Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

Milly (had she chickened out?) was not with her.

“Hu’?” the aspiration voiced and the vowel voiceless; George turned as she gained the top step. “Y’com’-ba’” (back or by, Kidd wasn’t sure) “heah too?” Thet was nearly a d, and the final vowel was a strangely breathy one from which the lips made no recovery, but hung heavy and open from teeth Kidd could see, even from here, were large, clean, and yellow. How, Kidd wondered, could this mauled and apocopated music be fixed to a page with roman letters and standard marks of elision? He decided: It can’t. “You taking an afternoon stroll, yeah?” George laughed and nodded. “I hear you playing before, and I think: She gonna come by” (or was it “back”?) “here maybe say hello.”

“Hello!” Lanya laughed too, and put her harmonica in her own shirt pocket. “I don’t always come by,” Lanya said. (She, he realized, had misheard gonna, with its almost unstopped g and n’s loose as l’s, as always.) “I saw you here a couple of days ago, but the last time we said hello was in the bar. Why do you come out here in the park every afternoon?”

“To look at the sky…” George shrugged. “To read the paper.”

(Kidd’s ankle stung from squatting. He slid his foot over—twigs crackled. But George and Lanya didn’t hear.)

“Last time I was at the bar—” (Kidd listened to the melodious inflection that catapulted the broad bass into the tenor at I and bar. Irony? Yes. But italics, he thought, would brutalize it to mere sarcasm)—“I didn’t even get a chance to say hello. You just running out of there with your friends.” George looked up at the sky again. “Can’t see nothing in all that mess. Can’t see nothing at all.”

“George,” Lanya said, leaning back against the wall, fingertips in her jean pockets and tennis shoes crossed, “this is the sort of question you lose friends over, but—” Kidd remembered when she’d used the same phrase with him—“I was curious, so I figured I’d just ask. What did happen with you and that girl there was supposed to be all the pictures of in the papers?”

“You know—” George paused to stick his tongue way down inside his cheek, and turned half around with his hands in his pockets—“the first time somebody asked me that, I was mad as shit! But you ain’t gonna lose you no friends ’cause too many other people done asked me now.”

Lanya said quickly: “I was asking because my old man knows her and he’s been—”

George’s face took a strange expression.

“—been telling me something about her…That’s all.” Lanya’s face, after a moment, mirrored it as if in an attempt to understand it. (Kidd felt his own face twitch.)

After a few seconds, George said: “Well, I got me an answer.”

“What is it?”

In the khaki pockets, George’s knuckles became a row of rounded points.

“Well, now I done raped this little white gal, right? I told the papers, right out, that’s what I done.” He nodded, like a man agreeing with the obvious—then glanced at Lanya, as though considering the new fact she brought. “Now there’s rape and there’s rape.” George’s hand came free. “You walking along one night and some guy jump—” George lunged, crouching—“out and grab you—” (Kidd, in the leaves, pulled back.) Lanya blinked—“and pull you into some alley and tie you up and other than that he don’t touch you, but he pull his thing out and Wank! Wank! Wank!—” crouching, Harrison swung his fist up and down at his groin. (Kidd’s jaw and buttocks clamped; Lanya, still leaning back on the wall, hands in her pockets, watched George’s mime.)—“and Oh it’s so good and Wow-wee that’s gooood shit and Ohhhh—” George stood, threw up his head, then let it fall slowly to the side with the end of the exhalation. His head came back up: “If he get one drop—one—” The fist rose with forefinger toward veiled heaven—“one drop on your handbag…that is lying there three feet away—” the fist fell—“in this state, that’s rape! Even though his pecker ain’t touched you…just dribbled on your handbag, like I say, see?” George nodded and considered: “And suppose some little girl who is seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four days and twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes old, she come up and say, ‘Oh, honey, I want it so bad! Give it to me, give it to me, baby! Oh, please!’” George’s long head went back again, wobbling side to side. “And she throw herself on the ground and pull down her panties and rubbing herself all up and down—” in a jogging crouch, he dragged his forearms up and down between his legs, pale nails on black fingers clawing toward the ground—“and moaning Oh, baby, do it to me, do it to me, I want it so bad! and you damn fool enough not to wait five minutes before you say—” George stood, punched the air—“Yeah, baby!” Both hands went slowly back to his pockets. “Well, that’s rape too—”

“Wait a minute, George.” Lanya said. “If you’re walking home at nine o’clock and somebody behind you grabs you by the throat and bangs your head into a wall and hisses he’ll knife you if you scream or don’t do what he says—No, wait a minute; listen! And you’re pissing in your pants in little squirts while he cuts you once on the arm and twice on the leg just so you see he’s serious and then tells you to spread your legs and gives you a black eye when you shake your head, because you’re so scared you don’t think you can, so you bunch up your skirts, while he’s got your ear between the blade and his thumb and he keeps twisting and it’s bleeding down your neck already and he tries to pull you open with his hand and pokes and prods you with a half-hard dick and slaps you a few times because you’re not doing it right—no, don’t stop me; we’re talking about rape, now—and when he’s got it about a half inch in you, he shoots, and while he’s panting and it’s dripping down your leg, you finally get a chance to run, and when he lunges after you, he trips and drops the knife, shouting he’s gonna kill you now, he’s gonna kill you, and for the next four days you can’t walk right because of what he did inside you with his fingers, and in court—because they do catch him—a lawyer spends six hours trying to prove that you gave him some come-hither look or your hem was too high or your tits were too big, but they put him away anyway: only next week, they ask you to change schools because you’re not a good influence anymore…Now while you’re telling me all this, don’t forget, that’s also rape!” Lanya’s forefinger speared the air; she leaned back once more.

“Well,” George said, “it is. Yes…that ever happen to you?”

“A friend of mine.” Lanya put her hands back in her pockets.

“Here in Bellona?”

“There aren’t any schools in Bellona you can be asked to change. No, it was before. But you men have a strange idea of the way the world works.”

“Now you,” George said, “are trying to make me think about something, right?”

“You think enough to bounce up and down here like a damn monkey and tell me a lot of bullshit. I asked you what happened. Tell me it’s none of my business, if you want. But don’t give me that.”

“Well just maybe,” George said, “you got a funny idea too if you think this is something I didn’t think about.” He looked at Lanya; a smile lurked behind his face. “You ask me a question, see, and you don’t wanna hear my answer? The whole point, see, is rape is one pot with a lot of different kinds of stew in it. Some of them is tastier than others.” George narrowed his eyes: “How you like it?”

“What?” Lanya asked.

“You like it rough, with fighting and beating and scratching and crying—” George leaned toward her, looking out of one eye, one hand between them, one fingertip wagging faster and faster—“and moaning No, no, don’t do it, please, don’t do it, but crawling back for more between trying to get away and a few yesses slipping out every once in a while between the scratching and the biting?”

“That’s the way you like it?”

“Yeah!” George stood back. His fist closed. (In the dirt, Kidd’s opened.) “You know what I tell my women? ‘Hit me! Go on, fight me! I’m gonna take it, now. I’m gonna take it, see. And you see if you can keep me from takin’ it.’ Then we do it—anyway. In an alley, in a stairway, on a roof, in a bed…” George’s brows lowered. “That the way you like it?”

“No,” Lanya said. “That’s not me. I’d rather do some of the taking myself.”

The black hand turned up its lighter palm. One shoulder shrugged. “Then you and me—” George began to chuckle—“we just gonna have to stay like we is; friends. ’Cause any other way, we just wouldn’t get along. Now I been liking it like that a long time, honey. And when you like it that way, when you do it that way, then you think about it; and you learn about it. And one of the things you learn is which women likes it that way too. Now you can’t tell all the time, without askin’; and some like it more than others. But you learn.” George’s eyes narrowed again. “Now you really want to know what it was like, with her and me?”

Lanya nodded. (Kidd’s chin tapped a leaf that swung down and up to tap it back.) “I asked.”

