Dhalgren

are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them do it.'

He raised his hand above his face, palm up, moving his fingers, watching them, black against four-fifths black, his arm muscle tiring, till he let his knuckles fall against his forehead. 'I was so scared… When I woke up, I was so scared!'

'It was just a dream,' she insisted. And then: 'Look, if it really was an accident, your bringing that poster didn't have anything to do with it. And if she did do it on purpose, then she's so far gone there's no way you could possibly blame yourself!'

'I know,' he said. 'But do you think…' He could feel the place on his neck her breath brushed warmly. 'Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?'

'Of course it does,' she said. 'San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one than say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely.' She waited.

So at last he said. 'Yeah… But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?'

'Yes,' she said, 'that's crazy — in a word.'

He slid his arm around her and could smell her wake-up breath, cuddling her. 'You know, when I pulled him out, blood all over me, like a flayed carcass off a butcher hook… you know, I had half a hard-on? That's too much, huh?'

She reached between his legs. 'You still do.' She moved her fingers there; he moved in her fingers.

'Maybe that's what I was dreaming about?' He laughed sharply. 'Do you think that's what I was—?'

Her hand contracted, released, moved forward, moved back.

He said: 'I don't think that's going to do any good…'

Against his chest he felt her shrug. 'Try.'

Not so much to his surprise, but somehow against his will, his will ceased, and it did.

I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body's machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-corporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.

The leaf shattered in his blunt fingers: leaf and flesh — he ground the flakings with his roughened thumb — were the same color, a different texture. He stared, defining the distinction.

'Come on.' Lanya caught up his hand.

Flakes fluttered away (some he felt cling); notebook under his other arm, he stood up from where he'd been leaning on the end of the picnic table. 'I was just thinking,' Kidd said, 'maybe I should stop off at the Labry's and try to collect my money.'

'And keep Mr Newboy waiting?' Lanya asked. 'Look, you said you got them all moved!'

'I was just thinking about it,' Kidd said. 'That's all.'

A young man with a high, bald forehead and side hair to his naked shoulders sat on an overturned wire basket, one sandal resting over the other. He leaned forward, a burned twig in each hand. They had smudged his fingers. 'I take these from you crossed,' he said to a girl sitting Indian fashion on the ground before him, 'and give them to you crossed.'

The girl's black hair was pulled back lacquer tight, till, at the thong whipped a dozen times around her pony tail and tied, it broke into a dozen rivulets about the collar of her pink shirt: her sleeves were torn off; frayed pink threads lay against her thin arms. With her own smudged fingers, she took the twigs. 'I take these from you—' she hesitated, concentrated—'uncrossed and I give them to you—' she thrust them back—'uncrossed?'

Some spectators in the circle laughed. Others looked as bemused as she did.

'Nope. Got it wrong again.' The man spread his feet, sandal heels lining the dirt, and drew them back against the basket rim. 'Now watch.' With crossed wrists he took the sticks from her: 'I take these from you… uncrossed—' his wrists came apart—'and I give them back to you…'

John, scratching under the fringed shoulder of his Peruvian vest with one hand and eating a piece of bread with the other, came around the furnace. 'You guys want some more?' He gestured with the slice, chewing. 'Just go take it. You didn't get here till we were already halfway through breakfast.' Gold-streaked hair and gold wire frames set off his tenacious tan; his pupils were like circles cut from the overcast.

Kidd said: 'We had enough. Really.'

In the basket on which the bald man sat ('I take these from you uncrossed and I give them to you… crossed!' More laughter.) a half dozen loaves of bland, saltless bread had been brought over by two scorpions who had taken back two cardboard cartons of canned food, in exchange.

Kidd said: 'You're sure that's today's paper?' which was the third time he'd asked John that over the last hour.

'Sure I'm sure.' John picked the paper up off the picnic table. 'Tuesday, May 5th — that's May-day, isn't it? — 1904. Faust brought it by this morning.' He folded it back, began to beat it against his thigh.

'Tell Milly when she gets back thanks again for the clean shirt.' Lanya tucked one side of the rough-dried blue cotton under her belt. 'I'll bring it back later this afternoon.'

'I will. I think Milly's laundry project—' John mused, beating, munching—'is one of the most successful we've investigated. Don't you?'

Lanya nodded, still tucking.

'Come on,' Kidd said. 'Let's get going. I mean if this is really Tuesday. You're sure he said Tuesday now?'

'I'm sure,' Lanya said.

('Nope, you're still doing it wrong, now watch: I take them from you crossed and I give them to you uncrossed.' His fingers smudged to the second knuckle and bunched at the base of the charred batons, came forward. Hers, smeared equally, hesitated, went back to fiddle with oae another, started to take them again. She said: 'I just don't get it. I don't get it at all.' Fewer laughed this time.)

'So long,' Kidd said to John, who nodded, his mouth full.

They made their way through the knapsacks.

'That was nice of them to feed us… again,' he? said. 'They're not bad kids.'

'They're nice kids.' She brushed at her clean, wrinkled front. 'Wish I had an iron.'

'You really have to get dressed up to go visit Calkins' place, huh?'

Lanya glanced appraisingly at his new black jeans, his black leather vest. 'Well, you're practically in uniform already. I, unlike you, however, am not at my best when scruffy.'

They made their way toward the park entrance.

'What's the laundry project?' he asked. 'Do they have some place where they pound the clothes with paddles on a rock?'

'I think,' Lanya said, 'Milly and Jommy and Wally and What's-her-name-with-all-the-Indian-silver found a laundromat or something a few days ago. Only the power's off. Today they've gone off to find the nearest three- pronged outlet that works.'

'Then when did the one you have on get done?'

'Milly and I washed a whole bunch by hand in the ladies' john yesterday, while you were at work.'

'Oh.'

'Recording engineer to laundress,' Lanya mused as they passed through the lion gate, 'in less than a year.' She humphed. 'If you asked him, I suspect John would tell you that's progress.'

'The paper says it's Tuesday.' Kidd moved his thumb absently against the blade of his orchid he'd hooked through a side belt loop; inside it, the chain harness jingled, each step. 'He said come up when the paper said it