Dhalgren

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses scowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges.

Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.

He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined.

The leaves winked.

What had been wind was a motion in brush below. His hand went to the rock behind.

She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows moved on her.

Fear prickled one side where his shirt (two middle buttons gone) bellied with a breeze. Muscle made a band down the back of his jaw. Black hair tried to paw off what fear scored on his forehead.

She whispered something that was all breath, and the wind came for the words and dusted away the meaning:

"Ahhhhh…" from her.

He forced out air: it was nearly a cough.

"…Hhhhhh…" from her again. And laughter; which had a dozen edges in it, a bright snarl under the moon. "…hhhHHhhhh…" which had more sound in it than that, perhaps was his name, even. But the wind, wind…

She stepped.

Motion rearranged the shadows, baring one breast. There was a lozenge of light over one eye. Calf and ankle were luminous before leaves.

Down her lower leg was a scratch.

His hair tugged back from his forehead. He watched hers flung forward. She moved with her hair, stepping over leaves, toes spread on stone, in a tip-toe pause, to quit the darker shadows.

Crouched on rock, he pulled his hands up his thighs.

His hands were hideous.

She passed another, nearer tree. The moon flung gold coins at her breasts. Her brown aureoles were wide, her nipples small. "You…?" She said that, softly, three feet away, looking down; and he still could not make out her expression for the leaf dappling; but her cheek bones were Orientally high. She was Oriental, he realized and waited for another word, tuned for accent. (He could sort Chinese from Japanese.) "You've come!" It was a musical Midwestern Standard. "I didn't know if you'd come!" Her voicing (a clear soprano, whispering…) said that some what he'd thought was shadow-movement might have fear: "You're here!" She dropped to her knees in a roar of foliage. Her thighs, hard in front, softer (he could tell) on the sides — a column of darkness between them — were inches from his raveled knees.

She reached, two fingers extended, pushed back plaid wool, and touched his chest; ran her fingers down. He could hear his own crisp hair.

Laughter raised her face to the moon. He leaned forward; the odor of lemons filled the breezeless gap. Her round face was compelling, her eyebrows un-Orientally heavy. He judged her over thirty, but the only lines were two small ones about her mouth.

He turned his mouth, open, to hers, and raised his hands to the sides of her head till her hair covered them. The cartilages of her ears were hot curves on his palms. Her knees slipped in leaves; that made her blink and laugh again. Her breath was like noon and smelled of lemons…

He kissed her; she caught his wrists. The joined meat of their mouths came alive. The shape of her breasts, her hand half on his chest and half on wool, was lost with her weight against him.

Their fingers met and meshed at his belt; a gasp bubbled in their kiss (his heart was stuttering loudly), was blown away; then air on his thigh.

They lay down.

With her fingertips she moved his cock head roughly in her rough hair while a muscle in her leg shook under his. Suddenly he slid into her heat. He held her tightly around the shoulders when her movements were violent. One of her fists stayed like a small rock over her breast. And there was a roaring, roaring: at the long, surprising come, leaves hailed his side.

Later, on their sides, they made a warm place with their mingled breath. She whispered, "You're beautiful, I think." He laughed, without opening his lips. Closely, she looked at one of his eyes, looked at the other (he blinked), looked at his chin (behind his lips he closed his teeth so that his jaw moved), then at his forehead. (He liked her lemon smell.) "…beautiful!" she repeated.

Wondering was it true, he smiled.

She raised her hand into the warmth, with small white nails, moved one finger beside his nose, growled against his cheek.

He reached to take her wrist.

She asked, "Your hand…?"

So he put it behind her shoulder to pull her nearer.

She twisted. "Is there something wrong with your…?"

He shook his head against her hair, damp, cool, licked it.

Behind him, the wind was cool. Below hair, her skin was hotter than his tongue. He brought his hands around into the heated cave between them.

She pulled back. "Your hands—!"

Veins like earthworms wriggled in the hair. The skin was cement dry; his knuckles were thick with scabbed callous. Blunt thumbs lay on the place between her breasts like toads.

She frowned, raised her knuckles toward his, stopped.

Under the moon on the sea of her, his fingers were knobbed peninsulas. Sunk on the promontory of each was a stripped-off, gnawed-back, chitinous wreck.

"You…?" he began.

No, they were not deformed. But they were… ugly! She looked up. Blinking, her eyes glistened.

"…do you know my…?" His voice hoarsened. "Who I… am?"

Her face was not subtle; but her smile, regretful and mostly in the place between her brow and her folded lids, confused.

"You," she said, full voice and formal (but the wind still blurred some overtone), "have a father." Her hip was warm against his belly. The air which he had thought mild till now was a blade to pry back his loins. "You have a mummer—!" That was his cheek against her mouth. But she turned her face away. "You are—" she placed her pale hand over his great one (Such big hands for a little ape of a guy, someone had kindly said. He remembered that) on her ribs—"beautiful. You've come from somewhere. You're going somewhere." She sighed.

"But…" He swallowed the things in his throat (he wasn't that little). "I've lost… something."

"Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become."

"I want something back!"

She reached behind her to pull him closer. The cold well between his belly and the small of her back collapsed. "What don't you have?" She looked over her shoulder at him: "How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"You have the face of someone much younger." She giggled. "I thought you were… sixteen! You have the hands of someone much older—"

"And meaner?"

"— crueler than I think you are. Where were you born?"

"Upstate New York. You wouldn't know the town, I didn't stay there long."

"I probably wouldn't. You're a long way away.

"I've been to Japan. And Australia."

"You're educated?"

He laughed. His chest shook her shoulder. "One year at Columbia. Almost another at a community college in Delaware. No degree."

"What year were you born?"

"Nineteen forty-eight. I've been in Central America too. Mexico. I just came from Mexico and I—"

"What do you want to change in the world?" she continued her recitation, looking away. "What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you're searching for? What are you running away from?"

"Nothing," he said. "And nothing. And nothing. And… nothing, at least that I know."

"You have no purpose?"

"I want to get to Bellona and—" He chuckled. "Mine's the same as everybody else's; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact."

The next second passed.

"Really?" she asked, real enough to make him realize the artificiality of what he'd said (thinking: It is in danger with the passing of each one). "Then be glad you're not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else's lost notebook: you'd be deadly dull. Don't you have any reason for going there?"

"To get to Bellona and…"

When he said no more, she said, "You don't have to tell me. So, you don't know who you are? Finding that out would be much too simple to bring you all the way from upper New York State, by way of Japan, here. Ahhh…" and she stopped.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

"Well, if you were born in nineteen forty-eight, you've got to be older than twenty-seven."

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, hell," she said. "It isn't important."

He began to shake her arm, slowly.

She said: "I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I'm a good deal older then twenty-eight." She blinked at him again. "But that really isn't im—"

He rolled back in the loud leaves. "Do you know who I am?" Night was some color between clear and cloud. "You came here, to find me. Can't you tell me what my name is?"

Cold spread down his side, where she had been, like butter.

He turned his head.

"Come!" As she sat, her hair writhed toward him. A handful of leaves struck his face.

He sat too.

But she was already running, legs passing and passing through moon-dapple.

He wondered where she'd got that scratch.

Grabbing his pants, he stuck foot and foot in them, grabbing his shirt and his single sandal, rolled to his feet—

She was rounding the rock's edge.

He paused for his fly and the twin belt hooks. Twigs and gravel chewed his feet. She ran so fast!

He came up as she glanced back, put his hand on the stone — and flinched: the rock-face was wet. He looked at the crumbled dirt on the yellow ham and heel.

"There…" She pointed into the cave. "Can you see it?"

He started to touch her shoulder, but no.

She said: "Go ahead. Go in."

He dropped his sandal: a lisp of brush. He dropped his shirt: that smothered the lisping.

She looked at him expectantly, stepped aside.

He stepped in: moss on his heel, wet rock on the ball of his foot. His other foot came down: wet rock.

Breath quivered about him. In the jellied darkness something dry brushed his cheek. He reached up: a dead vine crisp with leaves. It swung: things rattled awfully far overhead. With visions of the mortal edge, he slid his foot forward. His toes found: a twig with loose bark… a clot of wet leaves… the thrill of water… Next step, water licked over his foot. He stepped again:

Only rock.

A flicker, left.

Stepped again, and the flicker was orange, around the edge of something; which was the wall of a rock niche, with shadow for ceiling, next step.

Beyond a dead limb, a dish of brass wide as a car tire had nearly burned to embers. Something in the remaining fire snapped, spilling sparks on wet stone.

Ahead, where the flicker leaked high up into the narrowing slash, something caught and flung back flashings.

He climbed around one boulder, paused; the echo from breath and burning cast up intimations of the cavern's size. He gauged a crevice, leaped the meter, and scrambled on the far slope. Things loosened under his feet. He heard pebbles in the gash complaining down rocks, and stuttering, and whispering — and silence.

Then: a splash!

He pulled in his shoulders; he had assumed it was only a yard or so deep.

He had to climb a long time. One face, fifteen feet high, stopped him a while. He went to the side and clambered up the more uneven outcroppings. He found a thick ridge that, he realized as he pulled himself up it, was a root. He wondered what it was a root to, and gained the ledge.

Something went Eeek! softly, six inches from his nose, and scurried off among old leaves.

He swallowed, and the prickles tidaling along his shoulders subsided. He pulled himself the rest of the way, and stood:

It lay in a crack that slanted into roofless shadow.

One end looped a plume of ferns.

He reached for it; his body blocked the light from the brazier below: glimmer ceased.

He felt another apprehension than that of the unexpected seen before, or accidentally revealed behind. He searched himself for some physical sign that would make it real: quickening breath, slowing heart. But what he apprehended was insubstantial as a disjunction of the soul. He picked the chain up; one end chuckled and flickered down the stone. He turned with it to catch the orange glimmer.

Prisms.

Some of them, anyway.

Others were round.

He ran the chain across his hand. Some of the round ones were transparent. Where they crossed the spaces between his fingers, the light distorted. He lifted the chain to gaze through one of the lenses. But it was opaque. Tilting it, he saw pass, dim and inches distant in the circle, his own eye, quivering in the quivering glass.

Everything was quiet.

He pulled the chain across his hand. The random arrangement went almost nine feet. Actually, three lengths were attached. Each of the three ends looped on itself. On the largest loop was a small metal tag.

He stooped for more light.

The centimeter of brass (the links bradded into the 7 optical bits were brass) was inscribed: producto do Brazil.

He thought: What the hell kind of Portuguese is that?

He crouched a moment longer looking along the glittering lines.

He tried to pull it all together for his jean pocket, but the three tangled yards spilled his palms. Standing, he found the largest loop and lowered his head. Points and edges nipped his neck. He got the tiny rings together under his chin and fingered (Thinking: Like damned clubs) the catch closed.

He looked at the chain in loops of light between his feet. He picked up the shortest end from his thigh. The loop there was smaller.

He waited, held his breath even — then wrapped the length twice around his upper arm, twice around his lower, and fastened the catch at his wrist. He flattened his palm on the links and baubles hard as plastic or metal. Chest hair tickled the creasing between joint and joint.

He passed the longest end around his back: the bits lay out cold kisses on his shoulder blades. Then across his chest; his back once more; his belly. Holding the length in one hand (it still hung down on the stone), he unfastened his belt with the other.

Pants around his ankles, he wound the final length once around his hips; and then around his right thigh; again around; and again. He fastened the last catch at his ankle. Pulling up his trousers, he went to the ledge, buckled them, and turned to climb down.

He was aware of the bindings. But, chest flat on the stone, they were merely lines and did not cut.

This time he went to where the crevice was only a foot wide and stepped far of the lip. The cave mouth was a lambda of moon mist, edged with leaf-lace.

