Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“I said: He’s gotta be dead! You heard me?”

Mom, come on!

Can you see him down there? I can’t see anything. I can’t hear anything. Oh, Bobby, Bobby! Can you hear your mommy? Please, Bobby!

The grip suddenly sagged; for a moment Kidd thought he was falling—Dragon Lady, still holding, had leaned in behind him. Her voice roared about his ears. “YOUR SON IS DEAD, LADY!” And Kidd was pulled away. “Come on, let’s get you back.”

Thirteen, with an unhappy expression, shook his head.

Denny, up front now, gripped a length of wound clothes line. “You want to get him up? You take the rope. We’ll hold you while you go down.”

Kidd took hold of the double end, ducked his head through, and hooked his arms over. (Griffin and Mantis flanked the door.) Thirteen, Denny, and Dragon Lady were handing out the other end among them.

“You just hold on,” Kidd said. “I’ll climb down.” He got onto his knees at the sill, holding the edge (one rough hand lost in griffin light), dropped one leg down, then the other. The shaft at his back was cool. He could not tell if the wind came from above or below. He went over the edge, had to keep away from the wall first with his knee, then with his foot.

“You all right?” Denny asked, legs wide, fists close.

Kidd grunted, pulling on the ropes, taut around his back (pushing something glass into his back) and taut under his arms: “Yeah.” The slanted bar of the door mechanism slid under his bare foot. His sandal toe scraped metal.

Swaying at either side of the door, the apparitions loomed, luminous.

Once he called: “You can lower it a little faster than that. I’m okay.”

“Sorry,” which was Thirteen, catching his breath; and the rope.

His shin scraped the basement door-sill. His bare foot hit something and slipped, in either grease or blood.

He turned, while the rope sagged around him, and looked at the—he had to be dead.

The shaft was momentarily silent, except for wind.

Finally Dragon Lady called down: “You still okay…?”

“Yeah.” Kidd took a breath. “I’ll tie the rope around him. You can haul him up.” He slipped the rope from under his arms, pulled it over his head, but left it around one shoulder; he stepped forward on the oozy filth, stooped, and tugged a leg from where it had wedged between two blackened bumper plates.

“…is he alive?” Thirteen called.

Kidd took another breath. “Naw.” He pulled at the arm, got a grip around the chest, which was all soft against him. His own shirt front soaked immediately. Blood dribbled along his forearm. Standing, he dragged the body back a step. A foot caught, pulled free; the leg fell back against his thigh—his thigh wet, warm, to the knee. Dragging it, limp, reaching for the rope, he thought: Is this what turns on blood and blade freaks? He thought of Tak, he thought of George, hunted in himself for any idle sexuality: he found it, disconcertingly, a small warmth above the loins that, as he bared his teeth and the rope slid through his sticky hand, went out. “Let me have another couple of feet!” Well, he had found it before in auto wrecks, in blue plush, in roots, in wet wood with the bark just stripped.

Rope dropped over his shoulder; the voices eighteen floors up came again:

Oh, Mom—

Is he all right? Kidd, have you found him yet? Bobby? Bobby, can you hear me at all?

Oh, Mom, you heard—

Bobby, are you all right?

He got the rope around the chest, got a clumsy knot done—like trying to do it with your hands in glue—that maybe would hold. Bobby sagged against Kidd’s knees, heavy enough to make his bare foot slide backward. “Okay!” He tugged the rope.

He could see it run across the sill above him, go taut, and slow. The weight lifted from against him. A sneaker dragged across his foot, thumped against the door, and swung away again, and raised, dripping on his cheek. He smeared at his face with the heel of his hand and stepped back.

“Jesus Christ…!” from a girl at the doorway silenced everything but the wind and the reverberating voice:

Bobby, Bobby, please, can you hear me at all?

Another boy said: “Hey, wow…!”

Then, Denny’s nervous laugh: “Oh, man, that’s a mess…!”

Dragon Lady said, “All right, I’m untying him here—you get that rope down to the kid.”

