Dhalgren

Beginning in this tone, for us, is a little odd, but such news stands out, to your editor's mind, as the impressive occurrence in our eccentric history. Ernest Newboy, the most notable English-language poet to emerge from Oceana, was born in Auckland in 1916. Sent to school in England, at twenty-one (he tells us) he came back to New Zealand and Australia to teach for six years, then returned to Europe to work and travel.

Mr Newboy has been three times short-listed for the Nobel Prize, which, if he receives it, will make him one in a line of outstanding figures in the twin fields of diplomacy and letters which includes Asturias, St-John Perse, and Seferis. As a citizen of a comparatively neutral country, he has been visiting the United States at an invitation to sit on the United Nations Cultural Committee which has just adjourned.

Ernest Newboy is also the author of a handful of short stories and novellas, collected and published under the title Stones (Vintage Paperback, 387 pp., $2.95), including the often anthologized long story, The Monument, a disturbing and symbolic tale of the psychological and spiritual dissolution of a disaffected Australian intellectual who comes to live in a war-ravaged German town. Mr Newboy has told us that, though his popular reputation rests on that slim volume of incisive fiction (your editor's evaluation), he considers them essentially experiments of the three years following the close of the War when he passed through a period of disillusionment with his first literary commitment, poetry. If nothing else, the popularity of Stones and The Monument turned attention to the three volumes of poems published in the thirties and forties, brought together in Collected Poetry 1950 (available in Great Britain from Faber and Faber). To repeat something of a catch-phrase that has been echoed by various critics: While writers about him caught the despair of the period surrounding the War, Newboy, more than any other, fixed it in such light that one can lucidly see in it the genesis of so much of the current crisis. From his early twenties, through today, Newboy has produced occasional, literary, and philosophical essays to fill several volumes. They are characterized by a precise and courageous vision. In 1969 he published the book-length poem Pilgrimage, abstruse, surreal, often surprisingly humorous, and, for all its apparent irreverence, a profoundly religious work. After several more volumes of essays, in 1977 the comparatively brief collection of shorter poems written in the thirty-odd years since the War, Rictus, appeared.

A quiet, retiring, scholarly man, Newboy has traveled for most of his life through Europe, North Africa, and the East. His work is studded with images from the Maori and the many cultures he has been exposed to and explored, with his particular personal insight

Newboy arrived in Bellona yesterday morning and is indefinite about the length of his stay. His comment to us when asked about his visit was, after a reticent smile: "Well, a week ago I wasn't intending to come here at all. But I suppose I'm happy I did."

We are honored that a man with such achievement in English letters and a figure of such world admiration should.

"What are you doing?" she mumbled, turning from his side.

"Reading the paper." Grass creased his elbows. He had wiggled free of the blanket as far as his hips.

"Did it come out yet?" She raised her head in a haze of slept-in hair. "It isn't that late?"

"Yesterday's."

She dropped her head back. '"That's the trouble with sleeping out. You can't do it past five o'clock in the morning."

"I bet it's eight." He spread the wrinkled page bottom.

"What—" opened her eyes and squinted—"you reading about?"

"Newboy. That poet."

"Oh, yeah."

"I met him."

"You did?" She raised her head again, then twisted, tearing blankets from his leg. "When?"

"Up at Calkins'."

She pulled up beside him, hot shoulder on his. Under the headline, NEWBOY IN TOWN, was a picture of a thin white-haired man in a dark suit with a narrow tie, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, looking as though there were too much light in his face. "You saw him?"

"When I got beat up. He came out and helped me. From New Zealand; it sounded like he had some sort of accent."

"Told you Bellona was a small town." She looked at the picture. "Hey, how come you didn't get inside then?"

"Somebody else was with him who raised a stink. A spade. Fenster. He's the civil rights guy or something?"

She blinked at him. "You really are out meeting everybody."

"I wish I hadn't met Fenster." He snorted.

"I told you about Calkins' country weekends. Only he has them seven days a week."

"How does he get time to write for the paper?"

She shrugged. "But he does. Or gets somebody to do it for him." She sat up to paw the blankets. "Where did my shirt go?"

He liked her quivering breasts.

"It's under there." He looked back at the paper, but did not read. "I wonder if he's ever had George up there?"

"Maybe. He did that interview thing."

"Mmmm."

Lanya dropped back to the grass. "Hell. It isn't past five o'clock in the morning. You know damn well it isn't."

"Eight," he decided. "Feels like eight-thirty," and followed her glance up to the close smoke over the leaves. He looked down again, and she was smiling, reaching for his head, pulling him, rocking, by the ears, down: He laughed on her skin. "Come on! Let me go!"

She hissed, slow. "Oh, I can for a while," caught her breath when his head raised, then whispered, "Sleep…" and put her forearm over her face. He lost himself in the small bronze curls under her arm, and only loosened his eyes at faint barking.

He sat, puzzled. Barking pricked the distance. He blinked, and in the bright dark of his lids, oily motes exploded. Puzzlement became surprise, and he stood.

Blankets fell down his legs.

He stepped on the grass, naked in the mist.

Far away a dog romped and turned in the gap between hills. A woman followed.

Anticipatory wonder caught in the dizzy fatigue of morning and sudden standing.

The chain around his body had left red marks on the underside of his forearms and the front of his belly where he'd leaned.

He got on his pants.

Shirt open over tears of jewels, he walked down the slope. Once he looked back at Lanya. She had rolled over on her stomach, face in the grass.

He walked toward where the woman (the redhead, from the bar) followed behind Muriel.

He fastened one shirt button before she saw him. She turned on sensible walking shoes and said, "Ah, hello. Good morning."

Around her neck, the jewels were a cluttered column of light.

"Hi." He pulled his toes in in the grass, shy. "I saw your dog last night, at that bar."

"Oh yes. And I saw you. You look a little better this morning. Got yourself cleaned up. Slept in the park?"

"Yeah."

Where candlelight had made her seem a big-boned whore, smoke-light and a brown suit took all the meretricious from her rough, red hair and made her an elementary-school assistant principal.

"You walk your dog here?"

An assistant principal with a gaudy necklace.

"Every morning, bright and early… um, I'm going to the exit now."

"Oh," and then decided her tentativeness was invitation.

They walked, and Muriel ran up to sniff his hand, nip at it.

"Cut that out," she demanded. "Be a good dog."

Muriel barked once, then trotted ahead.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Ah!" she repeated. "I'm Madame Brown. Muriel went over and barked at you last night, didn't she? Well, she doesn't mean anything by it."

"Yeah. I guess not."

"About all you need now is a comb—" she frowned at him—"and a towel, and you will be back in shape." She released her shrill and astounding laughter. "There's a public john over there where I always see the people from the commune going to wash up." Then she looked at him seriously. "You're not with the commune there, are you?"

"No."

"Do you want a job?"

"Huh?"

"At least you're not a long-hair," she said. "Not very long, anyway. I asked you if you wanted a job."

"I wear sandals," he said, "when I put anything on my feet at all."

"That's all right. Oh, heavens, I don't care! I'm just thinking of the people you'd be working for."

"What kind of work is it?"

"Mainly cleaning up, or cleaning out I suppose. You are interested, aren't you? They'll pay five dollars an hour, and those aren't the sort of wages you can sneeze at in Bellona right through here."

"Sure I'm interested!" He swallowed in surprise. "Where is it?"

They approached twin lions. Madame Brown put her hands behind her back. Muriel brushed the hem of her skirt. The glut of chain and glass could catch no glitter in this light. "It's a family. Do you know where the Labry Apartments are?" To his shaking head: "I guess you haven't been here very long. This family, now, they're nice, decent people. And they've been very helpful to me. I used to have my office over there. You know there was a bit of confusion at the beginning, a bit of damage."

"I heard about some of it."

"A lot of vandalism. Now that it's settled down some, they asked me if I knew some young man who would help them. You mustn't take the long-hair thing seriously. Just clean yourself up a little — though it probably isn't going to be very clean work. The Richards are fine people. They've just had a lot of trouble. We all have. Mrs Richards gets easily upset by… anything strange. Mr Richards perhaps goes a little too far in trying to protect her. They've got three very nice children." He pushed his hair from his forehead. "I don't think it's going to grow too much in the next couple of days."

"There! You do understand!"

"It's a good job."

"Oh, it is. It certainly is." She stopped at the lions as though they marked some far more important boundary. "That's the Labry Apartments, up on 36th. It's the four hundred building. Apartment 17-E. Come up there any time in the afternoon."

"Today?"

"Certainly today. If you want the job."

"Sure." He felt relief from a pressure invisible till now through its ubiquitousness. He remembered the bread in the alley: its cellophane under the street lamp had flashed more than his or her fogged baubles. "You have an office there. What do you do?"

"I'm a psychologist."

"Oh," and didn't narrow his eyes. "I've been to psychologists. I know something about it, I mean."

"You do?" She touched the lion's cheek, not leaning. "Well, I think of myself as a psychologist on vacation right now." Mocking him a little: "I only give advice between the hours of ten and midnight, down at Teddy's. That's if you'll have a drink with me." But that mocking was friendly.

"Sure. If the job works out."

"Go on over when you get ready. Tell whoever's there that Mrs Brown — Madame Brown is the nickname they've given me at Teddy's, and since I saw you there I thought you might know me by it — that Mrs Brown told you to come up. Possibly I'll be there. But they'll put you to work."

"Five dollars an hour?"

"I'm afraid it isn't that easy to find trustworthy workers now that we've got ourselves into this thing." She tried to look straight up under her eyelids. "Oh no, people you can trust are getting rarer and rarer. And you!" Straight at him; "You're wondering how I can trust you? Well, I've seen you before. And you know, we really are at that point. I begin, really, to think it's too much. Really too much."

"Get your morning paper!"

"Muriel! Oh, now Muriel! Come back here!"

"Get your morning — Hey, there, dog. Quiet down. Down girl!"

"Muriel, come back here this instant!"

"Down! There. Hey, Madame Brown. Got your paper right here." Maroon bells flapping, Faust stalked across the street. Muriel danced widdershins about him.

"Hello, old girl."

"Good morning there," Madame Brown said, "It is about time for you to be along, Joaquim, isn't it?"

"Eleven-thirty, by the hands on the old church steeple." He cackled. "Hi there, hi there young fellow," handing one paper, handing another.

Madame Brown folded hers beneath her arm.

He let his dangle, while Faust howled to no one in particular, "Get your morning paper," and went on down the street. "Bye, there, Madame. Good morning. Get your paper!"

"Madame Brown?" he asked, distrusting his resolve.

She was looking after the newspaper man.

"What are those?"

She looked at him with perfect blankness.

"I've got them." He touched his chest. "And Joaiquim's got a little chain tight around his neck."

"I don't know." With one hand, she touched her own cheek, with the other, her own elbow: her sleeve was some cloth rough as burlap. "You know, I'm really not sure. I like them. I think they're pretty. I like having a lot of them."

"Where did you get them?" he asked, aware he broke the custom Faust had so carefully defined the day before. Hell, he was still uneasy with her dog, and with her transformation between smoke and candlelight.

"A little friend of mine gave them to me." She had the look, yes, of someone trying not to look offended.

He shifted, let his knees bend a little, his toes go, nodded.

"Before she left the city. She left me, left the city. And she gave me these. You see?"

He'd asked. And felt better for the violence done, moved his arms from the shoulder… his laughter surprised him, broke out and became huge.

Over it, he heard her sudden high howl. With her fist on her chest, she laughed too, "Oh, yes!" squinting. "She did! She really did. I was never so surprised in all my life! Oh, it was funny — I don't mean funny peculiar, though it certainly was. Everything was, back then. But it was funny ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa." She shook the sound about her. "She—" almost still—"brought them to me in the dark. People shouting around out in the halls, and none of the lights working. Just the flickering coming around the edge of the shades, and the terrible roaring outside… Oh, I was scared to death. And she brought them to me, in handfuls, wound them around my neck. And her eyes…" She laughed again, though that cut all smile from him. "It was strange. She wound them around my neck. And then she left. There." She looked down over the accordion of her neck, and picked through the loops. "I wear them all the time." The accordion opened. "What do they mean?" She blinked at him. "I don't know. People who wear them aren't too anxious to talk about them. I'm certainly not." She leaned a little closer. "You're not either. Well, I'll respect that in you. You do the same." Now she folded her hands. "But I'll tell you something: And, really, there's no reason behind it, I suppose, other than that it seems to work. But I trust people who have them just a little more than those who don't." She shrugged. "Probably very silly. But it's why I offered you that job."

"Oh."

"I suspect we share something."

"Something happened," he said, "when we got them. Like you said. That we don't like to talk about."

"Then again, it could be nothing more than that we happen to be wearing the same…" She rattled the longest strand.

"Yeah." He buttoned another button. "It could be."

"Well. I'll drop in on you at the Richards' later in the afternoon. You will be there?"

He nodded. "Four hundred, on 36th Street…"

"Apartment 17-E," she finished. "Very good. Muriel?"

The dog clicked back from the gutter.

"We'll be going now."

"Oh. Okay. And thanks."

"Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I'm sure." Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time diesel.

He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion bobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.

Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.

Her calves were smooth.

His heart, beating fast, slowed.

Her calves were unscarred.

He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.

Her calves had no scratch.

When he took his hand away, she made some in-slumber sound and movement. And didn't wake. He opened today's paper and put it on top of yesterday's. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline:

Would your editor ever like some pictures with this one! We, unfortunately, were asleep. But from what we can gather, shortly after midnight last night — so far twenty-six versions of the story have come in, with contradictions enough to oblige our registering an official editorial doubt — the fog and smoke blanketing Bellona these last months was torn by a wind at too great an altitude to feel at street level. Parts of the sky were cleared, and the full — or near full — moon was, allegedly, visible — as well as a crescent moon, only slightly smaller (or slightly larger?) than the first!

The excited versions from which we have culled our own report contain many discrepancies. Here are some: The full orb was the usual moon, the crescent was the intruder.

The crescent was the real moon, the full, the impostor… a young student says that, in the few minutes these downright Elizabethan portents were revealed, he made out markings on the full disk that prove it was definitely not our moon.

Two hours later, someone came into the office (the only person so far who claims to have caught any of this phenomenon through an admittedly low-power telescope) to assure us the full disk definitely was the moon, while the crescent was bogus.

In the six hours since the occurrence (as we write, into the dawn), explanations offered the Times have ranged from things so science-fiction-y we do not pretend to understand their arcane machinery, down to the all-purpose heat lightning and weather balloon, perennial explanation for the UFO.

I pass on, as typical, one comment from our own Professor Wellman, who was observing from the July gardens with several other guests: "One, we all agreed, was nearly full; the other was definitely crescent. I pointed out to the Colonel, Mrs Green, and Roxanne and Tobie, who were with me, that the crescent, which was lower in the sky, was convexed away from the bright area of the higher moon. Moons do not light themselves; their illumination comes from the sun. Even with two moons, the sun can only be in one direction from them both; no matter which phases they are in, if they are both visible in the same quarter of the sky, both should be light on the same side — which was not the case here."

To which your editor can only say that any "agreement," "certainty," or "definiteness" about these moons are cast into serious doubt — unless we are prepared to make even more preposterous speculations about the rest of the cosmos?

No.

We did not see it.

Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night's hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: things are — though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.

What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by all who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George!

The impetus to appelation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.

2

"What are you doing," she whispered through leaves, "now?"

Silent, he continued.

She stood, shedding blankets, came to touch his shoulder, looked down over it. "Is that a poem?"

He grunted, transposed two words, gnawed at his thumb cuticle, then wrote them back.

"Um…" she said, "do you mean making a hole through something, or telling the future?"

"Huh?" He tightened his crossed legs under the notebook. "Telling the future."

"A-u-g-u-r."

"Whoever wrote this notebook spells it different on another page." He flipped pages across his knees to a previous, right-hand entry:

"Oh… he did spell it right." Back on the page where he had been writing, he crossed and recrossed his own kakograph till the bar of ink suggested a word beneath half again as long.

"Have you been reading in there?" She kneeled beside him. "What do you think?"

"Hm?"

"I mean… the guy who wrote that was strange.

He looked at her. "I've just been using it to write my own things. It's the only paper I've got and he leaves one side of each page blank." His back slumped. "Yeah. He's strange," but could not understand her expression.

Before he could question it with one of his, she asked, "Can I read what you're doing?"

He said, "Okay," quickly to see what it would feel like.

"Are you sure it's all right?"

"Yeah. Go on. It's finished anyway."

He handed her the notebook: his heart got loud; his tongue dried stickily to the floor of his mouth. He contemplated his apprehension. Little fears at least, he thought, were amusing. This one was large enough to joggle the whole frame.

Clicking his pen point, he watched her read.

Blades of hair dangled forward about her face like orchid petals, till—"Stop that!" — they flew back.

They fell again.

He put the pen in his shut pocket, stood up, walked around, first down the slope, then up, occasionally glancing at her, kneeling naked in leaves and grass, feet sticking, wrinkled soles up, from under her buttocks. She would say it was silly, he decided, to show her independence. Or she would Oh and Ah and How wonderful it to death, convinced that would bring them closer. His hand was at the pen again — he clicked it without taking it from his pocket, realized what he was doing, stopped, swallowed, and walked some more. Lines on Her Reading Lines on Her he pondered as a future title, but gave up on what to put beneath it; that was too hard without the paper itself, its light red margin, its pale blue grill.

She read a long time.

He came back twice to look at the top of her head. And went away.

"It…"

He turned.

"…makes me feel… odd." Her expression was even stranger.

"What," he risked, "does that mean?" and lost: it sounded either pontifical or terrified.

"Come here…?"

"Yeah." Crouching beside her, his arm knocked hers; his hair brushed hers as he bent. "What…?"

Bending with him, she ran her finger beneath a line. "Here, where you have the words in reverse order from the way you have them up here — I think, if somebody had just described that to me, I wouldn't have found it very interesting. But actually reading it — all four times — it gave me chills. But I guess that's because it works so well with the substance. Thank you." She closed the notebook and handed it back. Then she said, "Well don't look so surprised. Really, I liked it. Let's see: I'm… delighted at its skill, and moved by its… well, substance. Which is surprising, because I didn't think I was going to be." She frowned. "Really, you… are staring something fierce, and it makes me nervous as hell." But she wouldn't look down.

"You just like it because you know me." That was also to see what it felt like.

"Possibly."

He held the notebook very tight, and felt numb.

"I guess—" she moved away a little—"somebody liking it or not doesn't really do you any good."

"Yeah. Only you're scared they won't."

"Well, I did." She started to say more, didn't. Was that a shrug? Finally, she looked from beneath the overhanging limbs. "Thank you."

"Yeah," he said almost with relief. Then, as though suddenly remembering: "Thank you!"

She looked back, confusion working through her face toward some other expression.

"Thank you," he repeated, inanely, palms pressing the notebook to his denim thighs, growing wet. "Thank you."

The other expression was understanding.

His hands worked across each other like crabs, crawled round himself to hug his shoulders. His knees came up (the notebook dropped between them) to bump his elbows. A sudden, welling of… was it pleasure? "I got a job!" His body tore apart; he flopped, spread-eagle, on his back. "Hey, I got a job!"

"Huh?"

"While you were asleep." Pleasure rushed outward into hands and feet. "That lady in the bar last night; she came by with her dog and gave me this job."

"Madame Brown? No kidding. What kind of job?" She rolled to her stomach beside him.

"For this family. Named Richards." He twisted, because the chain was gnawing his buttocks. Or was it the notebook's wire spiral? "Just cleaning out junk."

"Well there's certainly enough junk—" she reached down, tugged the book loose from beneath his hip—"around Bellona to clean out." She lay it above his head, propped her chin on her forearms. "A pearl," she mused. "Katherine Mansfield once described San Francisco, in a letter to Murray, as living on the inside of a pearl. Because of all the fog." Beyond the leaves, the sky was darkly luminous. "See." Her head fell to the side. "I'm literate too."

"I don't think—" he frowned—"I've ever heard of Katherine…?"

"Mansfield." Then she raised her head: "Was the reference in the thing you wrote, to that Mallarmé poem…" She frowned at the grass, started tapping her fingers. "Oh, what is it…!"

He watched her trying to retrieve a memory and wondered at the process.

"Le Cantique de Saint Jean! Was that on purpose?"

"I've read some Mallarmé…" He frowned. "But just in those Portuguese translations Editora Civilizaçáo put out… No, it wasn't on purpose I don't think…"

"Portuguese." She put her head back down. "To be sure." Then she said: "It is like a pearl. I mean here in Bellona. Even though it's all smoke, and not fog at all."

He said: "Five dollars an hour."

She said: "Hm?"

"That's what they're going to pay me. At the job."

"What do you want with five dollars an hour?" she asked, quite seriously.

Which seemed so silly, he decided not to insult her by answering.

"The Labry Apartments," he went on. "Four hundred, Thirty-Sixth Street, apartment seventeen-E. I'm supposed to go up there this afternoon." He turned to look at her. "When I come back, we could get together again… maybe at that bar?"

She watched him a moment. "You want to get together again, don't you." Then she smiled. "That's nice."

"I wonder if it's late enough to think about going over there?"

"Make love to me once more before you go."

He scrunched his face, stretched. "Naw. I made love to you the last two times." He let his body go, glanced at her. "You make love to me this time."

Her frown fell away before, laughing, she leaned on his chest.

He touched her face.

Then her frown came back. "You washedl" She looked surprised.

He cocked his head up at her. "Not very much. In the john down there, I splashed some water on my face and hands. Do you mind?"

"No. I wash, myself, quite thoroughly, twice — occasionally even three times a day. I was just surprised."

He walked his fingers across her upper lip, beside her nose, over her cheek — like trolls, he thought, watching them.

Her green eyes blinked.

"Well," he said, "it's not something I've ever been exactly famous for. So don't worry."

Just as if she had forgotten the taste of him and was curious to remember, she lowered her mouth to his. Their tongues blotted all sound but breath while, for the… fifth time? Fifth time, they made love.

The glass in the right-hand door was unbroken.

He opened the left: a web of shadows swept on a floor he first thought was gold-shot, blue marble. His bare foot told him it was plastic. It looked like stone…

The wall was covered with woven, orange straw — no, the heel of his palm said that was plastic too.

Thirty feet away, in the center of the lobby — lighting fixtures, he finally realized — a dozen grey globes hung, all different heights, like dinosaur eggs.

From what must have been a pool, filled with chipped, blue rock, a thin, ugly, iron sculpture jutted. Passing nearer, he realized it wasn't a sculpture at all, but a young, dead tree.

He hunched his shoulders, hurried by.

The "straw"-covered partitioning wall beside him probably hid mailboxes. Curious, he stepped around it.

Metal doors twisted and gaped — like three rows, suddenly swung vertical (the thought struck with unsettling immediacy), of ravaged graves. Locks dangled by a screw, or were missing completely. He passed along them, stopping to look at one or another defaced nameplate, bearing the remains of Smith, Franklin, Howard…

On the top row, three from the end, a single box had either been repaired, or never prised: Richards: 17-E, white letters announced from the small, black window. Behind the grill slanted the red, white and blue edging of an airmail envelope.

He came out from the other side of the wall, hurried across the lobby.

One elevator door was half-open on an empty shaft, from which drifted hissing wind. The door was coated to look like wood, but a dent at knee level showed it was black metal. While he squatted, fingering the edge of the depression, something clicked: a second elevator door beside him rolled open.

He stood up, stepped back.

There were no lights in the other car.

Then the door on the empty shaft, as if in sympathy, also finished opening.

Holding his breath and his notebook tight, he stepped into the car.

"17" lit his fingertip orange. The door closed. The number was the only light. He rose. He wasn't exactly afraid; all emotion was in super solution. But anything, he understood over his shallow breath, might set it in fantastic shapes.

"17" went out: the door opened on dimness.

At one end of the beige hall, an apartment door stood wide; grey light smoked through. At the other, in the ceiling-globe, at least one bulb worked.

He passed 17-B, 17-C, 17-D, nearing the globe.

After the third ring, (and practically a minute between) he decided to leave: And walk down the steps, because the pitch dark elevator was too spooky.

"Hello…? Who is it…?"

"Madame — Mrs Brown sent me."

"Oh." Things rattled. The door rasped on two inches of chain. A woman perhaps just shy of fifty, with shadowed hair and pale eyes, looked at him above the links. "You're the young man she said she'd send to help?"

"Yeah."

"Oh," she repeated. "Oh," closed the door and opened it again without the chain. "Oh."

He stepped in on green carpet. She stepped back to look at him; he began to feel uncomfortable, and dirty, and nervous.

"Edna told you what we wanted?"

"Cleaning," he said. "You've got some junk to move?"

"And moving—"

Two thuds, and two men's loud laughing was joined by a woman's.

They both looked down at the Acrolan.

"— to an apartment higher up in the building," she said. "The floors, the walls of these buildings are so thin.

Everything goes through. Everything." When she looked up, he thought: Why is she so uncomfortable… am I making her uncomfortable? She said, "We want you to help clear out the place upstairs. It's on the nineteenth floor, at the other end of the hall. It has a balcony. We thought that would be nice. We don't have a balcony in this apartment."

"Hey, Momma, is—"

He recognized her when she was half into the hall.

"Yes, June?"

"Oh…" which wasn't recognition, though she held the wall and blinked at him. Her yellow hair swung to hit her shoulders. She frowned by the green wall, just paler than the carpet. "Is Bobby here?"

"I sent him down for some bread."

"Oh," again, and into her room.

"I'm," pausing till he looked back at her, "Mrs Richards. My husband, Arthur, will be here very soon now. But come in, and I'll explain just what we want done."

The living room was all picture windows. Beyond half-raised Venetian blinds, a hill of patchy grass rolled between several brick high-rises.

"Why don't you sit—" her finger fell from her chin to point—"there."

"I didn't get a chance to wash too well, this morning, and I'm pretty messy," then realized that was just the reason she'd picked that particular chair. "No thanks."

"You're living…?"

"In the park."

"Sit down," she said. "Please. Please sit down."

He sat, and tried not to pull his bare foot behind his sandal.

She balanced at the edge of the L-shaped couch. "19-A where we want to move is, well frankly, a mess. The apartment itself is in good condition, the walls, the windows — so many windows got broken. We wrote to Management. But I wouldn't be surprised if they've lost the letter. Everything's so inefficient. So many people have left."

A rattling, with thumps, moved outside in the hall: Then, someone punched the door!

While he tried to fix his surprise, tattered whispers outside raveled with laughter.

Mrs Richards sat straight, eyes closed, small knuckles against her stomach, her other hand mashing the couch. The loose flesh between the ligaments over her collar pulsed either with slow heart beats or quick breathing.

"Ma'am…?"

She swallowed, stood up.

They punched again: he could see the chain shake.

"Go away!" Her hands were claws now. "Go away! I said go away!"

Footsteps — three or four pair, one, high heels — chattered to echo.

"Mother…?" June rushed in.

Mrs Richards opened her eyes, her mouth, and took a breath. "They've done that—" turning to him—"twice today. Twice. They only did it once yesterday."

June kept raising her knuckle to her mouth. Behind her the wall was covered with rough green paper, shelves of plants in brass pots, unwaterably high.

"We're going to move into another apartment." Mrs Richards took another breath and sat. "We wrote to Management. We haven't got an answer, but we're going to anyway."

He put his notebook on the table beside the chair and looked at the door. "Who are they?"

"I don't know. I don't know; I don't care. But they're about—" she paused to pull herself together—"about to drive me mad. I think they're… children. They've gotten into the apartment downstairs. So many people have left. We're going to move upstairs."

June kept looking over her shoulder. Her mother said: "It must be very difficult for you, living in the park."

He nodded.

"You've known Mrs Brown a while? It's nice of her to send somebody to help. She goes out, meets people. Myself, I just don't feel safe walking around the city."

"Mother hardly ever goes out," June said, very fast, yet still with the hesitancy he remembered from last night.

"It isn't safe, and I don't see any reason for a woman to take that sort of chance. Perhaps if I were someone else I wouldn't feel that way." She smiled. Her hair was salted brown, recently and simply done. "How long can you work?"

"As long as you want, I guess."

"I mean how many hours? Today?"

"The rest of the day, if you want. It's pretty late now. But I'll come earlier tomorrow."

"I'm talking about the light."

"Light?"

"The lights aren't working in most of the apartments."

"Oh, yeah. Well, I'll work till it gets dark. What time is it now?"

"The clocks." Mrs Richards turned up her hands. "The clocks have stopped."

"Your electricity's out?"

"All except one outlet in the kitchen. For the refrigerator. And that goes off too sometimes."

"In the hall, there's a light on. And the elevator's working. You could run a cheater in."

Mrs Richards looked puzzled.

"An extension cord. From the hall light, into your apartment. That would give you some electricity."

"Oh." Lines deepened in her forehead. "But then we'd lose the hall light, wouldn't we? We have to have some light in the hall. That would be just too—"

"You get a double socket. You put a bulb in one and run a cord from the other, under the door."

"From the hall?"

"Yeah. That's what I was talking about."

"Oh." She shook her head. "But the hall lights aren't on our utilities bill. Management wouldn't be very happy about that. They're strict here. You see, the hall lights, they're on another—" Her hands fluttered—"meter. I don't think we could do that. If someone saw…" She laughed. "Oh no, this isn't that kind of place."

"Oh," he said. "Well, you're moving. So I guess you don't have to. The apartment you're going to has electricity?"

"One of the things we have to find out. I don't know yet." Her hands went back together in her lap. "Oh, I hope it does!"

"I'll work till it gets dark, Mrs Richards."

"Very good. Oh, yes, that'll be fine. At least you'll be able to get started today."

"Maybe you better ask your husband about the extension cord. I could do it for you. I used to be a super."

"Did you?"

"Yeah. And I could do it, no trouble."

"I will…" She pinched at her skirt, noticed, then smoothed it. "But I don't think Management would go along with that. Oh no, I don't think so at all."

The door bell rang twice.

"That's Bobby!" from June.

"Ask who it is!"

"Who is it?"

Muffled: "Me."

The chain rattled loose.

"Okay, I got your—"

June interrupted him: "You know they came back and did it again! You didn't see anybody, in the halls, did you?"

"No…?" Bobby's questioning was toward the living room. "Who's he?"

Bobby (fourteen?) was holding a loaf of bread too tightly. Around his left wrist, in a bright bracelet, were half a dozen loops of the optical chain.

"Come in, Bobby. This is a young man Edna Brown sent over."

"Gee." Bobby stepped into the living room. Blond as his sister, where her features suggested shyness, his sharper nose, his fuller mouth hinted belligerence. Under his arm was a newspaper. "Are you just living out in the street, huh?"

He nodded.

"You want to use the bathroom or wash or something?"

"Bobby!" from June.

"Maybe," he said.

Mrs Richards laughed. "Isn't it rather difficult for you, and dangerous?"

"You… have to keep your eyes open." That sounded inane enough.

"We'll go upstairs and look around."

"I wanna stay and read the—"

"We'll go together, Bobby. All of us."

"Oh, Bobby," June said, "come on!"

Bobby stalked through the living room, threw the paper at the coffee table, said, "Okay," and went into the kitchen. "I have to put the bread away first."

"Well, put it away," Mrs Richards said. "Then we'll go."

"I could only find half a loaf," Bobby called.

"Did you ask for a whole one?" Mrs Richards called. "I'm sure if you asked them politely for a whole loaf, they would have tried to find one for—"

"There wasn't anybody in the store."

"Oh, Bobby—"

"I left the money."

"But you should have waited for somebody to come back. Suppose someone had seen you going out. They wouldn't have known you'd—"

"I did wait. Why do you think I was gone so long. Hey, this has got mold in it."

"Oh, nooo," Mrs Richards cried.

"Not a lot," from the kitchen. "Just a little spot on one corner."

"Does it go all the way through?"

"It's on the second slice. And the third—"

"Oh stop tearing in it!" Mrs Richards exclaimed, punched the cushion, stood, and followed her son into the kitchen. "Let me see."

Perhaps it was the discomforting lucidity centered in the recapitulation: he said to June: "Last night, did you ever find—?"

Cellophane rattled from the kitchen.

By the door frame, June's eyes widened in recognition — finally. Her forefinger brushed her lips awkwardly for silence, brushed, and brushed again, till it wiped all meaning from the gesture.

She blinked.

The cellophane rattled.

Bobby came out, sat in front of the coffee table, and pulled the paper onto his lap. When he saw his sister, he cocked his head, frowning, then looked back at the paper, while June's hand worked down the front of her sweater to her lap.

"It's through," announced Mrs Richards. "All the way through. Well, it isn't very large. Beggars can't be choosers." She came into the living room. "We can cut it out, and all have sandwiches with little rings in them. We are all beggars till this thing gets straightened out, you know. Are you reading that again?"

Mrs Richards put a fist against her hip.

Bobby did not look up.

"What is it talking about today?" in a gentler tone. The fist dropped.

Bobby read on.

He said, "That whole business last night, with the moons."

"What?"

June offered, "I… I told you, Mother. Last night, when I went out—"

"Oh, yes. And I told you, June, I didn't like that. I didn't like that at all. We'd better go upstairs. Bobby?" who only grunted.

"Some people said they saw two moons in the sky." He stood up from his chair. "They named one of them George," and didn't watch June but the back of Bobby's head; and knew June reacted anyway.

"Two moons in the sky?" Mrs Richards asked. "Now who said they saw that?"

"Calkins doesn't say," Bobby mumbled.

"The guy who wrote the article didn't see them," he told Mrs Richards.

"Two moons?" Mrs Richards asked again. "June, when you came in, you didn't say anything about—"

June had left the room.

"June! June, we've got to go upstairs!"

"Do I have to come too?" Bobby asked.

"Yes, you have to!"

Bobby folded the paper loudly.

"June!" Mrs Richards called again.

He followed mother and boy to the door, where June waited. While Mrs Richards opened first the upper, then the lower, at last the middle lock, June's eyes, perfectly round, swept his, implored, and closed.

"There we are."

All blinking for different reasons, they entered the hall. He followed till Mrs Richards announced, "Now," and continued, "I want you — what is your name? — to walk up in front."

It was surprisingly easy to say, "Kidd," as he stepped around the children.

"Pardon?" Mrs Richards asked.

"Kidd. Like Captain Kidd."

"Like Billy the Kid?" Bobby asked.

"Yeah."

"Neither of them were too terribly nice people," said June.

"The Cisco Kid," Bobby said. Then, with raised eyebrows and small smile, droll as an adult of thirty: "Pow, pow…?"

"Bobby, stop!"

He walked with Mrs Richards. Her heels clunked; his sandal lisped, his bare foot hardly whispered.

As they reached the elevators there was noise above. They looked at the stairwell door with its wire-webbed glass and EXIT in red letters across it. Trundling footsteps grew louder—

(His hand pressed against his leg, across one turn of chain.)

— grew louder still, till shadows crossed the glass. The footsteps, dropping below, softened.

Mrs Richards' hand, grey as twigs from fire, hung against the wall by the elevator bell. "Children," she said. "It must be children. They run up and down the stairs, in the hall, banging on the walls, the doors. They don't show themselves, you know. That's because they're afraid." Her voice, he realized, was hoarse with terror. "They're afraid of us. They, don't have to be. We're not going to hurt them. I just wish they wouldn't do that That's all. I just wish they wouldn't."

Two separate elevators opened.

From one a man said, "Oh," a little gruffly. "Honey. It's you. Scared me to death. Where're you going?"

From the other came a faint wind, from a long way up or a long way down.

"Arthur! Oh, Arthur, this is Kidd! Edna Brown sent him to help. We're taking him to see the new apartment"

He shook the large, moist hand.

"Pleased," Arthur Richards said. The closing door k-chunked his shoulder, retreated, then tried to close again.

"Edna sent him over to help us with the cleaning and the moving."

"Oh. Edna coming over later?"

"She said she'd try this afternoon, Mr Richards."

K-chunk.

"Good. Hey, let's get in this thing before it knocks me down." Mr Richards guffawed. His white collar made folds in his fleshy neck. His hair was so pale, possible white was lost in the gloom. "Sometimes I think this thing doesn't like me. Come in."

K-chunk.

They ducked before the door swung them into darkness.

"19" hung, orange, on the black.

"Arthur," Mrs Richards said in the humming dark, "they've been running in the hall, again. They came and beat on the door. Twice. Once this morning, and once right after Kidd came. Oh, I was so glad he was there!"

"That's all right, honey," Mr Richards reassured. "That's why we're moving."

"Management has just got to do something. You say you have been down to the office and told them?"

"I've been down. I told them. They said they're having difficulty right through here. You've got to understand that, sweetheart. We're all having difficulty."

June breathed beside him. She was the closest person to him in the elevator.

"You'd know how upsetting it was if you ever heard it, Arthur. I don't see why you can't take a day off of work. Just so you'd know."

"I'm sure it's upsetting."

The door opened; in the hall he could see two ceiling globes were working.

Mrs Richards looked across her husband's chest. "They wouldn't do it if Arthur was home."

"Where do you work, Mr Richards?" he asked as they got out.

"MSE… Maitland Systems Engineering. Honey, I wish I could take off from work. But things are even more confused there than they are here. This just isn't the time for it. Not now."

Mrs Richards sighed and took out a key. "I know, dear. You're sure Management said it would be all right?"

"I told you, honey, I got the key from them."

"Well, they never answered my letter. They answered in two days when I wrote them last year about the plaster in June's bedroom." The key went in with a sound like gravel. "Anyway—" she looked across Mr Richards' chest again—"this is where we're going to move to."

She strode into the pale blue room through rattling mountains of brown paper. "The lights," she said. "Try the lights."

Mr Richards and June and Bobby waited in the doorway.

He stepped inside, flicked the switch.

The ceiling light flared, went Pppp! and out.

June, behind him, let a small cry.

"That's only the bulb. At least you have some power."

"Oh, we can fix that," Mr Richards said and came inside. "Come on, kids. Get inside now."

June and Bobby squeezed through shoulder to shoulder, but remained sentinel at the jambs.

"What else has to go beside this paper?"

"Well." Mrs Richards righted a cane bottom chair.

"There're the other rooms, furniture and stuff." Brown paper roared about her shins. "All sorts of junk. And the dirt. And then of course, we'll have to move our things."

Blinds, fallen from one fixture, dangled their crushed aluminum slats to the floor. "Just take those all down. It'll be a nice apartment when it's clean."

"Did you know the people who lived here before?"

"No," Mrs Richards said. "No. We didn't know them. Now all you have to do is clean these out." She walked into the kitchen and opened a broom closet. "Mop, pail, Spic-n'-span. Everything." She came back. "There's all sorts of things in the other rooms."

"What were they doing with all this paper?"

"I dunno," Bobby said uneasily from the doorway.

Stepping into the lichenous leaves, his bare foot came down on wood, wire, glass: krak! He jerked his foot, kicking away paper.

The break in the cover-glass went through both faces: framed in black wood, husband and wife, bearded and coiffed, posed in nineteen-hundred clothing. He picked it up from the papers. The loose glass ground.

"What's that?" Mrs Richards asked, stepping around more overturned furniture.

"I guess I broke it," trying to feel, without looking, if he had cut his foot.

Between the parents, in matching sailor suits, a sister and her two brothers (one younger, one older) looked serious and uncomfortable.

