The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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Amparo passed around some pills she’d taken from her mother’s jar, a consolation prize.184 Jack left, apologizing that he was a borderline psychotic, which was the last that anyone saw of Jack till September.185 The gang was disintegrating, like a sugar cube soaking up saliva, then crumbling into the tongue.186 But what the hell—the sea still mirrored the same blue sky, the pigeons behind their wicket were no less iridescent, and trees grew for all of that.187
They decided to be silly and made jokes about what the M really stood for in M-Day.188 Sniffles started off with “Miss Nomer, Miss Carriage, and Miss Steak.”189 Tancred, whose sense of humor did not exist or was very private, couldn’t do better than “Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.”190 Little Mister Kissy Lips said, “Merciful Heavens!”191 MaryJane maintained reasonably that M was for MaryJane.192 But Amparo said it stood for “Aplomb” and carried the day.193
Then, proving that when you’re sailing the wind always blows from behind you,194 they found Terry Riley’s day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial.195 They’d studied Orfeo in mime class196 and by now it was part of their muscle and nerve.197 As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri.198 Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention.199 Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together,200 and though they couldn’t have held out201 till the apotheosis (at 9:30)202 without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails,203 what they had danced was authentic and very much their own.204 When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they’d felt all summer long.205 In a sense they had been exorcised.206
But back at the Plaza Little Mister Kissy Lips couldn’t sleep.207 No sooner was he through the locks than his guts knotted up into a Chinese puzzle.208 Only after he’d unlocked his window and crawled out onto the ledge did he get rid of the bad feelings.209 The city was real. His room was not. The stone ledge was real and his bare buttocks absorbed reality from it. He watched slow movements in enormous distances and pulled his thoughts together.210
He knew without having to talk to the rest that the murder would never take place.211 The idea had never meant for them what it had meant for him. One pill and they were actors again, content to be images in a mirror.212
Slowly, as he watched, the city turned itself off. Slowly the dawn divided the sky into an east and a west.213 Had a pedestrian been going past on 58th Street and had that pedestrian looked up, he would have seen the bare soles of a boy’s feet swinging back and forth, angelically.214
He would have to kill Alyona Ivanovna himself. Nothing else was possible.215
Back in his bedroom,216 long ago,217 the phone was ringing its fuzzy nighttime ring.218 That would be Tancred (or Amparo?) trying to talk him out of it. He foresaw their arguments. Celeste and Jack couldn’t be trusted now.219 Or, more subtly: they’d all made themselves too visible with their Orfeo.220 If there were even a small investigation, the benches would remember them, remember how well they had danced, and the police would know where to look.221
But the real reason, which at least Amparo would have been ashamed to mention now that the pill was wearing off,222 was that they’d begun to feel sorry for their victim. They’d got to know him too well over the last month and their resolve had been eroded by compassion.223
A light came on in Papa’s window. Time to begin.224 He stood up, golden in the sunbeams225 of another perfect day,226 and walked back along the foot-wide ledge to his own window.227 His legs tingled from having sat so long.228
He waited till Papa was in the shower,229 then tippytoed to the old secretaire in his bedroom (W. & J. Sloan, 1952). Papa’s keychain was coiled atop the walnut veneer. Inside the secretaire’s drawer was an antique Mexican cigar box, and in the cigar box a velvet bag, and in the velvet bag Papa’s replica of a French dueling pistol, circa 1790.230 These precautions were less for his son’s sake than on account of Jimmy Ness, who every so often felt obliged to show he was serious with his suicide threats.231
He’d studied the booklet carefully when Papa had bought the pistol and was able to execute the loading procedure quickly and without error,232 tamping the premeasured twist of powder down into the barrel and then the lead ball on top of it.233
He cocked the hammer back a single click.
He locked the drawer.234 He replaced the keys, just so. He buried, for now, the pistol in the stuffs and cushions of the Turkish corner, tilted upright to keep the ball from rolling out.235 Then with what remained of yesterday’s ebullience he bounced into the bathroom and kissed Papa’s cheek,236 damp with the morning’s allotted two gallons and redolent of 4711.237
They had a cheery breakfast together in the coffee room,238 which was identical to the breakfast they would have made for themselves except for the ritual of being waited on by a waitress.239 Little Mister Kissy Lips gave an enthusiastic account of the Alexandrians’ performance of Orfeo, and Papa made his best effort of seeming not to condescend. When he’d been driven to the limit of this pretense,240 Little Mister Kissy Lips touched him for a second pill,241 and since it was better for a boy to get these things from his father than from a stranger on the street, he got it.242
He reached the South Ferry stop at noon,243 bursting with a sense of his own imminent liberation.244 The weather was M-Day all over again,245 as though at midnight out on the ledge he’d forced time to go backwards246 to the point when things had started going wrong.247 He’d dressed in his most anonymous shorts and the pistol hung from his belt in a dun dittybag.248
Alyona Ivanovna was sitting on one of the benches249 near the aviary, listening to Miss Kraus.250 Her ring hand gripped the poster firmly,251 while the right chopped at the air, eloquently awkward, like a mute’s first words following a miraculous cure.252
Little Mister Kissy Lips went down the path and squatted in the shadow of his memorial.253 It had lost its magic yesterday, when the statues had begun to look so silly to everyone.254 They still looked silly. Verrazano was dressed like a Victorian industrialist taking a holiday in the Alps. The angel was wearing an angel’s usual bronze nightgown.255
His good feelings were leaving his head by little and little, like aeolian sandstone attrited by the centuries of wind.256 He thought of calling up Amparo,257 but any comfort she might bring to him would be a mirage so long as his purpose in coming here remained unfulfilled.258
He looked at his wrist, then remembered he’d left his watch home. The gigantic advertising clock on the facade of the First National Citi-bank said it was fifteen after two.259 That wasn’t possible.260
Miss Kraus was still yammering away.261
There was time to watch a cloud move across the sky from Jersey, over the Hudson, and past the sun. Unseen winds nibbled at its wispy edges. The cloud became his life, which would disappear without ever having turned into rain.262
Later, and263 the old man was walking up the sea promenade toward the Castle.264 He stalked him, for miles.265 And then they were alone, together, at the far end of the park.266
“Hello,” he said, with the smile reserved for grown-ups of doubtful importance.267
He looked directly at the dittybag, but