Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Um-hm.” Lanya nodded.

Kid turned another page of etched perspective imploded on itself and put back together inside out. Lanya bent to look now.

“This!” Denny said.

They both looked. And Kid took the book from Lanya and handed it back to Denny. (“That’s all right,” Denny said. “She can look at it,” ignoring Kid’s gesture.) He showed them a silver box. “Ain’t this a neat radio? It’s got AM and FM and it even says Short Wave.” It was the size of a box of kitchen matches. “And all sorts of other dials.”

“I wonder if they do anything,” Lanya said.

“That one says the ‘volume’,” Denny explained. “The button’s there, that one is the AFC thing so it doesn’t slide around. But you can’t tell around here because radios don’t work here anymore.”

“Like the shirts,” she said. “When you go someplace else, you’ll have something nice.”

“If we go someplace else,” Denny considered, “I’ll probably leave all this stuff here. You can get lots of nice things anywhere around. You just pick it up.”

“I meant somewhere outside the…” Kid watched her realize that Denny had not.

Suddenly she touched the radio. “It isn’t square!” she announced. The black and metal box was trapezoidal. She flattened her hands to the sides of it. “It is beautiful,” she said in the voice of someone admitting that a puzzle was still insoluble. (What was the name of his roommate in Delaware who had had so much trouble with the paper on mathematical induction? Another thing he couldn’t remember…and was sad at his ruined memory and happy for Lanya.) “It really is…just lovely.”

Kid leaned close to her and kneaded the inside of his thighs. He’d laid the Escher against his calf. The corner of the book nicked; he didn’t move it.

“You seen these pictures too?” Denny brought out another paper-covered book.

Lanya said: “Let me see.”

She turned over the first page and frowned.

“…Um, did Boucher ever paint religious pictures?” Kid ventured.

“Not,” Lanya said, “for three-dimensional, laminated-plastic dioramas.”

“I think 3-D pictures are great,” Denny said, while Kid felt vaguely embarrassed.

“These are strange.” Lanya turned another page.

A crowned woman in blue stood one foot on a crescent moon while below her two naked men cowered in a rowboat. Ghosts of the same picture at other angles haunted the striated plastic.

“What’s the next…” Lanya asked.

A man who looked like a classical Jesus, in a loincloth, limped on a single crutch, one hand, with stigma, extended.

“Spanish…?” she mused.

“Puerto Rican,” Kid suggested.

Lanya glanced at him. “It doesn’t have any writing anywhere.”

A woman, perhaps the virgin, as likely an empress, rode on a tiger. “The rocks and moss and water in the background, that’s lifted from da Vinci.” Lanya turned to the next. “These are really…” She closed the book to a white cover on which was a crowned and bleeding heart behind a cross. “You can’t tell me those are Christian. Did you find this in somebody’s house too?”

“In a store,” Denny said. He was hunting at the edge of the blanket again. “And these.”

In his cupped hands were three glass cubes set with glittering stones.

“Dice?” Kid asked.

“I had four of them,” Denny said. “One broke.” He rolled them against Lanya’s leg.

Three, two, and six: counting the top numbers was difficult because of pips on other faces.

“You’re really into collecting pretty things.” Lanya picked up a cube.

Denny sat back against the wall and hugged his knees.

“Um-hum.”

“Me too.” She watched him. “Only I leave them where I find them. Like buildings. Or trees. Or paintings in museums.”

“You just—” Denny let his knees fall open—“notice where they are; and go back and look at them?”

She nodded.

Denny tangled his fists in the blanket between his feet.

“But you don’t have to do it that way here. You can just take what you want. Well, maybe not the trees and the buildings. But the paintings, if you find one you like, you just carry it with you. Shit, you can go live in a fuckin’ building if you like it! In front of the fuckin’ tree!”

“No.” Lanya let her thin back bend. “I’m into collecting pretty, useful objects. Yours are just pretty.”

“Huh?”

“But if they’re supposed to stay useful, I have to leave them where they are.”

“You think there’s something wrong with taking that stuff?”

“No…of course not. As long as you didn’t take it from somebody.”

“Well it must have belonged to somebody once.”

“Do you think there’s something wrong with taking it?”