Standing on the bottom of the shaft, his bare heel wedged against one caked girder that crossed the bumper plates, Kidd stared up. For a moment he thought the elevator car descended at him. But it was a trick of light from the flanking beasts, both of whom swayed and flickered at the edge of sight.

The rope fell at him. He grabbed it with one hand, then the other. Someone pulled it; it rasped his coated palms. “Hey…!” It went slack again.

Dragon Lady leaned in, the rope wrapped around one fist. “You got it now?”

“Yeah.” Once more he shrugged it over his head, under his arms. “Got it.”

They tugged him up.

When his head reached the sill, Denny and somebody else were on their knees, catching him around under the armpits. The sill scraped his chin, his chest.

Smokey simply put her hand over her mouth and stepped back behind Thirteen.

Kidd crawled over, got to his feet, moved a few steps forward. The others fell back.

“God damn!” Dragon Lady shook her head, eyes wide, and rolled the rope against her thigh. “God…!”

Denny, with a funny smile, stepped back, black-lined nails moving over his chest. “Wow, you really…” He shook back pale hair, seemed to be considering several things to say. “You look just as bad as…” He glanced at the floor.

“Uh…” Thirteen said, “we got some clothes up at the place. You wanna look through them for something? To change into, well, that’s…all right.”

“Oh, yeah…” Kidd looked down at blood, on himself, on the floor. It didn’t run. It looked like jellied paste. “Thanks.” He looked at the thing on the floor too, while wind and the woman’s voice made torrents in the shaft. “I better get…him upstairs.”

Bobby’s shirt had ripped across the back. The flesh that wasn’t torn was purple.

“You could make a sling, or something,” Thirteen offered. “Hey, do we got anymore of that canvass stuff?”

Someone he didn’t recognize said: “We threw it out.”

Kidd sucked his teeth, stooped, got his arms under Bobby’s shoulders, tugged him over. One eye, open, had burst. The face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter.

Thirteen, glancing up the shaft, said: “Dragon Lady, why you want to go hollering up at her about her kid’s dead?”

“Because,” Dragon Lady said, “if I was his mother, I’d want to know!”

“But suppose he was still—”

“Man,” Dragon Lady said, “that ain’t like gettin’ dumped out a two story window. That’s seventeen, eighteen flights!”

Kidd wedged his hand under the knees, stood, unsteadily, stepped back.

“Watch it!” Denny grabbed Kidd’s shoulder. “You don’t want to go down there again, now, do you?”

Kidd said: “Make the elevator go!” In his arms, the body was heavy, not so warm, and dripped less.

“Huh?” from Dragon Lady, who was coiling up the rope. “Oh, yeah!” She swung into the car, did something else to the switches above the buttons.

The door started to close. She stopped it with her forearm. (K-chunk.)

Denny stepped back as Kidd carried Bobby inside.

“Baby, Adam, you go on up with the others,” Dragon Lady said from the back of the car.

But Kidd, turning to face the door as it rolled to, could not tell which of the people standing behind Thirteen and Smokey she addressed: their light shields had been extinguished.

A moment into darkness, he heard Dragon Lady’s hand move among her chains; and the car filled with light. “So you can see what you’re doing,” the dragon said. “Here, I’ll push the floor. Which one? Seventeen?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, stepped aside.

The car rose.

The dragon beside him, he realized, was bigger than the elevator. Since it was light, he would have expected walls and ceiling to cut off that side claw, the top of that head. The effect, however, was that those places in the blue, enameled walls and ceiling seemed transparent, and the claw and the head shone through. The apparition was reflected on four sides.

Standing there, shifting the weight in his arms—Kidd had to shift it several times—he noticed the striations, like a muzzy image on some vertical television screen, raced to the left if he swayed right; if he swayed left, they raced right. Kidd said: “I don’t think you should get out with me.”

The dragon said: “I wasn’t planning to.”

He shifted the weight again, looked down at it, and thought: It smells…it has a specific smell. And there was an annoying piece of paper—he glanced down over the knees; was it a match book?—stuck to his bare foot.

Why, Kidd thought, why am I standing here with this armful of heavy, heavy meat, filthy with blood…? Then something raked inside his face; his throat clamped, his eyes teared. Either fear or grief, it extinguished as quickly as the lust that had momentarily raked inside his loins.

He blinked, again shifted his weight to the sandaled foot. The bare one stuck to the floor.

Beside him the swayings and motions that might tell him Dragon Lady’s thoughts were hidden in light.

He shifted back the other way. His sandal stuck too.

The car slowed; the door opened.

Mrs. Richards’ fist rose to strike her chin. The gesture was a stronger version of June’s.

Mrs. Richards stepped back, and back again.

June caught her mother’s arm.

Mrs. Richards closed her mouth and her eyes and began to shake. High brittle sobs suddenly crackled the silence.

“You better take your mother upstairs,” Kidd said and stepped, after his grotesque shadow, into the hall.

June’s head whipped back and forth between him and her mother, till an edge of shadow swept over his. It was not him she was staring at, but the bright apparition in the closing elevator.

“I’ll put him in the old apartment.”

“Bobby’s…?” June whispered, and smashed back against the wall to avoid him as he passed.

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

Behind him Mrs. Richards’ crying changed pitch.

The other elevator door, against the rolled carpet, went K-chunk, K-chunk, K-chunk…

He shouldered into 17-E. Put the boy in his own…? Kidd walked down the hall, turned into the bare room. One of Bobby’s hands (the one with the chain, all stained) struck and struck his shin. All he had to do was look at what he lugged not to be sad.

He tried not to drop it on the floor, lowered it, almost fell; and dropped it. He pulled at the bent leg; it…bent again, at the wrong place. So he stood up.

Christ, the blood! He shook his head, and peeled his shirt from stomach and shoulders. Starting for the door, he unbuckled his pants and, holding them with one hand—they dropped to his thighs—stepped into the hall.

Mrs. Richards, standing in the middle of the hall, began to shake her head and cry again.

He scowled and pulled his pants up. He’d been heading for the bathroom but, exposed to her astonished grief, he was thrown back to the moment of sexual response at the shaft bottom. Shit, he thought: “Ma’am, why don’t you go upstairs. There’s nothing you can do. Being here won’t make you feel…any better. June…?”

June half hid behind her mother.

“…why don’t you take her upstairs.” Suddenly he didn’t want to be there at all. “Look, I’ve got to go get some—something.” Holding his pants closed, he went past them into the living room, picked up his notebook and, holding it in front of his lap, stalked out the door.

Thirteen said, “I guess she’s taking it pretty rough,” and stepped back to let him in.

“Shit.” Dragon Lady glanced at the ceiling.

The sound of crying, high and stifled, dripped into the room like something molten.

“Why don’t she shut up!” Dragon Lady said.

“Look, man—” Thirteen started.

“I know, I know. Somebody just asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. Well I sure as shit do. Baby? Adam? You bringing that damn wine?”

“You said,” Kidd began, “you had some clothes?”

“Oh yeah. Sure. Come on in.”

Denny, who was resting a glass jug on the crook of his arm, said, “I think he wants to use the bathroom.”

“Yeah, you want to wash up. Tub’s a mess, but you can use it if you want. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” But Denny’s last sentence had caused gooseflesh more unpleasant than either grief or terror. “Yeah, I better wash up.”

“Down the hall. It don’t have no fuckin’ windows. I’ll get a lantern.” Thirteen lifted one from a nail in the wall.

Kidd followed him into the john.

In the swaying lantern light, he saw a line of rust along the middle of the tub to the drain. The enamel had flaked here and there from black patches. “We had to put a fucked-up scorpion in here a couple of nights back—name was Pepper—and he’d put something in his arm he shouldn’t have. Put him in the bathtub with his spurs on, and he tried to kick holes in it.” Lantern high in one hand, Thirteen bent and picked up a screw from the tub bottom, looked at it, shrugged. “Use any of those towels you want. We don’t got no washcloths.” He put the lantern down on the back of the toilet.

