Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Why want more?
He had seen how much the intrusion concerned the wardens. None of this was going to last long, he could feel it in his bones.
On his way to the Diurns, Jebrassy stopped, peered at the ground, then knelt to examine the quality of the gravel that lined the path. Until now he had never given much thought to the substances that made up his world. He compared the gravel to the material used in most of the bridges, asking himself how this stony stuff differed from his own flesh, from the crops in the fields—and from the flexible stuff of the wardens, which he had had a number of opportunities to feel as he was being hauled away from one or another altercation.
Gravel, crops, flesh—not the same as the exposed isles beneath the Tiers: silver-gray, neither warm nor cold, but strangely neutral to the touch. Yet that silver-gray stuff constituted the foundation and the walls and probably the ceil, the limits of his world.
Again, Jebrassy needed desperately to know more—to understand. In that regard, he differed from nearly all the breeds he knew, so much so that he wondered if there had been a mistake in his making, if the umbers had dropped him on his head after hauling him out of the crèche. Stork.
He shook his head sharply at that unknown word, that difficult memory of a sound. You’re delivered by the umbers—they’re like storks, right? They leave you under a cabbage leaf.
“Shut up.”
His bare feet took him farther down the path.
You’re like an animal in a zoo. But you don’t even know what a zoo is. Why are they keeping you here?
Jebrassy did not dislikehis visitor, and certainly did not fear him, but these residues offered no answers. When Jebrassy strayed—when the visitor took over—typically, nothing happened, as Khren had pointed out.
“I don’t know what you are,” Jebrassy growled under his breath. “But I wish you’d go away.”
He stood by the bridge, looking over the still and covered meadows market and the beginning of the long roads which fanned out to the far limits of fields and walls surrounding the Tiers, their neighborhood—half a day’s brisk journey across, overarched by the ceil, the curtain wall, the moist wall, their vertex at one extremity—and the long round wall opposite—most difficult to reach, but under and through which ran the flood channels.
Sometimes the teachers referred to the round wall as the outer, and the other two as inner. All of them—limits.
Barriers to curiosity.
CHAPTER 17
The wardens had spread mist and black curtains around the site of the intrusion, at the outer perimeter of a field of chafe sprouts in the shadow of the Moist Wall. They now hovered, awaiting Ghentun’s inspection.
Behind the curtains, an irregular section of the chafe field measuring about a third of an acre had been turned into fine snowy crystals, primordial matter converted to something different, deadly or useless: the hallmark of the Typhon, perverse, even malevolent. In the middle of the crystals, a male breed—a farmer, judging from his stiff scraps of clothing—had been carelessly rearranged. The farmer had still been alive when the wardens found him.
“Did you kill this one?” Ghentun asked the lead warden.
“He was suffering, Keeper. We summoned a Bleak Warden and terminated him. No one has touched him since.”
The Bleak Warden itself—slender, with a red thorax and shiny black lift-wings, now lay deactivated beside the farmer. White crystals cluttered its frozen, bent limbs. It would have to be disposed of, along with the body, the soil, and all else that the intrusion had touched. Ghentun glanced toward the straight road that led from the unused inner precincts—the Diurns and the apex bridge—all the way across the meadows and fields to the narrowed, arched haft where the first isle absorbed the Tenebros flood channel. A few breeds were still about in the tweenlight. All of them avoided the fog.
In the seventy-five city years since he requested his interview with the Librarian, Ghentun estimated he had lost over two thousand breeds. These invasions into the lowest levels of the Kalpa were now occurring once or twice every dozen sleep-wakes. Most seemed to target breeds—those who saw, who perceived, in the oldest ways. More often than not, the wardens investigated and drew their conclusions without his presence, but Ghentun was beginning to doubt their accuracy. He could not discount the possibility that the wardens were being manipulated by the city officers, Eidolons loyal to the Astyanax, who in all these thousands of centuries had paid little attention to the Tiers. In the Kalpa’s higher levels and more prosperous urbs, the reality generators seemed better able to protect the vast majority of citizens. Intrusions rarely occurred there, but perhaps it was because the Chaos had no interest in Eidolons. Still, the more intrusions there were in the Tiers, the more danger there might be for the higher urbs—real, metaphysical danger, and political danger for the Astyanax. Once the poor farmer had been removed, the whited soil was scraped and stored in sealed containers by small gray wardens. As before, the containers, the victim, and all the wardens who had touched them—tainted by that contact—would be locked away in the vaults deep below the flood channels. Ghentun had visited those vaults several times during the past century. They had been unspeakable in their fermenting, noxious morphing.
