Cities of the Red Night

Sunset, train whistles. I am on the train with Waring. Red clay roads and flint chips glitter in the setting sun.

Pilots the plane across time into a waiting taxi, steep stone street, boy with erection yellow pimples turn-of-the-century lips parted ... red hair freckles a ladder.

A young face floats in front of his eyes. The lips, twisted in a smile of ambiguous sexual invitation, move in silent words that stir and ache in his throat with a taste of blood and metallic sweetness. He feels the dizzy death weakness breathing through his teeth, his breath ice cold.

The boy in front of him lights up inside, a blaze of light out at his eyes in a flash as Audrey feels the floor drop out from under him. He is falling, the face floating down with him, then a blinding flash blots out the room and the waiting faces.

Cheers here are the nondead

A tenor voice was singing in my head:

'A touch of sun, a touch of sun

The color sergeant said ...'

I woke up with something cold on my chest. A doctor was sitting by my bed with a stethoscope.

'Hello there, young guy,' he said when I opened my eyes.

A naval officer stood beside the doctor, looking down at me. I could feel a cast around my neck. The doctor turned to the other officer:

'Heart's sound as a gold dollar. Should be out of the cast in a week.'

The officer looked down at me from some stinker of a battleship film: 'If you feel like that again, son, so see the shrink or the chaplain.'

'Would someone show me my face in the mirror?'

The doctor held a hand mirror in front of me. A shock of recognition. Familiar young face. Red hair.

'Just wanted to be sure I was still there.'

The doctor and the officer laughed, and I heard the door close. The face looked at me from the foot of the bed.

'Hello. I'm Jimmy Lee. You're Jerry. We're identical twins. I'm in the medics, you're in communications. U.S. Navy, six years' service. Depressed over the death of your pet monkey, you tried to hang yourself. I cut you down in time. That's our story. You want to remember....'

They had to be careful about sex in the navy, so Jimmy and Jerry got a book on astral projection and decided to learn to do it in the 'second state,' as the book called it, and they finally succeeded though they never knew exactly when it would happen or who was going to visit whom until it happened and this was sometimes under embarrassing circumstances, like in the shower room or during a physical examination. One twin lets out an eerie high-pitched wolf howl and turns bright red all over as the hairs on his head and body stand up and crackle. Then, as if struck by lightning, he falls to the floor in an erotic seizure ejaculating repeatedly in front of the appalled and salacious tars. A slack-jawed pimply boy from east Texas watches with a bestial leer.

'Look at his peter!'

'Medics!'

Jimmy describes a typical attack to a flustered navy psychiatrist:

'First there's this smell, Doctor. Like skunks in heat, if you'll pardon the expression, sir. It chokes you and gets you hot. Like a popper, sir.' He makes a motion of breaking a popper under his nose, moans and shows his teeth. The doctor coughs, opens a window and pulls up a venetian blind. Sunlight streams into the room.

'And then Jerry's face comes into focus like. He he he,' he titters. 'That reminds me of a joke, sir. This old Jew, sir, got his wife and Mrs. Lieberman from next door in his car, he is driving out into the country to focus his headlights, sir, and he's got a sheet to do it with and Mrs. Lieberman sees him getting the sheet out, sir, and she says: