“Hey, he cut you, Spitt, man!” That was the heavy black accent, very far away. “Oh, hey, wow, Spitt! He really cut you. Spitt, you all right?”
He wasn’t all right. He was falling down a black hole.
“The motherfucker! I’m going to get him for that—”
He hit bottom.
Pawing across that leafy bottom, he finally found the remnants of a thought: His orchid had been hanging from his waist. No time had he reached down to—
“Are…you all right?”
—slip his roughened fingers into the harness, fasten the collar about his knobby wrist…
Someone shook him by the shoulder. His hand gouged moist leaves. The other was suspended. He opened his eyes.
Evening struck the side of his head so hard he was nauseated.
“Young man, are you all right?”
He opened his eyes again. The throbbing twilight concentrated on one quarter of his head. He pushed himself up.
The man, in blue serge, sat back on his heels. “Mr. Fenster, I think he’s conscious!”
A little ways away, a black man in a sports shirt stood at the clearing’s edge.
“Don’t you think we should take him inside? Look at his head.”
“No, I don’t think we should.” The black put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.
He shook his head—only once, because it hurt that much.
“Were you attacked, young man?”
He said, “Yes,” very thickly. A nod would have made it cynical, but he didn’t dare.
The white collar between the serge lapels was knotted with an extraordinarily thin tie. White temples, below grey hair: the man had an accent that was disturbingly near British. He picked up the notebook. (The newspaper slid off onto the leaves.) “Is this yours?”
Another thick, “Yes.”
“Are you a student? It’s terrible, people attacking people right out in the open like this. Terrible!”
“I think we’d better get inside,” the black man said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Just a minute!” came out with surprising authority. The gentleman helped him to a sitting position. “Mr. Fenster, I really think we should take this poor young man inside. Mr. Calkins can’t possibly object. This is something of an exceptional circumstance.”
Fenster took dark brown hands from his pockets and came over. “I’m afraid it isn’t exceptional. We’ve checked, now come on back inside.”
With surprising strength Fenster tugged him to his feet. His right temple exploded three times en route. He grabbed the side of his head. There was crisp blood in his hair; and wet blood in his sideburn.
“Can you stand up?” Fenster asked.
“Yes.” The word was dough in his mouth. “Eh…thanks for my—” he almost shook his head again, but remembered—“my notebook.”
The man in the tie looked sincerely perplexed. With a very white hand, he touched his shoulder. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” automatically. Then, “Could I get some water?”
“Certainly,” and then to Fenster: “We can certainly take him inside for a glass of water.”
“No—” Fenster spoke with impatient resignation—“ we can’t take him inside for a glass of water.” It ended with set jaw, small muscles there defined in the dark skin. “Roger is very strict. You’ll just have to put up with it. Please, let’s go back in.”
The white man—fifty-five? sixty?—finally took a breath. “I’m…” Then he just turned away.
Fenster—forty? forty-five?—said, “This isn’t a good neighborhood to be in, young fellow. I’d get back downtown as fast as I could. Sorry about all this.”
“That’s all right,” he got out. “I’m okay.”
“I really am sorry.” Fenster hurried after the older gentleman.
He watched them reach the corner, turn. He raised his caged hand, looked at it between the blades. Was that why they had…? He looked back toward the street.
His head gave a gratuitous throb.
Mumbling profanity, he put the paper on top of the notebook and walked out.
They’d apparently gone back through the gate. And locked it. Motherfuckers, he thought. The gloom was denser now. He began to wonder how long he’d been away from the park. Four or five hours? His head hurt a lot. And it was getting dark.
Also it looked like rain…But the air was dry and neutral.
Brisbain South had just become Brisbain North when he saw, a block away, three people run from one side of the avenue to the other.
They were too far to see if they wore chains around their necks. Still, he was overcome with gooseflesh. He stopped with his hand on the side of a lamppost. (The globe was an inverted crown of ragged glass points, about the smaller, ragged collar of the bulb.) He felt his shoulders pull involuntarily together. He looked at the darkening sky. And the terror of the vandal-wrecked city assailed him: his heart pounded.
His armpits grew slippery.
Breathing hard, he sat with his back to the post’s base.
He took the pen from his pocket and began to click the point. (He hadn’t put the orchid on…?) After a moment, he stopped to take the weapon from his wrist and put it through his belt loop again: moving armed through the streets might be provocative…?
He looked around again, opened his notebook, turned quickly past “Brisbain” to a clean page, halfway or more through.
“Charcoal,” he wrote down, in small letters, “like the bodies of burnt beetles, heaped below the glittering black wall of the house on the far corner.” He bit at his lip, and wrote on: “The wet sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the general gritty stink of the street. From the rayed hole in the cellar window a grey eel of smoke wound across the sidewalk, dispersed before” at which point he crossed out the last two words and substituted, “vaporized at the gutter. Through another window,” and crossed out window, “still intact, something flickered. This single burning building in the midst of dozens of other whole buildings was,” stopped and began to write all over again:
“Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink.” Then he went back and crossed out “the bodies of” and went on: “From a broken cellar window, a grey eel wound the sidewalk to vaporize at the gutter. Through another, intact, something flickered. This burning building,” crossed that out to substitute, “The singular burning in the midst of dozens of whole buildings,” and without breaking the motion of his hand suddenly tore the whole page from the notebook.
Pen and crumpled paper in his hand; he was breathing hard. After a moment, he straightened out the paper and, on a fresh page, began to copy again:
“Charcoal, like beetles heaped under the glittering wall…”
When he finished the next revision, he folded the torn paper in four and put it back in the notebook. On the back the former owner had written:
first off. It doesn’t reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour is quiet and still. We sit most of the time
Once more he made a face and closed the cover.
The mist had turned evening-blue. He got up and started along the street.
Several blocks later he identified the strange feeling: though it was definitely becoming night, the air had not even slightly cooled. Frail smoke lay about him like a neutralizing blanket.