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And you could still tell which link had parted.
When he was finished, he was very depressed.
V Creatures of Light and Darkness
WHEN HE HAD WALKED for several minutes, turned several corners, and the several tensions in his neck and back had ceased (he could think words now without striking up hysterical images on the screens of all five senses), he pissed in the middle of the street, hoping someone might pass, and, with his fly half open and his fingers under his belt, walked again and asked himself: Now just what is the problem with seeing an occasional red eyeball, hey? It is: If I’m hallucinating that, how do I tell if anything else is real? Maybe half the people I see aren’t there—like that guy who just ran up? What’s he doing in my world? Some fragment of Mexico, recreated out of smoke and fatigue? How do I know there isn’t a chasm in front of me I’ve hallucinated into plain concrete? (The entrance to the bridge…when I first came off it, was all broken and piled…with concrete…?) Put the whole thing up to dreaming? When I was seventeen or eighteen I stopped that. Five days!
I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don’t want to be. I’m tired, I’m tired and horny, I’m so tired I can’t make sense out of any of it and my mind won’t work right half the time I try. I’m thirsty. My head’s all filled with kapok coffee wouldn’t clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It’s not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on.
He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It’s only pain. All right (he looked at blurred house tops above the trolley wires), I’ve chosen, I’m here.
To come upon the monastery? Yes, now, wherever it was, whatever. Walls and white buildings? Syllables to mumble away the meaning? He had passed nothing that could possibly have been one. The streets were strewn with refuse, months old, dried, and odorless: feces gone pale and crumbly, ossified fruit rind, old papers, once wet and now crinkly dry.
He prodded the folds of his consciousness for sadness: the crystal had deliquesced to chalky powder.
…she look like? he thought, and was too tired to panic. Her name, what was that?
Lanya: and he saw her short hair, her green eyes, and she was not there.
One of the street signs was marred with filth and scratchings; the other was an empty frame. He turned into the alley because of the beats; for seconds he could not figure what had happened—a row of tree trunks on the narrow sidewalk, each in a metal fence, had burned to charred spikes. Wonderingly, Kid started down the street, not wide enough for two cars.
De
“Hey, how’re you!” De
“Just taking a walk. Trying to get my cock sucked. Or something. Only nobody’s out.”
“Huh?” De
“No.”
“Well it does.” De
“I was at this guy’s house,” Kid explained. “I thought he was go
De
On the other side of the street, a white curtain moved in a window almost as dirty. Two black faces pressed together, looked till Kid stared directly. The curtain dropped.
“You want to get your cock sucked? Come on.” De
“Huh?”
When De
De
“Now suppose I took you up on that…” Kid said, trying to make it a joke; it wasn’t. So he said: “You want to…?” Things that made the obscure obvious by overturning overturned.
“Yeah.” De
Kid glanced at the window curtain. “Sure, but those spades, they’re staring out the damned window.”
De
What he’d begun as banter was suddenly uncomfortable, because though all the actions were predictable, the feelings were not. “Hey, you know maybe you just better let the whole thing…”
De
“We’d have to find someplace,” Kid said. “A doorway, or inside or something. I don’t want to do it right here.” Fifteen? Kid thought. He’s out of his head; this kid is a fucking nut.
De
Kid caught up to him on the unpainted steps. “Is this Nightmare’s place?” He put his hand on De
De
Kid frowned. “What…happened to his old one?”
De
“Why…?” Kid asked, because there was no answer he could supply.
“The smell,” De
Kid followed. “Oh, yeah. That…” which made sense; but not the shifting and rearrangement during the robbed duration. The whole tape of reality which he had been following had somehow overturned. It still continued; he still followed. But during some moment when he had blinked, days had elapsed and everything right had shifted left: Everything left was now right. “Hey, the last time you saw me, how long was I with—?”
“Shhh,” De
And Kid suddenly did not want an answer. He asked instead in a softer voice: “Then what are you doing up?”
“I get up real early some times.” De
By the hall baseboard, tight black hair shocked from the end of a sleeping bag. Beyond a doorway, on a couch, a naked man with red hair all over his tan, freckled back—it was Copperhead—slept with a very blond girl wedged between himself and the couch back. Over his bare ankle, Kid could see her sandal, the neatly rolled cuff of her jeans. Her arm, pale from the sleeve of a navy pea-jacket, moved up the torn upholstery, then fell. Someone in another room stopped snoring, cleared his throat, coughed, was silent.