The sky—
He heard footsteps, lowered his eyes: the blonde girl was hurrying down the street. Frowning, he looked up again.
—streamed with black and silver. The smoke, so low and limitless before, had raddled into billows, torn and flung by some high wind that did not reach down to the street.
Hints of a moon struck webs of silver on the raveling mist.
He moved against Lanya’s shoulder (she too had glanced after the girl), all warm down his side. Her short hair brushed his arm. “I’ve never seen it like that before!” And then, louder: “Tak, has it ever been like that before?”
(Someday I’m going to die, he thought irrelevantly, but shook the thought away.)
“Damn!” Loufer took off his cap. “Not since I been here.” He was holding his jacket over his shoulder by one finger. “How do you like that, Jack? Maybe it’s finally breaking up.”
They started to the corner, still staring.
“That’s the first time here I’ve seen the—” Then Lanya stopped.
They all stopped. He swallowed, hard: with his head back, it tugged uncomfortably at his Adam’s apple.
Through one rent, the lunar disk had appeared; then, as the aperture moved with the wind, he saw a second moon!
Lower in the sky, smaller, it was in some crescent phase.
“Jesus!” Jack said.
The smoke came together again, tore away.
“Now wait just a God-damn minute!” Tak said.
Once more the night was lit by the smaller, but distinctly lunar crescent. A few stars glittered near it. The smoke closed here, opened there: The gibbous moon shone above it.
Before the bar door another group had gathered, craning at the violated night. Two, pulling a bottle back and forth, came loose, came close.
“What the hell—” The sky cleared again under two lights, crescent and near-full—”is that?” Tak demanded.
Someone else said: “What do you think it is, a sun?”
“The moon!” One gestured with his foaming bottle.
“Then what’s that?”
One pulled the bottle from the other’s hand. “That’s another…that one’s George!”
They reeled off, spilling liquor.
In the gathered group, people laughed. “You hear that, George? You got a God-damn moon named after you!” and out of the laughter and chatter, a louder laugh rose.
Lanya shrugged closer beneath his arm.
“Jesus…” Jack whispered again.
“Not according to them,” Tak said. “Come on.”
“What is it?” Lanya asked again.
“Maybe it’s some kind of reflection.” He flexed his fingers around on her small shoulder. “Or one of those weather balloons. Like they used to think were flying saucers.”
“Reflected from what, on to what?” Tak asked.
Flakes of smoke spun over. One or the other, and occasionally both, moons showed. There was a breeze now. The sky was healing. Over half the sky clouds had already coalesced. Voices came from in the bar doorway:
“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.”