Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

Upstairs the organ played on. And there were voices, mumbling and growing and diminishing. It was silly to think she was upstairs. He put the orchid in his belt and shrugged up his vest as he climbed the steps.

A dozen black men and women milled from the chapel into the vestibule, from the vestibule into the street. Two women walking together glanced at him curiously. A man in a narrow-brimmed hat smiled at him and vanished. Others looked less friendly. The voices turned and blurred like smoke, or prickled with laughter that melted with the next dozen ambling by the closed office.

“Lovely service, don’t you think…”

“She ain’t gonna talk about all that stuff next time too, is she, ’cause I…”

“Didn’t you think it was a lovely service…”

He stepped among them to leave. Somebody kicked his bare heel twice, but he racked it up to accident and didn’t look. Outside, the evening was purple grey; smoke blunted the facades across the street.

Only a few white people passed through the trapezoid of light across the sidewalk. One, a woman with a flowered scarf tied around her head, followed an older man talking earnestly with a black companion; and a heavy guy, blond, in a shirt with no collar that looked as if it were made of army blanket planted himself before the door, while brown and darker faces passed around him. Now a gaunt girl, with freckles on her tan cheeks and brick-red hair, reached him. The two whispered together, walked into the darkness.

Kid waited by the door, watching the worshippers, listening to the tape. People strolled away. Some voices lingered, till the owners followed their shadows into the night. The dwindling crowd made him feel lost. Maybe he should duck back in to tell Reverend Taylor he was leaving.

Studs bright in scuffed leather, shadows slipping across his shaggy blond stomach, cap pushed back off the yellow brush, Tak Loufer stepped out, looked at Kid with a single highlight in one shadowed eye, and said, “Hey, you still around here? I sent two people over looking for you. But I thought you’d be gone by now.”

5

“What are you here for?”

Tak held up a paper roll. “Completing my poster collection. You been keeping yourself away from us awhile? We were worried about you.”

“Shit!” fell from the residue of anger. “You wanted to suck on my dick some, maybe? Come on. It’s all slicked up for you with pussy juice. You like that, right?”

“Nigger pussy?”

“Huh?”

“Were you screwing a colored girl? And with the clap?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If it wasn’t black meat and a little runny, I’m not interested. Since I had you last time, boy, I’ve gone on to levels of perversion you haven’t even thought about. What’s the matter with you, anyway? You out of it again? Why don’t you come up and tell me about it while I get drunk.”

“Aw, shit…” Not wanting to, Kid put his hands in his pocket and his head down in the night’s chalky stench; they walked together to the curb.

“Your girlfriend find you?”

Kid grunted.

“Did you have a fight or something? The last few times I spoke to her, I got the impression she was sort of getting ready for one.”

“Maybe we did,” Kid said. “I don’t know.”

“Ah, one of those?”

“She said you saw me get off a bus?”

“Yeah. Earlier this evening. I was down at the corner. I was going to call you, but you turned first, down toward here.”

“Oh.”

A light moved in a window.

Fire, Kid thought. The flickering made him uneasy. He tried to imagine the whole block, the church and the buildings around it, conflagrated.

“I think somebody lives there,” Tak said. “It’s just candles.” They stepped off the curb.

“Where are we?” Kid asked when they stepped up again. “I mean, Tak…what is this place? What happened here? How did it get like this?”

“A good question,” Tak answered over tapping boot heels. “A very good one. For a while, I thought it was international spies—I mean, maybe the whole city here was just an experiment, a sort of test-out plan to destroy the entire country. Maybe the world.”

“You think it’s something like that?”

“No. But it’s comforting to consider all this the result of something organized. On the other hand, it could just be another ecological catastrophe. Maybe somebody filled in our swamp by mistake.”

“What swamp?”

“By every big city there’s always some sort of large swamp nearby, usually of about the same area. It keeps the smog down, supplies most of the oxygen, and half a dozen other absolutely essential things. New York has the Jersey Flats, San Francisco, the whole muddled-out Oakland edge of the bay. You fill the swamp in, the smog goes up, the sewage problem gets out of hand, and the city becomes unlivable. No way to avoid it. I think it’s fair to say most people would find this unlivable.”

Kid sniffed. “We sure got enough smog.” The blades at his belt tickled the hair on his inner forearm. “Where’s our swamp?”