“Shit.” Denny grinned. “Nobody’s gonna catch me. You like taking stuff?”

“It’s not—”

“Say,” Denny came to his knees. “You ever hustle?”

“Huh?” Lanya recovered from her surprise with an unsteady grin. “I beg your pardon.”

“I mean take money for going to bed with somebody.”

“No, I certainly haven’t.”

“Denny has, I bet,” Kid said.

“Yeah, sure,” Denny said. “But I just wanted to know. About you.”

Her amusement faltered toward curiosity. “Why?”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know…perhaps.” She laughed again and took his knee in her hands. “Are you planning to set me up in business now? There isn’t any business here.”

Denny giggled. “That’s not what I meant.” Suddenly he picked up the plastic box, opened the lid, tossed.

“Hey!” Lanya shrieked, and scrambled back under the cubes of colored wood.

Denny picked up a fallen cube and threw it at her.

“Oh, cut that out—”

He threw another one and laughed.

“Damn it—”

Scowling, she picked up a handful and flung them back, hard. He ducked: they clicked the wall.

She hurled another that hit his head.

“Ahh…!” He flung one back.

She laughed and threw two more, one with the left hand and one with the right. Both hit. Denny rolled away in hysterics and scrambled after more gaming pieces.

“You’re gonna lose the…” Kid started. Then he stretched across the front edge of the loft to keep the pieces from rolling over. Denny’s laughter bobbed between octaves. Kid thought, His voice hasn’t even finished changing.

Lanya was laughing too, almost so hard she couldn’t throw.

A cube hit Kid’s hip. He knocked it back onto the blanket. Another went over his shoulder, clattering to the floor. He watched them turn and duck and toss and wished they would throw pieces at him. After a while they did.

He threw them back, tried to guard the edge, gave up, by now laughing himself, till it hurt beneath his sternum, and couldn’t stop laughing, so hurled the bright cubes with gold p’s, q’s, k’s, and r’s.

“It’s not fair!” Lanya cried against Kid’s arm, then laughed again, when they had made him abandon the loft edge.

“Just ’cause you throw so hard!” Cube in hand, Denny ducked first left, then right.

“Come on…now…” Kid panted, and couldn’t laugh anymore.

Denny looked over the edge. “There’re a lot of them on the floor.”

Lanya pulled back, threw another. It deflected from Denny’s thigh. She ducked behind Kid.

Denny glanced back. “There goes another one.”

Lanya looked out tentatively. “Maybe we better go down and pick them up.”

Frowning, Denny turned back for the box. “Yeah…” He stopped to place the shirts and books and the glass dice in the corner. Koth regarded the hoard from his day-glo poster.

A shirt casing had gotten torn.

“Let’s go down,” Kid said.

Lanya followed him on the ladder.

They picked up cubes. When Denny came down, she threw one at him as he stepped to the floor.

“Hey, don’t—” Denny said, because the cube went off into the junk beneath the platform.

“I’m sorry!” Lanya snickered again. “Here, let me help.” She followed him into the leaning tools, piled chairs, cartons. She held back an ironing board while Denny dropped down. “Got it…”

She came over with the box, and held it for Kid to put in his handful. While he fingered them clumsily into place, she asked, “Have you ever taken money for having sex with somebody?”

“Yes.”

“Men and women?”

One cube stuck against another; Kid pressed, and another jumped out of the matrix. “Just men.”

“Maybe I should try it,” she said after a moment. “Everybody thinks about it.”

“Why?” Kid stopped for another cube by his foot.

“And maybe you’ve just made a good point.”

When Kid stood to place the cube, she added:

“But that wouldn’t stop me.”

She snapped the lid and turned toward Denny.

Kid grinned, watching her backbone like an arrow into her buttocks’ heart. I do not know, he thought, what goes on inside her. All I’m sure is it’s very different from what it looks like is going on.

“There’re still some up top.” She started up the ladder.

“I don’t see anymore here.” Kid started behind her.

“Hey—!” Denny said.

Then something locked around Kid’s neck, scraped his sides, and hung on.

“Fuck, what the—”

“Carry me!” Denny shouted, clinging. “Go ahead, carry me on up.”

