on hers,
on his.
“Do I have to wear the hat?” he said.
“Sure you do! It suits you, too. Isn’t it neat how it changes…” She pushed ahead of him to unlock and open the door, and he thought he heard her say, “…just like you?”
They only spent a few minutes in daylight, and Sylvie led Milo underground again, this time into the subways. They sat side by side in the strobing, shaking car with the suitcases on their laps; it was awkward, but Sylvie insisted they carry them that way. She also insisted that Milo sit on her left and that they hold the suitcases with the lettering facing out:
“Free advertising,” she said. No one looked. No oneever looked on the subway. If they looked, it meant trouble. Anything could happen down there, Milo learned; a baby could be born, water could spring from a stone, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could thunder from a businessman’s lapel, and everybody would turn their page ofNewsweek or theEnquirer or theNew York Times and keep their eyes down and their elbows close to their hips.
“What were you doing on the street where I fell yesterday?” Milo said between Manchester Avenue and Lafayette Park.Make it sound like ordinary conversation. “You were right below there, weren’t you?”
“It was listed in my ephemeris: ‘Boy falling out of the sky northeast of the MacCauly Building.’”
“Come on, Sylvie.”
Sylvie shifted uncomfortably on the crowded bench. “Hey! You’re the mystery man, not me, champ. I was going someplace, that’s all. Do you have to take up so much room?”
Milo scrunched himself farther into the end of the bench. “Have you ever been up there in that building where I fell from?”
“Where youflew from, you mean? Maybe. Yeah. Why? Yeah.” She looked away.
Don’t push too hard. She already knows I’m suspicious. She probably thinks I’ve seen her up there, and she’s cooking up an excuse right now.
“I might have a client up there, I think, if it’s the building I’m thinking of,” Sylvie said.
“Equidecohoozits?”
“No. Well, sort of. Paintings. Copies of the Masters. Subscription service. It’s another sideline. I got acouple of clients like that in that block. What wereyou doing up there?”
“Seeing a shrink.”
“You crazy?”
“Just nervous. I have trouble sleeping, like.”
“You’re telling me!”
“What do you mean?”
The train stopped. Sylvie slid sideways into Milo, then righted herself as the doors slid open and two women rushed in, business executives, briefcases under their arms, talking about wheat futures. They grabbed a stanchion and braced themselves. The doors clapped shut, and the train lurched forward.
“What did you mean?” Milo said.
“You kept me up half the night, screaming and talking in your sleep.”
“More than the once? What did I say?”
“Who cares? Stick with me, Milo. I’ll teach you how to sleep…Let’s move to the next car. I don’t like those two ladies.”
“Did I say something about Dede?”
“Every damn thing you say is about Dede, Milo. Get up and let’s go to the next car. They’re looking at me.”
One of the execs was edging closer. “Moon and Stars? Hey, Moon and Stars! I want to talk to you! I’ve got another deal. Hey!” There was a quality of pleading in the woman’s voice. Sylvie shoved Milo through the passage to the next car, and then the next, brutalizing whoever blocked the way and letting them curse.
“I hate that,” she said at last. “I did something for her when I was still green, and now she won’t leave me alone.”
“What do you mean, everything I say is about Dede?”
“It’s a big city, Milo. You can say whatever you like.”
The train stopped. They squeezed out, pinched between the shoulders of a dozen workers, shoppers, and students, only some of whom, in the subterranean light, looked human. Milo dutifully clutched his suitcase handle, clutched it so hard it made him think of the way he was clutching something else, in his belly, clutching so deep and so hard for so long that he had stopped thinking of it as something hedid; instead it had come to seem like something he suffered. They climbed up into a broad, cobbled square separated by a massive archway from a sunlit park.
Sylvie walked briskly. Milo quickened his pace to stay abreast. They passed through the arch, across a meadow the size of a football field, and down a dirt pathway through a clump of trees, until they came in sight of a picnic shelter.
“This is it,” she said. “Employee picnic. Dingsboomps, Incorporated or something. Full payment on day of performance. Watch this.”
A few children were running toward them from the shelter. As they came within badgering distance, Milo, hanging back a few yards, saw Sylvie’s suitcase stop in midair while Sylvie herself kept walking, still holding on. Like a tugboat trying to pull the shoreline out to sea, Sylvie suddenly was yanked back. The children giggled. Sylvie scowled. She pulled at the case. It wouldn’t budge. She pushed it. She leaned against it. The children fell down laughing.
Between her teeth, she said to Milo, “Kick it.”
“Huh?”
“Kick it.”
Milo kicked it. The case flew forward, tumbling Sylvie to the ground. Milo rushed to help her.
“You ass,” she said. “This ispart of it. Give me your hand.” Befuddled, he did it. Sylvie grabbed, pulling Milo down on top of her, sputtering and flailing. “Whoa!” she said-theatrically. The children howled.
They ran to the shelter to get their friends.
Milo lay face down, blinking and huffing, on top of Sylvie, face up, laughing. “You’ll do,” she said. His chest was on top of her chest. He could feel the breasts inside her smock. His legs were on top of hers.
Her hair, the little of it that spilled out of the bowler when she tumbled, was in his face.
He scrambled to his feet, tucked his shirt in, wiped his face, recovered the fallen top hat. Sylvie got up.
They picked up the suitcases and walked.
“Why do you dress like a boy?” he said.
“Showbiz, little man. It’s all showbiz. Why do you?”
Sylvie found the Dingsboomps honcho and set up where he told her to. Inside the “AND* STARS***” suitcase there were plastic pipes, tent poles, and colored nylon sheets with sleeves sewn along the hems for the poles and pipes to make a frame. It took fifteen minutes to erect the puppet stage, five of them to shoo away the children and grab back joints and dinguses they’d boosted from Milo’s suitcase.
Once the puppet stage was up, Sylvie was ruthless about keeping kids away. “This is our space, see?” she said to Milo, stooping low in the red light filtering through the nylon. She was hanging puppets and props on hooks backstage. “Nobody but showfolk here, Milo. If Mr. Dingsboomps comes back here, we boot him. If it’s the President of the United States, we boot him. If it’s God Almighty with Saint Peter and Saint Paul…what?”
“Huh?”