach was the only one who wiped the neck — with a hand so grubby the other colored girl, tall and hefty, refused to drink after him. The others laughed as if her rebuke contained more than was apparent. They did not look at me as I strolled on the other side of the street. It is rumored that these men and women can transform themselves in darkness to any one of a gallery of luminous beasts; that they have weapons to turn the slung fist into a five-way cutting tool. I wonder if anyone that I saw there was the Kid—

and I weren't going to have sex. He wanted to show me something on his cock-some sore or something. And I felt all uncomfortable, like I'd been trapped into being something that I'm not. I mean given my choice of types- types and not individuals — I'd rather have a Georgia farm-boy any day. Not that I've ever kicked Bobby out of bed. But it was a strange dream."

My first reaction was that Tak, who had always seemed a pretty big man, became much smaller. Later I realized that the big man simply contained many componants, among them a small one.

Also wonder if writing about myself in the third person is really the way to go about losing or making a name. My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggests mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will

It's not light yet. (Will it ever be?) Just returned from the third and what I hope is the last run on the Emboriki. Don't even want to write about this one. But, as usual, will. (At least, he said and can you hear the cap's, They Will Not Be Bothering Us Again. Tarzan's bizarly reflective comment (echoing something he heard from me?): "It's easier here than any place else") Raven, Priest, Tarzan, and Jack the Ripper kept telling me, "Man, don't take Pepper along!"

"Anyone goes who wants to go," I said. By the time we went, though, Pepper wasn't around anyway. Dragon Lady was waiting for us in front of Thirteen's; Baby, b.a. as usual, pimple-pocked and sullen, stood in the shadowed doorway. His arms slung through his chains, Adam sat on the curb, grumbling glumly. Cathedral, Revelation and Fireball had brought the cans of

have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial. (It is Troy, Sodom, Abel Cuyuk, the City of Dreadful

an ocean of smoke and evening. I tried to smell it, but my nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blurr. We neared the fogged pearl of one functioning lamp, and her face got all twisted. She stopped, turquoise, hem to knees, exploding high as her scarlet waist. "Should we…? Oh, Kid! Do you know what they said!" "Will you please…" I asked her. My throat hurt with running and the raw air. "Will you please tell me what… what they said!"

Both hands came up to cage her mouth. She was a shower of sliver on metallic black. "Someone, up on the roof of the bank: The Second City Bank — oh, a God-damn sniper!"

"Who, for Christ's sake?" I grabbed her small elbows and the hair shook around her head. "Will you tell me who they got?"

"Paul," she whispered. "Paul Fenster! The school, Kid… everything!"

"Is he dead?"

Her head shook in a way that meant she didn't know. Her hands twisted silver cloth at her hips: scarlet bled

Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop — was it eight o'clock yet? — stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a long-haired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I'd left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please o please I can't I please don't let it

down from one; yellow snaked across her belly from the other. "In the burning," she said very quickly. "In the fire… all your poems, the new ones; they burned…!" Her lips kept touching and parting, sorting more words, none of which fit. "Everything, all of them… I couldn't…"

"Unnn…" Something went right into my stomach without using gut or throat for entrance, I said, "Unnn…" She let go her skirt.

"That's… good I guess," was all I could say. "I didn't like them. So it's good they're… gone."

"You should have kept them in your notebook! I was wrong! You should…" She shook her head. "Oh, I'm so sorry!"

I started to cough.

"Look," she said, "I know half of them by heart anyway. You could reconstruct—" "No," I said.

"— and Everett Forest made that…" "No. It's good they're gone."

"Kid," she said, "what about Paul…? Up on the Second City Bank building. Were you…? Oh, please try to remember!" Then she started as though she'd seen something (behind me? above me? were my lights still on? I don't remember!), and turned. And ran, blazing gold a moment before shadow took her and I ran after, into the brush, feet crashing in leaves and ash. Her bright hem whipped back till she became some darker color. (Thinking: Who is in control of her? Who, less than fifty yards off, is following through the undergrowth, twisting the nobs, pushing the switches that change her from scarlet to ultramarine?) My bare foot passed

This morning Filament brought around a woman who I first thought was Italian and who became Black Widow this evening. Overheard her in a discussion in the back yard just now — one of the few here that has even veered near any politics outside the city: "It's not that men and women are identical, it's just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of 'inate' differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strangth of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage." I was impressed. But I have heard similar from Nightmare, Dragon Lady, Madame Brown, Tak, D-t, Bunny, even Tarzan. Is Bellona, then, that unbelievable field where awarenesses, of such an order, are the only real strangth? That they can occur here is what makes possible the idea of leaving for another city.

from concrete to grass. The night billowed and sagged. Did habit guide us through the maze of mists?

I saw the quivering fires.

The brass dish, big across as a car tire, had been dragged twenty feet over the ashy grass. I felt very high. Thought swayed through my mind, shattered, sizzled like water on coals. Something in the smoke—? I raised my arm.

Brass leaves, shells, claws — from the ornamented wrist band, over-long blades curved up around my hand. In the dish, small blue flames hung quivering over the red. Fire light dripped down the blades.

I took another step, flexing just the scarred fingertips.

Something tickled my shoulder.

I whirled, crouching. The leaf rolled down my vest, fluttered against the chains, brushed the worn place at my knee, spun on to the ground. Gasping, I looked up the leaning trunk. Above, shadow coiled in the bole of some major branch, struck away by lightning.

The air was still. But suddenly dead leaves I could not see thundered above, loud as jets. Holding my mouth wide as I could, I leaned forward. The side of my foot pressed a root. Thigh, belly, chest, cheek lay up against the bark. I breathed deep for the woody smell and pushed my body into the trunk.

With my bladed hand I stroked the bark till I felt the trunk move. Sweat rolled under my vest. Chains bit my belly; glass

About a third the nest say "must of," distict and clear. They think it, too. They aren't saying "must've," or must'a'," either. I notice it specifically in D-t, Filament, Raven, Spider, Angel, Cathedral, Oevestation, Priest. So: they are going through a different word to word process than the rest of us (Tarzan, for instance, who says "must'a' ")-I don't think we feel any verb in that at all, while the people who say "must of" do feel something prepositional, or at least genative. A word hits my ears and inside my head a sensory recall forms — a memory of an object, dim and out of focus, the recollection of a sound, a smell, or even a kinesthetic expectation. The recalls are unclear — there is always margin for correction. As word arrives after word, the recalls join and correct each other, grow brighter, clearer, become percise: a … huge… pink… mouse! What do I mean when I say a word means something? Probably the neuro/chemical

bits pressed about me; bark gnawed my cheek. Above, in the roaring, I heard a crack; not the sound wood makes broken against the grain, but when it splits longways. And there was a smell, stronger than the smoke: vegetative, spicey, and fetid.

Another crack: but that was gun or backfire, louder than leaves and across the park. I pushed back from the trunk, blinking away the water in my eyes. Something fell, rocked on the grass among the roots; and something else-shards of bark, twelve or twenty inches across. Bark split in front of me, sagging out a few inches. What was behind it, I could see by the light from the dish, was red; and moist; and moved. Something crashed down through the

process by which one word sounded against the ear generates one inner recall. Human speech has so little varience to it, so little creativity: I sit on the steps and scan an hour's conversation around me (my own included) and find once two words in new juxtaposition. Every couple of days such a juxtaposition will evoke something particularly apt about what the speaker (usually Lady of Spain or D-t; seldom me) is talking about. But when it happens, everyone notices:

"Yeah, yeah! That's right!" and laughter.

"I like that!" and someone grins.

"Yeah, that's pretty good."

In college I would scan and find one such language node in ten hours of speech, sometimes in two or three days. Though, there, people were much more ready to approve the hackneyed, the cliched, the inapt and im-percise.

Is that why I write here?

Is that why I don't write here much?

In the middle of this, Lanya says: "Guess who I had dinner with last night."

Me: "Who?"

She: "Madame Brown took me to the Richards'."

Me: "Have a good time?" I admit, I am surprised.

She: "It was … educational. Like your party. I think they're people I'd rather see on my terratory than on theirs. Madame Brown feels the opposite. Which probably means I won't see much of them."

Me: "What did you think of June?"

She: "I liked her. She was the only one I could really talk to … the hallway down stairs still stinks; weird going past it in the elevator and knowing what it was. I told her all about the House. She was fascinated. A few times Arthur and Mary overheard us and were scandalized. But not many." She rubs the lion's back (where bright metal scars the brown patina), looks out the window. "I think she's going to find George, soon. When she does, we all better watch out."

Me: "Why? What'll happen?"

She smiled: "Who knows? The sky may crack, and giant lightning run the noon's black nylon; and the oddest portents yet infect the

branches, but caught in them. I heard more wood split, and something like a moan. "Lanya!" I shouted loud as I could. "Lanya!" Leaves swelled to a roar again.

I took another step back — a sudden pain along my calf. I whirled, staggering. My bare heel had scraped the high, raised rim of hot metal. I danced away from spilled coals; rocking, the edge had scraped halfway to my knee. There were more gunshots. I began to run.

Very far ahead was a working nightlight. (Thinking: There's going to be a riot! With Fenster shot, the blacks are going to be out all over Jackson and there's going to be a debacle from Cumberland Park too…) I tried to remember which way the park exit was.

In all the trees around the leaves were loud as jets.

I thought of turning on my lights, but I didn't. Instead, I got off the path — stumbled, nearly twisted my ankle, the one I'd scraped. I climbed up some rocks where I couldn't see a thing; so I figured no one could see me. I sat there, wedged between stones, eyes half closed, trying to be still.

I wondered if they were waiting for me. If I did get out of the park, it would be my luck to stumble out the Cumberland exit. Where the burning was heaviest, I ran my hand around the orchid's wrist band.

Light through the leaves started me. I kneeled forward, sure it was going to be bright shields.

ceiling of the skull." She was mocking with misquotation what I'd given her to read that morning. Her turning it into something inflated like that made me uncomfortable.

She realized it and laid three fingers on my arm. But her touch was light as a leaf; I quivered. "You'd prefer to be hit than tickled, wouldn't you." She firmed her grip.

"Yeah," I said. "Usually."

She watched me, green eyes dark as gun metal in the crowded room. Almost everyone was asleep. We went into the front.

The sky reaches in through screen doors and un-curtained windows and wipes color off the couches, tables, pictures, posters we've hung.

Outside the streets are quiet as disaster-areas after evacuation, more claustrophobic than inside, rank as our den is with heat and sleepy shiftings.

People think of us as energetic, active, violent. At any time, though, a third of us are asleep and half have not been out of the nest for two, three, four days (it is seldom noisy here; as seldom silent); we nestle in the word-web that spins, phatically, on and on, sitting our meaning and meanings, insights and emotions, thin as what drifts the gritty sky.

