“It sounds awful,” she said. “But try to think about something else—”
“I am.” He glanced at the parklights again; now there was only one. Had the other gone out? Or had some tree branch, lifted away by wind, settled back before it. “About what George and you were saying yesterday—about everybody being afraid of female sexuality, and trying to make it into something that wreaks death and destruction all about it. I mean, I don’t know what Mr. Richards would do if he found out his sunshine girl was running around the streets like a bitch in heat, lusting to be brutalized by some hulking, sadistic, buck nigger. Let’s see, he’s already driven one child out of the house with threats of murder—”
“Oh, Kidd, no…”
“—and the sounds that come out of that apartment when they don’t think anybody’s listening are just as strange as the ones that come up from Thirteen’s, believe me. Maybe she’s got good reason not to want her old man to know, and if Bobby was threatening, in that vicious way younger brothers can have, to show the poster to her parents, well maybe just for an instant, when she was backing him down the hall, and the door rolled open, from some sort of half-conscious impulse, it was easier to shove—or not even to shove, but just not say anything when he stepped back toward the wrong—”
“Kid,” Lanya said, “now come on!”
“It would be just like the myth: her lust for George, death and destruction! Only—only suppose it was an accident?” He took another breath. “That’s what frightens me. Suppose it was, like she said, just an accident. She didn’t see at all. Bobby just backed into the wrong shaft door. That’s what terrifies me. That’s the thing I’m scared of most.”
“Why…?” Lanya asked.
“Because…” He breathed, felt her head shift on his shoulder, her hand rock with his on his chest. “Because that means it’s the city. That means it’s the landscape: the bricks, and the girders, and the faulty wiring and the shot elevator machinery, all conspiring together to make these myths true. And that’s crazy.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have given her that poster. I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t—” His head stopped shaking. “Motherfucker still hasn’t paid me my money. I was going to talk to him about it this evening. But I couldn’t, then.”
“No, it doesn’t sound like the most propitious time to bring up financial matters.”
“I just wanted to get out of there.”
She nodded.
“I don’t want the money. I really don’t.”
“Good.” She hugged. “Then just forget about the whole thing. Don’t go back there. Let them alone. If people are busy living out myths you don’t like, leave them to it.”
He raised his hand above his face, palm up, moving his fingers, watching them, black against four-fifths black, his arm muscle tiring, till he let his knuckles fall against his forehead. “I was so scared…When I woke up, I was so scared!”
“It was just a dream,” she insisted. And then: “Look, if it really was an accident, your bringing that poster didn’t have anything to do with it. And if she did do it on purpose, then she’s so far gone there’s no way you could possibly blame yourself!”
“I know,” he said. “But do you think…” He could feel the place on his neck her breath brushed warmly. “Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?”
“Of course it does,” she said. “San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I’ve spent time in both and I’m sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one is to, say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely.” She waited.
So at last he said. “Yeah…But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you’re not, that’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s crazy—in a word.”
He slid his arm around her and could smell her wake-up breath, cuddling her. “You know, when I pulled him out, blood all over me, like a flayed carcass off a butcher hook…you know, I had half a hard-on? That’s too much, huh?”
She reached between his legs. “You still do.” She moved her fingers there; he moved in her fingers.
“Maybe that’s what I was dreaming about?” He laughed sharply. “Do you think that’s what I was—?”
Her hand contracted, released, moved forward, moved back.
He said: “I don’t think that’s going to do any good…”
Against his chest he felt her shrug. “Try.”
Not so much to his surprise, but somehow against his will, his will ceased, and it did.
I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body’s machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-corporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.
The leaf shattered in his blunt fingers: leaf and flesh—he ground the flakings with his roughened thumb—were the same color, a different texture. He stared, defining the distinction.
“Come on.” Lanya caught up his hand.
Flakes fluttered away (some he felt cling); notebook under his arm, he stood up from where he’d been leaning on the other end of the picnic table. “I was just thinking,” Kidd said, “maybe I should stop off at the Labrys and try to collect my money.”
“And keep Mr. Newboy waiting?” Lanya asked. “Look, you said you got them all moved!”
“I was just thinking about it,” Kidd said. “That’s all.”
A young man with a high, bald forehead and side hair to his naked shoulders sat on an overturned wire basket, one sandal resting over the other. He leaned forward, a burned twig in each hand. They had smudged his fingers. “I take these from you crossed,” he said to a girl sitting Indian fashion on the ground before him, “and give them to you crossed.”
The girl’s black hair was pulled back lacquer tight, till, at the thong whipped a dozen times around her pony tail and tied, it broke into a dozen rivulets about the collar of her pink shirt: her sleeves were torn off; frayed pink threads lay against her thin arms. With her own smudged fingers, she took the twigs. “I take these from you—” she hesitated, concentrated—“uncrossed and I give them to you—” she thrust them back—“uncrossed?”
Some spectators in the circle laughed. Others looked as bemused as she did.
“Nope. Got it wrong again.” The man spread his feet, sandal heels lining the dirt, and drew them back against the basket rim. “Now watch.” With crossed wrists he took the sticks from her: “I take these from you…uncrossed—” his wrists came apart—“and I give them back to you…”