Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Wally!” Milly said from the edge of hysteria. “Wally Efrin!”

The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam. Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he’d once asked to help him get wood who’d said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we’d seen his girlfriend? One he’d seen but never noticed? One he’d never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)

“Where?” he asked, at her silence. “What’d we kill him for?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake…!” Milly shook her head.

“Yesterday,” John said. “Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the…sun. Mildred was there—”

“I didn’t know about it till after I got home,” she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.

“Me neither,” Kid said. “So do you want to tell me?”

“No, I don’t want to…” Milly exclaimed. “This is really just terrible! This is animal…!”

“You were in charge there, Kid, weren’t you?” John asked.

“So everybody tells me.”

“Well, it seems that—now I wasn’t there, but this is what I’ve been told…”

Kid nodded.

“…It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And…what? Wally tried to break it up?”

“He may have started the fight,” Milly said to the floor, “with them.”

“I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn’t even know about it. It was downstairs.” John repeated: “In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn’t know until after she got back and Jommy told her.” A movement of John’s tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He had remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him…)

“Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead.”

“Who did it?” Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.

Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.

John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: “Him!” who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.

“You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?” Kid asked.

“No!” He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.

Nightmare sat, now, at Dragon Lady’s feet. Head against the wall, he looked from speaker to speaker, with the smile of an enthusiast at a tennis match.

“You beat anybody up?” Kid asked.

“Beat the fuck out of ’im!” The scorpion’s fists bounced on the couch’s rim. “Yeah! With a fuckin piece of pipe. But I didn’t know what kind of pipe it was!…or if he was dead!”

“Shit, I sure did!” Glass chuckled. “I knew it when you hit the motherfucker the first time. The second, third…all those other times you were banging on him, man, that was just extra.”

“You shut the fuck up!” (It was, Kid remembered, the scorpion for whom he had rescued the bronze lion.) “I didn’t kill nobody.”

“But you did beat somebody over the head with a piece of pipe yesterday?”

“Look, I didn’t…” He stalled on the word, and stood, fists flailing about his shoulders to beat away the barrier to speech, then yelled, “…didn’t kill any God-damn body with no—”

“SIT DOWN, GODDAMN IT…!” Kid bellowed, coming away from the door by three steps. That, he thought in the silence, was pretty theatrical. But he was astonished by its efficacy. Twitching behind his face, he felt an embryonic giggle. Both feet and hands were tingling. Shall I say the next thing, or shall I yell it? (The scorpion was leaning back on the couch, balanced on his fists, his seat not quite on the cushion, an expression not quite on his face.) “DID YOU BEAT ON SOME KID’S HEAD WITH A PIPE…?” He’d made the choice to avoid laughing.

The scorpion sank to the cushion. The expression was terror. “I guess so?” the scorpion asked quietly. “I don’t know…?”

Kid shook both hands hard, by the hips, to return the feeling. He heard one of the people beside him creak a floor board and catch breath.

“Look,” he said to John. Milly, behind him, seemed more frightened than the scorpion on the couch. Little Jommy had an intent expression of cold interest. “Why don’t you people just get the fuck out of here, all right?”

“Um…” John’s thumbs had gone beneath the lapels with the rest of his fingers. “You know we haven’t had a…trial or anything.” He glanced at the scorpion. “Mildred said maybe Wally started it, you know—”

“I didn’t see it,” Milly reiterated. “Somebody just told—”

Kid breathed in, and was still surprised that it cut the ribbon of her whisper like scissors. “You all get out.”

“Now we’re not trying to…” John began: Milly, Jommy, and the others had all started for the door. He let go his lapels and followed.

“What’d you do with Wally, huh?” Kid called.

“Huh?” John stopped a moment. “We just left—”

“No,” Kid interrupted. “No, don’t tell me about it!” He kneaded one fist in the other. Feeling was beginning to return. The gesture sent John pushing against the people in front of him to get out of the room, beating nervously against his leg.