"It was just lying on the floor."

Mrs Richards took it from him. The hanging-wire rattled on the cardboard backing. "Isn't that something. Who do you suppose they are?"

"The people who lived here before—?" June stepped up, then laughed. "Oh, it couldn't be. It's so old!"

"Daddy," Bobby said from the doorway.

"Yes?"

"I think Kidd wants to use the bathroom."

June and Mrs Richards both turned.

"I mean," Bobby said, "he's just been living in the park, and stuff; he's real dirty."

Mrs Richards sucked her teeth and June only just did not say, "Oh, Bobby!"

Mr Richards said, "Well…" smiling, and then, "Um…" and then, "Well… sure."

"I am sort of scroungy," he admitted. "I could use a washup, after I finish work up here."

"Sure," Mr Richards repeated, heartily. "I've got a razor you can use. Mary'll give you a towel. Sure."

"In this room—" Mrs Richards had leaned the photograph against the wall and was trying to open a door now—"I don't know what they put in this room."

He went to take the knob. Something scraped as he shoved the door in a few inches. A few inches more and he could peer: "Furniture, ma'am. I think the whole room is filled up with furniture."

"Oh, dear…"

"I can squeeze in there and get it out"

"Are you sure—?"

"Why don't you all just go downstairs? I can get started on this. It's got to be neat and clean. It's a mess now. There's not too much you have to show me."

"Well, I suppose…"

"Come on, Mary. Let the boy get to work."

He went back to the front room and began to push the paper over to one side of the room.

"Bobby, come on back from there. I don't want you getting in trouble."

The door closed:… the boy? Well, he was used to having his age misjudged. (Where do they want me to put this crap!) He turned around and, with his sandal, stepped on something else. He kicked back paper: a kitchen fork.

He put his notebook on the chair Mrs Richards had set right, and began to fold the wrapping paper to yard-square packets. Out there on the balcony, he could toss it over. Shit-colored angel flakes? And the furniture: crash! No, can't do that very well. Drag all that junk to the elevator, drop a traveling furnished room to the cellar. Punch around in the basement dark with it? Beating on the wall, thumping on the floor? Not that either. Put it all on one side of the room, sweep and scrub, then all to the other. Burn it in the middle? What does she expect?

At any rate, in ten minutes, half the floor was clear. On the black (with white marbling) vinyl, he'd already uncovered a saucer filmed with dried coffee; Time with a wrinkled cover he recognized from several years back; some paint-crusted rags—

The knock made him jump.

June called, "It's just me…"

When he opened the door, she stepped in with a bottle of Coke in one hand, in the other a plate with a sandwich. The sandwich had a hole at one side. She thrust them out and said: "Please, don't say anything about last night, at the bar! Please! Please?"

"I didn't say anything to your mother." He took plate and bottle. "I wasn't going to get you in trouble."

"They don't know anything about that…! The paper had the pictures, but they didn't have my name… though everybody knows it anyway!"

"All right—"

"They looked at them, Mother and Daddy. They looked at them and they didn't recognize me! Oh, I thought I was going to die… I cried. Afterward. Oh…" She swallowed. "Mother… sent that up to you. She thought you might be hungry. Please don't say anything?"

"I won't," and was annoyed.

"It was like you were playing with me. That was awful!"

He took a drink. "Did you find him, George Harrison?" It was bubbly but tepid.

She whispered, "No…"

"What did you want him for?"

Her totally vulnerable look made him grin.

He put the plate down on the chair, considering whether to accept what so resembled the once rejected; then he took the sandwich and tore through the hole with his teeth. Spam. And mayonnaise. "He was in there. You shouldn't've run off. He came out just a minute later." He swallowed. "Hey, you want a picture of him?"

"Huh?"

"I can get you a picture of him, if you want, not like they had in the newspaper."

"No. I don't want a picture of him. What kind of picture?"

"Big full-color poster. Buck naked."

"No!" She dropped her head. "You are playing with me. I wish you wouldn't. It's just awful."

"Hey, I just…" He looked from sandwich to bottle. He wasn't hungry, but had eaten in complicity. Now he wished he hadn't. He said: "If you play by yourself, you're just going to lose. If I play with you, maybe you'll … have a chance."

Her hair swung; she looked up, with a confusion he paid her the compliment of assuming feigned.

"Tomorrow I'll get you the—"

"You were supposed to wait for me," Bobby said from the doorway. "Mom said we were supposed to come up here together… Gosh, you almost got this room clean."

June made shoulder motions which Bobby did not exactly ignore; neither did he respond. Instead, he said, "You got that stuff around your neck. Like this." He held up his bright wristlet.

"Yeah." He grinned. "Bet you won't tell me where you got yours."

Bobby looked more surprised than he'd expected. "I told Mom and Daddy that I just found them."

June said, petulantly, "You shouldn't wear them."

Bobby put his hands behind his back and humphed, as though this were an exchange from a frequent argument

"Why shouldn't he?"

Bobby said, "She thinks terrible things happen if you wear them. She's scared. She took hers off."

June glared at him.

"You know what I think?" Bobby said. "I think even worse things happen to people who wear them for a while and then take them off!"

"I didn't take it off."

"You did!"

"I didn't!"

"You did!"

"It wasn't mine! And you shouldn't have said you found it. I bet really bad things happen to people who steal them."

"I didn't steal it!"

"You did!"

"I didn't!"

"You did!"

"Oh…!" In sibling frustration she flung her hands out to end the antiphon.

He took another bite of pulpy bread; swallowed it with warm Coke: bad idea. He put both down.

"I'm going back!" Bobby said. "You better come too. We're supposed to be together." And marched out the door.

She waited. He watched.

Her hand moved in the side folds of her skirt, started to come up. Then she raised her head.

"Maybe you better—"

"Oh, he's going to go exploring." Contempt?

"Why do you want to find… George?"

She blinked. A word lost itself in breath. "I… I have to. I want to!" Her hands tried to raise, each one, in turn, holding the other down. "Do you know him?"

"I've seen him."

For all her light-eyed, ash-like blondness, her expression was incredibly intense. "You just… live out there?"

"Yeah." He examined her face. "So far I haven't needed a…" Intense, but it told him little. "…I haven't been here anywhere near as long as you have." He forced his shoulders down; they'd hunched to fend something he had not even consciously acknowledged an attack. "I hope you find him." It wasn't an attack; it was just that intensity. "But you've got a lot of competition."

"What…?" Her reaction to his realizing it was to suddenly lose all of it. "What do you want?" She sounded exhausted, looked as if she would repeat it with no voice at all. "Why… did you come here?"

"To clean up… I don't know why. To play, maybe. Why don't you let me clean up? You better go back downstairs." He picked up another paper and folded it, growling and flapping, to manageable size.

"Oh…" And suddenly she seemed just a very young girl again. "You're just…" She shrugged; and left.

He finished the paper, put the revealed junk in the kitchen, up-righted more furniture, and thought about this family.

They filled his mind while he finally shouldered into the packed room; he reached innumerable decisions about them which he lost to scraping chair legs, collapsing bridge tables, drawers that would not fit in their chiffoniers. One thought, however, remained surfaced for the time it took to move five pieces into the swept front room: Trying to stay sane under that sort of madness drives us nuts. He contemplated writing it in his notebook. But none of the words (and he had taken out his pen) weighed enough to pull his hand to the paper. The thought vanished in the gritting hinges of the writing board to a rolltop desk. Who had stuffed all this junk in here? (Drive? Pressure? Effort?… but was exerting too much of it maneuvering a daybed, on its end, around a bureau.) With slick underarms and gritty neck, he toiled, contemplating hours and wages. But it was difficult to judge slipping time while shuffling and arranging so much hollow dialogue.

When he went out on the balcony, the sky was the color of dark stone. His nasal cavity stung. He thought he saw movement down in the grounds. But when he took the rail, to look over, it was only smoke. And his forearms were sore. He went inside. He ate the rest of the sandwich. He drank the Coke, now flat as well as warm.

Work till sunset in a city where you never see the sun? He laughed. Fuck them if they expected him to get all this stuff to the basement! He ambled, panting, through dressers, easy chairs, day beds, and buffets. The thought occurred to put it in another apartment on the same floor. His next thought was: Why not?

He turned, gigantic, in the belly-high furniture forest. There was no one else, for practical purposes, in the building. Who would know? Who would care? His bladder suddenly warmed; he started down the hall.

At the end of an alcove, a hint of tile over the doorsill identified the bathroom. Inside, he flipped a light switch: lights stayed off. But, as he turned, his shin bumped the toilet ring.

It was pitch dark but he thought, what the hell.

The particular sound of his water, reiterated by sudden, hot wetness against his foot, told him he'd missed. He varied his aim without the rattle of water on water to sing success. Stop his stream? The memory of the yellow burst of pain at the base of his penis… He'd mop later. And let it run.

He lurched from the darkness and said, "Shit!"

His wet foot left its spreading print on the notebook, where it lay outside the door. Had it crept after him for soiling? No; he remembered (black and white; no color… like some dreams) carrying it with the intention of writing something down. When the lights hadn't worked, he had dropped it there.

3

"It's me, Kidd."

"Oh, hey, just a second."

The chain fell. The door opened.

Behind her, candles flickered on the phone table. The light from the living room tossed unsteady shadows on the rug. A doorway up the hall let out wavering orange. "Come on in."

He followed June to the living room.

"Well." Mr Richards peered above the Times, folded small. "You worked on a good bit past sundown I'd say. How's it going?"

"Fine. There was a whole lot of broken glass in the back room. A vanity turned over."

"You got the furniture out?" Mrs Richards called from the kitchen.

"Everything's in the front room. I can do all the back floors tomorrow, and get the rest of the stuff out of there for you. It's not going to be hard."

"That's good. Arthur…?"

"Oh, yes," Mr Richards said. "Mary's put out a towel for you. Go right in and run yourself a bath. Do you use an electric razor?"

"No."

"I have one, if you want. I put out a safety, for you, anyway. Blade's new. We'd like to invite you to stay for supper."

"Hey," he said, wanting to leave. "That's very nice. Thank you."

"Bobby, you put candles in the bathroom?"

Bobby went Umph over his book.

"Life by candlelight," Mr Richards said. "It's really something, isn't it?"

"At least the gas isn't off," Mrs Richards called again. "That's something too." She stepped to the door. "Bobby, Arthur, both of you! This isn't enough light to read by; you'll ruin your eyes."

"Bobby, put your book down. You heard your mother. You read too much anyway."

"Arthur, he can't read too much. It's just his eyes." She went back into the kitchen.

On top of the bookcase by Mr Richards' chair (neither he nor Bobby had ceased their reading) between an edition of Paradise Lost that said "Classics Club" and something thick by Michener, was a volume, thinner than both, with white letters down a black spine: "Pilgrimage/ Newboy." He pulled the book loose. The candles flaked light across the cover. "Did Mrs Brown ever come?" He turned the book over. From the case, black ceramic lions looked somewhere else and glistened. The back blurb was only three uninformative lines. He looked at the front again: Pilgrimage by Ernest Newboy.

"She'll be here by the time we eat. She always is." June snickered, waiting for Father or Mother to object Neither did. "That's by that poet they told about in the paper. Bobby got it for Mother from the bookstore yesterday."

He nodded. "Ma'am?" He looked in the kitchen door. "May I look at this?"

"Certainly," Mrs Richards said, stirring, at the stove.

He went into the bathroom; probably laid out the same as the one he'd peed all over upstairs. Two candles on the back of the toilet tank put two flecks on each tile; and there was another candle up on the medicine cabinet.

He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the "Prologemena."

The water rushed.

After a page he skipped, reading a line here, a verse paragraph further on. At some he laughed out loud.

He put down the book, shucked his clothing, leaned over the rim and lowered his chained, grimy ankle. Steam kissed the sole of his foot, then hot water licked it.

Sitting in the cooling tub, chain under his buttocks, he had scrubbed only a minute before the water was grey and covered with pale scalings.

Well, Lanya had said she wouldn't mind.

He let that water out, and ran more over his feet, rubbing the gritty skin from his insteps. He'd known he was dirty, but the amount of filth in the water was amazing. He soaked and soaped his hair, rubbed his arms and chest with the bar till the chain tore it. He grounded the balled washrag beneath his jaw, and then lay back with his ears under water, to watch the isle of his belly shake to his heart beat, each curved hair a wet scale, like the shingled skin of some amphibian.

Sometime during all this, Madame Brown's high laughter rolled into the hall; and a little on, her voice outside the door; "No! No, you can't go in there, Muriel! Someone's taking a bath."

He let out the water, and lay back, exhausted and clean, occasionally wiping at the tub-line of grit, wider than Loufer's garrison. He pressed his back against porcelain. Water trapped there poured around his shoulders. He sat, wondering if one could will oneself dry. And, slowly, dried.

He looked at his shoulder, peppered with pores, run with tiny lines he could imagine separated each cell, fuzzed with dark down. He brushed his mouth on his skin, licked the de-salted flesh, kissed it, kissed his arm, kissed the paler place where veins pushed across the bridge from bicep to forearm, realized what he was doing, with scowling laughter, but kissed himself again. He pushed to standing. Drops trickled the back of his legs. He was dizzy; the tiny flames wobbled in the tiles. He stepped out, heart knocking to the sudden effort.

He toweled roughly at his hair, gently at his genitals. Then, on his knees, he did a slightly better job washing away the hairs and grit and flaky stuff still on the bathtub bottom.

He picked up his pants, shook his head over them; well, they were all he had. He put them on, combed his moist hair back with his fingers, tucked in his shirt, buckled on his sandal, and came out into the hall. Behind his ears was cool, and still wet.

"How many baths did you take?" Mr Richards asked. "Three?"

"Two and a half." Kidd grinned. "Hello, Ma — Mrs Brown."

"They've been telling me how hard you've worked."

Kidd nodded. "It's not that bad. I'll probably finish up tomorrow. Mr Richards? You said you had a razor?"

"Oh yes. You're sure you don't want to use my electric?"

"I'm used to the other kind."

"It's just you'll have to use regular soap."

"Arthur," Mrs Richards called from the kitchen, "you have that mug of shaving soap Michael gave you for Christmas."

Mr Richards snapped his fingers. "Now I'd forgot. That was three years back. I never did open it. Grew a beard since too. I had a pretty good-looking beard for a while, you know?"

"It looked silly," Mrs Richards said. "I made him shave it off."

Back in the bathroom, he lathered his jaw, then scraped the warm foam away. His face cooled under the blade. He decided to leave his sideburns half an inch longer. Now (in two distinct stages) they came well below his ears.

For a moment, holding a hot washcloth across his face, he contemplated the patterns inside his eyes against the dark. But like everything in this house, they seemed of calculated inconsequence.

From the kitchen: "Bobby, please come in and set the table. Now!"

Kidd went into the living room. "Bet you'd hardly recognize me," he said to Madame Brown.

"Oh, I don't know about that."

"Dinner's ready," Mrs Richards said. "Kidd, you and Bobby sit back there. Edna, you sit here with June."

Madame Brown went over and pulled out her chair. "Muriel, stay down there and be good, hear me?"

He squeezed between the wall and the table — and took some tablecloth with him.

"Oh, dear!" Madame Brown lunged to grab a tottering brass candlestick. (In suddenly bared mahogany, the reflected flame steadied.) By candlelight her face had again taken on that bruised-eyed tawdriness she had last night in the bar.

"Jesus," Kidd said. "I'm sorry." He pulled the cloth back down across the table and began to straighten silverware. Mrs Richards had put out a profusion of forks, spoons, and side plates. He wasn't sure if he got all of them in the right place or which were his or Bobby's; when he finally sat, two fingers lingered on the ornate handle of a knife; he watched them rubbing, thick with enlarged knuckles and gnawed nails, but translucently clean. After baths, he reflected, when you're still alone in the john, is the time for all those things you don't want people around for: jerking off, picking your nose and eating it, serious nail biting. Was it some misguided sense of good manners that had kept him from any of these here? His thoughts drifted to various places he'd indulged such habits not so privately: seated at the far end of lunch counters, standing at public urinals, in comparatively empty subway cars at night, in city parks at dawn. He smiled; he rubbed.

"Those were my mother's," Mrs Richards said, on the other side of the table. She set down two bowls of soup for Arthur and Madame Brown, then went back to the kitchen. "I think old silver is lovely—" her voice came in—"but keeping it polished is awfully difficult." She came out again with two more bowls. "I wonder if it's that — what do they call it? That sulfur dioxide in the air, the stuff eating away all the paintings and statues in Venice." She set one in front of Kidd and one in front of Bobby, who was just squeezing into place — more plates and silverware slid on the wrinkling cloth; Bobby pulled it straight again.

Kidd took his fingers from the tarnished handle and put his hand in his lap.

"We've never been to Europe," Mrs Richards said, returning from the kitchen with bowls for her and June. "But Arthur's parents went — oh, years ago. The plates are Arthur's mother's — from Europe. I suppose I shouldn't use the good ones; but I do whenever we have company. They're so festive— Oh, don't wait for me. Just dig in."

Kidd's soup was in a yellow melmac bowl. The china plate beneath bore an intricate design around its fluted lip, crossed by more intricate scratches that might have come from cleanser or steel wool.

He looked around to see if he should start, caught both Bobby and June looking around for the same purpose; Madame Brown had a china bowl but every one else's was pastel plastic. He wondered if he, or Madame Brown alone, would have merited the spread.

Mr Richards picked up his spoon, skimmed up some soup.

So he did too.

With the oversized spoon-bowl still in his mouth, he noticed Bobby, June, and Madame Brown had all waited for Mrs Richards, who was only now lifting hers.

From where he sat, he could see into the kitchen: other candles burned on the counter. Beside a paper bag of garbage, its lip neatly turned down, stood two open Campbell's cans. He took another spoonful. Mrs Richards has mixed, he decided, two, or even three kinds; he could recognize no specific flavor.

Under the tablecloth edge, his other hand had moved to his knee — the edge of his little finger scraped the table leg. First with two fingers, then with three, then with his thumb, then with his fore-knuckle, he explored the circular lathing, the upper block, the under-rim, the wing bolts, the joints and rounded excrescences of glue, the hairline cracks where piece was joined to piece — and ate more soup.

Over a full spoon, Mr Richards smiled and said, "Where's your family from, Kidd?"

"New York—" he bent over his bowl—"State." He wondered where he had learned to recognize this as the milder version of the blunt What-nationality-are-you? which, here and there about the country, could create unpleasantnesses.

"My people are from Milwaukee," Mrs Richards said. "Arthur's family is all from right around the Bellona area. Actually my sister lived down here too — well, she did. She's left now. And so has all of Arthur's family. It's quite strange to think of Marianne and June — we named our June after Arthur's mother — and Howard and your Uncle Al not here any more."

"Oh, I don't know," Mr Richards said; Kidd saw him preparing to ask how long he'd been here, when Madame Brown asked: "Are you a student, Kidd?"

"No, ma'am," realizing it was a question whose answer she probably knew; but liked her for asking. "I haven't been a student for a while."

"Where were you in school, then?" Mr Richards asked.

"Lots of places. Columbia. And a community college in Delaware."

"Columbia University?" Mrs Richards asked. "In New York?"

"Only for a year."

"Did you like it? I've spent a lot of time — Arthur and I have both spent a lot of time — thinking about whether the children should go away to school. I'd like for Bobby to go to some place like Columbia. Though State, right here, is very good."

"Especially the poly-sci department," Kidd said. Mr Richards and Madame Brown spooned their soup away from them. Mrs Richards, June, and Bobby spooned theirs toward them. One, he remembered, was more correct; but not which. He looked at the ornate silverware handles, diminishing in size either side of his plate, and finally simply sank his spoon straight down in the soup's center.

"And of course it's a lot less expensive." Mrs Richards sat back, with a constrained laugh. "Expense is always something you have to think about. Especially today. Here at State—" (Four more spoonfuls, he figured, and the soup would be too low for his compromise technique.) Mrs Richards sat forward again. "You say, the poly-sci department?" She tipped her soup bowl toward her.

"That's what someone told me," Kidd said. "Where's June going to go?"

Mr Richards tipped his away. "I don't know whether June has thought too much about that."

Mrs Richards said: "It would be very nice if June wanted to go to college."

"June isn't too, what you'd call, well, academic. June's sort of my old-fashioned girl." Mr Richards, tipping his bowl, apparently couldn't get enough; he picked it up, poured the last drops into his spoon, and set it down. "Aren't you, honey?"

"Arthur, really…!" Mrs Richards said.

"It's very good, dear," Mr Richards said. "Very good."

"Yes, ma'am," Kidd said. "It is," and put his spoon on his plate. It wasn't.

"I'd like to go to college—" June smiled at her lap—"if I could go someplace like New York."

"That's silly!" Mr Richards made a disparaging gesture with his soup spoon. "It was all we could do to keep her in high school!"

"It just wasn't very interesting." June's bowl — pink melmac — moved, under her spoon, to the plate's rim. She centered it again. "That's all."

"You wouldn't like New York," Mr Richards said. "You're too much of a sunshine girl. June likes the sun, swimming, outdoor things. You'd wither away in New York or Los Angeles; with all that smog and pollution."

"Oh, Daddy!"

"I think June ought to apply to the Junior College next term—" Mrs Richards turned in mid-sentence from husband to daughter—"to get some idea if you liked it or not. Your marks weren't that bad. I don't think it would be such a terrible idea to try it out, at the Junior College."

"Mom!" June looked at her lap, not smiling.

"Your mother went through college," Mr Richards said, "I went through college. Bobby's going to go. If nothing else, it's a place to get married in."

"Bobby reads more than June," Mrs Richards explained. "He reads all the time, in fact. And I suppose he is more school-minded."

"That Junior College is an awful place," June said. "I hate everybody who goes there."

"Dear," Mrs Richards said, "you don't know everybody who goes there."

Kidd, with his middle finger, was exploring the counter sinking about some flathead screw, when Madame Brown said:

"Mary, how close are we to the second course? Arthur up there looks like he's about to eat the bottom of his bowl."

"Oh, dear me!" Mrs Richards pushed back in her chair. "I don't know what I'm thinking of. I'll be right in—"

"You want any help, mom?" June said.

"No." Mrs Richards disappeared into the kitchen. "Thank you, darling."

"Pass me your soup plates, everybody," June said.

Kidd's hand came up from under the tablecloth to join his other on the china plate to pass it — but stopped just below the table lip. Knuckles, fingertips, and two streaks on the back of the hand were smudged black.

He put his hand down between his legs and looked around.

Anyway, people were keeping their plates and just passing their bowls. He passed his with one hand, his other between his knees. Then the other joined it and he tried, without looking, to rub his fingers clean.

Mrs Richards came in with two steaming ceramic bowls. "I'm afraid we're vegetarian tonight." She went out, returned with two more. "But there's nowhere to get any meat that you can trust," and returned again.

"You do that nice tunafish casserole," Mr Richards called after her. "That's very good."

"Ugh," Bobby said.

"Bobby!" June said.

"Yes, I know, Arthur." Mrs Richards returned with a gravy boat, set it on the table, and sat. "But I just feel so funny about fish. Wasn't it a couple of years back all those people died from some canned tuna that had gone bad? I just feel safer with vegetables. Though Lord knows, they can go bad too."

"Botulism." Bobby said.

"Really, Bobby!" Madame Brown laughed, a hand against her sparkling chains.

"Oh, I don't think we're doing so badly. Mashed potatoes, mushrooms, carrots—" Mrs Richards indicated one and another of the bowls—"and some canned eggplant stuff I've never tried before. When I went to that health-food restaurant with Julia — when we were in Los Angeles? — she said they always use mushrooms and eggplants in place of meat. And I've made a sauce." She turned to her husband, as though to remind him of something. "Arthur…?"

"What?" Then Mr Richards too seemed to remember. "Oh, yes… Kidd? Well, we've taken up this little habit of having a glass of wine with our meals." He reached down beside his chair, brought up a bottle, and set it beside the candle at his end of the table. "If it isn't something that appeals to you, you're perfectly welcome to have water—"

"I like wine," Kidd said.

Mrs Richards and Madame Brown had already passed their wine glasses up. So Kidd did too; though the water glass at the head of his knife seemed the better size for wine drinking as he was accustomed to it.

Mr Richards peeled away gold foil, pulled loose the plastic stopper, poured, passed back the glasses.

Kidd sipped; it was almost black in candlelight. At first he thought his mouth was burning — the wine was bubbly as soda pop.

"Sparkling burgundy!" Mr Richards grinned and doffed his glass. "We haven't tried this one before. 1975. I wonder if that's a good year for sparkling Burgundy?" He sipped. "Tastes okay to me. Cheers."

The candle flame staggered, stilled. Above and below the ornate label, green glass flickered.

"I put a little wine in the gravy," Mrs Richards said. "In the sauce, I mean — it was left over from last night's bottle. I like to cook with wine. And soy sauce. When we went to Los Angeles two years ago for Arthur's conferences, we stayed with the Harringtons. Michael gave Arthur that shaving soap. Julia Harrington — she's the one who took me to that Health Food restaurant — made absolutely everything with soy sauce! It was very interesting. Oh, thank you, Arthur."

Mr Richards had helped himself to mashed potatoes and now passed the dish. So had Madame Brown.

Kidd checked his fingers.

The rubbing had not removed any dirt; but it had divided it fairly evenly between both hands; the rough strips of nail back on the wide crowns were once more darkly ringed, as though outlined, nub and cuticle, with pen. He sighed, served himself when the dishes passed him, passed them on, and ate. His free hand back beneath the tablecloth, found the table leg, again explored.

"If you're not a student," Madame Brown asked, "what do you put down in your notebook? — none of us could help noticing it."

It was inside, on the table by the chair; he could see it beyond her elbow. "I just write things down."

Mrs Richards hung her hands by the fingertips on the table edge. "You write! You're going to be a writer? Do you write poetry?"

"Yeah." He smiled because he was nervous.

"You're a poet!"

Mr Richards, June, and Bobby all sat back and looked. Mrs Richards leaned forward and beamed. Madame Brown reached down with some silent remonstrance to Muriel.

"He's a poet! Arthur, give him some more wine. Look, he's finished his glass already. Go on, dear. He's a poet! I think that's wonderful. I should have known when you took that Newboy book."

Arthur took Kidd's glass, refilled it. "I don't know too much about poetry." He handed it back with a smile that, on a college football player, would have purveyed sheepish good will. "I mean, I'm an engineer…" As he took his hand away, wine splashed on the cloth.

Kidd said, "Oh, hey, I—"

"Don't worry about that!" Mrs Richards cried, waving her hand — which knocked against her own glass. Wine splashed the rim, ran down the stem, blotched the linen. While he wondered if such a thing were done on purpose to put strangers at ease (thinking: What an uncomfortably paranoid thought), she asked: "What do you think of him? Newboy, I mean."

"I don't know." Kidd moved his glass aside: through the base, he could see the diametric mold line across the foot. "I only met him once."

At the third second of silence, he looked up, and decided he'd said something wrong. He hunted for the proper apology: but, like a tangle of string with a lost end, action seemed all loop and no beginning.

"You know Ernest Newboy? Oh, Edna, Kidd's a real poet! And he's helping us, Arthur! I mean, move furniture and things." She looked from Mr Richards to Madame Brown, to Kidd. "Tell me—" She spilled more wine— "is Newboy's work just — wonderful? I'm sure it is. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I just got the book yesterday. I sent Bobby down to get it, because of that article in the Times. We have this very nice little book-and-gift shop down the street. They have just everything like that — But after the article, I was afraid they were going to be all out. I think it's very important to keep up with current books, even if it's just bestsellers. And I'm really interested in poetry. I really am. Arthur doesn't believe me. But I do — I really do like it."

"That's just because you went to that coffee shop with Julia in Los Angeles where they were reading that poetry and playing that music."

"And I told you, Arthur, the evening we came back, though I don't pretend I understood it all, I liked it very much! It was one of the most—"she frowned, hunting for the right description—"exciting things I've… well, ever heard."

"I don't know him very well," Kidd said, and ate more mushrooms; that and the eggplant weren't bad. The mashed potatoes (instant) were pretty gluey, though. "I just met him… once."

"I'd love to meet him." Mrs Richards said. "I've never known a real writer."

"Mike Harrington wrote a book," Mr Richards objected. "A very good book, too."

"Oh, Arthur, that was an instruction manual… on stresses and strains and the uses of a new metal!"

"It was a very good instruction manual." Mr Richards poured more wine for Madame Brown and himself.

"Can I have some?" Bobby said.

"No," Mr Richards said.

"How long have you been writing poetry?" Madame Brown asked, helpfully.

Kidd looked up to answer — Madame Brown was waiting with a forkful of well-sauced eggplant, June with one of carrots; Mrs Richards had a very small fluff of potato on the tine tips of her fork — when it struck him that he didn't know. Which seemed absurd, so he frowned. "Not very…" long, he'd started to say. He had a clear memory of writing the first poem in the notebook, seated against the lamp post on Brisbain Avenue. But had he ever written any poems before? Or was it something he'd wanted to do but never gotten around to? He could see not remembering doing something. But how could you not remember not doing something? "…for very long," he finally said. "Just a few days, I guess," and frowned again, because that sounded silly. But he had no more surety of its truth or falsity than he had of his name. "No, not very long at all." He decided that was what he would say from now on to anyone who asked; but the decision simply confirmed how uncertain he was of its truth.

"Well I'm sure—" there was only one more fluff of mashed potatoes on Mrs Richard's plate—"they must be very good." She ate it "Did Mr Newboy like them?"

"I didn't show them to him." Somehow silverware, glasses, sideplates, and candles didn't seem right for talking about scorpions, orchid fights, the invisible Calkins and the belligerent Fenster—

"Oh, you should," Mrs Richards said. "The younger men in Arthur's office are always bringing him their new ideas. And he says they've been coming up with some lulus lately — didn't you, Arthur? Arthur's always happy to talk to the younger men about their new ideas. I'm sure Mr Newboy would be happy to talk to you, don't you think, Arthur?"

"Well," Mr Richards reiterated, "I don't know too much about poetry."

"I'd certainly like to see some of what you'd written," Madame Brown said and moved Mrs Richards' wine glass away from her straying hand. "Maybe some day you'll show us. Tell me, Arthur—" Madame Brown looked over joined fingers—"what is going on at Maitland, now? With everything in the state it's in, I'm amazed when I hear of anything getting done."

She's changing the subject! Kidd thought with relief. And decided he liked her.

"Engineering." Mr Richards shook his head, looked at Mrs Richards—"Poetry…" changing it, rather bluntly, back. "They don't have too much to do with one another."

Kidd decided to give it a try himself. "I met an engineer here, Mr Richards. His name was Loufer. He was working on… yeah, converting a plant. It used to make peanut butter. Now it makes vitamins."

"Most people who like poetry and art and stuff," Mr Richards adhered, "aren't very interested in engineering—" Then he frowned. "The vitamin plant? That must be the one down at Helmsford."

Kidd sat back and saw that Madame Brown did too.

Mrs Richards' hands still spasmed on the table.

Mr Richards asked: "What did you say his name was?"

"Loufer."

"Don't think I know him." Mr Richards screwed up his face and dropped his chin over the smooth gold-and-mustard knot of his tie. "Of course I'm in Systems. He's probably in Industrial. Two completely different fields. Two completely different professions, really. It's hard enough to keep up with what's going on in your own field, what your own people are doing. Some of the ideas our men do come up with — they're lulus all right. Like Mary says. Sometimes I don't even understand them — I mean, even when you understand how they work, you don't really know what they're for. Right now I'm just back and forth between the office and the warehouse — lord only knows what I'm supposed to be doing."

"Just keeping up," Madame Brown said, and leaned one elbow on the table. As she moved, the candle flame drifted back and forth across her left eye. "At the hospital, it was all I could do to read two or three psychology bulletins a week, what with the behaviorists and the gestaltists—"

"Peaches?" said Mrs Richards, leaning forward, knuckles like two tiny mountain ranges on the table edge. "Would anyone like some peaches? For dessert?"

Maybe, Kidd thought, she really did want to talk about poetry — which would be fine, he decided, if he could think of anything to say. His own plate was empty of everything except the sauce-and-mashed-potato swamp.

"Sure."

He watched the word hang over the table, silence on both sides.

"I don't want any!" Bobby's chair scraped.

Both candlesticks veered.

"Bobby—!" Mrs Richards exclaimed, while June caught one and Mr Richards caught the other.

Bobby was off into the living room. Muriel barked and ran after him.

"I'll have some, dear." Mr Richards sat back down. "Let him go, Mary. He's all right."

"Muriel? Muriel!" Madame Brown turned back to the table and sighed. "Peaches sound lovely. Yes, I'll have some."

"Yes, please, Mother," June said. Her shoulders were rather hunched and she was still looking at her lap, as though considering something intensely.

Mrs Richards, blinking after her son, rose and went in the kitchen.

"If I went to school," June blurted, looking up suddenly, "I'd go into psychology — like you!"

Madame Brown, slightly flattered, slightly mocking, turned to June with raised brows. Mocking? Or, Kidd wondered, was it simply surprise.

"I'd like to work with… mentally disturbed children — like you!" June's fingertips were over the table edge too, but tightly together, and even, so that you'd have to count to find where right fingertips ended and left began.

"In my job, dear, at the hospital—" Madame Brown lifted her glass to sip; as she bent forward, loops of optic chain swung out like a glittering bib, and back—"I have more to do with the disturbed parents."

June, now embarrassed by her outburst, was collecting plates. "I'd like to… to help people; like a nurse or a doctor. Or like you do—" Kidd passed his over; it was the last—"with problems in their mind."

He dragged his hands back across the cloth (spotted with sauce, soup, pieces of carrot, the purple wine blot) and let them fall into his lap.

Mrs Richards' place was nearly as messy as his own.

"I know it's a cliché—" Madame Brown shook her head—"but it really is true. The parents need the help far more than the children. Really: they bring their totally demolished child to us. And you know what they want in the first interview? It's always the same": they want us to say, 'What you should do is beat him.' They come in with some poor nine-year-old they've reduced to a state of numb, inarticulate terror; the child can't dress itself, can't talk above a whisper, and then only in some invented language; it soils its clothing, and the only coherent actions it can make are occasional attempts at murder or, more frequently, suicide. If I said to them, 'Beat her! Hit him!' they would glow—glow with delight. When they discover we want to take the children away from them, they're indignant! Under all the frustration and apparent concern, what they actually come hoping is that we will say, 'Yes, you're handling it all marvelously well. Just be a little firmer!' The reason I'm successful at my job at all—" Madame Brown touched June's shoulder and leaned confidentially—"as all I really do is pry the children loose from their parents — is because what I'm saying, underneath all my pleasant talk about how much better it would be for the rest of the family if they let little Jimmy or Alice come to us, is: Wouldn't it be ever so much more fun to work on one of your other children for a while? Wouldn't it be ever so much more interesting to fight someone with a little more strength left than this poor half-corpse you've just brought in. Why not clear the field and start in on little sister Sue or big brother Bill? Or maybe each other. Try to get an only child away from its parents once they've driven it practically autistic!" Madame Brown shook her head. "It's very depressing. I really think, sometimes, I'd like to change my field — do individual therapy. That's what I've always been interested in, anyway. And since there's nobody at the hospital now anyway—"

"But don't you need licenses, or special examinations to do that, Edna?" Mrs Richards asked from the kitchen. "I mean, I know it's your profession, but isn't fiddling with people's minds dangerous? If you don't know what you're doing?" She came in with two long-stemmed dessert dishes, gave one to Madame Brown, and one to Mr Richards. "I read an article—" She paused with her hands on the back of her chair—"about those encounter group things, I think they call them? Julia Harrington was going to one of those, two years ago. And the minute I read that article, I cut it out and sent it to her — it was just terrifying! About all those unskilled people leading them and how they were driving everybody crazy! Touching each other all over, and picking each other up in the air, and telling each other about everything! Well, some people just couldn't take it and got very seriously ill!"

"Well I—" Madame Brown began some polite protest.

"I think it's all poppycock," Mr Richards said. "Sure, people have problems. And they should be put away where they can get help. But if you're just indulging yourself, somebody telling you to straighten up and fly right may be what you need. A few hard knocks never hurt anybody, and who's in a better position to give out a few than your own parents, I say — though I've never lifted a hand to my own." Mr Richards lifted his hand, palm out, to his shoulder. "Have I, Mary? At least not since they were big."

"You're a very good father, Arthur." Mrs Richards came back from the kitchen with three more dessert glasses clutched together before her. "No one would ever deny that."

"You kids just be glad your parents are as sane as they are." Mr Richards nodded once toward Bobby's (empty) chair and once toward June's; she was just sitting down in it after taking the plates into the kitchen. She put a cut glass bowl, filled with white, on the white cloth.

"Here you are," Mrs Richards said, passing Kidd his fruit.

In its long-stemmed dessert dish, the yellow hemisphere just cleared the syrup.

Kidd looked at it, his face slack, realized his lips were hanging a little open, so closed them.

Beneath the table, he clutched the table-leg so tight a band of pain finally snapped along his forearm. He let go, let out his breath, and said: "Thank you…"

"It's not terribly exciting," Mrs Richards said. "But fruit has lots of vitamins and things. I made some whipped cream — dessert topping, actually. I do like real cream, but this was all we could get. I wanted to flavor it almond. I thought that would be nice. With peaches. But I was out of almond extract. Or vanilla. So I used maple. Arthur, would you like some? Edna?"

"Lord, no!" Madame Brown waved the proffered bowl away. "I'm heavy enough as it is."

"Kidd, will you?"

The bowl came toward him between the candles, facets glittering. He blinked, worked his jaw slowly inside the mask of skin, intent on constructing a smile.

He spooned up a white mound — with the flame behind it, its edges were pale green.

Madame Brown was watching him; he blinked. Her expression shifted. To a smile? He wondered what his own was. It was supposed to be a smile too; it didn't feel like one…

He buried his peach.

White spiraled into the syrup.

"You know what I think would be lovely?" Mrs Richards said. "If Kidd read us one of his poems."

He put half his peach in his mouth and said, "No," swallowed it, and added, "thanks. I don't really feel like it." He was tired.

June said, "Kidd, you're eating with the whipped cream spoon."

He said: "Oh…"

Mrs Richards said, "Oh, that's all right. Everybody's had some who wants some."

"I haven't," Mr Richards said.

Kidd looked at his dish (a half a peach, splayed open in syrup and cream), looked at his spoon (the damasking went up the spoon itself, streaked with cream), at the bowl (above the faceted edges, gouges had been cut into the heaped white).

"No, that's all right," Mr Richards said. Glittering, the bowl moved off beyond the candle flames. "I'll just use my spoon here. Everybody makes mistakes. Bobby does that all the time."

Kidd went back to his peach. He'd gotten whipped cream on his knuckles. And two fingers were sticky with syrup. His skin was still wrinkled from the bath. The gnawed and sucked callous looked like he imagined leprosy might.

Arthur Richards said something.

Madame Brown answered something back.

Bobby ran through the room; Mrs Richards yelled at him.

Arthur Richards said something else.

Cream, spreading through the puddle in the bottom of his dish finally met glass all the way around. "I think I'm going to have to go soon." He looked up.

The gold knot of Mr Richard's tie was three inches lower on his shirt.

Had he loosened it when Kidd was not looking? Or did he just not remember? "I have to meet somebody before it gets too late. And then…" He shrugged: "I want to get back here to work early tomorrow morning."

"Is it that late?" Mrs Richards looked disappointed. "Well, I guess you need a good night's sleep after all that furniture-moving."

Madame Brown put her linen napkin on the table. (Kidd realized he had never put his in his lap; it lay neatly, by the side of his stained and spotted place, a single drop of purple near the monogrammed R.) "I'm feeling a little tired myself. Kidd, if you could wait a minute, I wish you'd walk with me and Muriel. Is there coffee, Mary?"

"Oh, dear… I didn't put any up."

"Then we might as well go now. Kidd is anxious. And I certainly don't want to be out on the streets any later than I have to."

Downstairs, somebody laughed; the laughter of others joined it, till suddenly there were a series of thumps, like large furniture toppling, bureau, after bedstead, after chiffonier.

Kidd got up from the table — held the cloth in place this time. His arm still hurt. "Mr Richards, were you going to pay me now, or when I finished the whole job?" Getting that out, he was suddenly exhausted.

Mr Richards leaned back in his chair. His fists were in his suit coat pockets; the front chair legs lifted. "I imagine you could use a little right now." One hand came out and up. A bill was folded in it; he'd been anticipating the request. "Here you go."

"I worked about three and a half hours, I guess. Maybe four. But you can call it three if you want, since I was just getting started." He took the dark rectangle; it was a single five-dollar bill, folded in four.

Kidd looked at Mr Richards questioningly, then at Madame Brown, who was leaning over her chair, snapping her fingers for Muriel.

Mr Richards, both hands back in his pockets, smiled and rocked.

Kidd felt there was something else to say, but it was too difficult to think of what. "Um… thank you." He put the money in his pants pocket, looked around the table for June; but she had left the room. "Good night, Mrs Richards." He wandered across green carpet to the door.

Behind him, as he clicked over lock after lock — there were so many—Madame Brown was saying: "Good night, Arthur. Mary, thanks for that dinner. June…? June…?" she called now—"I'm on my way, dear. See you soon. Good night, Bobby — Oh, he's back in his room. With that book I bet, if I know Bobby. Muriel, come along, sweetheart. Right with you, Kidd. Good night again."

The smoke was so thick he wondered if the glass were opaque and he only misremembered it as clear—

"Well—" Madame Brown pushed open the cracked door—"what do you think of the Richards after your first day on the job?"

"I don't think anything." Kidd stretched in the over-thick night. "I'm just an observer."

"I take that to mean you've thought a great deal but find it difficult, or unnecessary, to articulate." Muriel clicked away down the cement walk. "They are perplexing."

"I wish," Kidd said, "he'd paid me for the whole day. Of course, if they're feeding me and stuff—" another highrise loomed before them, tier on tier of dark windows—"five dollars an hour is a lot." Smoke crawled across the facade. He had thought about them, of course; he remembered all his mulling while he worked in the upstairs apartment. And — again she was right — he'd certainly reached no synopsizable conclusion.

Madame Brown, hands behind her back, looked at the pavement, walked slowly.

Kidd, notebook before him in both hands (He'd almost forgotten it; Madame Brown had brought it to him at the door), looked up and could make out practically nothing. "You're still working in that hospital?"

"Pardon me?"

"That mental hospital, you were talking about" Walking revived him some. "With the children. Do you still go there every day?"

"No."

"Oh."

When she said nothing more, he said:

"I was in a mental hospital. For a year. I was just wondering what happened with—" he looked around at building faces whose wreckage was hidden behind night and smoke; he could smell smoke here—"with yours."

"You probably don't want to know," she said, walking a few more steps in silence. "Especially if you were in one. It wasn't pleasant." Muriel spiraled back and away. "You see, I was with the hospital's social service department — you must have gathered that. Lord, I got twenty-two phone calls at home in two hours about evacuation procedures — the phone went dead in the middle of the last one. Finally, we just decided, even though it was the middle of the night, we'd better go to the hospital ourselves — my friend and I; you see, I had a little friend staying with me at the time. When we got there — walking, mind you — it was just incredible! You don't expect doctors around at midnight in a place as understaffed as that. But there was not one orderly, one night nurse, one guard around! They'd just gone, like that!" She flung up her hand, in stark dismissal. "Patients were all up in the open night wards. We let out everybody we could. Thank God my friend found the keys to that incredible basement wing they first shut down fifteen years ago, and have been opening up and shutting down regularly — with not a bit of repair! — every three years since. You could see the fires out the windows. Some of the patients wouldn't leave. Some of them couldn't — dozens were logy in their beds with medication. Others were shrieking in the halls. And if all those phone calls about evacuation did anything besides scare off whatever staff was around, I'm sure I didn't see it! Some rooms we just couldn't find keys to! I broke windows with chairs. My friend got a crowbar, and three of the patients helped us break in some of the doors — Oh, yes: did I mention somebody tried to strangle me? He just came up in his pajamas, while I was hurrying down the second floor corridor, grabbed me, and started choking. Oh, not very seriously, and only for about two or three minutes, before some other patients helped me get him off — apparently, as I discovered, it takes quite a bit of effort to really choke somebody to death who doesn't want to be choked. And, believe me, I didn't. But it was a doozer. I was recovering from that in the S.S. office, when she came in with these." He heard Madame Brown finger the chains around her neck: it was too dark to see glitter. "She said she'd found them, wound them around my neck. You could see them flashing in flickers coming from outside, around the window shades." Madame Brown paused. "But I told you about that…?" She sighed. "I also told you that was when she left… my friend. Some of the rooms, you see, we just couldn't get into. We tried — me, the other patients, we tried! And the patients on the inside, trying just as hard! Christ, we tried! But by then, fire had broken out in the building itself. The smoke was so thick you could hardly—" She took a sudden breath. Did she shrug? "We had to leave. And, as I said, by that time, my little friend had left already."

He could see Madame Brown beside him now.

She walked, contemplating either the past or the pavement.

Muriel wove ahead, barked, turned, ran.

"I went back once," she said at last. "The next morning. I don't want to go again. I want to do something else… I'm a trained psychologist! Social service was never really my forte. I don't know if the patients who got out were finally evacuated or not. I assume they were; but I can't be sure." She gave a little humph. "Perhaps that has something to do with why I don't leave myself."

"I don't think so," Kidd said, after a moment "It sounds like you — and your friend — were very brave."

Madame Brown humphed again.

"It's just—" he felt uncomfortable, but it was a different discomfort than at the table—"you made it sound, when you were talking about it at dinner, like you still worked there. That's why I asked."

"Oh, I was just making conversation. To keep Mary entertained. When people take the trouble to bring out the best in her, she's quite a handsome woman; with quite a handsome soul — even if the quotidian surface sits on it a bit askew. I imagine some people find that hard to see."

"Yeah." He nodded. "I guess so." Half a block ahead, Muriel was a shifting dollop of darkness. "I thought—" on the curb, he scraped his heel—"Hey, watch…!" He staggered. "Um. I thought you said they had three children."

"They do."

They crossed the damp street. On cool pavement, his heel stung.

"Edward, the oldest, isn't with them now. But it isn't a subject I'd bring up. Especially with Mary. It was very painful for her."

"Oh." He nodded again.

They stepped up another curb.

"If nothing's functioning around here," Kidd asked, "why does Mr Richards go in to work every day?"

"Oh, just to make a showing. Probably for Mary. You've seen how keen she is on appearances."

"She wants him to stay home," Kidd said. "She's scared to death! — I was pretty scared too."

Madame Brown considered a few moments. "Maybe he does it just to get away." She shrugged — it was light enough to see it now. "Perhaps he just goes off and sits on a bench somewhere."

"You mean… he's scared?"

Madame Brown laughed. "Why wouldn't he be?" Muriel ran up, ran off. "But I think it's much more likely he simply doesn't appreciate her. That isn't fair of me, I know; but then, it's one of those universal truths about husbands and wives you really don't have to be fair with. He loves her, in his way." Muriel ran up again, leapt to Madame Brown's hip. She roughed the beast's head. Satisfied, it ran off again. "No, he must be going somewhere! Probably just where he says he is. To the office… the warehouse…" She laughed. "And we've simply got far too poetic an imagination!"

"I wasn't imagining anything." But he smiled, "I just asked." In the light from a flickering window, a story above them, he saw, through faint smoke, she was smiling too.

Ahead, Muriel barked.

And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: The only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog, to pain? Rather the long doubts: That this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows.

Madame Brown opened the bar door for him.

Kidd passed by vinyl Teddy, the bill in his fist. But while he contemplated offering her a drink, someone came screaming across the bar; Madame Brown screamed back; they staggered away. He sat down at the counter's end. The people whose backs he had seen along the stools, as he leaned forward, gained faces. But no Tak; nor any Lanya. He was looking at the empty cage when the bartender, rolled sleeves tying off the necks of tattooed leopards, said, "You're a beer drinker, ain't you?"

"Yeah." He nodded, surprised.

The bottle clacked the scarred counter board. "Come on, come on! Put it away, kid."

"Oh." Wonderingly, he returned the money to his pocket. "Thanks."

Under a haystack mustache, the bartender sucked his teeth. "What do you think this place is, anyway?" He shook his head, and walked off.

His hand had wandered to his shirt pocket to click the pen. He frowned down, paused above some internal turning: he opened the notebook, held his pen in the air, plunged.

Had he ever done this before? he wondered. With pen to paper and the actual process occurring, it was as though he had never done anything else. But pause, even moments, and it was as if not only had he never done it, but there was no way to be sure that he ever would again.

His mind dove for a vision of perfected anger while his hand crabbed and crossed and rearranged the vision's spillage. Her eyes struck a dozen words: he chose one in the most relevant tension to the one before. Her despair struck a dozen more; he grubbed among them, teeth clamped against what cleared. And cleared. So gazed at the cage again till the fearful distractions fell, then turned to her. An obtuse time later, he raised his hand, swallowed, and withdrew.

He jabbed the pen back in his pocket. His hand dropped, dead and ugly on the paper. His tongue worked in the back of his mouth while he waited for energy with which to copy. Sounds resolved from the noise. He blinked, and saw the pyramided bottles against the velvet backing. Between his fingers he watched the curling ink-line peeled off from meaning. He reached for the beer, drank a long time, put down the bottle, and let his hand drop on the paper again. But his hand was wet…

He took a breath, turned to look left.

"Eh… hello, there," from his right.

He turned right.

"I thought it might be you when I was on the other side of the bar." Blue serge; narrow lapels; hair the color of white pepper. "I really am glad to see you again, to know you're all right. I can't tell you how upset that whole experience left me. Though that must be a bit presumptuous: you were the one who was hurt. It's been a long time since I've had to move through such suspicion, such restraint." The face was that of a thin, aged child, momentarily sedate. "I'd like to buy you a drink, but I was told that they don't sell the drink here. Bartender?"

Walking his fists on the wood, the bartender came, like some blond gorilla.

"Can you put together a tequila sunrise?"

"Make my life easy and have a beer."

"Gin and tonic?"

The bartender nodded deeply.

"And another for my friend here."

The gorilla responded, forefinger to forehead.

"Hey, I'm sort of surprised," Kidd volunteered into the feeling of loss between them, "to see you in here, Mr Newboy."

"Are you?" Newboy sighed. "I'm out on my own, tonight. I've a whole list of places people have told me I must see while I'm in town. It's a bit strange. I gather you know who I…?"

"From the Times."

"Yes." Newboy nodded. "I've never been on the front page of a newspaper before. I've had just enough of that till now to be rather protective of my anonymity. Well, Mr Calkins thought he was doing something nice; his motives were the best."

"Bellona's a very hard place to get lost in." What Kidd took for slight nervousness, he reacted to with warmth. "I'm glad I read you were here."

Newboy raised his peppered brows.

"I've read some of your poem now, see?"

"And you wouldn't have if you hadn't read about me?"

"I didn't buy the book. A lady had it."

"Which book?"

"Pilgrimage."

Now Newboy lowered them. "You haven't read it carefully, several times, all the way through?"

He shook his head, felt his lips shake, so closed his mouth.

"Good." Newboy smiled. "Then you don't know me any better than I know you. For a moment I thought you had an advantage."

"I only browsed in it." He added: "In the bathroom."

Newboy laughed out loud, and drank. "Tell me about yourself. Are you a student? Or do you write?"

"Yes. I mean I write. I'm… a poet. Too." That was an interesting thing to say, he decided. It felt quite good. He wondered what Newboy's reaction would be.

"Very good." Whatever Newboy's reaction, surprise was not part of it. "Do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce lots of work?"

He nodded. "But I've never published anything."

"Did I ask if you had?"

Kidd looked for severity; what he saw was a gentle smile.

"Or are you interested in getting published?"

"Yeah." He turned half around on his stool. "How do you get poems published?"

"If I could really answer that, I would probably write a lot more poems than I do."

"But you don't have any problems now, about getting things in magazines and things?"

"Just about everything I write now—" Newboy folded his glass in both hands—"I can be sure will be published. It makes me very careful of what I actually put down. How careful are you?"

The first beer bottle was empty. "I don't know." He drank from the second. "I haven't been a poet very long," he confessed, smiling. "Only a couple of days. Why'd you come here?"

"Pardon?" There was a little surprise there; but not much.

"I bet you know lots of writers, famous ones. And people in the government too. Why did you come here?"

"Oh, Bellona has developed… an underground reputation, you call it? One never reads about it, but one hears. There are some cities one must be just dying to visit." In a theatrical whisper: "I hope this isn't one of them." While he laughed, his eyes asked forgiveness.

Kidd forgave and laughed.

"I really don't know. It was a spur of the moment thing," Newboy went on. "I don't quite know how I did it. I certainly wasn't expecting to meet anyone like Roger. That headline was a bit of a surprise. But Bellona is full of surprises."

"You're going to write about it here?"

Newboy turned his drink. "No. I don't think so." He smiled again. "You're all safe."

"You do know a lot of famous people though, I bet. Even when you read introductions and flyleaves and book reviews, you begin to figure out that everybody knows everybody. You get this picture of all these people sitting around together and getting mad, or friendly, probably screwing each other—"

"Literary intrigues? Oh, you're right: It's quite complicated, harrowing, insidious, vicious; and thoroughly fascinating. The only pastime I prefer to writing is gossip."

He frowned. "Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it." Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. "She knows your friend Mr Calkins."

"It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less — up tight?" He gestured toward the notebook. "I'd enjoy seeing some of your poems."

"Huh?"

"I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I've met. Let me tell you right away, I won't even presume to say anything about whether I think they're good or bad. But you're pleasant, in an angular way. I'd like to see what you wrote."

"Oh. I don't have very many. I've just been writing them down for… well, like I say, not long."

"Then it won't take me very long to read them — if you wouldn't mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?"

"Oh. Sure. But you would have to tell me if they're good."

"I doubt if I could."

"Sure you could. I mean I'd listen to what you said. That would be good for me."

"May I tell you a story?"

Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.

Newboy waved a finger at the bartender for refills. "Some years ago in London, when I was much younger than the time between then and now would indicate, my Hampstead host winked at me through his sherry glass and asked if I would like to meet an American writer staying in the city. That afternoon I had to see an editor of an Arts Council subsidized magazine to which my host, the writer in question, and myself all contributed. I enjoy writers: their personalities intrigue me. I can talk about it in this detached way because I'm afraid I do so little of it myself now, that, though I presumptuously feel myself an artist at all times, I only consider myself a writer a month or so out of the year. On good years. At any rate, I agreed. The American writer was phoned to come over that evening. While I was waiting to go out, I picked up a magazine in which he had an article — a description of his travels through Mexico — and began the afternoon's preparation for the evening's encounter. The world is small: I had been hearing of this young man for two years. I had read his name in conjunction with my own in several places. But I had actually read no single piece by him before. I poured more sherry and turned to the article. It was unpenetrable! I read on through the limpest recountings of passage through pointless scenery and unfocused meetings with vapid people. The judgments on the land were inane. The insights into the populace, had they been expressed with more energy, would have been a bit horrifying for their prejudice. Fortunately the prose was too dense for me to get through more than ten of the sixteen pages. I have always prided myself on my ability to read anything; I feel I must, as my own output is so small. But I put that article by! The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it! I assumed I had received that necessary betrayal and took my shopping bag full of Christmas presents into London's whiter mud. The editor in his last letter had invited me, jokingly, to Christmas dinner, and I had written an equally joking acceptance and then come, two thousand miles I believe, for a London holiday. Such schemes, delightful in the anticipation and the later retelling, have their drawbacks in present practice. I'd arrived three days in advance, and thought it best to deliver gifts in tune for Christmas morning and allow my host to rejudge the size of his goose and add a plum or so to his pudding. At the door, back of an English green hall, I rang the bell. It was answered by this very large, very golden young man, who, when he spoke, was obviously American. Let me see how nearly I can remember the conversation. It contributes to the point.

"I asked if my friends were in.

"He said no, they were out for the afternoon; he was babysitting with their two daughters.

"I said I just wanted to leave off some presents, and could he please tell them to expect me for dinner, Christmas day.

"Oh, he said. You must be — well, I'm going to be coming to see you this evening!

"I laughed again, surprised. Very well, I said, I look forward to it. We shook hands, and I hurried off. He seemed affable and I gained interest in the coming meeting. First rule of behavior in the literary community: never condemn a man in the living room for any indiscretion he has put on paper. The amount of charity you wish to extend to the living-room barbarian because of his literary excellence is a matter of your own temperament. My point, however, is that we exchanged no more than seventy-five or a hundred words. Virtually I only heard his voice. At any rate, back at Hampstead, as sherry gave way for redder wine, I happened to pick up the magazine with the writer's article. Well, I decided, I shall give it one more chance. I opened it and began to read." Newboy glared over the rim, set down the glass without looking at it and pressed his lips to a slash. "It was lucid, it was vivid, it was both arch and ironic. What I had taken for banality was the most delicate satire. The piece presented an excruciating vision of the conditions under which the country struggled, as well as the absurdity of the author's own position as American and tourist. It walked that terribly difficult line between grace and pathos. And all I had heard was his voice! It was retiring, the slightest bit effeminate, with a period and emphasis oddly awry with the great object of fresh water, redwoods, and Rockies who spoke with it. But what, simply, had happened was that now I could hear that voice informing the prose, supplying the emphasis here or there to unlock for me what previously had been as dense and graceless as a telephone directory. I have delighted in all of this writer's work since with exquisite enjoyment!" Newboy took another sip. "Ah, but there is a brief corollary. Your critics here in the States have done me the ultimate kindness of choosing only the work of mine I find interesting for their discussions, and those interminable volumes of hair-splitting which insure a university position for me when the Diplomatic Service exhausts my passion for tattle, they let by. On my last trip to your country I was greeted with a rather laudatory review of the reissue of my early poems, in one of your more prestigious literary magazines, by a lady whom modesty forbids me to call incisive if only because she had been so generous with her praise. She was the first American to write of me. But before she ever did, I had followed her critical writings with an avidity I usually have only for poets. A prolific critic of necessity must say many absurd things. The test is, once a body of articles has passed your eye, whether the intelligence and acumen is more memorable than the absurdity. I had never met her. To come off a plane, pick up three magazines at the airport, and, in the taxi to the hotel, discover her article halfway through the second was a delight, a rarity, a pleasure for which once, in fantasy, I perhaps became a writer. And at the hotel, she had left a letter, not at the desk, but in my door: She was passing through New York, was in a hotel two blocks away, and wanted to know if I would meet her for a drink that evening, assuming my flight had not tired me out. I was delighted, I was grateful: what better creatures we would be if such attention were not so enjoyable. It was a pleasant drink, a pleasant evening: the relation has become the most rewarding friendship in the years since. It is rare enough, when people who have been first introduced by reputation can move on to a personal friendship, to remark it. But I noted this some days later, when I returned to one of her articles: Part of the measured consideration that informed her writing came from her choice of vocabulary. You know the Pope couplet: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,/The line too labours and the words move slow. She had a penchant for following a word ending in a heavy consonant with a word that began with one equally heavy. In my mind, I had constructed a considered and leisurely tone of voice which, even when the matter lacked, informed her written utterances with dignity. Using the same vocabulary she wrote with, I realized, on the evening we met, she speaks extremely rapidly, with animation and enthusiasm. And certainly her intelligence is as acute as I had ever judged it. But though she has become one of my closest friends, I have lost practically all enjoyment in reading her. Even as I reread what before has given me the greatest intellectual pleasure, the words rush together in her vocal pattern, and all dignity and reserve has deserted the writing; I can only be grateful that, when we meet, we can argue and dissect the works before us till dawn, so that I still have some benefit of her astounding analytical faculty." He drank once more. "How can I possibly tell if your poems are good? We've met. I've heard you speak. And I have not even broached the convolved and emotional swamp some people are silly enough to call an objective judgment, but merely the critical distortion that comes from having heard your voice." Newboy waited, smiling.

"Is that a story you tell to everybody who asks you to read their poems?"

"Ah!" Newboy raised his finger. "I asked you if I might be allowed to read them. It is a story I have told to several people who've asked me for a judgment." Newboy swirled blunted ice. "Everyone knows everyone. Yes, you're right." He nodded. "I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the Artistic Community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work."

Kidd drank his beer, resentful at the long-windedness but curious about the man indulging it.

"The aesthetic equation," Newboy mused. "The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industralized society which has learned to distrust magic—"

"You're here!" Lanya seized his arm. "You look so bright and shiny and polished. I didn't recognize you!"

He pulled her against his shoulder. "This is Ernest Newboy," glad of the interruption. "This is my friend Lanya."

She looked surprised. "Kidd told me you helped him up at Mr Calkins'." She and Newboy shook hands across Kidd's chest.

"I'm staying there. But I was let out for the evening."

"I was there for days but I don't think I ever got a night off."

Newboy laughed. "There is that to it, yes. And where do you stay now?"

"We live in the park. You mustn't look astonished. Lots of people do. It's practically as posh an address as Roger's, today."

"Really? Do the two of you live there together?"

"We live in a little part all by ourselves. We visit people. When we're hungry. Nobody's come to visit us yet. But it's better that way."

Newboy laughed again.

Kidd watched the poet smile at her banter.

"I wouldn't trust myself to hunt you out of your hidden spot. But you must certainly come and see me, some day during the afternoon." Then to Kidd: "And you can bring your poems."

"Sure." Kidd watched Lanya be delightedly silent. "When?"

"The next time Roger decides it's Tuesday, why don't you both come around? I promise you won't have the same problem again."

He nodded vigorously. "All right."

Mr Newboy smiled hugely. "Then I'll expect you." He nodded, still smiling, turned, and walked away.

"Close your mouth." Lanya squinted about. "Oh, I guess it's okay. I don't see any flies." Then she squeezed his hand.

In the cage, neon flickered. Music rasped from a speaker.

"Oh, quick, let's go!"

He came with her, once glanced back: the back of Newboy's blue serge was wedged on both sides with leather, but he could not tell if the poet was talking or just standing.

"What have you been doing all day?" he asked on the cool street.

She shrugged closer. "Hanging out with Milly. I ate a lot of breakfast. Jommy is cooking this week so I really had more than I wanted. In the morning I advised John on a work project. Kibitzed on somebody's Chinese Checker game. After lunch I took off and played my harmonica. Then I came back for dinner. Jommy is a love, but dull. How was your job?"

"Strange." He pulled her close. (She brushed his big knuckles with her small ones, pensive, bending, removed.) "Yeah, they're weird. Hey, Newboy asked us up there, huh?" She rubbed her head against his shoulder and could have been laughing.

Her arm moved under his hand. "Do you want this back now?"

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks," and took the orchid, stopping to fix the longest blade in his belt loop. Then they walked again.

He did not demand a name. What does this confidence mean? Long in her ease and reticence, released from an effort to demand and pursue, there is an illusion of center. Already, presounded, I am armed with portents of a disaster in the consciousness, the failure to suspect, to inspect. Is she free here, or concerned with a complex intimacy dense to me? Or I excuse myself from her, lacking appellation. Some mesh, flush, terminal turned here through the larynx's trumpet. The articulate fear slips, while we try to measure, but come away with only the perpetual angle of distortion, the frequency of an amazed defraction.

In the half — or rather four-fifths dark, the lions looked wet. He brushed his right knuckles against the stone flank in passing: It was exactly as warm as Lanya's wrist, brushing his knuckles on the left.

How does she find her way? he wondered, but thirty steps on realized he had anticipated the last dark turn himself.

Distant firelight filigreed through near leaves. Lanya pushed them aside and said, "Hi!"

A shirtless man, holding a shovel, stood knee deep in a… half-dug grave?

Another man in a denim shirt, unbuttoned, stood on the lip. A young woman in a scrape, her chin balanced on both fists, sat on a log, watching.

"Are you still at this?" Lanya asked. "You were this far along when I was here this morning."

"I wish you'd let me dig," the young woman said.

"Sure," the bare-chested man with the shovel said. He shook blond hair from his shoulders. "Just as soon as we get it going."

The woman dropped her fists between her patched knees. Her hair was very long. In the distant light it was hard to see where its color was between bronze and black.

"I wonder where John gets the ideas for these projects," the man in the denim shirt on the lip said. "I was just as happy running off to squat in the bushes."

The guy with the shovel made a face. "I guess he's worried about pollution. I mean, look at all this!" The shovel blade swung.

But other than the dozen people standing or sitting over near the flaming cinderblocks, Kidd could see nothing outside the bubble of night the flames defined.

"Can you actually see what you're doing there?" Lanya asked.

"Enough to dig a God-damn latrine!" The shovel chunked into earth again.

"You know," the one on the lip said, "I could be in Hawaii right now. I really could. I had a chance to go, but I decided I'd come here instead. Isn't that too fucking much?"

As though she'd heard this too many times, the woman on the log sighed, palmed her knees, stood up, and walked off.

"Well, I really could." He frowned after her, then back at the pile of dirt. "Did your old lady really want to dig?"

"Naw." Another shovelful landed. "I don't think so."

Slap-slap, slap-slap, slap-slap went a rolled Times against a thigh. John walked up, cutting out more light.

Chunk-shush, chunk-shush went the shovel.

"They're digging it awfully close to where everybody stays," Kidd said to Lanya, "for a latrine."

"Don't tell me," Lanya said. "Tell them."

"I've been wondering about that too," John said, and stilled his paper. "You think we're digging it too close, huh?"

"Shit," the one who wanted to be in Hawaii said and glared at Kidd.

"Look," Kidd said, "you do it your way," then walked off.

And immediately tripped over the foot of somebody's sleeping bag. Recovering himself, he just missed another's head. Millimeters beyond the circle of darkness were chifferobes, bureaus, easy-chairs, daybeds, waiting to be moved from here, to there, to someplace else… He blinked in the fireplace's heat and put his hands in his back pockets. Standing just behind three others, he watched the curly-headed boy (Jommy?) wrestle a barrel—"Isn't this great, man? Oh, wow! Look at this. When we found this, I just didn't believe it — It's flour. Real flour. And it's still good. Oh, hey thanks, Kidd. Yeah, push it this… yeah, this way." — around the end of the picnic table.

"Here?" Kidd asked, and grunted. The barrel weighed two hundred pounds at least.

"Yeah."

Others stepped back a little more.

Both grunting now, Kidd and Jommy got it in place.

"You know," Jommy said, standing back, smiling, and wiping his forehead, "if you're hungry around here, man, you should ask for something to eat."

Kidd tried to figure out what that referred to when Milly and Lanya walked up. "It's awfully nice to see you here again and helping out," Milly said, passing between Kidd and the fire. The hot places just above his eyes cooled in her shadow. She passed on.

Lanya was laughing.

"Why'd we come here?" he asked.

"I just wanted to talk to Milly for a moment. All done." She took his hand. They started walking through the blanket rolls and sleeping bags. "We'll go sleep back at my spot, where we were last night."

"Yeah," he said. "Your blankets still there?"

"If nobody moved them."

"Hawaii," somebody said ten feet off. "I don't know why I don't take off for there right now."

Lanya said: "John asked me if you wanted to take charge of the new commune latrine work project."

"Jesus—!"

"He thinks you have leadership qualities—"

"And a feeling for the job," he finished. "I've got enough work to do." Blinking away after-images of firelight, he saw that the blond-haired guy with no shirt now, stood on the lip, shoveling dirt back in the hole.

He moved with her into dark.

Once more he wondered how she found her way. Yet once more, in the dark, he stopped first when he realized they had arrived.

"What are you doing?"

"I hung the blanket up over a limb. I'm pulling it down."

"You can see?"

"No." Leaves roared. Falling, the blanket brushed his face. They spread it together. "Pull down on your left… no, your right corner."

Grass and twigs gave under him as he lurched to the center on his knees. They collided, warm. "You know the Richards?" Artichokes…

He frowned.

She lay down with him, opened her fist on his stomach. "Um?"

"They're stark raving twits."

"Really?"

"Well, they're stark. They're pretty twitty too. They haven't started raving, but that's just a matter of time. Why do I have this job, anyway?"

She shrugged against him. "I thought, when you took it, you were one of those people who has to have one."

He humphed. "Tak took one look at me and decided I'd never worked in my life. I don't need the money, do I?"

She put her hand between his legs. He let his legs fall open and put his own hand on top, thick fingers pressing between her thin ones. "I haven't needed any yet." She squeezed.

He grunted. "You wouldn't. I mean, people like you. You get invitations places, right?" He looked up. "He's a systems engineer, she's a… housewife, I guess. She reads poetry. And she cooks with wine. People like that, you know, it's funny. But I can't imagine them screwing. I guess they have to, though. They've got kids."

She pulled her hand away, and leaned up on his chest. "And people like us." Her voice puffed against his chin. "Screwing is the easiest thing to imagine us doing, right? But you can't think of us with kids, can you?" She giggled, and put her mouth on his, put her tongue in his mouth. Then she stiffened and squeaked, "Owww."

He laughed. "Let me take this thing off before I stab somebody!" He raised his hips and pulled his orchid from the belt loops, pulled his belt out.

They held each other, in long lines of heat and cool. Once, on his back, naked, under her, while his face rubbed her neck, and he clutched her rocking buttocks, he opened his eyes: light came through the jungle of their hair. She halted, raising. He bent back his head.

Beyond the trees, striated monsters swayed.

The scorpions passed, luminous, on the path below.

More trees cut out their lights, and more, and more.

He looked up at her and saw, across the top of her breasts, the imprint of his chain, before darkness. Then, like a two-petaled flower, opened too early at false, fugitive dawn, they closed, giggling, and the giggling became long, heavy breaths as she began to move again. After she came, he pulled the corner of the blanket over them.

"You know, he tried to cheat me out of my money."

"Mmm." She snuggled.

"Mr Richards. He told Madame Brown he'd pay me five dollars an hour. Then he just gave me five for the whole afternoon. You know?" He turned.

When he pushed against her leg she said, "For God's sakes, you're still all hard…" and sucked her teeth.

"He did. Of course they fed me. Maybe he'll settle up tomorrow."

But she took his hand and moved it down him; again meshed, their fingers closed on him and she made him rub, and left him rubbing. She put her head down on his hip, and licked and nipped his knuckles, the shriveled scrotal flesh. He beat, till her hair on his thighs was nearly lost in some vegetative horror, then grunted, "Okay…" His fist hit her face three times, before he let her take him. She slid her arms behind his hip, put her legs around his, while he panted and let go of her hair.

Anxiety lost outlines beneath glittering fatigue. Once he did something like wake to her back against his stomach. He reached beneath her arm to hold her breast, the nipple a button on his palm. She took his thumb as gently, he realized, as she possibly could, in case he slept.

So he slept.

There was grey light after a while. On his back, he watched leaves appear in it. Suddenly he sat, in one motion, to his knees. He said:

"I want to be a poet. I want to be a great, famous, wonderful poet."

As he looked toward the hem of darkness beneath grey streakings, something caught in his stomach. His arms began to shake; he was nauseated; and his head throbbed; and throbbed; and throbbed. He opened his mouth and breathed roughly through it. He shook his head, felt his face shaking, and dragged his breath back in. "Wow," he said. The pain receded, and let him smile. "I don't think they… make poets as great as I want to be!" That only came out as a hoarse whisper. Finally he rose, naked, to a squat and looked back at her.

He thought she would have slept through: her head was propped on her hand. She watched him.

He whispered. "Go back to sleep."

She pulled the blanket across her arm and put her head down.

He turned for his shirt, took the pen. He opened the notebook to what he had written at the bar. Cross-legged on the blanket's edge, he readied to recopy. The paper was blued with halfdawn. While he contemplated the first word, distractions of book jackets, printed praise, receptions by people who ranged from Richards to Newboys — The twig under his ankle brought him back. He shook his head again, shifted his ankle, again bent to recast fair copy. His eyes dropped in a well of Time magazine covers, ("Poet Refuses Pulitzer Prize"), the audience's faces as he stood on Minor Latham's stage where he had consented to give a rare reading. He hauled himself back before the fantasies' intensity hit pain. Then he laughed, because he had still not re-copied a word. He sat a while more, unable to write for thinking, amused at his lack of control, but bored with its obvious lesson.

Self-laughter did not stop the fantasies.

But neither could the fantasies stop self-laughter.

He looked in the lightening sky for shapes. Mist bellied and folded and coiled and never broke. He lay back beside her, began to rub her under the blanket. She turned to him and hid in his neck when he tried to kiss her. "I don't think I taste very good," she murmured. "I'm all sleepy—" He licked her teeth. When he put his thumb in her cunt, she began to laugh through the kiss, till she caught her breath at his cock and another finger. His knees outside of hers, he swung his hips. His wet hand held her shoulder, his dry one her hair.

Later, he woke again with his arms tight around her, the blanket wound around them from rolling. The sky was lighter. "You know, I shouldn't go back to that God-damn job," he said. "What do I need a job for, here?"

"Shhh," she said. "Shhhhhh," and rubbed his shaven cheek. "Now shhhhhh."

He closed his eyes.

"Yes, who is it?" with a timbre of complaint.

"It's Kidd. Look, if it's too early, I'll come back—"

The chain rattled.

"No. No. It's all right." Mrs Richards, in a green bathrobe, opened the door.

"Isn't anybody up yet? I didn't know how early it was."

"It's all right," Mrs Richards repeated. "It's probably about eight." She yawned. "Would you like some coffee?"

"Thanks, yes. Can I use your bathroom." He stepped by before she finished her sleepy nod. "You know you got a letter in your mailbox, airmail?"

"I thought the boxes were broken."

"Your box is okay." He paused with his hand on the bathroom door jamb. "And there's a letter in it."

"Oh dear!"

He had already lathered for shaving before he registered her voice's despair.

June, in blue slacks and a pink sweater, a daisy embroidered near the collar, brought full coffee cups to the table as he sat. "Good morning."

"Were you up?"

"In my room. I'm always the early riser in this family. What have you been doing since yesterday?"

"Nothing. This morning, before I came here, I copied out a poem I wrote last night."

"Read it to me?"

"No."

She looked disappointed. "I guess I wouldn't want to read anything I wrote to other people either."

He held his cup in both hands, sipping.

"Is that strong enough for you?" Mrs Richards asked from the kitchen doorway. "I've got the jar of instant right here."

"It's fine." Black coffee hung in his mouth's emptied center, losing heat.

"Is Bobby up yet?" Mrs Richards asked from the kitchen.

"I heard him moving. What about Daddy?"

"Let your father sleep, dear. He had a hard day yesterday."

June asked: "Do you want some more coffee?"

He shook his head, and with his movement the bitter taste spread over her yellow hair, the plants in their brass pots, the plastic handles on the green drapes' pull. He smiled and swallowed it all.

Apartment 19-B was open, abandoned and perfectly ordinary:

Appliances in the kitchen, bathmat over the tub edge, the beds unmade. And there was not one book. Well, it would hold furniture.

The legs of the easy chair roared in the hall. Silly, he mulled in the echo. Why don't I ask them where they want it. Fuck—! Tilt the chair to get it in.

The chair roared; the daybed mattress on its side Ssssssssed. He left it leaning against the flowered couch, and went back out into the hall for the chifferobe.

Two elevator doors opened. From one came wind, from the other, Mr Richards. "Hi, there. Thought I'd stop up before I went out." His tie dropped, severe and indigo, between worsted lapels. "What are you doing with all the junk?"

Kidd worked his feet on sandal sole and vinyl tile. "I… well, I was putting it in the apartment down the hall."

Mr Richards walked past him, looked into 19-B. "It doesn't matter too much." He looked back. "Does it?"

They went together into 19-A.

"I figure I can get all this stuff out by tonight, Mr Richards." Kidd was relieved there was no protest. "Then I'll get the floors and everything mopped. I'll have it really nice. She'll like it. I'll do a good job."

Mr Richards frowned up at the dead bulbs.

"If you'd rather, I could take the stuff into the cellar." Relaxed enough to offer, he knew the offer would be refused.

"Only if you want." Mr Richards took a breath, and came in. His cordovan ground on the piled glass. He looked down. "Don't see any need. To take it all the way to the cellar. I don't know what's in that cellar, anyway." Not moving his foot, he looked at the remaining furniture. "She'll like it. Yes." He took his hand from his pocket. "Why don't you get your other shoe on, boy? You'll cut your foot all to hell."

"Yes, sir."

Mr Richards stepped away from the sweepings, shook his head.

"Mr Richards—?"

"You know, I've been thinking—" Mr Richards fingered his collar at his heavy neck; he might once have been a heavy man—"I mean if it's a good idea for us to move. For Mary. What do you think? She takes to you, you know. That's good. I was wondering what Edna was going to send us. She has some funny friends. Wondered about you too, until I saw you out from under all that dirt. But you seem like a nice kid. What do you think?"

"Your downstairs neighbors are pretty rough."

"Do you think it'll do any good, coming up here?"

It occurred to him to accuse: You don't. But he shrugged.

"What do you think? Go on. You can tell me. The situation we're all in now, we have to make ourselves be honest. I'll admit, it's hard for me. But you try."

"Why do you stay in the city?"

"Do you think she'd go? No, we live here: she wouldn't be able to do it." Then a breath that had been held in him broke away painfully. Mr Richards raised his thumbs to his belt. "Do you know, in here, in this house, I almost have the feeling that none of it's real? Or just a very thin shell."

Kidd wanted to frown. But didn't. Honest, he thought.

"Mary lives in her world of cooking and cleaning and the children. I come home. And nothing looks… I can't describe it. A man's home is supposed to be — well, a place where everything is real, solid, and he can grab hold. In our home, I just don't know. I come in from that terrible world, and I'm in some neverland I just don't believe in. And the less I believe in it, the more it slips. I think it's me, sometimes. Mary's always been a strange woman; she hasn't had it that easy. She tries so hard to be… well, civilized. We both do. But what with this…" He nodded toward the open balcony doors. Outside, layers of mist pulled from mist. "She's got imagination. Oh, that she's got, all right. It was the thing I first saw in her. My work, well, it's interesting. But it doesn't require that much what you'd call creativity. At least you probably wouldn't think so. But we get things done. Still, I like to come home to somebody who's got all sorts of ideas, reads books and things. But—" Mr Richards' hands rubbed at his hips, searching for pockets—"suddenly you begin to feel she's changing the world into her own ideas. She doesn't go out, now; but who could blame her. And once you get inside the door, it's all hers."