“Obviously you’ve never taken the ride out past Holland Lake.”

Kid shrugged in his bindings. “That’s true.” The chain that wrapped him had worked down so that it tugged across the back of his left hip at every other step. He reached under his vest and moved it with his thumb. “Do you think that’s what happened to Bellona?” Someday I’ll die, turned irrelevantly through his mind: Death and artichokes. Heaviness filled his ribs; he rubbed his chest for the reassuring systolic and diastolic thumps. Not that I really think it might stop, he thought: only that it hasn’t just yet. Sometimes (he thought), I wish I couldn’t feel it. (Someday, it will stop.)

“Actually,” Tak was saying, “I suspect the whole thing is science fiction.”

“Huh? You mean a time-warp, or a parallel universe?”

“No, just…well, science fiction. Only real. It follows all the conventions.”

“Spaceships, ray-guns, going faster than light? I used to read the stuff, but I haven’t seen anything like that around here.”

“Bet you don’t read the new, good stuff. Let’s see: the Three Conventions of science fiction—” Tak wiped his forehead with his leather sleeve. (Kid thought, inanely: He’s polishing his brain.) “First: A single man can change the course of a whole world: Look at Calkins, look at George—look at you! Second: The only measure of intelligence or genius is its linear and practical application: In a landscape like this, what other kind do we even allow to visit? Three: The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long enough to have an adventure. Here in Bellona—”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t read more of the stuff than I do,” Kid said. He had had his fill of criticism with Newboy; the noise was no longer comforting. “Wasn’t there a street lamp working on this block?”

Tak bulled out the end of his sentence: “—in Bellona you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by yourself, or get your friends to.”

“It’s funny, not that many people have that much.”

“A comment on the paucity of our imaginations—none at all on the wonders here for the taking. No—it’s a comment on the limits of the particular mind the city encourages. Who wants to be as lonely as the acquisition of all those objects would make them? Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn something from that.”

“You’ve got more than practically anybody else I know,” Kid said.

“Then you know very few people.”

“Except Mr. Calkins.” Kid thought about the Richards. “And I don’t know him.” But Tak had seen Mr. Newboy earlier. Tak would know his book was set.

“There’s a whole range between,” Tak said. “You’ve limited your acquaintances to the people who don’t want very much. Essentially a religious choice, I suppose. All things considered, I’d say it was a wise one. There are a thousand people—perhaps—in this city.”

“I did meet one family who—”

“There are many others. And most of them, as Paul Fenster keeps reminding us, are black.”

“George Harrison just told me I should come over and visit him in Jackson.”

Tak beat the darkness with his poster. “There! The whole thing. Paul will tell you, but George will show you, if you give him half a chance.” Now Loufer sighed. “I’m afraid I’m still pretty much a verbal type. I’d just as soon be told.”

“And look at posters.”

“And read books. Preferably science fiction. But like I say, Bellona is terribly hospitable. You can have your fantasy and…well, besides eating it too, you can also feel just a bit less like you’re depriving anyone else of theirs. Home again.”

Kid looked around with blunt thumbs of darkness on his eyes. “We are? Tak, didn’t there used to be a street light working at the end of your block?”

“Went out a few days ago. This way. Watch out for the steps. There’s all sorts of junk around.”

Some of it rolled beneath Kid’s flexible leather sole. Soft darkness turned hard. The echo from the sound of breath and footsteps changed timbre.

They went through the hall, went downstairs, went up.

“First time you were up here,” Tak laughed, “I made you park your weapon at the door. Boy, I don’t know how some people put up with me.”

The roof door opened on distant, flesh-colored light.

Where the streets had been hopelessly black, the roof was dusted with nightlight.

Like two giant hieroglyphs, over-printed and out of register, the bridge’s suspension cables rose to twin cusps, then dropped in smoke. No more than one row of buildings away, night water took up the glitter of both street lamps and redder quavering fires. “Hey, it’s so close…”

Before him, above the city, shapes unfurled out over the water. He could not see the far shore. It could even have been a sea he gazed at, save for the bridge…Above, sky-bits seemed to clear, their clarity, however, unconfirmed by stars.

“How come it’s so close?” He turned from the wall, as the light came on in the shack.

Tak had already gone inside.