It was a bunch of people with flashlights. When they passed — I pressed myself back against the rock, and one light swept right over me, for a moment directly in my eyes beyond the branches — it was pretty easy to see that they were mostly white; and they had rifles. Two of them were very angry. Then one among them turned back and shouted: "Muriel!" (It could have been a woman calling.) The dog barked, barked again, and rushed through a wandering beam.

I closed my mouth.

And my eyes.

For a long time. A very long time. Perhaps I even fell asleep. When I opened them, my neck was stiff; so was one leg.

The sky was hazy with dawn. It was very quiet.

I got up, arms and knees sore as hell, climbed over the rocks and kept on down the other side till I came out of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed in.

Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

There was no one there.

I walked to the furnace, between cans and package wrappers. On the bench was an overturned garbage carton. With my boot-toe, I scraped at some cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up red eyes which blinked, simplified, and clapped up.

"Lanya?"

They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here hid awfully just a million savants at the pot. An open egret hung around a perch — still she could stay here any night. The honey worts and wolfling braces amazingly lined askew in weevils or along a post-hole should report.

"Lanya!"

An apple to discover? Still they should have saved around what or fixed her. Except in the underpinned white shell, here are some scabs in purple; every beach but effluvia. And they had bought us up to mix here so few concepts with the lazy drinks, had sat sober or reinstated our personal fixated intensity. Soon they cauterized what you, constancy and exegesis, were found very loose around him that we had each, without Denny explaining, fished to fascinate them, beautifully or lazily. They should have allowed her less than an alligator has an eyelid never pulled her from a quiver; terror still felt less alive.

"Lanya?"

I turned to fixative among the walkings.

Beyond the leaves, the figure moved so that I still couldn't

When I came up the stairs, her office door was closed. So I wandered from the study to the kitchen into Lanya's room and back. Finally I sat on the edge of the desk in the hall, tilted the Newboy volumes from between the statuettes, piled them beside me, and began to flip pages.

Which was funny: after five minutes I still hadn't read one whole poem, or one complete paragraph from the essays or stories. My eyes could only focus before or behind the page. That part of the brain, directly behind the eye, that refracts the jewelry of words into image, idea, or information, wouldn't work. (I even wondered a while how much of that was because I'd heard him speak.) The books had generated ghosts of themselves, and I couldn't read the words for their after-images. I kept picking up different volumes, hefting them, closed, on my palm, putting them down, then hefting my emptied palm again, feeling for the ghost's weight. My stomach began to hurt because I was concentrating so widely. I put them all back — first I ordered them by size, then I pulled them out again and reordered them by the dates on the copyright pages — and walked for a while (remember the fourth day on speed?), returning to the desk, pulling the books out again, leaving — really finding I'd wandered away just as I'd turn around to go back.

What is it around these objects that vibrates so much the objects themselves vanish? A field, cast by the name of a man, who, without my ever having read a complete work of his, the hidden machinery of my consciousness at some point decided was an artist. How comical, sad, exhausting. Why am I a victim of this magic? But for all I recognize out of me, I wonder furiously who would hold Brass Orchids on their hand, hefting for noumenal weight?

"Kid?" Madame Brown's body and face were sliced by the door. "You're here. Good."

"Hello." I closed the The Charterhouse of Ballarat. "You ready for me to come in now?"

She opened the door the rest of the way; I got off the desk.

"Yes, let's begin. I hope I didn't keep you waiting…?"

"That's okay." I walked into the room.

Coming in to the dull green walls, dark wood up to the waist, a day bed with a green corduroy spread, three big leather chairs, a tall bookshelf, dark green drapes, I had to readjust my spatial model of the house: It was the biggest room on the floor and I'd never been in it.

On the wall was a swing-out display rack, like in poster shops. I walked over, started to open it, glanced at Madame Brown—

"Go ahead."

— and turned the first leaf, expecting George:

The raddled earth hung above tilted, lunar shale. On the next, a bulky astronaut stared out his half-silvered faceplate. All the pictures — I went through some dozen — were of the moon, or Mars, or the familiar faces of astronauts, necks ringed with helmet clamps — two of a younger, closer-cropped Kamp — or their polished angular equipment (the foil-wrapped module foot under which Kamp's moon-mouse had fled), plastic flags, or pale, cirrus clouds, hind-lit by exhaust-light as the rocket rose above its stanchions.

Let Kamp smirk out on our session? No, I turned to a chalky scape, backed by an earth with clouds like a negative thumb-print. Or a saucepan of soured milk a moment before it boils; and went to a chair.

"Comfortable there?" Madame Brown closed the door. "You can lie down on the couch if it's easier for you to talk that way."

"No. I'd rather see you."

She smiled. "Good. And I'd rather see you." She sat in one of the other chairs at a slight angle to me, a hand on the arm, a hand in her lap. "How do you feel about talking to me?"

"A little nervous," I said. "I don't know why: I've talked to enough shrinks before. I was thinking, though, it's all right here because there aren't any mental hospitals left so you can put me away."

"Do you feel that the other doctors you talked to — perhaps the doctors you saw before you went into the hospital the first time — put you away?" She said that pretty openly, not with any sarcastic quotes around put you away.

But suddenly I was angry: "You don't know very much about crazy people, do you?"

"What do you want to tell me about them?"

"Look — I'm very suggestive. Labile… like they say. I incorporate things into my… reality model very quickly. Maybe too quickly. Which is what makes me crazy. But when you tell us we're sick, or treat us like we're sick, it becomes part of… me. Then I am." And I wanted to cry, at once, surprisingly, and a lot.

"What's the matter?"

I wanted to say: I hate you.

"Do you think I think you're crazy?"

"I don't… don't think you think at all!" Then I cried. It really did surprise me. I couldn't move my hands. But I lowered my head to stop what hurt in the back of my neck. Water trickled the side of my nose. Thinking: Christ, that was fast! and sniffing when the silence got on my nerves.

"Did you like the hospital where you were?"

"Like it…?" I raised my head. "You're the one who said to me…" Another tear rolled. I felt cold. "…no, you said about learning to love the people at hand? Well there were a lot of very hurt people there, who it was very hard to learn to love, very expensive — emotionally. But I guess I did."

"Why are you crying?"

"Because I don't believe in magic." I sniffed again; this time something salty the size of a clam slid back out of my nasal cavity and I swallowed it. "You're a magic person, sitting there. You're sitting there because you think you can help me."

"Do you need help?"

I was angry again. But it was deep and bubbled down below things. "I don't know. I really don't. But that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that that's what you believe."

"You're angry at me."

I took a deep breath. "Not… really." The bubbles, one after the other, broke. I absorbed the fumes that raged.

My stomach was very tight.

"It's all right if you are. You may have good reason."

"Why should…?" and stopped because I could think of about ten. I said: "You're smug. You're not sympathetic. You think you understand. And you don't…"

"I don't understand yet; and I don't know whether I'll be able to. As of now, you haven't given me any reason to be sympathetic. If I'm smug, well… I'd rather I weren't, but I can feel some reserve in myself about getting too close to you just yet; which may be what smugness is."

"I don't think you can understand." I lugged both hands together in my lap and pushed them against one another. They felt numb. So did my feet

"What do you feel like now?"

"Like not much of anything."

"Does it make you want to cry again?"

I took another breath. "No. I don't…" I put my head back. "I think I lost it, whatever was coming out…"

"Are you a very emotional person? Do you cry often?"

"That's the first crying I've done in… three years, maybe four… a long time."

She raised her eyebrow. After a moment, she said: "Then you're probably under a great deal of pressure. What kind of pressure are you under?"

"I think I'm going crazy. And I don't want to. I don't like it. I like life, I like living. I like what's going on around me, all of it to watch, and most of it to do. There're all sorts of people and situations around I really enjoy. And I'm at a place where I don't have to worry about all sorts of others I don't. I don't want to go nuts again. Not now."

After a moment she smiled: "I've occasionally given therapy to some rather successful business executives; lots of money, happy families, some even without ulcers- who've said practically the same thing in the same way. We do know each other outside the office, and I must admit, from what I've observed myself, and from what Lanya's told me, I find it a little ironic; I mean that you express it in such similar words."

"I said you wouldn't understand. I said I was afraid — and I am angry — that I don't think you can."

"Tell me the symptoms of your going crazy."

"I forget things. I don't know who I am… I haven't been able to remember my name for months. I wake up, sometimes, terrified, everything in a blood-colored fog, which begins to clear while my heart beats so loud it hurts my chest. I've lost days, days and days out of my life. I see things, sometimes, like people with their eyes…" And I felt my back snarl with fear. Sweat rolled down the underside of one arm. "People with…" I closed my mouth, so astonished I couldn't say it that I couldn't say it. I backtracked in my mind, looking for something I could loop with words. "Can I…?" I had to back up further; I was looking at the multiple loops of optic chain she wore around her neck. "Can I tell you about a… dream?"

"Please go right ahead."

"I dreamed that I… well, I was in a woods, on the side of a mountain. The moon was shining — one moon. And this woman, a nice looking woman, a few years older than me, she came walking up over the rocks and through the leaves. She was naked. And we balled, right there in the leaves. Like that. When we were finished, she got up and ran off through the bush—"

"— you completed making love in the dream?"

"Yes. After we came, she got up and ran off through the woods to this cave, and told me to go inside it."

"And you obeyed her?"

"Yes. I remember that very clearly. I remember I stepped on some leaves once, in some water; I jumped over a crack in the cave floor. In a niche in one wall of the cave there was a brass thing, big around as my two arms, filled with glowing coals and little flames. I climbed this rock edge, and I found…" I touched the chain across my chest. "I dreamed I found these there." I hooked the chain with my thumb and watched Madame Brown. "I mean it must have been a dream; because of what happened later." She looked more intense; a fourth line crossed her forehead. "I put them on. But when I came out, she was gone. I looked for her in the woods, until I came to a moonlit road — just before, I remember, I stepped in a mud puddle. I was still trying to figure out where she'd gone when I saw her, there, in a meadow, on the other side of the road. So I started toward her, across the grass. And she turned into a tree. For some reason, in the dream, that terrified me. So I ran away, back down the road. Until I got to a highway. The rest of it is a little vague. I remember for part of it I was riding in a truck with this man with a sort of scarred-up face. Like bad pockmarks or acne. And this funny conversation about artichokes. Or maybe it wasn't really a conversation. One or the other of us just mentioned artichokes in some connection that I don't remember…"

"That's all?" Her fingertips came together.

"That's all," I said, while her hands parted, touched her knees. "But it was so… strange!"

"What made it particularly strange?"

"Well, everything happened so… clearly. And when this woman changed, I was so scared. I mean I was incredibly frightened. I ran away, I mean…"

Madame Brown crossed her legs.

Across her calf, glazed with nylon, a scratch curved down to her ankle.

She asked: "What is it?"

I tried to open my mouth, felt my face twitch.

She waited a long time.

I tried a couple more times.

My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.

But I tried.

And sank backward into myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.

"Tell me about Lanya."

"Denny—" the cave wasn't where I lived, though—"and me, we like her a lot."

She mmmed. "Tell me about Denny."

"Lanya and me like him… a lot."

My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.

"What are you feeling?"

"Scared."

"That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?"

"Huh?" That surprised me. "Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya's never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she's said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don't disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?"

"Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren't coming to me for help; and they don't think they're going crazy."

"More power to me!" She'd catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I'd dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was — it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: "You disapprove of people who come to you for help?"

"Now, that's not what I—"

"Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you—" I leaned forward—"what do you think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that's all anybody around here ever does — though I'm sure I'm just flattering myself. Tell me."

She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: "What do you think of the Richards, Kid?"

"I don't know…" Then I said: "She's frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won't hold. But that's sort of heroic, too. Him? He's despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit." Then I asked: "Do they even know you're black?"

"Yes. Of

Lanya surprises me once more: The whole nest out in the yard, and she asks, "Hey, how come Kid is the head scorpion in this nest? I mean Nightmare was before, and then Kid. I would have thought you'd have a black running things."

"Yeah," Tarzan says. "Me too." While everybody else looks like they'd never thought anything of the kind. But I have; so I waited.

Finally Glass laughs: "Well, of course Nightmare was sharing it with Dragon Lady. But I think more or less everybody has got it in their head that after one of these runs or other, the shit is gonna come down. Hard. When it does, you gonna see some niggers fade in the night like nobody's business. But the chief scorpion, maybe, ain't gonna be able to fade quite so fast. So that if this dumb-ass white motherfucker-" Glass put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a big grin, " — wants to stick around here and play superman, ain't no nigger with any sense gonna stand in his way. I mean the guy in charge is the one who gets zapped. At least, that's the way it works anyplace else…" Glass squints up at the sky.

Copperhead seemed to think it was funnier than anybody else.

course they do."

"I'm surprised."

"I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards."

"Do they know you're gay?"

Madame Brown moved in the chair and Mmmed again, negatively. "Let me see," she said after a moment: "Black, lesbian, I'm also very middle class.

Fireball said: "He's white? I didn't know that. He's darker than I am!"

"Man," Glass said, "the Kid is an Indian."

"Now I didn't know he was white," Fireball repeated. "He' crazy as a nigger."

Tarzan gave me a smile that dribbled strychnine.

"An' he sure likes his little blond brothers and sisters." Fireball (whose spade accent, more than any one else's, comes on and off for the occasion) pointed to Lanya and Denny. (Denny laughed.) "The Kid is really something else, man. Really something." (Lanya was pensive.)

And Mary and Arthur are my friends. But I wish sometimes I didn't think you were so right. It would make my life much easier. But then, I've never particularly wanted an easy life, really." She sighed. "I do find this in myself, Kid: When I occasionally get ex-asperated with Arthur or Mary, especially when they're going on about you, I wonder to myself — quite honestly — what they would say if I told them some of the things you've actually done-just for the upset it would cause. At that point, I tell myself it's because I 'approve' of you and don't 'approve' of them."

"If you wanted to upset them, you could tell them some things about June, about Bobby and… what's his name? Eddie."

"Of course, you side with the youngsters—"

"No," I said. "I'm nearly thirty years old. And I wouldn't swear to which side of it I'm on, from what some people tell me. I'm not taking sides; I'm just pointing out some upsetting areas in their life that are a little closer to home."

"To the Richards's home. What about yours?"

"You were going to tell me what you thought about the Kid. Maybe you'll tromp on something and I'll twitch for you."

"All right. I think…"

I looked at her leg.

"…you are very disturbed. You are personable, intelligent, forceful, vital, talented. But your basic ego structure is about as stable as a cracked teacup. You say you've lost bits and pieces of yourself? I think that's exactly what's happened. The point is, Kid, we still don't treat the mentally ill as though they were just sick. We treat them as though they were some strange combination of unclean, depraved, and evil. You know, the first mental hospitals in Europe were leprosaria, deserted all over the continent at the end of the middle ages because-for some reason we still don't know — there was a spontaneous remission in the disease over about seventy-five years, though it had been endemic for the last three thousand. Was it rising hygiene standards? A mutation in the germ? The point is that till then, though they had occasionally been shipped about on local rivers, the insane had never been hospitalized before. But when they were suddenly confined in these immense, empty buildings that, in some cases for hundreds of years, had held lepers, they took on as well the burden of three thousand years of superstition and fear connected with that unfortunate disease. And a good argument can be made that that's still more or less how we regard you today — complete with religious connotations. Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents have lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold. Tell me, what would you say to the idea that all your problems — the hallucinations, the depressions, even the moments of ecstasy — were biogenic? That the lapses of memory are an RNA depletion in the lower cortex; that the sudden fears are adrenal disruptions caused by random pituitary spasms; that the unreality that plagues you is merely a pineal cyst, inhibiting the production of serotonin?"

I looked up on the moonscape where there were no trees.

"That's sure as hell what it feels like," I said.

"Then, you differ from the businessmen, in that they are usually rather reluctant to give up any of the extra-biological significance of their symptoms. The over-determined human mind would rather have everything relevant, even if the relevance is simple-minded."

"When I was in the hospital—" remembering, I smiled—"I used to have a friend who'd say: 'When you're paranoid, everything makes sense.' But that's not quite it. It's that all sorts of things you know don't relate suddenly have the air of things that do. Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern." Once more I looked at her leg. "Only you never know which inch to move it…" I felt my face wrinkling over my skull with concentration.

She said: "Your dream. Can you think why you particularly wanted to tell me about it?"

I looked at my lap; "I don't know. I've just had it on my mind a long time."

"You mean it isn't a recent dream?"

"Oh, no. I had it… I don't remember when; while I was still staying in the… park?"

"And it isn't a recurrent dream?"

"No. I only had it once. But it… I just keep thinking about it."

One hand at her necklace, she fingered a lens. "I asked you this before, but I want to check: In the dream, you made love, had an orgasm, and then went to the cave. It wasn't just a heavy necking session?"

"No. She came first. I remember it surprised me, because I was just about ready myself. I finished up about thirty seconds after she did — which is unusual with me. Usually it takes me a couple of minutes longer. When I shot my load, leaves blew against my side. And I opened my eyes and we talked for a while."

Madame Brown mulled, a glass bead pressed to her chin. "I was on a research team that did a study some years ago-dirty old lady that I am-about sex dreams. We had, admittedly, a small sampling — two hundred and thirty-nine; they'd all checked yes to the question: whether they felt they had satisfactory sexual outlet. We had men, women, a few late adolescents; some homosexuals, of both sexes. One overwhelmingly consistent pattern was that when sex, in a dream, led to actual orgasm, either the dream ended or the subject awoke. Of course there was nothing conclusive about the study, and I can make a list of biasing factors an ell long. But yours is the first dream I've ever encountered, during or since the study, where orgasm was achieved and the dream continued." She looked at me like she was waiting for a confession.

"What am I supposed to say?"

"Anything that comes to mind."

"You think I didn't have the dream? You think I'm lying, or that maybe the dream was…" I hunched my shoulders and felt silly. "I don't know…"

"You want me to suggest it wasn't a dream? That it was real?" She gave a sudden, small frown. "Yes, you do, don't you? Well, I can understand that — if it seemed real to you." Underlying her frown was a slight and slightly sad smile. "But it was a dream, Kid. Because…" She paused; and I wondered what moons and suns returned to devil her memory. "Well, let's assume it wasn't. Would you like to discuss it further? What's the first thing that comes to mind?"

"I'm frightened, all of a sudden," I said. "Again."

"Of what?"

"Of you." I tried a smile and felt it abort deep in the muscles of my face.

"What about me frightens you?"

I looked at her scarred leg. I looked at the bead she rubbed against her chin. (I remembered what she had said, when I first met her, about them; I remembered what Nightmare had said. What Nightmare had said made more sense. But I want to believe her. Doesn't that count for something?) "I don't… I can't…" I began to cry again. And I couldn't stop this time. At all. "It's got to be a dream! It's got to…" Could she hear it for my sobbing? "If it isn't a dream, then I… I'm crazy!" And I cried about all the things people can not understand when other people say them. I cried over the miracle that they could understand anything at all. I cried for all the things I had said to other people that had been misunderstood because I, not knowing, had said them wrong. I cried with joy about those times when someone and I had nodded together, grinning over an understanding, real or wished for. A couple of times I managed to choke out; "I'm so

Denny's circumcised; I'm not. After we all made it this afternoon, he sat wedged in the loft corner and kept asking Lanya which kind of dick she liked more: "…one that's still got curtains or one that's been cut?"

"It doesn't make any difference to me." She sat cross-legged with my feet in her lap, playing with my toes.

"But which do you think is sexier?"

"I don't think it matters. They both feel the same."

"But don't you think one looks better?"

"No. I don't."

"But they are different; so you have to feel different about them. Which one… 7" and on and on till I got board lying there listening.

To stop it, I asked him: "Look, which one do you like more?"

"Oh. Well, I guess…" He leaned forward, hunching his shoulders. "The one that's still got it all there… like yours, is better."

"Oh," Lanya said, with a puzzled look as

frightened… I'm so frightened! I'm so alone!" I pushed my fingers into my mouth to stop the sound, rocking forward and back, bit on them, and couldn't stop.

Madame Brown brought me Kleenex. I blubbered, "Thank you," too inarticulate to be understood, and cried in despair that I could not even make that clear. I wandered back far enough in the cave to think, "This has got to be good for something," but climbed up the rocks where she told me to go, in the orange flicker, and didn't find anything there, so got scared again and cried and rocked in my seat, the pits above my kneecaps hurting, which is the place that hurts when I want to fuck bad, and kept crying and biting the sides of my hands for what seemed hours but was probably only fifteen, twenty minutes.

And it lessened; I felt weaker, better, and when I quieted, Madame Brown said: "You know, you asked me what I think of you? On the strength of the amnesia, the anxiety attacks, yes, that alone would make me suggest, if we were someplace else, that you go into a hospital. But as you say, there aren't any mental hospitals in Bellona any more. And, frankly, I don't know quite what they'd do for you if you went. It might take some of the pressure off you of being 'the Kid'. Perhaps that would allow some things to heal that are wounded, some things to settle in place that are swollen."

I nodded as though I was considering what she said — which wasn't what I was doing at all. "Do you…" I asked. "Do you believe… in my dream?"

"Pardon me?"

"Do you believe I had that dream?"

She looked confused. "I'm not sure what you mean. But… don't you?"

"Yes," I said. "Oh, Jesus Christ I do! I… I believe it was a… I had that dream." And realized there was a whole well of anguish from which only a single cup had been dipped. She hadn't understood. But that was all right.

Over her face was a mask of compassion: "Kid, there was nothing in the study to say that it couldn't happen the way you said. You remember it very clearly, and told all the details. Yes, I believe it was a dream. I don't know

though she'd suddenly understood something. About him.

"Yeah." Denny grinned, came out of his corner, and lay down with his head on my lap.

Lanya nodded, swung out from under my legs, and lay down with her head on Denny's lap. I put my feet in hers.

whether or not you do, but it's probably not a bad idea for you keep trying."

Over mine was a mask of relief: "Madame Brown," I said, "I am not going back into a mental hospital. The place I was in, for a leprosarium, was pretty nice. But I think I'd have to be crazy to go into one again. And you can read that any way you want!"

That made her laugh. "Though, in Bellona, the problem would be if you wanted to go in a hospital." Suddenly she cocked her head the other way. "Do you know why I offered you that job with the Richards, the morning I met you in the park?"

"You said it had something to do with—" I put two fingers on the optic chain across my chest—"these."

"Did I…?" Her smile turned inward, became preoccupied. "Yes, I suppose I did." She blinked, looked at me. "I told you the story of what happened at the hospital, with my friend, that night — I mean the night it all…"

"Yeah." I nodded.

"There was one point when I was coming down the third floor corridor and my friend was at the other end, trying to open one of the doors. A young, male patient was helping her, who… what shall I say? Looked very much like you. I mean I was only with him for perhaps a minute. He was working very hard, trying to pry back this locked door with a piece of wood or metal — he had done something terrible to his hands. His hands were much smaller than yours; and the bandages had come loose from two of his fingers." She grimaced. "But then some people needed help at the other end of the hall and he went off with them. I'd never seen him before — well, I was usually in the office. More sadly, I never saw him again. But when — how much later? — I saw you, in Teddy's, that night with your face cut, then again, wandering around the park the next morning, barefoot, with your shirt hanging open, the resemblance struck me immediately. For a moment I thought you were the same person. And you'd helped us; so I wanted to help you—" She laughed. "So you see these—" she touched her own beads—"these really meant… nothing."

I frowned. "You think maybe I'm … I was in the hospital here? That I never came here, from somewhere else? That I've been here all the—"

"Of course not." Madame Brown looked surprised. "I said the young man looked something like you; he had something of your carriage, especially at a distance. He was about your size and coloring — maybe even a little smaller. And I'm sure his hair was dark brown, not black — though this was all at night, by lights coming in the windows. I think, when he went away, someone — one of the other patients — called to him by name: I don't remember what it was, now." Her hands fell to her lap. "But that, anyway, is the real reason I offered you the job. I don't know why, but I thought it might be a good time to clear that up."

"I haven't always been here," I said. "I came here, over the bridge, over the river. And soon I'm going to leave. With Lanya and Denny…" It had felt very important to say.

"Of course," Madame Brown said; but looked puzzled. "We all have to go on from where we are. And of course we've all come from where we've been. Certainly, at some point, you must have come here. More important, though, is not to get trapped in some circle of your own, habitual—" Outside, the dog barked. "Oh, that must be my next patient," Madame Brown interrupted herself. The dog barked, kept barking.

Madame Brown frowned, half rose from the chair, one hand again absently at her beads. "Muriel!" she called; her voice was loud and low. "Muriel!"

It must have been something in the juxtaposition: the chains of lenses and prisms, or perhaps that she had said the beads meant nothing convinced me I was about to learn their real meaning; not that I was the person in the hospital but that somehow I or he… or that way she called the dog made me try to remember some place or some time when she, or someone else, had called it; not even my name, but possibly some other, if I could recall it — each element seemed about to explain the others, clearing the pattern; and that scratch… I got chills. I was being nudged, pushed, about to be reminded of… what? Anything more than the vast abysms of all our ignorances? Whatever, it was vastly sinister and breathlessly freeing. But I did not know; and that mystic ignorance wrung me out with gooseflesh.

"Well," Madame Brown was saying. "Our time is about up. And I'm pretty sure that's my next patient."

"Okay." I felt relieved too, somehow. "Hey, thanks a lot."

"Would you like to arrange another—"

"No. Thanks, no, I don't want to come back."

"All right." She stood up and considered saying something: Which, I guess, was: "Kid, please don't think I'm smug. About you, or about any of the things we've talked about I may not understand. But it's not from not caring."

I smiled. The gooseflesh rolled on—"I don't think you're smug—" and rolled away. "But I knew I wasn't going to come here more than once — as a patient. So I had to get something for my troubles. I've spent a lot of time in therapy. And you have to know how to use it." I laughed.

She smiled. "Good."

"I'll see you next time Lanya has Denny and me over for dinner — if not before. So long. Hey, if you want to talk about any of this with Lanya, go ahead."

"Oh, I wouldn't—"

"If she asks you anything, tell her what you think. Please."

She pressed her lips a moment. "All right. Then it probably will provide us with at least thirty-six hours solid conversation." She opened the door for me. "So long. I'll see… Oh, hello … I'll be with you in a few moments."

"Sure." The guy sitting on the desk corner, smiling up from the Newboy volumes, was the long-haired kid I'd seen cross-legged the night in the book-store basement, doing Om.

Madame Brown went back in her office and closed the door.

I went to the desk and picked up three of the books beside him. "I'm stealing these. Tell Madame Brown Lanya'll bring them back if she really wants them…" I was going to say more, but even that sounded silly.

"Sure. I'll tell Dr Brown as soon as I go in." Which made me wonder what he thought about me calling her "Madame". I went into the hall. As I passed Muriel, sitting on the top step, watching me with gentled eyes, I heard the office door open.

I wrote all this down because today the page with the list of names on it is missing from the notebook. When I got back to the nest from the session, I started browsing through and I couldn't find it. How many times have I read it over? I was planning to make myself read some of the Newboy. But as soon as I realized that page was gone, I suddenly felt an obsession to read it again, and began searching through the entries again and again on the chance I might have overlooked it. How many times have I read it before? (And now the only name I can remember from it is William Dhalgren.) At last, just to pull my mind away from it, I started writing out the above (and truncated) account of the hour Lanya arranged for me to have with Madame Brown, while she was off at her school. And what does it get me? The writing it down, I mean?

in their hands; the optic chain (a hundred feet? two hundred feet of it?), stretched among a dozen as they danced, glittered in beast light, sending flaked reflections along the undersides of leaves. Around us, they howled into the night, delighted, some going near the brazier, some going away.

Copperhead scrubbed at his mouth with his wrist. His eyes looked very red, his whole face burnished and flickering. "Hey, how do you like that?" he said. "Protection! That bastard Calkins wanted God-damn protection!" He turned from me to Glass. I laughed. Clapping perforated it. Copperhead looked up, suddenly; began to bellow and clap too, his palms hollowed. He was off rhythm so it carried a long way. He kept on bobbing his head to Glass's bobbing head, till finally he got it, though he was laughing, now. Dragon Lady, beyond the toppled furnace, one boot propped on a fallen cinderblock, kneaded her shoulder, pensive and intent, watching the dance, her jade beast momentarily out.

Lanya turned and jumped, her blue shirt mapped with sweat; she held a chain high with one hand. She moved her harmonica across her mouth with the other, blowing discord after discord. Her forehead was glazed, her hair wet down her brow.

Jommy, I guess it was, broke out between Mildred and some bird of paradise (Cathedral shouting, "Hey, watch it—"), staggering into the dazzling web, and grabbed a strand for balance. Denny's end — I jumped — broke (between mirror and prism) but he just whirled the loose length; finally looped it around somebody else's strand and held it high with both hands. An end someone else had dropped snaked and jerked through fire-lit grass. I stepped forward, grabbed it up, and dodged beneath it, jumping from foot to foot and bellowing. D-t and Spider and Raven and Cathedral and Tarzan (he really can dance good as the niggers) and Jack the Ripper and Filament and Angel made a web: one strand vibrated; another went slack in catenaries between taut lengths. Gladis paused, with a fist full of green cloth over her great belly, swaying and breathing with her mouth wide. She ducked from a strand that tightened against her cheek, swung away, and began to clap.

I stopped shouting soon because my throat hurt; and heard, between the claps: "Bunny, whyn't you get in there and show 'em how it's done!"

"Don't be silly, dear! We'll just watch."

"Naw, come on! I ain't never really seen you dance."

"Smile when you say that. Why don't you?"

"Aw, come on. I wanna see what you can do."

Something in the fire exploded; sparks shot above the flame tips, showering. The myriad narrow parabolas extinguished.

Dollar, his pimply back bright with sweat, stood centered in the clearing, feet wide, knees and head bent. Each clap detonated something in his belly that flung his hands, hips, and shoulders about.

Some of the commune kids were naked.

John danced with his brown beard up, his blond hair back, and his brass orchid waving on his hand overhead. A girl had gotten her legs caught in the chain going around, and fallen; she sat a long time, head forward, hair the color of dry leaves down across one breast. A few times she tried to stand. But another length of chain fell on her shoulder when someone dropped another end; she seemed too weighted to rise.

A griphon flickered twice: Adam bobbed and jerked. Chains and shocked hair swung and clattered and went out behind the reeling beast.

Bunny, barking shrill as a lap-dog, a dozen strands caught among up-thrust fingers, suddenly pranced forward, shaking back silver hair. Pepper, haunched behind him, followed, clapping and grinning like the devil.

An elderly black woman who'd brought some of the supper-boxes, stonely silent till now, cackled, beginning to clap too. The heavy, black-haired man with the bamboo flute had finally gotten out of his pants and danced up to her, trying to bring her into the circle. He piped and bobbed and bounced around: it was pretty phoney and for a second I thought she would pinch his crank. But she got into it anyway and clapped for him—

And I stopped, landing on both heels, jarred to the scalp.

I turned in the furor, looking for someone (Thinking: Where did it come from…? Why now…? What…? then throwing that away and just trying to hold on to it); Lanya, shirt open and flapping, breasts shaking, eyes closed under quivering lids, turned to me behind at least five chains. I reached through them and caught her shoulders.

Her eyes snapped wide.

"Michael…" I said.

"What?"

A chain pulled down across my arm; a prism nipped my wrist. Lady of Spain was at one end, hauling.

"Mike Henry…" I looked down between my elbows at the trampled grass. "Michael Henry…?"

One of her bare feet moved. "What's that?"

Very slowly, I said: "My first name is Mike… Michael. My middle name is Henry." I looked up. "My last name — Fl…? Fr…?"

Lanya narrowed her eyes. Then she grabbed my forearm with the same hand her harmonica was in.

The edge bit; which brought me back: "What did I say?"

But she was looking around us, among the others. "Denny!"

"Lanya, what did I say?"

Her eyes snapped back to mine. She had a funny smile, intense and scared. "You said your first name was—" around us they clapped—"Michael. Your second name—" they clapped again—"is Henry. And your last…?"

My jaw clamped so hard my head shook. "I… I had it for a second! But then I…"

"It begins with 'F'." She called again: "Denny!"

"Wait a minute! Wait, I… no, I can't remember! But the first name—"

"— Michael Henry…" she prompted.

Denny ran up. "What…?" He put a hand on her shoulder, a hand on mine. "Come on, you wanna—"

"Tell him, Kid!"

I dropped Lanya's elbows and took both of Denny's.

He was breathing very hard. "My name is Michael—" another clap—"Henry… something. I don't remember the last one now." I took a deep breath (clap!). "But two out of three is pretty good!" I must have been grinning pretty hard.

"Wow!" Denny said. He started to say a couple of other things, but finally just shrugged, grinning back.

"I don't know what to say either," I said.

Lanya hugged me. She almost knocked me over.

Denny hugged us both, getting his head between ours and wiggling it back and forth and laughing. So Lanya had to hold him up with one hand. We all staggered. I put my arm around him too. Somebody pulled a chain against my back. It either broke or one of the people holding it let go. We staggered again.

Someone put hands against my back and said: "Hey, watch it! Don't fall!" Paul Fenster — I hadn't even seen him among the spectators — was steadying me as we came apart.

Lanya said: "It's all right if we fall, Paul. It's okay."

Someone threw another length of chain into the circle. Mantichore and iguanadon caught it up, blundering together, casting ghost-lights. Clap!

"Hey, I like your school," Denny said. "I've been helping Lanya with her kids."

"I was telling you about Denny, Paul? He was the one who suggested we take that class trip that turned out so well."

Re-reading this single description of Paul Fenster between these soiled cardboards, this thought: Since life may end at any when, the expectation of revelation or peripity, if not identical to, is congruent with insanity. They give life meaning, but expectation of them destroys our faculty for experiencing meaning. So I am still writing out these incidents. But now I am interested in the art of incident only as it touches life… but I have written that at least three other places among these pages. What I haven't written is that, because of it, I am less and less interested in the incidence of art. ("Sex without guilt?" Entelechy without anticipation!) I just wonder would Paul have done anything differently that evening in the park if he'd known he was going to be shot in the head and neck four times, six hours later.

I said: "I've never seen any children there. I've heard their voices. On the tape recorder. But I don't believe you ever had any real children in there."

Lanya looked at me oddly.

Fenster laughed. "Well, you brought us five of them yourself."

"But there weren't any…" Inside, it felt like two disjoined surfaces had suddenly slipped flush; the relief was unbearable. "I put five of them… in the school?"

"Woodard, Rose, Sammy…?" Lanya said.

"You remember," Denny said. "Stevie? Marceline?"

"I remember," I said. "I know who I am…"

"Michael Henry," Denny said.

I put my hand on Fenster's shoulder. "You go dance."

"Naw, I'm not into the bare-ass bit."

I frowned at the dancers; only fifteen or twenty were naked.

"Go on." I pushed at him; he stepped back. "You don't have to take your clothes off. You just go dance."

Fenster looked at Lanya. To stand up for him? I flashed on him pulling her shirt closed across her breasts, buttoning the top button, patting her head, and walking away.

"Go ahead." I was angry. "Dance!"

"Come on, Kid," Lanya said, taking my arm.

Fenster walked off now, laughing.

"You wanna sit down?" Denny asked.

"Come on," Lanya said. "Let's go sit down."

Denny took my other arm; but I twisted to look back.

Fenster walked between the dancers, now pushed, now helping a girl wearing just a sopping T-shirt who fell against him, now ducking beneath one of the glittering lines pulled between bright creatures prancing at the tree.

"What are you trying to do?" Lanya asked.

"Take off my clothes. I don't need anything… anything now." I tossed my boot on top of my vest. I lifted my chin and raised the seven chains and the projector. Links dragged my nipples. I held them up, swaying, and let go. Some hit my nose and cheek and ear. Some fell across my shoulder, and slid off, clattering, to the grass. I looked down to undo the twin hooks on my belt; pushed down my pants. Lanya held my arm so I wouldn't fall getting my foot out the cuff.

"Feel better?" Denny asked.

I tried to undo the clasp at the side of my neck. A file of insects, it felt like, charged down my belly, caught in the hair at my groin. The optic chain sagged around my ankle.

"I think you broke it," Lanya said.

"I can fix it again," Denny said. "I got nails—"

"No," I said.

From the commune, from the nest, and from the people who'd just come to watch, they clapped and leaped beside the fire. Seven more, barking, calling, and yipping, broke from the loose ring, turned among and beneath (one very black girl jumped over) the beaded chain that crossed and crossed the clearing. The heads of beasts blown out of light like glass broke scarves of smoke; our throats tickled from the harsh air.

Three silhouetted figures, heads together, came toward me, whispering. Copperhead, center, conferred with Raven and Cathedral. Raven and Copperhead were naked. (The different curl and color of their hair, suddenly bright at the sides of their heads with the fire behind them…) Copperhead had his hand on Raven's shoulder.

Copperhead was saying: "Protection! Did you get that? Calkins asking for protection—?"

Cathedral said: "Scorpions don't protect nothing."

Copperhead said: "They shot out practically every God-damn window in the God-damn fucking building. Man, it was something!"

Raven asked: "They shot up Calkins's place? The sniper…?"

Copperhead said: "Not Calkins' place! And it weren't no fuckin' sniper! It was them people back at that big store. You remember that big fuckin' apartment house Thirteen used to be in, up on the sixteenth floor? God damn, man, they shot the whole fuckin' place up, practically every God-damn window in the building!"

"Shit, man!" Cathedral shook his head. "The honkeys is bad as the niggers."

Copperhead humphed: "Protection!"

Raven laughed.

They walked away in the dark.

I watched the fire. One pants leg was still around my ankle. The optic chain, as I swayed, swayed against my calf. "I want to… to dance."

"Then get your foot out your pants cuff," Denny said. "You'll trip yourself." He sounded like he didn't want me to go, though.

Each Clap! struck something inside my skull that made a flash all its own. My ears thundered as though only inches from the drum. Each explosion left some crazy echo stuttering in the tattered noise. I stepped forward, moiling my genitals in my hand. They felt sensitive. I stepped again,

"Watch it—"

Lanya must have held my pants leg down with her foot, because they came off. I stumbled, but kept going. Toward the dance.

In a black turtleneck sweater he stood, with folded arms, among the spectators. He didn't see me looking at him. But Lady of Spain and D-t and a couple of others did and stopped dancing. Prisms and lenses hung down from my neck. Mirrors and prisms swung from my wrist. Lenses and mirrors dragged from my ankle behind me in the grass.

He shifted a little. Firelight shook its patina across his brown hair.

"Hey…!" I said loudly. "I know who I… who I am now. Who are you?"

He looked at me, frowning.

"Who are you?" I repeated. 'Tell me. I know who I am!" A few more dancers stopped to listen. But the clapping was still awfully loud. I shook my head. "Almost…"

"Kid?" he asked; it had taken him until then to recognize me, naked. "Hey, Kid! How're you doing?"

It was the man who'd interviewed me at Calkins' party.

"No," I said. "I know who I am. You say who you are."

"William…" he began. "Bill…?" And then: "You don't remember me?"

"I remember you. I just want to know who you are!"

"Bill," he repeated. And nodded, smiling.

Two people who'd stopped to listen began to clap again.

"I know that," I said. "I remember that. What's your last name?"

He raised his head a little. His smile — a dragon, bobbing by, stained his face a momentary green — tightened: "You tell me yours, I'll tell you mine." His mouth stayed a little open, waiting for a laugh to come out.

But the laugh came from me. William…? I shouted: "I know who you are!" and doubled with hysteria. "I know…!"

"Hey, Kid? Come on now…" Lanya — she and Denny had followed me — took my arm again. I tried to pull away, stumbled into the dancers' chains, and turned, flailing my own. But she held on; Denny had me too. I yanked once more and fell against a guy I didn't know who cried, "Owwww!" and hugged me, laughing. I turned in a shield's glare, bright blind a moment, and moments after images pulsed everywhere.

"Come on, man," Denny kept saying, pulling at my forearm. "Watch out—" and held up a strand of chain so I could get under.

"That's right," Lanya said. "This way…"

I got dizzy and nearly fell. Fire and branches wheeled on a black sky. I came up against bark and turned my back to it:

"But I know what his name is! It has to be. He couldn't be anybody else!" I kept telling them, then breaking off into a giggle which, when I let it go, twisted my face in a grin so huge my jaw muscles hurt and I had to rub them with the heels of my palms. "That's got to be who he is! You understand why, don't you? I mean you do understand?"

They didn't.

But, for a while, I did.

And, bursting with my new knowledge, I danced.

I've never had more fun.

Then I came back and sat with them.

Denny's hand was on my knee; Lanya's shoulder was against my shoulder, her arm along my arm. We sat on the roots, ten feet from the high, forking fire, watching the men and women jog and jump to the sounds of their own bodies, one arched and beating the backs of his thighs, one spinning slowly, and shouting loudly, each time her short hair brushed by the sagging branch. Somebody danced with his belt loose and swinging. And somebody else was taking off her jeans.

Bill, arms folded across his black sweater, among the other watchers, watched.

I sat and panted and smiled (sweat dribbling the small of my back) with contentment over the absolute fact of his revealed identity, till even that, as all absolutes must, began its dissolve.

"What—?" Denny moved his hand on my leg.

Lanya glanced at me, shifted her shoulder against mine.

But I sat back again, silent, marveling the dissolve's completion, both elated and numbed by the jarring claps that measured and metronomed each differential in the change — till I had no more certainty of Bill's last name than I had of my own. With only the memory of knowledge, and bewilderment at whatever mechanic had, for minutes, made that knowledge as certain to me as my own existence, I sat, trying to sort that mechanic's failure, which had let it slip away.

Dragon Lady, with her boot, shoved in another part of the furnace's cinderblock wall, then turned to add her raucous contention to the argument behind her.

"You know," Lanya said, as somebody flung a burning brand that landed on the edge of the dish, flame end on the grass, "this place isn't going to be here tomorrow."

"That's all right," Denny said.

" Lanya pushed back against me harder, drew up her knees to hug.

The dance was all around us. The battered grass was tangled with chains, plain and jeweled. Most of the scorpions blazed up, incendiar-

up to bring the brandy, that afternoon, to Tak's place — I apologized about opening one of the bottles — he really looked surprised.

He came out of the shed doorway onto the roof, scratching his chest and his chin and still half asleep. But saying he was glad to see us.

Denny climbed onto the balustrade to walk, hands out for balance, along the roofs edge. Lanya kept running up and going, "Boo!" at him as though she were trying to make him fall off. I thought it was funny, but Tak said please stop it because it was eight stories down and scaring him into a stomach ache.

So they came back to the shack.

Denny went inside: "Look what Tak's got on the wall!"

Thought he meant George, but it was the interview with me from Calkins's party in the Times. Tak had stapled it to the wall just inside the door. The edges were yellow.

"I keep that there," Tak said, "for inspiration. I sort of like it. Glad to see, after all this, the papers says you're having another book."

"Yeah," I said. "Sure. Thanks." I really didn't want to talk about it. It got across, because he was looking at me a little sideways. But Tak is good at picking up on things like that.

Around us, the sky was close as crumpled lead. The first stanchion of the bridge was just visible through it, like a single wing of some dim bird that might, in a moment, fly anywhere.

Tak pulled the cork out of the open bottle. "Come on. Let's have a drink." He squatted, his back against the shack wall. We sat next to him. Denny took a swallow, screwed up his face, and from then on just passed it between Lanya and me.

"Tak," I said, "could you tell me something?" I asked him about the bubbles around the inside of the glasses. "I thought it might have something to do with the water pressure for the city. Maybe it's going down and that causes the ring to start higher?"

"I think," Tak said to the green-glass neck, "it has more to do with who washes your dishes. You're washing out a glass, see, and you run your finger around the inside to get off the crud, and it leaves this thin coating. But your finger doesn't reach the bottom. Later you put water in the glass, and the air comes out of solution to form bubbles. But the bubbles need something to nucleate on. So the imperfections in the glass and the crud left above

here any longer.

Curiosity took me, alone.

A bed had been overturned against the door but fell back clattering as soon as I pushed it in. They'd put bars up on the ground floor windows, but the panes were mostly smashed, and in the one remaining, I found three of those tiny, multi-haloed holes you get from bullets. There were a couple of sleeping bags still around. Some nice stuff was up on the walls from where they had the place decorated: and a big, almost life-size lion wedged together out of scrap car-parts and junked iron. An ascetalline bomb and nozzle leaned in the corner. ("I wonder what happened to the woman who was making that. She was Eurasian," Lanya said when I told her about it, later. "She was a pretty incredible person; I mean even besides building that thing.") The walls of two rooms were charred black. I saw a place where a poster had been burned away. And another place, where a quarter of one was left: George In the night wilderness. Upstairs I guess most of the rooms had never had doors. It was a wreck. Great pieces of plaster had been tugged off the walls. Once I heard what I thought was moaning, but when I rushed into the smashed up room — tools were scattered all over the floor, screwdrivers, nails, pliers, wrenches — it wasn't a

the grease line are easier to nucleate on; so you get this definite cutoff—"

"You mean," I said, "the dishwasher sticks his finger less and less far down the glass every day?"

Tak laughed and nodded "Aren't you glad you know some one with some idea of technology? Rising water tables, lowering pressure. You could get paranoid over stuff like that if you don't know what you're doing."

"Yeah," and I took the bottle and drank.

And over the next fifteen seconds, the afternoon sky, dull as an aluminum pot bottom, darkened to full night.

creaking shutter or anything. I don't know what it was. Bolted to the wall was a plank on which they had carved their initials, names, phrases, some written in fancy combinations of collored magic markers, others scrawled in plack pentel. Near the bottom, cut clearly with some small blade: June R. Lanya says she'll have to find some abandoned drugstore or someplace to get birth control pills now, in the next three months. Denny is worried about his little girlfriend. He says she was sick the last time he was over there,"… with a fever, man. And every thing. She wouldn't hardly move, under the blankets." No one at the commune, or the bar, or the church — neither George nor Reverend Amy — know where they all went or even what really happened. But if someone would do that to the House, I just wonder about the nest. Was the blond girl they described June? I guess I hope so.

Five seconds into the darkening, Denny said, "Jesus, what—?" and stood up.

There was a noise like a plane coming. It kept coming too, while I watched Denny's features go night blue.

Lanya grabbed my arm, and I turned to see her blue face, and all around it, go black.

If it was a plane, it was going to crash into us.

I jerked my head around left and right and up (hit the back of my head on the wall) and down, trying to see.

Another sound, under the roar, beside me: Tak standing?

Something wet my hand on the tar-paper beside me. He must have kicked over the brandy.

White light suddenly blotched the horizon, cut by the silhouette of a water tower.

I didn't feel scared, but my heart was beating so slow and hard my chin jerked, each thump.

Light wound up the sky.

I could just see Tak standing now, beside me. His shadow sharpened on the tar-paper wall.

The sound… curdled!

The light split. Each arm zigged and zagged, separate, ragged-edged and magnesium bright. The right arm split again. The left one was almost directly above us.

And Tak had no shadow at all. I stood up, helped Lanya to…

Some of the light flickered out. More came. And more.

But what is…?" she whispered right at my ear, pointing. From the horizon, another light ribboned, ragged, across the sky.

"Is it… lightning?" Denny shouted.

"It looks light lightning!" Tak shouted hack.

Someone else said: " 'Cause George don't shine that bright!"

Tak's bleached face twisted as if beat by rain. The air was dry. Then I noticed how cool it was.

Nodes in the discharge were too bright to look at. Clouds — sable, lead, or steel — mounded about the sky, making canyons, cliffs, ravines, for lightning it was too slow, too wide, too big!

Was that thunder? It roared like a jet squadron buzzing the city, and sometimes one would crash or something, and Lanya's face would

Here one page, possibly two, is missing.

as loud as I could: "Lanya! Denny!" If they answered, I couldn't hear; and I was hoarse from shouting. The street sign chattered in its holder — the wind had grown that strong.

I took another half dozen steps, my bare foot on the curb, my boot in the gutter. Dust fits

Don't remember who had the idea, but during the altercation, for a while I argued: "But what about Madame Brown? Besides, I like it here. What are we going to do when you're at school? Your bed's okay for a night, but we can't all sleep there that long."

Lanya, after answering these sanely, said: "Look, try it. Denny wants to come. The nest can get along without you for a few days. Maybe it'll do your writing some good." Then she picked up the paper that had fallen behind the Harly, climbed over it, came out from under the loft, tip-toed with her head up and kissed me. And put the paper in her blouse pocket — bending over, it had pulled out all around her jeans.

I pushed myself to the loft edge, swung my legs over, and dropped. "Okay."

So Denny and I spent what I call three

hit my face. My shadow staggered around me on the pavement, sharpening, blurring, tripling.

People were coming down the street, while the darkness flared behind them.

That slow, crazy lightning rolled under the sky.

The group milled toward me; some dodged forward.

One front figure supported another, who seemed hurt. I got it in my head it was the commune: John and Mildred leading, and something had happened to John. A brightening among the clouds—

They were thirty feet nearer than I'd thought:

George, looking around at the sky, big lips a wet cave around his teeth's glimmer, his pupils underringed with white, and glare flaking on his wet,

days and she calls one ("You come in the evening, spent the night and the next day, then left the following morning! That's one full day, with tag ends." "That should at least count for two," I said. "It seemed like a long time…") Which wasn't so bad but… I don't know.

The first night Madame Brown put supper together out of cans with Denny saying all through: "You wanna let me do something…? Are you sure I can't do nothin'…? Here, I'll do…" and finally did wash some pans and dishes.

I asked, "What are you making?" but they didn't hear so I sat in the chair by the table alternately tapping the chair-back on the wall and the front legs on the floor; and drank two glasses of wine.

Lanya came in and asked why I was so quiet.

I said: "Mulling."

"On a poem?" Madame Brown asked.

We ate. After dinner we all sat around and drank more, me a little more than the others, but Madame Brown and I actually talked about some things: her work, what went on in a scorpion run ("You make it sound so healthy, I mean like a class trip, I'm not so sure that I like the idea as much now. It sounded very exciting before you told me anything about it."), the problems of doctors in the city, George. I like her. And she's smart as hell.

Back in Lanya's room, I sat at the desk In the bay window, looking at my notebook. Lanya and Denny went to bed ("No, the light won't bother us."), and after about fifteen minutes, I joined them and we made cramped, langerous love which had this odd, let's-take-turns thing about it; but it was a trip. I nearly knocked over the big plant pot by the bed four times.

I woke before the window had lightened, got up and prowled the house. In the kitchen, considered getting drunk. Made myself a cup of instant coffee instead, drank half, and prowled some more. Looked back into Lanya's room: Denny was asleep against the wall. Lanya was on her back, eyes opened. She smiled at me.

veined temples, supporting Reverend Tayler; she leaned forward (crying? laughing? cringing from the light? searching the ground?), her hair rough as shale, her knuckles and the backs of her nails darker than the skin between.

The freckled, brick-haired Negress, among darker faces, walked behind them; with the blind-mute; and the blond Mexican.

Someone was shouting, among others shouting: "You hear them planes? You hear all them planes?" (It couldn't have been planes.) "Them planes are awfully low! They gonna crash! You hear—" at which point the building face across the street cracked, all up and down, and bellied out so slow I wondered how. Cornices, coping stones, window

I was naked. "Restless?"

"Yeah." I came over, squatted by the bed, hugged her.

"Go ahead. Pace some more. I need another couple of hours." She turned over. I took up the old notebook here, sat around cross-legged on the floor, contemplating writing down what had happened till then.

Or a poem.

Did neither.

Looked in the top desk drawer — the wood looks like paper had been glued all over it and then as much pulled off as possible. She said some friends lugged it from a burned-out windshield warehouse a few blocks down the hill.

I took out the poems she'd saved, spread them on the gritty wood, on every kind of paper, creased this way and that (red-tufted begonia stalks doffed), and tried to read them.

Couldn't.

Thought seriously of tearing them up.

Didn't.

But understood much about people who have.

Looked back at Lanya; bare shoulders, the back of her neck, a fist sticking from under the pillow.

Prowled some more.

Got back into bed.

Denny jerked his head up, blinking. He didn't know where he was. I rubbed the back of his neck and whispered, "It's okay, boy…" He settled back down, nuzzling into Lanya's armpit. She turned away from him toward me.

I woke alone.

Leaves arched over me. I looked up through them. Blew once to see if they'd move, but they were too far. Closed my eyes.

"Hey," Denny said. "You still asleep?"

I opened my eyes. "Fuck you if I was."

"I just walked Lanya over to school." He leaned against the edge of the doorway, holding his chains. "It's nice around here, huh?"

I sat up on the side of the bed.

"But there ain't too much to do … it's nice of her to have us over here, I mean to stay a while, huh?"

I nodded.

frames, glass and brick hurled across the street.

They screamed — I could hear it over the explosion because some were right around me — and ran against the near wall, taking me with them and I crashed into the people in front of me, wind knocked out of me by the people behind, screaming; someone reached over my shoulder for support, right by my ear, and nearly tore it off. More people (or something?) hit the people behind me, hard.

Coughing and scrambling, I turned to push someone from behind me. Across the street, girders, scabby with brick and plaster, tesselated luminous dust. I staggered from the wall among the staggering crowd and stumbled into a big woman on her hands and knees, shaking her head.

About two hours later he told me he was going out. I spent the rest of the morning staring at blank paper or prowling.

Madame Brown, coming out of her office, saw me once and said: "You look strange. Is anything the matter?"

"No."

"Are you just bored?"

"No," I said. "I'm not bored at all. I'm thinking a lot."

"Can you leave off long enough for a lunch break?"

"Sure." I hadn't had breakfast.

Tunafish salad.

Canned pears.

We both had a couple of glasses of wine. She asked me for my character impressions of: Tak, Lanya, Denny, one of her patients I had met at the bar once; I told her and she thought what I said was interesting; told me hers, which I thought were interesting too, and they changed mine; so I told her the changes. Then the next patient came by and I went back to staring at my paper; prowling; staring.

Which is what I was doing when Lanya and Denny came in. He'd gone back to the school to help out with the class.

"Denny suggested we go on a class trip, outside to look at the city. We did. It turned out to be a fine idea. With two of us we didn't have any problem handling them. That was a good idea, Denny. It really was." Then she asked if I'd written anything.

"Nope."

"You look strange," she told me.

Denny said: "No he don't. He just gets like that sometimes."

Lanya Mmmmed. She knows me better than he does, I guess.

Denny was really into being useful — a trait which, pleasant as he is, I've never seen in him before. I helped them do a couple of things for Madame Brown: explore the cellar, take one chair down, bring up a dresser she'd found on the street and managed to get to the back door.

It was a >nice evening.

I wondered if I was spoiling it by sug-

I tried to pull her up, but she got back down on her knees again.

What she was trying to do, I realized, was roll a pile of number ten tomato- and pineapple-juice cans and crumpled cookie packages back into her overturned shopping bag. Her black coat spread around her over crumbs of brick.

One can rolled against my foot. It was empty.

She began to go down, even further, laying her cheek on the pavement, reaching among the jangling cans. I bent to pull her once more. Then someone, yanking her from the other side, shouted, "Come on!" (Cüm öhn! the vowels, long and short, braying: the m soft as an n; the n loose as an r.) I looked up without letting go.

It was George.

gesting: "Maybe we should go back to the nest tonight?"

Lanya said: "No. You should use some of this boring peace and quiet to work it."

"I'm not bored," I said. And resolved to sit in front of a piece of paper for at least an hour. Which I did: wrote nothing. But my brain bubbled and bobbed and rotated in my skull like a boiling egg.

When I finally went to bed I fell out like an old married man.

One of them or the other got up in the night to take a leak, came back to bed brushing aside the plants and we balled, hard and a little loud I think.

In the morning we all got up together.

I noticed Lanya noticing me being quiet. She noticed my noticing and laughed.

After coffee we all walked to the school. Denny asked to stick around for the class. Now I noticed her wondering if two days in a row was a good idea. But she said, "Sure," and I left them and went back to the house, stopping once to wonder if I should go back to the nest instead.

Madame Brown and I had lunch again.

"How are you enjoying your visit?"

"Still thinking a lot," I told her. "But also think all the thinking is about to knock me out."

"Your poetry?"

"Haven't written a word. I guess it's just hard for me to write around here."

"Lanya said you weren't writing too much at your place, either. She said she thought there were too many people around."

"I don't think that's the reason."

We talked some more.

Then I came to a decision: "I'm going back to the nest. Tell Lanya and Denny when they get back, will you?"

"All right." She looked at me dubiously over a soup spoon puddled with Cross & Blackwell vischysoise. "Don't you want to wait and tell them yourself when they get back?"

I poured another glass of wine. "No."

When the next patient rang, I took my notebook and wandered (for five, funny min-

She came up between us, screaming: "Ahhhhhhhhhh — Annnnnn! Don't touch me! Ahhhhhhhhh—don't touch me, nigger"! She staggered and reeled in our grip. I didn't see her look at either of us. "Ahhhhh — I saw what you done! — that poor little white girl what couldn't do nothin' against you! We saw it! We all saw it! She come lookin' for you, askin' all around, askin' everybody where you are all the time, and now you take her, take her like that, just take her like you done! And see what's happened! Now, see! Oh, God, oh help me, don't touch me, oh, God!"

"Aw, come on!" George shouted again as once more she started to collapse. He pulled again; she came loose from my grip. The coat stung my hands. As I dodged away, she was still shrieking:

"Them white people gonna get you, nigger! Them white men gonna kill us all 'cause of what you done today to that poor little white girl! You done smashed up the store windows, broke all the streetlights, climbed up and pulled the hands down from the clock! You been rapin' and lootin' and all them things! Oh, God, there's gonna be shootin' and burnin' and blood shed all over! They gonna shoot up everything in Jackson. Oh, God, oh, God, don't touch me!"

"Will you shut up, woman, and pick up your damn junk," George said.

utes, midway, I thought I was lost) back to the nest.

Tarzan and the apes, all over the steps, were pretty glad to see me. Priest, California, and Cathedral did a great back-slapping routine down the hall. Glass nodded, friendly but overtly non-commital. And I had a clear thought: If I left, Glass, not Copperhead, would become leader.

I climbed up into the loft, told Devastation's friend Mike to move his ass the hell over.

"Oh, yeah, Kid. Sure, I'm sorry. I'll get down—"

"You can stay," I said. "Just move over." Then I stretched out with my notebook under my shoulder and fell asleep, splat!

Woke up loggy but clutching for my pen. Took some blue paper to the back steps, put the pine plank across my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Went back into the kitchen for some water.

Lanya and Denny were there.

"Hi."

"Oh, hi."

Went back to the porch and wrote some more. Finally it was

Which, when I looked back, seconds later, was what she was doing.

George, ten feet off, squatted to haul up a slab of rubble that rained plaster from both sides, while another woman tugged at a figure struggling beneath. A handful of gravel hit my shoulder from somewhere and I ducked forward.

Ahead of me, turning and turning in the silvered wreckage, Reverend Amy squinted up, fists moving about her ears, till her fingers jerked wide; the up-tilted face was scored with what I thought rage; but it swung again and I saw that the expression struggling with her features was nearer ecstasy.

I climbed over fallen brick. The orchid rolled and bounced on my belly.

The blind-mute was sitting on the curb near the hydrant. The blond Mexican and the brick-haired Negress squatted on either side. She held his hand, pressing her fist, the fingers rearranged and rearranged, at each contact, against his palm.

I reached among my chains, found the projector ball, and fingered the bottom pip.

The disk of blue light slid up the rubbly curb as I stepped to the sidewalk.

They looked up, two with eyes scarlet as blood-bubbles.

The mute's sockets (he poked his head about) were like empty cups dregged with shadow.

There was a sudden stinging in my throat from the smoke; smoke blew away. I shouted: "What are you doing?"

The Mexican dragged his boots back against the curb. The woman put her other hand on the mute's shoulder.

I watched their movements of surprise. Translated to their hands on the blind-mute's arms, it gave him his only knowledge of me. His face tilted forward; his hand closed on the woman's — my knowledge of what he knew. Thinking: It takes so little information… Though I am cased in light and their eyes orbited with plastic, in the over-determined matrix, translated and translated, perhaps his knowledge of me is even more complete.

I was frightened of their red eyes?

What does my blue beast become behind scarlet caps!

People shouted.

I shouted louder: "What's going on? What's happening? Do you know?" and ended coughing in more smoke.

The brick-haired Negress shook her head, a hand before her mouth, hesitant to quiet me, pinch her own lips close, or push me away. "Somebody put a bomb in… Didn't they? Isn't that what they said? Somebody put a—"

"No!" the Mexican said loudly. He tugged the blind-mute's shoulders. "There wasn't any — anything like that…" He got the blind-mute on his feet.

I turned to see men and women stumbling toward me, against the luminous mist. And something behind the mist flickered. I lurched into the street.

"There wasn't any bomb!" the man or the woman behind me shrieked. "They shot him! From up on the roof. Some crazy white boy! Shot him dead in the street! Oh, my God—"

Something warm splattered my ankle.

Water rolled between the humped cobbles, bright as mercury beneath the discharges on the collapsed, black sky. The street was a net of silver and I sprinted across it, catching one woman with my shoulder who spun — shouting — her scraped face after me, almost lunged into another man, but pushed off him with both hands; a sudden gust of heat stung the roofs of my eye-sockets. Lids clamped, I got through it and more dust, catching my boot-toe on something that nearly tripped me. I coughed and staggered with the back of my hand over my mouth.

Something went over the back of my neck, so cold I thought it was water. But it was just air. Eyes tearing, my throat spasming and hacking free of the dust caught in it, I staggered through it a dozen steps, till somebody grabbed me and I came up, staring at another black face.

"It's Kid!" Dragon Lady shouted to somebody and got her arm around me to keep me from falling.

A few steps behind her Glass turned around to see me. "Huh?"

Beyond him, against a screen of slowly moiling clouds, the side came off a twenty-story building, collapsing slowly away from the web of steel. But that must have been five blocks down.

"Jesus Christ…!" D-t said, then glanced back at me. "Kid, you all—?" and the sound got to us, filling up the space around us the way a volcano must up close.

The brunt of it past, I could hear people behind me still shouting: Three different voices bawled out instructions among some fifty more who didn't care.

"God damn it!" D-t said. "Come on!"

Someone had strewn coils of what looked like elevator cable all over the sidewalk. It was greasy too; so after the first dozen steps across it, we went into the street.

And the shouting behind us had resolved to a single, distant, insistant voice—"You wait, God damn it! You hear me, you motherfuckers wait for me!" — getting closer—"Wait for me, God damn it! Wait—!"

I looked back.

Fireball, fists pumping, bent forward from the waist and head flung back, ran full into Glass, who caught him by the arm. Fireball sagged back, gasping and crying: "You wait for me, God damn it! You damn niggers—" he sucked in a breath loud as vomiting—"why didn't you wait!" He was barefoot, with no shirt; a half dozen chains swung and tinkled from his neck as he bent, gasping, holding his stomach. In a pulse of light I saw he had a scrape down his jaw that went on across his shoulderblade as though something had fallen on him while he ran. His face was streaked with tears that he scrubbed with the flat of his fist. "You God damn fuckin' niggers, you wait for me!"

"Come on," D-t said. "You all right now."

I thought Fireball was going to fall down trying to get back his breath.

Somebody else sprinted up the street, out of the smoke. It was Spider. He looked very young, very tall, very black, very scared. Breathing hard, he asked: "Fireball okay? I thought a damn wall fell on him."

"He's okay," D-t said. "Now let's go!"

Fireball nodded and lurched ahead.

Glass let him go and moved beside me. His vinyl vest was hazed across with powdered plaster. "Hey," I said, "I've gotta find Lanya and Denny. They're supposed to be going back to the nest—"

"Oh, God damn, nigger!" Fireball twisted back to stare. His face was smeared filthy, and some of it was blood. "Leave them white motherfuckers alone, huh? Don't you think about nothin' except your pecker?"

"Now you just get yourself together!" Dragon Lady pushed Fireball's shoulder sharply with the heel of her hand; when he jerked around, she took his arm like they were going for a stroll. "Let's you just cut this 'nigger' shit, huh? What you think you are, a red-headed Indian?"

Glass said: "We don't got any nest; not any more."

"They got any sense," D-t said, "they gonna be trying to get out too. Maybe we meet up with them at the bridge."

"What happened to the others?" I asked. "Raven, Tarzan, Cathedral? Lady of Spain… What about Baby and Adam?"

Dragon Lady didn't even look back.

"You were the last one out," D-t said to Spider. "You see 'em?"

Spider looked from D-t to me and back. "No." He looked down where he was holding onto the end of his belt with his lanky, black fingers, twisting a little.

"Maybe," Dragon Lady said, letting go Fireball's arm but still not looking back, "we gonna meet 'em." I could tell she was frowning. "On the bridge. Like he says." Or something else.

I walked another five steps, looking down at the wet pavement, feeling numbness claw at me. My fingers tingled. So did the soles of both feet. Then I looked up and said, "Well, God damn it, the bridge is that way!" Which is when this incredibly loud crackling started on our left.

We all looked up, turned our heads, backed away all together. Spider broke, ran a dozen steps, realized we weren't coming, and turned back to look too.

Four stories up, fire suddenly jetted from one window. The flames flapped up like yellow cloth under a bellows; sparks and glass tumbled down the brick.

Two more windows erupted. (I hit my bare heel on the far curb.) Then another-as far apart as ticks on a clock.

We ran.

Not down the way I said because that street was a-broil with smoke and flickering. At the end of another block, we turned the corner and ran down the sloping sidewalk. There was water all over one end.

D-t and me splashed into it, watching the high brick walls, and the billowing clouds between them, shatter below our feet.

Ten yards in it was up to my knees and I couldn't really run. We slushed on. Glass, arms swinging wide in a wildly swaying stagger, moved ahead of me, dragging fans of ripples from the backs of his soaked pants. Then the street started sloping up. I splashed toward the edge.

What it felt like was something immense dropped into the street a block away. Everything shook. I looked back at the" others — Fireball and Dragon Lady were still splashing forward — when, in the center, was a swell of what looked like detergent bubbles. Then steam shot straight up. The water's edge rolled back from Fireball's dripping cuffs, leaving his wet feet slapping the glistening pavement.

Glass back-tracked to grab Dragon Lady's hand, like he thought she (or he) might fall.

The geyser spit and hissed and the water bubbled into it

We went around the next corner together.

I could see the bridge all the way to the second stanchion. Here and there clouds had torn away from the black sky. Something was burning down between the waterfront buildings. We rushed across fifty feet of pavement. Just before the bridge mouth, it looked like someone had grenaded the road. A slab of asphalt practically fifteen feet high jutted up. Down the crack around it, you could see wet pipes, and below that, flickering water. Above, that amazing, loud lightning formed its searing nodes among the cloud canyons.

"Come on," I said. "This way!"

Metal steps lead up to the bridge's pedestrian walk. The first half dozen were covered with broken masonry. Glass and Dragon Lady charged right up. Plaster dust puffed out between the railing struts. Fireball stepped carefully on the first three steps, then grabbed both railings and vaulted up three more. His feet were caked with junk and he was bleeding from one ankle.

"Get goin'!" D-t crowded behind. "Get goin'!"

Spider and me went up the narrow steps practically side by side.

At the top, Spider got ahead and we ran along the clanging plates maybe fifty yards when something… hit the bridge!

We swayed back and forth a dozen feet! Metal ground against old metal. Cables danced in the dark.

I grabbed the rail, staring down at the blacktop fifteen feet below, expecting it to split over the water a hundred feet below that.

Beside me, Fireball just dropped on his knees, his cheek against the bars. Spider put his arms around the dead lamppost, bent his head and went, "Ahhhhhhhhh…" like he was crying with his mouth open — which, five seconds later, when the shaking and the creaking died, was the only sound. Dragon Lady swallowed, let go the rail, and took a gasping breath.

My ears were ringing.

Everything was quiet.

"Jesus God," D-t whispered, "let's get off o'—" which was when everybody, including D-t, realized how quiet

Holding the rail tight, I turned to look back.

On the waterfront, flames flickered in smoke. A breeze came to brush my forehead. Here and there smoke was moving off the wind-runneled water. And there was nobody else on the bridge.

"Let's go…" I stepped around Fireball, passed by Dragon Lady.

A few seconds later, I heard Glass repeat: "Well, let's go!" Their footsteps started.

Dragon Lady caught up. "Jesus…" she said softly beside me. But that was all.

We kept walking.

Girders wheeled on either side. About twenty feet beyond the first stanchion, I looked back again:

The burning city squatted on weak, inverted images of its fires.

Finally D-t touched my shoulder and made a little gesture with his head. So I came on.

The double, thigh-thick suspensors swung even lower than our walkway; a few yards later they sloped up toward the top of the next stanchion.

"Who is…?" Glass asked softly.

Down on the black-top, She was walking slowly toward us.

Running my hand along the rail, I watched. Then I called: "Hey, you!"

Behind me there was a flare; then another; then another. The others had flicked on their lights — which meant I was in silhouette before a clutch of dragons, hawks, and mantises.

She squinted up at us: a dark Oriental, with hair down in front of her shirt (like two black, inverted flames); red bandanas were stuffed under the shoulder straps of her knapsack for padding. Her shirttails were out of her jeans. "Huh…?" She was trying to smile.

"You going into Bellona?"

"That's right." She squinted harder to see me. "You leaving?"

"Yeah," I said. "You know, it's dangerous in there!"

She nodded. "I'd heard they had the national guard and soldiers and stuff posted. Hitch-hiking down, though, I didn't see anybody."

"How were the rides?"

"All I saw was a pickup and a Willy's station wagon. The pickup gave me a lift."

"What about traffic going out?"

She shrugged. "I guess if somebody passes you, they'll give you a ride. Sometimes the truckers will stop for a guy to spell them on driving. I mean, guys shouldn't have too tough a time. Where're you heading?"

Over my shoulder, Glass said: "I want to get to Toronto. Two of us are heading for Alabama, though."

"I just wanted to get someplace!" Fireball said. "I don't feel right, you know? I ain't really felt right for two days…!"

"You got a long way to go, either direction," she said.

I wondered what she made of the luminous light-shapes that flanked me and threw pastel shadows behind her on the gridded black-top.

Glass asked: "Everything is still all right in Canada—?"

"— and Alabama?" asked Spider.

"Sure. Everything's all right in the rest of the country. Is anything still happening here?"

When nobody answered, she said:

"It's just the closer you get, the funnier… everybody acts. What's it like inside?"

D-t said: "Pretty rough."

The others laughed.

She laughed.

"But like you say," Dragon Lady said, "guys have a pretty easy time," which I don't think she got, because unless you listen hard, Dragon Lady's voice sounds like a man's.

"Is there anything you can tell me? I mean that might be helpful? Since I'm going in?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sometimes men'll come around and tear up the place you live in. Sometimes people shoot at you from the roof — that is, if the roof itself doesn't decide to fall on you. Or you're not the person on top of it, doing the shooting—"

"He wrote these poems," Fireball said at my other shoulder. "He wrote these poems and they published them in a book and everything! They got it all over the city. But then he wrote some more, only they came and burned them all up—" His voice shook on the fevered lip of hysteria.

"You want a weapon," I asked, "to take in with you?"

"Wow!" she said. "Is it like that?"

Glass gave a short, sharp laugh.

"Yeah," I said. "We have it easy."

Spider said: "You gonna tell her about… the Father? You gonna tell her about June?"

"She'll learn about those."

Glass laughed again.

D-t said: "What can you say?"

She ran her thumbs down her knapsack straps and settled her weight on one hip. She wore heavy, hiking shoes, one a lot muddier than the other. "Do I need a weapon?"

"You gonna give her that?" Dragon Lady asked as I took my orchid off its chain.

"We got ourselves in enough trouble with this," I said. "I don't want it with me any more."

"Okay," Dragon Lady said. "It's yours."

"Where you from?" Glass was asking.

"Down from Canada."

"You don't look Canadian."

"I'm not. I was just visiting."

"You know Albright?"

"No. You know Pern?"

"No. You know any of the little towns around Southern Ontario?"

"No. I spent all my time around Vancouver and B.C."

"Oh," Glass said.

"Here's your weapon." I tossed the orchid. It clattered on the blacktop, rolled jerkily, and stopped.

"What is—?" The sound of a car motor made us all look toward the end of the bridge; but it died away on some turnoff. She looked back. "What is it?" "How they call that?" Fireball asked.

"An orchid," I said.

"Yeah," Fireball said. "That's what it is."

She stooped, centered in her multiple shadows. She kept one thumb under her pack-strap; with her other band she picked it up.

"Put it on," I said.

"Are you right or left handed?" Glass asked.

"Left." She stood, examining the flower. "At least, I write with my left."

"Oh," Glass said again.

"This is a pretty vicious looking thing." She fitted it around her wrist; something glittered there. "Just the thing for the New York subway during rush hour." She bent her neck to see how it snapped. As her hair swung forward, under her collar was another, bright flash. "Ugly thing. I hope I don't need you."

I said: "Hope you don't either."

She looked up.

Spider and D-t had turned off their lights and were looking, anxiously, beyond the second stanchion toward the dark hills of the safer shore.

"I guess," I told her, "you can give it to somebody else when you're ready to be among the dried and crisp branches, trying to remember it, get it down, thinking: I didn't leave them like that! I didn't. It's not real. It can't be. If it is then I am crazy. I am too tired — wandering among all these, and these streets where the burning, burning, leaves the shattered and the toppling. Brick, no bridge because it takes so long, leaving, I haven't leaving. That I was following down the dark blood blots her glittering heel left on the blacktop. They slid into the V of my two shadows on the moon and George lit along the I walk on and kept. Leaving it. Twigs, leaves, bark bits along the shoulder, the hissing hills and the smoke, the long country cut with summer and no where to begin. In the direction, then, Broadway and train tracks, limping in the in the all the dark blots till the rocks, running with rusty water, following beside the broken mud gleaming on the ditch edge, with the trees so over so I went into them and thought I could wait here until she came, all naked up or might knowing what I couldn't, remember maybe if just one of them. He. In or on, I'm not quite where I go or what to go now but I'll climb up on the and wonder about Mexico if she, come, waiting.

This hand full of crumpled leaves.

It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can't remember any more if. I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to