Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Are…you all right?”

–slip his roughened fingers into the harness, fasten the collar about his knobby wrist…

Someone shook him by the shoulder. His hand gouged moist leaves. The other was suspended. He opened his eyes.

Evening struck the side of his head so hard he was nauseated.

“Young man, are you all right?”

He opened his eyes again. The throbbing twilight concentrated on one quarter of his head. He pushed himself up.

The man, in blue serge, sat back on his heels. “Mr. Fenster, I think he’s conscious!”

A little ways away, a black man in a sports shirt stood at the clearing’s edge.

“Don’t you think we should take him inside? Look at his head.”

“No, I don’t think we should.” The black put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

He shook his head—only once, because it hurt that much.

“Were you attacked, young man?”

He said, “Yes,” very thickly. A nod would have made it cynical, but he didn’t dare.

The white collar between the serge lapels was knotted with an extraordinarily thin tie. White temples, below grey hair: the man had an accent that was disturbingly near British. He picked up the notebook. (The newspaper slid off onto the leaves.) “Is this yours?”

Another thick, “Yes.”

“Are you a student? It’s terrible, people attacking people right out in the open like this. Terrible!”

“I think we’d better get inside,” the black man said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

“Just a minute!” came out with surprising authority. The gentleman helped him to a sitting position. “Mr. Fenster, I really think we should take this poor young man inside. Mr. Calkins can’t possibly object. This is something of an exceptional circumstance.”

Fenster took dark brown hands from his pockets and came over. “I’m afraid it isn’t exceptional. We’ve checked, now come on back inside.”

With surprising strength Fenster tugged him to his feet. His right temple exploded three times en route. He grabbed the side of his head. There was crisp blood in his hair; and wet blood in his sideburn.

“Can you stand up?” Fenster asked.

“Yes.” The word was dough in his mouth. “Eh…thanks for my—” he almost shook his head again, but remembered—“my notebook.”

The man in the tie looked sincerely perplexed. With a very white hand, he touched his shoulder. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes,” automatically. Then, “Could I get some water?”

“Certainly,” and then to Fenster: “We can certainly take him inside for a glass of water.”

“No—” Fenster spoke with impatient resignation—“ we can’t take him inside for a glass of water.” It ended with set jaw, small muscles there defined in the dark skin. “Roger is very strict. You’ll just have to put up with it. Please, let’s go back in.”

The white man—fifty-five? sixty?—finally took a breath. “I’m…” Then he just turned away.

Fenster—forty? forty-five?—said, “This isn’t a good neighborhood to be in, young fellow. I’d get back downtown as fast as I could. Sorry about all this.”

“That’s all right,” he got out. “I’m okay.”

“I really am sorry.” Fenster hurried after the older gentleman.

He watched them reach the corner, turn. He raised his caged hand, looked at it between the blades. Was that why they had…? He looked back toward the street.

His head gave a gratuitous throb.

Mumbling profanity, he put the paper on top of the notebook and walked out.

They’d apparently gone back through the gate. And locked it. Motherfuckers, he thought. The gloom was denser now. He began to wonder how long he’d been away from the park. Four or five hours? His head hurt a lot. And it was getting dark.

Also it looked like rain…But the air was dry and neutral.

Brisbain South had just become Brisbain North when he saw, a block away, three people run from one side of the avenue to the other.

They were too far to see if they wore chains around their necks. Still, he was overcome with gooseflesh. He stopped with his hand on the side of a lamppost. (The globe was an inverted crown of ragged glass points, about the smaller, ragged collar of the bulb.) He felt his shoulders pull involuntarily together. He looked at the darkening sky. And the terror of the vandal-wrecked city assailed him: his heart pounded.

His armpits grew slippery.

Breathing hard, he sat with his back to the post’s base.

He took the pen from his pocket and began to click the point. (He hadn’t put the orchid on…?) After a moment, he stopped to take the weapon from his wrist and put it through his belt loop again: moving armed through the streets might be provocative…?

He looked around again, opened his notebook, turned quickly past “Brisbain” to a clean page, halfway or more through.

“Charcoal,” he wrote down, in small letters, “like the bodies of burnt beetles, heaped below the glittering black wall of the house on the far corner.” He bit at his lip, and wrote on: “The wet sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the general gritty stink of the street. From the rayed hole in the cellar window a grey eel of smoke wound across the sidewalk, dispersed before” at which point he crossed out the last two words and substituted, “vaporized at the gutter. Through another window,” and crossed out window, “still intact, something flickered. This single burning building in the midst of dozens of other whole buildings was,” stopped and began to write all over again:

“Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink.” Then he went back and crossed out “the bodies of” and went on: “From a broken cellar window, a grey eel wound the sidewalk to vaporize at the gutter. Through another, intact, something flickered. This burning building,” crossed that out to substitute, “The singular burning in the midst of dozens of whole buildings,” and without breaking the motion of his hand suddenly tore the whole page from the notebook.

Pen and crumpled paper in his hand; he was breathing hard. After a moment, he straightened out the paper and, on a fresh page, began to copy again:

“Charcoal, like beetles heaped under the glittering wall…”

When he finished the next revision, he folded the torn paper in four and put it back in the notebook. On the back the former owner had written:

first off. It doesn’t reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour is quiet and still. We sit most of the time

Once more he made a face and closed the cover.

The mist had turned evening-blue. He got up and started along the street.

Several blocks later he identified the strange feeling: though it was definitely becoming night, the air had not even slightly cooled. Frail smoke lay about him like a neutralizing blanket.

Ahead, he could see the taller buildings. Smoke had gnawed away the upper stories. Stealthily, he descended into the injured city.

It does not offer me any protection, this mist; rather a refracting grid through which to view the violent machine, explore the technocracy of the eye itself, spelunk the semi-circular canal. I am traveling my own optic nerve. Limping in a city without source, searching a day without shadow, am I deluded with the inconstant emblem? I don’t like pain. With such disorientation there is no way to measure the angle between such nearly parallel lines of sight, when focusing on something at such distance.

4

“There you are!” she ran out between the lions, crossed the street.

He turned, surprised, at the lamppost.

She seized his hand in both of hers. “I didn’t think I would see you again before—Hey! What happened?” Her face twisted in the shadow. She lost all her breath.

“I got beat up.”

Her grip dropped; she raised her fingers, brushed his face.

“Owww…”

“You better come with me. What in the world did you do?”

“Nothing!” vented some of his indignation.

She took his hand again to tug him along. “You did something. People just don’t get beat up for nothing at all.”

“In this city—” he let her lead—“they do.”

“Down this way. No. Not even in this city. What happened? You’ve got to get that washed off. Did you get to Calkins’?”

“Yeah.” He walked beside her; her hand around his was almost painfully tight—then, as though she realized it, the grip loosened. “I was looking over the wall when these scorpions got at me.”

“Ohhh!” That seemed to explain it to her.

“‘Oh’ what?”

“Roger doesn’t like snoopers.”

“So he sets scorpions to patrol the battlements?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes he asks them for protection.”

“Hey!” He pulled loose; she swung around. In shadow, her eyes, turned up, were empty as the lions’. He tried to fix his tongue at protest, but she merely stepped to his side. They walked again, together, not touching, through the dark.

“In here.”

“In where?”

“Here!” She turned him with a hand on his arm.

And opened a door he hadn’t realized was beside them. Someone in flickering silhouette said, “Oh, it’s you. What’s the matter?”

“Look at him,” Lanya said. “Scorpions.”

“Oh.” Leather jacket, cap…and leather pants: long fingers pulled closed the door. “Take him inside. But don’t make a big thing, huh?”

“Thanks, Teddy.”

There were voices from the end of the hall. The flakes of light on nail-thin Teddy’s attire came from candles in iron candelabras.

He followed her.

At the end of the bar a woman’s howl shattered to laughter. Three of the men around her, laughing, shed away like bright, black petals: four-fifths present wore leather, amidst scattered denim jackets. The woman had fallen into converse with a tall man in a puffy purple sweater. The candlelight put henna in her hair and blacked her eyes.

Another woman holding on to a drink with both hands, in workman’s greens and construction boots, stepped unsteadily between them, recognized Lanya and intoned: “Honey, now where have you been all week? Oh, you don’t know how the class of this place has gone down. The boys are about to run me ragged,” and went, unsteadily, off.

Lanya led him through the leather crush. A surge of people toward the bar pushed them against one of the booth tables.

“Hey, babes—” Lanya leaned on her fists—“can we sit here a minute?”

“Lanya—? Sure,” Tak said, then recognized him. “Jesus, Kid! What the hell happened to you?” He pushed over in the seat. “Come on. Sit down!”

“Yeah…” He sat.

Lanya was edging off between people:

“Tak, Kidd—I’ll be right back!”

He put the notebook and the paper on the wooden table, drew his hands through the shadows the candles dropped from the iron webs, drew his bare foot through sawdust.

Tak, from looking after Lanya, turned back. “You got beat up?” The visor still masked his upper face.

He nodded at Tak’s eyeless question.

Tak’s lips pressed beneath the visor’s shadow. He shook his head. “Scorpions?”

“Yeah.”

The young man across the table had his hands in his lap.

“What’d they get from you?” Tak asked.

“Nothing.”

“What did they think they were going to get?”

“I don’t know. Shit. They just wanted to beat up on somebody, I guess.”

Tak shook his head. “No. That doesn’t sound right. Not scorpions. Everybody’s too busy trying to survive around here just to go beating up on people for fun.”

“I was up at the Calkins place, trying to look over the wall. Lanya said he keeps the bastards patrolling the damn walls.”

“Now there.” Loufer shook a finger across the table. “That’s like I was telling you, Jack. It’s a strange place, maybe stranger than any you’ve ever been. But it still has its rules. You just have to find them out.”

“Shit,” he repeated, indignant at everybody’s questioning of the incident. “They beat hell out of me.”

“Looks like they did.” Tak turned across the table. “Jack, want you to meet the Kid, here. Jack just pulled into town this afternoon. The Kid got in yesterday.”

Jack pushed himself forward and reached out to shake.

“Hi.” He shook Jack’s small, sunburned hand.

“Jack here is a deserter from the army.”

At which Jack glanced at Tak with dismay, then covered it with an embarrassed smile. “Ah…hello,” he said with a voice out of Arkansas. His short-sleeve sportshirt was very pressed. Army shorn, his skull showed to the temple. “Yeah, I’m a God-damn deserter, like he says.”

“That’s nice,” then realized how flip that sounded and was embarrassed.

“Tak here has been trying to tell me about how to get along in this place,” Jack offered: He had either not taken offense, or just not heard. “Tak’s a lot smarter than I am, you know. It’s pretty funny here, huh?”

He nodded.

“I was gonna go to Canada. But somebody told me about Bellona. Said it was a pretty swinging place, you know? So I thought I’d stop off here. On the way.” Now he looked around the bar. The woman howled again: The purple angora had abandoned her. The howl moved predictably once more toward laughter and she sat, alone, shaking her dark red hair over her drink. “I ain’t ever seen a place quite like this. Have you?” Jack offered the conversation back to him.

“Oh, I bet you ain’t,” Tak intercepted. “Now the Kid here, you know, he’s my age? You probably would have thought he was younger than you are. Jack here is twenty. Now seriously, how old would you say the Kid here is?”

“Uh…oh, I don’t know,” Jack said, and looked confused.

(He wanted to look at the engineer’s shadowed face again, but not yet.)

“Where the hell did you run off to this morning, anyway?”

A dog barked, somewhere in the bar.

About to turn and answer Tak, he looked toward the noise. Claws scrabbled; then, bursting between the legs of the people next to them, the black muzzle and shoulders!

He snatched his arm up from the barking.

At the same time, Lanya arrived: “Hey, come on, girl!”

Others had turned to watch the beast bark up at their table.

“Come on. Quiet down.” Lanya’s hand strayed on the shaking head, played on the black snout. “Be quiet! Quiet, now.” The dog tried to pull its head away. She grabbed its lower jaw and shook it gently. “What you making so much noise about? Shhhhh, you hear me? Shhhh!” The dog turned its brown eyes from the table, to Lanya, back to the table. Bright pricks from the candles slid on the black pupils. It licked her hand. “There now. Be quiet.” In the other was a wad of wet paper towels. She sat down, put them on the table: they trickled on the wood.

Jack’s hands were back in his lap.

Tak pushed up his cap; the shadow uncovered his large, blue eyes. He shook his head, and sucked his teeth in general disapproval.

“Come on, now,” Lanya said once more to the dog.

It waited beside the table, panting.

He reached out toward the dark head. The panting stopped. He passed his fingers over the rough hair, the wiry brows. The dog turned to lick the ham of his thumb. “Yeah,” he said. “You just be quiet.”

“Is Muriel bothering you people?” Purple Angora sucked a sighing breath. “I tell her—” he gestured toward the woman at the bar—“she shouldn’t bring her in here. Muriel is just not that well trained. She gets so excited. But she will bring her in here every night. I hope she hasn’t annoyed you.”

Lanya reached again to rough the dog’s head. “She’s an old dear! She didn’t bother anybody.”

“Well, thank you.” Purple Angora bent to drag Muriel back to the bar by the collar. Once he glanced back, frowned at them—

“See if you can wipe some of that stuff off your face,” Lanya said, wrinkling hers.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” He picked up a towel and held it to his temple; which stung. Water rolled down.

He rubbed the blood off his cheek. Picked up another towel (the first now purple to the rim) and wiped his face again.

“Hey,” Jack said. “I think you’re…” with a vague gesture.

“Lord—!” Lanya said. “I’ll get some more towels.”

“Huh? Am I bleeding again?”

Tak took him by the chin and turned his face. “You sure are,” and pressed another towel against his head.

“Hey!” He reached across for Lanya’s arm. “Look, let me just go to the men’s room. I’ll fix it up.”

She sat again. “Are you sure…?”

“Yeah. I’ll be back in a little while.” With one hand he held the paper to his face; with the other, he picked up the notebook. (“What happened to him?” Tak was asking Lanya. And Lanya was leaning forward to answer.) He pushed through the people next to them toward where the men’s room ought to be.

Behind him, music began, staticky as an old radio, more like somebody’s wind-up Victrola. He turned in front of the rest-room door.

Neon lights had come on in a cage hung up behind the bar. (The redhead’s face [forty-five? fifty?] was soap yellow in the glare:

(“Muriel! Now, Muriel, be quiet!”

(The fugitive barking stilled, and the Purple Sweater sat up once more.) Through the black curtain stepped a boy in a silver lamé G-string. He began to dance in the cage, shaking his hips, flicking his hands, kicking. His ash-pale hair was flecked with glitter; glitter had fallen down his wet brow. He grinned hugely, open mouthed, lips shaking with the dance, at customers up and down the bar. His eyebrows were pasted over with silver.

The music, he realized through the static, was a medley of Dylan played by something like the Melachrino Strings. The “boy” was anywhere between fifteen and an emaciated thirty-five. Around his neck hung glittering strands of mirrors, prisms, lenses.

He pushed into the bathroom as a big man in an army jacket came out fingering his fly.

He locked the door, put his notebook on the cracked porcelain tank (he’d left the paper on the table), looked at the mirror and said, “Christ…!”

Tap turned full, the cold water only trickled over the tear-shaped stain. He pulled paper towels, rasping, from their container, and let them soak. Minutes later the sink was awash with blood; the battleship linoleum was speckled with it; but his face was clear of gore and leakage.

Sitting on the toilet, pants around his shins, shirt open, he turned up a quarter-sized mirror on his belly and gazed down at a fragment of his face with an eye in it. Water beaded his eyelashes.

He blinked.

His eye opened to see the drop, pink with dilute blood, strike the glass and spread to the gripping callous.

He let go, took the notebook from the toilet tank, turned it back on his thighs, and took out his pen. The coil pressed his skin:

“Murielle”

He doubted the spelling, but wrote on:

“Seen through blood, her clear eyes…” He crossed out “clear” methodically, till it was a navy bar. He frowned, re-read, rewrote “clear,” and wrote on. He stopped long enough to urinate and re-read again. He shook his head, leaned forward. His penis swung against cold porcelain. So he wiggled back on the seat; rewrote the whole line.

Once he looked up: A candle by the painted-over window was guttering.

“Remembering,” he wrote, “by candle what I’d seen by moon…” frowned, and substituted a completely different thought.

“Hey!” Pounding at the door made him look up. “You all right in there, Kidd?”

“Tak?”

“You need some help in there? Lanya sent me to see if you’d fallen in. You all right?”

“I’m okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Oh. Okay. All right.”

He looked back at the page. Suddenly he scribbled across the bottom: “They won’t let me finish this God-damn” stopped, laughed, closed the book, and put the pen back in his pocket.

He leaned forward on his knees and relaxed: The length and splash surprised him. There wasn’t any toilet paper.

So he used a wet towel.

Light glittered on the dancer’s hips, his shaking hair, his sweating face. But people had resumed their conversations.

He pushed through, glancing at the cage.

“Well, you certainly look a lot better,” Lanya said.

Jack said: “Hey, I got you and your girlfriend a beer. One for you too, see, because I didn’t want you to think…well, you know.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sure. Thanks.”

“I mean Tak ain’t let me buy anything all evening. So I thought I’d get you and your girlfriend a beer.”

He nodded and sat. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lanya said.

“She’s a very nice girl.”

Lanya gave him a small Well-what-can-you-do look across the table and drank.

The music growled to a stop in the middle of a phrase; people applauded.

Jack nodded toward the cage, where the dancer panted. “I swear, I never been in a place like this. It’s really too much, you know? You got a lot of places like this in Bellona?”

“Teddy’s here is the one and only,” Tak said. “No other place like it in the Western World. It used to be a straight bar back before. Improvement’s not to be believed.”

“It sure is pretty unbelievable,” Jack repeated. “I’ve just never seen anything like it.”

Lanya took another swallow from her bottle. “You’re not going to die after all?” She smiled.

He saluted her with his and emptied it by a third. “Guess not.”

Tak suddenly twisted in his seat. “Ain’t this a bitch! Hot as it is in this God-damn place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, hung it over the bench back, then leaned one tattooed forearm on the table. “Now that’s a little more comfortable.” He furrowed the meadow of his chest, and looked down. “Sweating like a pig.” He slid forward, stomach ridged by the plank, and folded his arms. “Yeah, that’s a little better.” He still wore his cap.

“Jesus,” Jack said, looking around. “They let you do that in here?”

“They’d let me take my pants down and dance on the fucking table,” Tak said, “if I wanted. Wouldn’t they, Lanya-babes? You tell ’em.”

“Tak,” Lanya said, “I’d like to see that. I really would.” She laughed.

Jack said: “Wow!”

The dancer was climbing from the cage down to the bar; he made a joke with somebody below; somebody else gave him a hand, and he leapt lightly away.

At the doorway, a group had just come in.

A couple of men in leather had gone up to a tall black in a khaki shirt: even by candlelight, sweat darkened his shirt flanks. Other black men around wore suits and ties. People were putting tables together.

The redhead’s laughter carried her across the bar. She took the black’s beam-broad, khaki shoulders. He embraced her; she struggled, still laughing. Muriel barked about their knees.

Sepulchral Teddy, like some leather-sheathed plant, set bottles down, held back chairs. The tall black fell into his seat; his fists cracked open like stone on the table. Others sat around him. He reared back, stretched his arms, and caught the woman in coveralls with one and the sparkling dancer with the other. Everyone laughed. The woman tried not to spill her drink and pushed at the rough, dark head. The dancer squealed: “Ooooo!” His G-string broke. He pulled the cord across his white hip, yanked the whole pouch away, and spun from the circling arm. A black hand smacked the chalky buttocks. The dancer dodged forward, threw back an evil look that ended with a wink, flipped the silver strap over his shoulder, and stalked off, cheek grinding cheek.

“Jesus!” Jack said from the other side of the table.

The rabbity tuft above the dancer’s bobbing genitals had been dusted with glitter.

Teddy moved about the joined tables, pouring. Other people were coming up to talk, leaving to drink.

Lanya explained to his puzzled look: “That’s George Harrison. Do you…?”

He nodded. “Oh.”

“Jesus!” Jack repeated. “You got all sorts of people in a place like this, you know? I mean all kinds. Now that wouldn’t happen where I come from. It’s—” he looked around—“pretty nice, huh?” He drank more beer. “Everybody’s so friendly.”

Tak put his boot up on the bench and hung his arm across his knee. “Until they start to tear the place apart.” He turned up his bottle to waterfall at the wide mouth. “Hey, you all want to come up to my place? Yeah, why don’t you all come on back with me?” He put the beer down. “Jack, Lanya, you too, Kid.”

He looked across at her to see if she wanted to go.

But she was drinking beer again.

“Yeah, come on.” Tak pointed at her, so that when her bottle came down from her mouth, she looked at the engineer and frowned. “You’re not going to sit around this place all night and fight off the Horse Women of Dry-gulch Canyon, are you?”

Lanya laughed. “Well, if you really want me, all right.”

Tak slapped the table. “Good.” Then he leaned over and stage-whispered, “You know she’s a real stuckup bitch. Back when she used to hang out here, she wouldn’t be caught dead with the likes of me. But after we got to know each other, she turned out not to be so bad.” He grinned across the table.

“Tak, I’m not stuck up. I always spoke to you!”

“Yeah, yeah, so’s your old man!” Tak pointed with a thumb. “Is he your old man now?” Then he laughed. “Come on. Late supper at Tak Loufer’s. Tak Loufer’s gonna give a party. Jack, you were saying how hungry you were.”

“Gee,” Jack said. “I don’t know if…”

Lanya suddenly turned to him. “Oh, come on! Now, you have to come with us. You’ve just gotten here. Tak wants to show you around.” She positively beamed.

“Well…” Jack grinned at the table, at Tak, at the candelabra.

“I’ll give you something to eat,” Tak said.

“Hell, I’m not that—”

“Oh, come on!” Lanya insisted.

(He moved his hands over the notebook, stained with blood and charcoal, to where the newspaper stuck out from the sides…) Lanya reached across and laid one fingertip on his gnawed thumb. He looked up. Tak was standing to leave. Jack: “Well, all right,” finishing up his beer; Tak pulled his coat from the bench back. Lanya rose.

He picked up the paper and the notebook and stood beside her. Jack and Tak (he remembered again the juxtaposition of sounds) went ahead. She pressed his arm and whispered, “I’d say I just earned my supper, wouldn’t you?”

They skirted the Harrison party. “Hey, look a-dere go’ ol’ I’n Wo’f!” Harrison grinned up from a hand of cards.

“Go drown yourself, ape,” Tak jibed back, “or I’ll tell everybody you’re holding—”

Harrison pulled his cards away and rumbled into laughter—when suddenly the silver-haired dancer bounced into their midst, G-string mended; he grabbed Lanya’s arm. “Darling, how do you always manage to leave here with all the beautiful men? Come on, everyone! A big smile for your mother…Fabulous! Can I come too?”

Tak swung his jacket, and the silver head ducked. “Get outa here.”

“Oh, now, with that big old hairy chest of hers, she thinks she’s just too too!”

But they pushed toward the door.

The red-headed woman and Purple Angora were talking quietly by the wall. Muriel, panting, lay between their feet. The flickering candles kept gouging lines in the woman’s yellow face. She was not that made up, he realized as they passed, nor that old. But the roughness of her skin under the unsteady light suggested misplaced artifice. Over her jacket (he had not seen it before and wondered how he had missed it; unless simple profusion had misled him to think it was something else) were loops and loops and loops of the strange chain Faust, Nightmare, the dancer, indeed, he himself, as well, wore.

Muriel barked.

He pushed into the hall, behind Lanya, in front of Jack.

Teddy smiled at them, like a mechanical skull beneath his cap, and held the door.

The very blonde girl at the sidewalk’s edge bit at her knuckle and watched them intently.

The cool was surprising.

He had reached down to make sure that the orchid still hung in his belt loop when she said: “Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but was—” her face held its expression unsteadily—“George Harrison…in there?” then lost it completely. Her grey eyes were very bright.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. He’s inside.”

Her fist flew back against her chin and she blinked.

Behind him Jack was saying, “Jesus, will you look at that!”

“Now that is something!” Tak said.

“You say he is in there? George Harrison, the big colored man?”

“Yeah, he’s inside.” At which point Lanya tugged his arm: “Kid, look at that! Will you?”

“Huh? What?” He looked up.

The sky—

He heard footsteps, lowered his eyes: the blonde girl was hurrying down the street. Frowning, he looked up again.

–streamed with black and silver. The smoke, so low and limitless before, had raddled into billows, torn and flung by some high wind that did not reach down to the street.

Hints of a moon struck webs of silver on the raveling mist.

He moved against Lanya’s shoulder (she too had glanced after the girl), all warm down his side. Her short hair brushed his arm. “I’ve never seen it like that before!” And then, louder: “Tak, has it ever been like that before?”

(Someday I’m going to die, he thought irrelevantly, but shook the thought away.)

“Damn!” Loufer took off his cap. “Not since I been here.” He was holding his jacket over his shoulder by one finger. “How do you like that, Jack? Maybe it’s finally breaking up.”

They started to the corner, still staring.

“That’s the first time here I’ve seen the—” Then Lanya stopped.

They all stopped. He swallowed, hard: with his head back, it tugged uncomfortably at his Adam’s apple.

Through one rent, the lunar disk had appeared; then, as the aperture moved with the wind, he saw a second moon!

Lower in the sky, smaller, it was in some crescent phase.

“Jesus!” Jack said.

The smoke came together again, tore away.

“Now wait just a God-damn minute!” Tak said.

Once more the night was lit by the smaller, but distinctly lunar crescent. A few stars glittered near it. The smoke closed here, opened there: The gibbous moon shone above it.

Before the bar door another group had gathered, craning at the violated night. Two, pulling a bottle back and forth, came loose, came close.

“What the hell—” The sky cleared again under two lights, crescent and near-full—”is that?” Tak demanded.

Someone else said: “What do you think it is, a sun?”

“The moon!” One gestured with his foaming bottle.

“Then what’s that?”

One pulled the bottle from the other’s hand. “That’s another…that one’s George!”

They reeled off, spilling liquor.

In the gathered group, people laughed. “You hear that, George? You got a God-damn moon named after you!” and out of the laughter and chatter, a louder laugh rose.

Lanya shrugged closer beneath his arm.

“Jesus…” Jack whispered again.

“Not according to them,” Tak said. “Come on.”

“What is it?” Lanya asked again.

“Maybe it’s some kind of reflection.” He flexed his fingers around on her small shoulder. “Or one of those weather balloons. Like they used to think were flying saucers.”

“Reflected from what, on to what?” Tak asked.

Flakes of smoke spun over. One or the other, and occasionally both, moons showed. There was a breeze now. The sky was healing. Over half the sky clouds had already coalesced. Voices came from in the bar doorway: