“Kid,” she said, “what about Paul…? Up on the Second City Bank building. Were you…? Oh, please try to remember!” Then she started as though she’d seen something (behind me? above me? were my lights still on? I don’t remember!), and turned. And ran, blazing gold a moment before shadow took her and I ran after, into the brush, feet crashing in leaves and ash. Her bright hem whipped back till she became some darker color. (Thinking: Who is in control of her? Who, less than fifty yards off, is following through the undergrowth, twisting the knobs, pushing the switches that change her from scarlet to ultramarine?) My bare foot passed from concrete to grass. The night billowed and sagged. Did habit guide us through the maze of mists? I saw the quivering fires.
The brass dish, big across as a car tire, had been dragged twenty feet over the ashy grass. I felt very high. Thought swayed through my mind, shattered, sizzled like water on coals. Something in the smoke—? I raised my arm.
Brass leaves, shells, claws—from the ornamented wrist band, over-long blades curved up around my hand. In the dish, small blue flames hung quivering over the red. Firelight dripped down the blades.
I took another step, flexing just the scarred fingertips.
Something tickled my shoulder.
I whirled, crouching. The leaf rolled down my vest, fluttered against the chains, brushed the worn place at my knee, spun on the ground. Gasping, I looked up the leaning trunk. Above, shadow coiled in the bole of some major branch, struck away by lightning.
The air was still. But suddenly dead leaves I could not see thundered above, loud as jets. Holding my mouth wide as I could, I leaned forward. The side of my foot pressed a root. Thigh, belly, chest, cheek lay up against the bark. I breathed deep for the woody smell and pushed my body into the trunk. With my bladed hand I stroked the bark till I felt the trunk move. Sweat rolled under my vest. Chains bit my belly; glass bits pressed about me; bark gnawed my cheek. Above, in the roaring, I heard a crack; not the sound wood makes broken against the grain, but when it splits longways. And there was a smell, stronger than the smoke: vegetative, spicy, and fetid.
Another crack: but that was gun or backfire, louder than leaves and across the park. I pushed back from the trunk, blinking away the water in my eyes. Something fell, rocked on the grass among the roots; and something else—shards of bark, twelve or twenty inches across. Bark split in front of me, sagging out a few inches. What was behind it, I could see by the light from the dish, was red; and moist; and moved. Something crashed down through the branches, but caught in them. I heard more wood split, and something like a moan. “Lanya!” I shouted loud as I could. “Lanya!” Leaves swelled to a roar again.
I took another step back—a sudden pain along my calf. I whirled, staggering. My bare heel had scraped the high, raised rim of hot metal. I danced away from spilled coals; rocking, the edge had scraped halfway to my knee. There were more gunshots. I began to run.
Very far ahead was a working nightlight. (Thinking: There’s going to be a riot! With Fenster shot, the blacks are going to be out all over Jackson and there’s going to be a debacle from Cumberland Park too…) I tried to remember which way the park exit was.
About a third of the nest says “must of,” distinct and clear. They think it, too. They aren’t saying “must’ve,” or must a’,” either. I notice it specifically in D-t, Filament, Raven, Spider, Angel, Cathedral, Devastation, Priest. So: they are going through a different word to word process than the rest of us (Tarzan, for instance, who says “must’a’”)—I don’t think we feel any verb in that at all, while the people who say “must of” do feel something prepositional, or at least genitive. A word hits my ears and inside my head a sensory recall forms—a memory of an object, dim and out of focus, the recollection of a sound, a smell, or even a kinesthetic expectation. The recalls are unclear—there is always margin for correction. As word arrives after word, the recalls join and correct each other, grow brighter, clearer, become precise: a…huge…pink…mouse! What do I mean when I say a word means something? Probably the neuro/chemical process by which one word sounded against the ear generates one inner recall. Human speech has so little variance to it, so little creativity: I sit on the steps and scan an hour’s conversation around me (my own included) and find once two words in new juxtaposition. Every couple of days such a juxtaposition will evoke something particularly apt about what the speaker (usually Lady of Spain or D-t; seldom me) is talking about. But when it happens, everyone notices:
“Yeah, yeah! That’s right!” and laughter.
“I like that!” and someone grins.
“Yeah, that’s pretty good.”
In college I would scan and find one such language node in ten hours of speech, sometimes in two or three days. Though, there, people were much more ready to approve the hackneyed, the cliché, the inept and imprecise.
Is that why I write here?
Is that why I don’t write here much?
In the middle of this, Lanya says: “Guess who I had dinner with last night?”
Me: “Who?”
She: “Madame Brown took me to the Richards’.”
Me: “Have a good time?” I admit, I am surprised.
She: “It was…educational. Like your party. I think they’re people I’d rather see on my territory than on theirs. Madame Brown feels the opposite. Which probably means I won’t see much of them.”
Me: “What did you think of June?”
She: “I liked her. She was the only one I could really talk to…the hallway down stairs still stinks; weird going past it in the elevator and knowing what it was. I told her all about the House. She was fascinated. A few times Arthur and Mary overheard us and were scandalized. But not many.” She rubs the lion’s back (where bright metal scars the brown patina), looks out the window. “I think she’s going to find George, soon. When she does, we all better watch out.”
Me: “Why? What’ll happen?”
She smiled: “Who knows? The sky may crack, and giant lightning run the noon’s black nylon; and the oddest portents yet infect the ceiling of the skull.” She was mocking with misquotation what I’d given her to read that morning. Her turning it into something inflated like that made me uncomfortable.
She realized it and laid three fingers on my arm. But her touch was light as a leaf; I quivered. “You’d prefer to be hit than tickled, wouldn’t you.” She firmed her grip.
“Yeah,” I said. “Usually.”
She watched me, green eyes dark as gun metal in the crowded room. Almost everyone was asleep. We went into the front.
The sky reaches in through screen doors and un-curtained windows and wipes color off the couches, tables, pictures, posters we’ve hung.
Outside the streets are quiet as disaster areas after evacuation, more claustrophobic than inside, rank as our den is with heat and sleepy shiftings.
People think of us as energetic, active, violent. At any time, though, a third of us are asleep and half have not been out of the nest for two, three, four days (it is seldom noisy here; as seldom silent); we nestle in the wordweb that spins, phatically, on and on, sifting our meaning and meanings, insights and emotions, thin as what drifts the gritty sky.
In all the trees around the leaves were loud as jets.
I thought of turning on my lights, but I didn’t. Instead, I got off the path—stumbled, nearly twisted my ankle, the one I’d scraped. I climbed up some rocks where I couldn’t see a thing; so I figured no one could see me. I sat there, wedged between stones, eyes half closed, trying to be still.