Dhalgren

6

"Are you sure this is where Lanya lives?" Kid asked Denny. The others milled about the stoop.

"Yeah," Denny said. "Yeah! Sure, ring the bell."

Kid did. Moments later, after footsteps (and he heard someone say, "Oh, dear…" behind the peephole), she opened the door and stepped out, all silver, into the smokey light.

"God damn!" Raven said appreciatively behind him.

Lanya shaded her eyes, looked about, said, "My God!" and burst out laughing.

Madame Brown, in something blue and tailored, stepped out behind her, looking tentative. The diffused light gave back to her heavy face the lines and over-madeup quality Kid had first seen by candle light. Once more her hair was harsh henna. And her neck, bound and bound around again with the optical beads, looked far too heavily decorated — yet it was the same way she wore them with her daytime browns and beiges.

Muriel barked once, leaped forward, and came up on the end of the leash.

"Oh, why don't you leave her home?" Lanya coaxed. "Look at our escort. We'll be—"

"Kid doesn't mind Muriel coming along; do you Kid? You said Roger had all those grounds. She'll be a perfect dear."

"Naw," Kid said, and discovered, saying it, he did. "Bring her along!"

"She just gets so lonely if I don't take her with me." Madame Brown surveyed the arrayed scorpions.

Muriel tried to run down the porch steps, couldn't and barked again.

"Hush, now!" Madame Brown said. "Hush!"

"Here, I'm giving this to you." Lanya handed Denny the piece of equipment Tak had taken from the warehouse with the cloth. "Put it in your shirt pocket for me?"

The silver fringe on Denny's sleeve shook in curtains of light as he put the control box away.

Lanya took Kid's hand. Her dress was sleeveless, scoop-necked, and reached the ground. She leaned to whisper: "I've got something for you too," and handed him her harmonica. "Put this in your pants pocket for me?"

"Sure."

Feeling the metal on his thigh through the dime-sized tear, Kid stepped down among the others. Lanya, Muriel, and Madame Brown came behind.

As they started, he heard Madame Brown: "Your arm looks a lot better. It hasn't been giving you any trouble?"

"No ma'am," Siam answered. "Not much. Any more. But I thought I was gonna die when you just poured all that iodine in there." He laughed.

They crossed the street.

"That was the only way I could think to keep it from getting infected. You were very, very brave."

"Shit." Siam said. "I hollered like a motherfucker — pardon, ma'am. But you remember how they were holding me down."

"Yes. And I still think you were brave."

"It's nice of you to say so. But if one of them niggers had let go of me, I'd a' probably killed you." He laughed again.

They spread the sidewalk, the street, each beast sailing on a pool of light.

Windows dripped with molten reflections — those with panes.

Perhaps half had their shields lit any one time. A boisterous black in silhouette would turn on a bright hippogryph, a mantichore; some gorgeous parrot or lizard would collapse around an ambling, side-lit figure — Kid tried to recall what that one had been, but her apparition, among so many, attracted his attention only by vanishing.

Dragon Lady, lights out, looked skeptically at Lanya, said to Kid, "I thought you said this weren't no dress-up party."

"Then you and I," Lanya told her, "will look that much better!"

Dragon Lady laughed. "You and me? Oh, honey, we sure will!" She dropped back and linked her silver arm in Lanya's bare one. "We gonna strut out fine, honey, and make them sons of bitches suffer!" Which made Lanya laugh. For a block the three of them walked arm in arm in arm.

But at some altercation ahead, Dragon Lady flared in jade and hastened forward to quell it:

Revelation (a frog) had started quarelling with Cathedral (some large bird that could, Kid realized on closer view, have been intended as an American Eagle): The Dragon moved between them, making more noise than both; they quieted.

Behind and to the side, Tarzan fingered, but hesitated to ignite, his parti-colored gila monster.

"That one…?" Madame Brown nodded ahead with a deep frown and theatrical restraint. "Have you noticed, but every time his griphon flickers—" which it just did, revealing stringy yellow hair, knobbly spine, pockmarked buttocks, and grime-rimmed heels—"but doesn't it look just like he doesn't have any clothes on at all?"

"He doesn't." Kid said.

"Is there anything wrong with him?" Madame Brown demanded. "Is he all right?"

Her tone had changed from smutty complicity to puritan distress. Kid recognized each but could not follow the mechanics of transition; he grew fearful of the light-headedness in which his mind bobbed. "No. He just doesn't have any," he explained, wondering if he were losing again his ability to follow logical connections.

Madame Brown said, "Oh…" in a tone at total odds with either previous.

They swarmed across the little park between Brisbains.

"I hope we get a ride back," Lanya said. "This is a long enough walk sober."

"Don't count on it."

"Roger is always talking in the paper about driving people in and out of town. Maybe he could have one of his drivers run us home afterward."

"I've seen his car. It's something from the thirties. Besides, how'd we fit all these people in?"

"You're just too democratic for words." She kissed his cheek. "Do you think I look nice?"

"Didn't I say so?"

"You did not. Nor did you say, 'You really made that dress yourself?' Or any of those things for which I'd prepared such very clever answers."

"Did you really make that dress yourself?" Kid slipped his hand around the tickling material on her waist. "It looks nice."

"Don't press too hard," she said. "I don't want to injure the material. No, no… I'm not driving you away!"

"I think you look nice," Denny said. "I think…" He whispered in her ear.

"Young man!" Lanya said. "I don't believe I know you—"

"Aw," Denny said, "go suck on my dick…" and started away.

"Hey, I was kidding…" Lanya called, amused puzzlement at Denny in her voice. Her waist tugged in Kid's arm.

Denny turned, his face flickering in the passing lights. As they caught up to him, he grinned. "I wasn't." He put his arm around her too.

They stepped up on the next corner, watching the jogging luminosities, delicate or bulbous, pass beneath charred branches, under lamp posts suspending inverted crowns of broken glass, by houses with columned porches, entrances gaping on blackness, as if the occupants had rushed out to see, then fled back in too distracted a state to close the doors behind.

Blocks later that image, still working in Kid's mind, finally loosened a chuckle which rolled around in his mouth.

Lanya and Denny were looking at him, she with a smile anticipating explanation, he merely without comprehension. Kid pulled her tighter. Denny's fringe brushed his arm, then crushed against him as he lowered his own arm down her back. Her far hip, moving under Kid's fingers, did not change its rhythm.

"This is all very colorful." Madame Brown strained back on the leash. "But it's quite a walk. Muriel, heel!"

"Roger's friends are pretty colorful too," Lanya said. "He'll rise to the occasion."

Vines climbed the wall. Willow boughs hung over it, sawtooth shadows growing and shrinking as the red, orange, and green lights passed.

"We're just about there, ain't we?" Nightmare called from the middle of the street. Insects and arthropods floated around him, laughing gigantically.

"Yeah!" Kid called. "The gate's up there."

Denny was lingering in his shirt pocket. "Now what am I supposed to do with this thing?"

"Once we get inside," Lanya explained, "just turn me on. Every once in a while, give a look and if what you see is too dull, fiddle with those knobs till something interesting happens. Tak says its range is fifty yards, so don't get too far away. Otherwise I go out."

Suddenly Kid pulled away to shoulder through the bright, boisterous crowd. On a whim's stutter, he thumbed his shield's pip: it clicked.

From the inside, he remembered, your shield is invisible. But people had cleared around him. (I don't know what I am.) He looked down at the cracked pavement. (But whatever it is, it's blue.) The halo moved with him across the concrete.

Three beside him turned off their lights, growing shadows before them from the lights behind.

It's like a game (there were the stone newels), not knowing who, or what, you are. He wondered how long before he would finally get someone aside and ask. And flipped his pip to kill the temptation.

Stepping ahead of the crowd, he grabbed the bars. The others massed loudly around. He wondered, as he stared in at the pines, lit clumsily and shiftingly by his bright entourage, what to call out.

"Hello!" A young — Filipino? (probably) — in a green turtleneck and sports jacket stepped up. "You're the Kid? I thought so. I'm Barry Lansang. I'm on the gate tonight. Just a second, I'll let you all in."

"Hey, we're here!"

"How we gonna get in?"

"Shut up! He's lettin' us in now."

"This here's where we going?"

Lansang stepped aside. The gate went Clang, and the noise level around Kid cut by two-thirds.

Lansang swung back the bars.

Kid stepped forward, aware that the others had not.

"Go on up," Lansang smiled. "They're all expecting you. Is this your whole party?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"If you expect anybody else to come by later, just leave their names with me and I'll make a note."

"Naw. This is it."

Lansang smiled again. "Well, if stragglers come along later and we do have an identification problem, I can always go up and find you. Come on in," this last over Kid's shoulder, accompanied by a gesture.

Kid looked back."

The gateway crowded with silent, familiar faces.

"Come on," Kid said.

Then they came.

Dragon Lady was among the first. "This is something, huh?"

"Yeah." Kid said. "And this is just the trees."

"Follow the driveway up," Lansang instructed. He was, Kid saw, enjoying himself.

Lanya joined Kid; her gown blushed pink. As they walked together, robins-egg droplets grew into puddles which swelled to oceans.

"Am I doing this right?" Denny reached under his vest into his shirt pocket with a black and glittering arm.

Lanya looked down at herself. "I think the other knob — the one on the front — is for color intensity. Leave it like this for now. We don't want to shoot it ail on the entrance."

Floodlights between the huge pines lit the gravel and, after the night journey, made them squint.

"Here we are," Madame Brown said, looking off between two trees where one light was not working. "All safe and sound."

Muriel walked close to her.

"Where's everybody likely to be?" Kid asked Lanya, whose dress dribbled a metallic green across her left breast.

"Out on the terrace gardens. Where we were that afternoon with Mr Newboy."

Kid did not remember the driveway as this long. "How come they have all this electricity?"

"When it's all working, they can get this whole grounds practically bright as day," Lanya said.

They passed the last trees:

The house was bright as day against the night.

"Newboy said something about lanterns…"

"It doesnt all work inside," Lanya said. "There was one whole wing where there wasn't a socket functioning." (Some dozens of men and women along the stone terrace turned to look.) "But whenever Roger lights the whole place up like this, I get the feeling I'm watching some really banal Son et lumiere."

The scorpions quieted as they saw the other guests.

Suit, shirt, and tie of different blues, one pushed from among them. Short blond hair, a serious expression, he was followed by two women — the older also in blue, hair rinsed the same shade as his shirt. The younger, in a floor-length brocade, looked unhappy.

Calkins, Kid thought starting forward. But anticipation had betrayed him: It was Captain Kamp.

"Kid—!" called out affably enough—"you got here. And these are your friends… I… um. Well, we've had a little…" Initial affability spent, Kamp looked confused. "Now, Roger hasn't gotten back yet. He told us he might be late, and to tell you how sorry he was… He asked me and Thelma—" he nodded at the woman in brocade—"and Ernestine—" and at the woman in blue—"to say hello for him when you got here… um, since I'd met you—" his eyes kept moving to the people behind Kid—"to introduce you around and things. Now, Ernestine, this is the Kid. And this is Thelma…"

Ernestine, who seemed much less nervous than Kamp, said, "I'm Ernestine Throckmorton. How wonderful to have all you young people here. Hi, love," which was a special nod to Lanya, who grinned back. "Now I think the only thing to do is plunge in and go over how everything is laid out. Why don't you all come with us and we'll show you where to get something to eat and drink? Come on, now." She turned and motioned them up the steps onto the terrace.

As the other guests stepped back, staring, she went for the two nearest and brightest scorpions. "And what are your names?"

"Nightmare," Nightmare said rather like a question.

"And your friend?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. This here is Dragon Lady."

"Very pleased to meet you both. You know, I've heard your names before; well, read them actually, in the paper. Really, I'm quite terrified."

Kid glanced over.

Ernestine, who did not look terrified one bit, strolled by the staring (some smiled) guests, Nightmare on one arm, Dragon Lady on the other.

"Bill!" she cried out. (Bill was smiling.) "Come here, dear."

