Dhalgren

When he had walked for several minutes, turned several corners, and the several tensions in his neck and back had ceased (he could think words now without striking up hysterical images on the screens of all five senses), he pissed in the middle of the street, hoping someone might pass and, with his fly half open and his fingers under his belt, walked again and asked himself: Now just what is the problem with seeing an occasional red eyeball, hey? It is: If I'm hallucinating that, how do I tell if anything else is real? Maybe half the people I see aren't there — like that guy who just ran up? What's he doing in my world? Some fragment of Mexico, recreated out of smoke and fatigue? How do I know there isn't a chasm in front of me I've hallucinated into plain concrete? (The entrance to the bridge… when I first came off it, was all broken and piled… with concrete…?) Put the whole thing up to dreaming? When I was seventeen or eighteen I stopped that. Five days!

I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on.

He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. All right (he looked at blurred house tops above the trolley wires), I've chosen, I'm here.

To come upon the monastery? Yes, now, wherever it was, what ever. Walls and white buildings? Syllables to mumble away the meaning? He had passed nothing that could possibly have been one. The streets were strewn with refuse, months old, dried, and odorless: feces gone pale and crumbly, ossified fruit rind, old papers, once wet and now crinkly dry.

He prodded the folds of his consciousness for sadness: the crystal had deliquesced to chalky powder.

…she look like? he thought, and was too tired to panic. Her name, what was that?

Lanya: and he saw her short hair, her green eyes, and she was not there.

One of the street signs was marred with filth and scratchings; the other was an empty frame. He turned into the alley because of the beats; for seconds he could not figure what had happened — a row of tree trunks on the narrow sidewalk, each in a metal fence, had burned to charred spikes. Wonderingly, Kid started down the street, not wide enough for two cars.

Denny sat on the fender of a lopsided auto, a-straddle the smashed headlight, drumming two fingers on the bent rim. Kid walked toward him, wondering when to speak…

"Hey, how're you!" Denny's surprise became delight. "What you doin' here?" He banged with all his knuckles once and stopped. "What you doin' huh?"

"Just taking a walk. Trying to get my cock sucked. Or something. Only nobody's out."

"Huh?" Denny looked puzzled, and then — to Kid's surprise — embarrassed. He flipped one finger three times on the chrome, then looked up again with his lips tight. "The downtown end of the park has got queers all over it, all day and all night. You know the part with the paths?"

"No."

"Well it does." Denny flipped his finger once more. "If you been walking around all night, you couldn't've been looking very hard."

"I was at this guy's house," Kid explained. "I thought he was gonna do me, but somebody else came over and he kicked me out. What are you doing out this hour of the morning?"

Denny nodded toward one of the unpainted buildings. "I'm staying in there now." Behind dirty window glass, the brass lion leered, pinioned on his brass stalk. The shade was gone. The socket held a broken bulb neck.

On the other side of the street, a white curtain moved in a window almost as dirty. Two black faces pressed together, looked till Kid stared directly. The curtain dropped.

"You want to get your cock sucked? Come on." Denny, with three fingers tucked under the rim, was looking straight down. "I'll blow you."

"Huh?"

When Denny neither moved nor said anything else, Kid started to laugh. "Hey…"He stepped on the sidewalk, hit his thighs in imitation of Denny's drumming, then stepped back into the street. "Are you being funny…?"

Denny looked up. "No."

"Now suppose I took you up on that…" Kid said, trying to make it a joke; it wasn't. So he said: "You want to…?" Things that made the obscure obvious by overturning overturned.

"Yeah." Denny scratched his chest among rattling chains. "Go on, take it out. Right here, motherfucker." He shook his head. "I'll do you right here. You want me to show you I mean it? Right here?"

Kid glanced at the window curtain. "Sure, but those spades, they're staring out the damned window."

Denny let out his held breath. "I just told you; you think I give a fuck if they know?"

What he'd began as banter was suddenly uncomfortable, because though all the actions were predictable, the feelings were not. "Hey, you know maybe you just better let the whole thing…"

Denny leaned his head and glanced to the side with a concentrated expression — the look, Kid thought, of someone in a game of go trying to decide if a long-contemplated move, now made, was, after all, right.

"We'd have to find someplace," Kid said. "A doorway, or inside or something. I don't want to do it right here." Fifteen? Kid thought. He's out of his head; this kid is a fucking nut.

Denny got down from the headlight and slid most of his fingers in his back pockets. "You come on with me."

Kid caught up to him on the unpainted steps. "Is this Nightmare's place?" He put his hand on Denny's small, warm shoulder.

Denny looked back. "Used to be." His vest, showing rough-out leather, then scuffed tanning, swung against his ribs. "Just about anybody stays there now. Even Thirteen's been crashing there. The way he goes on, you'd think he was gonna make it his new place."

Kid frowned. "What… happened to his old one?"

Denny frowned back. "Well, everybody's moved around since…" He nodded. "The kids in the commune, they all went to the other side of the park. Dragon Lady moved her bunch up this side of Cumberland. And Thirteen couldn't stay in that damn apartment no more… but you was there." Denny's frown questioned Kid's.

"Why…?" Kid asked, because there was no answer he could supply.

"The smell," Denny said, "for one thing," and went up the steps.

Kid followed. "Oh, yeah. That…" which made sense; but not the whole shifting and rearrangement during the robbed duration. The whole tape of reality which he had been following had somehow overturned. It still continued; he still followed. But during some moment when he had blinked, days had elapsed and everything right had shifted left: Everything left was now right. "Hey, the last time you saw me, how long was I with—?"

"Shhh," Denny said. "Everybody's asleep." He pushed open the door. "It ain't even six o'clock in the morning, I bet."

And Kid suddenly did not want an answer. He asked instead in a softer voice: "Then what are you doing up?"

"I get up real early some times." Denny grinned back over his shoulder as Kid followed him down the hall. "Sometimes I sleep all day, too. You can do that here… but then I'm up all night."

By the hall baseboard, tight, black hair shocked from the end of a sleeping bag. Beyond a doorway, on a couch, a naked man with red hair all over his tan, freckled back — it was Copperhead — slept with a very blond girl wedged between himself and the couch back. Over his bare ankle, Kid could see her sandal, the neatly rolled cuff of her jeans. Her arm, pale from the sleeve of a navy pea-jacket, moved up the torn upholstery, then fell. Someone in another room stopped snoring, cleared his throat, coughed, was silent.

Denny glanced around. "You wanna do it in the bathroom?"

"No." Kid struck Denny's shoulder with his hand's heel. "I don't want to do it in the bathroom!" While Denny blinked, curious, the bathroom door at the end of the hall opened and Smokey walked out, sleepy, in nothing but jeans, her fly hanging open. With neither shielding nor greeting, she passed.

Leaning against the water tank, Kid saw the splotched dummy looped in chain — before the door swung to.

"I'm in here."

Which is where the Harley had been moved.

"How come you get a room all by yourself…?" Kid asked, realizing with the last word that three of the bundles among the shovels (why shovels?), pipes, lumber, and canvas, were people in sleeping bags.

Someone had built a loft.

Three steps up the ladder, Denny looked back over his shoulder. "You come up."

Denny's boots went over the edge. Kid climbed. The planks (they gave some with his hands and knees) were strewn with blankets. The size of a double bed, the platform was without pillow or mattress. "I keep all my shit up here," Denny explained, pushing himself back among wrinkled cloth. By his left hand was an army compass, a green shirt (with gold trim) fresh pressed and wrapped in plastic, a dagger whose handle was a ball-in-claw, and a gaming case on whose outside were long, alternately black and black-outlined triangles for backgammon.

Kid crawled forward through army drab and a weave of paler green rippled through with an electric-blanket cord. In the window that rose above the platform, a mottled shade let tan light on the tangle. He pulled his feet under him to sit and realized his arm was shaking. "How come you don't have half a dozen people sleeping up here with you?"

"I tell 'em to get the fuck out." Denny's hands lay knotted in his lap.

A zodiacal poster hung on the wall: Scorpio. And another of Koth, the Dark Angel. "It's sort of nice up here," Kid whispered. His throat was tight. I'm scared of him, he realized. And I like him. "Get the rest of your clothes off."

"Why?"

Kid let out a breath. "Nothing." He thumbed open the top button and tugged down his zipper. "Go on." He pulled his penis and testicles free of the closing V of brass teeth and let his shoulders relax against the plywood wall.

The ceiling would not let Denny stand. With hunkered back and crouched knees, the boy walked across the bedding, his arms swinging like a skinny blond ape. And fell. Kid flexed his knee under Denny's hand. Denny's hair swung forward, brushed Kid's belly.

His mouth is cold! Kid thought, and pulled his hand away a little sharply. Then he realized that it was only that the boy's lips were wet. Heat covered his thickening penis. He bent his knees and clamped them on Denny's thin flanks. He pushed his hand down his stomach, through moving hair. Saliva in his wiry groin was already cool. "That's good. Make it wet." His fingers butted the base. He pushed back Denny's hair, suddenly bending (and failing) to see the flattened cheeks, the distended mouth. The hair fell back. He cupped the back of Denny's neck. An image of the corpse in the shaft made him let his breath; he wished it hadn't. An equally surprising urge to smack the bobbing head away. Kid grunted, "Unn…" and then again, "Unn…" and had to close his eyes at the sensation. He pressed his palm against the warm ear. The head moved up and his penis was cold.

"Is it okay?" Denny asked.

"Yeah…"

Heat fell down it like a loose ring. His scrotal sack loosened between his thighs, then shriveled when spit ran down his leg, inside his pants. The moving head shook Kid's arm to the shoulder. He reached for Denny's shoulders. Denny tightened his fingers on Kid's thigh, let go, let himself be pulled up to lay with his chest on Kid's, a clutch of chain and crushed vest between them.

Denny's face was hard and amazed. "What you want?" All the small muscles of chin, cheek, and jaw were visible.

Kid rubbed Denny's back. "I want you to take the rest of your fucking clothes off." Denny's skin was hot and dusty dry.

With his other hand, Kid reached between them to move his cock, caught between creased denim.

Denny jerked back to his knees, took a breath, and began to unzip his pants. Kid thought: he doesn't want me to touch his dick. Something like anger gathered in his stomach.

Denny said softly and hoarsely, "You don't have to take yours off." He worked his jeans back beneath his knees, stopped to pull handfuls of chain from his neck.

Kid scratched his belly. Denny stopped all motion, his eyes caught Kid's groin. Something happened in Kid's throat and to his mouth that it was easy to think was fear, was easier to think desire.

Kid's cock, hardening, rolled up his thigh.

Denny's throat released the little air he tried to hold.

"Take your pants off…" Kid checked anger against desire. Checking only spilled the anger into his voice. "Go on…" Desire remained, a heavy heat under his stomach.

Denny sat back to pull off his boots. On the right, the outer half of the heel was worn to the leather. He pulled the left off more quickly. Loops of chain fell around his ankle. The knob of bone divided three strands from four: a dog's choke collar, wrapped several times. Denny leaned back to pull his pants off.

Kid looked at Denny's hands, Denny's feet, Denny's groin. His own back, against the wall, was slightly stiff. Denny, changing the texture of his movements, now began to fold his jeans, not looking at Kid. To relieve his shoulders, Kid sat forward. Then he reached out and pulled the jeans out of Denny's hands and tossed them in the corner with the boots and blankets. Denny's expression, as his eyes sought something other than Kid's, moved from confusion to belligerence.

Kid smiled, and the smile became the soft laughter for a house full of sleepers. "Come on."

Denny pushed himself forward. Then he said hoarsely: "That's pretty funny I should freak out now, ain't it?" The dry, hot skin brushed Kid's, pressed Kid's, a hand between their shoulders: heel hard, four light pressures and the length of thumb. Kid looked down at where the black-lined nails touched him. He reached around Denny's shoulders to cover the boy's fingers with his own. Child's? he thought. And then, with concern: Why has this child brought me here? He tightened both arms across Denny's back: Denny was shivering. "Hey…" Kid rubbed the boney stalk of Denny's spine down to where the flesh thickened and became soft. Then up. Then down. "Hey, cut that out. What's the matter?"

Denny still shook. "Nothing."

I'm afraid. And I want to stop this. Shit, no! "Come on, then. You try to relax." Kid worked further from the wall across the piled blankets. Holding Denny on top, he made a rocking motion. Denny turned his face away so that the side of Kid's face was all a-brush with yellow.

"If we just lay around like—"

One of the people under the loft turned over. And Denny stopped breathing for the count of three; then went on:

"— like this, we ain't never gonna do nothing."

Go on and do what you want then, was anger. With the sentence in his mouth unsaid, Kid realized: I'm twelve years older than him. He said, "Get down there and suck it," which, at the scrambling over his chest and stomach and the welling heat in his groin, he knew was lust. He reached for the hair and hunched shoulders between his legs. With his leg, he rolled Denny over on his side, pushing and pushing. Denny held Kid's thighs. Their congress was intense and diligent, till Denny, not holding him, was hammering near Kid's hip. "Okay…" Kid panted, and let the boy go. A quarter toward orgasm Kid hunkered down to press his hard groin on a hip, a thigh, something.

"Hey…" Breathing hard, Denny lay on his back. He raised his hand, glistening knuckles, strung with grey mucous. "I guess I came." He grinned. "What am I gonna do with this stuff?"

"Eat it," Kid said. "That what you usually do?"

"Yeah." Denny looked back up at the ceiling and put his fore knuckle in his mouth, turned his hand to lick the heel.

Kid put his arm, moist with effort, across Denny's thin, hard chest, still dry, and rubbed on the bony hip. Denny took his two middle fingers out of his mouth. "You didn't come yet?"

"Nope."

"Go… go on and do what you want."

Yeah, Kid thought, that's anger. He laughed.

"When I was little," Denny said and pressed the back of his hand against his open mouth, "there were these two brothers who were the strongest kids in my neighborhood. I used to want to be like them. And once they told me they were so strong because they used to eat each others' come. I didn't even know what they were talking about then. I hadn't even ever jerked off, you know?" Denny turned to look at Kid. "I guess it's protein or something. You do it too?"

Kid shook his head. "No."

"Then how'd you know?"

Kid shrugged. "You just looked like you were somebody who might."

"What's that mean?"

"I don't know." Kid squeezed the tight muscle under the tissuey skin of Denny's arm. "Maybe it's because you're strong. Like they said." He put his leg over Denny's, then suddenly sat. He felt his hair brush the ceiling and hunched. "You like that, hey?"

Denny grinned again, and held Kid's cock in his slick hand. Kid started to rock. Denny said, "You like girls?"

Kid was surprised. "Yeah."

"You wanna fuck a girl?"

"Why don't you just open your mouth? Or turn over, huh?"

"Just a second. Lemme up—"

"Hey, look, all you gotta—" But Denny struggled up. Kid let himself be pushed away, annoyed and curious.

"I'll be right back," Denny whispered, dropping over the edge of the board. Kid sighed and pushed his hand down between his legs. I may be crazy, he thought, but this one's nuts! He reached under his shoulder and pulled flat a fold of blanket. Look over the edge…? No. He stared at the ceiling that had brushed his head. Former owners had painted the cracked plaster white without spackle.

People came into the room.

She said, "Where?"

Denny said, "Up there, on my bed. Go on."

The platform shook as someone started up the ladder. Kid looked. Her curly hair, confused with sleep, her astounded eyes, her smiling mouth cleared the edge. She said, "Um…" then giggled, and then, "Hello."

"Go on up," Denny's voice urged.

She looked back down. "I am." She came over the edge and crawled forward, breasts swinging out against her arms, in against one another.

She had once brought him whiskey in the bathtub when he had been fouled with blood. "Hey!" Kid said, "how're you?" She smiled again and pulled herself to sit cross-legged, with lots of dark hair in the triangle of heel, heel, and groin.

Denny came up too, leaned on his forearms, grinning.

I am being used, Kid thought. For what, I am not sure.

"So what are we supposed to do now?" Kid asked.

"He likes to get his dick sucked," Denny said.

The girl reached out, with the tip of her tongue in her teeth.

"Hey!" Kid said to Denny, "You get on up here!"

Denny's expression went momentarily blank. Then he scrambled up onto the platform. The girl giggled again, and suddenly fell against him. "Hey…" Kid caught her, and while she laughed, he scraped his shoulder on the wall and hit his elbow. She didn't let go his penis.

Denny tried not to giggle and was saying, "Come on now. Be quiet…" He had scooted to the corner, and rocked and hugged his knees.

"Hey…" Kid said again and moved a boot (Denny's) from under his shoulder. Something in the midst of the pressure tickled his chest. He looked down. She had her face against him: it was her eyelash opening and closing. "Hey," he said a third time, and caught his hands in her curly hair and pulled her head back.

She just said, "Annnn…!" He kissed her. She grabbed his shoulders up near his neck and pushed back with her tongue. He held himself up with his left hand, mashed the softness of her shoulder with his right, of her breast, of her belly. When he pushed his middle fingers against the flesh folded in her cunt, she swung up her knee, with shaking calf and thigh. The entrance was soft, Inside his fingers found a sloppy firmness that slowly gave and grew softer. She made lots of little noises, and her hand on his penis became maddening as feathers. Trying (and succeeding) not to take his tongue out of her mouth, he moved around her, crawling over her large thighs, and wedged himself between them. He pulled out to go in again, and opened his eyes to find hers wide and staring toward Denny. But they came back to his, and at the same time she swung her legs up around him like hot pillows. He dug in her with penis and tongue, yet something changed gears inside him; he let it slow, and from the slowness build. Curious himself, he looked up with jogging sight. Denny, moved forward to his knees, with cantilevered cock, his mouth slightly open, and closing — mumbling things too soft to hear.

Kid turned his face against hers and momentarily saw himself surrounded by soft, by wet, by warm. He thrashed out in it, and came; a single, intense spasm that left her rolling under him and sucking at his mouth, the hard place between the mashed breasts pressing against his. Not felt since sometime far back in adolescence, he wanted violently to be free of physical contact. He rolled from her, feeling silly, while she caught her breath and the cold slapped his sweaty thighs and stomach — as he knew it had slapped hers. That wasn't it either. On his back he worked himself against her again; she made no protest, but turned to push her face against him. "Hey…" He raised one arm to slide it beneath her head. "Hey, come here." With the other, he motioned to Denny.

Denny stretched his legs out and slid over. Kid caught him around the shoulder. Denny lay down, put his leg over Kid's, his cock a small bar across Kid's hip. "You didn't come, did you?" Kid asked her.

"Um," she said, surprised, and blinked at him.

He tugged at Denny without looking at him. "I shot my load and your girl friend hasn't had hers yet. Get down there and do something about it."

"Huh?" He felt Denny push himself up on one elbow.

Kid licked her nose. She squinted. "I want to watch you eat my come out of her pussy," which was patently untrue. That's what I'm being used for! He wanted to watch her face; her eyes were half-closed, glistening slivers between the lashes. Her upper lip brushed and brushed the lower. Denny's neck was two hard bands with a valley between. Kid pulled it forward. "Go on, do it."

Denny grunted his protest. The girl suddenly looked surprised.

Kid clamped his hand on Denny's neck, in time to see fear below the protest. "Go on, motherfucker. Or I'll bust your head open!"

Denny swallowed and dropped his face.

Kid closed his fingers in the yellow hair, pushed the bobbing head and rocked it, less roughly than he thought he should.

She said, "Oh…" once and moved her leg. He looked at her: she kept the surprised expression. Inches away from her face, he questioned her with his eyes (she wouldn't answer), kissed her gently, harder, till at last she closed her eyes — tight — and began to gasp. He felt her hand touch and avoid his in Denny's hair, so let go (but pressed his leg against the boy's back) while he kissed her. He caressed her limp, long breast, rolling on her ribs. A heavy girl of… seventeen? Eighteen? Older than Denny; still a child. Her soft tongue blunted on his hard one. He held himself away from her, touching her only with hand and mouth. Once her hands hit his at his arched belly, returned to Denny's hair, and he heard the boy gasp. Denny was flexing on the wrinkled blankets as his head rocked and wobbled. "Unn…" she said, "Unn… Unnn… Unn…" Then she squealed and clutched him.

Kid dropped on her, gathering what was soft about her sides between his hands and elbows.

"Get your fucking knee off my head," Denny said.

With the tips of her fingers, she climbed Kid's back, and sighed, and tightened her hands in their climbing.

Denny pulled free of their legs and flopped against Kid.

"How you, sloppy-face?" Kid put his arm around Denny. The boy buried his chin, already cold, in Kid's shoulder. "Do you do this to everybody who drops by for a blow job in the morning?"

"It's her idea," Denny said.

She giggled and said, "It is not!"

Kid felt the boy's groin against his hip, "Denny's still got a hard-on," he told the girl. "You want to take him on front and center?"

She raised her hand and laughed again. "Sure. But he won't do that."

Kid turned to Denny. "You don't like to fuck?" He was thirsty. But you have to ask for something to drink later…

"I guess not," Denny said. "I mean it won't stay up…" It came out with sudden, adolescent gravity. "… see?" And it was softening.

"His tongue sure stays up, hey?" Kid said. The girl rubbed the side of his knee with hers.

Kid rubbed back, reached between Denny's legs.

"Hey, what are you…"

"Woops!" Kid said. "It's up again. Come on, I want to see you try."

The girl rolled on her back. "He won't do it."

"You shut up."

"I think he should." She folded her hands under her breasts. "But he keeps saying he's gay."

"Why don't you lay off me?" Denny said.

"I got a hand full of your dick." He moved his fingers so that Denny's crotch hair rubbed the ring of knuckle, forefinger, and thumb. "It's hard now."

"Denny…?" the girl said and uncrossed her hands.

Wrapped between ham and heel, Denny's cock bobbed but did not wilt. "Don't worry," Kid said, "I won't let go of it."

"Shit," Denny said and pushed himself up. "Okay, but it won't work." Denny's knee hit Kid's stomach.

"Uhhh…"

Denny's hands landed on Kid's chest. "Hey, you let go!"

"So? You still got a hard-on. You sure that's the only thing you're worried about?" Kid sat up and put one hand on Denny's hip, and rubbed the boy's buttocks with the other, moved his hand between them, to hair and loose scrotal flesh. Denny's skin was still brick dry. His own and the girl's (one soft thigh spread under his calf) were moist. She moved and made a sound like moaning; could have been mouthed laughter; even protest.

Kid put one hand on her belly, pressed a finger in a crease. He moved his hand onto her hair and mirrored her moan with his voice.

A muscle in Denny's thigh moved on Kid's wrist. The testicles lay on his palm. Kid brushed the undershaft with his fingers. "You like that?" He held the penis, moved his hand out to cover the circumcised head, back so that thick flesh moved under innards rigid as dry sponge. "You just think about the rest of my load in there, what you ain't got on your face. You won't lose it… yeah!" because his other hand, spreading the third and fourth finger, pressed and she gave, wet with mucus. "Go on…"

Denny lowered himself. The muscle in his thigh shook till his knee slipped on the blanket.

"His dick and my two fingers in your pussy," Kid said. "They can't all give out at once. Hey, look at him hump!"

Her hand lay loose: small fingers on white palms where the sweat was shiny as mica. The fingers moved to close and did not close, moved to open and did not: she touched Denny's shoulders as his pale hair curled against her face. Kid felt the boy shake, the cock sliding on his knuckles. He took his hand from between them to hold himself up. Denny's body flattened on her larger one beneath. Kid prodded between them again. "Hey, boy… there you go. You like that, huh?" He balanced himself to rub her arm, and felt a muscle twitch in her shoulder. "You like it too, don't you?" On the seventh or eighth motion, he could again move his middle finger knuckle deep in her beside Denny's scrotal sack which, having shriveled tight as possible, now unwrinkled on his palm. Denny backed up to push. Her hand jerked on his shoulder. Kid could not see her face. Denny pushed again and her counterpush beneath him made her legs sway. They're so silent, he thought, and caught his breath; his own cock was tight and tense and hard enough to hurt. He moved his hand from between them, and lay down beside them, pressed himself against them, his dick along the flexing crevice between, one arm across Denny's back, the other around the top of her head. Denny did not break rhythm. Kid nuzzled between their faces, trying to kiss her, but she would not turn toward him. Denny's breath was loud as an engine. "Hey, you fuck that shit…" Kid whispered. "You bust that pussy wide open, cocksucker! Bury him in pussy, bitch!" Denny was a motion against his right hip; against his left, her hip thrust and shook under Denny's falling, and falling, and falling faster. So he moved his hand down between Denny's buttocks; felt the first sweat on the dry body. Denny pushed harder. She had raised her far leg around his thighs, and was panting. Kid reached over her calf, thinking, maybe she won't like that, and between Denny's legs, moving down a few inches so he could cup balls; Denny growled, and he was going to take his hand away, but the growl articulated, "Yeah…! That's right. Go on…" He jabbed, his hand forward and she, beneath, jerked in a way that should have had a cry with it. Denny pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and stopped pushing, while she went on, and let out all his air. "Jesus Christ…" muffled against her neck. His ass relaxed. Then he began to pant.

Kid rubbed his neck, and Denny laughed against her, reached up to brush his hair from her face. She was panting too.

"Hey?" Kid brushed her cheek with his knuckle. Her wide eyes locked his. "You make it this time?" With his other hand, he pushed his cock down against her thigh. "I can go again."

She flashed an uncertain smile. "I'm okay."

"Shit!" Kid let his head drop with a bark of laughter. "I'm tired, that's what I am." He closed his eyes, and a breath later heard them making movements. His own groin, still engorged, was numbing. I bet I'm going to wake up with cramps under my balls, he thought, and didn't care. Denny touched his shoulder, tugged a little. So he rolled back against them. Denny made another breathy sound, and hugged Kid tightly, suddenly pushed his face against Kid's neck. "Hey…!" He caught the boy, who was giggling all panty like a puppy (like her, he remembered, when she had first fallen against him). He moved his hand down the hard flank till his knuckles touched her softer one. "Go to sleep or something." Denny took his face away, and Kid worked his arm beneath her neck (her hair was much crisper than the boy's, and the back of her neck was moist and hot; his own, moist and cooling) and felt comfortable enough to let himself drift. Drifting, he realized how loud Denny's breath was and listened for hers. It was slower and farther away. Then, after a time that might have been sleep, it was faster. He reached for her, only brushed her, he thought: A strangeness, hey, and beautiful. His lips, drying, had adhered to one another. They tore apart with the breath and the mumbled word: beautiful. Released, he fell away into sleep.

He woke in annoyance that turned immediately to pleasure. Somebody was blowing him. He grinned on the darkness of his lids, reached down through three levels of thought. Lanya? No, this other girl. His hand glanced from bone under soft hair to hit the hard, tight shoulder. Denny grunted.