The rocks licked his soles. Once, when his mind wandered, it was brought back by his foot in cold water; and the links were warm around his body. He halted to feel for more heat; but the chain was only neutral weight.

He stepped out onto moss.

His shirt lay across a bush, his sandal, sole up, beneath.

He slipped his arms into the wool sleeves: his right wrist glittered from the cuff. He buckled his sandal: the ground moistened his knee.

He stood, looked around, and narrowed his eyes on the shadows. "Hey…?" He turned left, turned right, and scratched his collar-bone with his wide thumb. "Hey, where…?" Turning right, turning left, he wished he could interpret scuffs and broken brush. She wouldn't have wandered down the way they'd come…

He left the cave mouth and entered the shingled black. Could she have gone along here? he wondered three steps in. But went forward.

He recognized the road for moonlight the same moment his sandaled foot jabbed into mud. His bare one swung to the graveled shoulder. He staggered out on the asphalt, one foot sliding on flooded leather, took a hissing breath, and gazed around.

Left, the road sloped up between the trees. He started right. Downward would take him toward the city.

On one side was forest. On the other, he realized after a dozen slippery jogs, it was only a hedge of trees. Trees dropped away with another dozen. Behind, the grass whispered and shushed him.

She was standing at the meadow's center.

He brought his feet — one strapped and muddy, one bare and dusty — together; suddenly felt his heart beating; heard his surprised breath shush the grass back. He stepped across the ditch to ill-mowed stubble.

She's too tall, he thought, nearing.

Hair lifted from her shoulders; grass whispered again.

She had been taller than he was, but not like… "Hey, I got the…!" She was holding her arms over her head. Was she standing on some stumpy pedestal? "Hey…?"

She twisted from the waist: "What the hell are you doing here?"

At first he thought she was splattered with mud all up her thigh. "I thought you…?" But it was brown as dried blood.

She gazed down at him with batting eyes.

Mud? Blood? It was the wrong color for either.

"Go away!"

He took another, entranced step.

"What are you doing here? Go away!"

Were the blotches under her breasts scabs? "Look, I got it! Now, can't you tell me my…?"

Leaves were clutched in her raised hands. Her hands were raised so high! Leaves dropped about her shoulders. Her long, long fingers shook, and brittle darkness covered one flank. Her pale belly jerked with a breath.

"No!" She bent away when he tried to touch her; and stayed bent. One arm, branched and branching ten feet over him, pulled a web of shadow — across the grass.

"You…!" was the word he tried; breath was all that came.

He looked up among the twigs of her ears. Leaves shucked from her eyebrows. Her mouth was a thick, twisted bole, as though some footwide branch had been lopped off by lightning. Her eyes — his mouth opened as he craned to see them — disappeared, first one, up there, then the other, way over there: scabby lids sealed.

He backed through stiff grass.

A leaf crashed his temple like a charred moth.

Rough fingers bludgeoning his lips, he stumbled, turned, ran to the road, glanced once more where the twisted trunk raked five branches at the moon, loped until he had to walk, walked — gasping — until he could think. Then he ran some more.

2

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin. Loping and limping in the ruts, it would be easier not to think about what she did (was done to her, done to her, done), trying instead to reconstruct what it is at a distance. Oh, but it would not be so terrible had one calf not borne (if I'd looked close, it would have been a chain of tiny wounds with moments of flesh between; I've done that myself with a swipe in a garden past a rose) that scratch.

The asphalt spilled him onto the highway's shoulder. The paving's chipped edges filed visions off his eyes. A roar came toward him he heard only as it passed. He glanced back: the truck's red, rear eyes sank together. He walked for another hour, saw no other vehicle.

A Mac with a double van belched twenty feet behind him, sagged to a stop twenty feet ahead. He hadn't even been thumbing. He sprinted toward the opening door, hauled himself up, slammed it. The driver, tall, blond, and acned, looking blank, released the clutch.

He was going to say thanks, but coughed. Maybe the driver wanted somebody to rap at? Why else stop for someone just walking the road!

He didn't feel like rapping. But you have to say something:

"What you loading?"

"Artichokes."

Approaching lights spilled pit to pit in the driver's face.

They shook on down the highway.

He could think of nothing more, except: I was just making love to this woman, see, and you'll never guess… No, the Daphne bit would not pass—

It was he who wanted to talk! The driver was content to dispense with phatic thanks and chatter. Western independence? He had hitched this sector of country enough to decide it was all manic terror.

He leaned his head back. He wanted to talk and had nothing to say.

Fear past, the archness of it forced the architecture of a smile his lips fought.

He saw the ranked highway lights twenty minutes later and sat forward to see the turnoff. He glanced at the driver who was just glancing away. The brakes wheezed and the cab slowed by lurches.

They stopped. The driver sucked in the sides of his mined cheeks, looked over, still blank.

He nodded, sort of smiled, fumbled the door, dropped to the road; the door slammed and the truck started while he was still preparing thanks; he had to duck the van corner.

The vehicle grumbled down the turnoff.

We only spoke a line apiece.

What an odd ritual exchange to exhaust communication. (Is that terror?) What amazing and engaging rituals are we practicing now? (He stood on the road side, laughing.) What torque and tension in the mouth to laugh so in this windy, windy, windy…

Underpass and overpass knotted here. He walked… proudly? Yes, proudly by the low wall.

Across the water the city flickered.

On its dockfront, down half a mile, flames roiled smoke on the sky and reflections on the river. Here, not one car came off the bridge. Not one went on.

This toll booth, like the rank of booths, was dark. He stepped inside: front pane shattered, stool overturned, no drawer in the register — a third of the keys stuck down; a few bent. Some were missing their heads. Smashed by a mace, a mallet, a fist? He dragged his fingers across them, listened to them click, then stepped from the glass-flecked, rubber mat, over the sill to the pavement.

Metal steps led up to the pedestrian walkway. But since there was no traffic, he sauntered across two empty lanes — a metal grid sunk in the blacktop gleamed where tires had polished it — to amble the broken white line, sandaled foot one side, bare foot the other. Girders wheeled by him, left and right. Beyond, the burning city squatted on weak, inverted images of its fires.

He gazed across the wale of night water, all wind-runneled, and sniffed for burning. A gust parted the hair at the back of his neck; smoke was moving off the river.

"Hey, you!"

He looked up at the surprising flashlight. "Huh…?" At the walkway rail, another and another punctured the dark.

"You going into Bellona?"

"That's right." Squinting, he tried to smile. One, and another, the lights moved a few steps, stopped. He said: "You're… leaving?"

"Yeah. You know it's restricted in there."

He nodded. "But I haven't seen any soldiers or police or anything. I just hitch-hiked down."

"How were the rides?"

"All I saw was two trucks for the last twenty miles. The second one gave me a lift."

"What about the traffic going out?"

He shrugged. "But I guess girls shouldn't have too hard a time, though. I mean, if a car passes, you'll probably get a ride. Where you heading?"

"Two of us want to get to New York. Judy wants to go to San Francisco."

"I just want to get some place," a whiny voice came down. "I've got a fever! I should be in bed. I was in bed for the last three days."

He said: "You've got a ways to go, either direction."

"Nothing's happened to San Francisco—?"

"— or New York?"

"No." He tried to see behind the lights. "The papers don't even talk about what's happening here, any more."

"But, Jesus! What about the television? Or the radio—"

"Stupid, none of it works out here. So how are they gonna know?"

"But— Oh, wow…!"

He said: "The nearer you get, it's just less and less people. And the ones you meet are… funnier. What's it like inside?"

One laughed.

Another said: "It's pretty rough."

The one who'd spoken first said: "But like you say, girls have an easier time."

They laughed.

He did too. "Is there anything you can tell me? I mean that might be helpful? Since I'm going in?"

"Yeah. Some men came by, shot up the house we were living in, tore up the place, then burned us out."

"She was making this sculpture," the whiny voice explained; "this big sculpture. Of a lion. Out of junk metal and stuff. It was beautiful…! But she had to leave it."

"Wow," he said. "Is it like that?"

One short, hard laugh: "Yeah. We got it real easy."

"Tell him about Calkins? Or the scorpions?"

"He'll learn about them." Another laugh. "What can you say?"

"You want a weapon to take in with you?"

That made him afraid again. "Do I need one?"

But they were talking among themselves:

"You're gonna give him that?"

"Yeah, why not? I don't want it with me any more."

"Well, okay. It's yours."

Metal sounded on chain, while one asked: "Where you from?" The flashlights turned away, ghosting the group. One in profile near the rail was momentarily lighted enough to see she was very young, very black, and very pregnant.

"Up from the south."

"You don't sound like you're from the south," one said who did.

"I'm not from the south. But I was just in Mexico."

"Oh, hey!" That was the pregnant one. "Where were you? I know Mexico."

The exchange of half a dozen towns ended in disappointed silence.

"Here's your weapon."

Flashlights followed the flicker in the air, the clatter on the gridded blacktop.

With the beams on the ground (and not in his eyes), he could make out half a dozen women on the catwalk.

"What—" A car motor thrummed at the end of the bridge; but there were no headlights when he glanced. The sound died on some turnoff—"is it?"

"What'd they call it?"

"An orchid."

"Yeah, that's what it is."

He walked over, squatted in the triple beam.

"You wear it around your wrist. With the blades sticking out front. Like a bracelet"

From an adjustable metal wrist-band, seven blades, from eight to twelve inches, curved sharply forward. There was a chain-and-leather harness inside to hold it steady on the fingers. The blades were sharpened along the outside.

He picked it up.

"Put it on."

"Are you right or left handed?"

"Ambidextrous…" which, in his case, meant clumsy with both. He turned the "flower". "But I write with my left. Usually."

"Oh."

He fitted it around his right wrist, snapped it. "Suppose you were wearing this on a crowded bus. You could hurt somebody," and felt the witticism fail. He made a fist within the blades, opened it slowly and, behind curved steel, rubbed two blunt and horny crowns on the underside of his great thumb.

"There aren't too many buses in Bellona."

Thinking: Dangerous, bright petals bent about some knobbed, half-rotted root. "Ugly thing," he told it, not them. "Hope I don't need you."

"Hope you don't either," one said above. "I guess you can give it to somebody else when you leave."

"Yeah." He stood up. "Sure."

"If he leaves," another said, gave another laugh.

"Hey, we better get going."

"I heard a car. We're probably gonna have to wait long enough anyway. We might as well start."

South: "He didn't make it sound like we were gonna get any rides."

"Let's just get going. Hey, so long!"

"So long." Their beams swept by. "And thanks." Artichokes? But he could not remember where the word had come from to ring so brightly.

He raised the orchid after them.

Caged in blades, his gnarled hand was silhouetted with river glitter stretching between the bridge struts. Watching them go, he felt the vaguest flutter of desire. Only one of their flashlights was on. Then one of them blocked that. They were footsteps on metal plates; some laughter drifting back; rustlings…

He walked again, holding his hand from his side.

This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perception themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.

3

Beyond the bridge-mouth, the pavement shattered.

One live street lamp lit five dead ones — two with broken globes. Climbing a ten-foot, tilted, asphalt slab that jerked once under him, rumbling like a live thing, he saw pebbles roll off the edge, heard them clink on fugitive plumbing, then splash somewhere in darkness… He recalled the cave and vaulted to a more solid stretch, whose cracks were mortared with nubby grass.

No lights in any near buildings; but down those waterfront streets, beyond the veils of smoke — was that fire? Already used to the smell, he had to breathe deeply to notice it. The sky was all haze. Buildings jabbed up into it and disappeared.

Light?

At the corner of a four-foot alley, he spent ten minutes exploring — just because the lamp worked. Across the street he could make out concrete steps, a loading porch under an awning, doors. A truck had overturned at the block's end. Nearer, three cars, windows rimmed with smashed glass, squatted on skewed hubs, like frogs gone marvelously blind.

His bare foot was calloused enough for gravel and glass. But ash kept working between his foot and his remaining sandal to grind like finest sand, work its way under, and silt itself with his sweat. His heel was almost sore.

By the gate at the alley's end, he found a pile of empty cans, a stack of newspaper still wire-bound, bricks set up as a fireplace with an arrangement of pipes over it. Beside it was an army messpan, insides caked with dead mold. Something by his moving foot crinkled.

He reached down. One of the orchid's petals snagged; he picked up a package of… bread? The wrapper was twisted closed. Back under the street lamp, he balanced it on his fingers, through the blades, and opened the cellophane.

He had wondered about food.

He had wondered about sleep.

But he knew the paralysis of wonder.

The first slice had a tenpenny nailhead of muzzy green in the corner; the second and third, the same. The nail, he thought, was through the loaf. The top slice was dry on one side. Nothing else was wrong — except the green vein; and it was only that penicillium stuff. He could eat around it

I'm not hungry.

He replaced the slices, folded the cellophane, carried it back, and wedged it behind the stacked papers.

As he returned to the lamp, a can clattered from his sandal, defining the silence. He wandered away through it, gazing up for some hint of the hazed-out moon—

Breaking glass brought his eyes to street level.

He was afraid, and he was curious; but fear had been so constant, it was a dull and lazy emotion, now; the curiosity was alive:

He sprinted to the nearest wall, moved along it rehearsing his apprehensions of all terrible that might happen. He passed a doorway, noted it for ducking, and kept on to the corner. Voices now. And more glass.

He peered around the building edge.

Three people vaulted from a shattered display window to join two waiting. Barking, a dog followed them to the sidewalk. One man wanted to climb back in; did. Two others took off down the block.

The dog circled, loped his way—

He pulled back, free hand grinding on the brick.

The dog, crouched and dancing ten feet off, barked, barked, barked again.

Dim light slathered canine tongue and teeth. Its eyes (he swallowed, hard) were glistening red, without white or pupil, smooth as crimson glass.

The man came back out the window. One in the group turned and shouted: "Muriel!" (It could have been a woman.) The dog wheeled and fled after.

Another street lamp, blocks down, gave them momentary silhouette.

As he stepped from the wall, his breath unraveled the silence, shocked him as much as if someone had called his… name? Pondering, he crossed the street toward the corner of the loading porch. On tracks under the awning, four- and six-foot butcher hooks swung gently — though there was no wind. In fact, he reflected, it would take a pretty hefty wind to start them swinging—

"Hey!"

Hands, free and flowered, jumped to protect his face. He whirled, crouching.

"You down there!"

He looked up, with hunched shoulders.

Smoke rolled about the building top, eight stories above.

"What you doing, huh?"

He lowered his hands.

The voice was rasp rough, sounded near drunk.

He called: "Nothing!" and wished his heart would still. "Just walking around."

Behind scarves of smoke, someone stood at the cornice. "What you been up to this evening?"

"Nothing, I said." He took a breath: "I just got here, over the bridge. About a half hour ago."

"Where'd you get the orchid?"

"Huh?" He raised his hand again. The street lamp dribbled light down a blade. "This?"

"Yeah."

"Some women gave it to me. When I was crossing the bridge."

"I saw you looking around the corner at the hubbub. I couldn't tell from up here — was it scorpions?"

"Huh?"

"I said, was it scorpions?"

"It was a bunch of people trying to break into a store, I think. They had a dog with them."

After silence, gravelly laughter grew. "You really haven't been here long, kid?"

"I—" and realized the repetition—"just got here."

"You out to go exploring by yourself? Or you want company for a bit."

The guy's eyes, he reflected, must be awfully good. "Company… I guess."

"I'll be there in a minute."

He didn't see the figure go; there was too much smoke. And after he'd watched several doorways for several minutes, he figured the man had changed his mind.

"Here you go," from the one he'd set aside for ducking.

"Name is Loufer. Tak Loufer. You know what that means, Loufer? Red Wolf; or Fire Wolf."

"Or Iron Wolf." He squinted. "Hello."

"Iron Wolf? Well, yeah…" The man emerged, dim on the top step. "Don't know if I like that one so much. Red Wolf. That's my favorite." He was a very big man.

He came down two more steps; his engineer's boots, hitting the boards, sounded like dropped sandbags. Wrinkled black jeans were half stuffed into the boot tops. The worn cycle jacket was scarred with zippers. Gold stubble on chin and jaw snagged the street light. Chest and belly, bare between flapping zipper teeth, were a tangle of brass hair. The fingers were massive, matted—"What's your name?" — but clean, with neat and cared-for nails.

"Um… well, I'll tell you: I don't know." It sounded funny, so he laughed. "I don't know."

Loufer stopped, a step above the sidewalk, and laughed too. "Why the hell don't you?" The visor of his leather cap blocked his upper face with shadow.

He shrugged. "I just don't. I haven't for… a while now."

Loufer came down the last step, to the pavement "Well, Tak Loufer's met people here with stranger stories than that. You some kind of nut, or something? You been in a mental hospital, maybe?"

"Yes…" He saw that Loufer had expected a No.

Tak's head cocked. The shadow raised to show the rims of Negro-wide nostrils above an extremely Caucasian mouth. The jaw looked like rocks in hay-stubble.

"Just for a year. About six or seven years ago."

Loufer shrugged. "I was in jail for three months… about six or seven years ago. But that's as close as I come. So you're a no-name kid? What are you, seventeen? Eighteen? No, I bet you're even—"

"Twenty-seven."

Tak's head cocked the other way. Light topped his cheek bones. "Neurotic fatigue, do it every time. You notice that about people with serious depression, the kind that sleep all day? Hospital type cases, I mean. They always look ten years younger than they are."

He nodded.

"I'm going to call you Kid, then. That'll do you for a name. You can be — The Kid, hey?"

Three gifts, he thought: armor, weapon, title (like the prisms, lenses, mirrors on the chain itself). "Okay…" with the sudden conviction this third would cost, by far, the most. Reject it, something warned: "Only I'm not a kid. Really; I'm twenty-seven. People always think I'm younger than I am. I just got a baby face, that's all. I've even got some white hair, if you want to see—"

"Look, Kid—" with his middle fingers, Tak pushed up his visor—"we're the same age." His eyes were large, deep, and blue. The hair above his ears, no longer than the week's beard, suggested a severe crew under the cap. "Any sights you particularly want to see around here? Anything you heard about? I like to play guide. What do you hear about us, outside, anyway? What do people say about us here in the city?"

"Not much."

"Guess they wouldn't." Tak looked away. "You just wander in by accident, or did you come on purpose?"

"Purpose."

"Good Kid! Like a man with a purpose. Come on up here. This street turns into Broadway soon as it leaves the waterfront."

"What is there to see?"

Loufer gave a grunt that did for a laugh. "Depends on what sights are out." Though he had the beginning of a gut, the ridges under the belly hair were muscle deep. "If we're really lucky, maybe—" the ashy leather, swinging as Loufer turned, winked over a circular brass buckle that held together a two-inch-wide garrison—"we won't run into anything at all! Come on." They walked.

"…kid. The Kid…"

"Huh?" asked Loufer.

"I'm thinking about that name."

"Will it do?"

"I don't know."

Loufer laughed. "I'm not going to press for it, Kid. But I think it's yours."

His own chuckle was part denial, part friendly.

Loufer's grunt in answer echoed the friendly.

They walked beneath low smoke.

There is something delicate about this Iron Wolf, with his face like a pug-nosed, Germanic gorilla. It is neither his speech nor his carriage, which have their roughness, but the way in which he assumes them, as though the surface where speech and carriage are flush were somehow inflamed.

"Hey, Tak?"

"Yeah?"

"How long have you been here?"

"If you told me today's date, I could figure it out. But I've let it go. It's been a while." After a moment, Loufer asked, in a strange, less blustery voice: "Do you know what day it is?"

"No, I…" The strangeness scared him. "I don't." He shook his head while his mind rushed away toward some other subject. "What do you do? I mean, what did you work at?"

Tak snorted. "Industrial engineering."

"Were you working here, before… all this?"

"Near here. About twelve miles down, at Helmsford. There used to be a plant that jarred peanut butter. We were converting it into a vitamin C factory. What do you do—? Naw, you don't look like you do too much in the line of work." Loufer grinned. "Right?"

He nodded. It was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly. And, anyway, the rush had stopped.

"I was staying down in Helmsford," Loufer went on. "But I used to drive up to the city a lot. Bellona used to be a pretty good town." Tak glanced at a doorway too dark to see if it was open or shut. "Maybe it still is, you know? But one day I drove up here. And it was like this."

A fire escape, above a street lamp pulsing slow as a failing heart, looked like charred sticks, some still aglow.

"Just like this?"

On a store window their reflection slid like ripples over oil.

"There were a few more places the fire hadn't reached; a few more people who hadn't left yet — not all the newcomers had arrived."

"You were here at the very beginning, then?"

"Oh, I didn't see it break out or anything. Like I say, when I got here, it looked more or less like it does now."

"Where's your car?"

"Sitting on the street with the windshield busted, the tires gone — along with most of the motor. I let a lot of stupid things happen, at first. But I got the hang of it after a while." Tak made a sweeping gesture with both hands — and disappeared before it was finished: they'd passed into complete blackness. "A thousand people are supposed to be here now. Used to be almost two million."

"How do you know, I mean the population?"

"That's what they publish in the paper."

"Why do you stay?"

"Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with — I got a theory now — freedom. You know, here—" ahead, something moved—"you're free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become—" they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lobling from a window sill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern—"exactly who you are." And Tak was visible again. "If you're ready for that, this is where it's at."

"It must be pretty dangerous. Looters and stuff."

Tak nodded. "Sure it's dangerous."

"Is there a lot of street mugging?"

"Some." Loufer made a face. "Do you know about crime, Kid? Crime is funny. For instance, now, in most American cities — New York, Chicago, St. Louis — crimes, ninety-five per cent I read, are committed between six o'clock and midnight. That means you're safer walking around the street at three o'clock in the morning than you are going to the theater to catch a seven-thirty curtain. I wonder what time it is now. Sometime after two I'd gather. I don't think Bellona is much more dangerous than any other city. It's a very small city, now. That's a sort of protection."

A forgotten blade scraped his jeans. "Do you carry a weapon?"

"Months of detailed study on what is going on where, the movements and variations of our town. I look around a lot. This way."

That wasn't buildings on the other side of the street: Trees rose above the park wall, black as shale. Loufer headed toward the entrance.

"Is it safe in there?"

"Looks pretty scary." Tak nodded. "Probably keep any criminal with a grain of sense at home. Anybody who wasn't a mugger would be out of his mind to go in there." He glanced back, grinned. "Which probably means all the muggers have gotten tired of waiting and gone home to bed a long time ago. Come on."

Stone lions flanked the entrance.

"It's funny," Tak said; they passed between. "You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?"

"Queers."

Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. "Yeah."

The dark wrapped them up and buoyed them along the path.

There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?

"What were you in prison for?"

"Morals charge," Tak said.

He was steps behind Loufer now. The path, which had begun as concrete, was now dirt. Leaves hit at him. Three times his bare foot came down on rough roots; once his swinging arm scraped lightly against bark.

