Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

He turned and she followed.

“Where is his house?”

“I think the actual address is on Brisbain South.”

“How’d you get to meet him?”

“They were having a party. I was wandering by. Someone I knew invited me in. Phil, actually.”

“That sounds easy.”

“Ah, it was very difficult. You want to go up there and meet Calkins?”

“Well, everything looks pretty scroungy down around here. I could wander up and see if somebody would invite me in.” He paused. “Of course, you’re a girl. You’d have an easier time, wouldn’t you? To be…decorative?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Not necessarily.”

He glanced at her in time to catch her glancing back. The idea struck him as amusing.

“You see that path behind the soccer posts?”

“Yeah.”

“It exits right on to Brisbain North. Which turns into Brisbain South after a while.”

“Hey!” He grinned at her, then let his head fall to the side. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m sad you’re going. I was all set for a dangerous, exciting afternoon, wandering about with you, playing my harmonica for you.”

“Why don’t you come?”

Her look held both embarrassment and collusion. “I’ve been.”

Hammering sounded behind them.

To his frown, she explained: “One of John’s work projects. They’ve gotten back from lunch. I know there’s food left. The guy who does most of their cooking, Jommy, is a friend of mine; do you want to eat?”

“Naw.” He shook his head. “Besides, I haven’t decided if I want—”

“Yes, you have. But I’ll see you when you get back. Take this.” She held out the notebook. “It’ll give you something to read on the way.”

For a moment he let his face acknowledge that she wanted him to stay. “Thanks…all right.”

“That’s one nice thing about this place,” she answered the acknowledgement; “when you come back, I will see you.” She raised her harmonica to her mouth. “You can’t lose anybody here.” In the metal, her eyes and nostrils were immense darknesses, set in silvered flesh, cut through, without lid or lash or limit, by green and green. She blew a discord, and walked away.

As he left the eyeless lions, it occurred to him: You can’t make that discord on a harmonica.

Not on any harmonica he’d ever had.

2

He’d walked three blocks when he saw, in the middle of the fourth, the church.

Visible were two (of presumably four) clocks around the steeple. Nearing, he saw the hands were gone.

He scrubbed at his forehead with the back of his wrist. Grit rolled between skin and skin. All this soot…

The thought occurred: I’m in fine shape to get myself invited into a house party!

Organ music came from the church door. He remembered Lanya had said something about a monastery…Wondering if curiosity showed on his face, he stepped carefully—notebook firmly under his arm—into the tiled foyer.

Through a second door, in an office, two of the four spools on the aluminum face of an upright tape recorder revolved. There were no lights on.

It only really registered as he turned away (and, once registered, he had no idea what to do with the image): Thumb-tacked above the office bulletin-board was the central poster from Loufer’s wall: the black man in cap, jacket, and boots.

Another door (leading to the chapel itself?) was ajar on darkness.

He stepped back to the sidewalk—

“Hey, there!”

The old man wore maroon bell bottoms, gold-rimmed spectacles; underneath a dull corduroy jacket, a bright red tanktop: beard, beret. He carried a bundle of newspapers under one arm. “How you doing on this pearly afternoon?”

“Hello.”

“Now…I bet you’re wondering what time it is.” The old man strained his ropy neck. “Let me see.” He gazed at the steeple. “Let me see. That would be about…eleven…twenty-five.” His head came down in wheezy laughter. “How do you like that, hey? Pretty good trick, huh? (You want a paper? Take one!) It is a trick. I’ll show you how to do it. What’s the matter? Paper don’t cost you. You want a subscription?”

“Under your beard…where’d you get that thing around your neck?”

“You mean…” The old man’s free hand moved to the peppery hair that went without break from the top of his chest to his chin. He unfastened the necklace, which fell, like a diamond snake. “…this? Where’d you get yours?”

He’d thought collar and cuff hid his own. “On my way here. It says it comes from Brazil.”

The old man held the end of the chain close to see: “…Japan?” then extended the end for him to look.

On the tab of brass were stamped letters: ade in Japan. Before ade there was a squiggle undoubtably an m.

The old man got it around his neck again and finally managed to secure it with one hand.

He looked down at the papers: he could read, just at the old man’s crumpled cuff:

BELLONA TIMES

Wednesday, April 1, 1979

NEW BOY IN TOWN!

He frowned at that.