"She keeps a nice house," Kidd offered.

"Oh, she does much more than that. She keeps us too. We all say things for her, you notice? Everybody who comes in there. She projects this… well, nervousness. And then you start to try and figure out what she wants you to say; and you say it. At first so you won't get her upset. Then, out of habit. You don't think so?"

"I don't… well, not much."

"You do, unless you just fit into it naturally. She used to always like musicians. And suddenly everybody who came to see us was a musician, or remembered that they used to play in the high school band, or something. And that was fine until she had some people over to play some chamber music stuff—" He raised his head and laughed. "That was funny. They were terrible. Mary and I laughed about it for weeks." He lowered his chin. "But that was the end of the music. Now — well, she's been reading that fellow you were talking about—"

"Ernest Newboy?" Kidd resolved not to mention meeting him again.

"Yeah. And you're here. Once she tried to get interested in engineering. I brought home a few of our younger men. And their wives. I brought the ones who had the ideas — like she said. That didn't last too long." He shook his head. "But she makes it all go her way. Which would be fine if I thought… thought that it was real. That if I touched anything, it wouldn't just crumble, like eggshell, like plaster. You think I should talk to Edna?" He smiled: his hands found his pockets, finally, and sank in them. "Maybe it is just me." He looked around the room again. "I hope moving does some good."

"Is Mrs Richards happy?"

"Not as happy as I'd like to see her. You know we used to have another — well, that's none of your affair. I won't put it on you. I've gone on too long already."

"That's okay."

"Better go. Have to be in the office by ten and the warehouse by eleven thirty."

"Hey, Mr Richards?"

Mr Richards turned in the doorway.

"You've got a letter in your mailbox. Airmail."

"Ah!" Mr Richards nodded. "Thanks." He went out.

"— and Mr Richards?" When there was no answer, he went to the hall. Both elevators were closed.

He put his hand in his pocket and felt the moist, crushed bill. He shook his head and started to work a dresser toward the door. Three feet, and he decided to take the drawers out.

After he'd moved furniture for a long time, he went out on the balcony. On the building across, smoke coiled. The mist to his right was bright as ivory. When he looked down, the top of a tree was just visible in pooling haze.

He moved the final large pieces of furniture; then, two at a time, he lugged off the cane-bottom chairs. On the last lay the notebook.

He rubbed his shirt pocket, wondering if he should take a break. The pen slipped under the cloth. He looked at the emptied room. In the doorway was the pail, the mop, the soap box. He moved his teeth on one another, took up the book and sat.

He wrote slowly. Every little while he looked sharply up, toward the door, and even toward the window. Eight lines later he put the pen in his pocket. The already enlarged front knuckle of his left middle finger was sore and dented from the pen. He yawned, closed the book, and sat for a while watching the fog stretch and constrict. Then he tossed the book on the floor, stood up, and carried his chair into 19-B.

He used a piece of cardboard for a dustpan, and carried the sweepings into the other apartment. Finding no can, he dumped them into a bureau drawer. Back in the kitchen, he clanked the pail into the sink. The water crashed on the zinc, swirled up in suds; crashing diminished to roaring, muffled more and more in foam.

"I just don't know what I was thinking of!"

"It's all right, ma'am. Really—"

"I just don't know what's the matter with me. Here they are—"

"That's all right, Mrs Richards."

"Right in the icebox." She swung the door back. "See. I made them. I really did."

Three sandwiches, each with corner hole, lay on a plate.

He laughed. "Look, I believe you."

"I made them. Then I thought I'd send June and Bobby up. Then I thought again, Oh no, it must be too early for lunch; so I put them in the icebox. And then—" She closed the icebox door halfway—"I forgot about them. You could eat them now."

"Thank you. That's fine. All I wanted to tell you is I got the furniture all out, and the back two rooms mopped, and the back bathroom."

"Take them." She opened the door again. "Go ahead. Go inside and eat. Oh!" The icebox door slammed and just missed knocking the plate from his hand. "Coffee! You'll want coffee. There, I'll start the water. Go on. I'll be in in a minute."

Maybe she is mad (he thought and went into the living room), too.

He sat on the L-shaped couch, put the plate on the coffee table, and peeled up the bread corners, one after the other: peanut butter and jelly, spam and mustard, and—? He stuck his finger in it, licked: Liver pâté.

He ate that one first.

"Here you are!" She put down his cup and sat on the other leg of the L, to sip her own.

"It's very good," he mumbled with a full mouth, joggled the sandwich demonstratively.

She sipped a while more. Then she said: "You know what I want?"

"Mmm?"

She looked down at the notebook lying on the couch and nodded. "I want you to read me one of your poems."

He swallowed. "Naw, I should go upstairs and finish mopping. Then clean up the kitchen. You can start getting your stuff together, and I'll take some of it up this evening."

"Tomorrow!" she cried, "Oh, tomorrow! You've been working terribly hard. Read me a poem. Besides, we don't have a thing ready."

He smiled and contemplated murder.

And here, he thought, it would be so much easier to get away with… "I don't think you'd like them."

Hands together in her lap, she leaned forward: "Please."

He dragged the book into his lap (like I was covering myself, he thought. I could kill her). "All right." Something tickled the underside of his thigh. It was sweat catching on the chain that bound him. "I'll read…" He opened the book, coughed: "This one." He took a breath, and looked at the paper. He was very hot. The chains across his back pulled: he was hunching his shoulders. When he opened his mouth, for a moment he was sure no voice would come.

But he read.

He dropped word after word into the room's silence.

Meaning peeled away from his voice and raveled.

Sounds he had placed together to evoke a tone of voice mis-sounded. The mouth's machinery was too clumsy to follow what his eye knew. He read each word, terribly aware how the last should have fallen.

Once he coughed.

For one phrase he grew quieter, easier. Then, frantically, at a place where his voice closed out a comma, he wondered, Why did I choose this one! I should have chosen any one except this!

Hoarsely he whispered the last line, and put one hand on his stomach to press away the small pain. He took some more deep breaths and sat back. The back of his shirt was sopping.

"That was lovely."

He wanted to and didn't laugh.

"…Lost inside your eye…" she misquoted. No, paraphrased.

His stomach tightened again.

"Yes, I liked that very much."

He arched his fingers there, and said: "Thank you."

"Thank you. I feel…"

He thought: I'm too tired to kill anyone.

"…feel that you have given me something of yourself, a very precious thing."

"Uhh." He nodded vaguely. Tension finally forced the laugh: "You just like it because you know me." With the laugh, some of the tiredness went.

"Definitely." She nodded. "I don't know any more about poetry than Arthur does. Really. But I'm glad you read it. For the trust."

"Oh." Something more terrifying than the possibility of murder happened in him. "You really are?" A cold metallic wire sewed somewhere, taking small stitches. "I better get back up to finish the mopping." He began to move on the couch, preparing to stand.

"I'm very glad you read that poem to me."

He stood. "Yeah. Sure. I'm glad you… liked it," and hurried for the door. It closed behind him far too loud. In the hall, his face heating, he thought: She was going to say something else to me! What else was she going to…? He hurried to the elevator.

In 19-B he filled the pail again, kicked off his sandal, and slushed the mop in suds. Foam, mop-strands and water returned him to varied beaches. He mopped angrily, remembering waves.

The water slopped his feet. It had been warm when he put it in the pail. Each stroke wet the baseboard further along.

They're cheating me, he thought and twisted the mophead. Among failing suds the water was black. I've got to tell them, he thought, that I know it. At least ask them why they're not paying me what they said. Of course they didn't say it to me. Not that I need the money, even… That made him even angrier.

He sloshed up more beaches in his mind, moving from room to room.

I don't have a name, he thought. Tides and tides, rolled from the tangled cords. These things I'm writing, they're not descriptions of anything. They're complex names. I don't want her to believe what they say. I just want her to believe I said them. Somewhere (Japan? Yeah…) I walked up the wharf from where the little boats were tied and the black rocks gave out to sand. And everything, even the sand slipping back under my feet, looked miles away like it used to all the time when I was tired, when I was a kid. One of the other fellows from the ship called to me. What did he call me? And how could I have possibly answered?

His eyes stung; he sniffed for the detergent smell.

Or was the smoke thicker? He wiped his face on his cuff.

In the hall, people laughed: footsteps. A door closed.

Gooseflesh enveloped him. His next heartbeat shocked loose his breath; he breathed. Perhaps ten seconds later he realized how tightly he was holding the handle. He laid the mop on the floor, went to the open door, and looked into the… empty hall. For at least a minute.

Then he got the mop and began to work again.

They're cheating me! he thought to replay the familiar. The tone was wrong. To think words set off pricklings.

More water.

His hands, soaked and soaked again, were translucent, the yellow all out of the horn, flesh white and ragged around the fragment nails and swollen crowns. Yeah, leprosy. He recalled Lanya sucking his middle finger with something like relief. What she liked was funny. Especially what she liked in him. Her absence mystified.

Slopping suds over recollected sands, he tried to hallucinate her face. It dissolved in water. He scrubbed the balcony sill, and backed into the room, swinging cords from side to side.

Confront them about his salary? Yes! Images of gifts for her. But he had not seen one store open; not one! Do they talk salary, he pondered, and I talk wages just to keep up?

But we haven't talked!

The inside of his mouth held much more room than the room. As he mopped, he seemed to stagger, shin-deep in tongue, bumping his knees on teeth, and his head against wet, palatal rugae, grasping for an uvula to steady himself. He flopped the mop in the water again, eyes a-sting, and passed his arm across his face; the blunted chain raked his cheek. Energies searched through the mechanic of his body for points to wreck changes. The rhythm and slosh lopped talk out of the brain. "I live in the mouth…" he had been mumbling over and over, he realized as he stopped it. Stopping, he mopped harder at the swirling floor.

"You…?"

He blinked at June in the doorway.

"…didn't get…?"

He grunted interrogatively.

"You said you were going to get me a… picture of…" Her knuckle made its habitual strike at her chin.

"Huh? But I thought you didn't…"

Her eyes beat, banal and wild. Then she ran from the door.

"Hey, look, I'm sorry! I didn't think you…" thought about running after her, sucked his teeth, shook his head, didn't, and sighed.

In the kitchen, he changed the dirty water in his pail for clear, then dry-mopped as much as possible of the flood.

He worked methodically. Every once in a while he made a sound of disgust, or shook his head. Finally he got to swiping after his own footprints. Which was futile; you just made more.

Balancing on one foot in the doorway, he fumbled at his sandal. Leather and wet flesh: He might as well throw it away. But the tab slipped into the buckle. He picked up his notebook and clacked to the elevator.

Half a minute later, the door opened (from the door beside it, where he did not want to look, came hissing wind); he stepped in. The thought, when he recalled it later, seemed to have no genesis:

He did not press seventeen.

"16" glowed before his falling finger in the falling car.

4

No bell-box was on the door.

Cloth or paper covered the hole inside.

Jaw clamped, he knocked; clamped tighter when something inside moved.

The door swung back. "Yeah?" Hot grease clattered.

Behind the man in the undershirt, the girl came forward, her features disappearing to silhouette before the hurricane lamp on the wall.

"What'cha want?" the man asked. "You want something to eat? Come on in. What'cha want?"

"No, I just was… well." He made himself grin and stepped inside. "I just wanted to know who was here."

"You wanna eat, you can." The girl behind the man's shoulder floated back far enough to take light on a cheek bone.

Against the wall people slept in iron bunks. Men sat on the mattresses on the floor. The lantern-light cast down hard blacks to their left.

The door swung behind Kidd. When it slammed, only one looked up.

Against the wall leaned a motorcycle with a day-glo gas tank. In one corner stood a dressmaker's mannequin, splashed with red paint, head twisted to the side, and looped with rounds of greasy chain (but none of the kind Kidd wore under his shirt and pants).

"I been doing work for the people upstairs. I was just wondering who was down here." The room smelled stale, and the cooking odor brought him momentarily back to a filthy fried-food stand where he had not been able to finish eating in waterfront Caracas. "That's why I came down."

Somewhere the sound of water ceased. Wet, blond hair dripping down his shoulders, a boy walked, naked, into the room, picked up a pair of black jeans. Glistening, he balanced on one leg. He glanced at Kidd, grinned: then his foot, bunioned, hammer-toed, and mostly ankle (with a dog's choke chain wrapped three times around it), went into the denim.

"The people upstairs?" The man shook his head, chuckling. "They must be somethin', all the shit that comes down here. What they do to each other all the time? Hey, you want to smoke some dope? Smokey, get our friend here some dope. Get me some too." The girl moved away. "You like dope, man, don't'cha?"

Kidd shrugged. "Sure."

"Hey, yeah. I thought you looked like you did." He grinned and hooked his thumbs over his beltless jeans; his first finger joints were tattooed love and hate. Between thumb and forefinger on the left was a large, red 13. "The noise that comes down here out of that place; was he beatin' her up last night?"

"Huh?" Kidd asked. "I thought you made all the damn noise."

Someone else said: "Oh, man, there was all sorts of crying and stuff comin' down."

And someone else: "Look, Thirteen; what come up from this place must be pretty weird too sometimes."

The second voice was familiar. Kidd looked for it:

Sitting on the bottom bunk, out of the light, was the newspaper carrier, Joaquim Faust — who now raised a finger in greeting. "How you doing, kid?"

Kidd gave back a bewildered smile.

There was someone in the bed Faust sat on.

Smokey returned with a glass jar, a plastic hose and brass bowl in the rubber stopper.

Thirteen took it from her. "God-damn water pipe, and you think somebody would fill it up with water — or wine or something. That's nice too, you know? Creme de Menthe or like that." He shook his head. "Nobody's got time." On the wall he struck a wooden match. "Some good hash, man." He pursed his lips on the rubber tube. The flame suddenly inverted over the brass. The bottle swirled with grey. "Here you go!" he mouthed, with tucked chin.

Kidd took the warm glass and sucked sweet, chalky smoke.

The arch of air grew solid beneath his sternum: breath held, palate tight, somewhere after ten seconds he felt sweat on the small of his back. "Thanks…!" Smoke exploded from his nose.

The pipe had gone to others.

"What kind of work you doing?"

"Hey, Thirteen, he gonna eat?" somebody called from the kitchen.

Through the doorway Kidd saw an enamel stove licked with burn marks.

The boy from the shower stooped to buckle his boots. "Give you a hand in a second." He tucked his cuffs into the boot tops, and stood. Scratching his wet belly, he ambled inside and asked, "What is that shit, anyway?"

"I've been moving furniture around for them, upstairs." Kidd said. "Thirteen — that's you?"

Thirteen raised his tattooed hand, then snapped his fingers. "Sure. Come on in, come on inside and sit." The girl passed Thirteen the water pipe and he extended it toward Kidd. "And have another toke."

Kidd drew in another chest full, and passed the pipe to someone else who wandered by.

Holding in the hash, Kidd noticed the mirror on the side wall, the end table with the crumpled antimacassar lingering from previous occupancy. He coughed: "How—" plosive with smoke—"long have you guys been down here?" What covered the door hole was the framed photograph of mother, father, and three children in their dated sailor suits, with the cracked coverglass.

"Too—" Thirteen exploded smoke of his own—"much. Somebody left that in the hallway, you know?"

He nodded.

Thirteen went on, "I just been here a couple of weeks. I mean in this place. Guys in and out here all the time. I don't even know how long I been in the city. Months, maybe. Cool. You?"

"Days." He looked again to Faust.

Faust was looking intently at the shape in the blanket.

Thirteen looked too, shook his head. "She got messed up, you know? I think she's got an infection or something. Course, it could be bubonic plague for all I know." He jabbed Kidd with his elbow. "Long as you're healthy, Bellona is great. But there's no doctors or nothing, you know?"

"Yeah. That must be bad."

From the kitchen; "What did you put in this shit, huh?"

"Will you stop bitching? Half of it's from last night."

"Then I know half of it won't kill me."

"Here, do something huh! Scrape that." A kitchen knife growled over metal.

"This place used to be all scorpions." Thirteen nodded toward the bed. "That's when she came here; she decided to be a member. Which is fine if you can do it. Guys get messed up like that too. But now she got an infection… If that's what it is."

Smokey returned with the waterless pipe, waiting at Thirteen's shoulder.

Kidd took it, sucked; Thirteen nodded approval.

"You… guys… are…?" Kidd loosed smoke-spurts between his words.

"— Scorpions? Shit, no… Well, you know." He scrunched his face, with an appropriate hand joggle. "I don't intend to be, again, ever; and Denny in there," he thumbed at the boy from the shower who passed by the kitchen door, "ain't exactly on active duty any more."

And that one's Denny, Kidd thought.

Thirteen took the pipe, sucked, and went off into a coughing fit.

"Hey, will she be all right?" Kidd asked, coming to the bed.

Faust made some noncommittal lip movement, lost in beard. "Somebody ought to take care of this girl." He kneaded his maroon and raveled knee.

She she she "She asleep?" sleep sleep. The hash was coming on. Sleep.

The olive landscape, mountains of shoulder and hip, was immobile.

Nobody there. Pillows?

Faust moved over for him.

Kidd sat on the bed's edge, warm from Faust.

"Isn't there a doctor any place in the city?" all over the city, city?

Faust's wrinkles shifted around on his face. "These sons of bitches wouldn't know if there was. I can't figure out whether to let her sleep or make her eat."

"She must be pretty tired if she can sleep through all this noise," Thirteen said. Coming up, Smokey handed the pipe to Faust, who closed his wrinkled eyelids when he sucked. When he. When.

"Maybe," Kidd suggested, "you better let her sleep. Save some food for when she wakes up," akes, akes.

"That—" Thirteen shook a tattooed finger—"is brains at work, Joaquim. Which are in short supply around here… Man!" He shook his head, turned away.

"Maybe," Faust nodded.

Kidd wondered whether it was Faust or the hash that muddled the meaning.

"Here."

He looked up for the pipe. Pipe. Plate? A plate of. Denny, face and chest still wet, stood in front of him, holding out a plate in a white, bath-wrinkled hand.

"Oh, thanks."

Faust took the other one.

"You ain't got no fork?" Denny asked.

"No." It was rice, it was onions, it had string beans in it, and corn. "Thanks." He looked up and took the fork. Water tracked on the white arm, shimmered in adolescent chest-hair, broken with acne.

Thirteen said, "You gotta give people food, you know? I mean, to be peaceable." Behind him, Smokey, plate just under her chin, ate eagerly.

It had meat in it too. Hash brought edges out from the grease that transformed the odor. He ate. And those were… nuts? No. Crisp potatoes. As the tastes staggered in his mouth, a muffled man's voice said something? something like, "Stop it! Now, stop it!" and a woman's wail rose toward the metallic.

He looked around, wondering which other room they were in.

Faust glanced at the ceiling.

So did Thirteen. "See what I'm talking about?" He sucked his teeth and shook his head. "They really go on up there."

The wail, which began to balk now toward sobbing, could have been either June or Mrs Richards. He had not realized before four for how alike their voices were.

Frowning, he ate more of the greasy rice (Bacon grease? Well, at any rate, bacon) and listened to forks tick tin.

Denny ate on one of the mattresses on the floor, back to Kidd: The marble knobs of vertebrae disappeared under the corn-colored hair which dried, lightened, curled.

Thirteen came from the kitchen at the rap on the door. "Hey, it's Nightmare!" Thirteen stepped back on his sudden shadow. "Sweetheart, you just made hash time! And have something to eat for dessert."

It and the blazing apparition in the doorway went out.

"Come on in." Thirteen stepped back again. "What can we do for you?"

The tickings had stopped.

"I'm looking—" Nightmare stepped forward, jingling — for motherfuckers who want to run." He pushed away the tangled braid from his shoulder; his hand stayed to massage the heavy muscle below the scratches, favoring that arm. "I'm not even gonna ask you, Thirteen. You're chicken shit." He nodded toward Faust. "Ain't she got out of the fuckin' bed yet?" Faust jammed another fork of rice somewhere into his beard and shook his head.

Thirteen stepped back to one side of the door, Smokey to the other.

Nightmare walked forward between them. His lips pulled from his broken tooth and his face creased with something like concern. Then he shook his head.

Kidd thought how many different meanings could reside in one gesture. The thought prickled through his stuttering ering ing mind. Nightmare — his eyes were the grey-green of wet, wet clay — looked at him. And blinked.

"You staring like you got toothpicks propping up your eyelids again," Nightmare said, grimacing. "Every time I seen you. Which is twice. I don't like that."

Confused, Kidd looked at his plate.

"I ain't gonna do anything about it," Nightmare went on. "I'm just telling you I don't like it, understand? I mean I like to make things clear."

He looked up again.

Nightmare laughed, a short, rough thing happening in his nose. "Okay, now. Which of you cocksuckers wants to run? Hey, Denny, wrap something around your neck and come on."

"I ain't finished eatin'," Denny said from the floor.

Nightmare grunted and stepped over him. Denny ducked.

"Hey, is that shit any good?"

Kidd hesitated in glistening sheets of clarity. Then he held out his plate and fork, and watched Nightmare warily decide to take the dare.

The scorpion took the fork in his fist, swept through the mixture, spilling some, and, fork still in his mouth, chewed, with grains about his lips. Still chewing, he grinned. "Hey, that's okay." As he handed Kidd back the fork, Thirteen broke the tensions that, with the hash, had almost grown visible about the room.

"Well, have a God-damn plate, will you? Here, Nightmare, I'll get you some. Hey—" he turned to Smokey—"take him some hash, while I get him something to eat."

Nightmare sat down on the bed, between Faust and Kidd, leg against Kidd's leg, arm against Kidd's arm. The figure under the blanket behind them didn't move. Nightmare sucked the pipe. He let out, with his smoke, "Now you want to tell me what you lookin' for, kid, all the time?"

"Man, he's higher than the World Trade Center's flagpole." Thirteen handed Nightmare a tin plate and a spoon. "I been pumping hash in him all evening. What you wanna do all this heavy shit to his head for?"

Nightmare took the plate but waved Thirteen away with the spoon. "No, this is friendly. The kid and me, we know each—"

Faust, finished with the last of his rice, suddenly put his plate on the floor, stood, picked up his paper, and marched toward the door.

"Hey, where you going?" Nightmare said.

"Thanks for the meal," Faust mumbled to Thirteen without stopping.

"Hey, motherfucker, so long!" Nightmare bellowed into the wake of ice.

The door swung open for Faust.

"Good bye!" Nightmare flipped his arm: the door slammed; the flung spoon clattered the picture frame.

The picture swung.

Nightmare laughed. Ice flushed away in the blowtorch of his hilarity.

Thirteen, first dubiously, then in full-throated hoarseness, laughed with him.

"Toss me back my fuckin' spoon!" Nightmare howled between landslides of laughter.

It came back underhand from Thirteen. "Now what's the old man all upset about, huh Smokey? He's crazy, ain't he?" and looked over his shoulder as Smokey nodded corroboration.

Nightmare had caught his spoon and now leaned toward Kidd. "He's all fucked up in the head, you know? Cause he thinks I messed up the bitch." He pointed the spoon at the form under the blanket. "I didn't mess her up. She got caught fightin' fair. I wasn't even around. Shit." He swiped food into his mouth. "You know—" grains fell — to his wrist, to his jeans, to the scarred parquet—"some of these sons of bitches didn't want no bitches whatsoever in the business?" He down stabbed the air with his spoon. "Keep 'em away! Keep 'em out of here! They just gonna mess up the works!" With a malicious grin he looked around the room at the people leaning on the walls, sitting on the mattresses, or on the other bunks. Three among the dozen of them were girls, Kidd saw: but the lamplight was harsh and full of shadow. Nightmare's clay-colored eyes came back and caught his. "Then some of the bitches got together and beat the shit out of a couple of brothers…!" He reared back, heavy arms shaking. More food spilled from his plate. "Well, since I was boss-man, I said come right on in, ladies, and do your thing! Shit, I been livin' off bitches since I was ten, so it ain't no news to me what they can do." He came forward again, his weight-lifter's shoulder flattened to Kidd's, and whispered conspiratorially: "When you knee 'em in the nuts, a bitch don't go down quite so fast, either." Which he thought was very funny and laughed again. "Good people to have on your side." He took another mouthful, and made another large gesture with his spoon; grains scattered. "Magnificent shit!" he said with his mouth full. "Magnificent! Which of you fine young ladies is responsible?" He swung his lowered head around, mimicking an exaggerated politeness.

A heavy girl, in a blue sweatshirt, standing by the mannequin said, "It was one of the guys… Denny helped."

"Hey, Denny!" Nightmare's small, boomerang chin jounced.

Denny looked up, still eating.

"I should throw this motherfucker at you!" Nightmare jerked the plate back to his shoulder. Kidd jerked aside. But Nightmare returned the plate to his lap, and laughed loudly and wetly.

Denny hadn't even flinched.

"People are very funny," Nightmare pronounced, recovering, nodding over another mouthful. "The ladies had their problems." He thumped his thumb against his sternum among rattling links. "I had mine too — some of the brothers just weren't interested in having no white people involved no how."

Kidd glanced around the room again; everyone in the room looked white.

Nightmare saw him glance and lifted a finger: "Now don't get your idea from this. Thirteen here runs the Lily White Rest Home for Depraved and Indigent A-heads; but the true brotherhood is of a much deeper hue."

"God damn, Nightmare," Thirteen said from the door. "Why are you always going on like that? We get spades here. There was—" he began to snap his tattooed fingers—"what's-his-name…?"

Nightmare waved in the air. "Tokens! Mere tokens." The nails on his beefy fingers were overlong and crested black as an auto mechanic's. " 'Cause I'm white," he said out of the side of his mouth to Kidd, "these racist bastards here will let me come around to look for replacement troops. Well, motherfuckers, I'd come around here even if I was black as George! And I'll keep coming around till both moons fall out of the sky and the sun comes up backwards!" He looked at Kidd directly. "And we're getting a few, too — though these shitheads would give up a nut before they'd admit that just a few of them even like it better living over there and being scorpions than hanging around this behavioral sink!" His hand, which was still up before him, returned to hold the edge of his plate, about to slide off. "Yes, the ladies had to beat some heads." He glanced back at the figure behind them in the blankets: "And some of the ladies, indeed, got their heads beat. Well, I had to beat some heads too, to attain my present status — and though I am now quite satisfied with my current position in the community, I would not be surprised if my head eventually took some beating too." He turned back, dark hair falling in tangles from his shoulder, and made a face. "Sisterhood… Brotherhood… very powerful stuff, man!" Grimacing, he shook his head. "Very powerful. Hey—?" once again at Denny. "Denny, you gonna run? We need you tonight. You run it good, boy."

"I dunno." Denny didn't turn. "Lemme finish my dinner, huh?"

Nightmare laughed again, looked around the room. "He's gonna come. How you like that, the little bastard's gonna come! I don't think I'd even take any of the rest of you cocksuckers. Denny? It's a good run with us, ain't it? Go on, tell 'em."

"Yeah," Denny said with his mouth full, then swallowed: "It's a good run, okay?"

"Now you see; these motherfuckers all think I want to be the daisy in a field of black orchids—" (lower:) "though we have two or three of those; and no problems with 'em. But since I been boss-man, I take whoever wants in and knows their business." He nodded to Kidd. "I'd even take you, and you ain't no nigger… what?" He leaned back, narrowed his eyes, and raised a hand like an artist at a picture: "A half-blood American Indian on your… father's side? 'Course, the light's a little dim…"

Kidd grinned. "On my mother's."

Nightmare grinned back, shrugged. "Well, you still got more meat on you than most of these sad-assed A-heads."

A frustrated laugh came from across the room. Thirteen said: "Nightmare, why are you always down on us like that? You got us out as racists, and chauvinist pigs, and speed freaks to boot. We ain't had no speed around here for I don't know how long."

Nightmare bounced on the bed with delight, the back of his wrist against his forehead, miming a distressed belle. "Me!" in falsetto. "Me?" even higher. "Me, down on speed? I'm just waiting for you racist, chauvinist pigs to get some more!"

Smokey said: "That blond Spanish guy hasn't been around with any for a long time… I sort of wonder where he went."

Somebody else said: "He probably burned the whole city."

Thirteen began laughing again, moved across the room, laughing. Others moved too.

Nightmare turned back to Kidd. "How'd you like that idea, goin' on a scorpion run?" It must have suddenly struck him as funny; he guffawed, snorting, shook his head, and brushed rice grains from his chin with his fist. "You'd picked yourself a nice shiny orchid last time I saw you. What would you do in a real garden party, huh, kid?" Two more spoonfuls and Nightmare's plate was empty. Holding it between both thumbs and forefingers, he opened his knees and dropped it. "You think about that, running. Maybe that's what you're looking for, huh? Let me tell you something." He fingered among the chains around his neck, held up the thin brass one with its round and triangular glasses, and shook it. "You're a fool to wear yours where anybody can see it, kid." Glass glittered, harsh in white lantern light.

Why why "Why? You got yours on around your neck," nd your neck our eck ck. He hadn't been aware that his shirt was half open.

"Just shut up and listen now. Smokey over there. I know she's got one. But you don't see her with it out and waving it, now?"

"You know," Kidd said, "I figured two people who saw each other with… these: well, they'd sort of trust each other, you know? Because they'd… know something about each other," and wondered if Madame Brown had arrived upstairs for dinner.

Nightmare frowned. "Say, he's got a brain, you know?" He glanced at Thirteen. "The kid ain't that stupid. But I'll tell you: You look at this and you know something about me. I look at that and I know something about you. Well, what are we gonna do with what we know, huh? I'll tell you what you'll do with it. You'll use it to put the longest, sharpest blade on that orchid of yours, soon as I ain't lookin, between that rib, and that rib." His finger suddenly ger suddenly turned to enly his ly jab Kidd's his side. "And don't think for one second I wouldn't do the same thing to you. So I don't trust anybody I see with one at all." He pressed his lips to make a little pig's snout and nodded, mocking sagesse. "Hey, just look at Denny!"

Finished with his food, Denny had walked over to the mannequin. He took up a heavy chain loop from it, draped dark links around his own neck.

"I told you Denny'd run with me. Okay, man. You know when, you know where. Lemme get out of this freak hole. I gotta hunt some more." He stood and lumbered over the mattresses. "I knew you'd come through, Denny. Hey?" He frowned at Thirteen. "Do something with her," and gestured back toward the bed.

"Yeah, sure, Nightmare." Thirteen opened the door for him. When he closed it, he looked back at Denny. Smokey at his shoulder blinked in anticipation.

"Hey, man," Thirteen said slowly after seconds of silence, "are you still into that shit?"

Denny put another chain around his neck. It rattled on the one already there.

Thirteen swung up his hands and grunted. "Come on, Denny, I thought you were gonna stay out of all that. All right, all right. It's your ass."

Upstairs a woman was laughing, and the laughter grew, ghter grew, laughter: "Stop it! Stop it will you?" in Mr Richards' harsh voice. "Just stop it." op it, ghter grew ew.

"Look, I'm gonna have to get back to work." Kidd stood up. "Thanks for the food, you know? And the dope. It's good stuff."

Denny put on another loop, and Thirteen said, "Oh, yeah, sure." He seemed as disappointed at Kidd's leaving as Mrs Richards always was. "Come on down again and smoke some more dope. Don't mind Nightmare. He's crazy, that's all."

"Sure." Kidd went to the door, opened it.

The moan stopped him: hesitant, without vocal color, it came on behind. He started to turn, but his eyes stalled on the mirror. In it he could see practically the whole room:

On the bed where he had been sitting, she had pushed herself up to her elbow. The blanket slipped down, and she turned a face, wet as Denny's from the bath. It was puffed, bruised. Though her temples trickled with fever, the sound, as she swayed, came from the driest tissue.

She blinked on balls of scarlet glass.

The door clapped behind him. After ten steps, he released his breath. Then he dragged back air, rasping with something like sobbing, something like laught er aughter sobb ter bing er.

"Excuse me."

"Yes?"

"Reverend Taylor?"

"What can I do for you?"

On the shelf behind the desk, tape-spools turned. Organ music gentled in the shadowed office. "I … well, somebody told me I could get those pictures — posters here. Of George," he explained, "Harrison."

"Oh yes, certainly." Her benign smile as she pushed herself away from the desk, made him, holding his notebook in the church foyer, absolutely uncomfortable. "Just reach over for the latch there and it'll open."

He pushed through the waist high door. His bare foot left tile and hit carpet. He looked around the walls; but they were covered with shelves. The bulletin board was a shale of notices and pamphlets.

The poster was down.

"Now which picture would you like?" She opened the wide top drawer.

He stepped up: it was filled with eight-by-ten photographs of the rough-featured black man. Reverend Taylor stood up and spread a disordered pile of pictures across more pictures. "We have six of these. They're very nice. I'm afraid I haven't got them arranged though. I just had to dump them in here. Let's see if I can pull out a complete set—"

"Oh. I think maybe—"

She paused, still smiling.

The pictures in the drawer were all full-head photos.

"No." His embarrassment hove home. "You probably don't have the ones I was looking for, ma'am. Somebody told me he'd gotten one from you, and I guess… well, I'm sorry—"

"But you said posters, didn't you?" She closed the drawer and her eyes, a comment on her own misunderstanding. "Of course, the posters!" She stepped around the desk and the toes of her shoes beat at the hem of her robe. "We have two, here. There's a third in preparation, since that article in Mr Calkins' paper about the moon."

Behind the desk were portfolio-sized cardboard boxes. Reverend Taylor pulled one open. "Is this what you want?"

"Really, I'm pretty sure you don't have—"

Harrison, naked and half-erect, one hand cupping his testicles, leaned against some thick tree. The lowest branches were heavy with leaves. Behind him, a black dog — it could have been Muriel — sat in the dead leaves, lolling an out-of-focus tongue. Sunset flung bronzes down through the browns and greens. "It was done with a backdrop, right down in the church basement," she said. "But I think it's rather good. Is that the one you want?"

"No…" he said, too softly and too quickly.

"Then it must be this one."

She flipped over a handful to let him see.

"Yeah — yes. That's it," and was still astounded with the memory.

She peeled the poster from its identical twin and began to roll it up. "It had to be. Until the new one comes in—" as jacket, genitals, knees, boots and background purple rose into the white roll turning in dark fingers—"these are all we have. Here you go. I'll get you a rubber band." She stepped to the desk.

"Hey," he said, putting belligerent stupidity in front of his disconcerted astonishment, "why do you—" He stopped because the idea came, interrupting his question, clearly and without ambiguity, to request the other poster as well. " — why do you have stuff like this here? I mean to give away."

Only later did it occur to him that her ingenuous surprise must have been as calculated to disarm as his naiveté. When she recovered from it, she said, "They're very popular. We like to be up to date, and posters are being used a lot … they were done for us free, and I suppose that's the main reason. We've given out quite lots of the first one you saw. That one," she pointed to the one he held, "isn't in quite as much demand."

"Yeah?"

She nodded.

"What I mean is, why…"

She picked up a rubber band from the desk and stretched her fingers inside it to slip it over his roll. The band pulled in the fingertips: he thought a moment of his orchid. With deliberation, as though she had reached a decision about him, she said, "The poor people in this city — and in Bellona that pretty well means the black people — have never had very much. Now they have even less." She looked at him with an expression he recognized as a request for something he could not even name. "We have to give them—" she reached forward—"something." The red rubber snapped on the tube. "We have to." She folded her hands. "The other day when I saw you, I just assumed you were black. I suppose because you're dark. Now I suspect you're not. Even so, you're still invited to come to our services." She smiled brightly again. "Will you make an effort?"

"Oh. Yeah." He doffed the poster: He'd realized before he probably would not come to a service. Now he resolved never to return at all. "Sure. What do I owe you for… this." One hand, in his pocket, he fingered the crumpled bill.

"It's free," she said. "Like everything else."

He said, "Oh," But his hand stayed on the moist note.

In the foyer he stepped around the dumpy black woman in the dark coat too heavy for the heat. She blinked at him suspiciously from under her black hat, pulled up her shopping bag, and continued toward the office door. Between what Nightmare had said earlier and what Reverend Taylor had just said, he found himself wondering, granted the handful he'd seen, just where all the black people in Bellona were. The poster under his arm, he hurried into the evening.

"Hello!" Mrs Richards said, eyes both wide and sleepy. She held her bathrobe at the neck. "Come in, Kidd. Come in. I didn't know what happened to you yesterday. We were expecting you to come back down. And eat with us."

"Oh. Well, when I got finished, I just thought…" He shrugged and entered. "You got coffee this morning?"

She nodded and went off to the kitchen. He followed her, letting his notebook flap his leg. She said, "The way you left, I thought there might have been something wrong. I thought perhaps you weren't going to come back at all."

He laughed. "I just went upstairs and finished my work. Then I went back to the park. I mean, you don't have to feed me. I do the work. You pay me for it, what you told Mrs Brown you would. That'll be okay."

"Of course," she said from the kitchen.

He went into the dining room and sat. "Coffee, I mean. And a sandwich, and letting me use your bathroom and stuff. That's nice. I appreciate it. But you shouldn't put yourself out." He was talking too loud. More softly: "You see?"

June, in pink slacks and robin's-egg sweater, a bird appliquéd near the neck, came to the door.

"Hey…" he said, quietly. "I have something for you. Upstairs, in nineteen."

"What—" then caught herself and mouthed: "What is it?"

He grinned and pointed up with his thumb.

June looked confused. Then she called: "I'll help you with the coffee, Mom."

"That's all right, dear." Mrs Richards came in with a tray, a pot, and cups. "If you want to bring in a cup for yourself. Darling?" She sat the tray down. "Aren't you drinking too much coffee?"

"Oh, Mother!" June marched into the kitchen and returned with a cup.

He liked putting his hands around the warming porcelain while the coffee went in.

"I did something, you know, perhaps I ought not to have." Mrs Richards finished pouring and spoke carefully. "Here, I'll bring it to you."

He sipped and wished it wasn't instant. His mind went off to some nameless spot on the California coast, carpeted with rust-colored redwood scraps and the smell of boiled coffee while a white sun made a silver pin cushion in the tree tops, and fog wrapped up the gaunt trunks—

"Here." Mrs Richards returned and sat. "I hope you don't mind."

June, he saw, was trying to hold her cup the same way he did.

"What is it?" On blue bordered stationery, in black, calligraphic letters, Mrs Richards had written out his poem.

"I've probably made all sorts of mistakes, I know."

He finished reading it and looked up, confused. "How'd you do that?"

"It stayed with me, very clearly."

"All of it?"

"It's only eight lines, isn't it? It sticks very persistently in the mind. Especially considering it doesn't rhyme. Did I make any terrible mistakes?"

"You left out a comma." He slid the paper to her and pointed.

She looked. "Oh, of course."

"You just remembered it, like that?"

"I couldn't get it out of my mind. I haven't done anything awful, have I?"

"Um… it looks very nice." He tried to fix the warmth inside him, but it was neither embarrassment, nor pride, nor fear, so stayed un-named.

"You may have it." She sat back. "Just stick it in your notebook. I made two copies, you see — I'm going to keep one for myself. Forever." Her voice broke just a little: "That's why I was so worried when I thought you weren't coming back. You really go and sleep out in the park, just like that, all alone?"

He nodded. "There're other people there."

"Oh, yes. I've heard about them. From Edna. That's… amazing. You know you haven't told me yet, is it all right that I remembered your poem; and wrote it down?"

"Eh… yeah." He smiled, and wished desperately she would correct that comma. "Thanks. You know, we can start moving stuff up today. You got everything all ready down here?"

"We can?" She sounded pensive. "You mean you've got it all ready."

"I guess I should have come back last night and told you we could start today on the moving."

"Arthur—" who stood at the door, tie loose—"Kidd says we can move today. By the time you come home, dear, we'll all be upstairs."

"Good. You really are working!" When Mr Richards reached the table, Mrs Richards had his cup poured. Standing, he lifted it. The cup's reflection dropped away in the mahogany, stayed vague while he drank, then suddenly swam up like a white fish in a brown pool to meet the china rim that clacked on it. "Gotta run. Why don't you get Bobby to give you a hand with the little stuff? Exercise'll do him some good."

"Beds, and things like that…" Mrs Richards shook her head. "I really wonder if we shouldn't get somebody else, to help."

"I can get everything up there," Kidd said. "I'll just take the beds apart."

"Well, if you're sure."

"Sure he can," Mr Richards said. "Well, I'm on my way. Good-bye." In his fingers, the knot rose up between his collar wings, wobbled into place. He turned and left the room. "The front door slammed.

Kidd watched the amber rim make nervous tides on the china, then drank the black sea. "I better go on upstairs and get last-minute things cleaned up. You can start putting things out. I'll be down in about fifteen minutes." He clinked his cup in his saucer, and went out.

"Where is it?" June called from the door.

He closed the broom closet on the mop and pail. "Over there, leaning against the wall."

When he came in, she was staring at the white roll in its red rubber band; her fist floated inches under her chin. "You're sure that's a picture of…"

"George," he said, "Harrison. Look at it."

She picked up the roll.

On the floor he saw the stack of her father's computer magazines she had brought up as excuse.

She rolled the rubber band toward the end, but stopped. "Where did you get it?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you. They got them all over." He wanted to avoid the specific answer. "There's a woman minister who just gives him away." He sighed. "At a church."

"Have you seen… him, again?"

"No. Aren't you gonna open it?"

"I'm afraid to."

The simplicity with which she said it surprised and moved him. The fog outside the windows was almost solid. He watched: she stood, head slightly bent, and still.

"Does Madame Brown know about you and George—"

Her "No!" was so quick and soft (her head whirled) he stiffened.

"She goes to that bar too. She knows him," he said. "That's why I was wondering."

"Oh…" so less intense.

"She was in there the night you stopped me to ask about him."

"Then it's good I didn't go in. She might have… seen." June closed her eyes, too long for blinking. "If she had seen me, that would have been just…"

Her blonde energies were to him terrible but dwindling things. "Why — I still don't understand — are you so hung up on him? I mean, I know about what… happened. And I mean, that doesn't matter to me. But I…" He felt his question confused among hesitations, and stopped it.

She looked vulnerable and afraid. "I don't… know. You wouldn't understand—" then even vulnerability fell away—"if I told you. They named that… moon after him!"

He pretended not to stare. "Enough other people are after him too, I guess. That's why they have those, huh? Open it."

She shook her head with small, quick movements. "But they don't know…" Unable to look at him longer, she looked down at the roll. "I know more than they do."

"Hey," he asked to fill the discomforting silence, "what did happen between you?"

"Go read about it in the Times." She looked up.

He searched for the belligerence he'd heard: her raised features held none of it.

"The night the… black people had the riot? I was out, just walking around. There was lightning. And that immense thundering. I didn't know what had happened. And then it… I didn't even see the man with the camera until— It's just like it showed in the paper!"

"Oh," which gave her none of what she'd requested.

She walked toward the door. Just before she reached it, she finished removing the rubber band and unrolled the poster.

"Is that him?" he asked, thinking it would be friendly rhetoric but hearing a real request.

The movement of the back of her head as she looked here and there became nodding. She glanced back. "Why… did they make… these?"

"I guess some other people felt the same way about him you do. I was talking, last night, with some friends. This girl I stay with: she's maybe a few years older than you are. And this guy. He's an engineer, like your father. We were talking, in a bar, about whether I should give that to you."

Her face began worry on itself.

"I didn't tell them your name or anything. They took it very seriously, you know? More seriously than I did, at first. They didn't laugh at you or anything."

"…What did they say?"

"That it was up to me, because I knew you. That some bad things could happen, or some good things. You like it?"

She looked again. "I think it's the most horrible thing I've ever seen."

He was angry, and swallowed to hold it. "Tear it up and throw it down the elevator shaft, then… if you want." He waited and wondered if her shaking head was confusion or denial. "I'd keep it if I were you."

"Hey, what's that?" From the way Bobby ran into the room, Kidd thought he would burst through the poster like a clown through a paper hoop.

June crashed the edges together. "It's a picture!" The white backing wrinkled against her thighs.

"What's it a picture of?"

"It isn't anything you'd be interested in!"

"D'you find it up here in a closet?" Bobby asked Kidd, walking into the room. "I bet it's a naked lady. I've seen pictures of naked ladies in school before."

June sucked her teeth. "Oh, really!"

"Come on. Let me see."

"No." June tried to roll the paper. Bobby peered, and she whipped around. "It isn't yours!"

"Oh, I don't want to see your old naked lady anyway. Hey, you really got the place cleaned up, Kidd. We gotta carry everything up here?"

"Yeah."

"We got an awful lot of stuff in our house." Bobby looked dubious.

"We'll make it."

June finished rolling the crinkled poster, picked up her magazines, and started down the hall to the back of the apartment.

"I'm just gonna sneak in and look at it when you're not there!" Bobby called.

At the hall's end a door closed loudly.

"Come on," Kidd said. "Leave your sister alone. Let's go downstairs and move some furniture."

"Naw!" Bobby complained, though he started to the door with Kidd. "She'd tell on me if she caught me with a picture of a naked lady."

They went out.

"You tell on her," Kidd said, "they'll take it away and you'll never see it."

"Is it a naked lady?" Bobby asked, wonderingly.

"Nope. It's not." Kidd rang the elevator bell.

"What is it?"

"A naked man."

"Aw, come on!" Bobby began to laugh as the elevator doors rolled open and stepped forward.

"Hey, boy! This one!" Kidd grabbed Bobby's shoulder.

The wind hissed.

"Oh, wow!" Bobby stepped back, then shrugged from Kidd's grip on his shoulder. "Hey, I almost…!" He shook his head.

"You better watch yourself. Come on."

They stepped into the other elevator.

The door pulled darkness around them.

Bobby, still breathing hard, pushed "17".

"Does June always tell on you?"

"Sure, she does… well, not always."

"What's the last thing she didn't tell on you about?"

"What do you want to know for?"

"Just curious."

The door opened. Bobby, revealed beside him, had one hand around his chained wrist, stroking the clumsy beads.

"I can't decide," Mrs Richards announced when they walked in, "whether we should take the big things up first or the little things. I really haven't arranged this very well in my head. I assumed because we were moving inside the building, it wouldn't be any trouble."

"I want my old room!"

"What do you mean, dear? We're moving into a new apartment."

"It's just the same as this one; only backward. And it's blue. I want my old room."

"Of course, darling. What room did you think you were going to have?"

"I just wanted to make sure." Bobby marched off down the hall. "I'll start putting my stuff together."

"Thank you, dear."

"I'll start with the couch and the beds and things, Mrs Richards. They're the hardest; but once they're up, you'll really be moved in, just about, you know?"

"All right. But the beds, they're so big!"

"I'll take them apart. You got a hammer and screwdriver?"

"Well, all right. I guess if you're going to get them upstairs, you have to. I'm just feeling guilty that I didn't organize this thing any better. Now you want a screwdriver. And a hammer. You're sure you'll be able to put them back together?"

Mrs Richards was pulling off the bedding as he came back from the kitchen with the tools. "You see, ma'am," he explained, hoisting off the mattress, "these big beds, the frames just come off the headboards." Even so, as soon as he got to work, he realized five full-sized beds, to dismantle, move, and reassemble, would take at least two hours.

He'd been working for one when (Mrs Richards herself had already made several trips) he heard Bobby and June out in the front room. He put down his screwdriver as Bobby said: "You didn't tell on me about this… and Eddie; so I won't tell about your old picture."

Kidd walked out of the bedroom and stopped by the living room door.

June, her back to him, was reaching into the sideboard. Silverware clashed in her hands. She turned with the bunched, heavy spoons and forks.

"Only," Bobby continued by the bookshelf, "you shouldn't have taken yours off." This and yours apparently referred to the optic chain that bound his wrist; he was holding his arm up to show his sister. "Eddie took his off, and you remember what happened."

"I was just scared," June protested. "Because of all that other stuff. If you hadn't stolen that one from Eddie, he wouldn't have—"

"I didn't steal it!"

"He didn't give it to you, did he?"

"I didn't steal it," Bobby insisted. "If you say I stole it, I'll tell them about your bad picture—"

"It isn't bad!"

"Of course it's bad; if it wasn't bad, you'd let me see it."

"Hey," Kidd said.

Both children looked.

"Eddie's your brother, isn't he? What happened to Eddie, anyway."

Both looked at each other.

The silverware recommenced clanking.

Bobby moved his palm over his beaded wrist.

"Okay," Kidd said. "I guess it isn't really any of my business."

"He went away," June said.

"He ran away from home," Bobby said. "Only—"

"— he came back a couple of times," June said. "And did terrible things. It wouldn't have been so hard on Mommy if he hadn't kept coming back like that."

"Daddy said he was gonna kill him if he ever came back like that again—"

"Bobby!"

"Well, he did. And Mommy screamed—"

"Look, it isn't any of my business," Kidd concluded. "Once we have all the kitchen stuff upstairs, your mother can start getting ready for dinner — in your new apartment." Which sounded perfectly inane. He wondered where Eddie was—

"We don't know," Bobby said in a way that, once, in the mental hospital, when someone did the same thing, made Kidd go around for ten hours thinking all the other patients could read his mind, "where Eddie is now. He said he was going to another city. I wanted to go with him. But I was scared."

June looked more and more uncomfortable.

"Come on," Kidd said, "take the silverware. And Bobby, you start on those books. We'll have everything up but the rugs by the time your father gets home."

He got most of the disassembled stuff into the hall, a couple of times thinking that the thumping, banging, and scraping might be causing as much unrest in Thirteen's place as any running in the halls or banging on the doors had caused in the Richards'.

He loaded springs and headboards into the elevator — the empty shaft, whose door apparently opened at whatever floor the car beside it stopped, hissed blandly by his side.

The ride up in the dark, with only bed springs, the orange number "19" before him, and his own harsh breath, was oddly calming.

"They should have the padding in the elevators when people are moving furniture," Mrs Richards, waiting for him in the upper hall, admonished. "Well, there's no one to get it out for us. There's nothing we can do."

In the new apartment (an hour later), he had reassembled the frames and, going from room to room, put the springs on — he was sitting on the last spring, staring at the folded mattress on the floor when Mrs Richards came in carrying a small night-table against her chest, its legs stuck forward like four horns. "You know, I didn't believe you were actually going to get them up here?" she exclaimed. "You really have been working like a madman! You should take a rest, I think."

He said, "Yeah, I'm resting," and smiled.

She put the table down, and he noticed her distraught expression. For a moment he thought she'd taken offense at his flip answer. But she said: "They were back, just a moment ago. Downstairs. Running in the halls, making that terrible noise!"

Kidd frowned.

"I am so happy to be out of there…" Mrs Richards shook her head, and for a moment he thought she was going to cry. "I'm so happy! Really, I was practically afraid to take this—" her fingers swayed on the night table's carved corner—"out of there. And carry it up here. But we've done it. We've moved! We've… done it!"

He looked about the room, at the folded mattress, at tke night table, at the dresser out from the wall. And the rugs were still downstairs.

"I guess we have…" He frowned. "Just about."

A bubble grew at the caldron's rim, reflecting both their faces, one front, one profile, tiny and distant.

Jommy's spoon handle, circling the soup, passed: the bubble broke.

Kidd, still panting, asked, "You seen Lanya?"

"Sure." Jommy's face was wider ear to ear than from chin to forehead. "She was right over there talking to Milly—hey, before you run off again! Will you two be back for dinner?" He rested the spoon on a black pipe, crusted with burnt grease, sticking from the cinderblocks.

"I guess so. I took off before the lady at my job could get a chance to feed me."

Soup ran down the granular grey, bubbled and popped. "Good." Grinning, Jommy went back to stirring. His khaki shirt sleeve, rolled loosely up his thin arm, swung: the shirt was about three sizes too big. "It'll be ready about time it gets dark. Lanya knows, but I guess I gotta tell you again: Now come and eat, any time you want, you hear? John and Milly won't mind…"

But Kidd was crossing the worn grass, among sleeping bags, rolled or airing; knapsacks and pack-braces scattered the clearing, lay piled around the picnic bench, or leaned beneath the trees.

She wasn't among the dozen spectators to the Chinese Checker game between the squat, dark-haired man who sat crosslegged behind the board and rocked with his elbows on his knees, and a tall, freckled woman with crew-cut hair, who wore much Southwestern silver under and over her denim shirt; her belt was silver and turquoise. As her long freckled fingers, heavy with blue-stoned rings, moved and moved back over the marbles, Kidd saw her nails were bitten badly as his own.

A girl who looked at first like nothing but a mop squatted (two threadbare knees poked up either side) to paw through the cardboard carton of colored string— what was left of John's "loom" project.

Another girl (her hair was the color of a car he recalled, whose owner said he'd just had it painted "Mediterranean Gold") sat on a dented brass drum, lacing a high-topped shoe — the kind with hooks in place of the last dozen eyes. Her pants leg was rolled up above a very red knee. A bearded boy stood beside her, talking and grinning, occasionally pushing his own bushy hair back from an earlobe pierced with a gold cross. His sneaker, on top of the drum, was wedged against her thigh. The drum itself held clay, cracked away from the side and shot with crevices — that was Milly's "pottery" project.

Milly herself, or Lanya, were not there…

Harmonica notes tangled with the smoky leaves above. He looked up. More music — but not from above. Just far away. And from which—?

He looked around the clearing again, charged off into the brush… which dumped him on another park path, sloping up toward silver notes. He started after them, wondering at how little of the park he'd actually explored.

The music moved away.

Notes bent like blues, and slid, chromatically, from mode to austere mode. It was as if her major influences, (he grinned) were late Sonny Terry and early Stockhausen.

At the top of the rise, he saw them at the bottom: Milly's bare legs below her denim shorts, Lanya's jeans; Milly's heavy red hair shook as she gazed around; Lanya's, scrap bronze, bent to her harp. Shoulder to shoulder, the two girls disappeared around a turn.

He started to run after them, anticipated dialogue filling his mouth: Hey, I just about got the Richards into their new apartment! All the big stuff is up, so Mrs Richards gave me the rest of the day off. Tomorrow morning, I take up the rugs and we put the furniture…

Two steps, and erupting through it was the sudden and inexplicable urge to follow, to observe, to overhear! What he wanted to do, he realized, was watch Lanya when she was not watching him.

The path curved right.

To the right, he pushed into the brush — making a lot of noise. Well, if they discovered him, he was discovered. He was still curious.

The music halted; were they talking?

That path had sloped down; the ground he pushed over sloped up. Was he going to come out on them after all?

A sharp drop stopped him.

Beyond rocks and a few trees grown crookedly on the slope, the path lay sixteen feet below. Which meant, he figured, they'd come around the bend right there — and see him.

They came around the bend — and didn't.

One hand above, he hooked a slender branch; bare foot flat, sandal on its toe, he waited, a smile ready behind his face to push forward when they noticed him. Would he get some snatch of conversation (possibly even about him) before they looked up and saw?

"…perfectly terrified," Milly said in a tone neither flip nor rhetorical.

"There isn't anything to be terrified of," Lanya said. "I'd think, with the rumors of rape and violation going around, you'd be fascinated to meet the man himself and get a look."

"Oh, the rumors are fascinating enough," Milly said, "in a perfectly horrible way—"

"And the man is rather nice—" Lanya turned her harmonica, examining it as she walked—"despite the rumors. Don't you find reality more fascinating than a flicker of half truths and anxiety-distorted projections?"

The two young women passed beneath. He imagined his reflection sliding across her harmonica; her eyes starting up—

"In principle," Milly said. "In practice, when the rumors get to a certain point, I'm willing to let the whole business alone and go off exploring in the opposite direction. Suppose the reality turns out to be worse than the rumors?"

"Oh, really…!" Lanya raised her harmonica, played. "You're going to chicken out, again, aren't you?" She played another snatch.

"Someday," Milly said, pensively, "I wish you'd play a piece from one end to the other. The snatches are awfully nice."

(Kidd looked after them.)

Lanya looked at her harmonica. "I guess that's because I never play for anybody else."

"You should," Milly said. "I mean, everybody hears it anyway. Sometimes, all those little pieces, pretty as they are, practically give me a headache because they aren't connected to each other."

"I'll try," Lanya said. "And you should not try to avoid the subject. Are you going to chicken out?"

"Look," Milly said, "going to meet George Harrison was your idea. I just said it might be interesting to talk to him."

"But I've already met George," Lanya said. "I've talked to him lots of times, I told you. Going to meet him was your idea; I just said I'd make introductions."

"Oh, you know everyone," Milly said; her hair shook. And then, "…" which was maddeningly beyond ear shot. Lanya's answer was another burst of music, that went on as they disappeared around the next turn; after a few wrong notes, the tune halted.

Kidd crab-walked down the dirt, stepped from behind the last bush, and looked where the girls had been.

The mention of George Harrison left a funny feel. A subterranean frown battled the inner smile still behind his face. His cheek twitched, his lips moved to shape vowels from no languages he spoke. Again he was tempted to run after them. But his curiosity had shifted a thumb's width toward anxiety.

The path, apparently, wound back the other way.

Perhaps he could cut through again, overtake them once more—? Speculation became resolution. He crossed into the bushes, again climbing; he scrambled over a stretch of rock, pushed forward through leaves. Ten feet away, fifteen — a long note from Lanya's harmonica, a flicker of Milly's bright hair! He crouched, cheek and one palm against bark. His bare boot, over a root, rocked him unsteadily.

Through dull leaves, he could just make them out.

There was another musical sound — not her harmonica, but their two laughters.

"Okay," he heard Lanya say, "we'll do it that way— if you want."

"Oh, yes," Milly cried. "Let's!"

"It's silly." Lanya laughed. "But all right. He's there every afternoon, almost. All right, we'll do it that way, but only because you're my…"

They were further away, so he heard less this time — except their laughter, leaving. What, he wondered, were they going to do what way, that involved George Harrison? Were they going to see him now—? Suddenly he was convinced they were. Their interchange, like schoolgirls planning a prank, upset him. What prank, he wondered, "do two women sanely play on a man who'd just molested a girl only a few years younger than themselves? He remembered the obscene poster. He remembered his glimpse of Harrison at the bar.

He stood again, took three loping steps through the brush, the worried laugh to stop them with, ready in his throat. (Thinking: Hey, what kind of crazy idea have you two nuts gotten into your—)

A root caught his sandal toe and spun him out on the concrete. He almost fell. Pushing up from one knee, he turned. And was suddenly confused.

Which way had they come from?

Which way had they gone?

He'd only glimpsed them this time. In both directions the path curved the same way… His faulty left-right orientation, always worse under strain — the plague of the ambidextrous, a doctor had once explained — gave way completely. Well, he'd come from that side of the road. He darted into the other, hoping to catch the path again and head them off.

The growth — of course — was thicker. The slope here was so steep he had to scrabble with hands as well as feet. Thinking: When was the last time I saw sunlight a golden flutter in bright green? The sky, flickering through, was the color of iron. The leaves, each in a caul of ash, were like grey velvet scraps, or dead mice.

Pebbles rolled underfoot. No, he thought, they can't be going to see George Harrison now! For all he knew, the conversation had changed subject completely between the first turn and the second.

And where the hell was the third? Trees cleared to high boulders. He skirted one and, leaning on it, vaulted down a small drop, brushed aside brush—

Across flat rock (a section had been filled with cement to level it) was a building of black stones, rounded and the size of heads, webbed in white mortar. Above the building's several wings rose a square tower with a crenellated balcony of the same black stone. The building was not large; the tower was not quite three stories. The vaulted windows, paned with pebbled glass, deeply recessed, were so thin he would have had trouble climbing out.

A waist-high wall of stone went along two sides of a large, informal courtyard in front of the building.

On the corner, wearing black-framed glasses, work-shoe heels wedged in a deep tenon, elbows on the knees of soiled khaki coveralls, and reading the Times, sat George Harrison.

Kidd squatted.

Leaves flicked up the image.

Knuckles mashed in dirt, Kidd leaned forward.

Leaves tickled his cheek.

Kidd was afraid; Kidd was fascinated. Whatever caused both left him clammy-handed.

George took off his glasses, put them in his shirt pocket, slid from the wall and, work shoes wide and fist-heels up, stretched. Khaki creases fanned from flank to shoulder.

(Squatting, watching; curiosity and alarm resolved, into a sort of self-righteous, silent mumble: Okay, fun is fun, but what sort of prank were they up to?)

George's face twisted under a metal sky so low the city's fires had scorched and marred it like an aluminum pot-bottom.

Beyond a break in the wall (which, Kidd realized only from her gait, had steps below it) Lanya — hair, nose, chin, shoulders — emerged. "Hey, George," she said. "You're back here again this afternoon? City life too much for you?"

Milly (had she chickened out?) was not with her.

"Hu'?" the aspiration voiced and the vowel voiceless; George turned as she gained the top step. "Y'com' ba' " (back or by, Kidd wasn't sure) "heah too?" The t was nearly a d, and the final vowel was a strangely breathy one from which the lips made no recovery, but hung heavy and open from teeth Kidd could see, even from here, were large, clean, and yellow. How, Kidd wondered, could this mauled and apocopated music be fixed to a page with roman letters and standard marks of elision? He decided: It can't. "You taking an afternoon stroll, yeah?" George laughed and nodded. "I hear you playing before, and I think: She gonna come by" (or was it "back"?) "here maybe say hello."

"Hello!" Lanya laughed too, and put her harmonica in her own shirt pocket. "I don't always come by," Lanya said. (She, he realized, had mis-heard gonna, with its almost unstopped g and n's loose as l's, as always.) "I saw you here a couple of days ago, but the last time we said hello was in the bar. Why do you come out here in the park every afternoon?"

"To look at the sky…" George shrugged. "To read the paper."

(Kidd's ankle stung from squatting. He slid his foot over — twigs crackled. But George and Lanya didn't hear.)

"Last time I was at the bar—" (Kidd listened to the melodious inflection that catapulted the broad bass into the tenor at I and bar: Irony? yes. But italics, he thought, would brutalize it to mere sarcasm.)—"I didn't even get a chance to say hello. You just running out of there with your friends." George looked up at the sky again. "Can't see nothing in all that mess. Can't see nothing at all."

"George," Lanya said, leaning back against the wall, finger tips in her jean pockets and tennis shoes crossed, "this is the sort of question you lose friends over, but—" Kidd remembered when she'd used the same phrase with him—"I was curious, so I figured I'd just ask. What did happen with you and that girl there was suppose to be all the pictures of in the papers?"

"You know—" George paused to stick his tongue way down inside his cheek, and turned half around with his hands in his pockets—"the first time somebody asked me that, I was mad as shit! But you ain't gonna lose you no friends 'cause too many other people done asked me now."

Lanya said quickly: "I was asking because my old man knows her and he's been—"

George's face took a strange expression.

"— been telling me something about her… That's all." Lanya's face, after a moment, mirrored it as if in attempt to understand it. (Kidd felt his own face twitch.)

After a few seconds, George said: "Well, I got me an answer."

"What is it?"

In the khaki pockets, George's knuckles became a row of rounded points.

"Well, now I done raped this little white gal, right? I told the papers, right out, that's what I done." He nodded, like a man agreeing with the obvious — then glanced at Lanya, as though considering the new fact she brought. "Now there's rape and there's rape." George's hands came free. "You walking along one night and some guy jump—" George lunged, crouching—"out and grab you—" (Kidd, in the leaves, pulled back.) Lanya blinked—"and pull you into some alley and tie you up and other than that he don't touch you, but he pull his thing out and Wank! Wank! Wank! — "crouching, Harrison swung his fist up and down at his groin. (Kidd's jaw and buttocks clamped; Lanya, still leaning back on the wall, hands in her pockets, watched George's mime.)—"and Oh it's so good and Wow-wee that's gooood shit and Ohhhh—!" George stood, threw up his head, then let it fall slowly to the side with the end of the exhalation. His head came back up: "if he get one drop—one—" The fist rose with forefinger toward veiled heaven—"one drop on your handbag… that is lying there three feet away—" the fist fell—"in this state, that's rape! Even though his pecker ain't touched you… just dribbled on your handbag, like I say, see?" George nodded and considered: "And suppose some little girl who is seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four days and twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes old, she come up and say, 'Oh, honey, I want it so bad! Give it to me, give it to me, baby! Oh, please!'" George's long head went back again, wobbling side to side. "And she throw herself on the ground and pull down her panties and rubbing herself all up and down—" in a jogging crouch, he dragged his forearms up and down between his legs, pale nails on black fingers clawing toward the ground— "and moaning Oh, baby, do it to me, do it to me, I want it so bad! and you damn fool enough not to wait five minutes before you say—" George stood, punched the air—"Yeah, baby!" Both hands went slowly back to his pockets. "Well, that's rape too—"

"Wait a minute, George." Lanya said. "If you're walking home at nine o'clock and somebody behind you grabs you by the throat and bangs your head into a wall and hisses he'll knife you if you scream or don't do what he says — No, wait a minute; listen! And you're pissing in your pants in little squirts while he cuts you once on the arm and twice on the leg just so you see he's serious and then tells you to spread your legs and gives you a black eye when you shake your head, because you're so scared you don't think you can, so you bunch up your skirts, while he's got your ear between the blade and his thumb and he keeps twisting and it's bleeding down your neck already and he tries to pull you open with his hand and pokes and prods you with a half-hard dick and slaps you a few times because you're not doing it right — no, don't stop me; we're talking about rape, now — and when he's got it about a half inch in you, he shoots, and while he's panting and it's dripping down your leg, you finally get a chance to run, and when he lunges after you, he trips and drops the knife, shouting he's gonna kill you now, he's gonna kill you, and for the next four days you can't walk right because of what he did inside you with his fingers, and in court — because they do catch him — a lawyer spends six hours trying to prove that you gave him some come-hither look or your hem was too high or your tits were too big, but they put him away anyway: only next week, they ask you to change schools because you're not a good influence any more… Now while you're telling me all this, don't forget, that's also rape!" Lanya's forefinger speared the air; she leaned back once more.

"Well," George said, "it is. Yes… that ever happen to you?"

"A friend of mine." Lanya put her hands back in her pockets.

"Here in Bellona?"

"There aren't any schools in Bellona you can be asked to change. No, it was before. But you men have a strange idea of the way the world works."

"Now you," George said, "are trying to make me think about something, right?"

"You think enough to bounce up and down here like a damn monkey and tell me a lot of bullshit. I asked you what happened. Tell me it's none of my business, if you want. But don't give me that."

"Well just maybe," George said, "you got a funny idea too if you think this is something I didn't think about." He looked at Lanya; a smile lurked behind his face. "You ask me a question, see, and you don't wanna hear my answer? The whole point, see, is rape is one pot with a lot of different kinds of stew in it. Some of them is tastier than others." George narrowed his eyes: "How you like it?"

"What?" Lanya asked.

"You like it rough, with fighting and beating and scratching and crying—" George leaned toward her, looking out of one eye, one hand between them, one fingertip wagging faster and faster—"and moaning No, no, don't do it, please, don't do it, but crawling back for more between trying to get away and a few yesses slipping out every once in a while between the scratching and the biting?"

"That's the way you like it?"

"Yeah!" George stood back. His fist closed. (In the dirt, Kidd's opened.) "You know what I tell my women? 'Hit me! Go on, fight me! I'm gonna take it, now. I'm gonna take it, see. And you see if you can keep me from takin' it.' Then we do it — anywhere. In an alley, in a stairway, on a roof, in a bed…" George's brows lowered. "That the way you like it?"

"No," Lanya said. "That's not me. I'd rather do some of the taking myself."

The black hand turned up its lighter palm. One shoulder shrugged. "Then you and me—" George began to chuckle—"we just gonna have to stay like we is; friends. 'Cause any other way, we just wouldn't get along. Now I been liking it like that a long time, honey. And when you like it that way, when you do it that way, then you think about it; and you learn about it. And one of the things you learn is which women likes it that way too. Now you can't tell all the time, without askin'; and some like it more than others. But you learn." George's eyes narrowed again. "Now you really want to know what it was like, with her and me?"

Lanya nodded. (Kidd's chin tapped a leaf that swung down and up to tap it back.) "I asked."

"There it was, you see—" George's shoulders hunched—"all dark in the middle of the day and lightning rolling easy and slow overhead and the flames licking up and the smoke licking down and people screaming, running, rioting, bricks falling in the street and glass breaking behind me — I turned to see: And there she was, just staring. At me. People going past her every which way, and her the only still one on the street, looking like she was about to eat the back of her own hand, all pressed up against her mouth like that, and from the way she was looking at me, I — knew! I knew what she wanted and I knew how she wanted it. And I knew I wanted it too." One hand was back in George's pocket. "Now I'll tell you, that ain't something you know all that often. But when you do, you can either say 'Shit man,' and walk away. Or, 'I know what I know!' Now, you an' me, we wouldn't get along." The chuckle ran out into a sound too low to hear. George breathed. "But her and me, we got along!" He suddenly turned, took a step, and halted as though his great body had been — struck. "Shit, we got along!" He turned back. "I ain't got along with nobody that well since I was twenty-eight years old and that's been more than ten years! We was in this alley, and there was this light flashing on and off, on and off; and people would run in, run out, and we just didn't care! Or maybe that made it better, that there wasn't nothing they could do, or that they wanted to do." Suddenly he looked down, laughed: "I remember one old woman with a shopping bag full of empty old tin cans come running in and seen us and started shouting bloody murder and running in and out, and screaming 'Get off that poor little white girl, nigger! You do that, they gonna kill us, they gonna kill us for sure!'" George shook his head. "The light, I guess, was this guy taking his pictures; I don't know if I really seen him or not. He wasn't there when I finished. I stood up, see, and she was lying there, still reachin' for it, you know?" Once more he shook his head, laughed once more: both meant something different from when he'd done them moments before. "Like I say, she weren't no more than seventeen. And she got hit and she got punched and she got thrown around and she was yelling and screaming, 'No, no, oh, don't, oh please don't.' So I guess it was rape. Right? But when we finished—" George nodded " — she was reaching for it. She wanted some more, awful bad." He tapped the air with a concluding forefinger. "Now that's a very interesting kind of rape. It's the kind they always have in the movies. It's the kind your lawyer friend was trying to make this other thing into. And when it gets to the law courts, it's a pretty rare kind. But it's the one they all afraid of — especially between little-bitty white girls and big, black niggers."

"Well," Lanya said, "it still sounds a little strange. Okay, it's not my thing. But what do you think, say, about the guy I was telling you about, who did that to my friend?"

"I think," George said, "I know a little bit more about him than you do. And I think if he'd maybe come talked to somebody like me first, we could have maybe worked somethin' out where he didn't have to go and get himself and some little girl in trouble. About him or the girl, I don't think nothing; I don't know them. But I think what you told me about is very," and George dropped his chin, "very, very sad."

Lanya took a breath. "I'm just still wondering about the girl. I mean the one you were with… Do you even know her name?"

"Well, after I was finished, we did not exactly introduce ourselves." Suddenly George scowled. "Look, you try and understand this. I don't give a shit about the bitch! I really don't. And suppose I did? Suppose, afterward, I'd done said, 'Oh, hey baby, that was so fine, let's you and me get married and live all happily ever after so we can just take care of one another every night!' What she gonna say? 'You crazy, nigger!' I mean a couple of times I tried that, and it don't work. That ain't her thing. That ain't mine. She ain't interested in me neither. She interested in what she thinks about me. And that's fine by me. She know my name — it was in the paper. I gave it to them for free, too. I told them I ain't ashamed of nothing I done, I like it like that, and I'm gonna do it again, any time, any place. And believe me, that's all she wants to know!" George's scowl relaxed. "Afterward, people was gossiping around and saying her name was June or something like that. You say your old man know her? What he say about her?"

"About," Lanya said, "what you just did." She pressed her lips, considering. Then she said, "She's looking for you, George. I saw her once, come up to ask my old man after you. She wants to find you again."

George's laugh launched high as Madame Brown's and, with his rocking head, tumbled down into its easy bass. "Yeah…! Yeah, she looking for me! She just circling and circling around me, getting in closer and closer—" George's forefinger circled on the air, spiraled in—"just circling and circling, closer and closer, like the moon around the sun!"

Something (though Kidd was not sure what it was) struck Lanya as funny and she laughed too. "George, you've got your images mixed up! You're supposed to be the moon; not her. Besides, the moon doesn't circle around the sun!"

"Well," George said, "maybe it usually don't, but this is Bellona, and you ain't got no way to tell what's gonna happen here!" His laugh grew, fell away; he came out of it with a serious expression. "You see, I been around, I know some things. How old are you? Twenty-three?"

"On the head," Lanya said. "You should be guessing in a fair."

"Well I'm old enough to be your daddy—"

"You're old enough to be June's daddy too." Lanya said. "Do you have any children?"

"I got five of them I know about," George said, "and one of them off a white woman, too, young lady. Green-eyed, mustard-headed—" George screwed his face—"ugly little motherfucker! Well, maybe he ain't so ugly. And I got one of them as old now as her momma was when I first stuck it to her, too." George cocked his head the other way. "And that ain't nowhere near old as the little girl we was talking about. None of the five of them is here in Bellona. But I tell you, if I was to see that oldest girl of mine, standing on the corner, looking at me like that little white girl was looking — I don't care if she my kin or not, I'd do the same fuckin' thing. Now you believe it!"

"George," Lanya said, "you are incorrigible!"

"Well, sometimes you look pretty funny yourself, Miss Anne! Look—" George got back his explanatory tone—"what it is, is that women wants it just exactly like men do. Only nobody wants to think about that, you know? At least not in the movies. They pretends it don't exist, or they pretends it's something so horrible, making all sorts of death and destruction and needless tragedy and everybody getting killed, that it might just as well not exist — which is the same thing, you see?"

"Yes," Lanya said, "I'd noticed. George, people are scared of women doing anything to get what they want, sex or anything else. Christ, you men are presumptuous bastards. If I was telling you how blacks really are the way you're telling me about women, you'd organize a sit-in!"

"Well," George said, "I just didn't know if you went to the movies that much so's you'd know."

After a moment, Lanya asked: "What do you think's gonna happen when you two finally do meet again, George?"

George's eyebrows, darker crescents on an iron-black face (the tarnished light erased all browns and reds), rose. "Well, she gonna get closer, and closer, just circling—" one hand traced its spiral while the other waited for it at the spiral's center—"and circling, and closer and closer, till—" George's cupped palms smashed; Kidd blinked; his back muscles cramped—"Blam! And the sky gonna go dark and the lightning gonna go roll over the night, wide as a river and slow as the sea, and buildings gonna come toppling and fire and water both gonna shoot in the air, and people gonna be running and screaming in the streets!" George winked, nodded. "Gonna be just like last time."

"I think," Lanya said, "you've got your images mixed again." She came away from the wall and ambled a few steps across the stone. "You're doing just what the movies are doing — making it into something terrible and frightening."

"That's the problem — like I say: You see I like it like the movies. But when we get together again, we just gonna be doing our thing. You all is the ones who gonna be so frightened the city gonna start to fall down around your head." George's head went to the side. He grinned. "See?"

"Not quite." Lanya grinned back. "But let it ride. Okay, what are you gonna do afterward?"

"Same as before, I guess. Blam! and excuse me, ma'am, and then be on my way. And then it starts all over…" Once more that oblique expression came to George's face. "You say your old man … is she all right? I mean is she okay and all?"

"Yeah," Lanya said. "I guess so."

George nodded. "Yeah… somebody told me back in the bar you done got yourself a new boy friend. That's nice."

Where, Kidd wondered, was Milly?

"Things get around." Lanya smiled, and Kidd had an image of her suddenly snatching her harmonica to fling up some fusillade of notes to hide her embarrassment. Only she didn't look embarrassed. (He remembered wanting to overhear Lanya and Milly discussing him; the prospect of a discussion of him with George left him vaguely uncomfortable.) Fingers hooked over her pocket rim, Lanya was toying with her harmonica. "Yeah. I don't know if I'd say I got him; how about getting?"

"Well, you sure get yourself some winners! That last one…" George shook his head.

"What did you think of Phil, George?" The subject, almost as uncomfortably, had changed.

"I thought he was crazy!" George said. "I thought he was a stuckup, up-tight, tight-assed asshole— Smart? Oh, he was smart as a whip. But I'm still glad to see you shut of him." George paused; his brows wrinkled. "Though I guess maybe you ain't…?"

"I don't know." Lanya's lowered eyes suddenly rose. "But that's easier to say if you got a new one, isn't it?"

"Well—" George's laugh came out surprising and immense—"I guess it is. Say, when you gonna bring your old man on down to Jackson and say hello?"

"Well, thanks," Lanya said. "Maybe we'll come down… if we don't see you in the bar, first."

"Gotta check your new old man out," George said. "First, see, I thought maybe you'd got involved with one of them faggot fellas up at Teddy's. God damn, sometimes I think there ain't nobody in the city no more ain't a faggot but me."

"Is that a standard male, "heterosexual fantasy?" Lanya asked. "I mean, to be the only straight man around when all the others are gay?"

"I ain't got nothing against faggots," George said. "You seen them pictures them boys made of me? Something, huh? Some of my best friends is—"

"George!" Lanya held up her hand, her face in mock pain. "Come on, don't say it!"

"Look—" George's gestures became sweepingly gallant—"I just like to make sure all my friends is taken care of. If you wasn't getting none, see, I was gonna volunteer to make an exception in my standard methods of procedure and fit you in my list. We got to watch out for our friends? Now, don't we?"

"That's sweet of you," Lanya said. "But I'm royally taken care of in that department."

And Kidd, gloriously happy, put his other knee on the ground and sat back. A thought, circling below articulation, suddenly surfaced, dripping words: They know each other… were the first that fell off it; more followed, obscuring clear thought with lapped, resonant rings. He remembered the poster. It was the same man, with the same, dark, rough face (the face was laughing now), the same body (the khaki coverall was mostly too loose but now and again, when a leg moved so or a shoulder turned, it seemed about to tear at arm or thigh), that he'd seen reproduced, bared, black, and bronze-lit.

"Well, then—" George made a slate-wiping motion—"everything's fine! You two come on down. I'd like to meet this guy. You pick 'em pretty interesting."

"Okay." Lanya said: "Well, I guess I'm gonna be on my way. Just stopped in to say hello."

Now, Kidd thought, now Milly is going to jump out and…?

"Okay. I see you," George said. "Maybe later in the bar."

Now…?

"So long." Lanya turned around and started down the steps.

George shook his head, went back to the wall — glanced after her once — picked up the newspaper and while he shook it out, speared two fingers at his breast pocket for his glasses. He got them on the third try.

Harmonica notes twisted up like silver wires in the haze.

Kidd waited half a dozen breaths, realizing finally he had misjudged Lanya's and Milly's intentions. Milly had, apparently, chickened out. Again he wondered from what. Backing into thicker brush, he stood with cramping thighs and, ignoring them, circled the court. The ground sloped, sharply. This time, if he could overtake her on the path, he would not hide—

The music wound in the smoke toward some exotic cadence that, when achieved, slid it into a new key where the melody defined itself along burbling triplets till another cadence, in six measures, took it home.

He came out on the side of the steps. Small branches tugged his hips and shoulders, swished away.

Lanya, at the bottom of the flight, ambled onto the path, dragging her music after like a silver cape.

And she had almost completed the song. (He had never heard her play it through.) Its coda hauled up the end in one of those folk suspensions that juxtapose two un-related chords to hold a note from one above the other and make chaos of it. Starting down the steps behind her, he got chills, not from fear or confusion, but from the music's moment which sheered through mouse-grey mist glimmering in the leafy corridor.

He tried to walk silently, twice stopped entirely, not to break the melody before its end.

He was on the bottom step. She was fifteen feet ahead.

The melody ended.

He hurried.

She turned, lips together for some word that began with "m." Then her eyes widened: "Kidd—?" and she smiled. "What are you doing here—?" and took his hand.

"I was spying on you," he said, "and George."

She raised an eyebrow. "You were?"

"Yeah." They walked together. "I liked your song."

"Oh…"

He glanced over.

She was more embarrassed, he realized, by his overhearing the music than the conversation. While he was wondering what to offer her to atone, she managed to say:

"Thank you," softly, "though."

He squeezed her hand.

She squeezed his.

Shoulder to shoulder, they walked up the path, while Kidd's mind turned and sorted and wondered what hers turned and sorted. He asked, suddenly: "The person you were telling George about, who got raped — was that Milly?"

Lanya looked up, surprised. "No… or let's say that I'd rather not say."

"Huh? What does that mean, no or you'd rather not say?"

Lanya shrugged. "I just mean Milly probably wouldn't want me to say, one way or the other."

Kidd frowned. "That doesn't make sense."

Lanya laughed, without letting it out, so that it was only an expression, a breath through her nose, her head shaking. She shrugged again.

"Look, just give me a simple answer, was she or—?"

"Now you look," Lanya said: "You're a very sweet man, and I know you're not doing it on purpose, it's just the habit men get into of trying to undermine anything that goes on between two women. But stop it."

He was confused.

She asked: "Okay…?"

Confused, he agreed. "Okay."

They wandered on. The song, etched on memory, filigreed, in memory, the silent, present trees. The sky had deepened to a color that could be called blue, in leaf-shaped flakes among them.

Confused, he was still happy.

At the commune clearing, Milly, with Jommy at the furnace, turned, saw them, and ran over. "Lanya, Kidd—" and to Lanya: "Did you tell him?"

Lanya said: "No. I didn't, yet…"

"Oh, Kidd, I'm afraid—" Milly took another breath; she had been running more than just from the furnace. "I'm afraid I was spying on the two of you most of the way back here." She laughed. "You see, we decided I was going to hide in the bushes and overhear Lanya and George—"

"Huh?" Kidd said.

Lanya said: "He's not so bad after all—"

"Kidd?" Milly said. "Oh — you mean George! No, of course he isn't…" Back to Kidd: " was going to come out and join Lanya again on the path back from the Weather Tower—" then it wasn't the monastery; but he'd pretty well decided it couldn't have been—"when I saw you pop out on the steps, thirty seconds before I was going to!"

He said to Lanya: "Then you were expecting…?" The half-dozen questions in his mind were halved again when Milly said:

"I couldn't keep close enough to hear everything you were saying. If I had, I would have made too much noise. I just cut straight through and caught the paths on the snake-turns. Oh, Lanya, it is a lovely song! Really, you've got to play it for other people. See, you can play it all the way through. I told you you could. You knew I was listening, and you got through it. Just don't let people embarrass you… Kidd—?" Milly frowned. "You look so confused, Kidd!" Suddenly she hugged him; red hair brushed dry against his face. He nearly stumbled. "Really, I'm sorry!" She released him, put her hand on Lanya's shoulder. "I didn't mean to spy. But you knew I was there…" She looked imploringly at Lanya. "I just couldn't resist!" And she laughed.

He blinked; he smiled. "…that's all right." The memory of the melody came again; it had not been a private moment he'd overheard, but one meant for a friend. Had that, he wondered, given it its beauty? Lanya was laughing too.

So he laughed with them.

At the furnace, Jommy banged his ladle on the caldron. "Come on! Soup's ready! Come and get it!"

About the clearing, with mess-pans and mess-pots, crocks and tin cups and bowls, two dozen people gathered at the fire.

"Come on, let's eat," Lanya said.

"Yes, you too, Kidd!" Milly said. "Come on."

He followed the girls toward the crowd. A thin, ginger-haired spade with gold-rimmed teeth gave him a dented enamel soup plate. "I got two, man. You can take this one." But when he reached the front, at the furnace, for his ladle-full, it was John (with swinging vest and eye-glasses full of flame), not Jommy, who served. The sky was almost dark. Though firelight lay coppery against Milly's hair, he could not make out, on either bare leg, as he followed Milly and led Lanya out among the crowd, trying to balance his bowl, that scratch.

Dusk had come quickly — and lingered, holding off dark. They sat on the rumpled blankets at Her Place. He squinted up between lapped leaves while the sky drizzled powdery rubbings, gritty and cool.

"One more day's work at the Richards, and I'll have them moved."

"You've… well, you've got a name now. And a job. Are you happy?"

"Shit—" He stretched out on his back and felt beneath him twigs, creases, pebbles, and the beaded chain around him. "I haven't even decided how to spell it. And they still haven't paid me more than that first five dollars."

"If they don't pay you—" she stretched out too— "why do you go back?"

He shrugged. "Maybe they know if they gave me my money, I wouldn't come." He shrugged again. "It doesn't matter. Like I told Madame Brown, I'm just an observer. They're fun to watch." Thinking: Someday I'm going to die. He glanced at her: "Do you know, I'm afraid of dying. A lot."

"Hm?"

"I am. Sometimes, when I'm walking around, I think maybe my heart is going to stop. So I feel it, just to make sure it's going. Which is funny, because if I'm lying down, about to go to sleep, and I can hear my heart going, I have to move into another position, or I get scared—"

"— that it might stop and you'll hear it?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"That happens to me sometimes. When I was fifteen, in boarding school, I sat on the edge of the main building roof for a long time and thought about committing suicide."

"I've never wanted to kill myself," he said. "Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to — because I'd gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn't worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn't fix it up — that's if I couldn't get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn't stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes — and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop — action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like—" he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped—"that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten… before the thought goes and you only remember, the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes."

"Yes… yes, that's happened to me."

"Well, I think all the buildings and the bridges and the planes and the books and the symphonies and the paintings and the spaceships and the submarines and… and the poems: they're just to keep people's minds occupied so it doesn't happen — again." After a while he said: "George Harrison…"

She said: "June Richards…" and glanced at him. When he said nothing, she said: "I have this picture, of us going down to the bar one night, and you saying, 'Hey, man, come on with me. I want you to meet a friend of mine,' and George says, 'Why sure!'—and he probably would, too; he knows how small the world is he's acting moon for — so you take him, in all his big, black, beautiful person up to that pink brick high-rise with all the broken windows and you get a-hold of Miss Demented-sweetness-and-light, and you say, 'Hey, Lady, I've just brought you His Midnight Eminence, in the flesh. June, meet George. George, meet June." I wonder what they'd talk about — on her territory?"

He chuckled. "Oh, I don't know. He might even say, Thank you. After all, she made him what he is today." He blinked at the leaves. "It's fascinating, life the way it is; the way everything sits together, colors, shapes, pools of water with leaves in them, reflections on windows, sunlight when there's sun, cloudlight when it's cloudy; and now I'm somewhere where, if the smoke pulls back at midnight and George and the moon are up, I might see two shadows instead of one!" He stretched his hands behind him on the blanket. He knocked something — which was his orchid, rolling across his notebook cover.

"When I was at Art School," she said, "I remember an instructor of mine saying that it was only on days like you have here that you know the true color of anything. The whole city, all of Bellona, it's under perpetual north light."

"Mmm," he said.

What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.

"You…" he said, suddenly. It was dark. "Are you happy, I mean, living like that?"

"Me?" She breathed a long breath. "Let me see… before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who'd just arrived in New York's Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI, FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence." And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him.

"Gotta run." Click. The tie knot rose.

"Hey, Mr Richards?" Kidd put down his own cup.

"Yes, Kidd?" Mr Richards, already in the doorway, turned back. "What do you want?"

Bobby spooned at his frosted cereal. There was no milk. June traced a column in the Friday, October 24, 1985 Times with her forefinger. It was several weeks old.

"I want to know about my money."

"You need some more? I'll have some for you when I get home this evening."

"I want to know how much I'm getting."

"Hm?" Oh. Well, we'll have to figure that out. Have you been keeping track of how long you've been working each day?"

"More or less," Kidd said. "Madame Brown told me you were going to give me five bucks an hour."

Mr Richards took the door knob. "That's pretty high wages." He shook his head, thoughtfully.

"Is that what you told her?"

The knob turned. "We better talk about it later on this evening." The door closed on his smile.

Kidd turned back to Mrs Richards.

She sipped, eyes flickering above the china rim.

"I mean that's what you told her, isn't it?"

"Five dollars an hour is quite high. For unskilled labor." The cup lowered to her chin.

"Yeah, but not for furniture movers. Look, let me go downstairs and finish bringing up the rugs and the clothes. It's only going to take another half-dozen trips. I'll be through before you get started on lunch." Kidd got up too noisily and went to the door.

Bobby's spoon, silent the exchange, crunched again.

June's eyes had stayed down, but once more her finger moved.

From the doorway Kidd glanced back at her (as moments before her father had glanced back at him) and tried to set her against George's and Lanya's conversation of the previous afternoon. But, with blonde head bent over the paper at the edge of dark wood-blonde and pink reflection fuzzed in the polish — she seemed as at home among the fluted, white china cups, the brass pots of plants, the green rugs, the blue flowered drapes, her mother, her brother, the wide windows, or the green wallpaper with its paler green florals.

Down on seventeen, he came into the apartment (unchained, unlocked) and thought: Why didn't we take the rugs up first? That was silly, not to have taken the rugs up. Like mottled eels (the underpad, a smaller darker eel, printed with a design that, till now, he'd only seen on corrugated ceilings) the rugs lay against the living room wall. Outside the window, pale leviathans swam. Piles of books sat on the floor.

Pilgrimage was on top of one.

For the third — or was it the fourth? Or the fifth? — time he picked it up, read at random pages, waiting to be caught and driven into the work. But the receptivity he tried to bring was again and again hooked away by some pattern of shadow on the bare vinyl tile, some sound in the apartment below, some itch in his own body: and there went all his attention. Though his eye moved over the print, his place and the print's sense were lost: At last he lay the book back on the pile, and put a book from another pile on top, as though — and wondered why he thought of it this way — the first book were his own.

He stood up — he had been squatting — and gazed around: still to be moved were bridge tables from the back storage closet, folding chairs with scrolled arms, green cushions, and black metal hinges; and toys from Bobby's room, scattered among them. A set of four nest tables was crowded with small, bright breakables.

He wandered down the hall (there was the carton of papers from Mr Richards' den) and turned into Bobby's room. Most of what was left was evidence of the older brother who'd once shared it: a handkerchief that had fallen out of a bureau drawer yesterday, showing the monogram: EGR; propping the closet door were three small cartons with Eddy written across them in magic marker; on the floor was the Bellona High School Yearbook. Kidd picked it up and paged through: Edward Garry Richards (Soccer team, G.O. Volunteer, "The Cafeteria Staff's favorite two years running…") was Camera Shy.

He lay the book down on the boxes, wandered across the hall into June's room: on the window sill was the tepee of an empty matchbook and a white plastic flower pot still filled with earth which, June had told him yesterday, had once grown a begonia her aunt Marianne had given her two Easters ago.

In memory he refurnished the space with the pieces he'd taken upstairs the previous day and tried to pull back, also from memory, the image of June that had come to him in George's overheard converse. Memory failed at a sound outside.

Kidd stepped back into the hall as Bobby came from the living room; he grunted, over an armful of books, "I'm taking these upstairs."

"Why don't you take about half of them?"

"Maybe—" two books fell—"I better."

June came in: "Oh, hey, I'll take some of those…" They divided the stack, left.

Where, he wondered as the door closed (the unlatched chain swung and swung over green paint), is my notebook? Of course; down the hall in what had been the back bedroom, from when he'd stopped in this apartment out of habit when he'd first come in the morning: He had momentarily forgotten that the Richards were living in nineteen now.

In the back bedroom another file box stood off center in the middle of the floor.

The notebook was on the window sill. Kidd walked up to it, looked at the worn, smeared cardboard. Outside, small darknesses moved below the mist. What, he thought, should I say to Mr Richards about my money? Suppose Mr Richards comes back this evening and doesn't bring up the subject? Kidd considered writing down alternative opening lines and rehearsing them for Mr Richards' return. No. No, that's exactly the wrong way! It's almost nine o'clock, he thought, and too smoky to tell people from shadows at seventeen stories.

Something thumped; a girl cried out. A second thump, and her pitch changed. A third — it sounded like toppling furniture — and her cry swooped. A fourth ended it.

That was from the apartment below.

Breaking glass, much nearer, brought his eyes from the floor.

Kidd went to the living room.

Mrs Richards, kneeling over something shattered, looked up and shook her head. "I…"

He stopped before her restrained confusion.

"…I dropped one of the—"

He could not tell what the figurine had been.

"So thin — these walls are so very thin. Everything comes through. I was so startled…" By the nest tables, she picked faster in the bright, black shards, white matt overside.

"I hope it wasn't anything you really—" but was halted by his own inanity.

"Oh, that's all right. Here, I've got it all." She stood, cupping chips. "I heard that awful… and I dropped it."

"They were going on pretty loud." He tried to laugh, but before her gaze, he let the laugh die in breath. "Mrs Richards, it's just noise. You shouldn't let yourself get so upset about it."

"What are they doing down there? Who are they?"

He thought she might crush the ceramic between her palms. "They're just some guys, some girls, who moved into the downstairs apartment. They're not out to bother you. They think the noises from up here are pretty strange too."

"Just moved in? How do you mean, they just moved in?"

He watched her expression lurch at fear, and not achieve even that. "They wanted a roof, I guess. So they took it over."

"Took it over? They can't come in here and take it over. What happened to the couple who lived there before? Management doesn't know things like this are going on. The front doors used to be closed at ten o'clock, every night! And locked! The first night they started making those dreadful sounds, I sent Arthur out for one of the guards: Mr Phillips, a very nice West Indian man, he's always in front of our building till one in the morning. Arthur couldn't find him. He'd gone away. All the guards. And the attendants for the garage. I want you to know I put that in my letter to Management. I certainly did." She shook her head. "How can they just come in and take it over?"

"They just… Ma'am, there aren't any more guards, and nobody was living there; they just moved in. Just like you're moving into nineteen."

"We're not just moving in!" Mrs Richards had been looking about. Now she walked into the kitchen. "I wrote Management. Arthur went to see them. We got the key from the office. It isn't the same thing at all."

Kidd followed Mrs Richards around the stripped kitchen.

"How do you know nobody was living there? There was a very nice couple downstairs. She was Japanese. Or Korean or something. He was connected with the university. I didn't know them very well. They'd only been here six months. What happened to them?" She looked back, just before she went into the dining room again.

"They left, just like everybody else." He still followed.

She carried the broken things, clacking, down the rugless hall. "I think something awful happened to them. I think those people down there did something awful. Why doesn't Management send some new guards?" She started into Bobby's room, but changed her mind and continued to June's. "It's dangerous, it's absolutely, terribly dangerous, without guards."

"Mrs Richards?" He stood in the doorway while she circuited the room, hands still cupped. "Ma'am? What are you looking for?"

"Someplace to throw—" she stopped—"this. But you took everything upstairs already."

"You know you could just drop it on the floor." He was impatient and his impatience embarrassed him. "I mean you don't live here any more."

After the silence in which her expression became curious, she said, "You don't understand the way we live at all. But then, you probably think you understand all too well. I'm going to take this out to the incinerator."

He ducked back as she strode through.

"I don't like to go out in the hall. I don't feel safe—"

"I'll take it out for you," he called after her.

"That's all right." Hands still together, she twisted the knob.

When the door banged behind her, he sucked his teeth, then went and got his notebook from the window. The blue-rimmed stationery slid half out. He opened the cover and looked at her even letters. With his front teeth set, he took his pen and drew in the comma. Her ink was India black; his, dark blue.

Going back to the living room, he stabbed at his pocket several times. Mrs Richards came in with a look of accomplishment. His pen caught. "Mrs Richards, do you know, that letter's still down in your mailbox?"

"What letter?"

"You've got an airmail letter in your mailbox. I saw it again this morning."

"All the mailboxes are broken."

"Yours isn't. And there's a letter inside it. I told you about it the first day I came here. Then I told Mr Richards a day later. Don't you have a mailbox key?"

"Yes, of course. One of us will go down and pick it up this afternoon."

"Mrs Richards?" Something vented still left something to come.

"Yes, Kidd?"

His teeth were still set. He sucked air and they opened. "You're a very nice woman. You've really tried to be nice to me. And I think it's a shame you have to be so scared all the time. There's nothing I can do about it, but I wish there was."

She frowned; the frown passed. "I don't suppose you'd believe just how much you have done."

"By being around?"

"Yes. And also by being, well…"

He could not interpret her shrug: "Mrs Richards, I've been scared a whole lot of my life too. Of a lot of things that I didn't know what they were. But you can't just let them walk all over you — take over. You have to—"

"I am moving!" Her head bobbed in emphasis. "We are moving from seventeen-B to nineteen-A."

"— do something inside yourself."

She shook her head sharply, not looking. "And you are very presumptuous if you think you are telling me something I don't know." Now she looked up. "Or your telling me makes it any easier."

Frustration drove the apology. "I'm sorry." He heard his own reticence modify it to something else.

Mrs Richards blinked. "Oh, I know you're just trying to… I am sorry. But do you know how terrible it is to live inside here—" she gestured at the green walls—"with everything slipping away? And you can hear everything that goes on in the other rooms, in the other apartments? I wake up at night, and walk by the window, and I can see lights sometimes, moving in the smoke. And when the smoke isn't so heavy, it's even worse, because then the lights look like horrible things, crawling around… This has got to stop, you know! Management must be having all sorts of difficulty while we're going through this crisis. I understand that. I make allowances. But it's not as though a bomb had fallen, or anything. If a bomb had fallen, we'd be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don't we, until the situation is rectified?" She leaned forward: "You don't think it is a bomb?"

"It isn't a bomb. I was in Encenadas, in Mexico, just a week or so ago. There was nothing about a bomb in the papers; somebody gave me a lift who had an L.A. paper in his car. Everything's fine there. And in Philadelphia—"

"Then you see. We just have to wait. The guards will be back. They will get rid of all these terrible people who run around vandalizing in the halls. We have to be patient, and be strong. Of course I'm afraid, I'm afraid if I sit still more than five minutes I'll start to scream. But you can't give in to it, any more than you can give in to them. Do you think we should take kitchen knives and broken flower pots and run down there and try to scrape them out?"

"No, of course not—"

"I'm not that sort of person. I don't intend to become that sort. You say I have to do something? Well, I have moved my family. Don't you think that takes a great deal of… inner strength? I mean in this situation? I can't even let myself assess how dangerous the whole thing really is. If I did, I wouldn't be able to move at all."

"Of course it's dangerous. But I go out. I live outside in it; I walk around in it. Nothing happens to me."

"Oh, Edna told me how you got that scab on your face. Besides, you are a man. You are a young man. I am a middle-aged woman."

"But that's all there is now, Mrs Richards. You've got to walk around in it because there isn't anything else."

"It will be different if I wait. I know that because I am middle-aged. You don't because you're still very young."

"Your friend Mrs Brown—"

"Mrs Brown is not me. I am not Mrs Brown. Oh, are you just trying not to understand?"

He gathered breath for protest but failed articulation.

"I have a family. It's very important to me. Mrs Brown is all alone, now. She doesn't have the same sort of responsibilities. But you don't understand about that; perhaps in your head, you do. But not inside, not really."

"Then why don't you and Mr Richards take your family out of all this mess?"

Her hands, moving slowly down her dress, turned up once, then fell. "One can retreat, yes. I suppose that's what I'm doing by moving. But you can't just give up entirely, run away, surrender. I like the Labry Apartments." Her hands pulled together to crush the lap of her dress. "I like it here. We've lived here since I was pregnant with Bobby. We had to wait almost a year to get in. Before that, we had a tiny house out in Helmsford; but it wasn't as nice as this, believe me. They don't let just anyone in here. With Arthur's position, it's much better for him. I've entertained many of his business associates here. I especially liked some of the younger, brighter men. And their wives. They were very pleasant. Do you know how hard it is to make a home?"

His bare heel had begun to sting, just from the weight of standing. He rocked a little.

"That's something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they're not that anxious to help. It's understandable. They don't know how. The children don't even appreciate. But it's terribly necessary. You must make it your own world. And everyone must be able to feel it. I want a home, here, that looks like my home, feels like my home, is a place where my family can be safe, where my friends — psychologists, engineers, ordinary people… poets — can feel comfortable. Do you see?"

He nodded.

He rocked.

"That man Calkins, the one who runs the Times, do you think he has a home? They're always writing articles about the people who're staying with him, visiting with him, those people he's decided are important. Do you think I'd want a place like that? Oh, no. This is a real home, a place where real things happen, to real people. You feel that way, I know you do. You've become practically part of the family. You are sensitive, a poet; you understand that to tear it all apart, and set it up again, even on the nineteenth floor: that's taking a desperate chance, you see? But I'm doing it. To you, moving like this is just a gesture. But you don't understand how important a gesture can be. I cannot have a home where I hear the neighbors shrieking. I cannot. Because when the neighbors are shrieking, I cannot maintain the peace of mind necessary for me to make a home. Not when that is going on. Why do you think we moved into the Labry? Do you know how I thought of this moving? As a space, a gap, a crack in which some terrible thing might get in and destroy it, us, my home. You have to take it apart, then put it back together. I really felt as though some dirt, or filth, or horrible rot might get in while it was being reassembled and start a terrible decay. But here—" once more she waved her hand—"I couldn't live here any more."

"But if everything outside has changed—"

"Then I have to be—" she let go her skirt—"stronger inside. Yes?"

"Yeah." He was uncomfortable with the answer forced. "I guess so."

"You guess?" She breathed deeply, looking around the floor, as if for missed fragments. "Well, I know. I know about eating, sleeping, how it must be done if people are going to be comfortable. I have to have a place where I can cook the foods I want; a place that looks the way I want it to look: a place that can be a real home." Then she said: "You do understand." She picked up another ceramic lion from the nest tables. "I know you do."

He realized it was its twin that had shattered. "Yeah, Mrs Richard's but—"

"Mom?" June said over the sound of the opening door. She glanced hesitantly between them. "I thought you were going to come right back up. Is that my shell box?" She walked to the cluster of remaining furniture. "I didn't even know we still had it in the house."

"Gee," Bobby said from the doorway. "We've almost got everything upstairs. You want me to take the television?"

"I don't know why," June said. "You can't get any picture on it any more; just colored confetti. You better let Kidd take the teevee. You help me carry the rug."

"Oh, all right."

June dragged the carpet roll by one end. Bobby caught the other.

"Are you sure the two of you can manage that?" Mrs Richards asked.

"We got it," June said.

It came up like a sagging fifteen-foot sausage between them. They maneuvered across the room — Mrs Richards slid the nest tables back, Kidd pushed aside the television — June going forward and Bobby going backward.

"Hey, don't back me into the damn door," Bobby said.

"Bobby!" his mother said.

June grunted, getting the rug in a firmer grip.

"I'm sorry." Bobby hugged the rug under his arm, reached behind him for the door knob. "Darn door… Okay?"

"You got it all right?" June asked; she looked very intense.

"Uh-huh." Bobby nodded, backing out into the hall.

June followed him: the edge of the rug hissed by the jamb. "Just a second." She shoved the door with her foot; and was through.

"All right, but don't push me so fast," Bobby repeated out in the echoing corridor.

The door swung to.

"Mrs Richards, I'll take the television… if you want?"

She was stepping here and there, searching.

"Yes. Oh. Certainly, the television. Though June's right; you can't see anything on it. It's terrible the way you get to depend on all these outside things: Fifty great empty spots during the evening when you wish a radio or something were there to fill them up. But the static would just be awful. Wait. I could take the rest of these things off the tables, and you could carry them up. Once we get the front room rug down, I'm going to try putting that end table beside the door to the balcony. That's what I really like up there, the balcony. When we came here, we applied for an apartment with a balcony but we couldn't get it then. I'm going to split these up and put them on either side of—"

Out in the hall, June screamed: a long scream he could hear empty her of all breath. Then she screamed again.

Mrs Richards opened her mouth without sound; one hand shook by her head.

He dashed between the television and the tables, out the door.

June, dragging one hand against the wall, backed up the hall. When he caught her shoulder, the scream cut and she whirled. "Bobby…!" That had almost no voice at all. "I … I didn't see the…" Shaking her head, she motioned down the hall.

He heard Mrs Richards behind him, and ran three more steps.

The rug lay on the floor, the last foot sagging over the sill in to the empty elevator shaft. The door nudged it, went K-chunk, retreated, then began to close again.

"Mom! Bobby, he fell in the—"

K-chunk!

"No, oh my dear God, no!"

"I didn't see it, mom! I didn't! I thought it was the other—"

"Oh, God. Bobby, no he couldn't—"

"Mom, I didn't know! He just backed into it! I didn't see—"

K-chunk!

Kidd hit EXIT with both palms, vaulted down the flight, came out on sixteen, sprinted to the end of the hall, and beat the door.

"All right, all right. What the fuck you—" Thirteen opened for him—"banging so hard for?"

"A rope…!" Kidd was gasping. "Or a ladder. You guys got a rope? And a flashlight? The boy from upstairs, he just fell down the elevator shaft!"

"Oh, wow…!" Thirteen stepped back.

Smokey, behind his shoulder, opened her eyes very wide.

"Come on! You guys got a light and a ladder? And a rope?"

A black woman with hair like two inches of Brillo with hints of rust, shouldered Smokey aside, stepped around Thirteen: "Now what the fuck is going on, huh?" Around her neck hung some dozen chains, falling between her breasts between the flaps of a leather vest laced through its half-dozen lowest holes. Her thumb hooked a wide, scuffed belt; her wrists were knobby, the back of her hands rough. Dark skin rounded above the belt and below the vest bottom.

"A boy just fell down the God-damn elevator shaft!" Kidd took another breath and tried to see past the crowd that had gathered at the door. "Will you bastards get a ladder and a rope and a light and come on! Huh?"

"Oh, hey, man!" The black woman looked over her shoulder. "Baby! Adam! Denny, you had that line! Bring it out here. Some kid fell down the shaft." She turned back. "I got a light." A brown triangle of stain, that looked permanent, crossed her two, large, front teeth. "Come on!"

Kidd turned away and started back down the hall.

He heard them running behind him.

As he ducked into the stairwell, Denny's voice separated from the voices and footsteps around it: "Fell down the elevator! Oh, man," and a barking laugh. "All right. All right, Dragon Lady — I'm with you."

Sudden light behind him flung his shadow before him down the next flight. At the landing he glanced back:

The bright scales, claws, and fangs careened after him, striated and rigid as a television image from a monster film suddenly halted in its projector: it was the dragon he'd seen his first night in the park with Tak. He could tell because griffon and mantis glimmered just behind, and sometimes through it. Bleached out like ghosts, the others clustered down, streaked with sidelight. Kidd ran on, heart hammering, breath scoring his nasal roof.

He fell against the bottom door; it sagged forward. He staggered out. The others ran behind. Harsh light lay out harsh shadow, dispersing the lobby's grey as he crossed.

"How do you get down into the fucking basement?" He hammered the elevator bell.

"The downstairs is locked," Thirteen said. "I tried to get in when we first got—"

Both elevator doors rolled open.

Dragon Lady, light extinguished, swung around him into the one with the car, wrenched away the plate above the buttons: The plate clattered on the car floor as she did something with switches. "Okay, I got both doors locked open."

Kidd looked back — the two other apparitions swayed forward among the others standing — and called: "Where's the rope?" He held the other jamb and leaned into the breezy shaft. Girders rose by hazy brick. "I can't see too much." Above and in the wind a voice echoed:

Oh, no! He's down there! He must be terribly hurt!

And another:

No, Mom, come back. Kidd's down there. Mom, please!

Bobby, Bobby, are you all right? Please, Bobby! Oh, dear God!

Kidd strained to see: the vaguest suggestion of light up in the distance — was it some upper, open door? "Mrs Richards!" His shout vaulted about the shaft. "You get back from that door!"

Oh, Bobby! Kidd, is he all right? Oh, please, let him be all right.

Mom, come back, will you?

Then lights around him moved forward, harshening the brick, the painted steel. On the shaft wall shadows of heads swung; some grew, some faded; new shadows grew.

"You see anything?" Dragon Lady asked, crowding his shoulder. "Here." Her arm came up, hooked his. "Lean on out further if you want."

He glanced back at her.

She said, her head to the side: "I ain't gonna let you fall, motherfucker!"

So he hooked up his arm. "Got me?"

"Yeah."

Their elbows made a hot, comfortable lock.

He leaned forward, swaying into the dark. She let him slowly out.

The other lights had filled the door, flushing the shaft with doubled shadows.

"You see anything in there?" which was not Dragon Lady's voice but Denny's.

The junk down there: On darkness like velvet, cigarette packages, chewing-gum papers, cigarettes and cigarette butts, match books, envelopes and, there to one side, heaped up … the glitter in it identified the wrist. "Yeah, I can see him… I think."

Can you see where he is? Bobby? Bobby, Kidd, can you see him? Oh, my God, he fell all that way! Oh, he must be hurt, so badly! I can't hear him. Is he unconscious? Oh, can't you see where he is yet?

Momma, please, please come back from here!

Behind him, Dragon Lady said with soft brutality: "Christ, I wish that bitch would shut the fuck up!"

"Look, man," Thirteen said, behind them, "that's her kid down there!"

"Don't 'man' me, Thirteen," Dragon Lady said; and Kidd felt her grip — well, not loosen so much as shift, about an inch; his shoulder tensed. "I still wish she'd keep — quiet!"

"I brought the crowbar," somebody said. "And a screwdriver. Do you need a crowbar or a screwdriver?"

"After that fall," Dragon Lady said, "there can't be too much left of him. He gotta be dead."

"Shit, Dragon Lady," Thirteen said, "his Momma's right up there!"

"I said: He's gotta be dead! You heard me?"

Mom, come on!

Can you see him down there? I can't see anything. I can't hear anything. Oh, Bobby, Bobby! Can you hear your mommy? Please, Bobby!

The grip suddenly sagged; for a moment Kidd thought he was falling — Dragon Lady, still holding, had leaned in behind him. Her voice roared about his ears. "YOUR SON IS DEAD, LADY!" And Kidd was pulled away. "Come on, let's get you back."

Thirteen, with an unhappy expression, shook his head.

Denny, up front now, gripped a length of wound clothes line. "You want to get him up? You take the rope. We'll hold you while you go down."

Kidd took hold of the doubled end, ducked his head through, and hooked his arms over. (Griffon and Mantis flanked the door.) Thirteen, Denny, and Dragon Lady were handing out the other end among them.

"You just hold on," Kidd said. "I'll climb down." He got onto his knees at the sill, holding the edge (one rough hand lost in griffon light), dropped one leg down, then the other. The shaft at his back was cool. He could not tell if the wind came from above or below. He went over the edge, had to keep away from the wall first with his knee, then with his foot.

"You all right?" Denny asked, legs wide, fists close.

Kidd grunted, pulling on the ropes, taut around his back (pushing something glass into his back) and taut under his arms: "Yeah." The slanted bar of the door mechanism slid under his bare foot. His sandal toe scraped metal.

Swaying at either side of the door, the apparitions loomed, luminous.

Once he called; "You can lower it a little faster than that. I'm okay."

"Sorry," which was Thirteen, catching his breath; and the rope.

His shin scraped the basement door-sill. His bare foot hit something and slipped, in either grease or blood.

He turned, while the rope sagged around him, and looked at the — he had to be dead.

The shaft was momentarily silent, except for wind.

Finally Dragon Lady called down: "You still okay…?"

"Yeah." Kidd took a breath. "I'll tie the rope around him. You can haul him up." He slipped the rope from under his arms, pulled it over his head, but left it around one shoulder; he stepped forward on the oozy filth, stooped, and tugged a leg from where it had wedged between two blackened bumper plates.

"…is he alive?" Thirteen called.

Kidd took another breath. "Naw." He pulled at the arm, got a grip around the chest, which was all soft against him. His own shirt front soaked immediately. Blood dribbled along his forearm. Standing, he dragged the body back a step. A foot caught, pulled free; the leg fell back against his thigh — his thigh wet, warm, to the knee. Dragging it, limp, reaching for the rope, he thought: Is this what turns on blood and blade freaks? He thought of Tak, he thought of George, hunted in himself for any idle sexuality: he found it, disconcertingly, a small warmth above the loins that, as he bared his teeth and the rope slid through his sticky hand, went out. "Let me have another couple of feet!" Well, he had found it before in auto wrecks, in blue plush, in roots, in wet wood with the bark just stripped.

Rope dropped over his shoulder; the voices eighteen floors up came again:

Oh, Mom—

Is he all right? Kidd, have you found him yet? Bobby? Bobby, can you hear me at all?

Oh, Mom, you heard—

Bobby, are you all right?

He got the rope around the chest, got a clumsy knot done — like trying to do it with your hands in glue — that maybe would hold. Bobby sagged against Kidd's knees, heavy enough to make his bare foot slide backward. "Okay!" He tugged the rope.

He could see it run across the sill above him, go taut, and slow. The weight lifted from against him. A sneaker dragged across his foot, thumped against the door, and swung away again, and raised, dripping on his cheek. He smeared at his face with the heel of his hand and stepped back.

"Jesus Christ…!" from a girl at the doorway silenced everything but the wind and the reverberating voice:

Bobby, Bobby, please, can you hear me at all?

Another boy said: "Hey, wow…!"

Then, Denny's nervous laugh: "Oh, man, that's a mess…!"

Dragon Lady said, "All right, I'm untying him here— you get that rope down to the kid."

Standing on the bottom of the shaft, his bare heel wedged against one caked girder that crossed the bumper plates, Kidd stared up. For a moment he thought the elevator car descended at him. But it was a trick of light from the flanking beasts, both of whom swayed and flickered at the edge of sight.

The rope fell at him. He grabbed it with one hand, then the other. Someone pulled it; it rasped his coated palms. "Hey …!" It went slack again.

Dragon Lady leaned in, the rope wrapped around one fist. "You got it now?"

"Yeah." Once more he shrugged it over his head, under his arms. "Got it."

They tugged him up.

When his head reached the sill, Denny and somebody else were on their knees, catching him around under the armpits. The sill scraped his chin, his chest.

Smokey simply put her hand over her mouth and stepped back behind Thirteen.

Kidd crawled over, got to his feet, moved a few steps forward. The others fell back.

"God damn!" Dragon Lady shook her head, eyes wide, and rolled the rope against her thigh. "God…!"

Denny, with a funny smile, stepped back, black-lined nails moving over his chest. "Wow, you really…" He shook back pale hair, seemed to be considering several things to say. "You look just about as bad as…" He glanced at the floor.

"Uh…" Thirteen said, "we got some clothes up at the place. You wanna look through them for something? To change into, well, that's… all right."

"Oh, yeah…" Kidd looked down at blood, on himself, on the floor. It didn't run. It looked like jellied paste. "Thanks." He looked at the thing on the floor too, while wind and the woman's voice made torrents in the shaft. "I better get… him upstairs."

Bobby's shirt had ripped across the back. The flesh that wasn't torn was purple.

"You could make a sling, or something," Thirteen offered. "Hey, do we got any more of that canvas stuff?"

Someone he didn't recognize said: "We threw it out."

Kidd sucked his teeth, stopped, got his arms under Bobby's shoulders, tugged him over. One eye, open, had burst. The face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter.

Thirteen, glancing up the shaft, said: "Dragon Lady, why you want to go hollering up at her about her kid's dead?"

"Because," Dragon Lady said, "if I was his mother, I'd want to know!"

"But suppose he was still—"

"Man," Dragon Lady said, "that ain't like gettin' dumped out a two story window. That's seventeen, eighteen flights!"

Kidd wedged his hand under the knees, stood, unsteadily, stepped back.

"Watch it!" Denny grabbed Kidd's shoulder. "You don't want to go down there again, now, do you?"

Kidd said: "Make the elevator go!" In his arms, the body was heavy, not so warm, and dripped less.

"Huh?" from Dragon Lady, who was coiling up the rope. "Oh, yeah!" She swung into the car, did something else to the switches above the buttons.

The door started to close. She stopped it with her forearm. (K-chunk.)

Denny stepped back as Kidd carried Bobby inside.

"Baby, Adam, you go on up with the others," Dragon Lady said from the back of the car.

But Kidd, turning to face the door as it rolled to, could not tell which of the people standing behind Thirteen and Smokey she addressed: their light shields had been extinguished.

A moment into darkness, he heard Dragon Lady's hand move among her chains; and the car filled with light. "So you can see what you're doing," the dragon said. "Here, I'll push the floor. Which one? Seventeen?"

"Yeah." He nodded, stepped aside.

The car rose.

The dragon beside him, he realized, was bigger than the elevator. Since it was light, he would have expected walls and ceiling to cut off that side claw, the top of that head. The effect, however, was that those places in the blue, enameled walls and ceiling seemed transparent, and the claw and the head shone through. The apparition was reflected on four sides.

Standing there, shifting the weight in his arms — Kidd had to shift it several times — he noticed the striations, like a muzzy image on some vertical television screen, raced to the left if he swayed right; if he swayed left, they raced right. Kidd said: "I don't think you should get out with me."

The dragon said: "I wasn't planning to."

He shifted the weight again, looked down at it, and thought: It smells… it has a specific smell. And there was an annoying piece of paper — he glanced down over the knees; was it a match book? — stuck to his bare foot.

Why, Kidd thought, why am I standing here with this armful of heavy, heavy meat, filthy with blood…? Then something raked inside his face; his throat clamped, his eyes teared. Either fear or grief, it extinguished as quickly as the lust that had momentarily raked inside his loins.