"Actually," Tak tossed back into the black between them, "I was acquitted. The situation, I guess. My lawyer figured it was better I stayed in jail without bail for ninety days, like a misdemeanor sentence. Something had got lost in the records. Then, at court, he brought that all out, got the charge changed to public indecency; I'd already served sentence." Zipper-jinglings suggested a shrug. "Everything considered, it worked out. Look!"

The carbon black of leaves shredded, letting through the ordinary color of urban night.

"Where?" They had stopped among trees and high brush.

"Be quiet! There…"

His wool shushed Tak's leather. He whispered: "Where do you…?"

Out on the path, sudden, luminous, and artificial, a seven-foot dragon swayed around the corner, followed by an equally tall mantis and a griffin. Like elegant plastics, internally lit and misty, they wobbled forward. When dragon and mantis swayed into each other, they — meshed!

He thought of images, slightly unfocused, on a movie screen, lapping.

"Scorpions!" Tak whispered.

Tak's shoulder pushed his.

His hand was on a tree trunk. Twig shadows webbed his forearm, the back of his hand, the bark. The figure neared; the web slid. The figures passed; the web slid off. They were, he realized, as eye-unsettling as pictures on a three-dimensional postcard — with the same striations hanging, like a screen, just before, or was it just behind them.

The griffin, furthest back, flickered:

A scrawny youngster, with pimply shoulders, in the middle of a cautious, bow-legged stride — then griffin again. (A memory of spiky, yellow hair; hands held out from the freckled, pelvic blade.)

The mantis swung around to look back, went momentarily out:

This one, anyway, was wearing some clothes — a brown, brutal looking youngster; the chains he wore for necklaces growled under his palm, while he absently caressed his left breast. "Come on, Baby! Get your ass in gear!" which came from a mantis again.

"Shit, you think they gonna be there?" from the griffin.

"Aw, sure. They gonna be there!" You could have easily mistaken the voice from the dragon for a man's; and she sounded black.

Suspended in wonder and confusion, he listened to the conversation of the amazing beasts.

"They better be!" Vanished chains went on growling.

The griffin flickered once more: pocked buttocks and duty heels disappeared behind blazing scales.

"Hey, Baby, suppose they're not there yet?"

"Oh, shit! Adam…?"

"Now, Adam, you know they're gonna be there," the dragon assured.

"Yeah? How do I know? Oh, Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady, you're too much!"

"Come on. The two of you shut up, huh?"

Swaying together and apart, they rounded another corner.

He couldn't see his hand at all now, so he let it fall from the trunk. "What… what are they?"

"Told you: scorpions. Sort of a gang. Maybe it's more than one gang. I don't really know. You get fond of them after a while, if you know how to stay out of their way. If you can't… well, you either join, I guess; or get messed up. Least, that's how I found it."

"I mean the… the dragons and things?"

"Pretty, huh?"

"What are they?"

"You know what is it a hologram? They're projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser. It's not complicated. But it looks impressive. They call them light-shields."

"Oh." He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. "I've heard of holograms."

Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.

"Are there more of them around?"

"Maybe." Tak's upper face was again masked. "Their light-shields don't really shield them from anything — other than our prying eyes, from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck." Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. "You forget people don't know about scorpions. About Calkins. They're famous here. Bellona's a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they've forgotten we're here."

"No. They haven't forgotten." Though he couldn't see Tak's eyes, he knew they had narrowed.

"So they send in people who don't know their own name. Like you?"

He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.

Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. "Oh, yeah! You're quite a kid." Laughter trailed on.

"Where we going now?"

But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.

From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanique. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

4

"Tak!" she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. "Who'd you bring?" She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.

A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.

The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak's cuff, close enough now to have a face again. "We haven't seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for dinner practically every night. John was worried about you." It was a pretty face in half light.

"I wasn't worried." A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. "Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is." Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. "You're closer to breakfast time than you are to dinner, right now." He — John? — tapped a rolled newspaper against his thigh.

"Come on. Tell me, Tak." She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. "Who have you brought John and me this time?" while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.

Tak said: "This is the Kid."

"Kit?" she asked.

"Kid."

"K-y-d-d…?"

"— i-d."

"…d," she added with a tentative frown. "Oh, Kidd."

If Tak had an expression you couldn't see it.

He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.

She reared her shoulders back, blinking. "How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?" To Tak: "Isn't it amazing how we're always turning up people like that? You think you've met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who's been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out—"

"That's how we met Tak," John said. To Tak: "Isn't it, Tak?"

Tak said: "He's new."

"Oh. Well," John said, "we've got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?"

"Well, we figure—" Mildred's shoulders came, officially, forward. "We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can't be at each other's throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this—" He was sure her gesture, at 'this', included nothing beyond the firelight—"to degenerate into something… well, awful! So we've set up I guess you'd call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that's getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don't take in everybody. But when we do, we're very accepting." There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn't sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. "You are new? We're always glad when we get somebody new."

He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?

Tak said: "Show him around, Milly."

John said: "Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something," tapping his newspaper again. "Oh, here. Maybe you want to take a look at this?"

"What? Oh…" You couldn't worry so much about things like that! Often, though, he had to remind himself. "Thanks." He took the folded paper.

"All right, Tak." John, with Tak, turned away. "Now when are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you—"

"Look, John." Tak put his hand on John's shoulder as they wandered off. "All you need is the plans, and you can—"

Then they were out of earshot.

"Are you hungry?"

"No." She was pretty.

"Well, if you are — come, let's go over here — we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That's not too far off."

"You been up all night?" he asked.

"No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early."

"I have."

"We do a lot of work here—" she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs—"during the day. We don't just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It's pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all." She smiled.

"I've been up; but I'm not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything." He looked down at her legs.

As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. "Oh, we wouldn't mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don't want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand."

"Yeah, I understand that." He'd been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.

"Why do you go around wearing an orchid?" she asked. "Of course, with the city in the state it's in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But…"

"Some people gave it to me." He turned the rolled newspaper around.

SERIOUS WATER

He let the tabloid fall loose.

SHORTAGE THREATENS

The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. "What the hell is that?"

She looked concerned. "Well, there's not very many people around who know how to keep things running. And we've all been expecting the water to become a real problem any day. You have no idea how much they used when they were trying to put out the fires."

"I mean the 1995?"

"Oh. That's just Calkins." On the picnic table sat a carton of canned goods. "I think it's amazing we have a newspaper at all." She sat on the bench and looked at him expectantly. "The dates are just his little joke."

"Oh." He sat beside her. "Do you have tents here? Anything for shelter?" still thinking: 1995?

"Well, we're pretty outdoors oriented." She looked around, while he tried to feel the city beyond the leafy, fire-lit grotto. "Of course, Tak — he's promised to give John some simple blueprints. For cabins. John wants Tak to head the whole project. He feels it would be good for him. You know, Tak is so strange. He feels, somehow, we won't accept him. At least I think he does. He has this very important image of himself as a loner. He wants to give us the plans — he's an engineer, you know — and let us carry them out. But the value of something like that isn't just the house — or shack — that results. It should be a creative, internal thing for the builder. Don't you think?"

For something to do, he held his teeth together, hard.

"You're sure you're not hungry?"

"Oh. No."

"You're not tired? You can get in a few hours if you want. Work doesn't start till after breakfast. I can get you a blanket, if you'd like."

"No."

In the firelight, he thought he might count twenty-five years in her firm, clear face. "I'm not hungry. I'm not sleepy. I didn't even know Tak was bringing me here."

"It's a very nice place. It really is. The community of feeling is so warm, if nothing else." Probably only twenty.

The harmonica player played again.

Someone in an olive-drab cocoon twisted beyond the fire.

Mildred's tennis sneaker was a foot from the nearest sleeper's canvas covered head.

"I wish you wouldn't wear that." She laughed.

He opened his big fingers under metal.

"I mean, if you want to stay here. Maybe then you wouldn't have to wear it."

"I don't have to wear it," and decided to keep it on.

The harmonica squawked.

He looked up.

From the trees, light brighter than the fire and green lay leafy shadows over sleeping bags and blanket rolls. Then ballooning claws and barbed, translucent tail collapsed:

"Hey, you got that shit ready for us?"

A lot of chains hung around his neck. He had a wide scab (with smaller ones below it) on the bowl of his shoulder, like a bad fall on cement. Chains wound around one boot: he jingled when he walked. "Come on, come on. Bring me the fuckin' junk!" He stopped by the fireplace. Flames burnished his large arms, his small face. A front tooth was broken. "Is that it?" He gestured bluntly toward the picnic table, brushed tangled, black hair, half braided, from his shoulder, and came on.

"Hello!" Mildred said, with the most amazing smile. "Nightmare! How have you been?"

The scorpion looked down at her, wet lip high off his broken tooth, and said, slowly, "Shit," which could have meant a lot of things. He wedged between them— "Get out of the—" saw the orchid—"fucking way, huh?" and lugged the carton of canned goods off the table edge against his belly, where ripe, wrinkled jeans had sagged so low you could see stomach hair thicken toward pubic. He looked down over his thick arm at the weapon, closed his mouth, shook his head. "Shit," again, and: "What the fuck you staring at?" Between the flaps of Nightmare's cut-down vest, prisms, mirrors, and lenses glittered among dark cycle chain, bright stainless links, and hardware-store brass.

"Nothing."

Nightmare sucked his teeth in disgust, turned, and stumbled on a sleeping bag. "Move, damn it!"

A head shook loose from canvas; it was an older man, who started digging under the glasses he'd probably worn to sleep, then gazed after the scorpion lumbering off among the trees.

He saw things move behind Milly's face, was momentarily sure she was going to call good-bye. Her tennis shoe dragged the ground.

Down her lower leg was a scratch.

He frowned.

She said: "That was Nightmare. Do you know about the scorpions?"

"Tak told me some."

"It's amazing how well you can get along with people if you're just nice. Of course their idea of being nice back is a little odd. They used to volunteer to beat up people for us. They kept wanting John to find somebody for them to work over — somebody who was annoying us, of course. Only nobody was." She hunched her shoulders.

"I guess," he offered from the faulted structure of his smile, "you have trouble with them sometimes?"

"Sometimes." Her smile was perfect. "I just wish John had been here. John's very good with them. I think Nightmare is a little afraid of John, you know? We do a lot for them. Share our food with them. I think they get a lot from us. If they'd just acknowledge their need, though, they'd be so much easier to help."

The harmonica was silent: the bare-breasted girl had gone from her blanket

"How'd you get that scratch?"

"Just an accident. With John." She shrugged. "From one of those, actually." She nodded toward his orchid. "It isn't anything."

He leaned to touch it, looked at her: she hadn't moved. So he lay his forefinger on her shin, moved it down. The scab line ran under his callous like a tiny rasp.

She frowned. "It really isn't anything." Framed in heavy red, it was a gentle frown. "What's that?" She pointed. "Around your wrist."

His cuff had pulled up when he'd leaned.

He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin. "Something I found." He wondered if she heard the question mark on his sentence, small as a period.

Her eyebrow's movement said she had: which amused him.

The optical glass flamed over his knobby wrist.

"Where do you get it? I've seen several people wear that… kind of chain."

He nodded. "I just found it."

"Where?" Her gentle smile urged.

"Where did you get your scratch?"

Still smiling, she returned a bewildered look.

He had expected it. And he mistrusted it. "I…" and the thought resolved some internal cadence: "want to know about you!" He was suddenly and astonishingly happy. "Have you been here long? Where are you from? Mildred? Mildred what? Why did you come here? How long are you going to stay? Do you like Japanese food? Poetry?" He laughed. "Silence? Water? Someone saying your name?"

"Um…" He saw she was immensely pleased. "Mildred Fabian, and people do call me Milly, like Tak does. John just feels he has to be formal when new people come around. I was here at State University. But I come from Ohio… Euclid, Ohio?"

