"Go on, Kidd," Lanya said. "Read another poem," as Newboy brought her the cup.
"Yes." The elderly poet, collecting himself, returned to his chair. "Let's hear another one."
"All right." Kidd paged through: they were all in some conspiracy to obliterate, if not Lanya's news itself, at least its unsettling effect. And he's got to live here, Kidd thought. There were only three more poems.
After the second, Lanya said: "That one's one of my favorites." Her hand moved over torn blue, folded over the wall.
And he read the third. "So now," Kidd said, primarily to keep something going, "you've got to give me some idea of what you think of them, whether they're good or bad," a thought which hadn't occurred to him once since he'd come; only previous mental rehearsal brought it out now.
"I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you read them," New-boy said. "But for anything else, you simply have to say to yourself, with Mann: I cannot know, and you cannot tell me."
Kidd smiled, reached for three more cookies on the tea-wagon, tried to think of something else.
Newboy said: "Why don't we take a stroll around the grounds? If it were a bright sunny day, it would be quite spectacular I'm sure. But it's still nice, in an autumnal sort of way."
Lanya, who was looking into her cup, suddenly raised her eyes. "Yes, that's an idea. I'd like that."
And that, Kidd realized, was Newboy's kindness to Lanya. Somehow after her initial confidence, a moodiness had surfaced, but she had jumped to dispel it with movement and converse.
She put down her saucer, got down from the balustrade.
Kidd started to ask her: "Are you gonna take your . . . ?"
But obviously she wasn't.
What, he wondered as they walked along the terrace and turned down the low steps, would be the emotional detritus from the violence upstairs in himself? But, as he wondered, Lanya, at the bottom step, took hold of his little finger in a hot, moist grip.
They walked across grass till rock rose from under it.
They climbed stone steps. They crossed a bridge with wrought railings.
A waterfall rushed beside them, stilled beneath them.
"This is April," Mr Newboy informed them from the plaque in the bridge's center.
They crossed it.
The corner bit Kidd's heel.
"You must know these quite well," Newboy said to Lanya.
"Not really. But I like them." She nodded.
"I've always meant to ask Roger why he has September and July in each other's place."
"Are they?" Lanya asked. "I must have walked around here fifty times and never noticed!"
They left the bridge to stroll under huge-leafed catapas, past bird baths, past a large bronze sundial, tarnished brown and blank of shadow.
Stone benches were set out before the hedges in August.
Beyond the trees he could see the lawns of September. They passed through high stone newels where a . wrought iron gate was loose from the bottom hinge, and, finally, once more, they were on the gravel driveway curving through great, squat evergreens.
Mr Newboy walked them to the front gate. By the green guard-shack, they exchanged Good-bye's, So-long's, I really enjoyed myself's, You must come again, and more good-bye's, during which, Kidd felt, as the gate-latch clanked behind them, each person had spoken one time too many.
He turned on the sidewalk to take Lanya's hand, sure she would bring up the shattered Observatory Wing the moment silence settled.
They walked.
She didn't.
After a dozen steps she said, "You want to write, don't you?" which, he realized, was what this compulsion to articulation was.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess I'll stop off at the bar, maybe do something there."
"Good," she said. "I'm going back to the park, first. But I'll come by Teddy's later."
"Okay."
She ambled beside him, shoulder brushing his, sometimes looking at the houses beside them, sometimes at the pavement before them, sometimes glancing up at the willow-lapped wall.
He said: "You want to go off and play your harmonica, don't you?" knowing it by the same pattern of silent cues she had known his desire. He put his arm around her shoulder; their walks fell into sync.
"Yes."
He thought his own thoughts, occasionally glancing to wonder what hers were.
Silent on the circuit of the year, speech is in excess of what I want to say, or believe. On the dismal air I sketch my own restraint, waking, reflexively, instant to instant. The sensed center, the moment of definition, the point under such pressure it extrudes a future and a past I apprehend only as a chill, extends the overlay of injury with some retentive, tenuous disease, the refuse of brick-and mortar-grinding violence. How much more easily all machination were such polarized perception to produce so gross an ideal.
Speech, the notebook's owner had written across from the page where Kidd wrote now, is always in excess of poetry as print...
"Hello."
He looked up from the counter (in the cage the silver dancer bowed to thin applause and flicked through the black curtain), then down as the dog gave a short bark.
"Muriel-!"
"Hello, Madame Brown. I haven't seen you in a while."
"Odd: I haven't seen you either." She laughed, high to low. "God, this place is dead tonight. May I sit down? You can pretend to buy an old woman a drink."
"Sure-"
"But I'm interrupting your work."
He shrugged. "I'm sort of at a stopping point."
As Madame Brown sat, the bartender brought her usual and replaced Kidd's beer. "What are you writing. Another poem?"
"A long one. It's in the natural rhythm of English speech."
She raised her eyebrow, and reflexively he closed the book; then wished he hadn't. "How are Mr and Mrs Richards, and June?"
"Oh." She flattened her knuckles to the wood. "Like always."
"They like their new place?"
She nodded. "I was over there for dinner night before last. But this evening they're having other guests, apparently. It was quite amusing to watch Mary try and make sure I didn't just accidentally drop around tonight." She didn't laugh. "Oh, yes, they're quite settled in now." She sat back. "I wish there were some more people. The city soaks them up; or maybe people are just . . . leaving?"
Kidd put the orchid on the cover of his book where it balanced on the three longest prongs.
"I guess you have to carry that around, don't you." Madame Brown laughed. "Perhaps I ought to get one. Perhaps I've just been very lucky in this dangerous city?"
From opposite sides he moved his hands together till his blunt fingertips bumped in the cage, and the blade points tugged back the skin between, burning now, about to cut. "I've got to go back to see them." He separated his fingers a little. "About my money."
"You haven't been paid?"
"Five dollars, the first day." He looked at her. "That morning I met you in the park, you said they'd told you they'd pay five an hour."
She nodded and said something softly. He thought he heard ". . . poor kid," but could not tell if "poor" were preceded by "you" or followed by comma and capital. "How did they tell you?"
She looked at him questioningly.
"What did they say to you, exactly?"
She turned her frown to her glass. "They told me that if I found a young man who might help them with their moving, I should tell him they would pay him five dollars an hour."
"Mr Richards?"
"That's right."
"It's one of the reasons I took the job. Though, lord knows, you don't need it here. But I guess they knew what they were doing, then?"
"You should have spoken to him. He'd have given you some-thing."
"I want him to give me what he said he was going to -shit, I couldn't ask him that last day."
"Yes, it would have been a little odd."
"I'm going to have to go back and talk to him, I guess." He opened his notebook. "I think I'm going to write some more now, ma'
am."
"I wish there were more people here." She pushed back from the bar.
"Well, it's early."
But she wasn't listening.
He went through the pages till he found: . . . as print is in excess or words. I want to write; but can fix with words only the desire itself. I suppose I should take some small comfort in the fact that, for the few writers I have actually known, publication, in direct proportion to the talent of each, seems to have been an occurrence always connected with catastrophe. Then again, perhaps they were simply a strange group of . . .
"Ba-da," he whispered and turned over the notebook to the blank page, "ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da."
The letter was still in the mailbox.
Among the bent and broken doors, red, white, and blue edging crossed this one, intact grille. He thought he could see the inking of a return address. I can pretend, he thought, it says Edward Richards, from a hotel in Seattle, Washington, off Freemont Avenue, on Third. He could make some things appear like that, when it was this dim . . . He turned and went to the elevator.
Someone, at least, had mopped the lobby. He pressed the button.
Wind hissed from the empty shaft. He stepped into the other.
He'd come out in the pitch-dark hall before-as the door went k-chunk-he realized habit had made him push seventeen, not nineteen. He scowled in the dark and walked forward. His shoulder brushed a wall. He put out his hand and felt a door. He walked forward till he felt another.
Then he stopped-because of the smell. He scowled harder.
By the time he reached the next door (three, four doors on that side of the hall?) the odor was nauseous and sharp. "Jesus . . ." he whispered; his breath echoed.
He made himself go on.
The next door, which had to be the Richards' old apartment, swung in under his hand. The stench made him reel and lose kinesthetic focus. He hurried back, twice banging walls, one with his left shoulder, one with his right.
He was wondering how long it would take him to feel for the elevator bell . . .
K-chunk . . . k-chunk . . . k-chunk. One of the doors had caught on something. Between k-chunks, reminiscent of his own breath, came wind.
He paused, disoriented in the putrid dark. The left elevator door? The right? Then fear, like the lightest fore- ï finger, tickled his shoulder. He nearly bent double, and staggered against the wall; which was not a wall, because it gave.
Inside the exit door, he caught the bannister, and stumbled down.
Faint light greyed the glass a flight below. Gulping fresh breath, he came out in the hall of sixteen. One bulb burned at the far end.
His next gulp checked explosive giggles. Kidd shook his head. Well, what the fuck were they supposed to do with it? He started down the hall, grinning and disgusted. Still, then why did I go to all that to drag it up?
When he knocked, on the door, rattlings suggested it was opened. When he pushed it in, a girl caught her breath. "Hey, who's home?" he asked.
"Who . . . who is it?" She sounded afraid and exhausted. The window let in dark blue over the iron bunks, piles of clothing, an overturned stool. "It's the Kid." He was still grinning.
"They're all gone," she said, from the muddle of blankets. "There's just me. Please . . . they're all gone."
"I'm not going to do anything." He stepped in.
She pushed herself up on her elbow, brushed hair back from her face and blinked bruised eyes.
"You're . . . the one who was sick?"
"I'm better," she whined. "Really, I'm better. Just leave me alone."
"Thirteen, and the others? How long have they been gone?"
She let herself fall, sighing.
"Are they coming back?"
"No. Look, just-"
"Do you have food and things?"
"Please . . . yes, I'm all right. They split a couple of days ago. What do you want?"
Because he had once feared her, he stepped closer. "Don't you have any light?"
"Lights, huh?" Plurality and inflection baffled him. "Look, I'll be all right, just go away. Lights? Over there . . ." She gestured toward the mannequin.
He went to see what she pointed at. "Has Faust been coming to check you out? He was all worried about you last time I was here." Bald plaster breasts were snaked with chain.
"Yeah, he comes. Look around the neck." That was further instruction. "Some guy left them. He ain't gonna come back." She coughed. "They don't got no battery."
He lifted the heavy links from the jointed neck. The smile was paint streaked and chipped under one eye. "Lights? Light shield?" The thing linked to the bottom clicked on the plaster chin, nose, forehead.
"All right. Now just go, will you?"
"It doesn't have a battery?"
She only sighed, rustled her covers.
"All right, if you say you're okay, I'll go." Something in him . . . thrilled? That's what he'd heard people say. The fear was low, the physical reaction Tunneled and grave. He dared the mirror:
Her bunk was filled with shadow and crumpled blankets.
"All right," he repeated. "Good-bye. Tell Thirteen or Denny if they come back-"
She sighed; she rustled. "They're not coming back."
So he shut the door behind him. Ominous: but what would he have had her tell? He put the chain around his neck. A blade snagged the links. He pulled his bladed hand away.
Light shield?
The thing linked to the bottom was spherical, the diameter of a silver dollar, black, and set with lenses. The heavy links crossed the brass chain and glass bits. He ran his thumb around the back of his vest, shrugged the lapels closed, and walked up the hall.
The elevator opened.
Rising in the dark, "19" suspended orange at eye level, he thought about batteries and rubbed his naked stomach.
At the Richards' new apartment door he heard voices. A woman, neither Mrs Richards nor June, laughed.
He rang.
Carpet-muffled heels approached.
"Yes?" Mrs Richards asked. "Who is it?" The peek-hole clicked. "It's Kidd!"
The chain rattled, the door swung back.
"Why, come in! Bill, Ronnie, Lynn; this is the young man we were telling you about!" Air from the opened balcony doors beat the candle flames: light flapped through the foyer. "Come in, come in. Kidd, some friends of Arthur's . . . from work. Arthur? They came over for dinner. Would you like some coffee with us? And dessert?"
"Look, if you're busy, just let me talk to Mr Richards a minute?"
"Kidd?" Mr Richards called from the dining room, "come on in, will you?"
Kidd sought for an expression, but finding nothing adequate for his impatience, came, patiently, inside; he settled on a frown.
Mrs Richards' smile was perfect.
Kidd went into the dining room.
The woman sitting next to Mr Richards was doing something with her earring. "You write poems, Mary told us. Are you going to read us some?"
"Huh? Oh. No, I didn't bring any." The man across from her took his leather-patched elbows from the tablecloth. "That's a rather dangerous looking thing you did bring."
"Oh." Kidd looked at the orchid. "Well, it's almost dark out." He snapped the band open, shucked the finger harness, while the people up and down the table chuckled.
From where he stood, the flame at the white wax taper tip covered June's left eye. She smiled.
"Here," Mrs Richards said behind him. "Here's a chair. Move down a little bit, Sam. Pour him a cup of coffee, Arthur."
"What do you think I'm doing, honey," Mr Richards said with total affability.
A large woman in brown corduroy began to talk again with the man on her left. The cup passed from hand to hand to hand.
The woman in the green dress smiled, but couldn't keep her eyes (pale grey) from flicking at the steel cage he had set on the corner of the tablecloth. She put the cup beside it. Mrs Richards held the back of her chair, about to sit. "Really, just like I was telling you, Kidd absolutely saved our l
ives. He was such a help. We were beginning to think of him as part of the family."
At the other end of the table, a large man rubbed lone finger against his nose and said, "Mary, you've been about to bring in that dessert for fifteen minutes now, and I'm on my second cup of coffee."
Mrs Richards laughed. "I have been talking on. Here, I'll bring it in right now."
"June," Mr Richards said from his end of the table, "go help your mother."
June, her small fists whispering in white taffeta, rounded the table for the kitchen.
The man beside the woman in green leaned around her and said, "Mary's just been going on all about you and your poems. You just live downtown, near the park?"
"Yeah," he said. "Where do you live?"
"Ah-ha." Still leaning forward he fingered the collar of his sports shirt. "Now, that's a very good question." His nails were not clean and the side of the collar was frayed. "That's a very good question indeed." He sat back, still laughing.
Still plucking at her earring, the woman at Mr Richards' right said, "You don't look like a poet. You look more like one of those people they're always writing about in the Times."
"Scorpions?" said the very blond man (tweed and leather elbow patches) over his clasped hands. "His hair isn't long enough."
"His hair is long," insisted the earring plucker.
"Long enough," explained the blond man and turned to look for a napkin fallen by June's vacated chair.
Kidd grinned at the woman. "Where do you live?"
She stopped plucking, looked surprised. "Ralph and I used to be out on Temple. But now we've been staying-" and stopped because somebody said something on her other side, or may have even elbowed her.
"You like it better there?" Kidd asked, vaguely curious as to where Temple was.
"If you can like anything in Bellona, right now!"
Mrs Richards entered with a large glass bowl.
"What is that?" the man on Madame Brown's left asked, "jello?"
"No, it isn't jello!" Mrs Richards set the bowl before Mr Richards. "It's wine jelly." She frowned at the purple sea. "Port. The recipe didn't mention any sugar. But I think that was probably a mistake, so I put some in, anyway."
Beside Mrs Richards, June held a bowl heaped with whipped cream, glossy as the taffeta. Wrapped around one wrist, glittering in the candlelight . . . No, Kidd thought, she wouldn't have taken them off the . . . But the idea made him grin.