“There it was, you see—” George’s shoulders hunched—“all dark in the middle of the day and lightning rolling easy and slow overhead and the flames licking up and the smoke licking down and people screaming, running, rioting, bricks falling in the street and glass breaking behind me—I turned to see: And there she was, just staring. At me. People going past her every which way, and her the only still one on the street, looking like she was about to eat the back of her own hand, all pressed up against her mouth like that, and from the way she was looking at me, I—knew! I knew what she wanted and I knew how she wanted it. And I knew I wanted it too.” One hand was back in George’s pocket. “Now I’ll tell you, that ain’t something you know all that often. But when you do, you can either say ‘Shit man,’ and walk away. Or, ‘I know what I know!’ Now, you an’ me, we wouldn’t get along.” The chuckle ran out into a sound too low to hear. George breathed. “But her and me, we got along!” He suddenly turned, took a step, and halted as though his great body had been struck. “Shit, we got along!” He turned back. “I ain’t got along with nobody that well since I was twenty-eight years old and that’s been more than ten years! We was in this alley, and there was this light flashing on and off, on and off; and people would run in, run out, and we just didn’t care! Or maybe that made it better, that there wasn’t nothing they could do, or that they wanted to do.” Suddenly he looked down, laughed: “I remember one old woman with a shopping bag full of empty old tin cans come running in and seen us and started shouting bloody murder and running in and out, and screaming ‘Get off that poor little white girl, nigger! You do that, they gonna kill us, they gonna kill us for sure!’” George shook his head. “The light, I guess, was this guy taking his pictures; I don’t know if I really seen him or not. He wasn’t there when I finished. I stood up, see, and she was lying there, still reachin’ for it, you know?” Once more he shook his head, laughed once more: both meant something different from when he’d done them moments before. “Like I say, she weren’t no more than seventeen. And she got hit and she got punched and she got thrown around and she was yelling and screaming, ‘No, no, oh, don’t, oh please don’t.’ So I guess it was rape. Right? But when we finished—” George nodded—“she was reaching for it. She wanted some more, awful bad.” He tapped the air with a concluding forefinger. “Now that’s a very interesting kind of rape. It’s the kind they always have in the movies. It’s the kind your lawyer friend was trying to make this other thing into. And when it gets to the law courts, it’s a pretty rare kind. But it’s the one they all afraid of—especially between little-bitty white girls and big, black niggers.”

“Well,” Lanya said, “it still sounds a little strange. Okay, it’s not my thing. But what do you think, say, about the guy I was telling you about, who did that to my friend?”

“I think,” George said, “I know a little bit more about him than you do. And I think if he’d maybe come talked to somebody like me first, we could have maybe worked somethin’ out where he didn’t have to go and get himself and some little girl in trouble. About him or the girl, I don’t think nothing; I don’t know them. But I think what you told me about is very,” and George dropped his chin, “very, very sad.”

Lanya took a breath. “I’m just still wondering about the girl. I mean the one you were with…Do you even know her name?”

“Well, after I was finished, we did not exactly introduce ourselves.” Suddenly George scowled. “Look, you try and understand this. I don’t give a shit about the bitch! I really don’t. And suppose I did? Suppose, afterward, I’d done said, ‘Oh, hey baby, that was so fine, let’s you and me get married and live all happily ever after so we can just take care of one another every night!’ What she gonna say? ‘You crazy, nigger!’ I mean a couple of times I tried that, and it don’t work. That ain’t her thing. That ain’t mine. She ain’t interested in me neither. She interested in what she thinks about me. And that’s fine by me. She knows my name—it was in the paper. I gave it to them for free, too. I told them I ain’t ashamed of nothing I done, I like it like that, and I’m gonna do it again, any time, any place. And believe me, that’s all she wants to know!” George’s scowl relaxed. “Afterward, people was gossiping around and saying her name was June or something like that. You say your old man know her? What he say about her?”

“About,” Lanya said, “what you just did.” She pressed her lips, considering. Then she said, “She’s looking for you, George. I saw her once, come up to ask my old man after you. She wants to find you again.”

George’s laugh launched high as Madame Brown’s and, with his rocking head, tumbled down into its easy bass. “Yeah…! Yeah, she looking for me! She just circling and circling around me, getting in closer and closer—” George’s forefinger circled on the air, spiraled in—“just circling and circling, closer and closer, like the moon around the sun!”

Something (though Kidd was not sure what it was) struck Lanya as funny and she laughed too. “George, you’ve got your images mixed up! You’re supposed to be the moon; not her. Besides, the moon doesn’t circle the sun!”

“Well,” George said, “maybe it usually don’t, but this is Bellona, and you ain’t got no way to tell what’s gonna happen here!” His laugh grew, fell away; he came out of it with a serious expression. “You see, I been around, I know some things. How old are you? Twenty-three?”

“On the head,” Lanya said. “You should be guessing in a fair.”

“Well, I’m old enough to be your daddy—”

“You’re old enough to be June’s daddy too.” Lanya said. “Do you have any children?”

“I got five of them I know about,” George said, “and one of them off a white woman, too, young lady. Green-eyed, mustard-headed—” George screwed his face—“ugly little motherfucker! Well, maybe he ain’t so ugly. And I got one of them as old now as her momma was when I first stuck it to her, too.” George cocked his head the other way. “And that ain’t nowhere near as old as the little girl we was talking about. None of the five of them is here in Bellona. But I tell you, if I was to see that oldest girl of mine, standing on the corner, looking at me like that little white girl was looking—I don’t care if she my kin or not, I’d do the same fuckin’ thing. Now you believe it!”

“George,” Lanya said, “you are incorrigible!”

“Well, sometimes you look pretty funny yourself, Miss Anne! Look—” George got back his explanatory tone—“what it is, is that women wants it just exactly like men do. Only nobody wants to think about that, you know? At least not in the movies. They pretends it don’t exist, or they pretends it’s something so horrible, making all sorts of death and destruction and needless tragedy and everybody getting killed, that it might just as well not exist—which is the same thing, you see?”

“Yes,” Lanya said, “I’d noticed. George, people are scared of women doing anything to get what they want, sex or anything else. Christ, you men are presumptuous bastards. If I was telling you how blacks really are the way you’re telling me about women, you’d organize a sit-in!”

“Well,” George said, “I just didn’t know if you went to the movies that much so’s you’d know.”

After a moment, Lanya asked: “What do you think’s gonna happen when you two finally do meet again, George?”

George’s eyebrows, darker crescents on an iron-black face (the tarnished light erased all browns and reds), rose. “Well, she gonna get closer, and closer, just circling—” one hand traced its spiral while the other waited for it at the spiral’s center—“and circling, and closer and closer, till—” George’s cupped palms smashed; Kidd blinked; his back muscles cramped—“Blam! And the sky gonna go dark and the lightning gonna go roll over the night, wide as a river and slow as the sea, and buildings gonna come toppling and fire and water both gonna shoot in the air, and people gonna be running and screaming in the streets!” George winked, nodded. “Gonna be just like last time.”

“I think,” Lanya said, “you’ve got your images mixed again.” She came away from the wall and ambled a few steps across the stone. “You’re doing just what the movies are doing—making it into something terrible and frightening.”

“That’s the problem—like I say: You see I like it like the movies. But when we get together again, we just gonna be doing our thing. You all is the ones who gonna be so frightened the city gonna start to fall down around your head.” George’s head went to the side. He grinned. “See?”

“Not quite.” Lanya grinned back. “But let it ride. Okay, what are you gonna do afterward?”

“Same as before, I guess. Blam! and excuse me, ma’am, and then be on my way. And then it starts all over…” Once more that oblique expression came to George’s face. “You say your old man…is she all right? I mean is she okay and all? I don’t want no thin’ to happen to her ’fore we meet up again.”

“Yeah,” Lanya said. “She…I guess so.”

George nodded. “Yeah…somebody told me back in the bar you done got yourself a new boyfriend. That’s nice.”

Where, Kidd wondered, was Milly?

“Things get around.” Lanya smiled, and Kidd had an image of her suddenly snatching her harmonica to fling up some fusillade of notes to hide her embarrassment. Only she didn’t look embarrassed. (He remembered wanting to overhear Lanya and Milly discussing him; the prospect of a discussion of him with George left him vaguely uncomfortable.) Fingers hooked over her pocket rim, Lanya was toying with her harmonica. “Yeah. I don’t know if I’d say I got him; how about getting?”

“Well, you sure get yourself some winners! That last one…” George shook his head.

“What did you think of Phil, George?” The subject, almost as uncomfortably, had changed.

“I thought he was crazy!” George said. “I thought he was a stuckup, up-tight, tight-assed asshole—Smart? Oh, he was smart as a whip. But I’m still glad to see you shut of him.” George paused; his brows wrinkled. “Though I guess maybe you ain’t…?”

“I don’t know.” Lanya’s lowered eyes suddenly rose. “But that’s easier to say if you got a new one, isn’t it?”

“Well—” George’s laugh came out surprising and immense—“I guess it is. Say, when you gonna bring your old man on down to Jackson and say hello?”

“Well, thanks,” Lanya said. “Maybe we’ll come down…if we don’t see you in the bar, first.”

“Gotta check your new old man out,” George said. “First, see, I thought maybe you’d get involved with one of them faggot fellas up at Teddy’s. God damn, sometimes I think there ain’t nobody in the city no more ain’t a faggot but me.”

“Is that a standard male, heterosexual fantasy?” Lanya asked. “I mean, to be the only straight man around when all the others are gay?”

