It was not, Kid had noticed, a particularly quiet nor attentive crowd—save the thirty or forty actually clustered at the Reverend’s podium. People wandered, talked; and now laughter began somewhere, obscuring her words. Up in the dark balcony, a few people, widely distant, slept like darker blotches among the brown wood seats. Somebody moved along the railing, checking spotlights; none seemed to work. Fat, bald, the color of terra cotta and wearing just some bib-coveralls, he stood up, wiped at his forehead with the back of his arm, and moved to the next dead light.
On the walls, were high barred windows. As Kid’s eyes came down the gates, a group of six middle-aged men and women ran across the floor: One woman knocked over a statue that one man caught and struggled to right, till a plaster wing fell. Plaster shattered over the floor. Others clustered to laugh, to shout advice.
Beyond them, Reverend Taylor waved her arms, ducked her head and tossed it back, haranguing the powdered floor, the shadowed ceiling; but only a word or two could tear clear now of talk and laughter.
The group fell apart from a sunburst of white footprints: George Harrison stalked through.
One arm was around the neck of a yellow-haired, plump, pink woman, the other around the waist of a gaunt, tan girl with a brick-colored natural and freckles. (He’d seen her, at the church, with the blond Mexican, who had stopped him on the street, how many mornings later, how many mornings ago?) George saw Kid, veered over, and called: “Hey, so you gonna come here, now? Shit!” His sleeves were rolled high on biceps like French-roast coffee. “You sure pick a hell of a time to come. Right in the middle of super-night. This is super-night, ain’t it?” and nodded and hallooed people passing ten yards away. “Today sure as hell was super-day when that super-sun come up in the super-sky! Hey—?” He released the gaunt girl’s waist. Between the lapels of her jump suit hung a glittering catenary. “What you got there? Lemme see.” His black fingers (pink nails, scimitared with yellow) clawed up the optical chain. “I see all the people running around wearing these things. Him…” He nodded at Kid. “You see all of them walking around with them. Come on, gimme that one. I’m gonna be a hippie too and wear them little glass beads.”
“Ohh!” she complained. “George!”
“You give me those, and you can get some more, right?”
“No honey.” She lifted them from his fingers. “You can’t have these.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause you can’t, that’s all.”
“You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself—”
“Not these, honey.” She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. “You tell me what else you want and I’ll give you that, okay?”
“Well, that’s what I want!”
“Oh, George.” She snuggled, closer—and out of his line of sight.
“All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I’m sure gonna get them later.” Harrison guffawed.
The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking hand.
“What is all this?” Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. “I mean, what’s everybody doing here? And the preacher—?”
“Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!”
“She sure been going on,” the gaunt girl said. “She just don’t stop.”
“This here is my house,” George said, with a grave nod. “Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn’t be able to fit ’em all in the church. So we say, come on and we gonna open up the big meeting room. And you just put a sign out say everybody come on over.”
“I think that’s real nice,” Plump Pink said in an accent that, during three weeks at the Georgia border loading melons, Kid had learned to identify as South Alabama Flats. “She always preaching about George and telling everybody about George. So I think it was very nice of George to say why not come on and do it here.”
“Don’t look to me like there anymore people than she could fit in the chapel,” the girl said.
“We got a bar over there—” the blond woman turned up her hand to point—“where you fellas can go get a drink. Then you can go listen to the preacher lady. George just wants everybody to make themselves at home.”
“Shit,” George said. Then he laughed.
Glass laughed too; the blond woman looked satisfied, did something with two fingers under the flowered cotton of her bodice, smiled.
“Gotta give the preacher lady a place to preach,” George repeated. He nodded, dropped the gaunt girl’s waist.
“Who lives in this city?” Reverend Amy’s voice came on through a lull. “Logicians love it here!” George turned to listen. So did the gaunt girl and Glass. “Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you. What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated pleroma. No, Che, no Fanon, you are not niggers enough! Look—” Once more she waved her fist high. Her black sleeve flung out below it. “I have a handful of monads here. Listen—They’re chattering and gossiping away like eight-operation logic-cells calling up order from a random net…” At the mention of Che an (unrelated? Kid wondered) wave of noise had started in one corner of the hall. Now another, which had at its center crashing bottle glass, rose over her voice. On the brown scape of the Reverend’s face, a constellation of droplets gleamed on each temple. Her mouth moved, her head bent, her head rose; her eyes sealed, snapped open, stared intently; and again Kid could hear none of her dithyramb.
He did hear George chuckle. Harrison stood with his hands in the pockets of his dirty khaki slacks.
Glass, a few steps away, was craning to see something over somebody’s head. The blond woman was shouldering her way forward with smiles and “excuse-me’s,” right and left; the gaunt girl stood, pensive, still watching the preacher, her left hand on her right shoulder, looking pained and picturesque.
“You know your girlfriend was outside looking for you again,” Kid said.
“Yeah?” George said. “Which one?”
“A little blond seventeen-year-old white girl.” The sweat, Kid realized, was not just under the books. The shoulders of his vest slid on it. The backs of his knees and the skin under his jaw were wet. “She was outside, asking…asking for you: ‘Is George Harrison in there? Is George inside?’”
George’s nose and cheeks like sanded teak, his heavy lips wrinkled as hemlock bark, the planes around his off-ivory teeth and eyes moved into an expression fixed loosely among irony, amusement, and contempt: It was the expression on Tak’s first poster. “Lots of little white girls come around here looking for me.”