“—like in Bellona?”
“Bellona is a very small part of the universe. And this party is a very good place to bear that in mind. Kid, all the criticism you’re going to get here, good or bad, is going to be a ritual kind.” She glanced down under her brows. “Maybe that’s what Mr. Newboy was trying to tell you?”
“Maybe,” Kid said, and put his face against her shoulder. “And maybe he was just too chickenshit to say what Frank did.”
“I don’t think so.” Lanya rubbed his hair again. “But that’s just my personal reaction.”
“Frank said that too.”
“Then be generous and believe him.” She pulled back. “You know, someday I’m going to shock you all and produce a philosophical treatise thick as The Critique of Pure Reason, The Phenomenology of Mind, and Being and Time put together! It’ll be in neatly numbered, cross-referenced paragraphs, a third of it mathematical symbols. I’ll call it—” she drew a thumb and forefinger across the air, top and bottom of an imaginary signboard—“Preliminary Notes Toward a Calculus of Attentional and Intentional Perception, with an Analytics of Modular—I guess ‘modular’ is the adjective from ‘modal’?—Feedback. Then you’ll see. All of you!”
“You could always call it: Lanya Looks at Life,” Kid suggested.
“Poets!” Lanya exclaimed, mocking despair. “Artists!—God!” and put her hot, pale hands around his, to cage the beasts his fingers were.
He pulled them from the cave to rest them on the blades turning, tic-tic-tic, on his chest.
She stood, shedding turquoise to the hem, and moved by Denny. The boy’s hip pocket stuck out with corners from the control box. “Take a walk,” Lanya said. “You’ll feel better.”
Kid nodded, started away from them, realized he was fleeing, and slowed.
Dragon Lady swung around the newel at the bottom of the steps and said to Baby: “Now what you wanna go say that to that woman, for, huh? Huh?”
“’Cause she said I—”
“Now why you wanna go say something like that?”
Three steps behind them, Adam walked with Nightmare; Nightmare doubled with laughter, held his stomach and staggered up the stairs. From knee to cuff one scarlet pants leg was smeared from a fall.
Adam’s eyes were very wide behind loose, rough hair; his grin split, brown, over yellow teeth.
“God damn!” Dragon Lady said. “You don’t go around saying things like that.”
“Shit.” Baby’s hands were locked before his groin. His head was down and his blond hair swayed as though he worried something in his teeth. “If she hadn’t said—aw, shit!”
Nightmare’s hand fell on Kid’s shoulder. His face came forward, fighting to explain, but exploded in laughter. He smelled very drunk. At last Nightmare just shook his head, helplessly, and staggered, loudly, away.
Kid took a breath and went on down, pondering madness’s constituents. Later he could not recall where his thoughts had gone from there. And he pondered that loss more than days or names.
Below, Frank said: “Wait a minute…wait a minute! Wait—!”
Kid held the bridge’s black metal rail and looked down at the path.
They came, laughing, along the short-cut from March to October.
The rocks were covered with moss and slicked with floodlight.
“Look, now I know something that’s sort of funny.”
“All right.” Black-sweatered Bill stopped, still laughing. “What?”
Thelma stood to the side.
“You mustn’t say anything nasty about him, Frank,” Ernestine said. “I think they’ve all been perfectly charming, everything considered.”
“He’s a nice guy,” Frank said. “He really is. But I’ve met him a couple of times before, that’s all. And I just—”
“Well,” drawled a man whose freckled skull was ringed with white hair, “I haven’t yet. But his friends are the funniest children I have ever seen. Oh, they put on quite a show. Gibbons, I tell you! A real bunch of little black gibbons!”
Bill said: “Most of them aren’t that little.”
“I just wonder,” Frank repeated, “whether he actually wrote them or not.”
“Why would you think he didn’t?” Bill asked, turning.
“I met him,” Frank said, “once down in that place—Teddy’s? A long time ago. I’d lost a notebook a few weeks back and I was telling him about it. Suddenly he got very excited—very upset, and called the bartender over to bring him this notebook that he told me he’d found in the park. He told me he’d found it, already filled up with writing, I’m very sure of that. I flipped through it, and it was all full of poems and journals and things. He wanted to know if it was mine. It wasn’t, of course. But at least two of the poems in that notebook—and I remember because they struck me as rather odd—I’d swear were identical with two of the poems in Brass Orchids. That notebook had a poem on practically every other page.”
“Are you serious?” Roxanne asked as though she thought the tale very funny. “Well, you mustn’t ever tell Roger. He would feel quite had!”
Bill let out a loud, “Ha!” at the sky. “If it is true, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all night!”
“I wouldn’t make it up!”
“It’s a perfectly awful thing to say,” Ernestine said. “Do you really think he would do a thing like that?”
“Well, you’ve met him,” Frank said. “He’s not what I would call the literary type.”
“Oh, everybody and their brother writes poems,” Bill tossed away.
“You think, then—” which was Kamp’s voice: It came from under the bridge where Kid could not see—“he took all the poems out of this notebook, now?”
“Oh, perhaps…” Frank began. “I’m not accusing him of anything. Maybe he only took those two. I don’t know. Maybe he only took a couple of lines that I just happened to recognize—
Thelma said: “You said they were identical,” and Kid strained and failed to hear more than her words.
“I said I thought they were,” Frank said, which was not, Kid remembered with obsessive lucidity, what he had said at all.
“That’s interesting,” Bill reflected, head down, all dark hair and black sweater. He started walking.
The others followed him under the bridge.
Frank said: “He told me that night he’d only been a poet for, I think he put it, a couple of weeks. And then, there was this notebook he’d found, all filled up with poems that—well, the two I looked at closely—are awfully similar to two in his book.” The voices echoed beneath. “What would you think?”
Thelma (he could not see her face) was the last to go under.
“Well, you obviously think he took them—” The voice’s identity was obscured by echo.
“I think,” someone’s voice came back, “he’s just a nice—I wouldn’t say dumb, just non-verbal—guy who probably isn’t too concerned with the significance of that sort of thing. Hell, I like him. With all those guys in the chains he’s got running around for bodyguards, I sort of hope he likes us too.”
“He didn’t sign his name to the book,” the southerner said.
“Oh, Frank, I think you’re just—”
Kid had to clear his throat so missed Ernestine’s last words in the rattle. (Run to the other rail, hear what they said as they emerged…) He looked along the empty path.
In an Oregon forest, back during that winter, on his day off, a log, loosed from the pile he’d been climbing, had crashed his leg, bloodying his right calf and tearing his jeans. He’d thought his shin was broken. But, finally, he had been able to hobble back to the bunkhouse, a quarter of a mile away—it took forty minutes. The whole time he kept thinking: “This hurts more than anything I’ve ever felt before in my life. This hurts more than anything I’ve ever…” He reached the empty cabin, with the thought repeating like a melody now, rather than an idea; he had sat down on the lower bunk—it belonged to a laborer named Dehlman—opened his belt, got the seat of his jeans from beneath his buttocks, and in a single motion stripped them down his—