Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he’d bitten to blood. He’d always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what calluses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hand horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the inner flesh with her tongue, make love to them like gnomes, while he, voyeuristically, observed and mocked and felt tender.

He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers between them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into the lap, and began to click his pen.

Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn’t what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint’s button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.

Lanya crashed Kid’s ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion’s head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds. Then at Kid: “You’re still writing on that…?”

“No.” The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya’s voice. “No, I’ve been finished a few minutes now.”

Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, “Hey…” She frowned. “It’s going down!”

Kid nodded. “You can see it falling almost.”

The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.

Denny came through the doors, paused, a hand on each, to screw his face in the glare. Then, silently, he sat on the rail beside Lanya, gripped his knees, his arm an inch from hers.

Denny comes: some fantastic object.

She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.

Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said, “I like that.”

But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile: but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.

Anyway a smile’s what they gave him back.

Denny said, “It’s going down,” unnecessarily for her.

One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.

Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don’t know who she is! He gripped harder.

She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.

So he dropped his hand.

With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.

While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, “Why aren’t you afraid?” Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.

She said: “Then I won’t be either.”

The boy who’d come out was the pimply, stubble-bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as though he felt he might have interrupted something, seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?), when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.

Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn, small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.

“It’s going down, see,” Denny repeated.

He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can’t get the same reactions.

Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.

Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.

The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.

There were too many people.

Milly brushed at her cheek.

Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She’s guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She’s guilty…?

There were too many people.

The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.

They didn’t move.

“What are you going to do with that?” Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.

The scorpion’s breath was thunderous.

“I don’t know.” That sounded thunderous too.

“Let me take it.” She tore off the three pages, corrected, and recorrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. “I have your notebook at home. I’ll put these with it. I want to go.” She turned to Denny. And the shadow had rolled somewhere beneath her chin; in the creases of her eyelid he could see sweat. “You want to walk me home?”

Kid wanted to protest, decided no; offer to come too?

She touched Denny’s arm. Her nose and ear were shadowed: the incredible disk had lowered so that what remained was small enough that everyone around them, beneath a folded elbow, behind a heel on reddened tile, under frayed denim where a sleeve had been torn off, or within and behind the curves of flesh in flesh of the ear, had once more grown shadows. She looked afraid.

Lanya stood, and people stepped apart.

Denny, like someone just awakened, clambered from the rail, and, blinking about him (at the others as much as Kid), followed her.

Denny left, and people closed around.

“When it goes down…” the pimply scorpion began.

Kid, and the two people who held his hand, looked.

Something white had dried on his mouth. His lashless lids were pink and swollen.

The two looked away.

“When it goes all the way down, there won’t be any fuckin’ light at all, again…ever.” He shook his head, scuffed his boots, rocked on the doorsill. “Black as a fucking bitch…yeah!”

They’ve gone, Kid thought. No light at all?

Fifteen minutes later, when it had set completely, the sky had returned to its ordinary grey.

3

He woke…alone?

Someone was climbing up the loft ladder.

He struggled to choose between dreams and…the rest. Because they had all left the muraled house, and wandered back to the nest. Milly had talked to him, aimlessly, in the sloped street, mostly all surprised that he was the same Kid everybody had been talking about, and how glad she was to know that she knew him, till he’d decided she was trying to put the make on him and had gotten angry. “Get the fuck out of here, you stupid bitch!” he’d yelled in the street and made to hit her. She’d run away; he’d laughed, loudly, till he was staggering. Copperhead had come up to him and beat him on the shoulder, laughing too. “I didn’t like that one either. Shit, you can have one of mine…” He’d kept laughing, so he wouldn’t have to speak, thinking with perfectly maniacal pride: I have, I have already—

“Kid, are you okay?” Denny’s ears were lit from behind and below. His face was dark.

“Yeah…?”

Denny came up over the edge.

“They’re making food—” and at the word, Kid smelled it—“inside. Nightmare and Dragon Lady just came back. You sleepin’?”

