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?
As he climbed (notebook and paper left on the ground) two women behind the walls laughed.
He paused.
Their laughter neared, became muffled converse. A man guffawed sharply; the double soprano recommenced and floated off.
He could just grasp the edge. He pulled himself up, elbows winging. It was a lot harder than movies would make it. He scraped at the brick with his toes. Brick rasped back at knees and chin.
His eyes cleared the top.
The wall was covered with pine needles, twigs, and a surprising shale of glass. Through spinning gnats he saw the blunt pine tops and the rounded, looser heads of elms. Was that grey thing the cupola of a house?
“Oh, I don’t believe it!” an invisible woman cried and laughed again.
His fingers stung; his arms were trembling.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, kid?” somebody behind him drawled.
Shaking, he lowered, belt buckle catching a mortise once to dig his stomach; his toes hit at the thin ledges; then the crate: he danced around.
And went back against the wall, squinting.
Newt, spider, and some monstrous insect, huge and out of focus, glared with flashbulb eyes.
He got out an interrogative “Wh…” but could choose no defining final consonant.
“Now you know—” the spider in the middle extinguished: the tall redhead dropped one freckled hand from the chains looping neck to belly—“damn well you ain’t supposed to be up there.” His face was flat, his nose wide as a pug’s, his lips overted, his eyes like brown eggshells set with tarnished gold coins. His other hand, freckles blurred in pale hair, held a foot of pipe.
“I wasn’t climbing in.”
“Shit,” came out of the newt on the left in a black accent much heavier than the redhead’s.
“Sure you weren’t,” the redhead said. His skin, deep tan, was galaxied with freckles. Hair and beard were curly as a handful of pennies. “Yeah, sure. I just bet you weren’t.” He swung the pipe, snapping his arm at the arc’s end: neck chains rattled. “You better get down from there, boy.”
He vaulted, landed with one hand still on the crates.
The redhead swung again: The flanking apparitions came closer, swaying. “Yeah, you better jump!”
“All right, I’m down. Okay—?”
The scorpion laughed, swung, stepped.
The chained boot mashed the corner of the notebook into the mulch. The other tore the newspaper’s corner.
“Hey, come on—!”
He pictured himself lunging forward. But stayed still…till he saw that the pipe, next swing, was going to catch him on the hip—was lunging forward.
“Watch it! He’s got his orchid on…!”
He slashed with his bladed hand; the scorpion dodged back; newt and beetle spun. He had no idea where they were under their aspects. He jammed his fist at the scaly simulation—his fist went through and connected jaw-staggeringly hard with something. He slashed with his blades at the retreating beetle. The spider rushed him. He staggered in rattling lights. A hand caught him against the cheek. Blinking, he saw a second, sudden black face go out under newt scales. Then, something struck his head.