No.
We did not see it.
Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night’s hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: Things are—though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.
What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by all who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George.
The impetus to appellation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.
2
“What are you doing,” she whispered through leaves, “now?”
Silent, he continued.
She stood, shedding blankets, came to touch his shoulder, looked down over it. “Is that a poem?”
He grunted, transposed two words, gnawed at his thumb cuticle, then wrote them back.
“Um…” she said, “do you mean making a hole through something, or telling the future?”
“Huh?” He tightened his crossed legs under the notebook. “Telling the future.”
“A-u-g-u-r.”
“Whoever wrote this notebook spells it differently on another page.” He flipped pages across his knees to a previous, right-hand entry:
A word sets images flying from which auguries we read…
“Oh…he did spell it right.” Back on the page where he had been writing, he crossed and recrossed his own kakograph till the bar of ink suggested a word beneath half again as long.
“Have you been reading in there?” She kneeled beside him. “What do you think?”
“Hm?”
“I mean…the guy who wrote that was strange.”
He looked at her. “I’ve just been using it to write my own things. It’s the only paper I’ve got, and he leaves one side of each page blank.” His back slumped. “Yeah. He’s strange,” but could not understand her expression.
Before he could question it with one of his, she asked, “Can I read what you’re doing?”
He said, “Okay,” quickly to see what it would feel like.
“Are you sure it’s all right?”
“Yeah. Go on. It’s finished anyway.”
He handed her the notebook: His heart got loud; his tongue dried stickily to the floor of his mouth. He contemplated his apprehension. Little fears at least, he thought, were amusing. This one was large enough to joggle the whole frame.
Clicking his pen point, he watched her read.
Blades of hair dangled forward about her face like orchid petals, till—“Stop that!”—they flew back.
They fell again.
He put the pen in his shirt pocket, stood up, walked around, first down the slope, then up, occasionally glancing at her, kneeling naked in leaves and grass, feet sticking, wrinkled soles up, from under her buttocks. She would say it was silly, he decided, to show her independence. Or she would Oh and Ah and How wonderful it to death, convinced that would bring them closer. His hand was at the pen again—he clicked it without taking it from his pocket, realized what he was doing, stopped, swallowed, and walked some more. Lines on Her Reading Lines on Her he pondered as a future title, but gave up on what to put beneath it; that was too hard without the paper itself, its light red margin, its pale blue grill.
She read a long time.
He came back twice to look at the top of her head. And went away.
“It…”
He turned.
“…makes me feel…odd.” Her expression was even stranger.
“What,” he risked, “does that mean?” and lost: it sounded either pontifical or terrified.
“Come here…?”
“Yeah.” Crouching beside her, his arm knocked hers; his hair brushed hers as he bent. “What…?”
Bending with him, she ran her finger beneath a line. “Here, where you have the words in reverse order from the way you have them up here—I think, if somebody had just described that to me, I wouldn’t have found it very interesting. But actually reading it—all four times—it gave me chills. But I guess that’s because it works so well with the substance. Thank you.” She closed the notebook and handed it back. Then she said, “Well don’t look so surprised. Really, I liked it. Let’s see: I’m…delighted at its skill, and moved by its…well, substance. Which is surprising, because I didn’t think I was going to be.” She frowned. “Really, you…are staring something fierce, and it makes me nervous as hell.” But she wouldn’t look down.
“You just like it because you know me.” That was also to see what it felt like.
“Possibly.”
He held the notebook very tight, and felt numb.
“I guess—” she moved away a little—“somebody liking it or not doesn’t really do you any good.”
“Yeah. Only you’re scared they won’t.”
“Well, I did.” She started to say more, didn’t. Was that a shrug? Finally, she looked from beneath the overhanging limbs. “Thank you.”
“Yeah,” he said almost with relief. Then, as though suddenly remembering: “Thank you!”
She looked back, confusion working through her face toward some other expression.
“Thank you,” he repeated, inanely, palms pressing the notebook to his denim thighs, growing wet. “Thank you.”
The other expression was understanding.
His hands worked across each other like crabs, crawled round himself to hug his shoulders. His knees came up (the notebook dropped between them) to bump his elbows. A sudden welling of…was it pleasure? “I got a job!” His body tore apart; he flopped, spread-eagle, on his back. “Hey, I got a job!”
“Huh?”
“While you were asleep.” Pleasure rushed outward into hands and feet. “That lady in the bar last night; she came by with her dog and gave me this job.”
“Madame Brown? No kidding. What kind of job?” She rolled to her stomach beside him.
“For this family. Named Richards.” He twisted, because the chain was gnawing his buttocks. Or was it the notebook’s wire spiral? “Just cleaning out junk.”
“Well there’s certainly enough junk—” she reached down, tugged the book loose from beneath his hip—“around Bellona to clean out.” She lay it above his head, propped her chin on her forearms. “A pearl,” she mused. “Katherine Mansfield once described San Francisco, in a letter to Murray, as living on the inside of a pearl. Because of all the fog.” Beyond the leaves, the sky was darkly luminous. “See.” Her head fell to the side. “I’m literate too.”
“I don’t think—” he frowned—“I’ve ever heard of Katherine…?”
“Mansfield.” Then she raised her head: “Was the reference in the thing you wrote, to that Mallarmé poem…” She frowned at the grass, started tapping her fingers. “Oh, what is it…!”
He watched her trying to retrieve a memory and wondered at the process.
“Le Cantique de Saint Jean! Was that on purpose?”
“I’ve read some Mallarmé…” He frowned. “But just in those Portuguese translations Editora Civilizaçáo put out…No, it wasn’t on purpose I don’t think…”
“Portuguese.” She put her head back down. “To be sure.” Then she said: “It is like a pearl. I mean here in Bellona. Even though it’s all smoke, and not fog at all.”
He said: “Five dollars an hour.”
She said: “Hm?”
“That’s what they’re going to pay me. At the job.”
“What do you want with five dollars an hour?” she asked, quite seriously.
Which seemed so silly, he decided not to insult her by answering.
“The Labry Apartments,” he went on. “Four hundred, 36th Street, apartment 17-E. I’m supposed to go up there this afternoon.” He turned to look at her. “When I come back, we could get together again…maybe at that bar?”