Kidd put the notebook on the seat-top, turned on the water and picked up the soap: Flakes of rust had dried into it.

With a grey towel (torn) he swabbed the bottom of the tub. There was no stopper, so he rolled it up and plugged the drain, then got in before the water had covered the bottom.

“Do you want something to drink?” a girl called through the door.

“Yeah.”

While he sat, scrubbing at his face, he could hear the crying upstairs. He wondered if she were moving from room to room.

The girl came into the bathroom with a white cup in her hands. She wore jeans, was heavy, and had a cheerful face that was trying to look very serious. “Here you are. That poor boy.” She bent down, spilling curly hair from her shoulder, and put the cup on the tub edge. She had loose, heavy breasts under a blue sweatshirt. “That must have been awful!”

Her voice was breathy, and he thought she probably giggled a lot. The thought of her giggling made him smile. “It wasn’t nice.”

“You live upstairs?” she asked.

Perhaps she was seventeen. “I just work there. You know if you keep on staring at me like that, I’m gonna get all excited.”

She giggled.

He leaned back in the tub. “See, I told you.”

“Oh…” She gestured mock frustration, left—she had to push past Denny who stood in the door now. He gave a sharp, short laugh. “You really got yourself messed up, huh, kid?”

“Yeah, well. I guess we couldn’t leave him down there.”

“I guess not.” Denny came in and sat on the toilet cover, picked up the notebook. “Hey, kid? This yours?”

He nodded, only realizing now that Denny’s “kid” had neither capital K or extra d. Kidd grinned and picked up the mug. (Around him the water ran brown. The match book from his foot floated under the spigot.) When he sipped, his mouth burned. “Shit, what is this?”

“Whisky,” Denny said, looking up. “You want wine, we got wine. But I thought maybe you’d want something good and strong. I mean after…” His hair swung in pale blades.

“That’s fine.”

“You write all this?”

“Yeah. Leave it alone.”

“Oh.” Quickly Denny put it on the floor between his boots. He rubbed two fingers on his naked chest a while. Then he glanced up and said, “She’s really going on, huh? I guess that’s cause she’s his momma.”

Kidd nodded and ground his knuckles in the soap. “I got all that junk off my face?”

“Nope. On the side, under your chin.”

He lathered there. The lantern showed the suds gone tan.

Denny gestured. “What you got a hard-on for?”

“Your scrawny ass hanging over the back of your pants.”

“Yeah?” Denny grinned. “Be the best piece you ever had.”

But when Kidd sloshed the lather off his face, Denny was still looking at it. “How’d your run go?” Kidd asked.

“With Nightmare?”

“Yeah.”

“It was a fuck-up.” Denny shrugged. “We didn’t get nothing. Time before was really good. Next time be good too.”

“What you guys run after?” Kidd drank some more, and rubbed the rusty soap on his stomach.

“You all that interested in scorpion shit?”

Kidd shrugged. The soap bobbed away.

Denny nodded. “You interested, you ask Dragon Lady.”

“Not that interested.” He retrieved it, pushed it between his toes.

“You ask her, she’ll tell you if she thinks you wanna know. Dragon Lady, she likes you.” Suddenly Denny stood. “So does Nightmare. I’ll be back in a second.”

Kidd took another drink, and fell to scrubbing again. His nails were lined—ruined rim and bitten cuticle—with brown. He dunked his head, rubbed it, lifted it; dark streaks wormed from the drippings.

“Here you go, kid.” Denny came back in with an armful of clothing and sat down again on the toilet. “Now we got this pair of pants; and this pair—naw, that’s pretty raunchy. I guess these’ll fit you. Nice belt, too. I dunno who left all this shit. You think there’d be a shirt in here, you know.”

“I thought scorpions didn’t wear shirts.” Kidd stood up in the loud water to soap his groin.

Denny glanced at him once more. “Shit, I better keep my ass out of your way. You want a black leather vest? That’d look good on you, kid, you know? Scorpions just wear vests, usually. You seen the one I got?”

“How old are you?”

“Eh…sixteen,” followed with a questioning glance.

Fifteen, Kidd decided. “I’m practically a dozen years older than you. Stop calling me kid.”

“Huh? You are?”

“Yeah. Now throw me that other towel.” As he caught it, the door crashed back. Dragon Lady lurched in, dark face twisted, stained teeth bared, shaking a fist with one finger up. “Look, when you go back upstairs, you tell that bitch to cut it out, you hear? It’s driving me up the fuckin’ wall! God damn, I know it’s her kid, but—well, Jesus Christ, she been whining up there a fuckin’ hour!” She looked at the ceiling and bellowed: “I mean, go out and take a walk, lady!”

“Dragon Lady…” Denny’s interruption seemed to take in none of the scorpion’s rage.

“We dragged the cocksucker up there for her! She keep it up, I’m gonna go up there and beat the shit out of her, if you don’t quiet her down!”

Anger and the cold air: his erection, anyway, was gone. “The walls are thin.” He rubbed himself with the bunched towel.

“Dragon Lady?”

“What do you want?”

“The…Kid was asking about the run.”

Kidd sensed the hesitant disobedience was some acquiescence to previous commitment. But he could not be sure whether the newly implied capital was respectful or mocking.

“Yeah?” Dragon Lady’s anger was quickly exhausted.

“Look, lemme out of here and see what I can do upstairs,” Kidd said. “We’ll talk about it some other time.” He wished Mrs. Richards would quiet too.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Try and shut her up, huh?” Dragon Lady backed out again.

“You don’t want the vest?” Denny still pawed in the heap.

The crying suddenly rose in pitch. Outside, Dragon Lady said, “God damn!”

“Yeah, I want the fucking vest.” Kidd stepped from the tub, reached down, and drained the whisky. Twin warmths of agreement and alcohol turned through him.

Denny, still sitting, was bent almost double, as he sorted the clothing. His belt loops tugged his jeans below his buttocks’ crevice.

Kidd sucked his teeth again and toweled his groin. “What’s she here for, anyway?”

“Dragon Lady?” Denny glanced up, unbending.

“Yeah.”

“You remember when you were here last time, Nightmare was collecting us for the run?” Denny shrugged and fell back to sorting. “Well, she’s bringing us back, I guess.”

“Oh.”

The door opened again. The girl stood there, with a plastic cup this time. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you were…” That was to Denny who didn’t look up. So she said to Kidd, “Denny told me I should bring you another glass after fifteen minutes. Did you finish the first one?”

“You don’t give a fuck whether he finished it or not,” Denny said, still bent over. “Just give it to him.”

“I’m finished.”

She blinked rapidly, while they exchanged mug for cup. Then, without glancing at Denny, she left. Kidd drank some more, then put the cup on the tub edge. “Thanks.”

Denny, still, didn’t say anything, almost as though embarrassed.

In black jeans and leather vest, Kidd went into the front room.

“Oh, man!” Dragon Lady was saying. “This is just too much—”

The crying was louder here.

“Dragon Lady,” Smokey said, tugging at the tassels of her macramé belt, “why do you shout things up there like that? It…it isn’t necessary!”

“Well,” Dragon Lady said, thumb hooked around hers, “if I was making that big a fool of myself, after about an hour, I don’t know as how I wouldn’t appreciate somebody telling me to cut it out—like they meant it!”

Which Smokey seemed to think was funny; Thirteen’s reaction, though, was silent, hand-throwing frustration. He moved, almost protectively, between the two women; Smokey didn’t seem to mind.

“Look,” Thirteen said, with settling gestures of the palms, “if your neighbor, I mean your own neighbor is going through that, you’re just obliged, obliged, see, to put up with—”

Dragon Lady threw her glass. It missed Thirteen. Smokey ducked too. “Hey, watch…!” Thirteen shouted. Pieces of glass rocked on the floor. Wine licked down the wall. Smokey just blinked and looked like she didn’t know whether to be amused or angry.

