But now the bicycle wheel's become a reel of film, and in the passover it's come partially unwound. Thumb jammed at the center, fingers dialing, I start rewinding. Images click against my wrists.
"Guess you must show that to your wife, get her primed and wet, huh?" the bearded man behind the counter says. "Have to tell you: I've handled my share of erotica through here over the years. But that damn near made me wet."
When I grope for bus fare back out on the street, film tucked beneath my arm the same way he'd carried it, I drop the reel. It hits the pavement and begins smoking. Burns its way through like a cattle brand, making a kind of patterned manhole. I lean over and look. There's a whole subterranean city below. Streets, buildings, cars. Someone walking by down there looks up at me. Our eyes meet.
I awake lying on the floor, eye to eye with Dana, who's just stepped into view above me, naked except for the press pass alligator-clipped to one nipple. Swampy, mothball smell off her body.
'You're ready, aren't you, Lewis?" Definitely I seem to be ready. She lowers herself onto me. "News at six? Good news for a change?" Body warm as a bath. Completes itself with my small emendation. Press pass swinging gaily back and forth as she moves above. "Don't forget me, Lew." Moving ever faster as a long moan escapes her. "Whatever happens, don't forget me." She throws her head back in abandon. When she brings it forwards again, her head has become a grinning skull.
"Jesus!"
I started awake-really awake thistime-heartpounding, fingernails pushed hard into palms. Probably crescents of bright blood there.
"Bad dreams, my boy?" Standing by the window, from the sound of it.
I heard the tab rip from a beer can, which cinched it. I was getting pretty good at this. Think of men in old movies sitting faithfully before their sonar screens listening to blips.
"My boy, your black ass," I said. "Been reading those damn British novels again, haven't you. Thought you told me you were done with those."
"Yeah. But sometimes what we're done with isn't done with us, you know?"
Time rolled itself millimeters thinner.
"You're a Trollope, Slaughter. A slut, just like Molly Bloom. I ever tell you that?"
"As well you as another."
"Good to see you, Hosie-in a manner of speaking. Thanks for coming."
"How you doing, boy."
'There you go with that boy shit again."
"What can I say? Three generations-"
"-out of slavery. I've read Himes too, remember?"
He pulled the tab on another beer and held it out to me. I reached and found it. Always had his shoulder bag with him those days. Never far from a corner store here in the civilized swamp.
"I most assuredly do remember," Hosie said. "And I'm here to tell you I can groove on that. Know where you're comingfrom. I hear you."
Once he'd written an entire column on local government in current catchwords and cliches, another time a whole essay in song tides. Hung out in cafes and bus stations and bars just to listen to people talk, then he'd go home afterwards and write it all down. I often wonder what Hosie would have thought if he'd lived into the rap era. He'd have loved hip-hop's special language- flavor, down on, up for.
'What time of day you think it is, anyway?" he said. Man never did have any sense of time. Forever ringing doorbells at three in the morning only to say, authentically surprised and apologetic: Hey, I wake you up? I could hear his hand rubbing at the window.
"Everything gray out there. Tops of buildings look the same as sky."
He downed most of the rest of his beer at a gulp and belched magnificently.
"Raining," I said.
And hard, from the sound of it. Water would be rising inch by inch towards midtown porches, trash at curbside all over the city levitating, the Corps of Engineers' clever pumps chugging away at their efforts to push water out of the city and back up to sea level.
"Weather will continue bad, yes. More calamities, death, despair. Not the slightest inclination of a change anywhere. No escape. The weather will not change."
"Henry Miller."
Very good, sir. Your prize."
He set another beer, cracked open, on the nightstand. Three there now in a perfect row. I'd counted them the way movie cowboys count expended bullets.
"You love them so much, Lew. Literature, the language itself."
"You taught me that, Hosie, a lot of it."
"I did, didn't I? I did." He was quiet a moment. "And I wish like hell they'd never let you down. Everything does, you know, sooner or later."
No answer to that. I didn't try. Rain bucketed down outside. Somewhere a phone rang unanswered; stopped; started up again.
"You've all been taking turns, standing watch," I said.
"Guess we have at that."
"Why?"
He didn't answer, but walked back to the window. I tried to imagine, to summon up within myself, what he was seeing out there. Pinpricks of stars. Diminutive fires of the planet. Everything, as he said, gray. As though we were in some reverse aquarium, a cube of air complete with its own strange creatures, with water all around.
I never found out exacdy what it was that had hurt my friend so-something working in him a long time, that finally found purchase. In future years I'd come to recognize similar things scrabbling for footholds within myself. They were already there, of course, even then. Sometimes at night I heard them breathing.
"We care about you, Lew. That's not enough?"
Guess it would have to be.
"I've got a story to write," Hosie said, and left.
Days marched in and out much as Hosie had, appearing unannounced, just as suddenly gone, banners bright or damp. Elsewhere in the world, wars were declared or fought undeclared, sons left home, workers tore open fingers and drove steel rods into their eyes, history smoothed its skirt in place over lap and legs. LaVerne and Hosie brought me tapes: T. S. Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas reading their own work, a five-cassette Dead Souls, Francois Villon.
Two times a day someone appeared, generally an intern or resident, infrequently a nurse, to clean and dress wounds in chest and thigh. Med school professors swept through with students like so many gulping pilot fish in their wake. Meals arrived on covered trays, medications came, phlebotomists entered apologetically, social workers asked about diings that were none of their business and went away when I made no response.
LaVerne, Don and Hosie were there frequently, from time to time others: Sam Brown from SeCure Corps, Frankie DeNoux, Bonnie Bider, Achilles Boudleaux. Doo-Wop even stopped by one morning on his rounds. Things awful slow out there, Captain, he told me.
I listened to the Folkways poetry tape till I'd got it mosdy by heart.
One morning LaVerne climbed into bed beside me as the tape played. We'd done this before. Basically the nursing response was threefold. Some thought it was great, no problem. Others insisted it was against hospital policy. (One foot on the floor at all times?) A handful thought it abominable. Nurses in this last category had a penchant for wheeling about and storming back through the door.
"What do you think, Lew? Enough time out? Dinner's been on the table awhile now. Getting pretty cold."
I could smell her perfume, the scented shampoo she'd used, breath sweet with champagne and cheese. Her sweat, that smelled like no one else's. That distant odor she always insisted I imagined, of other men.
"Sooner or later-some things-you have to decide, Lew."
She burrowed closer against me, as into covers on cold mornings.
"I miss you so much, hon."
Some code in their bodies, in our own, stamped and trampled deep, a code we never understand, never learn to read, but respond to.
"And I'm sotired, Lew."
We listened to traffic build outside. How many mornings had we lain like this, LaVerne newly home from work, light filling the world's wide-mouthed jar, all our city's good citizens slipping back into their lives.