Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Then you did intend it. Here, use my pencil. Just cross out the question mark I put by the line. I had a feeling you might—what’s the matter?”

“I thought I had a comma there. But I didn’t.”

“Oh, I’m always discovering I’ve left out words I was sure I wrote down in the first draft—”

“You…”

Mr. Newboy started to question, grew uncomfortable with that, so returned his eyes to the line.

“…just read it and knew I’d wanted one there?”

Newboy began to say several things, but stopped (after a little nod) before voice, as if curious what silence would effect.

Two emotions clawed the inside of Kid’s skull. The fear, as it rose, he questioned: Is this some trick of the autonomic nerves that causes the small of my back to dampen, my heart to quicken, my knees to shake like motors? It was only a comma, the smallest bit of silence that I had misplaced—only a pause. I am quaking like Teddy’s candles. The joy, mounting over, obliterating, and outdistancing it, was at some sensed communion. (Newboy had known!) To restrain it, Kid told himself: Between two phrases like that, why shouldn’t Newboy be able to tell? He lowered his head to read on: his eyes filled with water and the emotion tore through such logic. And the darkness under. He anticipated their collision to make some wave. But like two swirls of opposite spin, they met—and canceled. He blinked. Water splashed from his lashes across the back of his hand.

There had been a recurrent pain on the back of his right shoulder that, three or four years ago, had intrigued him because it would be a pulsing annoyance for hours or even days and then would, in a second, vanish: no proddings or contortions could recall it. He hadn’t for years…

Tensing his shoulder, he read the next poem, and images set to at the backs of his eyes, their substance and structure familiar, their texture alien, alien and grave. He kept blinking, to finish the line in his mind; eyes opened to finish it on the page, where it demanded new bulbs. Boxes of glass ticked their clear covers on stunned marvels. Things were safe, and that was so horrifying his heart was pulsing in the little pit at the base of his throat as though he were swallowing rock after rock. “Mr. Newboy?”

“Mmm?” Papers shuffled.

Kid looked over.

Newboy was going through the illustrations.

“I don’t think I’m gonna write anymore poems.”

Newboy turned another black page. “You don’t like them, reading them over?”

Kid peeled off the next paper ribbon. The first two words of the first line of the first poem were transposed—

“Here!” Mr. Newboy offered his pencil. “You found a mistake?” He laughed. “Now see, you don’t have to write quite so hard as that! Wait! You’ll tear the paper!”

Kid unhunched his shoulder, unbent his spine, and let his fingers relax about the yellow shaft. He breathed again. “They’re going to fix that, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes. That’s why you’re looking it over now.”

Kid read, and remembered: “The parts I like, well…” He shook his head, with pursed lips. “They just don’t have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. That’s pretty strange. The parts I don’t like—well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word.”

“Then why aren’t you going to write any—?”

But Kid had found another mistake.

“Here,” Newboy said. “Why don’t you lay the galleys on your notebook so you can write more easily.”

While Kid passed the half-point of the next galley, Newboy mused: “Perhaps it’s good you’re not going to write anymore: you’d have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it. Since you told me you weren’t responsible for those notes, I’ve been trying to figure out whether it just happened or whether you were making a conscious reference: You managed to reproduce, practically verbatim, one of my favorite lines from Golding’s translation of the Metamorphosis.”

“Mmm?”

“Are you familiar with it?”

“It’s a big green and white paperback? That’s the one Shakespeare used for some of his plays. I only read about the first half. But I didn’t take any lines from it, at least not on purpose. Maybe it just happened?”

Mr. Newboy nodded. “You amaze me. And when you do, I suspect I’m rather a smaller person for having such petty notions in the first place. Well, the line I was referring to was from the last book anyway. So you hadn’t gotten to that one yet. Tell me, who do you think should read your poems once they’re published?”

“I guess people who…well, whoever likes to read poetry.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. I read it more than I read anything else, I guess.”

“No, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“You know, in bookstores for the schools I used to go to, or down in the Village in New York, or in San Francisco, they got whole sections for poetry. You can read a lot of it there.”

“Why poetry?”

Kid shrugged. “Most poems are shorter than stories.”

Newboy, Kid saw, was suppressing a laugh. Kid felt embarrassed.

