He could see no one in the balcony.
On a chair by the far wall, muffled in an absurd overcoat, the only other person in the room swayed to one side, froze, recovered, swayed once more, once more froze at an angle that challenged gravity.
“What does he have inside him, a gyroscope?” Glass asked.
“More like half a spoon of skag.”
Glass laughed.
In the hallway, a door that had been closed before now stood ajar on a stairwell.
“You wanna go exploring?” Glass asked.
“Sure,” Kid said.
Glass pinched at his broad nose, twice, sucked in both lips, cleared his throat, and started down.
Kid followed.
A door at the bottom was open. Kid’s foot crushed a Times, which caught some low draft (the dirty stair was cold: the banister pipe warm) and drifted down. It rasped again beneath his boot on the last step.
Kid came up behind Glass in the doorway:
The couch had been opened into a bed. The gaunt, brick-haired girl who had been with George, her neck looped with the optical chain, slept beneath a rumpled blanket, baring small, light-coffee breasts, dolloped with dark nipples.
A lamp by the bed had a shade of glass from which a triangle was broken away. The wedge of light, molding to body and bedding, just touched one aureole at the height of her blowy breath.
“Hey, man!” Glass whispered, and grinned.
Kid breathed with her, swaying on the bottom step, and had to move his feet apart.
“How’d you like some of that?”
“I think I could eat about three helpings,” Kid said. “Where’s George?”
“Man, he probably gone off with the other one—” Glass’s emphatic whispers broke into and returned from falsetto.
Then: “What the fuck are you doing!” She sat up, sharply, face going from sleep to anger like two frames of film.
“Jesus Christ, lady,” Kid said, “we were just looking.”
“Well stop looking! Go on, get the fuck out of here! Where the hell is everybody? You, both of you, get out!”
“Sweetheart, don’t go on like that,” Glass said. “Now you got your door wide open—”
“Did that nut leave the damn door unlocked—” She pulled up the sheet, reached down by the bed, and whipped up some article of clothing. “Come on. Out! Out! Out! I’m not kidding. Out!”
“Look—” Kid glumly contemplated the difficulties of rape (a surprising memory of his arms filled with the bloody boy; he moved his feet back together) and wondered what Glass was contemplating—“if you just stop yelling, maybe we can discuss this a little; you might change your mind—”
“Not on your fucking life!” She shook out the wrinkled jump suit, swung her legs off the bed, and stuck her feet in. “I don’t know what you got on your mind to do. But if you try it, you gonna get your ass hurt!”
“Nobody wants to hurt anybody—” Kid stopped because Glass was looking up at the small, high window. Kid felt his cheeks wrinkling and the pressure of surprise on his forehead.
She started to say something, and then said, “Huh?”
The foggy air outside had lightened to blue.
Then Glass turned and ran up the stairs.
“Hey!” Kid followed him.
Behind, he could hear her fighting with shoes.
Kid ran down the hall, swung outside.
Glass, a dozen feet from the sidewalk, stared along the street.
Kid joined him, stopping to look back, at the sound of footsteps: She stopped at the edge of the door, leaned out, her face contorted. “Jesus God,” she said softly, stepped out and raised her head. “…it’s getting…light!”
Kid’s first thought was: It’s happening too fast. The uneven roofs descended in a paling V, vertex blurred with smoke. He stared, waiting for an eruption of bronze fires. But no; the arch of visible sky, though modeled and mottled with billows, was deep blue, except the lowest quarter, gone grey.
“Oh, man!” Glass looked at Kid. “I’m so tired.” Below one eye, water tracked his dark cheek. Blinking, Glass turned back to the morning.
Kid got chills. And kept getting them. I don’t trust this reaction, he thought, remembering the last late-night TV drama where the frail heroine’s tearful realizations of burgeoning love had caused him the same one. I’m going on like this because there’s a nigger next to me about to bawl, and another in the doorway who looks so scared and confused I’m about to…No, it’s not the light. No.
But the chills came on, frazzling his flesh, till even his thoughts stuttered. Chills sandpapered his spine. His palms hummed. He opened his mouth and eyes and his fingers wide to the raddled and streaming dawn.
5
Sunday, April 1, 1976—There is reason to speak of this on page two rather than lend the phenomenon the leading headline it could so easily claim. We, for one, are just not ready to grant the hysteria prevailing beneath this miasmal pollution the reinforcement of our shock.
We saw this one ourselves.
But in the city where we live, one doubts even the validity of that credential.
We went so far as to entertain awhile the idea of devoting this issue to accounts only by those who had slept through, who were busy in the cellar or windowless back room when, or—hope on hope—could claim to have been strolling about yesterday afternoon and observed during, nothing extraordinary in the sky.
But if the advent in our nights of George is anything to go by, we should have to look outside our misty and deliquescent city limits to find a negative witness. At least we hope so.
Please, return to page one. The plight of Jackson’s Lower Cumberland area, where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water main on my last Thursday (how dangerous that is for the rest of us nobody can say because nobody can estimate the losses from the fractured dam in terms of our decreased population), is a real dilemma. More real, we would like to feel, than yesterday’s portent.
We are not anxious either to describe or even name what passed. Presumably some copy of this will get beyond our border; we should like to keep our good name. We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park. But another writer (page one, continued page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first-hand account. And, anyway, in his words, “…chances are, no one lives there anymore.”
Dubious to time, the arc became visible in the late afternoon of the overcast day. In a spectrum ranging only through grey, black, and blue, you would have to see to judge the effects of those golds and bronzes, those reds and purplish browns! Minutes later, most of us here had gathered in the August Garden. The view was awesome. Speculation, before awe silenced it, was rampant. When, after fifteen minutes, perhaps a fourth of the disk had emerged, we had our first case of hysteria…But rather than dwell on those understandable breakdowns, let us commend Professor Wellman on his level-headedness throughout, and Budgie Goldstein on her indomitable high spirits.
More than an hour in the rising, the monumental…disk? sphere? whatever? eventually cleared the visible buildings. There is some question, even among those gathered in August, as to whether the orb actually hovered, or whether it immediately changed direction and began to set again, slightly (by no more than a fifth of its diameter) to the left—this last, the estimate of Wallace Guardowsky.
The lower rim, at any rate, was above the horizon for fifteen or twenty minutes. Even at full height, it could be stared at for minutes because of the veiling clouds. Colonel Harris advised, however, that we curtail prolonged gazing. The setting, almost all are agreed, took substantially less time than the rising, and has been estimated between fifteen minutes and a half an hour. We have heard several attempts now, to estimate size, composition, and trajectory. We doubt recording even the ones we could understand would be much use—the merest indulgence in cleverness before something so…awful! Do we hear objections from you eager for meaningful cosmologic distractions? May we simply ask your trust: Of the explanations heard, none, frankly, was that clever. And we do not choose to insult our readers.