Nine flights down he walked the warm hall. Twelve steps up? Thirteen he counted this time, stubbing his toe on the top one.
Kid came out on the dawn-dim porch hung with hooks and coiled with smoke. He jumped from the platform, still groggy, still blinking, still filled with the terror which there was no other way to deal with save laughter. After all, he thought, ambling toward the corner, if this burning can go on forever, if besides the moon there really is a George, if Tak kicks me out for a glass-eyed spade, if days can disappear like pocketed dollars, then there is no telling. Or only the telling, but no reasoning. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets where the material was already fraying, and turned the corner.
Between the warehouses, clearing and fading in moving smoke, the bridge rose and swung out into oblivion. Among the consorted fragments of his curiosity, the thought remained: I should have at least made him give me a cup of coffee before I went. He cleared his sticky throat, and turned, expecting the suspension cables any moment to fade forever, while he (forever?) wandered the smelly waterfront that somehow never actually opened on water.
This wide avenue had to lead onto the bridge.
Kid followed it for two blocks around a dark official building. Then, beyond a twist of figure-eights and cloverleaves, the road rolled out between the suspensors, over the river.
He could only see as far as the start of the second span. The mist, among folds and tendrils, condensed the limits of vision. Foggy dawns should be chill and damp. This one was grit dry, tickled the back of his arms and the skin beneath his neck with something only a breath off body temperature. He walked up the edge of the road, Thinking: There are no cars, I could run down the middle. Suddenly he laughed loudly (swallowing phlegm caught there in the night) and ran forward, waving his arms, yelling.
The city absorbed the sound, returned no echoes.
After thirty yards he was tired, so he trudged and panted in the thick, dry air. Maybe all these roads just go on, he theorized, and the bridge keeps hanging there. Hell, I’ve only been going ten minutes. He walked beneath several overpasses. He started to run again, coming around a curve to the bridge’s actual entrance.
The roads’ lines between the cables began a dozen perspective V’s, their single vertex lopped by fog. Slowly, wonderingly, he started across toward the invisible shore. Once he went to the rail and looked over through the smoke to the water. He looked up through girders and cables past the walkway toward the stanchion tower. What am I doing here? he thought, and looked again into the fog.
The car was back among the underpasses half a minute while its motor got louder. Maroon, blunt, and twenty years old, it swung out onto the gridded macadam; as it growled by, a man in the back seat turned, smiled, waved.
“Hey!” Kid called, and waved after him.
The car did not slow. But the man gestured again through the back windshield.
“Mr. Newboy!” Kid took six running steps and shouted: “Good-bye! Good-bye, Mr. Newboy!”
The car diminished between the grills of cable, hit the smoke, and sank like a weight on loose cotton. A moment later—too soon, from his own recollection of the bridge crossed by foot—the sound of the motor ceased.
What was that sound? Kid had thought it was some wind storm very far away. But it was the air rushing in the cavern of his mouth. Goodbye, Mr. Ernest Newboy, and added with the same good will, you’re a tin Hindenburg, a gassy Nautilus, a coward to the marrow of each metatarsal. Though it would embarrass you to Hollywood and Hell, I hope we meet again. I like you, you insincere old faggot; underneath it all, you probably like me. Kid turned and looked at the shrouded city, like something crusty under smoke, its streets stuck blind in it, its colors pearled and pasteled; so much distance was implied in the limited sight.
I could leave this vague, vague city…
But, holding all his humor in, he turned back toward the underpass. Now and again his face struck into the grotesque. Where is this city’s center? he wondered, and walked, left leg a little stiff, while buildings rose, again, to receive him.
Free of name and purpose, what do I gain? I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands. The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night. Reality? The only moment I ever came close to it was when, in the moonless New Mexican desert, I looked up at the prickling stars on that hallowed, hollowed dark. Day? It is beautiful there, true, fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but it is distorted as distance itself, the real all masked by pale diffraction.
Buildings, bony and cluttered with ornament, hulled with stone at their different heights: window, lintel, cornice, and sill patterned the dozen planes. Billows brushed down them, sweeping at dusts they were too insubstantial to move, settled to the pavement and erupted in slow explosions he could see two blocks ahead—but, when he reached, had disappeared.
I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable. And wondered why loneliness in him was almost always a sexual feeling. He stepped off the sidewalk and kept along the loose line of old cars—nothing parked on this block later than 1968—thinking: What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations, are too unfixed to hold it in, so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape. He had a momentary image of all these walls on pivots controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after he had passed, they might suddenly swing to face another direction, parting at this corner, joining at that one, like a great maze—forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable…
When the heavy man ran into the street, Kid first recognized the green-drab wool shirt with no collar. Lumbering from the alley sidewalk, he saw Kid, headed for him. The man had been one of the white men at the church last night.
The fleshy face, red and sweat-flecked, shook above pumping fists. The top of the head was blotchy under a haze of yellow; on the forehead the hair lay out like scrap brass.
Suddenly Kid started to move backward. “Hey, watch it—”
“You—!” The man lunged. His fingers caught among, and tugged at, Kid’s chains. “You are the one who…” At the Mexican accent Kid rifled his wounded memory. “When I was…you didn’t…no? You, please…don’t…” the man panted through wet lips. His eyes were bloodshot coral. “Oh, please, don’t you…you were in there, yes? I…I mean you fool around like that, they gonna…” His mouth compressed; he looked across the street, looked back. “You…Oh, the Kid!” and yanked his hand from tangled links while Kid thought: No, he didn’t say ‘the Kid,’ he maybe said ‘the kid,’ or even ‘they did.’ The man was shaking his head: “No, you gonna…Hey, don’t do that…”
“Look,” Kid said, trying to take his arm. “You need some help? Here, let me—”
The man jerked away, nearly fell, began to run.
Kid took two steps after him, stopped.
The blond Mexican tripped on the far sidewalk, pushed up from his knee, and made it into the alley.
Circling Kid’s mind was the Mexican voice in the hall at the Richards’; various mentions by Thirteen; amphetamine-psychosis? And then the thought, clear and overriding:
He was…crazy!
Something cascaded, tickling like a line of insects, across his stomach. For a moment he mistook it for a chill of recognition; indeed, real chills ignited a moment after.