"Hey, we got a moon! And we got a George!"
"Shine on, shine on harvest George—"
"Oh man, June and George don't rhyme!"
("Tak and Jack do," Lanya whispered, giggled, and pulled her harmonica from her pocket.)
"But you remember what he do to that little white girl—"
"Oh, shit, was that her name!"
Lanya blew harmonica notes in his ear. He pulled away, "Hey…!" and came back to her, perturbed. She reached up and held his forefinger. Something tickled his blunt knuckle. She was brushing her lips across the ruin of his thumb's first joint. The shoutings died behind them. Overhead, the lights blurred in returning clouds. She played lazy music by his chest, following the ex-soldier and the ex-engineer. Her motion pulled him. She paused to tell him, "You smell good."
"Huh? Yeah, I guess I stink," and cringed.
"I mean it. Good. Like a pear somebody's soaked in brandy."
"That's what happens when you bum around for three weeks and can't get a bath." She nuzzled the forking of his arm.
He thought she was funny. And liked her funniness. And realized that it was because she made it easier to like… whoever he was; and came out of the thoughts trying not to smile. She played randomly.
He beat the paper and notebook on his thigh, till he remembered John whom he did not like, and stopped.
5
Look for shadow in this double-lit mist. A dark communion in the burning streets between the landscape and the smarting senses suggests more sterile agonies. Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don't need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire's base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light.
With the jollity of their progress through the night streets, the repeated exclamations and speculations at the twinned satellites, moments into Tak's dark stairway — footsteps pummeling around him, down, across, then pummeling up — he realized he had no memory of the doorway through which they'd just entered out of the night, save the memory of his exit that lingered from the morning.
"A great idea!" Lanya, behind, was breathing heavily. "A Full George party!"
"If George was the full one," Tak said. "Excuse me; gibbous."
"How far up do you live?" Jack asked, ahead.
The orchid jogged on his hip. Notebook and newspaper — he'd read none of the paper yet — were still clamped in clammy fingers.
"We'll be there in one more — Nope. I mis-counted," Tak called down. "We're here already! Come on! It's party time!"
Metal creaked on metal.
Both Lanya, behind, and Jack, ahead, were laughing.
Above is light. What else does this city cast up on its cloudy cover, from ill-functioning streetlights, from what leaks tentatively out of badly shaded doors and windows, from flame? Is it enough to illuminate another bright, brief, careening, but less-than-standard body?
6
He put the wine bottle on the roof's thigh-high wall. Below, the street lamp was a blurred pearl. He searched the dense and foggy distances, was lost in them.
"What are you looking at?" She came up, surprising, behind.
"Oh." The night was thick with burnt odors. "I don't know."
She picked up the bottle and drank, "All right," and put it down; then said, "You're looking for something. You've got your eyes all squinched up. You were craning way out and… oh, you can't see anything down there for the smoke!"
"The river," he said.
"Hm?" She looked again.
"I can't see the river."
"What river?"
"When I came off the waterfront, across the bridge. This place, it was like two blocks away, maybe. And then, when I first came up here, you could just see the water, as though suddenly the river was a half a mile off. It was right through there. But now I can't see…" craning again.
She said: "You couldn't see the river from here. It's nearly… I don't know exactly; but it's quite a way."
"I could this morning."
"Maybe, but I doubt it." Then she said: "You were here this morning?"
He said: "There isn't any smoke over there. I can't even make out the lights from the bridge, or anything; even the reflections from the places on the waterfront that're burning. Unless they've gone out."
"If they've gone out, the electricity's gone on somewhere else." Suddenly she pulled her shoulders together, gave a little shiver; sighed, and looked up. And said, eventually: "The moon."
"What?"
"Do you remember," she asked, "when they got the first astronauts to the moon?"
"Yeah," he said. "I saw it on TV. A whole bunch of us were over at my friend's house."
"I missed it, until the next morning," she said. "But it was… funny."
"What?"
She pulled her lips in between her teeth, then let them pop. "Do you remember the next time you were outside and you looked up and saw the moon in the sky instead of on television?"
He frowned.
"It was different, remember. I realized that for the last fifty thousand science-fiction novels it had still been just a light hanging up there. And now it was… a place."
"I just figured somebody had taken a shit up there, and why weren't they telling." He stopped laughing. "But it was different; yeah."
"Then tonight." She looked at the featureless smoke. "Because there was another one, that you don't know if anybody's walked on, suddenly both of them were…"
"Just lights again."
"Or…" she nodded. "Something else." Leaning, her elbow touched his arm.
"Hey," Jack said from the doorway, "I think I better go now. I mean… maybe I better go." He looked around the roof. The mist had wrapped them in. "I mean," he said, "Tak's awful drunk, you know? He's sort of…"
"He isn't going to hurt you."
Lanya poised her quick laugh at the rim of amusement, started back, and entered the cabin.
He picked up the wine and followed.
"Now here," Tak announced, coming from the bamboo curtain. "I knew I had some caviar. Got it on the first day up here." He grimaced. "Too much, huh? But I like caviar. Imported." He held up the black jar in his left hand. "Domestic." He raised the orange one in his right. His cap was on the desk with his jacket. His head seemed very small on his thick torso. "I got more stuff in there than you can twitch the proverbial stick at." He set the jars down among a dozen others.
"Isn't it sort of late…" Jack's voice trailed off in the doorway.
"Christ," Lanya said, "what are you going to do with all this junk, Tak?"
"Late supper. Don't worry, nobody goes hungry up at the Fire Wolfs."
He picked up a small jar (cut glass in scarred, horny flesh): "… Spiced Honey Spread …?"
"Oh, yeah." Tak arranged the breadboard on the edge of the desk. "I've even tried some of that before. It's good." He swayed above pickled artichoke hearts and caponata, deviled ham, herring, pimento, rolled anchovies, guava paste, pate. "And another glass of—" He raised the bottle and splashed the liquid around inside. "Jack, some for you?"
"Aw, no. It's getting pretty late."
"Here you go!" He pushed the glass into the boy's hand. Jack took it because it would have dropped otherwise: