Still, no doubt it had all been shown on the beams. Even being in the Ginsberg wasn’t like being on another planet.
Disappointed perhaps-for they had gone so far as to make him empty his bag and proffer the contents for inspection-the policemen at length nodded Madipermission to go ahead, and one of them who had stood by idly chewing, a very tall lean young man, indeed gangling, put out his foot casually with the intenof tripping him as he hurried away. And somehow-Lyla couldn’t see how-the outstretched foot was in precisely the spot where Madison next needed to step, and his weight went down on the arch without breaking stride, and by the time the pain was signaled to the astonished and furious busy there were a dozen people separating them.
“I’m sorry for the delay,” Madison said as he rejoined Lyla. “There was no need to wait-I can easily find my way to this hotel you suggested.”
Granted. So why had she waited? For the sake of having company, she decided suddenly. Last night she had lain beside the bed where Dan had died, where his body still rested, where-ugh. In cleanly modern America, one spoke of the organs, heart, liver, kidneys, for they were terms the doctors used when one was ill, and never made the connection with the tidily frosterile, plastic-wrapped objects purchased for food. Dan had been opened, and the gash showed truly that men too possessed these things, these bloody wet palpitating things.
She looked around her giddily at the crowd. There was a crowd on this street, there was always a crowd on every street in every modern city. She thought: hunand hundreds of hearts and livers and kidneys, kilometers of gut, liters of blood enough to make the sidewalk run awash with red!
“Are you all right, Miss Clay? You look very pale!” On her shoulder a touch steadying her, for which she was grateful because the world had tilted askew.
“You get your filthy hand off that blank girl!” screamed someone and instantly heads turned for twenty paces on every side, but luckily it was an elderly woman with a pinched mouth and stern eyes under a furrowed old forehead who had uttered the shriek.
“Want him to handle you instead, you old bag?” Lyla shouted back, and there was laughter and people had forgotten it, except the old woman herself who looked murder. In this century of ours, curses upon our ancestors, even the sweet old ladies know what it is to hate enough to kill. Turn out that big purse clutched so protectively: find a Blazer like the one that stinking Gottschalk tried to sell me over Dan’s warm corpse.
But the instant of tension had taken with it her unexfit of dizziness. She said in a normal voice, “I guess I should have warned you, Mr. Madison, that even though this is a district where knees can still find hotels and restaurant service it isn’t what you’d call a very integrated neighborhood.”
“That’s all right, Miss Clay. One expects that. And the Army taught me to look after myself, which is someI haven’t forgotten.”
She looked at him thoughtfully, seeing him for the first time as Harry Madison person instead of Harry Madison overdue ex-mental patient. She thought back over the echo in memory of those confident words he had just uttered, and realized that he had an extremely pleasant voice, bass-baritone, old-fashioned like a singer’s with premeditated weight on individual words instead of a single monotonous rapid spate of them as in most twenty-first century speech.
And recalled that she was still alone, because Dan was dead.
Dan had had his friend Berry. Berry, she was vaguely aware, had a friend of his own-or possibly of Martha’s, the girl he lived with. One needed a friend in a city like this. but why stop at a friend? Yet it was the pattern; query because making more than one was so difficult, because making the first had been such a strugone was afraid to revert to the rebuffs and disapof friend-hunting?
It was too deep, too terrifying, to be considered now on a hot evening in summer, the time growing late, the sun going from the sky, the aimless dense crowds of the city moving out under the goggle gaze and as-yet silent gun-mouths of the police half eager and half fearat the possibility of tonight climaxing in riots and rockets from the sky which brought sniper-riddled builddown in flames.