“I ain’t got nothing against faggots,” George said, “You seen them pictures them boys made of me? Something, huh? Some of my best friends is—”

“George!” Lanya held up her hand, her face in mock pain. “Come on, don’t say it!”

“Look—” George’s gestures became sweepingly gallant—“I just like to make sure all my friends is taken care of. If you wasn’t getting none, see, I was gonna volunteer to make an exception in my standard methods of procedure and fit you in my list. We got to watch out for our friends? Now, don’t we?”

“That’s sweet of you,” Lanya said. “But I’m royally taken care of in that department.”

And Kidd, gloriously happy, put his other knee on the ground and sat back. A thought, circling below articulation, suddenly surfaced, dripping words: They know each other…were the first that fell off it; more followed, obscuring clear thought with lapped, resonant rings. He remembered the poster. It was the same man, with the same, dark, rough face (the face was laughing now), the same body (the khaki coverall was mostly too loose but now and again, when a leg moved so or a shoulder turned, it seemed about to tear at arm or thigh), that he’d seen reproduced, bared, black, and bronze-lit.

“Well, then—” George made a slate-wiping motion—everything’s fine! You two come on down. I’d like to meet this guy. You pick ’em pretty interesting.”

“Okay.” Lanya said: “Well, I guess I’m gonna be on my way. Just stopped in to say hello.”

Now, Kidd thought, now Milly is going to jump out and…?

“Okay. I see you,” George said. “Maybe later in the bar.”

Now…?

“So long.” Lanya turned around and started down the steps.

George shook his head, went back to the wall—glanced after her once—picked up the newspaper and while he shook it out, speared two fingers at his breast pocket for his glasses. He got them on the third try.

Harmonica notes twisted up like silver wires in the haze.

Kidd waited half a dozen breaths, realizing finally he had misjudged Lanya’s and Milly’s intentions. Milly had, apparently, chickened out. Again he wondered from what. Backing into thicker brush, he stood with cramping thighs and, ignoring them, circled the court. The ground sloped sharply. This time, if he could overtake her on the path, he would not hide—

The music wound in the smoke toward some exotic cadence that, when achieved, slid it into a new key where the melody defined itself along burbling triplets till another cadence, in six measures, took it home.

He came out on the side of the steps. Small branches tugged his hips and shoulders, swished away.

Lanya, at the bottom of the flight, ambled onto the path, dragging her music after like a silver cape.

And she had almost completed the song. (He had never heard her play it through.) Its coda hauled up the end in one of those folk suspensions that juxtapose two unrelated chords to hold a note from one above the other and make chaos of it. Starting down the steps behind her, he got chills, not from fear or confusion, but from the music’s moment which sheared through mouse-grey mist glimmering in the leafy corridor.

He tried to walk silently, twice stopped entirely, not to break the melody before its end.

He was on the bottom step. She was fifteen feet ahead.

The melody ended.

He hurried.

She turned, lips together for some word that began with “m.” Then her eyes widened: “Kidd—” and she smiled. “What are you doing here…?” and took his hand.

“I was spying on you,” he said, “and George.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You were?”

“Yeah.” They walked together. “I liked your song.”

“Oh…”

He glanced over.

She was more embarrassed, he realized, by his overhearing the music than the conversation. While he was wondering what to offer her to atone, she managed to say:

“Thank you,” softly, “though.”

He squeezed her hand.

She squeezed his.

Shoulder to shoulder, they walked up the path, while Kidd’s mind turned and sorted and wondered what hers turned and sorted. He asked, suddenly: “The person you were telling George about, who got raped—was that Milly?”

Lanya looked up, surprised. “No…or let’s say that I’d rather not say.”

“Huh? What does that mean, no or you’d rather not say?”

Lanya shrugged. “I just mean Milly probably wouldn’t want me to say, one way or the other.”

Kidd frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Lanya laughed, without letting it out, so that it was only an expression, a breath through her nose, her head shaking. She shrugged again.

“Look, just give me a simple answer, was she or—?”

“Now you look,” Lanya said: “You’re a very sweet man, and I know you’re not doing it on purpose, it’s just the habit men get into of trying to undermine anything that goes on between two women. But stop it.”

He was confused.

She asked: “Okay…?”

Confused, he agreed. “Okay.”

They wandered on. The song, etched on memory, filigreed, in memory, the silent, present trees. The sky had deepened to a color that could be called blue, in leaf-shaped flakes among them.