"What you doing?" Kid asked. He rolled his head left, then right on the creased blanket, then again with his eyes open. The girl was gone.

Denny said, "You were asleep all the time with a God-damn hard-on. I was just—" Kid locked his fingers in Denny's hair and pulled his head down.

"That's what you started doing and you ain't finished me yet."

Denny dropped his mouth again.

Kid moved one fist out in the blanket beside his face, hoping it was still warm from her. One fantasy memory of Denny's face between her legs and his penis thrust between them… he moved from fantasy and lay, with his mouth opened, his head back, each muscle loosening; Denny held Kid's balls while he sucked; and that felt good. Kid held the boy's sides with his legs. And came. It was something like hot oil poured in cotton (cotton into flame; flame, out beneath water. Water and ashes and ashes washed through him); "Come on up here."

Denny lay down on Kid's chest.

Kid rubbed his back, dry and papery as before. He wanted to say thanks, but decided it would be silly, so he squeezed Denny's shoulder instead.

"Your come tastes different from mine," Denny said.

"Yeah?" Kid closed his eyes.

"It's more, you know, liquid. And there's more of it."

"I'm bigger than you."

"And it's more bitter."

"You know," Kid said, "you're a pretty funny little guy. Where'd your girl friend go?"

"She got—"

Somebody came into the room, moved something below them, turned.

Kid looked down across the blanket as a nondescript top-of-a-head left through the doorway.

"— got up a little while ago and went out." Denny's fist uncurled on Kid's shoulder.

"Oh. You two do this a lot?"

"Huh?"

"Drag people into bed all the time?"

"Not like this."

"Like how?"

"I don't know. It's her idea, most of the time. She's my best friend here."

Kid nodded, his chin tapping the top of Denny's head. "Is she a scorpion too?"

"Naw. She's not a member. Not like Filament. Or Lady of Spain. She just likes to hang around with them." He shifted. "I mean us. I bring guys around for her sometimes. As long as she lets me watch. A couple of times I messed around with the guys, just a little. But not like… well, what we did."

"You like messing around with her too?"

Denny shrugged. "I don't know. I guess so. But I never done that before. I mean get inside."

Kid laughed.

"Sometimes she'd tell me I should, but I never did. It just embarrassed me, you know? I couldn't keep it hard, I mean before."

"Oh." Kid tried not to smile, even though Denny could not see it.

"I can get guys for her two or three times a week, sometimes. She says she don't wanna be one guy's girl friend."

"She likes two at a time? I can dig it."

"Maybe." Denny moved a little. "We do anything together, any old crazy thing, you know? If I told her to do something real crazy, like go up in an old building where there might be people hiding with guns, she'd do it. We found all sorts of junk. In old buildings. There's lots of stuff around."

Kid crossed his arms over Denny's back; the warm mouth brushed his chest.

"I like to watch her make it with guys," Denny said. "When I blew you, were you thinking about her?"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? No, I wasn't. I mean only a little at first."

"I don't care what you were thinking about," Denny said. "You think you know an awful lot about what I like, huh?"

Now Kid shrugged. "I think I like you. How's that?" Relaxing from the shrug, he began to laugh. "You want to suck it, sit on it, that's fine by me. Now you're going to turn around and run off and look all scared and wide-eyed at me every time we see each other from now on, huh? But I want to make love to you, sometime. Just you."

"Like I was a girl?"

Kid sighed. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way."

"I'd like that."

"I know you would." He cuffed the back of Denny's head with his hand.

"When you jerk off, do you do that like what I did?"

"Huh?"

"You know. Eat it."

"Oh. No. I've tasted my own a couple of times. Hell, I guess I ate it once or twice, just to see."

"I do it all the time," Denny said, with resolve. "How did you know I did?"

"I've just known other people who did that too, and… well. I don't know."

"Oh."

"Is she going to come back?" Kid asked.

Denny shrugged.

"Oh," Kid said again and thought he'd been saying that a lot. So he closed his eyes.

He listened for people moving around the house, thinking it must be growing late in the morning. Something — Denny's elbow — hit the side of his head, and he realized he was waking up after drifting off again.

He opened his eyes and pushed himself to sitting position. Denny lay curled away from him. Kid breathed deeply; his head was heavy with the detritus of pleasure. He rubbed his shoulder and it tingled, paused at the chain that crossed the hair on his chest. It still held: from a very long time ago, a waking and a sleeping and a waking, he recalled the blond Mexican who had surprised him in the street. Kid frowned, and began to reach around for his clothes.

He had to go to the bathroom, for one thing. His head ached slightly, and his mouth tasted like unflavored gelatin, solid around tongue and teeth. He looked for his pants, stopped, put his hand on Denny's buttock. A face, he thought, hatcheted on the obstetric line. Cheeks, he thought, sucked in with astonishment. If you hang around, I'm going to tear it up. Denny rubbed his nose and was probably awake but not moving.

Kid pulled on his pants, dragged his vest and his boot over the edge of the platform. The people in the sleeping bags were still there. Bending to put on his vest, he found his flanks sore; he leaned on the jamb to put on his boot, and for the first time in a while wished he had a second. (A vision of his own hands crumbling dirt between them, the dirt falling on water.) He stepped into the hallway.

The tan shade and the warmth in Denny's loft had intimated a false summer.

The sky beyond a dirty window pane high on the hall wall was stormy. The bathroom door opened: not Thirteen's girl friend, but Thirteen himself. His long hair was bushy from sleep. "Hey I didn't know you was around here?" Thirteen nodded heavily, his voice roughened by fatigue. "Ain't seen you in a couple of days." Kid went into the bathroom and while he urinated, busied himself not thinking about when the last time he had actually seen Thirteen was. He ground his fist against his sore side and reflected: it probably isn't possible to really fuck yourself to death. Punching his tongue into bitter corners of his mouth, he squinted out the window. Stormy?

Incredible suspensions in the dry air, and he moved between them, dribbling and/or blowing out all holes. He waited for some bright precipitate. His water splashed and silenced. He massaged his limp genitals, not with desire, but rather to press some feeling back. His knuckles got wet, and he looked down wondering if it were urine or final mucus. Pleasure can be an appalling business, he thought and buttoned his pants.

In the hallway, he stood sucking his salty fingers until he realized what he was tasting, wondered why he was doing it, and remembered Denny. He grinned: a psychologist had once called him a maddening combination of lability and willfulness.

Then she walked into the hall without seeing him, and opened the front door. He took his fingers from his mouth, recognized her curly hair, tried to envision her full shoulders beneath the blue sweatshirt she now wore.

She went down the steps.

Curious, he walked to the door. If she turns around, he thought, her eyes will be red, hey?

She stopped by the car, prying beneath the bent rim with one finger, looking absently down the block; looked back at him.

The little chill was all anticipation.

She blinked surprised brown eyes at him, from a face that could have been angry.

"Hey," he said, and smiled at her from the top of the steps, which became more and more difficult to do before her blank blinking, except in confusion. In confusion, smiling, he walked down. "I missed you when you cut out." There are some storms, he thought beneath the mangled sky, it's easier to walk into.

"Sure," she said as he came down the steps. "I bet you did." Her fingers kept moving on the broken glass.

"If you keep that up, you're going to cut your—"

"There's something funny about you," she said with a look of distaste. "That was funny, or queer, or something."

"Look," he said, "you're not going to call me names," and realized he did not know what hers was. That brought him crashing through his embryo anger till he was much closer to her than he'd wanted to be: his fingers against his leg were trying to take the same position as hers. His face pulled to mimic hers.

"When he was… was with me, that was all between you and him. I might as well not have been there!"

"When I was with you, that was all between you and him. I might as well have been beating my meat," and felt, saying it, the comparison was unfair. "He says you're his best friend. What is it? He thinks he's doing it for you, you think you're doing it for him?" His face, straining after hers, registered a sudden sadness inside him so intensely it took him instant after instant to see her expression had changed.

"I used to be the smartest person in my class!" she said, suddenly.

He wondered why his eyes were burning till he saw tears in hers.

"I used… to be the smartest person in my class!" She dropped her head.

He dropped his, whispered, "Hey…" and put his hand (too gently, he thought) on the back of her neck, touched his forehead to hers.

"Why don't you go away?" she said with sad, exhausted anger.

"Okay." He squeezed, snorted the faint laughter of withdrawal, and went back up the steps (his palm cold; her neck had been warm). Halfway up the hall, though, he was frowning.

When he climbed back into the loft, Denny (between Kid's fists) turned over and blinked and grunted.

"Hey, your girl friend's outside all upset."

"Oh, shit!" Denny said and sat up. He ground the heels of his palms against his eyes, then started for the edge of the loft.

Kid grabbed his unchained ankle.

Denny looked back.

"You guys go through this much trauma every time you screw?"

"It's my fault," Denny said.

"Sure," Kid nodded. "Come on back here, will you?"

"I better go. I guess I been doing too much talking about you. I guess I ain't talked to her about nothing else for a pretty long time."

"Which reminds me," Kid said. "You're making a lot more out of that lady in the department store with the bee-bee gun than it's really worth, you know?"

Denny grinned. "I been talking about you a hell of a lot longer than that," and went over the side.

Kid lay back, grunted, "Fuck…" and rolled over, wishing there was someone else there. Maybe, he thought, very tired, he'll bring her back. Denny, he figured, would return. Should he have actually touched her? (He recognized the beginnings of a welter of paranoid speculation; recognized as well that sleep lay on the other side of it.) Touched her in the street? If they were lovers, he would be able to find out in a day, a week, a month if it was the proper thing to do. Hell, should he have told Denny about it at all? He was being used: he didn't like it. That's not the sort of shit you lay on somebody you just dragged into bed. Lovers? He decided he didn't like her at all. (She, among silent others, had once said, "Goodbye.") On the other hand, he shouldn't go prying around in emotional closets like that. (He turned over again, wishing Lanya had not disappeared.) Silly, stupid kids! Why did Denny drag her in in the first place? Righteous indignation, he finally decided, was easier. For the first time in a long while he was aware of the chain around him. Careful, he mulled, that it doesn't come apart — not sure why he should be afraid it might.

2

He woke alone.

Kid sat up, with his eyes closed, for half a minute. The air in the loft was heavy and dry. Would the pulsing at the back of his head become a headache? People moved in other rooms. The bathroom door closed three times. Grinding his knees on the blanket, he turned for his clothes.

Denny's were gone.

In another room a black woman laughed.

His pants were still on. He shrugged up his vest and, with neither buttoned, climbed down. One of the sleeping bags was still occupied. Two others were shed in quilted rings.

He leaned on the wall to pull up his boot. He wished again he had the other, but felt habit dissolve the wish. He went into the hall wondering if he'd encounter Denny or the girl first.

From the door ahead, light slapped across the hall and made him squint.

"Hey, Dragon Lady!"

Kid looked in.

Nightmare, squatting on one of the mattresses, kneaded his thick, scarred shoulder. "Hey, Dragon Lady, you been down!"

The gorgeous beast dazzled about the shabby room.

Nightmare let himself thud backward against the wall. A figure under a blanket moved away. Nightmare laughed and rocked and jangled.

"Down and back! Oh, hey, man. And back!" Dragon Lady turned, killed her lights. And laughed. Kid watched her stained teeth gape.

A dozen people slept around the room. Nightmare and Dragon Lady talked on raucously:

"I brought you coffee!" She breathed heavily, breasts stretching her vest's rawhide laces. "Adam and Baby are out there now putting it together. Found a whole fucking warehouse full!" Her face was long and dark as bittersweet chocolate. "Brought you back a whole carton."

"Instant?"

"No." She made a fist. "No!" — insistent as an economics teacher. "The real thing. My boys are making it in the kitchen."

Nightmare rocked and hugged his shoulders. "Hey, we're gonna do up a little caffeine here! That's really good. Oh, Yeah!"

Copperhead suddenly, knees wide, swung up to sit. Head low between his shoulders, he shook his hair. Freckled hands crossed on his darker genitals, he blinked at the room. His lids were puffy so that you just saw two slashes of gold; which turned toward Kid. Copperhead frowned, cocked his head; his mouth hung open, his lips, marked with a line Kid knew was dried blood (because his own gums bled when he slept), sagged from even, yellow teeth. The girl in the pea jacket moaned and tried to wedge between the cushion and the couch-back.

Nightmare swung his hand at Kid. "That's him."

"Sure looks like him." Dragon Lady's heavy lips pursed.

Nightmare's thin ones grinned.

"What you wearin' that thing around the house for?" Copperhead asked.

Kid looked down at the orchid — on his hand. "It makes shaking my dick after I take a leak a real adventure." He took a breath, tried not to search out the memory, searched and found a blank.

"Not to mention zipping up your fly," Copperhead said. "It's open." He turned to pull his pants out from under the blond girl, who squeaked and tried to roll into the upholstery again.

"That's him?" Dragon Lady asked, mocking.

Kid nodded. "It's me." He leaned back on the door jamb and dropped to a squat. "It's going to stay open for a while, too, I guess. I don't feel like castrating myself."

"He's really funny." Nightmare pushed the end of his braid back over his shoulder. "He's a good kid. He doesn't make a lot of noise. But when he does something, it usually turns out pretty good."

That's a good image to live up to, Kid decided; and decided not to say very much more. When had he put on the orchid…? When…? Copperhead looked unpleasant, yanked again: "Will you get off my fuckin' clothes? I wanna get dressed!"

"Hey, will you guys bring in that coffee!" Dragon Lady hollered.

Somebody half hidden by the couch raised her head from the crook of her arm, and dropped it. It was not Denny's girl.

"They been talking a lot about you," Dragon Lady said. She frowned at Copperhead. "He ain't been saying nothing nice." She laughed.

"I ain't been saying nothing." Copperhead fumbled at the snap on his fatigues. One of the thigh pouches was torn. There were holes in both knees. "I don't got nothing to say about the Kid."

Nightmare hunkered a little. "Kid, what you got to say about Copperhead?"

Kid shook his head. They want us to fall out and fight right here, he thought.

Nightmare's laugh started wide, then pulled into gruff, belligerent, good nature.

Somebody else raised his head from a pile of blankets, blinked sleepily, then grinned—"Hey!" — and stood, clumsily, scratching first at the sweaty hair across his forehead, then at the belly of his undershirt. His other arm was bandaged to the shoulder. "Hey, it's the Kid! You come on back here for a while?"

"How you doing, Siam?" Kid hazarded. The brown, agonized face rocking back and forth on the bus floor had been… different? No, not that different…

"Fine!" Siam ducked his head, grinning hugely. "I'm okay. I'm fine!" His good hand touched the bandage; the finger bounced down dirty cloth (Nightmare still kneaded the multiple-headed bulge of a shoulder that spoke of weightlifting sessions). Siam glanced at the others, got an uneasy look, grinned through the uneasiness, and squatted too, aping Kid.

Dragon Lady called, "I want some God-damned coffee!"

"They ain't got very many cups." The guy had two in each hand and three in his arms. His hair was a jangle of scrap gold; chest, chin and buttocks were all blebs and pustules, his toenails and fingernails filthy, and he was naked. "I don't think they got enough for everybody." He looked around.

"Give one to Nightmare, Baby." Dragon Lady took one for herself.

Denny walked in. He sat next to Kid, quietly, and leaned on his crossed legs: the knee of his jeans brushed the shin of Kid's.

Nightmare took a cup and motioned Baby to give one to Denny. "And give the Kid one—"

"— As long as there's one for me." Copperhead got on his second boot and stamped twice. He looked at Kid.

"I guess Adam and me can share one." Baby frowned at the cups clutched to his chest.

Kid took his cup and thought: if there weren't enough, I suppose we would have to fight.

Copperhead got one. So did Siam.

"Adam!" Dragon Lady called. "Baby done passed out the glasses. What you doin' with the brew?"

Adam came in, brown face veiled by steam. Steam rolled down over the chains on his chest. He had lots of thick, dark hair. "Here you go." He poured for Dragon Lady, and went on to Nightmare. His pants were too big, bunched under, or just sagging from the chain he used for a belt.

Kid held his cup with both hands, feeling its heat.

In the middle of the room, Baby was examining the last cup to see if a crack went all the way through.

"A whole warehouse," Dragon Lady reiterated. "You can go down and get it yourself when you run out of what we brought you."

"Shit." Adam squinted through the steam. "We got 'em a whole carton." He rubbed his chest; chains growled.

"I don't make no food runs." Nightmare blew steam down over his hands. "You know I don't make no fuckin' food runs."

"We got so many free loaders," Copperhead said at the coffee cup he held on his right knee, "you just may have to." Head still low, he looked at Kid again. "We get more of 'em every day."

"You got some in there for you?" Dragon Lady finished saying to Adam, who checked the fuming pot and nodded. Then she looked at Copperhead and hooted: "You really down on the Kid, hey? Why you so down on him?"

"Cause Copperhead's big and dumb," Nightmare said.

"Now I like Copperhead. He's big, dumb, and mean. The Kid's small and smart. But I bet he's just as mean as Copperhead."

"When I got shot," Siam said, "the Kid pulled me onto the bus. Kid ain't mean—"

"Aw, fuck you!" Nightmare bellowed, and rolled sharply to his knees.

Siam spilled coffee over his hand.

Nightmare didn't.

Siam put his cup down, shook his fingers, sucked at his knuckles.

Nightmare guffawed, sipped and guffawed again.

Copperhead blinked, rubbed his beard against his freckled wrist, and retreated even farther between his shoulders.

Kid gripped his cup; his palm was uncomfortably hot. "Hey, Copperhead?" He flexed his nubs on burning porcelain. "Hey, Copperhead, why you think they're so anxious to get us after each other?"

The redhead glowered from the couch.

"I'm half Indian," Kid said. "And you're about… what? Half nigger?" He glanced at Dragon Lady, who looked back and forth between them, black eyes a glint in her dark face, as though she were holding a snicker. Nightmare, his skin, for all his muscles, translucent white, peered over his cup, and actually looked surprised.

"So I guess they just figure it'll be easy, huh?"

Copperhead's glower turned to puzzlement. Then suddenly it broke out in a laugh.

"Yeah," Copperhead said. "Yeah, only—" He pointed a thumb at Nightmare, at Dragon Lady. "Easy, sure. Only half an Indian's a halfbreed or something, right? Half a nigger, anywhere around this part of the world, is still just plain old nigger." This laugh was a bark that threw back his head. But the building anger was loosed in contempt about the room.

Dragon Lady's laugh got drowned in coffee, which chattered loudly below her lowered eyes.

"Copperhead and me—" Kid jutted his arm forward for balance and rocked to standing—"we're on the same side, aren't we?" He stepped over someone asleep. "We better be, with you bastards around."

"Man, he got your number, white boy," Dragon Lady said to Nightmare, chuckling.

"Aw, shut up," Nightmare said.

"He got both your numbers," Copperhead said, "Jesus Christ—" He began to dig his hand under the girl on the couch, pulled out his vest.

Kid was about to look at Denny; but Denny's girl stepped into the far doorway.

She looked very surprised.

Kid walked across the room. He saw Copperhead shrugging into his vest, watched him. So did Dragon Lady and Nightmare, each with differing smiles.

"You want some coffee?" Kid asked.

The girl took the cup he thrust and looked even more surprised. He pushed past, through the door.

The sink and counter were heaped with dishes. The table was piled with garbage. A garbage bag underneath had broken.

Outside the screen door, the sky heaved and twisted like a thing chained.

Kid stopped on the littered linoleum and raised his hands to his face—

He'd forgotten the blades.

He pressed the heel of his other hand against one eye. Clean metal and dirty flesh — he brought his armed hand closer, till metal tickled his cheek.

Beyond metal and skin and screening, and wooden roofs across the street, the sky ran and blistered and dribbled on itself.

I will play, he thought, this game another hour. One more hour. Then I will go do something else. I'm tired. That's not complicated. I'm just tired.

He ground one eye, till light spots superimposed blades, hand and sky.

They were laughing in the other room.

What do I want here?

The boy? he thought to see it fall. I still like him, don't I? He bores me already (thinking: All that guarantees is that he still likes me).

Lanya, Kid thought angrily, has gone away. Why. Because I'm impossible. And realized, astonished, what he wanted was her.

Double laughter separated into a boy's and a girl's. When they stepped around him, hand in hand, she looked quickly away. Denny didn't.

Kid felt his expression change, not sure to what. But it made Denny stop.

"Get out of here," Denny said to the girl.

She looked between them, puzzled and — eager? Then she fled back into the living room.

After a second, Kid said, "Your girl friend doesn't like me very much."

Denny's shoulders made some small, sharp motions. "You been pretty nice to her."

"Like hell." Maybe, Kid thought, I should tell him to go away, like he told her. "Come here."

Denny walked over.

Kid reached in his pocket for Tak's battery. "Put this in for me?"

Denny's face made motions small and strange as his shruggings. I make up rituals, Kid thought. They try to comprehend them; and forced the memory of Lanya's green eyes shut.

Denny fingered up the projector. (The chain tickled Kid's chest.) Biting his lower lip, Denny unsnapped the sphere. He pushed the battery between the clips with his thumb.

Kid moved both caged and free fingers on the blades, and let his hand swing against Denny's pants. "You got a hard-on."

"I know." Denny sucked in his lips and thumbed the projector case closed. It clicked. "Okay." Without looking up, he turned for the door.

Kid put his thumb between his own legs and hooked his genitals forward against his pants. "Hey, turn around."

Denny turned.

"And smile."

Denny laughed, and then tried to stop the laughter. Shaking his head, he said, "You're real crazy." Then he went out.

"Jesus Christ!" Thirteen pushed in around the boy. "Hey, it's the Kid!" He turned and repeated to Smokey, like an after-image at his shoulder: "It's the Kid. Hey, Kid, they told me you were around here but I thought you split already. How you doing?"

Kid nodded. The door closed behind them. There isn't room in this kitchen for all these people. Kid thought.

"Glad to see you!" Thirteen nodded back. "Before you cut out. I mean…" He held the strap of his tank top from his shoulder. "…you cutting out?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, you stay as long as you want That's fine with me. They got all those God-damn freaks in here, I'm really glad to have somebody like you, you know?"

"Thanks," Kid said and wondered what Thirteen wanted.

"Um…" Thirteen said, obviously uncomfortable. "Um… somebody told me you been fuckin' around with the kids, huh?"

"Huh?"

"I mean somebody heard you guys going at it in the loft. You know?" Thirteen grinned; and still looked uncomfortable. "I mean, how old are they, fifteen? Sixteen? I mean, I just sort of feel responsible for them, because they're not that old, you know?"

"I wasn't fucking with them. They were fucking with me."

"Yeah," Thirteen said and nodded. "They're too much, huh? I mean, I don't care what you do, man. It's not a moral thing." Suddenly he reached behind him and drew Smokey up under his arm. "I mean, Smokey here is, what are you, honey? Eighteen? And I mean, seventeen, eighteen, there ain't that much difference. I just don't want to see anybody hurt them, that's all."

"I'm not out to hurt anybody."

"Yeah, man. Sure." Thirteen nodded deeply. "I didn't think you were. It's just that, well… some people have, that's all. Come on inside, hey, and smoke some dope with me, hey? I mean, if you feel like it."

Kid let his caged hand fall to the side.

"I mean, maybe later, then, if you want to." Thirteen grinned again.

"It's good you… don't want anybody to get hurt."

Thirteen hesitated. "Thanks." Then he pulled Smokey a little closer, and they walked around Kid into the other room, while somebody outside the door said:

"Hello…?"

She and her shadow on the screening were out of register.

"Kid? That is you…?"

The door opened — she and his memory of her were, too.

She watched him with small things happening at her mouth that could have been preparation for either laughter or recrimination; and other small things happening in her green eyes.

"Oh, hey—!" he said anyway, because something was worming in his chest. It rose to heat his face, left him grinning and squinting. "Hey, I'm glad you…" His arms went out. She and his memory of her (the screen door clacked) came together between them. Her cheek butted against his, her laughter roared happily at his ear. "Oh, hey, I'm glad you came!" His arms had whipped across her back — one slightly out (and quivering for wanting to close) for the orchid.

She leaned away, "You sure?" and kissed him. "I'm glad too."

He kissed her — harder, longer, losing himself in it (as his hand hung, lost in air and metal; he bunched his fingers, loosened them) till he felt the thing in her shirt pocket, cutting.

He pulled back: Next to her harmonica was his pen.

She said, because she saw him looking, "The bartender at Teddy's told me to give it to you. He said you dropped it there—" and then he kissed her (it still cut) again; but he held on.

She pulled away, once more, wrinkling her nose. "Something smells good." Looking around, she went to the living-room door — he followed — leaned through with one hand on the white frame. "Hey, Nightmare — is there any more of that coffee?"

"You want some, sweetheart?" which was from Dragon Lady. "Help yourself."

Kid watched her cross the room, leaned back on the frame.

She squatted to fill a cup — looked in it first; someone must have used it, but she shrugged — from the enamel pot. Once she glanced back at him, pushed hair from her forehead, grinned. She picked up the cup and returned. The warmth inside him still grew.

On the couch, Denny's girl and Copperhead were going through some sort of toasting game, clicking brims and laughing.

Nightmare was saying, "I can't hang around this place all day! Hey, Dragon Lady, you gonna come with me? I mean I can't hang around—"

A woman stuck two brown arms from under a blanket, with quivering fists, waking.

Dragon Lady and Adam were whispering about something, dark brown and light brown heads together. Adam rubbed his chains.

Suddenly Baby came up. Among the faint fuzz of a new moustache, his nose had run all over his upper lip. Clutched in scrawny, filthy-nailed fingers was a cut-glass bowl, caked at the edges with sugar. "You want some?" He gestured with his chin toward the tablespoon handle.

"No thanks," Lanya said.

Kid shook his head too. Baby said, "Oh," and went away.

Lanya held up the cup for Kid to sip. His hands came up to guide hers. A blade ticked the crock, so he took that one away, felt the ligaments in the back of her hand with the other.

Coffee slapped bitter back across his tongue; he swallowed. Steam tickled his nostrils.

She blew; she sipped; she said, "It's strong!"

"Hey, Baby! Wait — come on back here, Adam!" Dragon Lady bawled, turning, jangling. "Come on, now!"

Through some door, not the kitchen's, a lot of people came into the house.

Lanya frowned, blinked.

