He flipped more pages. There was only writing on the right-hand ones. The left-hand ones were blank. He closed the book. He put the coffee cup in the sink, the can in the empty garbage paiclass="underline" when he caught himself doing it, he laughed out loud, then tried silent justification: he could always stay here, make this place nicer than Tak’s.
That made the back of his neck tingle again.
He closed the notebook and, with the paper tucked beside it, climbed back out the window.
He scratched himself on broken glass, but only noticed it a block away when he looked down to see a drop of blood had trickled across the notebook cover, red-brown on the char. He nudged at the new, purple-red scab with the blunt of his thumb, which just made it itch. So he forgot about it and hurried on up Brisbain. It was only…a scratch.
Distance? Or destination?
He had no idea what to expect of either. These lawns and facades needed sunlight, or at least light rain, to be beautiful. The corner trees might be clear green. But mist blurred them now.
Odd that the elements of pleasure were so many greys, so much fear, so many silences. That house there, gaping through dreary drapes with intimations of rugs still out in July—someone had lived there. A Doctor sign hung beside the door of that one: he mulled on the drugs closeted behind the Venetian blinds. Well, maybe on the way back…
Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall on the far corner. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink. Through a cellar window, broken, a grey eel of smoke slithered the sidewalk to vaporize in the gutter. Through another, intact, flickerings…The singular burning among the dozens of whole buildings was the most uncanny thing he’d seen.
He crossed quickly to the next block.
The loose rhythm of the day carried him through the streets. Once it occurred to him that he was tired. Later, he looked for the tiredness and found it had dispersed, like the eel.
This had to be the Heights.
He trudged on up the sloping street, by a window full of brass, three layers of glass doors in a foyer, the head of a white statue behind a high hedge—all the vulnerable, gloomy elegance bothered him. Break in for another cup of coffee? He wondered why the images of shotguns behind the curtains were stronger here. But laughed at them, anyway.
He moved, and the movement was a rush of sound among his body’s cavities. He slapped the paper and bloody notebook on his thigh, thinking of Lanya, of Milly, of John. From his other hip the orchid swung. Chained in points of view, he loped along, an uneasy vandal, suffering for the pillage his mind wreaked among the fabulous facades. He moved, a point of tension, by homes that would have been luxurious in sunlight.
He was not sure why he decided to explore off the avenue.
In the center of the alley was an oak, set in a circle of cobbles, ringed in a decorative fence. His heart beat fast.
He passed it.
The backside of the trunk was ash. Instead of heavy greenery, the rear leaves were shriveled black.
Eyes wide at the vision, he turned as he passed it, to back away. Then he looked at the houses.
On both sides of him walls were sundered on smashed furniture, beams, and piled masonry. The demarcation between lawn and street vanished beneath junk. Twenty feet on, the cobbles were upturned. He felt his face squinch against the destruction.
Bulldozers?
Grenades?
He could not imagine what had caused this. Pavingstones were smashed, loose, or upside down in raw earth, so that he was not even certain where the next street began. Frowning, he wandered in the debris, stepped over a pile of books, vaguely seeking the source of a smoke plume waving fifty feet away, then, suddenly, not seeking it.
He picked up a clock. The crystal flaked out, tinkling. He dropped it and picked up a ballpoint pen, wiped the ashes against his pants, clicked the point in and out. Half under plaster was a wooden chest, slightly larger than an attaché case. With the toe of his sandal, he nudged up the lid. White powder swirled above forks, spoons, and knives bound in grey ribbon, then settled to the purple velvet. He let the lid clack, and hurried to the Avenue.
He practically ran Brisbain’s next three blocks, past houses empty and elegant. But now he was aware of lawn poles askew, of shapeless heaps between them, of windows, which, beyond pale curtains, were light as the sky behind them.
He was still clicking the ballpoint pen. So he put it in his shirt pocket. Then, at the next corner, he took it out again and stood very still. If a wind came now, he thought, and caused any sound on this dreary street, he would cry out.
There was no wind.
He sat down on the curb, opened to the notebook’s first page.
to wound the autumnal city.
he read once more. Hastily he turned the page over to the clear side. He looked down the four streets, looked at the corner houses. He sucked a breath through closed teeth, clicked the point out and began to write.
In the middle of the third line, without taking pen off paper, he swept back to cross it all out. Then, carefully, he recopied two words on the next line. The second was “I.” Very carefully now, word followed word. He crossed out two more lines, from which he salvaged “you,” “spinner,” and “pave,” dropping them into a new sentence that bore no denotative resemblance to the one from which they came.
Between lines, while he punched his pen point, his eye strayed to the writing beside his:
It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of language that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward
“Annn!” out loud. There was not a pretty word in the bunch. Roughly he turned the notebook back around the paper to avoid distraction.
Holding the last two lines in his head, he looked about at the buildings again. (Why not live dangerously?) He wrote the last lines hurriedly, notating them before they dispersed.
He printed at the top: “Brisbain”
Lifting his pen from the “n,” he wondered if the word had any other meaning than the name of the Avenue. Hoping it did, he began to re-copy, in as neat a hand as he could, what he had settled on. He altered one word in the last two lines (“cannot” became “can’t”), and closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.
Then he stood.
Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He shook his head, and finally managed to get the world under him at the right angle. The backs of his legs were cramped: he’d been in a near-fetal squat practically half an hour.
The dizziness gone, the cramps stayed with him for two blocks. As well he felt choked up in his breathing. That put him in touch with a dozen other little discomforts that he had ignored till now. So that it was not for another block after that he noticed he wasn’t afraid.
The pulling in the back of his right shin, or the mental disquiet? He gave up pondering the preferable, looked at a street sign, and noticed that Brisbain N had become Brisbain S.
Click-click, click-click, click-click: realizing what he was doing, he put the pen back in his shirt pocket. Along the street, beside him, was a stone wall. The houses across from him, porched and lawned and spacious and columned, all had broken windows.
The car—a blunt, maroon thing at least twenty years old—grumbled up behind.
He’d jumped, in surprise, turning.
It passed, leaving no impression of the driver. But two blocks ahead, it turned in at a gate.
Willow fronds draped the brick above him. Walking again, he ran two fingers along the mortared troughs.
The gate was verdigrised brass, spiked at the top, and locked. Ten yards beyond the bars, the road got twisted up in the shaggiest pines he’d ever seen. The brass plate, streaked pink with recent polish, said: ROGER CALKINS
He looked through at the pines. He looked back at the other houses. Finally he just walked on.
The street ended in brush. He followed the wall around its corner into bushes. Twigs kept jabbing beneath his sandal straps. His bare foot went easier.
In the clearing, someone had piled two crates, one on another, against the brick: children after fruit or mischief?