Confused, he was still happy.

At the commune clearing, Milly, with Jommy at the furnace, turned, saw them, and ran over. “Lanya, Kidd—” and to Lanya: “Did you tell him?”

Lanya said: “No. I didn’t, yet…”

“Oh, Kidd, I’m afraid—” Milly took another breath; she had been running more than just from the furnace. “I’m afraid I was spying on the two of you most of the way back here.” She laughed. “You see, we decided I was going to hide in the bushes and overhear Lanya and George—”

“Huh?” Kidd said.

Lanya said: “He’s not so bad after all—”

“Kidd?” Milly said. “Oh—you mean George! No, of course he isn’t…” Back to Kidd: “I was going to come out and join Lanya again on the path back from the Weather Tower—” then it wasn’t the monastery; but he’d pretty well decided it couldn’t have been—“when I saw you pop out on the steps, thirty seconds before I was going to!”

He said to Lanya: “Then you were expecting…?” The half-dozen questions in his mind were halved again when Milly said:

“I couldn’t keep close enough to hear everything you were saying. If I had, I would have made too much noise. I just cut straight through and caught the paths on the snake-turns. Oh, Lanya, it is a lovely song! Really, you’ve got to play it for other people. See, you can play it all the way through. I told you you could. You knew I was listening, and you got through it. Just don’t let people embarrass you…Kidd—?” Milly frowned. “You look so confused, Kidd!” Suddenly she hugged him; red hair brushed dry against his face. He nearly stumbled. “Really, I’m sorry!” She released him, put her hand on Lanya’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to spy. But you knew I was there…” She looked imploringly at Lanya. “I just couldn’t resist!” And she laughed.

He blinked; he smiled. “…that’s all right.” The memory of the melody came again; it had not been a private moment he’d overheard, but one meant for a friend. Had that, he wondered, given it its beauty? Lanya was laughing too.

So he laughed with them.

At the furnace, Jommy banged his ladle on the caldron. “Come on! Soup’s ready! Come and get it!”

About the clearing, with mess-pans and mess-pots, crocks and tin cups and bowls, two dozen people gathered at the fire.

“Come on, let’s eat,” Lanya said.

“Yes, you too, Kidd!” Milly said. “Come on.”

He followed the girls toward the crowd. A thin, ginger-haired spade with gold-rimmed teeth gave him a dented enamel soup plate. “I got two, man. You can take this one.” But when he reached the front, at the furnace, for his ladle-full, it was John (with swinging vest and eyeglasses full of flame), not Jommy, who served. The sky was almost dark. Though firelight lay coppery against Milly’s hair, he could not make out, on either bare leg, as he followed Milly and led Lanya out among the crowd, trying to balance his bowl, that scratch.

Dusk had come quickly—and lingered, holding off dark. They sat on the rumpled blankets at Her Place. He squinted up between lapped leaves while the sky drizzled powdery rubbings, gritty and cool.

“One more day’s work at the Richards, and I’ll have them moved.”

“You’ve…well, you’ve got a name now. And a job. Are you happy?”

“Shit—” He stretched out on his back and felt beneath him twigs, creases, pebbles, and the beaded chain around him. “I haven’t even decided how to spell it. And they still haven’t paid me more than that first five dollars.”

“If they don’t pay you—” she stretched out too—“why do you go back?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they know if they gave me my money, I wouldn’t come.” He shrugged again. “It doesn’t matter. Like I told Madame Brown, I’m just an observer. They’re fun to watch.” Thinking: Someday I’m going to die. He glanced at her: “Do you know, I’m afraid of dying. A lot.”

“Hm?”

“I am. Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I think maybe my heart is going to stop. So I feel it, just to make sure it’s going. Which is funny, because if I’m lying down, about to go to sleep, and I can hear my heart going, I have to move into another position, or I get scared—”

“—that it might stop and you’ll hear it?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“That happens to me sometimes. When I was fifteen, in boarding school, I sat on the edge of the main building roof for a long time and thought about committing suicide.”

“I’ve never wanted to kill myself,” he said. “Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to—because I’d gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn’t worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn’t fix it up—that’s if I couldn’t get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn’t stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You’re walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes—and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: ‘I am going to die.’ Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like—” he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped—“that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten…before the thought goes and you only remember the words you were mumbling, like ‘Someday I will die,’ which isn’t the thought at all, just its ashes.”