Kid and Denny clapped.
So did Lanya, taking a large step back from the mike, bobbing her head and whacking the back of her harmonica hand against her palm. They clapped through the ringing five, and all shouted together with the voices already taped. Once more Lanya was at the mike, harp at her mouth, weaving high shatter-notes through the ending tapestry.
Then silence.
She said, softly, breathing hard: “There…” and pressed a button. The tapes halted.
“Jesus…!” Denny stood. “That’s wild! Where’d you get the tape recorder? I mean, how’d you learn—”
“Paul borrowed it from Reverend Taylor for me.”
“You do a lot of that stuff before?” Denny asked.
“Nope.” Lanya took off her own earphones, hung them over the mike’s jutting bar. “It’s just something I wanted to try out. I’ve worked with tapes before but—”
Kid said: “Let’s hear the whole thing!” Taking off his earphones, he came up beside her.
“What are you gonna call it?” Denny clacked his earphones down on the table.
“—Watch it,” Lanya said. “Those are delicate.”
“Sorry—What’s its name?”
“For a while—” she ran her thumb across Kid’s chest—“I was thinking of calling it ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens.’ But then—” Denny disappeared in his ball of light; Lanya squinted, stepped back—“what with that big thing we saw up in the sky…I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just call it ‘Diffraction.’ I like that.”
Holding his lips between his teeth, Kid nodded. “Go on.” His lips came loose and tingled. “Play it.”
Denny turned on like a frozen node of incandescent gas, moved center floor.
Tapes turned.
“Here we go…”
Denny stilled.
“…I want you to note—” Lanya lay her harmonica on the table, then raised one finger—“that something like that usually takes six or eight hours to do; we have been at this no more than two hours.”
From the speakers beneath the table, Denny’s chair leg squeaked.
Kid put his own phones down softly and listened (thinking: Temporal diffraction? Two hours? It had seemed perhaps twenty minutes!):
The long note bent.
Somehow, lost in a machine, I have been able to grasp and strip from the body of experience three layers of living thesis: She inscribed them with her music, laid them over one another so that, thinned by tape and transistors, their transparent silences and aural aggregates, as she, the inventor, conceived them, clear for me, the invented one, at last. (On the tape Lanya whistled and played with her own whistling, the harmonica cradling its brittle, upper notes with low, breathy ones.) Is that where it goes (thinking:) when it goes? This is melody and there—the shrill whistle which Kid realized now was the real, musical signal for the clapping to begin—which began! He listened to a room full of people clap in time. One of the tracks was heavily echoed and made the clapping seem to come from dozens. The claps mounted; a final clap, and the dozens shouted—among them he recognized his own voice, and Denny’s, and Lanya’s; but there were many others. Their shouts died over a discord no single harmonica could make.
But probably any three could.
The finale cleared in its higher, supporting key; trills of notes fell into, and trills of notes rose out of, the moaning chord. The sound clutched at him, tightened his stomach.
Lanya listened, arms at her sides, head down, frowning with concentration. The white pips of her upper teeth dented one side of her lip.
The piece ended.
She still listened.
Then Denny applauded and laughed. Another Denny, on top of him, shouted, “Whoop-eee!” And Denny across the room, encased in light, said: “Hey, you know we got company in here? Look back there…”
Lanya’s head came up suddenly. She turned off the tape.
Denny’s light was over near the darkened corner. “Back behind the blackboard there.”
“Huh?” Kid stepped forward.
“There’s a big old nigger bitch in here, and, man, she’s about to shit!”
“Denny!” Lanya exclaimed, and ran through the edge of his light, which turned, laughing, after her.
Kid pushed away the blackboard, looked down.
The board-stand’s wheels stopped creaking.
The woman wore a black hat and a black coat, hem rumpled on the floor around her. She blinked up at them, feeling for the string handles of the shopping bag beside her. Catching the bag up, she breathed a word all wind.
“What do you want?” Lanya asked. “Are you…all right?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed at the light that was Denny, came to Kid’s and widened. She blinked again. “You got juice and cookies…”
“What?”
“This is the school?” Her voice was still breathy. “You got the juice and the cookies for the children? Oh, I’m sorry!” Her knuckle rose to dent her double chin, a gesture recalling June. “I thought I could get some from here, you know? I live in Cumberland Park? And the store where I go all the time ain’t got none no more. I go in there every day and I get some every day, but I go in there yesterday and there just ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, God…from the children! I’m so sorry!”
“Then,” Lanya said, “why don’t you go to another store?”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I really am…”
“You got juice and cookies?” Denny asked. “Whyn’t you give her some?”
“Because this is…” Lanya’s lips worried the teeth behind them. “You wait here.” She walked from the circle of Denny’s illumination; Kid heard a door.
The woman transferred her bag to the other hand. “Taking from the children. That’s just so awful!” Her voice was weak and low as some man’s.
Lanya stepped back into the light. In one arm were two number ten cans of grapefruit juice. In the other were two boxes of Tollhouse cookies, glistening in cellophane. “You take these. But don’t come back here. Don’t break in here and try and take stuff out. Find another store. There’s one four blocks up from here that still has things in it. And there’s another one a block and a half down, right by the burned-out dry cleaners.”
The woman, her tongue tip pink between her lips, blinking, opened her bag.
The cans and boxes went chattering in.
Lanya walked to the front door and held it open.
The woman glanced at Kid, at Denny’s light, quite distressed, and stepped unsteadily forward. At the door she hesitated, suddenly turned to Lanya: “You teach little children dressed like that, half naked with your breasts all hanging out like that? Why, that’s terrible! It’s a disgrace to God!” Then she fled, coat hem swinging above her splayed heels.
“Get that!” Denny (lights doused) ran forward. “You want us to take back our God-damn juice and—!”
“Denny!” Lanya blocked him at the door.
“I mean will you get that shit!” He turned in her restraining arms, shaking his head. “Why’d you give her the damn stuff?”
“Oh, come on. Let’s go!”
“I mean, God damn, she didn’t even say whether or not she liked your music!”
Lanya held on to Denny’s shoulder. “Well, maybe if she was hungry she didn’t really care about the music. Hiding back there for a couple of hours—”
“Then what’s she care that much about your tits for?” Denny shrugged her hand away. “She could’ve come out. We wouldn’t’ve done nothing. Shit!”
“Well, I’m not going to let it bother me,” she said. “So don’t let it bother you.”
Kid thought: How did she get in here in the first place? Then thought: What was I just thinking…It was something I wanted to ask. “Yeah, let’s go, huh?” He laughed, and thought: What was the thought that just slid off the tables of my mind?
Kid followed them outside. And thought: She is bothered.