Dhalgren

"Look, leave me alone…"

"Come on; come—"

"Tak, will you get your fuckin' hands—"

"I'm not after your tired brown body. I just want to get you to the bar where you can sit down."

"Look, please I'm…"

"You're not drunk; you say you're not stoned or anything, then you damn well better sit down and relax!" Tak's beefy hand clamped his shoulder. (Kidd took three more unsteady steps.) "You were staggering around there like you were half in some sort of trance. Now come on with me, sit down, have a drink, and get yourself together. You sure you didn't take anything?"

The ornate orchid at Tak's belt clashed the simple one at Kidd's.

"Hey, look! Just come on and leave me alone… Where's Lanya?"

"She's more likely to find you at Teddy's than wandering around out in the dark. You come on."

In such colloquy they made their hesitant way from park to bar.

Kidd swayed in the doorway, looking at rocking candle flames, while Tak argued with the bartender:

"Hot brandy! Look, just take your coffee-water there, in a glass with a shot of…"

June? Or George?

Paul Fenster looked up from his beer, three people down (Kidd felt something cold but manageable happen in his belly at the recognition), and came over to stand behind Tak; who turned with two steaming glasses.

"Huh…?"

"So. I've found somebody here I know." Fenster was buttoned halfway up the chest in a red, long-sleeve shirt. "I didn't think I was, and it's my first night back."

"Oh." Tak nodded. "Yeah. How you doing? Hey, I gotta bring a friend a drink. Um… Come on." Tak lifted the brandy glasses over some woman's shoulder, stepped around some man. Fenster raised his chin, watching.

Tak came across to Kidd. Fenster came behind.

"Here's your brandy. This is Paul Fenster, my favorite rebel-who-has-managed-to-misplace-his-cause."

"That's what you think." Fenster saluted with his beer bottle.

"Well, he didn't misplace it, actually. It went somewhere else when he wasn't looking. Paul this is the Kid." (Kidd wondered if he were projecting Tak's lack of enthusiasm.) "Come on over and sit down."

"Hello." Kidd nodded toward Fenster, who wasn't looking at him, hadn't heard him, apparently did not recognize him. Well, he didn't feel like talking anyway, so could be amused at Fenster's obliqueness.

"Come on, come on." Tak headed them toward a booth, glanced apprehensively at Kidd again.

Gesturing with his bottle, Fenster continued: "Oh, there's a cause all right! Maybe you've lost ninety-five per cent of your population, but you're still the same city you were before—"

"You weren't, here, before." Tak sat at the outside edge of the seat, so that Fenster had to sit across the table. Then Tak slipped over, making room for Kidd, who noted the whole maneuver and wondered if Fenster had.

Kidd sat. Tak's leg immediately swung against his in warm, if unwanted, reassurance.

"That's not what I mean," Fenster said. "Bellona was… what? Maybe thirty per cent black? Now, even though you've lost so many people, bet it's closer to sixty. From my estimate, at any rate."

"All living in harmony, peace, and brotherly love—"

"Bullshit," Fenster said.

"— with the calm, clear, golden afternoon only occasionally torn by the sobs of some poor white girl dishonored at the hands of a rampaging buck."

"What are you trying to do, show off for the kid there?" Fenster grinned at Kidd. "I met Tak here the first day I got to Bellona. He's a really together guy, you know? He likes to pretend he's short on brains. Then he lets you hang yourself." Fenster still hadn't recognized him.

Kidd nodded over his steaming glass. The fumes stung; he smiled back and felt ill.

"Oh, I'm the God-damn guardian of the gate. I've spoken to more people on their first day in this city than you could shake a stick at." Tak sat back. "Let me clue you. It's the people I take time to speak to again on the third, fourth, and fifth day you should watch."

"Well, you're still kidding yourself if you think you don't have a black problem here."

Tak suddenly sat forward and put his worn, leather elbows on the table. "You're telling me? What I want to know is how you're going to do anything about it sitting up there on Brisbain Avenue?"

"I'm not at Calkins' any more. I've moved back to Jackson. Down home again."

"Have you now? Well, how did your stay work out?"

"Hell — I guess it was nice of him to invite me. I had a good time. He has quite a place up there. We got into a couple of talks. Pretty good, I think. He's an amazing man. But with that constant weekend bash going, thirty-eight days a month it looks like, I don't know how he has time to take a leak, much less write half a newspaper every day, and run what's left of the God-damn town. I outlined a couple of ideas: a switchboard, a day-care center, a house-inspection program. He says he wants to cooperate. I believe him… as much as you can believe anybody, today. Since there's as little control around here as there is, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets more done than you'd expect, you know?"

Tak turned his hands up on the table. "Just remember, nobody voted him up there."

Fenster sat forward too. "I've never been that down on dictators. Long as they didn't dictate me." He laughed and drank more beer.

Brandy sips dropped in hot knots to Kidd's stomach and untied. He moved his leg away from Tak's. "Did you talk to him about that Harrison article?" Kidd asked Fenster.

"George Harrison?"

"Yeah."

"Hell, that's just a whole lot of past noise. There're real problems that have to be dealt with now. Have you ever walked up Jackson Avenue?"

"I've crossed it."

"Well, take a good look around it, talk to the people who live there before you go on to me about any of that George Harrison horseshit."

"Paul here doesn't approve of George." Tak nodded deeply.

"I don't approve or disapprove." Fenster clinked his bottle on the wood. "Sadism simply isn't my bag. And I don't hold with anybody committing rape on anybody. But if you want to associate with him, that's your problem, not mine. I think making all that to-do over it is the worst sort of red-herring."

"If you're back down on Jackson, then you got him for a nextdoor neighbor; so you're more or less stuck with associating with him, huh? I just have to be friendly in the bar." Suddenly Tak slapped the table edge: "You know what the problem is, Paul? George is nicer than you."

"Huh?"

"No, I mean: I know you both, I like you both. But I like George more."

"Hell, man, I seen those posters Reverend Amy's giving out. I know what you guys in here like—"

"No," Tak said. "No, you're missing the point."

"Like hell I am— Hey, you know?" Fenster turned to Kidd. "Have you ever read those articles, the ones in the issue about the riot, and the other issue with the interview?"

"Huh? No, but I heard about them."

"Tak hasn't read them either."

"I've heard enough about them," Tak echoed.

"But here's the point. Everybody's heard about the articles. But since I've been here, I've only talked to one person who actually says he read them."

"Who?" Tak asked.

"George Harrison." Fenster sat back and looked satisfied.

Kidd tilted his brandy. "I met somebody who read them."

"Yeah?" Fenster asked. "Who?"

"The girl he screwed. And her family. Only they didn't recognize her in the pictures." From something that happened on Fenster's face without destroying the smile, Kidd decided maybe Fenster wasn't so bad after all.

"You met her?"

"Yeah." Kidd drank. "You probably will too. Everybody keeps telling me how small the city is. Hey, Tak, thanks for the drink." He started to stand.

Tak said, "You sure you're all right, Kidd?"

"Yeah. I feel better." He nodded at Fenster, then walked, relieved, to the bar.

When Jack said, "Hey, how you doing?" Kidd started. His relief, the shallowest of things, vanished.

"Hello," he said. "Fine. How you been?"

"I been fine." Jack's shirt was wrinkled, his eyes red, his cheeks unshaven. He looked very happy. "I just been fine. How are you? And your girl friend?"

"I'm fine," Kidd repeated, nodding. "She's fine."

Jack laughed. "That's great. Yeah, that's really great. Say, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Frank." Jack stepped back.

"Hello." With a high, bald forehead and neck-length hair, Frank had apparently decided to grow a beard perhaps a week ago: I give them to you crossed, I take them uncrossed… yes, that was who it was. Only he had put on a green shirt with milky snaps instead of buttons; and washed his hands.

"This," Jack explained to Frank, "is the friend of Tak's I was telling you about who writes the poems. Only I can't remember his name."

"Kidd," Kidd said.

"Yeah, they call him the Kid." Jack continued his explanation. "Kid, this is Frank. Frank was in the army, and he writes poems too. I was telling him all about you, before. Wasn't I?"

"Yeah, I've seen you around the park." Frank nodded. "Jack was telling me you were a poet?"

Kidd shrugged. "Yeah. A little."

"We been drinking," Jack continued his explanation, "all afternoon."

"And it's night now." Frank grinned.

"This God-damn city. If you wanna stay drunk, it sure is the place to come. You can buy drinks at the God-damn bars and you don't have to pay no money. Or anything. And anyplace you go, people always got stuff to smoke or to drink. Jesus." He burped. "I gotta go water the garden. Be back in a minute." He stepped away and headed for the john.

Kidd felt a wave of disorientation, but the phrases he'd prepared before broke through: "You been looking out for nature boy?"

"He's sort of looking out for me," Frank said. "We're both army deserters. Him, a little more recently. Only I think Jack's getting homesick."

Kidd swallowed. "For the army?" And felt better.

Frank nodded. "I'm not. I left about six months ago. Happy I'm here. I'm getting a chance to write again, and it's a pretty together place."

"You," and at the reiteration he felt toward Frank sudden, surprising, and total distrust, "write poems?" So he smiled.

Frank smiled back and nodded over his glass: "Well, I've been sort of lucky about getting things published, really. The book was just an accident. One of the west coast little magazines puts out good editions of people who contribute. I was lucky enough to get selected."

"You mean you have a book?"

"No copies in Bellona." Frank nodded. "Like I said, even that was an accident."

"You been writing a long time, then."

"Since I was fifteen or sixteen. I started in high school; and most of what you write back then is crap."

"How old are you now?"

"Twenty-five."

"Then you've been one for a long time. A poet. I mean it's your job, your profession."

Frank laughed. "You can't make a living at it. I taught for a year at San Francisco State, till I went into the army. I like to think of it as a profession, though."

Kidd nodded. "You got a lot of poems in magazines and things?"

"Three in the New Yorker about a year ago. Some people think that's my crowning achievement. Two in Poetry, Chicago, before that. There're a few others. But those are the ones I'm proud of."

"Yeah, I used to read that magazine a lot."

"You did?"

"It's the one that used to have the little curlicue horse a long time ago? Now it just has funny pictures on it. I read it every month in the library, at school. For years."

Frank laughed. "Then you're doing better than am."

"I've seen the New Yorker," Kidd said. "But I neve read it."

Frank's expression changed slightly and noncomittally.

"And I've never published any poems at all," Kidd said. "Anyplace. I've only been a poet a little while, couple of weeks. Since I came here. You probably know lot more about it than I do."

"About getting things published?"

"That too. I mean about writing them, though. It's hard."

"Yes, I guess it can be."

"It's about the God-damned hardest thing I've eve done."

Frank laughed and rubbed his young beard. "Sometimes. You've… only been writing — poems, for a few weeks? What made you start?"

"I don't know. What made you?"

"I suppose," and Frank nodded again, "I had to."

"Do you—" Kidd paused a moment, considering the theft—"do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce work?"

"About as much as anyplace else, I guess. Maybe little less, because you have to spend so much time scuffling, you know? I was working on a few short things. But I lost my notebook a few weeks back."

"Huh?"

Frank nodded. "Since then I haven't written anyhing. I haven't had time."

"Hey, you lost your notebook!" Discomfort broached fear. "Christ, that must be…" Then his feelings centered. Kidd leaned over the bar. "Hey, can I get the notebook! Huh? Come on! You want to give me the notebook, please!"

"All right," the bartender said. "All right, I'll get it. Simmer down. You guys ready for another—"

"The notebook!" Kidd knocked the counter with his fist.

"All right!" Sucking his teeth, the bartender pulled it from the cage and flopped it on the bar. "Now do you want another drink?"

"Oh. Yeah," Kidd said. "Sure."

Besides blood, urine, mulch, and burn marks, there were rings from the bottles he had set haphazardly on the cover. He opened it in the middle. "… This isn't yours, is it?"

Frank frowned. "You found this?"

"Yeah. It was in the park."

Kidd looked over Frank's shoulder and read the listed names, till Frank turned the page.

"Hey, what you doin'?" Jack said behind them. "You showing Frank here your poetry writing?"

Kidd turned around. "Just this notebook I found, filled up with somebody's writing."

"Frank's pretty smart." Jack nodded. "He knows about all sorts of shit. He taught history. In a college. And he cut out on the army too."

"Lots of us have," Frank said, not looking up. "The ones with any sense go to Canada. The rest of us end up here." He turned a page.

"You been having a good time?" Jack put his hand on Kidd's shoulder. "This is the place to have a good time, you know?"

"Fine time," Kidd said. "But I haven't seen you around. Where you been staying?"

"Stayed on a few days with Tak." Jack's hand rose and fell. "He kicked me out after a week when I wouldn't let him suck on my peter no more."

Across the bar Loufer, his cap low on his ears, still talked earnestly with Fenster.

Jack's hand fell again. "They got girls in this city! Frank knows this whole house. Full of girls. Real nice girls. We was over there, and…" His grin widened toward ecstasy. "They like Frank a lot." He screwed up his face. "I think that's 'cause he's growin' a beard and things. Or maybe taught in a college."

"They liked you okay," Frank said, still not looking up. "They just didn't know you."

"Yeah, I guess they just didn't know me well enough, yet."

"Say?" Frank looked up now. "You wrote all this—?"

"Yeah — well, no. I mean most of it was written in there when I found it. That's why I wanted to know if it was yours."

"Oh," Frank said. "No. It's not mine."

Kidd turned from under Jack's hand. "That's good. Because when you said you had lost your notebook, you know, I just thought…"

"Yeah," Frank said. "I see."

"We're gonna go out and look for some more girls," Jack said. "You wanna come along?"

"Jack thinks there's safety in numbers," Frank said.

"No. No, that's not it," Jack protested. "I just thought he might want to come and help us look for some girls. That's all. Maybe we can go back to that house?"

"Hey, thanks," Kidd said. "But I got to hang around here for a while."

"The Kidd here's got his own old lady," Jack said in knowing explanation. "I bet he's waiting on her."

"Hey, I'm… sorry it's not your notebook," Kidd told Frank.

"Yeah," Frank said. "So am I."

"We see you around," Jack said, while Kidd (smiling, nodding) wondered at Frank's tone.

Absently rubbing the paper (he could feel the pen's blind impressions), he watched them leave.

Bumping shoulders with them, Ernest Newboy came into the bar. Newboy paused, pulling his suit jacket hem, looked around, saw Fenster, saw Kidd, and came toward Kidd.

Kidd sat up a little straighter.

"Hello, there. How've you been for the past few days?"

The small triumph prompted Kidd's grin. To hide it he looked back at the book. The poem Frank had left showing, had been tentatively titled:

In the margin, he had noted alternates: The Red Wolf, The Fire Wolf, The Iron Wolf. "Eh… fine." Suddenly, and decisively, he took his pen from the vest's upper button hole, crossed out LOUFER, and wrote above it: WOLF BRINGER. He looked up at Newboy. "I been real fine; and working a lot too."

"That's good." Newboy picked up the gin and tonic the bartender left. "Actually I was hoping I'd run into you tonight. It has to do with a conversation I had with Roger."

"Mr Calkins?"

"We were out having after-dinner brandy in the October gardens and I was telling him about your poems." Newboy paused a moment for a reaction but got none. "He was very impressed with what I told him."

"How could he be impressed? He didn't read them."

Newboy doffed his gin. "Perhaps what impressed him was my description, as well as the fact that — how shall I say it? Not that they are about the city here — Bellona. Rather, Bellona provides, in the ones I recall best at any rate, the decor which allow the poems to… take place." The slightest questioning at the end of Newboy's sentence asked for corroboration.

More to have him continue than to corroborate, Kidd nodded.

"It furnishes the décor, as well as a certain mood or concern. Or am I being too presumptuous?"

"Huh? No, sure."

"At any rate, Roger brought up the idea: Why not ask the young man if he would like to have them printed?"

"Huh? No, sure." Though the punctuation was the same, each word had a completely different length, emphasis, and inflection. "I mean, that would be…" A grin split the tensions binding his face. "But he hasn't seen them!"

"I pointed that out. He said he was deferring to my enthusiasm."

"You were that enthusiastic? He just wants to put some of them in his newspaper, maybe?"

"Another suggestion I made. No, he wants to print them up in a book, and distribute them in the city. He wants me to get copies of the poems from you, and a title."

The sound was all breath expelling. Kidd drew his hand back along the counter. His heart pounded loudly, irregularly, and though he didn't think he was sweating, he felt a drop run the small of his back, pause at the chain—"You must have been pretty enthusiastic—" and roll on.

Newboy turned to his drink. "Since Roger made the suggestion, and I gather you would like to go along with it, let me be perfectly honest: I enjoyed looking over your poems, I enjoyed your reading them to me; they have a sort of primitive vigor that comes very much from a pruned sort of language that, from looking at the way you revise, at any rate, you've apparently done quite a bit of work to achieve. But I haven't lived with them by any means long enough to decide whether they are, for want of a simple term, good poems. It's very possible that if I just picked them up in a book store, and read them over, read them over very carefully too, I might easily not find anything in them at all that interested me."

Kidd frowned.

"You say you've only been writing these for a few weeks?"

Kidd nodded, still frowning.

"That's quite amazing. How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"Now there." Mr. Newboy pulled back. "I would have thought you were much, much younger. I would have assumed you were about nineteen or eighteen and had worked most of your life in the country."

"No. I'm twenty-seven and I've worked all over, city, country, on a ship. What's that got to do with it?"

"Absolutely nothing." Newboy laughed and drank. "Nothing at all. I've only met you a handful of times, and it would be terribly presumptuous of me to think I knew you, but frankly what I've been thinking about is how something like this would be for you. Twenty-seven…?"

"I'd like it."

"Very good." Newboy smiled. "And the decision I've come to is, simply, that so little poetry is published in the world it would ill behoove me to stand in the way of anyone who wants to publish more. Your being older than I thought actually makes it easier. I don't feel quite as responsible. You understand, I'm not really connected with the whole business. The idea came from Mr Calkins. Don't let this make you think ill of me, but for a while I tried to dissuade him."

"Because you didn't think the poems were good enough?"

"Because Roger is not in the business of publishing poetry. Often unintentionally, he ends up in the business of sensationalism. Sensationalism and poetry have nothing to do with one another. But then, your poems are not sensational. And I don't think he wants to make them so."

"You know, I was just talking to another poet, I mean somebody who's been writing a long time, and with a book and everything. He's got poems in Poetry. And that other magazine… the New Yorker. Maybe Mr Calkins would like to see some of his stuff too?"

"I don't think so," Mr Newboy said. "And if I have one objection to the whole business, I suppose that's it. What would you like for the name of your book?"

The muscles in Kidd's back tightened almost to pain. As he relaxed them, he felt the discomfort in the gut that was emblematic of fear. His mind was sharp and glittery. He was as aware of the two men in leather talking in the corner, the woman in construction boots coming from the men's room, of Fenster and Loufer still in their booth, of the bartender leaning on the towel against the bar, as he was of Newboy. He pulled the notebook into his lap and looked down at it. After the count of seven he looked up and said, "I want to call it—Brass Orchids."

"Again?"

"Brass Orchids."

"No 'The' or anything?"

"That's right. Just: Brass Orchids."

"That's very nice. I like that. I—" Then Newboy's expression changed; he laughed. "That really is nice! And you've got quite a sense of humor!"

"Yeah," Kidd said. "Cause I think it takes some balls for me to pull off some shit like that. I mean, me with a book of poems?" He laughed too.

"Yes, I do like that," Newboy repeated. "I hope it all works out well. Maybe my hesitations will prove unfounded after all. And any time you want to get us copies of the poems, in the next few days, that'll be fine."

"Sure."

Newboy picked up his glass. "I'm going to talk to Paul Fenster over there for a while. He left Roger's today and I'd like to say hello. Will you excuse me?"

"Yeah." Kidd nodded after Newboy.

He looked at his notebook again. With his thumb, he nudged the clip on the pen out of the spiral where he had stuck it, and sat looking at the cover: click-click, click-click, click.

He lettered across the cardboard: Brass Orchids. And could hardly read it for dirt.

Brushing to the final pages (pausing at the poem called Elegy to read two lines, then hurrying past), he felt a familiar sensation: at the page where he'd been writing before, listening for a rhythm from his inner voice, he turned to strain the inner babble—

It hit like pain, was a pain; knotted his belly and pushed all air from his lungs, so that he rocked on the stool and clutched the counter. He looked around (only his eyes were closed) taking small gulps. All inside vision blanked at images of glory, inevitable and ineffably sensuous till he sat, grinning and opened mouthed and panting, fingers pressing the paper. He tore his eyelids apart, the illusory seal, and looked down at the notebook. He picked up the pen and hastily wrote two lines till he balked at an unrevealed noun. Re-reading made him shake and he began automatically crossing out words before he could trace the thread of meaning from sound to image: he didn't want to feel the chains. They drew across him and stung.

They carried pain and no solution for pain.

And incorrectly labeled it something else.

He wrote more words (not even sure what the last five were) when once more his back muscles sickled, his stomach tapped the bar edge, and inside the spheres of his eyes, something blind and luminous and terrifying happened.

Those women, he thought, those men who read me in a hundred years will… and no predicate fixed the fantasy. He shook his head and choked. Gasping, he tried to read what he had set down, and felt his hand move to X the banalities that leached all energy: "…pit…" There was a word (a verb!), and watched those on either side suddenly take its focus and lose all battling force, till it was only flabby, and archaic. Write: he moved his hand (remember, he tried to remember, that squiggle is the letters "…tr…" when you go to copy this) and put down letters that approximated the sounds gnawing his tongue root, "Awnnn…" was the sound gushing from his nose.

Someday I am going to… it came this time with light; and the fear from the park, the recollections of all fear that stained and stained like time and dirt, page, pen, and counter obliterated. His heart pounded, his nose ran; he wiped his nose, tried to re-read. What was that squiggle that left the word between "…reason…" and "…pain…" indecipherable?

The pen, which had dropped, rolled off the counter and fell. He heard it, but kept blinking at his scrawl. He picked the notebook up, fumbled the cover closed, and the floor, hitting his feet, jarred him forward. "Mr Newboy …!"

Newboy, standing by the booth, turned. "… yes?" His expression grew strange.

"Look, you take this." Kidd thrust the notebook out. "You take this now…"

Newboy caught it when he let it go. "Well, all right—"

"You take it," Kidd repeated. "I'm finished with it…" He realized how hard he was breathing. "I mean I think I'm finished with it now… so—" Tak looked up from his seat—"you can take it with you. Now."

Newboy nodded. "All right." After a slight pause, he pursed his lips: "Well, Paul. It was good seeing you. I'd hoped you'd have gotten up again. You must come sometime soon, before I leave. I've really enjoyed the talks we've had. They've opened up a great deal to me. You've told me a great deal, shown me a great deal, about this city, about this country. Bellona's been very good for me." He nodded to Tak. "Good meeting you." He looked once more at Kidd, who only realized the expression was concern as Newboy — with the notebook under his arm — was walking away.

Tak patted the seat beside him.

Kidd started to sit; halfway, his legs gave and he fell.

"Another hot brandy for the Kidd here!" Tak hollered, so loud people looked. To Fenster's frown, Tak simply shook his grimacing head: "He's okay. Just had a rough day. You okay, Kidd?"

Kidd swallowed, and did feel a little better. He wiped his forehead (damp), and nodded.