He nodded again.

"But State's got such a damned good Poly-sci department. Had, anyway. So I came here. And…" She dropped her eyes (brown, he realized with a half-second memory, as he looked at her lowered, corn-colored lashes — brown with a coppery backing, copper like her hair) "…I stayed."

"You were here when it happened?"

"…yes." He heard a question mark there bigger than any in the type-box.

"What…" and when he said, "…happened?" he didn't want an answer.

Her eyes widened, dropped again; her shoulders sank; her back rounded. She reached toward his hand in its cage, lying between them on the bench.

As she took a shiny blade tip between two fingers, he was aware of his palm's suspension in its harness.

"Does… I've always… well, could you make an…" She tugged the point to the side (he felt the pressure on his wrist and stiffened his hand), released it: A muffled Hmmmmm. "Oh."

He was puzzled.

"I was wondering," she explained, "if you could make it ring. Like an instrument. All the blades are different lengths. I thought if they made notes, perhaps you could… play them."

"Blade steel? I don't think it's brittle enough. Bells and things are iron."

She bent her head to the side.

"Things have to be brittle if they're going to ring. Like glass. Knives are hard, sure; but they're too flexible."

She looked up after a moment. "I like music. I was going to major in music. At State. But the Poly-sci department was so good. I don't think I've seen one Japanese restaurant in Bellona, since I've been in school here. But there used to be several good Chinese ones…" Something happened in her face, a loosening, part exhaustion, part despair. "We're doing the best we can, you know…?"

"What?"

"We're doing the best we can. Here."

He nodded a small nod.

"When it happened," she said softly, "it was terrible." "Terrible" was perfectly flat, the way he remembered a man in a brown suit once say "elevator." It's that tone, he thought, remembering when it had denuded Tak's speech. She said: "We stayed. I stayed. I guess I felt I had to stay. I don't know how long… I mean, I'm going to stay for. But we have to do something. Since we're here, we have to." She took a breath. A muscle leaped in her jaw. "You…?"

"Me what?"

"What do you like, Kidd? Someone saying your name?"

He knew it was innocent; and was annoyed anyway. His lips began a Well, but only breath came.

"Silence?"

Breath became a hiss; the hiss became, "…sometimes."

"Who are you? Where are you from?"

He hesitated, and watched her eyes pick something from it:

"You're afraid because you're new here… I think. I'm afraid, I think, because I've been here… an awfully long time!" She looked around the campsite.

Two long-haired youngsters stood by the cinder-blocks. One held up his hands, either to warm them, or just to feel heat.

It is a warm morning. I do not recognize any protection in this leafy blister. There is no articulation in the juncture of object and shadow, no fixed angle between fuel and flame. Where would they put their shelters, foundations sunk on ash; doors and windows sinking in cinders? There is nothing else to trust but what warms.

Mildred's lips parted, her eyes narrowed. "You know what John did? I think it was brave, too. We had just finished building that fireplace; there were only a few of us here, then. Somebody was going to light it with a cigarette lighter. But John said, wait; then went off all the way to Holland Lake. That was when the burning was much worse than it is now. And he brought back a brand old, dried, burning stick. In fact he had to transfer the fire to several other sticks on the way back. And with that fire—" she nodded where one of the youngsters was now poking at the logs with a broken broom-handle— "he lit ours." The other waited with a chunk of wood in his arms. "I think that was very brave. Don't you?" The chunk fell. Sparks geysered through the grate, higher than the lowest branches.

"Hey, Milly!"

Sparks whirled, and he wondered why they all spoke so loud with so many sleeping.

"Milly! Look what I found."

She had put on a blue workshirt, still unbuttoned. In one hand was her harmonica, in the other a spiral notebook.

"What is it?" Milly called back.

As she passed the furnace, she swung the notebook through the sparks; they whipped into Catherine wheels, and sank. "Does it belong to anybody around here? It's burned. On the cover."

She sat with it, between them, shoulders hunched, face in a concentrated scowl. "It's somebody's exercise book." The cardboard was flaky black at one corner. Heat had stained half the back.

"What's in it?" Milly asked.

She shrugged. Her shoulder and her hip moved on his. He slid down the bench to give her room, considered sliding back, but, instead, picked up the newspaper and opened it — blades tore one side — to the second page.

"Who ripped out the first pages?" Milly asked.

"That's the way I found it."

"But you can see the torn edges, still inside the wire."

"Neat handwriting."

"Can you make out what it says?"

"Not in this light. I read some down by the park lamp. Let's take it over by the fire."

The page he stared at flickered with backlight, the print on both sides visible. All he could make out was the Gothic masthead:

And below it:

He closed the paper.

The girls had gone to the fireplace.

He stood, left the paper on the bench, stepped, one after another, over three sleeping bags and a blanket roll. "What does it say?"

Her harmonica was still in one fist.

Her hair was short and thick. Her eyes, when she looked at him directly, were Kelly green. Propping the book on the crook of her arm, with her free hand she turned back the cardboard cover for him to see the first page. Remnants of green polish flecked her nails.

In Palmer-perfect script, an interrupted sentence took up on the top line:

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

That made goose bumps on his flanks…

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight-elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student

She lowered the notebook to stare at him, blinked green eyes. Hair wisps shook shadow splinters on her cheek. "What's the matter with you?"

His face tensed toward a smile. "That's just some… well, pretty weird stuff!"

"What's weird about it?" She closed the cover. "You got the strangest look."

"I don't… But…" His smile did not feel right. What was there to dislodge it lay at the third point of a triangle whose base vertices were recognition and incomprehension. "Only it was so…" No, start again. "But it was so … I know a lot about astronauts, I mean. I used to look up the satellite schedules and go out at night and watch for them. And I used to have a friend who was a bank clerk."

"I knew somebody who used to work in a bank," Milly said. Then, to the other girl: "Didn't you ever?"

He said: "And I used to have a job in a theater. It was on the second floor and we always had to carry things up in the freight elevator…" These memories were so simple to retrieve… "I was thinking about him — the elevator operator — earlier tonight."

They still looked puzzled.

"It was just very familiar."

"Well, yeah…" She moved her thumb over the bright harmonica. "I must have been on a freight elevator, at least once. Hell, I was in a school play and there were lights around the dressing room mirror. That doesn't make it weird."

"But the part about the student riots. And the bodegas… I just came up from Mexico."

"It doesn't say anything about student riots."

"Yes it does. I was in a student riot once. I'll show you." He reached for the book (she pulled back sharply from the orchid), spread his free hand on the page (she came forward again, her shoulder brushing his arm. He could see her breast inside her unbuttoned shirt. Yeah) and read aloud:

"…'thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student happenings with spaghetti filled Volkswagens, dawn in Seattle, automated evening in L.A.' " He looked up, confused.

"You've been in Seattle and Los Angeles, morning and night, too?" Her green-eyed smile flickered beside the flames.

"No…" He shook his head.

"I have. It's still not weird." Still flickering, she frowned at his frown. "It's not about you. Unless you dropped it in the park … You didn't write it, did you?"

"No," he said. "No. I didn't." Lost (it had been stronger and stranger than any déjà vu), the feeling harassed him. "But I could have sworn I knew…" The fire felt hottest through the hole at his knee; he reached down to scratch; blades snagged raveled threads. He snatched the orchid away: threads popped. Using his other hand, he mauled his patella with horny fingers.

Milly had taken the book, turned to a later page.

The green-eyed girl leaned over her shoulder:

"Read that part near the end, about the lightning and the explosions and the riot and all. Do you think he was writing about what happened here—to Bellona, I mean?"

"Read that part at the beginning, about the scorpions and the trapped children. What do you suppose he was writing about there?"

They bent together in firelight.

He felt discomfort and looked around the clearing.

Tak stepped over a sleeping bag and said to John: "You people want me to work too hard. You just refuse to understand that work for its own sake is something I see no virtue in at all."

"Aw, come on, Tak." John beat his hand absently against his thigh as though he still held the rolled paper.

"I'll give you the plans. You can do what you want with them. Hey, Kid, how's it going?" Flames bruised Tak's bulky jaw, prised his pale eyes into the light, flickered on his leather visor. "You doing all right?"

He swallowed, which clamped his teeth; so his nod was stiffer than he'd intended.

"Tak, you are going to head the shelter building project for us…?" John's glasses flashed.

"Shit," Tak said, recalling Nightmare.

"Oh, Tak…" Milly shook her head.

"I've been arguing with him all night," John said. "Hey." He looked over at the picnic table. "Did Nightmare come by for the stuff?"

"Yep." Brightly.

"How is he?"

She shrugged — less bright.

He heard the harmonica, looked:

Back on her blanket, the other girl bent over her mouth harp. Her hair was a casque of stained bronze around her lowered face. Her shirt had slipped from one sharp shoulder. Frowning, she beat the mouth holes on her palm once more. The notebook lay against her knee.

"Tak and me were up looking at the place I want to put the shelters. You know, up on the rocks?"

"You've changed the location again?" Milly asked.

"Yeah," Tak said. "He has. How do you like it around here, Kid? It's a good place, huh?"

"We'd be happy to have you," John said. "We're always happy to have new people. We have a lot of work to do; we need all the willing hands we can get." His tapping palm clove to his thigh, stayed.

He grunted, to shake something loose in his throat. "I think I'm going to wander on."

"Oh…" Milly sounded disappointed.

"Come on. Stay for breakfast." John sounded eager. "Then try out one of our work projects. See which one you like. You know, those are some strange streets out there. You don't know what you're gonna find in 'em."

"Thanks," he said. "I'm gonna go…"

"I'll take him back down to the avenue," Tak said. "Okay, so long, you guys."

"If you change your mind," Milly called (John was beating his leg again), "you can always come back. You might want to in a couple of days. Just come. Well be glad to have you then, too."

On the concrete path, he said to Tak: "They're really good people, huh? I just guess I…" He shrugged.

Tak grunted: "Yeah."

"The scorpions — is that some sort of protection racket they make the people in the commune pay?"

"You could call it that. But then, they get protected."

"Against anything else except scorpions?"

Tak grunted again, hoarsely.

He recognized it for laughter. "I just don't want to get into anything like that. At least not on that side."

"I'll take you back down to the avenue, Kid. It goes on up into the city. The stores right around here have been pretty well stripped of food. But you never know what you're gonna luck out on. Frankly, though, I think you'll do better in houses. But there you take your chances: somebody just may be waiting for you with a shotgun. Like I say, there's maybe a thousand left out of a city of two million: Only one out of a hundred homes should be occupied — not bad odds. Only I come near walking in on a couple of shotguns myself. Then you got your scorpions to worry about… John's group?" The hoarse, gravelly laughter had a drunken quality the rest of Tak's behavior belied. "I like them. But I wouldn't want to stick around them too much either. I don't. But I give them a hand. And it's not a bad place to get your bearings from… for a day or two."

"No. I guess not…" But it was a mulling "no."

Tak nodded in mute agreement

This park is alive with darknesses, textures of silence. Tak's boot heels tattoo the way. I can envision a dotted line left after him. And someone might pick the night up by its edge, tear it along the perforations, crumple it, and toss it away.

Only two out of forty-some park lights (he'd started counting) were working. The night's overcast masked all hint of dawn. At the next working light, within sight of the lion-flanked entrance, Tak took his hands out of his pockets. Two pinheads of light pricked the darkness somewhere above his sandy upper lip. "If you want — you can come back to my place…?"

5

"…Okay."

Tak let out a breath—"Good—" and turned. His face went completely black. "This way."

He followed the zipper jingles with a staggering lope. Boughs, black over the path, suddenly pulled from a sky gone grey inside a V of receding rooftops.