But Dragon Lady launched into a doubled-over laughter. “Oh, Thirteen…Thirteen, you are so—” Chains swung, flung back around her neck as she stood. “You are so chicken shit!” She laughed again.

Maybe, Kidd thought, scorpions just yelled loud, laughed a lot, and threw things.

“Baby!” Dragon Lady shouted. “Adam! We gonna get out of here, soon…”

“Good-bye,” Kidd said, at the door, and went. (The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said “good-bye.” Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave.) In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn’t even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not.

5

He carried the nest tables into 19-A.

Mrs. Richards stood in the middle of the room.

“Um,” he said, “I thought I’d bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the…” then went and put them by the balcony door.

“Your clothes,” she said. “I was going to give you some of my…son’s clothes.”

“Oh. I got these…” They were all black, too.

Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

“Is June all right?”

She kept nodding.

“I thought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you’d already gone up.”

The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her face.

“I’ll go bring the rest of the stuff up, ma’am.”

He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs. Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he’d considered Bobby’s toys, but decided he’d better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby’s room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.

Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip…

He paused; he re-wrote:

Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped…

Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the ed’s and reorder three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable limit. He took a breath, and a clause from the first three lines, to close the passage; and, writing it, saw only one word in it was necessary, so crossed out the others.

Mrs. Richards came into the room, circled it, searching, saw him: “You’re writing. I didn’t mean to disturb your…writing.”

“Oh, no.” He closed the book. “I’m finished.” He was tired. But he was finished.

“I thought perhaps you were writing some sort of…elegy. For…” and dropped her head.

“Oh. No…” he said, and decided “Elegy” was the title. “Look, you’ve got everything up here. Maybe I should just go on and leave.”

“No.” Mrs. Richards’ hand left her neck to reach for him. “Oh, you mustn’t go! I mean you haven’t talked to Arthur about your pay, have you?”

“Well, okay.” He sat back.

Mrs. Richards, all exhausted nervousness, sat across the coffee table from him.

He asked: “Where’s June?”

“She’s in her…” ended by vague gesture. She said, “It must be awful for you.”

“It’s worse for you.” He was thinking: Her son’s clothes? She couldn’t have meant Bobby, we weren’t anywhere near the same size. Edward’s? “Mrs. Richards, I can’t even say how sorry I—”

She nodded again, chin striking her knuckles. “Oh, yes. You don’t have to. I understand. You went down there and brought him—” in the pause he thought she was going to cry—“back. How can I say thank you for that? You went down there. I saw you when you brought him up. How can I say—”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Richards. Really.” He wanted to ask her about the structure of light that had been in the elevator car with him; and could think of no way. Momentarily he wondered, maybe she hadn’t seen it. But moved his jaws on one another to dispel those implications. “I don’t have to wait here, for Mr. Richards. I can catch him another time. You might want to be alone with him when…”

The disorganized movements of her face stopped. “Oh no, I want someone here! Please stay, stay for me! That would be—” she began to look around in the seat of her chair—“the kindest thing. You could do.”

“All right.”

What she looked for, she did not find. “I want somebody with me. I need somebody.” She stood. “With me here.” Again, she circled the room. “It’s so strange, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll say. I wish I could phone him; on the phone it would be so much easier. But I just have to wait. He’ll come in the door. And I’ll say, Arthur, this afternoon, June backed Bobby into the elevator shaft and he fell down seventeen flights and killed himself…” She looked into the kitchen, crossed the room, looked down the hall.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t feel better if I went?” He wanted to go, could not conceive her wanting him to remain, even though she waved her hand at him, even though she said:

“Please. You have to stay.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will.”

She came back to her chair. “It doesn’t feel like we live here. The walls are blue. Before they were green. But all our furniture, it’s all in the proper place.”

“The rugs aren’t down yet,” he suggested. Well, it filled the silence.

“Oh, no. No, I don’t think it’s the rugs. It’s the feeling. It’s the feeling of trying to make a home. A home for my husband and my…” Then she pressed her lips together and dropped her head.

“Look, Mrs. Richards, why don’t you go in and lie down or something till Mr. Richards gets back? I’ll put the rugs down,” and thought abruptly: That’s what she wanted me to say; so I’ll have to tell him!

Who told the damn kids to take the rugs up anyway? And couldn’t remember whether it was him or her.

But she shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep now. No. When Arthur comes back…no.” The last was calm. She put—pushed her hands into her lap. Bobby’s pile of books still sat in the corner…Kidd wished he had put them away.

She stood.

She walked the room once more.

Her motions began definitively but lost focus in a glance—first out the balcony doors, next into the dining room, now toward the hall.

She stopped beside her chair.

“Arthur,” she said, followed by what sounded more like a comma of address than of apposition, “he’s outside.”

“Ma’am?”

“Arthur is outside, in that.” She sat. “He goes out every day. I can watch him from the window turn down Forty-Fourth there and disappear. Into the smoke. Like that.” Outside the balcony door, buildings were blurred. “We’ve moved.” She watched the fog for the length of five breaths. “This building, it’s like a chessboard. Now we occupy a different square. We had to move. We had to. Our position before was terrible.” Smoke pulled from the window, uncovering more smoke—“But I didn’t know the move would cost so much.”—and more. “I am not prepared for this. I’m really not. Arthur goes out there, every day, and works in Systems. Maitland Systems Engineering. Then he comes home.” She leaned forward. “Do you know, I don’t believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don’t believe he goes anywhere. I don’t believe there’s anyplace to go.” She sat back. “I don’t think I believe there ever was. I’m very much in love with that man. And I’m very much in awe of him. It frightens me how much I don’t understand him. I often suspect that he isn’t happy, that going out to work everyday in that—” she shook her head slightly—“that it doesn’t give him anything real, the inner things he needs. Whatever it is he does out there, it frightens me. I picture him going to a great empty building, filled with offices, and desks, and work benches, and technician shops, and drafting tables, and filing cabinets, and equipment closets—no people. He walks up and down, and looks into the open office doors. I don’t think he opens the closed ones. Sometimes he straightens a pile of papers on somebody’s desk. Sometimes he looks through a pile of circuit plans, but he puts them back, neatly. That’s all. All day. With no one else there. Do you think any of the windows are broken? Do you think he sometimes turns on a light switch and only one of those long fluorescent tubes flickers, faintly orange at one end? There’s something wonderful about engineering, you know. I mean, you go in and you solve problems, you make things, with your hands, with your mind. You go in, and you have a problem to work with, and when you’ve finished solving it, you’ve…well, done something with real, tangible results. Like a farmer who raises a crop; you can see that it’s there. You don’t just push a button, again and again, or put endless piles of paper in the proper drawers. Engineers are very wise. Like farmers. They can also be very dense and stubborn. Oh, I don’t know what’s out there, what he goes to do every day. He won’t talk about it. He used to. But not now. I don’t know where he goes, every morning. If he walked around the streets all day, I could tell that. That’s not it. But whatever it is, it isn’t good for him. He’s a good man. He’s more than a good man; he’s an intelligent man. Do you know he was hired right out of his class in college? Oh, they were doing that a lot a few years ago. But it wasn’t as common as all that when we were in school. He needs…something—I’d seem like a silly woman if I said ‘worthy of him.’ But that’s what I mean. I’ve never understood what was out there.” She looked again through the balcony doors. “I’ve suspected, oh, I’ve suspected that whatever was there wasn’t really what he needed, what would make him—happy? Oh, I learned a long time ago you don’t look for that. But the thing you do try for—excellence? Contentment? Oh no, oh no: not in a great empty office building, where the lights don’t work, where the windows are broken, where there aren’t any people.”