'Come on,' Pepper said. 'Take another glass. Bunny don't mind the company.'
'Sorry.' Kid moved his jar from Bunny's reach. 'Thanks.' He smiled. 'I'll come back another time.'
'I'll only let you go if you promise me.' Bunny suddenly reached for Kid's chest. 'No, no, don't jump. Mother's not going to rape you.' Bunny put a finger beneath the chain that crossed Kid's belly. 'We have something in common, you and I.' With the other hand, Bunny lifted the white silk to show the optical chain around a slim, veined neck. 'Nightmare and I. Madame Brown and Nightmare. You and Madame Brown. I wonder if I betray it by mentioning it.' Bunny laughed.
Kid, unsure why, felt his cheeks heat and the rest of his body cool. I can't have absorbed the custom of reticence so completely in so little time, he thought. And still wanted anxiously and urgently to leave.
Bunny was saying, 'I'll tell your girl friend what you said if I see her. You know even if you did have one of those… ahem, smiles I find just too irresistible, I'd still deliver your message. Because then, you see, I'd want you to like me, and to come back. Doing something you wanted me to do would be one way to get that. Just because I'm not a good person—' Bunny winked—'you mustn't think I'm a bad one.'
'Yeah. Sure. Thanks.' Kid tugged away from Bunny's finger. 'I'll see you.'
'Good-bye!' Pepper called from the counter where he'd gone for more wine.
Now the street sign said RUBY and PEARL. The ladder and the lady in greens were gone.
He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down 'Pearl'), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an after image on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It's only, he thought, when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else's notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else's survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that's exactly where it's important and where it's not. The Kid? He thought: I'm going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can't remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I'm somebody famous? No, I do remember too well what I've done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn't what it's about. I'm too used to being liked.
Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his calloused thumb, he turned another corner.
Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings.
Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.
'You got a transfer?'
'Hey, I'm sorry. If you need fare or something—' He stepped back.
But the driver motioned him on. 'This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on.'
An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.
A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.
A couple — he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom — were making a point of not looking at him.
Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody, and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.
Where am I — but wouldn't think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the billowy ball.
He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.
She blinked.
He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.
They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.
He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.
After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct was 'Three Stars says the Times.' On the next R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckle on blades.
On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.
Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, grinning and hanging his neck from slung shoulders.
ECK N W'S
S R OGS
ND
T E G TA Y
announced the next marquee. He looked at broken store windows — in one was a pile of naked dummies. The street widened and once smoke rolled by so that he could make out no letters at all upon the final marquee of the strip.
Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights his own body sensation cast in the nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It's the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.
He looked out the window.
Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):
E
M
B
O
R
I
K
Y'
S
Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with