“We will have to exportthis one, Keeper,” the lead warden confided as Ghentun knelt beside the contorted body. “The vaults are nearly full.”
This was almost too much for Ghentun to bear. The tainted evidence of the intrusion would have to be shot out into the Chaos.
CHAPTER 18
The tweenlight had turned tawny gold, ushering in flat wispy clouds and the muddy shades that came before a sleep. The lowering flush of light was so diffuse and universal that Jebrassy cast only a faint hint of shadow. Everything around him—old and abandoned—seemed lost in a smoky dream. The Diurns lay flush against the curtain wall, accessible by a long and sometimes treacherous hike past the end of the abandoned Apex Causeway where it connected the tips of the three isles—the plateaus that supported the stacked Tiers. The curtain wall, in turn, ascended three miles to the overarching ceil, upon which the lights and darks of wake and sleep played out in endless, faded procession, as they had for tens of thousands of lives.
All this fell within one sweep of his eye from where Jebrassy now walked along the causeway. He also glanced from side to side to make sure there were no screeches or wardens waiting in the shadows to nab sleep-hikers. The wardens were particularly vigilant after an intrusion. Behind him, the causeway stretched more than a mile toward the bridges that had once carried the old neighborhood’s traffic over the Tartaros, the larger of the two channels that separated the blocs. Four slender, twisted spires flanked the conclusion of the causeway, five hundred feet tall and needled through with fluted pipes that, it was said, had once produced deep and awesome sounds—music. Whether the spires were original to the Diurns or had been added later was unknown—there were so many tottering, muddled layers of old breed construction here, contributing to the dangers of the entire precinct, which had long ago been condemned and blocked by debris and screech sentinels. Most of these had themselves long since collapsed, failed, or were simply forgotten, and were no longer necessary, since few of the ancient breed felt the urge to come here. There was enough faded grandeur in the inhabited parts of the Tiers to satisfy anybody.
At the apex where the Curtain Wall met the Moist Wall, spread an amphitheater that could once have seated thirty or forty thousand of the ancient breed. As a stripling, Jebrassy had been here twice, demonstrating his bravery or at least his persistence—climbing the debris, evading the few sentinels that were still active, making his way down the dirt-encrusted, sloping aisles between the risers to the gallery, a roofed labyrinth that stretched for several hundred yards to the proscenium. The Diurns were visible from several points in the gallery where the roof had fallen. Jebrassy, working his way once more through the stone maze, speculated as he had before that this might have been the site of old initiation rituals, and was certainly not part of the original construction. Even upon his first visit, the labyrinth had proved simple enough to solve—a left-handed maze with a distal twist, made easy by ages of decay.
Is the glow testing my resolve? Poor test.
Retracing the path he had taken before, still clear in memory—any adventure, however disappointing, was etched deep—he came to a huge gap in the gallery roof. This rewarded him with an unobstructed view of the Sounding Wall, a name that meant nothing to him—a mottled gray expanse hundreds of feet high, blank but for eroded holes and corroded extrusions where large things had once been set or fastened.
A few more minutes of climbing and threading the last of the gallery’s barriers brought him to the base of the amphitheater’s Sounding Wall, and from there it was just a snap until he stood in the immense, glimmering shadow of the curved Wall of Light.
Jebrassy took a moment to catch his breath. The immense screen was streaked and crusted top to bottom with dust and soot—not from smoke, but from the accumulated miasma of thousands of generations of living beings. At the far end, an ornate and partly collapsed partition of stone and masonry—its highest remnant still towering hundreds of feet above the gallery—had left a pile of rubble that spilled onto the proscenium and the lowest sweep of the amphitheater, where all the seats had long since been stripped or rotted away. Clearly, many ancient breeds had tried to solve the mystery of this place—or to use it for their own purposes, adding their own masonry structures. Most of their efforts, like the original, had come to ruin—even greater ruin, since, Jebrassy thought, it wouldn’t take much to scrub the screen, rebuild or replace the seats in the galleries, and restore at least the outward appearance of the original design.
But no one now living could match the endurance and ingenuity of the Wall of Light’s original builders. And who were they? Tall Ones?
“I don’t know,” Jebrassy murmured to the residue’s soft question. “Be quiet.”
