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Kid drank some wine. “Yeah. I’d like to come and talk to you. Thanks. That’s nice of you.”
“You think he’s crazy?” De
“You shut up, huh?” Kid said.
Madame Brown said: “I’m afraid I don’t have facilities for handling…real nuts. ‘Crazy’ and ‘nuts’ are terms doctors don’t use—or shouldn’t. But, no, I don’t think Kid’s crazy at all.”
De
“I don’t want to start any long-term thing,” Kid said, “where I come back and back—yeah, I know that’s how it works. But I just don’t want to get into that.”
“Whether or not you needed something long term would more or less depend on what we found out in the first sessions, wouldn’t it? So we’ll do first things first.”
“Okay…” Kid felt wary.
“You know—” Lanya’s chair legs came down—“that whole thing about Dollar killing Wally has really got me upset.”
“What is this,” Madame Brown asked, “about someone killing somebody?”
So they told her.
“Now he sounds nuts.” Madame Brown nodded.
“Oh, he ain’t that nuts,” De
Madame Brown sighed: “Well, I suppose that afternoon did provide some extenuating circumstances.” But she sounded more worried than convinced.
The bell rang.
“Well, my break is over.” Madame Brown left the room.
As soon as she’d gone, De
“You been busy, huh?” Kid hadn’t known; he was surprised.
De
“I don’t know whether I should be flattered or not.” She rocked her chair again. “I’ve always pictured myself as a pretty worldly young lady, but you guys have a way of making me feel like I just got out of a convent. Not—” she let the chair legs down—“that I’m trying to keep up…well, maybe I am, just a little.” She stood, stepped around the table corner, and put a hand on either side of De
Kid’s laughter made them look.
“What would you do,” Kid said, “if I brought the whole nest around and had them all lined up, taking turns?”
Leaning against De
“I’ve got a hard-on,” De
“You’ve had a hard-on ever since I met you,” Lanya told him. “Look, you two: two guys making it together turns me on. That’s all. Most of my friends have always been gay. That’s what I dig.”
“I know a lot of guys who dig dikes,” De
Lanya bit his ear.
“Owww…!”
“Anyway,” she said, “that’s the turn-on for me. Not getting gang-shagged.”
“Glib.” Kid rocked his stool legs now. “But logical.”
“I think you look cute in my vest,” De
“As a bug, babes,” Lanya told him.
“Hey,” De
“No,” she said. “Just a little confused.” She looked at Kid. “I can never figure out if you’re the person I keep thinking you are.”
Kid stood up, walked over, and stopped with his hands on Lanya’s shoulders, his legs astraddle De
“And I think you misunderstand me entirely—” she nodded with a look both wary and wry—“sometimes.”
He kissed her (face turning between his palms) and had to bend his legs. She turned her head gently back and forth, rubbing his tongue with hers, and meshed her fingers behind his neck, pulling him down, harder. Finally he had to settle his weight on De
“Both of you,” De
Lanya laughed into Kid’s mouth.
“Let’s go back into your room and ball.” Kid said.
He had actually thought one or the other of them would protest.
Geoff Rivers
Arthur Pearson
Kit Darkfeather
Earl Rudolph
David Wise
Phillip Edwards
Michael Roberts
Virginia Colson
Jerry Shank
Hank Kaiser
Frank Yoshikami
Gary Disch
Harold Redwing
Alvin Fischer
Madeleine Terry
Susan Morgan
Priscilla Meyer
William Dhalgren
George Newman
Peter Weldon
A
Linda Evers
Thomas Sask
Preston Smith
At her desk, he read the list for the sixth time. The sky beyond the bay window, dense and low, darkened toward evening. Roberts or Rudolph, Rivers or Evers: Fantasize a persona for any. Which, he pondered, would I pick myself? Some permutation…Gary Morgan, Terry Rivers, Thomas Weldon? None was his. Was one perhaps nearer than the other? No…if they are all real people, he reflected, then each is just as important. Hey, Kamp, isn’t this what that democracy’s about that put you up on…a moon? (But I don’t want one. I need one about as much as I need a handful of dollars.) Lips tight, he picked up the papers: Three sheets from the phone pad, two pieces of newsprint, the back, blank pages of a paperback, some sheets of Lanya’s paper—all he had written since Brass Orchids. I promised not to write anymore; Newboy promised I would. Kid smiled, putting one paper behind the other. He slipped Brass Orchids from beneath the notebook, opened it, closed it, opened it again. Holding it on his palm too long made his stomach ache. Such a strange, marvelous, and marvelously inadequate object! He was still unable to read it through. He still tried. And tried again, and tried till his throat was constricted, his forearms wet, and his heart hammered down where he’d always thought his liver was. Neither dislike nor discomfort with the work explained that. Rather the book itself was lodged in some equation where it did not belong, setting off hyperradicals and differentials through all the chambers of his consciousness. He looked over at the notebook, read what was on the page behind the list:
Lingual synthesis: Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky—I suspect it is what they were getting at: Attempts to reduce vast fields of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Linguistics to sets of parameters that not so much define as mirror the way in which philosophical, anthropological, and linguistic information respectively fit into, upon, and around the mind itself. Those particularly parametric works (the Tractatus, La Geste d’Asdiwal, Syntactic Structures—though all three men have written much longer works, work of this type must be very short; none of these is above 30 thousand words) do not discuss fields of study; they drop careful, crystalline catalysts, which on any logical mind (as opposed to trained minds familiar with galleries of evidence and evaluations) perforce generate complicated and logical discussions of the subject using whatever evidence is at hand, limited only by the desire or ability to retain interest in the dialogue propagating in the i