My first reaction was that Tak, who had always seemed a pretty big man, became much smaller. Later I realized that the big man simply contained many components, among them a small one
There were three girls among them, one an ebullient young black girl, capped with a large natural and vastly pregnant. They wore chains, some as many as fifteen strands, some as few as two. They were dirty and gregarious. They smiled and talked a sort of quiet half-talk to one another. Boots, leather vests—no shirts—and chains made them look like some ’cycle club in Coventry. A tall, skinny, black boy on the top step had a gallon of wine between his boot heels which periodically passed on its way to the curb and back. The white guy with no vest and the scarred stomach was the only one who wiped the neck—with a hand so grubby the other colored girl, tall and hefty, refused to drink after him. The others laughed as if her rebuke contained more than was apparent. They did not look at me as I strolled on the other side of the street. It is rumored that these men and women can transform themselves in darkness to any one of a gallery of luminous beasts; that they have weapons to turn the slung fist into a five-way cutting tool. I wonder if anyone that I saw there was the Kid—
Also wonder if writing about myself in the third person is really the way to go about losing or making a name. My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will have so changed by the book’s end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial. (It is Troy, Sodom, Çatal Höyük, the City of Dreadful
It’s not light yet. (Will it ever be?) Just returned from the third and what I hope is the last run on the Emoboriki. Don’t even want to write about this one. But, as usual, will. (At least, he said and can you hear the cap’s, They Will Not Be Bothering Us Again. Tarzan’s bizarrely reflective comment [echoing something he heard from me?]: “It’s easier here than any place else.” Raven, Priest, Tarzan, and Jack the Ripper kept telling me, “Man don’t take Pepper along!”
“Anyone goes who wants to go,” I said. By the time we went, though, Pepper wasn’t around anyway. Dragon Lady was waiting for us in front of Thirteen’s; Baby, b. a. as usual, pimple-pocked and sullen, stood in the shadowed doorway. His arms slung through his chains, Adam sat on the curb, grumbling glumly. Cathedral, Revelation and Fireball and brought the cans of
an ocean of smoke and evening. I tried to smell it, but my nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blurr. We neared the fogged pearl of one functioning lamp, and her face got all twisted. She stopped, turquoise, hem to knees, exploding high as her scarlet waist. “Should we…? Oh, Kid! Do you know what they said!”
“Will you please…” I asked her. My throat hurt with running and the raw air. “Will you please tell me what…what they said!”
Both hands came up to cage her mouth. She was a shower of silver on metallic black. “Someone, up on the roof of the bank: The Second City Bank—oh, a Goddamn sniper!”
“Who, for Christ’s sake?” I grabbed her small elbows and the hair shook around her head. “Will you tell me who they got?”
“Paul,” she whispered. “Paul Fenster! The school, Kid…everything!”
Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder, pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop—was it eight o’clock yet?—stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a longhaired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I’d left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please oh please I can’t I please don’t let it
Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder, pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop—was it eight o’clock yet?—stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a longhaired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I’d left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please oh please I can’t I please don’t let it
“Is he dead?”
Her head shook in a way that meant she didn’t know. Her hands twisted silver cloth at her hips: scarlet bled down from one; yellow snaked across her belly from the other. “In the burning,” she said very quickly. “In the fire…all your poems, the new ones; they burned…!” Her lips kept touching and parting, sorting more words, none of which fit. “Everything, all of them…I couldn’t…”
“Unnn…” Something went right into my stomach without using gut or throat for entrance.
I said, “Unnn…”
She let go her skirt.
“That’s…good I guess,” was all I could say. “I didn’t like them. So it’s good they’re…gone.”
“You should have kept them in your notebook! I was wrong! You should…” She shook her head. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”
I started to cough.
“Look,” she said, “I know half of them by heart anyway. You could reconstruct—”
“No,” I said.
“—and Everett Forest made that…”
“No. It’s good they’re gone.”
This morning Filament brought around a woman who I first thought was Italian and who became Black Widow this evening. Overheard her in a discussion in the back yard just now—one of the few here that has even veered near any politics outside the city: “It’s not that men and women are identical; it’s just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of ‘innate’ differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage.” I was impressed. But I have heard similar from Nightmare, Dragon Lady, Madame Brown, Tak, D-t, Bunny, even Tarzan. Is Bellona, then, that unbelievable field where awarenesses of such an order are the only real strength? That they can occur here is what makes possible the idea of leaving for another city.