"Where did you get them?" he asked, aware he broke the custom Faust had so carefully defined the day before. Hell, he was still uneasy with her dog, and with her transformation between smoke and candlelight.
"A little friend of mine gave them to me." She had the look, yes, of someone trying not to look offended.
He shifted, let his knees bend a little, his toes go, nodded.
"Before she left the city. She left me, left the city. And she gave me these. You see?"
He'd asked. And felt better for the violence done, moved his arms from the shoulder… his laughter surprised him, broke out and became huge.
Over it, he heard her sudden high howl. With her fist on her chest, she laughed too, "Oh, yes!" squinting. "She did! She really did. I was never so surprised in all my life! Oh, it was funny — I don't mean funny peculiar, though it certainly was. Everything was, back then. But it was funny ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa." She shook the sound about her. "She—" almost still—"brought them to me in the dark. People shouting around out in the halls, and none of the lights working. Just the flickering coming around the edge of the shades, and the terrible roaring outside… Oh, I was scared to death. And she brought them to me, in handfuls, wound them around my neck. And her eyes…" She laughed again, though that cut all smile from him. "It was strange. She wound them around my neck. And then she left. There." She looked down over the accordion of her neck, and picked through the loops. "I wear them all the time." The accordion opened. "What do they mean?" She blinked at him. "I don't know. People who wear them aren't too anxious to talk about them. I'm certainly not." She leaned a little closer. "You're not either. Well, I'll respect that in you. You do the same." Now she folded her hands. "But I'll tell you something: And, really, there's no reason behind it, I suppose, other than that it seems to work. But I trust people who have them just a little more than those who don't." She shrugged. "Probably very silly. But it's why I offered you that job."
"Oh."
"I suspect we share something."
"Something happened," he said, "when we got them. Like you said. That we don't like to talk about."
"Then again, it could be nothing more than that we happen to be wearing the same…" She rattled the longest strand.
"Yeah." He buttoned another button. "It could be."
"Well. I'll drop in on you at the Richards' later in the afternoon. You will be there?"
He nodded. "Four hundred, on 36th Street…"
"Apartment 17-E," she finished. "Very good. Muriel?"
The dog clicked back from the gutter.
"We'll be going now."
"Oh. Okay. And thanks."
"Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I'm sure." Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time diesel.
He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion bobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.
Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.
Her calves were smooth.
His heart, beating fast, slowed.
Her calves were unscarred.
He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.
Her calves had no scratch.
When he took his hand away, she made some in-slumber sound and movement. And didn't wake. He opened today's paper and put it on top of yesterday's. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline:
MYSTERIOUS RUMORS!
MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS!
Would your editor ever like some pictures with this one! We, unfortunately, were asleep. But from what we can gather, shortly after midnight last night — so far twenty-six versions of the story have come in, with contradictions enough to oblige our registering an official editorial doubt — the fog and smoke blanketing Bellona these last months was torn by a wind at too great an altitude to feel at street level. Parts of the sky were cleared, and the full — or near full — moon was, allegedly, visible — as well as a crescent moon, only slightly smaller (or slightly larger?) than the first!
The excited versions from which we have culled our own report contain many discrepancies. Here are some: The full orb was the usual moon, the crescent was the intruder.
The crescent was the real moon, the full, the impostor… a young student says that, in the few minutes these downright Elizabethan portents were revealed, he made out markings on the full disk that prove it was definitely not our moon.
Two hours later, someone came into the office (the only person so far who claims to have caught any of this phenomenon through an admittedly low-power telescope) to assure us the full disk definitely was the moon, while the crescent was bogus.
In the six hours since the occurrence (as we write, into the dawn), explanations offered the Times have ranged from things so science-fiction-y we do not pretend to understand their arcane machinery, down to the all-purpose heat lightning and weather balloon, perennial explanation for the UFO.
I pass on, as typical, one comment from our own Professor Wellman, who was observing from the July gardens with several other guests: "One, we all agreed, was nearly full; the other was definitely crescent. I pointed out to the Colonel, Mrs Green, and Roxanne and Tobie, who were with me, that the crescent, which was lower in the sky, was convexed away from the bright area of the higher moon. Moons do not light themselves; their illumination comes from the sun. Even with two moons, the sun can only be in one direction from them both; no matter which phases they are in, if they are both visible in the same quarter of the sky, both should be light on the same side — which was not the case here."
To which your editor can only say that any "agreement," "certainty," or "definiteness" about these moons are cast into serious doubt — unless we are prepared to make even more preposterous speculations about the rest of the cosmos?
No.
We did not see it.
Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night's hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: things are — though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.
What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by all who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George!
The impetus to appelation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.