“And you’re not going to write anymore?”

“It’s too hard.” Kid looked down. “I mean if I kept it up, I think it would kill me, you know? I never did it before, so I just didn’t understand.”

“That’s sad—no, I can be more honest than that. It’s frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.”

“Yeah.” Kid’s eyes came up. “I know. I really know that. And I wish—I wish I didn’t frighten you as much as I do. What is it? What’s the matter with you, now?”

“Nothing.” Newboy shook his head.

“I wish I didn’t,” Kid repeated. “The last poem…” Kid began to turn through the galleys. “What did you think of that one, I mean compared to all the rest of them?”

“The one in meter? Well, it isn’t finished. We printed it up to where you broke off. That’s another thing I wanted to query about—”

“How do you like what there is?”

“Frankly, I didn’t think it was as strong as many of the others. When I went back over it the fourth or fifth time, I began to see that the substance of it was probably on its way to a great deal of richness. But the language wasn’t as inventive. Or as clean.”

Kid nodded. “The rhythm of natural speech,” Kid mused. “I had to write it. And it was pretty bad, wasn’t it? No, I don’t think I’ll write anymore. Besides, I’m probably never going to have another book published…?” He raised an eyebrow at Newboy.

Newboy, lips pursed, considered. “I could say that I sincerely don’t believe that should be a consideration. Or that, as I remember it, it was something like eleven years between my first and second book of poems. Or that I think you’re asking for confirmation of something that really doesn’t have anything to do with poetry.”

“What else could you say?”

Newboy’s lips unpursed. “I could say, ‘Yes, possibly you won’t.’”

Kid grinned quickly and went back to correcting.

“It’s very silly to commit yourself to something like that, if you’re going to write or not. If you wrote these, you will write more. And if you promise yourself you won’t, you’ll just be very unhappy when you break the promise. Yes, a good part of me doesn’t like the idea of an artist giving up art. But that is another part of me talking. Believe me.”

Kid’s mind was on Lanya.

He pulled it away, to reflect on: Golding’s Metamorphosis. He’d seen the book on a dozen shelves in a dozen bookstores, picked it up as many times, read the back cover, the first page of the introduction, flipped through three or four pages, unable to read more than three or four lines on each. (The same thing, he realized, had happened with Pilgrimage.) The first half? He’d been unable to read a whole page! Poetry, he thought. If it makes me start lying to a guy like this, I should stop writing it.

Kid corrected the last half-dozen sheets in silence drenched with vision. He flipped them, rattling like dry feathers, together.

He leaned on the couch arm (he breathed gently: but felt breath’s coolness only on the left side of his upper lip) and looked at the paper over his lap. I’ve just corrected the last half-dozen sheets, he thought: his upper arms were bone tired. Pains pulsed in his finger joints. He loosened his grip on the pencil.

The title-page, he noticed now, read:

BRASS

ORCHIDS

BY

He started to smile; the muscles of his mouth blocked it.

Mr. Newboy, gone to the kitchen, returned now with another steaming cup.

“I guess—” the smile broke through—“you better take the ‘by’ off the title page.”

“Ah,” Mr. Newboy raised his chin. “That does bring up a sort of strange subject. I talked to your friend Mr. Loufer. And he told me about—”

“I mean it’s okay,” Kid said. “I think it would be a good idea if it came out with no name. Anonymously.”

“Mr. Loufer said that you’re—rather picturesquely—called ‘the Kid’ by many of your friends?”

“That would look pretty stupid,” Kid said. “‘Poems by the Kid.’ I think it would be better with nothing.” Somewhere beneath the thing inside that made him smile, there was the beginnings of embarrassment. He sighed, still smiling.

Gravely, Mr. Newboy said: “If you really feel that way, I’ll tell Roger. Are you finished looking them over?”

“Yeah.”

“That was quick. How were they?”

“Uh, fine. I mean not that many mistakes.”

“That’s good.”

“Here.”

“Oh, are you sure you wouldn’t like to keep the notebook?”

It was opened back in the middle. Kid lowered the papers to his lap. To avoid the feeling of confusion he let his eyes take the page’s opening lines:

Poetry, fiction, drama—I am interested in the arts of incident only in so far as fiction touches life; oh no, not in any vulgar, autobiographical sense, rather at the level of the most crystalline correspondence. Consider: If an author, passing a mirror, were to see one day not himself but some character of his invention, though he might be surprised, might even question his sanity, he would still have something by which to relate. But suppose, passing on the inside, the character should glance at his mirror and see, not himself but the author, a complete stranger, staring in at him, to whom he has no relation at all, what is this poor creature left

Newboy was saying, “You’re all sure now that you don’t want to write again. But be certain, inspiration will come, arriving like one of Rilke’s angels, so dazzled by its celestial journey it will have completely forgotten the message entrusted to it yet effectively delivering it merely through its marvelous presence—”

“Here!” Kid thrust out galleys and notebook. “Please take it! Please take it all. Maybe…I mean, maybe you’ll want to check something else.” He watched his extended hands sway to his thumping heart.

“All right,” Newboy said. “No, you keep the notebook. You just may want it again.” He took the papers, and hefted his case against his hip. “I’ll take these back to Roger this evening.” The papers rustled down in the case. “I probably won’t be seeing you again. I really don’t know how long the printing will take. I wish I could see the whole project through.” He snapped a last snap. “I’m sure he’ll send me a copy when it’s done—however your mail system works here. Good-bye.” His hand came forward. “I’ve really enjoyed the time we’ve spent together, the talks we’ve had. Do say good-bye to your little friend for me…?”

Kid shook. “Yes, sir. Um…thank you very much.” The notebook was on the floor, one corner over Kid’s bare foot.

Newboy walked to the steps.

“Good-bye,” Kid repeated into the silence.

Newboy nodded, smiled, left.

Kid waited for the disturbing memory to flicker once more. His heart quieted. Suddenly he picked up his and Newboy’s coffee cups and went into the kitchen.

Seconds after he began to rinse them in the sink, he noticed how firm the water pressure was. He ran his forefinger around the crock rim. The water hissed on enamel.

Somebody struck a dissonance on the piano.

Curious, Kid turned off the water. The cups clinked on the sideboard. As he crossed the floor, one of the boards squeaked: he had wanted to be completely quiet.

At the darker end of the auditorium, someone in work clothes stood before the brass innards. The orange construction shoes and the coveralls momentarily recalled the woman on the ladder changing the street signs.

The figure turned and walked to the couch. “’Ey…” A heavy, flattened voice, a slight nod and slighter smile: George Harrison picked up an old Times and lowered himself to the couch, crossed his legs, and opened the tabloid-size paper.

“Hello.” Kid heard faint organ music.

“Y’s’pos’d’ be i’ ’eah?” Harrison looked from behind the paper.

The natural rhythm of English speech; no, Kid thought, it is impossible.

“You sure you supposed to be in here?” George repeated.

“Reverend Taylor brought me down.” (It would be stupid, he decided, even to try.)

“’Cause if you ain’t suppose to be in here, she gonna get mad.” Harrison smiled, a mottled ivory crescent between his lips’ uneven pigment. “Seen you in the bar.”

“That’s right.” Kid grinned. “And you’re in those posters all over town.”

“You seen them?” Harrison put down the paper. “You know, them fellows what make them is a little—” he joggled his hand—“you know?”

Kid nodded.

“They good though. They good guys.” He shook his head, then pointed at the ceiling. “She don’t want no scorpion around here. You sure you’re supposed to be in here. Don’t matter to me, she said okay.”

“I was hungry,” Kid said. “She said I could get something to eat.”

“Oh.” Harrison turned on the couch. His green jumpsuit was open to the waist, over a banlon shirt with a raveled collar. “You come for the service?”

“No.”

“Ain’t no scorpion come to the damn service anyway. What you fellows dress up all that shit for?” Harrison laughed, but shook a finger. “It’s cool, it’s cool.”

Kid looked at the large, lined knuckles and thought of cracks in black earth. “What kind of service is it?”

“I just come because she say I should please come, so, you know, I come here sometimes.” Harrison shook his head. “From Jackson, that’s where—” and something Kid couldn’t follow—“see?”

Though he didn’t, Kid nodded. Then he became curious and asked, “What did you say?”

“In Jackson. You know what Jackson is?”

“Yeah, sure.”

But Harrison was laughing again.

