He reviewed: pants, shirt, sandal, the dark stair—down, across, up. Light from the door; the racketing hooks; his stinging palm.
He looked at his free palm; scraped skin was streaked grey…He looked down the block. There were no vehicles anywhere on the street…
No. Go back.
Warm concrete under his foot. His sandal clacking. Slapping the wall; coming up. Seeing the doorway. Seeing the pipes…! They were on the left-hand side of the doorway. The blistered covering was bound with metal bands! On the thicker one, near the ceiling, hadn’t there been some kind of valve? And had rushed past them, onto the concrete, nearly skewered himself; hit with his forearm—it was still sore. He was falling…
He was turning; missed the curb, staggered, shook his head, looked up.
The street sign on the corner lamppost said Broadway.
“…goes up into the city and…” Someone had said that. Tak?
But no…
…seeing the light. Ran out the door. The hooks…
The muscles in his face snarled on chin and cheekbones. Suddenly tears banked his eyes. He shook his head. Tears were on his cheek. He started walking again, sometimes looking at one hand, sometimes at the other. When he finally dropped his arms, blades hissed by one jean thigh—
“No…”
He said that out loud.
And kept walking.
Snatched his clothes from the floor, jammed his feet into his pants; stopped just outside the shack (leaning against the tarpaper wall) for his sandal. Around the skylight; one sleeve. Into the dark; the other. Running down steps—and he’d fallen once. Then the bottom flight; the warm corridor; coming up; slapping; he’d seen light before he’d reached the top, turned, and seen the day-bright doorway (the big pipe and the little pipe to one side), run forward, out on the porch, beat at the hooks; two trundled away as his bare foot went over. For one bright moment, he fell—
He looked at his hands, one free, one caged; he looked at the rubble around him; he walked; he looked at his hands.
A breath drained, roaring, between tight teeth. He took another.
As he wandered blurred block after blurred block, he heard the dog again, this time a howl, that twisted, rose, wavered, and ceased.
II The Ruins of Morning
HERE I AM AND AM NO I. This circle in all, this change changing in winterless, a dawn circle with an image of, an autumn change with a change of mist. Mistake two pictures, one and another. No. Only in seasons of shortlight, only on dead afternoons. I will not be sick again. I will not. You are here.
He retreated down the halls of memory, seething.
Found, with final and banal comfort—Mother?
Remembered the first time he realized she was two inches taller than his father, and that some people thought it unusual. Hair braided, Mother was tolerant severity, was easier to play with than his father, was trips to Albany, was laughter (was dead?) when they went for walks through the park, was dark as old wood. More often, she was admonitions not to wander away in the city, not to wander away in the trees.
Father? A short man, yes; mostly in uniform; well, not that short—back in the force again; away a lot. Where was Dad now? In one of three cities, in one of two states. Dad was silences, Dad was noises, Dad was absences that ended in presents.
“Come on, we’ll play with you later. Now leave us alone, will you?”
Mom and Dad were words, lollying and jockeying in the small, sunny yard. He listened and did not listen. Mother and Father, they were a rhythm.
He began to sing, “Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…” that had something of the fall of words around. “Annnnnnn—”
“Now what are you going on like that for?”
“Ain’t seen your mom in two weeks. Be a good boy and take it somewhere else?”
So without stopping he took his Annnnnnnnnn down the path beside the house where hedge-leaves slapped his lips and tickled them so that he took a breath and his sound snagged on laughter.
ROAR and ROAR, ROAR: he looked up. The planes made ribs across the sky. The silver beads snagged sun. The window wall of his house blinded him so—“Annnnnnnn…”—he made his noise and gave it the sound of the planes all up and down the street, walking and jogging with it, in his sneakers, and went down the steps at the side of the street, crossed over. His sound buzzed all the mask of his face. Shadows slid over him: he changed sound. Shadows slid away: he changed it back. The sun heated the bony spots above his eyes; that changed it again; and again, when the birds (he had wandered into the woods that lapped like a great tongue five blocks into town; soon he had been in them for a quarter of an hour) collided in the leaves, then flung notes down. One note was near enough; he caught it with his voice and it thrust him toward another. Sun and chill (spring had just started) cuffed and pummeled him and he sang, getting pine needles inside his canvas shoes (no socks) and the back of his neck tickling from hair when the wind came.
He climbed the rocks: his breath made windy pauses in the sound and that was interesting, so that when he reached the top he pushed the leaves away and made each note as low as the green whisper—
Three of the five were naked.
Which stopped him.
And one girl was wearing only a little cross around her neck. The silver tilted on the inner slope of one breast. She breathed.
He blinked and whispered another note.
Silver broke up the sun.
The man still in pants pushed one fist up into the foliage (pants undone, his belt lay free of half its loops, away from his hip), pushed his other hand down to scratch, twisting his hips so that more and more, stretching in the green—
The girl who was darker even than his mother rolled to her side: someone else’s yellow hair fell from her back and spread. And her hands on the man’s face were suddenly hidden by his hands on hers (in the pile of clothing he recognized another uniform, but blue-black where his father’s was green) and she was moving against him now, and there was a grass blade against her calf that slipped first one way, then the other.
He held his breath, forgot he was holding it: then it all came out in a surprising at-once that was practically not a note at all. So he got more air back in his lungs and began another.
“Hey, look!” from the other naked one, on elbows and laughing: “We got company!” and pointing.
So his sound, begun between song and sigh, ended in laughter; he ran back through the brush, pulling a music from their laughing till his was song again. He cantered down the path.
Some boys came up the path (this part of the wood was traveled as any park), thumbs in their jeans, hair all points and lines and slicks. Two of them were arguing (also, he saw as they neared, one of the boys was a girl), and one with carroty hair and small eyes glared at him.
He hunched, intently, and didn’t look back at them, even though he wanted to. They were bad kids, he decided. Dad had told him to stay away from bad kids.
Suddenly he turned and sang after them, trying to make the music stealthy and angular till it became laughter again. He had reached the playground that separated the woods from town.
He mixed his music with the shouting from the other side of the fence. He rippled his fingers on the wire and walked and looked through: Children clustered at the sliding board. But their scuffle had turned to shouts.
Beyond that were street sounds. He walked out among them and let his song pick them up. Cars, and two women talking about money, and something bang-banging in the big building with the corrugated walls: emerging from that, foot-rhythms. (Men in construction-helmets glanced at him.) That made him sing louder.