“I didn’t see your chain,” the man went on, in unrequested explanation. “But you wouldn’t have asked if you hadn’t got one yourself, now, would you?”

He nodded, mainly to make the geezer continue—an urging not needed.

“I guess it’s like a prize for an initiation. Only you didn’t know you were being initiated? And that sort of upset you, I bet.”

He nodded again.

“My name’s Faust,” the old man said. “Joaquim Faust.”

“Wakeem…?”

“You’re pronouncing it right. From your accent, though, I bet you wouldn’t put the same letters in it I do.”

He reached for Joaquim’s extended hand: Joaquim caught his up in a biker shake. “You say—” Joaquim frowned before he let go—“you got yours on your way here? Outside Bellona?”

“That’s right.”

Joaquim shook his head and said, “Mmmmmm,” while a roaring that had been gathering seconds now, broke overhead. They looked up. Nothing was visible in the haze. The jet lingered disturbingly long, then pulled away. The taped organ sounded soft after it.

“On the clock,” Joaquim said. “The front face. That little stub used to be the minute hand. So you can about figure out which way it’s pointing.”

“Oh. What about the hour?”

Joaquim shrugged. “I left the office around eleven. Least I guess it was eleven. I haven’t been gone that long.”

“What happened to the…hands?”

“The niggers. The first night, I guess it was. When all that lightning was going on. They went wild. Swarmed all over. Broke up a whole lot of stuff around here—Jackson’s just down there.”

“Jackson?”

“Jackson Avenue is where most of the niggers live. Used to live. You new?”

He nodded.

“See if you can get hold of the paper for that day. People say you never seen pictures like that before. They was burning. And they had ladders up, and breaking in the windows. This guy told me there was a picture of them climbing up on the church. And breaking off the clock hands. Tearing each other up, too. There’s supposed to be one set of pictures; of this big buck, getting after this little white girl…a whole lot of stink about them pictures. ‘Rape’ is the nasty word they didn’t use in the paper but rape is what it was. People was saying Calkins shouldn’t’ve printed them. But you know what he did?” Joaquim’s twisted face demanded answer.

“No. What?” he ceded, warily.

“He went down and hunted up the nigger in the pictures and had somebody interview him; and he printed everything. Now if you ask me, what he shouldn’t have printed was that interview. I mean, Calkins is all interested in civil rights and things. He really is. The colored people in this town had it bad I guess, and he was concerned with that. Really concerned. But that nigger had the dirtiest mouth, and didn’t use it to talk nothing but dirt. I don’t think he even knew what a newspaper interview was. I mean, I know the colored people got it rough. But if you want to help, you don’t print a picture of the biggest, blackest buck in the world messin’ up some little blond-headed seventeen-year-old girl, and then runnin’ two pages of him saying how good it was, with every other word ‘shit’ and ‘fuck,’ and ‘Wooo-eeeee’, how he’s going to get him some more soon as he can, and how easy it’s gonna be with no pigs around! I mean not if you want to help—do you? And because of the article, Harrison—his name was George Harrison—is some sort of hero, to all the niggers left over in Jackson; and you’d think just about everybody else too. Which shows you the kind of people we got.”

“But you didn’t see it, though?”

Faust waved that away.

“There’s this other colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant person—a Mr. Paul Fenster? He got here right around the time it happened. Calkins knows him too, I guess, and writes about what he’s doing a lot. Now I would guess this guy probably has some decent intentions; but how’s he going to do anything with all that George Harrison business, huh? I mean it’s just as well—” he looked around—“there’s not too many niggers left in Jackson.”

He resolved annoyance and curiosity with the polite question:

“What started it? The riot I mean.”

Joaquim bent his head far to the side. “Now you know, nobody has the story really straight. Something fell.”

“Huh?”

“Some people say a house collapsed. Some others say a plane crashed right there in the middle of Jackson. Somebody else was talking about some kid who got on the roof of the Second City Bank building and gunned somebody down.”

“Somebody got killed?”

“Very. It was supposed to be a white kid on the roof and a nigger that got shot. So they started a riot.”

“What did the paper say?”

“About everything I did. Nobody knows which one happened for sure.”

“If a plane crashed, somebody would have known.”

“This was back at the beginning. Things were a hell of a lot more confused then. A lot of buildings were burning. And the weather was something else. People were still trying to get out. There were a hell of a lot more people here. And they were scared.”

“You were here then?”

Joaquim pressed his lips till mustache merged with beard. He shook his head. “I just heard about the newspaper article. And the pictures.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Ahhhhh!” Faust waggled a free finger in mock reproval. “You have to learn not to ask questions like that. It’s not polite. I didn’t ask nothing about you, did I? I told you my name, but I didn’t ask yours.”

“I’m sorry.” He was taken back.

“You going to meet a lot of people who’ll get all kinds of upset if you go asking them about before they came to Bellona. I might as well tell you, so you don’t get yourself in trouble. Especially—” Faust raised his beard and put a thumb beneath his choker—“people wearing one of these. Like us. I bet if I asked your name, or maybe your age, or why you got an orchid on your belt…anything like that, I could really get your dander up. Now couldn’t I?”

He felt the discomfort, vague as remembered pain, in his belly.

“I come from Chicago, most recently. Frisco before that.” Faust reached down to hold out one leg of his belled pants. “A grandpa Yippie, yeah? I’m a traveling philosopher. Is that good enough for you?”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Think nothing of it. I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I’m here. Is that good enough?”

He nodded again, disconcerted.

“I got a good, honest job. Sold the Tribe on the corner of Market and Van Ness. Here I’m Bellona’s oldest newspaper boy. Is that enough?”

“Yeah. Look, I didn’t mean—”

“Something about you, boy. I don’t like it. Say—” Eyelids wrinkled behind gold-rimmed lenses—“you’re not colored, are you? I mean you’re pretty dark. Sort of full-featured. Now, I could say ‘spade’ like you youngsters. But where I was comin’ up, when I was comin’ up, they were niggers. They’re still niggers to me and I don’t mean nothing by it. I want all the best for them.”

“I’m American Indian,” he decided, with resigned wrath.

“Oh.” Joaquim tilted his head once more to appraise. “Well, if you’re not a nigger, you must be pretty much in sympathy with the niggers.” He came down heavy on the word for any discomfort value it still held. “So am I. So am I. Only they won’t ever believe it of me. I wouldn’t either if I was them. Boy, I got to deliver my papers. Go on—take one. That’s right; there you go.” Faust straightened the bundle under his arm. “You interested in rioting niggers—and just about everybody is—” the aside was delivered with high theatricality—“you go look up those early editions. Here’s your paper, Reverend.” He strode across the sidewalk and handed another paper to the black minister in pavement-length cassock who stood in the church door.

“Thank you, Joaquim.” The voice was…contralto? There was a hint of…breasts beneath the dark robe. The face was rounded, was gentle enough for a woman.

The minister looked at him now, as Joaquim marched down the street. “Faust and I have a little game we play,” she—it was she—explained to his bemusement. “You mustn’t let it upset you.” She smiled, nodded, and started in.

“Excuse me…Reverend…”

She turned. “Yes?”

“Eh…” Intensely curious, he could focus his curiosity on no subject. “What kind of church is this, here?” He settled on that, but felt it hopelessly contrived. What he wanted to ask about, of course, was the poster.

She smiled. “Interfaith, interracial. We’ve been managing to have services three times a week for a while now. We’d be very happy if you were interested in coming. Sunday morning, of course. Then again, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. We don’t have a very large congregation, yet. But we’re gathering our flock.”

“You’re Reverend…?”

“Amy Taylor. I’m a lay preacher, actually. This is a project I’ve taken on myself. Working out quite well, too, everything considered.”

“You just sort of moved into the church and took it over?”

“After the people who were here abandoned it.” She did not brush her hands off. She extended one. It might have been the same gesture. “I’m glad to meet you.”

He shook. “Glad to meet you.”

“I hope you come to our services. This is a time of stress for everybody. We need all the spiritual help we can get…don’t you think?”

Her grip (like Joaquim’s) lingered. And it was firmer. “Hey, do you know what day it is?”

She looked down at the paper. “Wednesday.”

“But…How do you know when it’s Sunday?”

She laughed. It was very self-assured laughter. “Sunday services happen when the paper says Sunday. Mr. Calkins confuses dates, I know. But there’s never more than one Sunday every seven days. Or one Tuesday, either. Now, Thursdays slip up. I went to see him about that. A very polite man. And very concerned about what goes on in his city, despite what some people find a trying sense of humor. I had noticed about the frequency of Sundays myself. He explained about Tuesdays; but he held out for arbitrary Thursdays. He quite nicely offered to declare a Thursday any time I asked—if I would give him twenty-four-hour notice.” Her perfect seriousness ruptured with a smile. And she dropped his hand. “The whole business is funny. I feel as strange talking about it as you must hearing it, I’m sure.” Her natural hair, her round, brown face: he liked her. “Will you try and come to our services?”

He smiled. “I’ll try.” He was even vaguely sorry to lie.

“Good.”

“Reverend Taylor?”

Her sparse eyebrows rose as she looked back.

“Does this street go toward…Mr. Calkins’?”

“Yes, his home is about a mile up. You have to cross Jackson. Two days ago some brave soul had a bus running back and forth along Broadway. Only one bus. But then it doesn’t have any traffic to fight. I don’t know if it’s still going. But that would take you to the newspaper office, anyway. Not his home. I suppose you could walk. I did.”

“Thanks.” He left her, smiling after him from the doorway. No, he decided. That probably wasn’t the monastery. He pictured the tape winding and winding as the music dimmed, chord after chord falling from glimmering reels.

Jackson Avenue was a wide street, but the crowded houses, blurred with noon-smoke, were mostly wood. Trolley wires webbing the intersection were down, in a snarl, on the corner pavement. Two blocks off, wreckage fumed. Billows cleared charred beams, then rolled to.

A block in the other direction a heavy figure with a shopping bag paused mid-trek between corner and corner to watch him watching. Though it was an arbitrary Wednesday afternoon, the feel was of some ominous Sunday morning.

3

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

This is what a good neighborhood in Bellona looks like?

The ground floor windows were broken in the white house there; curtains hung out.

The street was clean.

Bare foot and sandal, bare foot and sandal: he watched the pavement’s grain slip beneath them.

A door beside him stood wide.

He kept walking. Easier to think that all these buildings are inhabited, than that their vacancy gives me license to loot where I will—not loot. Borrow. Still, it’s unnerving.

Loufer had said something about shotguns.

But he was hungry after all and he was going to—borrow food soon.

He broke a window with a stick he had found wedging back a garage door (eight jars of instant coffee on the kitchen shelf) and sat at the formica dinette table to eat a cold can (can-opener in the drawer) of Campbell’s Pepperpot. (Easy!) Marveling between fingerfuls of undiluted soup (salty!), he looked from the paper he’d taken from Faust to the notebook he’d gotten from Lanya. Made himself a cup of coffee with hot water—after running ten seconds, it was steaming and spitting—from the tap. Finally, he opened the notebook at random and read, in the terribly neat ballpoint:

It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow there is no way to conclude…

He looked up at creakings. But it was only some slight architectural shift. Nobody, he subvocalized, lives here now. (The kitchen was very clean.) Without particularly understanding what he’d read (or not understanding it, for that matter) the notes by the absent journalist, coupled with the creak, made the back of his neck tingle.

Déjà vu is a thing of the eye.

This was like reading lines that echoed some conversation he might have followed idly once on a crowded street. The book hinted he pay attention to part of his mind he could not even locate.

lability, not affectation; a true and common trait. But if I tried to write down what I say as I move from speech

He flipped more pages. There was only writing on the right-hand ones. The left-hand ones were blank. He closed the book. He put the coffee cup in the sink, the can in the empty garbage pail: when he caught himself doing it, he laughed out loud, then tried silent justification: he could always stay here, make this place nicer than Tak’s.

That made the back of his neck tingle again.

He closed the notebook and, with the paper tucked beside it, climbed back out the window.

He scratched himself on broken glass, but only noticed it a block away when he looked down to see a drop of blood had trickled across the notebook cover, red-brown on the char. He nudged at the new, purple-red scab with the blunt of his thumb, which just made it itch. So he forgot about it and hurried on up Brisbain. It was only…a scratch.

Distance? Or destination?

He had no idea what to expect of either. These lawns and facades needed sunlight, or at least light rain, to be beautiful. The corner trees might be clear green. But mist blurred them now.

Odd that the elements of pleasure were so many greys, so much fear, so many silences. That house there, gaping through dreary drapes with intimations of rugs still out in July—someone had lived there. A Doctor sign hung beside the door of that one: he mulled on the drugs closeted behind the Venetian blinds. Well, maybe on the way back…

Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall on the far corner. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink. Through a cellar window, broken, a grey eel of smoke slithered the sidewalk to vaporize in the gutter. Through another, intact, flickerings…The singular burning among the dozens of whole buildings was the most uncanny thing he’d seen.

