A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector's swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.
Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letter, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). "Are you in there?" Lanya asked.
"Huh?" He looked up at the door's layered scrawl. "Yeah. I'm coming out now." He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.
"He said you were in there." She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. "Come on."
"Huh? Where?"
She smiled. "Come on." She took his hand.
"Hey," he called, passing the bar. "You wanna keep this for me again?"
The bartender leaned over for the notebook. "In the usual place, kid." He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.
She paused at the door to ask, "How did it go with the Richards?"
"I gave him back his fucking five bucks."
Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. "That's too much! Tell me what happened." And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.
"What happened?" she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.
"He didn't want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?" He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid's harness jingled. "You know their kid, the little boy, they just left him…" He shook his head against hers. "Hell, I don't want to talk about that. Where we going?"
"To the park. To the commune."
"Why?"
"I'm hungry, for one thing."
"Just as well I'm not talking."
She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. "This morning," Lanya said, "after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!"
"Smoke's sure thicker."
"Down there," she nodded, "before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn't even gotten dark yet."
"There couldn't be any fires in the park," he announced suddenly. "The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn't it? It would either all burn or it wouldn't."
"I guess so."
"Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront." Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a cannister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. "Maybe you and John and his people could go."
She shrugged under his arm. "No, really, I'd rather not go down there…"
From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.
"You're scared to death!"
Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.
"Why?"
She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, "Come on," quietly, sharply.
His bare foot went from concrete to grass.
The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.
He saw quivering fires.
But they were from the commune's cinderblock furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.
Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.
One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It's the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there's something in this fog and smoke. No…
John walked by the fire's edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak's weapon. Then, at John's wrist — brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John's fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.
Tak grinned and John moved away.
Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya — she had moved from his side — talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.
Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.
Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to them, put together actions and conversation snatches: He searched the screen where perception translated to information, waiting for somebody to dance, to eat, to sing. He wished Lanya had told him why they had come. But he was very tired. So he moved around. Someday I'm going to die, he thought irrelevantly: But blood still beat inside his ear.
He stepped backward from the heat, and backward again. (Where was Lanya?) But was too distraught to turn his head. Everything meant, loudly and insistently, much too much: smoke, untwirling over twigs; the small stone biting his heel; the hot band from the fire across his lowered forehead; the mumblings around him that rose here, fell there.
Milly stood a few feet in front of him, bare legs working to a music he couldn't hear. Then John crashed down, crosslegged in the leaves, beside her, fiddling absently with the blades around his hand.
A while ago, he realized, he had thought once again: Please, I don't want to be sick again, please, but had hardly heard the thought go by, and could only now, disinterestedly, discern the echo.
Something, or one, was, about to emerge into the clearing — he was sure; and was equally sure that, naked and glistening, it would be George! It would be June!
"Isn't this stupid," someone Kidd couldn't see was saying, "when I could be in Hawaii—?"
Tongue tip a pink bud at the corner of his lips, John stared at Milly's shifting calves. He raised his bladed hand (a reflection crossed his chin), and, with a sharp, downward sweep, cut.
Milly gasped, bit off the gasp, but made no other sound. She did not step, she did not even look.
Astounded, Kidd watched blood, in a torrent wide (the thought struck irrelevantly amidst his terror) as a pencil run down her heel.
IV: In Time of Plague
"Look, leave me alone…"
"Come on; come—"
"Tak, will you get your fuckin' hands—"