Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 53 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Revelation,” Lanya said.

I nodded.

“…and, well, Copperhead.”

“Jesus,” Denny said. “When?”

Lanya raised a forefinger to bite on the green polish. “You remember the night of Kid’s party, when he went off to Cumberland Park, during the fire, and found those kids, with George? You’d wandered off somewhere, Denny, and I was just sitting around here talking with everybody. Gladis and I were telling them about the House—that place where all the girls stay? They were very interested. So finally Gladis and I took Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass over—that’s where I pick up my birth-control stuff, anyway. The evening is a little hazy, but as I recall, Revelation wandered in just a little later—” She sat up, scowling at her lap. “Spitt retired early with a young lady he met right away—they just went upstairs. And Glass wasn’t feeling well so he left to come back here. But Copperhead and Revelation stayed around downstairs with the rest of us—Dragon Lady had come over, and everybody was yakking about old times—and got incredibly stoned. And—” She paused, her expression between consideration and confession—“eventually, I balled them. And—” she nodded at Denny—“your little girlfriend there balled them. And Gladis balled them. And Filament. And Dragon Lady. And, all in all, about—” she raised her fist and began opening it, finger at a time; raised her other fist—“nine other women balled them too. Not in that order: I was fifth or sixth.”

Denny said slowly and wondrously, “Wow…!”

“It was very funny.” Lanya dropped her shoulders. “I really thought the two of them had flipped out or something, at first. I was sort of scared for them. I don’t think they could have stood up and walked. It was almost like they were in some sort of half-trance. Revelation was lying on his back crying through most of it. That part didn’t turn me on too much. But it got some of the ladies off, and how! And he didn’t lose his hard-on.”

I was surprised and I was curious: “Did they come?”

“Maybe a couple of times at first. I think. But after that, they were just permanently up. Nobody gave ’em a chance to go down. You just did anything you wanted with them. And anyone who was interested did.”

In the middle of a corrective complaining about Risa’s/Angel’s joint cooking effort, Lanya turned to me as I came into the kitchen and said: “Kid, I had a thought, about your memory thing.”

“You all full of thoughts,” Angel said. “Whyn’t you shut up and let us cook?”

“She’s just helpin’,” Risa said.

“And she knows I’m just jokin’,” Angel said. “Don’t you?”

“I’ll shut up,” Lanya said.

I sat on a corner of the kitchen table. “What’s your idea?” A piece of silverware fell on the floor.

“Actually—” Lanya picked it up—” you have an amazing memory! I was snooping in your notebook again—forgive me, and I know you will: but your memory for conversation is practically photographic!”

“No it’s not,” I told her.

“I said ‘practically.’”

“No,” I said again. “About a third of any conversation I write down is just paraphrase.”

“Being able to remember two thirds of what people say, even a few minutes after they’ve said it, is very unusual. Even your account of the night in the park; and you told me you hardly remembered any of that.”

“I just wrote down what you said happened.”

“If you don’t have the lines right, you’ve certainly got the feeling! And with my hustling escapade, you’ve got all the lines. Those I remember.”

I said: “You read that too?”

“And also your accounts of some of the talks we’ve had together. I don’t know how they would stack up next to a transcript, but it’s still impressive.”

“So what’s your idea?”

“Just that, maybe, since you’ve got such memory for details, it has something to do with your losing track of whole periods of time or…well, you know.”

“That’s so interesting,” I said, “I think I’ll forget it right now.”

“She’s just tryin’ to help!” Risa said from the stove, clashing pot tops.

“And she too knows I am joking,” I said. “But even if you’re right, so what?”

Of course I didn’t forget it, witness this. Still, I suspect my highly creative renderings are more convincing than accurate, no matter what she says—I think (hope?).

“All girls?” Denny asked.

Lanya nodded.

“Shit.”

Lanya leaned against me. “I’ve never seen men in a state like that before. The whole thing was really very dyke-y.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. “I dug it. It was a little scary. But it was…an experience.”

“You’re just having experiences one after the other, aren’t you?” The first thing I thought of was what Risa had said to me that day out in the yard; what I found myself grinning at was that the possibility of a genital expedient for taking her suggestion left me just as dubious as an anal one about whether or not I wanted to go through something like that. Oh, well; maybe some people can’t have everything.

Lanya grinned up at me—“Um-hm”—and kissed my nose.

“What does your Madame Brown think about all this?” I asked.

“That I lead a wild and fascinating life.”

“Oh.” I nodded.

“She just wonders how I manage to get to school every day on time.”

“How do you manage to get to school every day on time?”

Lanya shrugged. “Just conscientious, I guess.”

“Jesus!” Denny sat back, his hands in his lap. “You gang-shagged Revelation and Copperhead! Hey—who was better, Pinky or the nigger?”

“Neither of them —” she leaned forward and kissed Denny’s nose—“was as sweet as you.”

“And by the way,” Denny said, “where’s my five bucks?”

I cuffed him. “Hey you want to hear what happened to me today?”

“It’s my five bucks, babes!” Lanya said.

Am writing this comment on what Lanya said about the girls shagging the two guys at the house right after finishing putting down my account of our chaos and confusion with the Emboriky (with Jack, wouldn’t you know, being that much help and making that much trouble!) because a lot of what happened there, what we said to them, what they said to us, pushed my mind back to it. I note that Copperhead and Revelation are pretty much exclusively-interested-in-girls guys; remember from last night (significant in terms of today?) Revelation politely trying to tell a pretty drunken Angel: Really, it was nothing personal but, no, he didn’t want to fuck around with him, and no, he had never really tried it before, and no he didn’t want to, at least not now; and the two of them went on like this, quietly out on the service porch, for half an hour. The truth, of course, is that Revelation was vastly flattered by that much attention from someone that much quicker than he is and wanted to extend it as much as possible. (Did we think by paying them serious attention we were going to flatter them into getting their foot off our necks?) I think, sometimes, the difference is that they are sure that any social structures that arise grow out of patterns innate to The Sex Act—whatever that is; while we have seen, again and again, that the psychology, structures, and acoutrements that define any sex act are always internalized from social structures that already exist, that have been created, that can be changed. All right: Let me ask the terrible question: Could it be that all those perfectly straight, content-with-their-sexual-orientation-in-the-world, exclusive-heterosexuals really are (in some ill-defined, psychological way that will ultimately garner a better world) more healthy than (gulp…!) us? Let me answer: No way! The active ones (of whichever sex) are denser and crueler. The passive ones (of whichever sex) are lazier and more self-satisfied. In a society where they are on top, they cling like drowners to their active/passive, male/female, master/servant, self/other set-up not for pleasure, which would be reasonable, but because it allows them to commit or condone any lack of compassion among themselves, or with anyone else, and that (at least in this society, as they have set it up) is immoral, sick, and evil; any madness is preferable to that. And madness is not preferable!

“Aw, shit! I went out in the damn street to pimp the fuckin’ John—”

“Look, shut up!” I told them. “Listen.” Then I described what had happened back in the park. I thought it was funny. But they both thought it was pretty serious, while we talked about it.

We talked about it a long time too.

Three conversations in which Lanya took part her last few days here. (Stayed overnight; which I liked. Maybe I’m ready to go spend some time at her place? The nesting instinct is not the same as the homing one. Which pales first?) She was talking with Gladis when I came into the yard:

“Oh—!” and ran up to me, blocked me halfway down the steps.

I focused on her, as on a memory of mountain rain, autumn light, sea fizz.

(She has green eyes!)

The most natural thing, she turned me around on the steps and led me back to the porch—when I realized I was being led, she pulled a little harder; urged, “Come on,” and took me into the loft room:

“Where’s your notebook? Or your new poems, anyway.”

“Huh? I thought you wanted to fuck.”

“Oh, if you want—” imitating another kind of girl, then she laughed at the imitation’s success—“here!” The notebook corner stuck over the loft’s edge; she pulled it down. Two loose pages fell.

She picked them up. “Can I have these to take home?”

“Sure,” I said, “—no; not that one,” and took back the sheet of blue paper (from the package of stationery Raven brought home).

She folded the page I’d left her and put it in her shirt pocket. I put the other inside the cover and slid the notebook back up on the bed. “Why do you want these?”

“Why do you write them?”

“I don’t know…anymore.”

“Ditto,” she said, disturbed; which disturbed.

“Hey,” I asked. “You haven’t seen Mr. Calkins again recently, have you?”

“No…?” in a way that asked why I’d asked.

“I mean this isn’t his idea…to get my new poems from me? You’re not just keeping them for somebody else?”

“Of course not. I just thought I had less chance of losing them than you did.”

“Mr. Calkins talked to me about stealing them. I thought he was joking—you haven’t showed them to anybody?”

