Behind her, somebody picked up the lamp (the beam swung from the mural), turned it off. The woman with the mirrors hanging from her toes was climbing the rope, hauling herself back into the dark.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.” Again the gray-caped shoulders moved with gentle laughter. “Really, you’re the most appreciative audience we’ve had in a while.” She looked around. “I think we’ll all agree to that—”
“He sure is!” a man, squatting before the refuse can, called up. He seized the can’s rim, yanked. The can opened. The acrobat, on the other side, caught one half, pulled something, and—clank!—clash!—clunk!—the whole thing folded down into a shape the two of them lifted and carried off into an alleyway.
The rope climber was gone: the rope end, jerking angrily, went up, and up, and up into the black—
“I hope you didn’t mind the drugs ... ?”—and disappeared.
She turned over her palm again with its metal circle. “It’s only the mildest psychedelic—absorbed through the skin. And there’s a built-in allergy check in case you’re—”
“Oh, I didn’t mind,” he protested. “Cellusin, I’m quite familiar with it. I mean, I know what ...”
She said: “It only lasts for seconds. It gives the audience better access to the aesthetic parameters around which we’re—” Her look questioned—”... working?” He nodded in answer, though not sure what the question was. The hirsute, scarred woman took hold of one of the poles edging the mural and pulled it from the wall, walking across and rolling the loose, rattling canvas with great swings.
“Really ...” Bron said. “It was ... wonderful! I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever ...” which, because it didn’t sound like what he’d intended to say, he let trail. Behind the mural was a palimpsest of posters. The last of the canvas came away from: “Look what Earth did to their Moon! We don’t” The rest had been torn off:—want them to do it to us\ he supplied mentally, annoyed he knew it but not from where. Like lyrics of a song, he thought, running through your head, that, basically, you didn’t like.
The woman dropped his hand, nodded again, turned and walked across the square, stopping to look up after the rope.
Bron started to call, but coughed (she looked back) and completed: “—what’s your name?”
She said, “My friends call me the Spike,” as one of the men came up, put his arm around her shoulder, and whispered something that made her laugh.
The variety, he thought, that subsumes her face between mild doubt and joy!
“We’ll be in this neighborhood for another day or so” (The man was walking away) “By the way, the music for our production was written by our guitarist, Charo—”
The dark-haired girl, pulling up the cloth case around her instrument, paused, smiled at Bron, then zipped it closed.
“The backdrop and costumes were by Dian—”
Who was apparently the hairy woman lugging the rolled mural over her shoulder: before she turned off down the alley, she gave him a grotesque, one-eyed grin.
“Our special effects were all devised by our tumbler, Windy—but I think he’s already getting set up at the next location. The solo voice that you first heard singing was recorded by Jon-Teshumi.”
One of the women held up what he realized was a small playback recorder.
“The production was coordinated by our manager, Hatti.”
“That’s me too,” the woman with the recorder said, then hurried after the others.
“And the entire production—” The guitarist (Charo?) spoke now, from the corner—“was conceived, written, produced, and directed by the Spike.” The guitarist grinned.
The Spike grinned—“Thank you, again—” and, with an arm around the guitarist’s shoulder, they were around the corner.
“It was great!” he called after them. “It was really—” He looked about the empty square, at the poster-splotched wall, at the other streets. Which way had he come? The emotion Bron had been fighting down suddenly surged. He did not shout out, No—! He lunged instead for the low archway and loped into the alley.
He had already turned at two intersections when his mind was wrenched away from what was going through it by the shambling figure that, thirty yards ahead, crossed from corner to corner, glanced at him—the eye; the chains; the sunken chest; the high coordinate lights made a red snarl of the hairy shoulder: this time it was the gorilla-ish man—and was gone.
At the corner, Bron looked but couldn’t see him. Were the Dumb Beasts, he wondered suddenly, also part of the charade? Somehow, the possibility was appalling. Wander around the u-1 until he found him? Or some other member of the sect? Or of the cast? But if the initial encounter had been theatrical prologue, how would he know the answer he got were not some equally theatrical coda? Meaningless communication? Meaningful ... ? Which one had she said?
He turned, breathed deeply, and hurried left—sure he was going wrong; till he came out on the familiar, plated walkway, three intersections down from where he’d entered.
And what had been going through his mind?
Mimimomomizolalilamialomuelarmronoriminos ... And ‘mu’ and ‘ro’ were the thirteenth and seventeenth syllables! From out memory’s detritus they had reachieved their places, fixed and certain.
Was it the brief drug? Or some resonance from the theater piece? Or simply chance? Walking slowly, strangely pensive, he reviewed the mumble again. In the swing between pleasantry and unpleasantness, the Spike’s laugh returned, either as something that effected, or that was, the transition.
The mumble rolled about his mind.
Then Bron frowned.
The third syllable ... and what about the ninth? With sure memory of the thirteenth and seventeenth, another came that he had not reviewed for years: The Instructor, at the last meeting of the Poor Children he had attended, had stood by his bench, correcting his pronunciation of those two syllables again and again and again and again and again and saying, finally, “You still don’t have them right,” and proceeded to the next novice. The class had recited the mumble, several more times, in unison: he had been able to hear that his own vowels, for those syllables, three and nine, were, indeed, off. Finally, he had looked at his lap, slurred over the whole thing; and hadn’t come to the next session. The truth, undercutting present pleasure—the new feeling (the Spike’s face flickered a moment, in memory, laughing) was somehow part of the first negative one he had tried to suppress back at the little square (the No—! he hadn’t shouted)—was that, having nothing to do with the thirteenth syllable, or the seventeenth, or the third, or the ninth, he had never, really, known the mantra.
All he had (once more the syllables began to play through) was something with which he could, as he had done with so much of his life, make do.
The realization (it wasn’t the drug; it was just the way things were) shivered his vision with leftover tears that—no, that wasn’t what she’d laughed at ... ?—he blinked, confusedly, back.
2. Solvable Games
The death at the center of such discourse is extraordinary and begins to let us see our own condition.
Bronze clasps, cast as clawing beasts, snapped back under Lawrence’s wrinkled thumbs. Lawrence opened out the meter-wide case.