The scorpion on the couch looked very miserable. Clutching his lamp, or on the balcony crying; Kid thought: He’s looked miserable every time I’ve ever noticed him.

“Shit!” Kid said. (Outside, he heard the door close behind the commune deputation.)

The scorpion bounced a little and blinked.

“Ah, shit!” Kid turned and walked out of the room.

Three steps down the hall, Kid heard a noise behind him, and turned.

Nightmare swung around the door jamb, an incongruous grin on his face. “Man, you’re too fuckin much!” Nightmare pranced, jingling, in the hall, slapped the wall. “Really! You’re too much.”

Right behind him, Copperhead came out and asked, “Hey, what you want to do with Dollar in there?” He thumbed back in the room.

So that’s his name, Kid thought (Dollar?), while asking, “Huh?”

“You want me to rough him up a little for you?” Copperhead asked. “Yeah, I’ll do it. I don’t mind doing shit like that. I mean if he goes around hitting people over the head, he’s gonna get us in trouble, you know? You want me to work him over?”

Kid made a disgusted face. “No! You don’t have to do anything like—”

“If you want me to,” Copperhead announced over Nightmare’s shoulder, “I’ll kill the little white bastard. Or I could just work him over to scare him, you know…”

“No,” Kid repeated. “No, I don’t want you to do that.”

“Maybe later…?” Copperhead said. “When you thought about it?”

“Well, not now,” Kid said. “Just leave him alone now.”

Nightmare laughed as Copperhead went back into the room. “What were you trying to do, huh? Man, you are too much!”

“Just find out if he did it. That’s all.”

Nightmare held his laughter in his mouth; it bellied his cheeks till he swallowed it. “Did you find out?”

From inside, there was a sudden crack and a cry. Voices silenced around the sound of loud sipping:

“Now the Kid told me I’m supposed to wait till later to work you over, cocksucker. But don’t give me any shit, you hear? You go around breaking people’s heads, I think I’m gonna have some fun breaking yours. Now get out of here.”

“I…guess so,” Kid said.

“I mean,” Nightmare shook his open palms in front of Kid’s hips, “I was just wondering if you found out. I wasn’t there. You was, right? So you should know if he done it or not.” He backed away, grinning.

“Hey!”

“What?”

“Come here. I want to talk to you.”

Nightmare’s arms folded low on his stomach, then raised up his broad chest so that the chains looped across his forearms. “Sure.” He tilted his head, warily. “What you want to talk about?”

“I just want to know what—hey, you come on with me.”

“Sure,” Nightmare said; then his tongue went into the side of his jaw, licking for something among back teeth.

They went up the hall and onto the service porch. Nightmare, arms still folded, stood in the doorway squinting. Dulling smoke hung only yards beyond the screening, Kid asked: “What are you trying to do, huh?”

“What do you mean?” Nightmare’s forearms slid across one another to tighten toward a knot.

“I mean you. And Dragon Lady and all. How come I suddenly get to be the boss about everything?”

“You do it pretty well.”

“But I want to know why.”

“Well.” Nightmare looked at the floor and let himself fall against the jamb. “It’s gotta be somebody, right?” Boards around them creaked.

“But what about you?”

“What about me?” The boards creaked again, though Nightmare hadn’t moved. “What you want to know about me?”

“Just why, that’s all. You want a new boss—why not one of the spades, or something. I mean what’s with you?”

Nightmare rolled his wet, red underlip back into his mouth, and nodded. His left eye, Kid noticed again, had the slightest cast.

The water puddling in the sink shook beneath the crusty faucet.