“Of course not…” Then she said: “Would it be so awful if I had? I did read one—a few to Madame Brown. And a friend of hers who came over that night to visit.”

“It wouldn’t be awful.”

“You look unhappy about it, though.”

“I don’t know. I’m just confused. Why did you read them? You just liked them?”

“Very much. Everett Forest—Madame Brown’s friend—asked me to, actually. We were talking about you, one night when he had dropped over. It came up that I had some of your unpublished work; he was very anxious to see it. So I read three or four of my favorites. I suppose—” she said and sat down on the motorcycle’s seat “—this is the part I shouldn’t tell you: He wanted to copy them. But I didn’t think he should…Kid?”

“What?”

“There’s a lot of people in Bellona who are very interested in practically any and everything about you.”

“There aren’t a lot of people in Bellona,” I said. “Everybody keeps telling me this; what are they interested in me for?”

“They think you’re important, interesting…maybe some combination of the two. Make copies of your poems? I know people who, if I gave them your laundry list, would type careful reproductions as if they were some university library or something.”

“I don’t have a fucking laundry list. I don’t even have any laundry,” I said. “Who?”

“Well, Everett for one. When I told him you sometimes left your notebook over at my place he practically had a fit. He begged me to let him know next time you left it so he could look through it and maybe make a—”

“I’d break your head.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” She moved on the seat. “I wouldn’t.”

“There’s just not enough else for people to be interested in in this city.”

“I think,” she said, “you’ve got it. But even though I wouldn’t let him go snooping in your journal, I still think your writing this down bores me; no, it makes me angry. It didn’t make me angry when she and I were talking about it, it was flattering. Its rehearsal, however, is maddening. I enjoy having fantasies about these things, thinking about them—but as a game. (Haven’t I?) There’s no reason not to enjoy them that way anymore. But since the publication of Brass Orchids I sometimes find myself saying to myself: “All right. I want to stop playing this game and go try another one for a while. Lord, let me think about something else!” And I can’t. That’s a much meaner version of the terrifying morning beneath the tree. But the truth is, most of the poems in the book were written before I came to the scorpions. (Which ones were actually written afterward?) The other irony is that the one time I really was their leader was when I made them help me get June’s and Tarzan’s brother out of the shaft. Everything since has been the concretizing of some fantasy begun then—and in their minds, not mine. Have I lost by the realization? For (arbitrarily?) precious sanity’s sake I have to think at least I’ve learned.

My sensibilities have grown inflamed as our giant sun. I am writing poems now because there is nothing else to read except the newspaper, discussing for pages the rumors and epehemera that fume through the city. How can this go on when such moons rise and such suns set? I am living this way because the horror here seems preferable to life in Tarzan’s family.

Bullshit! Only I felt like that when I wrote it—no: I felt something, and thought those words the proper ashes of the feeling as I searched the smoldering. But they were only smoke. Now I cannot tell whether the feeling itself was misperceived or merely its record inaccurate!

When you get water from either the kitchen or the bathroom or the service-porch tap, bubbles form around the sides of the glass, but not evenly about the whole surface. They make a band with a definite bottom edge, but peter out up the side. Have noticed, over the last several days, the line starts higher and higher. Must ask Tak if this means something.

To the next conversation, then; maybe better luck:

I stopped outside the kitchen door because I heard them talking inside. Through the screening I saw Lanya sitting on the table, her back against the wall, Gladis and pretty much all the apes (no Tarzan); also D-t leaning against the icebox and Glass standing in the living-room doorway; and Spitt just behind him, to the other side. A loud discussion; and Lanya’s voice cut over (she leaned forward, looking around): “I have never—no, wait a minute! Wait. I have never seen a bunch less interested in sex than you guys! No, listen! I mean for guys who don’t have anything else to do. Really, I’m not kidding. When I was in college, or practically any place, any job I’ve ever had; or guys I’ve just known—seen a bunch who were less interested in getting laid—”

“I don’t see why you’re complaining!” from Jack the Ripper.

“I’m not,” Lanya said. “But I mean, I spend maybe half my time here. Maybe more than half. And I think I know you guys pretty well—”

And D-t: “No, now you wait a minute! Hey, now you wait—”

Lanya finished in the silence: “I was just curious why, that’s all.”

“Now wait,” D-t repeated. “We got a very strange and funny group of people here. And I guess we don’t talk about it that much because you have to be very careful you know? Very polite.”

“I don’t just mean making jokes about sex,” Lanya said. “But even that, when you come down to it. You’ll get really foul for ten, twenty minutes. Then nothing for a day, two days—”

“You mean thinking and figuring how to get laid?” Raven said. “Yeah, I know what she means.”

Spitt said: “I don’t have to talk about it. I get mine,” and looked at Glass to corroborate him.

Glass, hands behind him on the wall, just leaned back a little more watching (Spitt and Lanya were the only whites in the room), curious, as though the discussion was going on all for him.

“There are just very different kinds of people here,” D-t said. “For me, maybe, what she said is true. I just never been that interested in sex, I guess, compared to some people. I told a friend of mine once I jerked off about maybe two, three times a year. And got laid about the same. He said that was very strange—”

“Yeah, that’s strange!” Jack the Ripper hollered, and people laughed.

“Spider over there, see—he’s what…? Ten years younger than I am? And he’s down at the park, practically every God-damn night it looks to me, getting his pipes swabbed out by the guys sneaking around the bushes—”

“God damn—” Spider said, uncomfortably.

“We just got very different people,” D-t went on, “who like very different things. In very different ways. People like me and Gladis, say. We’re pretty much exclusively interested in the opposite sex, and then, one at a time and rarely.”

“Three times a year, baby,” Gladis said, her inflection swinging down low as it could get; “now I don’t know whether I’m all that much like you,” and up again.

Which tickled the Ripper.

“Shit,” D-t said. “You know I used to think I was normal. But then we got guys like Jack the Ripper who are interested in anything.”

Spider said, sullenly: “I’m interested in anything.”

“Aw, nigger,” D-t said, “you’d be interested in a clam if it smiled at you and promised not to bite!”

Spitt added over the laughter, “…and even then, I don’t know!” which I don’t think anybody really heard.

“Then we got the groupies—” D-t went on.

“Groupies!” from Glass, laughing for the first time. “Is that what you call us?”

“I mean you guys just aren’t interested in anything less than a full scale encounter group-grope—”

“Aw, man,” from Glass, “you just wish you could—” and I didn’t hear the rest because:

Tarzan asked: “What’s going on in there?”

I glanced back. “Nothing.”

But some of the guys inside had seen us through the screen. A couple more turned to look. So I opened the door and went in, Tarzan following. Lanya was still laughing. Edging Thruppence over on the table, I sat next to her.

“With so many different types, see,” D-t said, getting Lanya’s attention back, “you have to be very polite: when we live this close. And that means you don’t talk too much. You just do it when it’s around to be done and the rest of the time you talk about something else.”

Tarzan stayed in the doorway, his back to the screen, as outside now as Glass had been before.

Laughter spilled them into different subjects (food, wouldn’t you know): Thruppence said we had stuff in the cellar that we hadn’t known about till now because nobody had thought to look, till he’d gone down that morning. He took some of us out to show us. There was no real cellar door; just a trap-window, planked over, and a busted Yale lock hanging from the hasp. It let you into a damp, four-and-a-half foot dugout that went under half the house where, besides all the crates of tin cans—some with mildewed labels—was the fuse-box and the hot-water heater, which I re-lit.

Later a couple of people took baths.

I wish they’d continued the sex discussion. It hadn’t felt finished. I wondered if it was the advent of me (the Boss) or Tarzan (the Oddball) that had shifted it; or simply the balance in the cream-to-coffee ratio. Out of conceit, I decided it must have been Tarzan.

Revelation, with his ash-pale hair, his gold chains, his pink, pink skin, polarizes a black bunch when he is the only white among them the same way Lady of Spain, blacker than Spider, high-assed, with little, low tits (from jokes the others make, she’s of West Indian descent), polarizes a white group when she is the sole black: visually.

Tarzan, however, so often the only blue-eyed blond among the apes (now the official name for the sub-group of five out of the fifteen/sixteen blacks in the nest [Raven, Jack the Ripper, Thruppence, Angel, Spider]) polarizes them in a very different way. His fawning fascination, his near-belligerence, and general lack of use for anyone white makes it impossible to see him/them without a whole aura of sexual/political resonances, which they carry like their lights. (Two thoughts—First:) Even so, everyone seems more or less able to absorb the situation with tolerance and hardly a comment. (Second:) With all these whacked-out spades, there doesn’t seem to be one among them, man or woman, in a similar position with a white group (Glass, triumvirate with Spitt and Copperhead, seems a very different thing. Why?) Perhaps the nest (or the House) would be a good place for June after all—after all, I can put up with Eddy. (Or can I?)

Pretty soon it broke up around the cellar window and got back together in the yard…But we never did get back to talking about sex. Oh, well: that politeness. I guess Lanya’s right.

Third conversation started in the loft. I was on my back; Lanya was leaning on my chest, looking in my mouth while I talked about something. In the middle of a sentence, she got my mind off what I was saying, saying: “I could come from just the smell of your breath. It puffs out in a small hot cloud with each word.”

“Pretty bad, huh?”

“It’s not bad—please, don’t stop talking.”

But I couldn’t think of how to go on.

She said: “Your mouth is like a flower. Each tooth is like a daisy petal, complete with calyx: You’re getting a sort of green skin over the base of your teeth, up near the gum.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “Pretty soon I’ll be ready for Bunny to come take me away.”

“Hey.” Denny rolled over. “Let me see?” leaning on my shoulder.

I said, “Oof!” and didn’t smile.

“Smile,” Denny said.

“I wonder if it comes off.” Lanya reached up and held her hand like a claw, over my face. “Just a second,” one finger coming down.

“Cut it out—!” I turned my head.

“I was just going to scrape at it with my fingernail.”

Denny looked at his and on my shoulder. “Man, my nails are filthy.”

“They’re rimmed with the exact color of black pearl.” Lanya put her cheek next to his. “And he’ll probably use it in one of his poems.”

“Too fancy,” I said, my hand on his. She covered mine. Then Denny closed his eyes tight and tried to wiggle between us like a basset puppy (which started us laughing) and sometimes she is a lorikeet. And sometimes he is a parrot; and she is an airborne borzoi.

I said: “Get up. I want to show you something,” at which Denny laughed and Lanya grunted.

Denny told her: “That’s all right. We’ll just get our clothes off right away, next time.”

I said: “Aw, come on!”

We put on some clothes (Denny: socks, vest, chains. Lanya: shirt; her harmonica fell out; was returned to breast pocket; tennis sneakers. Me: pants) climbed down from the loft, put on more clothes (Denny: pants, boots. Lanya: took off sneakers to put on jeans, put on sneakers again. Me: vest, chains, boot), and went into the hall.

Baby Adam, Priest, Devastation, Filament, the Executioner (who everybody usually calls: X-X) and Cathedral were pell-melling in and X-X told me they were really beat, had been running since sometime yesterday. I said three or four of them could go up and fall out in the loft bed because we weren’t using it. Filament, the knuckles of one hand on her hip, the other hand waving (she chooses to wear only thin chains, some outside her breasts [nipples like puddles of Peptobismol on the upper slopes of soapstone breasts] some inside) told about what they done in the park: scared some children, unintentionally, and had some sort of loose, blurry confrontation with two men who might have been Tom and Mak. Three went to find mattresses in the back room.

(To try for accuracy is to risk awkwardness.) To find out who I am I’ve had to give up my name and who knows what part of my life. It wasn’t a choice. But treating it like one seems the only way to keep my mind…“seems”? I am frightened because, in this City, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I can go. (To try for form is to risk pomposity.)

The trapdoor on the porch ceiling was open. Denny climbed up the ladder nailed against the wall; Lanya and me (wondering who’d opened the door and why) followed. Poked my head after her heels into the lead-colored sky. Stepped up on the pebbly roofing paper and couldn’t figure out how transition had occurred between the slab of runny metal three feet beyond the trap, and the football-Stadium-wide, muzzy balloon around us-and-the-nearest-buildings. Thought of climbing down and up again to watch this time.

Asked Lanya if she’d reconsidered being a scorpion instead of just a scorpion’s old lady. “Not,” she said sweetly, “on your fucking life!” And then: “No, seriously. I’ve thought about it again, and it’s just something I don’t want to do. I like staying here for extended visits. But I like living with Madame Brown.” Well, she’s been here three days straight. And yesterday Denny, for a joke, put one of his chains around her neck and she kept it on till she went to bed. But she didn’t put it on again this morning when she went to school.

Across the roof, Fireball—buck naked except his optic girdle—turned around and smiled, a little confused.

“Did you open the roof trap?” Lanya asked.

Filament has a blue scorpion tattooed on her shoulder she said she got before she came to Bellona. She has probably volunteered more information about her previous life than anyone around the nest (most of her life sounds very dull); but, high on tact, she also manages to remain one of the most invisible. If one were writing about the place, she’d probably be among the half dozen people most likely left out, or whose one or two outstanding traits you’d fix for decoration on another character. A girl, and white, she still has the most typical scorpion personality, almost unbelievably so. In fact, I wonder if I believe that; so this note.