He blinked, again shifted his weight to the sandaled foot. The bare one stuck to the floor.

Beside him the swayings and motions that might tell him Dragon Lady's thoughts were hidden in light.

He shifted back the other way. His sandal stuck too.

The car slowed; the door opened.

Mrs Richards' fist rose to strike her chin. The gesture was a stronger version of June's.

Mrs Richards stepped back, and back again.

June caught her mother's arm.

Mrs Richards closed her mouth and her eyes and began to shake. High brittle sobs suddenly crackled the silence.

"You better take your mother upstairs," Kidd said and stepped, after his grotesque shadow, into the hall.

June's head whipped back and forth between him and her mother, till an edge of shadow swept over his. It was not him she was staring at, but the bright apparition in the closing elevator.

"I'll put him in the old apartment."

"Bobby's…?" June whispered, and smashed back against the wall to avoid him as he passed.

"Yeah, he's dead."

Behind him Mrs Richards' crying changed pitch.

The other elevator door, against the rolled carpet, went K-chunk, K-chunk, K-chunk…

He shouldered into seventeen-E. Put the boy in his own…? Kidd walked down the hall, turned into the bare room. One of Bobby's hands (the one with the chain, all stained) struck and struck his shin. All he had to do was look at what he lugged not to be sad.

He tried not to drop it on the floor, lowered it, almost fell; and dropped it. He pulled at the bent leg; it… bent again, at the wrong place. So he stood up.

Christ, the blood! He shook his head, and peeled his shirt from stomach and shoulders. Starting for the door, he unbuckled his pants and, holding them with one hand — they dropped to his thighs — stepped into the hall.

Mrs Richards, standing in the middle of the hall, began to shake her head and cry again.

He scowled and pulled his pants up. He'd been heading for the bathroom but, exposed to her astonished grief, he was thrown back to the moment of sexual response at the shaft bottom. Shit, he thought: "Ma'am, why don't you go upstairs. There's nothing you can do. Being here won't make you feel… any better. June …?"

June half hid behind her mother.

"…why don't you take her upstairs." Suddenly he didn't want to be there at all. "Look, I've got to go get some — something." Holding his pants closed, he went past them into the living room, picked up his notebook and, holding it in front of his lap, stalked out the door.

Thirteen said, "I guess she's taking it pretty rough," and stepped back to let him in.

"Shit." Dragon Lady glanced at the ceiling.

The sound of crying, high and stifled, dripped into the room like something molten.

"Why don't she shut up!" Dragon Lady said.

"Look, man—" Thirteen started.

"I know, I know. Somebody just asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. Well I sure as shit do. Baby? Adam? You bringing that damn wine?"

"You said," Kidd began, "you had some clothes?"

"Oh yeah. Sure. Come on in."

Denny, who was resting a glass jug on the crook of his arm, said, "I think he wants to use the bathroom."

"Yeah, you want to wash up. Tub's a mess, but you can use it if you want. What's the matter?"

"Nothing." But Denny's last sentence had caused gooseflesh more unpleasant than either grief or terror. "Yeah, I better wash up."

"Down the hall. It don't have no fuckin' windows. I'll get a lantern." Thirteen lifted one from a nail in the wall.

Kidd followed him into the john.

In the swaying lantern light, he saw a line of rust along the middle of the tub to the drain. The enamel had flaked here and there from black patches. "We had to put a fucked-up scorpion in here a couple of nights back — name was Pepper — and he'd put something in his arm he shouldn't have. Put him in the bathtub with his spurs on, and he tried to kick holes in it." Lantern high in one hand, Thirteen bent and picked up a screw from the tub bottom, looked at it, shrugged. "Use any of those towels you want. We don't got no washcloths." He put the lantern down on the back of the toilet.

Kidd put the notebook on the seat-top, turned on the water and picked up the soap: Flakes of rust had dried into it.

With a grey towel (torn) he swabbed the bottom of the tub. There was no stopper, so he rolled it up and plugged the drain, then got in before the water had covered the bottom.

"Do you want something to drink?" a girl called through the door.

"Yeah."

While he sat, scrubbing at his face, he could hear the crying upstairs. He wondered if she were moving from room to room.

The girl came into the bathroom with a white cup in her hands. She wore jeans, was heavy, and had a cheerful face that was trying to look very serious. "Here you are. That poor boy." She bent down, spilling curly hair from her shoulder and put the cup on the tub edge. She had loose, heavy breasts under a blue sweatshirt. "That must have been awful!"

Her voice was breathy, and he thought she probably giggled a lot. The thought of her giggling made him smile. "It wasn't nice."

"You live upstairs?" she asked.

Perhaps she was seventeen. "I just work there. You know if you keep on staring at me like that, I'm gonna get all excited."

She giggled.

He leaned back in the tub. "See, I told you."

"Oh…" She gestured mock frustration, left — she had to push past Denny who stood in the door now. He gave a sharp, short laugh. "You really got yourself messed up, huh, kid?"

"Yeah, well. I guess we couldn't leave him down there."

"I guess not." Denny came in and sat on the toilet cover, picked up the notebook. "Hey, kid? This yours?"

He nodded, only realizing now that Denny's "kid" had neither capital K or extra d. Kidd grinned and picked up the mug. (Around him the water ran brown. The match book from his foot floated under the spigot.) When he sipped, his mouth burned. "Shit, what is this?"

"Whisky," Denny said, looking up. "You want wine, we got wine. But I thought maybe you'd want something good and strong, I mean after…" His hair swung in pale blades.

"That's fine."

"You write all this?"

"Yeah. Leave it alone."

"Oh." Quickly Denny put it on the floor between his boots. He rubbed two fingers on his naked chest a while. Then he glanced up and said, "She's really going on, huh? I guess that's cause she's his momma?"

Kidd nodded and ground his knuckles in the soap. "I got all that junk off my face?"

"Nope. On the side, under your chin."

He lathered there. The lantern showed the suds gone tan.

Denny gestured. "What you got a hard-on for?"

"Your scrawny ass hanging over the back of your pants."

"Yeah?" Denny grinned. "Be the best piece you ever had."

But when Kidd sloshed the lather off his face, Denny was still looking at it. "How'd your run go?" Kidd asked.

"With Nightmare?"

"Yeah."

"It was a fuck-up." Denny shrugged. "We didn't get nothing. Time before was really good. Next time be good too."

"What you guys run after?" Kidd drank some more, and rubbed the rusty soap on his stomach.

"You all that interested in scorpion shit?"

Kidd shrugged. The soap bobbed away.

Denny nodded. "You interested, you ask Dragon Lady."

"Not that interested." He retrieved it, pushed it between his toes.

"You ask her, she'll tell you if she thinks you wanna know. Dragon Lady, she likes you." Suddenly Denny stood. "So does Nightmare. I'll be back in a second."

Kidd took another drink, and fell to scrubbing again. His nails were lined — ruined rim and bitten cuticle — with brown. He dunked his head, rubbed it, lifted it; dark streaks wormed from the drippings.

"Here you go, kid." Denny came back in with an armful of clothing and sat down again on the toilet. "Now we got this pair of pants; and this pair — naw, that's pretty raunchy. I guess these'll fit you. Nice belt, too. I dunno who left all this shit. You think there'd be a shirt in here, you know."

"I thought scorpions didn't wear shirts." Kidd stood up in the loud water to soap his groin.

Denny glanced at him once more. "Shit, I better keep my ass out of your way. You want a black leather vest? That'd look good on you, kid, you know? Scorpions just wear vests, usually. You seen the one I got?"

"How old are you?"

"Eh… sixteen," followed with a questioning glance.

Fifteen, Kidd decided. "I'm practically a dozen years older than you. Stop calling me kid."

"Huh? You are?"

"Yeah. Now throw me that other towel." As he caught it, the door crashed back. Dragon Lady lurched in, dark face twisted, stained teeth bared, shaking a fist with one finger up. "Look, when you go back upstairs, you tell that bitch to cut it out, you hear? It's driving me up the fuckin' wall! God damn, I know it's her kid, but — well, Jesus Christ, she been whining up there a fuckin' hour!" She looked at the ceiling and bellowed: "I mean, go out and take a walk, lady!"

"Dragon Lady…" Denny's interruption seemed to take in none of the scorpion's rage.

"We dragged the cocksucker up there for her! She keep it up, I'm gonna go up there and beat the shit out of her, if you don't quiet her down!"

Anger and the cold air: his erection, anyway, was gone: "The walls are thin." He rubbed himself with the bunched towel.

"Dragon Lady?"

"What do you want?"

"The… Kid was asking about the run."

Kidd sensed the hesitant disobedience was some acquiescence to previous commitment. But he could not be sure whether the newly implied capital was respectful or mocking.

"Yeah?" Dragon Lady's anger was quickly exhausted.

"Look, lemme out of here and see what I can do upstairs," Kidd said. "We'll talk about it some other time." He wished Mrs Richards would quiet too.

"Oh, yeah. Sure. Try and shut her up, huh?" Dragon Lady backed out again.

"You don't want the vest?" Denny still pawed in the heap.

The crying suddenly rose in pitch. Outside, Dragon Lady said, "God damn!"

"Yeah, I want the fucking vest." Kidd stepped from the tub, reached down, and drained the whisky. Twin warmths of agreement and alcohol turned through him.

Denny, still sitting, was bent almost double, as he sorted the clothing. His belt loops tugged his jeans below his buttocks' crevice.

Kidd sucked his teeth again and toweled his groin. "What's she here for, anyway?"

"Dragon Lady?" Denny glanced up, unbending.

"Yeah."

"You remember when you were here last time, Nightmare was collecting us for the run?" Denny shrugged and fell back to sorting. "Well, she's bringing us back, I guess."

"Oh."

The door opened again. The girl stood there, with a plastic cup this time. "Oh," she said. "I didn't know you were…" That was to Denny who didn't look up. So she said to Kidd, "Denny told me I should bring you another glass after fifteen minutes. Did you finish the first one?"

"You don't give a fuck whether he finished it or not," Denny said, still bent over. "Just give it to him."

"I'm finished."

She blinked rapidly, while they exchanged mug for cup. Then, without glancing at Denny, she left. Kidd drank some more, then put the cup on the tub edge. "Thanks."

Denny still didn't say anything, almost as though embarrassed.

In black jeans and leather vest, Kidd went into the front room.

"Oh, man!" Dragon Lady was saying. "This is just too much—"

The crying was louder here.

"Dragon Lady," Smokey said, rugging at the tassels of her macramé belt, "why do you shout things up there like that? It… it isn't necessary!"

"Well," Dragon Lady said, thumb hooked around hers, "if I was making that big a fool of myself, after about an hour, I don't know as how I wouldn't appreciate somebody telling me to cut it out — like they meant it!"

Which Smokey seemed to think was funny; Thirteen's reaction, though, was silent, hand-throwing frustration. He moved, almost protectively, between the two women; Smokey didn't seem to mind.

"Look," Thirteen said, with settling gestures of the palms, "if your neighbor, I mean your own neighbor is going through that, you're just obliged, obliged, see, to put up with—"

Dragon Lady threw her glass. It missed Thirteen. Smokey ducked too. "Hey, watch…" Thirteen shouted. Pieces of glass rocked on the floor. Wine licked down the wall. Smokey just blinked and looked like she didn't know whether to be amused or angry.

But Dragon Lady launched into doubled-over laughter. "Oh, Thirteen… Thirteen, you are so—" Chains swung, flung back around her neck as she stood. "You are so chicken shit!" She laughed again.

Maybe, Kidd thought, scorpions just yelled loud, laughed a lot, and threw things.

"Baby!" Dragon Lady shouted. "Adam! We gonna get out of here, soon…"

"Good-bye," Kidd said, at the door, and went. The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said "good-bye". Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave. In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn't even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not.

5

He carried the nest tables into nineteen-A.

Mrs Richards stood in the middle of the room.

"Um," he said, "I thought I'd bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the…" then went and put them by the balcony door.

"Your clothes," she said. "I was going to give you some of my… son's clothes."

"Oh. I got these…" They were all black, too.

Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

"Is June all right?"

She kept nodding.

"I tbought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you'd already gone up."

The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her face.

"I'll go bring the rest of the stuff up, ma'am."

He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he'd considered Bobby's toys, but decided he'd better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby's room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.

Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

He paused; he re-wrote:

Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the ed's and re-order three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable limit. He took a breath, and a clause from the first three lines, to close the passage; and, writing it, saw only one word in it was necessary, so crossed out the others.

Mrs Richards came into the room, circled it, searching, saw him: "You're writing. I didn't mean to disturb your… writing."

"Oh, no." He closed the book. "I'm finished." He was tired. But he was finished.

"I thought perhaps you were writing some sort of… elegy. For…" and dropped her head.

"Oh. No…" he said, and decided "Elegy" was the title. "Look, you've got everything up here. Maybe I should just go on and leave."

"No." Mrs Richards' hand left her neck to reach for him. "Oh, you mustn't go! I mean you haven't talked to Arthur about your pay, have you?"

"Well, okay." He sat back.

Mrs Richards, all exhausted nervousness, sat across the coffee table from him.

He asked: "Where's June?"

"She's in her…" ended by vague gesture. She said, "It must be awful for you."

"It's worse for you." He was thinking: Her son's clothes? She couldn't have meant Bobby, we weren't anywhere near the same size. Edward's? "Mrs Richards, I can't even say how sorry I—"

She nodded again, chin striking her knuckles. "Oh, yes. You don't have to. I understand. You went down there and brought him—" in the pause he thought she was going to cry—"back. How can I say thank you for that? You went down there. I saw you when you brought him up. How can I say—"

"It's all right, Mrs Richards. Really." He wanted to ask her about the structure of light that had been in the elevator car with him; and could think of no way. Momentarily he wondered, maybe she hadn't seen it. But moved his jaws on one another to dispel those implications. "I don't have to wait here, for Mr Richards. I can catch him another time. You might want to be alone with him when…"

The disorganized movements of her face stopped. "Oh no, I want someone here! Please stay, stay for me! That would be—" she began to look around in the seat of her chair—"the kindest thing. You could do."

"All right."

What she looked for, she did not find. "I want somebody with me. I need somebody." She stood. "With me here." Again, she circled the room. "It's so strange, I haven't the faintest idea what I'll say. I wish I could phone him; on the phone it would be so much easier. But I just have to wait. He'll come in the door. And I'll say, Arthur, this afternoon, June backed Bobby into the elevator shaft and he fell down seventeen flights and killed himself…" She looked into the kitchen, crossed the room, looked down the hall.

"Are you sure you wouldn't feel better if I went?" He wanted to go, could not conceive her wanting him to remain, even though she waved her hand at him, even though she said:

"Please. You have to stay."

"Yes, ma'am. I will."

She came back to her chair. "It doesn't feel like we live here. The walls are blue. Before they were green. But all our furniture, it's all in the proper place."

"The rugs aren't down yet," he suggested. Well, it filled the silence.

"Oh, no. No, I don't think it's the rugs. It's the feeling. It's the feeling of trying to make a home. A home for my husband and my…" Then she pressed her lips together and dropped her head.

"Look, Mrs Richards, why don't you go in and lie down or something till Mr Richards gets back? I'll put the rugs down," and thought abruptly: That's what she wanted me to say; so I'll have to tell him!

Who told the damn kids to take the rugs up anyway? And couldn't remember whether it was him or her.

But she shook her head. "I couldn't sleep now. No. When Arthur comes back… no." The last was calm. She put — pushed her hands into her lap. Bobby's pile of books still sat in the corner… Kidd wished he had put them away.

She stood.

She walked the room once more.

Her motions began definitively but lost focus in a glance — first out the balcony doors, next into the dining room, now toward the hall.

She stopped behind her chair.

"Arthur," she said, followed by what sounded more like a comma of address than of apposition, "he's outside."

"Ma'am?"

"Arthur is outside, in that." She sat. "He goes out every day. I can watch him from the window turn down Forty-Fourth there and disappear. Into the smoke. Like that." Outside the balcony door, buildings were blurred. "We've moved." She watched the fog for the length of five breaths. "This building, it's like a chessboard. Now we occupy a different square. We had to move. We had to. Our position before was terrible." Smoke pulled from the window, uncovering more smoke—"But I didn't know the move would cost so much." — and more. "I am not prepared for this. I'm really not. Arthur goes out there, every day, and works in Systems. Maitland Systems Engineering. Then he comes home." She leaned forward. "Do you know, I don't believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don't believe he goes anywhere. I don't believe there's anyplace to go." She sat back. "I don't think I believe there ever was. I'm very much in love with that man. And I'm very much in awe of him. It frightens me how much I don't understand him. I often suspect that he isn't happy, that going out to work everyday in that—" she shook her head slightly—"that it doesn't give him anything real, the inner things he needs. Whatever it is he does out there, it frightens me. I picture him going to a great empty building, filled with offices, and desks, and work benches, and technician shops, and drafting tables, and filing cabinets, and equipment closets — no people. He walks up and down, and looks into the open office doors. I don't think he opens the closed ones. Sometimes he straightens a pile of papers on somebody's desk. Sometimes he looks through a pile of circuit plans, but he puts them back, neatly. That's all. All day. With no one else there. Do you think any of the windows are broken? Do you think he sometimes turns on a light switch and only one of those long fluorescent tubes flickers, faintly orange at one end? There's something wonderful about engineering, you know. I mean, you go in and you solve problems, you make things, with your hands, with your mind. You go in, and you have a problem to work with, and when you've finished solving it, you've… well, done something with real, tangible results. Like a farmer who raises a crop; you can see that it's there. You don't just push a button, again and again, or put endless piles of paper in the proper drawers. Engineers are very wise. Like farmers. They can also be very dense and stubborn. Oh, I don't know what's out there, where he goes to do every day. He won't talk about it. He used to. But not now I don't know where he goes, every morning. If he walked around the streets all day, I could tell that. That's not it. But whatever it is, it isn't good for him. He's a good man. He's more than a good man; he's an intelligent man. Do you know he was hired right out of his class in college? Oh, they were doing that a lot a few years ago. But it wasn't as common as all that when we were in school. He needs… something — I'd seem like a silly woman if I said 'worthy of him.' But that's what I mean. I've never understood what was out there." She looked again through the balcony doors. "I've suspected, oh, I've suspected that whatever was there wasn't really what he needed, what would make him — happy? Oh, I learned a long time ago you don't look for that. But the thing you do try for — excellence? Contentment? Oh no, oh no: not in a great empty office building, where the lights don't work, where the windows are broken, where there aren't any people."

"There're probably people there," Kidd said, uncomfortably. "Probably a skeleton staff. Madame Brown and I were talking about that. It's probably like at… the Management office."

"Ah." Her hands met in her lap. "Yes." She sat back. "But I'm only telling you how it feels. To me. When the smoke thins, I can look across at the other buildings. So many of the windows are broken. Maybe the maintenance men in Arthur's office have already started putting in new panes. The maintenance is always better in a place of business. Well, there's more money involved. I just wonder when we can expect some sort of reasonable return to normal here. There's a certain minimum standard that must be kept up. They should send somebody around, if only to let us know what the situation is. Not knowing, that's the worst. If I did know something, something for sure about plans for repairing the damages, for restoring service, lights, and things, when we could expect them to start…" She looked oddly annoyed.

"Maybe they will," he suggested, "send somebody around."

"You'd think they would. We have had trouble with them before; there was a huge crack, it opened up in June's ceiling. It wasn't our fault. Something upstairs leaked. It took them three months to send somebody. But they answered my letter right away. Meanwhile, I just have to muddle, muddle on. And every morning I send Arthur out of here, out into that." She nodded. "That's the crime. Of course I couldn't keep him back; he wouldn't stay. I'd tell him how dangerous I thought it was out there, all the awful things I'm afraid might happen, and he'd — Oh, I wish he'd laugh. But he wouldn't. He'd scowl. And go. He goes away, every morning, just disappears, down Forty-Fourth. The only thing I can do for him is try and keep a good home, where nothing can hurt him, at least here, a happy, safe and—"

He thought she'd seen something behind him, and was about to turn around. But her expression went on to something more violent than recognition.

She bent her head. "I guess I haven't done that very well. I haven't done that at all."

He wished she would let him leave.

"Mrs Richards, I'm going to see about that stuff in the back." He thought there was some stuff in the back still to be put in place. "You just try and take it easy now." He got up, thinking: When I come back I can put down the living-room rug.

There's nothing I can do, he justified, to sponge up her grief. And I can't do nothing.

He opened the door to Bobby's room where the furniture had still not been put against the walls.

And June's fists crashed the edges of the poster together.

"Hey, I'm sorry… I didn't realize this was your—" But it was Bobby's room. Kidd's apologetic smile dropped before her astounded despair. "Look, I'll leave you alone…"

"He was going to tell!" she whispered, wide-eyed, shaking her head. "He said so! But I swear," and she crushed the poster altogether now. "I swear I didn't do it on purpose…!"

After a few moments, he said, "I suppose that's the first thing that would have occurred to anybody else in his right mind. But I didn't even think of it till just now." Then — and was afraid — he backed out of the room and closed the door, unable to determine what had formed in her face. I'm just an observer, he thought, and, thinking it, felt the thought crumple like George's poster between June's fists.

Walking toward the living room, he envisioned her leaping from the door, to bite and rake his back. The doors stayed closed. There was no sound. And he didn't want to go back to the living room.

Just as he came in, the lock ratched, and the hall door pushed open. "Hello, guess who I found on the way up here?"

"Hi, Mary." Madame Brown followed Mr Richards in.

"Honey, what in the world is that mess down in the lobby? It looks as though somebody—"

Mrs Richards turned around on the couch.

Mr Richards frowned.

Madame Brown, behind him, suddenly touched her hand to her bright, jeweled chains.

Mrs Richards squeezed the fabric of her skirt. "Arthur, this afternoon Bobby… June—Bobby—!"

His eyelids, snapped wide enough to pain the sockets. He rolled, scrabbling on snarled blankets and crushed leaves, flung his hands at her naked back. Had he nails, he would have torn.

"Unnnh," Lanya said and turned to him. Then, "Hey—" because he dragged her against him. "I know," she mumbled beside his ear, moving her arms inside his to get them free, "you want to be a great and famous—"

His arms shook.

"Oh, hey—!" Her hands came up across his back, tightened. "You were having bad dreams! About that boy!"

He shook his head beside hers.

"It's all right," she whispered. She got one hand high enough to rub the back of his shoulder. "It's all right now. You're awake." He took three rough breaths, with stomach-clenched silences between, then let go and rolled to his back. The red veil, between him and the darkness, here, then there, fell away.

She touched his arm; she kneaded his shoulder. "It was a really bad dream, wasn't it?"

He said, "I don't… know," and stopped gasping. Foliage hung over them. Near the horizon, blurred in fog, he saw a tiny moon; and further away, another! His head came up from the blanket — went slowly back:

They were two parklights which, through smoke, looked like diffuse pearls. "I can't remember if I was dreaming or not."

"You were dreaming about Bobby," she said. "That's all. And you scared yourself awake."

He shook his head. "I shouldn't have given her that damned poster—"

Her head fell against his shoulder. "You didn't have any way to know…" Her hand dropped over his chest; her thigh crossed his thigh.

"But—" he took her hand in his—"the funny lack of expression Mr Richards got when she was trying to tell him how it happened. And in the middle of it, June came in, and sort of edged into the wall, and kept on brushing at her chin with her fist and blinking. And Mrs Richards kept on saying, 'It was an accident! It was a terrible accident!' and Madame Brown just said 'Oh, Lord!' a couple of times, and Mr Richards didn't say anything. He just kept looking back and forth between Mrs Richards and June as though he couldn't quite figure out what they were saying, what they'd done, what had happened, until June started to cry and ran out of the room—"

"It sounds awful," she said. "But try to think about something else—"

"I am." He glanced at the parklights again; now there was only one. Had the other gone out? Or had some tree branch, lifted away by wind, settled back before it. "About what George and you were saying yesterday — about everybody being afraid of female sexuality, and trying to make it into something that wreaks death and destruction all about it. I mean, I don't know what Mr Richards would do if he found out his sunshine girl was running around the streets like a bitch in heat, lusting to be brutalized by some hulking, sadistic, buck nigger. Let's see, he's already driven one child out of the house with threats of murder—"

"Oh, Kidd, no…"

"— and the sounds that come out of that apartment when they don't think anybody's listening are just as strange as the ones that come up from Thirteen's, believe me. Maybe she's got good reason not to want her old man to know, and if Bobby was threatening, in that vicious way younger brothers can have, to show the poster to her parents, well maybe just for an instant, when she was backing him down the hall, and the door rolled open, from some sort of half-conscious impulse, it was easier to shove — or not even to shove, but just not say anything when he stepped back toward the wrong—"

"Kidd," Lanya said, "now come on!"

"It would be just like the myth: her lust for George, death and destruction! Only — only suppose it was an accident?" He took another breath. "That's what frightens me. Suppose it was, like she said, just an accident. She didn't see at all. Bobby just backed into the wrong shaft door. That's what terrifies me. That's the thing I'm scared of most."

"Why?" Lanya asked.

"Because…" He breathed, felt her head shift on his shoulder, her hand rock with his on his chest; "Because that means it's the city. That means it's the landscape: the bricks, and the girders, and the faulty wiring and the shot elevator machinery, all conspiring together to make these myths true. And that's crazy." He shook his head. "I shouldn't have give her that poster. I shouldn't. I really shouldn't—". His head stopped shaking. "Motherfucker still hasn't paid me my money. I was going to talk to him about it this evening. But I couldn't, then."

"No, it doesn't sound like the most propitious time to bring up financial matters."

"I just wanted to get out of there."

She nodded.

"I don't want the money. I really don't."

"Good." She hugged. "Then just forget about the whole thing. Don't go back there. Let them alone. If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them do it."

He raised his hand above his face, palm up, moving his fingers, watching them, black against four-fifths black, his arm muscle tiring, till he let his knuckles fall against his forehead. "I was so scared… When I woke up, I was so scared!"

"It was just a dream," she insisted. And then: "Look, if it really was an accident, your bringing that poster didn't have anything to do with it. And if she did do it on purpose, then she's so far gone there's no way you could possibly blame yourself!"

"I know," he said. "But do you think…" He could feel the place on his neck her breath brushed warmly. "Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"

"Of course it does," she said. "San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one than say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely." She waited.

So at last he said. "Yeah… But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said, "that's crazy — in a word."

He slid his arm around her and could smell her wake-up breath, cuddling her. "You know, when I pulled him out, blood all over me, like a flayed carcass off a butcher hook… you know, I had half a hard-on? That's too much, huh?"

She reached between his legs. "You still do." She moved her fingers there; he moved in her fingers.

"Maybe that's what I was dreaming about?" He laughed sharply. "Do you think that's what I was—?"

Her hand contracted, released, moved forward, moved back.

He said: "I don't think that's going to do any good…"

Against his chest he felt her shrug. "Try."

Not so much to his surprise, but somehow against his will, his will ceased, and it did.

I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body's machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-corporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.

The leaf shattered in his blunt fingers: leaf and flesh — he ground the flakings with his roughened thumb — were the same color, a different texture. He stared, defining the distinction.

"Come on." Lanya caught up his hand.

Flakes fluttered away (some he felt cling); notebook under his other arm, he stood up from where he'd been leaning on the end of the picnic table. "I was just thinking," Kidd said, "maybe I should stop off at the Labry's and try to collect my money."

"And keep Mr Newboy waiting?" Lanya asked. "Look, you said you got them all moved!"

"I was just thinking about it," Kidd said. "That's all."

A young man with a high, bald forehead and side hair to his naked shoulders sat on an overturned wire basket, one sandal resting over the other. He leaned forward, a burned twig in each hand. They had smudged his fingers. "I take these from you crossed," he said to a girl sitting Indian fashion on the ground before him, "and give them to you crossed."

The girl's black hair was pulled back lacquer tight, till, at the thong whipped a dozen times around her pony tail and tied, it broke into a dozen rivulets about the collar of her pink shirt: her sleeves were torn off; frayed pink threads lay against her thin arms. With her own smudged fingers, she took the twigs. "I take these from you—" she hesitated, concentrated—"uncrossed and I give them to you—" she thrust them back—"uncrossed?"

Some spectators in the circle laughed. Others looked as bemused as she did.

"Nope. Got it wrong again." The man spread his feet, sandal heels lining the dirt, and drew them back against the basket rim. "Now watch." With crossed wrists he took the sticks from her: "I take these from you… uncrossed—" his wrists came apart—"and I give them back to you…"

John, scratching under the fringed shoulder of his Peruvian vest with one hand and eating a piece of bread with the other, came around the furnace. "You guys want some more?" He gestured with the slice, chewing. "Just go take it. You didn't get here till we were already halfway through breakfast." Gold-streaked hair and gold wire frames set off his tenacious tan; his pupils were like circles cut from the overcast.

Kidd said: "We had enough. Really."

In the basket on which the bald man sat ("I take these from you uncrossed and I give them to you… crossed!" More laughter.) a half dozen loaves of bland, saltless bread had been brought over by two scorpions who had taken back two cardboard cartons of canned food, in exchange.

Kidd said: "You're sure that's today's paper?" which was the third time he'd asked John that over the last hour.

"Sure I'm sure." John picked the paper up off the picnic table. "Tuesday, May 5th — that's May-day, isn't it? — 1904. Faust brought it by this morning." He folded it back, began to beat it against his thigh.

"Tell Milly when she gets back thanks again for the clean shirt." Lanya tucked one side of the rough-dried blue cotton under her belt. "I'll bring it back later this afternoon."

"I will. I think Milly's laundry project—" John mused, beating, munching—"is one of the most successful we've investigated. Don't you?"

Lanya nodded, still tucking.

"Come on," Kidd said. "Let's get going. I mean if this is really Tuesday. You're sure he said Tuesday now?"

"I'm sure," Lanya said.

("Nope, you're still doing it wrong, now watch: I take them from you crossed and I give them to you uncrossed." His fingers smudged to the second knuckle and bunched at the base of the charred batons, came forward. Hers, smeared equally, hesitated, went back to fiddle with oae another, started to take them again. She said: "I just don't get it. I don't get it at all." Fewer laughed this time.)

"So long," Kidd said to John, who nodded, his mouth full.

They made their way through the knapsacks.

"That was nice of them to feed us… again," he? said. "They're not bad kids."

"They're nice kids." She brushed at her clean, wrinkled front. "Wish I had an iron."

"You really have to get dressed up to go visit Calkins' place, huh?"

Lanya glanced appraisingly at his new black jeans, his black leather vest. "Well, you're practically in uniform already. I, unlike you, however, am not at my best when scruffy."

They made their way toward the park entrance.

"What's the laundry project?" he asked. "Do they have some place where they pound the clothes with paddles on a rock?"

"I think," Lanya said, "Milly and Jommy and Wally and What's-her-name-with-all-the-Indian-silver found a laundromat or something a few days ago. Only the power's off. Today they've gone off to find the nearest three-pronged outlet that works."

"Then when did the one you have on get done?"

"Milly and I washed a whole bunch by hand in the ladies' john yesterday, while you were at work."

"Oh."

"Recording engineer to laundress," Lanya mused as they passed through the lion gate, "in less than a year." She humphed. "If you asked him, I suspect John would tell you that's progress."

"The paper says it's Tuesday." Kidd moved his thumb absently against the blade of his orchid he'd hooked through a side belt loop; inside it, the chain harness jingled, each step. "He said come up when the paper said it was Tuesday. You don't think he's forgotten?"

"If he has, we'll remind him," Lanya said. "No, I'm sure he hasn't forgotten."

He could press his thumb or his knuckles against the sharp edges and leave only the slightest line, that later, like the other cross-hatches in the surface skin, filled with dirt; but he could hardly feel it. "Maybe we'll avoid any run-ins with scorpions today," he said as they crossed from Brisbain North to Brisbain South. "If we're lucky."

"No self-respecting scorpion would be up at this hour of the morning," Lanya said. "They all sleep till three or four, then carouse till dawn, didn't you know?"

"Sounds like the life. You been in Calkins' place before, you keep telling me. It'll be okay?"

"If I hadn't been in there before—" she slapped her harmonica on her palm—"I wouldn't be making this fuss." Three glistening notes. She frowned, and blew again.

"I think you look pretty good scruffy," he said.

She played more notes, welding them nearly into melody, till she changed her mind, laughed, or complained, or was silent, before beginning another. They walked, Lanya strewing incomplete tunes.

His notebook flapped his hip. (His other hand was petaled in steel, now.) He swung, in twin protections, from the curb. "I wonder if I'm scared of what he's going to say."

Between notes: "Hmm?"

"Mr Newboy. About my poems. Shit, I'm not going to see him. I want to see where Calkins lives. I don't care what Mr Newboy says about what I write."

"I left three perfectly beautiful dresses there, upstairs in Phil's closet. I wonder if they're still there."

"Probably, if Phil is," he said from within his protections.

"Christ, no. Phil hasn't been in the city for… weeks!"

The air was tingly and industrial. He looked up on a sky here the color of clay, there the color of ivory, lighter over there like tarnished tin.

"Good idea," Lanya said, "for me to split. I got you." Slipping her hand between blades, she grasped two of his fingers. Even on her thin wrist, turned, the blades pressed, rubbed, creased her skin—

"Watch out. You're gonna…"

But she didn't.

Over the wall hung hanks of ivy.

At the brass gate, she said, "It's quiet inside."

"Do you ring?" he asked, "or do you shout?" Then he shouted: "Mr Newboy!"

She pulled her hand gingerly away. "There used to be a bell, I think…" She fingered the stone around the brass plate.

"Hello…?" from inside. Footsteps ground the gravel somewhere behind the pines.

"Hello, sir!" Kidd called, pulling the orchid off, pushing a blade into a belt-loop.

Ernest Newboy walked out of shaggy green. "Yes, it is Tuesday, isn't it." He gestured with a rolled paper. "I just found out half an hour ago." He did something on the inside of the latch plate. The gate clanked, swung in a little. "Glad to see you both." He pulled it open the rest of the way.

"Isn't the man who used to be a guard here anymore?" Lanya asked, stepping through. "He had to stay in there all the time." She pointed to a small, green booth, out of sight of the sidewalk.

"Tony?" Mr Newboy said. "Oh, he doesn't go on till sometime late in the afternoon. But practically everybody's out today. Roger decided to take them on a tour."

"And you stayed for us?" Kidd asked. "You didn't have to—"

"No, I just wasn't up to it. I wouldn't have gone anyway."

"Tony…" Lanya mulled, looking at the weathered paint on the gate shed. "I thought his name was something Scandinavian."

"Then it must be somebody else now," Mr Newboy said. He put his hands in his pockets. "Tony's quite as Italian as you can get. He's really very nice."

"So was the other one," Lanya said. "Things are always changing around here."

"Yes, they are."

They started up the path.

"There're so many people in and out of here all the time I've given up trying to keep track. It's very hectic. But you've picked a quiet day. Roger has taken everyone down town to see the paper office." Newboy smiled. "Except me. I always insist on sleeping late Tuesdays."

"It's nice to see the place again," Lanya consented. "When will everybody be back?"

"I would imagine as soon as it gets dark. You said you'd stayed here before. Would you like to wait and say hello to Roger?"

"No," Lanya said. "No. I was just curious."

Mr Newboy laughed. "I see."

The gravel (chewing Kidd's calloused foot) turned between two white columned mock-temples. The trees gave way to hedges; And what might have been an orchard further.

"Can we cut across the garden?"

"Of course. We'll go to the side terrace. The coffee urn's still hot I know, and I'll see if I can find some tea cakes. Roger keeps telling me I have the run of the place, but I still feel a little strange prying into Mrs Alt's kitchen just like that—"

"Oh, that's—" and "You don't have—" Kidd and Lanya began together.

"No, I know where they are. And it's time for my coffee break — that's what you call it here?"

"You'll love these!" Lanya exclaimed as they stepped through the high hedge. "Roger has the most beautiful flowers and—"

Brambles coiled the trellis. Dried tendrils curled on splintered lathe. The ground was gouged up in black confusion here, and here, and there.

"— What in the world…" Lanya began. "What happened?"

Mr Newboy looked puzzled. "I didn't know anything bad. It's been like this since I've been here."

"But it was full of flowers: those sun-colored orange things, like tigers. And irises. Lots of irises—"

Kidd's foot cooled in moist ground.

"Really?" Newboy asked. "How long ago were you there?"

Lanya shrugged. "Weeks… three weeks, four?"

"How strange." Mr Newboy shook his head as the crossed the littered earth. "I'd always gotten the impression they'd been like this, for years…"

In a ten-foot dish of stone, leaves rotted in puddles.

Lanya's head shook. "The fountain used to be going all the time. It had a Perseus, or a Hermes or something in it. Where did it get to?"

"Dear me," Newboy squinted. "I think it's in a pile of junk behind the secretary cottage. I saw something like that when I was wandering around. But I never knew it had anything to do with the fountain. I wonder who's been around here long enough to know?"

"Why don't you ask Mr Calkins?" Kidd said.

"Oh, no. I don't think I would do that." Mr Newboy looked at Lanya with bright complicity. "I don't think I would do that at all."

"No," said Lanya, face fallen before the desolation, "I don't think so."

At the brim's crack, the ground, oozy under thin grass, kept their prints like plaster.

They passed another vined fence; a deal of lawn, and, higher than the few full trees, the house. (On a rise off to one side was another house, only three floors. The secretary cottage?)

Set in the grass a verdigrised plate read:

From the five fat, stone towers — he sought a sixth for symmetry and failed to find it — it looked as though a modern building of dark wood, glass, and brick had been built around an old one of stone.

"How many people does he have here?" Kidd asked.

"I don't really know," Mr Newboy said. They reached the terrace flag. "At least fifteen. Maybe twenty-five. The people he has for help, they're always changing. I really don't see how he gets anything done for looking after them. Unless Mrs Alt does all that." They climbed the concrete steps to the terrace.

"Wouldn't you lose fifteen people in there?" Kidd asked.

The house, here, was glass: inside were maple wall panels, tall brass lamps, bronze statuary on small end-tables between long couches covered in gold velvet, all wiped across with flakes of glare.

"Oh, you never feel the place is crowded."

They passed another window-wall; Kidd could see two walls covered with books. Dark beams inside held up a balcony, flanked with chairs of gold and green brocade; silver candlesticks — one near, one far off in shadow— bloomed on white doilies floating on the mahogany river of a dining table. "Sometimes I've walked around thinking I was perfectly alone for an hour or so only to come across a party of ten in one of the other rooms. I suppose if the place had a full staff—" dried leaves shattered underfoot—"it wouldn't be so lonely. Here we are."

Wooden chairs with colored canvas webbing sat around the terrace. Beyond the balustrade the rocks were licked over with moss and topped by birches, maples and, here and there, thick oaks.

"You sit down. I'll be right back."

Kidd sat — the chair was lower and deeper than he thought — and pulled his notebook into his lap. The glass doors swung behind Newboy. Kidd turned. "What are you looking at?"

"The November garden." Arms crossed, Lanya leaned on the stone rail. "You can't see the plaque from here. It's on top of that rock."

"What's in the… November garden?"

She shrugged a "nothing." "The first night I got here there was a party going on there: November, October, and December."