High above and beyond the amphitheater, a breeze across the pipes embedded in the four spires blew a low, breathy chuckle, like hundreds of amused voices.
The Diurns themselves were just left of the screen—three merging ellipses, each over a hundred yards across, on which various displays still labored, it was said, to tell the time in ways that no one alive could fathom, even if anyone could have read the moving and broken and scattered lines of symbols within each ellipse.
This was the only theory that had ever made sense—that the Diurns had once been a huge timekeeper, attached to the side of an even larger public and ceremonial display that had ages before fallen into disuse.
To the right of the Diurns, the immensity of the Wall of Light—a thousand feet wide and half that in height—still gleamed with softly passing gleams, haphazard attempts at images, all repeating at hourly intervals, broken by faults that no longer even attempted to flicker, but hung dark and dead. The Diurns had looked thus since the earliest times known to the ancient breeds. Jebrassy leaned back as far as his neck would allow, to take in the whole of the screen, then turned swiftly and stared out over the amphitheater, as if to glimpse forty thousand ghosts—the citizens who had once sat or stood there, transfixed by what must have once been a magnificent gathering place, a crowded exchange of stories.
This theory grew in him as he absorbed the setting through older, presumably more sophisticated eyes: that once information and gossip had been shared communally, thousands attending at once, receiving instructions, warnings, and (possibly) news about events in the Tiers—headlines and banners, visions of the world beyond the Kalpa, now denied.
Just a guess, but it felt right.
The inner voice expressed no opinion.
The ruins, with their grime and patina of age—common in the abandoned precincts behind the Tiers—conveyed their own special message. Along with the flickering quality of time itself, the intrusions, and declining populations—evident from empty niches and long-deserted neighborhoods—the architectural decay proved that whatever the Kalpa might once have been, it was no longer in its prime. The Tall Ones were getting weaker. The long bondage of the ancient breeds might soon come to an end. Then, all who wished could pass under the round wall, through the pumping stations at the outflow of the flood channels, walk beneath the arches and through the gates, cross the border of the real, into the final freedom of the Chaos…
A beautiful dream.
The shuffle of Jebrassy’s feet as he padded back and forth, glancing high at the vague, fragmented words…these small sounds bounced back from the walls with portentous distortions. A loud crack and rumble to the left of the screen announced another fall of masonry. Large stones and pieces of rusted metal rolled and thumped in a dusty sift at the far side of the gallery. The whole prospect angered and frustrated him—lost knowledge, failed communications, pretenses to educating the masses…like all the false books that taunted breeds who searched the deserted hallways of the high levels in the Tiers—endless shelves, their titles fascinating, when he could read them. But none could be pried loose. He had tried thousands of times since childhood. The books were solid, cold, useless. If we’re toys or tools, he thought, nobody much cares anymore what we do or think. Maybe they don’t even care if we live or die…
He did a slow dance, listening for the echoes, and touched his nose at this folly. Better folly than boredom and safety.
“Hello!”
The single word drifted high and leaped back, acquiring a spooky rattle. Jebrassy turned to see a shadowy female perched on the edge of the proscenium.
She stood up in the dim light cast by the screen.
Jebrassy let out his breath in a relieved grunt.
“What did you think I was?” Tiadba asked.
“You’re late.”
“Nice dance. Why did you come here—just because I asked?”
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “It’s no big deal. Do I get to ask questions, too?”
“Certainly.”
“Breed females like sturdy, normal men with sturdy, normal attitudes. What makes you different?”
Tiadba strolled along the base of the screen, skirting the piles of rubble. “Not all of us have slow blood,”
she said. She looked down at something by her feet, stopped, and sucked in her breath. Her shoulders tensed.
Jebrassy joined her. She had found a shriveled body—a young breed, probably male. It lay curled in the rubble, covered with dust and flakes of crusted veneer that had drifted down from the screen. Tiadba knelt to brush the dead breed’s clothing. “Some of us go seeking…a few dozen each generation, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace,” she said. “Not even the Bleak Warden found this one. You and I could end the same way. Does that frighten you?”
Jebrassy twirled two fingers clockwise.
Tiadba did the same, agreeing. “It might frighten us,” she said firmly, “but it wouldn’t stop us.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Some say we’re toys or pets. I know we’re more important than that. We’re the end of a long experiment. That’s why we stray. The Tall Ones want us to.”
“And how can youknow—how can you be sure?”
“If I show you, you must make three promises.”
“You like things in threes, don’t you?”
“Triangles are stable. Females seek stability—you said so yourself.”
Jebrassy drew his brows together.
“You must promise you will never tell another.”
“And?”
“You must promise you will use what you learn to guide all our explorations—not just your own. You will not seek glory alone.”
This smarted. He had hoped to do just that. “And?”
“You must not go on a march by yourself or with anyone else—not right away. You will consent to be chosen—or you will stay in the Tiers.”
“Nothing is worth that. I’d…” He shuddered. “I’d go mad if I thought I couldn’t leave.”
The desperate slant in Tiadba’s eyes told Jebrassy that he had made a serious mistake. “Go on, then,”
she told him. “I’ll stay here and follow a little later. We shouldn’t be seen together. When I get back, I’ll alert the wardens about this poor explorer.”
Jebrassy turned and sat on the edge of the proscenium. What could she possibly offer that would be worth such sacrifice, such slavery?
“There isgoing to be a youth march,” Tiadba said to his back, her voice carrying an odd quaver. “It’s being assembled very carefully…not quickly enough. We’re all impatient. A lot of preparations have to be made. But soon, it will happen.”
Jebrassy had heard rumors of groups handpicked, trained, sent down the flood channels. Rumors were all he had ever heard.
“There’s a plan, a leader,” Tiadba said. “Someone we trust.”
This had the ring of truth. He had always wondered how anyone could survive in the unknown outside the Kalpa without training, supplies, or equipment.
Tiadba sat next to him, startling him again, her movements were so quiet and graceful. She glanced left, eyes half lidded in peaceful drowse. With a little shudder, she moved closer and leaned her head on his shoulder. Her touch was electric. His heart thumped and his hands warmed.
“You won’t lie,” she said. “And you’ll never let us down.”
“How can you be so sure about everything?” he asked, trying to be abrupt.
“Because I know you. We’ve met before,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?”
He got up, shook out his arms, and started to walk away. “Too many promises, not enough in return.”
Tiadba ran after him, wide-awake, lifted his hand, then pulled on his fingers—hard. “Promise!” she demanded. “You knowyou must.”
“Let go!” He tried to break free, and she grabbed his shoulders with a small shout. They began to roll across the dusty stage. She was stronger—females of the breed could be that way, wiry and sweetly scented. That scent was their greatest weapon. It made him much less willing to fight.
“Stop it!” he shouted as she held him down on the floor. Her face pressed close, eyes intense. They had covered their clothes with dust.
She frowned so hard that he wanted to look away in shame. “Don’t be stupid. Promise! You know you will.” Then, in a harsh whisper, lips almost touching his…“ Promise!”
“Give me something, give me hope,” he said, his voice resentful and raw. “Promise meI’ll go on the next march!”
She rolled off and got to her feet, brushing her clothes. “I’m not the one who chooses.”
“You say we know each other—but you obviously don’t know me at all.”
Tiadba placed her hands together and tipped her fingers against her forehead, eyes closed.
“You’re taking advantage,” he said. “You pick on lonely outcasts…you’re like a pretty bunch of chafe shoots held out for a pede, to lure them into the fields.” He pulled down her hands and stared directly into her eyes. There wasa connection—he could not explain it, and that angered him more. He let her go.
“If you’re so bold, why haven’t you run away on your own?” she asked. “What’s stopping you?”
He blustered, “Someone has to watch for wardens. I agree with one thing—it takes planning.”
“What if I tell you about the difficulties, just a little about what’s involved?”
“You’d betray your people?”
“I trust you.”
“You shouldn’t. I’m not responsible.”
“Is that what your sponsors tell you?”
“My mer and per are gone,” Jebrassy said.
She drew up close again. She was nothing if not persistent. “I know,” she said.
“An intrusion took them.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you spoke with our leader in the market. But before that, I told her about you. She gave me permission to meet you here.”
This rendered Jebrassy speechless. That a sama—a healer and listener—would betray his confidence as easily as Khren was almost beyond belief.
Almost.Time itself was changing, there were so many intrusions—and the wardens weren’t acting the way they used to. He could almost see the Tall Ones walking among them. Why should he trust anyone or anything?
Tiadba felt his distress and again lightly gripped his shoulders. “I’ll tell you as much as I know. You don’t even have to promise. It’s that important.”
“Did shetell you to say that?”
“No,” Tiadba said. “My risk.”