Bill, a tall, handsome man, perhaps thirty-eight, in a black turtleneck, a can of beer in one hand (the only guest there already, without a jacket), fell in beside them. "Bill, this is Nightmare and Dragon Lady. You mentioned them in that article you did for Roger a little while ago. Now, have you ever met them?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Well, here they are."

"Hello," and "Hello," Nightmare and Dragon Lady said, just out of sync.

"I'm glad to meet you, but I'm not sure that you're glad to meet me after some of the things I said."

"You wrote an article?" Nightmare asked. "In the paper?"

"I didn't read no article," Dragon Lady said.

"Probably all just as well, considering some of what I put down — here, we're all heading for the beer wagon down at the end—" Bill gestured with his can. "I'm really surprised to meet you here with the Kid. I was under the impression that the various gangs — nests — kept at each other's throats."

"Naw," Nightmare said. "Naw, it ain't like that…"

While Nightmare explained how it was, Kid looked over again. Bill had replaced Ernestine, who had drifted back to other scorpions: "I'm Ernestine Throckmorton. And you're…?"

Lanya smiled and whispered: "This is going to be work." Concern underlay the smile.

"Huh?"

"Since Roger's not here. To get people mixing. I mean if he's got one, that's his single overwhelming talent. Ernestine's competent. I've seen her work before—"

"I guess you know her."

"I recognize about five people here, I think. Thank God. Roger usually keeps a pretty inspired group. Ernestine can even be brilliant. Roger, however, has genius. And I'm afraid I was sort of counting on it this evening. Don't be mad if I abandon you for a little while. You can take care of yourself. Why don't you start by introducing me to the Captain?"

"Oh," Kid said. "Sure. I know him. Glass and I walked him up here one night."

"Glass…" she considered, and her consideration made him pause till she nodded:

"Captain Kamp?" he had to say three times before the Captain turned. "This is my friend, Lanya Colson."

"Since everyone's talking to people they've read about in the papers," Lanya said, "I guess I can tell you that I've read about you."

"Um…" The Captain smiled uncertainly.

"I spent some time here with Roger a little while ago," Lanya said, which to Kid sounded pretty phony.

But the Captain's "Oh?" was filled with relief.

She seemed to know what she was doing.

"Where has Roger gone? It's not like him to arrange something like this and then not be here."

"Now I'm sure he'll be back," the Captain said. "I'm just sure. He had it all arranged with the lady in the kitchen—"

"Mrs Alt?"

"— yes. And she's really laid out a nice spread. I don't know where he went off to. I was sort of hoping he'd be back in time. Partying isn't really my strong point. And I didn't realize all of you people were going to come. Of course, Roger did say bring twenty or thirty friends, didn't he? But. Now. Well…"

The long terrace ended at a patio.

Two tables were set up on the stone flags.

Flame blued the copper bottoms of a half-dozen chafing dishes.

There were paper plates. There were plastic forks. The napkins were linen.

Most of the guests, before on the terrace, had. now drifted with them to the patio.

"You just help yourselves to anything you'd like to eat." Ernestine's arms rose like a conductor's. "That's the bar over there. Either of these gentlemen—" one young black bartender, one elderly white one, both in double-breasted blue—"will get you a drink. Those two kegs over there are beer. If you want it in the can, the cooler, here—" she thumbed at it; two people laughed—"is chock-full." In more modulated tones to whoever happened to be beside her: "Would you like something to eat?"

"Sure." Revelation said.

"Yes, ma'am," from Spider.

No full meal had been cooked in the nest that day.

"Captain Kamp," Lanya was saying, "this is Glass. Glass, this is Captain Kamp."

"Oh, yes. We've met, now."

"You have?" Lanya's surprise sounded perfectly delighted and perfectly sincere. (If I wrote her words down, Kid thought, what she's saying would vanish into something meaningless as the literal record of the sounds June or George makes.) "Then I can leave the two of you alone and get something to eat," and turned away.

("Now," Kamp said. "Well. What have you been doing since I saw you last?")

(Glass said: "Nothing. You been doing anything?")

(Kamp said: "No, not really.")

Lanya shouldered through Tarzan-and-the apes. "Hey, come on with me, I want you to meet someone. No, really, come on," and emerged with Jack the Ripper and Raven, herding before them the diminutive black Angel. "Dr Wellman, you're from Chicago! I'd like you to meet Angel, the Ripper, and Raven." She stayed a little longer with them. Kid listened to the conversation start, halt, and finally settle into even exchanges (between Angel and Dr Wellman at any rate) about community centers in Chicago, which Angel seemed to think were "all right, man. Yeah I really liked that," while Dr Wellman held out, affably, that "they weren't very well organized. At least not the ones we did our reports on."

"Hey, Kid."

Kid turned.

Paul Fenster doffed a paper plate at him.

"Oh, hi…!" Kid grinned, astonished how happy he was to see someone he knew.

"Get yourself something to eat, why don't you?" Fenster said and stepped away between two others, while Kid held the words he'd been about to say clumsily in his mouth.

He wished that Tak had come. And that Fenster had not.

Lanya passed close enough to smile at him. And he was close enough to hear her coax Madame Brown: "Work, work, work!" in a whisper.

Wrapping herself in her leash, Madame Brown turned and said: "Siam, this is a terribly good friend of mine, Everett Forest. Siam was my patient, Everett."

Everett was the man Kid usually saw at Teddy's in purple angora. He now wore a navy blazer and grey knitted pants.

Somewhere across the patio, Lanya was holding paper plates in both hands, about to give them away. Turquoise billowed about her silver hem, trying and failing to rise like a lazy lava lamp. He started to go take a plate, but suddenly thought of Denny, looked around for him—

"I asked Roger if I could be on—"

Kid turned.

"— on your welcoming committee—" (unhappy Thelma of the floor-length brocade)—"because I didn't think I could possibly get to speak to you otherwise. I wanted to tell you how much pleasure Brass Orchids gave me. Only now I — find that it's—" her dark eyes, still unhappy, fell and rose—"just very difficult to do."

"Um… thank you," Kid offered.

"It's hard to compliment a poet. If you say his work seems skillful, he turns around and explains that all he's interested in is vigor and spontaneity. If you say the work has life and immediacy, it turns out he was basically concerned with overcoming some technical problem." She sighed. "I really enjoyed them. And outside a few polite phrases, there just isn't the vocabulary to describe that sort of enjoyment in a way that sounds real." She paused. "And your poems are one of the realest things that's happened to me in a long time."

"Damn!" Kid said. "Thank you!"

"Would you like something to drink?" she suggested in the silence.

"Yeah. Sure. Let's get something to drink."

They walked to the table.

"I've written — and published — two novels." Thelma went on. "Nothing you're likely to have heard of. But the effect of your poems on me, especially the first four, the Elegy, and the last two before the long conversational one in meter, is rather the effect I'd always hoped my books would have on people." She actually laughed. "In a way, your book was discouraging, because watching your poems gain that effect showed me some of the reasons why my prose often doesn't. That condensed and clear descriptive insight is something I envy you. And you wield it as naturally as speech, turning it on this and that and the other…" She shook her head, she smiled. "All I can do is find a lot of adjectives that you've got to fill up with meaning for yourself: Beautiful, perhaps mar-velous, or wonderful…"

Kid decided they all applied, to her anyway; His delight was awesome. But holding it (the black bartender poured him a bourbon) was an entrancing irritation as pleasurable in building as a sneeze in relief.

Denny stepped up to the table, fingering inside his shirt pocket. "Hey, you wanna see something?"

Kid and Thelma watched.

And across the patio, Lanya's dress splashed around with orange and gold. The people she was talking with stepped back in surprise. She looked down at herself, laughed, searched about till she saw Kid and Denny, and blew them a kiss.

Thelma smiled and did not seem to understand.

Kid introduced Thelma to Denny. She introduced them to someone else. Bill, the reporter, joined them. Thelma left. Kid watched laddering relational torques and tensions, already interpreting them as likes, dislikes, ease and unease. Lanya brought Budgie Goldstein to meet him. Budgie, immense in green chiffon, explained how frightened she'd always been of scorpions but now how nice they all seemed, punctuating her explanation with sharp, short laughs. They had wandered from the terrace onto the-

"These? I believe there are… Toby, what are these?"

"The September Gardens, Roxanne. September, remember… And who is this young man? You wouldn't be the Kid?"

And he was handed on.

He liked it.

It took half an hour to realize he had been kept entirely away from the other scorpions.

Besides what he estimated at two dozen house guests, there were another thirty-odd invited from town, including Paul Fenster, Everett (Angora) Forest, and (Kid was surprised to see him leaning over against the stone wall, talking with Revelation) Frank.

There was a bridge between January and June.

Kid looked over the rail at wet rock; floodlights glistened on a vein of clotted leaves — there was no clear water. Lanya and Ernestine passed on the little path underneath.

Ernestine said into her drink: "The only thing I could think of to do was to physically push them at one another…"

Kid thought Lanya had not seen him, but a moment after she vanished she said, "Hello," behind him.

He turned from the rail. "You've been very busy."

Wrist against forehead, she mimed distress. "Phase one, at any rate, is over. Just about everyone knows now it's possible to talk to everyone else. Are you having a good time?"

"Yeah. They're all here for me." Then he grinned. "But they're all talking about you."

"Huh?"

"Three people have told me how great your dress is," which was true. "Denny's doing a good job."

"You're a doll!" She clapped his cheeks between her palms and kissed him on the nose.

Cathedral, California, and Thruppence ambled below them on the path, light and dark shoulders together. I feel responsible for them, he thought, recalling her initial efforts. He laughed.

Her dress began to broil with green and lavender.

She saw and asked, "Where's Denny gotten off to? Let's go look for him."

They did and could not find him, spoke to others, and then Kid lost her again.

From the high rocks of—"October," said the plaque on the rust-ringed birdbath — he looked down toward the terrace.

Two women he had not met, with Bill (whom he had) between them, had cornered Baby and were talking at him intently. Baby smiled very hard, his paper plate just under his chin. Sometimes he dropped his head to nod, sometimes to scrape up another and another forkful. Once in a while someone across the terrace, when they were sure they were unobserved, would glance — two ladies, one after another, maneuvered for the better view, noticed they were observed, and walked away.

Someone was in the bushes behind him.

Kid looked around: Jack the Ripper backed out; from the movement of his elbows, he was closing his fly. He turned. "Huh?… oh, it's just you, man." He grinned, bent, adjusted himself. "Scared somebody gonna see me back there takin' a leak."

"There's a bathroom in the house somewhere."

"Shit. I didn't wanna go askin' around for that. My piss ain't gonna kill no flowers. This is a real nice place, huh. A real nice party. Everybody's real nice. You havin' a nice time? I sure am."

Kid nodded. "You catch Baby when he came in?"

"No," the Ripper drawled with a wildly interrogative cadence.

"You said you wanted to see what the reaction was. I missed it. I was wondering if you caught it."

"God damn!" The Ripper snapped his fingers. "You know I wasn't even looking?"

"There he is."

"Where?"

Kid nodded toward the terrace.

The Ripper stuck his hands in the back of his pants. "What they talkin' about?"

Kid shrugged.

"Hey, man!" The Ripper's hands came loose again. "I gotta go down and hear this." He grinned at Kid who started to say something. But the Ripper was off along the rocks.

At the four-foot terrace wall, the Ripper straight-armed up, scrambled over — half a dozen looked — and jumped. A bopping lope took him to the bar. The white bartender gave him two drinks. He came to the corner, thrust one glass at Baby and said loud enough for Kid to hear: "Now I know you want a drink, Baby, 'cause you gonna need something to keep you warm."

Several people laughed.

Baby took the drink in both hands — he had put his plate down on the wall — and looked as though he were about to dive into it. But Bill and the two women merely made room, and continued.

Seconds later, the Ripper, all weight on one leg, heavy lower lip sucked in and long head quizzically cocked, stood rapt, nodding in unison with Baby.

Curious at their low converse, Kid walked away from it into March.

Only one light worked here, anchored high and harsh on an elm. Captain Kamp stood silhouetted at the vertex of his shadow. "Hello, now, I was just coming back this way… you enjoying yourself?" Backlight made him ominous; his voice was cheerful. "I was just over there taking a—" (Kid expected him to say "leak")—"look in the August gardens. There're no lights in there, so I guess people are staying clear. But you can see down into the city. A few street lights are still on. I'm not too good at this ersatz host business. And this party takes some hosting." Kamp stepped up. Kid turned to walk with him. "Now I sure wish Roger would get here."

"Doesn't look like anyone's missed him too much."

"I have. I'm just not used to all this… well, sort of thing. I mean, trying to be in charge of it."

"I guess I'd like to meet him."

"Sure. Of course you would." Kamp nodded as they came nearer the house. "I mean he's giving this party for you, for your book. You'd think he'd… but now I'm pretty sure he'll get here. You don't worry now."

"I'm not and don't mean to start."

"You know I was thinking—" they walked up the stone steps—"about some of the things we were talking about when I first met you."

"That was a strange evening. But it came after a strange day."

"Sure did. Have you seen Roger's observatory?" Kamp interrupted himself. "Perhaps you'd like to go up and see it."

Kid was curious at the transition rather than the suggestion. "Okay."

Coming down the terrace, Lady of Spain, Spider, Angel, Raven and Tarzan, circled gangling D-t:

"D-t, man, you gotta see this!"

"I ain't never seen no garden like this before. All them flowers—"

"— and a big fountain that works and all."

"Come on. We gonna show you." Lady of Spain tugged his arm.

"D-t, you ain't never seen no garden as pretty as this in your whole life!"

"I guess—" Kamp opened the door for Kid—"I'm just not used to it. I mean all these different… kinds of people. Like that boy back there walking around with no clothes on? And everybody going on just like there was nothing wrong." The large, dark room was lined with books. In candlelight some dozen people sat on the floor or on hassocks. Several looked up from a tape recorder from which organ music flowed. One man (Kid remembered his making some joke in November about the smoke) said, "Kid? Captain? Would you like to join us? We were just listening to some—"

"We're going to the observatory." Kamp opened another door.

The organ piece ended; after a slight pause, a long note bent. Then another… They were playing Diffraction.

Kid smiled as he walked after Kamp down a hall nearly black. He could hear Lanya's whistle. At the top of a stairway Kid saw faint light. The carpeting was thick and so warm under his bare foot he wondered if there were heating on.

"I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Roger was here. But being left in charge of a party for a bunch of people that, frankly, I'd put out of my house…"

Kid was quietly amazed and wondered what Kamp was thinking in the pause.

"…I just don't know what to do. Do you know what I mean?"

Anything, Kid thought, I say will sound angry and stupid. He said, "Sure," and followed Kamp up the stairs.

"A few months ago," Kamp said, "I was in some experiments. They didn't have anything to do with the moon. In fact I had to get a special release from the Space Program to participate. Some students of a friend of mine at Michigan were running tests, and I guess he thought it would be a feather in his cap to get me for a guinea pig. Now, it'd been so long since I had anything to do that wasn't in some way connected with the Program, I went along with it. They were experiments on sensory deprivation and overload." At the head of the steps, Kamp waited for Kid before starting up a third flight.

He led Kid across a brick floor to a double doorway.

"I was in the overload part. It was all pretty amateurish, actually."

Kid stepped onto what first seemed a semi-circular balcony.

Faintly, below, a room full of people began to clap in time to the music—

"I guess they'd all been reading too many articles on LSD—"

— and shouted.

"— I took LSD back in the late fifties — more tests, that this psychiatrist friend of mine was running. But I've always been a little ahead of what's going on. Anyway, I know what it's like, LSD. And I'm pretty sure most of those kids setting up those experiments in Michigan didn't."

The terrace was enclosed in a glass dome. In the center was a six-foot in diameter celestial globe of clear plastic. Light from the garden below struggled in the smoke above, glowing like dilute milk.

"Now I guess you've taken LSD and all that stuff."

"Sure."

"Well, all they'd been doing was looking at all the pretty pictures everyone had been drawing." Kamp touched the globe, removed his fingers. Ares passed across Libra. The stars were glittering stones set in the etched constellations. "They had spherical rear-projection rooms, practically as big as this place here. They could cover it with colors and shapes and flashes. They put earphones on me and blasted in beeps and clicks and oscillating frequencies. Anyway, I was supposed to pick out patterns from all this. Later I learned that mine was the control group: We were given no patterns at all. I was told all the ones I had seen I had imposed myself… But after two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was just astounded at how… rich and complicated everything suddenly looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory-overload chamber. Rich… and I suddenly realized what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information deprivation. It's the pattern that colors and shapes assume that tell you whether it's a cow or a car you're looking at. It's the very finest alternations in color differentiation over a surface that tell you whether it's maple or pine, styrene or polyethylene, linen or flannel. Take any view in front of you and cut off the top and bottom till you've only got an inch-wide strip and you'll still be amazed at all the information you can get from just running your eye along that. Well, all this started me thinking back to the moon. Because that had been a place — and it happened in every mile en route — where standard information patterns just broke down. And yet, that's something we haven't been able to talk about — to anyone — since we got back. We'd trained for prolonged free-fall by spending time underwater in diving suits. I remember when we actually hit sustained weightlessness, I broadcast back, 'Hey, it's just like being underwater!' and yet as I said that into the chin mike, I was thinking: You certainly could never mistake the two conditions for one another. But I couldn't think of any way to say what was different about it, so I just described the way everybody, who'd never been there themselves, had told me it was going to feel like. Later I thought, that's like telling someone the world is flat and sending him off to the edge; but because he doesn't know quite how to describe such gentle roundness, he mumbles and stammers and says, 'Well yeah, I was at the… edge.' And the thing about the moon itself, the one thing I've really never told anybody, because I don't think I would have known how before those experiments: it's another world, and when you're there, you have no way of knowing what anything means. Physically. That whole landscape tells you nothing about itself, on any level, in the way that the most desolate stretch of sand on earth tells you about winds that have blown over it, rains that have or have not fallen, or the feel it might have beneath your feet if you walked across it. 'An airless, waterless void…' the way they say in all the science-fiction stories? No, that refers to some desert on earth, or what space between the stars looks like when you're safely tucked under the atmosphere. The moon is a different world, with a different order that you don't understand. There isn't that richness — not because it isn't in bright colors, or because it's all brown, purple, and grey. It's because as you run your eyes over the rocks and dirt, you have no way to know what the tiny alterations in color mean. Even though it has a horizon and perspective, and… well, rocks and dirt, it's more like being in that sensory-overload chamber than anything else. And of course, it isn't like that at all. It wasn't horrible. Horror still has something to do with earth. I suppose it was frightening. But even that was absorbed in the excitement of it. I—" he paused—"do not know how to tell you about it." He smiled and shrugged. "And that's probably the one thing I really haven't told anybody before. Oh, I've said, 'You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.' But that's my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn't what I mean."

Kid smiled back and wished he hadn't.

It isn't his moon I distrust so much, he thought, as it is that first wife in Persia. "I understand," he said, "as much as I'll let myself."

"Maybe," Kamp said after a moment, "you do. Let's go back down to the party."

Walking down the steps, Kid felt self-betrayed and wondered if there were any benefit from the feeling. He wanted to find Lanya and Denny.

Outside on the terrace, while the Captain, beside him, looked around as if for someone else to talk to, Kid thought: I feel the responsibility for him now he probably hoped I felt the night I walked him up here. That is not right, and I don't like it.

Ernestine Throckmorton said, "Captain! Kid! Ah, there you are," and began to talk definitely only to Kamp.

Kid excused himself, wondering whether she really was an angel, and went down into the gardens.

Lanya was crossing the bridge in a fury of emerald and indigo.

"Hey," he said. "Have you seen Denny?"

She turned. "You haven't. He's feeling abandoned."

Paul Fenster, holding his drink beneath his chin, stepped around Kid and said: "Jesus Christ, you'll never believe what was going on back there in April. I didn't think I was going to be able to make it." He laughed.

Lanya didn't, and asked, "What?"

"A whole bunch of black kids, back in April, they've got this whole routine worked out. They've got this white boy, called Tarzan: And they were just performing! And of course Roger's nice old colonel from Alabama was there — the one I was telling you about who gave me so much trouble when I was visiting — and of course he was laughing harder than anybody else. I kid you not, they were swinging from the God-damn trees!"

"What did you do?" Lanya had begun to laugh.

"Sweated a lot," Fenster said. "And tried to think of some way to leave. You know, guys who come to parties like this in berets and talk about liberating the furniture: Now I'm pretty into that. But I guess that type all had sense, enough to get out of Bellona while there was some getting. This Stepin Fetchit stuff, though — well, all I can say is, it's been a while!"

"Suffering's supposed to be good for the something-or-other," Kid said.

"It damn," Fenster replied, "well better be!" He grunted (simianly?) and walked on across the bridge.

Lanya took Kid's hand. "…Denny?"

"Yeah."

"I just left him." Her dress was shimmering black. A silver circle rose on the hem. "In March." She gestured with her head.

He said, "You're beautiful."

He thought, she's wistful.

"Thank you. You really like the dress?"

He nodded, kept nodding, and suddenly she laughed and closed his mouth with her fingers.

"I believe you. But I was beginning to think it was too much. Of course I was expecting just to stand around in some elegantly arbored corner holding court; not run around working. Where, I wonder, is Roger?"

Kid held her cool hands against his face with his warm ones. "Let's find Denny."

Dawn broke on her waist. "You find him," she said. "I'll see you a little later." A scarlet sun, haloed in yellow, eclipsed the silver moon.

He wondered why but said. "Okay," and left her on the bridge.

The stream became a pool in March, scaled with immobile leaves.

"I told that bitch!" Dollar stood and rocked on bowed legs. "I told that bitch. After what she tried, you know? I just told her."

Denny sat cross-legged on the stone bench and didn't look like he was listening too hard.

Kid walked around the pool. "You trying to get in trouble at my party?"

Dollar's head jerked: he looked scared.

Denny said, "Dollar's okay. He ain't done nothing."

"I ain't done nothing," Dollar echoed. "It's a real nice party, Kid."

Kid put his hand on the back of Dollar's pitted neck and squeezed. "You have a good time. Don't let anything get you, you know? You got a whole lot of space to walk around in. Something gets you here, you walk on over there. Something gets you there, you go on someplace else. If it happens a third time, come tell me about it. Understand? There's no strange sun in the sky tonight."

"Nothing's wrong, Kid. Everything's okay." The distressful smile went; Dollar just looked sad. "Really."

"Good." Kid let go Dollar's neck and looked at Denny. "You having a good time?"

"I guess so." Denny's shirt, unbuttoned, hung out of his pants. "Yeah."

A group came through the ivied gate, scorpions and others, following Ernestine Throckmorton.

Dollar said, "Oh, hey!" and jogged, jangling, after them, around the pool and out another entrance.

"I'm going to take this off." Denny shrugged from his vest, got the control box from his pocket, slipped out of his shirt, and sat, turning the box in one hand, the other slung among his chains. "Lanya says I've been doing a good job. This little thing is something, huh?"

Kid sat down and put his hand on Denny's dry, knobby back. In the boy's glance some relief flickered.

Kid rubbed his back.

Denny said, "Why you doin' that?" But he was smiling at his lap.

"Because you like it." Kid moved his hand up the sharp shoulder blade and down, pressing. Denny rocked with each rub.

"Sometimes," Lanya said and Kid turned, "I envy you two."

Kid did not stop rubbing and Denny did not look up.

"Why?" Denny moved his shoulders, reached up to scratch his neck.

"I don't know. I supposed it's because you can let people — let Kid know you want things I'd be afraid to ask for."

"You want your back rubbed?" Kid asked.

"Yes." She grinned. "But not now."

"I watch the two of you," Kid said, "when you're playing. When you're throwing things at one another; tugging one another around all the time. I envy you."

"You…?" Lanya reached for Denny's shoulder.

But Denny suddenly stood and stepped forward.

Kid wondered if he'd seen her reaching, watched her face pass through hurt and her hand withdraw.

Denny turned on the pool edge and laughed. "Aw, you two are all—" He twisted a knob.

From neck to hem she glittered black; black granulated silver; scarlet poured about her. "Hey, see, I got it good!"

"You sure do," Lanya said.

Kid stood and took her arm. "Come on."

"Where are we …?"

Kid grinned: "Come on!"

She raised a brow and came, intently curious.

Denny followed them; his confusion looked much less sharp than hers.

On the other side of the ivied stone, Ernestine apostrophized: "…chunk crab meat, not the stringy kind! Then eggs. Then a few bread crumbs. And bay seasoning. When I lived in Trenton, I'd have to have it sent up from Maryland. But Mrs Alt — nobody could have been more surprised than I was — found an entire shelf full in a store down on Temple…"

At the silent edge, Dollar muttered reverently: "…God damn…"

"Bay seasoning," Ernestine reiterated as Kid and Lanya and Denny passed around her, "is the most important thing."

On the path to the next garden, Denny whispered: "Where are we going?"

"Through here," Kid said. "The lights are out in here…"

"August," Lanya said.

They stepped into flakey darkness. Grass slid cool between Kid's toes. He clutched; it slipped away with the next step; tickling again.

The next stop was surprising stone.

He rocked his naked foot: Wet, cold… rough. His shod one stayed steady.

"I think there's a—". Lanya's voice echoed. She paused to listen to the reverberations—"some sort of underpass."

They came from under it four steps later.

"I didn't even see us go in." Denny stepped forward in the night grass.

Kid curled his free toes again, lifted his foot; grass tore.

"Hey, you can see the city, almost," Denny said.

Beyond a ruffed, stone beast, blurs of light were snipped off across the bottom by buildings. Implied hills, slopes, or depressions patterned the darkness around.

"Calkins' place can soak up a lot of people." The high trees — like small cypresses — were carbon dark against the muzzy night. Kid tried to see down into Bellona. One tall… building? It had perhaps a dozen windows lit.

"How odd," Lanya said. "All the limits go, and you can't believe there's really any more to it. We're used to objects like icebergs or oilwells where you know most of it is under ground or water. But something like a city at night, with great stretches of it blotted or obscured, that's a very different—"

"You guys," Denny interrupted. "I don't envy you… I guess. But you two can talk about things that, you know, are just so far beyond me I don't even know how to ask questions sometimes. I listen. But sometimes when I don't understand-or even when I do, I just wanna fuckin' cry, you know?" When they were silent, he asked again, "You know?"

Lanya nodded. "I do."

Denny breathed out and looked.

They stood apart and felt very close.

Kid watched her dress catch what light there was and glitter dim crimson, with waves of navy, or green of the evening ocean.

"What's that?" Denny asked.

Kid looked beyond them. "A fire."

"Where do you think it is?" Lanya asked.

"I can't tell. I don't really know where we are." He stepped up and put his hand on her shoulder: The metallic cloth prickled. Her skin was cool.

Denny's, under his other hand, was fever hot and, as usual, paper dry.

Kid wanted to walk.

So they walked with him, a hip on either hip, hitting to different rhythms. He'd slipped his hands across their backs to their outer shoulders. The hand on Lanya's shoulder was still.

Denny put his arm around Kid's back.

Lanya's arms were folded, her vision distanced while she walked and watched the charred city.

Then she put her head on his shoulder (still watching), her arm around him, her shoulder more firmly in the place beneath his arm, brought her thigh against his thigh.

And was still watching.

They walked beside the waist-high wall. This is the largest garden, Kid thought. Denny shifted his step—

"What?" Kid asked.

"One of the spotlights that ain't working…" Denny had just stepped around it.

They crossed cool flags.

Leaves rasped away the silence. A breeze? While he walked beneath the loud, black fleece of some high elm or oak, he waited for the warm or cool gust. Silence returned; he'd felt neither.

"Why don't it ever burn up here?" Denny asked, too softly, too intently. His shoulder twitched in Kid's hand. "Why don't it just all burn up or something, the whole thing? It just goes on and…" Kid ceased to knead, rubbed now.

Denny took another deep breath, fast, then let it out over the next five steps.

Lanya turned on Kid's shoulder, glanced across at Denny, and turned back.

Kid tried to loosen the tension in his abdomen. There was a sudden, unsettling feeling: All his organs, gut, liver, belly, lungs and heart, seemed to have shifted inches down. He didn't break step, but the feeling passed through a moment of nausea that ended with his breaking wind.

Which felt better.

He pulled Lanya closer; the leg against his leg and the shoulder's tugging eased into Kid's and Lanya's rhythm. Translated through Kid's body, Denny's motion firmed and, to the tension, Kid's firmed too. She sighed with her mouth just slightly open, corner to corner, then stroked his arm with the back of her neck. Denny's hand slipped its knuckly padding between Kid's hip and hers.

Another stone lion crouched on the wall, staring.

By it, with leafless branches like shatter lines on the night's smoked glass, was a tree. Beneath Kid's foot the ground was bare, crumbly and — ashy? Recognizing the texture, he stepped from the charred grass to fresh.

They circled the garden.

It was too dark to tell if the small pool were full or empty. Lanya put her hand out and touched a tree trunk. She no longer watched the small burnings worm down in the night city. She walked more closely in step with Kid than Denny did. (Kid thinking: It frees her to think of things further away.) He felt protective of her meditations, and frightened by them.

A memory of rustling italicized the silence. Kid listened for converse in another garden. Their own footsteps were so quiet.

Beyond the wall, (miles away?) things smoked and flickered.

A whisper: "Someone's coming—!"

And another: "Oh, wait a minute. Watch out—!"

Kid recognized one girl's voice but not the other.

One branch among the bushes beat at the rest.

The guy who stepped out, zipping his fly, belt loose down both hips, and grinning… it was Glass. "Oh," he said. "It's you all," and pulled his belt through the buckle.

One of the girls said: "Just a second. Here it is…"

"Can you see anything?" the other asked, then giggled — the girl in maroon jeans who had come with them from the nest: She pushed out between the brush.

Somebody behind her was looking all around: that was Spitt.

The other girl Kid first recognized as one of Roger's guests. Even in the three-quarter dark she looked rumpled. The second recognition was that it was Milly: her red hair fell over a dark, velvet jumper: She wore something metallic beneath it, unbuttoned now. Copperhead, a hand on each of her shoulders, guided her out.

Lanya said, "Lord!" and laughed.

"Oh!" Milly said. "It's you all!" in dissimilar accent, but identical inflection, as Glass. She pulled from Copperhead.

She and Lanya clutched one another in a fit of giggles.

Copperhead frowned at Kid and shook his head.

Kid shrugged.

"I can't find my comb!" Milly finally got out. "Isn't it amazing! I can't find my comb."

Lanya looked back at Kid: "Here, I'll see you in a little while."

Then, her arm around Milly's shoulder, they fled the garden.

"Man," Glass said. "This is a pretty good party."

Copperhead, deprived of Milly, settled beside the first girl. He bent to whisper to her. She whispered back.

"God damn, nigger!" Spitt said. "You don't do nothin' but fuck, do you?"

"Shit," Glass said. "I watched your pink ass poppin' up and down there a pretty good long while."

"Yeah, sure." Spitt said. "But, man, you were in this one, then that one, then this one again — God damn!"

Glass just chuckled.

Then both of them saw that Copperhead and the girl were moving off.

"Hey!" Spitt called and started after them.

Glass loped to their other side.

Phalanxed by black and white, the girl and Copperhead left.

"Come on." Denny pulled away from Kid, who followed, wondering what of all that interchange had interested Denny most. But as soon as Denny got between the hedges — one shoulder feathered with shadow, the other bright under the lights of June — he stopped to adjust the control box. "There."

Nowhere, Kid was sure, had he seen John. But then he hadn't recognized Mildred before.

Guests surging Novemberwards cut them off from Copperhead and the others.

After he'd left Denny, Kid thought: But the whole point was to spend some time with him. Kid sucked his teeth, annoyed with himself, and stepped onto another bridge.

The lights on Kid's end worked.

Frank came toward him, grinning hugely, squinting slightly, face full of floodlight.

I must be in silhouette, Kid thought.

"Hey!" Frank said. "It is a really good party they're having for you. Congratulations on everything. I'm having a great time."

"Yeah," Kid said. "Me too."

Beyond Frank, beyond the bridge, Kid saw a flash of metallic kelly. Lanya was still with Milly, whose complicated hair was now in place. They were still laughing. They were still going away.

"You see my book?"

"Sure."

"What'd you think of my poems? I was sort of interested in what you'd think of them. I mean because you're a real poet."

Frank raised his eyebrows. "That's really — Well…" He lowered them. "Would you like me to be honest? I make the offer, because I guess you've been getting a lot of compliments, especially here at your party. And real honesty is going to be a little rare — maybe this evening isn't the place for it and we should save it for some night at Teddy's."

"No, go on," Kid said. "I guess you didn't think they were all that great?"

"You know…" Frank grasped the rail with one stiffened arm and leaned. "I was wondering what I was going to say to you about them if you ever really asked. I've been thinking about you a lot. A lot more, I guess, than you've been thinking about me. But I keep hearing about you all the time, people always talking about you. And it occurs to me that I don't know you at all. But youVe always seemed like a good person. And I thought it would be good if somebody was just straightforward with you, you know?" He laughed. "And there I was, starting to say, 'They're great,' like everyone else. That's really not my character. I think it's better to be honest."

"What did you think?" Kid heard the coldness in his own voice, and was astonished; listening to himself, he felt suddenly trapped.

"I didn't like them."

It's his smile, Kid thought and thought after that: No, you're just trying to tell yourself it's the smile you don't like. He said, He didn't like them, that's all. "What's wrong with them?"

Frank snorted a laugh and looked down at the rocks. "You really want to know?"

"Yeah," Kid said. "I want to know what you think."

"Well." Frank looked up. "The language is extremely artificial. There's no relation, or even tension, between it and any sort of real speech. Most of the poems are pompous and over-emotional — I'm sure you were sincere about every one of them. But sincerity by itself, without skill, usually just results in mawkishness. The lack of emotional focus makes subjects that could have been interesting into Grand Guignol melodrama. They end up coming off pretty banal. The method's cliche, and often, so is the diction. And they're dull." After a silence in which Kid tried to figure the varieties of unpleasantness he was experiencing, Frank continued: "Look, you once told me you'd only been writing poetry a couple of weeks. Didn't it ever strike you as a little improbable that you could just jump into it and the first batch you produced would be worth reading? I guess the thing that's really got me upset over the whole thing is all this business." He gestured at guests both sides of the bridge. "Tak once told me you were as old as he is — two years older than me! Kid, most of the people here think you're seventeen or eighteen! That, along with the poor man's Hell's Angel bit, and all the gossip about the various kinky things you get into — people are just here for the show. As far as most of them are concerned, Brass Orchids is like a performance by a talking dog. They find it so cunning that he speaks at all, they couldn't care less what he actually said."

"Un…" Kid had intended that to be an Oh. "And you—" which wasn't what he'd wanted to say either, but he went on because he had to make sure—"you think the poems aren't very good?"

Frank said: "I think they're very bad."

"Wow," Kid said, gravely. "And you think that's all the poems mean to any of the people here?"

"To most people—" Frank put his hand, stiff-armed, on the rail again—"poetry doesn't mean anything at all. From a couple of things you said to me at the bar, though — about what you read and what you felt — I suspect it does mean something to you. Which is why I keep bothering to put my foot in my mouth the way I've been."

"No," Kid said, "go on," thinking: But he hasn't stopped, has he?

Kid's shadow cut Frank's face and purple shirt down the middle.

"With all the variety that's part of current poetry—" Frank blinked his visible, squinting eye—"perhaps it's silly for me to be passing judgments like this. There are lots of kinds of poetry. And sure, some kinds I personally prefer to others. I'll be honest: the kind that yours is trying to be isn't a kind I find very interesting at its best. Which is maybe the reason I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place. Well, look, I'm not passing judgments. I'm just talking about my own reactions. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, as far as I can tell — and I admit I'm biased — it seems pretty clear what you wanted to do in the poems. And pretty clear that you didn't come. close. I mean, that last one, in the clunky blank verse- now that may of may not be a good poem; I can't tell. It's unreadable." Frank's smile was wan. "But you have to admit, that's a stumbling block."

Kid grunted what he had intended as polite assent. It sounded more like he'd been elbowed in the liver. And that's not, he thought, what I want to sound like. "Maybe some time at Teddy's or someplace you could go over one or two of them with me and tell me what you think is—"

"No." Frank shook his hand, fingers straight, and his head, face a-scowl. "No, no. It isn't that kind of… Look, I can't tell you how to be a poet. I can just tell you what I think. That's all."

Kid grunted again.

"Don't take it as anything more than that."

Do you say thanks, now? Kid wondered. You say thanks for compliments. "Thanks." It sounded the most tentative question.

Frank nodded, looked over the rail again.

Kid stepped around him and walked toward the end of the bridge. Halfway, like a tic, he thought Frank was about to tap his shoulder. He turned, and realized, turning, it was some untransformed kernel, perfectly hostile, trying to emerge. Facing into the lights of May, Kid could not tell if Frank looked at him or away.

Squinting, Kid swallowed the thought unworded and went on into the high paths of January; from which he could look down on the crowded terrace.

They're all here, Kid thought, for me! He was desperately uncomfortable. Frank's smile — it had made his criticism seem as though he thought he was getting away with something. Well, that still didn't change what he'd said. Somebody else, Kid remembered but couldn't remember who, had said they'd liked them… and decided that wasn't what he wanted to think about now. But with the resolve erupted memories of seven other reactions: Puzzled, indifferent, interests fleeting or otherwise. He recalled Newboy's complex noncommittal and sensed in it betrayal — not so much Newboy's but his own — of something the poet had tried to tell and he had not been able to understand.

"This is like…" he started out loud, heard himself, and laughed. This was like the night in the park when his fantasized reception had pressed so heavily he'd been unable to write.

He laughed again.

A couple smiled and nodded.

His look became surprised as he noticed them. But they passed.

I want a drink, he thought, and saw he was already heading for the bar. I really want a drink very much.

This isn't, Kid found himself repeating, what it should be about. Repeating it for the sixteenth or seventeenth time, he sat on the stone rail, looking across at the table and the bottles, still without a glass.

"Hi!" Then her expression (and handfuls of scarlet fell down among green fires) changed. "What happened to you?"

His hands went out against her hips: Around one, blue puddled, around the other, green.

"Am I bleeding?"

He slid them back to her buttocks, thinking, how warm she is; lay his face against her warm belly. She took hold of his hair. Before his blinking, black scales flittered to silver, to scarlet, to green.

"No. But you look like you just walked into a wall and now you're waiting for it to go away."

Kid made a sound supposed to launch the next sentence; it came out another grunt. So he backed off it and started again a little higher. "I was just… talking with Frank. About my… poems."

She pulled loose and hoisted herself up on the wall beside him, shoulder against his shoulder, leg against his leg, to become a deviling glitter at the corner of his eye while he stared at his ruined thumbs, now pressed together on his meshed fists' calloused drum. She asked: "What did he say?"

"He didn't like them, very much." She waited.

"He said everybody here thought I was a talking dog. They all think I'm some sort of dumb nut, that I'm ten years younger than I am, and they'd all be just as astonished that I even spelled my name right — if I had a name…"

"Kid…" which came out much softer than his voice. She put her hand over his. He raised one thumb. She caught it in her fist. "That's fucking nasty."

"Maybe it's fucking true."

"It isn't!" Her voice told him she was frowning: "That's Frank? The one who's supposed to have had a book of poems published out in California?"

Asking who else it could have been, he said: "Yeah?"

She answered: "He's jealous, Kid!"

"Huh? of what," which was a statement, not a question.

"You're both poets. You both have a book published. Look at all the attention you're getting. I doubt if this happened when his book came out."

"That's awfully easy. Besides, I don't care why he said it, I just wish I knew if it were true — Oh, shit! Calkins didn't even read the poems when he decided to publish them. Maybe he did when they finally came out and was so embarrassed he decided not to show up this evening."

"No! That's silly—"

"And you remember how Newboy kept beating around the bush whenever I asked him if they were—"

"He enjoyed them—"

"Shit! He enjoyed me! If he was trying to say anything, he was trying to say he couldn't make the distinction."

"And what makes you to think Frank is any more capable of making it? He resents you, he resents the way everybody has fixated on you: And then he tries to read the poems. At least Mr Newboy was honest enough to admit he couldn't make the separation. Hell, I like them!"

"You're biased."

"You think Frank isn't? Look, they don't—" She let go his thumb.

He looked over.

Her fists were knotted above her tidewise, swirling lap. "We're going about this wrong." Her bottom lip moved over her teeth, to fix her mouth for some new tone of voice. "He is right. About a lot of it, anyway."

The simple hurt started in his throat. One swallow dragged it down to his stomach's floor.

"He doesn't like your poems and he's probably sincere. About not liking them. Thelma likes them, and she's probably just as sincere."

"I was trying to remember her name. It was sort of hard."

"It should be just as hard to remember his. Being sincere doesn't mean they're right. It just means they believe they are."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Sure. That's what Frank said, about the poems."

"Sorry."

"He's right about the people, about what everybody here thinks."

"Not everybody," she said. "I suspect not even half. Do you care what people think?"

"I care…" He paused. "… about people. The people here. So if they think that, I've got to care about that too. And I wish they didn't think what he said."

She made a sound of assent.

"Maybe we shouldn't have come to this party," he said.

"You want to go?"

"No. I want to stay and see what happens." Kid opened a hand on each knee. "It's something not to do again, maybe. But I don't think I want to leave in the middle. I'm learning too much." He pushed from the rail and turned to the bar.

Denny said, "What's the—?"

Kid put his arms around him: Denny's hands came up first to push, then all of a sudden went tight across Kid's back. Kid pushed his face against the dry, hot neck and thought: My face must feel cold. He held the hot shoulders and thought: My hands…

Denny moved once, was still, moved again; let his arms half down, waiting to pull away.

Kid raised his head.

Two people passing looked away.

Kid stepped back.

Denny asked, "Are you all right?" then glanced at Lanya.

Her eyebrows moved to answer him.

"I'm okay," Kid said and wondered if he'd contradicted her.

She asked "You're sure?"

Kid put his hand on her bright knee. "I'm okay. Somebody said some nasty things about my poems. Whether they're true or not, it made me mad as hell."

Lanya sighed. "I guess that's why I'm glad I'm not an Artist."

"Why are you always saying that?" Kid pulled back. "There's a whole room full of people inside listening to Diffraction right now! And enjoying it!"

"I mean—" Lanya looked uncomfortable—"I mean Artist in the way this party presupposes. Sure, I make a piece of music; or a fucking dress for that matter — you'd be astonished how similar they are! But I don't just think you can be that kind of artist any more. Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can't call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don't waste your time knocking the rest. This party — it's ritual attention, the sort you give a social hero. I guess that can be an artist if there're few enough of them around—"

"— like in Bellona?"

"Bellona is a very small part of the universe. And this party is a very good place to bear that in mind. Kid, all the criticism you're going to get here, good or bad, is going to be a ritual kind." She glanced down under his brows. "Maybe that's what Mr Newboy was trying to tell you?"

"Maybe," Kid said, and put his face against her shoulder. "And maybe he was just too chickenshit to say what Frank did."

"I don't think so." Lanya rubbed his hair again. "But that's just my personal reaction."

"Frank said that too."

"Then be generous and believe him." She pulled back. "You know, someday I'm going to shock you all and produce a philosophical treatise thick as The Critique of Pure Reason, The Phenomonology of Mind, and Being and Time put together! It'll be in neatly numbered, cross-referenced paragraphs, a third of it mathematical symbols. I'll call it—" she drew a thumb and forefinger across the air, top and bottom of an imaginary signboard—"Preliminary Notes toward a Calculus of Attentional and Intentional Perception, with an Analytics of Modular—I guess 'modular' is the adjective from 'modal'?—Feedback. Then you'll see. All of you!"

"You could always call it: Lanya Looks at Life," Kid suggested.

"Poets!" Lanya exclaimed, mocking despair. "Artists! — God!" and put her hot, pale hands around his, to cage the beasts his fingers were.

He pulled them from the cave to rest them on the brass blades turning, tic-tic-tic, on his chest.

She stood, shedding turquoise to the hem, and moved by Denny. The boy's hip pocket stuck out with corners from the control box. 'Take a walk," Lanya said. "You'll feel better."

Kid nodded, started away from them, realized he was fleeing, and slowed.

Dragon Lady swung around the newel at the bottom of the steps and said to Baby: "Now what you wanna go say that to that woman, for, huh? Huh?"

" 'Cause she said I—"

"Now why you wanna go say something like that?"

Three steps behind them, Adam walked with Nightmare; Nightmare doubled with laughter, held his stomach and staggered up the stairs. From knee to cuff one scarlet pants leg was smeared from a fall.

Adam's eyes were very wide behind loose, rough hair; his grin split, brown, over yellow teeth.

"God damn!" Dragon Lady said. "You don't go around saying things like that."

"Shit." Baby's hands were locked before his groin. His head was down and his blond hair swayed as though he worried something in his teeth. "If she hadn't said — aw, shit!"

Nightmare's hand fell on Kid's shoulder. His face came forward, fighting to explain, but exploded in laughter. He smelled very drunk. At last Nightmare just shook his head, helplessly, and staggered, loudly, away.

Kid took a breath and went on down, pondering madness's constituents. Later he could not recall where his thoughts had gone from there. And he pondered that loss more than days or names.

Below, Frank said: "Wait a minute… wait a minute! Wait—!"

Kid held the bridge's black metal rail and looked down at the path.

They came, laughing, along the short-cut from March to October.

The rocks were covered with moss and slicked with floodlight.

"Look, now I know something that's sort of funny."

"All right." Black-sweatered Bill stopped, still laughing. "What?"

Thelma stood to the side.

"You mustn't say anything nasty about him, Frank," Ernestine said. "I think they've all been perfectly charming, everything considered."

"He's a nice guy," Frank said. "He really is. But I've met him a couple of times before, that's all. And I just—"

"Well," drawled a man whose freckled skull was ringed with white hair, "I haven't yet. But his friends are the funniest children I have ever seen. Oh, they put on quite a show. Gibbons, I tell you! A real bunch of little black gibbons!"

Bill said: "Most of them aren't that little."

"I just wonder," Frank repeated, "whether he actually wrote them or not."

"Why would you think he didn't?" Bill asked, turning.

"I met him," Frank said, "once down in that place—Teddy's? A long time ago. I'd lost a notebook a few weeks back and I was telling him about it. Suddenly he got very excited—very upset, and called the bartender over to bring him this notebook that he told me he'd found in the park. He told me he'd found it, already filled up with writing, I'm very sure of that. I flipped through it, and it was all full of poems and journals and things. He wanted to know if it was mine. It wasn't, of course. But at least two of the poems in that notebook — and I remember because they struck me as rather odd — I'd swear were identical with two of the poems in Brass Orchids. That notebook had a poem on practically every other page."

"Are you serious?" Roxanne asked as though she thought the tale very funny. "Well, you mustn't ever tell Roger. He would feel quite had!"

Bill let out a loud, "Ha!" at the sky. "If it is true, that's the funniest thing I've heard all night!"

"I wouldn't make it up!"

"It's a perfectly awful thing to say," Ernestine said. "Do you really think he would do a thing like that?"

"Well, you've met him," Frank said. "He's not what I would call the literary type."

"Oh, everybody and their brother writes poems," Bill tossed away.

"You think, then—" which was Kamp's voice: It came from under the bridge where Kid could not see—"he took all the poems out of this notebook, now?"

"Oh, perhaps…" Frank began. "I'm not accusing him of anything. Maybe he only took those two. I don't know. Maybe he only took a couple of lines that I just happened to recognize—"

Thelma said: "You said they were identical," and Kid strained and failed to hear more than her words.

"I said I thought they were," Frank said, which was not, Kid remembered with obsessive lucidity, what he had said at all.

"That's interesting," Bill reflected, head down, all dark hair and black sweater. He started walking.

The others followed him under the bridge.

Frank said: "He told me that night he'd only been a poet for, I think he put it, a couple of weeks. And then, there was this notebook he'd found, all filled up with poems that — well, the two I looked at closely — are awfully similar to two in his book." The voices echoed beneath. "What would you think?"

Thelma (he could not see her face) was the last to go under.

"Well, you obviously think he took them—" The voice's identity was obscured by echo.

"1 think," someone's voice came back, "he's just a nice — I wouldn't say dumb, just non-verbal — guy that probably isn't too concerned with the significance of that sort of thing. Hell, I like him. With all those guys in the chains he's got running around for bodyguards, I sort of hope he likes us too."

"He didn't sign his name to the book," the southerner said.

"Oh, Frank, I think you're just—"

Kid had to clear his throat so missed Ernestine's last words in the rattle. (Run to the other rail, hear what they said as they emerged…) He looked along the empty path.

In an Oregon forest, back during that winter, on his day off, a log, loosed from the pile he'd been climbing, had crashed his leg, bloodying his right calf and tearing his jeans. He'd thought his shin was broken. But, finally, he had been able to hobble back to the bunkhouse, a quarter of a mile away — it took forty minutes. The whole time he kept thinking: "This hurts more than anything I've ever felt before in my life. This hurts more than anything I've ever…" He reached the empty cabin, with the thought repeating like a melody now, rather than an idea; he had sat down on the lower bunk — it belonged to a laborer named Dehlman — opened his belt, got the seat of his jeans from beneath his buttocks, and in a single motion stripped them down his—

He hadn't screamed. Instead, his lungs flattened themselves in his chest, and for the next ten minutes he could only make little panting sounds. Blood and flesh, dried to the cloth, had stripped the length of his leg, sending the pain into realms he had not known existed. When he could think again, the still running thought, connected with the memory of that so much lesser pain, seemed silly.

He dropped his hand from the rail and thought about this (and for some reason the name of the man on whose bunk he'd lain with his bleeding calf) and tried to recall his reaction to Frank's criticisms of ten minutes ago.

He could not fit both into anything like a single picture. (They took it so lightly!) He blinked at the empty path.

I wrote…?

Kid's eyes stung; he wandered from the bridge. Raising his hand to rub his face, he saw blurred brass and stopped the motion.

One foot hit something on the path and he stepped ahead unsteadily.

I remember re-writing them!

I remember changing lines, to make them more like something… mine?

Kid blinked; and his rough fingers were circled with scrolled blades. Did the first terror precede the scream?

…someone — Dollar? Dollar, beyond the hedge, screamed.

Kid flung back his hands and ran — toward the sound. Because what was behind him was too frightening.

As he sprinted into the garden, a low branch struck his face.

He grasped away leaves with his bladed hand, came up short, and heard (though he could not see) Dollar scream again, thinking: My God, the rest of them are so quiet!

Black and brown arms waved and spun (and among them was Tarzan's yellow hair and dough-colored shoulder), caught against someone buried in the brawl. Somebody grunted.

Thelma, watching, sucked in her breath, rasping the silence.

From out the fray: "Hey, watch it…! Watch it…! Watch out for the… Unh!"

Their scrabbling boots were louder than their caught breaths and voices.

Kid lunged, grabbed, pulled, and only just remembered to get his orchid up out of the way.

"Hey, what you—"

Cathedral hit him as he pulled Thruppence off.

Priest's head struck his flank hard enough to hurt.

Kid swung his hand out and around, and Spider didn't shriek but hissed: "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh… God-damn motherfucker!" A filament of blood widened on Spider's belly.

"GET OFF HIM!" Kid pulled the Ripper back. "God-damn it, get off him!"

Raven, Tarzan, then Lady of Spain, still pummeling, got yanked back.

As they recognized him, one by one they fell away among the guests who ringed the garden. More were edging in.

Siam, in the central tussle, looked up, then ducked under Kid's arm; Kid stumbled forward, lunged between the last two (Angel and Jack the Ripper) who sprinted aside; he grabbed the back of Dollar's vest, his orchid still high.

Dollar screamed once more, and then went into foetal collapse on the flags. "Don't kill me, please don't kill me! Don't kill me, Kid, please don't kill me! I'm sorry, Kid! Don't kill me!" Dollar's right cheek was bruised and bleeding; his left eye was puffy, and his mouth looked like it had dandruff. Trying to get him up, Kid almost slipped. Swiveling his head, he saw his blades flash; leaves like green scales of the night fell from his opening fingers. He saw the ring of scorpions and guests—

Ernestine Throckmorton had jabbed both fists beneath her chin. Lanya, Nightmare, Denny, and Dragon Lady crowded the garden entrance. Baby and Adam pushed around them. Captain Kamp, on the other side of the fountain — water dribbled a rust-rimmed stain down a marble breast and across a cornucopia — looked angry and was about to step up. The southern colonel (with the ring of white hair) at his side was about to restrain him.

"I didn't do nothing! I really didn't mean to do nothing. I didn't mean nothing by it, I swear, Kid! I swear I didn't do it!"

Kid looked down. "WILL YOU GET THE FUCK UP!" He lowered his orchid.

Dollar ducked his head.

"Get on up, will you?" He jerked the back of Dollar's vest again.

Glass grabbed Dollar under one arm and helped Kid pull him to his feet Kid and Glass exchanged frustrated looks.

"You okay?" Glass asked. "Can you stand up?"

"Is it all right… now?" Ernestine Throckmorton asked.

Kid turned to tell her just to go away—

But she was ten feet off, and talking to Nightmare, who said: "Yeah, it's okay. Just forget it, huh? Yeah, it's all right."

And other people were walking.

Kid's senses had grown amphetamine bright. Listening, however, words blurred back to normal incoherence.

"I didn't do—!" shrieked in his ear again as Dollar tried to wedge between Kid and Glass

Tarzan said: "Oh, man, I'm not gonna hurt you!" He looked at Kid. "But if he's gonna go around callin' people 'nigger' he's gonna get his head broke."

"Yeah!" from the hirsute Raven, behind Tarzan's left shoulder.

"Huh?" Kid asked.

And, "Yeah, I'm gonna break his fuckin' head!" from the Ripper, behind his right.

"I didn't do nothin'!" Dollar pulled on Kid's arm and stumbled back against Glass who caught him up. "You all do it all the time! You all say it, why can't I say it!"

"Aw, come on, man!" Kid said. "You all must be putting me on!"

"He's gonna call the wrong nigger 'nigger' and he's gonna have to pick his head up off the ground and screw it back on!" D-t said.

"All right," Kid told Dollar. "Who you calling names?"

"Me, God-damn it!" Tarzan said. "And if that psycho little bastard's gonna—"

"Aw, shit!" D-t said. "What he gonna call you 'nigger' for? He was bad-mouthin' the Ripper, and the Ripper don't like it. I don't like it either."

"Oh," Tarzan said. "I thought he was talking to me… He was looking at me when he said it."

D-t grunted. "God-damn, nigger, the Ripper was standing just behind your shoulder!" He pointed across the garden.

Several people stepped aside from the line his finger projected over the lawn.

Tarzan said, "Oh."

"I told him to say he was sorry," the Ripper said. "I didn't want to start no trouble, here at the God-damn party. If he'd a' said he was sorry, I wouldn't of done nothing."

"Okay," Kid told Dollar. "Tell him you're sorry."

"No!" Dollar lurched in Glass' grip. Glass' vinyl vest swung back from the crossed scar poking over his belt, then flapped to again.

"You say you're sorry." Kid held the back of Dollar's neck with one hand and put the orchid points against the lower right quadrant of his belly; the dirty flesh jerked. Dollar's chains jingled. "Say you're sorry, or I'll take your appendix out, right here, and we'll spread everything you got all over the God-damn ground—"

"Nooooo!" Dollar whined and twisted. "Please don't kill me!"

Talk had stopped again.

"Say you're sorry."

"I'm sorry!"

"Okay." Kid let his bladed hand drop and looked at the Ripper. "He's said he's sorry. Okay?"

"He didn't have to say it." The Ripper looked sullenly around the circle. "I already got my licks in."

But other guests had begun to talk once more.

"Okay," Kid said. "Then let's break it up. WILL YOU PLEASE BREAK IT UP GOD-DAMN IT!" He pushed Dollar forward by the head. Glass came with them.

Nightmare said: "Come on you guys, will you? You heard the Kid. Break it up! Get out of here! Go on!"

Somebody asked: "What happened?"

Somebody else: "What did he do?"

"I didn't see. Did you see what happened? Is it all right now?"

"No, I just came in. I guess it's all right…?"

"Hey, Kid?"

That was Bill.

"When you got a chance, can I…" but somebody moved between them.

Which was just as well.

Kid held Dollar by one arm. Glass held him by the other. Kid dug a finger into Dollar's armpit. "Didn't I tell you if something went wrong, you come to me?"

"I didn't get no chance," Dollar said. "I told 'em, I told 'em just like you said, if they messed with me, I was gonna tell the Kid? Just like you said." He looked over his smudged shoulder at Glass. "Were you there? Did you hear me tell 'em?"

Glass's head-shake showed more frustration than anything else.

"But I didn't get no chance to, you know? Them colored guys was all over me."

Frank leaned over the rail and called down. "Hey, Kid, is everything all—?"

Glass glanced up. Kid didn't

"I just don't think them guys—" Dollar's voice took on an echo beneath the bridge—"you know? — like me too much. I guess, you know, some people just don't like other people."

"I don't exactly love you," Kid said.

"I just wish—" Dollar rolled his head forward and spoke down at his chest—"somebody would tell me what to do."

"You don't have it too easy, huh?" Glass said, and didn't even bother to glance at Kid.

"Oh, man!" Dollar said. "Oh, man, I just don't know, sometimes, you know? I'm half sick all the God-damn time. I can hardly eat the fucking food. Because of my stomach, you know? I can't drink nothin' except wine, or I get sick. I don't get drunk, I just get sick. Unless it's wine. I mean half them God-damn niggers are—" he looked at Glass—"the colored guys…" Then he looked at Kid. "Well, that's what they say, I mean—"

"Say your thing," Glass said.

"…half the God-damn colored guys are drunk already. That's why they jumped me, I bet. They wouldn't of jumped me if they wasn't drunk. They're nice guys; even the girls. I was just kiddin' anyway… I wasn't drunk. I didn't drink nothing here except some wine, 'cause I didn't want to get sick at your party. I just wish somebody would tell me what to do."

They came from beneath the bridge.

The path bent like a boomerang into the rocks.

"You know? If somebody would just tell me…"

"Why don't you just keep from bothering people who're gonna beat you up?" Glass said.

"Now that's what I mean," Dollar said. "Everybody's always tellin' me what not to do. Keep away from this. Get out of that. Don't bother the other. If somebody would just tell me what I should do, I'd work my fuckin' ass off."

"Right now you would," Glass said, " 'cause somebody just scared the shit out of you."

"I would," Dollar said. "I really would."

"You just come on with me," Glass said. "All right?"

By the edge of a black railing above, among small trees, Copperhead, Spitt, and the girl in maroon levis waited.

Dollar blinked at Kid and rubbed at the flaking corner of his mouth with his thumb. He looked sad and scared.

"We ain't gonna hurt you," Glass said. "We already got our licks in, too. All we gonna do is make sure you don't get in no more trouble here at the Kid's party."

Kid, doubting, let go of Dollar's arm.

"I just wish somebody would tell me what I was supposed to do."

"Go on with them," Kid said.

Glass and Dollar climbed up the slope among the brush and saplings.

Kid turned before Dollar reached the top.

I want, among all these people who are here because of me, one to come up and tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I'm all right, if I feel okay, say come on, let's go get a drink, after that you must need one. And, God-damn it, I don't want to go all hangdog looking for some person who'll oblige. I just want it to happen. Sometimes the pressure of vision against the retina or sound against the drum exhausts. Where have I lost myself, where have I laid the foundation of this duct? Walking in these gardens, it is as if the nervous surface of the mind registering the passage of tune itself has, by its exercise, been rubbed and inflamed.

Did I write…?

Finding the thought was like looking down again at a pattern of tiles he'd been walking over for hours.

Did I…?

The sublimest moment I remember (Kid pondered) was when I sat naked under that tree with the notebook and the pen, putting down one word then another, then another, and listening to the ways they tied, while the sky greyed out of night Oh, please, whatever I lose, dont let me lose that one—

"Hey, Kid!"

"Huh?"

But the Ripper had only called in passing, with a wave, and was walking on.

Kid nodded hesitantly back. Then he frowned. And for the life of him could not remember what he'd just been thinking. The only word on his mind was… artichokes.

Spider, alone in October, sat on the ground, half in darkness, beside the floodlight, swabbing at his belly with a bunched piece of newsprint. It kept flapping, bloody, in front of the glaring glass.

"Are you all right?" Kid asked.

"Huh? Oh, yeah." Spider mashed the paper smaller. "You just scratched me, you know. It didn't bleed too much."

"I'm really sorry," Kid said. "You feel okay? I didn't see you."

Spider nodded. "I know." He crumpled the paper some more. "I'm a fuckin' mess—" he pulled his boot heels under him and got to his feet—"but it was just a scratch." He held back his vest and brushed himself with the paper, pressed it to himself. "It was only really bleeding bad at one end."

Kid looked up at the black youngster's lowered face. "You sure it's okay now?"

"I guess so. Now. Man, you scared me to death, though I was expecting to see my guts come out all over the grass."

"I'm sorry, man. Lemme see?"

Spider stared down.

His stomach looked like someone had smeared the teak flesh with paint. From one end of the cut, red threaded down toward his belt. The left side of his pants lap was black maroon. He blotted his belly again.

"You're bleeding like a pig!" Kid said.

"It's just a cut." Spider touched his stained stomach with his fingertips (He bites his nails, too, Kid thought), felt the taut skin over the top of his navel, pulled the waist of his pants out to unstick it. "It don't hurt none."

"Maybe they have something inside, some bandages or something. Come on—"

"It's stopping," Spider said. "It's gonna stop soon."

He turned the stained paper around, examining it.

Blood is a living tissue, Kid thought, remembering his high school biology teacher's glasses knocked from the edge of the marble lab table, one lens smithereening over the mustard tiles. "Look, come on. Let's go get a drink, then. After that, you look like you could use it."

"Yeah." Spider smiled. "Yeah, come on. A drink. I'd like that." He grinned, balled the paper, flung it noisily into the brush. "Uhnnn…" he said after three steps. "Maybe I should go inside and wash it or something."

"I'm sorry, man," Kid said. "I'm really sorry."

"I know," Spider said. "You didn't do it on purpose."

When they were halfway across July, Ernestine Throckmorton looked up and said, "Oh! I mean my… God!"

In the following confusion, Denny and Lanya (purple, purple blooming blue) found him while Ernestine and several others tried to get Spider to go inside.

"I wanna… drink," Spider said, hesitantly.

Ernestine asked Spider: "Do you feel all right? Are you okay?"

"He wants a drink," Kid said.

Spider looked confused; then the confusion sank in belligerent, silent embarrassment; he let himself be taken away.

"That could get infected," Everett Forest said for the third tune.

Madame Brown stood across the crowd, folding and turning her hands. The leash swung and sagged and jingled.

Kid kept touching Lanya's shoulder; they stood watching. (The second tune she touched his hand in return, but not the first, third, or fourth.)

Muriel, panting, pushed to her forepaws; then lowered her muzzle again to the ground.

Denny, in the crowding, had pushed against Kid several times, settling a hand on his shoulder, arm, or back. Kid contemplated some response—

"Kid!"

Kid didn't look around at first.

"If you've a few minutes to spare— Kid, do you think I could have you for a few minutes?"

When he did turn (Lanya and Denny turned too), Bill was smiling at him over the surrounding heads, and holding a box that looked much like the controls to Lanya's dress up near his ear. "Can I have you for a few minutes… Kid?"

This time when Kid touched Lanya and Denny, they came with him. (Thinking: They would have come anyway; both, working within entirely different mechanics, have developed curiosities that would not let them miss it!) "Sure," Kid said. "What you want?"

"Thank you." Bill grinned, and adjusted the mike clipped to the pocket in his black turtleneck pullover. "This is on now. We might as well leave it going, so you can get used to ignoring it. But let's get out of all this noise. Why don't we go behind — Say, what happened to that tall black kid? He's part of your nest?"

"I cut him," Kid said.

Bill tried not to look surprised.

"It was an accident," Kid said to the mike. He un-snapped the ornate blades from his wrist.

"You're—" Bill noticed Lanya and Denny but didn't say any thing to them—"very strict with your own, aren't you?"

Kid decided: I'm being told, not asked, and said nothing.

"Where we going?" Denny whispered, and looked warily again at Bill's cassette recorder.

"To hell, if we're invited nicely," Kid said. "Shut up and come on. He's not going to make you say anything. Just me."

"Let's…" Bill looked like he was trying to, politely, think of a way to get rid of Lanya and Denny.

Lanya looked as though she were about to, politely, excuse herself and take Denny with her.

"They should come," Kid said. "They're my friends."

"Of course. I just wanted to ask you a few questions — let's go this way." They passed through another garden. "This is really a little confused, what with Roger's not being here. I guess he's… gone for the night. He wanted to get a chance to talk to you, I know that; he told me so. He wanted to find out a few things he thought the readers of the Times might be interested in… we were actually going to interview you together. I help Roger with a lot of his newspaper work. Draft a lot of his articles. As you might imagine, he's a busy man."

"You write his articles?" Lanya asked. "I always wondered where he got the time to do all he does."

"I don't actually write anything he signs. And… I research a lot for him." Bill turned up a small path Kid remembered having walked over twice during the evening but couldn't remember where it led. "Roger wanted to ask you — well, we both did… just a few things. I was going to wait for him. But I get the impression that people might start leaving soon. And if Roger didn't get back in time, I know he'd still want me to use the opportunity."

Before two spotlights, fixed low to trees at opposite corners of the clearing, white wicker furniture cast black coils and curlicues on the grass.

"Nobody seems to have found their way here yet. Why don't we have a seat and get started?"

Denny sat beside Kid on the edge of the bench, leaning forward on his knees to look over at Bill, who took the paddle-backed lounge. Lanya stood a little ways away, leaning on a tree trunk, once brushing at her autumn-colored skirts to strike in them silver rain.

"I want to ask you a few questions about your gang — your nest. And then something about your work… your poetry. All right?"

Kid shrugged. He was excited and uncomfortable; but the two states, vivid as feelings, seemed to cancel any physical sign of either.

He looked at Lanya.

She had folded her arms and was listening rather like someone who had just passed by and stopped.

Denny was looking at the control box, wanting to play with it, but also wondering if this were the time.

Lanya hovered among various blues.

Bill ran his hand from the mike along the wire to the recorder, turned a knob, and looked up again. "Tell me first, how do you feel having your book published? It's your first book, right?"

"Yeah. It's my first. I like it, all the commotion. I think it's stupid, but it's… fun. There aren't very many mistakes in it … I mean the ones the people who put the type together made."

"Well, that's very good. You feel, then, the poems are as you wrote them; that you can take full responsibility for them?"

"Yeah." Kid wondered why the muffled accusation did not make him more uncomfortable. Possibly because he'd been through it already in silence.

"I mean," Bill went on, "I remember Ernest Newboy telling us, one evening, about how hard you worked on the galleys. He was very struck by it. Did Mr Newboy help you much with the poems themselves? I mean, would you say he was an influence on your work?"

"No." He does think, Kid thought, that I'm seventeen! He laughed, and the familiarity of the deception put him even more at ease. He moved back on the lounge and let his knees fall apart. So far it wasn't so bad.

Something moved at the corner of Kid's eye. Bill looked up too.

Revelation stood behind them with Milly, who he had not seen since they had surprised her in the bushes.

Denny went, "Shhhhh," took his finger from his lips and pointed to the recorder.

"Can you tell me—"

Kid looked back.

Bill coughed. " — tell me something about the scorpions, about the way you live, and why you live that way?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Do you like it?"

"Sure."

"Do you feel that this way of life offers you some protection, or makes it easier for you to survive in Bellona? I guess it's a pretty dangerous and unknown place, now."

Kid shook his head. "No… it isn't that dangerous, for us. And I'm getting to know it pretty well."

"You all live together, in a sort of commune — nest, as you call it. Tell me, do you know the commune of young people that used to live in the park?"

Kidd nodded. "Yeah. Sure."

"Did you get along well with each other?"

"Pretty much."

"But they're fairly peaceful; while your group believes in violence, is that right?"

"Well, violence—" Kid grinned—"that isn't something you believe in. That's something that happens. But I guess it happens more around us than around them."

"Someone told me that, for a while, you were a member of this other commune; but apparently you preferred the scorpions."

"Yeah." Kid pressed his lips and nodded. "…well, no, actually. I was never a member of the other commune. I hung around; they fed me. But they never made me a part of it. The scorpions, now, soon as I got with them, they took me right in, made me a part. That's probably why I like it better. We had a couple of kids hanging around our place who should probably have ended up with the park people; but we fed them too. Then they drifted on. That's what you have to do."

Bill nodded, his own lips pursed. "There's been talk that some of the things you guys indulge in get pretty rough. People have been killed… or so one story goes."

"People have been hurt," Kid said. "One guy was killed. But he wasn't a scorpion."

"But the scorpions killed him…?"

Kid turned up his hands. "What am I supposed to say now?" He grinned again.

Behind Bill, a dozen others had gathered. Another cough, behind Kid, made him realize another dozen had come up to listen.

Bill's eyes came back to Kid. "Do you think, objectively, that the way you're living is… a good way?"

"I like it." Kid felt his jaw with his wide fingertips and heard five-hour stubble rasp. "But that's subjective. Objectively? It depends on what you think of the way the rest of the world is living."

"What do you think of it?"

"Well, look at it," Kid said. Then he coughed, which caused some general laughter, defining the audience he had not looked at yet as thirty, or even forty: scorpions and other guests.

Nightmare stepped into the clearing, said, "Say, what's everybody—?" then got quiet and went to sit on the grass next to Dragon Lady.

"How would you describe life in the nest?"

"Fucking crowded!"

"Oh, man!" D-t slapped Tarzan's palm. "He said fucking crowded!"

"Shut up, you two," Raven said.

"And with all the crowding, and all the violence, you still manage to work — to write."

"When I get a chance."

Lanya laughed at that. She was the palest orange, flaking to palest pink and purple. Denny held the box between his knees; his arms were folded.

"A lot of people have commented on the, how shall I say, colorfulness of your poems, their vivid descriptive quality. Is there any connection between the violence and that?"

"Probably. But I don't know what it is."

"Do your friends in the nest like your book?"

"I don't think most of the guys read too much."

"Hey, man!" Nightmare called out. "I ain't even in his fuckin' nest and I read every fuckin' one!" which caused someone else to call: "Yeah, they're great! The Kid writes great," and someone else: "Sure, ain't you got this party for him?"

Kid leaned back and laughed and closed his eyes. His own laughter had begun in the calamity of shouts and calls.

"Come on," Bill said loudly. "Come on, now. I just want to ask the Kid a few more questions. Come on…"

Kid opened his eyes and found his lashes wet. Light around the garden glittered and streaked. He shook his head.

"I want to ask you, Kid—"

"Come on, be quiet!" Lady of Spain said. "Come on, shut up, man! He's trying to ask the Kid some questions!"

"— want to ask you: How would you sum up what you're trying to say in your poems?"

Kid leaned his elbows on his knees. "How the hell am I supposed to do that, sum up what I'm trying to say?"

"I guess you'd rather we just read—"

"Shit, I don't care if you read it or not"

"I just meant that—"

"I'm trying to—" Kid looked up at Bill, frowning in the pause—"to construct a complicitous illusion in lingual catalysis, a crystalline and conscientious alkahest."

"…again?" Bill asked.

"You listen to that too carefully and you'll figure out what it means." Kid let the frown reverse into a grin. "Then the words will die on you and you won't understand any more."

Bill laughed. "Well, do you feel that your work accomplishes what… ever you set out to do?"

"How am I supposed to decide that?" Kid sat back again. "I mean suppose one person liked something I wrote. I'd want to make what I say here mean something to him. Suppose somebody else didn't like it. I'm a snob. I'd like to be able to talk to him too. But somebody you've had a good time with and somebody you've had a bad time with, you talk to in different ways. There isn't much overlap in what you can say to both. Maybe, just, I did it." Kid sat back. "And maybe, you know, other people can think of reasons not to even insist on that too much. Look, the guys are getting fidgety. I've made too much noise already." He looked around at the gathered nest. "I guess Mr C just isn't going to make it this evening."

Ernestine Throckmorton (Spider stood beside her, his belly lashed with gauze and adhesive) said: "I guess he isn't. He'll be absolutely mortified he missed you. I just don't know where—"

"You think something happened to him?" Raven looked around with swaying top-knot. "You want us to go out and look for him?"

"Oh, no!" Ernestine said. "No, that's not necessary. When he left, he said he… might be late. That's why he put the Captain and myself in charge."

Neither the Captain nor Frank were present. Paul Fenster, with a beer can at his hip, stood directly opposite.

"Look, we've got most of my guys here, just about." Kid stood, feeling among his neck chains. "It's getting time for me to split. Any of you guys who want to come along with me, come on." He caught his shield (nicked his thumb knuckle on an orchid prong and thought: The price of dramatic exits) and flipped the pip.

The scorpions on the grass squinted in blue light. Denny did something with the box and laughed: And Lanya stood up a-swirl in crimson and indigo.

Where Dragon Lady had been, her dragon rose.

"Uh… thank you." Bill looked about. "Eh, thank you an awful lot. I'm sure Roger will have what he… I mean you gave some very interesting…"

People got to their feet amidst the glowing, growing menagerie.

The 3-D Rohrschach that was Denny turned and turned and moved through the crush.

Kid doused long enough for Lanya to see him. She caught his hand. Branches cut through the insubstantial luminosities wheeling the garden.

"How'd I do?"

"Lord," she said. "This has been a party! Roger doesn't know what he missed — then again, maybe he does."

In another garden, beyond some dozen guests, Kamp and Fenster had become deeply embroiled in animated agreement.

Heavy Cathedral, with white California (greasy hair swinging long as his chains), was very drunk in the corner:

"We goin'? Oh, shit… Oh, shit, I can't go…"

"What we goin' for?"

"I think we gotta go, you know…?"

"We gotta go already…?"

Three others went splashing through the pool in May.

And Copperhead began to laugh and point so vigorously, Kid thought: He's drunk enough to fall down in a minute. Moments later, however, along with Glass, the girl, Dollar, and Spitt, Copperhead was ambling across the terrace.

Kid thought (and saw Captain Kamp look up and thought as counterpoint to that first thought: He's thinking the same thing): They're going to start breaking up the place.

They didn't.

"Oh," Kamp said to Ernestine, "you mean they're going now… well, eh… Good night!"

Revelation said: "Hey, man, I can't go." He shook his head, deviling his hair to a gold cotton. Yellow chains rattled over his pink, pink chest. "I got something goin' here, you know? And I'm so fuckin' smashed… look, you go on, and maybe I'll see you back there in the morning."

Kid nodded, pushed past and came up before Thelma who opened her mouth, said, "Um…" and was gone.

Angel, at the bar table, picked up a full bottle of whiskey, put it under his thin arm, and started after the others.

"Hey…" the black bartender said.

Captain Kamp hurried up.

I could be a hero, Kid thought, and make him put it back. Suddenly he said, "Shit…" pulled away from Lanya, and loped over to the bar. "Captain, we've got a long—"

"Your friend," Captain Kamp said, "just walked off with a full bottle of—"

"— got a long walk back. And I just don't think one is going to be enough." Kid picked up another bottle (he chose it because it had the cap on, but saw, when it was in his hand that it was only half full: Well, it was a gesture) and, to the Captain's frown, flipped on his shield. "Tell Mr Calkins thanks. Good night."

Kamp squinted and pulled back, his face washed with light the same pale blue as his shirt. His eyes, widening, rose.

When Kid left the terrace steps and was halfway across the lawn, "You," Lanya told him, "are a perfect child!"

"Fuck you. You want to go put it back?"

"No. Come on."

"Hey," Angel was saying to the young Filipino gate keeper, "you want a fuckin' drink? How come they didn't let you up to the party?"

"Thank you, no. That's all right—"

"You got just as much right to a party as we got! You wanna drink?"

"Thank you, no. Good night."

"God-damn motherfuckers! Keep a God-damn gook down here workin' his ass off all night while everybody else is up having a good time—"

"Come on," Kid said. "Let's get going. Go on, get out. Hurry up, will you."

"Hey, gook; are you from Nam? I was in Nam…"

"Come on!"

"I was in Nam," Angel said. "We should give him a fuckin' drink!"

As they herded, blindingly, through the gate, Lansang said: "Excuse me, I've got something for you."

"Huh?" Kid turned.

The brown hand went under the brown lapel for an inside pocket. "Here." On the envelope's corner was a small Times masthead. "Mr Calkins asked me to give this to you if, by any chance, he didn't get back before the evening was over."

"Oh." Kid folded the envelope and slid it into his pants pocket beside Lanya's harmonica.

"What's that?" Lanya asked. Her arm was around Denny's shoulder.

Kid shrugged. "Where's Madame Brown?"

"She left with Everett, a long time ago."

"Oh."

Spider, dragon, newt and waddling bird lit the street.

"Hey, can I have some of that?" Jack the Ripper asked as they reached the corner.

"Sure. You can carry it too."

"Thanks." The Ripper took the bottle, removed the cap, swigged, and belched. "God damn!" He put the cap back on. "That's good!" He shook his head like a terrier. "Yeah… hey, did you see that old white guy from Alabama with the bald head? He's supposed to be some sort of colonel or something…"

"I saw him," Kid said. "Didn't meet him."

"He's a funny guy," the Ripper said. "Man, he just loved me. Wouldn't let me alone the whole God-damn night."

"What'd he want?"

In the glow of shifting beasts, the Ripper smiled down at the bottle. "T' suck on my big, black dick."

Kid laughed. "You let him?"

"Shit." The Ripper wiped the bottle neck with the paler heel of his hand, then put the cap back on. "If I was in Atlanta, I could've got ten, twenty dollars out of that old guy, you know? Even a steady thing, you know, where you drop in every couple of days, pull down your pants and pick up your pay. It ain't so bad. But around here, there ain't even any God-damn money or anything, you know?" The Ripper reached among the heavy links, tucked his shallow chin back in his neck to look for his shield, found it, flipped it. "…But he ain't so bad," he repeated.

Kid walked beside a raging mantis with swaying ruby eyes.

Watching the walkers among the ballooning lights, Kid realized that the group was nearly a fourth smaller than the one which had come up with him. Nightmare's scorpion, on the corner, threw a half dozen amblers (Baby was the one recognizable) into silhouette.

Listening to their silent progress down, Kid recalled their boisterous journey up. A street lamp pulsed above the corner (they had passed it before. Where?) and Kid saw the couple, hand in hand, beneath it.

"Hey, you two."

The woman turned, surprised, and raised her free hand: Bracelets clattered to her pale elbow. She blinked interrogatively, then smiled.

The man looked over at Kid. "Hello." He brushed back long hair, the color of wild rice, from his cheek and smiled too.

"What are you supposed to be doing here?"

"Oh, we… well, we were at… your party." Over his double-breasted jacket, he wore a large lion's-head medallion that, in this light, looked like metallic plastic. It hung around his neck on a loop of the optical chain. "We have to get down to Temple, and we just thought we'd walk along with you, for the company."

"It's all right, isn't it?" the woman asked.

"Sure," Kid said. "You can walk anywhere you fucking well want."

"Um… thanks," the man said.

"You want a drink?" Kid looked around in the darkness. "Hey, Ripper come here!" He took the bottle from the tire-colored hands that jutted from the mantis. "Here, have a drink. We got a long walk."

"Thanks, no," the man said. "I don't drink."

"I do," the woman said and reached out a clinking arm.

"Good." Kid nodded and gave her the bottle. He left them while she was still uncapping it, wondering where, over the last few moments, he had misplaced Lanya and Denny.

He heard their laughter some twenty feet behind him.

He turned to face the dark; and realized how dark it was.

"You scared?" Denny laughed. "There ain't nothing to be scared of."

Lanya said: "I'm not scared. Unlike you, I don't believe in ghosts."

Kid turned on his lights.

Lanya gave a little shriek and fell into Denny's arms, both of them blue and helpless with hysterics;

"Are you drunk?" Kid asked.

"No," she said. "I'm not drunk," and began to laugh again.

"She smells like she's drunk," Denny said.

"How would you—" Still laughing, she straightened up and nearly tripped at the curb.

Which started all three of them off again.

When they were halfway down the next block, Denny asked: "You like your party?"

"Yeah," Kid said. "I wish I'd gotten a chance to say good night to the old girl with the crab cakes and the blue hair. She was my favorite."

"Ernestine? She's priceless!" Lanya said. "Where's my harmonica?"

Kid pawed in his pocket. Beside the mouth organ and the envelope, there was grit at the bottom. The metal was so warm on bis hand it might have been artificially heated.

He gave her the harp.

She played three chords, walking beside him, then started some improvisation in long, platinum notes that took her two, three, four steps ahead.

Denny had turned on his lights (and apparently turned off her dress). Her back was silver, and as she played she trod the joined shadows of herself.

Between two notes, something crackled at Kid's hip: The envelope. He pushed thick fingertips into his pocket to feel the folded edge.

Copperhead, the girl in maroon jeans tucked tightly under his arm, bobbed into the dim penumbra. "Hey, Kid!" He grinned, broad-nosed, freckle-lipped, and bobbed out.

Kid fantasized a conversation: Copperhead, did Mr Calkins ever hire you to keep people away from his place? I mean, were you working for him that first day you guys beat me up? No, he didn't want to know.

Behind Kid, Angel, Glass, and Priest were in altercation.

"No!" Glass interrupted himself at some request from Dollar. "What do you want any for? You just got through tellin' us how it makes you sick."

"What I wanna know…" Angel said, thickly. "No, wait, man. Let him have it. Let the dumb white motherfucker get sick if he want to — Now, what I want to know is, where do all these niggers come from?"

"Louisiana," Priest said, "mostly. But there're a lot of guys here from Chicago. Like you. Illinois, anyway."

I just don't like, Kid thought, the idea of not wanting to know anything. He looked around luminous dark. "Hey, Copperhead?"

But Copperhead's arachnid, scales bright as the undersides of submerged rose leaves sheened with air, ballooned ahead, drifted away. The legs, rigorous and hirsute, with a faint indigo after-image, deviled Kid's eyes behind sliding striations.

What he'd expected most from this evening — information about Calkins — the whole over-determined matrix seemed bent on denying him.

A gorgeous bird collapsed near him. Ahead, among a dozen others, a scorpion flickered. Harmonica music was drowned in breaking glass and laughter: someone had dropped the bottle. The bird ignited again; Kid glanced around to see the pavement glisten.

They exhaust my eyes. My ears are on fire. There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.