"How many gardens does he have?"

"How many months are there?"

"What about the garden we first came through?"

"That one," she glanced back, "doesn't have a name." She looked again at the rocks. "It was a marvelous party, with colored lights strung up. And a band: violins, flutes, and somebody playing a harp."

"Where did he get violins here in Bellona?"

"He did. And people with lots and lots of gorgeous clothes."

Kidd was going to say something about Phil.

Lanya turned. "If my dresses are still here, I know exactly where they'd be."

Mr Newboy pushed through the glass doors with a teawagon. Urn and cups rattled twice as the tires crossed the sill. The lower tray held dishes of pastry. "You caught Mrs Alt right after a day of baking."

"Hey," Kidd said. "Those look good."

"Help yourself." He poured steaming coffee into blue porcelain. "Sugar, cream?"

Kidd shook his head; the cup warmed his knee. He bit. Cookie crumbs fell and rolled on his notebook.

Lanya, sitting on the wall and swinging her tennis shoes against the stone, munched a crisp cone filled with butter-cream.

"Now," Mr Newboy said. "Have you brought some poems?"

"Oh." Kidd brushed crumbs away. "Yeah. But they're handwritten. I don't have any typewriter. I print them out neat, after I work on them."

"I can probably decipher good fair copy."

Kidd looked at the notebook, at Lanya, at Mr Newboy, at the notebook. "Here."

Mr Newboy settled back in his seat and turned through pages. "Ah. I see your poems are all on the left."

Kidd held his cup up. The coffee steamed his lips.

"So…" Mr Newboy smiled into the book, and paused. "You have received that holy and spectacular wound which bleeds… well, poetry." He turned another page, paused to look at it not quite long enough (in Kidd's estimate) to read it. "But have you hunkered down close to it, sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your own humanity with that of the race?"

"Sir…?"

"Whether love or rage," Mr Newboy went on, not looking up, "or detachment impels the sighting, no matter. If you don't do it, all your blood is spilled pointlessly… Ah, I suppose I am merely trying to reinvest with meaning what is inadequately referred to in art as Universality. It is an inadequate reference, you know." He shook his head and turned another page. "There's no reason why all art should appeal to all people. But every editor and entrepreneur, deep in his heart of hearts is sure it does, wants it to, wishes it would. In the bar, you asked about publication?" He looked up, brightly.

"That's right," Kidd said with reserve and curiosity. He wished Newboy would go on, silently, to the poems.

"Publishers, editors, gallery owners, orchestra managers! What incredible parameters for the creative world. But it is a purgatorially instructive one to walk around in with such a wound as ours. Still, I don't believe anybody ever enters it without having been given the magic Shield by someone." Newboy's eyes fell again, rose again, and caught Kidd's. "Would you like it?"

"Huh? Yeah. What?"

"On one side," intoned Newboy with twinkling gravity, "is inscribed: 'Be true to yourself that you may be true to your work.' On the other: 'Be true to your work that you may be true to yourself'." Once more Newboy's eyes dropped to the page; his voice continued, preoccupied: "It is a little frightening to peer around the edge of your own and see so many others discarded and glittering about in that spiky landscape. Not to mention all those naked people doing all those strange things on the tops of their various hills, or down in their several dells, some of them — Lord, how many? — beyond doubt out of their minds! At the same time—" he turned another page—"nothing is quite as humbling, after a very little while, as realizing how close one has already come to dropping it a dozen times oneself, having been distracted — heavens, no! — not by wealth — or fame, but by those endless structures of logic and necessity that go so tediously on before they reach the inevitable flaw that causes their joints to shatter and allow you passage. One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora. At any rate, they make every object from axletrees to zarfs and finjons cast the most astonishing shadows." Mr Newboy glanced up again. "Perhaps you've followed some dozen such lights to their source?" He held the page between his fingers. "Admit it — since we are talking as equals — most of the time there simply wasn't anything there. Though to your journal—" he let the page fall back to what he'd been perusing before—"or in a letter to a friend you feel will take care to preserve it, you will also admit the whole experience was rather marvelous and filled you with inadmissible longings that you would be more than a little curious to see settle down and, after all, admits. Sometimes you simply found a plaque which read, 'Here Mozart met da Ponti,' or 'Rodin slept here.' Three or four times you discovered a strange group heatedly discussing something that happened on that very spot a very long time by, which, they assure you, you would have thoroughly enjoyed had you not arrived too late. If you can bear them, if you can listen, if you can learn why they are still there, you will have gained something quite valuable. 'For God's sakes, put down that thing in your hand and stay a while!' It's a terribly tempting invitation. So polite themselves, they are the only people who seem willing to make allowances for your natural barbarousness. And once or twice, if you were lucky, you found a quiet, elderly man who, when you mumbled something about dinner for him and his slightly dubious friend, astounded you by saying, 'Thank you very much; we'd be delighted.' Or an old woman watching the baseball game on her television, who, when you brought her flowers on her birthday, smiled through the chain on the door and explained, 'That's very sweet of you boys, but I just don't see anyone now, any more, ever.' Oh, that thing in your hand. You do still have it, don't you?"

"Sir, maybe if—?"

Newboy moved his hand, looked back down. "It starts out mirrored on both sides: initially reassuring, but ultimately distracting. It rather gets in the way. But as you go on, the silvering starts to wear. Now you can see more, and more, directly through. Really—" Newboy glanced up quickly, then returned his eyes to the page— "it's a lens. The transition period is almost always embarrassing, however. While you are still being dazzled with bits of your own reflection, you have begun to suspect that it might, after all, be one-way glass — with a better view afforded from out there! Still, once used to it, you find the view more interesting. With only a little practice, you get so you can read both legends at once, without having to stop what you're doing to turn the thing around. Oh, and how many, many times you came close to clashing into someone you thought buck-naked only to find his Shield had grown transparent as your own. You become chary of judging too quickly who still has, and who has discarded, his. And when some youngster, glitteringly protected, through malice or, worse, some incomprehensible vision of kindness, shouts up at the dreadfully stark crag on which you happen to be panting, or down into the fetid ravine from which you are manfully trying to clamber with only one arm free, 'You're naked, don't you understand?' you may, momentarily, squint to make sure the double legend is still etched before you, but you are not liable to waste much energy setting him straight unless your own vision of kindness is as incomprehensible as his. There are more important things to do. As best you can, you go about doing them. But things still interrupt: now your eyes are deviled by a recurrent, polychrome flash. You try to ignore it. But its frequency increases. From habit, you check the cut runes to make sure. But, frankly, during the moments of illumination, it is practically impossible for you to read them, much less decide whether they still contain sense. The thing you have been baring, not to mention staring through all this time, has become an immense prism." Newboy leaned back now, his eyes somewhere on the underside of the balcony. "Did I say the first transition was embarrassing? This one is monstrous. And it is the same fear: one-way glass! If only you didn't remember all those other, endless, elderly ladies with their water-color sets, the old men with their privately printed poems, whom one had, out of politeness, brought flowers for or invited out to dinner, as well, even though their heads were wrapped in tin foil and they babbled ceaselessly about Poetry and Truth. After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. You even could discern two or three of the proper letters among the foil folds, admittedly cut from cardboard and taped there with sticking plaster. Are all these humbling fireworks some sort of cruel second childhood, a defect in the eye: You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own — never deny that for an instant — it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn't. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned — was it before you began? — the terrifying fact that had you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heal: indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been — and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs — and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority — that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all."

Newboy fixed his eyes on Kidd's. Kidd smiled and felt uncomfortable. Then he felt belligerent, which maybe tainted the smile. He was going to say, Do you always rap like this when somebody…

The notebook suddenly slipped from Newboy's knees. The poet bent, but Kidd snatched it up first.

Its back cover had fallen open. Kidd frowned at the final block of handwriting that ran off the page bottom:

"Do you…" Kidd's hand fell on the page. He looked up slowly.

The chain snaked around his wrist up his arm. It crossed his belly, his chest, between the vest flaps. "Do you think that's what they mean?"

"Pardon me?"

Kidd hooked his thumb beneath the chain and pulled it. "These. Do you think that's what they're supposed to mean?"

Mr Newboy laughed. "I haven't the faintest idea! You have them. I don't. I've seen people with them, here, but no. No. I was just using them. Oh, no! I would never presume to say what they meant."

Kidd looked down again. "Do you always go on like that to people who bring you poems?" he asked, with nowhere near the belligerence he had intended: He grinned.

Newboy was still laughing. "Go on." Newboy waved his hand. "You read some of them to me now." He sat forward, took another sip, then put his cup down. "No, really, I want to hear some of them out loud."

"All right," Kidd said, expecting to feel resentment, but experiencing a different anxiety altogether. He noted, with concern, once more, the number of pages left with free sides.

"Read the one about the dog-thing. I liked that one."

"Murielle?"

Newboy nodded, hands together in his lap.

Kidd turned toward the front of the book.

He began to read.

Breathlessness left about the third line. Somewhere, something like enjoyment bloomed under his tongue and, rather than tripping it, somehow made it more sensitive, so that, without pause he realized how the vowels in both loom and flow took off from the same point but went different places. He found his face hollowing for the more resonant tones. He let them move the muscles about his mouth till staccato t's and k's riddled the final line and made him smile.

"Lovely," Newboy said. "In a rather horrifying way. Read the one in front of it."

He read, and lost himself in the movements of his mouth, till a momentary convocation in the ear stunned him into a shriller voice. Then the long sounds quieted the answer.

"There are two voices in dialogue in that one, aren't there," Newboy commented at the finish. "I didn't pick it up just glancing at it."

"Huh? Oh, yeah. Maybe I should set them apart on the page—"

"No, no!" Mr Newboy sat up and motioned. "No, believe me, it isn't necessary. It would be perfectly clear in a page of print. It was my attention reading, believe me. Just go on."

He read.

What had come to him as images (among which he had pecked with tongue tip and pen point) returned, shocked, luminous — sometimes more, sometimes less luminous than memory, but so rich he thrust them out with his tongue to keep from trying to eat them.

"It's so much fun," Newboy said, "that you enjoy your own poems so much. Have you ever noticed how free verse tends to turn into iambic pentameter all by itself? Especially by people who haven't written much poetry."

"Sir?"

"Well, it's only nautral. It's the natural rhythm of English speech. You know, when the line goes ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da? Oh, now don't sit there and look confused. Read some more. I'm not going to get pedantic again. I am enjoying this. Really."

Kidd was happily embarrassed. His eyes dropped to the page. Kidd read; turned; read… Several times he thought he must be going on awfully long. But Newboy motioned for another, and once asked to hear both versions ("I saw that you had two when I was looking through…" and, after the earlier version: "Well, most of your revisions are in the right direction.") and had him reread several more. More confident, Kidd chose others now, went back to one he had left out, then skipped ahead, gathering some enjoyment that was not pride, was greatest when he was least aware of the man eating cookies before him, was a supportive pattern in the caverns under the tongue.

He stopped to glance at Newboy—

The poet was frowning at something not him.

Lanya said (in a voice that made Kidd turn, frowning) ten feet down the terrace: "I… I didn't mean to interrupt." It was blue, it was shredded, it was silk.

"What's that?"

"My… dress." She came forward carrying it over her arm. "I looked upstairs in the Observatory Wing… for my dress, while you were reading. Christ, it's a mess up there!"

Mr Newboy frowned. "I didn't even know anybody was staying there."

"It doesn't look like anybody is," she said, "now."

"Is that on the third floor?"

Lanya nodded.

"Roger said something about not using that section — the doors were closed, weren't they? I thought it was something about plumbing repairs."

"They were closed but they weren't locked." Lanya said. "I just went right in. They were using it when I was here — I was just looking for the room Phil and I stayed in. But… the carpets have been pulled up off the floor; and torn. It looks like somebody yanked the light fixtures out of the ceiling, with about a foot of plaster each. In the bathroom off our bedroom, the sink's just sitting in the middle of the floor, and all that lovely blue Victorian tilework has been smashed. There're two holes in the wall that look like they've been put there with a battering ram — and somebody's slashed all the mattresses!" She looked down at the shredded material. "And my dress. It was balled up in a corner of the closet… the clothes bars were all pulled down and the clothes hook had been hammered back and bent or something." She held the dress up. "Somebody had to do this — it looks like somebody's been at it with a razor! But what in the world for?"

"Oh, dear!" Mr Newboy said. "Why, that's perfectly—"

"I mean it doesn't matter," Lanya said. "About the dress. When I left it, I didn't think I was coming back for it. But why in the world—?" She looked at Kidd, at Newboy. Suddenly she said, "Oh, hey — I didn't mean to interrupt!" She pulled the dress together into a ball, leaned back against the balustrade. "Please, go on. Don't stop reading, Kidd—"

Kidd said, "Let's go up and take a look at—"

"No," Lanya said, surprisingly loud.

Newboy blinked.

"No, I really don't want to go back up there."

"But…?" Kidd frowned.

"Roger did ask us all not to go in that wing," Newboy said, uncomfortably. "But I had no idea it was—"

"I closed the doors." Lanya looked at the blue silk in her fist. "I should have left this up there."

"Maybe some wild party got out of hand?" Kidd asked.

Lanya said: "It didn't look like any party to me."

Newboy, Kidd suddenly saw (and realized at the same time that Lanya saw it too) was upset. Lanya's response was: "Is the coffee hot? I think I'd like a cup."

"Certainly." Newboy stood, went to the urn.

"Go on, Kidd," Lanya said. "Read another poem," as Newboy brought her the cup.

"Yes." The elderly poet, collecting himself, returned to his chair. "Let's hear another one."

"All right." Kidd paged through: they were all in some conspiracy to obliterate, if not Lanya's news itself, at least its unsettling effect. And he's got to live here, Kidd thought. There were only three more poems.

After the second, Lanya said: "That one's one of my favorites." Her hand moved over torn blue, folded over the wall.

And he read the third. "So now," Kidd said, primarily to keep something going, "you've got to give me some idea of what you think of them, whether they're good or bad," a thought which hadn't occurred to him once since he'd come; only previous mental rehearsal brought it out now.

"I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you read them," Newboy said. "But for anything else, you simply have to say to yourself, with Mann: I cannot know, and you cannot tell me."

Kidd smiled, reached for three more cookies on the tea-wagon, tried to think of something else.

Newboy said: "Why don't we take a stroll around the grounds? If it were a bright sunny day, it would be quite spectacular I'm sure. But it's still nice, in an autumnal sort of way."

Lanya, who was looking into her cup, suddenly raised her eyes. "Yes, that's an idea. I'd like that."

And that, Kidd realized, was Newboy's kindness to Lanya. Somehow after her initial confidence, a moodiness had surfaced, but she had jumped to dispel it with movement and converse.

She put down her saucer, got down from the balustrade.

Kidd started to ask her: "Are you gonna take your…?"

But obviously she wasn't.

What, he wondered as they walked along the terrace and turned down the low steps, would be the emotional detritus from the violence upstairs in himself? But, as he wondered, Lanya, at the bottom step, took hold of his little finger in a hot, moist grip.

They walked across grass till rock rose from under it.

They climbed stone steps. They crossed a bridge with wrought railings.

A waterfall rushed beside them, stilled beneath them.

"This is April," Mr Newboy informed them from the plaque in the bridge's center.

They crossed it.

The corner bit Kidd's heel.

"You must know these quite well," Newboy said to Lanya.

"Not really. But I like them." She nodded.

"I've always meant to ask Roger why he has September and July in each other's place."

"Are they?" Lanya asked. "I must have walked around here fifty times and never noticed!"

They left the bridge to stroll under huge-leafed catalpas, past bird baths, past a large bronze sundial, tarnished brown and blank of shadow.

Stone benches were set out before the hedges in August.

Beyond the trees he could see the lawns of September. They passed through high stone newels where a wrought iron gate was loose from the bottom hinge, and, finally, once more, they were on the gravel driveway curving through great, squat evergreens.

Mr Newboy walked them to the front gate. By the green guard-shack, they exchanged Good-bye's, So-long's, I really enjoyed myself's, You must come again, and more good-bye's, during which, Kidd felt, as the gate-latch clanked behind them, each person had spoken one time too many.

He turned on the sidewalk to take Lanya's hand, sure she would bring up the shattered Observatory Wing the moment silence settled.

They walked.

She didn't.

After a dozen steps she said, "You want to write, don't you?" which, he realized, was what this compulsion to articulation was.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess I'll stop off at the bar, maybe do something there."

"Good," she said. "I'm going back to the park, first. But I'll come by Teddy's later."

"Okay."

She ambled beside him, shoulder brushing his, sometimes looking at the houses beside them, sometimes at the pavement before them, sometimes glancing up at the willow-lapped wall.

He said: "You want to go off and play your harmonica, don't you?" knowing it by the same pattern of silent cues she had known his desire. He put his arm around her shoulder; their walks fell into sync.

"Yes."

He thought his own thoughts, occasionally glancing to wonder what hers were.

Silent on the circuit of the year, speech is in excess of what I want to say, or believe. On the dismal air I sketch my own restraint, waking, reflexively, instant to instant. The sensed center, the moment of definition, the point under such pressure it extrudes a future and a past I apprehend only as a chill, extends the overlay of injury with some retentive, tenuous disease, the refuse of brick-and mortar-grinding violence. How much more easily all machination were such polarized perception to produce so gross an ideal.

Speech, the notebook's owner had written across from the page where Kidd wrote now, is always in excess of poetry as print…

"Hello."

He looked up from the counter (in the cage the silver dancer bowed to thin applause and flicked through the black curtain), then down as the dog gave a short bark.

"Muriel—!"

"Hello, Madame Brown. I haven't seen you in a while."

"Odd: I haven't seen you either." She laughed, high to low. "God, this place is dead tonight. May I sit down? You can pretend to buy an old woman a drink."

"Sure—"

"But I'm interrupting your work."

He shrugged. "I'm sort of at a stopping point."

As Madame Brown sat, the bartender brought her usual and replaced Kidd's beer. "What are you writing. Another poem?"

"A long one. It's in the natural rhythm of English speech."

She raised her eyebrow, and reflexively he closed the book; then wished he hadn't. "How are Mr and Mrs Richards, and June?"

"Oh." She flattened her knuckles to the wood. "Like always."

"They like their new place?"

She nodded. "I was over there for dinner night before last. But this evening they're having other guests, apparently. It was quite amusing to watch Mary try and make sure I didn't just accidentally drop around tonight." She didn't laugh. "Oh, yes, they're quite settled in now." She sat back. "I wish there were some more people. The city soaks them up; or maybe people are just… leaving?"

Kidd put the orchid on the cover of his book where it balanced on the three longest prongs.

"I guess you have to carry that around, don't you." Madame Brown laughed. "Perhaps I ought to get one. Perhaps I've just been very lucky in this dangerous city?"

From opposite sides he moved his hands together till his blunt fingertips bumped in the cage, and the blade points tugged back the skin between, burning now, about to cut. "I've got to go back to see them." He separated his fingers a little. "About my money."

"You haven't been paid?"

"Five dollars, the first day." He looked at her. "That morning I met you in the park, you said they'd told you they'd pay five an hour."

She nodded and said something softly. He thought he heard "…poor kid," but could not tell if "poor" were preceded by "you" or followed by comma and capital.

"How did they tell you?"

She looked at him questioningly.

"What did they say to you, exactly?"

She turned her frown to her glass. "They told me that if I found a young man who might help them with their moving, I should tell him they would pay him five dollars an hour."

"Mr Richards?"

"That's right."

"It's one of the reasons I took the job. Though, Lord knows, you don't need it here. But I guess they knew what they were doing, then?"

"You should have spoken to him. He'd have given you something."

"I want him to give me what he said he was going to — shit, I couldn't ask him that last day."

"Yes, it would have been a little odd."

"I'm going to have to go back and talk to him, I guess." He opened his notebook. "I think I'm going to write some more now, ma'am."

"I wish there were more people here." She pushed back from the bar.

"Well, it's early."

But she wasn't listening.

He went through the pages till he found: …as print is in excess of words. I want to write; but can fix with words only the desire itself. I suppose I should take some small comfort in the fact that, for the few writers I have actually known, publication, in direct proportion to the talent of each, seems to have been an occurrence always connected with catastrophe. Then again, perhaps they were simply a strange group of…

"Ba-da," he whispered and turned over the notebook to the blank page, "ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da."

The letter was still in the mailbox.

Among the bent and broken doors, red, white, and blue edging crossed this one, intact grille. He thought he could see the inking of a return address. I can pretend, he thought, it says Edward Richards, from a hotel in Seattle, Washington, off Freemont Avenue, on Third. He could make some things appear like that, when it was this dim… He turned and went to the elevator.

Someone, at least, had mopped the lobby.

He pressed the button.

Wind hissed from the empty shaft. He stepped into the other.

He'd come out in the pitch-dark hall before — as the door went k-chunk—he realized habit had made him push seventeen, not nineteen. He scowled in the dark and walked forward. His shoulder brushed a wall. He put out his hand and felt a door. He walked forward till he felt another.

Then he stopped — because of the smell. He scowled harder.

By the time he reached the next door (three, four doors on that side of the hall?) the odor was nauseous and sharp. "Jesus…" he whispered; his breath echoed.

He made himself go on.

The next door, which had to be the Richards' old apartment, swung in under his hand. The stench made him reel and lose kinesthetic focus. He hurried back, twice banging walls, one with his left shoulder, one with his right.

He was wondering how long it would take him to feel for the elevator bell…

K-chunk… k-chunk… k-chunk. One of the doors had caught on something. Between k-chunks, reminiscent of his own breath, came wind.

He paused, disoriented in the putrid dark. The left elevator door? The right? Then fear, like the lightest fore-finger, tickled his shoulder. He nearly bent double, and staggered against the wall; which was not a wall, because it gave.

Inside the exit door, he caught the bannister, and stumbled down.

Faint light greyed the glass a flight below. Gulping fresh breath, he came out in the hall of sixteen. One bulb burned at the far end.

His next gulp checked explosive giggles. Kidd shook his head. Well, what the fuck were they supposed to do with it? He started down the hall, grinning and disgusted. Still, then why did I go to all that to drag it up?

When he knocked, on the door, rattlings suggested it was opened. When he pushed it in, a girl caught her breath. "Hey, who's home?" he asked.

"Who… who is it?" She sounded afraid and exhausted. The window let in dark blue over the iron bunks, piles of clothing, an overturned stool.

"It's the Kid." He was still grinning.

"They're all gone," she said, from the muddle of blankets. "There's just me. Please… they're all gone."

"I'm not going to do anything." He stepped in.

She pushed herself up on her elbow, brushed hair back from her face and blinked bruised eyes.

"You're… the one who was sick?"

"I'm better," she whined. "Really, I'm better. Just leave me alone."

"Thirteen, and the others? How long have they been gone?"

She let herself fall, sighing.

"Are they coming back?"

"No. Look, just—"

"Do you have food and things?"

"Please… yes, I'm all right. They split a couple of days ago. What do you want?"

Because he had once feared her, he stepped closer. "Don't you have any light?"

"Lights, huh?" Plurality and inflection baffled him. "Look, I'll be all right, just go away. Lights? Over there…" She gestured toward the mannequin.

He went to see what she pointed at. "Has Faust been coming to check you out? He was all worried about you last time I was here." Bald plaster breasts were snaked with chain.

"Yeah, he comes. Look around the neck." That was further instruction. "Some guy left them. He ain't gonna come back." She coughed. "They don't got no battery."

He lifted the heavy links from the jointed neck. The smile was paint streaked and chipped under one eye. "Lights? Light shield?" The thing linked to the bottom clicked on the plaster chin, nose, forehead.

"All right. Now just go, will you?"

"It doesn't have a battery?"

She only sighed, rustled her covers.

"All right, if you say you're okay, I'll go." Something in him… thrilled? That's what he'd heard people say. The fear was low, the physical reaction runneled and grave. He dared the mirror:

Her bunk was filled with shadow and crumpled blankets.

"All right," he repeated. "Good-bye. Tell Thirteen or Denny if they come back—"

She sighed; she rustled. "They're not coming back."

So he shut the door behind him. Ominous: but what would he have had her tell? He put the chain around his neck. A blade snagged the links. He pulled his bladed hand away.

Light shield?

The thing linked to the bottom was spherical, the diameter of a silver dollar, black, and set with lenses. The heavy links crossed the brass chain and glass bits. He ran his thumb around the back of his vest, shrugged the lapels closed, and walked up the hall.

The elevator opened.

Rising in the dark, "19" suspended orange at eye level, he thought about batteries and rubbed his naked stomach.

At the Richards' new apartment door he heard voices. A woman, neither Mrs Richards nor June, laughed.

He rang.

Carpet-muffled heels approached.

"Yes?" Mrs Richards asked. "Who is it?" The peek-hole clicked. "It's Kidd!"

The chain rattled, the door swung back.

"Why, come in! Bill, Ronnie, Lynn; this is the young man we were telling you about!" Air from the opened balcony doors beat the candle flames: light flapped through the foyer. "Come in, come in. Kidd, some friends of Arthur's… from work. Arthur? They came over for dinner. Would you like some coffee with us? And dessert?"

"Look, if you're busy, just let me talk to Mr Richards a minute?"

"Kidd?" Mr Richards called from the dining room, "come on in, will you?"

Kidd sought for an expression, but finding nothing adequate for his impatience, came, patiently, inside; he settled on a frown.

Mrs Richards' smile was perfect.

Kidd went into the dining room.

The woman sitting next to Mr Richards was doing something with her earring. "You write poems, Mary told us. Are you going to read us some?"

"Huh? Oh. No, I didn't bring any."

The man across from her took his leather-patched elbows from the tablecloth. "That's a rather dangerous looking thing you did bring."

"Oh." Kidd looked at the orchid. "Well, it's almost dark out." He snapped the band open, shucked the finger harness, while the people up and down the table chuckled.

From where he stood, the flame at the white wax taper tip covered June's left eye. She smiled.

"Here," Mrs Richards said behind him. "Here's a chair. Move down a little bit, Sam. Pour him a cup of coffee, Arthur."

"What do you think I'm doing, honey," Mr Richards said with total affability.

A large woman in brown corduroy began to talk again with the man on her left. The cup passed from hand to hand to hand.

The woman in the green dress smiled, but couldn't keep her eyes (pale grey) from flicking at the steel cage he had set on the corner of the tablecloth. She put the cup beside it. Mrs Richards held the back of her chair, about to sit. "Really, just like I was telling you, Kidd absolutely saved our lives. He was such a help. We were beginning to think of him as part of the family."

At the other end of the table, a large man rubbed lone finger against his nose and said, "Mary, you've been about to bring in that dessert for fifteen minutes now, and I'm on my second cup of coffee."

Mrs Richards laughed. "I have been talking on. Here, I'll bring it in right now."

"June," Mr Richards said from his end of the table, "go help your mother."

June, her small fists whispering in white taffeta, rounded the table for the kitchen.

The man beside the woman in green leaned around her and said, "Mary's just been going on all about you and your poems. You just live downtown, near the park?"

"Yeah," he said. "Where do you live?"

"Ah-ha." Still leaning forward he fingered the collar of his sports shirt. "Now, that's a very good question." His nails were not clean and the side of the collar was frayed. "That's a very good question indeed." He sat back, still laughing.

Still plucking at her earring, the woman at Mr Richards' right said, "You don't look like a poet. You look more like one of those people they're always writing about in the Times."

"Scorpions?" said the very blond man (tweed and leather elbow patches) over his clasped hands. "His hair isn't long enough."

"His hair is long," insisted the earring plucker.

"Long enough," explained the blond man and turned to look for a napkin fallen by June's vacated chair.

Kidd grinned at the woman. "Where do you live?"

She stopped plucking, looked surprised. "Ralph and I used to be out on Temple. But now we've been staying—" and stopped because somebody said something on her other side, or may have even elbowed her.

"You like it better there?" Kidd asked, vaguely curious as to where Temple was.

"If you can like anything in Bellona, right now!"

Mrs Richards entered with a large glass bowl.

"What is that?" the man on Madame Brown's left asked, "jello?"

"No, it isn't jello!" Mrs Richards set the bowl before Mr Richards. "It's wine jelly." She frowned at the purple sea. "Port. The recipe didn't mention any sugar. But I think that was probably a mistake, so I put some in, anyway."

Beside Mrs Richards, June held a bowl heaped with whipped cream, glossy as the taffeta. Wrapped around one wrist, glittering in the candlelight… No, Kidd thought, she wouldn't have taken them off the… But the idea made him grin.

"Do you want to serve that, Arthur?"

At his corner Kidd contemplated being belligerently nice to the woman with the earring. But she was too far away. He turned to the woman beside him in green. "You work with Mr Richards?"

"My husband used to," she said and passed him a white-capped dessert dish.

He ate a spoonful: maple.

"I," he said and swallowed, "have to talk to Mr Richards about some money. You like it here?"

"Oh, it's a very nice apartment. You moved all the furniture for them, they told us."

He smiled, nodded, and decided he just couldn't take grape jello with maple flavored whipped cream.

The man beside the woman leaned around again: "I didn't really work with Arthur. I used to work for Bill over there who used to do statting for MSE — where Arthur works. So Lynn and me, we just came along."

"Oh," Lynn said deprecatingly while Kidd drank coffee, "we just have to extend ourselves, you know, While all this is going on."

"That's what I'm doing; that's what I'm doing, A bunch of us have gotten together, you see. We're living together in… well, we're living together. I mean we were just about to get chased out of our house. By son guys with those things, you know?" The man pointed the orchid. "But today, I'd wear one if I had it."

"No, you wouldn't!" Lynn insisted. "You wouldn't"

"It's pretty rough," Kidd said.

"The way we got together," Lynn went on to explain, "it's much better for the children. You see?"

"Yeah, sure!" He'd heard her suddenly helpless tone and he responded to it.

"What's there around here to write poems about?" That was her husband again. "I mean, nothing ever happens. You sit around, scared to go outside. Or when you do, it's like walking into a damn swamp."

"That's the whole thing," Lynn acknowledged. "Really. In Bellona, I mean, now. There's nothing to do."

From her father's side, June said: "Kidd writes lovely poems." Under the candles, shadows doffed in the cream.

"Oh, yes," Mrs Richards affirmed, setting down dishes of jelly before the large woman in corduroy and the blond man in tweeds. "Kidd, you will read something to us, won't you?"

"Yes," Mr Richards said. "I think Kidd should read a poem."

Kidd sucked his teeth with annoyance. "I don't have any. Not with me."

Mrs Richards beamed: "I have one. Just a moment." She turned and hurried out.

Kidd's annoyance grew. He took another spoonful of jello; which he hadn't wanted. So drank the rest of his coffee. He hadn't wanted that either.

"Here we are!" Mrs Richards cried, returning; she slipped the blue-edged paper before him.

"Oh," Kidd said. "I forgot you had this one."

"Go on, read it."

"Better be good," said blond and tweedy, affably enough. "Otherwise Ronnie will run the other way every time she sees you on the street because she thinks you're a—"

"I don't go out on the streets," Ronnie said. "I want to hear what kind of poems you write. Go on."

A man who wasn't Mr Richards said, "I don't know very much about poetry."

"Stand up, Kidd," Mr Richards said, waving a creamy spoon. "So we can hear you."

Kidd stood and said as dumbly as possible, "Mr Richards, I just came to see you about getting my money for the work I did," and waited for reaction.

Mr Richards moved his shoulders back and smiled.

Somewhere — outside in the hall? — a door closed.

Mrs Richards, holding the edge of the table and smiling, nodded: "Go on, Kidd."

Ronnie said to Mrs Richards: "He wants his money: He's a pretty practical poet." Though she spoke softly, everyone laughed.

He looked down at Mrs Richards' copy of his poem, and drew his tongue back from his teeth for the first word.

In the hall, a man screamed, without words or inflection; footsteps, some dull thuds — the scream changed pitch at each of them.

Kidd started reading. He paused at the third line, wanting very much to laugh, but didn't look up.

Footsteps: running voices arguing — a lot of them.

Kidd kept reading till he reached Mrs Richards' omitted comma.

Lynn, beside him, let out a little cry. From the corner of his eye, he saw her husband take her arm. Somebody banged on the wall outside with what sounded like a crowbar. And the screaming cracked to a hysterical, Mexican accent: "Oh, come on, please, come on lemme 'lone. Don't fool 'round like that — No! C'mon, c'mon — No. Don' please—"

Kidd read the last lines of his poem and looked up.

The crashes had moved from the wall to the door, and fell with timed, deliberate thuds. Within the crash, as though it were an envelope of sound, he could hear the chain rattle, the hinges jiggle, the lock click.

As he looked around the table, the thought passed with oblique idleness: They look like I probably do when somebody's eyes go red.

Outside, above the shouting, somebody laughed.

Kidd's own fear, dogged and luminous and familiar enough to be almost unconscious, was fixed somewhere in the hall. Yet he didn't want to laugh. He still wanted to giggle.

Out there, someone began to run. Others ran after.

A muscle on the back of Kidd's thigh tensed to the crashing. He smiled, vaguely, confused. The back of his neck was tickly.

Someone's chair squeaked.

"Oh, for God's sake, why don't they—" and, where rhythm predicted the next crash, only her word fell: " — stop!"

Footsteps lightened, tumbled off down steps, retreated behind banged doors.

Kidd sat down, looked at the guests, some of whom I looked at him, some who looked at each other; the woman in corduroy was looking at her lap; Mrs Richards was breathing hard. He wondered if anyone liked his poem.

"They do that around here too, huh?" Sam forced, jocularly.

Then a woman Kidd could not really see at the table's end spilled coffee.

"Oh, I'll get a rag!" Mrs Richards screamed, and fled the room.

Three people tried to say nothing in particular at once.

But when Mrs Richards returned with a black and white, op-art dishtowel, one voice detached itself, a hesitant baritone: "For God's sakes, can't we do something about that? I mean, we've got to do something!"

Of several feelings, the only sharp one Kidd felt was annoyance. "Mr Richards?" he said, still standing, "Mr Richards? Can I talk to you now?"

Mr Richards raised his eyebrows, then pushed back his chair. June, beside him, surprisingly concerned, touched her father's arm… restrainingly? protectively? Mr Richards brushed her hand away and came down the table.

Kidd picked up his orchid and went out into the hall.

The woman in corduroy was saying, "When you can think of something to do, will you please let me know what it is. You'll have my cooperation one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent, believe me."

At the door Kidd turned. "We should get this five dollars an hour business settled now, don't you think, Mr Richards, because it'll just—"

Mr Richards' slight, taut smile broke. "What are you trying to do, huh?" he demanded in a whisper. "What are you trying to do? I mean five dollars an hour, you must be crazy!"

Mrs Richards, still holding the dishtowel, drifted up behind her husband's shoulder, blinking, in perfect imitation of Smokey with Thirteen.

"I mean just what are you trying to do?" Mr Richards went on. "We don't have any money to give you, and you better understand that."

"Huh?" because it seemed absurd.

"Five dollars an hour?" Mr Richards repeated. "You must be crazy!" His voice was insistent, tense and low. "What does somebody like you need that kind of money for, anyway? It doesn't cost anything to live in this city— no food bills, no rent. Money doesn't mean anything here any more. What are you trying to do…? I've got a wife. I've got a family. MSE hasn't had a payroll for months. There hasn't even been anyone in the damn office! I've got to hold on to what I have. I can't spend that kind of money now, with everything like this. I can't—"

"Well, isn't that what you told—?" He was angry. "Oh shit. Look, then why don't you…" Then he reached around to his pocket.

Mr Richards' eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.

But Kidd only dug at his pocket. "Then why don't you keep this too?" Mr Richards swayed when the moist, green knot, bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.

Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it—ratch! — at two inches.

Mrs Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.

The astonishment Mr Richards returned him, as Mrs Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the door's clash.

He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.

In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices.

There was no one in the lobby.

Satisfied?

His annoyance, at any rate.

But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. "Ba-da ba-da ba-da?" he asked. "Ba-da ba-da," he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers on the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the beginning of one section: with the delight of resignation, he decided, with the change of a "This" to a "That", on his initial version.

A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector's swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.

Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letter, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). "Are you in there?" Lanya asked.

"Huh?" He looked up at the door's layered scrawl. "Yeah. I'm coming out now." He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.

"He said you were in there." She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. "Come on."

"Huh? Where?"

She smiled. "Come on." She took his hand.

"Hey," he called, passing the bar. "You wanna keep this for me again?"

The bartender leaned over for the notebook. "In the usual place, kid." He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.

She paused at the door to ask, "How did it go with the Richards?"

"I gave him back his fucking five bucks."

Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. "That's too much! Tell me what happened." And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.

"What happened?" she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.

"He didn't want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?" He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid's harness jingled. "You know their kid, the little boy, they just left him…" He shook his head against hers. "Hell, I don't want to talk about that. Where we going?"

"To the park. To the commune."

"Why?"

"I'm hungry, for one thing."

"Just as well I'm not talking."

She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. "This morning," Lanya said, "after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!"

"Smoke's sure thicker."

"Down there," she nodded, "before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn't even gotten dark yet."

"There couldn't be any fires in the park," he announced suddenly. "The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn't it? It would either all burn or it wouldn't."

"I guess so."

"Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront." Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a cannister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. "Maybe you and John and his people could go."

She shrugged under his arm. "No, really, I'd rather not go down there…"

From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.

"You're scared to death!"

Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.

"Why?"

She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, "Come on," quietly, sharply.

His bare foot went from concrete to grass.

The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.

He saw quivering fires.

But they were from the commune's cinderblock furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.

Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.

One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It's the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there's something in this fog and smoke. No…

John walked by the fire's edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak's weapon. Then, at John's wrist — brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John's fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.

Tak grinned and John moved away.

Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya — she had moved from his side — talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.

Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.

Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to them, put together actions and conversation snatches: He searched the screen where perception translated to information, waiting for somebody to dance, to eat, to sing. He wished Lanya had told him why they had come. But he was very tired. So he moved around. Someday I'm going to die, he thought irrelevantly: But blood still beat inside his ear.

He stepped backward from the heat, and backward again. (Where was Lanya?) But was too distraught to turn his head. Everything meant, loudly and insistently, much too much: smoke, untwirling over twigs; the small stone biting his heel; the hot band from the fire across his lowered forehead; the mumblings around him that rose here, fell there.

Milly stood a few feet in front of him, bare legs working to a music he couldn't hear. Then John crashed down, crosslegged in the leaves, beside her, fiddling absently with the blades around his hand.

A while ago, he realized, he had thought once again: Please, I don't want to be sick again, please, but had hardly heard the thought go by, and could only now, disinterestedly, discern the echo.

Something, or one, was, about to emerge into the clearing — he was sure; and was equally sure that, naked and glistening, it would be George! It would be June!

"Isn't this stupid," someone Kidd couldn't see was saying, "when I could be in Hawaii—?"

Tongue tip a pink bud at the corner of his lips, John stared at Milly's shifting calves. He raised his bladed hand (a reflection crossed his chin), and, with a sharp, downward sweep, cut.

Milly gasped, bit off the gasp, but made no other sound. She did not step, she did not even look.

Astounded, Kidd watched blood, in a torrent wide (the thought struck irrelevantly amidst his terror) as a pencil run down her heel.