I guess he was almost a block ahead, but for maybe a minute I wasn’t sure he was there, in the smoke. So I hurried.
He had short, black hair and wore a brown corduroy coat with a woolly collar; it was cooler than usual, but because there was no wind, I was still in my vest. His hands were in his pockets. The coat’s belt hung down on either side.
The belt was all I was staring at.
Just as I started to overtake him, I scraped my leg on some piece of crating or junk lying on the sidewalk—I never did look back at what it was. But it surprised hell out of me. I wonder now if I would have done it if that hadn’t happened: I mean, trying to ignore the surprising sting across my calf, maybe I also ignored that part of my head that would have made me just hurry on past him, reflecting on how close I had come. (Does the City’s topology control us completely?)
When I’d halved the distance, he glanced back. But kept walking. I guess he thought I was just going to walk past.
I grabbed his shoulder and spun him back against the fence bars.
“Hey…!” he said. “What’s your problem!”
I put the orchid blades right up against his throat. He flinched and looked surprised.
“Give me everything in your pockets,” I told him.
He took a breath. “You got it.” He wore glasses.
I dug into his pants pocket while he held his hands up. I brought out three dollar bills. (I think an orchid point accidentally nicked his neck and he flinched again.) “Turn around and let me check your back pockets.” He turned and I felt around under the flap of his coat until I realized his pants didn’t have back pockets. I thought I might hit him or cut him then; but I didn’t.
I backed away and he turned to look at me. His mouth was pressed together. As I stepped away, I realized his side pockets were much deeper than I’d thought: I could see the clustered circles of change outlined low in the black denim.
He glanced past one raised hand to the left.
A guy was crossing the street, watching us. But when I looked, the guy looked away.
The man made a disgusted sound, dropped his hands, and turned to go.
I gestured with the orchid and said, “Hey!”
He looked back.
“You wait here ten minutes before you move,” I said, and took another step backward. “If you call for anybody, or try to come after me, I’ll cut your throat!” I turned and sprinted up the block; glanced back once.
He was walking away.
I made it around the corner, went into a doorway to take off the orchid and put the three bills in my pocket. Then I stooped down and rolled up my cuff to look at my leg. It was just the tiniest scratch, down the side of my calf and back toward my ankle, like a swipe past a nail or a broken board or a
out on the front steps, met Dragon Lady: Denim vest laced tight, arms folded (making the laces above them look a little loose), looking pensive.
Haven’t seen her in a while.
Back now.
What’s she been doing?
Nothing.
Where’s she been?
Around.
I put my arm around her but she obviously didn’t feel like being mauled. So I dropped it and just walked with her.
As we circled the house, she relaxed a little, dark arms still folded.
Baby and Adam with you?
Yeah, they’ll be here.
I have to keep mentioning this timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time’s passage registers, so that instants, seconds, minutes are painfully real; but hours—much less days and weeks—are left-over noises from a dead tongue.
Reached the yard (telling her, “It’s good too see you back,” and she smiled her stained-tooth smile) and delivered her up to the apes and Tarzan who were goofing around there. The atmosphere cedes us a day featureless as night. I didn’t know what time it was; the noise and raillery surrounded her as she went to sit under the tree, fists between her knees, with a troubled look that did not stay on anything. Wondering how (late? early?) it was, I decided I would fix the sink in the service porch (because I’d gone into the cabinet under the kitchen sink for something else and seen some tools; again, topology preordinates) and after I’d turned off the water and wrenched off the first nut, I decided I’d take the whole thing apart and then see if I felt like putting it back together.
I took the cap off the bottom of the elbow drain and lots of hair and purple gunk fludged out on the floor. Took the taps off. Should have done that before I took the cap off, because there was a little surge of rusty water out of each—that went down the drain and onto the floor. Then I unscrewed the collars from inside the taps.
I’ve lost a name. So? If the inhabitants of this city have one thing in common, it is that such accidents don’t interest them; that is neither lauded here as freedom nor wailed as injury; it is taken as a fact of landscape, not personality.
D-t came out, squatted, and watched a while, sometimes handed me tools; finally asked, whimsically, “What the fuck are you doing?” and helped me wobble the sink from the wall (standing suddenly when it almost fell) on its enameled claw and ball.
“I’m putting the sink back together,” I told him because I’d just decided to.
D-t grunted and shoved at the bowl-back. The forejoints of his thumbs are both crooked; which I’d never noticed before.
There was some string on the windowsill, and I brought in a can of putty from the kitchen. But when I’d pried up the lid with the screwdriver, the surface was cracked like Arizona. And I didn’t know where any oil was. D-t came back with a bottle of Wesson, and I couldn’t think of any reason why not. D-t settled back to watch.
“Now we could of got a place without no leaky sink,” D-t said. “But then I guess there wouldn’t be nothing to do.”
I laughed as much as I could holding the cold-water pipe up while trying to screw the fitting back down over it.
I asked him something or other.
Don’t recall his exact answer, but somewhere in it, he said; “…like when I first got here, I used to walk along the street and know I could break into just about any house I wanted, and I was just scared to death…”
We talked about that. I remembered my first walks in the streets. (D-t said: “But I broke in, anyway.”) While we talked I recall thinking: It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of then. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow, there is no way to conclude; but here, conclusion itself is superfluous. I said something to D-t about: “What this place needs is a good wind, or a lightning storm. To clean it out. Or thunder.”
“Oh, man,” D-t said. “Oh, man—No! No, I don’t think I could take that. Not here,” and chuckled (like, I suspect, someone under sentence). We really got into some talk. In that quiet way where you’re into the feeling, if not the information. Once he asked me how long I thought I could keep it up, here, and I said: “I don’t know. How long can you?” and he laughed too. I was wrapping string around the joint and the fastening on the other end of the cold-water pipe when someone in the doorway said: “Hi, Kid.”
Reading over my journal, I find it difficult to decide even which incidents occurred first. I have hysterical moments when I think finding that out is my only possible hope/salvation. Also wonder at some of the things I have not written down: the day with Lanya when she took me to the city museum and we spent from before dawn to after dark sitting around in the reconstructed 18th century rooms (“We could live here, like Calkins!” and she whispered, smiling, “No…” and then we talked about a run here: and again she said, “No…” this time not smiling. And I won’t. But all the talking we did there, and wandering, growing hungrier and hungrier in the pearl light through the ceiling panes because we could not bear to leave), should make this the longest and most detailed incident in this journal because it was where she showed me thing after thing and told me about them, to make them mean something for me; she became a real person, by what she knew and what she did, more than anyway she ever could by what was done to her, done to her, done: which was so easily the way I’ve always wanted to define her. Wanting her to take Denny and the whole nest there; and—holding a small painting she had taken down from the wall to show me something about how the canvas was prepared in the seventeenth century (“Christ, I used to spend weeks making black oil and Mereget! I’m surprised I didn’t asphyxiate someone”)—she said, “No, I don’t think so. It’s a gamble enough with you. Not just yet. Maybe later,” and re-hung the painting, upside down.