He crossed quickly to the next block.

The loose rhythm of the day carried him through the streets. Once it occurred to him that he was tired. Later, he looked for the tiredness and found it had dispersed, like the eel.

This had to be the Heights.

He trudged on up the sloping street, by a window full of brass, three layers of glass doors in a foyer, the head of a white statue behind a high hedge—all the vulnerable, gloomy elegance bothered him. Break in for another cup of coffee? He wondered why the images of shotguns behind the curtains were stronger here. But laughed at them, anyway.

He moved, and the movement was a rush of sound among his body’s cavities. He slapped the paper and bloody notebook on his thigh, thinking of Lanya, of Milly, of John. From his other hip the orchid swung. Chained in points of view, he loped along, an uneasy vandal, suffering for the pillage his mind wreaked among the fabulous facades. He moved, a point of tension, by homes that would have been luxurious in sunlight.

He was not sure why he decided to explore off the avenue.

In the center of the alley was an oak, set in a circle of cobbles, ringed in a decorative fence. His heart beat fast.

He passed it.

The backside of the trunk was ash. Instead of heavy greenery, the rear leaves were shriveled black.

Eyes wide at the vision, he turned as he passed it, to back away. Then he looked at the houses.

On both sides of him walls were sundered on smashed furniture, beams, and piled masonry. The demarcation between lawn and street vanished beneath junk. Twenty feet on, the cobbles were upturned. He felt his face squinch against the destruction.

Bulldozers?

Grenades?

He could not imagine what had caused this. Pavingstones were smashed, loose, or upside down in raw earth, so that he was not even certain where the next street began. Frowning, he wandered in the debris, stepped over a pile of books, vaguely seeking the source of a smoke plume waving fifty feet away, then, suddenly, not seeking it.

He picked up a clock. The crystal flaked out, tinkling. He dropped it and picked up a ballpoint pen, wiped the ashes against his pants, clicked the point in and out. Half under plaster was a wooden chest, slightly larger than an attaché case. With the toe of his sandal, he nudged up the lid. White powder swirled above forks, spoons, and knives bound in grey ribbon, then settled to the purple velvet. He let the lid clack, and hurried to the Avenue.

He practically ran Brisbain’s next three blocks, past houses empty and elegant. But now he was aware of lawn poles askew, of shapeless heaps between them, of windows, which, beyond pale curtains, were light as the sky behind them.

He was still clicking the ballpoint pen. So he put it in his shirt pocket. Then, at the next corner, he took it out again and stood very still. If a wind came now, he thought, and caused any sound on this dreary street, he would cry out.

There was no wind.

He sat down on the curb, opened to the notebook’s first page.

to wound the autumnal city.

he read once more. Hastily he turned the page over to the clear side. He looked down the four streets, looked at the corner houses. He sucked a breath through closed teeth, clicked the point out and began to write.

In the middle of the third line, without taking pen off paper, he swept back to cross it all out. Then, carefully, he recopied two words on the next line. The second was “I.” Very carefully now, word followed word. He crossed out two more lines, from which he salvaged “you,” “spinner,” and “pave,” dropping them into a new sentence that bore no denotative resemblance to the one from which they came.

Between lines, while he punched his pen point, his eye strayed to the writing beside his:

It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of language that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward

“Annn!” out loud. There was not a pretty word in the bunch. Roughly he turned the notebook back around the paper to avoid distraction.

Holding the last two lines in his head, he looked about at the buildings again. (Why not live dangerously?) He wrote the last lines hurriedly, notating them before they dispersed.

He printed at the top: “Brisbain”

Lifting his pen from the “n,” he wondered if the word had any other meaning than the name of the Avenue. Hoping it did, he began to re-copy, in as neat a hand as he could, what he had settled on. He altered one word in the last two lines (“cannot” became “can’t”), and closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.

Then he stood.

Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He shook his head, and finally managed to get the world under him at the right angle. The backs of his legs were cramped: he’d been in a near-fetal squat practically half an hour.

The dizziness gone, the cramps stayed with him for two blocks. As well he felt choked up in his breathing. That put him in touch with a dozen other little discomforts that he had ignored till now. So that it was not for another block after that he noticed he wasn’t afraid.

