Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“What…do you mean?” Denny asked again.

“How is this place different?”

“Shit,” Denny said. “This place is about twice as big! Don’t you remember how cracked the walls and everything were? This place is in pretty good condition.” After a moment, Denny asked: “Is this gonna be your place?”

“I guess so,” Kid said.

“Can I put some of my shit up there? These cocksuckers will walk off with anything you just leave around.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Denny flung up one of the bags, then the other. “I sure wish this one had a ladder. You’re supposed to really climb up and down this thing?” The supporting beam had triangular notches cut into the side. Denny climbed up two, and looked back. “Hey, it ain’t that hard…you really don’t remember where we were before?”

“I guess…no.”

“Wow,” Denny said and pulled himself up onto the mattress. “You lived there an awful fucking long time.” He looked at Kid again, frowned, responding to something Kid could feel moving in his face but could not identify. “…maybe not that long,” Denny recanted, dubiously. He disappeared.

More people moved in the hall behind him.

“Hey, Kid,” somebody said, but was gone when he looked.

He went to the post and climbed up after Denny. In the corner, he sat back and watched the boy thumbtack Koth the Dark Angel next to the day-glo Scorpio. Now Denny emptied the other bags between his knees. “I guess,” he said after a moment, “she really got it all. That was pretty nice of her, huh?”

Kid nodded.

Denny crawled over the mattress, hesitated, then put his head in Kid’s lap. Kid rubbed Denny’s neck, looked down, surprised. Denny took two deep breaths.

He’s gonna cry…? Kid wondered.

“You all right?” Denny asked in a perfectly controlled voice.

“Yeah,” Kid said. “What about you?”

“I’m fine,” Denny said, listlessly. After a while, he said, “I’m gonna go down and check things out, huh?”

“Okay.”

He sat alone, listening to the sounds of the house. Once he picked up Denny’s radio and turned it on. There was not even static. No battery?

He turned the glass dice, watching reflected ghosts of his face. He turned up a mirror on his chain; comparison of the two images told him nothing. But he looked back and forth.

Someone banged on the boards beneath him.

“Hey, you up there? Kid?”

He opened his eyes; the dice rolled from his lap as he crawled to loft’s edge.

Black eyes, broken tooth, hair with a braid undone: Between huge shoulders, the smooth and the scarred, Nightmare grinned. “Hey, you got yourself a real nice nest set up for you here, huh?”

“How you doin’, man!” Kid swung his legs over, dropped to the floor. His body tingled, heels, chin, knuckles and knees.

Nightmare took a stiff step back, another to the side, and bobbed his head. “Yeah, you really got yourself set up. Really nice.” He looked into the hall, nodded at someone who hailed him. “Stealin’ all my folk away from me?” He glanced back, brows high and forehead furrowed. “You’re welcome to the scroungy motherfuckers! The niggers are okay. But the white ones, man. Shit…!”

Dollar said, “Hey, Nightmare—”

Shoulders raised; head lowered, Nightmare spat on the floor.

Dollar swallowed, and disappeared at a gesture of Nightmare’s fist.

Nightmare turned, annoyance and concern weighting the ends of his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth. “Fuckin’ psycho! You gotta treat these bastards like horse turds, man! Like fuckin’ monkey puke! They all like you now. But you’re gonna have go show ’em soon.” He turned his boot on the gobbet. “And watch out for the ladies, they are particularly bad.”

“Nightmare,” Kid said, “Most of the time, I can’t even tell which ones the ladies are!”

“Got a point there.” Nightmare nodded. “Altogether, how many you got here?”

“Don’t know.”

“I never did neither.” In the hall, Nightmare squinted at the ceiling. “Yeah, this is going to be interesting.”

Kid followed him.

“Somebody told me you fool around with boys, huh?” Nightmare nodded again, considering. “I was in reform school for years. Yeah, I know about that shit.” He leaned out on the service porch (where two blacks manhandled a chipped washing machine), and pulled back, still nodding. “So you got Copperhead, Glass, and Spitt all here in the nest with you. That’s pretty cool, I guess. I wouldn’t have the balls for that. I tell you that now.”

“Which one is Spitt?”