“I thought it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen if one of you brainy, crazed types was running things for a while. All the brainy niggers in Bellona had sense enough to get out. We don’t got too much to choose from so we might as well make it interesting, right? I ain’t gonna stay in this fucking fog hole the rest of my life. It’s a real gas being Nightmare, you know? But I’m gonna get back to St. Louis, get me a little foreign car, do some work in the gym, and put two or three ladies back to work for me, and I’m gonna be Larry H. Jonas all over again. And I hope I don’t ever hear about no Nightmare no more. If somebody shouts it out on Sixth Street, I’m gonna walk down Olive. I’ve done too many things here I’d just as soon leave here.” He stood up. “You strip off the Nightmare, and I got me a name. I know people. In St. Louis.” His hand slid up to his shoulder, big fingers working. “So I figured I’d leave you here. Besides, Denny likes you. That little cocksucker’s got a head on his shoulders. Not like some of these dumb nuts. You don’t look like you mind.” Among the links sagging on his chest, bright beads caught more light than there was to catch, winking and dying and winking.

“Hey, that scar on your shoulder?” Kid asked. “You and Dragon Lady getting on pretty good?”

“Like a bitch. Sometimes.” Nightmare’s face twisted a moment about his broken tooth. “And then sometimes—” he frowned—“well, you know.” After the faucet dripped three more times, he turned to leave, but paused to look over his shoulder. “You want to talk about anything else?”

“No.” Kid said. “That’s all.”

Nightmare left.

Across the hall was a room Kid had never been in. He opened the door.

Dollar, silhouetted before the torn window shade, turned. The lion peered by his hip from the sill. The taste of burning at the back of Kid’s throat flooded forward, into an amazing stench: on one of the overlapping mattresses was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton. Newspaper and magazine pictures had been pasted over one wall; many had been ripped off again.

One of the three blacks sitting on the floor glanced at him. The little blond girl shrugged her pea jacket back up her shoulders and pulled it across her breasts.

“What are you…I mean, hey, man…?” Dollar stepped up unsteadily. “Kid, look, you’re supposed to be an all-right guy, huh? You don’t gotta hurt me. Please? Man, I ain’t never done nothing like that before in my life, you know?…You want me to…?” He took another step. “Hey…what are you trying to do? Huh?” His hand strayed in the chains around his neck, twisted in them.

“Whatever it is,” Kid said, “it looks like I’m doing it.” All the muscles in his face felt tight: he went back into the hall.

Noise was coming from the front room. Nightmare’s laughter rose. Dragon Lady’s cut across it.

As if they’d suddenly heated, Kid pawed beneath the back of his vest and, from his belt, pulled loose the books. Both were creased. The face of one was rubbed and dirty. So was the back of the other.

“Hey, come on, come on, sweetheart!” Nightmare hollered. “What are you trying to do to me, huh? What are you trying to…” and exploded in laughter.

“I just asked,” Dragon Lady announced with hysterical deliberation, “if you want some more God-damned coffee…” The last syllable became a shriek, tumbling in counterpoint to Nightmare’s laugh, till both splashed into the cistern of mirth.

Kid took refuge in the bathroom.

Pants about his knees, he sat. A fugitive bubble in the gut cramped his abdomen; the cramp faded. He broke wind and knew he was empty.

He turned the books over, flipped through one, then the other. He wanted to read one poem, at least, through. A minute later, he realized he’d actually been deliberating not which poem, but in which book to read it. Was the discomfort in his belly a ghost of the gas? No.

A book in either hand, he joggled them. Time had been spent writing these. The time was mornings with his forehead wrinkled and the grass obligingly silent beyond the blanket’s edge; was evenings at the bar with candlelight scoring bottles with their different contents at different heights like pistons in an engine; was a broken curb on either side while he sat with the ballpoint burning his middle finger. Writing, he had not thought to retrieve any of it. But the prospect of publication had somehow convinced him magic was in process that would return to him, in tacto (not memoriam), some of what the city had squandered. The conviction was now identified by its fraudulence, before the inadequate objects. But as it died, kicking in his gut, spastic and stuttering, he knew it had been as real and unquestioned as any surround: air to a bird, water to a fish, earth to a worm.

He was exhausted, with an exhaustion that annihilated want. And all he could conceive of wanting was to try again; to make more poems, to put them in a book, to have that book made real by reproduction, and give that hallucination another chance!

He had nothing to write. He could not imagine what another poem of his would be, how it might lilt, or even look. Is that, he wondered, why they call it “creation”? The texture on the eye, the corrugation on the air around him had absorbed all. There was nothing left (…about what you see about you, what’s happening to you, what you feel. No). No. Something had to be…created. As these had been.

A muscle in his shoulder tensed.

He’d once been scared of things like that:…a blood-clot breaking loose from the vein wall to race toward the heart, jamming a valve! Habit commenced a shiver.

He caught up his breath, and his pants, and the books from where he’d dropped them. The leering mannequin, chained and bloody, leaned against the tank and smiled benignly up at Kid’s left nipple. Kid scratched it, put the books back under his belt, and went out.

In Denny’s room he took two rungs of the ladder at once. His chin gained the loft. “Hey, wake up!” Denny didn’t, so he climbed up the rest of the way, kneeled astraddle, and took hold of the boy’s head. “Hey!”

“God damn—!” Denny tried to roll to his back. One arm shot out and waved. “What the fuck are you…”

“Come on, get up!” Kid’s hands clamped, and Denny’s came back to grasp his wrist.

“Okay!” Denny said, his cheeks pushed together, distorting his voice. “Shit, man. I’m getting up, all right…?”

“You got to take me to Lanya’s place.” Kid raised his leg and sat back. “You know where it is, huh? You took her there. You know!”

Denny grunted and pushed himself up on his elbows. Boots and chains by his head lay on a crumple of green. His vest’s leather edge fell back from a pinkened line across one waxy pectoral. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Get the fuck up, cocksucker.” Kid gestured. “I want to go see her.”

“Okay, okay.” Denny reached back for his boots and started to put them on. Once he glanced up and said, “Shit!”

Kid grinned at him. “Move your ass.”

“Fuck you,” Denny said dryly and ducked his head through rattling links. “Come on.” He swung his feet over the edge and jumped.

Kid swung over the ladder while Denny bobbed erect in the doorway.

“What’s all the rush for?” Denny asked. “Hey, stop pushing me, will you?” as Kid shoved him into the hall.

“I’m not hurting you,” Kid said. “Did you know Dollar beat some kid to death with a pipe?”

“Huh? When?”

“Yesterday.”

Denny tried to whistle. It squeaked at the beginning and was all air. “Dollar’s a crazy motherfucker, you know that? I mean he always was crazy. Hell, all the white guys in the nest are nuts.”

“Sure.” Kid herded Denny toward the hall door.

“Why’d he do it?”

Kid shrugged. “I dunno.”

The hall door opened. Thirteen (Smokey behind) stepped inside, looking around as though he expected something…different. “Hey, Kid! Oh, hey man, I got to talk to you! You know Dollar? Well, we just got here, but…somebody told me yesterday he got a bar, from a police lock, and beat some kid to—”

“GET OFF MY ASS!” Kid said very loudly in Thirteen’s face, hefting his fist. If I keep this up, he thought, I’m going to hit somebody. “Now just get off my ass, will you?”

Thirteen, one hand against his green tank top (the “13” tattoo stretched wide), had backed against one wall, and Smokey, wide-eyed, against the other.

Kid put his hand on Denny’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go!”

They stalked between them and out the door; it swung to behind.

VI Palimpsest

“…JUST WATCH OUT. OH yeah, you just better watch out. I know. I know.” He wagged his finger, backed away, talked Spanish. Then: “They gonna get you—”

“Look, man,” Kid said. “Will you—”

“It’s all right. It’s all right. You just watch out, now. Please? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” His thick neck sweated. He tugged at the wool. “I’m sorry. You just lemme ’lone, huh? They gonna…” Suddenly he looked around, turned, and lumbered into the alley.

“Jesus Christ.” A smile hovered about Denny’s face. “What…was that about?”

“I don’t know.” One book had fallen on the sidewalk. The other leaned against the curb.

“I mean this guy just comes up and starts to push you like that. I thought you were gonna hit him.” Denny nodded heavily. “You should’ve hit him. Why’d he just want to come up and start messing on us like that?”

“He didn’t mess on you any.” Kid picked up the books and put them back under his belt.

“He’s just crazy or something, huh?”

“Come on,” Kid said. “Yeah, he’s…crazy.”

“Jesus Christ. That’s really funny. You ever see him before?”

“Yeah.”

They walked.

“What was he doing then?”

“Just about the same thing…one time. The others? He was pretty normal.”

“A nut,” Denny pronounced and scratched his groin inside both pants pockets. “She lives over there. I thought you knew already. She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

Denny wrinkled his nose. “All this shit in the air. I don’t think it’s very healthy, you know? What’s the matter?”

Kid had stopped, to hook up a section of the chain across his stomach. A glass circle distorted the pad of his thumb into a zebra’s flank: dirty troughs whorled the flesh.

“She lives right over there,” Denny reiterated, warily.

“All right.”

In step, they angled into the street.

“She got a nice place.”

A tension held, suspended: Kid wished he could examine it more closely: diffract, reflect, magnify…

They turned the corner and went down the empty street. “Looks like rain, doesn’t it?” Denny said.

“It always looks like rain.”

“It doesn’t feel like rain.”

“It never feels like rain.”

“Yeah, you know, that’s right?” Denny hopped up the concrete steps, holding the aluminum rail. “It never does!”

Kid followed, surveying the three-story facade. Denny thumbed the bell.

“They live on the top floor. The first two floors are empty so people won’t think anyone’s in the building.”

“It’s a good idea not to attract attention, I guess.” Kid contemplated asking who was the rest of “they” when footsteps clacked on a stairway.

“Who is it?” asked a woman. Voice familiar? He wondered from where.

“I’m a friend of Lanya’s. I’d like to see her.”

The peephole darkened. “Just a second.”

The door opened. “You know, I didn’t recognize your voice at first,” Madame Brown said. “How have you been, Kid?” She took in Denny: “Hello. It’s nice to see you again…Denny, isn’t it?” Her neck glittered.

“Lanya’s living with you?” Kid, shocked, was unsure why.

“Um-hm. Why don’t you come inside?”

Somewhere above the first landing, Muriel barked.

“Hush!” Madame Brown commanded the air. “Hush, I say!”

The dog barked three times more.

“Come in, come in. Pull the door behind you. It locks itself.”

They followed her up the steps.

“I think,” she let fall behind, “Lanya’s asleep. Even with her school we’ve both been having an incredible time keeping to any sort of schedule. I don’t know when she went to bed. I suspect it was rather late.”

“She’ll want to see me,” Kid said. He frowned at the back of Madame Brown’s red rough hair.

“Oh, I’m sure she will.”

They rounded the first landing.

Muriel, visible now, barked again.

“Hush! Now hush up! These are people you know, dear. It’s Kid. And Denny. You played with Denny for hours the last time he was here. Don’t carry on like that.” She reached for the dog’s muzzle; Muriel quieted. “Did I say Lanya was asleep? I doubt it after all that. Naughty! Naughty!”

Denny was looking up and down and sideways—not like somebody who’d played there for hours. Candlesticks were everywhere: three on a small table beneath a framed portrait, an iron brace full in the corner, two more on the windowsill between white curtains dulled by the sky behind.

“You got electricity here?” Kid asked.

“In two rooms,” Madame Brown explained. “Oh, the candles? Well, we’re so near Jackson, we thought we better have them around, in case.”

Two rooms away, unlit: a wall of books, a desk, an easy chair.