“Yeah. I just wanted to get out and walk around.” He told us he liked to go around naked. To his unnecessary explanation, Denny explained (unnecessarily) that you could go around in the street stark naked if you wanted in Bellona “…and it wouldn’t bother nobody.” Lanya, by now, was taking off her clothes. So I took off mine. Denny said, “What the fuck,” and took off his. (He left the dog’s choke collar looped and re-looped on his ankle.) Lanya took her harmonica out of her shirt and began to play those discordant clutches. We all walked around and stared out at the edges of what we could see or each other when each other wasn’t staring back; leaned on the roof rim; sat on the mansard things along the side. A long time.

Then Fireball got on his pants and chains—

“So long,” Lanya said.

Fireball grinned. “So long.”

–and went down.

We came closer together at the far corner and talked about him awhile, me and Lanya mostly, mostly Denny listening. Then I told them for the first time about mugging that guy last week.

Sort of awed, Denny said: “Wow!”

Lanya said: “You are kidding, aren’t you…? Jesus, you’re not!” She was sitting cross-legged with her back on the low wall. When she lifted her harmonica, there were two parallel dashes on her thigh.

“No, I’m not kidding. It was interesting.”

“The awful thing is, I’m sure you did it to find out what it felt like, or for some other half-assedly commendable reason.”

“The main thing,” I explained, “isn’t that I was so scared, but if you get off this very thin line, you get angrier than a motherfucker—”

“Look,” she said, “you wouldn’t kill somebody just to find out what it felt like.”

“It would be easier here than any place else.”

“Christ!” She looked up at the sky.

“Okay,” I said. “So you don’t approve. Why are you angry?”

“Because,” and her eyes came down to mine, “in some funny way I think it’s my fault. And don’t ask me to explain that; or you’ll get angry.”

While I tried to figure out some way to get her to explain, practical Denny asked: “What’d you get?”

“Three bucks. For the work, it pays better than the Richards’s.” I reached over for my pants, took the bills out of my pocket, and gave them to him. “Here.” I glanced at Lanya with a little smile. “I’d split it between you, but she won’t take one.”

She got a tightish expression that let me know she certainly would.

Denny looked at the bills and repeated: “Wow!” Thinking: He would use the same inflection if he discovered something had been stolen from him. “Here.” Denny handed one bill to Lanya and—“Here, you keep one. That way we can split it up right”—one back to me. “I gotta take a piss.” He stood and walked away, palms facing back, the bill wrapped on the middle finger of his left hand.

Lanya watched me. “I suppose I’d find you dull if you didn’t keep dropping stuff like that into my head. No, don’t say anything. I’m still thinking.” She pushed herself to her knees. “I’ve got to take a piss too.” Her buttocks and one thigh were printed from the roofing paper.

At the corner drain, Denny looked back over his shoulder. “You going downstairs to the bathroom?”

“No,” she said in a considered tone that, when the rest of their exchange was finished, should have made me realize she knew what it was going to be.

“Oh, yeah. I guess you can squat here.” Denny finished and shook himself.

“What makes you think I have to squat to piss?”

“You’re a girl. You can’t do it st…I mean I thought girls had to sit down or something.”

“Jesus God!” Lanya said.

“Well, how do you guide it then?” Denny asked.

“Same way you do.”

“But you don’t have a—?”

She held up two fingers in a peace sign, turned them down against her cunt and sort of pulled. “Like that, if you must know. Now would you please stop staring and let me pee?”

“Oh…yeah.” Denny frowned. “Sometimes I can’t piss in a john if somebody’s staring right at my dick.” He turned away, glanced back, away again. “Wow.”

Like something had been given back to him.

He went to the wall. “Now I never knew that,” he said.

When she came up, he was looking at the harmonica; turned and handed it to her across my shoulder.

“You know how to play it?” she asked.

“Naw.”

“The scale starts here,” she said. “See, at the fourth hole.”

We went down (putting on clothes half here, half there), and in the living room got into the discussion with some of the people mentioned (Fireball, Filament, et al) that I wanted to write down some of the things Lanya said in it in the first place. (When I started this, I’d thought that the business about Lanya being turned on by all those funny things about me, and what had happened on the roof would make a good prologue, because in the discussion she referred to them) but again I’m tired of writing it down, now that I’ve gotten to the substance.