Nightmare’s face swung back, ruptured with disbelief. “Which one is Spitt?” Disbelief erupted into mockery. “You wanna know which one is Spitt?” Mockery erupted into laughter. “Hey, Spitt! Come here.” He turned in the hall.

“Yeah?” The white youth came from the room. A matted belly, massing toward the pubic, disappeared under a turquoise and silver buckle. A scar careened across the tight, bald pectoral, and turned down toward his navel. He wore no vest. His only chain was his projector. Wrists and forearms were furry, his biceps veined and bald. His cheeks wore the few hairs of someone who could never have a beard. “What you want?”

“The Kid here thought he’d like a formal introduction. Kid, this is Spitt. Spitt, this is the Kid.”

“Huh?” Spitt said. “Eh…Hi.” He wiped a wet hand on his black jeans and held it out.

“Hi,” Kid said, but didn’t shake.

Spitt put down his hand and looked uncomfortable. “I was in the kitchen, trying to wash up some of the God-damn dishes. They ain’t gonna stay clean very long, but I thought for the first day, maybe. Did you want something?”

“You go on back,” Kid said. “Nightmare’s a clown, you know? Yeah, and throw out some of that garbage, huh?”

“I was gonna.” Spitt’s eyes flicked, questioning, between them. He looked down, moved his feet a couple of times, grunted, then went into the other room.

“Now you mean to tell me you don’t know who put the split in Spitt’s tit?” Nightmare demanded; with his finger, he flicked the orchid hanging at Kid’s neck. It ticked and chattered in the chains.

After silent seconds Nightmare, aping frustration, shook his head and assumed a theatrical whisper. “He’s the guy you cut, man, when him and Glass and Copperhead first beat the shit out of you up at Calkins’! You mean you didn’t know that?” Nightmare’s expelled “Ha!” of laughter made at least two of the scorpions in the front hall turn around. They turned back. One, a black woman, was hammering a nail into the wall, using a piece of plank to hit with. “They been tellin’ me you’re a little punchy sometimes, too. Like you’re not always there, you know? Well, I tell ’em just to watch out for you, huh? The Kid knows what he’s doing better than any of you motherfuckers, I tell ’em.”

“Glad you think so,” Kid said. “You going to stay here?”

“Me?” Nightmare buried a thumb in the links looping his chest. “Am I gonna stay here, with these scroungy motherfuckers?” The thumb wagged. The links rattled. “Shit!”

“What about you and Dragon Lady?”

“We’re around, you know. Dragon Lady used to have this all-suede gang, man, over on the edge of Jackson. You know where Cumberland Park is?”

Kid nodded.

“Man, they were some mean motherfuckers. I mean, man…” Nightmare looked in the living room again, stepped inside.

Kid followed.

On the table in the corner were stacked a dozen copies of Brass Orchids.

“You got to watch out, down there,” Nightmare said. “I mean it’s getting pretty hungry, down there. Since the water main broke, it’s just been sort of terrible. Two guys I know already got killed, down there. Yesterday. And somebody else two days before that.”

“I heard most of the people moved.”

“And the one’s that are left, man, are pretty God-damn strange, you better believe it. Dragon Lady got her nest down there. She’s pretty cool, you know?”

“And you’re really going to leave all this for me?”

“I don’t want it.” Nightmare frowned at the table.

“Why?”

“You asked me that already.”

“And I may God-damn well ask you ten times more, too! Until I find out.”

“I told you I was just curious—”

“Me! Why me?” (The three scorpions who came through the room now and didn’t look were making a noticeable effort.) “Come on, Nightmare. Talk to me.”