“Fuck you!” Kid shouted, sagging on his grip. He tried to shake the boy loose. “Don’t choke me to death, you stupid…bastard!” He hauled up another rung.

Lanya crouched on the ledge. “You’ll drop him—”

Kid hauled up one more. “Get on up there, cocksucker!”

Lanya was tugging at Denny’s arm.

Kid tried to heave Denny up.

“Hey—!”

Kid felt Denny slipping. Bare feet pawed his hip. Then something scrambled over his head. “Hey,” Denny repeated in a different voice. He tugged at Kid’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

Lanya sat beside him, slapping first her thighs and then her stomach, once more helpless with laughter.

“Fuck you.” Kid crouched on the loft edge. As he leaned forward, something hissed across his chest.

“Hey, my chain!”

“What?” Denny pushed himself backward, pulling the blankets from the board. He reached, without looking, for his own anklet.

Kid wondered if that was what had scraped so at his side.

Lanya watched, her lips apart.

“My chain,” Kid repeated; he turned to sit on the edge of the loft, and looked down. The end, dangling from his foot, swung inches above the floor. He reached down to pull it up. “It broke this morning…somebody broke it.”

“Who?” Lanya asked.

“Somebody broke it. I tried to fix it, but I knew it probably wouldn’t hold.”

With two fingers he followed it across his shoulder. The break was at the same link. He pulled the ends together.

“Wait a second,” Lanya said. “You don’t have any nails. Let me look.” She crouched before Kid, so close her hair tickled his chest. How can she see, he wondered. “I just about got it.”

She did something with her teeth.

“Hey…?” Kid asked.

“There,” and pushed herself backward.

Behind Lanya, Denny asked now, “Who broke it?” Denny lay his foot on Lanya’s knee. He put down the box, and brought his arms around her stomach, pulled her to him, laid an arm along hers.

“Don’t those get in your way?” She glanced over Denny’s leg at his dog-chained ankle. “Sexy, I suppose.”

“Who?” Denny repeated his question.

“I don’t know,” Kid said. “I really don’t.”

He fingered for the weak link. Part of it was the dimness, but he doubted he could find that link now even in full light. He tugged, first here, then there. “You really fixed it?”

Lanya, her shoulder under Denny’s chin, bit her lip to retain laughter. The words “…in time,” fell through his head, and he was unsure what they referred to. I’ve found something, he thought, in time. Who needs monasteries? He laughed out loud for Lanya’s caged humor.

She let go Denny, and picked up the box, looking about her legs to see if anymore pieces had fallen out.

A cube gnawed the side of Kid’s foot. “Here!”

Lanya recovered herself to hold out the box.

Kid tossed the cube in. She put the box on her thigh to fit the cube in place.

“You really think you’re a funny little cocksucker, huh?” Kid stood up, crouched, moved forward. His head tapped the ceiling. Not hard, but he staggered. “Yeah?” He crouched again, turning toward Denny and rubbing his groin. “Look at you. You suck a nice dick. You give some good head, what do you think that makes you?” He nudged Lanya with his elbow. The cubes rattled; she looked up. “Yeah, I like his tongue up my ass. But you think that makes you anything more than lukewarm shit—Hey, look at Denny!” Kid pointed between Denny’s legs. “See, I do like that and he’s got a hard-on already.” He sat down and smiled. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Now?” Lanya asked.

“Yeah, now!”

Denny crawled over to look in the box. “We got all the pieces.” He sighed.

“Um-hm,” she said quietly, and closed the lid.

Denny put the box in the corner. Kid pulled out his vest and put it on.

Lanya sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. Kid could not decide if her expression were pensive or absent. “Come on.” He tossed her blouse, and did not wait to see what she did with it, but reached for his pants.

“Did everybody leave the house?” Lanya asked.

“It sure is quiet.” Denny said.

Kid looked back.

Lanya pushed another button through its hole. The blouse tails lay a-tangle in her lap.

Denny stooped listening, his cock, finally, lowering.

“I’m hungry,” Kid said. “I haven’t done anything but fuck for twenty-four hours: you, him, his girlfriend—”

“You’re a busy—” Lanya pulled on her jeans—“son of a bitch.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“—him, then you again.” The two hooks came through the belt. “Jesus!” He looked up.

Denny said: “It sure is quiet. Maybe everybody went out.”

“That’d be nice,” Lanya said.

“Do you guys keep food in the house?” Kid asked.

“Not very long.” Denny tossed Kid his projector.

Lanya started down first. She held the laces of her tennis shoes in her teeth. “I can’t carry them and climb too,” she had to say three times before they understood.

While Denny dropped over the edge, Kid turned to get the orchid.

The light around the window shade was neon orange. As he picked up the clustered blades, red gleamings poured down the edges. Kid frowned and backed to the ladder.

In the hallway, Lanya asked, “Has the smoke cleared up outside?” The window in the hall door was filled with light like bloody sunrise.

“I guess they all have gone out.” Denny looked in another room.

“Do you think maybe it is clearing off?” Lanya asked. “Let’s go outside and see.”

Kid followed them to the front door.

Lanya opened it and went down the steps. “There’re still clouds all over the sky.” She reached the sidewalk, turned around, looking up—and screamed.

While Kid and Denny hurried down, the screaming lost voice and became just expelled air.

On the sidewalk, they turned to look up in the direction she stared:

From the edge of the sidewalk, three-quarters of the disk was visible above the houses. The clouds dulled it enough to squint at, but it went up, covering the roofs, and up, and up, and up. What they could see of it filled half the visible sky. And, Kid realized, half of the sky is huge! But that fell away into impossibility. Or unverifiability anyway. The rim was a broil of gold. Everything was like burning metal.

Lanya pressed his shoulder, gasping.

Denny was saying, “Huh…?” and taking a step backward, and saying, “Huh…?” again. He backed into Kid. His head snapped around, and the expression (the sockets of his eyes were cups of molten brass spilling down his cheeks) was maniacal. “Hey, that’s really…something, ain’t it?” The question was not rhetorical. “Ain’t it something?” He turned to squint again.

“What is it?” Lanya whispered.

“It’s the sun,” Kid said. “Don’t you see, it’s just the sun.”

“My God we’re falling into it…” Lanya caught her breath, released it, then began to cry.

“Aw, come on!” Kid said. “Cut it out, will you—”

“My God…” she whispered and looked again.

He watched her face, open and glistening and shaking.

“Is it dangerous?” Denny whispered. “I’m scared as a motherfucker!”

“It’s getting bigger!” Lanya shrieked, turned, and crouched with her hands against the side of her face.

“No, it’s not,” Kid said. “At least not fast enough to see! Hey, come on!” He hit at her shoulder.

The orchid swung from the chain on his chest, tickling and glittering. It isn’t a dream, Kid thought. I was dreaming already. It isn’t a dream; that would make it…Bands of muscle made his throat so tight it hurt. “Hey!” He pounded his fist on Denny’s back. “Hey, are you okay?”

Eyes wide, and chest all filled up with air, Denny got out, “Yeah!”

Lanya knuckled at her face, pulling creases into it, as she squinted at the great, great, great circle.

“Come on,” Kid reiterated. “Let’s go, huh?”

Denny followed, too quickly to tell why.

Lanya waited till they had gone three steps (Kid looked back), then ran after them, her face bewildered. She caught Kid’s hand. Kid held his other one to Denny who took it tightly. Denny was sweating: “That is something.” (Kid glanced up again.) “I never seen anything like that before in my life.”

Kid looked at Lanya who was watching him oddly, and not where she was going. “We’re not falling into the sun or anything like that,” Kid said. “Otherwise we’d be burned up already. It isn’t even hot.” He looked at Denny, who dropped his eyes from the sky and looked back. “Well, Jesus Christ,” Kid said. “Don’t you think it’s pretty fucking funny?” They didn’t laugh. “I mean, there’s nothing you can do about it.” He did, alone. It felt good.

“What in the world is it?” Lanya repeated. Her voice was calmer.

“I don’t know,” Kid said. “I don’t know what the fuck it is!”

Copperhead, hair like hell-bright rust, sprinted around the corner, and stopped in the middle of the street, boots apart, elbows bent, fists swinging about his hips and belly.

The other scorpions caught up. Among them was Siam and Jack the Ripper and Denny’s girl, but neither Dragon Lady nor Nightmare.

Kid let go their hands and pointed to the sky. “Ain’t that too fucking much!” He laughed, and the tight things in his throat loosened. He came out of the laughter, which had closed his eyes and jerked the small of his back almost into spasm, to find them watching. “Hey, Copperhead! Where you going? You going to come with me?”

“What…” Copperhead began to bellow, then coughed, and there was nothing left in his voice to sustain. “What is that?” His voice was tearfully inane. “Is it some kind of heat lightning?”

Someone else said: “Does that look like lightning to you?”

Kid blinked and wondered. “You better come on with me,” he dared.

“You all right, Kid?” the black in the vinyl vest asked from behind Copperhead, drifting there as Lady of Spain drifted behind him.

“You,” Kid spoke carefully, explaining to them as though it were a lesson, “come on with me!” He took a breath and started across the street. As he stepped up on the curb, a hand caught his shoulder. He looked back; it was Denny, and behind him, Lanya; black scorpions moved around them, passed in front of them.

And footsteps.

He didn’t look back again.

Perhaps, he thought, we are all going to die in moments, obscured by flame and pain. That is why this. And then, perhaps we are not. That is why this in this way.

Scorpions milled and clustered, and he chuckled again.

That was as silly as the blades tickling his chest.

Laughter grasped the back of his tongue to shake it loose. Flesh lay too heavy in his mouth. So it retreated, and heaved itself against the spoke of his spine. I am happy, he thought. And heard somebody else, a white girl (not Lanya; the scorpion, who wore a vest and was called Filament), laughing too.

So he let his own.

It doubled him up, staggering.

Somebody—that was Lanya, and that was, almost, enough to stop him—cried out.

But others laughed.

Somebody else—that was Denny, and when he saw it was, he kept laughing through his puzzlement—ran past, picked up the lid of a garbage can leaning against the curb, and hurled it up the street. It went clattering against a stoop. Denny danced back in the blood-colored light.

Gold nodes ground in the clouds.

Kid reached out, had to lean to catch Lanya’s fingers; his fingers, between hers, pummeled the back of her hand. She came up against his side, and watched in wonder as others pushed ahead on the cobbled street.

“Pick a house,” he told her.

“Huh—?”

“Just pick a house on the street,” he whispered (she bent nearer to hear). “Maybe one you don’t like very much.”

Copperhead bounded past them, flung his arm: The brick-shard flew across the street, shattered the window; Copperhead, full hair and sparse beard furious, turned back, grinning.

“That one?” Kid asked.

“No!” with an urgency he could not follow. “At the top of the hill. That one. There.”

“Okay.” Kid wheeled.

The blond girl in the pea jacket was falling back through the loose blacks. She was crying; she looked at the sky, and cried harder. Denny’s girl put her arm around her, was talking, was making consoling motions with her head. Once she glanced at the great, burning wheel; her face was webbed with rage.

Kid’s hand went up across his cheek. Bristle clawed his palm. “This way!” He waved and turned again. They passed around him as he turned in the light. “Hey, Ripper, Denny, Copperhead!” He caught at the jouncing projector, and thumbed at the bottom pip. “How do you turn this thing on?”

“Huh?” Ripper looked back. “Oh…to the side. Not in.”

The pip slid.

Of course, he thought, I can’t see anything from inside. And wondered what he looked like.

Lanya had stepped away and was looking all over him. Kid beat his knees, and swung about. And Denny had disappeared in his own deformed explosion.

“Hey,” the espresso-hued Ripper called, “we goin’ on!”

Figure passed figure as they milled about the cobbles. Kid looked where Copperhead was laughing; and Copperhead disappeared in his lucent arachnid. The menagerie formed in the terrible light.

Thirteen, whom Kid hadn’t seen till now, passed him. “Come on,” he whispered to Smokey beneath his arm, “let’s get out of out here. This ain’t gonna be no good—”

“I want to watch!” she insisted. “I want to watch!”

Kid reached the porch. Some people were running behind him. He’d broken down three doors in his life: so he expected to bruise his shoulder. (The light that was Denny blinked beside him: the boy was climbing the rail.) Kid crashed into the weathered wood. It flew back so easily he went down on one knee and grabbed at the jamb. (About him, the mystic aspects lurched.) At the same time, glass broke and light filled the hallway as Denny’s apparition came through the shattered porch window.

“Oh—Jesus…” A girl’s black face passed the door opposite.

Then another’s: “It’s scorpions…!”

A skinny black boy ran into the room with a stick. He opened his mouth and his eyes wide.

“Jimmy, you come on—!”

The boy (was he twenty? Kid staggered to his feet, a little scared, and not believing he was invisible behind some bright beast) kept on jerking at the stick.

“Jimmy!” she shrieked, “come out of there! It’s the scorpions, for God’s—”

Jimmy (Kid was surprised) suddenly closed his mouth, flung away his stick, and ran back through the doorway. Somewhere else in the house footsteps banged down steps.

Denny beat Kid to the doorway and extinguished. He leaned through, then looked back with a puzzled grin (others had already surged into the room, to fling their shadows in the red light across the wall.) “Hey, you see the way those niggers run?”

Behind Kid somebody overturned a chair.

He frowned, realized no one could see it, stopped frowning, and slid the stud over the bottom of his projector.

“Shit, man,” Denny said. “Them was some scared, black motherfuckers.” Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.

“Don’t do that! Don’t do that! Don’t—”

“What the fuck they got in here?”

“Come on, Goddamn it, don’t do that!”

In the maroon light across the wall in front of Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid’s, raised.

The hand clapped Kid’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Copperhead said. “They got some place here! Carpet on the floor…” His other hand gestured down; and up: “And look at all that shit on the ceiling.”

Kid looked.

Women in gauze and men in armor careered through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.

Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. “Well.” He looked back. “I’m gonna go see what they got in here.” While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead’s hand fell again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.

She was standing just inside the door, and angry.

“What’s the matter?”

“There were people living here!” she hissed. “What in the world…” She shook her head.

“I didn’t know that,” Kid said. “You picked the house.”

“And I didn’t know what you wanted to do with it!” She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. “What the hell did you want to do?”

“Anything.” He shrugged. “Let’s go.”

She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.

Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.

“Here.” Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.

“I gotta eat,” Kid said, “first, I think.” Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. “You want some?”

“No thank you,” she said softly, and held his arm with both hands.

As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, “I want—” the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness—“to write something down.”

He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. “Here. There’s no pen on this. But you’ve got yours.” He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall’s end.

He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them—

Beneath the pea jacket, opened around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead’s freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said goodbye, to whom he had made love.

“Oh,” Lanya said, matter-of-factly.

The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead’s thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, “Hey!” and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) “Join the party, motherfucker! You gimme one of yours, I’ll give you one of mine.”

“Knock yourself out.” Kid backed from the door, with Lanya’s hand in his.

The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

“What’s going on in there?” Blond Denny pushed between them.

“Stay out of there, cocksucker.” Kid put his arm around the boy’s chest, pulled him back.

“Why?”

“Because I’d get jealous as hell.”

Denny frowned, shrugged, said, “Okay,” and wormed loose.

Lady of Spain jogged against Kid’s shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: “Shit! What a way to go. I guess we’re going, ain’t we?” She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya’s shoulder.

Lanya tugged Kid’s arm. “This way,” she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside (“Hey, how you doing, Kid?”), who pushed back a bottle at his face.

At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. “Are you having…a party?” They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions’.

“Is this Nightmare’s…Is this Nightmare’s nest?” a girl asked and pushed up past the first two. “Lanya!” She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.

“Milly!” Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly’s wrists. “What are you doing?” Lanya’s voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began—to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.

He pushed between the people crowding the hall. “Fuck!” he shouted at somebody once. “Get out of the way!”

Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), “No, man, this is the Kid’s nest. Nightmare ain’t here. Nightmare ain’t anywhere around.”

“Kid—?” which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate; and talking about, not to, him: “You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn’t know that was the Kid. How do you like that?”

Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:

It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzical: Deadly rays!

A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn’t it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.

With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.

He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam’s bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.

The suede boot was blotched with what he’d always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn’t rained. Below the wrinkled leather—forty feet below—cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.

He examined his left hand. I don’t like what they look like, he thought. I don’t like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.