“Come—” and at the word, Denny, all shoulders and chin and elbows, wedged against him—“here. Yeah.” He held the warm knobby shapes and lay there smelling grease and a hot, vegetative stench that defined no food he recognized; but he liked it anyway.

“Lanya’s got a nice place,” Denny said.

“Yeah?” Kid thought: he’s so light; but his edges are sharp. “You ball her again?”

“…Yeah,” Denny said. “In her room, at her house. I guess that was all right.”

Surprised, Kid opened his eyes. Cracks crossed the dim ceiling. “Oh.” He shifted Denny to the side. “You got more energy than I do. I was tired when I got back here.”

“She’s got a nice place,” Denny repeated. “Real nice.”

“Why’d she want to go?” He nubbed his rough chin for the itching.

Denny squirmed to get comfortable. “To see about her class, she said.” Denny squirmed again.

“Class?”

The L about the window shade had finally taken on the deep color of evening.

“Her kids. She’s been looking out for this group of kids, you know? About eight and nine years old. Black kids mostly.”

“No, I didn’t know.” He let his lips purse to a tent where, with the help of air, they were off his teeth. Well, he hadn’t seen her much. How many days gone? She’d said she had a place, yes; “No, I didn’t know.”

He frowned at the top of Denny’s head.

“I like her,” Denny said. “I like her a lot.” Denny’s face came up from under the hair. “You know, I think she likes me too?”

“Guess she does,” Kid said. “Did she check…her class?”

“No,” Denny said. “Not while I was there. She was going to. But we got to fuckin’ around again. Screwin’, you know. She said she was going to, after I left. If she didn’t go to sleep first. I think she was pretty tired.”

Kid looked at the ceiling again. “How long she had the kids?”

“A couple of weeks,” Denny said. “That’s what she told me. She said she likes it. They meet a little way from her place. That’s real nice.”

“What’s it like?” A couple of weeks? He was too exhausted to be upset.

“Real nice.” Some of Denny’s hair brushed and caught on Kid’s chin.

“Well, you’re good for something, cocksucker. Hey!” Kid bunched the muscles of his leg under Denny’s stiffening groin. “No, man. Fuck off. I don’t want to now.”

Denny pulled himself back on all fours. “You better go eat something, then. They don’t got that much. They’ll eat it all.”

Kid sat, nodding. “Yeah, come on.” He climbed groggily down, and stood in the doorway.

Why (watching Denny climb) did she tell him all that about her new place, and her class, and not me? Why didn’t I ask? he answered. He could smile at that, finally.

“Come on.” Denny took Kid’s elbow and led him down.

Halfway up the hall, Kid sucked his teeth and pulled free. It was a gentle pull; but Denny’s hand leapt away at the motion, frightened and anticipatory, despairing and wild. Without looking at him particularly, Denny stepped back to let him through.

“Jesus Christ!” Nightmare exclaimed, turning with a full plate in his hand, gesturing first, then scooping with his fork. “Wasn’t that something this afternoon? I mean, wasn’t that too much!” He filled his mouth and spoke on, scattering little pieces. “We heard about you chasing out the niggers! Hey—” he gestured to Dragon Lady who sat against the wall—“we heard about what he did to those niggers.”

“Shit,” Dragon Lady said dryly, and looked at Kid only from the corner of her eye. “I don’t care what he do to any God-damn niggers.”

“I didn’t even know they were in the house,” Kid said.

Dragon Lady took another mouthful. “Shit,” she repeated, and pried with her spoon tip through what was on her plate.

“Give ’em something to eat,” Nightmare yelled toward the kitchen.

“Baby!” Dragon Lady bellowed; her shoulders shook; nobody stopped doing anything. “Adam!” She flung the words up like grenades. “Bring some more food out for ’em!”

“Here you go!” Baby, still naked, pushed between the people at the door, leading (dangerously) with steaming plates.

“This is yours.”

Kid ignored the dirty thumb denting what must have been a hash of canned vegetables (he pulled the fork out from where it had been buried: corn, peas, okra, fell off) and (he tasted the first mouthful) meat. (Spam?) Baby gave the other plate to Denny. He returned to serve Cathedral, Jack the Ripper, Devastation, all sitting about silently.

Copperhead, not served yet, watched from the couch, and grinned and nodded when Kid looked at him.

“Here you go.” Adam shoved a plate at Copperhead. He took it, saluted Kid with a fork with twisted tines, then dropped his shoulders and shoveled.

Denny’s girlfriend (should I find out her name?) with a coffee cup of the hash, came out of the kitchen, crossed to sit right by Denny on the floor and made a big thing of not looking at Kid. The girl in the pea jacket, next to Copperhead on the couch, occasionally picked food from Copperhead’s plate with a spoon: Copperhead more or less ignored her.

“You had a party?” Nightmare exclaimed in answer to a question Kid hadn’t heard asked. “We ran! Adam, Baby, the Lady, and me! I was so scared I didn’t think I was gonna make it. Shit, I’m still scared.”

The last laughter to trail away was Dragon Lady’s gusty chuckle.

“We were in the park.” Nightmare waved his fork above his head; more people sat down. “Baby, Adam, Dragon Lady, and me. You know the old weather tower in the park?”

(What, Kid wondered, had George been doing in the brazen light of this noon? What had June?)

“When it began, I mean after it began—first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire—after we could see what it was—” he shook his head at somebody who started a comment—“no, no, I don’t know what the fuck it was. Don’t ask me. After we could see it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn’t we?”

Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed.

“We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down.” Nightmare whistled. “Jesus Christ!”

We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities.

“You were out there in it,” the scorpion in vinyl asked, watching, “until it was all over?”

Copperhead protested: “We watched it going down—”

“All over?” But Nightmare’s mouth hung open, mocking his interlocutor. “What’s all over?”

Adam rubbed the chains on his chest: the rest were still.

“You think it’s all over?” Nightmare demanded.

The blond girl in the pea jacket held her spoon in both hands tightly between her knees. “When it went down,” she said, “it was just like regular day again…here. And it was light for four or five hours till it was time to get dark.” She looked back over her shoulder at the black glass; the brass lion on the windowsill watched the night from beneath his bulbless stalk.

Dragon Lady’s laughter built in the silence.

“Shit.” Nightmare filled his mouth again and yelled at his plate: “You don’t know if the sun is ever gonna come up again! We could all be burned up to death by tomorrow. Or frozen. What were you saying, Baby, about maybe the earth got pushed off its orbit or something like that, maybe into the sun, or out past it—”

“I didn’t say that.” Baby looked down at himself, pimply chest, un-circumcised genitals, bowed knees, dirty feet; his nakedness for the first time was out of place. “I wasn’t sayin’ it that serious—”

“There’d be an earthquake if that happened.” Brown Adam, with his Philadelphia accent, held his chains in his fist. “I told you that. A big earthquake, or a tidal wave; both maybe. Nothing like that’s happened. And there’d have to be if the earth got pushed somewhere—”

“So maybe—” Nightmare looked up—“in ten minutes there’s gonna be a fuckin’ earthquake!”

Then the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling dropped to quarter dimness.

Kid tried to swallow his heart; it threatened to burst and fill his mouth with blood.

Someone was crying again.

Kid looked to see if it was Denny. But it was another scorpion (Spider?) on the other side of Nightmare. Denny’s face, even in the yellowish half-dark, was cut with blades of shadow from his hair.

“Oh, come on!” Smokey edged from behind Thirteen’s shoulder. “Look, it used to do that four or five times a day when we stayed here.”

In the kitchen something hummed: the light returned to full brightness.

Nightmare ate doggedly.

No one else did.

“You guys make up anymore of this shit?” Nightmare nodded toward Adam and Baby. “It’s good.” Then looked around. “You don’t know if it’s over or not.”

“I could use some more,” Dragon Lady said.

Baby came forward with his hands out for their plates.

“The mistake—” Kid surprised himself by speaking, took a mouthful to stop, but went on anyway—“isn’t thinking that it’s finished.” I’m imitating Nightmare, he thought, then realized, no, I’m doing what Nightmare did for the same reason. “The mistake is thinking it began this afternoon.”

“Right on, motherfucker!” Nightmare shook his fork for emphasis.

Kid took another mouthful, and thought: I may throw up. And then thought: No, I’m too hungry.

“We got some more out there in the big pot,” Adam was saying. “Why don’t you guys go out and get it till it’s all gone.”

A shadow made Kid look up from the last of his eating.

Adam stood there, hand out for Kid’s plate, about (Kid realized) to burst out crying too. Kid gave it to him.

Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and me get served first, Kid reflected as Baby brought his seconds. Well, Copperhead seemed at ease.

Finished, Kid put his fork on the floor and stood up.

“Hey, where’re you going?” Copperhead asked, no belligerence, all bewilderment.

“Taking a walk.”

On the bottom step of the house, he noted two streetlights in the distance. Burn up at any minute? Or freeze at the advent of an ice age, twenty minutes to completion? The air was the same excruciatingly bland temperature it had been night after night after night. The door opened behind him: Denny looked out.

“I want to go over and see Lanya’s place,” Kid said, turning. “You want to show me the way?”

“I…I can’t,” Denny said. “She’s upset. And she wants to talk…to me.”

“Fuck you, cocksucker.” Kid started down the block. “See you later.” (He wasn’t angry at all.) That was pretty good. Halfway to the corner, however, he realized Denny would be the only way to find Lanya’s new place. (Then he was.)

He could try the bar. But if she had a house now, what was the chance she’d be at Teddy’s tonight?

He looked back, ready to yell to Denny to get the fuck on down here.

The door was closed.

And I still don’t know her name!

He took a breath between his teeth. Maybe he’d find Lanya at the bar.

At the corner of the hill: surprised at how many street lamps—perhaps one out of five—worked in this neighborhood. The one diagonally across the street gave enough light to make out the charred walls of the big house. (The stronger burned smell had made him stop.) The columns supporting the balcony over the door had charred through, so that the platform, with its rail of lions, hung askew. Even so it took Kid a whole minute to be sure what house it was. Only houses he could see around confirmed it.

Four, five, six hours since they had screamed and laughed and yelled inside it?

Chilled to gooseflesh in the neutral air, he hurried away.

4

“…definitely saw it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You were already in the city?”

“That’s right.”

“You said earlier you didn’t see the whole thing though.”

“I caught, I guess, now it must have been, the last ten or fifteen minutes. Roger came and woke me up to see.”

“You saw it from inside the house then?”

“Well, first out my window. Then we went down to the gardens. I tell you, now, it was pretty strange.”

The others laughed. “Hey,” Paul Fenster said, half standing to look at the others seated. “We’ve just about got the Captain boxed in here. Why doesn’t somebody move back, there?”

“That’s all right. If I want to get out, I’ll just bust on through.”

“I imagine—” Madame Brown reached down to play with Muriel’s muzzle—“you aren’t any closer to an explanation than we are.”

“I think that was about the strangest thing I ever saw, I’ll be honest now.”

“As strange as anything you ever saw in space?” from the man in purple angora.

“Well, I tell you, this afternoon was pretty…I guess you’d say, spaced out.”

They laughed again.

The heavy blond Mexican with the blanket shirt rose from beside Tak and walked to the door, passing within a foot of Kid, and left. Tak saw Kid. With tilting head, he beckoned.

Kid, curious, went to sit in the vacated seat.

Tak leaned to whisper, “Captain Kamp…” A dozen others had pulled chairs up to listen to the crew-cut man in the green, short-sleeved shirt who sat in the corner booth.

Tak folded his hands across the bottom of his leather jacket so that the top pushed out from his blond chest.

“What I want to know,” purple angora announced, “…down, sweetheart, down—” Muriel had momentarily switched allegiances—“I want to know is, if it could possibly have been some kind of trick. I mean, is there any way somebody could have made that seem to happen? I mean…well, you know: in a man-made way.”

“Well…” The Captain looked among his listeners. “He’s your engineer, isn’t he?” His look settled on Tak—who reared back with a high laugh.

That must be as self-conscious as I’ve ever seen him, Kid thought. He’d never heard Tak make that sound before.

“No,” Tak said. “No, I’m afraid that doesn’t have anything to do with any engineering I’d know anything about.”

“What I want to know—now what I want to know,” Fenster said. “You’ve been in space. You’ve been on the moon…” He paused, then added in a different voice: “You’re one of the ones that was actually on the moon.”

Captain Kamp was only attentive.

“We’ve had here some sort of…astrological happening, and it’s got us all pretty shook. I want to know if you…well, from being up on the moon, or like that, you might know something more about it.”

Kamp’s face ghosted a smile. Kid searched for the names of the astronauts from the four moonshots he’d followed closely, tried to recall what he could about the fifth. Captain Kamp crossed his arms on the booth table. He wasn’t very tall.

“Now it’s certainly possible—” Kamp punctuated his southwestern speech with small nods—“that there’s an astronomical, or better, cosmological explanation. But I’ll be frank: I don’t know what it is.”

“Do you think we should worry?” Madame Brown asked in a voice with no worry in it at all.

Kamp, whose crew mixed grey and gold, nodded. “Worry? Well, we’re all here. And alive. That’s certainly no reason not to worry. But worry isn’t going to do us much good, now, is it? Now yesterday—about this time yesterday—I was in Dallas. And if that thing was as big as it looked and really some sort of body in the sky, a comet or a sun, I suspect it would have been seen a long way off coming, with telescopes. And nobody told me about it.”

“It sounds, Captain, as though you don’t believe it’s serious.”

Kamp’s smile said as much. Kamp said, “I saw it—some of it, anyway.”

“Then,” Kid said, and others turned, “you don’t know how big it really was.”

“Now that,” the Captain answered, “I’m afraid, is it.” His jaw was wider than his forehead. “Now you all, Roger too, described something which practically filled up half the sky. So obviously what I saw was only a little bit. And then there was the story about—George, was it?”

Tak looked around the room, frowned, and again whispered to Kid: “George was here a few minutes ago. He must have gone out just before you came—”

“Now I’m afraid nobody outside…of Bellona, saw that one. And Roger tells me he didn’t either.”

“I certainly did,” Tak whispered.

“I certainly did!” someone cried.

“Well.” Kamp smiled. “Not too many other people did, and certainly nobody outside Bellona.”

“You saw what happened today.” Teddy, arms folded, leaned against the back of the next booth.

“Yes, I guess I did.”

“You mean,” Fenster announced jovially, “you went from here to the moon and back, and you didn’t see anything on the way that would tell us anything at all about this thing this afternoon?”

Kamp said: “Nope.”

“Then what use was it, I ask you?” Fenster looked around for somebody’s back to slap. “I mean now what was the use of it?”

Someone said: “You haven’t been with the space program a while…?”

“Now you don’t really leave it. Just last week I was down for medical testing for long-range results. That, I don’t ever expect to stop. But I’m much less involved with it now than some of the others.”

“Why did you leave?” the purple angora asked. “Was it your idea or theirs—if you can answer a question like that?”.

“Well.” This, a considered sentence. “I suspect they thought it was a touchier question than I did at the time. But I doubt they wanted me that much if I didn’t want them. My interest in the space program just about ended with splashdown. The tests, the research work afterward, that was important. The parades, the celebrations, the panels, the publicity—I think the fun in that was exhausted a month after I came out of the isolation chamber. The rest—probably more so for me than for the others, because that’s the kind of person I am—was just a nuisance. Also,” and he smiled, “I’ve occasionally been known to pick up a guitar at a party and sing a folk song or two. Nothing political, mind you. But they still frown on that sort of thing.”

Everyone laughed. Kid thought: Is he for real?

And a second thought, like a stutter: My reaction is as fixed as his action. And Kid laughed, though later than the others. Two or three glanced at him.

“No,” Kamp went on, “I suppose I saw myself as something of an adventurer…as much as a navy test pilot can be. Apollo for me was an adventure—practically an eight-year adventure, with all the preparation. But when it was over, I was ready to go on to something else.”

“So you’ve come to Bellona?” Madame Brown said, as Fenster said: “After the moon, where else is there?”

“Now, you’re right…”

Kid wondered which question Kamp was answering.

“…but I’m just beginning to see that myself.”

“Are you here in any official capacity?” asked another woman.

“I’d imagine,” Fenster said, “you’re never officially disconnected.”

“No. I’m here unofficially.”

“What does that mean?” someone challenged.

Fenster scowled, offended for Kamp, who merely said, “They know I’m here. But they gave me no instructions before I came. They won’t ask me anything about what I did or saw after I come back.”

“Why don’t we break up this Star Chamber?” Fenster stood. “Come on, the Captain is nice enough to talk to us all at once, but we’ve got to give the man a chance to circulate.”

“Now this is quite informal,” Kamp countered, “compared to what I’m used to. I would like a chance to walk around though.”

“Come on, come on.” Fenster made shooing motions.

Some rose.

The bartender rolled his cuffs above the blurry blue beasts and strolled to the counter.

Tak’s chair scraped.

“Come on, now, let’s let the Captain get himself a drink. Madame Brown, you look like you could use one too.”

Kid shook his hands below the chair edge to stop the tingling.

Tak stood, stretched to tiptoe, looked around. “Wonder where George got off to. He was all curious when he discovered we had a genuine man in the moon with us.”

They walked to the bar.

Teddy was returning chairs.

Once the dozen clustered at the Captain’s booth dispersed, the place looked empty.

“I thought Lanya was here, maybe.”

Tak’s hands locked. “I haven’t seen her. Madame B. might know where she is.” And unlocked. “Hey, I saw the big advertisement in the Times, all over page three. Congratulations.” Tak frowned. “By the way, what did you do at the coming of the great white light? Orange, I guess it was, really. You got any opinions to pass the time with while we wait to see if there’s going to be a tomorrow?”

Kid leaned on meshed fingers. “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything much. I had some people with me. I think they were more upset than I was. You know, Tak, for a while I thought…” The bartender set down a beer bottle. “…no, that’s silly.” Kid pulled the bottle to him, leaving a sweat ribbon. “Isn’t it?” The candles glittered in it.

“What?”

“I was going to say, for a while I thought it was a dream.”

“If I woke up right now, I’d feel a lot better.”

“No. Not that.” Kid lifted his bottle once, twice, a third, a fourth, a fifth time from lapping rings. “When it was rising, I remember I went out to take a look from the back porch; and thinking maybe I was dreaming. Suddenly I woke up. In bed. Only, when I got up, later, it was still there. Finally, after it went down, I went to sleep again. You know, right now—” he smiled, to himself till it overcame the strictures of his facial muscles and burst stupidly onto his face—“I still don’t know what I dreamed and what I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t really see anymore than the Captain.”

“You went to sleep?”

“I was tired.” Saying that annoyed Kid. “What about you?”

“Christ, I—” The bartender brought Tak’s bottle. “What did I do?” Tak snorted. “I saw the light coming through those bamboo blinds I have, and went out on the roof to take a look. I watched it rising for about three minutes. Then I freaked.”

“What’d you do?”

“I went down into the stairwell and sat in the dark for about an hour or so…I guess. I’d got this whole paranoid thing about radiation—no, don’t laugh. We might all start losing our hair in the next six hours while our capillaries fall apart. Finally I got scared of just sitting in the dark and went up to look again…” He stopped moving his bottle around the wet circle. “I’m just glad I don’t have a heart condition. It stretched over so much of the horizon I couldn’t look at one edge and see the other. I couldn’t look at where the bottom was cut off by the roofs and see the top.” Tak’s bottle rumbled about. “I went back down into the stairwell, closed the door, and just cried. For a couple of hours. I couldn’t stop. While I was crying, I thought about lots of things. One of them, by the way, was you.”