“That’s my office in there,” Madame Brown commented on Kid’s stare.

Which brought his eyes to more candleholders in the next room. “Um…this is really a nice place.”

“There’re some marvelous houses all through this area, if you just look. They’re not hard to find at all. Though I suppose we were lucky with this one. Most of the furniture was already here.”

“The rent must be a steal,” Kid said, “if you don’t mind the neighborhood.”

“Oh, we don’t pay any—” After an emotionless moment (Kid stopped and Denny bumped into him) she laughed, loudly, shrilly. “By the way, congratulations on your book! Mary Richards showed me a copy the other day. She just tells everybody about how she knows you now.”

“Yeah?” He’d intended the smile to be cynical; but pleasure pushed him into joyous, goofy sincerity. “She does?”

“She reads people passages out loud after dinner. I’m sure if you came by, you’d get a positively ebullient welcome.” She raised an eyebrow. “You really would.”

“Maybe from her,” Kid said. “Not from him. Don’t you think those people…?” and, watching her, decided to let it drop.

But she took it on:

“What is it that writer all you youngsters were reading here a few years ago was saying: ‘The problem isn’t to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.’”

Collected Poems 1930-1950, Stones, Pilgrimage, Rictus, The Dynamic Moment, A Sense of Commencement and The Charterhouse of Ballarat, all by Ernest Newboy, were book-ended at the back of the desk with two African statuettes. The last three volumes together were twice as thick as the first four.

“Well, they’re not at my hand. I mean, I don’t hold your friends against you. I got some pretty strange ones myself.”

“I didn’t think you did, which is one of the reasons I like you. And they haven’t done anything to me…yet.”

The “yet” challenged him to possibilities. It also tested his reticence. So he asked, “How’d you and Lanya get…together here?”

“Oh, she’s a fine roommate! Energetic, lively…It’s nice to have someone so sharp around. When I had to leave my other place—but you weren’t here for that. You could have helped us move. I was being terrorized to death. Nothing had happened, definitively, but I had to move. Lanya helped me find this place. I’ve always liked her and…well, I suggested that we share. It’s worked out very nicely, I think. The school is only a couple of blocks from here. The few patients I’ve taken on—”

The bell rang.

“One now. You know—” as she moved around them toward the hall—“I really thought that’s what you were. When I came down to let you in.” She waved toward another hallway. “Lanya’s room is down there. Go in and wake her up. I know she wants to see you.” They heard her gait go from the hallway’s measured rush to the stairwell’s hurried canter.

Denny said, “Nice, huh?” softly, then sucked at his upper lip where pale hairs stabbed about in reddened flesh. “You want to…go to her room?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Denny went into the corridor.

There were no bulbs in the elaborate ceiling fixture. An immense painting (Denny-tall by Kid-long), bordered in gilt, looked, as they passed in shadow, completely black.

“That door,” Denny said.

It was ajar.

“Go in, go on in,” Kid said. Denny didn’t; so Kid did.

Warm air puffed at his face. The burning here had a hint of gas—in front of a tile fireplace a heater flickered and hissed through its lower grille.

She slept on a daybed, under a pink blanket. Before a huge canvas with violent colors and no frame, arms of vegetation, white and purple, bent over her from a dozen pots, spidered in the bay window, or hung from the mantle.

“Christ, it’s hot!” Denny said, “How she sleep in here?”

“Go on,” Kid said. “Wake her up.”

Denny frowned at him.

“I want to watch,” Kid said.

Denny’s tongue pushed out his lower lip a moment. He stepped forward—

Her cheek was flat on the pillow, and both bare shoulders touched the sheet. Her hand near her face bent sharply at the wrist. One heel, greyed at the rim, stuck out, toes turned in.

–put one knee on the mattress (she went Uhhhh, turned her face down, and her heel pulled under the cover), swung the other over to straddle her and grabbed her head.

“Hey…” One arm shot out and waved. “God damn, let go of my…” She got over on her back. “What are you doing, huh…Oh, hey…” The arm came back and locked around Denny’s thigh. “Look, babes, I’m sound asleep, huh?…”

Denny shook her head again—

“Oh, come on…”

–and laughed. “Kid said I should wake you up.”

“Huh?”

“He wanted to watch.”

“With binoculars from the roof across the street?”

“He’s right here.”

“Where?” She pushed herself up and looked around Denny’s leg. “Hey!” Then a smile poured into her face, mixing with the sleep like milk poured into water, while her eyes cleared like jade.

“I brought you something,” Kid said.

“Him?” She laid her head on Denny’s hip. “I like him. He’s great and it’s very sweet of you. But I’m awfully sleepy.”

“Not that.” Kid pulled out the books. “These.” He sat down on the bed.

Her T-shirt was torn at the side and he could see the place her breast started, and then the nipple under cloth. (He contemplated the difference in the two colors for which even he could only think of the word white.)

“What are—?” Then she let go of Denny who sat down, shaking the bed. “Oh!” She took them from him, grinning.

“What are those, anyway?” Denny asked.

“Kid’s poems!” Lanya said.

“I guess one of those can be for you.”

“Yeah?” Denny asked. “Why didn’t you give it to me before, then?”

Lanya gave Denny his book and opened hers. “It really looks nice…I think you sat on this one a while, though.”

“You’re not mad at me now?” Kid asked.

“Was I ever?”

“Sometimes I think you’re stranger than I am.”

“Women’s Liberation has really lost us the prerogative of changing our minds, hum?” She sighed. “Enough people will be glad to see it go.”

“Hey,” Kid asked, “are you balling Madame Brown?”

“No!” Lanya looked up from the book, surprised. “What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know.” Kid shrugged. “She likes chicks, and, well, you’re here—”

Lanya frowned. The book slapped the blanket. “Can’t two people just be friends in this city?”

“You should be balling her.” Denny didn’t look up from his.

“Why?” Lanya demanded.

“’Cause she’s your friend,” Denny said.

Lanya’s frown lingered a moment. Then she laughed. “What are you, the Counter-Culture Dale Carnegie? Hey, move off my foot, huh?”

Denny moved. “You write all this stuff?” He turned another page, turned back to the cover, opened it again. He turned another page, closed it, opened it. “Hey, this is the thing they keep on advertising in the God-damn newspaper, huh?”

“Sure is.” Lanya turned another page too. “Oh, you’re a doll to bring me this.” She glanced at him, looked back. “I…I’m afraid I have a confession, though.”

“What…?”

“I’ve already given away about twelve copies each to practically everybody I know. And I think I have about half the poems down by heart—I knew them before they were published, really.”

“That’s all right.” Kid tried to discover whether that made him feel bad or good.

“I was going to ask you to write something in the copy I’ve been holding onto for myself. But this one’s mine now.” She held it up to her nose. “It smells like you. That’s much better than an autograph, I think.”

Denny closed his book for the sixth time and sniffed it. “You like the way Kid smells?”

“Mmmmmm.” Lanya put her arm around Kid’s chest and tugged him backward. “Don’t you?”

“It gives me a hard-on,” Denny said, “sometimes. But I don’t know whether I like it.”

Kid lay back. “I guess that’s nice you’ve been giving them out. I didn’t know you could get hold of it that long. No, you’re going to tell me about some more days I missed. How do you get this jungle to grow in here?”

“It’s all coleus,” she said. “They’ll grow any place.”

“Creepy,” Kid said. “You’ve got it like a fucking jungle.”

“Plants are relaxing.”

“Long as they don’t take a bite out of your hand when you’re trying to water them.” Throughout the variegated purple, he focused on the plaster ceiling (another white than either cloth or flesh). “Do I know Wally Efrin?”