“Well; you come.” Nightmare turned around and leaned his butt on the table edge. “You go. You got a certain style.” He shook back his hair. “You’re crazy. People say you don’t even know who you are. That’s okay by me. I don’t want nobody asking about Larry H. Jonas before he come here, either—Then, every once in a while, you do something really crazy-ass brave.” Nightmare gripped the edges of the table. “Now I ain’t brave. I think anybody who is, is stupid. I’m just not so spaced out today I can’t remember what I did yesterday—which is more than I can say for you. I think that’s the only reason I ended up the boss.” He shrugged. “Now you got it. You don’t want it, you just take off all them chains, ball ’em up in a little ball, throw ’em in Holland Lake and go on do something else. Somebody else’ll pick it up—Copperhead, Raven, Lady of Spain…maybe some nigger you don’t even know their name yet.” Nightmare’s face twisted. “But I don’t see you doing that, you know?” He pawed something from his back pocket, brought it up between them. “And this shit—” A copy of Brass Orchids, folded. “You know I been actually trying to read this? I don’t understand shit like this, man! But every day for a fuckin’ week you got a fuckin’ page or half-page in the fuckin’ newspaper. Like it was a fuckin’ movie, or something.” Nightmare turned, and with his book knocked the stack. Copies spread the table. Three fell on the floor. “You don’t ever talk about it; least I never heard you.” Nightmare turned the folded book. “It ain’t got no name on it. I mean I don’t even know if it was really you wrote the stuff. I mean that’s what some people are saying. But I’m gonna look at it anyway, see? And I’m looking. Then I find that part about me!”

Kid frowned.

Nightmare conducted the next sentence with the folded book. “Yeah, you know; don’t tell me you didn’t put nothing about me in there.” He opened the cover, brushed over the pages.

Kid stepped around to see.

“Here!” Nightmare thumped the page with bunched fingers, leaving four prints. “That ain’t me you talkin’ about?” The whole page was grey with finger marks, the corners limp.

Kid took the book. The next page was clean. So was the page before. “Yeah…” Kid said. “I guess I had you in mind when I was writing that.”

“You did?” The question’s falling inflection rang with mistrust.

Kid nodded, closed the book and thought how inaccurate a truth he was perpetrating.

“Oh.” Nightmare pulled the book from him. The pages parted automatically at the questioned passage. “Well, reading a fuckin’ book and finding somebody talkin’ about you is some pretty weird shit, you know? I mean I haven’t made up my mind whether I like it…course, you didn’t say anything bad about me.” Once more he nodded, pursed his lips, parted them in a silent shape: “You don’t say anything good, either.” Again he stared at Kid. “That is pretty weird. I just wish I understood shit like this better, you know?” Suddenly, a grin opened around Nightmare’s broken tooth. “That really is me, huh? And you weren’t puttin’ me down or nothing? I told Dragon Lady that was me, and she tried to tell me I was full of shit. You just wait till I tell her.” He folded the book, tapped Kid’s arm with it, and stabbed at his back pocket a couple of times, till it went in. “You are a very strange person. And you do some very strange things.” Nightmare stood up and walked out of the room.

Kid saw Spitt and Glass, who had been standing just inside the kitchen door, going toward the table.

Nightmare mumbled very loudly:

“Too much.”

“You want to come to a party?” Kid called after Nightmare in the hall.

“Here?”

“At Roger Calkins’.”

Nightmare’s head went to the side. “What am I gonna do at a party up there?”

“It’s my party. Calkins is giving it for me at his place. Bring Dragon Lady along.”

“Just your friends? In his place?”

“His friends, too.”

“Oh,” Nightmare said. “She ain’t gonna come without her sidelights.”

“Adam and Baby?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s all right. All of you come on up. It’s in three Sundays, by the paper date. Soon as it gets dark.”

“Calkins’ friends, them people you read about in the paper?”

“Probably.”

“That astronaut guy gonna be there?”

“I guess so.”

“Motherfucker,” Nightmare said. “You know, Baby don’t put no clothes on. I mean he’s funny and he just refuses, flat out, you know? And Dragon Lady ain’t gonna come if he don’t.”

“He can come. If he wants to come buck naked, that’s all right with me.”

“Yeah?”

“You guys come anyway you want. Bring your lights. That’s all they probably care about.”

“I don’t got nothing to dress up in,” Nightmare said. “This ain’t a party you have to dress up for?”

“I’m coming like this.”

“You know I’m gonna tell Baby you said to come on up to that party buck naked.” Nightmare frowned. “He probably gonna do it, too. Cause he’s a real funny motherfucker. I mean he walks around in the street like that, all the God-damn time.” The frown broke before laughter. “I gotta see that. Yeah, I gotta go see that shit.”

“Three Sundays,” Kid said.

“Maybe we all come over here first?” Nightmare offered.

“Okay. I’ll see you then, if I don’t before.”

From the nail hung the framed photograph with the broken cover glass. Father, Mother, the two brothers and the sister gazed reprovingly in their dated dress. With black marker, on the glass, someone had drawn, across the boy’s and the woman’s mouth, outsized mustaches.

“Hey, there, pops!” Nightmare saluted the bearded gentleman in the photo. “Kid, I’m gonna split. Thanks for the invitation. I’ll tell the Lady. We’re all waiting to hear about your next run.”

Nightmare opened the door.

Their shadows spilled the steps into night.

“So long.” Nightmare trampled his own down to the sidewalk, waved, and stalked away.

Kid looked back down the hall. All three light bulbs were working, as well as the one in the bathroom. I guess, he thought, I picked a good nest. The films of his thought hanging beyond words curled and withered, made all the motions of the thinnest tissue caught in blasting flame. I guess…

Spitt stepped out of the living room. “We gonna eat out back, hey; Nightmare still here?” His hand, straying on his chest, concentrated its motions around the scar.

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

Behind Kid, the closing door clicked.

“He could’a stayed,” Spitt said. “We got plenty of food for tonight—”

Kid wandered down the hall.

I am a parasite. I have never made a home. Even here, I have not instructed a home to be made. In my whole stay, though I cannot recall looking for food, among these twenty, twenty-five faces, some among them must take that care. I crawl from place to place, watching homes created or crumbling around me.

He wondered what kind of party Calkins expected.

Breath bucked from his nose; that was laughter.

On the service porch, Kid looked down into the yard (firelight on the ceiling beams), grabbed the sill of the window, reared back, vaulted: “Whooop-peee!”

Others laughed.

“Jesus Christ,” Raven said. “You’ll break your fuckin’ neck!”

Kid staggered, agonized.

Three hands came to steady him.

And three voices:

“Man, that must be fifteen feet!”

“It ain’t fifteen feet—ten? Twelve? Here, Kid, have a drink. You know there’s a God-damn liquor store just around the corner and ain’t nobody even broken in the window?”

“It’s broken now. Shit. We’re gonna have to work a week to drink up all that booze.”

Kid took another step, grinning, between the scorpions who flanked him. Pain shot again from calf to thigh. Did I break my knee, he thought. No. It’ll be all right in a minute…

“You all right, Kid?” That was one of the black girls with bare breasts joggling jingling links. “Man, you scared me good when you come leaping out like that!”

Kid took another breath and grinned. “I’m okay.” He leaned on the black shoulder, while she pulled away from another girl to support him. She laughed, shifted, steadied; and Kid pulled away, took another step, another breath. “Yeah, I’m okay. What we got to eat?”

The Ripper, with a can opener, kneeled over a big, odd-shaped can. “One of them canned hams.” The tin wept gelatin down its red and blue label. “We found three of them.”

The fire crackled on the bottom of a kettle hung on a pipe propped on cinder blocks. “The gas isn’t working in the stove?”

“Yeah,” Denny said, across the fire, “but we thought we’d cook out.”

The first bubble on the…soup? stew? grey at the kettle edge, shook its reflection of the porch window frame, and burst. Another bubble grew.

Kid took his weight off his throbbing leg. Better. He flexed, feeling the tender machinery of knee and ankle jarred from place. It was his booted leg. Perhaps the soft sole had hit a rock?

“Don’t throw your God-damn bottle in the yard, man. Don’t you know about pollution? We gotta live here.”

“You shut up, or I’ll pollute you!” a short-haired white woman said.

“Throw your fuckin’ bottle over in the next yard, will you?”

“Okay, okay…”

Light snarled in the loops of chain, laid out dull splashes on dark leather, lit the trough beneath a black lip, put wires of light in greasy brass hair, glistened on the puffed rim of a lashless eye, sank in the graphite nap bushing an ovoid skull.

The Ripper laughed and bent and wiped at his mouth with his wrist. The orchid, from the chain at his neck, spun bright petals.

“Here…!” A bottle neck hit Kid’s mouth, clicked his teeth, hurting his gum.

“Christ, man!” Kid beat it away. “I don’t want no God-damn wine,” which was the taste he licked from his lower lip; he rubbed his mouth. “Somebody get me something real.”

“You want this?” Denny asked.

“Yeah. What is it?” Kid drank, and cleared his burning throat. “You know when I was your age I use to be a fuckin’ booze hound? I don’t even like the stuff now.” He took another, smaller drink, and handed the bottle back to Denny; “But I was a fuckin’ hound.” Guys argued:

“Now what you gonna do with that?”

“Cut it up, cook it over the fire.”

“You can eat it right out of the can like that.”

“Hell, no. That’s ham, man. You’ll get trichinosis!”

“Man, you can’t get trichinosis from no canned ham!”

“Well, you’re gonna cook mine before I eat any.”

Somebody passed out long-handled kitchen forks. (“That’s all right. I got my huntin’ knife.”) Bubbling soup dribbled the kettle’s side. Kid’s leg felt about okay. He turned, smiling at the dark, as scorpions joggled him to get at the meat. (“Hey, somebody start opening up the other one, will you?”) Soup hissed and chattered in the flame. The edges of the evening softened with the liquor. He looked for Denny and Denny’s bottle.

“Hey, Kid!” The smile was a pit of flickering rot and silver. “You really doing nice here, huh? Beautiful, yeah. Beautiful.”

“Well, I’ll be a motherfucker!” Kid announced, “I didn’t even think you were gonna live another twenty-four hours, much less show up here.”

Pepper gaped wider. “Sort of…hungry!” His chin jutted on the syllable. He joggled a wine bottle in his spiky hand. “You got a really nice nest here; and I’m all ready for a run.”

“Help yourself.” Kid gestured over the heads around him. “You just go right on and help yourself.”

A very blond and square-jawed scorpion pushed from the center of a bunch of blacks (Raven, Jack the Ripper, Thruppence, D-t, Spider) stepped up behind Pepper, and said, “Jesus Christ…Shit!” He seized Pepper’s scrawny shoulder. “What are you doing back here, you sad-assed motherfucker? Why don’t you get your ass out of here before I—”

“Hey, now…” Pepper said. “Hey…!”

Others, looking, moved aside. The short-haired woman stepped forward. Copperhead stopped her with a freckled hand on her chained and vested shoulder.

“Come on and get the fuck out of here,” the square-jawed blond said. “Nobody wants you around stinking up the place now. You been run out twice. Somebody gotta run you out again?”

“Man, I’m hungry!” Pepper complained. “Kid said I could—” And under the thrusting hand, stumbled into Kid.

Kid stepped back, thought, no, with no word on top of it. He swung his hand, and caught the back of the blond head so hard his palm stung.

“Owee…!” came unaccountably from Pepper, who scurried to the side.

The scorpion Kid had hit turned, his face screwed up.

No, Kid thought, this time with the word. I got a bum leg, I’m half drunk, and I’m beating on people? No. This is going to get me in trouble. “Leave him alone!” Kid said loudly.

Scorpions shuffled in the silence.

Kneeling over the ham, Priest squinted. He was so close to the fire his dark shoulders sweated.

Kid walked toward the scowling blond and took his shoulder. “Now you just go on and get yourself something to eat!” He shook the scorpion’s shoulder in large motions. “There’s enough for everybody, see?” Am I really getting away with this? Kid began to laugh. “Come on, give him a piece of ham.” He pushed the scorpion toward the fire. And I’ll just turn, walk away, and wait for a fork in my shoulder.

Kid turned.

Copperhead stood before the others, arms crossed, Glass to one side of him, Spitt to the other. The short-haired woman, shaking her head, was walking away.

Kid moved toward them thinking; I can’t tell whether they’re about to back me or jump me. Do the others know? “Whyn’t you get yourself something to eat, too?” He walked by.

Some tension had broken with his laughter.

Thruppence said, “You got a ladle or a cup or something?”

Jack the Ripper said, “We got bowls and cups and things. Somebody washed all the fuckin’ dishes.”