A lot of people came into the room. Coffee, chocolate, and tamarindo faces, hands, and shoulders swung by, turning, as chains from long or stocky necks swung under several hairdos of beachball dimensions. Two of the men were arguing, while a third, his arm supple as a blacksnake, waved and shouted to quell them: "Com'on, man! Come on, now, man! Come on—" A minimal half-dozen white faces were occluded or eclipsed before Kid could fix them. Most, blacks and others, Kid recognized from the Emboriky run. A dark mahogany guy in a black vinyl vest stopped by the couch to regale Copperhead, while a diffident white, vestless and a scorpion only from the chains (his belly and chest were scarred with a single, long pucker, still-scabbed and pink), stood by, waiting to speak. In trio, they seemed oddly familiar. The black in the vinyl was the one who'd been friendly to him in Denny's group in the department store.

A hand the color of an old tire suddenly landed on Lanya's shoulder, another on Kid's; the close-cropped head bobbed between them; the long black body, under the swinging vest flaps and hanging chain loops, was sour with sweat, the breath, over small teeth and a heavy, hanging lip, sour with wine. "Shit…" drawled in two syllables.

"Hey, Ripper," Lanya said, "get off!" Kid was surprised she knew his name.

But Ripper — yes, it was Jack the Ripper — got off.

A stocky white girl with a tattooed arm was talking to Nightmare when two more blacks joined the colloquy, loudly. Nightmare, louder, cut over: "Man, I can't hang around—"

"Come on," Kid said to Lanya. "I want to talk to you."

Lanya's eyes flicked from the room to Kid's face. "All right."

He gestured with his head for her to follow.

Stepping around one person and over another, they went into the hall.

The noise erupted and trundled and careered.

Looking for the room with Denny's loft, Kid pushed open the second door he saw. But there was too much light—

Siam on a crate by the green sink, said, "Hey!" and put the newspaper over his lap. He looked at Kid with a smile that fell apart into awed confusion. "I was… was reading the paper." At the edge of the bandage over his hand, the flesh was scaling. Siam offered his brown smile again, thought better, took it back. "Just reading the paper." He stood; the paper fell on the floor. The boards had once been painted maroon.

There was neither glass nor screening in the wide porch window. The city sloped away down the hill.

"You can see… so far," Lanya said at Kid's shoulder. She took another sip of coffee. "I didn't realize you could see so far from here."

But Kid was frowning. "What's that?"

Beyond the last houses, beyond the moiled grey itself, at a place that might have marked the horizon, a low, luminous arc burned.

"It looks like the sun coming up," Lanya said.

"Naw," Siam said. "It's the middle of the afternoon. Maybe it's…" He looked at Kid again, stopped.

"Maybe it's a fire," Kid said. "It's too wide for the sun."

Siam squinted. The arc was reddish. Beyond the gash of the park, a few houses were touched here and there with a copper that, in the haze, paled almost to white gold. "Sometimes," Siam said, "when you see the moon real close to the horizon, like that, it looks much bigger. Maybe the same thing happens to the sun, sometimes?"

"But you just said it was the middle of the afternoon." Kid squinted too. "Besides, it's still ten times too wide." He looked back at Lanya. "Let's go."

"Okay." Lanya took his hand, the bladed one, slipping her fingers between the metal, to hold two of his.

They went back into the hall.

The room with Denny's loft didn't have a door.

"If there's nobody in here," Kid said, "we can talk."

"Want any more coffee?"

"No."

She finished half the cup (while he thought how hot it must be) and put it down on a cluttered ironing board behind the motorcycle.

"Get up in the loft."

She climbed, looked back. "Nobody's up here."

"Go on."

She crawled over, first one tennis shoe, then the other disappearing.

He came up after her.

"Look," she said, as he got his other knee over, "I came by because I wanted to apologize for being so— well, you know. Running off like that. And acting so angry."

"Oh," he said. "That's okay. You were angry. I'm just glad you come." One fist balled on the blankets, he settled to his haunches, watching her silhouette against the windowshade. "How did you know I was here?" He wanted to put his head in her lap; he wanted to nuzzle between her legs. "How did you find me, this time? Who saw me wander up here this morning and came running back to tell you?"

"But this is where they said you'd been for—"

"I know!" He sat back, laughed sharply. "I've been gone another five days! Right?"

Her silhouette frowned.

"Or six. Or ten… people have been talking about me again, saying how I've been living it up here, running with the scorpions, making my rep." He wanted to cup her warm cheeks in his rough, ugly hands. He said, and his voice suddenly became rough, ugly: "I've seen you every day since I met you…" He dragged his hands, bladed and unbladed, into his lip, where bone and muscle and chain and leather and nerve and metal, all mixed up, lay, heavy and confused and gripping. "I have!" He said, swallowed. "That's what it feels like. To me…"

She said: "That's one of the things I wanted to talk about. I mean, after I left you asleep, in the church, I thought maybe you'd want to know some of what happened while you… were away. You told me you went looking for me at the park commune. I thought you'd want to know what happened there after that guy with the gun—"

"I—" fingers and metal and harness moved in his lap—"I don't… I mean, I live in one city." He moved but couldn't lift. "Maybe you live in another. In mine, time… leaks; sloshes backwards and forwards, turns up and shows what's on its… underside. Things shift. Yeah, maybe you could explain. In your city. In your city, you're sane and I'm crazy. But in mine, you're the one who's nuts! Because you keep telling me things are happening that don't fit with what I see! Maybe that's the only city I can live in. Some guy with a gun? In the park?" He laughed, harshly. "I don't know if I want to live in yours!"

She was silent; once he saw her head jerk at some idea; but she decided not to say that one, seconds later decided to say another: "You say you saw me… last night, at the church? And then before that, yesterday… morning? In the park? All right. I'll accept that's what it looks like to you, if you'll accept that it doesn't seem that way to me. All right." She gestured toward his knee, did not quite touch it. "I'm curious about your… city. But some time soon, ask me about what goes on in mine. Maybe something's there that can help you."

"You have my notebook?"

"Yes." She smiled. "I figured you were so out of it, you just might leave it behind on the floor. You've written some strange stuff in there."

"My poems?"

"Those too," she said.

Which made him frown because some of this warmth, still unresolved, was connected with wanting to write.

"I'm glad you have it. And I'm glad you came to see me. Because I—"

Footsteps below.

And Denny's head came up over the loft edge. "Hey, look. This is — oh. You." Denny crawled up over while someone else climbed.

She stopped with her head just visible, and recognized Kid with a frown that faded to resignation, then climbed the rest of the way, breasts swinging in blue jersey.

"Um… this loft is theirs," Kid said to Lanya.

"It's his," the girl said. "It isn't mine. All the junk up here is his. We just came to get away from the mob."

"You see," Kid said, "instead of telling me what's been going on while I was there, you should be finding out what's been going on here."

"Sure," Lanya said. "What?"

"I been balling these two, for one thing. That seemed like days…"

Denny's chin jerked.

The girl sighed a little.

"Denny's a good fuck," Kid said. "She is too. But sometimes it gets a little hectic."

"Denny…?" the girl said.

Denny, sitting back on his heels, darted his eyes from Lanya to Kid.

"Maybe," Kid said, and suddenly his hands came apart, "we all could ball again. I mean the four of us. That might work out better—"

The girl said, "Denny, I'm supposed to be going some place with Copperhead and his friends. I told you that before. Look I gotta …"

"Oh," Denny said. "Well, okay."

"You sure?" Kid asked the girl. "I mean, the whole idea was because I thought maybe it would make you feel better if…"

The girl poised at the edge of the loft. "Look," she said. "You're probably trying to be very nice. But you just don't understand. It isn't my thing. Maybe it's his." She nodded toward Denny. "I don't know… is it yours?" That was to Lanya.

"I don't know," Lanya said. "I've never tried."

"I don't mind somebody watching," the girl said, "if it's a friend. But what we were doing," she shrugged; "It isn't me." She got down from the platform, paused again, just a head showing. "Denny, I'll see you later. Goodbye," with the same tone Kid remembered from the sixteenth-floor apartment in the Labrys. A second later she tripped on something, gave a startled, stifled, "Shit…" and was gone.

Kid looked from Denny to Lanya, back to Denny. "We…" he started. "We were just… we figured we'd use your loft because, well, there were so many other people around. Like she said; the mob."

"That's okay," Denny said. He crossed his arms. "Is it okay if I watch?"

Lanya laughed and sat back against the window edge. A scar of light from beside the shade lay on her hair.

Denny looked at her. "That's what I like to do. Sometimes, I mean, since it's my place. He knows."

"Sure," Lanya said. "That's reasonable." She nodded, laughed again.

"We were just using it to talk," Kid said.

"Oh," Denny said. "I just thought because you were saying we should all… you know. All of us."

"You do live in a strange city," Lanya said. "Maybe I do too." She looked at Denny. "Where do you live?"

"Right here." Denny frowned. "Most of the time."

"Oh." After a moment, Lanya said: "You two've been at it? Why don't you two make it then—" she moved her tennis shoes from beneath her, raised her knees, dropped her meshed fists between—"and I'll watch. I've been in the other room when two guys were balling. But I've never been in the same bed. The idea sort of turns me on."

Kid said: "I just meant—"

"I know," Lanya said. "You want Denny and me to ball, and you want to watch. Well—" she shrugged, tossed her hair and grinned—"I think you're cute—" at Denny. "I wouldn't mind that."

"Gee," Denny said, "I don't know if…" and shifted into some other emotional gear: "because you see that's what we were…" and into another: "before. It was okay. But…" He went forward on his fists, lowered his haunches. "It's just that it wasn't her…" He glanced over the edge. "Like she said. And I'd never done it that way either."

"Oh." Lanya said, pushing her elbows together.

Kid thought: I still don't know her name. "Hey," he said to Lanya. "Come here."

Lanya pursed her lips, hesitated with stiffened arms; then they unstiffened. She came forward.

"You too, motherfucker." Denny practically fell against his side. Kid caught the boy's neck in the crook of his arm. The blades swung beyond Denny's face, dim in half light. Kid pulled his arm tight around Lanya's shoulder, his hand an epaulet over blouse, collar bone, muscle.

"If you don't play, you don't watch."

He had been planning to squeeze them affectionately, maybe say something else funny, and let go. But, for a moment, he was aware they were two entirely different temperatures; and something in his own heat was defined) resolved, released. And Denny (his shoulder hot and still powdery dry) reached across Kid's chest, put two fingers against Lanya's cheek (her neck against Kid's arm cooler and softer, as though it had been recently dried after rain) and said. "You're…" and stopped when she reached out and put her palm on Denny's neck. Kid said: "Yeah…" She watched, something happening in her face, which became quiet laughter, her eyes going back and forth between Kid's and Denny's, pulling herself closer.

Denny's head suddenly moved. His laugh back was sharp, shrill. Still, whatever tensions were in it eased in it.

"You open your mouth after this morning, cocksucker," Kid said, "and it won't be my dick you get in it—"

"Kid…!" Lanya's protest was real.

But Denny caught Lanya's forearm, turned his face into her palm.

Something in the machinery between Kid's belly and loin tightened. Denny was trying to climb over him. Kid moved a leg between them — something scraped. Lanya got one elbow under her. Kid's hand dragged her back. It's clumsy, Kid thought. It is clumsy! and a despair that he had been trying to hold in suspension for — how long? broke. He thought he was going to cry. What came out was a great, voiceless gasp.

Denny lay his head down on Lanya's hand that was on Kid's chest. Then he said, softly, "Aren't we gonna take our clothes off… this time?"

Lanya moved her other hand down Denny's head till she was holding his ear.

"Don't pull," Denny said. "I'm not pulling," she said. "I'm tickling."

"Oh," Denny said. And then: "That's nice." And then, raising his head, "I think you better take that thing off — at least."

(Kid looked at his hand still in the air. It was quieter in the other room.)

Lanya suddenly sat. "Oh wow. Sure." She wore one of her stranger expressions. "I didn't even see!"

Kneeling over him, she took Kid's wrist, got the clasp. Kid was completely astonished when Denny's hands joined hers and, with no clumsiness, the blades opened, fell away: the harness was lifted from his tingling wrist.

Lanya put it on the window ledge by the blind, where it stood, upright, a long, bright crown.

Kid turned his freed hand in the air, looking at the hirsute joints and ruined tips flex, horny palms and knuckles folding, opening, till, tired, it began to waver, fall. Someone tugged at his belt. Someone pulled at his vest shoulder. He laughed, turning, while through some door in another room a lot of people left.

They made love.

It was energetic. It was graceful. It was intense. He was a warmth that moved around and between them. They were warmths that moved around him, between him and each other. Once, eyes closed against the damp blanket, he moved his hand across her rib cage, brushing beneath her breasts with the knuckle of his thumb (she caught her breath…) till he reached her arm (…then let it out) and followed her arm to where her elbow bent on Denny's belly, and on to where her hand held Denny's penis.

After moments, his hand came away, against the embankment of her hip, crossed it. He pressed his fingertips in the hair over her pubic bone, slid them down to cup, to press in. First one, then the other, he touched their genitals. Finally he pushed himself to his knees, put one knee across them, watched them watch him, blinked. Sweat dribbled his cheek. A drop caught in his eyelash and shook. He bent his head.

Is it only an hour, he wondered, that encompassed three people's four orgasms? Now I know why, though foreplay can be delineated in all its fascinating and psychotropic detail, a poet must use asterisks or blank paper for orgasmic mechanics that satisfying: they open to something so wide you can now understand why, when sex is that good, you may say, "The sex is not the most important part," and feel these words analogue some shadow of truth.

Then he remembered, amidst his auto-pontifications, there were two other people who would have to agree with him before he could even suspect such maunderings correct. Grinning, he pushed up on his hands, climbed over one of them (stopped to stare at the sleeping face, full up, lips momentarily pressing, nostrils flaring, two fingers coming to scratch the nose and fall away, still in sleep), looked over at the other (this one on the side, lips parted, lower eyelid mashed slightly open revealing an albumen line, breath whispering against curled knuckles) and, after taking the pen from Lanya's pocket and putting it in a bottom hole of his vest, climbed down, dragging his clothes on top of him.

He wondered, if they woke, would they think he had gone to the bathroom.

In the doorway, he pulled on his pants, put on his vest. There was a cold line against his chest… The pen. The chain around him was hot. He ran his fingertips along it, concerned and trying to recall why.

In the strangely quiet hall, he went to the porch door, opened it. And squinted. Gold trapezoids lay high up the lapped-plank wall. His moist skin was slathered with bronze. Each hair on his forearm glowed amber.

He heard his own loud breath; he closed his mouth.

Looking down at his chest, before his vision blurred with tears, he saw that one prism had laid out on his skin a tiny chain of color.

The house was perfectly silent behind him.

He rubbed his eyes, shook his head.

The tearing stopped, anyway.

He raised his eyes again, looked out the porch window at the horizon again—

When he'd first moved to New York City to go to Columbia, he had brought with him an absolute panic of the Bomb. It had been October; he had no Thursday morning classes, was still half-asleep in the sweaty sheets of a persistent, Indian summer. Sirens woke him — he remembered no scheduled test. A jet snarled somewhere on the sky. He got chills and immediately tried to logic them away. This is the sort of coincidence, he thought, blinking at the dull window, that can ruin a good day.

Then the window filled with blinding yellow light.

He'd leaped from the bed, taking the sheets with him. His throat cramped and his heart exploded while he watched gold fire spill from window to window in the tenement across the street.

The fireball! he thought, beyond the pain in his terrified body. The light's here now. The shock and the sound will arrive in four seconds, five seconds and I will be dead…

Four seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds later, he was still standing there, shaking, panting, trying to think of someplace to hide.

The clouds, in coincidence compounded, had pulled away from the sun. The plane was gone. The clock radio in the bookshelf said noon. The siren lowered its pitch, softened its whine, and ceased.

What he'd felt then had been active terror.

What he felt now was its passive equivalent.

It couldn't be a fireball, he thought. That was impossible.

Beyond the mist, it shone through as moon or sun shone through an even veil of clouds. It was the color of the sunrise: perhaps a sixth of the circle had risen, secanted by the horizon. But already it was, what? A hundred? Three hundred? Six hundred times the area of the platinum poker chip he remembered as the sun.

…If the sun went nova! he thought. Between his loudening heart he ferreted this information: If that's what it was, then the earth would boil away in seconds! His heart stilled. What a silly fact to base one's confidence on before this light!

The clouds over half the sky were a holocaust of pewter and pale gold.

Was the light warm?

He rubbed his bronzed forearm.

The verdigrised spigot on the wall dropped molten splashes on the muddy drain. Torn paper tacked to the frame of the window filigreed the shadow on the wall beside him.

When he had thought the bomb had fallen, back in New York, he had been left with a tremendous energy, had paced and pondered and searched for something to do with it, had ended up just walking it away.

I may be dead, he thought, in… seconds, minutes, hours? He squinted at the brilliant arc, already perhaps thirty houses wide. The thought came with absurd coolness, I'm going to write something.

He sat quickly on the floor (despite callous, he noticed again it was so much easier to distinguish textures in the gritty boards with the foot he kept bare than the one he wore booted), pulled the paper Siam had left up from the top of the crate. (His pants pulled across the place he'd scraped his knee climbing into the loft.) The Times was often sloppily laid out with frequent white spaces. Paging through, he saw one, and pulled his pen out of his vest.

I had a mother, I had a father. Now I don't remember their names. I don't remember mine. In another room, two people are sleeping who are nearer to me by how many years and thousands of miles; for whom, in this terrifying light, I would almost admit love.

He opened the pages back and placed the paper on the crate. The pages were yellow in the new light.

And it was not blank space.

The bottom quarter was boxed for an advertisement. Inside, two-inch letters announced:

In smaller, italic type beside the title, set off in quotation marks, were lines of verse.

He mouthed: "…at this incense…" and balked. He threw back his head at the chills on his neck (and closed his eyes against the light: inside his lids was the color of orange rind), opened his eyes to look at the paper. A misreading: "…this incidence…" He let his breath out.

Why had they taken those lines, he wondered. Without the two before or the one after, they meant… nothing? He puzzled on the severed image, clicking his pen point.

What was the purpose of it?

(What had he wanted to write?)

His forehead moistened; his eye drifted to the column of type down the left of the… advertisement; and snagged on "…Newboy…" He went to the top, to shake loose the confusion:

Incense had come as a misreading of incidence; did illustrious echo illusion? Kid wondered.

He raised his eyes to the bright vista, squinted, and thought: The problem of hallucinating red eyes, even a great red one rising into the sky…

The thought came with a load of monstrous comfort: This is impossible. He stopped clicking his pen. Momentarily he wanted to laugh.

Hallucination?

He gazed into the light, tried to open his eyes full to it; they hurt and refused.

He had wanted to write something?

This wasn't even hallucination. I'm probably lying in bed, somewhere, with my eyes closed… is that called dreaming?

After-images deviled the walls.

He turned his head away, and into darkness… dreaming?

His cheek was on a blanket. One arm was cramped beneath his side. He was filled with the tingling one has after having laughed a long time. He lay, trying to remember what had just passed, gnawing at his fingers till he tasted blood. And kept gnawing.

Lanya shifted, made some slow, sleepy sound. Kid took his hand from his mouth, curled his fingertips tight against his palm. "Hey," he said. "Are you asleep…?"

Lanya stretched. "More or less…" She lowered her chin and looked down at the blond head between their hips. "What was his name?"

Kid laughed.

Denny's hand uncurled on Kid's thigh. Then the blond head came up. "…huh?"

"What's your name?" She pushed back cords of his hair.

Denny's lids slid closed. He sighed without answering and lay down again.

Kid held his laughter in this time. Lanya shook her head; her hand at Kid's forehead pushing at his coarser hair.

"How was he?" he whispered, from somewhere down in his chest.

"Mmmm?"

"I heard you two when I was sort of half-asleep." He cupped her cheek and she turned to lip the ham of his thumb. "How'd he do?"

She turned back. A smile and a frown mixed themselves on her face. "Now which one of you was that—" She laughed when he shook her ear. "Very sweet and very energetic." She glanced down again. "Sort of … up and down, you know? He's got quite a sense of humor."

"That's one name for it."

Her eyes came up again; even in the shadow their green was bright between his fingers baring her face.

"Terribly, terribly sweet, mainly."

"And how are you?"

"Mmmmm." She closed her eyes and smiled.

"You know what he did this morning?"

"What?"

"He dragged me in here and said he was going to blow me, and then he got that girl in here."

She opened her eyes; "Oh, is that how it happened." He felt her eyebrows raise. "Well, I guess turn about is fair play."

"I dig that scene—"

"So I noticed. You're sweet too."

"— but she was sort of funny about the whole thing. I didn't like it, I mean with her."

"So I gathered. Also he's a little boy, isn't he? Or is he another baby face like you?"

"He's fifteen. She's seventeen. I think."

Lanya sighed. "Then perhaps you just have to give them time to grow into their own perversions. And by the way, how are you?"

"Fine." Kid grinned. "I'm really fine."

And laughing, she pushed her face toward his.

Hands scrabbled on Kid's belly; Denny grunted.

An elbow hit Kid's stomach. A knee hit his knee.

"Hey, watch it," Lanya said.

"I'm sorry," Denny said, and fell on top of them.

The scent of Denny's breath, which was piney, joined Lanya's, which reminded Kid of ferns.

"Oof," Lanya said. "Would you please tell me what your name is?"

"Denny," Denny said loudly in Kid's ear. "What's yours?"

"Lanya Colson."

"You're the Kid's old lady, huh?"

"When he remembers who I am." Her hand on Kid's wrist squeezed.

Kid rubbed the back of Denny's neck with one hand and held Lanya's with the other. Again he felt how chalky Denny's skin was. Lanya's was warm.

"You like this?"

Lanya laughed and moved her arms farther around Denny's back.

"Up here, where I live." Denny suddenly pulled back. "You like this?"

They watched him hunker on the blankets. The side of Kid's thigh on hers was warm. The top, where Denny had been, cooled.

"You can't stand up," Lanya said. "But it must be good for sitting and thinking."

"I stay up here a lot," Denny said. "Cause it never gets that hot. Then sometimes I don't come up here two or three days." Suddenly he sat back and pulled a plastic envelope into his lap. "You like this?"

"What is it?" Lanya asked and leaned forward.

"It's a shirt." Denny said. "It's a real pretty shirt."

Kid looked too.

Beneath the plastic cover, and over green satin, gold strings tangled: the fringe was attached to the velveteen yoke. Velveteen cuffs sported gilt and green glass links.

"I found it in a store." Denny reached behind him. "And this one."

Silver thread elaborately embossed the black.

"Those were the two I liked," Denny explained. "Only you can't wear stuff like this around here. Maybe if I go someplace else…" He looked between the two quickly.

Kid scratched the hair between his legs and drew away a little.

Lanya had leaned closer. "They are pretty!"

"What is that one made of?" Kid asked.

Lanya pressed the plastic covering with her palm. "It's crepe."

"And I have these." Denny pushed the shirts behind him. "See."

When the lid clicked off the plastic box, the cubes inside bounced.

"It's a game," Denny explained. "I found it in another store. It's too complicated for me to play, and there's nobody here to play it with. But I liked the colors."

Lanya picked up one of the green blocks. On each face was an embossed gold letter: p,q,r,s,o,i…

Denny blinked and held the box open for her to replace the playing piece.

She turned it in her fingers a long time, till Kid's awareness of Denny's restrained impatience made him uncomfortable.

"Put it back," Kid said, quietly.

She did, quickly.

"And this." Denny pulled out an oversized paperback book. "You got to look at those close. They're very funny pictures—"

"Escher!" Lanya exclaimed. "They certainly are."

Kid reached over her arm to turn the page.

"Where did you get those?" Lanya asked.

"In another… store." (Kid idly wondered at the hesitation but didn't look up.) "In somebody's house," Denny corrected himself. "We broke in. This was there, so I took it. You seen 'em before, ain't you."

"Um-hm." Lanya nodded.

Kid turned another page of etched perspective imploded on itself and put back together inside out. Lanya bent to look now.

"This!" Denny said.

They both looked. And Kid took the book from Lanya and handed it back to Denny. ("That's all right," Denny said. "She can look at it," ignoring Kid's gesture.) He showed them a silver box. "Ain't this a neat radio? It's got AM and FM and it even says Short Wave." It was the size of a box of kitchen matches. "And all sorts of other dials."

"I wonder if they do anything," Lanya said.

"That one says the 'volume'," Denny explained. "The button's there, that one is the AFC thing so it doesn't slide around. But you can't tell around here because radios don't work here any more."

"Like the shirts," she said. "When you go someplace else, you'll have something nice."

"If we go someplace else," Denny considered, "I'll probably leave all this stuff here. You can get lots of nice things anywhere around. You just pick it up."

"I meant somewhere outside the…", Kid watched her realize that Denny had not.

Suddenly she touched the radio. "It isn't square!" she announced. The black and metal box was trapezoidal. She flattened her hands to the sides of it. "It is beautiful," she said in the voice of someone admitting that a puzzle was still insoluble. (What was the name of his roommate in Delaware who had had so much trouble with the paper on mathematical induction? Another thing he couldn't remember… and was sad at his ruined memory and happy for Lanya.) "It really is… just lovely."

Kid leaned close to her and kneaded the inside of his thighs. He'd laid the Escher against his calf. The corner of the book nicked; he didn't move it.

"You seen these pictures too?" Denny brought out another paper-covered book.

Lanya said: "Let me see."

She turned over the first page and frowned.

"…Um, did Boucher ever paint religious pictures?" Kid ventured.

"Not," Lanya said, "for three-dimensional, laminated-plastic dioramas."

"I think 3-D pictures are great," Denny said, while Kid felt vaguely embarrassed.

"These are strange." Lanya turned another page.

A crowned woman in blue stood one foot on a crescent moon while below her two naked men cowered in a rowboat. Ghosts of the same picture at other angles haunted the striated plastic.

"What's the next…" Lanya asked.

A man who looked like a classical Jesus, in a loincloth, limped on a single crutch, one hand, with stigma, extended.

"Spanish…?" she mused.

"Puerto Rican," Kid suggested.

Lanya glanced at him. "It doesn't have any writing anywhere."

A woman, perhaps the virgin, as likely an empress, rode on a tiger. "The rocks and moss and water in the background, that's lifted from Da Vinci." Lanya turned to the next. "These are really…" She closed the book to a white cover on which was a crowned and bleeding heart behind a cross. "You can't tell me those are Christian. Did you find this in somebody's house too?"

"In a store," Denny said. He was hunting at the edge of the blanket again. "And these."

In his cupped hands were three glass cubes set with glittering stones.

"Dice?" Kid asked.

"I had four of them," Denny said. "One broke." He rolled them against Lanya's leg.

Three, two, and six: counting the top numbers was difficult because of pips on other faces.

"You're really into collecting pretty things." Lanya picked up a cube.

Denny sat back against the wall and hugged his knees.

"Um-hum."

"Me too." She watched him. "Only I leave them where I find them. Like buildings. Or trees. Or paintings in museums."

"You just—" Denny let his knees fall open—"notice where they are; and go back and look at them?"

She nodded.

Denny tangled his fists in the blanket between his feet.

"But you don't have to do it that way here. You can just take what you want. Well, maybe not the trees and the buildings. But the paintings, if you find one you like, you just carry it with you. Shit, you can go live in a fuckin' building if you like it! In front of the fuckin' tree!"

"No." Lanya let her thin back bend. "I'm into collecting pretty, useful objects. Yours are just pretty."

"Huh?"

"But if they're supposed to stay useful, I have to leave them where they are."

"You think there's something wrong with taking that stuff?"

"No … of course not. As long as you didn't take it from somebody:"

"Well it must have belonged to somebody once."

"Do you think there's something wrong with taking it?"

"Shit." Denny grinned. "Nobody's gonna catch me. You like taking stuff?"

"It's not—"

"Say," Denny came to his knees. "You ever hustle?"

"Huh?" Lanya recovered from her surprise with an unsteady grin. "I beg your pardon."

"I mean take money for going to bed with somebody."

"No, I certainly haven't."

"Denny has, I bet," Kid said.

"Yeah, sure," Denny said. "But I just wanted to know. About you."

Her amusement faltered toward curiosity. "Why?"

"Would you?"

"I don't know… perhaps." She laughed again and took his knee in her hands. "Are you planning to set me up in business now? There isn't any business here."

Denny giggled. "That's not what I meant." Suddenly he picked up the plastic box, opened the lid, tossed.

"Hey!" Lanya shrieked, and scrambled back under the cubes of colored wood.

Denny picked up a fallen cube and threw it at her.

"Oh, cut that out—"

He threw another one and laughed.

"Damn it—"

Scowling, she picked up a handful and flung them back, hard. He ducked: they clicked the wall.

She hurled another that hit his head.

"Ahh…!" He flung one back.

She laughed, and threw two more, one with the left hand and one with the right. Both hit. Denny rolled away in hysterics, and scrambled after more gaming pieces.

"You're gonna lose the…" Kid started. Then he stretched across the front edge of the loft to keep the pieces from rolling over. Denny's laughter bobbed between octaves. Kid thought, His voice hasn't even finished changing.

Lanya was laughing too, almost so hard she couldn't throw.

A cube hit Kid's hip. He knocked if back onto the blanket. Another went over his shoulder, clattering to the floor. He watched them turn and duck and toss and wished they would throw pieces at him. After a while they did.

He threw them back, tried to guard the edge, gave up, by now laughing himself, till it hurt beneath his sternum, and couldn't stop laughing, so hurled the bright cubes with gold p's, q's, K's, and r's.

"It's not fair!" Lanya cried against Kid's arm, then laughed again, when they had made him abandon the loft edge.

"Just 'cause you throw so hard!" Cube in hand, Denny ducked first left, then right.

"Come on… now…" Kid panted, and couldn't laugh any more.

Denny looked over the edge. "There're a lot of them on the floor."

Lanya pulled back, threw another. It deflected from Denny's thigh. She ducked behind Kid.

Denny glanced back. "There goes another one."

Lanya looked out tentatively. "Maybe we better go down and pick them up."

Frowning, Denny turned back for the box. "Yeah…" He stopped to place the shirts and books and the glass dice in the corner. Koth regarded the board from his day-glo poster.

A shirt casing had gotten torn.

"Let's go down," Kid said.

Lanya followed him on the ladder.

They picked up cubes. When Denny came down, she threw one at him as he stepped to the floor.

"Hey, don't—" Denny said, because the cube went off into the junk beneath the platform.

"I'm sorry!" Lanya snickered again. "Here, let me help." She followed him into the leaning tools, piled chairs, cartons. She held back an ironing board while Denny dropped down. "Got it…"

She came over with the box, and held it for Kid to put in his handful. While he fingered them clumsily into place, she asked, "Have you ever taken money for having sex with somebody?"

"Yes."

"Men and women?"

One cube stuck against another; Kid pressed, and another jumped out of the matrix. "Just men."

"Maybe I should try it," she said after a moment. "Everybody thinks about it."

"Why?" Kid stopped for another cube by his foot.

"And maybe you've just made a good point."

When Kid stood to place the cube, she added:

"But that wouldn't stop me."

She snapped the lid and turned toward Denny.

Kid grinned, watching her backbone like an arrow into her buttocks' heart. I do not know, he thought, what goes inside her. All I'm sure is that it's very different from what it looks like is going on.

"There're still some up top." She started up the ladder.

"I don't see any more here." Kid started behind her.

"Hey—!" Denny said.

Then something locked around Kid's neck, scraped his sides, and hung on.

"Fuck, what the—"

"Carry me!" Denny shouted, clinging. "Go ahead, carry me on up."

"Fuck you!" Kid shouted, sagging on his grip. He tried to shake the boy loose. "Don't choke me to death, you stupid… bastard!" He hauled up another rung.

Lanya crouched on the ledge. "You'll drop him—!"

Kid hauled up one more. "Get on up there, cocksucker!"

Lanya was tugging at Denny's arm.

Kid tried to heave Denny up.

"Hey—!"

Kid felt Denny slipping. Bare feet pawed his hip. Then something scrambled over his head. "Hey," Denny repeated in a different voice. He tugged at Kid's shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Lanya sat behind him, slapping first her thighs and then her stomach, once more helpless with laughter.

"Fuck you." Kid crouched on the loft edge. As he leaned forward, something hissed across his chest.

"Hey, my chain!"

"What?" Denny pushed himself backward, pulling the blankets from the board. He reached, without looking, for his own anklet.

Kid wondered if that was what had scraped so at his side.

Lanya watched, her lips apart.

"My chain." Kid repeated; he turned to sit on the edge of the loft, and looked down. The end, dangling from his foot, swung inches above the floor. He reached down to pull it up. "It broke this morning… somebody broke it."

"Who?" Lanya asked.

"Somebody broke it. I tried to fix it, but I knew it probably wouldn't hold."

With two fingers he followed it across his shoulder. The break was at the same link. He pulled the ends together.

"Wait a second," Lanya said. "You don't have any nails. Let me look." She crouched before Kid, so close her hair tickled his chest. How can she see, he wondered. "I just about got it."

She did something with her teeth.

"Hey?" Kid said.

"There," and pushed herself backward.

Behind Lanya, Denny asked now, "Who broke it?" Denny lay his foot on Lanya's knee. He put down the box, and brought his arms around her stomach, pulled her to him, laid an arm along hers.

"Don't those get in your way?" She glanced over Denny's leg at his dog-chained ankle. "Sexy, I suppose."

"Who?" Denny repeated his question.

"I don't know," Kid said. "I really don't."

He fingered for the weak link. Part of it was the dimness, but he doubted he could find that link now even in full light. He tugged, first here, then there. "You really fixed it?"

Lanya, her shoulder under Denny's chin, bit her lip to retain laughter. The words "…in time," fell through his head, and he was unsure what they referred to. I've found something, he thought, in time. Who needs monasteries? He laughed out loud for Lanya's caged humor.

She let go Denny, and picked up the box, looking about her legs to see if any more pieces had fallen out.

A cube gnawed the side of Kid's foot. "Here!"

Lanya recovered herself to hold out the box.

Kid tossed the cube in. She put the box on her thigh to fit the cube in place.

"You really think you're a funny little cocksucker, huh?" Kid stood up, crouched, moved forward. His head tapped the ceiling. Not hard, but he staggered. "Yeah?" He crouched again, turning toward Denny and rubbing his groin. "Look at you. You suck a nice dick. You give some good head, what do you think that makes you?" He nudged Lanya with his elbow. The cubes rattled; she looked up. "Yeah, I like his tongue up my ass. But you think that makes you anything more than lukewarm shit — Hey, look at Denny!" Kid pointed between Denny's legs. "See, I do like that and he's got a hard-on already." He sat down and smiled. "Come on, let's get out of here."

"Now?" Lanya asked.

"Yeah, now!"

Denny crawled over to look in the box. "We got all the pieces." He sighed.

"Um-hm," she said quietly, and closed the lid.

Denny put the box in the corner. Kid pulled out his vest and put it on.

Lanya sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. Kid could not decide if her expression were pensive or absent. "Come on." He tossed her blouse, and did not wait to see what she did with it, but reached for his pants.

"Did everybody leave the house?" Lanya asked.

"It sure is quiet." Denny said.

Kid looked back.

Lanya pushed another button through its hole. The blouse tails lay a-tangle in her lap.

Denny stooped listening, his cock, finally, lowering.

"I'm hungry," Kid said. "I haven't done anything but fuck for twenty-four hours: you, him, his girl friend—"

"You're a busy—" Lanya pulled on her jeans—"son of a bitch."

"Huh?"

"Nothing."

"— him, then you again." The two hooks came through the belt. "Jesus!" He looked up.

Denny said: "It sure is quiet. Maybe everybody went out."

"That'd be nice," Lanya said.

"Do you guys keep food in the house?" Kid asked.

"Not very long." Denny tossed Kid his projector.

Lanya started down first. She held the laces of her tennis shoes in her teeth. "I can't carry them and climb too," she had to say three times before they understood.

While Denny dropped over the edge, Kid turned to get the orchid.

The light around the window shade was neon orange. As he picked up the clustered blades, red gleamings poured down the edges. Kid frowned and backed to the ladder.

In the hallway, Lanya asked, "Has the smoke cleared up outside?" The window in the hall door was filled with light like bloody sunrise.

"I guess they all have gone out." Denny looked in another room.

"Do you think maybe it is clearing off?" Lanya asked. "Let's go outside and see."

Kid followed them to the front door.

Lanya opened it and went down the steps. "There're still clouds all over the sky." She reached the sidewalk, turned around, looking up — and screamed.

While Kid and Denny hurried down, the scream lost voice and became just expelled air.

On the sidewalk, they turned to look up in the direction she stared:

From the edge of the sidewalk, three-quarters of the disk was visible above the houses. The clouds dulled it enough to squint at, but it went up, covering the roofs, and up, and up, and up. What they could see of it filled half the visible sky. And, Kid realized, half of the sky is huge! But that fell away into impossibility. Or unverifiability, anyway. The rim was a broil of gold. Everything was like burning metal.

Lanya pressed his shoulder, gasping.

Denny was saying, "Huh…?" and taking a step backward, and saying, "Huh…?" again. He backed into Kid. His head snapped around, and the expression (the sockets of his eyes were cups of molten brass spilling down his cheeks) was maniacal. "Hey, that's really… something, ain't it?" The question was not rhetorical. "Ain't it something?" He turned to squint again.

"What is it?" Lanya whispered.

"It's the sun," Kid said. "Don't you see, it's just the sun."

"My God we're falling into it…" Lanya caught her breath, released it, then began to cry.

"Aw, come on!" Kid said. "Cut it out, will you—"

"My God…" she whispered and looked again.

He watched her face, open and glistening and shaking.

"Is it dangerous?" Denny whispered. "I'm scared as a motherfucker!"

"It's getting bigger!" Lanya shrieked, turned, and crouched with her hands against the side of her face.

"No, it's not," Kid said. "At least not fast enough to see! Hey, come on!" He hit at her shoulder.

The orchid swung from the chain on his chest, tickling and glittering. It isn't a dream, Kid thought. I was dreaming already. It isn't a dream; that would make it… Bands of muscle made his throat so tight it hurt. "Hey!" He pounded his fist on Denny's back. "Hey, are you okay?"

Eyes wide, and chest all filled up with air, Denny got out, "Yeah!"

Lanya knuckled at her face, pulling creases into it, as she squinted at the great, great, great circle.

"Come on," Kid reiterated. "Let's go, huh?"

Denny followed, too quickly to tell why.

Lanya waited till they had gone three steps (Kid looked back), then ran after them, her face bewildered. She caught Kid's hand. Kid held his other one to Denny who took it tightly. Denny was sweating: "That is something." (Kid glanced up again.) "I never seen anything like that before in my life."

Kid looked at Lanya who was watching him oddly, and not where she was going. "We're not falling into the sun or anything like that," Kid said. "Otherwise we'd be burned up already. It isn't even hot." He looked at Denny, who dropped his eyes from the sky and looked back. "Well, Jesus Christ," Kid said. "Don't you think it's pretty fucking funny?" They didn't laugh. "I mean, there's nothing you can do about it." He did, alone. It felt good.

"What in the world is it?" Lanya repeated. Her voice was calmer.

"I don't know," Kid said. "I don't know what the fuck it is!"

Copperhead, hair like hell-bright rust, sprinted around the corner, and stopped in the middle of the street, boots apart, elbows bent, fists swinging about his hips and belly.

The other scorpions caught up. Among them was Siam and Jack the Ripper and Denny's girl, but neither Dragon Lady nor Nightmare.

Kid let go their hands and pointed to the sky. "Ain't that too fucking much!" He laughed, and the tight things in his throat loosened. He came out of the laughter, which had closed his eyes and jerked the small of his back almost into spasm, to find them watching. "Hey, Copperhead! Where you going? You going to come with me?"

"What…" Copperhead began to bellow, then coughed, and there was nothing left in his voice to sustain. "What is that?" His voice was tearfully inane. "Is it some kind of heat lightning?"

Someone else said: "Does that look like lightning to you?"

Kid blinked and wondered. "You better come on with me," he dared.

"You all right, Kid?" the black in the vinyl vest asked from behind Copperhead, drifting there as Lady of Spain drifted behind him.

"You," Kid spoke carefully, explaining to them as though it were a lesson, "come on with me!" He took a breath and started across the street. As he stepped up on the curb, a hand caught his shoulder. He looked back; it was Denny, and behind him, Lanya; black scorpions moved around them, passed in front of them.

And footsteps.

He didn't look back again.

Perhaps, he thought, we are all going to die in moments, obscured by flame and pain. That is why this. And then, perhaps we are not. That is why this in this way.

Scorpions milled and clustered, and he chuckled again.

That was as silly as the blades tickling his chest.

Laughter grasped the back of his tongue to shake it loose. Flesh lay too heavy in his mouth. So it retreated, and heaved itself against the spike of his spine. I am happy, he thought. And heard somebody else, a white girl (not Lanya; the scorpion, who wore a vest and was called Filament), laughing too.

So he let his own.

It doubled him up, staggering.

Somebody — that was Lanya, and that was, almost, enough to stop him — cried out.

But others laughed.

Somebody else — that was Denny, and when he saw it was, he kept laughing through his puzzlement — ran past, picked up the lid of a garbage can leaning against the curb, and hurled it up the street. It went clattering against a stoop. Denny danced back in the blood-colored light.

Gold nodes ground in the clouds.

Kid reached out, had to lean to catch Lanya's fingers; his fingers, between hers, pummeled the back of her hand. She came up against his side, and watched in wonder as others pushed ahead on the cobbled street.

"Pick a house," he told her.

"Huh—?"

"Just pick a house on the street," he whispered (she bent nearer to hear). "Maybe one you don't like very much."

Copperhead bounded past them, flung his arm: the brick-shard flew across the street, shattered the window; Copperhead, full hair and sparse beard furious, turned back, grinning.

"That one?" Kid asked.

"No!" with an urgency he could not follow. "At the top of the hill. That one. There."

"Okay." Kid wheeled.

The blond girl in the pea jacket was falling back through the loose blacks. She was crying; she looked at the sky, and cried harder. Denny's girl put her arm around her, was talking, was making consoling motions with her head. Once she glanced at the great, burning wheel; her face was webbed with rage.

Kid's hand went up across his cheek. Bristle clawed his palm. "This way!" He waved and turned again. They passed around him as he turned in the light. "Hey, Ripper, Denny, Copperhead!" He caught at the jouncing projector, and thumbed at the bottom pip. "How do you turn this thing on?"

"Huh?" Ripper looked back. "Oh… to the side. Not in."

The pip slid.

Of course, he thought, I can't see anything from inside. And wondered what he looked like.

Lanya had stepped away and was looking all over him. Kid beat his knees, and swung about. And Denny had disappeared in his own deformed explosion.

"Hey," the espresso-hued Ripper called, "we goin' on!"

Figure passed figure as they milled about the cobbles. Kid looked where Copperhead was laughing; and Copperhead disappeared in his lucent arachnid. The menagerie formed in the terrible light.

Thirteen, whom Kid hadn't seen till now, passed him. "Come on," he whispered to Smokey beneath his arm, "let's get out of here. This ain't gonna be no good—"

"I want to watch!" she insisted. "I want to watch!"

Kid reached the porch. Some people were running behind him. He'd broken down three doors in his life: so he expected to bruise his shoulder. (The light that was Denny blinked beside him: the boy was climbing the rail.) Kid crashed into the weathered wood. It flew back so easily he went down on one knee and grabbed at the jamb. (About him, the mystic aspects lurched.) At the same time, glass broke and light filled the hallway as Denny's apparition came through the shattered porch window.

"Oh-Jesus …" A girl's black face passed the door opposite.

Then another's: "It's scorpions…!"

A skinny black boy ran into the room with a stick. He opened his mouth and his eyes wide.

"Jimmy, you come on—!"

The boy (was he twenty? Kid staggered to his feet, a little scared, and not believing he was invisible behind some bright beast) kept on jerking at the stick.

"Jimmy!" she shrieked, "come out of there! It's the scorpions, for God's—"

Jimmy (Kid was surprised) suddenly closed his mouth, flung away his stick, and ran back through the doorway. Somewhere else in the house footsteps banged down steps.

Denny beat Kid to the doorway and extinguished. He leaned through, then looked back with a puzzled grin (others had already surged into the room, to fling their shadows in the red light across the wall.) "Hey, you see the way those niggers run?"

Behind Kid somebody overturned a chair.

He frowned, realized no one could see it, stopped frowning, and slid the stud over the bottom of his projector.

"Shit, man," Denny said. "Them was some scared, black motherfuckers." Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.

"Don't do that! Don't do that! Don't—"

"What the fuck they got in here?"

"Come on, God damn it, don't do that!"

In the maroon light across the wall in front of Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid's, raised.

The hand clapped Kid's shoulder.

"Hey," Copperhead said. "They got some place here! Carpet on the floor…" His other hand gestured down; and up: "And look at all that shit on the ceiling."

Kid looked.

Women in gauze and men in armor careened through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.

Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. "Well." He looked back. "I'm gonna go see what they got in here." While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead's hand fell twice again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.

She was standing just inside the door, and angry.

"What's the matter?"

"There were people living here!" she hissed. "What in the world…" She shook her head.

"I didn't know that," Kid said. "You picked the house."

"And I didn't know what you wanted to do with it!" She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. "What the hell did you want to do?"

"Anything." He shrugged. "Let's go see."

She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.

Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.

"Here." Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.

"I gotta eat," Kid said. "First, I think." Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. "You want some?"

"No thank you," she said softly, and held his arm with both hands.

As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, "I want—" the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness—"to write something down."

He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. "Here. There's no pen on this. But you've got yours." He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall's end.

He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them—

Beneath the pea jacket, open around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead's freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said good-bye, to whom he had made love.

"Oh," Lanya said, matter-of-factly.

The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead's thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, "Hey!" and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) "Join the party, motherfucker! You gimme one of yours, I'll give you one of mine."

"Knock yourself out." Kid backed from the door, with Lanya's hand in his.

The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

"What's going on in there?" Blond Denny pushed between them.

"Stay out of there, cocksucker." Kid put his arm around the boy's chest, pulled him back.

"Why?"

"Because I'd get jealous as hell."

Denny frowned, shrugged, "Okay," and wormed loose.

Lady of Spain jogged against Kid's shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: "Shit! What a way to go. I guess we're going, ain't we?" She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya's shoulder.

Lanya tugged Kid's arm. "This way," she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside ("Hey, how you doing, Kid?"), who pushed back a bottle at his face.

At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. "Are you having… a party?" They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions'.

"Is this Nightmare's… Is this Nightmare's nest?" a girl asked and pushed up past the first two. "Lanya!" She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.

"Milly!" Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly's wrists. "What are you doing?" Lanya's voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began — to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.

He pushed between the people crowding the hall. "Fuck!" he shouted at somebody once. "Get out of the way!"

Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), "No, man, this is the Kid's nest. Nightmare ain't here. Nightmare ain't anywhere around."

"Kid—?" which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate, and talking about, not to him. "You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn't know that was the Kid. How do you like that?"

Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:

It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzical: Deadly rays!

A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn't it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.

With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.

He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam's bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.

The suede boot was blotched with what he'd always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn't rained. Below the wrinkled leather — forty feet below — cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.

He examined his left hand. I don't like what they look like, he thought. I don't like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.

He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he'd bitten to blood. He'd always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what callouses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hands horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the inner flesh with her tongue, make love to them like gnomes, while he, voyeuristically, observed and mocked and felt tender.

He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers behind them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into his lap, and began to click his pen.

Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn't what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint's button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.

Lanya crashed Kid's ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion's head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds: Then at Kid: "You're still writing on that…?"

"No." The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya's voice. "No, I've been finished a few minutes now."

Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, "Hey…" she frowned. "It's going down!"

Kid nodded. "You can see it falling almost."

The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.

Denny came through the doors, paused, a hand on each, to screw his face in the glare. Then, silently, he sat on the rail beside Lanya, gripped his knees, his arm an inch from hers.

Denny comes: some fantastic object.

She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.

Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said "I like that."

But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile; but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.

Anyway a smile's what they gave him back.

Denny said, "It's going down," unnecessarily for her.

One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.

Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don't know who she is! He gripped harder.

She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.

So he dropped his hand.

With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.

While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, "Why aren't you afraid?" Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.

She said: "Then I won't be either."

The boy who'd come out was the pimply, stubble-bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as though he felt he might have interrupted something, seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?), when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.

Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn, small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.

"It's going down, see," Denny repeated.

He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can't get the same reactions.

Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.

Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.

The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.

There were too many people.

Milly brushed at her cheek.

Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She's guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She's guilty…?

There were too many people.

The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.

They didn't move.

"What are you going to do with that?" Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.

The scorpion's breath was thunderous.

"I don't know." That sounded thunderous too.

"Let me take it." She tore off the three pages, corrected, and recorrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. "I have your notebook at home. I'll put these with it. I want to go." She turned to Denny. And the shadow had rolled Somewhere beneath her chin; in the creases of her eyelid he could see sweat. "You want to walk me home?"

Kid wanted to protest, decided no; offer to come too?

She touched Denny's arm. Her nose and ear were shadowed: the incredible disk had lowered so that what remained was small enough that everyone around them, beneath a folded elbow, behind a heel on reddened tile, under frayed denim where a sleeve had been torn off, or within and behind the curves of flesh in flesh of the ear, had once more grown shadows. She looked afraid.

Lanya stood, and people stepped apart.

Denny, like someone just awakened, clambered from the rail, and, blinking about him (at the others as much as Kid) followed her.

Denny left, and people closed around.

"When it goes down…" the pimply scorpion began.

Kid, and the two people who held his hand, looked.

Something white had dried on his mouth. His lashless lids were pink and swollen.

The two looked away.

"When it goes all the way down, there won't be any fuckin' light at all, again… ever." He shook his head, scuffed his boots, rocked on the doorsill. "Black as a fucking bitch… yeah!"

They've gone, Kid thought. No light at all?

Fifteen minutes later, when it had set completely, the sky had returned to its ordinary grey.

3

He woke… alone?

Someone was climbing to the loft ladder.

He struggled to choose between dreams and… the rest. Because they had all left the muraled house, and wandered back to the nest. Milly had talked to him, aimlessly, in the sloped street, mostly all surprised that he was the same Kid everybody had been talking about, and how glad she was to know that she knew him, till he'd decided she was trying to put the make on him and had gotten angry. "Get the fuck out of here, you stupid bitch!" he'd yelled in the street and made to hit her. She'd run away; he'd laughed, loudly, till he was staggering. Copperhead had come up to him and beat him on the shoulder, laughing too. "I didn't like that one either. Shit, you can have one of mine…" He'd kept laughing, so he wouldn't have to speak, thinking with perfectly maniacal pride: I have, I have already—

"Kid, are you okay?" Denny's ears were lit from behind and below. His face was dark.

"Yeah…?"

Denny came up over the edge.

"They're making food—" and at the word, Kid smelled it—"inside. Nightmare and Dragon Lady just came back. You sleepin'?"

"Come—" and at the word, Denny, all shoulders and chin and elbows, wedged against him—"here. Yeah." He held the warm knobby shapes and lay there smelling grease and a hot, vegetative stench that defined no food he recognized; but he liked it anyway.

"Lanya's got a nice place," Denny said.

"Yeah?" Kid thought: he's so light; but his edges are sharp. "You ball her again?"

"…Yeah." Denny said. "In her room, at her house. I guess that was all right."

Surprised, Kid opened his eyes. Cracks cross the dim ceiling. "Oh." He shifted Denny to the side. "You got more energy than I do. I was tired when I got back here."

"She's got a nice place," Denny repeated. "Real nice."

"Why'd she want to go?" He nubbed his rough chin for the itching.

Denny squirmed to get comfortable. "To see about her class, she said." Denny squirmed again.

"Class?"

The L about the window shade had finally taken on the deep color of evening.

"Her kids. She's been looking out for this group of kids, you know? About eight and nine years old. Black kids mostly."

"No, I didn't know." He let his lips purse to a tent where, with the help of air, they were off his teeth. Well, he hadn't seen her much. How many days gone? She'd said she had a place, yes; "No, I didn't know."

He frowned at the top of Denny's head.

"I like her," Denny said. "I like her a lot." Denny's face came up from under the hair. "You know, I think she likes me too?"

"Guess she does," Kid said. "Did she check… her class?"

"No," Denny said. "Not while I was there. She was going to. But we got to fuckin' around again. Screwin', you know. She said she was going to, after I left. If she didn't go to sleep first. I think she was pretty tired."

Kid looked at the ceiling again. "How long she had the kids?"

"A couple of weeks," Denny said. "That's what she told me. She said she likes it. They meet a little way from her place. That's real nice."

"What's it like?" A couple of weeks? He was too exhausted to be upset.

"Real nice." Some of Denny's hair brushed and caught on Kid's chin.

"Well, you're good for something, cocksucker. Hey!" Kid bunched the muscles of his leg under Denny's stiffening groin. "No, man. Fuck off. I don't want to now."

Denny pulled himself back on all fours. "You better go eat something, then. They don't got that much. They'll eat it all."

Kid sat, nodding. "Yeah, come on." He climbed groggily down, and stood in the doorway.

Why (watching Denny climb) did she tell him all that about her new place, and her class, and not me? Why didn't I ask? he answered. He could smile at that, finally.

"Come on." Denny took Kid's elbow and led him down.

Halfway up the hall, Kid sucked his teeth and pulled free. It was a gentle pull; but Denny's head leapt away at the motion, frightened and anticipatory, despairing and wild. Without looking at him particularly, Denny stepped back to let him through.

"Jesus Christ!" Nightmare exclaimed, turning with a full plate in his hand, gesturing first, then scooping with his fork. "Wasn't that something this afternoon? I mean, wasn't that too much!" He filled his mouth and spoke on, scattering little pieces. "We heard about you chasing out the niggers! Hey—" he gestured to Dragon Lady who sat against the wall—"we heard about what he did to those niggers."

"Shit," Dragon Lady said dryly, and looked at Kid only from the corner of her eye. "I don't care what he do to any God-damn niggers."

"I didn't even know they were in the house," Kid said.

Dragon Lady took another mouthful. "Shit," she repeated, and pried with her spoon tip through what was on her plate.

"Give 'em something to eat," Nightmare yelled toward the kitchen.

"Baby!" Dragon Lady bellowed; her shoulders shook; nobody stopped doing anything. "Adam!" She flung the words up like grenades. "Bring some more food out for 'em!"

"Here you go!" Baby, still naked, pushed between the people at the door, leading (dangerously) with steaming plates.

"This is yours."

Kid ignored the dirty thumb denting what must have been a hash of canned vegetables (he pulled the fork out from where it had been buried: corn, peas, okra, fell off) and (he tasted the first mouthful) meat. (Spam?) Baby gave the other plate to Denny. He returned to serve Cathedral, Jack the Ripper, Devastation, all sitting about silently.

Copperhead, not served yet, watched from the couch, and grinned and nodded when Kid looked at him.

"Here you go." Adam shoved a plate at Copperhead. He took it, saluted Kid with a fork with twisted tines, then dropped his shoulders and shoveled.

Denny's girl friend (should I find out her name?) with a coffee cup of the hash, came out of the kitchen, crossed to sit right by Denny on the floor and made a big thing of not looking at Kid. The girl in the pea jacket, next to Copperhead on the couch, occasionally picked food from Copperhead's plate with a spoon: Copperhead more or less ignored her.

"You had a party?" Nightmare exclaimed in answer to a question Kid hadn't heard asked. "We ran! Adam, Baby, the Lady, and me! I was so scared I didn't think I was gonna make it. Shit, I'm still scared."

The last laughter to trail away was Dragon Lady's gusty chuckle.

"We were in the park." Nightmare waved his fork above his head; more people sat down. "Baby, Adam, Dragon Lady, and me. You know the old weather tower in the park?"

(What, Kid wondered, had George been doing in the brazen light of the noon?What had June?)

"When it began, I mean after it began — first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire — after we could see what it was—" he shook his head at somebody who started a comment—"no, no, I don't know what the fuck it was. Don't ask me. After we could see it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn't we?"

Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed.

"We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down." Nightmare whistled. "Jesus Christ!"

We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities.

"You were out there in it," the scorpion in vinyl asked, watching, "until it was all over?"

Copperhead protested: "We watched it going down—"

"All over?" But Nightmare's mouth hung open, mocking his interlocutor. "What's all over?"

Adam rubbed the chains on his chest: the rest were still.

"You think it's all over?" Nightmare demanded.

The blond girl in the pea jacket held her spoon in both hands tightly between her knees. "When it went down," she said, "it was just like regular day again… here. And then it was light for four or five hours till it was time to get dark." She looked back over her shoulder at the black glass; the brass lion on the windowsill watched the night from beneath his bulbless stalk.

Dragon Lady's laughter built in the silence.

"Shit." Nightmare filled his mouth again and yelled at his plate: "You don't know if the sun is ever gonna come up again! We could all be burned up to death by tomorrow. Or frozen. What were you saying, Baby, about maybe the earth got pushed off its orbit or something like that, maybe into the sun, or out past it—"

"I didn't say that." Baby looked down at himself, pimply chest, uncircumcised genitals, bowed knees, dirty feet; his nakedness for the first time was out of place. "I wasn't sayin' it that serious-"

"There'd be an earthquake if that happened." Brown Adam, with his Philadelphia accent, held his chains in his fist. "I told you that. A big earthquake, or a tidal wave; both maybe. Nothing like that's happened. And there'd have fo be if the earth got pushed somewhere—"

"So maybe—" Nightmare looked up—"in ten minutes there's gonna be a big fuckin' earthquake!"

Then the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling dropped to quarter dimness.

Kid tried to swallow his heart; it threatened to burst and fill his mouth with blood.

Someone was crying again.

Kid looked to see if it was Denny. But it was another scorpion (Spider?) on the other side of Nightmare. Denny's face, even in the yellowish half-dark, was cut with blades of shadow from his hair.

"Oh, come on!" Smokey edged from behind Thirteen's shoulder: "Look, it used to do that four or five times a day when we stayed here."

In the kitchen something hummed: the light returned to full brightness.

Nightmare ate doggedly.

No one else did.

"You guys make up any more of this shit?" Nightmare nodded toward Adam and Baby. "It's good." Then looked around. "You don't know if it's over or not."

"I could use some more," Dragon Lady said.

Baby came forward with his hands out for their plates.

"The mistake—" Kid surprised himself by speaking, took a mouthful to stop, but went on anyway—"isn't thinking that it's finished." I'm imitating Nightmare, he thought, then realized, no, I'm doing what Nightmare did for the same reason. "The mistake is thinking it began this afternoon."

"Right on, motherfucker!" Nightmare shook his fork for emphasis.

Kid took another mouthful, and thought: I may throw up. And then thought: No, I'm too hungry.

"We got some more out there in the big pot," Adam was saying. "Why don't you guys go out and get it till it's all gone."

A shadow made Kid look up from the last of his eating.

Adam stood there, hand out for Kid's plate, about (Kid realized) to burst out crying too. Kid gave it to him.

Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and me get served first, Kid reflected as Baby brought his seconds. Well, Copperhead seemed at ease.

Finished, Kid put his fork on the floor and stood up.

"Hey, where're you going?" Copperhead asked, no belligerence, all bewilderment.

"Taking a walk."

On the bottom step of the house, he noted two streetlights in the distance. Burn up at any minute? Or freeze at the advent of an ice age, twenty minutes to completion? The air was the same excruciatingly bland temperature it had been night after night after night. The door opened behind him: Denny looked out.

"I want to go over and see Lanya's place," Kid said, turning. "You want to show me the way?"

"I… I can't," Denny said. "She's upset. And she wants to talk… to me."

"Fuck you, cocksucker." Kid started down the block. "See you later." (He wasn't angry at all.) That was pretty good. Halfway to the corner, however, he realized Denny would be the only way to find Lanya's new place. (Then he was.)

He could try the bar. But if she had a house now, what was the chance she'd be at Teddy's tonight?

He looked back, ready to yell to Denny to get the fuck on down here.

The door was closed.

And I still don't know her name!

He took a breath between his teeth. Maybe he'd find Lanya at the bar.

At the corner of the hill; surprised at how many street lamps — perhaps one out of five — worked in this neighborhood. The one diagonally across the street gave enough light to make out the charred walls of the big house. (The stronger burned smell had made him stop.) The columns supporting the balcony over the door had charred through, so that the platform, with its rail of lions, hung askew. Even so it took Kid a whole minute to be sure what house it was. Only houses he could see around confirmed it.

Four, five, six hours since they had screamed and laughed and yelled inside it?

Chilled to gooseflesh in the neutral air, he hurried away.

4

"…definitely saw it?"

"Oh, yes."

"You were already in the city?"

"That's right."

"You said earlier you didn't see the whole thing though."

"I caught, I guess, now it must have been, the last ten or fifteen minutes. Roger came and woke me up to see."

"You saw it from inside the house then?"

"Well, first out my window. Then we went down to the gardens. I tell you, now, it was pretty strange."

The others laughed. "Hey," Paul Fenster said, half standing to look at the others seated. "We've just about got the Captain boxed in here. Why doesn't somebody move back, there?"

"That's all right. If I want to get out, I'll just bust on through."

"I imagine—" Madame Brown reached down to play with Muriel's muzzle—"you aren't any closer to an explanation than we are."

"I think that was about the strangest thing I ever saw, I'll be honest now."

"As strange as anything you ever saw in space?" from the man in purple angora.

"Well, I tell you, this afternoon was pretty… I guess you'd say, spaced out."

They laughed again.

The heavy blond Mexican with the blanket shirt rose from beside Tak and walked to the door, passing within a foot of Kid, and left. Tak saw Kid. With tilting head, he beckoned.

Kid, curious, went to sit in the vacated seat.

Tak leaned to whisper, "Captain Kamp…" A dozen others had pulled chairs up to listen to the crew-cut man in the green, short-sleeved shirt who sat in the corner booth.

Tak sat and folded his hands across the bottom of his leather jacket so that the top pushed out from his blond chest.

"What I want to know," purple angora announced, "…down, sweetheart, down—" Muriel had momentarily switched allegiances—"I want to know is, if it could possibly have been some kind of trick. I mean, is there any way somebody could have made that seem to happen? I mean… well, you know: in a man-made way."

"Well…" The Captain looked among his listeners. "He's your engineer, isn't he?" His look settled on Tak — who reared back with a high laugh.

That must be as self-conscious as I've ever seen him, Kid thought He'd never heard Tak make that sound before.

"No," Tak said. "No, I'm afraid that doesn't have anything to do with any engineering I'd know anything about."

"What I want to know — now what I want to know," Fenster said. "You've been in space. You've been on the moon…" He paused, then added in a different voice: "You're one of the ones that was actually on the moon."

Captain Kamp was only attentive.

"We've had here some sort of… astrological happening, and it's got us all pretty shook. I want to know if you… well, from being up on the moon, or like that, you might know something more about it."

Kamp's face ghosted a smile. Kid searched for the names of the astronauts from the four moonshots he'd followed closely, tried to recall what he could about the fifth. Captain Kamp crossed his arms on the booth-table. He wasn't very tall.

"Now it's certainly possible—" Kamp punctuated his southwestern speech with small nods—"that there's an astronomical, or better, cosmological explanation. But I'll be frank: I don't know what it is."

"Do you think we should worry?" Madame Brown asked in a voice with no worry in it at all.

Kamp, whose crew mixed grey and gold, nodded. "Worry? Well, we're all here. And alive. That's certainly no reason not to worry. But worry isn't going to do us much good, now, is it? Now yesterday — about this time yesterday — I was in Dallas. And if that thing was as big as it looked and really some sort of body in the sky, a comet or a sun, I suspect it would have been seen a long way off coming, with telescopes. And nobody told me about it."

"It sounds, Captain, as though you don't believe it's serious."

Kamp's smile said as much. Kamp said, "I saw it — some of it, anyway."

"Then," Kid said, and others turned, "you don't know how big it really was."

"Now that," the Captain answered, "I'm afraid, is it." His jaw was wider than his forehead. "Now you all, Roger too, described something which practically filled up half the sky. So obviously what I saw was only a little bit. And then there was the story about — George, was it?"

Tak looked around the room, frowned, and again whispered to Kid: "George was here a few minutes ago. He must have gone out just before you came—"

"Now I'm afraid nobody outside… of Bellona, saw that one. And Roger tells me he didn't either."

"I certainly did," Tak whispered.

"I certainly did!" someone cried.

"Well." Kamp smiled. "Not too many other people did, and certainly nobody outside Bellona."

"You saw what happened today." Teddy, arms folded, leaned against the back of the next booth.

"Yes, I guess I did."

"You mean," Fenster jovially announced, "you went from here to the moon and back, and you didn't see anything on the way that would tell us something about all this thing this afternoon?"

Kamp said, "Nope."

"Then what use was it, I ask you?" Fenster looked around for somebody's back to slap. "I mean now what was the use of it?"

Someone said, "You haven't been with the space program a while…?"

"Now you don't really leave it. Just last week I was down for medical testing for long-range results. That I don't ever expect to stop. But I'm much less involved with it now than some of the others."

"Why did you leave?" the purple angora asked. "Was it your idea or theirs — if you can answer a question like that?"

"Well." This, a considered sentence. "I suspect they thought it was a touchier question than I did at the time. But I doubt they wanted me that much if I didn't want them. My interest in the space program just about ended with splashdown. The tests, the research work afterward, that was important. The parades, the celebrations, the panels, the publicity — I think the fun in that was exhausted a month after I came out of the isolation chamber. The rest — probably more so for me than for the others, because that's the kind of person I am — was just a nuisance. Also," and he smiled, "I've occasionally been known to pick up a guitar at a party and a sing a folk song or two. Nothing political, mind you. But they still frown on that sort of thing."

Everyone laughed. Kid thought: Is he for real?

And a second thought, like a stutter: My reaction is as fixed as his action. And Kid laughed, though later than the others. Two or three glanced at him.

"No," Kamp went on, "I suppose I saw myself as something of an adventurer… as much as a navy test pilot can be. Apollo for me was an adventure — practically an eight-year adventure, with all the preparation. But when it was over, I was ready to go on to something else."

"So you've come to Bellona," Madame Brown said, as Fenster said: "After the moon, where else is there?"

"Now, you're right…"

Kid wondered which question Kamp was answering.

"…but I'm just beginning to see that myself."

"Are you here in any official connection?" asked another woman.

"I'd imagine," Fenster said, "you're never officially disconnected."

"No. I'm here unofficially."

"What does that mean?" someone challenged.

Fenster scowled, offended for Kamp, who merely said, "They know I'm here. But they gave me no instructions before I came. They won't ask me anything about what I did or saw after I come back."

"Why don't we break up this Star Chamber?" Fenster stood. "Come on, the Captain is nice enough to talk to us all at once, but we've got to give the man a chance to circulate."

"Now this is quite informal," Kamp countered, "compared to what I'm used to. I would like a chance to walk around though."

"Come on, come on." Fenster made shooing motions.

Some rose.

The bartender rolled his cuffs above the blurry blue beasts and strolled to the counter.

Tak's chair scraped.

"Come on, now, let's let the Captain get himself a drink. Madame Brown, you look like you could use one too."

Kid shook his hands below the chair edge to stop the tingling.

Tak stood, stretched to tiptoe, looked around. "Wonder where George got off to. He was all curious when he discovered we had a genuine man in the moon with us."

They walked to the bar.

Teddy was returning chairs.

Once the dozen clustered at the Captain's booth dispersed, the place looked empty.

"I thought Lanya was here, maybe."

Tak's hands locked. "I haven't seen her. Madame B. might know where she is." And unlocked. "Hey, I saw the big advertisement in the Times, all over page three. Congratulations." Tak frowned. "By the way, what did you do at the coming of the great white light? Orange, I guess it was, really. You got any opinions to pass the time with while we wait to see if there's going to be a tomorrow?"

Kid leaned on meshed fingers. "I don't know. I didn't do anything much. I had some people with me. I think they were more upset than I was. You know, Tak, for a while I thought…" The bartender set down a beer bottle. "…no, that's silly." Kid pulled the bottle to him, leaving a sweat ribbon. "Isn't it?" The candles glittered in it.

"What?"

"I was going to say, for a while I thought it was a dream."

"If I woke up right now, I'd feel a lot better."

"No. Not that." Kid lifted his bottle once, twice, a third, a fourth, a fifth time from lapping rings. "When it was rising, I remember I went out to take a look from the back porch; and thinking maybe I was dreaming. Suddenly I woke up. In bed. Only, when I got up, later, it was still there. Finally, after it went down, I went to sleep again. You know, right now—" he smiled, to himself till it overcame the strictures of his facial muscles and burst stupidly onto his face—"I still don't know what I dreamed and what I didn't. Maybe I didn't really see any more than the Captain."

"You went to sleep?"

"I was tired." Saying that annoyed Kid. "What about you?"

"Christ, I—" The bartender brought Tak's bottle. "What did I do?" Tak snorted. "I saw the light coming through those bamboo blinds I have, and I went out on the roof to take a look. I watched it rising for about three minutes. Then I freaked."

"What'd you do?"

"I went down into the stairwell and sat in the dark for about an hour or so… I guess. I'd got this whole paranoid thing about radiation — no, don't laugh. We might all start losing our hair in the next six hours while our capillaries fall apart. Finally I got scared of just sitting in the dark and went up to look again…" He stopped moving his bottle around the wet circle. "I'm just glad I don't have a heart condition. It stretched over so much of the horizon I couldn't look at one edge and see the other. I couldn't look at where the bottom was cut off by the roofs and see the top." Tak's bottle rumbled about. "I went back down into the stairwell, closed the door, and just cried. For a couple of hours. I couldn't stop. While I was crying, I thought about lots of things. One of them, by the way, was you."

"What?"

"I remember sitting there and asking myself if this was what the inside of insanity felt like — Ah, there: you've taken offense."

He hadn't. But now wondered if he should.

"Well, I'm sorry. That's what I thought, anyway."

"You were really that scared?"

"You weren't?"

"I guess a lot of people around me were. I thought about all the terrible things it could have been — like everybody else. But if it was any of them, there wasn't anything I could do."

"You really are almost as weird as people keep trying to make us think you are. Look, when you come up short against the edge like that, when you discover the earth really is round, when you find out you've killed your father and married your mother after all, or when you look at the horizon and see something, like that, rising — man, you have to have some sort of human reaction: laugh, cry, sing, something! You can't just lie down and take a nap."

Kid lingered in the ruins of his confusion. "I… did a lot of laughing."

Tak snorted again. "Okay, so you're not that flippy. I'd just hate to think you were as brave as everybody keeps going on you are."

"Me?" This couldn't, Kid thought, be what the inside of courage felt like.

"Excuse me," the southwestern voice said from Kid's other side. "You were pointed out to me as… the Kid?"

Kid turned, with his confusion. "Yeah…?"

Kamp looked at it, and laughed. Kid decided he liked him. Kamp said, "I'm supposed to deliver a message to you, from Roger."

"Huh?"

"He told me if I came here I would probably meet you. He'd like — if it's all right with you — if you'd come up to the house three Sundays from now. He says that he'll be squeezing more time together, so it will be in slightly less than two weeks — now I don't know how you guys put up with that—" He laughed again. "Roger wants to have a party for you. For your book." The Captain paused with a considered nod. "Saw it. Looks good. Good luck on it, now."

Kid wondered what to say. He tried: "Thank you."

"Roger said to come in the evening. And bring twenty or thirty friends, if you want. He says it's your party. It starts at sunset; in three Sundays."

"Presumptuous bastard," Tak said. "Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there's a tomorrow morning." With his forefinger he hooked down his cap visor and walked off.

Kid was pondering statements to place into the silence, when Kamp apparently decided he'd try: "I'm afraid I don't know much about poetry."

Liked him, Kid felt. But for the life of him he didn't know why.

"I read some of Roger's copy, though. But if I started asking questions about it, now, I'd probably just end up looking worse than I already do."

"Mmmm." Kid nodded and pondered. "You get tired of people asking you all those questions?"

"Yes. But it wasn't too bad this evening. At least we were talking about something real. I mean something that happened, today. It's better than all those discussions where they ask you whether, as an astronaut, you believe in long hair, abortions, race relations, or the pill."

"You're a very public man, aren't you? You say you're not really into the space program any more. But you're doing public relations work for them right now."

"Exactly what I'm doing. I don't claim to be doing anything else. Except enjoying myself. They're beginning to accept the idea of having a non-conformist doing front work for them." Kamp glanced around. "Though I suspect compared to most of you guys here, even some of the ducks up at Rogers, I'm more or less the image of the establishment, folk songs or not, hey? Well, that makes me Bellona's biggest nonconformist. I don't mind."

"Questions like, did you leave, or were you kicked out — what do you do when people ask you the same questions over and over? Especially the embarrassing ones."

"If you're a public man, as soon as you get a question more than three times, you figure out the most honest public answer you can give. Especially to the embarrassing ones."

"Is that a question you get asked a lot?"

"Well," Kamp mulled, "more times than three."

"Then I guess it would be okay to ask you questions about the moon." Kid grinned.

Kamp nodded. "Sounds like a pretty safe topic."

"Can you tell me something about the moon you've never told anybody else before?"

After a second, Kamp laughed. "Now that is a new one. I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"You were there. I'd like to know something about the moon that someone could only know what was actually on it. I don't mean anything big. But just something."

"The whole flight was broadcast. And we were pretty thorough in our report. We tried to take pictures of just about everything. Also, that's a few years ago; and we were only out walking around for six and a half hours."

"Yeah, I know. I watched it."

"Then I still don't get you."

"Well: I could bring a couple of television cameras in here, say, and take a lot of pictures, and report on all the people, tell how many were here or what have you. But afterward, if somebody asked me to tell them something that wasn't in the coverage, I'd close my eyes and sort of picture the place. Then I might say, well, on the back of the counter with the bottles, the bottle second from the left — I don't remember what the label was — but the little cone of glass at the bottom was just above the top of the liquor." Kid opened his eyes. "See?"

Kamp ran his knuckles under his chin. "I'm not used to thinking like that. But it's interesting."

"Try. Just mention some rock, or collection of rocks, or shape on the horizon that you didn't mention to anyone else."

"We took photographs of all three hundred and sixty degrees of the horizon—"

"Then something else."

"It would be easier to tell you something like that about the module. I remember…" Then he cocked his head.

"I guess that would do," Kid said. "But I'd prefer it was about the moon."

"Hey, here's something." Kamp leaned forward. "When I got down the ladder — do you remember the foil-covered footpaths that the modules rested on? You say you watched it."

Kid nodded.

"Well, now, when I was getting some of the equipment out of the auxiliary compartments — I'd been actually on surface maybe a minute, maybe not quite: A lot of people, back before the probe shots, had the idea the moon was covered with dust. But it was purplish brown dirt and rock and gravel. The feet didn't sink at all."

Kid thought: Translation.

Kid thought: Transition.

"The module's feet were on universal joints, you know? Anyway. The one to the left of the entrance was tilted on a small rock, maybe two inches through. The shadows were pretty sharp. I guess when I was passing by it, my shadow passed over the module foot. And the shadow from the pad, made by the rock it was sitting on, and my shadow, joining it, for just a second made it look like something moved under there. You know? I was excited, see, because I was on the moon. And it just isn't like anything in the training sessions at all. But I do remember for maybe three seconds, while I was going on doing all the things I had to do, thinking, 'There's a moon-mouse, or a moon-beetle under there.' And feeling silly that I couldn't say anything — I was broadcasting all the time, describing what I saw — because there couldn't be anything alive on the moon, right? Like I said, it just took me a couple of seconds to figure out what it really was. But for a moment it was pretty funny. Now there. That's something I never told anybody… no, I think I did mention it once to Neil, when I got back. But I don't think he was listening. And I told it just like a joke."

Formation. Kid thought: Transformation.

"Is that the sort of thing you mean?"

Kid had expected Kamp to be smiling at the end of his story. But each feature rested just within the limit of sobriety.

"Yes. What are you thinking now?"

"I'm wondering why I told you. But I guess Bellona is the kind of place you come to do something new, right? See new things. Do new things."

"What do people say about this place, outside? Do people who come back from here tell you all about life under the fog? Who did you talk to that made you want to come?"

"I don't think I've ever met anyone who's actually gone and come back from here — except Ernest Newboy, that morning. We just shook hands in passing and didn't get a chance to talk. I've met some people who were evacuated back at the beginning. Once they stopped trying to cover it on TV, people stopped talking, I guess-people don't talk about it now."

Kid let his head lean.

"They refer to it," Kamp said. "You can be sitting around somebody's living room, in Los Angeles or Salt Lake, talking about this, that, or the other, and somebody might mention somebody he used to know here. A friend of mine in physics, driving down from the University of Montana, said he gave two girl hitch-hikers a lift who told him they were going here. He thought that was very strange, because, the last the paper reported, there was supposed to be some national guards around."

"That's what I heard too," Kid said. "But that was a while before I came. I haven't seen any."

"How long have you been here?"

"I don't know. It feels like a pretty fair time. But I really couldn't tell you." Kid shrugged. "I wish I did know more than that… sometimes."

Kamp was trying not to frown. "Roger said you would be an interesting person. You are."

"I've never met him."

"So he told me."

"I guess you don't know how long you're going to stay either?"

"Well now, I haven't really made up my mind. When I came here, I wasn't thinking of the trip exactly as a vacation. But I've been here a few days, and I'll tell you, especially with the business this afternoon, I don't quite know what to make of it."

"You're interesting too," Kid said after a moment. "But I don't know whether it's because you've been to the moon; or just because you're interesting. I like you."

Kamp laughed, and picked up his beer. "Come on, since we're trying so hard to be honest: What reason could you possibly have for liking me?"

"Because even though you're a public person — and public people are great if you happen to be the public — some of the private 'you' gets through. I think you're very proud of the things you've done, and you're modest about them, and don't want to talk about them unless it's serious — even joking serious. To protect that modesty, I think you've had to do some things that haven't made you all that happy."

Measuredly, Kamp said, "Yes. But what do you get by telling me that?"

"Because I like you, I want you to trust me a little. If I can show you I understand something about you, perhaps you will."

"Ah, ha!" Kamp drew back, ineptly mocking something theatrical. "Just for argument now: Supposing you do know something about me, how do I know you won't use it against me?"

Kid looked down at the optical jewels on his wrist, turned his wrist: two veins joined beneath the ham of his thumb to run under the chain. "That's the third time somebody's asked me that. I guess I'll have to think of a public answer."

Tak was talking with someone by the door: Unshaven, and a little wild looking, Jack stepped in. Tak turned to the young deserter, who looked around, looked at Captain Kamp. Tak nodded in corroboration to something. Jack turned, picked up something that could have been a gun leaning against the wall, and practically ran out of the bar.

"I think I've figured out an answer already." Kid said.

Captain Kamp said, "…mmmm," and then, "so did I."

Kid grinned. "Good."

"You know—" Kamp looked down at the counter—"there are some things I'm not happy about. But now, they're just the things a guy would be reluctant to tell, ordinarily, to… well, one of you fellows with the shaggy hair, the funny clothes, and the beads and things. Or chains…" He looked up. "I am dissatisfied with my life and my work. It's a very subtle dissatisfaction, and I don't want to be told to take dope and let my hair grow. I mean that's just the last thing I want to hear."

"Why don't you take dope and let your hair grow? See, it wasn't that bad. Now that the worst has happened, maybe you can go on and talk about it. I'll just listen."

Kamp laughed. "I'm dissatisfied with my life on earth. How's that? Not clear, I guess. Look — I'm not the same person I was before I went to the moon — maybe this is the sort of thing you were asking about. Perhaps it's the sort of thing that should only be told to one person. But I've told a couple of dozen: You know the world is round, and that the moon is a small world circling it. But you live in a world of up and down, where the land is a surface. But for me, just the visual continuity from that flat surface to a height where the edge of the earth develops a curve, to where that curve is a complete circle, to where the little soap-colored circle hanging in front of you enlarges to the size the Earth was, and then you come down. And suddenly that circle is a surface — but up and down is already not quite the same thing. We danced when we got out on the moon. What else could we do with that lightness? You know, seeing a film backward isn't the same experience as seeing it forward in reverse. It's a new experience, still happening forward in time. What falls out is all its own. Returning from the moon was not the same as going, played backward. We arrived at a place where no one had walked; we left a place where we had danced. The earth we left was peopled by a race that had never sent emissaries to another cosmological body. We returned to a people who had. I really feel that what we did was important — folks starving in India not withstanding; and if there's a real threat of world starvation, technology will have to be used to avoid it; and I can't think of a better way to let people know just how far technology can take us. I was at a point of focus, for six and a half hours. I'm happy with that focus. But I'm not too terribly satisfied with the life on either side. The things that are off are like the things off about the way Bellona looked when we were driving through the first day I got here: there aren't many people, but there's no overt signs of major destruction — at least I didn't see any. It's grey, and some windows are broken, and here and there are marks of fire. But, frankly, I can't tell what's wrong. I still haven't been able to figure out what's happened here."

"I'd like to go to the moon."

"Cut your hair and stop taking dope." Kamp's tongue bulged his upper lip. "You don't even have to join the services. We have civilians in the program. Worst thing I could say, huh? But it really is the basic requirement. I mean all the rest comes after that. Really."

He thinks, Kid thought, he may have offended me. Kid tried not to smile.

"You're frowning," Kamp said, "Come on, now. Turnabout's fair play… well, all right. Tell me this. Are you all that happy? Be honest now."

Tak was ambling, slow and aimless, across the room.

"I think," and Kid felt his feelings change to fit the frown, "there's something wrong with your question, you know? I spend a lot of time happy; I spend a lot of time unhappy; I spend a lot of time just bored. Maybe if I worked real hard at it, I could avoid some of the happiness, but I doubt it. The other two I know I'm stuck with…"

Kamp was brightly attentive to something not more than a degree or so outside of Kid's face. Well, Kid reflected, I said I'd listen. When Kid had been silent five seconds, Kamp said:

"I'm not the same person I was before I went to the moon. Several people have explained to me that nobody else on Earth is either. Someone told me once that I have, begun to heal the great wound inflicted on the human soul by Galileo when he let slip the Earth was not the center of the Universe. No, I am not really satisfied now. I wonder at that light in the sky, this afternoon. I wonder at the stories I've heard about two moons when I know, first hand, what I do about the one. But I observe it from a very different position than you. We could sit and discuss and have conferences and seminars until a much more reassuring sun came up, and I still doubt if I could say anything meaningful to you, or you could say anything meaningful to me. At least about that."

"Hey, there." Tak put his hand on Kid's shoulder — but was talking to Kamp: "That was my friend Jack. You know, we have a good number of army deserters with us. I told him we had a full-fledged Captain with us this evening. He wanted to know whether you were a deserter too. I told him that as far as I knew you were still a member in good standing. I'm afraid he just turned around and ran without even waiting to find out you were in the Navy. Are you on your way, Captain?"

Kamp nodded, raised his bottle. "Glad I got a chance to meet you, Kid. If I don't see you before, I'll catch you at Roger's." Again he nodded at Tak, and turned.

"I hope I make him as uncomfortable as he keeps pretending I do." Tak sucked his teeth. "Wish he'd come in uniform. Before I went on to more complicated pleasures, I used to have a real passion for sea-food."

"You're flattering yourself."

Tak gave a few small nods. "Possibly, very possibly. Hey, I'm sorry I kicked you out last night. Come home with me. Fuck me."

"Naw. I'm looking for Lanya."

Tak enfolded his beer with his big, pale hands and looked down the bottle mouth. "Oh." Then he said: "Then come with me somewhere else. I want to show you something. You probably want to see it, too."

"What is it?"

"On the other hand, maybe you have seen it already and you're not interested."

"But you're not going to tell me what it is?"

"Nope."

"Come on," Kid said. "Show me."

Tak clapped Kid's shoulder, then pushed away from the bar. "Let's go."

Between the buildings black bulged down like a tarpaulin filled with rain.

"This is the sort of night I'd give anything for a star. When I was younger I used to try to learn the constellations, but I never really got them down. I can find the Big Dipper." Tak opened his zipper. "Can you do that?"

"I know them pretty well now. But I learned them a few years ago, back when I was traveling, and on boats and stuff. There're the only things that stay the same when you're really moving around a lot. I picked up this pocket book for fifty cents, when I was in Japan — it was an American book though. In about two weeks I could pick out just about anything."

"Mmmmm." Tak glanced up as they neared the corner lamp. "Just as well we can't see them, then. I mean, are you ready to have to learn a whole new set?" The shadow drew over his face like a shade. "This way."

The street sloped. At the next corner they turned again. Half a block later Kid asked, "Can you see anything at all?"

"No."

"But you know where we're going…?"

"Yes."

The smell of burning had again become distinct. The air was cooler, much cooler: he felt a crack in the pavement beneath his bare foot. Something with edges rolled away from his boot. The woody odors sifted. For one instant they passed through a smell that brought back-it hit with the force of hallucination: a cave in the wooded mountains where something had crackled in a large, brass dish on the wet stone, while above he had seen, glittering…

The chain around him tingled and tickled as though the memory had sent current through it. But the particular odor (wet leaves over dry, and a fire, and something decayed…) was gone. And cool as the darkness was, it was dry, dry…

Edged by a vertical wall, light a long way away diffused in smoke.

At the corner, Tak looked back. "Checking to make sure you were still with me. You don't make much noise. We're going across there." Tak nodded forward and they crossed the street, shoulder bumping shoulder.

Beyond plate glass, an amber light silhouetted black wire forms.

"What sort of store was this?" Kid asked, behind Tak who was opening the door.

It sounded like a machine was running in the basement. Empty shelves lined the walls, and the wire frames were display racks. The light came from no more than a single bulb somewhere on the stairwell. Tak went to the cash register. "First time I came in here, would you believe there was still eighty dollars in the drawer?"

Tak rang.

The drawer trundled out.

"Still there."

He closed it.

In the cellar the sound stopped, then started again: only now it didn't sound like a machine at all, but someone moaning.

"We want to go downstairs," Tak said.

Someone had scattered pamphlets on the steps. They whispered under Kid's bare foot. "What was this place?" Kid asked again. "A bookstore?"

"Still is." Tak peered out where the single hanging bulb lit empty shelves. "Paperback department down here."

Tacked to an edge was a hand-lettered sign: _{^{ITALIAN LITERATURE}}.

A youngster with very long hair sat cross-legged on the floor. He glanced up, then closed his eyes, faced forward, and intoned: "Om…" drawing the last sound until it became the mechanical growl Kid had heard when they'd entered.

"Occupied tonight," Tak said, softly. "Usually there's no one here."

Between the checked flannel lapels, the boy's chest ran with sweat. Cheek bones glistened above his beard. He'd only glanced at them, before closing his eyes again.

It's cool, Kid thought. It's so much cooler.

Beside ^{_{ITALIAN LITERATURE}} was ^{_{POLITICAL SCIENCE}}. There were no books on that one either.

Kid stepped around the boy's knees and looked up at ^{_{PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE}} (equally empty) and walked on to ^_PHILOSOPHY. All the shelves, it seemed, were bare.

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm…"

Tak touched Kid's shoulder. "Here, this is what I wanted to show you." He nodded across the room.

Kid followed Tak around ^{_{AMERICAN LITERATURE}} which was a dusty wooden rack in the middle of the floor.

The unfrosted bulb pivoted shadows about them.

"I used to come down here for all my science fiction," Tak said, "until there wasn't anything on the shelves any more. In there. Go ahead."

Kid stepped into the alcove and stubbed his booted toe (thinking: Fortunately), hopped back, looked up: The ivory covers recalled lapped bathroom tiles.

All but the top shelf was filled with face-out display. He looked again at the carton he had kicked. The cover wagged. As he stared into the box, something focused: a shadow, first fallen across his mind at something Lanya had said at the nest, almost blurred out by the afternoon's megalight, now, under the one, unfrosted bulb, lay outlined and irrefutable: As manuscripts did not become galleys overnight, neither did galleys become distributed books. Many more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had corrected proofs with Newboy in the church basement.

Frowning, he bent to pick out a copy, paused, reached for one on the shelf, paused again, looked back at Tak, who had his fists in his jacket pockets.

Kid's lips whispered at some interrogative. He looked at the books again, reached again. His thumb stubbed the polished cover-stock.

He took one.

Three fell; one slid against his foot.

Tak said: "I think it's very quaint of them to put it inPOETRY," which is what the sign above said. "I mean they could have filled up every shelf in the God-damn store. There're a dozen cartons in the back."

Thumb on top, three fingers beneath, Kid tried to feel the weight; he had to jog his hand. There was a sense of absence which was easiest to fill with

lettered in clean shapes with edges and serifs his own fingers could not have drawn, even with French curve and straightedge. He reread the title.

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm…" The light blacked and went on again; the "… mmmmmmmmmm …" halted on a cough.

Kid looked over the six, seven, eight filled shelves. "That's really funny," he said, and wished the smile he felt should be on his face would muster his inner features to the right emotions. "That's really…" Suddenly he took two more copies, and pushed past Tak for the stair. "Hey," he said to the boy. "Are you all right?"

The sweating face lifted. "Huh?"

"What's the matter with you?"

"Oh, man!" The boy laughed weakly. "I'm sick as a dog. I'm really sick as a fucking dog."

"What's wrong?"

"It's my gut. I got a spastic duodenum. That's like an ulcer. I mean I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I've had it before, so I know what it feels like."

"What are you doing here, then?"

The boy laughed again. "I was trying yoga exercises. For the pain. You know you can control things like that, with yoga."

Tak came up behind Kid. "Does it work?"

"Sometimes." The boy took a breath. "A little."

Kid hurried on up the steps.

Tak followed.

From the top step Kid looked around at the shelves, and turned to Tak, who said:

"I was just thinking, I really was, about asking you to autograph this for me." He held up the copy and snorted rough laughter. "I really was."

Kid decided not to examine the shape this thought made, but caught the mica edge: It's not not having: It's having no memory of having. "I don't like that sort of shit anyway…" he said, awed at his lie, and looked at Tak's face, all shadowed and flared with backlight. He searched the black oval for movement. It's there anyway, he thought; he said: "Here. Gimme," and got the pen from the vest's buttonhole.

"What are you going to do?" Tak handed it over.

Kid opened it on the counter by the register, and wrote: "This copy of my book is for my friend, Tak Loufer." He frowned a moment, then added, "All best." The page looked yellow. And he couldn't read what he'd written at all, which made him realize how dim the light was. "Here." He handed it back. "Let's go, huh?"

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…"

"Yeah." Tak glanced down stairs and sucked his teeth. "You know?" They walked to the door. "When you took it from me, I thought you were going to tear it up."

Kid laughed. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. And thinking it, decided what he had put was best. "You know—" as they stepped into the night, Kid felt his fingers dampen on the cover: fingerprints? — "people talk about sexual inadequacy? That doesn't have anything to do with whether you can get a hard-on or not. A guy goes out looking for his girl friend and doesn't even know where she lives, and doesn't seem to have bothered to find out… You said Madame Brown might know?"

"I think so," Tak said. "Hey, you're always talking about your girl friend. Right now, do you have a boy friend?"

Kid figured they had reached the corner. On the next step he felt the ball of his bare foot hung over the curb. "Yeah, I guess I do." They stepped down.

"Oh," Tak said. "Somebody told me you're supposed to be making it with some kid in the scorpions."

"I could get to hate this city—"

"Ah, ah, ah!" Tak's voice aped reproval. "Rumor is the messenger of the gods. I'm sort of curious to find out what you wrote in my book."

At which Kid started to balk, found his own balking funny, and smiled. "Yeah."

"And of course, the poems too. Well…"

Kid heard Tak's footsteps stop.

"…I go this way. Sure I can't convince you…?"

"No." He added: "But thanks. I'll see you." Kid walked forward thinking, That's nuts. How does anybody know where anything is in this, and thought that thought seven or eight times through, till, without breaking stride, he realized: I cannot see a thing and I am alone. He pictured great maps of darkness torn down before more. After today, he thought idly, there is no more reason for the sun to rise. Insanity? To live in any state other than terror! He held the books tightly. Are these poems mine? Or will I discover that they are improper descriptions by someone else of things I might have once been near: the map erased, aliases substituted for each location?

Someone, then others, were laughing. Kid walked, registering first the full wildness of it, the spreading edges; but only at the working street lamp at the far corner, realizing it was humor's raddle and play.

Two black men, in the trapezoid of light from a doorway, were talking. One was drinking a can of beer or Coke. From across the street, a third figure (Kid could see the dark arms were bare from here, that the vest was shiny) ambled up.

The street lamp pulsed and died, pulsed and died. Black letters on a yellow field announced, and announced, and announced:

Kid walked toward them, curious.

"She run up here…" the tall one explained, then laughed once more. "Pretty little blond-headed thing, all scared to death; you know, she stopped first, like she gonna turn around and run away, with her han' up in front of her mouth. Then she a'ks me—" The man lowered his head and raised his voice: " 'Is George Harrison in there? You know, George Harrison, the big colored man?' " The raconteur threw up his head and laughed again. "Man, if I had 'em like George had 'em…" In his fist was a rifle barrel (butt on the ground) that swung with his laughter.

"What you tell her?" the heavier one asked, and drank again.

" 'Sure he's inside,' I told her. 'He better be inside. I just come out of there and I sure as hell seen him inside. So if he ain't inside, then I just don't know where else he might be.' " The rifle leaned and recovered. "She run. She just turned around and run off down the block. Run just like that!"

The third was a black scorpion with the black vinyl vest, his orchid on a neck chain. It's like, Kid thought, meeting friends the afternoon the TV had been covering the assassination of another politician, the suicide of another superstar; and for a moment you are complicit strangers celebrating by articulate obliteration some national, neutral catastrophe.

Remembering the noon's light, Kid squinted in the dark. And wished he were holding anything else: notebook or flower or shard of glass. Awkwardly, he reached back to shove the books under his belt.

The three turned to look.

Kid's skin moistened with embarrassment.

"…She just run off," the black man with the gun finally repeated, and his face relaxed like a musician's at a completed cadence.

The one with the beer can, looking left and right, said, "You scorpions. So you come down here a little, huh?"

"This is the Kid," the black scorpion explained. "I'm Glass."

His name, Kid thought (he remembered Spider helping with Siam's arm on the rocking bus floor…): It isn't any easier to think of them once their names surface. They might as well be me. Surfaced with it was a delight at his own lack. But that joy still seemed as dull and expected as a banally Oedipal dream he'd had the first night he'd been assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital.

"You the Kid?" The man hooked the can's bottom on the top of his belt buckle. "You fellows gonna come down here and give us protection?"

"Yeah, they all shootin' up black people now, you come on down to Jackson."

Far inside, other blacks were talking and laughing.

"What happened?" Kid asked.

Glass stepped over closer to Kid. (Kid thought: I feel more comfortable. He probably does too.) The others moved to accomodate the shift.

"Someone been shooting up down here?" Glass asked. "That was this afternoon?"

"Sure was." The barrel went into the other hand. "Like a sniper, you know? Ain't that something. I mean, this afternoon, with that thing hanging up there."

"What happened?"

"Somebody climbed up on the roof of the Second City Bank building down on the corner, and started shooting people with a gun. Just like that."

"Did he kill anybody?" Kid asked.

The man with the can pursed his lips to a prune.

The man with the gun said: "About seven."

"Shit!" Kid said.

"Like he got four people together, you know — bip, bip, bip, bip. The woman wasn't dead yet, but she couldn't move very far. A little later some people came out to help them, 'cause they thought he'd gone. But he stood up again and picked off three of them. Then he run."

"It was a white boy, too." The other gestured with his can. "And he gonna come all the way down here to shoot niggers."

"The woman died, hey… when?" Glass asked.

"A little later. She didn't say nothing about the guy did the shooting though. Some others saw. That's how they know he was white." He grinned, finished the can, tossed it. "You scorpions gonna—" it clunked and bounced—"gonna come down to Jackson and give us some protection? Keep them crazy white motherfuckers from shooting up people in the street?"

The gun came up. "We don't need no scorpion protection," and a deprecating: "Shit."

"That's good," Kid said. "Because we don't protect anybody." This all sounds sort of familiar. Didn't somebody get shot from a roof…

The two men looked at each other, looked uncomfortable.

Glass repeated, finally, "That's not what we do."

The man with the gun slid the barrel up to his shoulder. "Naw, we don't need no protection."

"We don't need no motherfuckers standing on the roof of the Second City Bank building shooting people, either." The other man's hands moved on his belt to finger the buckle, as though he wished the can back. "You know, without having no doctors. Or undertakers."

"What'd they do with them?" Glass asked.

"Put them in a house way down there. And after about three or four days, people gonna start crossing the street when they was going past that stretch."

The man with the gun didn't laugh. "What you scorpions doing over here? Cause that sun comes up—" the butt clacked down on the concrete—"you gonna come on down here?"

"George told me to come down and see him," Kid said. "I saw him over at Reverend Amy's church and he told me to come down and visit."

"Yeah," Glass said. "We comin' to see George."

After a while one said, "Oh."

"Well, go on in," the other said. "Sure, go on inside. He's in there."

"Come on," Kid said to Glass.

Halfway down the hall, Glass said, "You think he ever had a gun before? The way he was banging it around, he gonna shoot off his ear or his nose or his head or something."

"Or my head," Kid said. "Yeah, I was thinking that too."

Three lanterns hung together. Their magnesium-white light harshened the battleship linoleum, the institutional yellow walls. Through an iron elevator gate, Kid could see a web of shadow on the cinder block.

He knew he reacted, but could not tell by what it showed. "Where to put the bodies? I'm not going to like it when I run into that a third time."

Glass was watching him.

"Why're you wearing your orchid around your neck? When I first saw you the day we broke into the department store, you had it in a piece of leather."

"I know," Glass said. "But you were wearing yours that way."

"Oh. That's what I thought."

Beyond the turn they could hear people.

"Hey."

Glass turned. Slabs of light slid across his black vinyl. "Huh?"

"What did you guys think when I showed up, I mean back at the department store?"

Glass laughed through his nose. He looked embarrassed. He pulled his pants across his stomach, scratched the twice-crossed T of an appendectomy scar showing above his belt. His knuckles were much darker than the rest of his skin; the places between his fingers looked like they had been brushed with ash.

"What did you think? Tell me."

Glass shrugged and shook his head to settle the smile about the yellow corners of his eyes. "We… well, we knew you were coming. Only we didn't know you were coming then. I mean, you remember the morning we woke you up in the park?"

Kid nodded.

Glass nodded too as though the reference explained something, then looked up the hall.

Kid walked on.

At a party, I hand out a hundred and fifty copies of my book, and they all turn down the music and sit around cross-legged on the floor, reading so intently I can walk among them, lean down, and examine each expression flickering from humor through compassion to the visage of the deeply moved.

He sweated under the books in his belt. A drop rolled, tickling his buttock.

Kid and Glass stepped inside the wide-swung doors.

He'd thought there was music.

"…wants more of it, can't get enough of it, how to get out of it: Time—" a woman cried over the loose crowd—"is the hero!" She swayed in dark robes on some platform — or maybe just a table — that brought her knees high as the highest, close-cropped, black (with a brown bald spot vague in the middle) head. "Time is the villain!" Reverend Amy Tayler, thirty yards across the balconied hall, shook her head and her fist, glared around at craning women and men with faces of humus, sand, and all in-between colors earth can have. "Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truths and lies. Not truth and falsity — Oh, no. No. Nothing so grand. Here we are sunk on the abyss of discrete fibs, innocent misobservations, brilliant speculations that turn out wrong and kill — Oh, there is so much less truth in the universe than anything else. Yes, even here we founder on the fill of language, the quick ash of desire." Glass touched Kid's arm. His expression looked stranger than Kid's felt. Lanterns hung on the walls. Shadows were multiple and dim on blood-colored linoleum. Near them, strung crepe-paper had fallen behind the potted… not palms. Cactuses! "So you have seen the moon! So you have seen George — the right and left testicles of God, so heavy with tomorrow they tore through the veil to dangle naked above us all? Then what was that in the sky today? God's womb punched inside out and blazing with Her blood, looking like a moment ago She had passed the egg of the earth and its polar body we've so cavalierly dismissed from singularity? Is God a sow who devours Her young and gets heartburn? Is God the garter-snake Ouroborus, gagging on the tip of His own tail? Or is God just a category-concept mistake, like Ryle's mind, a process the materia of the universe preforms, indulges in, or inflicts on itself, through necessity or chance, for arcane reasons you and I will never discover? Being is a function of time, ey, Martin? Well, now, where does that get us? Now seems pretty specious to me… for it's just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we've been allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch, watching that flow, terrible for all of us, tragic for some of us, in which the future hisses through to heap the potter's field of the past. Very deep, indeed; and dried up. And dusty. And spiked with bone like pongee pits. Was it a heart of fire, up there today? Or just a dollop of what burns, squeezed out of the cosmic gut — to its great relief! Maybe it was our sun, hurtling by, on its way somewhere else; and all that's left to us now is to grow colder and older, every day in every way, gracefully as possible. How long did this light last? Oh, my poor, sick, doomed, and soon to be obliterated children, ask instead how long is the darkness that follows it!"

It was not, Kid had noticed, a particularly quiet nor attentive crowd — save the thirty or forty actually clustered at the Reverend's podium. People wandered, talked; and now laughter began somewhere, obscuring her words. Up in the dark balcony, a few people, widely distant, slept like darker blotches among the brown wood seats. Somebody moved along the railing, checking spotlights; none seemed to work. Fat, bald, the color of terra cotta and wearing just some bib-coveralls, he stood up, wiped at his forehead with the back of his arm, and moved to the next dead light.

On the walls, were high barred windows. As Kid's eyes came down the gates, a group of six middle-aged men and women ran across the floor: one woman knocked over a statue that one man caught and struggled to right, till a plaster wing fell. Plaster shattered over the floor. Others clustered to laugh, to shout advice.

Beyond them, Reverend Tayler waved her arms, ducked her head and tossed it back, haranguing the powdered floor, the shadowed ceiling; but only a word or two could tear clear now of talk and laughter.

The group fell apart from a sunburst of white footprints: George Harrison stalked through.

One arm was around the neck of a yellow-haired, plump, pink woman, the other around the waist of a gaunt, tan girl with a brick-colored natural and freckles. (He'd seen her, at the church, with the blond Mexican, who had stopped him on the street, how many mornings later, how many mornings ago?) George saw Kid, veered over, and called: "Hey, so you gonna come here, now? Shit!" His sleaves were rolled high on biceps like French-roast coffee. "You sure pick a hell of a time to come. Right in the middle of super-night. This is super-night, ain't it?" and nodded and hallooed people passing ten yards away. "Today sure as hell was super-day, when that super-sun come up in the super-sky! Hey—?" He released the gaunt girl's waist. Between the lapels of her jump suit hung a glittering catenary. "What you got there? Lemme see." His black fingers (pink nails, scimitared with yellow) clawed up the optical chain. "I see all the people running around wearing these things. Him…" He nodded at Kid. "You see all of them walking around with them. Come on, gimme that one. I'm gonna be a hippie too and wear them little glass beads."

"Ohh!" She complained, "George!"

"You give me those, and you can get some more, right?"

"No honey." She lifted them from his fingers. "You can't have these."

"Why not?"

"Cause you can't, that's all."

"You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself—"

"Not these, honey." She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. "You tell me what else you want and I'll give you that, okay?"

"Well, that's what I want!"

"Oh, George." She snuggled, closer — and out of his line of sight.

"All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I'm sure gonna get them later." Harrison guffawed.

The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking palm.

"What is all this?" Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. "I mean, what's everybody doing here? And the preacher—?"

"Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!"

"She sure been going on," the gaunt girl said. "She just don't stop."

"This here is my house," George said, with a grave nod. "Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn't be able to fit 'em all in the church. So we say, come on and we gonna open up the big meeting room. And you just put a sign out say everybody come on over."

"I think that's real nice," Plump Pink said in an accent that, during three weeks at the Georgia border loading melons, Kid had learned to identify as South Alabama Flats. "She always preaching about George and telling everybody about George. So I think it was very nice of George to say why not come on and do it here."

"Don't look to me like there any more people than she could fit in the chapel," the girl said.

"We got a bar over there—" the blond woman turned up her hand to point—"where you fellas can go get a drink. Then you can go listen to the preacher lady. George just wants everybody to make themselves at home."

"Shit," George said. Then he laughed.

Glass laughed too; the blond woman looked satisfied, did something with two fingers under the flowered cotton of her bodice, smiled.

"Gotta give the preacher lady a place to preach," George repeated. He nodded, dropped the gaunt girl's waist.

"Who lives in this city?" Reverend Amy's voice came on through a lull. "Logicians love it here!" George turned to listen. So did the gaunt girl and Glass. "Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you. What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated plurima. No, Che, no Fanon, you are not niggers enough! Look—" Once more she waved her fist high. Her black sleeve flung out below it. "I have a handful of monads here. Listen — They're chattering and gossiping away like eight-operation logic-cells calling up order from a random net…" At the mention of Che an (unrelated? Kid wondered) wave of noise had started in one corner of the hall. Now another, which had at its center crashing bottle glass, rose over her voice. On the brown scape of the Reverend's face, a constellation of droplets gleamed on each temple. Her mouth moved, her head bent, her head rose; her eyes sealed, snapped open, stared intently; and again Kid could hear none of her dithyramb.

He did hear George chuckle. Harrison stood with his hands in the pockets of his dirty khaki slacks.

Glass, a few steps away, was craning to see something over somebody's head. The blond woman was shouldering her way forward with smiles and "excuse-me's," right and left; the gaunt girl stood, pensive, still watching the preacher, her left hand on her right shoulder, looking pained and picturesque.

"You know your girl friend was outside looking for you again," Kid said.

"Yeah?" George said. "Which one?"

"A little blond seventeen-year-old white girl." The sweat, Kid realized, was not just under the books. The shoulders of his vest slid on it. The backs of his knees and the skin under his jaw were wet. "She was outside, asking… asking for you: 'Is George Harrison in there? Is George inside?' "

George's nose and cheeks like sanded teak, his heavy lips wrinkled as hemlock bark, the planes around his off-ivory teeth and eyes, moved into an expression fixed loosely among irony, amusement, and contempt: It was the expression on Tak's first poster. "Lots of little white girls come around here looking for me."

"Her name rhymes with moon, and she—" Kid's right fist clamped, fingertips and knuckles scraping his jeans—"she killed her brother for you: George? She had your poster, all big and black and naked and he saw it, her little brother. He saw it and was teasing her — you know how little brothers are, George? He was teasing her and he was gonna tell on her, you see? He was gonna tell her mother, tell her father: only she was afraid if he did, they'd know — know that it wasn't just a picture; know that she'd found you once; know that she was trying to find you again! See, they'd already threatened to kill her older brother. Already. And he'd run away. So she pushed him, her little brother, down the elevator shaft — sixteen, seventeen, eighteen stories down…! I don't quite… remember!" Kid shook his head. Something that was not pain pulsed in it, pulsed in it again. "Oh, Christ, there was… blood! I had blood all over me. I had to pull him up out of the basement, by the armful! And carry him back upstairs. After he was dead. But… it was for you! That's why she… that's why she did it! That's why I…" What pulsed became pain. "She told me herself. She told me that she was afraid he was going to tell. And that she…" Kid stepped away, stepped again, because the first step was unsteady and he had to catch himself on the second. He looked back.

George watched, as if from a long hall whose walls moved with indifferent faces, black and brown.

His eyes will explode like blooming poppies, Kid thought. His teeth will erupt like diamonds spat by the mouthful. His tongue will snake the yards between us, nearly touch my mouth before it becomes pink smoke. Steam in two columns will hiss down from his nostrils…

George stared with — and recognizing it, Kid suddenly turned away and lurched away — the indulgence reserved for the mad.

Is this, Kid thought (saying, "Hey, I'm sorry, man…" and patting someone's shoulder he'd just bumped), one of those moments that, momentarily, will slip out of mind to join my purpose, age, and name? He made it between those two; then somebody, laughing, steadied his arm and handed him on. He came up against the thin metal bars with his cheek and both hands, clutched them, leaned back, looked up:

Someone was coming down the spiral stairway. The fat, bald man (whose skin looked now more like oiled wrapping-paper) in the bib-overalls, descended, by Kid, stepped from ringing, black, triangular steps that circled the central pole, up, around, and up through the open square in the balcony floor—

When Kid looked down again, the man was working sideways through the people wandering about the center of the room.

"You all right?"

"Yeah, I…" Kid looked around.

"Good." Glass, with a bobbing walk, almost slow motion, came toward him. "I was just wondering. You know…?"

"I'm all right…" But he was cold; the sweat was drying on his neck, his forearms, his ankles. "Yeah."

Glass ran his thumb along his belt. Vinyl flapped back from the appendectomy scar in his dark, matte skin, swung over it again.

Multiple Caucasian laughter fell down through the spiral railing.

Glass and Kid looked up together, looked down together.

A lantern high on the wall brushed soft highlights on Glass's arms, slapped harsh ones on his vest, and slipped a line of light along an orchid petal against his chained and chain-lapped chest so bright Kid squinted.

"You wanna go see?" Glass said.

"Sounds like the kids from the park." Kid pressed his lips, glanced up again; suddenly he swung around the rail, started up the steps, one hand on the gritty pole, one trailing on the banister. Glass, behind him, kept bumping Kid's fist with his fist on the rail. The toe of his boot caught Kid's bare heel one step before the top.

From the shadowed kiosk at the head of the aisle, Kid looked down the balcony's raked seats. He heard Glass breathing inches behind his ear.

They sat — six, no seven of them — just back from the balcony rail: The blond woman in the third row, leaning forward to see between the shoulders of the two men in front, was Lynn, the woman he had sat next to at the Richards, the woman from whom he had wrested the gun in the Emboriky.

A tall, curly-haired man sat beside her, his hands locked around the barrel of a gun. He leaned forward, the barrel tip higher than his head; he looked almost asleep.

Another man was still laughing.

Another was saying, "Where is that damn woman's dog? Hey—" He half rose, looked over the empty seats: "Muriel! Muriel—"

"Oh, for God's sakes, Mark, sit down!" Lynn, in her green dress, said.

Another man, in a worn suede jacket, said: "I want to know where that damn woman is. She was supposed to be back by…" The last of his sentence was lost in laughter and applause from below, that must have had something to do with the Reverend; but Kid could not see her from here.

And one man had cuffed the man next to him. The other woman, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, was trying to separate them, laughing.

A seat away, scuffed shoes on the back of the seat ahead, knees jackknifed in shiny slacks, and a rifle across his chair arms like a guard bar on the seat of a carnival ride, sat Jack. While the others joked and laughed, Kid could see his hollow, unshaven cheek pulse with swallowing as he balanced his chin on his joined fists and brooded down on the milling blacks.

"Ain't some of those guys look awfully familiar?" Glass whispered, too loudly, it seemed, near Kid's ear. But none of them turned.

Kid glanced back—"The department store…" — and saw Glass nod before he looked away.

Widely scattered in the dark balcony (there were only two lanterns that someone had set up about twenty yards down the balcony rail; all the other light came from below), perhaps a dozen people lounged in the ply-backed seats. The bolts in the wrought metal braces holding the seat, in front of Kid's knee, to the dusty floor were half out—

"What's she saying? Can you hear what the preacher lady's saying down there?"

"On, come on! You can't hear anything up here except noise! I want to go downstairs and wander around the party!"

"You want to go down there, with all of them? Go on, then!"

"That guy down there looks all right… Who is he, anyway?"

"The white guy over there?"

"That's who I was pointing at, wasn't I?"

"Man—" The curly-haired one dragged the barrel back against his chest. "We could really just pick them off from up here. Just like—" He suddenly raised his rifle to his eye. "Pow!" he said, then glanced over and laughed. "Just like that, right? Wish I knew which one was George Harrison." He sighted down the gun again. "Pow…" he whispered.

"Cut it out," the man who was Mark said. "We just snuck in here to see what was going on."

The curly-headed man leaned forward and called, "Hey, Reb? Don't you think we could stir up a little excitement down there with a few well-aimed ones — just for target practice, mind you? What you think of that idea, Reb?"

Jack said, soberly and not looking over: "All you folks got some strange ideas. Everybody I met since I come here got strange ideas." Not soberly, came to Kid as a second thought: Jack's voice had the slurred gravity of a very grave drunk.

"Why do you two want to bring guns to a place like this for anyway?" Mark said.

"They had guns," the curly-headed man said, putting his rifle butt back on the floor. "You see the way them niggers tried to kick us out, because we had guns? Now that's not right. They had guns, we had guns — all men are created equal. Didn't you know that? — Hey, get your hand off!"

"I just wanted to see it," the woman in the peasant blouse said. "Besides, I'm a better shot than you, anyway."

"Yeah?" the man said. "Sure you are." He hung his curly head back against the barrel.

"Well, I am!"

"Which one is Harrison?" one of the other men said. "You know, they all do look alike." He laughed. "At least from up here."

Jack put one shoe down. Other than that — elbows on the chair arms across his rifle, chin on his fists, and one shiny knee angling wide — he did not move.

"What is that woman shouting about down there? Jesus…"

Kid looked at Glass, who had stepped up beside him now. Glass, frowning, glanced back at the small group, with a small, disgusted head shake.

Kid gestured down the spiral steps with his chin, turned, and started.

The hall of milling men and women revolved and received him.

"Too much!" Glass said at the bottom, stopping Kid with a warm hand on the shoulder. "I mean, Christ, man…"

"Let's find George." Kid took a breath. "We'll tell him they're up there and see what he wants to do."

"They probably ain't really gonna do nothing…" Glass said, warily.

"Then we find George, tell him there's a bunch of white people up in the balcony, two of them with guns, who probably ain't gonna do anything." Kid wondered which way to go, saw an opening in the crowd, and loped into it.

Behind him, Glass suggested on the run: "Maybe George already knows they're there?"

"Fine," Kid said, back over his shoulder. "Then he can tell us that too."

Three tubs near the wall held the four- and five-foot cactuses — the sort Kid had always heard sent roots thirty and forty feet down into the desert for water.

On the nearest, among browned and crisscrossed needles, hung what looked like a pink tissue. Two steps nearer, and Kid saw it was the rag of a flower, wide as his hand, limp on the succulent's flesh.

Before the furthest, George joked among a loud and jocular group. One woman with arms like brown sacks, wrinkled at elbows, wrists, and knuckles, waved a bottle, offering it here and there, with kisses and explosive shrieks.

Kid glanced at the balcony. No, they were not visible from where he stood.

Kid edged forward into the group. An arm pressed his arm, a hand steadied against his back to steady someone unsteady: He was sweating again. "George—! Hey, George?" He wondered why, and for answer found all the memories of ten minutes ago's encounter: the compulsive tale of June, his own terror, returning now. "George, I got to—" He took the bottle passed him, drank, passed it on. "George, I got to see you for a minute, man!" Am I afraid of him? Kid wondered. If that's all it is, then all I know to do is not be afraid of the fear. "George…!"

Harrison had the bottle now. His arm rose, his laughter fell—"Hey now, how you doing, Kid? This here is the Kid. The Kid wants to speak to me for a second—" then the arm fell around Kid's shoulder—"so I'll be with you in a second." The dark head lowered next to Kid's with an anticipatory swig, fixing attention.

"Look," Kid said. "Outside, there was some guy talking about some people getting killed in the street by snipers from the roof this afternoon? Well, up in the balcony, you got about half a dozen white guys-two of them with guns. They're sitting there joking about picking people off. And they're particularly interested in which one is you. Now they probably aren't gonna pull anything, but I thought you ought to—"

"Shit!" George hissed. He raised his eyes, but not his head. "They got three women and a dog with them—?"

"Two…" Kid began. "No, three and a dog."

"God-damn thick-headed niggers!" George's breath lurched in sharply. "I told them not to let them crazy people in here with no guns! What the hell they think I put them out there for… unless they done snuck in some other way—"

"That's what they were saying," Kid said. "They must of snuck in. And—"

George started to stand.

Kid caught his shoulder and pulled him back down, his mind gone bright with recognition of what was inside of it: " — and George! What I told you—" the sweat started to dry, and as his back cooled under his vest, he knew why it had come—"about June, killing her brother…?"

George's eyes, the corners blood-heavy, the pupils fading almost evenly into the stained-ivory whites, came close to Kid's.

"…it wasn't true. I mean, she did it. But you see, I don't know whether she did it because of you or not. After he was killed, that's when she told me he was going to tell, about the poster of you I gave her. She said it was an accident. She said he was going to tell, and then, just by accident… So I don't know. You see…?"

"You real worried about that, ain't you?" George straightened. His arm still hung on Kid's shoulder, the glass bottle moving, as George breathed, against Kid's chains. "Well that's why she looking for me, not you. 'Cause I don't care about that one way or the other. You so busy blamin' or forgivin', you gonna drive her crazy. Me, see, I don't care if she innocent as a little white bunny rabbit in a brand new hutch, or if she done killed her brother, her mother, her daddy, and the President of the United States, cut up the bodies, and danced naked in the blood. What's it to me? What's it to her—? Another white man out of the way, that's all. She might worry about it a bit more than I do, but not much. And, finally, it's just gonna make both our lives easier — maybe even yours. When she come to me, I do her just the same, both ways. You say she looking? Well, I'm here, man, I'm still here. Hey—!" which was called out across the crowd. George waved the bottle high. "We all getting tired out, now. I think we got to all think about going home."

The blades clicked on Kid's chest, turned. Kid said: "You want us to go up and get 'em down for you, George? We'll take them out of the balcony."

George looked back at Kid, hesitated with narrowed eyes. "We get my boys up there to cover them. Then we get some people to take them away. My boys let them get in. So they can get them out. I know you guys is pretty handy with them bunch of thorns hanging around your necks, but they got equalizers, and if all men is created equal, we might as well keep it that way. Party's been going on too long, anyway. We all gonna go home now, So you can oblige me by moving out too, okay?"

Kid grinned, aped an over-polite bow—

"Much obliged to you, there," George said. "For all your trouble" — and laughed. Kid looked at the cactus in its wooden tub: for a moment he considered throwing himself against it to embrace the spiked, fleshy trunk; which was so ridiculous he merely turned and walked away. They will meet, he thought, by sun, by moons, by laughter or lightning. Why I sweat is because I do not know what will happen to me, then. What will happen to me…

Glass fell in beside him. After about six steps, Glass said: "What would you have done if he'd said, 'Why, sure, man! Go on up there and bring the motherfuckers down'?"

"Probably—" Kid dodged a drunk who was going to fall three steps beyond them—"pissed all over myself."

"Maybe." Glass laughed. "But then, you'd probably of tried to go up there and get 'em down, too."

"I don't think they'd have been much trouble." Kid said. "I hope."

The white man coming toward them, shouldering through the blacks and smiling, was Captain Michael Kamp. "Well, hello, there. Now I didn't think I was going to see you again. I mean, not this evening." His smile took in Glass.

"Hello, sir," Kid said. "Good to see you again. But I think the party's breaking up. They got some problem upstairs. Nothing serious. But there just might be some shooting. And it's awfully easy pickings from up there." Kamp's eyes followed Kid's up to the balcony and came back, confused and half again as wide. Kid said, "Oh. This is my friend Glass. Glass, this is Captain Kamp."

"Hello, sir." Glass put out his hand. "Glad to meet you."

Kamp had to remember to shake. "What is… I mean?"

"Come on," Kid said. "Let's move over this way."

"What's going on now?" Kamp followed them. "Now, well… Roger gave me a list of places to hit this evening. I'm afraid I'm one of those guys who likes to drink booze and chase women-the Navy's favorite kind. While that bar is all very interesting — a very interesting bunch—" he nodded—"really, I thought I might do better, at least on the second part of that, some place else. Like here." He looked up at the balcony again, while a sudden mass of people moved noisily toward the door and out. "They got some pretty women, too…" Another bunch followed them. "What is it?" Kamp asked.

"Some crazy white folks with guns," Kid said. "They aren't doing anything but making people nervous. But they shouldn't be up there, anyway."

"Didn't I hear somebody saying something about people getting shot in the street this afternoon?"

"Yeah," Glass said, and grimaced.

"Oh," Kamp said, because he could apparently think of nothing else. "Roger said they didn't even let white people in this place. What are they doing here?"

Kid frowned a moment at Kamp. "Well, some of us get by."

"Oh," Kamp said again. "Well, sure. I mean…"

"You from the moon, ain't you," Glass said. "That's pretty interesting."

Kamp started to say something, but a voice — it was the Reverend's — coming through the half-silence that followed the exodus:

"…of the crossing taken again is not the value of the crossing? Oh, my poor, inaccurate hands and eyes! Don't you know that once you have transgressed that boundary, every atom, the interior of every point of reality, has shifted its relation to every other you've left behind, shaken and jangled within the field of time, so that if you cross back, you return to a very different space than the one you left? You have crossed the river to come to this city? Do you really think you can cross back to a world where a blue sky goes violet in the evening, buttered over with the light of a single, silver moon? Or that after a breath of dark, presaged by a false, familiar dawn, a little disk of fire will spurt, spitting light, over trees and sparse clouds, women, men, and works of hand? But you do! Of course you do! How else are we to retain the inflationary coinage and cheap paper money of sanity and solipsism? Oh, it is common knowledge, the name of that so secondary moon that intruded itself upon our so ordinary night. But the arcane and unspoken name of what rose on this so extraordinary day, for which George is only consort, that alone will free you of this city! Pray with me! Pray! Pray that this city is the one, pure, logical space from which, without being a poet or a god, we can all actually leave if — what?" Someone reached up to her: the Reverend looked down. "What did…?" It was George. The Reverend bent. For a moment she started to look up, did not, and hastily climbed from her platform. Her small head was lost among the heads around her.

"Well, I guess it's about time for me to be getting up to Roger's then." Kamp looked around. "Though they have some pretty nice-looking ladies around, I must admit."

"Guess it's time for us all to get going," Kid said, and noticed Kamp did not move. He tried to glance in the direction Kamp looked, wondering which lady his eyes had come to rest on, found only the blank, barred window.

Kamp said: "Um… Getting up to Roger's in the dark…" He shifted his weight, put his one hand in his slacks pocket. "I don't really enjoy the idea." He shifted back. "Say, you guys want a job?"

"Huh?"

"Give you five bucks if you walk me up to the house — you know where it is?"

Kid nodded.

"I mean, you guys are in the protection business, aren't you? I'd just as soon have some, walking around this town at night."

"Yeah?"

"Walking around the streets in the dark, in a city with no police, you don't know what you're going to find… both of you: I'll give you five apiece."

"I'll go with you," Glass said.

"We'll go," Kid said.

"I really appreciate that, now, I really do. I don't want to rush you out. If you want to stay around and have a couple more drinks, fine. Just let me know when you're ready—"

Glass looked at Kid with a sort of Is-he-crazy? look.

So Kid said, "We'll go now," and thought: Is he that much more terrified of the dark than known danger?

"Good," Kamp said. "Okay. Fine, now." He grinned and started for the crowded door.

Glass's expression was still puzzled.

"Yeah," Kid said. "He's for real. He's been to the moon."

Glass laughed without opening his lips. "I'm for real too, man." And then he clapped his hands.

Kamp looked back at them.

Kid, followed by Glass, shouldered through the bunch milling loudly at the exit.

In the hallway, Kamp asked, "Do you fellows — you're scorpions, now, right? — do you fellows have much trouble around here?"

"Our share," Glass said.

Kid thought: Glass always waits before he speaks as if it were my place to speak first.

"I'm not the sort of man who usually runs from a fight," Kamp said, "But, now, you don't set yourself up. I'm not carrying a lot of money, but I want to get home with what I've got." (People before the door listened to a woman who, in the midst of her story, stopped to laugh torrentially.) "If I'm going to stay in Bellona for a while, maybe it would be a good idea to hire a bunch of you guys to hang around with me. Then again, maybe that would just be attracting attention. Now, I really do appreciate you coming with me."

"We won't let anything happen to you," Kid said and wondered why.

He contemplated telling Kamp his fear was silly; and realized his own nether consciousness had grown fearful.

Glass settled his shoulders, and his chin, and his thumbs in his frayed pockets, like a black, drugstore cowboy.

"You'll be okay," Kid reiterated.

The woman recovered enough for the story's punchline, which was "…the sun! He said it was the God-damn sun!" Black men and women rocked and howled.

Kid laughed too; they circuited the group, into the dark.

"Did you talk to George when you were inside?" Glass asked.

"We sort of talked. He offered me one of his girl friends. But she just wasn't my type, now. Now if he'd offered me the other one…" Kamp chuckled.

"What'd you think of him?" Kid asked.

"He isn't so much. I mean, I don't know why everybody is so scared of him."

"Scared?"

"Roger's terrified," Kamp said. "Roger was the one who told me about him, of course. It's an interesting story, but it's strange. What do you think?"

Kid shrugged. "What's there to say?"

"A great deal, from what you hear."

On the brick wall, beneath the pulsing streetlamp, George's posters, as shiny as if they had been varnished, overlapped like the immense and painted scales of a dragon, flank fading off and up into night. Glass looked at them as they passed. Kid and Kamp glanced at Glass.

"From what I've gathered, now, everybody spends a great deal of time talking about him."

"What did you two talk about, beside swapping pussy?" Kid asked.

"He mentioned you, among other things."

"Yeah? What did he say?"

"He wanted to know if I'd met you. When I said I had, he wanted to know my opinion of you. Seems people are almost as interested in you as they are in him."

That seemed like something to laugh at. Kid was surprised at Kamp's silence.

Dark pulled over Kamp's face. "You know, there's something — well, I'm not a strictly religious man. But I mean, for instance, when we were up there and we read the bible to everybody on television, we meant it. There's something about naming a new moon, for somebody — somebody like that, and all that sort of stuff, now, it's against religion. I don't like it."

Glass chuckled. "They ain't named the sun yet."

Kamp, baffled by Glass's accent (by now Kid had set it somewhere near Shreveport), made him say that again.

"Oh," Kamp said when he understood. "Oh, you mean this afternoon."

"Yeah," Glass said. "I hope you don't think they gonna name it after you?" and chuckled on.

"You think you could live up to that?" Kid asked.

Kamp gestured in the dark. But they could not tell the curve of his arm, whether it were closed or open-handed, so lost the meaning. "You fellows know where we're going, now?"

"We're going right," Glass said.

Kid felt distinctly they were going wrong. But distrust of his distinct feelings had become second nature. He walked, waiting, beside them.

"See," Glass said, surprising Kid from his reverie, maybe twenty minutes later, "This is that place between Brisbain North and Brisbain South. Told you we're going right."

Two canyon walls collapsed inward upon one another, obliterating the time between.

"What?" asked Kamp.

"We're going right," Glass said. "Up to Mr Calkins'."

Lamps on three consecutive corners worked.

They squinted and blinked at one another after blocks of darkness.

"I guess," Kamp said, jocularly, "it must be pretty hard for anybody to navigate after dark in the city."

"You learn," Kid said.

"What?"

What sort of accent do I have? "I said 'You learn'."

"Oh."

Ahead, black was punctured by a streetlamp at least five blocks off, flickering through branches of some otherwise invisible tree.

"You fellows ever have any trouble on the street?"

"Yeah," Kid said.

"What part of the city," Kamp asked. "You know, I want to know what neighborhoods to stay out of. Was it over where we were? The colored area, Jackson?"

"Right outside of Calkins'," Kid said.

"Did you get robbed?"

"No. I was just minding my own business. Then this bunch of guys jumped out and beat shit out of me. They didn't have anything better to do, I guess."

"Did you ever find out who it was?"

"Scorpions," Kid said. (Glass chuckled again.) "But that was before I started running."

"Scorpions are about the only thing in Bellona you got to worry about," Glass said. "Unless it's some nut with a rifle in an upstairs window or on the roof who decides to pick you off."

"— because he don't have anything better to do," Kid finished.

Kamp took a breath in the dark. "You say the neighborhood up here, around Roger's, is really bad?"

"About as bad as anyplace else," Kid said.

"Well," Kamp reflected, "I guess it was a pretty good idea to get you guys to come up with me, now."

He is using his fear to use me, Kid reflected, and said nothing. Ten dollars for the walk? Kid wondered how much this parallelled the genesis of the protection racket in the park commune. He put his fingertips in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, grinned at the night and thought: Is this how a dangerous scorpion walks? He swung his steps a bit wider.

Kamp coughed, and said very little for the next quarter-hour.

…am a marauder in the internal city, tenuous as the dark shaken on itself with a footstep, eyeblink, heartbeat. Intrigued by the way his fear has given me purpose, I swagger down the labyrinth of least resistance. Where is the sound? There is a sound like glass and sand, or a finger turning in the channels of the ear. I acknowledge my own death with an electrified tongue, wanting to cry. These breaths I leave here disperse like apparitions of laughter I am too terrified to release.

Which was the conclusion of the reverie he'd begun before: but could not remember its beginning.

"Do you know how far along the wall here the gate is?" Kamp asked.

"The wall makes your voice sound funny in the dark, don't it?" Glass said.

"Won't we be able to see some light from the house?" Kamp asked.

Kid asked, "They still got light?"

They walked.

"There," Kid said. "I see something—" stumbling at the curb edge. "…hey, watch—!" but did not fall. He recovered to Kamp's nervous laugh. He thinks, Kid thought, something almost jumped out at us. Only my eyes are bandaged in darkness. The rest of my body swerves in light.

"Yes," Kamp said. "We're here."

Between the newels, through the brass bars and shaggy pine, light slid into the crevices of Glass's face (sweating; Kid was surprised) and dusted Kamp's that was simply very pale.

I thought I was the only one scared to death, Kid thought. My luck, on my dumb face it doesn't show.

"Jose," Kamp called. "Jose, it's Mike Kamp. I'm back for the night." "Jose," Kamp explained somewhat inanely, "is the man Roger has on the gate."

K-k-klank: the lock (remotely controlled?) opened and bars swung inches in.

"Well," Kamp put his hands in his pockets. "I certainly want to thank you guys for — oh." His hands came out. "Here you go." He rifled through his wallet, held it up to his eyes. "Got to see what I have here, now…" He took out two bills.

Glass said, "Thanks," when he got his.

"Well," Kamp said again. "Thanks again. Well now. If I don't see you before, Kid, I'll see you in three Sundays." He pushed the gate. "Do you fellows want to come—"

"No," Kid said, and realized Glass had gotten himself ready to say yes.

"All right." K-k-klank. "Good night, now."

Glass shifted from one foot to the other. "Night." Then he said: "Those curbs are too much in all this dark shit. Let's go down the middle of the street."

"Sure."

They stepped off the sidewalk and started back.

You'll get to see what it looks like inside in a couple of weeks, Kid thought of saying and didn't. He also thought of asking why Glass was a scorpion, how long he'd been, and what he'd done before.

They did not talk.

Kid constructed the stumps of a dozen conversations, and heard each veer into some mutually embarrassing area, and so abandoned it. Once it occurred to him Glass was probably indulging in the same process: for a while he pondered what Glass might want to know about him: that too became fantasized converse, and like the others, embarrassing. So their silent intercourse moved to another subject.

"All this walking ain't worth five bucks," Glass said at the North-South connection.

"Here." Kid held out his bill, crumpled by the hour in his fist (the crisp points had blunted with perspiration). "It probably ain't worth ten either. But I don't need it."

"Thanks," Glass said. "Hey, thanks, man."

He was both surprised and amused that the interchange released him from his preoccupation with who Glass was.

They ambled the black street into the city, neither moving to illuminate his projector, in memoriam — Kid realized — to the sun.

How long had they been? Three hours? More? The distance between then and now was packed full of time during which his furious mind had prodded the outsides of a myriad fantasies and (if he were asked he would have said) nothing had happened. Thoughts of madness: Perhaps those moments of miscast reality or lost time were the points (during times when nothing happened) when the prodding broke through. The language that happened on other muscles than the tongue was better for grasping these. Things he could not say wobbled in his mouth, and brought back, vividly in the black, how at age four he had sat in the cellar, putting into his mouth, one after the other, blue, orange, and pink marbles, to see if he could taste the colors.

They passed another lamp.

Glass's face was dry.

The way anywhere in this city was obviously to drift; Kid drifted, on kinesthetic memory. To try consciously for destination was to come upon street signs illegible through smoke, darkness, or vandalism, wrongly placed, or missing.

When they crossed Jackson, Kid asked, "I want to go back to the party."

"Sure, motherfucker." Glass grinned. "Why not? You really want to?"

"Just to see what happened."

Glass sighed.

Across the pavement, at the other end of the block, Kid saw the dim trapezoid. "Light's still on."

Of the cluster of three lanterns inside the door, one still burned. Inside, the doors to the hall were closed.

"Don't sound like nobody's there."

"Open the door," Kid said because Glass was ahead of him.

Glass pushed, stepped in; Kid stepped after.

Only two lanterns were working: a third, in the corner, guttered. The meeting room was empty; the party's detritus lay in ruin and shadow.

Near the one-winged statue, fallen among the prickly plants, the tip of the barrel on his belly, the butt on the linoleum, the black guard whom they had talked to outside lay on his back and snored. The tracked plaster, overturned chairs, and scattered bottles momentarily brought Kid an image of a drunken shooting, the barrel swinging around the room moments before he'd passed out — but he saw no bullet holes.

He could see no one in the balcony.

On a chair by the far wall, muffled in an absurd overcoat, the only other person in the room swayed to one side, froze, recovered, swayed once more, once more froze at an angle that challenged gravity.

"What does he have inside him, a gyroscope?" Glass asked.

"More like half a spoon of skag."

Glass laughed.

In the hallway, a door that had been closed before now stood ajar on a stairwell.

"You wanna go exploring?" Glass asked.

"Sure," Kid said.

Glass pinched at his broad nose, twice, sucked in both lips, cleared his throat, and started down.

Kid followed.

A door at the bottom was open. Kid's foot crushed a Times, which caught some low draft (the dirty stair was cold; the banister pipe warm) and doffed down. It rasped again beneath his boot on the last step.

Kid came up behind Glass in the doorway:

The couch had been opened into a bed. The gaunt, brick-haired girl who had been with George, her neck looped with the optical chain, slept beneath a rumpled blanket, bearing small, light-coffee breasts, dolloped with dark nipples.

A lamp by the bed had a shade of glass from which a triangle was broken away. The wedge of light, molding to body and bedding, just touched one aureole at the height of her blowy breath.

"Hey, man!" Glass whispered, and grinned.

Kid breathed with her, swaying on the bottom step, and had to move his feet apart.

"How'd you like some of that?"

"I think I could eat about three helpings," Kid said. "Where's George?"

"Man, he probably gone off with the other one—" Glass's emphatic whispers broke into and returned from falsetto.

Then: "What the fuck are you doing!" She sat up, sharply, face going from sleep to anger like two frames of film.

"Jesus Christ, lady," Kid said, "we were just looking."

"Well stop looking! Go on, get the fuck out of here! Where the hell is everybody? You, both of you, get out!"

"Sweetheart, don't go on like that." Glass said. "Now you got your door wide open—"

"Did that nut leave the damn door unlocked—" She pulled up the sheet, reached down by the bed, and whipped up some article of clothing. "Come on. Out! Out! Out! I'm not kidding. Out!"

"Look—" Kid glumly contemplated the difficulties of rape (a surprising memory of his arms filled with the bloody boy; he moved his feet back together) and wondered what Glass was contemplating—"if you just stop yelling, maybe we can discuss this a little; you might change your mind—?"

"Not on your fucking life!" She shook out the wrinkled jump suit, swung her legs off the bed, and stuck her feet in. "I don't know what you got on your mind to do. But if you try it, you gonna get your ass hurt!"

"Nobody wants to hurt anybody—" Kid stopped because Glass was looking up at the small, high window. Kid felt his cheeks wrinkling and the pressure of surprise on his forehead.

She started to say something, and then said, "Huh?"

The foggy air outside had lightened to blue.

Then Glass turned and ran up the stairs.

"Hey!" Kid followed him.

Behind, he could hear her fighting with shoes.

Kid ran down the hall, swung outside.

Glass, a dozen feet from the sidewalk, stared along the street.

Kid joined him, stopping to look back, at the sound of footsteps: She stopped at the edge of the door, leaned but, her face contorted. "Jesus God," she said softly, stepped out and raised her head. "…it's getting… light!"

Kid's first thought was: It's happening too fast. The uneven roofs descended in a paling V, vortex blurred with smoke. He stared, waiting for an eruption of bronze fires. But no; the arch of visible sky, though modeled and mottled with billows, was deep blue, except the lowest quarter, gone grey.

"Oh, man!" Glass looked at Kid. "I'm so tired." Below one eye, water tracked his dark cheek. Blinking, Glass turned back to the morning.

Kid got chills. And kept getting them. I don't trust this reaction, he thought, remembering the last late-night TV drama where the frail heroine's tearful realizations of burgeoning love had caused him the same one. I'm going on like this because there's a nigger next to me about to bawl, and another in the doorway who looks so Scared and confused I'm about to… No, it's not the light. No.

But the chills came on, frazzling his flesh, till even his thoughts stuttered. Chills sandpapered his spine. His palms hummed. He opened his mouth and his eyes and his fingers wide to the raddled and streaming dawn.

5

Sunday, April 1, 1776—There is reason to speak of this on page two rather than lend the phenomenon the leading headline it could so easily claim. We, for one, are just not ready to grant the hysteria prevailing beneath this miasmal pollution the reinforcement of our shock.

We saw this one ourselves.

But in the city where we live, one doubts even the validity of that credential.

We went so far as to entertain a while the idea of devoting this issue to accounts only by those who had slept through, who were busy in the cellar or windowless back room when, or — hope on hope — could claim to have been strolling about yesterday afternoon and observed during, nothing extraordinary in the sky.

But if the advent in our nights of George is anything to go by, we should have to look outside our misty and deliquescent city limits to find a negative witness. At least we hope so.

Please, return to page one. The plight of Jackson's Lower Cumberland area, where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water main on my last Thursday (how dangerous that is for the rest of us nobody can say because nobody can estimate the losses from the fractured dam in terms of our decreased population) is a real dilemma. More real we would like to feel, than yesterday's portent.

We are not anxious either to describe or even name what passed. Presumably some copy of this will get beyond our border; we should like to keep our good name. We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park. But another writer (page one, continued page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first-hand account. And, anyway, in his words, "…chances are, no one lives there any more."

Dubious to time, the arc became visible in the late afternoon of the overcast day. In a spectrum ranging only through grey, black, and blue, you would have to see to judge the effects of those golds and bronzes, those reds and purplish browns! Minutes later, most of us here had gathered in the August Garden. The view was awesome. Speculation, before awe silenced it, was rampant. When, after fifteen minutes, perhaps a fourth of the disk had emerged, we had our first case of hysteria… But rather than dwell on those understandable breakdowns, let us commend Professor Wellman on his level-headedness throughout, and Budgie Goldstein on her indomitable high spirits.

More than an hour in the rising, the monumental… disk? sphere? whatever? eventually cleared the visible buildings. There is some question, even among those gathered in August, as to whether the orb actually hovered, or whether it immediately changed direction and began to set again, slightly (by no more than a fifth of its diameter) to the left — this last, the estimate of Wallace Guardowsky.

The lower rim, at any rate, was above the horizon for fifteen or twenty minutes. Even at full height, it could be stared at for minutes because of the veiling clouds. Colonel Harris advised, however, that we curtail prolonged gazing. The setting, almost all are agreed, took substantially less time than the rising, and has been estimated between fifteen minutes and a half an hour. We have heard several attempts now, to estimate size, composition, and trajectory. We doubt recording even the ones we could understand would be much use — the merest indulgence in cleverness before something so… awful! Do we hear objections from you eager for meaningful cosmologic distractions? May we simply ask your trust: of the explanations heard, none, frankly, were that clever. And we do not choose to insult our readers.

We recall, with distrust and wheedling astonishment, the speed at which the last such celestial apparition acquired, by common consent of the common, its cognomen. How heartening, then, that this vision should prove too monstrous for facile appellation. (One has been suggested from a number of quarters, but all common decency and decorum forbids us to mention it; we have defamed the young woman, many feel, enough in these pages already.) Indeed, though a label might cling to such when we review it with a smile, certain images lose their freedom and resonance if, when we regard them with a straight face, we do so through the diffraction of a name.

"What do you think of that?" Faust asked, coming a little ways across the street.

Kid laughed. "Calkins is pretty quick to call a spade a spade. But when it comes to naming anything else, he's still chicken-shit!"

"No, no. Not that." Faust had to toss the rolled paper three times before getting it into the second story window. "I mean on page one."

Kid, sitting on the stoop, leaned down to scratch his foot. "What—?" He turned back to the front of the tabloid. "Where is Cumberland Park, anyway?"

"Lower Cumberland Park?" Faust craned his ropy neck and, beneath his corduroy jacket, scratched his undershirt. "That's down at the other end of Jackson. That's where they got some really bad niggers. It's where the great god Harrison lives."

"Oh," Kid said. "Where I was last night. It says here something about nobody living there any more."

Faust hefted the bundle on his hip. "Then all I know is that I leave a God-damn lot of papers in front of a God-damn lot of doors, and they ain't there the next day when I come back. Damn, splashing around in all that water in the street yesterday morning!" He squinted back at the window. "It was better this morning though. Hey, I see you again tomorrow. That your book the office is full up with?"

"I don't know," Kid said. "Is it?"

Faust frowned. "You should come up to the office sometime and take a look where they print the paper and things. Come up with me, some day. I'll show it all to you. Your book went in the day before yesterday—" Faust snapped his fingers. "And I put cartons of it in the bookstores last night. Soon as it… well, you know, got dark."

Kid grunted and opened the Times again, to look at something not Faust.

"Get your morning paper!" The old man loped down the block, hollering into the smoke: "Right here, get your morning paper!"

What he'd opened to was another quarter-page advertisement for Brass Orchids. He left it on the stoop, and walked toward the corner, when a sound he'd been dimly aware of broke over the sky: Roaring. And nestled in the roar, the whine a jet makes three blocks from the airport. Kid looked as the sound gathered above him. Nothing was visible; he looked down the block. Faust, a figurine off in a milky aquarium, had stopped too. The sound rolled away, lowering.

Faust moved on to disappear.

Kid turned the corner.

It's different inside the nest, he thought, trying to figure what should be the same:

The crayoning on the dirty wall—

The loose ceiling fixture—

In his hand, the knobs squared and toothy shaft rasped out another inch—

A black face came from the middle room, looked back inside; shook his head, and went down to the bathroom. Among voices, Nightmare's laugh, and:

"Okay. I mean, okay." That was Dragon Lady. "You said your thing, now what you want us to do?"

While someone else in the hubbub, shouted, "Hey, hey, hey come on now. Hey!"

"I mean now… yeah!" Nightmare's voice separated. "What do you want?"

Kid went to the door.

Across the room, Siam and Glass noticed him with small, different nods. Kid leaned on the jam. The people in the center, their backs to him, were not scorpions.

"I mean—" Nightmare, circling, bent to hit his knees—"what do you want?"

"Look." John turned to follow him, holding the lapels of his Peruvian vest. "Look, this is very serious!" His blue work shirt was rolled up his forearms; the sleeves were stained, dirty, and frayed at one elbow. His thumbnails, the only ones visible, were very clean. "I mean you guys have got to…" He gestured.

Milly stepped out of the way of his arm.

"Gotta what?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder. "Look, man I wasn't there. I didn't know nothing about it."

"We were someplace else." Dragon Lady turned a white cup in her dark hands, shoulders hunched, sipping watching. "We weren't even anywhere around, you know?" She alone in the room drank; and drank loudly.

Mildred brushed away threads of red hair and looked much older than Dragon Lady. (He remembered once thinking when neither were present that, for all their differences, they were about the same age.) Dragon Lady's lips kept changing thickness.

"This is shit!" Nightmare kneaded his arm. "I mean this is real shit, man! Don't load this shit on me. You want to talk to somebody—" His eyes came up beneath his brows and caught Kid—"talk to him. He was there, I wasn't. It was his thing."

Kid unfolded his arms. "What'd I do?"

"You—" Mildred turned—"killed somebody!"

He felt, after moments, his forehead wrinkle. "Oh, yeah?" What cleared inside was distressingly close to relief. "When?" he asked with the calm and contrapuntal thought: No. No, that's not possible, is it? No.

"Look," John said, and looked between Nightmare and Kid. "Look, we could always talk to you guys, right? I mean you're pretty together, you know? Nightmare, we've always done right by you, hey? And you've done right by us. Kid, you used to eat with us all the time, right? You were almost part of our family. We were gonna put you up the first night you got here, weren't we? But you guys can't go around and murder people. And expect us to just sit around. I mean we have to do something."

"Who'd we kill?" he asked, realizing, they don't mean me! They mean us. The feeling came cold and with loss.

"Wally!" Milly said from the edge of hysteria. "Wally Efrin!"

The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam; Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he'd once asked to help him get wood who'd said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we'd seen his girl friend? One he'd seen but never noticed? One he'd never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)

"Where?" he asked, at her silence. "What'd we kill him for?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake…!" Milly shook her head.

"Yesterday," John said. "Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the… sun. Mildred was there—"

"I didn't know about it till after I got home," she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.

"Me neither," Kid said. "So do you want to tell me?"

"No, I don't want to…" Milly exclaimed. "This is really just terrible! This is animal…!"

"You were in charge there, Kid, weren't you?" John asked.

"So everybody tells me."

"Well, it seems that — now I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told…"

Kid nodded.

"…It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And… what? Wally tried to break it up?"

"He may have started the fight," Milly said to the floor, "with them."

"I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn't even know about it. It was downstairs." John repeated: "In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn't know until after she g back and Jommy told her." A movement of John's tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He had remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him…)

"Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead."

"Who did it?" Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.

Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.

John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: "Him!" who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.

"You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?" Kid asked.

"No!" He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.

Nightmare sat, now, at Dragon Lady's feet. Head against the wall, he looked from speaker to speaker, with the smile of an enthusiast at a tennis match.

"You beat anybody up?" Kid asked.

"Beat the fuck out of 'im!" The scorpion's fists bounced on the couch's rim. "Yeah! With a fuckin piece of pipe. But I didn't know what kind of pipe it was!.. or if he was dead!"

"Shit, I sure did!" Glass chuckled. "I knew it when you hit the motherfucker the first time. The second, third… all those other times you were banging on him, man, that was just extra."

"You shut the fuck up!" (It was, Kid remembered, the scorpion for whom he had rescued the bronze lion.) "I didn't kill nobody."

"But you did beat somebody over the head with a piece of pipe yesterday?"

"Look, I didn't…" He stalled on the word, and stood, fists flailing about his shoulders to beat away the barrier to speech, then yelled, "… didn't kill any God-damn body with no—"

"SIT DOWN, GOD DAMN IT…!" Kid bellowed, coming away from the door by three steps. That, he thought in the silence, was pretty theatrical. But he was astonished by its efficacy. Twitching behind his face, he felt an embryonic giggle. Both feet and hands were tingling. Shall I say the next thing, or shall I yell it? (The scorpion was leaning back on the couch, balanced on his fists, his seat not quite on the cushion, an expression not quite on his face.) "DID YOU BEAT ON SOME KID'S HEAD WITH A PIPE…?" He'd made the choice to avoid laughing.

The scorpion sank to the cushion. The expression was terror. "I guess so?" the scorpion asked quietly. "I don't know…?"

Kid shook both hands hard, by the hips, to return the feeling. He heard one of the people beside him creak a floor board and catch breath.

"Look," he said to John. Milly, behind him, seemed more frightened than the scorpion on the couch. Little Jommy had an intent expression of cold interest. "Why don't you people just get the fuck out of here, all right?"

"Um …" John's thumbs had gone beneath the lapels with the rest of his fingers. "You know we haven't had a… trial or anything." He glanced at the scorpion. "Mildred said maybe Wally started it, you know—"

"I didn't see it," Milly reiterated. "Somebody just told—"

Kid breathed in, and was still surprised that it cut the ribbon of her whisper like scissors. "You all get out."

"Now we're not trying to…" John began; Milly, Jommy, and the others had all started for the door. He let go his lapels and followed.

"What'd you do with Wally, huh?" Kid called.

"Huh?" John stopped a moment. "We just left—"

"No," Kid interrupted. "No, don't tell me about it!" He kneaded one fist in the other. Feeling was beginning to return. The gesture sent John pushing against the people in front of him to get out of the room, beating nervously against his leg.

The scorpion on the couch looked very miserable. Clutching his lamp, or on the balcony crying; Kid thought: He's looked miserable every time I've ever noticed him.

"Shit!" Kid said. (Outside, he heard the door close behind the commune deputation.)

The scorpion bounced a little and blinked.

"Aw, shit!" Kid turned and walked out of the room.

Three steps down the hall, Kid heard a noise behind him, and turned.

Nightmare swung around the door jamb, an incongruous grin on his face. "Man, you're too fuckin much!" Nightmare pranced, jingling, in the hall, slapped the wall. "Really! You're too much."

Right behind him, Copperhead came out and asked, "Hey, what you want to do with Dollar in there?" He thumbed back in the room.

So that's his name, Kid thought (Dollar?), while asking, "Huh?"

"You want me to rough him up a little for you?" Copperhead asked. "Yeah, I'll do it. I don't mind doing shit like that. I mean if he. goes around hitting people over the head, he's gonna get us in trouble, you know? You want me to work him over?"

Kid made a disgusted face. "No! You don't have to do anything like—"

"If you want me to," Copperhead announced over Nightmare's shoulder, "I'll kill the little white bastard. Or I could just work him over to scare him, you know…"

"No," Kid repeated. "No, I don't want you to do that."

"Maybe later…?" Copperhead said. "When you thought about it?"

"Well, not now," Kid said. "Just leave him alone now."

Nightmare laughed as Copperhead went back into the room. "What were you trying to do, huh? Man, you are too much!"

"Just find out if he did it. That's all."

Nightmare held his laughter in his mouth; it bellied his cheeks till he swallowed it. "Did you find out?"

From inside, there was a sudden crack and a cry. Voices silenced around the sound of loud sipping:

"Now the Kid told me I'm supposed to wait till later to work you over, cocksucker. But don't give me any shit, you hear? You go around breaking people's heads, I think I'm gonna have some fun breaking yours. Now get out of here."

"I… guess so," Kid said.

"I mean," Nightmare shook his open palms in front of Kid's hips, "I was just wondering if you found out. I wasn't there. You was, right? So you should know if he done it or not." He backed away, grinning.

"Hey!"

"What?"

"Come here. I want to talk to you."

Nightmare's arm folded low on his stomach, then raised up his broad chest so that the chains looped across his forearms. "Sure." He tilted his head, warily. "What you want to talk about?"

"I just want to know what — hey, you come on with me."

"Sure," Nightmare said; then his tongue went into the side of his jaw, licking for something among back teeth.

They went up the hall and onto the service porch. Nightmare, arms still folded, stood in the doorway squinting. Dulling smoke hung only yards beyond the screening. Kid asked: "What are you trying to do, huh?"

"What do you mean?" Nightmare's forearms slid across one another to tighten toward a knot.

"I mean you. And Dragon Lady and all. How come I suddenly get to be the boss about everything?"

"You do it pretty well."

"But I want to know why."

"Well." Nightmare looked at the floor and let himself fall against the jamb. "It's gotta be somebody, right?" Boards around them creaked.

"But what about you?"

"What about me?" The boards creaked again, though Nightmare hadn't moved. "What you want to know about me?"

"Just why, that's all. You want a new boss — why not one of the spades, or something. I mean what's with you?"

Nightmare rolled his wet, red underlip back into his mouth, and nodded. His left eye, Kid noticed again, had the slightest cast.

The water puddling in the sink shook beneath the crusty faucet.

"I thought it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen if one of you brainy, crazed types was running things for a while. All the brainy niggers in Bellona had sense enough to get out. We don't got too much to choose from so we might as well make it interesting, right? I ain't gonna stay in this fucking fog hole the rest of my life. It's a real gas being Nightmare, you know? But I'm gonna get back to St. Louis, get me a little foreign car, do some work in the gym, and put two or three ladies back to work for me, and I'm gonna be Larry H. Jonas all over again. And I hope I don't ever hear about no Nightmare no more. If somebody shouts it out on Sixth Street, I'm gonna walk down Olive. I've done too many things here I'd just as soon leave here." He stood up. "You strip off the Nightmare, and I got me a name. I know people. In St. Louis." His hand slid up to his shoulder, big fingers working. "So I figured I'd leave you here. Besides, Denny likes you. That little cocksucker's got a head on his shoulders. Not like some of these dumb nuts. You don't look like you mind." Among the links sagging on his chest, bright beads caught more light than there was to catch, winking and dying and winking.

"Hey, that scar on your shoulder?" Kid asked. "You and Dragon Lady getting on pretty good?"

"Like a bitch. Sometimes." Nightmare's face twisted a moment about his broken tooth. "And then sometimes—" he frowned—"well, you know." After the faucet dripped three more times, he turned to leave, but paused to look over his shoulder. "You want to talk about anything else?"

"No." Kid said. "That's all."

Nightmare left.

Across the hall was a room Kid had never been in. He opened the door.

Dollar, silhouetted before the torn window shade, turned. The lion peered by his hip from the sill. The taste of burning at the back of Kid's throat flooded forward, into an amazing stench: on one of the overlapping mattresses was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton. Newspaper and magazine pictures had been pasted over one wall; many had been ripped off again.

One of the three blacks sitting on the floor glanced at him. The little blond girl shrugged her pea jacket back up her shoulders and pulled it across her breasts.

"What are you… I mean, hey, man…?" Dollar stepped up unsteadily. "Kid, look, you're supposed to be an all-right guy, huh? You don't gotta hurt me. Please? Man, I ain't never done nothing like that before in my life, you know?… You want me to…?" He took another step. "Hey… what are you trying to do? Huh?" His hand strayed in the chains around his neck, twisted in them.

"Whatever it is," Kid said, "it looks like I'm doing it." All the muscles in his face felt tight: he went back into the hall.

Noise was coming from the front room. Nightmare's laughter rose. Dragon Lady's cut across it.

As if they'd suddenly heated, Kid pawed beneath the back of his vest and, from his belt, pulled loose the books. Both were creased. The face of one was rubbed and dirty. So was the back of the other.

"Hey, come on, come on, sweetheart!" Nightmare hollered. "What are you trying to do to me, huh? What are you trying to…" and exploded in laughter.

"I just asked," Dragon Lady announced with hysterical deliberation, "if you wanted some more God-damned coffee…" The last syllable became a shriek, tumbling in counterpoint to Nightmare's laugh, till both splashed into the cistern of mirth.

Kid took refuge in the bathroom.

Pants about his knees, he sat. A fugitive bubble in the gut cramped his abdomen; the cramp faded. He broke wind and knew he was empty.

He turned the books over, flipped through one, then the other. He wanted to read one poem, at least, through. A minute later, he realized he'd actually been deliberating not which poem, but in which book to read it. Was the discomfort in his belly a ghost of the gas? No.

A book in either hand, he joggled them. Time had been spent writing these. The time was mornings with his forehead wrinkled and the grass obligingly silent beyond the blanket's edge; was evenings at the bar with candlelight scoring bottles with their different contents at different heights like pistons in an engine; was a broken curb on either side while he sat with the ballpoint burning his middle finger. Writing, he had not thought to retrieve any of it. But the prospect of publication had somehow convinced him magic was in process that would return to him, in tacto (not memorium), some of what the city had squandered. The conviction was now identified by its fraudulence, before the inadequate objects. But as it died, kicking in his gut, spastic and stuttering, he knew it had been as real and unquestioned as any surround: air to a bird, water to a fish, earth to a worm.

He was exhausted, with an exhaustion that annihilated want. And all he could conceive of wanting was to try again; to make more poems, to put them in a book, to have that book made real by reproduction, and give that hallucination another chance!

He had nothing to write. He could not imagine what another poem of his would be, how it might lilt, or even look. Is that, he wondered, why they call it "creation?" The texture on the eye, the corrugation on the air around him had absorbed all. There was nothing left (…about what you see about you, what's happening to you, what you feel. No.) No. Something had to be… created. As these had been.

A muscle in his shoulder tensed.

He'd once been scared of things like that: (…a blood-clot breaking loose from the vein wall to race toward the heart, jamming a valve!) Habit commenced a shiver.

He caught up his breath, and his pants, and the books from where he'd dropped them. The leering mannequin, chained and bloody, leaned against the tank and smiled benignly up at Kid's left nipple. Kid scratched it, put the books back under his belt, and went out.

In Denny's room he took two rungs of the ladder at once. His chin gained the loft. "Hey, wake up!" Denny didn't, so he climbed up the rest of the way, kneeled astraddle, and took hold of the boy's head. "Hey!"

"God damn—!" Denny tried to roll to his back. One arm shot out and waved. "What the fuck are you…"

"Come on, get up!" Kid's hands clamped, and Denny's came back to grasp his wrist.

"Okay!" Denny said, his cheeks pushed together, distorting his voice. "Shit, man. I'm getting up, all right…?"

"You got to take me to Lanya's place." Kid raised his leg and sat back. "You know where it is, huh? You took her there. You know!"

Denny grunted and pushed himself up on his elbows. Boots and chains by his head lay on a crumple of green. His vest's leather edge fell back from a pinkened line across one waxy pectoral. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Get the fuck up, cocksucker." Kid gestured. "I want to go see her."

"Okay, okay." Denny reached back for his boots and started to put them on. Once he glanced up and said, "Shit!"

Kid grinned at him. "Move your ass."

"Fuck you," Denny said dryly and ducked his head through rattling links. "Come on." He swung his feet over the edge and jumped.

Kid swung over the ladder while Denny bobbed erect in the doorway.

"What's all the rush for?" Denny asked. "Hey, stop pushing me, will you?" as Kid shoved him into the hall.

"I'm not hurting you," Kid said. "Did you know Dollar beat some kid to death with a pipe?"

"Huh? When?"

"Yesterday."

Denny tried to whistle. It squeaked at the beginning and was all air. "Dollar's a crazy motherfucker, you know that? I mean he always was crazy. Hell, all the white guys in the nest are nuts."

"Sure." Kid herded Denny toward the hall door.

"Why'd he do it?"

Kid shrugged. "I dunno."

The hall door opened. Thirteen (Smokey behind) stepped inside, looking around as though he expected something… different, "Hey, Kid! Oh, hey man, I got to talk to you! You know Dollar? Well, we just got here, but… somebody told me yesterday he got a bar, from a police lock, and beat some kid to—"

"GET OFF MY ASS!" Kid said very loudly in Thirteen's face, hefting his fist. If I keep this up, he thought, I'm going to hit somebody. "Now just get off my ass, will you?"

Thirteen, one hand against his green tank top (the "13" tattoo stretched wide), had backed against one wall, and Smokey, wide-eyed, against the other.

Kid put his hand on Denny's shoulder. "Come on. Let's go!"

They stalked between them and out the door; it swung to behind.