With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.
He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam’s bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.
The suede boot was blotched with what he’d always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn’t rained. Below the wrinkled leather—forty feet below—cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.
He examined his left hand. I don’t like what they look like, he thought. I don’t like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.
He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he’d bitten to blood. He’d always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what calluses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hand horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the inner flesh with her tongue, make love to them like gnomes, while he, voyeuristically, observed and mocked and felt tender.
He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers between them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into the lap, and began to click his pen.
Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.
Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn’t what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint’s button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.
Lanya crashed Kid’s ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion’s head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds. Then at Kid: “You’re still writing on that…?”
“No.” The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya’s voice. “No, I’ve been finished a few minutes now.”
Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, “Hey…” She frowned. “It’s going down!”
Kid nodded. “You can see it falling almost.”
The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.
Denny came through the doors, paused, a hand on each, to screw his face in the glare. Then, silently, he sat on the rail beside Lanya, gripped his knees, his arm an inch from hers.
Denny comes: some fantastic object.
She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.
Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said, “I like that.”
But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile: but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.
Anyway a smile’s what they gave him back.
Denny said, “It’s going down,” unnecessarily for her.
One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.
Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don’t know who she is! He gripped harder.
She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.
So he dropped his hand.
With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.
While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, “Why aren’t you afraid?” Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.
She said: “Then I won’t be either.”
The boy who’d come out was the pimply, stubble-bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as though he felt he might have interrupted something, seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?), when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.
Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn, small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.
“It’s going down, see,” Denny repeated.
He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can’t get the same reactions.
Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.
Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.
The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.
There were too many people.
Milly brushed at her cheek.
Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She’s guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She’s guilty…?
There were too many people.
The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.
They didn’t move.
“What are you going to do with that?” Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.
The scorpion’s breath was thunderous.
“I don’t know.” That sounded thunderous too.
“Let me take it.” She tore off the three pages, corrected, and recorrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. “I have your notebook at home. I’ll put these with it. I want to go.” She turned to Denny. And the shadow had rolled somewhere beneath her chin; in the creases of her eyelid he could see sweat. “You want to walk me home?”