Half a dozen crouched together behind the fire, shoulders smooth as great plums, hair wrinkled as prunes, holding forks over the coals, shifting hands suddenly sucking their knuckles.

He looked at a bottle.

“You want some of—?”

“Yeah.” He took the bottle and another drink, “Thanks,” and kept circling. Two were necking under a tree. Momentarily he thought they were both boys.

Dollar lifted his face from the black girl’s disarrayed hair. “Hey, Kid…” He blinked in the firelight, his stubbly jaw blebbed here and there.

Kid stepped over Dollar’s boots.

“You got something to eat yet?” Denny asked.

Kid shook his head.

“You take this. I’ll get another one.”

The cup was hot and soup had run down the sides. “Thanks.”

“You won’t get trichinosis from that ham if it isn’t cooked through, will you?” Denny asked.

“If it comes out of a can,” Kid said, “it’s cooked.”

“That’s what I thought,” Denny said.

He sipped, stinging the roof of his mouth. The sensation took seconds to subside to simple heat. He was looking, desultorily, for either Pepper or the scorpion who’d harassed him. He could spot neither around the fire. And people were going in and out of the house again.

Glass, Spitt, and Copperhead, less formally posed, but still together, stood to the side of the yard eating ham and soup. Kid doffed his cup.

“Can you hear that?” Glass asked.

“Hear what?”

“Listen,” Spitt said.

Kid bent over the soup while it steamed his chin. The yard was filled with voices. “What?”

“There,” Spitt said.

Perhaps two blocks away, a man screamed. The sound went on and on, died at the length of a long breath, and began again, this time shaking and breaking.

“You wanna go check it out?” Copperhead took another bite of ham. A line of grease glistened from the corner of his mouth into his beard.

“Naw,” Kid said.

“You’re the big hero, man,” Copperhead said. “Don’t you wanna go help a gentleman in distress?” Copperhead laughed.

“No, I…”

The man screamed again.

Momentarily Kid pictured the four of them foraging beyond the firelight, through darkened streets, the ululation filling the night about them.

“No, I don’t wanna. I got Pepper fed. That’s my heroics for the night.” He sipped loudly and walked back among the scorpions around the fire. When the neighbors are shrieking…went through his mind but could not remember who’d said it.

“Here, Kid. You wanna use my fork?”

It was the blond scorpion who had tried to eject Pepper.

“Thanks.” It was a long-handled, three-pronged laundry fork. Kid took a chunk of ham and squatted beside the fire. He squinted before flame. Trying to drink his soup, he spilled more over his hand. And even with the long fork, his knuckles were painfully hot. The blond scorpion, squatting beside Kid, watched the meat bubble and char. “Thanks for the fork,” Kid said again after a few minutes and sipped from the cup once more.

The screaming had stopped.

Or there was too much noise to hear.

4

“Hey, Tak!”

“Kid?”

“What are you doing?”

“What are you doing? Can you get down from there? You better watch out…”

Kid let go of the beam and crabbed down the rubble, raising dust banks behind and an avalanche before.

“That was impressive,” Tak said. “You’re still going around with one shoe? You must have a sole on that foot like an oak board.”

“Naw.” Kid beat his foot against his black jeans, both legs grey to the knee. “Not really.”

“You exploring in there?” Tak pushed up his cap to watch the smoke curl back through the girders. “How come you don’t have the rest of the nest? I didn’t think scorpions ever traveled alone.”

“I come,” Kid shrugged. “I go. I take them on runs. Where you going?”

“I’m on a mission of mercy for your girlfriend.”

“Lanya?”

“I volunteered to help her with her dress for your party.”

Kid tried to hold back his laughter. It burst his lips’ seal and lights shot either in his eyes or in the windows of the warehouse across from them.

“What’s so funny?”

“She’s got you turned into a seamstress?”

“She does not. Come on and I’ll show you something interesting.”

They walked the littered streets.

“You’re going to come to the party, aren’t you?”

“Not,” Tak said, “on your fucking life.”

“Huh? Oh, man, come on. Calkins wants me to bring my friends. I’m going to take the whole nest along. Don’t you want to see what happens when all us freaks get turned loose in there?”

“Not terribly. But I suspect Calkins does—though I’ve never met the man.”

“Aw, come on, Tak—”

“No. Somebody’s got to be around to read about it in the next day’s gossip column. That’s my job. You just have a good time and drink a glass of brandy for me. Swipe a bottle if they’ve got any good stuff and bring it back. I’m down to Gold Leaf. Somebody got into my liquor connection and made off with just about everything worth drinking.”

“We got a liquor store right around our corner. What do you drink? It’s got everything. Anything you want. You just tell me, and I’ll get it for you.”

“Five Star Courvoisier.” Tak laughed his whisky growl and hooked his cap down. “Come on.” As they left the corner, he asked, “How long you been up?”

“A few hours.”

“Oh,” Tak said. “Because I got up very early, when it was still getting light. I came over here, and you could see flames…” He nodded down the side street where turbulent smoke blocked vision less than two blocks away.

“You could?”

“Now it’s just…” Tak nodded again.

Smoke bellied and heaved about the upper stories. The sky was thick as cheese and eveninged without shadows. I don’t (Kid thought) get thirsty anymore, but I’m always hoarse. Three boots and one foot ground the gritty street.

“Tak, where’s the monastery from here? I don’t mean Reverend Amy’s church. I mean the monastery.”

“Now this is…” Tak stopped. “This goes up into the city and turns into Broadway. You just go straight on to the other end of Broadway and you run right into it.”

“Yeah?…Just like that?”

“It’s a long walk. I don’t know if that bus is still running. Over here.” Tak stepped into the street.

The freight ramp sloped to a wooden door studded with rivet heads the size of fifty-cent pieces. Above, on rust-ringed iron, aluminum letters, forward on bolts, announced cleanly: MSE WAREHOUSE SPACE. By the door a black plaque reflected Kid’s face askew. White letters obscured his eyes and lips: Maitland Systems Engineering Warehouse. Kid struggled momentarily with a memory of Arthur Richards while Tak took the hasp in both hands, grunted. The door rumbled back from blank blackness. Tak looked at his hands, their cleanness emphasized by swipes of rusty grease.

“Go on in.” Tak held his hands from his hips to keep them from his pants.

Kid stepped in and heard his breath’s timbre change. Iron steps rose to a concrete porch.

“Go on up.”

Kid did and stepped sideways through the door at their head.

The skylight, three stories above, mapped continents in dirt and light, among longitudinal and latitudinal tessellations.

“What’s in—” the reverberation halted him—“what’s in here?”

“Go on,” and Tak was without face. He passed ahead of Kid. Each boot heel on the concrete cast back stuttering echoes.

It was very cool.

Blocked by eight-foot plank X’s, spools big enough for underground electrical cables sat about the floor among twenty and thirty-foot stacks of cartons. Kid passed two before he recognized what was wound on them.

Later he tried to figure out what the process of recognition had been. At the moment of seeing there was a period in which all emotions were dead, during which he had gone up to one—yes, he had put out his hand, pulled it back, and just stood there a long while.

In hanks, in dripping loops from the drum (hundreds of feet? Hundreds of thousands? And how many drums were there in the block-square warehouse?) the brass chain, set with prisms, mirrors, lenses, looped.

He stood before the ranked glitter, waiting for it to strike up some explanatory thought.

The end of the chain hung to the floor, where a few feet formed a full (c. 300 stars?) Pleiades.

There was an open cardboard carton beside the spool. Kid bent down, pushed back the flap. They looked like copper beetles. He pushed his hand into the metal tabs, picked out one—there was a hole at one end—and tried to read what was embossed on it. The light was too dim, and the corners of his eyes were stinging.

On the carton, however, stenciled in white, was: PRODUCTO DO BRAZIL.

Kid stood.

Tak had wandered some forty feet down an avenue of cartons.

Kid’s eyes had cleared to the dim light enough to make out the stenciling on the boxes piled around him.

FABRIQUE FRANÇAISE.

MADE IN JAPAN—the initial smudge must have been an ‘M.’

ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ.

Kid turned back to the chain. He had begun his observations in curiosity, but what generated had so little to do with answers that even curiosity blanked.