The pulling in the back of his right shin, or the mental disquiet? He gave up pondering the preferable, looked at a street sign, and noticed that Brisbain N had become Brisbain S.

Click-click, click-click, click-click: realizing what he was doing, he put the pen back in his shirt pocket. Along the street, beside him, was a stone wall. The houses across from him, porched and lawned and spacious and columned, all had broken windows.

The car—a blunt, maroon thing at least twenty years old—grumbled up behind.

He’d jumped, in surprise, turning.

It passed, leaving no impression of the driver. But two blocks ahead, it turned in at a gate.

Willow fronds draped the brick above him. Walking again, he ran two fingers along the mortared troughs.

The gate was verdigrised brass, spiked at the top, and locked. Ten yards beyond the bars, the road got twisted up in the shaggiest pines he’d ever seen. The brass plate, streaked pink with recent polish, said: ROGER CALKINS

He looked through at the pines. He looked back at the other houses. Finally he just walked on.

The street ended in brush. He followed the wall around its corner into bushes. Twigs kept jabbing beneath his sandal straps. His bare foot went easier.

In the clearing, someone had piled two crates, one on another, against the brick: children after fruit or mischief?

As he climbed (notebook and paper left on the ground) two women behind the walls laughed.

He paused.

Their laughter neared, became muffled converse. A man guffawed sharply; the double soprano recommenced and floated off.

He could just grasp the edge. He pulled himself up, elbows winging. It was a lot harder than movies would make it. He scraped at the brick with his toes. Brick rasped back at knees and chin.

His eyes cleared the top.

The wall was covered with pine needles, twigs, and a surprising shale of glass. Through spinning gnats he saw the blunt pine tops and the rounded, looser heads of elms. Was that grey thing the cupola of a house?

“Oh, I don’t believe it!” an invisible woman cried and laughed again.

His fingers stung; his arms were trembling.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, kid?” somebody behind him drawled.

Shaking, he lowered, belt buckle catching a mortise once to dig his stomach; his toes hit at the thin ledges; then the crate: he danced around.

And went back against the wall, squinting.

Newt, spider, and some monstrous insect, huge and out of focus, glared with flashbulb eyes.

He got out an interrogative “Wh…” but could choose no defining final consonant.

“Now you know—” the spider in the middle extinguished: the tall redhead dropped one freckled hand from the chains looping neck to belly—“damn well you ain’t supposed to be up there.” His face was flat, his nose wide as a pug’s, his lips overted, his eyes like brown eggshells set with tarnished gold coins. His other hand, freckles blurred in pale hair, held a foot of pipe.

“I wasn’t climbing in.”

“Shit,” came out of the newt on the left in a black accent much heavier than the redhead’s.

“Sure you weren’t,” the redhead said. His skin, deep tan, was galaxied with freckles. Hair and beard were curly as a handful of pennies. “Yeah, sure. I just bet you weren’t.” He swung the pipe, snapping his arm at the arc’s end: neck chains rattled. “You better get down from there, boy.”

He vaulted, landed with one hand still on the crates.

The redhead swung again: The flanking apparitions came closer, swaying. “Yeah, you better jump!”

“All right, I’m down. Okay—?”

The scorpion laughed, swung, stepped.

The chained boot mashed the corner of the notebook into the mulch. The other tore the newspaper’s corner.

“Hey, come on—!”

He pictured himself lunging forward. But stayed still…till he saw that the pipe, next swing, was going to catch him on the hip—was lunging forward.

“Watch it! He’s got his orchid on…!”

He slashed with his bladed hand; the scorpion dodged back; newt and beetle spun. He had no idea where they were under their aspects. He jammed his fist at the scaly simulation—his fist went through and connected jaw-staggeringly hard with something. He slashed with his blades at the retreating beetle. The spider rushed him. He staggered in rattling lights. A hand caught him against the cheek. Blinking, he saw a second, sudden black face go out under newt scales. Then, something struck his head.

“Hey, he cut you, Spitt, man!” That was the heavy black accent, very far away. “Oh, hey, wow, Spitt! He really cut you. Spitt, you all right?”

He wasn’t all right. He was falling down a black hole.

“The motherfucker! I’m going to get him for that—”

He hit bottom.

Pawing across that leafy bottom, he finally found the remnants of a thought: His orchid had been hanging from his waist. No time had he reached down to—