Kid looked at the warehouses, at the waters between. Joy, sudden and insistent, twisted the muscles of his mouth toward laughter. But he held the sound in with tiny pantings. What swelled inside was made of light. It burst—he blinked and the backs of his lids were blinding—and left a great wave of trust washing inside. Not that I trust that trust for a moment, he thought, grinning. But it was there, and pleasant. He went into the shack. “It’s…it’s so clear tonight.”

A tiny solitaire of sadness gleamed in the velvet folds of good feeling.

“Last time I was up here, Lanya was with me.”

Tak just grunted and turned from his desk. “Have some brandy.” But he smiled.

Kid took the glass and sat on the hard bed. Now Tak unrolled the poster:

George Harrison as the moon.

“You got all three now.” Kid sipped, with hunched shoulders.

George in cycle drag was still above the door.

George in the forest had replaced the Germanic youth.

Tak rolled his chair to the wall and climbed onto the green cushion. Corner by corner he tugged loose “Spanish boy on the rocks.” “Hand me the staple gun?”

The first poster swayed to the floor.

Ch-klack, ch-klack, ch-klack, ch-klack, the new moon replaced it.

Kid sat down again and regarded the three aspects of George over the rim of his glass while Tak got down from the chair. “I…” Kid’s voice sounded hollow and made something deep in his ear tickle so that he grinned. “You know, I lost five days?” He slid his fingers around the glass till the nubs butted.

“Where—” Tak put down the stapler, took up the bottle and leaned back against the desk, hands locked on the green neck; the base put a crease in his stomach—“or would you be telling me if you knew—did you lose them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You look pleased enough about it.”

Kid grunted. “A day now. It takes about as long as an hour used to when I was thirteen or fourteen.”

“And a year takes about as long as a month. Oh yes, I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”

“Most of the time in my life is spent lying around getting ready to fall asleep.”

“That one has been mentioned to me before, but I’m not conscious of it myself.”

“Maybe, somehow, for the last few days, I’ve just missed out on the sleeping part. There’s hardly any change in light around here from morning to evening anyway.”

“You mean the last five days are the ones you can’t remember?”

“Yeah, what have I been up to, anyway? Lanya…said everybody was talking about it.”

“Not everybody. But enough, I suppose.”

“What were they saying?”

“If you lost those days, I can see why you’d be interested.”

“I’d just like to know what I’ve been doing.”

Brandy splashed inside the bottle to Tak’s laughter. “Maybe you’ve traded the last five days for your name. Quick, tell me: Who are you?”

“No.” Kid hunched his shoulders more. The feeling that he was being played with wobbled like an unsteady ball on some slanted rim, rolled into the velvet pouch. “I don’t know that either.”

“Oh.” Tak drank from the bottle, set it back on his belly. “Well, I thought it was worth a try. I suspect it isn’t something to be harped on.” The brandy swayed. “What have you been doing for the last week? Let me see.”

“I know I was with the scorpions—I met this guy named Pepper. And he turned me on to this department store they were going to try and…rip off, I guess.”

“So far I’m with you. There was supposed to have been some shooting there? You were supposed to have saved one guy by fighting off somebody with a gun, bare-handed. You were supposed to have busted a mirror over the head of another guy who acted up with you—”

“Under his chin.”

“That’s it. Copperhead told me about that himself. And then when another cat named Siam got shot—”

“Was that his name?”

“—when Siam got shot, you pulled him off the street and got him into the bus.”

“And you saw me get out of that bus earlier this evening.”

“Copperhead told me about it a couple of days back.”

“Only it happened to me this afternoon, Goddamn it!” Ashamed, he blinked at his hands. “That’s all they said happened? I mean there wasn’t anything else?”

“Sounds to me like enough.”

“What happened to Siam?”

Tak shrugged. Brandy splashed. “Somebody went to see about him, I remember, from the bar.”

“Madame Brown?”

“I think that’s who it was. But I haven’t heard anything else. For somebody who doesn’t remember where he’s been, you seem to know as much about it as I do.” Tak reached over, dragged the chair to the desk, and sat. He started to put the bottle on the desk, but halted to take a final drink. “You do remember all the things I just told you about actually happening?”

Kid nodded at his lap. “I’ve just lost the time, then. I mean, I’ve lost days before—thought it was Thursday when it was Friday.”

“All we thought, really, was that you’d deserted us to become a full-fledged scorpion. It was cool with me. You sure look like that’s what happened. You got your lights and everything.”

Kid focused on the lensed ball hanging against his stomach. “It doesn’t work. It needs a new battery.”

“Just a second.” Tak opened a desk drawer. “Here you go.” He tossed.

Kid caught it in both hands: bunched lightning on red and blue.

“Turn yourself on sometime.”

“Thanks.” Wanting to talk longer, he put the battery in his pocket, noting the cloth was frayed enough at the bottom seam to feel flesh through it with his fingers. “Tak, you really think you got the city figured out?”

“Me?”

“You were telling me how it follows those conventions—”

Tak laughed, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. “No, not me. I don’t understand anything about it. I’m a God-damn engineer. I take a plug; I put it in one socket; and it works. I put it in another one; and it doesn’t. I go into an office building and one elevator works, and only the lights on the top floor. That’s impossible, by anything I know about. I go down a street: buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They’re still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backward here. Or sideways. But that’s impossible too. I make my forage trips out to the warehouses, or some of the stores, and sometimes I can get in, and sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I have trouble, and sometimes I don’t; and sometimes I take my shopping bag into a store and clear off a shelf of canned goods, and come back to that same store again a week later—I mean I think it’s the same damn store—and that shelf is just as full as the first time I saw it. To my mind, that’s also impossible.”

“Sometimes the morning light starts over here,” Kid said. “Sometimes it starts over there.”

“Who told you about that?”

“You did. First day I got here.”

“Oh.” Tak lifted the bottle. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. You got a pretty good memory for some things.”

“I remember lots of things: Some of it, so sharp it…hurts sometimes. All this fog, all this smoke—sometimes it’ll be sharper and clearer than what you see in front of you. And the rest of it—” he looked up again and noticed Loufer’s discomfort—“just isn’t there.” Kid laughed, which made Loufer chew harder on what was in the back of his mouth. “Why do you stay in Bellona, Tak?”

“I gather your friend Ernest Newboy is leaving tomorrow. I don’t know. Why do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, considering what you’ve been going through, maybe Bellona isn’t the best place for you.” Tak leaned forward, stretching the bottle out.

“Oh,” Kid said. “Here.” He held out his glass; Tak refilled it.

“You were talking about the first night I met you. Remember back then, I asked you why you’d come here, and you said you had a purpose for coming?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me what it is.”

And once, in South Dakota, he had dropped a quarter into a pool that turned out to be much deeper than he’d thought. He had watched the coin spin and dull and vanish beyond the edging of leaves. Now a thought vanished from his mind, and the memory of the lost quarter was all he had to describe the vanishing. “I…I don’t know!” Kid laughed and pondered all the other things he might do; laughing seemed best. “I don’t…remember! Yeah, I know I had a reason for coming here. But I’ll be God damned if I can tell you what it was!” He leaned back, then forward, caught the brandy that was about to spill his glass in his mouth, and gulped it. “I really can’t. It must have been…” He looked at the ceiling, suspending his breath for recollection. “I can’t remember…remember that, either!”

Tak was smiling.

“You know, I had it with me; I mean, the reason.” Kid swung out his hands. “I was carrying it around, in the back of my head, you know? Like on a back shelf? And then I just reached for it, to take it down, only I guess I knocked it over. I saw it fall off and disappear. I’m hunting around in my mind, but I can’t…find it.” He stopped laughing long enough to feel the annoyance that had begun to grow. “Bellona’s not a bad place for me.” Stated reasonably and smilingly, it was still annoyance. “I mean, I got a girlfriend; I’ve met all sorts of people, some pretty nice—”

“Some not so nice?”

“Well, you learn. And I got a book. Brass Orchids, you know, my poems; it’s all finished! They got galleys on it.”

Tak still smiled, nodding.

“And you say people are talking about me like I’d done something great. Leave? You think I’m not going to go mad in some other city? There I might not have all these extras.” Kid put the glass down, punched the air, and leaned back on the wall. “I…like it here? No. I want to see some sun. Sometimes I want to reach up and peel off all that sky. It looks like the cardboard they make egg crates out of, you know? Just peel it, in great, flapping strips. I wonder where Lanya went.” He frowned. “You know, maybe I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. And the book is finished with; I mean it’s all written and in type; and I don’t want to do anymore.” He turned his fist on his forefinger. “And even if they say I’m a hero, I didn’t really do anything.” He looked at the posters: just pictures, yet thinking that opened both their mocking and their harrowing resonances; he looked away. “Something isn’t…finished here. No.” The denial made him smile. “It’s me. At least part has to do with me. Or maybe George. Or June…It would almost look like everything was finished, wouldn’t it? And maybe it’s time to leave? But that’s what lets me know I shouldn’t. Because there’re no distractions. I can look in and see. There’s so much I don’t know.” The laughter filled his mouth, but when he let it out, it was only breath from a smile. “Hey, you want to blow me? I mean…if you’d like to, I’d like it.”

Tak frowned, put his head to the side. But before he spoke, his own rough laugh exploded: “You are a nervy bastard!”

“I don’t mean just suck my dick. I’d make love with you. I’ve done it before, with guys.”

“I never doubted it a minute.” Tak laughed again. “And no, I don’t want to suck your dick, pussy or no. Where do you come off with that idea?”

But something inside had released. Kid yawned hugely and explained, with the end of it muddling his words, “Lanya said I should go to bed with you again; she thought you’d like it.”

“Did she, now?”

“But I said you were only interested in first tastes.” Looking at Loufer, he suddenly realized behind the blond jocularity there was embarrassment, so looked at his lap again. “I guess I was…” right was mauled by another yawn.

“Oh, look. Why don’t you just lie down and go to sleep. What I want to do is drink about three more shots of brandy and read a God-damn book or something.”

“Sure.” Kid lay belly down on the pallet, and jiggled around so the chains and prisms and projector did not bite his chest.

Tak shook his head, turned around in his chair, and stretched for the second shelf over the desk. A book fell. Tak sighed.

Kid grinned and moved his mouth down into the crook of his arm.

Tak drank some more brandy, folded his arms on the desk and began to read.

Kid looked for the sadness again, but it was now neatly invisible among dark folds. Hasn’t turned a page for ten minutes, was his last amused thought before he closed his eyes and—

“Hey.”

Kid, lying on his back, grunted, “Huh?”

Tak scratched his naked shoulder and looked perturbed. Kid thought: Now he’s going to—?

“I’m afraid I gotta kick you out.”

“Oh…” Kid squinted and stretched, in muffled and mechanical protest. “Yeah, sure.” Behind the bamboo curtains were streaks of light.

“I mean a friend of mine came over,” Tak explained, “and we’d sort of like…”

“Oh, yeah…” Kid closed his eyes tight as he could, opened them, and sat up while the chains rattled down his chest, and blinked:

Black, perhaps fifteen, in jeans, sneakers, and a dirty white shirt, the boy stood by the door, blinking on balls of red glass.

Kid’s back snarled with chills; he made himself smile. From some other time came the prepared thought: Such distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself. And the autonomic nerves, habituated to terror, nearly made him scream. He kept smiling, nodded, got groggily to his feet. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll be on my way. Thanks for letting me crash.”

Passing through the doorway, he had to close his eyes, again, tight as possible, then look, again, hopeful that the crimson would vanish for brown and white. They’ll think I’m still half asleep! he hoped, hoped desperately, his boot scraping the roof’s tarpaper. Morning was the color of dirty toweling. He left it for the dark stair. Shaking his head, he tried not to be afraid, so thought: Ousted for someone younger and prettier, wouldn’t you know. Well—beneath the lids the eyes were glass and red! He reached a landing, swung round it, and remembered the nervous woman with skirts always far too long for the season, who had been his math instructor his first term at Columbia: “A true proposition,” she had explained, rubbing chalky fingertips hard on one another, “implies only other true propositions. A false one can imply, well, anything—true, false, it doesn’t matter. Anything at all. Anything…” As if the absurd gave her comfort, her perpetual tone of hysteria had softened momentarily. She left before the term’s completion. He hadn’t, damn it!

Nine flights down he walked the warm hall. Twelve steps up? Thirteen he counted this time, stubbing his toe on the top one.

Kid came out on the dawn-dim porch hung with hooks and coiled with smoke. He jumped from the platform, still groggy, still blinking, still filled with the terror which there was no other way to deal with save laughter. After all, he thought, ambling toward the corner, if this burning can go on forever, if besides the moon there really is a George, if Tak kicks me out for a glass-eyed spade, if days can disappear like pocketed dollars, then there is no telling. Or only the telling, but no reasoning. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets where the material was already fraying, and turned the corner.

Between the warehouses, clearing and fading in moving smoke, the bridge rose and swung out into oblivion. Among the consorted fragments of his curiosity, the thought remained: I should have at least made him give me a cup of coffee before I went. He cleared his sticky throat, and turned, expecting the suspension cables any moment to fade forever, while he (forever?) wandered the smelly waterfront that somehow never actually opened on water.

This wide avenue had to lead onto the bridge.

Kid followed it for two blocks around a dark official building. Then, beyond a twist of figure-eights and cloverleaves, the road rolled out between the suspensors, over the river.

He could only see as far as the start of the second span. The mist, among folds and tendrils, condensed the limits of vision. Foggy dawns should be chill and damp. This one was grit dry, tickled the back of his arms and the skin beneath his neck with something only a breath off body temperature. He walked up the edge of the road, Thinking: There are no cars, I could run down the middle. Suddenly he laughed loudly (swallowing phlegm caught there in the night) and ran forward, waving his arms, yelling.

The city absorbed the sound, returned no echoes.

After thirty yards he was tired, so he trudged and panted in the thick, dry air. Maybe all these roads just go on, he theorized, and the bridge keeps hanging there. Hell, I’ve only been going ten minutes. He walked beneath several overpasses. He started to run again, coming around a curve to the bridge’s actual entrance.

The roads’ lines between the cables began a dozen perspective V’s, their single vertex lopped by fog. Slowly, wonderingly, he started across toward the invisible shore. Once he went to the rail and looked over through the smoke to the water. He looked up through girders and cables past the walkway toward the stanchion tower. What am I doing here? he thought, and looked again into the fog.

The car was back among the underpasses half a minute while its motor got louder. Maroon, blunt, and twenty years old, it swung out onto the gridded macadam; as it growled by, a man in the back seat turned, smiled, waved.

“Hey!” Kid called, and waved after him.

The car did not slow. But the man gestured again through the back windshield.

“Mr. Newboy!” Kid took six running steps and shouted: “Good-bye! Good-bye, Mr. Newboy!”

The car diminished between the grills of cable, hit the smoke, and sank like a weight on loose cotton. A moment later—too soon, from his own recollection of the bridge crossed by foot—the sound of the motor ceased.

What was that sound? Kid had thought it was some wind storm very far away. But it was the air rushing in the cavern of his mouth. Goodbye, Mr. Ernest Newboy, and added with the same good will, you’re a tin Hindenburg, a gassy Nautilus, a coward to the marrow of each metatarsal. Though it would embarrass you to Hollywood and Hell, I hope we meet again. I like you, you insincere old faggot; underneath it all, you probably like me. Kid turned and looked at the shrouded city, like something crusty under smoke, its streets stuck blind in it, its colors pearled and pasteled; so much distance was implied in the limited sight.

I could leave this vague, vague city…

But, holding all his humor in, he turned back toward the underpass. Now and again his face struck into the grotesque. Where is this city’s center? he wondered, and walked, left leg a little stiff, while buildings rose, again, to receive him.

Free of name and purpose, what do I gain? I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands. The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night. Reality? The only moment I ever came close to it was when, in the moonless New Mexican desert, I looked up at the prickling stars on that hallowed, hollowed dark. Day? It is beautiful there, true, fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but it is distorted as distance itself, the real all masked by pale diffraction.

Buildings, bony and cluttered with ornament, hulled with stone at their different heights: window, lintel, cornice, and sill patterned the dozen planes. Billows brushed down them, sweeping at dusts they were too insubstantial to move, settled to the pavement and erupted in slow explosions he could see two blocks ahead—but, when he reached, had disappeared.

I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable. And wondered why loneliness in him was almost always a sexual feeling. He stepped off the sidewalk and kept along the loose line of old cars—nothing parked on this block later than 1968—thinking: What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations, are too unfixed to hold it in, so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape. He had a momentary image of all these walls on pivots controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after he had passed, they might suddenly swing to face another direction, parting at this corner, joining at that one, like a great maze—forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable…

When the heavy man ran into the street, Kid first recognized the green-drab wool shirt with no collar. Lumbering from the alley sidewalk, he saw Kid, headed for him. The man had been one of the white men at the church last night.