As they paused by the lions, looking down a wide street, Tak rubbed himself inside his jacket. "Guess we're about to get into morning."

"Which way does the sun come up?"

Loufer chuckled. "I know you won't believe this—" they walked again—"but when I first got here, I could have sworn the light always started over there." As they stepped from the curb, he nodded to the left. "But like you can see, today it's getting light—" he gestured in front of them—"there."

"Because the season's changing?"

"I don't think it's changed that much. But maybe." Tak lowered his head and smiled. "Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention."

"Which way is east?"

"That's where it's getting light." Tak nodded ahead. "But what do you do if it gets light in a different place tomorrow?"

"Come on. You could tell by the stars."

"You saw how the sky was. It's been like that or worse every night. And day. I haven't seen stars since I've been here — moons or suns either."

"Yeah, but—"

"I've thought, maybe: It's not the season that changes. It's us. The whole city shifts, turns, rearranges itself. All the time. And rearranges us…" He laughed. "Hey, I'm pulling your leg, Kid. Come on." Tak rubbed his stomach again. "You take it all too seriously." Stepping up the curb, Tak pushed his hands into his leather pockets. "But I'm damned if I wouldn't have sworn morning used to start over there." Again he nodded, with pursed lips. "All that means is I wasn't paying attention, doesn't it?" At the next corner he asked: "What were you in a mental hospital for?"

"Depression. But it was a long time ago."

"Yeah?"

"I was hearing voices; afraid to go out; I couldn't remember things; some hallucinations — the whole bit. It was right after I finished my first year of college. When I was nineteen. I used to drink a lot, too."

"What did the voices say?"

He shrugged. "Nothing. Singing… a lot, but in some other language. And calling to me. It wasn't like you'd hear a real voice—"

"It was inside your head?"

"Sometimes. When it was singing. But there'd be a real sound, like a car starting, or maybe somebody would close a door in another room: and you'd think somebody had called your name at the same time. Only they hadn't. Then, sometimes you'd think it was just in your mind when somebody had; and not answer. When you'd find out, you'd feel all uncomfortable."

"I bet you would."

"Actually, I felt uncomfortable about all the time… But, really, that was years back."

"What did the voices call you — when they called?"

At the middle of the next block, Tak said:

"Just thought it might work. If I snuck up on it."

"Sorry." The clumsiness and sincerity of Tak's amateur therapy made him chuckle. "Not that way."

"Got any idea why it happened? I mean why you got — depressed, and went into the hospital in the first place?"

"Sure. When I got out of high school, upstate, I had to work for a year before I could go into college. My parents didn't have any money. My mother was a full Cherokee… though it would have been worth my life to tell those kids back in the park, the way everybody goes on about Indians today. She died when I was about fourteen. I'd applied to Columbia, in New York City. I had to have a special interview because even though my marks in high school were good, they weren't great. I'd come down to the city and gotten a job in an art supply house — that impressed hell out of them at the interview. So they dug up this special scholarship. At the end of the first term I had all B's and one D — in linguistics. By the end of the second term, though, I didn't know what was going to happen the next year. I mean about money. I couldn't do anything at Columbia except go to school. They've got all sorts of extracurricular stuff, and it costs. If that D had been an A, I might have gotten another scholarship. But it wasn't. And like I said, I really used to drink. You wouldn't believe a nineteen-year-old could drink like that. Much less drink and get anything done. Just before finals I had a breakdown. I wouldn't go outside. I was scared to see people. I nearly killed myself a couple of times. I don't mean suicide. Just with stupid things. Like climbing out on the window ledge when I was really drunk. And once I knocked a radio into a sink full of dishwater. Like that." He took a breath. "It was a long time ago. None of that stuff bothers me, really, any more."

"You Catholic?"

"Naw. Dad was a little ballsy, blue-eyed Georgia Methodist—" that memory's vividness surprised him too— "when he was anything. We never lived down south, though. He was in the Air Force most of the time when I was a kid. Then he flew private planes for about a year. After that he didn't do much of anything. But that was after mom died…"

"Funny." Tak shook his head in self-reproach; "The way you just assume all the small, dark-complected brothers are Catholic. Brought up a Lutheran, myself. What'd you do after the hospital?"

"Worked upstate for a while. DVR — Division of Vocational Rehabilitation — was going to help me get back in school, soon as I got out of Hillside. But I didn't want to. Took a joyride with a friend once that ended up with me spending most of a year cutting trees in Oregon. In Oakland I worked as a grip in a theater. Wasn't I telling you about… No, that was the girl in the park. I traveled a lot; worked on boats. I tried school a couple more times, just on my own — once, in Kansas, for a year, where I had a job as a super for a student building. Then again in Delaware."

"How far on did you get?"

"Did fine the first term, each place. Fucked up the second. I didn't have another breakdown or anything. I didn't even drink. I just fucked up. I don't fuck up on jobs, though. Just school. I work. I travel. I read a lot. Then I travel some more: Japan. Down to Australia— though that didn't come out too well. Bumming boats down around Mexico and Central America." He laughed. "So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time."

"You're here, aren't you?" Tak's Germanic face (with its oddly Negroid nose) mocked gently. "And you don't know who you are."

"Yeah, but that's just 'cause I can't remember my—"

"Home again, home again." Tak turned into a doorway and mounted the wooden steps; he looked back just before he reached the top one. "Come on."

There was no lamp post on either corner.

At the end of the block, a car had overturned in a splatter of glass. Nearer, two trucks sat on wheelless hubs — a Ford pickup and a GM cab — windshields and windows smashed. Across the street, above the loading porch, the butcher hooks swung gently on their awning tracks.

"Are we going in the way you came out…?"

The smoke around the building tops was luminous with dawn.

"Don't worry," Tak grinned. "You'll get used to it."

"I remembered you being on the other side of the…" He looked across, again, at the three-foot concrete platform that stretched beneath the awning along the building opposite.

"Come on." Tak took another step. "Oh— One thing. You'll have to park your weapon at the door." He pointed vaguely at the orchid. "Don't take offense. It's just a house rule."

"Oh, sure. Yeah." He followed Tak up the steps. "Here, just a second."

"Put it behind there." Tak indicated two thick asbestos-covered pipes inside the doorway. "It'll be there when you come back."

He unsnapped the wrist band, slipped his fingers from the harness, bent to lay the contraption on the floor behind the pipes.

Tak, already at the head of a dim stairwell, started down.

He stood up and hurried after.

"Fifteen steps." Tak was already invisible below him. "It's pretty dark so you better count."

There was no bannister so he kept one hand on the wall. His wrist prickled where the orchid's collar had been. Hairs, drying now, palled, tickling, from his skin. Every other step his bare foot hit the stair edge, heel on gritty marble, ball and toes hanging. Tak's boots thudded below… Thirteen… fourteen… The last step still surprised him.

"Back this way."

He followed through the dark. The cement under his bare foot was very warm.

The steps ahead changed timbre. "Steps up now…"

He slowed.

"…don't get lost."

This time he found a rail.

He could anticipate landings from the variations in Loufer's gait. After the third flight, faint lines near head height indicated doors.

Rhythm is the only thing secure. In this darkness, rising, I recall the Pacific stars. This ritual ascendance goes on in a city that has erased them and blurred its sun out altogether. Iron Wolf has something. I want it without the bother of definitions. The dangerous illumination, the light in the exploding eye, is not for this other city.

"Last flight—"

They had come up nine landings.

"— and here we are."

A metal door grated in its frame.

As Tak stepped before him onto the tarred roof, he turned his head away from the cloud-colored dawn. After darkness, it was still too bright. Face scrunched against the light, he stopped on the sill, one hand on the jamb, the other holding back the ribbed and riveted door.

Smoke lay waist-high on the air.

He relaxed his face, blinking a lot.

Beyond the brick balustrade, roofs and roofs checkered into the mist. The gap, there, must have been the park. Beyond it was a hill, scaly with housing. "Jesus." He squinted in the other direction. "I didn't realize this place was so far from the bridge. I'd just come off it when you called to me down in the street."

Tak chuckled. "No, you'd wandered pretty far."

"I can just get a glimpse—" he stood on tiptoe— "of the river." And lowered himself. "I thought it was just two, three blocks away."

Tak's chuckle became a full laugh. "Hey, how'd you lose one sandal?"

"Huh?" He looked down. "Oh… I was being chased. By dogs." That sounded funny, too; so he laughed. "Yeah, I really was." He picked up his foot, rested it above his knee to examine the caked and calloused sole. The horny edge was cracked both sides. His ankle, knob and hollow, was grit-grey. Heel, ball, instep, and each dusty toe were gun-barrel black. He wiggled his toes: grit ground. "I guess it was—" He looked up frowning—"maybe a couple of days ago—" and put his foot down. "It was about three o'clock. In the morning. It was raining. No cars. So I took a nap on somebody's porch. About five, when it was getting light, I went back out on the road to hitch. But it was still raining. So I figured, hell, I'd go back and catch another hour or two, 'cause there weren't any cars. Only when I got back, there was this damn dog, who'd been sleeping under the porch all the time I'd been snoozing topside. He was awake now. And he started barking. Then he chased my ass down to the road. I ran. He ran. My sandal broke and went into a ditch somewhere — I just about didn't notice. While I was running, this old blue car pulled up — big, old lady driving, with her skinny husband, and the back seat full of children. I jumped in out of the rain, and we drove right across the border, into Louisiana! They were all off to spend the day with some other kid of hers who was at some army base." He stepped from the sill. "Bought me a good breakfast, too." The door creaked closed behind him. "But I guess that's when I first noticed I couldn't remember my name. She asked me for it and I couldn't tell her… But I don't think I've known it for a long, long time." And he was almost used to the light. "I mean, you don't go around thinking about yourself by your own name, do you? Nobody does — unless somebody calls to you by it, or asks you what it is. I haven't been around people who know me for… for a while now. It's just something I haven't thought of for a long time, and somehow it's… I guess just slipped my mind." He looked at the tops of his feet again, both filthy, one crossed with straps, one bare. "It doesn't bother me. Missing a sandal, I mean. I go barefoot a lot of the time."

"Like a hippie?"

He shrugged. "Yeah, when I'm in a hippie-type town." Again he looked around the misty horizon. "You sleep up here?"

"Come on." Tak turned. A breeze swung one jacket flap from his belly, pressed the other against him, neck to hip. "That's my house."

It had probably been built as a maintenance shack, put on the roof for tool storage. Bamboo curtains backed recently puttied panes. The door — tar paper had ripped in one place from greyed pine — was ajar.

They walked around a skylight. Tak hit the door with his hand-heel. (Like he expected to surprise somebody…?) The door swung in. Tak stepped inside: click. Lights went on. "Come on, make yourself at home."

He followed the engineer across the sill. "Hey, this is pretty nice!"

Tak stooped to peer into a crackling kerosene heater. "It's comfortable… now I know I didn't walk out of here and leave this thing going. Someday I'm gonna come back home and find this whole place just a pile of ashes — of course, in Bellona that could happen whether I left it on or not." He stood up, shaking his head. "It gets a little chilly here in the morning. I might as well leave it go."

"Christ, you've got a lot of books!"

Shelves covered the back wall, floor to ceiling, filled with paperbacks.

And: "Is that a short wave setup?"

"Part of one. The rest is in the next room. I could just sit in bed and CQ all over the place — if I could get anything but static. The interference around this place is something terrible. Then, it may be something's wrong with my set. I've got my own power supply: a couple of dozen acid batteries in the back. And a gasoline charger." He stepped to the desk in the corner, shrugged his jacket down the gold rug of his back, and hung it on a wall hook. (He still wore his cap.) Blurred in blond, his forearm bore a dragon, his bleep some naval insignia. On one shoulder, a swastika had been tattooed, then, not very efficiently, removed. "Have a seat." Tak pulled a swivel chair from the desk, turned it around, and sat. Knees wide, he slid his hand under his belt to arrange himself where his genitals bagged the denim. "Take the bed… there."

An incongruous fur throw lay on the board floor. An India print draped down over what he thought was a daybed. But when he sat on it, he realized it was just a very thin mattress on the top of some built-out cabinet: or at any rate, just plank. Still, the place looked comfortable. "You're doing a little better than those kids in the park."

Tak grinned, took off his cap, and dropped it on the desk blotter. "I guess I am. But then, that's not too difficult." The military short hair jarred with his unshaven jaw.

The desk, except for the cap, was bare.

Shelves above it held binoculars, slide rules, drafting compasses and pens, two pocket calculators, French curves and templates, colored pentels, several cut and polished geodes, a row of ornamental daggers on display stands, a pile of plastic parts boxes, a soldering gun…

"Hey…" Tak slapped one knee. "I'm gonna make some coffee. Got some canned ham, too. Real good ham. And bread." He stood up and went to a door, hung, like the windows, with tan splints. "You just relax. Take it easy. Take your clothes off and stretch out, if you want." By his boot, the bubbling heater picked out what still glowed in the scuffed leather. "I'll be back in a minute. Glad you like the place. I do too." He ducked through bamboo.

On one wall (he had only glanced till now) were three, yard-high, full color, photographic posters:

On one, some adolescent weightlifter, Germanic as Tak, wearing only boots and a denim jacket with no sleeves, leaned against a motorcycle, stubby hands flat against his naked legs.

On the second, a muscular black, in what could have been Tak's jacket, cap, and boots, stood against some indistinct purple background, legs wide, one fist before his bared thigh, one against his bare hip.

On the third, a dark youth — Mexican or Indian perhaps? — shirtless and shoeless, sat on a boulder under a stark, blue sky, his jeans pushed down to his knees.

Their bared genitals were huge.

The photographs had been taken from crotch level, too, to make them look even larger.

From the other room he heard pans clinking; a cabinet opened and closed.

By the head of the bed, on a table near a tensor lamp, books were piled irregularly:

A bunch on the Hell's Angels: Thompson, and Reynolds/McClure; four cheaply bound, two-dollar paperbacks: Angels on Wheels, and Weekend in Hell, a True Story of the Angels as Told by Millicent Brash—he read the first paragraph of ill-lined type, shook his head, and put it down. A book called Bike Bitch was apparently the sequel to (same cover/different author) Bike Bastard. Under that was The Poems of Rimbaud, with English at the bottom of the pages; then a paperback Selected Letters of Keats; next, Dickey's Deliverance; a green, hard-cover book of logs and trigonometric functions, place held by a white enamel, circular slide rule. There was sundry science fiction by Russ (something called The Female Man), Zelazny, and Disch. The last book he picked up had a purple and gold reproduction of a Leonor Fini for cover: Evil Companions. He opened it in the middle, read from the top of the left-hand page to the bottom of the right, closed it, frowning, went to the bamboo, and pushed it aside.

"You ever see one of these in somebody's house before?" Tak thumped the grey cabinet with his elbow. "It's a Micro Wave oven. They're great. You can roast a whole rib roast in ten, twenty minutes. They cost about six hundred dollars. At least that's what the price tag said in the store I lifted this one from. Only I don't like to run it because it uses up so much power. Someday, though, I'm gonna give a dinner party for thirty or forty people. Hold it outside on the roof. For all my friends in the city. I'll knock their eye out with what this thing can do." He turned to the counter.

On two burners of a three-burner camp stove, pale flames from canned heat licked an enameled coffeepot and an iron skillet. Along the back of the counter were several gallons of wine, white and red, and a dozen bottles of whiskeys, liqueurs, and brandies. "This is sort of my work room." Back muscles shifted under hairy flesh. "Probably spend more time here than in the front." More bookshelves here; more shortwave components; a work bench slagged with solder, strewn with spaghetti wire, bits of pegboard in which dozens of small, colorful transistors, resistors, and capacitors had been stuck; several dissembled chassis. A single easy-chair, with stuffing pushing between worn threads across the arms, made the room cluttered. Above the tin sink, the bamboo had been pushed back from the glass. (The putty can stood open on the sill, a kitchen knife stuck in it; the panes were spotless — save a few puttied fingerprints.) Outside, two pairs of jeans and a lot of socks hung from a line. "You looking for the john, Kid? I just use the roof. There's a coffee can upside down outside with a roll of toilet paper under it. There's no drain. Everything goes right over the edge."

"Naw, that's okay." He stepped through. Bamboo clicked and clicked behind him. "I guess here — in a place like Bellona — you can have about anything you want. I mean, you just walk in and take it out of stores and things."

"Only—" Tak put a handful of something in the skillet—"I don't want very much." Steam, hissing, made the room smell, and sound, very good. "Figured while I was at it I'd make us up a full breakfast. I'm starved."

"Yeah…" At the pungence of thyme and fennel, the space beneath his tongue flooded. "I guess if you liked you could live here about as well as you wanted." And rosemary…

On a cutting board by the stove, a loaf of mahogany-colored bread sat among scattered crumbs. "Fresh food is hard as hell to come by. Meat especially. But there's canned stuff in the city enough to last…" Tak frowned back over his hirsute shoulder. "Truth is, I don't know how long it'll last. I lucked out on a couple of pretty well-stocked places nobody else seems to have found yet. You'll discover, by and large, people are not very practical around here — if they were, I guess they wouldn't be here. But when somebody else eventually does stumble on one of my classified, top-secret, hush-hush food sources, in a place like Bellona you can't very well say, 'Go away or I'll call the cops.' There're aren't any cops to call. Have a piece of bread. Another thing I lucked out on: Ran into this woman who bakes loaves and loaves of the stuff every week; just gives it away to anyone who comes by. For some reason I do not quite understand, she won't use any sugar or salt, so, good as it looks, it takes a bit of getting used to. But it's filling. She lives in the Lower Cumberland Park area — talk about nuts. She's very nice and I'm glad I know her, but she visits all sorts of people, many of whom are simply not in." Tak finished cutting a slice, turned and held it out. "Margarine's over there; haven't found any frozen butter for a while. Good plum preserves, though. Homemade in somebody's cellar last fall."

He took the bread, picked up a kitchen knife, and removed the top from a plastic butter dish.

"That should hold you till breakfast, which—" Tak swirled a spatula in the skillet—"is three minutes off."

Under the jelly and the margarine, bread crumbled on his tongue, oddly flat. Still, it goaded his appetite.

Chewing, he looked through the newspapers piled to one side of the cluttered workbench.

The headline for that one:

"Calkins has a thing for Christmas?"

"That was last week," Tak said. "A couple back, every other issue was 1984."

The next half dozen papers went from July 14, 2022, to July 7, 1837 (Headline: ONLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS TILL THE DEATH OF HARLOW!)

"It's a real event when he brings out two papers with consecutive dates. They're never two in a row with the same year. But sometimes he slips up and Tuesday actually follows Wednesday — or do I have that backward? Well, I'm just surprised people don't take bets; trying to pick the next date for the Times could be the Bellona equivalent to playing the numbers. Oh, he's got real news in there — articles on evacuation problems, scorpions terrorizing remaining citizens, what's happening in the poorer communities, pleas for outside help — even an occasional personality article on newcomers." Tak gave him a knowing nod. "You read it; but it's the only paper around to read. I read it up here. John, Wally, Mildred, Jommy — they read it down in the park. Still, it makes me incredibly hungry to see a real paper, you know? Just to find out how the rest of the world is getting on without us."

Did Tak's voice veer, once more, toward that unsettling tone? Only by suggestion, he realized, and realized too: The longer he stayed, the less of that tone he would hear. Whatever request for complicity, in whatever labyrinth of despair, it made of the listener, whatever demand for relief from situations which were by definition un-relievable, these requests, these demands could only be made of the very new to such labyrinths, such situations. And time, even as he munched flat bread, was erasing that status. "The rest of the country, it's fine."

Tak turned, with the knife.

He jumped, even though he knew Fire Wolf was only in the midst of some domestic slicing. "Yesterday, I think it was: I got a ride with a guy who had an L.A. paper in his car. Nothing's wrong on the West Coast. Then later, two women picked me up; and they had a Philadelphia paper. The Eastern Seaboard's all okay." He looked down at the papers on the bench again, watched his thick, nail-gnawed fingers grub there, leaving crumbs, margarine tracks, jelly stains. "This is the only place where…" He shrugged, wondering if Tak took his news as good, bad; or even believed it. "…I guess."

"Why don't you pour some coffee?" Tak said.

"Okay." He stepped around the armchair, lifted the enameled pot from the burner; the handle stung his knuckle as he poured.

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.

"We'll eat inside." Above the plates of eggs, ham, and bread, two amber ponies rose on the tray between Tak's gripping thumbs. As Tak turned to the bamboo, the brandies ran with light.

Inside, sitting on the bed again, he lay his plate on his clamped knees till it burned. Lifting it by one edge, then the other, he speared ham chunks from the gravy, or pushed them on his fork with his thumb.

"It's amazing what Worcestershire will do for dehydrated eggs," Tak said through a mouthful of food, "Thank God."

He bit a tiny die of garlic; in his stinging mouth the scrambled flavors bloomed; the confusion of tastes recalled many good things, but gave no basic flavor (his plate was half clean already) to which he could fix his tongue.

"Since this is supper as well as breakfast—" seated at the desk, Tak poured himself another glass—"I guess brandy is all right."

He nodded, the amber bulb lost in his outsized fingers. "It's really good." He looked back at his plate and wished there was a vegetable; even some lettuce.

"You have any plans where you'll go?" Tak finished his second pony, poured another, and extended the bottle.

He shook his head to the drink and shrugged at the question.

"You can catch some sleep here."

Idly, he thought: Artichokes. Then he looked at the posters. "You're really into the S and M thing, huh?" He hoped the food in his mouth would muddle the comment.

"Mmm?" Tak's coffee chattered as he sipped. "It depends on who I'm with." He put his cup on the desk, opened the side drawer, reached in: "You ever seen one like this?"

It was an orchid.

The blades, twice as long as his, with greater curve, were brass. On the ornate band, brass leaves, shells, and claws gripped the bases of the damasked knives.

Tak placed the points around his left nipple, pressed, winced — let the weapon drop to his lap. "Not your thing, huh?" In the yellow hair, flushed points ringed his breast "It's a beautiful object." He smiled, shook his head, and put it back in the drawer.

"Can I put my brandy in my coffee?"

"You can do anything you like."

"Oh, yeah." He spilled the glass over the steaming black. "Uh… thanks." He raised the cup. Brandy fumed about his face. A deep breath made his tongue stagger in his throat. "It's a very nice breakfast." Squinting eyes observed his from beyond the cup's bottom.

He drank, set the cup on the floor, thumbed the last of the ham onto his fork; still chewing, he set the plate down by the cup.

"More brandy?"

"No, thanks."

"Come on." Tak poured himself a third glass. "Relax. Take your shirt off."

He had known what was coming since he'd accepted the invitation in the park. Another time, he would have had some feelings about it. But feelings were muted in him; things had drifted to this without his really considering. He tried to think of something to say, couldn't, so unbuttoned the three buttons, pulled the tails from his pants.

Tak raised his eyebrows at the optical chain. "Where'd you get that?"

"On my way here."

"Outside the city?"

"It says 'Made in Brazil'… I think."

Tak shook his head. "Bellona has become a city of strange—" he burlesqued the word with a drawl—"craftsmen. Ah, the notions that are engineered here! Orchids, light-shields, that chain you're wearing — our local folk art."

"I'm not going to take it off!" The conviction surprised him; its articulation astounded him.

Tak laughed. "I wasn't going to ask you to." He looked down at his chest, ran his forefinger, in the hair, from one pink dot to the next — still visible where he'd pressed the orchid prongs. "You've got some nerve thinking you were ever any crazier than anybody else."

His shirt lay beside him on the bed. He pulled his hands together into his lap, fingers and knuckles twisted around one another — scratched his dark, creased stomach with his thumb. "Look, about… being nuts." He felt self-righteous and shy, looked at the doubled fist of flesh, hair, horn and callous pressed into his groin; it suddenly seemed weighted with the bones in it. "You're not, and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think… you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see… until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts… Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense — stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety — is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself… in a way other people just can't." He pushed his shirt down to the foot of the bed, pushed his sandal free of his foot with his other toes. "You see?" He was far more conscious of the texture of the floorboards with the foot that had been bare.

"All right." Tak spoke gently and appeasingly. "Why don't you take the rest of your clothes off?"

"Look, I'm awfully dirty, man—" He raised his eye. "I probably stink like hell. If you don't want—"

"I know just what you stink like," Tak said. "Go on."

He took a breath, suddenly found it funny, lay back on the hard pallet, unhooked his belt, and closed his eyes.

He heard Tak grunt. One, then another boot, thumped the floor and fell over.

A moment later a warm hip pressed his. Palms and fingers pressed his stomach; the fingers spread. Tak slid his hands to the jeans' waist, tugged.

Heels and shoulders pressed on the hard pad, he raised his buttocks.

Tak slid the jeans down, and—"Jesus Christ, man! What's the matter with you — that stuff all over your dick!"

"What… huh?" He opened his eyes, propped his elbows under him, looked down at himself. "What do you…?" Then he grinned. "Nothing's the matter. What's the matter with you?"

"You got dandruff in your crotch?"

"That's not dandruff. I was with a woman. Just before I met you. Only I didn't get a chance to wash."

"Was she sick?"

"Naw. Didn't you ever fuck a woman?"

Tak had a strange expression. "I'll be honest: I can count the attempts on the fingers of one hand." He narrowed his already thin mouth.

"If my God-damn feet don't turn you off, that's sure not going to hurt you!" He reached to brush off his rough groin hair. "It's just like dried… come or something." The chain glittered across it. "It happens with some women, when they're very wet. It's nothing wrong." He stopped brushing, let himself back down on his elbows. "I bet it turns you on."

Tak shook his head, then laughed.

"Go on," he said.

Tak lowered his head, looked up once with bright blue eyes: "It turns you on, doesn't it?"

He reached down from the hairy shoulder, pressed: "Go on."

Thick arms joined under his waist. Once Tak, twice — full fist between their groins, ground his stubbed chin against his neck. He pushed Tak away; the chunky head rolled down his chest and belly. The heated ring of Tak's mouth fell down his cock; his cock engorged; the ring rose; and fell down again. Tak's forehead butted low on his stomach. He had to cross his ankles and strain, his mouth open, his eyes closed, the chain tightening on his chest. Think of her, it would be easy. (Tak's face pressed glass bits into his groin hair.) The insides of his lids were moon-silvered, run with cracks like branches. A memory of blowing leaves suddenly became hair moving from her face, eyes clamped, mouth taking tiny breaths. He gasped at the welling heat, and came. A moment later Tak raised his head, grunted, "Yeah…" and moiled his wet, sensitive genitals.

He clamped his teeth.

Tak elbowed up beside him, turned on his back.

His forehead pressed Tak's arm. From his left eye, Loufer's chest was a heaving meadow. (His right was closed against flesh.) "You want me to do anything?" He didn't feel like doing anything. He was tired.

Tak scooped up his head and pulled it against him.

Chest hair ran between his fingers.

"Bite my tit," Tak said. "The right one. Hard."

"Okay. Where is…? Oh." He gripped the knoblet in his teeth.

Tak pushed his hand to the outsized scrotum, squeezed his fingers to the full, wrinkled flesh. "Go on. Really hard."

Tak's fist fell and fell on his hand heel. It took a long time.

He ground Tak's nipple in his teeth, chin and nose rubbing in hair. He squeezed Tak's testicles a few times, tightening his grip as much as he could; Tak's rhythm quickened. And his own mouth was salty; he didn't want to see if it was blood.

Something hot splattered his hip and rolled down between them. He let go, with teeth and fingers, closed his eyes, and turned over. A heavy arm slid around his chest. Tak's chin knocked his shoulder a few times seeking a position on the thin pillow; he squeezed Tak's forearm, once, leaned sleepily, and comfortably, into the cradle of Tak's body.

And slept.

Now and again, he felt Tak turning and turning on the single bed. Once he awoke fully to a hand rubbing his shoulder; but slept again before the motion halted. At one point he was aware that Tak was not in the bed; at another, felt him climbing back in. Through it all, he had not moved, but lay facing the wall, lids closed, head on his forearm, one knee drawn up, one foot off the mattress bottom, surfacing and submerging in sleep.

Later, he woke with heat behind his groin. As he blinked, sexuality resolved into an urge to pee. He rolled to his back, pushed himself to his elbows.

Loufer, probably unable to get comfortable with two in so cramped a space, sat deep in the swivel chair, knees wide, head lolling forward on one matted shoulder, hands curled on snarled thighs.

Plate on the desk, books scattered on the table; plate and coffee cup on the floor, as well as Tak's boots, his own sandal, and both their pants — the room, before fairly neat, looked disordered.

When he sat up, his foot carried the print spread to the floor. There was no sheet on the mattress pad. Rings of stain overlapped on the ticking. He kicked the cloth loose, looked at the chain fastened on his ankle, spiraling his calf, groin, stomach, and thigh… He touched, in the hollow of his collarbone, the catch fastening the chain around his neck. He extended his arm, turned it back and forth: light jumped from glass to glass at the loops there, joined around his wrist. Then he hunched to examine one of the mirrors against his belly: it was silvered on both sides. Bent over, on the bed, he felt his bladder burn.

He stood up, went out the door.

Warm.

Grey.

Smoky gauzes tore on his body as he walked toward the balustrade. He dug two horny fingers at the inner corners of his eyes for sleep grains. The retaining wall hit him mid-thigh. Without looking down, he let his water go. It arched away, perfectly silent, while he wondered if there was any traffic…

From a building, a block away, astounding billows raised a lopsided tower.

Finished, he leaned across the splattered stone.

The alley was a torrent of grey in which he could see no bottom. Licking his coated teeth, he walked back to the shack, stepped sideways through the tar-papered door: "Hey, you can have your bed back; I'm gonna …"

In the shadowed room, Tak's chest rose evenly in a subvocal growl.

"I'm going to go now…" but spoke it more softly; he took a few steps toward the naked engineer, asleep in the chair.

Tak's long toes spread the boards. Between his knuckles, a stumpy cock with its circumsized helmet was nearly hidden in hair above a long, heavy scrotum rivaling those on the posters. The single belly crease, just a his navel, smoothed with each breath.

He looked for scab at the nipple; there was none.

"Hey, I'm gonna go…" The desk drawer was slightly open; inside, in shadow, brass glinted.

He leaned down to look at Tak's slack lips, the broad nostrils flaring each breath—

And his teeth jarred together. He stepped back, wanted to go forward, stepped back again: his heel hit a coffee cup — cold coffee spread around his foot. He still didn't look away.

In his lowered face, Tak's eyes were wide.

Without white or pupil, the balls were completely crimson.

Mouth still closed, he heard himself make a muffled roar.

His left flank glittered with gooseflesh.

He did look again, leaning forward violently, almost hitting Tak's knee.

Loufer continued his quiet breathing, scarlet-eyed.

He backed away, stepped on wet fur, tried to work his throat loose. Gooseflesh, at face, flank, and buttocks, crawled across him.

He was in his pants when he got outside. He stopped to lean on the wall while he fumbled his sandal strap closed. As he sidestepped the skylight, he punched one arm down one woolen sleeve, pulled back the metal door and went into the dark well, working his other fist down the other.

With darkness in his eyes, the red memory was worse than the discovery.

On the third landing, he slipped, and fell, clutching the rail, the whole next flight. And still did not slow. He made it through the corridors at the bottom (warm concrete under his bare foot) on kinesthetic memory. He tore up the bannisterless stair, slapping at the wall, till he saw the door ahead, charged forward; he came out under the awning, running, and almost impaled himself on the dangling hooks.

Averting his face, he swung his arm against them — two clashed, trundling away on their rails. At the same time, his bare foot went off the porch's concrete edge.

For one bright instant, falling, he thought he was going to do a belly-whop on the pavement, three feet down. Somehow, he landed in a crouch, scraping one hand and both knees (the other hand waving out for balance) before he pushed up, to stagger from the curb.

Gasping, he turned to look back up at the loading porch.

From their tracks, under the awning, the four- and six-foot butcher hooks swung.

Blocks away, a dog barked, barked, barked again.

Still gasping, he turned, and started walking toward the corner, sometimes with his sandaled foot on the curb, mostly with both in the gutter.

Nearly there, he stopped, raised his hand, stared at the steel blades that curved from the plain wrist band to cage his twitching fingers. He looked back at the loading porch, frowned; looked back at the orchid on his hand: he felt the frown, from inside; a twisting in his facial flesh he could not control.

He remembered snatching up his pants. And his shirt. And his sandal. He remembered going down the dark stair. He remembered coming up and out on the porch, hitting at the hooks, and falling—

But nowhere in the past moments did he recall reaching behind two asbestos-covered pipes, fitting his fingers through the harness, clamping the collar to his wrist—

He reviewed: pants, shirt, sandal, the dark stair — down, across, up. Light from the door; the racketing hooks; his stinging palm.

He looked at his free palm; scraped skin was streaked grey… He looked down the block. There were no vehicles anywhere on the street…

No. Go back.

Warm concrete under his foot. His sandal clacking. Slapping the wall; coming up. Seeing the doorway. Seeing the pipes…! They were on the left-hand side of the doorway. The blistered covering was bound with metal bands! On the thicker one, near the ceiling, hadn't there been some kind of valve? And had rushed past them, onto the concrete, nearly skewered himself; hit with his forearm — it was still sore. He was falling…

He was turning; missed the curb, staggered, shook his head, looked up.

The street sign on the corner lamppost said Broadway.

"…goes up into the city and…" Someone had said that. Tak?

But no…

…seeing the light. Ran out the door. The hooks…

The muscles in his face snarled on chin and cheekbones. Suddenly tears banked his eyes. He shook his head. Tears were on his cheek. He started walking again, sometimes looking at one hand, sometimes at the other. When he finally dropped his arms, blades hissed by one jean thigh—

"No…"

He said that out loud.

And kept walking.

Snatched his clothes from the floor, jammed his feet into his pants; stopped just outside the shack (leaning against the tar-paper wall) for his sandal. Around the skylight; one sleeve. Into the dark; the other. Running down steps — and he'd fallen once. Then the bottom flight; the warm corridor; coming up; slapping; he'd seen light before he'd reached the top, turned, and seen the day-bright doorway (the big pipe and the little pipe to one side), run forward, out on the porch, beat at the hooks; two trundled away as his bare foot went over. For one bright moment, he fell—

He looked at his hands, one free, one caged; he looked at the rubble around him; he walked; he looked at his hands.

A breath drained, roaring, between tight teeth. He took another.

As he wandered blurred block after blurred block, he heard the dog again, this time a howl, that twisted, rose, wavered, and ceased.