Hands scrabbled on Kid’s belly; Denny grunted.
An elbow hit Kid’s stomach. A knee hit his knee.
“Hey, watch it,” Lanya said.
“I’m sorry,” Denny said, and fell on top of them.
The scent of Denny’s breath, which was piney, joined Lanya’s, which reminded Kid of ferns.
“Oof,” Lanya said. “Would you please tell me what your name is?”
“Denny,” Denny said loudly in Kid’s ear. “What’s yours?”
“Lanya Colson.”
“You’re the Kid’s old lady, huh?”
“When he remembers who I am.” Her hand on Kid’s wrist squeezed.
Kid rubbed the back of Denny’s neck with one hand and held Lanya’s with the other. Again he felt how chalky Denny’s skin was. Lanya was warm.
“You like this?”
Lanya laughed and moved her arms farther around Denny’s back.
“Up here, where I live.” Denny suddenly pulled back. “You like this?”
They watched him hunker on the blankets. The side of Kid’s thigh on hers was warm. The top, where Denny had been, cooled.
“You can’t stand up,” Lanya said. “But it must be good for sitting and thinking.”
“I stay up here a lot,” Denny said. “’Cause it never gets that hot. Then sometimes I don’t come up here two or three days.” Suddenly he sat back and pulled a plastic envelope into his lap. “You like this?”
“What is it?” Lanya asked and leaned forward.
“It’s a shirt.” Denny said. “It’s a real pretty shirt.”
Kid looked too.
Beneath the plastic cover, and over green satin, gold strings tangled: the fringe was attached to the velveteen yoke. Velveteen cuffs sported gilt and green glass links.
“I found it in a store.” Denny reached behind him. “And this one.”
Silver thread elaborately embossed the black.
“Those were the two I liked,” Denny explained. “Only you can’t wear stuff like this around here. Maybe if I go someplace else…” He looked between the two quickly.
Kid scratched the hair between his legs and drew away a little.
Lanya had leaned closer. “They are pretty!”
“What is that one made of?” Kid asked.
Lanya pressed the plastic covering with her palm. “It’s crepe.”
“And I have these.” Denny pushed the shirts behind him. “See.”
When the lid clicked off the plastic box, the cubes inside bounced.
“It’s a game,” Denny explained. “I found it in another store. It’s too complicated for me to play, and there’s nobody here to play it with. But I liked the colors.”
Lanya picked up one of the green blocks. On each face was an embossed gold letter: p,q,r,s,o,i…
Denny blinked and held the box open for her to replace the playing piece.
She turned it in her fingers a long time, till Kid’s awareness of Denny’s restrained impatience made him uncomfortable.
“Put it back,” Kid said, quietly.
She did, quickly.
“And this.” Denny pulled out an oversized paperback book. “You got to look at those close. They’re very funny pictures—”
“Escher!” Lanya exclaimed. “They certainly are.”
Kid reached over her arm to turn the page.
“Where did you get those?” Lanya asked.
“In another…store.” (Kid wondered idly at the hesitation but didn’t look up.) “In somebody’s house,” Denny corrected himself. “We broke in. This was there, so I took it. You seen ’em before, ain’t you.”
“Um-hm.” Lanya nodded.
Kid turned another page of etched perspective imploded on itself and put back together inside out. Lanya bent to look now.
“This!” Denny said.
They both looked. And Kid took the book from Lanya and handed it back to Denny. (“That’s all right,” Denny said. “She can look at it,” ignoring Kid’s gesture.) He showed them a silver box. “Ain’t this a neat radio? It’s got AM and FM and it even says Short Wave.” It was the size of a box of kitchen matches. “And all sorts of other dials.”
“I wonder if they do anything,” Lanya said.
“That one says the ‘volume’,” Denny explained. “The button’s there, that one is the AFC thing so it doesn’t slide around. But you can’t tell around here because radios don’t work here anymore.”
“Like the shirts,” she said. “When you go someplace else, you’ll have something nice.”
“If we go someplace else,” Denny considered, “I’ll probably leave all this stuff here. You can get lots of nice things anywhere around. You just pick it up.”
“I meant somewhere outside the…” Kid watched her realize that Denny had not.
Suddenly she touched the radio. “It isn’t square!” she announced. The black and metal box was trapezoidal. She flattened her hands to the sides of it. “It is beautiful,” she said in the voice of someone admitting that a puzzle was still insoluble. (What was the name of his roommate in Delaware who had had so much trouble with the paper on mathematical induction? Another thing he couldn’t remember…and was sad at his ruined memory and happy for Lanya.) “It really is…just lovely.”
Kid leaned close to her and kneaded the inside of his thighs. He’d laid the Escher against his calf. The corner of the book nicked; he didn’t move it.
“You seen these pictures too?” Denny brought out another paper-covered book.
Lanya said: “Let me see.”
She turned over the first page and frowned.
“…Um, did Boucher ever paint religious pictures?” Kid ventured.
“Not,” Lanya said, “for three-dimensional, laminated-plastic dioramas.”
“I think 3-D pictures are great,” Denny said, while Kid felt vaguely embarrassed.
“These are strange.” Lanya turned another page.
A crowned woman in blue stood one foot on a crescent moon while below her two naked men cowered in a rowboat. Ghosts of the same picture at other angles haunted the striated plastic.
“What’s the next…” Lanya asked.
A man who looked like a classical Jesus, in a loincloth, limped on a single crutch, one hand, with stigma, extended.
“Spanish…?” she mused.
“Puerto Rican,” Kid suggested.
Lanya glanced at him. “It doesn’t have any writing anywhere.”
A woman, perhaps the virgin, as likely an empress, rode on a tiger. “The rocks and moss and water in the background, that’s lifted from da Vinci.” Lanya turned to the next. “These are really…” She closed the book to a white cover on which was a crowned and bleeding heart behind a cross. “You can’t tell me those are Christian. Did you find this in somebody’s house too?”
“In a store,” Denny said. He was hunting at the edge of the blanket again. “And these.”
In his cupped hands were three glass cubes set with glittering stones.
“Dice?” Kid asked.
“I had four of them,” Denny said. “One broke.” He rolled them against Lanya’s leg.
Three, two, and six: counting the top numbers was difficult because of pips on other faces.
“You’re really into collecting pretty things.” Lanya picked up a cube.
Denny sat back against the wall and hugged his knees.
“Um-hum.”
“Me too.” She watched him. “Only I leave them where I find them. Like buildings. Or trees. Or paintings in museums.”
“You just—” Denny let his knees fall open—“notice where they are; and go back and look at them?”
She nodded.
Denny tangled his fists in the blanket between his feet.
“But you don’t have to do it that way here. You can just take what you want. Well, maybe not the trees and the buildings. But the paintings, if you find one you like, you just carry it with you. Shit, you can go live in a fuckin’ building if you like it! In front of the fuckin’ tree!”
“No.” Lanya let her thin back bend. “I’m into collecting pretty, useful objects. Yours are just pretty.”
“Huh?”
“But if they’re supposed to stay useful, I have to leave them where they are.”
“You think there’s something wrong with taking that stuff?”