"Like I was saying," Tak continued, as blond arms with inky leopards set Kidd a steaming glass, "for me, it's a matter of soul." He observed Fenster across his knuckles, continuing from the interruption. "Essentially, I have a black soul."

Fenster looked from the exiting Newboy. "Hum?"

"My soul is black," Tak reiterated. "You know what black soul is?"

"Yeah, I know what black soul is. And like hell you do."

Tak shook his head. "I don't think you understand—"

"You can't have one," Fenster said. "I'm black. You're white. You can't have a black soul. I say so."

Loufer shook his head. "Most of the time you come on pretty white to me."

"Scares you I can imitate you that well?" Fenster picked up his beer, then put the bottle back down. "What is it that all you white men suddenly want to be—"

"I do not want to be black."

"— what gives you a black soul?"

"Alienation. The whole gay thing, for one."

"That's a passport to a whole area of culture and the arts you fall into just by falling into bed," Fenster countered. "Being black is an automatic cutoff from that same area unless you do some fairly fancy toe-in-the-door work." Fenster sucked at his teeth. "Being a faggot does not make you black!"

Tak put his hands down on top of one another. "Oh, all right—"

"You," Fenster announced to Loufer's partial retreat, "haven't wanted a black soul for three hundred years. What the hell is it that's happened in the last fifteen that makes you think you can appropriate it now?"

"Shit." Tak spread his fingers. "You can take anything from me you want — ideas, mannerisms, property and money. And I can't take anything from you?"

"That you dare—" Fenster's eyes narrowed—"express, to me, surprise or indignation or hurt (notice I do not include anger) because that is exactly what the situation is, is why you have no black soul." Suddenly he stood — the red collar fell open from the dark clavicle— and shook his finger. "Now you live like that for ten generations, then come and ask me for some black soul." The finger, pale nail on a dark flesh, jutted. "You can have a black soul when I tell you you can have one! Now don't bug me! I gotta go pee!" He pulled away from the booth.

Kidd sat, his finger tips tingling, his knees miles away, his mind so opened that each statement in the altercation had seemed a comment to and/or about him. He sat trying to integrate them, while their import slipped from the tables of memory till Tak turned to him with a grunt, and with his forefinger hooked down the visor of his cap. "I have the feeling—" Tak nodded deeply— "that in my relentless battle for white supremacy I have, yet once again, been bested." He screwed up his face. "He's a good man, you know? Go on, drink some of that. Kid, I worry about you. How you feeling now?"

"Funny," Kidd said. "Strange… okay, I guess." He drank. His breath stayed in the top of his lungs. Something dark and sloppy rilled beneath.

"Pushy, self-righteous." Tak was looking across to where Fenster had been sitting. "You'd think he was a Jew. But a good man."

"You met him on his first day here too," Kidd said. "You ever ball him?"

"Huh?" Tak laughed. "Not on your life. I doubt he puts out for any one except his wife. If he has one. And even there one wonders. Anyplace he's ever gone, I'll bet he's gotten there over the fallen bodies of love-sick faggots. Well, it's an education, on both sides. Hey, are you sure you didn't take some pill you shouldn't have, or something like that? Think back."

"No, really. I'm all right now."

"Maybe you want to come to my place, where it's a little warmer, and I can keep an eye on you."

"No, I'm gonna wait for Lanya." Kidd's own thoughts, still brittle and hectic, were rattling so hard it was not till fifteen seconds later, when Fenster returned to the table, he realized Tak had said nothing more, and was merely looking at the candlelight on the brandy.

Voiding his bladder had quenched Fenster's heat. As he sat down, he said quite moderately, "Hey, do you see what I was trying to—"

Tak halted him with a raised finger. "Touché, man. Touché. Now don't bug me. I'm thinking about it."

"All right." Fenster was appeased. "Okay." He sat back and looked at all the bottles in front of him. "After this much to drink, it's all anybody can ask." He began to thumb away the label.

But Tak was still silent.

"Kidd—?"

"Lanya!"

2

Wind sprang in the leaves, waking her, waking him beneath her turning head, her moving hand. Memories clung to him, waking, like weeds, like words: They had talked, they had walked, they had made love, they had gotten up and walked again — there'd been little talk that time because tears kept rising behind his eyes to drain away into his nose, leaving wet lids, sniffles, but dry cheeks. They had come back, lay down, made love again, and slept.

Taking up some conversation whose beginnings were snarled in bright, nether memories, she said: "You really can't remember where you went, or what happened?" She had given him time to rest; she was pressing again. "One minute you were at the commune, the next you were gone. Don't you have any idea what happened between the time we got to the park and the time Tak found you wandering around outside — Tak said it must have been three hours later, at least!" He remembered talking with her, with Tak in the bar; finally he had just listened to her and Tak talk to each other. He couldn't seem to understand.

Kidd said, because it was the only thing he could think: "This is the first time I've seen real wind here." Leaves passed over his face. "The first time."

She sighed, her mouth settling against his throat.

He tried to pull the corner of the blanket across his shoulders, grunted because it wouldn't come, lifted one shoulder: it came.

The astounded eye of leaves opened over them, turned, and passed. He pulled his lips back, squinted at the streaked dawn. Dun, dark, and pearl twisted beyond the branches, wrinkled, folded back on itself, but would not tear.

She rubbed his shoulder; he turned his face up against hers, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.

"What is it? Tell me what happened? Tell me what it is!"

"I'm going… I may be flipping out. That's what it is, you know?"

But he was rested: things were less bright, more clear. "I don't know. But I may be…"

She shook her head, not in denial, but wonder. He reached between her legs where her hair was still swive-sticky, rubbed strands of it between his fingers. Her thighs made a movement to open, then to clamp him, still. Neither motion achieved, she brushed her face against his hair. "Can you talk to me about it. Tak's right — you looked like you were drugged or something! I can tell you were scared. Try to talk to me, will you?"

"Yeah, yeah, I…" Against her flesh, he giggled. "I can still screw."

"Well, a lot, and I love it. But even that's sort of… sometimes like instead of talking."

"In my head, words are going on all the time, you know?"

"What are they? Tell me what they say."

He nodded and swallowed. He had tried to tell her everything important, about the Richards, about Newboy. He said, "That scratch…"

"What?" she asked his lingering silence.

"Did I say anything?"

"You said, 'The scratch.'"

"I couldn't tell…" He began to shake his head. "I couldn't tell if I said it out loud."

"Go on," she said. "What scratch?"

"John, he cut Milly's leg."

"Huh?"

"Tak's got an orchid, a real fancy one, out of brass. John got hold of it, and just for kicks, he cut her leg. It was…" He took another breath. "Awful. She had a cut there before. I don't know, I guess he gets his rocks off that way. I can understand that. But he cut—"

"Go on."

"Shit, it doesn't make any sense when I talk about it.

"Go on."

"Your legs, you don't have any cut on them." He let the breath out; and could feel her frowning down in her chest. "But he cut her."

"This was something you saw?"

"She was standing up. And he was sitting down. And suddenly he reached over and just slashed down her leg. Probably it wasn't a very big cut. He'd done it before. Maybe to someone else. Do you think he ever did it to anyone else—?"

"I don't know. Why did it upset you?"

"Yes… no, I mean. I was already upset. I mean because…" He shook his head. "I don't know. It's like there's something very important I can't remember."

"Your name?"

"I don't even… know if that's it. It's just — very confusing."

She kept rubbing till he reached up and stopped her hand.

She said: "I don't know what to do. I wish I did. Something's happening to you. It's not pretty to watch. I don't know who you are, and I like you a lot. That doesn't make it easier. You've stopped working for the Richards; I'd hoped that would take some pressure off. Maybe you should just go away; I mean you should leave…"

In the leaves, the wind walked up loudly. But it was his shaking head that stopped her. Loudly wind walked away.

"What were they… why were they all there? Why did you take me there?"

"Huh? When?"

"Why did you take me there tonight?"

"To the commune?"

"But you see, you had a reason, only I can't understand what it was. It wouldn't even matter." He rubbed her cheek until she caught his thumb between her lips. "It wouldn't matter." Diffused anxiety hardened him and he began to press and press again at her thigh.

"Look, I only took you there because—" and the loud wind and his own mind's tumbling blotted it. When he shook his head and could hear again, she was stroking his thick hair and mumbling, "Shhhhh… Try and relax. Try and rest now, just a little…" With her other hand, she pulled the rough blanket up. The ground was hard under shoulder and elbow.

He propped himself on them while they numbed, and tried out memory.

Suddenly he turned to face her. "Look, you keep trying to help, but what do you…" He felt all language sunder on silence.

"But what do I really feel about all this?" she saved him. "I don't know — no, I do." She sighed. "Lots of it isn't too nice. Maybe you're in really bad shape, and since I've only known you for a little while, I should get out now. Then I think, Hey, I'm into a really good thing; if I worked just a little harder I might be able to do something that would help. Sometimes, I just feel that you've made me feel very good — that one hurts most. Because I look at you and I see how much you hurt and I can't think of anything to do."

"He…" he dredged from flooded ruins, "I… don't know." He wished she would ask what he meant by "he," but she only sighed on his shoulder. He said, "I don't want to scare you."

She said, "I think you do. I mean, it's hard not to think you're just trying to get back at me for something somebody else did to you. And that's awful."

"Am I?"

"Kidd, when you're off someplace, working, or wandering around, what do you remember when you remember me?"

He shrugged. "A lot of this. A lot of holding each other, and talking."

"Yeah," and he heard a smile shape her voice, "which is a lot of the most beautiful part. But we do other things. Remember those too. That's cruel of me to ask when you're going through this, isn't it? But there's so much you don't see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt. That's cruel to say, but it's hard to watch."

"No." He frowned at the long dawn. "When we went up to see Newboy, did you like—" and remembered her ruined dress while he said:

"At Calkins'—did you have fun?"

She laughed. "You didn't?" Her laugh died.

Still, he felt her smile pressed on his shoulder. "It was strange. For me. It's easy sometimes to forget I've got anything to do other than… well, this."

"You talked about an art teacher once. I remember that. And the tape editing and the teaching. You paint too?"

"Years ago," she countered. "When I was seventeen I had a scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York, five, six years back. I don't paint now. I don't want to."

"Why'd you stop?"

"Would you like to hear the story? Basically, because I'm very lazy." She shrugged in his arms. "I just drifted away from it. When I was drifting, I was very worried for a while. My parents hated the idea of my living in New York — I had just left Sarah Lawrence, again, and they wanted me to stay with a family. But I was sharing an awful apartment on Twenty-Second Street with two other girls and going part time to the League. My parents thought I was quite mad and were very happy when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist about my 'painting block'. They thought he would keep me from doing anything really foolish." She barked a one-syllable laugh. "After a while, he said what I should do is set myself a project. I was to make myself paint three hours each day — paint anything, it didn't matter. I was to keep track of the time in a little twenty-five cent pad. And for every minute under three hours I didn't paint, I had to spend six times that amount of time doing something I didn't like — it was washing dishes, yes. We had decided that I had a phobia against painting, and my shrink was behaviorist. He was going to set up a counter unpleasantness—"

"You had a phobia about dishwashing too?"

"Anyway." She frowned at him in the near dark. "I left his office in the morning and got started that afternoon. I was very excited. I felt I might get into all sorts of areas of my unconscious in my painting that way… whatever that meant. I didn't fall behind until the third day. And then only twenty minutes. But I couldn't bring myself to do two hours of dish washing."

"How many dishes did you have?"

"I was supposed to wash clean ones if I ran out of dirty ones. The next day I was okay. Only I didn't like the painting that was coming out. The day after that I don't think I painted at all. That's right, somebody came over and we went up to Poe's Cottage."

"Ever been to Robert Louis Stevenson's house in Monterey?"

"No."

"He only rented a room in it for a couple of months and finally got thrown out because he couldn't pay the rent. Now they call it Stevenson's House and it's a museum all about him."

She laughed. "Anyway, I was supposed to see the doctor the next day. And report on how it was going. That night I started looking at the paintings — I took them out because I thought I might make up some work time. Then I began to see how awful they were. Suddenly I got absolutely furious. And tore them up — two big ones, a little one, and about a dozen drawings I'd done. Into lots of pieces. And threw them away. Then I washed every dish in the house."

"Shit…" He frowned at the top of her head.

"I think I did some drawing after that, but that's more or less when I really stopped painting. I realized something though—"

"You shouldn't have done that," he interrupted. "That was awful."

"It was years ago," she said. "It was sort of childish. But I—"

"It frightens me."

She looked at him. "It was years ago." Her face was greyed in the grey dawn. "It was." She turned away, and continued. "But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry top, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all."

"You like washing dishes?"

"I haven't had to in a long, long time." She shrugged again. "And when I have to now, actually I find it rather relaxing."

He laughed. "I guess I do too." Then: "But you shouldn't have torn up those paintings. I mean, suppose you changed your mind. Or maybe there was something good in them that you could have used later—"

"It was bad if I wanted to be an artist. But I wasn't an artist. I didn't want to be."

"You got a scholarship."

"So did a lot of other people. Their paintings were terrible, mostly. By the laws of chance, mine were probably terrible too. No, it wasn't bad if I didn't want to paint at all."

But he was still shaking his head.

"That really upsets you, doesn't it? Why?"

He took a breath and moved his arm from under her. "It's like everything you — anybody says to me… it's like they're trying to tell me a hundred and fifty other things as well. Besides what they're saying direct."

"Oh, perhaps I am, just a bit."

"I mean, here I am, half nuts and trying to write poems, and you're trying to tell me I shouldn't put my faith in art or psychiatry."

"Oh no!" She folded her hands on his chest, and put her chin there. "I'm saying I decided not to. But I wasn't nuts. I was just lazy. There is a difference, I hope. And I wasn't an artist. A tape editor, a teacher, a harmonica player, but not an artist." He folded his arms across her neck and pushed her head flat to its cheek. "I suppose the problem," she went on, muffled in his armpit, "is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and other takes up." She paused a moment, moving her head. "My blue dress…"

"That reminds you of the problems with the outside?"

"That, and going up to Calkins'. I don't mind living like that — every once in a while. When I've had the chance, I've always done it rather well."

"We could have a place like Calkins'. You can have anything you want in this city. Maybe it wouldn't be as big, but we could find a nice house; and I could get stuff like everybody else does. Tak's got an electric stove that cooks a roast beef in ten minutes. With microwaves. We could have anything—"

"That—" she was shaking her head—"however, is when the inside problems start. Or start to become problems, anyway. Sometimes, I don't think I have any inside problems at all. I think I'm just giving myself something to worry about. I'm not scared of half the things half the people I know are. I've gone lots of places, met lots of people, had lots of fun. Maybe it is all a matter of getting the outside problems solved. Another not nice thing: When I look at you, sometimes I don't think I have a right to think I have any problems, inside or out."

"Don't you want to do anything? Change anything; preserve anything; find any…" He stopped because he felt distinctly uncomfortable.

"No." She said it very firmly.

"I mean, maybe that would make it easier to solve some of the outside problems, anyway. You know, maybe you'd feel happier if you could get another dress."

"No," she repeated. "I want wonderful and fascinating and marvelous things to happen to me and I don't want to do anything to make them happen. Nothing at all. I suppose that makes you think I'm a superficial person… no, you're too intelligent. But a lot of people would."

He was confused. "You're a marvelous, deep, fascinating person," he said, "and therefore you should be world-famous this instant."

"For twenty-three, I'm famous enough, considering I haven't done anything. But you're right."

"How are you famous?"

"Oh, not really famous. I just have lots of famous friends." She rolled her head once more to her chin. "It said in that article that Newboy had been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. I know three people who've actually won it."

"Huh?"

"Two in the sciences, and Lester Pearson was a good friend of my uncle and would come spend weeks with us at my uncle's summer place in Nova Scotia. The one in chemistry was very pleasant — he was only twenty-nine — and connected with the university. We were very close for a while."

"You went out on dates and things. With all your famous friends?"

"No, I hate that. I never go on dates. These are people I met and I talked to and I liked talking to, so I talked to again. That's all."

"I'm not famous. Would you be happy in a place like Calkins', living with me?"

"No."

"Why not? Just because I'm not famous?"

"Because you wouldn't be happy. You wouldn't know what to do there. You wouldn't fit." Then he felt all her muscles, thigh to shoulder, tighten on him. "That isn't true! I'm being awful." She sucked her teeth. "Do you know, I was terrified to go up to Roger's with you. It had nothing to do with what I was wearing: I thought you'd behave dreadfully — you'd either Ooooh and Ahhh the whole afternoon to death, or you'd shut up and be a big silent hole in the day."

"You think I've never been in any nice places before?"

"But you weren't like that," she said. "That's the point! You were perfectly fine, you had a good time, and I'm sure Mr Newboy enjoyed it. If anyone spoiled it, it was me with my silly dress. And I'm a mean, small, petty person for worrying about such things in the first place." She sighed. "Do I get points at all for keeping it to myself this long?" She sighed again. "No, I guess not."

He blinked at the wild sky and tried to comprehend: he could follow her logic, though the emotions behind it confused.

After a while she said: "I grew up in some awfully big houses. Some were almost as big as Roger's. When I was at boarding school, once, my uncle said I could have some kids to the summer place for my birthday. It came on a long weekend and they said I could have ten kids up from Thursday night till Sunday afternoon. There was one boy at the Irving School — the boys' school next to ours— named Max, whom I thought was just great. He came from a poor — well, poorish family. He was on scholarship. He was intelligent, sensitive, gentle… and gorgeous — I was probably in love with him! I would have been perfectly happy to take him off for the weekend all by himself. But I had to plan a party: so I planned it all for him. I got two girls who just loved to listen to intelligent boys talk — I wasn't a very good listener at the time, and Max could go on. I invited this perfectly dreadful colored boy who Max said he'd admired because he was second on the debating team and never did anything wrong. I scoured four schools for the most marvelous and charming people — people who would entertain him, complement him, offer just the right contrast. No two people from the same clique, you know, who would stick together and make a little indigestible dumpling in the stew. The weekend was dreadful. Everyone had a fabulous time, and for the next two years kept asking me when I was going to do it again. Except Max. The plane ride, the horses, the boats, the maids, the chauffeurs, they were just too much for him. All he said the whole four days was, Thank you,' and, 'Gosh.' About forty-four times each. Oh, I guess we were just very young. In another couple of years he would probably have been a socialist or something and might have attacked the whole thing. That would have been fine! I had people there who could have argued. At least there would have been communication. I don't know — maybe I'm still young." Suddenly she turned over. "I could be the older woman in an eighteenth century French novel right now." She turned back. "Twenty-three! Isn't that awful? And they say the twentieth century has a youth hangup." She giggled against his chest.

"You want to hear a story from me, now?"

"Um-hm." He felt her nod.

"About when I was twenty-three. Your age."

"Sure thing, gramps. That's about three years after you got out of the mental hospital?"

"No, it's about going to nice places." He frowned. "One summer I was working up and down the gulf coast, as a header on the shrimp boats."

"What's a header?"

"He washes dishes and pulls the heads off the shrimp. Anyway, I'd just gotten fired in Freeport and was waiting around to get on another boat—"

"Why'd you get fired?"

"I got seasick. Now shut up. Anyway, I was sitting in front of this cafe, which was about the only thing there to do, when these two guys in black Triumphs came hauling around the dust. One yells, Did I know where he could get a traveler's check cashed in this God-damn town. I'd been there three days, so I told him where the bank was. He told me, Get in, and I showed him and his friend where to go. We got to talking: he was in law school up in Connecticut. I told him about going to Columbia. He got his check cashed and asked if I wanted to come along with them — which was better than two bucks a night I didn't have, so I said, Yeah. A whole bunch of kids were staying out on this island just off the coast."

"Like the commune?"

"One of the kids' fathers was head of a land development company down there. The company had moved the fisherman who lived on the island someplace else, built a bridge to the mainland, dug a canal, and built a whole bunch of 150 thousand, 200 thousand dollar homes, lawns in the front, swimming pool on one side, garage on the other, and boat house in the back on the canal so you could get your boat out to sea. They were all for the executives of Dow Chemical, who just about owned the city. So prospective buyers could check them out first, the houses were furnished, the freezers were filled with steaks, the closets stocked with liquor, towels in the bathrooms and all the beds kept made. The executives could bring their families in for a weekend to try out the house before they bought it. On Monday, a truck would come by with maids, carpenters, plumbers, and supplies to replace anything that had been used up, to clean out the mess, and fix anything broken. There wasn't anybody on the island, so the doors had all been left open. The kid's father had told him since he was in the area, why didn't he stay there. So the kid, with about twenty of his friends — they went from about seventeen to twenty-five — had moved in. They'd start on one house, drink up all the liquor, eat up the food, destroy the furniture, break the windows, tear up everything they could, then move on to another one. On Monday the maids, carpenters, and plumbers would fix the damages. I stayed with them for two weeks. I'd pick out a room, lock the door, and read most of the time, while all the noise went on outside. Every once in a while, you know, I'd come out to get something to eat — wade through the beer cans in the kitchen, scrape the grease out of some pan and fry a piece of steak. Then I'd go down to the swimming pool maybe if it wasn't too bad and, if there wasn't too much furniture floating in it, or bottles, or broken glass around, I'd swim a while. Pretty soon, when it would get too crowded, I'd go back to my room. There'd be people screwing in my bed, or somebody would've gotten sick all over the bureau. Once I found some little girl sitting in the middle of the floor, out of her head — cocaine all over the rug, and that is a lot of cocaine: she'd pulled down the drapes and was cutting paper-dolls out of them. So I'd take my book and go lock myself in another room. A couple of days after I got there, the two guys who'd brought me suddenly decided to fly back to somewhere else. They gave me the keys to the Triumphs and said I could have them. I don't even know how to drive. One of them had got the front smashed in by now, but the other one was still good. The police came twice. The first time the kids told them to go fuck themselves and said they were supposed to be there, and the police went away. The second time, I thought it was better I split. When the shit came down, I wouldn't have any rich Texas relatives to run home to. There was one girl there who said she'd buy me a ticket into Houston if I would fuck her and stay on more than five minutes."

"No…" Lanya giggled against his neck.

"She bought me a bus ticket and a pair of jeans and a new shirt."

Her giggling turned to laughter. Then she looked up. "That isn't really true, is it?" Her smile tried to force, through the dawn light.

After a second he said, "Naw. It isn't. I mean I screwed her and she bought the bus ticket for me. But she didn't put it that way. It just makes a better story."

"Oh." She put her head down again.

"But you see, I know about nice places. How to act in them. You go in, and you take what you want. Then you leave. That's what they were doing down there. That's what I was doing up at Calkins'."

Once more she balanced on her chin.

He looked down over his.

She was frowning. "I think you have that absolutely ass backward. But if it makes you, in your own delightfully naive way, polite and charming, I guess…" She put her head down again, and sighed. "But I wouldn't be surprised if there turned out to be one or two people who came up to my party in Nova Scotia who were also down in Texas a few years later at… yours."

He glanced at her again and chuckled.

Mist made mountains above the trees, made waves that broke, and fell and did not reach them.

His chest was damp from her cheek. She turned her head, tickling him with hair. A leaf, surprising as shale, struck his forehead and made him look up at the half-bare branches. "We shouldn't be trying to do it like this. We're dirty. It's uncomfortable. Soon it's going to get colder, or start raining, or something. Like you said, the commune is sort of a drag. You sit around and watch them waste whatever they have and then you finish up the leavings. We'll get a place—"

"Like the Richards?" she asked, in a tired voice.

"No. No, not like that."

"You think you'd like to put together something like Roger's place?"

"It doesn't have to be all that spectacular, huh? Just somewhere that was ours, you know? Maybe something like Tak's got."

"Mmmm," she said. Then once more she raised her head up on her chin. "You should go to bed with Tak again."

"Huh? Why?"

"Because he's a nice person. And he'd enjoy it."

He shook his head. "Naw, he's not my type. Besides, he catches them when they first get here. I don't think he's interested in anything more than the first taste, you know?"

"Oh." She put her head down again.

"You trying to get rid of me," he asked, "like you always think I'm trying to do with you?"

"No." After a while she asked, "Does it ever bother you that you make it with both men and women?"

"When I was fifteen or sixteen it used to bug hell out of me. I guess I worried about it a lot. By the time I was twenty, though, I noticed that no matter how much worrying I did, it didn't seem to have too much effect on who I ended up in bed with. So now I don't worry. It's more fun that way."

"Oh," she said. "Glib. But logical."

"Why'd you ask?"

"I don't know." He moved her to the side. She reached down to touch his hip. Moved her hand across his hip. "I fooled around a few times in boarding school. With girls, I mean. Sometimes, you know, I felt maybe I was a little strange because I didn't do it more. But I've just never been turned on to girls, sexually."

"Your loss," he said, and pulled her shoulder against his.

She turned to taste his neck, his chin, his lower lip. "What you were telling me happened…" she said between her tongue's dartings". . at the Richards' tonight… must have been… awful."

"I'm not going back there." He nipped her. "Ever. I'm not ever going back."

"Good…"

Then, from a small movement down her body, he recognized some new thought had come to her mind. "What?"

"Nothing."

"What is it?"

"It isn't anything. I just remembered you told me you were twenty-seven years old."

"That's right."

"But once I remember, just in passing, you mentioned you were born in nineteen forty-eight."

"Yeah?"

"Well, that's impossible… hey, what's the matter? You're going all gooseflesh."

As well, behind his rigid loins was a slab of pain. He pushed against her. The edge of the blanket, caught under them, rubbed across his shoulder as he rocked, till she tugged them free, and made a sound, caught his neck. He held his hips up, probing. She moved her hands down his back, pushed him down, thrust up her tongue under his. He made love taking great, gasping breaths. She took many small ones. Wind wandered back and cooled his running shoulders.

After a laboring release, seething, he relaxed.

How jealous I am of those I have known afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear those moments before sleep when words tear from the nervous matrix and, like sparks, light what responses they may. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully, sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh those skeletal epiphanies with visual and aural coherence, if not rationale: better those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where either is merely a pain in the gut or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates both the sun and the heart.

"What are you staring at?" Lanya asked.

"Huh? Nothing. I was just thinking."

Her hand moved on his chest. "About what?"

"About sleep… and I guess poetry. And being crazy."

She made a small sound that meant "go on."

"I don't know. I was remembering. Being a kid and things."

"That's good." She moved her hand, made that small sound again. "Go on…"

But with neither fear nor anguish, he felt he had nowhere to go.

He came out of sleep to lights and the stench of burning.

The luminous spider above him blinked off: the redhead lowered (and as he did, Kidd recognized him) one hand from the chains hanging to his belly. In the other, this time, was a slat from an orange crate.

An iridescent beetle disappeared from a sudden black face (also familiar) above a vinyl vest, shiny as his former carapace.

The arched pincers of a scorpion collapsed: "Hey," Nightmare said, "I think they're about awake."

Kidd's arms were around Lanya. She moved her face against his neck; then moved it again, sharper, deliberate now, conscious.

Two dozen scorpions (most were black) stood in a ring against the grey morning.

Kidd recognized Denny between one bony, brown shoulder and a fleshy black one.

Then the redhead swung his stick.

Lanya shouted — he felt her jerk against his shoulder. She also caught the end of the slat.

She got to her knees, still holding the stick, her eyes were wide; her cheek kept hollowing.

Kidd pushed up to his elbows.

The redhead started to move his end of the stick back and forth.

"Cut that shit, Copperhead." Nightmare hit the stick with his knuckles.

"I just wanted to make sure they were awake," the redhead said. "That was all I want to do. That's all." He pulled the stick.

Lanya let go.

Nightmare squatted slowly before her, resting his wrists on his torn knees, with heavy hands, drooping between, balanced by muscle-builder forearms.

"Man," Lanya said, "if you're trying to scare hell out of us, you've about succeeded."

Kidd didn't feel scared.

Lanya, sitting back on her heels, held her left arm with her right hand, moving her thumb over the knob of her elbow.

Kidd pushed the blanket from his legs and sat up cross-legged.

Naked in the chained circle, he figured, was better than half covered.

"I got better things to do than scare you, Lady. I just wanna talk."

She took a breath, waiting.

"How's he doin'?" Nightmare bobbed his head toward Kidd.

"What?"

"You doin' pretty well with him?"

"Say what you want to say," she said, and touched Kidd's knee. She was scared; her fingers were icy.

Nightmare's forehead, large pores and heavy creases, creased more. "The other one. You got rid of the other one, huh? That's good." He nodded.

"Phil…?"

"I didn't have much use for… Phil? That was his name, huh?" Nightmare's smile moved his lips more to the side then it curved them. "Guess you didn't either. So you don't have to worry now. What about it? I asked you before." Suddenly he ducked his head and, from his thick neck — the half-braided hair falling from it — lifted a loop of chain.

It wasn't the optical one.

Reaching forward, Nightmare placed it around Lanya's neck. His fists hung from it like clock weights. The half-inch links creased her breasts at the nipples. One fist went up, one down.

"Hey, man…" Kidd said.

Copperhead flipped the stick against his hand, watching Kidd.

Kidd looked up: the leopard-freckled, bearded and redheaded spade was taller and narrower than Nightmare and, for all Nightmare's barbell muscles, looked stronger.

Nightmare's fists stopped, one on Lanya's belly, one on her breast: he watched her.

She watched back, her jaw flexing. She took her hand from Kidd's knee, put both fists around the chain, up near her neck, and ran them down, so that her left one pushed Nightmare's high one away. "Take it off," she said. "I told you once, I don't want it."

A thin, dark woman in the circle, bare breast pushing aside her vest flap and chains, shifted her weight. Someone else coughed.

"What about him?" Nightmare said and didn't look at Kidd. "What you gonna do when we take him? This one's comin' with us, Lady."

"What do you guys…?" Kidd stopped. Anger, fascination, and a third feeling he couldn't name braided together from his brain base into his belly and below.

"Take it off," Lanya said. "I don't want it."

"Why?"

"I just want to stick to my guns. I don't that often." Then she gave a funny laugh. "Beside, your costume designer's cruddy."

Nightmare snorted. A few people in the circle laughed too. "What about yours?" somebody else said. But Nightmare lifted the chain. Scraps of her hair fell from the links.

Then the scorpion swiveled, boot toes tearing grass. "Here." The chain went over Kidd's head. Nightmare's eyes were traced with coral. His vest had apparently come apart at one scarred shoulder and was laced now with rawhide.

Nightmare began to pull the chain.

Cold links slid down Kidd's right nipple. Nightmare's fist came up against his left breast, warm and rough. "Okay?" Nightmare squinted. There was something wrong with his eyes' focus, Kidd realized, irrelevantly.

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Kidd said. "What is all this supposed to mean?"

"Don't mean nothin'." Nightmare let go. "You can take it and throw it in Holland Lake if you want." Then he rocked back and stood. "I'd keep it if I were you."

The circle broke.

Nightmare at their head, big shoulders rocking, big arms swinging, the scorpions filed away. A few glanced back. Ten feet off, a girl who could have been white or black, and a tall black boy began to laugh loudly. Then, as though inflated too fast to follow, an iguana ballooned luminously, translucent in the grey-light. Then a peacock. Then a spider. The scorpions wandered into the trees.

"What the fuck," Kidd asked, "was that about?" He felt his neck where there were three chains now: the optic, the projector, and this new one — the heaviest.

"Nightmare gets it in his head sometimes that he wants certain people…"

The timbre of her voice made him look.

"…get certain people into his nest." Scrabbling in the blanket, she came up with her harmonica, put it down and scrabbled some more.

"He wanted you before, huh? What's with Phil?"

"I told you, he was my boy friend for a while before I met you."

"What was he like?"

"He was a black guy, sort of bright; sort of nice, sort of square. He was here checking out scenes, about like you are…" Her voice muffled for the last words. He looked again: her head was coming out the top of her shirt while she tugged the bottom down over her shaking breasts. "He couldn't really make Calkins' thing that well. He couldn't make Nightmare's either."

The edge of the blanket was tented with the orchid beneath. Reaching for it, Kidd noticed nearly an acre of charred grass across the meadow. Smoke wisped along the edges. That hadn't been there. He frowned. It hadn't.

"People liked him down at the commune, I guess. But he was one of those people you get tired of pretty quick." He heard the fly of her jeans rasp. "Nightmare's funny. It's sweet of him to ask, I suppose, but I'm just not the joining kind. With anyone."

Kidd slid his hand into the orchid's harness, clicked it closed. The burning smell was very strong. He spread his chewed and enlarged knuckles, flexed his scarred and blunted fingers — tickling his shoulder.

He sprang up, whirling, and crouched.

The leaf rolled down his shoulder fluttered against his knee, spun on to the ground. Gasping, and with thudding heart, he looked up the leaning trunk, over the great bole at the stump of some thick, major branch, at bare branches and branches hung with ragged tan, at crossed twigs like shatter lines on the sky.

Moisture sprung on his body and he grew cold.

"Lanya…?"

He looked around at the clearing, and then back at the blanket. She hadn't had time to put her sneakers on!

But her sneakers were gone.

He circled the tree, frowning, looking out at the charred grass and the other trees, looking back at this one.

With orchid and chains, he was suddenly far more aware of his nakedness than when he had awakened with Lanya at the center of the scorpion ring.

She's gone back down to the commune, he thought. But why off just like that? He tried to recall the funny quality that had been in her voice. Anger? But that's silly. He touched the chain Nightmare had placed around his neck. That's silly.

But he stood there a long time.

Then — and his whole body moved with a different rhythm now — he stepped toward the tree, stepped again; stepped a third time, and the side of his foot pressed a root. He leaned forward, his knee against the bark, his thigh, his belly, his chest, his cheek. He closed his eyes and stretched his chained arm high as he could and pressed his fingers on the trunk. He breathed deep for the woody smell and pushed his body into the leaning curve: Bark was rough against the juncture at penis and scrotum, rough on the bone of his ankle, the back of his jaw.

Water was running out the corners of both his eyes. He opened them slightly, but closed them quickly against distortions.

With his weaponed hand — the urge came and went, like a flash bulb's pulsing after-image, to jam the orchid phloem deep — gently he moved his blades across the bark. Turning his hand this way and that; listening to the variated raspings, again and again he stroked the tree.

When he pushed away, the bark clung to his chest hair, his crotch hair. His ankle stung. So did his jaw. He rubbed his palm across his face to feel the mottled imprint; could see it along the flesh of his inner arm, stopping at the loops of chain to continue on the other side.

He went back to the blanket and pulled his vest from the folds. His feelings sat oddly between embarrassment and the greatest relief. Unused to either, the juxtaposition confused him. Still wondering where she'd gone, he pulled up his pants, then sat to strap on (wondering why he still bothered) his one sandal.

He began to search the blanket. He looked under the folds, lifted it to see beneath, frowned and finally searched the whole area.

After fifteen frustrating minutes, he gave up and started down the slope. It was only when he reached the door of the park rest rooms (it had been locked before but someone had broken it open so that the hasp still dangled by one screw) he remembered he had already given the notebook, last night, to Newboy.

3

The pipes yowled, started to knock.

A trickle spilled the porcelain, crawled like a glass worm through the light lozenges from the window high in the concrete. He put his orchid in the next sink and scrubbed hard at his hands, wrists, and forearms, then bent to drink. He washed some more till his bladder warmed.

He urinated into the drain in the middle of the floor. Under his stream the loose grate chattered.

At the sink he wet his fists and ground them in his armpits. Again and again he wiped his neck. He filled his cupped hands, sloshed his face, and cupped them to fill again. Bark crumbs flecked him, neck to knee. He brushed them, rubbed them, washed them away. (Pants and vest were across another sink.) He put his foot in the bowl. Water ran between the ligaments. He rubbed; the porcelain streaked black and grey. Laboriously, fingers tingling, he washed away all the dirt except what callous had taken permanently. He wet and rubbed his legs to the thigh, then began the other foot. With dripping hands he kneaded his genitals; they shriveled at cold water.

Once the trickle gave out.

A minute later, the pipes recommenced yowling. The stream, slightly stronger, started once more.

Water gathered in the hair behind his testicles, dribbled his legs. He ran his hands over his head. His hair was greasy. With his hand's edge, he squeegeed as much as possible from arms, legs, and sides. The muddy puddle where he stood reached the drain: plonk-plonk, plonk-plonk, plonk-plonk.

Someone around in the stalls coughed.

The labored ablutions had dissolved all verbal thought. But his brain was super-saturated with the stuff of thinking. The cough — repeated, and followed by a clearing throat — set thought forming.

Someone very old and ill?

He used his left pant leg to blot dry groin, belly, and back. He dressed, put the orchid in his belt, and even went outside to walk his feet dry. He put on his sandal, came back in — he had made a mess, he realized — and went around the dividing wall hiding the Johns.

Not old, the guy certainly looked sick.

Cowboy boots, turned in, rested on their sides. One sole, pulled free, showed toes crusty as Kidd's own before washing. Sitting on the toilet ring, head against the empty paper dispenser, face strung with ropey hair, bare ribs and wrinkled belly hung with chain — among them a spherical shield projector. "You okay?" Kidd asked. "You look like you're—"

"Unnnn.…" The white scorpion moved his head and, though he sat both feet on the floor, swayed like a drunken cyclist on a high wire. "Naw. Naw, I'm not sick…" The long nose cut the shaking hair. Beside the nose a rimmed eye blinked its purple lid. "Who… who you?"

"Who're you?" Kidd countered. "Pepper. I'm Pepper. I ain't sick." He put his head back against the dispenser. "I just don't feel well."

Kidd felt a small, sharp sadness; as well, an urge to laugh. "What's the matter?"

Pepper suddenly shook the hair from his eyes and was almost still. "Who you run with?"

Kidd frowned.

"Ain't you a scorpion?" Pepper gestured with a hand whose nails were graphite spikes. "Guess you run with Dragon Lady."

"I don't run," Kidd said. "With anybody."

Pepper squinted. "I used to be with Nightmare's nest." The squint became curious. "You with Dragon Lady now? What did you say your name was?"

On a ludicrous impulse, Kidd stuck his thumb in his pocket, put his weight on one hip. "Some people been calling me the Kid."

Pepper's head went back the other way. Then he laughed. "Hey, I heard of you." His gums were rimmed with rot and silver. "Yeah, Nightmare, he said something about the Kid. He was talkin' to Dragon Lady when she was over. I heard 'em talking. Yeah." His laugh broke; he laid his head back against the wall and moaned. "I don't feel real well."

"What'd you hear?" Within surprise, Kid (Kidd decided) reflected on the smallness of the city.

Pepper raised only his eyes; "Nightmare," and lowered them. "He told her you was around, that he thought you was…" He coughed: the sound, weak, still tore things inside. His hands, upturned, shook on his thighs, shook when he coughed: "…till she went away."

Which made fairly little sense; so he asked: "You been in here all night?"

Cough. "Well, I ain't gonna stay out there in the dark!" Pepper's hand gathered enough strength to indicate the doorway.

"You can find yourself a clump of brush, get inside where nobody can see. It's pretty warm out, and it's more comfortable than sleeping on the can. Get yourself a blanket for the night—"

"Man, there're things out there." At first Pepper's face seemed seized with pain. But he was just squinting. "That's what you do, huh? Yeah, you must be pretty brave. Like Nightmare told her."

Which made equally little sense. "How come you're not with Nightmare? I saw him this morning, with his gang. Dragon Lady wasn't with him."

"Naw," Pepper said. "Naw, she ain't gonna be with him now. They had a fight, see. Oh, Jesus, was that one bloody garden party!" This time Pepper's "pain" was memory.

"What was it about?" Kid asked.

Pepper's head came forward, hair strings swinging. "You see those scars on Nightmare's shoulder? You seen them scars?" He tried to nod. "Oh, I guess it's blown over now, and they almost friendly. But she got her own nest again, somewhere over in Jackson I heard. And they ain't gonna be together too much any more, I don't think." His head fell back, and he repeated: "I ain't feeling too well."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I dunno. Maybe I ate something bad. Or I got a cold maybe."

"Well, does it hurt in your stomach, or is your head stopped up?"

"I told you, I don't know why."

"What hurts?"

Pepper shook back hair and sat up again. "How can I tell you what hurts till I know what's wrong?"

"How can anybody know what's wrong till you say what—"

Pepper lurched upright.

Kid started to catch him.

But Pepper didn't fall. Scrubbing at his face with his fist and snuffling, he said, "I been staying with Bunny, but I think she threw me out. Maybe we better go back there and find out, huh?" He let go of the side of the stall. "I think I'm feeling a little better. You know Bunny?"

"I don't think so."

"She dances over in that freak joint, Teddy's."

"You mean the little silver-haired guy?"

"She's pretty together. A nut. But together." Pepper lurched forward. "I wish I had a God-damn drink of water."

"Come on around to the sink."

Pepper passed unsteadily, staggered around the partition.

Kid followed.

Pepper spun one of the taps and jerked his hand back when the pipes began their complaint. "…nothing's coming out," he ventured.

"Give it a second."

When the trickle had gone on half a minute, Pepper grimaced. "Shit, that ain't big enough to drink." He turned again and staggered for the door. "God damn I wish I had some water."

Kid, in amused frustration, turned off the tap and went out. Pepper was wandering up the slope.

Kid watched for a few steps, then turned down toward the commune.

"Hey!"

He looked back. "What?"

"Ain't you coming with me?"

His amusement diminished to minuscule. "No." Minuscule, it still made him wait Pepper's reaction.

"Hey, then." Pepper returned, his stagger now loosened to a bow-legged jounce. "Maybe I better come on with you, huh?"

Kid started walking: Not the reaction he'd wanted.

Pepper caught up. "Look, we go where you going, then we go where I'm going, huh? That's fair."

"There's a water fountain."

"Naw, naw, man! You're in a rush. I don't wanna hold you up none."

Kid sighed, came to a decision, and bellowed, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"

Pepper stopped, blinking.

Kid took a breath and walked on, shaking his head. I don't like to yell at people, he thought. And then, smiling: That isn't true — I just don't get much chance.

He came to the trees at the edge of the clearing.

The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed over. Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

There were no people.

Ten feet from the picnic table lay the torn sleeping bag that nobody used because somebody had been sick in it one night and fouled it with puke and diarrhea.

Puzzled, he walked to the furnace, between tin cans and package wrappers. (On the picnic bench, someone had overturned a carton of garbage.) With his sandal, he scraped away cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up red spots, which pulsed, wavered and went out.

"Lanya?"

He turned, waiting, for her answer, uncomfortable at any noise in this ringed, misty clearing. Even at the height of the project period, there were usually half a dozen people at the fire. A torn blanket lay under the bench — but it had been there all week. The sleeping bags and blanket rolls usually piled haphazard by trees and behind the firewood were gone.

"Lanya!"

A decision to move? But she would have known about that and told him. Save for the overturned cinderblocks of the furnace wall, there were no marks of violence; only junk and disorder. He had come here with her to eat … how many times? He had been quiet and observed his own measured politeness. Momentarily he fantasized that his reserve and preoccupation had been so unbearable to them that they had all, with Lanya cooperating, schemed to abandon him, suddenly and silently. He would have pondered it more than a moment had the idea not urged him to giggle; frowning still seemed more appropriate.

"Lanya?"

He turned to squint among the trees.

When the figure hiding in the brush realized it had been seen, it — it was Pepper — stepped hesitantly forward. "You're looking for somebody down here, hey?" Pepper craned to look left, then right. "I guess they all gone away, you know?"

Kid sucked his teeth and scanned the clearing again, while Pepper judged distances.

"I wonder why they all went away, huh?" Pepper stepped nearer.

Kid's annoyance with Pepper's presence was absorbed in his discomfort at Lanya's absence. He hadn't been that long washing. Wouldn't she have waited—?

"Where you think they all went?" Pepper advanced another step.

"Well if you don't know, you're no use."

Pepper's laugh was hoarse, light, and infirm as his cough. "Why don't you come on with me to Bunny's? She lives right behind the bar. I mean, if you can't find your friend down here. Get something to eat. She don't mind none if I bring friends over. She says she likes them long as they're nice, you know? You ever seen Bunny dance?"

"A couple of times." Kid thought: She might have gone over to the bar.

"I never have. But she's supposed to be good, huh? All sorts of weird people hang out in that place. I'm scared to go in."

"Come on." Kid looked once more: And she was not there. "Let's go."

"You coming? Good!" Pepper followed him for a dozen steps. Then he said, "Hey."

"What?"

"It's shorter if we go this way."

Kid stopped. "You say Bunny lives right behind Teddy's?"

"Uh-huh." Pepper nodded. "This way, through here."

"Okay. If you say so."

"It's a lot shorter," Pepper said. "A whole lot. It really is." He started, still stiff-legged, into the trees.

Kid followed, doubtful.

He was surprised how soon they reached the park wall; it was just over a hill of trees. The path down to the lion gate must have been more curvy than he'd thought.

Pepper scrambled up the wall, wheezing and grimacing. "You know," he panted from the far side as Kid crouched to vault, "Bunny is a guy, you know? But she likes to be called 'she'."

Kid sprang, one hand on the stone. "Yeah, yeah, I know all about it."

Pepper stepped back as Kid landed on the pavement. "You know," he said, as Kid bounced up right, "you're like Nightmare."

"How?"

"He yells a lot. But he don't mean it."

"I'm not gonna yell at you again," Kid said. "I may break your head. But I'm not gonna yell."

Pepper grinned. "Come on this way."

They crossed the empty street.

"You meet a new person, you go with him," Kid mused, "and suddenly you get a whole new city." He'd offered it as a small and oblique compliment.

Pepper only glanced at him, curiously.

"You go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't know were there. Everything changes."

"This way." Pepper ducked between buildings not two feet apart.

They sidled between the flaking boards. The ground was a-glitter from the broken windows.

Pepper said, "Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way."

Kid recalled conversations with Tak, but decided not to question Pepper further, who didn't seem too good with abstractions. In the alley, Kid stopped to brush the glass off his bare foot.

"You okay?" Pepper asked.

"Callous like a rock."

They walked between the gaping garages. A blue car—'75 Olds? — had been driven through a back wall: snapped boards and sagging beams, scattered glass, skid marks across the roadway. The car was impaled in broken wood to its dangling door. Who, Kid wondered, had been injured in the wreck, who had been injured in the house? Hanging over the sill of another smashed window was a blue telephone receiver — hurled out in fear or fury? Accidentally dropped or jarred?

"Uhn." Pepper gestured with his chin toward an open door.

As they walked the dark corridor, Kid smelled traces of something organic and decayed, which was about to remind him of — when he remembered what, they had already come out on the porch.

Somebody in workman's greens and orange construction boots, on a high ladder against the corner lamp post — it was a woman he had noticed his first night in the bar — was unscrewing the street sign.

Metal ground metal; HAZE ST came out of its holder. From the ladder top she picked up AVE Q, inserted it, and began to screw the bolts.

"Hey?" Kid was both amused and curious. "Which one of those is right?"

She frowned back over her shoulder. "Neither one, honey, far as I know."

But Pepper was crossing toward the unmarked, familiar door. Kid followed, looking around the street, estranged by smoky daylight. "I don't think I've ever been here this time of day before."

Pepper just grunted.

The door they entered was two from the bar entrance.

At the top of the steps, Pepper blocked the cracks of light and thumped with the back of his hand.

"All right, all right. Just a second, dear. It isn't the end of the world—" the door swung in—"yet." Around Bunny's thin neck a white silk scarf was held by a silver napkin ring. "And if it is, I certainly don't want to hear about it at this hour of the morning. Oh, it's you."

"Hi!" Pepper's voice mustered brightness and enthusiasm. "This is a friend of mine, the Kid."

Bunny stepped back.

As Kid walked in, Bunny pointed a knuckly, manicured finger at Pepper. "It's his teeth, actually."

Pepper gave his stained and pitted grin.

"Peking Man — do you know about Peking Man? Peking Man died of an ulcerated tooth." Bunny brushed back bleached, silken hair. "Show me a boy with bad teeth and I just feel so sorry for him, that I — well, I'm not responsible. Pepper, darling, where have you been?"

"Jesus, I'm thirsty," Pepper said. "You got something to drink? You couldn't get a God-damn drink of water in the God-damn park."

"On the sideboard, dear. It hasn't moved."

Pepper poured wine from a jug with an ornate label first into a handle-less cup, then a jelly jar.

"Have you any idea where he was? I know he's not going to tell me." Bunny dodged while Pepper handed Kidd the jar.

"You get the glass 'cause you're company."

"You could have poured one for me too, dear. But you're famous for not thinking of things like that."

"Jesus Christ, sweetheart, I thought you had one already working. I really did." But Pepper made no move to pour another.

Bunny raised exasperated eyebrows and went to get a cup.

Pepper doffed his. "You don't tell her where I was. That's for me to know and her to find out." He finished his wine and went for seconds, "Go on, have a seat. Sit down. Bunny, did you throw me out of here last night?"

"The way you were carrying on, doll, I should have." Bunny ducked under Pepper's elbow and, cup on finger tips, returned. "But I didn't get a chance. Have you ever noticed that about people who are dumb in a particular way? In-sen-si-tive—" Bunny's eyes closed on the antepenultimate— "to everything. Except one second before catastrophe: Then they split. Oh, they know when that's coming all right. I guess they have to. Otherwise they'd be dead. Or missing an arm, or a head, or something." Bunny's eyes narrowed at Pepper (who, on his third cup already, turned to the room, a little more relaxed). "Darling, I could have killed you last night. I could have committed murder. Did I throw you out? If I did, you wouldn't be here now. But I'm calmer today."

Kid decided not to ask what Pepper had done.

"Go on," Pepper said. "Sit down. On the couch. That's where I sleep, so it's okay. She sleeps in there."

"My boudoir." Bunny gestured toward another room, where Kid could see a mirror and a dressing table with bottles and jars. "Pepper's very eager to clear that up with all his new friends. Yes, do have a seat." Kid sat.

"Oh, there've been a few times — but you were probably too high to remember those — when you've turned into quite a tiger. Pepper, darling, you shouldn't be so concerned about what other people think."

"If I cared what he thought, I wouldn't 'a brung him in here," Pepper said. "You want some more wine, Kid, just take it. Bunny don't mind."

"Actually—" Bunny stepped back into the boudoir door—"Pepper is a part of that tragic phenomenon, the Great American Un-screwed. A lot of talk about how much he wants to, but if you want my opinion, I don't think Pepper has gone to bed with anything in all his twenty-nine years that didn't just roll him over in his sleep. And God forbid he wake up!"

"I don't talk about doin' anybody I ain't never done," Pepper said, "which is more'n I can say for you. Why don't you lay off?"

From the couch, Kid said: "I just came around to see if somebody was in Teddy's. I want to—"

"Well, take a look, if you like." Bunny unblocked the door. "But I doubt it. In here. Where you can see."

Wondering, Kid got up and walked past Bunny into the second room. Though nothing was out of place, it gave the impression — with three chairs, a bed, a dozen pictures on the wall, from magazines (but all framed) — of clutter. Oranges, reds, purples, and blues massed in the bedspread. Yellow plastic flowers hung over the back of a pink ceramic dove. Interrupting the floral wallpaper was a black curtain.

"In there."

Kid stepped around a grubby, white vinyl hassock (everything had speckles of silver glitter on it) and pushed back black velvet.

Through cage bars, he saw upturned stools clustering the counter. Under a skylight he had never noticed before — this was the first time he had seen the place during the day — the empty booths and tables looked far more rickety: the whole room seemed larger and shabbier.

"Is the bartender there?" Bunny asked.

"No."

"Then they aren't even open."

Kid dropped the curtain.

"Isn't that convenient? I just run right out there and do my thing, then run right back in here, and am shut of you all. Come on back inside. Don't run away." Bunny motioned Kid into the living room. "I really think scorpions are perfectly fascinating. You're the only really effective enforcement organization in the city. Pepper, what was the name of your friend with all the ugly muscles and that lovely, broken…?" Bunny nudged his upper lip with his forefinger "…This one here?"

"Nightmare."

"Fascinating boy." Bunny glanced at Kid. "He's old as I am, dear, but I still consider him very young. (Really, you must sit down. I'm the only one who's allowed to wander around and make everyone nervous.) You scorpions do more to keep law and order in the city than anyone else. Only the good and the pure in heart dare go out on the street after dark. But that's the way, I suppose, the law has always worked. The good people are the ones who live their lives so that they don't have anything to do with whatever law there is anyway. The bad ones are the ones unfortunate enough to become involved. I rather like the way it works here, because, since you are the law, the law is far more violent, makes much more noise, and isn't everywhere at once: so it's easier for us good people to avoid. Are you sure you wouldn't like some more wine—?"

"I told him to get it when he wants it."

"I'll get it for him, Pepper. You may not be a gentleman, but I am a lady." Bunny plucked the jar from Kid's hands and went to fill it and another cup. "Just an old-fashioned girl, too shy to dive into the rushing river of worldly fame, too late for the mouse-drawn pumpkin to take me to the ball, too old for Gay Lib — not to mention Radical Effeminism!" Bunny couldn't have been more than thirty-five, Kid thought. "Not in body, mind you. Just in spirit. Ah, well… I have the consolations of philosophy — or whatever the hell you call it."

Kid sat down on the couch beside Pepper.

Bunny returned with the brimming jelly glass. "When you let your little light shine, what great and luminous beast do you become?"

"I'm not a scorpion."

"You mean you just like to dress up that way? And wear a shield around your neck? Mmmm?"

"Somebody gave me these clothes when I got my others messed up." Kid took the jar and picked up his projector at the end of its chain. "This doesn't have a battery or something. I just found it."

"Ah, then you're not really a scorpion yet. Like Pepper, right? Pepper used to be a scorpion. But his battery's run down."

"I guess that's what it is." Pepper rattled the links of his shield among his other chains. "I gotta get hold of another one and see."

"Pepper used to be the most charming bird of paradise. Red, yellow, and green plumes — one could almost ignore its relation to the common parrot. Then he began to flicker, more and more, splutter, grow dim. Finally—" Bunny's eyes closed—"he went totally out." They opened. "He hasn't been the same since,"

"Where could you pick up one? A battery, I mean."

"Radio store," Pepper said. "Only the guys have about stripped all the places around here. A department store, maybe. Or maybe somebody's got an extra one. Nightmare's got a lot, I bet."

"How exciting, to anticipate your glowing aspect, to puzzle over what you'll turn out to be."

"Inside here—" Pepper snapped his shield apart— "they got a little thing in here that's supposed to be what it is. But it just looks like a whole lot of colored dots to me. The battery goes in there." He picked at the mechanism with a grey nail—"This one…" — and pried loose a red and white striped oblong with blue lettering: 26½ Volts D.C., below a colophon of gathered lightning. "This one ain't worth shit." He flipped it across the room.

"Not on the floor, Pepper love." Bunny picked up the battery and put it on a shelf behind some porcelain frogs, vases of colored glass, and several alarm clocks. "Tell me, Kid, now that you've found me, just who were you looking for?"

"A girl. Lanya. You know her: You spoke to her one night in the bar when George Harrison was there."

"Oh, yes: She-who-must-be-obeyed. And you were with her. Now I do remember you. That was the night they made George the new moon, wasn't it? The way that poor man has driven all those silly dinge-queens out of their flippy little minds is just terrible!"

Kid turned his jar. "He has a pretty heavy fan club."

"More power to him, I say." Bunny raised the cup overhead. "But if George is the New Moon, darling, I am the Evening Star."

Pepper loosed his consumptive giggle.

"I want to go out and look for her," Kid said. "If she comes into Teddy's after it opens, will you give her a message for—"

"I can't think of any reason why I should. She has a much easier time getting hers than I do getting mine. What do you want me to tell her?"

"Huh? Just that I was around looking for her, and that I'll be back."

"Smile."

"What?"

"Grin. Like this." Bunny's bony face became a death mask around bright, perfect teeth. "Let's see an expression of ecstatic happiness."

Kid twisted his lips back quickly and decided this was his last politeness.

To Kid's leer, Bunny returned a wistful grin. "You just don't seem to have any special points of attraction. Actually, I'd put you rather low down on my list. It's completely personal, you understand. I suppose I can afford to tell your girl friend you're looking for her. I will if I see her."

"Everybody's somebody's fetish," Kid said. "Maybe I still got hope?"

"That's what I keep telling Pepper. But he just won't believe me."

"I believe it." Pepper said from his end of the couch. "You just won't believe you ain't mine."

"Oh, I don't think I'm revealing any embarrassing secrets when I say that you can be very sweet and affectionate once you relax. No, Pepper is just terribly uncomfortable at the idea that anyone could find him attractive. It's that simple."

"It ain't happened that often so I'm what you'd call used to it." Pepper squinted into the bottom of his cup, rocked up to his feet, and walked to the counter. He gave Bunny a passing nudge on the arm with his elbow. "Bunny's a good guy, but she's a nut."

"Ow!" Bunny rubbed the spot, but grinned after Pepper.

Kid grinned too and tried not to shake his head.

"Why are you two here now, anyway?" Bunny asked. "What are the scorpions doing today? Shouldn't you be out working?"

"You trying to kick me out again?" Pepper stooped to open a cabinet and took out another jug which he put on the counter beside the one now empty.

Kid saw four more gallons and decided to leave after this glass. "Where was Nightmare's gang off to this morning?"

"You said you saw them. How many were there?"

"Twenty, twenty-five maybe," Kid said.

"Maybe he's gonna pull that Emboriky rip-off today. How you like that?"

"Oh, no!" Bunny put the cup down— "Oh well." — then picked it up again, to sip pensively.

"He's been talking about it for a month, but he wants a whole damn army."

"Why's he need so many people?" Kid asked. "What's Emboriky?"

"Big downtown department store."

"Lovely things," Bunny said sadly. "Perfectly lovely things. I mean it isn't just your run of the mill five-and-dime. I just wish I could have some of their stuff in here. Give some class to this place. Oh, I hate to think of you guys clomping around in all that beautiful stuff."

"Nobody's gotten to it before?"

"Guess not." Pepper said.

"Maybe just a little," Bunny explained. "But you see, now it's 'occupied.' Some kid got killed back a little while ago trying to break in."

"Killed?"

"Somebody leaned out the third-story window," Pepper said, "and shot the motherfucker dead." He laughed. "A couple of other people got shot at, who were just passing by. But they didn't get hurt."

"Perhaps it's Mr Emboriky, protecting his worldly goods." Bunny contemplated the cup bottom, looked over at the fresh gallon, but thought better. "I wouldn't blame him."

"Naw, naw," Pepper said. "It's a whole bunch in there. Nightmare's one of the people who got shot at. He said shots came from lots of places."

Bunny laughed. "Imagine! Two dozen sales clerks valiantly holding off the barbarian hordes! I hope those poor children don't get hurt."

"You think it's the sales clerks?" Pepper asked.

"No." Bunny sighed. "It's just whoever got to the Gun Department in Sporting Goods first."

"Nightmare's got this real thing about it. He really wants to get in there and see what's going on. I guess I would too if somebody'd shot at me out the third-story window."

"You?" Bunny exploded at the ceiling. "You'd be back here with your head under the pillow so fast! Why aren't you out there with them now? No, no, that's all right. I'd rather have you here safe and sound. If you got your ass full of buckshot, I just know it would be for something stupid."

"I think getting your ass full of buckshot is pretty stupid for any reason."

"Fine!" Bunny pointed an admonishing finger. "You just stick to that idea and keep momma happy. One honorable man!" Bunny's hand returned to the cup. "Yea, even for the want of one honorable man. Or woman— I'm not prejudiced. That's really what Bellona needs." Bunny regarded Kid. "You look like a sensitive sort. Haven't you ever thought that? Lord knows, we have everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to know that somewhere around there was one good and upright individual — one would do, for contrast."

"Well, we've got Calkins," Kid said. "He's a pillar of the community."

Bunny grimaced. "Darling, he owns that den of iniquity in there where I display my pale and supple body every evening. Teddy just runs it. No, Mr C won't pass, I'm afraid."

"You got that church person," Pepper offered.

"Reverend Amy?" Bunny grimaced again. "No, dear, she's sweet, in her own strange way. But that's absolutely not what I mean. That's the wrong feeling entirely."

"Not that church," Pepper countered. "The other one, over on the other side of the city."

"You mean the monastery?" Bunny was pensive as Pepper nodded. "I really don't know that much about it. Which speaks well for it, I'm sure."

"Yeah, someone mentioned that to me once," Kid said, and remembered it was Lanya.

"It would be nice to think that, somewhere inside its walls, a truly good person walked and pondered. Can you imagine it? Within the city limits? Perhaps the abbot or the mother superior or whatever they call it? Meanwhile the scorpions play down at the Emboriky."

"Maybe if you went to the monastery, somebody'd shoot at you too."

"How sad," Bunny looked at the jug again. "How probable. That wouldn't make me happy at all."

"Where is this place?" Kid asked; with the memory occurred the fantasy that Lanya, with her curiosity about it, might have gone there.

"I don't actually know," Bunny said. "Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope that down-hills and up-hills, working propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You'll find it eventually. As we are all so tired of hearing, this is a terribly small city."

"I heard it's on the other side of town," Pepper said. "Only I don't even know which side of town this is."

Kid laughed and stood up. "Well, I'm gonna go." He drained the wine, and tongued the bitter aftertaste. Wine first thing in the morning, he pondered. Well, he'd done worse. 'Thanks for breakfast."

"You're going to go? But honey, I have enough in here for brunch, lunch, high tea, and dinner!"

"Come on," Pepper said. "Take another glass. Bunny don't mind the company."

"Sorry." Kid moved his jar from Bunny's reach. "Thanks." He smiled. "I'll come back another time."

"I'll only let you go if you promise me." Bunny suddenly reached for Kid's chest. "No, no, don't jump. Mother's not going to rape you." Bunny put a finger beneath the chain that crossed Kid's belly. "We have something in common, you and I." With the other hand, Bunny lifted the white silk to show the optical chain around a slim, veined neck. "Nightmare and I. Madame Brown and Nightmare. You and Madame Brown. I wonder if I betray it by mentioning it." Bunny laughed.

Kid, unsure why, felt his cheeks heat and the rest of his body cool. I can't have absorbed the custom of reticence so completely in so little time, he thought. And still wanted anxiously and urgently to leave.

Bunny was saying, "I'll tell your girl friend what you said if I see her. You know even if you did have one of those… ahem, smiles I find just too irresistible, I'd still deliver your message. Because then, you see, I'd want you to like me, and to come back. Doing something you wanted me to do would be one way to get that. Just because I'm not a good person—" Bunny winked—"you mustn't think I'm a bad one."

"Yeah. Sure. Thanks." Kid tugged away from Bunny's finger. "I'll see you."

"Good-bye!" Pepper called from the counter where he'd gone for more wine.

Now the street sign said RUBY and PEARL. The ladder and the lady in greens were gone.

He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down "Pearl"), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an after image on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It's only, he thought, when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else's notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else's survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that's exactly where it's important and where it's not. The Kid? He thought: I'm going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can't remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I'm somebody famous? No, I do remember too well what I've done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn't what it's about. I'm too used to being liked.

Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his calloused thumb, he turned another corner.

Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings. Clap-clap, the doors. He looked at the balding driver squinting out the windshield as if for traffic.

Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.

"You got a transfer?"

"Hey, I'm sorry. If you need fare or something—" He stepped back.

But the driver motioned him on. "This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on." Clap-clap: the bus rocked forward.

An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.

A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.

A couple — he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom — were making a point of not looking at him.

Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody, and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.

Where am I — but wouldn't think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the billowy ball.

He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.

She blinked.

He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.

They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.

He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.

After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct was "Three Stars says the Times." On the next R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckle on blades.

On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.

Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, grinning and hanging his neck from slung shoulders.

announced the next marquee. He looked at broken store windows — in one was a pile of naked dummies. The street widened and once smoke rolled by so that he could make out no letters at all upon the final marquee of the strip.

Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights his own body sensation cast in the nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It's the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.

He looked out the window.

Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):

Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with canvas. A crack in another zagged edge to edge.

Kid pulled the frayed ceiling cord, then held on to the bar across the back of the seat before him till the bus, a block later and somewhat to his surprise, stopped. He jumped off the back treadle to the curb and turned; through the dirty window, he saw the couple who had not looked at him when he'd gotten on, stopped looking at him now. The bus left.

He was standing diagonally across from the five, six, seven, eight story department store. Uneasily, he backed into a doorway. (People with guns, hey?) He felt for his orchid — looked at it. It was a very silly weapon. People shooting out the windows? Several, higher up, were open. Several more were broken. Across the street a gutter grill waved a steamy plume. Why, he thought, get out here? Maybe the people in there have all gone and he could just cross the street and — the skin of his back and belly shriveled. Why had he gotten off here? It had been in response to some un-named embryo feeling, and he had leapt out of the bus, following it to term. But now it was born; and was terror.

Cross the street, motherfucker, he told himself. You get up close to the building and they can't see you out the windows. This way somebody can just aim out and pick you off if they got a penchant for it. He told himself some other things too.

A minute later, he walked to the opposite corner, a sidestep for the fire hydrant, stopped with his hand against the beige stone, breathing long, slow breaths and listening to his heart. The building took up all the block. There were no show windows down the side alley. Save from the front door, there was no place from the store he could be seen. He looked across the avenue. (From what letters still remained on that broken glass, it must have been a travel agency. And down there…? Some kind of office building, perhaps? Burn marks lapped great carbon tongues around the lower stories.) The street looked so wide — but that was because there were no cars at either curb.

He started down the alley, running his hand on the stone and occasionally glancing up for the imaginary gunman to lean out a window and blast straight down.

There's nobody in there, he thought.

There's nobody coming up behind me—

At the end of the block something — moved? No, it was a shadow between two parked trucks.

"Hey," somebody said directly across the alley in a voice just under normal. "What the fuck you think you doin', huh?"

He bruised his shoulder on the wall, then came away, rubbing it.

A thick shoulder pushed from behind a metal door across the alley. "Don't get excited." Half of Nightmare's face emerged. Kid could see half the mouth speaking: "But when I count three, you get your ass over here so fast I wanna see smoke. One. Two…" The visible eye rose to look somewhere up the department store wall, looked back down. "Three."

Nightmare caught Kid's arm, and the memory of traversed pavement was battered out by bruises on his back, knee, and jaw—"Hey, man, you don't have to—" as Nightmare snatched him through the quarter-opened doorway.

He was in four-fifths darkness with a lot of people breathing.

"God damn," Nightmare said. "I mean Jesus Christ."

He said, "You don't have to break my head," softer than he'd started to.

Somebody very black in a vinyl vest, laughed loudly. For a moment he thought it was Dragon Lady, but it was a man.

Nightmare made some disgusted sound. The laugh cut off.

Nightmare's scarred shoulder (it was the first thing Kid saw as his eyes cleared of the dark) hid half of Denny's face as the door had hidden half of Nightmare's. The other faces were darker. "You don't think so?" Nightmare still held Kid's arm. With his other hand, he grabbed Kid's hair—"Hey!" — and marched him around 180 degrees: Kid's face came up against wire, behind some dirty glass, and behind that was—

"Now look up there."

Kid focused outside the dirty window on the second story of the department store.

"You lookin' good?"

— was a window where gold letters arched: New Fashions. And behind them, a man, with a rifle in one hand, scratched his thin neck under the too large collar of his blue sports shirt, then ambled on.

"Now what" — with sweetness—"the hell are you doing here?" Nightmare yanked Kid's head back from the window before he let go. "Come on. Tell me now."

"I just—" pain sat in him blankly as anxiety—"was coming by and—" Pain subsided.

"I should break your head open, you know?"

"Hey, man, you—"

"Shut up, Copperhead," Nightmare said.

The big, bearded, redhead spade leaned in the corner. " — you don't have to do that," he finished. "I'll do it for you, if you want." He nodded at Kid in damped recognition. "Give 'im to me."

"Fuck off." Nightmare waved a peremptory fist. "You just come by, huh? We been planning this three months and you just come by?"

"Well, Pepper told me you guys were maybe down here—"

Nightmare sucked some more. "We been planning—"

"I got him," Denny said. "Let him go with us. He won't hurt nothing. I'll tell him what to do."

Nightmare glanced questioningly over his shoulder.

"Sure," Denny insisted.

In his corner, Copperhead turned his stick up behind his arm.

"He can go with my group," Denny repeated. "He won't get in the way."

Kid thought, unsure: Three against two.

Once more Nightmare flung round his fist; and growled.

"Come on," Denny said. "You come with me."

"You don't let him mess up anything!" Nightmare admonished with his chin.

"Yeah. The Kid'll be okay."

"He'd better be."

"He's a good guy, Nightmare. Come on, you said he was a good guy yourself."

Nightmare growled once more.

Kid stepped by him, tried and failed not to look at Copperhead. Copperhead blinked and started to smile. Kid decided it was worth his life to fail at anything among them again.

Denny clapped Kid's arm. "Let's go." He looked around and, louder: "You guys, let's go."

Some dozen (safer…) clustered; and they were walking through another door, following Denny. The hall of some sort of warehouse? Maybe the back corridor of another store? He looked at the faces around him. The real black guy in vinyl looked up from Kid's orchid, blinked, looked away; he wore one too, but in a leather strap.

"Here," Denny said, primarily to Kid. "We just wait here. You follow us when we go. Don't worry."

They stopped before another door. A window on one side showed the Emboriky's sandy wall.

Denny looked over the scorpions with him.

Kid thought: They top Pepper, I guess.

Denny folded his arms, leaned beside the window, occasionally looked out.

Like Copperhead's little blond brother.

They have a plan, Kid thought, caught in it

I am not thinking of Lanya.

One on wet leather, one on grit, his feet tingled. How did I get here? Did I choose to come? I want to control these people. (The tingling reached his head, subsided.) I chose. Observe and go, easy with them. He would ask Denny the details of the plan — began to tingle; so didn't. Observe? But his mind twisted in. Well. What did he think? Nightmare, with all his unreciprocity, he liked. Copperhead was efficient and detestable, a combination intriguing because, in his experience, it was unusual. Denny? Astounded, he realized: Denny had given him the clothes he wore, had first lopped the obtrusive d from his name, and now had him in custody. He squinted at two of the black guys leaning by the window (Denny glanced at Kid, at the floor, out the window) in webbed shadow. Nightmare's lieutenant… He tried to review the faces left at the hall's end; there were more than three women in the group. Prompted by the bus ride, he mused on Fenster's population percentages: What percentage were black? George? Waiting, chained and flowered (he'd seen half a dozen knives), I don't want to individualize them. Rather deal in their mass than texture. (Priest, Anthrax, Lady of Spain — these names had already been whispered around him: Devastation, Glass (the black in vinyl), California, Filament, Revelation (blond as Bunny but with brutally red skin), Angel, Dollar, D-t.) Fight that. Some two dozen strung down this grey in grey, waiting: there are probably more here who have killed by accident than by intent. That makes them dangerous. What do they become?

"That thing work?" Denny pointed to Kid's shield.

"No battery."

Denny shook his head, aping Nightmare's disgust. "You stay with me, then."

Either the people or the situation is boring. But either the situation or the people are intriguing. I cannot fix the distinction. Nor, having chosen, would it be useful. Again, I am somewhere where the waiting is more instructive than initial or terminal action. Not thinking of Lanya entails: Her green blinking when something I do surprises her, her expression (it always seems sad) seconds before laughter when something I do amuses. Is this like forgetting a name? I want to be among these people. (Where would she have gone?) It is difficult, because it grosses so little, to consider that I don't want to be with her. But these, who chew their teeth and shuffle, and engage in interesting waiting: what is their plan? Not so much afraid of what I don't know about what they do; the cool, absorptive fear I used to feel before stealing books and comics from corner kiosks, shoplifting small compasses and ornamental bullets from army-navy surplus stores.

A long time later, a long way away, someone whistled.

While Denny said, "Come on," everybody moved.

The doors flapped.

They ran across the street; scorpions were running up the alley. "In here!" was steps down and a metal door in the Emboriky's side. Kid thought: Grains struggling through the stricture of an hour-glass. He watched Denny three steps before him, paused when Denny paused (at the bottom of more steps) quickened after him (Worlds within worlds: I am in a different world.) At the first landing, Denny motioned the others ahead, glanced to make sure Kid was still behind him (Plans, completed and synchronized, sketched floor layouts, schedules for the changing guard — he hadn't seen anyone who looked that intelligent), then pulled a heavier chain from his neck and wound two lengths around his fist. "This way." The others' footsteps faded above them as they went from the army drab stairwell through a doorway.

Kid pulled his orchid from his belt loop (the loop, worn from the blade, snapped) and fitted his wrist into the harness. "What's in here?"

"Nothin'," Denny said. "I hope."

The short hall ended on a room full of cardboard boxes. (The wrapping paper in Apartment 19-A. Why?) They had fallen from half-stacked shelves, they covered the floor; they had been pushed into piles and had fallen again.

"What are we doing, huh?" Kid asked.

"Keeping our asses out of trouble," Denny said. "They wanna run around and get shot at, you got more brains than that. The store's eight stories high. Covers the whole block. We figure there's maybe ten, fifteen people in here. I think we're on the mezzanine." He glanced back again. "I hope."

They stepped out into darkness that became three-quarter dark. Kid sniffed. Something had burned in here too. His arm brushed hanging plastic. They snuck through racks of shower curtains, into bathmats and accessories.

"Sure this is the mezzanine?"

"The railing should be over there."

"You been in here before?"

"Keep it down," Denny said. "No. But I talked to somebody who has."

"What—" Kid whispered: "What is Nightmare trying to do in here?"

Denny looked back again. "You think he knows? This is a run!"

They reached towels. By an overturned counter, they walked across mounds of terrycloth. The cool, charred dark stopped at a glass balcony rail with a brass bar. There was light up from below; leaning out ("Hey, watch it," Denny said, "somebody might be down there.") Kidd could not see its source.

There're people in here, Kid thought. There're people in here, walking around with guns! He looked over the balcony, down at counters and the paths between where grey ribbons of light lay over riotous indistinguishables.

Some one, some two scorpions ran out among them.

Denny took Kid's shoulder.

Three more, like mazed mice, zagged through the aisles.

"Hey, what the hell do you people think you're—" shouted by somebody who sounded like he was in a stairwell.

Five heads, deployed among lingerie and watchbands, swiveled. Two of the scorpions went on like flash bulbs— a rooster and some sort of baby dinosaur.

Kid pulled back from the light. Denny was looking up, suddenly aware that they both now had shadows swinging across the ceiling.

"Douse your God-damn lights!" which was Nightmare.

The gun-clap filled the double story. The echo settled.

Some flat reflex that held neither fear nor excitement took him back from the rail (for a moment he saw Denny's excited, frightened face) among the dark displays. Then Denny was behind him.

"Hey, they got in! Hey, they God-damn got in—"

"Mark?" A woman. "Mark? Mark, what's down there…"

"You get back! Did they get in? You didn't see—"

Echo botched all meaning in a fourth, fricative voice.

Someone nearer tried to interrupt: "What are you—? Why don't you—? Hey, look…"

"I saw their lights! For God's sakes, I saw their lights! Somebody called out, too. I saw…"

Draped plastic dragged Kid's shoulder. And the woman standing behind it shook the rifle at them, said, "Hhhhhhhhaa…" and started walking backward.

Mutually, Kid thought, paralyzed with terror.

But Denny wasn't paralyzed. He grabbed his shield projector and disappeared in light.

Neither was the woman. She staggered backward, in the sudden glare and fired somewhere between them. The rifle gave a breathy crack, and Kid recognized her green dress: it was the woman, Lynn, he'd sat next to, his last visit to the Richards'. Now, squinting, and screaming, she held up the rifle to block the light. On the handle, lit by Denny's shield, in four-color decalcomania, Red Rider smiled at Little Beaver, surrounded by a yellow lariat. The air-pump rattled. A bee-bee in the eye, he mused: And lunged.

He thought she would throw the gun at him.

But she held it, and when she didn't let go on the second jerk (the blades of the orchid clicked on the barrel he grasped), he turned it hard and kicked her. She jerked her twisted hands away, shook them, turned. He smacked her shoulder with the rifle butt, and she dodged in darkness.

He turned, mainly to see what Denny was:

A ten-foot blob of light, colorful and disfocused, ran into itself like an amoeba erupting.

It went out, and Denny's hand came down from his neck. Kid pushed the bee-bee gun at him. "What the hell," he whispered, "are you supposed to be?" The fear made him laugh.

Waving the gun, they stalked through the mezzanine shadows.

"Huh?"

"Your shield."

"Oh. About a month ago, something happened to it. I shorted something, I guess, and the projection grid — it's plastic — melted or something. So it comes out like that. I sort of like it."

"What did it used to be?" They turned past bolts of fabric.

Denny gave a confidential whisper. "A frog."

With the woman, Kid thought all of a sudden, did that really happen?

People were screaming again. Below, Nightmare cried, "Hey, man, look at that!" and his excited laugh.

They went into a stairwell: it was pitch-black. Three steps down Kid said, "Wait up—"

Half a flight down, Denny asked, "What happened?"

"My sandal strap broke. I lost my sandal." Listening to Denny's breathing, Kid felt around with his feet, on the step above, on the one below.

Denny suddenly stopped panting and said, "Hey, thank you."

"I can't find it," Kid said. "Thanks for what?"

"I guess you saved my life."

"Huh?"

"That woman. She would have shot me if she got a chance."

"Oh." Kid's toes stubbed the wall. "It wasn't anything. She would have shot me too." He thought: a bee-bee gun? Fifteen-year-old Denny was very young all of a sudden. "Damn thing's got to be around here somewhere."

"Lemme make a light," Denny said and made one.

Kid moved to see if his sandal was under his shadow. "Maybe it fell over…" He glanced across the bannister. "Look, never mind… put that out, will you." The luminous amoeboid collapsed. The stairwell filled up with darkness, to his eyes, and over. "Can you hear anything?"

The pulsing blot on the black said, tentatively, "No."

"Come on then." Kid started down.

"Okay," was whispered in front of him.

— shot me if she got a chance: would she have if she recognized me? Or would I have wrested the rifle if I hadn't recognized her? (He collided softly with Denny's shoulder.) He thinks I saved his life. What — because he saw light — are they doing out there? Shoulders bumping, they walked into the silent first floor.

Denny stepped between racks of twilit tweed and corduroy.

Kid glanced at the figure standing just beyond the doorway beside him (which was, of course, a dressing mirror, in a wooden stand, slightly tilted so that the reflected floor sloped) and — in a gym locker-room, that opened onto the field, someone had once thrown snow at his naked back.

Looking, he re-experienced (and remembered) the moment from that Vermont winter. Then forgot it, looking at the reflection, trying to recall, now that he had stared for a third, a fourth, a fifth second what had struck him first. He raised his hand (the reflected hand raised), turned his head a little (the head turned a little) took a breath (the reflection breathed); he touched his vest (the reflection touched its khaki shirt) then suddenly raised his hand to knuckle his chin (the reflection's knuckle dug into its full, black beard) and blinked (its eyes blinked behind black plastic glass frames).

The pants, he thought, the pants are the same! There was a white thread snaking across the black denim of his thigh. He (and the reflection) picked it warily away, suddenly arching his naked toes on the carpet (the tips of the black engineer boots flexed), then once more raised his hand toward the glass. He opened his fingers (reflected fingers opened), the string dropped (the string dropped).

Between gnarled knuckles and gnawed nails he looked at the smooth undersides of fingers thinner than his own. (He's taller than I am, Kid thought inanely, taller and stockier.) He reversed his hand, to look at his own palm: the yellowed callous was lined and lined again, deep enough for scars. Between his fingers he saw the backs of fingers with only the slightest hair, only the faintest scar above the middle knuckle and a darkening at the left of the first joint. The reflection's nails, though without moons save the thumbs, were long as his adolescent dreams, and only slightly dirty. He glanced down at the other hand. Where his was caged in blades, the reflection held — his notebook? But the correspondence (he recalled the church clock with its broken hands) was too banal for relief. Wanting to cry, he gazed full at the face, which, mirroring him twitch to twitch, for all its beard and glasses (and a small brass ring in one ear!) gazed back, with confusion, desperation, and sadness.

The combination was terrifying.

"Hey," somebody said, "what you staring at?" grabbed the top of the mirror from the back, and yanked it down. It swiveled between its posts. The lower rim struck kid's shins.

Kid reeled.

"You pickin' your pimples?" Copperhead grinned across the glass, flat now like a table.

Astonished and angry, Kid lunged forward and brought his free fist down against the mirror's near edge. The far rim tore from Copperhead's loose fingers, scraped his chest, cracked his chin. The mirror drifted down again.

Roaring and clutching his jaw, Copperhead danced between the clothing racks. "Now what the fuck did you… Arggg! Oh, my fuckin' tongue, I think I bit… Ahhhh!.." The third time he looked up, he just blinked.

Kid gulped air.

A triangle of glass slipped from the frame, broke again on the rug. Beyond shatter lines he saw himself, barefoot and beardless, gasping and rubbing the chains on his chest. At his hip the orchid flickered. Some feet behind, Denny, holding something in his arms, watched.

Kid turned in quarter-light.

"I got some…" Denny looked at Copperhead, who rubbed and glowered. "Over there, they got shoes and boots and things. I brought you—" he hefted the armful—"these."

"Huh?"

" 'Cause you lost your shoe." Denny looked at Copperhead again.

Kid said: "You pickin' your pimples now?" Then he laughed. Started, it raced at hysteria. He was frightened.

A laugh, he thought, is a lot of clotted barkings. He laughed and leaned against a table covered with shirts, and motioned Denny to come.

"You only wear the right one, huh?" Denny dumped the shoes — boots mostly — on the table.

Kid picked up two, three — they were all right ones. He laughed harder, and Denny grinned.

"What are you guys making all the God-damn noise for?" Nightmare called across the aisle. "Will you cut the God-damn hollering?"

Kid choked back both his laughter and his fear, picked out a moccasin boot of soft, rough-out black.

Denny watched gravely while Kid, holding the edge in one hand — waving his orchid for balance — pushed in his foot.

Denny said, "That's the one I liked too."

Kid laughed again. Denny, higher, sharper, laughed too.

"I guess we scared them all upstairs," one girl said to Nightmare.

"You bastards over here making enough noise to scare anybody," Nightmare said.

"Hey," Kid said, "if I broke any of your teeth, I'm sorry. But don't fuck with me any more, hear?"

Copperhead mumbled and rubbed his scantly bearded jaw.

"All this shit going down, and the two of you got into it?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder.

"Nightmare," Denny said, "the Kid saved my life. Upstairs, up on the balcony. Somebody came at us with a gun, shot at us as close as you are to me. The Kid just grabbed the barrel and pulled it away."

"Yeah?"

A heavy scorpion behind Nightmare said: "Somebody was shootin' down here too."

"You goin' around savin' peoples' lives?" Nightmare said. "You got guts in you after all. Told you he was a good kid."

Kid flexed his toes. The boot gave like canvas. Fear kept lancing, looking for focus, found one: he felt vastly embarrassed. A bee-bee gun, he thought, from some scared woman I ate dinner with, read a poem to! He put his booted foot on the floor.

Denny looked hugely happy.

Nightmare pushed Copperhead's head to the side to examine it. "I wouldn't mess with the Kid if I was you. First time I saw him, I didn't like him either. But I said: If I ain't gonna kill him, I ain't gonna mess with him. That'd be best."

Copperhead pulled away from Nightmare's inspection.

"There was something about him," Nightmare went on. "You nasty, Copperhead, but you dumb. I'm tellin' you this 'cause I'm smarter than you and I thought you'd like to know how to act. The Kid's smarter than you too."

Behind teeth clamped and filled with tongue, Kid thought: does he want him to kill me, huh?

"He just grabbed the gun," Denny repeated. "By the barrel. And pulled it away."

"I'm gonna carry this on back to the place," another white scorpion said, lugging a marble slab on which crouched a large, brass lion; the blacks all seemed so silent, a reversal of his usual experience. The lamp shade kept striking the boy's pimpled, unshaven chin. "I always wanted one of these."

"You carry it," Nightmare said. "I ain't gonna help you. Let's get out of here."

"There're still people up there with guns?" Copperhead took his hand from his jaw to gesture at the dark mezzanine.

"Kid scared 'em away," the black called D-t said.

Nightmare turned and bellowed so loud his knees and elbows bent: "All right, motherfuckers! Here we are! You wanna shoot us, go on!" He glanced around at the others and giggled. "God damn it, go on, pick us off!" He started forward.

The unshaved, pimpled scorpion hefted the lion up on his belly, turned his chin away to avoid the shade, and followed.

"You up there, you better get us now! Come on, you mangy motherfucker, you chicken-shit assholes! You ain't gonna get another chance!"

This, Kid thought walking between a tall, thin black (named Spider) and the heavy one (called Cathedral: Kid slowed to let Copperhead get a step ahead of them so he could see him), is insane. Laughter: only a fragment blurted. Two of the others looked at him. Grinning, Kid shook his head.

"You up there, you better shoot!" Nightmare bawled at the mezzanine railing. "You don't, you some real scroungy cocksuckers!" He unscrewed his face and said to Priest, who walked next to him:

"I heard you over on the other side, hollering. What were you doing?"

"There was somebody in there. I don't think he had a gun. I chased him up the—"

"You better do it now, you son of a bitch!" Nightmare turned back to the guy beside him. "Yeah?… Do it, you do it, cocksucker, if you're gonna do it, do it now!"

"— chased him up the stairs."

Lady of Spain had kicked in the board bottom of a display case. Copperhead looked up, with consternation and surprise, and put his boot through the glass case in front of him, first the top shelf, then the bottom, then once on the other end; glass and watches scattered the rug. Gasping, he loped to the next. Crash! and crash! and crash-crash-crash! All their eyes, Kid noted (trying to recall what it meant), are red glass.

Another thin black frowned toward Kid, his lids narrowing over blank crimson balls. He looked about Denny's age.

"You real chicken-shit up there, you know!"

CRASH-CRASH!

"You ain't worth shit, god damn it!"

CRASH!

"Eat my shit…!" Nightmare looked around and smiled. "Up your ass!.. Fuck you!"

Lady of Spain pushed a whole case over; it smashed into the one behind it. She grinned at Copperhead who didn't see; others laughed.

"They got the door locked." Someone jiggled the handle.

"Here you go…" Nightmare said, grabbing for the lion.

"Hey, no—"

Glass exploded over the pavement. The grey street was momentarily obscured by myriad bright prisms. "Come on!"

Kid stepped gingerly across the shards, remembering: On broken glass, go flatfooted.

The white, unshaven scorpion stood (among others moving) looking at his lamp. The marble base was in two pieces, the shade crushed. Finally he stooped, caught up the injured object — a marble chip fell but the cracked base stayed amazingly together — and shuffled on, kicking glass.

"Come on…" Denny tugged Kid's arm.

Kid started walking again.

"A God-damn bus!" which hove around the corner. "How do you like that!"

Some stood in the street now, waving their arms.

The bus pulled to the curb. Nightmare at their head, they crowded between the folding doors. Shoulders collided. Through them, Kid saw the bald, black driver's worried face.

"You gonna take us home!" the thin black was saying, while the others tried to push past. "Now that's convenient, brother! You gonna take us—!"

"AHHHH—!" shrill and directly into Kid's ear.

Kid flinched and turned (A gun crack? There!) and grabbed the scorpion opening and closing his mouth and falling. Hooking the post by the front seat with the elbow of his bladed arm, Kid swung the wounded youth inside. As he fell, the unshaven guy (and some others) no longer holding his lion, clambered over them—"Watch it—!" Crouched at the top of the bus steps, Kid saw the crushed lamp shade leaning against the sill. He grabbed the socket stalk, wrenched the whole thing up into the bus and as the doors closed he heard ping-CRACK! The bus was moving: ping-CRACK!

He stood — everyone else was crouched in seats or between them.

Even the driver was hunkering over his wheel.

Outside, Kid saw the figure in a third story window of the sandstone wall (right beside the gold i in Emboriky)—sighting along the rifle, eye to the finder.

The broken marble cut at his shin, joggling. Thirty pounds? As he pulled the lion up onto his forearm (so not to blunt his orchid which stuck from underneath) the bus lurched. "Here." The stubbled face turned up from the seat and blinked. "Here."

The scorpion wrapped his arms around it — the shade came completely off and joggled around the post — dropped his face, then raised it, at the gasping.

Kid turned, holding the back of the seat.

Denny stopped at the feet of the wounded scorpion.

A woman in a grey hat, jammed against the window next to Nightmare, said, "Oh dear! Oh, he's terribly hurt—" then put both hands flat against the pane when Kid looked at her, and began to cry. Then she stopped, faced forward again with her eyes closed.

From a rear seat: "Say…"

No one said.

"…what happened to you guys?"

No one answered.

Kid took off his orchid and poked a prong around for his belt loop till he saw (remembering) it had broken. So he hung it from his chain and squatted.

"Annnnnnnn—waa! They got my… arm. I… Annnn!"

Denny looked up: his very blue eyes were bloodshot.

"Annnnnn—ah. Awww?… Oh, hey. Awwwee…!"

Warm blood touched Kid's toes and spread.

"You want to make a tourniquet or something…" Denny suggested.

"Awwwwwwww—Ahhh…"

"Yeah."

"Here!" The colored girl in the front seat leaned forward holding a scarf, and almost dropped it when Kid reached. The scorpion panted like a woman in childbirth while Kid tightened the looped cloth on the handle of a knife one of the others gave him. "You gotta loosen it," he told Spider who was helping. "Every five minutes or so. So he doesn't get gangrene or something." Then he sat back on his heels, jogging with the bus. The driver looked back, then turned a corner.

Nightmare, forearms across his knees, was watching them with interest. "You really into this hero bit. Tourniquet, huh? That's pretty good. Yeah, I like that."

Kid stood, about to look disgusted: pain shot up his calves from the minutes spent crouched. So he didn't look anything, walked to Denny's seat, and sat.

Across the aisle, the old man with his head in his coat collar, who had been on the bus when it had been going in the other direction, pretended to sleep.

"You okay?" Denny asked. "You look…"

Kid turned to the boy (two others, a scorpion and a passenger, were just turning away): Denny rubbed beneath his nose, blinked his blue—

The memory of crimson eyes in the Emboriky's lobby made Kid open his mouth: the eyes that watched now, intently and compassionately, became horrible as the discovered significance of what he had forgotten. Surprise blotted another memory — he felt it fade from his mind, struggled to keep it, failed — of something passed in a looking glass. What could he have seen in a mirror? Himself? Nothing else? I'm mad, he thought: like echo, This is insane, he had said there. Stripped of context — what had happened in the department store? — he shook before what it could have signified. Why did I say, This is insane? Something shook in him. His head waggled.

"Kid…?" which Kid was desperately aware was not his name.

Denny's hand had been on his forearm. He knew because now it moved away. Released, he tried to remember having been held, fixed by the warmth that was fading, had faded. Denny rubbed his upper lip again.

Breathing heavily, Kid sat back in the jogging seat.

Outside, movie marquees passed in cryptic cavalcade.

4

Under high, electric notes, low, wet ones burbled and troughed and erupted. A metallic chord; another metallic chord. Between them: tape-hiss.

Kid cleared his throat; it became a cough.

"Yes?" Reverend Tayler held her pencil by both ends. "Can I help you?"

"I'm hungry," Kid said. "Um…" He pulled his hands from the half-door's sill. "Some… somebody told me you used to have a free supper here?"

"Oh, we discontinued that some time back—" Behind her, like revolving eyes, the spools turned.

Kid took a breath. "Yeah, I know…"

"Did you fall… or hurt yourself?"

"Huh? No, I… no."

"You're just hungry?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Really, we're not providing that service any longer, you see. It was far too…" Now she let her eyes drop, sucked her teeth, and considered: "Well, perhaps coffee? And…" She looked up. "Maybe there's something… and you can sit down for a little while."

"Yes, ma'am."

Wheels and swivel roared and squeaked through the music as she pushed away her chair. "Come with me." She stepped to the door, fluttering black robes.

He stepped back while she came through, followed her across the vestibule—"Now, you understand I'm not establishing a tradition. Just this once: I am not opening up the Evening Aid Program again. This is for you tonight. Not for your friends tomorrow." — and down a stairway.

"Yes, ma'am."

At the bottom, Reverend Tayler turned on a caged worklight hung on a nail. A high windowsill, level with the street outside, went from blue to black. The heavy cord curved up the steps. "Let's see what we have."

Columns fanned thick shadows across the basement auditorium. Folding chairs were stacked by one wall. A half-collapsed sofa sat by another. Before the closed curtains of a stage was an upright piano, its works bare.

"We're having a service this evening in the chapel upstairs. In just a little while. Maybe if you feel up to it, you can come upstairs to the chapel and join us."

Another high window was open. The slight gust made him look instead of answer. Three leaves jittered to the sill's edge; one spun, before falling. It ticked down the wall, clicked on the piled chairs, to stop at the scuffed linoleum, like an erratic tick-tocking at last run down.

"In here." Reverend Tayler waited by another door.

Inside, she snapped on another worklight.

Across a long, newspaper-covered table, Kid saw a wall hung with pots, potato mashers, colanders, and shelves stacked with thick, church-kitchen crockery. "We were able to get bread for a while, I mean in large quantities. So we could make tinned meat sandwiches — that's when we had Evening Aid. But we lost our source. Without the staff of life, such a program dries up quickly. Beans take too long to cook and I didn't have the help for it." From a wall cabinet she took a can dotted with white paper where the label had been removed. "Beef stew."

He took it from her.

"Taking the labels off," she explained to his questioning expression, "is one minor way to discourage pilfering. I don't like to put locks on things. Snoopers look in on shelves full of blank cans, and don't know whether it's rat poison, motor oil, or green peas, I just have to remember what's where." She tried to look sly. "I have my own system. You must know how these camp stoves work if you've been here any length of time…?"

"Yeah," wondering whether he should explain that he'd learned, however, on a camping trip when he was twelve.

"The urn there is hot. I keep it going all day. I'm sure I'm drinking too much coffee. Can I more or less leave you on your own? I've got to get back to my notes."

"Sure. Thank you, ma'am."

"Wash things up; and let me know when you leave?"

He nodded.

At the kitchen door, she frowned, dark and broad. "You're sure you didn't have some sort of accident? I mean, you're all smudged up there on the side."

"Huh? … oh, I'm all right now. Really."

Setting her lips at a blunt, black roundness, she nodded curtly, and left.

Looking over the pans and pots, he thought: No can-opener, and panicked.

It lay beside the stove.

He twisted and twisted till the last metal scollop popped, and the can-top, lapped with gravy, began to sink. He looked at the stove, at the can; then something happened in his gut. He went in with fingers, shoved grease, meat, and vegetable chunks into his mouth, licked cold gravy from his hand, wiped what ran on his chin with his forefinger and sucked that.

His stomach bubbled, clamped twice, hard, and he had a mouthful of gas still tasting of Bunny's wine. Anticipating nausea, he stopped, for several deep breaths. Then he took the can out, sat on the sagging sofa, and pushed his hand back into the ragged ring.

He chewed and licked and swallowed and sucked and licked.

When the coppered inside was clean except for the bottom corner for which his middle finger had been too thick, he returned to the kitchen, rinsed the can, and let black coffee steam into it from the urn's plastic spigot. Hot tin between his hands made him aware of his dry left, his sticky right.

Back on the couch, holding it between his knees, he watched the steam and grew sleepy, tasted (hot, bitter) some, decided he didn't want it, and let his eyes close…

"Yes, he's right here," Reverend Tayler was saying.

Kid blinked awake. He had put the coffee on the arm of the sofa before he drifted off.

"I don't think he's feeling too — oh."

Kid took the can in his fist to hide behind sipping — tepid.

"Ah," said Mr Newboy. "Thank you."

Kid set the coffee on the arm again.

"Ah," Reverend Tayler repeated, but in such a different tone Kid only identified the similarity seconds later, "you got yourself something to eat?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good." Reverend Tayler beamed at Newboy, swept around him, and said, disappearing, "You'll excuse me. I must get back."

"I'm terribly glad I found you!" Mr Newboy carried a briefcase before him, with naked eagerness on his face.

"What'd you want?" Kid's body still tingled from sleep. "How did you know I was here?"

Newboy hesitated before the couch (Kid glanced at the plush and thought: It is pretty dusty), sat. "Just another evidence of the smallness of the city. Your friend in the bar — the big, blond man—"

"Tak?"

"— Yes, that's him. He saw you getting off a bus and coming in this direction. He thought you'd eventually get to Teddy's. When you didn't, I decided to wander over here in case you were still around. I'd never seen this place. And I'm going to be leaving Bellona, soon. Tomorrow morning, actually."

"Oh," Kid said. "He just saw me?… and you're leaving? Hey, that's too bad." Fighting the tingling and the sluggishness, he pushed himself up and started toward the kitchen. "You want some coffee, Mr Newboy?"

"Thank you," Newboy said, and called, "Yes."

"What—" through the doorway—"did you want to see me about?"

In the white crock, the coffee ploshed and plopped. Outside Mr Newboy was unsnapping his case.

"I don't know where the milk and sugar is."

"I take it black."

Kid released the plastic spigot, moved a second cup under for himself, (the stuff in the can: cold) and carried them, out to the couch, the foreknuckles of both hands burning.

"Oh, thank you."

"What—" sitting next to Newboy—"did you want to see me about?"

"Well. I thought you'd like to take a look at these." Wide ribbons of paper came up from the plaid lining. "And these." Now a sheaf of black paper. "And this. This is the cover."

On thick, textured paper, were the centered letters:

He took the—"Oh, my hands aren't too clean…"

"Go on, this is just a sample."

— took the cover which suddenly curved down as he held it by the corner, propped it with his other hand and read again:

"And those are the galleys, which you have to look over." Mr Newboy indicated the papers lying now across Kid's knee. "Fortunately, it isn't too long. Thirty-six pages, I believe. Counting cover. There may be some awful mistakes. It'll be printed on slightly better paper than that. I'd argued for a larger typeface—"

"— but Roger explained, something I suppose we're all aware of, that here in Bellona we often have to make do."

"Oh, yeah." Kid looked up and let the title of his book embed that part of his consciousness reserved for reality, while he expunged it from the part called dream. The transition came easy, but with a firmness and inevitability he associated with comprehending violence. He was joyous, and upset, but could just distinguish that the reactions were contiguous, not consequent.

"These are the illustrations. Again, we have Roger's sense of theatricality to contend with. I'm not at all sure they're in good taste. Frankly, I don't think poetry needs illustration. But he asked me to show them to you: the decision is yours, ultimately."

He was about to say, They're all black, when he caught glintings in the matt stock.

"They're black ink on black paper," Mr Newboy explained. "The only way you can really see them is to hold them up to the light and look at them from the side. Then the light catches on the ink. Roger feels that since the poems take so much of their imagery from the city, he's used some of what he feels are the most striking pictures from his newspaper. But he's printed them this way — I don't believe there's been any effort to correlate particular pictures with particular poems."

Kid nodded. "That's a good idea." He tilted another picture to catch, in sudden silverpoint, burning buildings, people gaping, and one child, in the foreground, leering into the camera. "Oh, yeah!" He laughed, and looked through the others.

"Have you any idea when you'll be able to look over the proofs? The Times is notorious for typos. Your book was set on the same machinery."

"I could do it now." Kid put down the pictures and picked up the galleys. "How many pages did you say it was?"

"Thirty-six. I went over it once myself against your notebook — we'd rather hoped for a typescript; and when you pushed that into my hands, that evening, I was a bit worried. But your fair copies are very neat. You know, you have at least four completely distinct handwritings?"

"It's never been too good."

"But your printing's perfectly legible." Newboy pawed in the case. "Here…" He gave Kid the notebook.

It fell open in Kid's hands:

Poetry, fiction, drama — I am only interested in…

Kid turned back the book to the page with his poem (a middle draft of Elegy), then picked up the galleys. Moving ribbon from ribbon on his lap, saw, printed, ELEGY go by, and caught his breath. The letters were so much sharper and more serene than ink on notebook paper.

He let a random line of print tug his eyes across. Words detonated memories intense enough to blot the fact that they were not his — or, at least, this wasn't… or… Behind his lips the teeth hung open; now his lips pulled apart. He took a silent breath. My poem, he thought, terribly excited, terribly happy.

"I couldn't help reading some of your notes. I've always found it amusing, writers pouring out pages and pages of analysis on why they can not write — lord knows I've done it myself."

"Huh?"

"There were many, many places where I found your aesthetic analysis let me into some of the more difficult things you were trying to do in the actual work." Mr Newboy picked up his coffee cup. "You have a fascinating critical mind, and quite a bit of insight into the problems of the poem. It made me feel closer to you. And of course, the most important thing, is that the poems themselves deepen considerably in the light of your—"

Kid's head was shaking. "Oh…" He closed his mouth again, opened it, with a moment's urge, luminous in its strength, to allow misconception to become deception.

Newboy paused.

Blinking through the after urge, the pause indicating he was already found out (he pawed his fragmented memory for some previous intent to deceive, to support him in what he wished to reveal), said: "All that other stuff — hey, I didn't write that."

Newboy's grey head went a bit to the side.

"I just found the notebook." The desperation of embarrassment subsided, his heart was left hammering heavily and slowly. "It was all filled up with writing, but just on one side of the page. So I used the other sides for… my stuff." A final pulse of heat behind his eyes.

"Oh," Newboy said trying to retain his smile, "this is embarrassing. You didn't write those journal sections?"

"No, sir. Only the poems."

"Oh, I… well, I guess… oh, really I am sorry." Newboy let the smile become laughter. "Well, I really feel that, once more, I've made myself look quite silly."

"You? No," Kid said, and discovered himself angry. "I should have said something. I just didn't think of it when I gave it to you that evening. Really."

"Of course," Mr Newboy said. "No, I simply mean your poems are your poems. They exist of themselves. In the same way nothing I could say about them is going to change what they are, nothing you could say — or anything I mistakenly thought you said — is going to change that either."

"You think that's true?"

Newboy pursed his lips. "Actually, I don't know whether it's true or not. But truly I don't see how any poet can write who doesn't think so."

"Why are you going away, Mr Newboy?" Kid had begun the question to make a connection: But now it seemed equally apt for severing one, and Newboy's embarrassment and his own confusion seemed better left. "Can't you work here very well? Bellona doesn't stimulate you?"

Newboy accepted the severance, acknowledging his acceptance with another sip. "In a way, I suppose you're right. Every once in a while something comes along to remind me that I am — though not as often as I would sometimes like — after all, a poet. What is it Mr Graves says? All poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons. Well, here the seasons do not change. So I'm leaving." Behind coiled steam, the grey eyes gleamed. "After all. I'm only a visitor. But circumstances seem to have contrived to change that status with a rapidity thoroughly disquieting." He shook his head. "I've met some very pleasant people, seen some fascinating things, had a wealth of rich experiences — just the way the city was represented to me. I certainly haven't been disappointed."

"But not all of the things that happened to you were pleasant?"

"Are they ever? No, Roger has arranged to get me as far as Helmsford. There some people can take me to Lakesville. There's still transportation there. I can get a bus across to the airport at Pittsblain. Then — back to civilization."

"What was so unpleasant here?"

"Not the least was my initial meeting with you."

"At Teddy's?" Kid was surprised.

Newboy frowned. "Outside the wall, in back of Roger's."

"Oh. Oh, yeah. That." He sat back a little on the couch. The projector rolled between his vest flaps. He did not glance down, and felt uncomfortable.

"Inside those walls, I'm afraid," Newboy pondered, "are all the intrigues and personality clashes that — well, that one might imagine at a place like Roger's. And they are beginning to bore me." He sighed. "I suppose such things have driven me from one city to another all my life. No, I can't say Bellona was misrepresented. But even for me, at my age, not all of its lessons have been kind."

"Jesus," Kid said. "What's been happening at—"

"There are, if I can oversimplify," Newboy went on (Kid took a long breath and picked up his coffee), "two concepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not produce volumes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life totters and sways and often plummets into chaos. It is presumptuous of us to judge him unhappy: or, when he is obviously unhappy, to judge the source of it. Be thankful for him, he lends art all its romance, its energy, and creates that absolutely necessary appeal to the adolescent mind without which adult maturation is impossible. If he is a writer, he hurls his words into the pools of our thought. Granted the accuracy of the splashes, the waves are tremendous and glitter and flash in the light of our consciousness. You Americans — not to mention the Australians — are extraordinarily fond of him. But there is another concept, a more European concept — one of the few concepts Europe shares with the Orient — that includes Spenser and Chaucer, but excludes Shakespeare, that includes the Cavaliers and the Metaphysicals, but bypasses the Romantics: the artist who gives his all to life, to living within some sort of perfected ideal. Sometime in his past, he has discovered he is… let us say, a poet: that certain situations, certain convergences of situations — usually too complicated for him to understand wholly, as they propitiously juxtapose conscious will with unconscious passion — they something-between-cause-and-allow a poem. He dedicates himself to living, according to his concepts, the civilized life in which poetry exists because it is part of civilization. He risks as much as his cousin. He generally produces fewer works, with greater intervals between them, and constantly must contend with the possibility that he will never write again if his life should so dictate — a good deal of his civilized energies must go toward resigning himself to the insignificance of his art, into the suppression of that theatrical side of his personality of which ambition is only a small part. He stands much closer to the pool. He does not hurl. He drops. Accuracy is again all-important: there are some people who can hit bull's eye from a quarter of a mile while others cannot touch the target at ten feet. Given it, the patterns and ripples this sort of artist produces can be far more intricate, if they lack the initial appearance of force. He is much more a victim of the civilization in which he lives: his greatest works come from the periods art historians grossly call 'conducive to aesthetic production.' I say he stands very close to the pools; indeed, he spends most of his time simply gazing into them. Myself, I rather aspire to be this second type of artist. I came to Bellona to explore. And I find the entire culture here — I cannot be kind — completely parasitic… saprophytic. It infects — even inside Roger's carefully closed estate. It's not conducive to my concept of the good life, therefore, if only tertiarily, it damages all my impulses toward art. I would like to be a good person. But it's too difficult here. I suspect that's cowardly, but it's true."

The coffee, prompting a memory that would not resolve, was again cold in his mouth. "Mr Newboy—" he swallowed and was pensive—"do you think a bad person can be a good poet? … or is that a silly question?"

"Not if you're essentially questioning yourself. I mean, we suspect Villon went on to murder and died by the noose. But — and what a dreadfully unpopular notion — he might just as well have simply been writing about the strange people he knew around him; and, when they got him into trouble, gave up his bad company, abandoned writing, changed his name, and went on to die a peaceful burger in another town. From a perfectly practical point of view — and one would have had to have written fairly well to appreciate the practicality — I would imagine the answer is that it would be quite difficult. But it would be absurd of me to pronounce it impossible. Frankly, I don't know."

When Kid looked up, he was surprised to see the elderly gentleman smiling straight at him.

"But that question is just your natural idealism speaking." Newboy turned a little on his cushion. "All good poets tend to be idealistic. They also tend to be lazy, acrimonious, and power-crazed. Put any two of them together and they invariably talk about money. I suspect their best work tries to reconcile what they are with what they know and feel they should be — to fit them into the same universe. Certainly those three are three of my own traits, and I know they often belong as well to some very bad men. Should I triumph over my laziness, however, I suspect I would banish all feeling for economical expression which is the basis of style. If I overcame my bitterness, beat it out of my person for good, I'm afraid my work would lose all wit and irony. Were I to defeat my power-madness, my craving for fame and recognition, I suspect my work would become empty of all psychological insight, not to mention compassion for others who share my failings. Minus all three, we have work only concerned with the truth, which is trivial without those guys that moor it to the world that is the case. But we are wandering toward questions of doing evil versus the capacity for doing evil, innocence, choice, and freedom. Ah well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us that." Newboy glanced at the ceiling and shook his head. Dulled organ music came from the stair. He looked down into his case.

"I guess what I want to know, really—" Kid's thumb had stained the galley margin: momentary panic. "Do you think these—" and four fingers marked the paper in a sweep—"that these are any good?" There will be other copies, he thought to ease himself. There will be. "I mean, really."

Newboy sucked his teeth and put the case on the floor against his knees. "You have no realization what an absurd question that is. Once, when I used to find myself in this situation, I would always answer 'no' automatically, 'I think they're worthless.' But I'm older, and I realize now all I was doing was punishing people who asked such questions for their stupidity, and was only being 'honest' in the most semantically vulgar sense. I really cannot think about poetry in such absolute terms as 'good' and 'bad', or even in the more flexible terms you'd probably be willing to accept in their place: 'well done' or 'badly done'. Perhaps it is because I suffer from all the aesthetic diseases of the times which cause the worthless to be praised and the worthy to be ignored. Well, they have ravaged all ages. But you must leave open the possibility that poetry means far too much to me to vulgarize it in the way you are asking me to do. The problem is essentially one of landscape. I've already made it clear, I hope, that I, personally, have enjoyed the particular complex of interchange between you and your poems, both as I have perceived it and, to my personal embarrassment, misperceived it. If you think my distance insulting, dwell on the complexities in it. But let me pose an example. You know of Wilfred Owen?" Newboy did not wait for Kid's nod. "Like many young men, he wrote his poems during the War; he seems to have hated that war, but he fought in it, and was machine-gunned to death while trying to get his company over the Sambre Canal when he was younger than you. He is generally considered, in English, the greatest war poet. But how is one to compare him to Auden or O'Hara, Coleridge or Campion, Riding or Roethke, Rod or Edward Taylor, Spicer, Ashbery, Donne, Waldmen, Byron or Berrigan or Michael Dennis Browne? As war— the experience or the concept — stays a vital image, Owen will stay a vital poet. If war were to be both abolished and forgotten, then Owen would become a minor figure, interesting only as a purely philological point in the development of the language, as an influence on more germane figures. Now your poems wrap themselves around and within this city as Cavafy's twist and refract about pre-World War Two Alexandria, as Olson's are caught in the ocean light of mid-century Gloucester, or Villon's in medieval Paris. When you ask me the worth of these poems, you are asking me what place the image of this city holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times, as I wander in this abysmal mist, when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, with no relation to what I know as civilization, better obliterated than abandoned. I can't judge because I am still in it. Frankly I will not be able to judge once out of it, for the bias that will remain from once having been a visitor."

Kid, halfway through the second poem in proof, looked up at the silence.

"The worth of our work?" (Kid dropped his eyes and continued reading.) "People who do not create are always sure that on some inchoate level the creator knows it. But the roster of Nobel laureates I have come so near to joining three times now is cluttered with mediocre writers who have neither elegance nor depth, readability nor relevance: lauded during their lifetimes, they died, I'm sure, convinced they had substantially advanced their languages. Your Miss Dickinson died equally convinced no one would ever read a word she wrote; and she is one of the most luminous poets your country has produced. An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit. Private ones? They are even more misleading."

Kid turned over the next galley. "You're talking to yourself." Eyes down, he wondered what expression was on Newboy's face.

"Most certainly," Newboy said after a longish pause.

"You're really that scared your own stuff isn't any good."

Newboy paused.

In the pause, Kid considered looking up but didn't.

"When I'm not actually working, I have no choice: I must consider it worthless. But when I'm engaged in it, writing, revising, shaping and polishing, by the same process, I have to consider it the most important thing in the world. And I'm very suspect of any other attitude."

Kid looked up now: the expression leaving Newboy's face was serious. But laughter marks were replacing it. "Ah, when I was a young man, as young as I once thought you were, I recall I labored with incredible diligence over a translation of Le Bateau ivre. Here I am at the respectable, if a bit garrulous, threshold of old age, and last night, in the front library at Roger's, after everyone else had gone up, I sat there working — by hurricane lanterns: the electricity is off in that wing now — on Le Cimetiere marin. The impulse was thoroughly the same." He shook his head, still laughing. "Have you found any mistakes?"

"Um," Kid said. "Not in the first three sheets."

"I spent yesterday and most of today checking it against your fair copy. I've put a couple of queries here and there. You'll get to them as you go through."

"Where?"

"The first one's near the front." Newboy set down his cup and leaned over Kid's shoulder. "Next sheet. There. It's the poem you had the loose copy of it on blue paper just stuck in the notebook. It looked like somebody else had written it out for you. Did you perhaps intend a comma in the third line? I checked it back with the version in your notebook, and neither one has it. Except for the phrasing, I wouldn't have—"

"The copy in the notebook has a comma, doesn't it?" Kid frowned and flipped handwritten pages. His eyes stumbled among words, trying not to be caught between any two, till he found the notebook page. "It's not there." He looked up. "I thought I put one."

"Then you did intend it. Here, use my pencil. Just cross out the question mark I put by the line. I had a feeling you might — what's the matter?"

"I thought I had a comma there. But I didn't."

"Oh, I'm always discovering I've left out words I was sure I wrote down in first draft—"

"You…"

Mr Newboy started to question, grew uncomfortable with that, so returned his eyes to the line.

"…just read it and knew I'd wanted one there?"

Newboy began to say several things, but stopped (after a little nod) before voice, as if curious what silence would affect.

Two emotions clawed the inside of Kid's skull. The fear, as it rose, he questioned: Is this some trick of autonomic nerves that causes the small of my back to dampen, my heart to quicken, my knees to shake like motors; it was only a comma, the smallest bit of silence that I have misplaced — only a pause. I am quaking like Teddy's candles. The joy, mounting over, obliterating, and outdistancing it, was at some sensed communion. (Newboy had known!) To restrain it, Kid told himself: Between two phrases like that, why shouldn't Newboy be able to tell? He lowered his head to read on: his eyes filled with water and the emotion tore through such logic. And the darkness under. He anticipated their collision to make some wave. But like two swirls of opposite spin, they met — and canceled. He blinked. Water splashed from his lashes across the back of his hand.

There had been a recurrent pain on the back of his right shoulder that, three or four years ago, had intrigued him because it would be a pulsing annoyance for hours or even days and then would, in a second, vanish: no proddings or contortions could recall it. He hadn't for years, till now.

Tensing his shoulders, he read the next poem, and images set to at the backs of his eyes, their substance and structure familiar, their texture alien, alien and grave. He kept blinking, to finish the line in his mind; eyes opened to finish it on the page, where it demanded new bulbs. Boxes of glass ticked their clear covers on stunned marvels. Things were safe, and that was so horrifying his heart was pulsing in the little pit at the base of his throat as though he were swallowing rock after rock. "Mr Newboy?"

"Mmm?" Papers shuffled.

Kid looked over.

Newboy was going through the illustrations.

"I don't think I'm gonna write any more poems."

Newboy turned another black page. "You don't like them, reading them over?"

Kid peeled off the next paper ribbon. The first two words of the first line of the first poem were transposed—

"Here!" Mr Newboy offered his pencil. "You found a mistake?" He laughed. "Now see, you don't have to write quite so hard as that! Wait! You'll tear the paper!"

Kidd unhunched his shoulder, unbent his spine, and let his fingers relax about the yellow shaft. He breathed again. "They're going to fix that, aren't they?"

"Oh, yes. That's why you're looking it over now."

Kid read, and remembered: "The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. That's pretty strange. The parts I don't like — well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."

"Then why aren't you going to write any—?"

But Kid had found another mistake.

"Here," Newboy said. "Why don't you lay the galleys on your notebook so you can write more easily."

While Kid passed the halfpoint of the next galley, Newboy mused: "Perhaps it's good you're not going to write any more: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it. Since you told me you weren't responsible for those notes, I've been trying to figure out whether it just happened or whether you were making a conscious reference: You managed to reproduce, practically verbatim, one of my favorite lines from Golding's translation of the Metamorphosis."

"Mmm?"

"Are you familiar with it?"

"It's a big green and white paperback? That's the one Shakespeare used for some of his plays. I only read about the first half. But I didn't take any lines from it, at least not on purpose. Maybe it just happened?"

Mr Newboy nodded. "You amaze me. And when you do, I suspect I'm rather a smaller person for having such petty notions in the first place. Well, the line I was referring to was from the last book anyway. So you hadn't gotten to that one yet. Tell me, who do you think should read your poems once they're published?"

"I guess people who… well, whoever likes to read poetry."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. I read it more than I read anything else, I guess."

"No, that doesn't surprise me."

"You know, in bookstores for the schools I used to go to, or down in the Village in New York, or in San Francisco, they got whole sections for poetry. You can read a lot of it there."

"Why poetry?"

Kid shrugged. "Most poems are shorter than stories."

Newboy, Kid saw, was suppressing a laugh. Kid felt embarrassed.

"And you're not going to write any more?"

"It's too hard." Kid looked down. "I mean if I kept it up, I think it would kill me, you know? I never did it before, so I just didn't understand."

"That's sad — no, I can be more honest than that. It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art."

"Yeah." Kid's eyes came up. "I know. I really know that. And I wish — I wish I didn't frighten you as much as I do. What is it? What's the matter with you, now?"

"Nothing." Newboy shook his head.

"I wish I didn't," Kid repeated. "The last poem…" Kid began to turn through the galleys. "What did you think of that one, I mean compared to all the rest of them?"

"The one in meter? Well, it isn't finished. We printed it up to where you broke off. That's another thing I wanted to query about—"

"How do you like what there is?"

"Frankly, I didn't think it was as strong as many of the others. When I went back over it the fourth or fifth time, I began to see that the substance of it was probably on its way to a great deal of richness. But the language wasn't as inventive. Or as clean."

Kid nodded. "The rhythm of natural speech," Kid mused. "I had to write it. And it was pretty bad, wasn't it? No, I don't think I'll write any more. Besides, I'm probably never going to have another book published…?" He raised an eyebrow at Newboy.

Newboy, lips pursed, considered. "I could say that I sincerely don't believe that should be a consideration. Or that, as I remember it, it was something like eleven years between my first and second book of poems. Or that I think you're asking for confirmation of something that really doesn't have anything to do with poetry."

"What else could you say?"

Newboy's lips unpursed. "I could say, 'Yes, possibly you won't.' "

Kid grinned quickly and went back to correcting.

"It's very silly to commit yourself to something like that, if you're going to write or not. If you wrote those, you will write more. And if you promise yourself you won't, you'll just be very unhappy when you break the promise. Yes, a good part of me doesn't like the idea of an artist giving up art. But this is another part of me talking. Believe me."

Kid's mind was on Lanya.

He pulled it away, to reflect on: Golding's Metamorphosis. He'd seen the book on a dozen shelves in a dozen bookstores, picked it up as many times, read the back cover, the first page of the introduction, flipped through three or four pages, unable to read more than three or four lines on each. (The same thing, he realized, had happened with Pilgrimage.) The first half? He'd been unable to read a whole page! Poetry, he thought. If it makes me start lying to a guy like this, I should stop writing it.

Kid corrected the last half-dozen sheets in silence drenched with vision. He flipped them, rattling like dry feathers, together.

He leaned on the couch arm (he breathed gently: but felt breath's coolness only on the left side of his upper lip) and looked at the paper over his lap. I've just corrected the last half-dozen sheets, he thought: his upper arms were bone tired. Pains pulsed in his finger joints. He loosened his grip on the pencil.

The title-page, he noticed now, read:

He started to smile; the muscles of his mouth blocked it.

Mr Newboy, gone to the kitchen, returned now with another steaming cup.

"I guess—" the smile broke through—"you better take the 'by' off the title page."

"Ah," Mr Newboy raised his chin. "That does bring up a sort of strange subject. I talked to your friend Mr Loufer. And he told me about—"

"I mean it's okay," Kid said. "I think it would be a good idea if it came out with no name. Anonymously."

"Mr Loufer said that you're — rather picturesquely — called 'the Kid' by many of your friends?"

"That would look pretty stupid," Kid said. " 'Poems by the Kid.' I think it would be better with nothing." Somewhere beneath the thing inside that made him smile, there was the beginnings of embarrassment. He sighed, still smiling.

Gravely, Mr Newboy said: "If you really feel that way, I'll tell Roger. Are you finished looking them over?"

"Yeah."

"That was quick. How were they?"

"Uh, fine. I mean not that many mistakes."

"That's good."

"Here."

"Oh, are you sure you wouldn't like to keep the notebook?"

It was opened back in the middle. Kid lowered the papers to his lap. To avoid the feeling of confusion he let his eyes take the page's opening lines:

Newboy was saying, "You're all sure now that you don't want to write again. But be certain, inspiration will come, arriving like one of Rilke's angels, so dazzled by its celestial journey it will have completely forgotten the message entrusted to it yet effectively delivering it merely through its marvelous presence—"

"Here!" Kid thrust out galleys and notebook. "Please take it! Please take it all. Maybe… I mean, maybe you'll want to check something else." He watched his extended hands sway to his thumping heart.

"All right," Newboy said. "No, you keep the notebook. You just may want it again." He took the papers, and hefted his case against his hip. "I'll take these back to Roger this evening." The papers rustled down in the case. "I probably won't be seeing you again. I really don't know how long the printing will take. I wish I could see the whole project through." He snapped a last snap. "I'm sure he'll send me a copy when it's done — however your mail system works here. Good-bye." His hand came forward. "I've really enjoyed the time we've spent together, the talks we've had. Do say good-bye to your little girl friend for me?"

Kid shook. "Yes, sir. Um… thank you very much." The notebook was on the floor, one corner over Kid's bare foot.

Newboy walked to the steps.

"Good-bye," Kid repeated into the silence.

Newboy nodded, smiled, left.

Kid waited for the disturbing memory to flicker once more. His heart quieted. Suddenly he picked up his and Newboy's coffee cup and went into the kitchen.

Seconds after he began to rinse them in the sink, he noticed how firm the water pressure was. He ran his forefinger around the crock rim. The water hissed on the enamel.

Somebody struck a dissonance on the piano.

Curious, Kid turned off the water. The cups clinked on the sideboard. As he crossed the floor, one of the boards squeaked: he had wanted to be completely quiet.

At the darker end of the auditorium, someone in work clothes stood before the brass innards. The orange construction shoes and the coveralls momentarily recalled the woman on the ladder changing the street signs.

The figure turned and walked to the couch. " 'Ey…" A heavy, flattened voice, a slight nod and slighter smile: George Harrison picked up an old Times, and lowered himself to the couch, crossed his legs, and opened the tabloid-size paper.

"Hello." Kid heard faint organ music.

"Y's'pos'd' be i' 'eah?" Harrison looked from behind the paper.

The natural rhythm of English speech; no, Kid thought, it is impossible.

"You sure you supposed to be in here?" George repeated.

"Reverend Tayler brought me down." (It would be stupid, he decided, even to try.)

" 'Cause if you ain't suppose to be in here, she gonna get mad." Harrison smiled, a mottled ivory crescent between his lips' uneven pigment. "Seen you in the bar."

"That's right." Kid grinned. "And you're in those posters all over town."

"You seen them?" Harrison put down the paper. "You know, them fellows what make them is a little—" he joggled his hand—"you know?"

Kid nodded.

"They good though. They good guys." He shook his head, then pointed at the ceiling. "She don't want no scorpion around here. You sure you're supposed to be in here. Don't matter to me, she said okay."

"I was hungry," Kid said. "She said I could get something to eat."

"Oh." Harrison turned on the couch. His green jumpsuit was open to the waist, over a banlon shirt with a raveled collar. "You come for the service?"

"No."

"Ain't no scorpion come to the damn service anyway. What you fellows dress up all that shit for?" Harrison laughed, but shook a finger. "It's cool, it's cool."

Kid looked at the large, lined knuckles and thought of the cracks in black earth. "What kind of service is it?"

"I just come because she say I should please come, so, you know, I come here sometimes." Harrison shook his head. "From Jackson, that's where—" and something Kid couldn't follow—"see?"

Though he didn't, Kid nodded. Then he became curious and asked, "What did you say?"

"In Jackson. You know what Jackson is?"

"Yeah, sure."

But Harrison was laughing again.

He, Kid reflected, is becoming a god, to see what emerged from his tone of thought. Kid's inner eye was alive with visions of June.

But George stood, dropping his paper. White leaves opened and fell, one on the couch, several on the floor. "You the one they call the Kid. Yeah?"

Kid was terrified, and felt stupid for not knowing why.

"They talk about you. I heard about you. I heard what they said." The finger shook again. "You the one that don't know who he is. I heard them."

"Nobody around here got anything to do except talk," Kid said. "You know that? You know what I mean about that?"

The black hand went down against the coverall. The green wrinkled. "So you don't like it here?"

"Yeah," Kid said. "I like it… don't you?"

Harrison nodded, his cheek filled with his tongue. "You ever come over in the Jackson?" The tongue flicked the lips.

"I've walked through."

"You know any black people live over there?"

"No. Well, Paul Fenster…"

"Oh, yeah."

"But I don't know where he lives."

"You come over there and see me sometime, huh?"

"Huh?" Kid was not sure he had caught any of the last words bundled in that voice with a nap longer than velvet.

"I say 'You come pay a visit on me.' "

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks." Kid was bewildered. Searching that, he found two questions about things that rhymed which flooding embarrassment blocked. So he narrowed his eyes instead.

"Kid—" she called from the stairs behind him. Then, in a completely different voice: "George — hi there, babes!"

Kid turned. "Hey—!"

George called over him, "Hey there—" and then with a narrowing expression. "Say, this ain't your old man, is it? The guy I been hearing all that talk about over in the bar — well, say! Now the last time I seen your old lady, you know I tell her to bring you down and pay a visit to me, you hear?"

Lanya came down the steps; George walked toward them.

"Now see," Lanya said, "I haven't seen you since the park."

"If I got to invite you twice, I guess I got to invite you twice," George said, starting up. "Got to go see me the Reverend now, though. One of you drag the other on down, now." George nodded toward Kid.

"Um… thanks," Kid said, nodded back.

"See you around," George said.

"Sure," said Lanya.

They passed.

George's response was a falsetto, "Ooooooooo," which broke and became trundling laughter. Laughter rolled beneath the ceiling like smoke. George mounted into it.

At the bottom of the stairs Lanya said, "Where've you been?" and blinked four or five times more than he thought she would have, in the silence.

"I… I couldn't find you this morning. I looked for you. I couldn't find you. At the commune, or down at the bar. What happened? Where did everybody go?"

Her eyes questioned. Her lips moved on one another, did not open.

"You want some coffee?" he asked out of discomfort, turned and went into the kitchen. "I'll go get you some coffee. It's all ready, inside."

At the urn, he picked up a cup, pulled the lever. "Did you see Tak too? How'd you know I was here?" Amber bubbles burst at the rim; black liquid steamed. "Here you—" He turned and was surprised that she was right behind him.

"Thank you." She took the cup. Steam flushed before her lowered eyes. "I saw Tak." She sipped. "He said you might be here. And that Mr Newboy was looking for you."

"He just left. He had my book. The galleys, for the poems. The type's all set."

She nodded. "Tell me what you've been doing."

"It was a pretty funny day." He poured coffee for himself, deciding as he did he had already had too much. "Really funny. After you went off, I looked for you. And I couldn't find you anywhere. I stopped in the john to wash up. When I got down to the camp site, I couldn't find you. And everybody'd run off." He put his hand on her shoulder; she smiled faintly. "I got in with some scorpions this afternoon… this evening. That was pretty strange. A guy got shot. We were on the bus, and he was bleeding. And I kept on thinking, what are they going to do with him? Where are they going to take him? There isn't any doctor around. We even had his arm in a tourniquet. I couldn't take it. So I just got off the bus. And came here. Because I was hungry. I hadn't had anything to eat all day except a God-damn pint of wine for breakfast."

"You ate here?" She looked by both his shoulders. "That's good."

"What did you do?"

She was wearing a white blouse, clean but unironed, that he had not seen before. As she walked beneath the bulb, he saw her jeans were new enough to show the crease. "You pick up some clothes this afternoon?" He followed her into the bare auditorium.

"Yesterday. I found them in a closet of the place where I'm staying now."

"You have been busy, huh? You found a house an' all?"

"About three days ago."

"Jesus," Kid said, "when did you get time to do that? I didn't think I let you alone long enough to go to the damn bathroom, much less find a house—"

"Kid…" She turned on the word to lean against the sofa arm. In the hall, shrill echoes returned. "Kid," much more softly, "I haven't seen you in five days!"

"Huh?" The heel on the floor and the heel in his boot prickled. Prickling rose up his legs, spread about his thighs. "What do you mean?"

"What do you mean what do I mean?" She spoke clumsily, breaking through three tones of voice. "Where have you been?" Retreating from the clumsiness, her voice was left only with hurt. "Why did you go away? What did you do all this time?"

Little things clawed between his buttocks, mounted rib by rib, perched on his shoulder to nip at his neck so he had to drop his chin. Lines of perspiration suddenly cooled. "You're kidding with me, aren't you? Like with the moons?"

She looked puzzled.

"The night when the moons first came out, and later we were talking about them; you pretended that there had just been one, and that I had been seeing things. You're fooling with me like that now?"

"No!" She shook her head, stopped it in the middle of a shake. "Oh, no…"

His cheeks felt like pincushions.

"Kid, what happened since the last time you saw me?"

"We woke up, when those sons of bitches were standing around us, right?"

She nodded.

"Then you went away, and I… well, I hung around for a little while, and then I went down to the john to wash up. I guess I took an awful long time. I should have hurried… But there was this guy there, Pepper, a scorpion." The prickling had left his feet: it felt as though he were being poured full of cold water. It rose behind his knees. "Pepper and me, we went down to the camp site, only it had been abandoned."

"John and Milly didn't move the commune till the day after I saw you last; they thought it would be safer."

"Then we went to Teddy's to look for you. Only it wasn't open yet. And I had a lot of wine with Bunny — you know the guy who dances there. I gave him a message for you."

She nodded. "Yes, he gave it to me… the day before yesterday!"

"No," he said. "Because I gave it to him this morning." The water reached his loins, poured into his scrotum; his scrotum shriveled. "Then I went out, and ended up at that department store downtown. That's where I met the other guys, and we broke into the place. There were people living in there. We got out. But they shot one of the guys. We just got him out of there, on the God-damn bus that happened to be coming along!"

"That happened two nights ago, Kid! Some of the scorpions came into the bar and wanted to know if anybody knew where they could get a doctor. Madame Brown went with them, but she came back in about ten minutes. Everybody was talking about it all yesterday."

"He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!" The water roared around in Kid's chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. "I got off the bus, and I came—" He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown. " — came here." The water reached his eyes, (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.

He kept rubbing at his eyes with one hand.

Something burned the knuckles of the other: coffee had slopped over.

He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.

"Oh, give that here!" She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. "I'm not fooling you!"

His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.

Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. "I'm not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven't seen you since!"

At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.

"Look, you said Mr Newboy was here with the galleys. You can't set type on a whole book overnight, can you?"

"Oh…"

"When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too."

"Talking about me?" He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.

"About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody's life."

"Huh?"

She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.

The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and there was a hard thing over one breast — her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. "Oh, for God's sakes," she whispered.

"I'm not fooling you either!" He didn't sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. "I saw you this morning. I… I thought I saw you this morning."

"You've been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you're some kind of hero or something."

"What'd you think?" Her hair brushed his moving chin.

"Shit. That's what I thought: 'Shit.' You want to go off in that direction. Fine. But I don't feel like getting messed up in anything like that. I really don't."

"This afternoon," he said. "I mean it was by accident I found them. And I didn't save anybody's life. That was just…"

"Look at you," she said, not moving away. "You're dressing like them; you're hanging out with them. I mean go on: If that's what you want, go on. But it's not my scene. I can't go there with you."

"Yeah, but… Hey, look. You: you say you've got a house and all. Where are you staying now?"

"Would you mind," she said softly, "if I didn't tell you?" But opened her arms and put them around him. "Just for a while?" The harmonica corner cut his chest.

He wondered could she feel the anger inside him, pulsing under her hands. "I," he said, "saw you this morning."

She pulled back, all his anger on her face. "Look!" She made fists at her hips. "Either you're lying to me for some kooky reasons I don't even want to know about, and I shouldn't have anything to do with you, right? The night before I saw you last, you lost three hours. Now you've lost five days. Maybe you really are crazy. Maybe I shouldn't have anything to do with you! That's pretty irrational, isn't it? I haven't seen you in five days and Christ, am I angry at you!"

"Then why the fuck were you looking for me!" He turned and stalked down the hall, a great bubble about to burst inside his ribs.

At the piano, he realized Harrison must have opened the curtains on the low stage. The backdrop — and there were stands with photographer's floods — showed a painted moon, some seven feet across, and indications around it of trees.

He turned at the apron, surprised again to find her behind him. "Why did you come?"

"Because this is the first time I've known where you were. I didn't know…." She gasped. "I didn't know if you were all right. You didn't come back. I thought maybe you were angry at me for something. You used to always come back. And suddenly, for all that time, instead of you, all I got was what people were saying about you. You and the scorpions, you and the scorpions." Something spent itself in her eyes. The lids lowered on the shadowed green. "Look, so far we haven't had one of those 'I'll-follow-you-anywhere' relationships. I still haven't made up my mind if that's where I want to go. And I just get a little nervous when I find myself thinking I might. That's all."

"A week." He felt his face twist. "What the hell did I do for … five days? When did I…" He reached for her.

Her face crashed against his, hitting his mouth, but she pushed her tongue against his, and was holding tight to the back of his neck. He kept trying to pull her even closer, leaning against the stage.

He loosed one hand to dig between them, till he could pull the harmonica from her blouse pocket. It rattled on the stage behind them.

"You're not going to hurt anyone," she said once. "You're not going to hurt me. I know that. You're not."

The hysteria with which she made love to him on that dark stage was first furious, then funny, (wondering if someone was going to walk in, and excited by the idea); he lay on his back while she bucked above him, clutching his shoulders, wondering should he feel this way. But the sound she was making that he'd thought was crying cleared to laughter. Her buttocks filled his hands, and he dug between them.

She reared too high, and lost him to the annealing chill. While she reached for him, he rolled her to her side. Legs in the clutch of denim, he crawled down to the sweaty corner of her blouse and pushed his tongue through her salty hair. She lifted a knee to let it fall wide. After she came, (he had worked his pants free of one foot) he straddled her, pushed his penis into her again, lowered his belly to her belly, his chest to her chest, his wet face against the crumpled shoulder of her blouse, and began long final strokes, while her arms tightened on his back.

Coming burned his loins (he remembered the spilled coffee) and left him exhausted and still burning (he remembered how it felt after masturbating when all you started off with was a piss-on), and exhaustion won. Lakes of sweat cooled around his body. She nodded in the crook of his shoulder, where he knew his arm would numb soon, but didn't feel like doing anything about it. He slid his hand down his own chest, till his fingers caught in the transverse chain, beneath angular shapes.

Times' voices in agon? Who wants to hear hunchbacks and spastics haggle? Even, if there are no others in concert. We should not be lying here, cooling, half naked, half asleep. A good reason to do it. I am still angry at her. I am still angry. Would she have it I choose scorpions all for negative reasons? Have they been a surround? No: it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory is a moon that gives odd light. It is safe here—

He woke: which was suddenly arriving in that space between the boards and the touch of eyelid against eyelid, the weight of his loose fist on his pelvis and the boards pressing his backside.

She's gone, he thought, with her harmonica to sit on the couch and play. He listened to the music from the other end of the hall.

But you can't make that discord on a harmonica.

He opened his eyes and rolled to his side (the batteryless projector clacked onto the floor at the end of the rattling chain) and frowned.

The sound was much further away than he'd thought; and was organ music.

She's gone…?

Kid stood to pull his pants around on his leg.

The harmonica was not on the backdrop curving down over the floor.

He pushed his foot into his pants legs, sweaty in blotches. He picked up his vest, his orchid, and walked down the steps at the stage edge. Booted foot and bare left their alternative prints in the dust.

Also, his notebook was not in front of the couch.

At the room's center, he stopped to swallow something filling his throat. The sound with it was almost a sob.

Upstairs the organ played on. And there were voices, mumbling and growing and diminishing. It was silly to think she was upstairs. He put the orchid in his belt and shrugged up his vest as he climbed the steps.

A dozen black men and women milled from the chapel into the vestibule, from the vestibule into the street. Two women walking together glanced at him curiously. A man in a narrow-brimmed hat smiled at him and vanished. Others looked less friendly. The voices turned and blurred like smoke, or prickled with laughter that melted with the next dozen ambling by the closed office.

"Lovely service, don't you think…"

"She ain't gonna talk about all that stuff next time too, is she, 'cause I…"

"Didn't you think it was a lovely service…"

He stepped among them to leave. Somebody kicked his bare heel twice, but he racked it up to accident and didn't look. Outside, the evening was purple grey; smoke blunted the facades across the street.

Only a few white people passed through the trapezoid of light across the sidewalk. A woman with a flowered scarf tied around her head followed an older man, talking earnestly with a black companion; and a heavy guy, blond, in a shirt with no collar that looked as if it were made of army blanket planted himself before the door, while brown and darker faces passed around him. Now a gaunt girl, with freckles on her tan cheeks and brick-red hair, reached him. The two whispered together, walked into the darkness.

Kid waited by the door, watching the worshippers, listening to the tape. People strolled away. Some voices lingered, till the owners followed their shadows into the night. The dwindling crowd made him feel lost. Maybe he should duck back in to tell Reverend Tayler he was leaving.

Studs bright in scuffed leather, shadows slipping across his shaggy, blond stomach, cap pushed back off the yellow brush, Tak Loufer stepped out, looked at Kid with a single highlight in one shadowed eye, and said, "Hey, you still around here? I sent two people over looking for you. But I thought you'd be gone by now."

5

"What are you here for?"

Tak held up a paper roll. "Completing my poster collection. You been keeping yourself away from us a while? We were worried about you."

"Shit!" fell from the residue of anger. "You wanted to suck on my dick some, maybe? Come on. It's all slicked up with pussy juice. You like that, right?"

"Nigger pussy?"

"Huh?"

"Were you screwing a colored girl? And with the clap?"

"What are you talking about?"

"If it wasn't black meat and a little runny, I'm not interested. Since I had you last time, boy, I've gone on to levels of perversion you haven't thought about. What's the matter with you, anyway? You out of it again? Why don't you come up and tell me about it while I get drunk."

"Aw, shit…" Not wanting to, Kid put his hands in his pocket and his head down in the night's chalky stench; they walked together to the curb.

"Your girl friend find you?"

Kid grunted.

"Did you have a fight or something? The last few times I spoke to her, I got the impression she was sort of getting ready for one."

"Maybe we did," Kid said. "I don't know."

"Ah, one of those?"

"She said you saw me get off a bus?"

"Yeah. Earlier this evening. I was down at the corner. I was going to call to you, but you turned first, down toward here."

"Oh."

A light moved in a window.

Fire, Kid thought. The flickering made him uneasy. He tried to imagine the whole block, the church and the buildings around it, conflagrated.

"I think somebody lives there," Tak said. "It's just candles." They stepped off the curb.

"Where are we?" Kid asked when they stepped up again. "I mean, Tak… what is this place? What happened here? How did it get like this?"

"A good question," Tak answered over tapping boot heels. "A very good one. For a while, I thought it was international spies — I mean, maybe the whole city here was just an experiment, a sort of test-out plan to destroy the entire country. Maybe the world."

"You think it's something like that?"

"No. But it's comforting to consider all this the result of something organized. On the other hand, it could just be another ecological catastrophe. Maybe somebody filled in our swamp by mistake."

"What swamp?"

"By every big city there's always some sort of large swamp nearby, usually of about the same area. It keeps the smog down, supplies most of the oxygen, and half a dozen other absolutely essential things. New York has the Jersey Flats, San Francisco, the whole mudded-out Oakland edge of the Bay. You fill the swamp in, the smog goes up, the sewage problem gets out of hand, and the city becomes unlivable. No way to avoid it. I think it's fair to say most people would find this unlivable."

Kid sniffed. "We sure got enough smog." The blades at his belt tickled the hair on his inner forearm. "Where's our swamp?"

"Obviously you've never taken the ride out past Holland Lake."

Kid shrugged in his bindings. "That's true." The chain that wrapped him had worked down so that it rugged across the back of his left hip at every other step. He reached under his vest and moved it with his thumb. "Do you think that's what happened to Bellona?" Some day I'll die, turned irrelevantly through his mind: Death and artichokes. Heaviness filled his ribs; he rubbed his chest for the reassuring systolic and diastolic thumps. Not that I really think it might stop, he thought: only that it hasn't just yet. Sometimes (he thought), I wish I couldn't feel it. (Someday, it will stop.)

"Actually," Tak was saying, "I suspect the whole thing is science fiction."

"Huh? You mean a time-warp, or a parallel universe?"

"No, just… well, science fiction. Only real. It follows all the conventions."

"Spaceships, ray-guns, going faster than light? I used to read the stuff, but I haven't seen anything like that around here."

"Bet you don't read the new, good stuff. Let's see: the Three Conventions of science fiction—" Tak wiped his forehead with his leather sleeve. (Kid thought, inanely: He's polishing his brain.) "First: A single man can change the course of a whole world: Look at Calkins, look at George — look at you! Second: The only measure of intelligence or genius is its linear and practical application: In a landscape like this, what other kind do we even allow to visit? Three: The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long enough to have an adventure. Here in Bellona—"

"Maybe that's why I don't read more of the stuff than I do," Kid said. He had had his fill of criticism with Newboy; the noise was no longer comforting. "Wasn't there a street lamp working on this block?"

Tak bulled out the end of his sentence: " — in Bellona you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by yourself, or get your friends to."

"It's funny, not that many people have that much."

"A comment on the paucity of our imaginations — none at all on the wonders here for the taking. No — it's a comment on the limits of the particular mind the city encourages. Who wants to be as lonely as the acquisition of all those objects would make them? Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn something from that."

"You've got more than practically anybody else I know," Kid said.

"Then you know very few people."

"Except Mr Calkins." Kid thought about the Richards. "And I don't know him." But Tak had seen Mr Newboy earlier. Tak would know his book was set.

"There's a whole range between," Tak said. "You've limited your acquaintances to the people who don't want very much. Essentially a religious choice, I suppose. All things considered, I'd say it was a wise one. There are a thousand people — perhaps — in this city."

"I did meet one family who—"

"There are many others. And most of them, as Paul Fenster keeps reminding us, are black."

"George Harrison just told me I should come over and visit him in Jackson."

Tak beat the darkness with his poster. "There! The whole thing. Paul will tell you, but George will show you, if you give him half a chance." Now Loufer sighed. "I'm afraid I'm still pretty much a verbal type. I'd just as soon be told."

"And look at posters."

"And read books. Preferably science fiction. But like I say, Bellona is terribly hospitable. You can have your fantasy and… well, besides eating it too, you can also feel just a bit less like you're depriving anyone else of theirs. Home again."

Kid looked around with blunt thumbs of darkness on his eyes. "We are? Tak, didn't there used to be a street light working at the end of your block?"

"Went out a few days ago. This way. Watch out for the steps. There's all sorts of junk around."

Some of it rolled beneath Kid's flexible leather sole. Soft darkness turned hard. The echo from the sound of breath and footsteps changed timbre.

They went through the hall, went downstairs, went up.

"First time you were up here," Tak laughed, "I made you park your weapons at the door. Boy, I don't know how some people put up with me."

The roof door opened on distant, flesh-colored light.

Where the streets had been hopelessly black, the roof was dusted with nightlight.

Like two giant hieroglyphs, over-printed and out of register, the bridge's suspension cables rose to twin cusps, then dropped in smoke. No more than one row of buildings away, night water took up the glitter of both street lamps and redder quavering fires. "Hey, it's so close…"

Before him, above the city, shapes unfurled out over the water. He could not see the far shore. It could even have been a sea he gazed at, save for the bridge… Above, sky-bits seemed to clear, their clarity, however, unconfirmed by stars.

"How come it's so close?" He turned from the wall, as the light came on in the shack.

Tak had already gone inside.

Kid looked at the warehouses, at the waters between. Joy, sudden and insistent, twisted the muscles of his mouth toward laughter. But he held the sound in with tiny pantings. What swelled inside was made of light. It burst — he blinked and the backs of his lids were blinding — and left a great wave of trust washing inside. Not that I trust that trust for a moment, he thought, grinning. But it was there, and pleasant. He went into the shack. "It's … it's so clear tonight."

A tiny solitaire of sadness gleamed in the velvet folds of good feeling.

"Last time I was up here, Lanya was with me."

Tak just grunted and turned from his desk. "Have some brandy." But he smiled.

Kid took the glass and sat on the hard bed. Now Tak unrolled the poster:

George Harrison as the moon.

"You got all three now." Kid sipped, with hunched shoulders.

George in cycle drag was still above the door.

George in the forest had replaced the Germanic youth.

Tak rolled his chair to the wall and climbed onto the green cushion. Corner by corner he tugged loose 'Spanish boy on the rocks'. "Hand me the staple gun?"

The first poster swayed to the floor.

Ch-klack, ch-klack, ch-klack, ch-klack, the new moon replaced it.

Kid sat down again and regarded the three aspects of George over the rim of his glass while Tak got down from the chair. "I…" Kid's voice sounded hollow and made something deep in his ear tickle so that he grinned. "You know, I lost five days?" He slid his fingers around the glass till the nubs butted.

"Where—" Tak put down the stapler, took up the bottle and leaned back against the desk, hands locked on the green neck; the base put a crease in his stomach—"or would you be telling me if you knew — did you lose them?"

"I don't know."

"You look pleased enough about it."

Kid grunted. "A day now. It takes about as long as an hour used to when I was thirteen or fourteen."

"And a year takes about as long as a month. Oh yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon."

"Most of the time in my life is spent lying around getting ready to fall asleep."

"That one has been mentioned to me before, but I'm not conscious of it myself."

"Maybe, somehow, for the last few days, I've just missed out on the sleeping part. There's hardly any change in light around here from morning to evening anyway."

"You mean the last five days are the ones you can't remember?"

"Yeah, what have I been up to, anyway? Lanya… said everybody was talking about it."

"Not everybody. But enough, I suppose."

"What were they saying?"

"If you lost those days, I can see why you'd be interested."

"I'd just like to know what I've been doing."

Brandy splashed inside the bottle to Tak's laughter. "Maybe you've traded the last five days for your name. Quick, tell me: Who are you?"

"No." Kid hunched his shoulders more. The feeling that he was being played with wobbled like an unsteady ball on some slanted rim, rolled into the velvet pouch. "I don't know that either."

"Oh." Tak drank from the bottle, set it back on his belly. "Well, I thought it was worth a try. I suspect it isn't something to be harped on." The brandy swayed. "What have you been doing for the last week? Let me see."

"I know I was with the scorpions — I met this guy named Pepper. And he turned me on to this department store they were going to try and … rip off, I guess."

"So far I'm with you. There was supposed to have been some shooting there? You were supposed to have saved one guy by fighting off somebody with a gun, barehanded. You were supposed to have busted a mirror over the head of another guy who acted up with you—"

"Under his chin."

"That's it. Copperhead told me about that himself. And then when another cat named Siam got shot—"

"Was that his name?"

"— when Siam got shot, you pulled him off the street and got him into the bus."

"And you saw me get out of this bus earlier this evening."

"Copperhead told me about it a couple of days back."

"Only it happened to me this afternoon, God damn it!" Ashamed, he blinked at his hands. "That's all they said happened? I mean there wasn't anything else?"

"Sounds to me like enough."

"What happened to Siam?"

Tak shrugged. Brandy splashed. "Somebody went to see about him, I remember, from the bar."

"Madame Brown?"

"I think that's who it was. But I haven't heard anything else. For somebody who doesn't remember where he's been, you seem to know as much about it as I do." Tak reached over, dragged the chair to the desk, and sat. He started to put the bottle on the desk, but halted to take a final drink. "You do remember all the things I just told you about actually happening?"

Kid nodded at his lap. "I've just lost the time, then. I mean, I've lost days before — thought it was Thursday when it was Friday."

"All we thought, really, was that you'd deserted us to become a full-fledged scorpion. It was cool with me. You sure look like that's what happened. You got your lights and everything."

Kid focused on the lensed ball hanging against his stomach. "It doesn't work. It needs a new battery."

"Just a second." Tak opened a desk drawer. "Here you go." He tossed.

Kidd caught it in both hands: bunched lightning on red and blue.

"Turn yourself on sometime."

"Thanks." Wanting to talk longer, he put the battery in his pocket, noting the cloth was frayed enough at the bottom seam to feel flesh through it with his fingers. "Tak, you really think you got the city figured out?"

"Me?"

"You were telling me how it follows those conventions—"

Tak laughed, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. "No, not me. I don't understand anything about it. I'm a God-damn engineer. I take a plug; I put it in one socket; and it works. I put it in another one; and it doesn't. I go into an office building and one elevator works, and only the lights on the top floor. That's impossible, by anything I know about. I go down a street: buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They're still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it's been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backward here. Or sideways. But that's impossible too. I make my forage trips out to the warehouses, or some of the stores, and sometimes I can get in, and sometimes I can't, and sometimes I have trouble, and sometimes I don't; and sometimes I take my shopping bag into a store and clear off a shelf of canned goods, and come back to that same store again a week later — I mean I think it's the same damn store — and that shelf is just as full as the first time I saw it. To my mind, that's also impossible."

"Sometimes the morning light starts over here," Kid said. "Sometimes it starts over there."

"Who told you about that?"

"You did. First day I got here."

"Oh." Tak lifted the bottle. "Oh, yeah. That's right. You got a pretty good memory for some things."

"I remember lots of things: Some of it, so sharp it… hurts sometimes. All this fog, all this smoke — sometimes it'll be sharper and clearer than what you see in front of you. And the rest of it—" he looked up again and noticed Loufer's discomfort—"just isn't there." Kid laughed, which made Loufer chew harder on what was in the back of his mouth. "Why do you stay in Bellona, Tak?"

"I gather your friend Ernest Newboy is leaving tomorrow. I don't know. Why do you?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, considering what you've been going through, maybe Bellona isn't the best place for you." Tak leaned forward, stretching the bottle out.

"Oh," Kid said. "Here." He held out his glass; Tak refilled it.

"You were talking about the first night I met you. Remember back then, I asked you why you'd come here, and you said you had a purpose for coming?"

"That's right."

"Tell me what it is."

And once, in South Dakota, he had dropped a quarter into a pool that turned out to be much deeper than he'd thought. He had watched the coin spin and dull and vanish beyond the edging of leaves. Now a thought vanished from his mind, and the memory of the lost quarter was all he had to describe the vanishing. "I … I don't know!" Kid laughed and pondered all the other things he might do; laughing seemed best. "I don't… remember! Yeah, I know I had a reason for coming here. But I'll be God damned if I can tell you what it was!" He leaned back, then forward, caught the brandy that was about to spill his glass in his mouth, and gulped it. "I really can't. It must have been…" He looked at the ceiling, suspending his breath for recollection. "I can't remember… remember that, either!"

Tak was smiling.

"You know, I had it with me; I mean, the reason." Kid swung out his hands. "I was carrying it around, in the back of my head, you know? Like on a back shelf? And then I just reached for it, to take it down, only I guess I knocked it over. I saw it fall off and disappear. I'm hunting around in my mind, but I can't… find it." He stopped laughing long enough to feel the annoyance that had begun to grow. "Bellona's not a bad place for me." Stated reasonably and smilingly, it was still annoyance. "I mean, I got a girl friend; I've met all sorts of people, some pretty nice—"

"Some not so nice?"

"Well, you learn. And I got a book. Brass Orchids, you know, my poems; it's all finished! They got galleys on it."

Tak still smiled, nodding.

"And you say people are talking about me like I'd done something great. Leave? You think I'm not going to go mad in some other city? There I might not have all these extras." Kid put the glass down, punched the air, and leaned back on the wall. "I… like it here? No. I want to see some sun. Sometimes I want to reach up and peel off all that sky. It looks like the cardboard they make egg crates out of, you know? Just peel it, in great, flapping strips. I wonder where Lanya went." He frowned. "You know, maybe I don't have a girl friend any more. And the book is finished with; I mean it's all written and in type; and I don't want to do any more." He turned his fist on his forefinger. "And even if they say I'm a hero, I didn't really do anything." He looked at the posters: just pictures, yet thinking that opened both their mocking and their harrowing resonances; he looked away. "Something isn't… finished here. No." The denial made him smile. "It's me. At least part has to do with me. Or maybe George. Or June… It would almost look like everything was finished, wouldn't it? And maybe it's time to leave? But that's what lets me know I shouldn't. Because there're no distractions. I can look in and see. There's so much I don't know." The laughter filled his mouth, but when he let it out, it was only breath from a smile. "Hey, you want to blow me? I mean… if you'd like to, I'd like it."

Tak frowned, put his head to the side. But before he spoke, his own rough laugh exploded: "You are a nervy bastard!"

"I don't mean just suck my dick. I'd make love with you. I've done it before, with guys."

"I never doubted it a minute." Tak laughed again. "And no, I don't want to suck your dick, pussy or no. Where do you come off with that idea?"

But something inside had released. Kid yawned hugely and explained, with the end of it muddling his words, "Lanya said I should go to bed with you again; she thought you'd like it."

"Did she, now?"

"But I said you were only interested in first tastes." Looking at Loufer, he suddenly realized behind the blond jocularity there was embarrassment, so looked at his lap again. "I guess I was…" right was mauled by another yawn.

"Oh, look. Why don't you just lie down and go to sleep. What I want to do is drink about three more shots of brandy and read a God-damn book or something."

"Sure." Kid lay belly down on the pallet, and jiggled around so the chains and prisms and projector did not bite his chest.

Tak shook his head, turned around in his chair, and stretched for the second shelf over the desk. A book fell. Tak sighed.

Kid grinned and moved his mouth down into the crook of his arm.

Tak drank some more brandy, folded his arms on the desk and began to read.

Kid looked for the sadness again, but it was now neatly invisible among dark folds. Hasn't turned a page for ten minutes, was his last amused thought before he closed his eyes and—

"Hey."

Kid, lying on his back, grunted, "Huh?"

Tak scratched his naked shoulder and looked perturbed. Kid thought: Now he's going to—?

"I'm afraid I gotta kick you out."

"Oh…" Kid squinted and stretched, in muffled and mechanical protest. "Yeah, sure." Behind the bamboo curtains were streaks of light.

"I mean a friend of mine came over," Tak explained, "and we'd sort of like…"

"Oh, yeah…" Kid closed his eyes tight as he could, opened them, and sat up while the chains rattled down his chest, and blinked:

Black, perhaps fifteen, in jeans, sneakers and a dirty white shirt, the boy stood by the door, blinking on balls of red glass.

Kid's back snarled with chills; he made himself smile. From some other time came the prepared thought: Such distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself. And the autonomic nerves, habituated to terror, nearly made him scream. He kept smiling, nodded, got groggily to his feet. "Oh, sure," he said. "Yeah, I'll be on my way. Thanks for letting me crash."

Passing through the doorway, he had to close his eyes, again, tight as possible, then look, again, hopeful that the crimson would vanish for brown and white. They will think I'm still half asleep! he hoped, hoped desperately, his boot scraping the roof's tar-paper. Morning was the color of dirty toweling. He left it for the dark stair. Shaking his head, he tried not to be afraid, so thought: Ousted for someone younger and prettier, wouldn't you know. Well — beneath the lids the eyes were glass and red! He reached a landing, swung round it, and remembered the nervous woman with skirts always far too long for the season, who had been his math instructor his first term at Columbia: "A true proposition," she had explained, rubbing chalky fingertips hard on one another, "implies only other true propositions. A false one can imply, well, anything — true, false, it doesn't matter. Anything at all. Anything…" As if the absurd gave her comfort, her perpetual tone of hysteria had softened momentarily. She left before the term's completion. He hadn't, damn it!

Nine flights down he walked the warm hall. Twelve steps up? Thirteen he counted this time, stubbing his toe on the top one.

Kid came out on the dawn-dim porch hung with hooks and coiled with smoke. He jumped from the platform, still groggy, still blinking, still filled with the terror for which there was no other way to deal with save laughter. After all, he thought, ambling toward the corner, if this burning can go on forever, if beside the moon there really is a George, if Tak kicks me out for a glass-eyed spade, if days can disappear like pocketed dollars, then there is no telling. Or only the telling, but no reasoning. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets where the material was already fraying, and turned the corner.

Between the warehouses, dealing and fading in moving smoke, the bridge rose and swung out into oblivion. Among the consorted fragments of his curiosity, the thought remained: I should have at least made him give me a cup of coffee before I went. He cleared his sticky throat, and turned, expecting the suspension cables any moment to fade forever, while he (forever?) wandered the smelly waterfront that somehow never actually opened on water.

This wide avenue had to lead onto the bridge.

Kid followed it for two blocks around a dark, official building. Then, beyond a twist of figure-eights and clover-leafs, the road rolled out between the suspensors, over the river.

He could only see as far as the start of the second span. The mist, among folds and tendrils, condensed the limits of vision. Foggy dawns should be chill and damp. This one was grit dry, tickled the back of his arms and the skin beneath his neck with something only a breath off body temperature. He walked up the edge of the road, thinking: There are no cars, I could run down the middle. Suddenly he laughed loudly (swallowing phlegm caught there in the night) and ran forward, waving his arms, yelling.

The city absorbed the sound, returned no echoes.

After thirty yards he was tired, so he trudged and panted in the thick, dry air. Maybe all these roads just go on, he theorized, and the bridge keeps hanging there. Hell, I've only been going ten minutes. He walked beneath several overpasses. He started to run again, coming around a curve to the bridge's actual entrance.

The roads' lines between the cables began a dozen perspective V's, their single vertex lopped by fog. Slowly, wonderingly, he started across toward the invisible shore. Once he went to the rail and looked over through the smoke to the water. He looked up through girders and cables past the walkway toward the stanchion tower. What am I doing here? he thought, and looked again into the fog.

The car was back among the underpasses half a minute while its motor got louder. Maroon, blunt, and twenty years old, it swung out onto the gridded macadam; as it growled by, a man in the back seat turned, smiled, waved.

"Hey!" Kid called, and waved after him.

The car did not slow. But the man gestured again through the back windshield.

"Mr Newboy!" Kid took six running steps and shouted: "Good-bye! Good-bye, Mr Newboy!"

The car diminished between the grills of cable, hit the smoke, and sank like a weight on loose cotton. A moment later—too soon, from his own recollection of the bridge crossed by foot — the sound of the motor ceased.

What was that sound? Kid had thought it was some wind storm very far away. But it was the air rushing in the cavern of his mouth. Good-bye, Mr Ernest Newboy, and added with the same good will, you're a tin Hindenburg, a gassy Nautilus, a coward to the marrow of each metatarsal. Though it would embarrass you to Hollywood and Hell, I hope we meet again. I like you, you insincere old faggot; underneath it all, you probably like me. Kid turned and looked at the shrouded city, like something crusty under smoke, its streets stuck blind in it, its colors pearled and pasteled; so much distance was implied in the limited sight.

I could leave this vague, vague city…

But, holding all his humor in, he turned back toward the underpass. Now and again his face struck into grotesque. Where is this city's center? he wondered, and walked, left leg a little stiff, while buildings rose, again, to receive him.

Free of name and purpose, what do I gain? I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands. The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night. Reality? The only moment I ever came close to it was when, on the moonless, New Mexican desert, I looked up at the prickling stars on that hallow, hollow dark. Day? It is beautiful, there, true, fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but it is distorted as distance itself, the real all masked by pale defraction.

Buildings, bony and cluttered with ornament, hulled with stone at their different heights: Window, lintel, cornice and sills patterned the dozen planes. Billows brushed down them, sweeping at dusts they were too insubstantial to move, settled to the pavement and erupted in slow explosions he could see two blocks ahead-but, when he reached, they had disappeared.

I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable. And wondered why loneliness in him was almost always a sexual feeling. He stepped off the sidewalk and kept along the loose line of old cars — nothing parked on this block later than 1968—thinking: What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations are too unfixed to hold it in so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape. He had a momentary image of all these walls on pivots controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after he had passed, they might suddenly swing to face another direction, parting at this corner, joining now at that one, like a great maze — forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable—

When the heavy man ran into the street, Kid first recognized the green-drab, wool shirt with no collar. Lumbering from the alley sidewalk, he saw Kid, headed for him. The man had been one of the white men at the church last night.

The fleshy face, red and sweat-flecked, shook above pumping fists. The top of the head was blotchy under a haze of yellow; on the forehead the hair lay out like scrap brass.

Suddenly Kid started to move backward. "Hey, watch it—"

"You—!" The man lunged. His fingers caught among, and tugged at, Kid's chains. "You are the one who…" At the Mexican accent Kid rifled his wounded memory. "When I was… you didn't… no? You, please… don't…" the man panted through wet lips. His eyes were bloodshot coral. "Oh, please, don't you… you were in there, yes? I… I mean you fool around like that, they gonna…" His mouth compressed; he looked across the street, looked baek. "You… Oh, the Kid!" and yanked his hand from tangled links while Kid thought: No, he didn't say 'the Kid,' he maybe said 'the kid,' or even 'they did.' The man was shaking his head: "No, you gonna… Hey, don't do that…"

"Look," Kid said, trying to take his arm. "You need some help? Here, let me—"

The man jerked away, nearly fell, began to run.

Kid took two steps after him, stopped.

The blond Mexican tripped on the far sidewalk, pushed up from his knee, and made it into the alley.

Circling Kid's mind was the Mexican voice in the hall at the Richards'; various mentions by Thirteen; amphetamine-psychosis? And then the thought, clear and overriding:

He was… crazy!

Something cascaded, tickling like a line of insects, across his stomach. For a moment he mistook it for a chill of recognition; indeed, real chills ignited a moment after.

But the optic chain had parted, probably under the man's tugging, and fallen down over his belt.

Kid picked up the loose end, found the other hanging across his chest — it had parted between lens and prism — and pulled the thin brass together. On one end still hung a tiny, twisted link. With great, stubby fingers, nearly numb inside their callous, he tried to get it closed. He stood in the street, pinching, twisting, sometimes holding his breath, sometimes letting it all out suddenly with a mumbled "Shit…" or "Fuck…" His armpits slipped with the sweat of concentration. His heels, one on leather, one on pavement, stung at different heats. His chin stayed tucked into his neck: he squinted in the dawn light, turning once so that his own, edgeless shadow slid from his fumbling nubs. It took practically ten minutes to fix.

And you could still tell which link had parted.

When he was finished, he was very depressed.