Jebrassy rolled his head in misery. “I don’t know who I am or where I’ll end up. That’s why I went to a sama in the first place.” He shuddered.
Tiadba struggled to find her next words. “Two names. Tell me what they mean. I’ll tell you one name, and you tell me the other.”
“Names?”
“Ginny,” she said.
Jebrassy backed off. Before he could stop himself, he said, “Jack.”
She looked at him, triumphant—and scared. “Two funny, ugly names,” she said. “Not from the Tiers. We knoweach other, Jebrassy. We know each other from somewhere else. It’s as if we’ve known each other forever. I’ve never felt that with anyone else.” Her eyes crossed with the intensity of her emotion.
“Some wake or another, one of us will be in very bad trouble. I think I will be the one who needs you. And you will come for me.”
Jebrassy groaned and got down on his knees, suddenly weak. It was true. He could feel the intensity of grief already—the knowledge that he would have her, that he would be faithful and bond to this female, and that he would lose her far too quickly.
Out of sequence.
Out of control.
Our lives are not our own.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he whispered.
She knelt in front of him and they placed their foreheads together, hands on each other’s temples.
“Promise me the three promises, and I’ll share—I’ll show you.”
The visitor—a useless residue inside of him—seemed to kick up in his head, trying to force him to make a decision.
Jebrassy stroked her cheek.
They swore in the way they had learned as children, repeating the words to each other over and over, until both had them precisely memorized.
Tiadba then whistled a short tune of sealing.
It was done. Jebrassy had no idea what had just happened. His eyes slowly focused. Tiadba had moved off and stood nearby, staring up. She pointed to an open half cup pushed out from the far right-hand edge of the screen, tiny in comparison to the total span, like a private box seat, but with the worst view of all. “See that?”
“A bump. It’s always been there. What about it?”
“They used to call it the Valeria,” Tiadba said. “It’s where they organized and controlled the shows. I found a way to get up there, from behind the Wall of Light. Would you like to see?”
“It’s full of dirt, right?”
“I cleaned it.”
He struggled to steady his voice and recover his attitude. “Might be interesting…but why so important?”
“The big screen is broken,” Tiadba said. “But up there is a littlescreen. Up there we can connect to a catalog of the shows they used to put on in the Diurns. I’ve watched a few. I think they tell a history. Not ours, exactly. The history of those who were here before us.”
“I still don’t know how that can help the marchers.”
“Aren’t you curious, just a little bit? To see things no other breed has seen, nor anyone else, for millions of wakes? To learn how we came to be here, and…maybe…why? We’re so ignorant,” she sighed.
“And that…”
“That’s the third thing we have in common,” Jebrassy said. “You should also know I’m impulsive. Some say I’m stupid, but I’m really just stubborn. And I care too much.”
“Four, five, and…”
“Six things we have in common?” he finished.
She drew herself up, standing just a little taller than Jebrassy, not uncommon among the ancient breed.
“If the wardens find us, or learn that we know…I think they would stop us. They would give us up to the Tall Ones. Understand?”
He nodded.
“Come with me, then. Part of the old gallery fell down a while back, right next to the proscenium.”
Jebrassy followed for about fifty yards, and then clambered after her into a darkened pit formed by the walls of a masonry chamber whose roof had collapsed. A small hatch hung open in the base of the proscenium, still partially blocked.
“Are you afraid of tight places?” Tiadba asked as she removed a few stones and bricks.
“I don’t think so,” Jebrassy said. “As long as there’s a way out.”
“Well, here’s a tunnel. It stretches behind the screen for quite a ways, and then there’s a narrow shaft going up. I think there was a lift nearby—but it’s not working. To go up there, we have to climb a tiny spiral with lots of tiny steps.”
“Show me,” Jebrassy said.
Gleeful, Tiadba took his hand and tugged him forward.
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 19
Seattle
Ginny had followed the music for miles and now, her long hike finished, she stared up in awe at what she had found: a wide banner painted in red and black circus letters, announcingLE BOULEVARD DU
CRIME .
A collision of sounds filled the air—hurdy-gurdies, calliopes, electric guitars, flutes and trombones and trumpets—a screeching but melodious wreck of noise that ascended in triumph to shimmer the clouds in the starlit sky.
A wide smile crossed her flushed face.
“Hey, pretty lady!” shouted a crimson and blue clown balancing a huge nimbus of white hair. “Join the Busker Jam! Certified insane, we am! We’re better than Fair, we’re not even there!”
The clown led a toothy, grinning monkey that stalked with anxious delicacy on yard-long stilts. Busker Jam filled several long acres of grass and gravel overlooking the glinting obsidian waters of Elliot Bay, marked at the northern end by a big grain elevator, flanked on the land side by gray and brown apartment buildings and condos, and tapering at the southern end into a sculpture garden—now closed—and a lot filled with a churning puzzle of parking cars. Red and yellow tents flapped and snapped in a light breeze. Food trucks and trailers clustered near the parking lot. A veering, snaking line of performance rings of all sizes poked up between the food trailers and the grain elevator, each distinctively labeled:THÉÂTRE-LYRIQUE, CIRQUE OLYMPIQUE, FOLIES
DRAMATIQUE, FUNAMBULES, THÉÂTRE DES PYGMÉS, THÉÂTRE PATRIOTIQUE,
DÉLASSEMENTSCOMIQUES, and so on, stretching out of sight.
Ginny had never seen so many artistes—clowns, musicians, acrobats, magicians, and of course mimes—and she wanted to laugh and cry at once. It was so much like the girlhood she could not remember, but wanted with a desperate ache to return to.
As Jack rode along the bike path, searching for familiar faces, jauntily swinging his front tire to keep a slow balance, he spotted a practice circle, and within the circle: Flashgirl, the Blue Lizard, Joe-Jim, and other old friends warming up for a turn in the rings.
Hundreds of patrons milled about in clumps, laughing, applauding, oohing and aahing, dropping bills and change into boxes and hats. It looked like a clink-paff night for his friends and colleagues. Buskers called a good show clink-paff—the sound of coins falling into thick piles of bills. In the first ring, T-square—dressed in a flame-red leotard—arranged three firepots and a circular roller-coaster-style ramp for his unicycle. On his head he wore a bright blue T-square jutting above a huge pair of wing-tip glasses studded with rhinestones. During his act, he said not a word, simply doing acrobatics on the unicycle and riding through brilliant and startling flashes of fire from his pots. Jack knew what the marks did not: that T-square would soon set his hat on fire and require the assistance of a prestationed shill—his daughter, a savvy and quick nine-year-old who would extinguish him with a spray of foam from a chrome-plated canister.
Needing no ring, Somnambule the Sleepified worked a series of startling card tricks, then struck a frozen pose, leaning into an imaginary wind with kerchief flying and hat about to blow off his head—cradling his cheek against nested hands and snoring until the next act began.
He winked as Jack cycled past. Jack tipped a salute.
Flashgirl did not use fire, but in her yellow and orange jumpsuit, with sultry countenance and angry, superfeminist patter, everything else about her was inflammatory. Her routine consisted of juggled illusions with knives and wands, frenetic dance, and jabbing verbal assaults on male members of the audience—whose sexist attitudes she blamed for the failure of her magic. Nearly everyone laughed; she was good. Not once had Jack seen Flashgirl actually anger an audience member. Still, at forty-five, she was slowing down. He thought from the sag of her shoulders and subtle gasping as she danced that her lifelong habit of smoking might be taking a toll.
Still, buskers worked sick or well—he hoped she was just fighting a cold. Jack knew where to find the performers’ zone, at the end of a short path winding up to the small changing trailer, marked off by stakes and ribbon. The moon-shadow of the huge grain elevator dominated this end of the park, and here, half in lunar shade, Joe-Jim squatted on a big white bucket, eating fruit salad from a plastic tray. He spotted Jack, and for a moment gave him a blank look. He doesn’t remember.
Then something seemed to connect—to click in his head—and Joe-Jim waved his fork. “Brother Jack, back on track!” he called, spraying bits of orange.
“Whom do I address tonight?” Jack asked, shaking hands busker-style, with a sharp clap of palms and a hook-and-wriggle of three fingers.
“Tonight we are Jim. Joe’s on vacation in Chicago. Be back in a week. Calls me every day to check in.”
Joe-Jim’s routine was to perform acrobatics with an invisible partner—mime in the middle of the air, to all purposes, and at his best, he astonished. He was only a few years older than Jack but looked older, and also looked as if he had not been eating well. His eyes were haunted, his high cheeks were dark yellow, and both cheeks and chin bristled with two days’ growth of beard. One of his wrists had been tightly secured with a dirty Ace bandage. A lateral cut, Jack guessed—not a serious attempt.