He, Kid reflected, is becoming a god, to see what emerged from his tone of thought. Kid’s inner eye was alive with visions of June.

But George stood, dropping his paper. White leaves opened and fell, one on the couch, several on the floor. “You the one they call the Kid. Yeah?”

Kid was terrified, and felt stupid for not knowing why.

“They talk about you. I heard about you. I heard what they said.” The finger shook again. “You the one that don’t know who he is. I heard them.”

“Nobody around here got anything to do except talk,” Kid said. “You know that? You know what I mean about that?”

The black hand went down against the coverall. The green wrinkled. “So you don’t like it here?”

“Yeah,” Kid said. “I like it…don’t you?”

Harrison nodded, his cheek filled with his tongue. “You ever come over in the Jackson?” The tongue flicked the lips.

“I’ve walked through.”

“You know any black people live over there?”

“No. Well, Paul Fenster…”

“Oh, yeah.”

“But I don’t know where he lives.”

“You come over there and see me sometime, huh?”

“Huh?” Kid was not sure he had caught any of the last words bundled in that voice with a nap longer than velvet.

“I say ‘You come pay a visit on me.’”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” Kid was bewildered. Searching that, he found two questions about things that rhymed which flooding embarrassment blocked. So he narrowed his eyes instead.

“Kid—” she called from the stairs behind him. Then, in a completely different voice: “George—hi there, babes!”

Kid turned. “Hey—!”

George called over him, “Hey there—” and then with a narrowing expression: “Say this ain’t your old man, is it? The guy I been hearing all that talk about over in the bar—well, say! Now the last time I seen your old lady, you know I tell her to bring you down and pay a visit to me, you hear?”

Lanya came down the steps; George walked toward them.

“Now see,” Lanya said, “I haven’t seen you since the park.”

“If I got to invite you twice, I guess I got to invite you twice,” George said, starting up. “Got to go see me the Reverend now, though. One of you drag the other on down, now.” George nodded toward Kid.

“Um…thanks,” Kid said, nodded back.

“See you around,” George said.

“Sure,” said Lanya.

They passed.

George’s response was a falsetto, “Ooooooooo,” which broke and became trundling laughter. Laughter rolled beneath the ceiling like smoke. George mounted into it.

At the bottom of the stairs Lanya said, “Where’ve you been?” and blinked four or five times more than he thought she would have, in silence.

“I…I couldn’t find you this morning. I looked for you. I couldn’t find you. At the commune, or down at the bar. What happened? Where did everybody go?”

Her eyes questioned. Her lips moved on one another, did not open.

“You want some coffee?” he asked out of discomfort, turned and went into the kitchen. “I’ll go get you some coffee. It’s all ready, inside.”

At the urn, he picked up a cup, pulled the lever. “Did you see Tak too? How’d you know I was here?” Amber bubbles burst at the rim; black liquid steamed. “Here you—” he turned and was surprised that she was right behind him.

“Thank you.” She took the cup. Steam flushed before her lowered eyes. “I saw Tak.” She sipped. “He said you might be here. And that Mr. Newboy was looking for you.”

“He just left. He had my book. The galleys, for the poems. The type’s all set.”

She nodded. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“It was a pretty funny day.” He poured coffee for himself, deciding as he did he had already had too much. “Really funny. After you went off, I looked for you. And I couldn’t find you anywhere. I stopped in the john to wash up. When I got down to the camp site, I couldn’t find you. And everybody’d run off.” He put his hand on her shoulder; she smiled faintly. “I got in with some scorpions this afternoon…this evening. That was pretty strange. A guy got shot. We were on the bus, and he was bleeding. And I kept on thinking, what are they going to do with him? Where are they going to take him? There isn’t any doctor around. We even had his arm in a tourniquet. I couldn’t take it. So I just got off the bus. And came here. Because I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except a God-damn pint of wine for breakfast.”

“You ate here?” She looked by both his shoulders. “That’s good.”

“What did you do?”

She was wearing a white blouse, clean but unironed, that he had not seen before. As she walked beneath the bulb, he saw her jeans were new enough to show the crease. “You pick up some clothes this afternoon?” He followed her into the bare auditorium.

“Yesterday. I found them in a closet of the place where I’m staying now.”

“You have been busy, huh? You found a house an’ all?”

“About three days ago.”

“Jesus,” Kid said, “when did you get time to do that? I didn’t think I let you alone long enough to go to the damn bathroom, much less find a house—”

“Kid…” She turned on the word to lean against the sofa arm. In the hall, shrill echoes returned. “Kid,” much more softly, “I haven’t seen you in five days!”

“Huh?” The heel on the floor and the heel in his boot prickled. Prickling rose up his legs, spread about his thighs. “What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean?” She spoke clumsily, breaking through three tones of voice. “Where have you been?” Retreating from the clumsiness, her voice was left only with hurt. “Why did you go away? What did you do all this time?”

Little things clawed between his buttocks, mounted rib by rib, perched on his shoulder to nip at his neck so he had to drop his chin. Lines of perspiration suddenly cooled. “You’re kidding with me, aren’t you? Like with the moons?”

She looked puzzled.

“The night when the moons first came out, and later we were talking about them; you pretended that there had just been one, and that I had been seeing things. You’re fooling with me like that now?”

“No!” She shook her head, stopped it in the middle of a shake. “Oh, no…”

His cheeks felt like pincushions.

“Kid, what happened since the last time you saw me?”

“We woke up, when those sons of bitches were standing around us, right?”

She nodded.

“Then you went away, and I…well, I hung around for a little while, and then I went down to the john to wash up. I guess I took an awful long time. I should have hurried…But there was this guy there, Pepper, a scorpion.” The prickling had left his feet: it felt as though he were being poured full of cold water. It rose behind his knees. “Pepper and me, we went down to the camp site, only it had been abandoned.”

“John and Milly didn’t move the commune till the day after I saw you last; they thought it would be safer.”

“Then we went to Teddy’s to look for you. Only it wasn’t open yet. And I had a lot of wine with Bunny—you know the guy who dances there. I gave him a message for you.”

She nodded. “Yes, he gave it to me…the day before yesterday!”

“No,” he said. “Because I gave it to him this morning.” The water reached his loins, poured into his scrotum; his scrotum shriveled. “Then I went out, and ended up at that department store downtown. That’s where I met the other guys, and we broke into the place. There were people living in there. We got out. But they shot one of the guys. We just got him out of there, on the God-damn bus that happened to be coming along!”

“That happened two nights ago, Kid! Some of the scorpions came into the bar and wanted to know if anybody knew where they could get a doctor. Madame Brown went with them, but she came back in about ten minutes. Everybody was talking about it all yesterday.”

“He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!” The water roared around in Kid’s chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. “I got off the bus, and I came—” He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown.“—came here.” The water reached his eyes (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.

He kept rubbing at his eyes with the other: coffee had slopped over.

He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.

“O, give that here!” She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. “I’m not fooling you!”

His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.

Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. “I’m not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven’t seen you since!”

At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.

“Look, you said Mr. Newboy was here with the galleys. You can’t set type on a whole book overnight, can you?”

“Oh…”

“When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too.”

“Talking about me?” He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.

“About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody’s life.”

“Huh?”

She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.

The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and here was a hard thing over one breast—her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. “Oh, for God’s sakes,” she whispered.

“I’m not fooling you either!” He didn’t sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. “I saw you this morning. I…I thought I saw you this morning.”

“You’ve been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you’re some kind of hero or something.”

“What’d you think?” Her hair brushed his moving chin.

“Shit. That’s what I thought: ‘Shit.’ You want to go off in that direction. Fine. But I don’t feel like getting messed up in anything like that. I really don’t.”

“This afternoon,” he said. “I mean it was by accident I found them. And I didn’t save anybody’s life. That was just…”

“Look at you,” she said, not moving away. “You’re dressing like them; you’re hanging out with them. I mean go on: If that’s what you want, go on. But it’s not my scene. I can’t go there with you.”

“Yeah, but…Hey, look. You: you say you’ve got a house and all. Where are you staying now?”

“Would you mind,” she said softly, “if I didn’t tell you?” but opened her arms and put them around him. “Just for a while?” The harmonica corner cut his chest.

He wondered could she feel the anger inside him, pulsing under her hands. “I,” he said, “saw you this morning.”

She pulled back, all his anger on her face. “Look!” She made fists at her hips. “Either you’re lying to me for some kooky reasons I don’t even want to know about or you’re really crazy, and in either case I shouldn’t have anything to do with you, right? The night before I saw you last, you lost three hours. Now you’ve lost five days. Maybe you really are crazy. I shouldn’t have anything to do with you! That’s rational, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in five days, and, Christ, am I angry at you!”

“Then why the fuck were you looking for me!” He turned and stalked down the hall, a great bubble about to burst inside his ribs.

At the piano, he realized Harrison must have opened the curtains on the low stage. The backdrop—and there were stands with photographer’s floods—showed a painted moon, some seven feet across, and indications around it of trees.

He turned at the apron, surprised again to find her behind him. “Why did you come?”

“Because this is the first time I’ve known where you were. I didn’t know….” She gasped. “I didn’t know if you were all right. You didn’t come back. I thought maybe you were angry at me for something. You used to always come back. And suddenly, for all that time, instead of you, all I got was what people were saying about you. You and the scorpions, you and the scorpions.” Something spent itself in her eyes. The lids lowered on the shadowed green. “Look, so far we haven’t had one of those ‘I’ll-follow-you-anywhere’ relationships. I still haven’t made up my mind if that’s where I want to go. And I just get a little nervous when I find myself thinking I might. That’s all.”

“A week.” He felt his face twist. “What the hell did I do for…five days? When did I…” He reached for her.

Her face crashed against his, hitting his mouth, but she pushed her tongue against his, and was holding tight to the back of his neck. He kept trying to pull her even closer, leaning against the stage.

He loosed one hand to dig between them, till he could pull the harmonica from her blouse pocket. It rattled on the stage behind them.

“You’re not going to hurt anyone,” she said once. “You’re not going to hurt me. I know that. You’re not.”

The hysteria with which she made love to him on that dark stage was first furious, then funny (wondering if someone was going to walk in, and excited by the idea); he lay on his back while she bucked above him, clutching his shoulders, wondering should he feel this way. But the sound she was making that he’d thought was crying cleared to laughter. Her buttocks filled his hands, and he dug between them.

She reared too high, and lost him to the annealing chill. While she reached for him, he rolled her to her side. Legs in the clutch of denim, he crawled down to the sweaty corner of her blouse and pushed his tongue through her salty hair. She lifted a knee to let it fall wide. After she came (he had worked his pants free of one foot) he straddled her, pushed his penis into her again, lowered his belly to her belly, his chest to her chest, his wet face against the crumpled shoulder of her blouse, and began long final strokes, while her arms tightened on his back.

Coming burned his loins (he remembered the spilled coffee) and left him exhausted and still burning (he remembered how it felt after masturbating when all you started off with was a piss-on); exhaustion won. Lakes of sweat cooled around his body. She nodded in the crook of his shoulder, where he knew his arm would numb soon, but didn’t feel like doing anything about it. He slid his hand down his own chest, till his fingers caught in the transverse chain, beneath angular shapes.

Time’s voices in agon? Who wants to hear hunchbacks and spastics haggle? Even if there are no others in concert. We should not be lying here, cooling, half naked, half asleep. A good reason to do it. I am still angry at her. I am still angry. Would she have it I choose scorpions all for negative reasons? Have they been a surround? No: it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory is a moon that gives odd light. It is safe here—

He woke: which was suddenly arriving in that space between the boards and the touch of eyelid against eyelid, the weight of his loose fist on his pelvis and the boards pressing his backside.

She’s gone, he thought, with her harmonica to sit on the couch and play. He listened to the music from the other end of the hall.

But you can’t make that discord on a harmonica.

He opened his eyes and rolled to his side (the batteryless projector clacked onto the floor at the end of the rattling chain) and frowned.

The sound was much further away than he’d thought; and was organ music.

She’s gone…?

Kid stood to pull his pants around his leg.

The harmonica was not on the backdrop curving down over the floor.

He pushed his other foot into his pants, sweaty in blotches. He picked up his vest, his orchid, and walked down the steps at the stage edge. Booted foot and bare left their alternating prints in the dust.

Also, his notebook was not in front of the couch.

At the room’s center, he stopped to swallow something filling his throat. The sound with it was almost a sob.