“Oh.” He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. “I’ve heard of holograms.”
Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.
“Are there more of them around?”
“Maybe.” Tak’s upper face was again masked. “Their light-shields don’t really shield them from anything—other than our prying eyes from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck.” Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. “You forget people don’t know about scorpions. About Calkins. They’re famous here. Bellona’s a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they’ve forgotten we’re here.”
“No. They haven’t forgotten.” Though he couldn’t see Tak’s eyes, he knew they had narrowed.
“So they send in people who don’t know their own name. Like you?”
He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.
Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. “Oh, yeah! You’re quite a kid.” Laughter trailed on.
“Where we going now?”
But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.
From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.
4
“Tak!” she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. “Who’d you bring?” She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.
A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.
The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak’s cuff, close enough now to have a face again. “We haven’t seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for dinner practically every night. John was worried about you.” It was a pretty face in half light.
“I wasn’t worried.” A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. “Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is.” Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. “You’re closer to breakfast time than you are to dinner, right now.” He—John?—tapped a rolled newspaper against his thigh.
“Come on. Tell me, Tak.” She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. “Who have you brought John and me this time?” while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.
Tak said: “This is the Kid.”
“Kit?” she asked.
“Kid.”
“K-y-d-d…?”
“-i-d.”
“…d,” she added with a tentative frown. “Oh, Kidd.”
If Tak had an expression you couldn’t see it.
He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.
She reared her shoulders back, blinking. “How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?” To Tak: “Isn’t it amazing how we’re always turning up people like that? You think you’ve met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who’s been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out—”
“That’s how we met Tak,” John said. To Tak: “Isn’t it, Tak?”
Tak said: “He’s new.”
“Oh. Well,” John said, “we’ve got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?”
“Well, we figure—” Mildred’s shoulders came, officially, forward. “We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can’t be at each other’s throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this—” He was sure her gesture, at ‘this,’ included nothing beyond the firelight—“to degenerate into something…well, awful! So we’ve set up I guess you’d call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that’s getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don’t take in everybody. But when we do, we’re very accepting.” There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn’t sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. “You are new? We’re always glad when we get somebody new.”
He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?
Tak said: “Show him around, Milly.”
John said: “Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something,” tapping his newspaper again. “Oh, here. Maybe you want to take a look at this?”
“What? Oh…” You couldn’t worry so much about things like that. Often, though, he had to remind himself. “Thanks.” He took the folded paper.
“All right, Tak.” John, with Tak, turned away. “Now when are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you—”
“Look, John.” Tak put his hand on John’s shoulder as they wandered off. “All you need is the plans, and you can—”
Then they were out of earshot.
“Are you hungry?”
“No.” She was pretty.
“Well, if you are—come, let’s go over here—we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That’s not too far off.”
“You been up all night?” he asked.
“No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early.”
“I have.”
“We do a lot of work here—” she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs—“during the day. We don’t just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It’s pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all.” She smiled.
“I’ve been up; but I’m not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything.” He looked down at her legs.
As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. “Oh, we wouldn’t mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don’t want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand.”
“Yeah, I understand that.” He’d been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.
“Why do you go around wearing an orchid?” she asked. “Of course, with the city in the state it’s in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But…”
“Some people gave it to me.” He turned the rolled newspaper around.
SERIOUS WATER
He let the tabloid fall loose.
SHORTAGE THREATENS
The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. “What the hell is that?”
She looked concerned. “Well, there’s not very many people around who know how to keep things running. And we’ve all been expecting the water to become a real problem any day. You have no idea how much they used when they were trying to put out the fires.”