“And a year takes about as long as a month. Oh yes, I’m familiar with the phenomenon.”
“Most of the time in my life is spent lying around getting ready to fall asleep.”
“That one has been mentioned to me before, but I’m not conscious of it myself.”
“Maybe, somehow, for the last few days, I’ve just missed out on the sleeping part. There’s hardly any change in light around here from morning to evening anyway.”
“You mean the last five days are the ones you can’t remember?”
“Yeah, what have I been up to, anyway? Lanya…said everybody was talking about it.”
“Not everybody. But enough, I suppose.”
“What were they saying?”
“If you lost those days, I can see why you’d be interested.”
“I’d just like to know what I’ve been doing.”
Brandy splashed inside the bottle to Tak’s laughter. “Maybe you’ve traded the last five days for your name. Quick, tell me: Who are you?”
“No.” Kid hunched his shoulders more. The feeling that he was being played with wobbled like an unsteady ball on some slanted rim, rolled into the velvet pouch. “I don’t know that either.”
“Oh.” Tak drank from the bottle, set it back on his belly. “Well, I thought it was worth a try. I suspect it isn’t something to be harped on.” The brandy swayed. “What have you been doing for the last week? Let me see.”
“I know I was with the scorpions—I met this guy named Pepper. And he turned me on to this department store they were going to try and…rip off, I guess.”
“So far I’m with you. There was supposed to have been some shooting there? You were supposed to have saved one guy by fighting off somebody with a gun, bare-handed. You were supposed to have busted a mirror over the head of another guy who acted up with you—”
“Under his chin.”
“That’s it. Copperhead told me about that himself. And then when another cat named Siam got shot—”
“Was that his name?”
“—when Siam got shot, you pulled him off the street and got him into the bus.”
“And you saw me get out of that bus earlier this evening.”
“Copperhead told me about it a couple of days back.”
“Only it happened to me this afternoon, Goddamn it!” Ashamed, he blinked at his hands. “That’s all they said happened? I mean there wasn’t anything else?”
“Sounds to me like enough.”
“What happened to Siam?”
Tak shrugged. Brandy splashed. “Somebody went to see about him, I remember, from the bar.”
“Madame Brown?”
“I think that’s who it was. But I haven’t heard anything else. For somebody who doesn’t remember where he’s been, you seem to know as much about it as I do.” Tak reached over, dragged the chair to the desk, and sat. He started to put the bottle on the desk, but halted to take a final drink. “You do remember all the things I just told you about actually happening?”
Kid nodded at his lap. “I’ve just lost the time, then. I mean, I’ve lost days before—thought it was Thursday when it was Friday.”
“All we thought, really, was that you’d deserted us to become a full-fledged scorpion. It was cool with me. You sure look like that’s what happened. You got your lights and everything.”
Kid focused on the lensed ball hanging against his stomach. “It doesn’t work. It needs a new battery.”
“Just a second.” Tak opened a desk drawer. “Here you go.” He tossed.
Kid caught it in both hands: bunched lightning on red and blue.
“Turn yourself on sometime.”
“Thanks.” Wanting to talk longer, he put the battery in his pocket, noting the cloth was frayed enough at the bottom seam to feel flesh through it with his fingers. “Tak, you really think you got the city figured out?”
“Me?”
“You were telling me how it follows those conventions—”
Tak laughed, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. “No, not me. I don’t understand anything about it. I’m a God-damn engineer. I take a plug; I put it in one socket; and it works. I put it in another one; and it doesn’t. I go into an office building and one elevator works, and only the lights on the top floor. That’s impossible, by anything I know about. I go down a street: buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They’re still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backward here. Or sideways. But that’s impossible too. I make my forage trips out to the warehouses, or some of the stores, and sometimes I can get in, and sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I have trouble, and sometimes I don’t; and sometimes I take my shopping bag into a store and clear off a shelf of canned goods, and come back to that same store again a week later—I mean I think it’s the same damn store—and that shelf is just as full as the first time I saw it. To my mind, that’s also impossible.”
“Sometimes the morning light starts over here,” Kid said. “Sometimes it starts over there.”
“Who told you about that?”
“You did. First day I got here.”
“Oh.” Tak lifted the bottle. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. You got a pretty good memory for some things.”
“I remember lots of things: Some of it, so sharp it…hurts sometimes. All this fog, all this smoke—sometimes it’ll be sharper and clearer than what you see in front of you. And the rest of it—” he looked up again and noticed Loufer’s discomfort—“just isn’t there.” Kid laughed, which made Loufer chew harder on what was in the back of his mouth. “Why do you stay in Bellona, Tak?”
“I gather your friend Ernest Newboy is leaving tomorrow. I don’t know. Why do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, considering what you’ve been going through, maybe Bellona isn’t the best place for you.” Tak leaned forward, stretching the bottle out.
“Oh,” Kid said. “Here.” He held out his glass; Tak refilled it.
“You were talking about the first night I met you. Remember back then, I asked you why you’d come here, and you said you had a purpose for coming?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me what it is.”
And once, in South Dakota, he had dropped a quarter into a pool that turned out to be much deeper than he’d thought. He had watched the coin spin and dull and vanish beyond the edging of leaves. Now a thought vanished from his mind, and the memory of the lost quarter was all he had to describe the vanishing. “I…I don’t know!” Kid laughed and pondered all the other things he might do; laughing seemed best. “I don’t…remember! Yeah, I know I had a reason for coming here. But I’ll be God damned if I can tell you what it was!” He leaned back, then forward, caught the brandy that was about to spill his glass in his mouth, and gulped it. “I really can’t. It must have been…” He looked at the ceiling, suspending his breath for recollection. “I can’t remember…remember that, either!”
Tak was smiling.
“You know, I had it with me; I mean, the reason.” Kid swung out his hands. “I was carrying it around, in the back of my head, you know? Like on a back shelf? And then I just reached for it, to take it down, only I guess I knocked it over. I saw it fall off and disappear. I’m hunting around in my mind, but I can’t…find it.” He stopped laughing long enough to feel the annoyance that had begun to grow. “Bellona’s not a bad place for me.” Stated reasonably and smilingly, it was still annoyance. “I mean, I got a girlfriend; I’ve met all sorts of people, some pretty nice—”
“Some not so nice?”
“Well, you learn. And I got a book. Brass Orchids, you know, my poems; it’s all finished! They got galleys on it.”