“I come from Chicago, most recently. Frisco before that.” Faust reached down to hold out one leg of his belled pants. “A grandpa Yippie, yeah? I’m a traveling philosopher. Is that good enough for you?”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“Think nothing of it. I heard Bellona was where it was at. It must be, now. I’m here. Is that good enough?”
He nodded again, disconcerted.
“I got a good, honest job. Sold the Tribe on the corner of Market and Van Ness. Here I’m Bellona’s oldest newspaper boy. Is that enough?”
“Yeah. Look, I didn’t mean—”
“Something about you, boy. I don’t like it. Say—” Eyelids wrinkled behind gold-rimmed lenses—“you’re not colored, are you? I mean you’re pretty dark. Sort of full-featured. Now, I could say ‘spade’ like you youngsters. But where I was comin’ up, when I was comin’ up, they were niggers. They’re still niggers to me and I don’t mean nothing by it. I want all the best for them.”
“I’m American Indian,” he decided, with resigned wrath.
“Oh.” Joaquim tilted his head once more to appraise. “Well, if you’re not a nigger, you must be pretty much in sympathy with the niggers.” He came down heavy on the word for any discomfort value it still held. “So am I. So am I. Only they won’t ever believe it of me. I wouldn’t either if I was them. Boy, I got to deliver my papers. Go on—take one. That’s right; there you go.” Faust straightened the bundle under his arm. “You interested in rioting niggers—and just about everybody is—” the aside was delivered with high theatricality—“you go look up those early editions. Here’s your paper, Reverend.” He strode across the sidewalk and handed another paper to the black minister in pavement-length cassock who stood in the church door.
“Thank you, Joaquim.” The voice was…contralto? There was a hint of…breasts beneath the dark robe. The face was rounded, was gentle enough for a woman.
The minister looked at him now, as Joaquim marched down the street. “Faust and I have a little game we play,” she—it was she—explained to his bemusement. “You mustn’t let it upset you.” She smiled, nodded, and started in.
“Excuse me…Reverend…”
She turned. “Yes?”
“Eh…” Intensely curious, he could focus his curiosity on no subject. “What kind of church is this, here?” He settled on that, but felt it hopelessly contrived. What he wanted to ask about, of course, was the poster.
She smiled. “Interfaith, interracial. We’ve been managing to have services three times a week for a while now. We’d be very happy if you were interested in coming. Sunday morning, of course. Then again, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. We don’t have a very large congregation, yet. But we’re gathering our flock.”
“You’re Reverend…?”
“Amy Taylor. I’m a lay preacher, actually. This is a project I’ve taken on myself. Working out quite well, too, everything considered.”
“You just sort of moved into the church and took it over?”
“After the people who were here abandoned it.” She did not brush her hands off. She extended one. It might have been the same gesture. “I’m glad to meet you.”
He shook. “Glad to meet you.”
“I hope you come to our services. This is a time of stress for everybody. We need all the spiritual help we can get…don’t you think?”
Her grip (like Joaquim’s) lingered. And it was firmer. “Hey, do you know what day it is?”
She looked down at the paper. “Wednesday.”
“But…How do you know when it’s Sunday?”
She laughed. It was very self-assured laughter. “Sunday services happen when the paper says Sunday. Mr. Calkins confuses dates, I know. But there’s never more than one Sunday every seven days. Or one Tuesday, either. Now, Thursdays slip up. I went to see him about that. A very polite man. And very concerned about what goes on in his city, despite what some people find a trying sense of humor. I had noticed about the frequency of Sundays myself. He explained about Tuesdays; but he held out for arbitrary Thursdays. He quite nicely offered to declare a Thursday any time I asked—if I would give him twenty-four-hour notice.” Her perfect seriousness ruptured with a smile. And she dropped his hand. “The whole business is funny. I feel as strange talking about it as you must hearing it, I’m sure.” Her natural hair, her round, brown face: he liked her. “Will you try and come to our services?”
He smiled. “I’ll try.” He was even vaguely sorry to lie.
“Good.”
“Reverend Taylor?”
Her sparse eyebrows rose as she looked back.
“Does this street go toward…Mr. Calkins’?”
“Yes, his home is about a mile up. You have to cross Jackson. Two days ago some brave soul had a bus running back and forth along Broadway. Only one bus. But then it doesn’t have any traffic to fight. I don’t know if it’s still going. But that would take you to the newspaper office, anyway. Not his home. I suppose you could walk. I did.”
“Thanks.” He left her, smiling after him from the doorway. No, he decided. That probably wasn’t the monastery. He pictured the tape winding and winding as the music dimmed, chord after chord falling from glimmering reels.
Jackson Avenue was a wide street, but the crowded houses, blurred with noon-smoke, were mostly wood. Trolley wires webbing the intersection were down, in a snarl, on the corner pavement. Two blocks off, wreckage fumed. Billows cleared charred beams, then rolled to.
A block in the other direction a heavy figure with a shopping bag paused mid-trek between corner and corner to watch him watching. Though it was an arbitrary Wednesday afternoon, the feel was of some ominous Sunday morning.
3
There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
This is what a good neighborhood in Bellona looks like?
The ground floor windows were broken in the white house there; curtains hung out.
The street was clean.
Bare foot and sandal, bare foot and sandaclass="underline" he watched the pavement’s grain slip beneath them.
A door beside him stood wide.
He kept walking. Easier to think that all these buildings are inhabited, than that their vacancy gives me license to loot where I will—not loot. Borrow. Still, it’s unnerving.
Loufer had said something about shotguns.
But he was hungry after all and he was going to—borrow food soon.
He broke a window with a stick he had found wedging back a garage door (eight jars of instant coffee on the kitchen shelf) and sat at the formica dinette table to eat a cold can (can-opener in the drawer) of Campbell’s Pepperpot. (Easy!) Marveling between fingerfuls of undiluted soup (salty!), he looked from the paper he’d taken from Faust to the notebook he’d gotten from Lanya. Made himself a cup of coffee with hot water—after running ten seconds, it was steaming and spitting—from the tap. Finally, he opened the notebook at random and read, in the terribly neat ballpoint:
It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow there is no way to conclude…
He looked up at creakings. But it was only some slight architectural shift. Nobody, he subvocalized, lives here now. (The kitchen was very clean.) Without particularly understanding what he’d read (or not understanding it, for that matter) the notes by the absent journalist, coupled with the creak, made the back of his neck tingle.
Déjà vu is a thing of the eye.
This was like reading lines that echoed some conversation he might have followed idly once on a crowded street. The book hinted he pay attention to part of his mind he could not even locate.
lability, not affectation; a true and common trait. But if I tried to write down what I say as I move from speech