He removed her gently from around the post, then held her warmly in his arms, stroking her sack as though it were bare flesh. “Please tell me your name,” he begged, whispering.
“Duck,” she said.
“Uh. What?” Andrew was a nephew of the round lady. He had accompanied her here today. But it was this sack girl—the one who said her name was Duck—whom he presently loved without end.
“I said it was Duck,” said Duck.
“What?” said Andrew.
“Oh, Rodelphia,” she said, her patience at an end. Then hastily, before he could once more say “what?” she added, “And you’re the duck.”
“What?” said the duck.
Rodelphia left him quacking madly in the soft fluttering eternally springtime grass of the park. When she was sufficiently far away, her conscience began to ache, so, taking pity upon him, she sent him forward and allowed him to join his aunt and her friend upon the steps. That way all three of them were together, and this was enough to satisfy Rodelphia’s sense of rightness.
That day, upon the steps leading to the observation platform, for a full quarter of an hour before the arrival of the police, Union Square Park was graced by the following: (1) a mooing, pleading cow with an exposed udder; (2) a squawking, cackling chicken who ate garbage; and (3) a madly quacking young duck. It was the duck who caused the greatest difficulty when he insisted upon trying to float in the artificial river that flowed past the statue of the forty-niner. Unfortunately, when the duck tried this, he sank with the dull suddenness of a two-hundred-pound man, a creature he happened to closely resemble.
What the whole thing was—it was decided—was a scandal.
When the Free City Chief of Police, Kendrick Drake, was at last allowed to interrogate the trio of surrogate animals, their squawking and quacking and mooing having for the moment ceased, he could not discover a single really solid fact. “I remember nothing—and if I could, I certainly would not choose to discuss it.” “My mind is a total blank except—no, I simply cannot remember.” When informed that the chief’s name was Drake, the man named Andrew immediately became hostile and had to be restrained physically. The two ladies were eventually allowed to return to their oceanfront homes while the young man was held for the night in the county jail. An intoxicant test was administered, but the results proved negative.
Rodelphia, who was blocks away from the park before the police arrived, was shocked by the contrasting conditions prevalent here in the Free City. The tall, stately towers near the floater terminal quickly gave way to smaller two- and three-story houses, the rotting wood and flaking plaster of which seemed to exude the powerfully musty odor of decay. Then she realized there was human excrement here and there in the gutters. She paused to examine this phenomenon but could make nothing of it. Children flocked everywhere, flowing past her in small, strutting, prancing groups. Her mind was jambled with untranslatable phrases: Gotegetadaw and Sumdayagunbebigga and Whazamatwitya-aenwa, the thoughts of these passing children; and Rodelphia soon had to admit that she would have to close down her mind entirely before they succeeded in driving her screwy. She did so, remembering how Grandfather had warned her, mincing not a word, “In the Free City there’s just three kinds of people, all different. One is the first-degree kind, who is both rich and smart. The second-degree kind is nothing. They do all the work and are famous for being bland, like that meat I got two weeks ago which wasn’t real. Remember that? And the third-degree: well, they talk a whole different language. They ain’t hardly people.”
Nor were they.
Rodelphia’s grandfather had resided here in the Free City at one time, back before he had come and stolen her away from the Home, but he would never say what degree he had been, if any. “Couldn’t stand the constant noise,” he explained, though for her the noise itself was grand—she only regretted she could not comprehend its meaning. The eyes of these children appeared dead, their mouths hung flaccid with decay, and their skin was either incredibly pale or else black as a starless night. Without the noise that came from their minds, she might easily have mistaken them for a lot of marvelously animated walking corpses. Opening her mind once more briefly, she caught a passing thought, Girlwudya? and shut things off again, pleased by this comforting reminder of the continuing jamble of daily life about her. God, she was falling in love with this city. Its immemorial jambling and hooting. Above, in bright sparkling scarlet letters as tall as the tallest downtown buildings, the dome cried out: two oclock exactly fct while disturbance today union sq when 3 1-d citizens performed bizarre acts while mixed crowd watched under full police investigation present moment of possible exterior subversive influences complete report to follow k drake ch of police. Rodelphia stopped cold, her head tilting, eyes pointed at the artificially painted sky. Reading, she laughed. Grandfather had also warned her never to reveal her powers openly. “It’s the true reason why I had to flee the home of my fathers and the Free City in turn. They came yipping at my heels and my best frock coat got caught in the Golden Gate as I slipped toward the redwoods that night. Had they caught me, they darn well would have burned me, and I don’t mean my frail old body, I mean my mind, which is still as keen and sharp as a slickman’s polished blade.” She knew he was right, admitted the fact openly to herself, always had, but those two old ladies with their cackling—they had both been so brazen and vulnerable, an irresistible combination. The young man too.
Even as a child, Rodelphia had been unable to withstand open temptation. In the third grade, there was a time when she had made the teacher—an apprentice spinster in her late twenties-expose her naked underbriefs before the gathered class, front and back, then remove them in a brisk singular motion—with pink roses imprinted upon the azure silk—holding them high like a fluttering dove and then proceeding to lecture the class upon the divine nature of such objects, meanwhile rubbing the garment passionately up against her own bare pink cheeks.
Rodelphia had been an incredible sophisticate for that place and time, with any man’s mind wide open for her to see, and she had rocked with laughter, watching the humbling of her enemy, but that same night she and Grandfather had moved again, crawling higher up the white slopes of the cold Sierras, plunging ever deeper into the lonely mysteries of the deep backwoods. After turning twelve, she had never seen another human being in the flesh except for Grandfather until yesterday when she caught the floater. When she was fourteen, seeing the turn of the old man’s thoughts, she had allowed him to seduce her one warm red night when the whole of the sky was ablaze with a thundering fire. Afterward, bawling painfully upon her bared chest, he pleaded to be forgiven, admitting that he wasn’t really her grandfather and couldn’t very well be expected to help himself.
“Go ahead and tell me,” she said, knowing it had to come.
His tale poured out of him: “Hell, I was only thirty-three when I got away and couldn’t have been your grandfather even if I’d’ve wanted to. I’m not a bit of your blood, my darling. I wish I was closer to you, but when I left the Free City with them yipping ‘Mutie, mutie, mutie!’ at my heels and came sneaking along various cold back roads, I passed this huge white house with gables and turrets and a million lights, green willowy grass out front and trees in the yard like a miniature forest. I thought it could have been a real country mansion and I stopped, almost thinking I saw a cow grazing in the yard, freezing through and through, hungry enough to gnaw at my own hand, and I started listening to see if I might find a receptive welcome. Instead, near knocked this old head off of its supporting shoulders, on account of what I got was kids—these thousands of kids—all blaring back at me in a horrible cacophony and I started to shut off in a dreadful fright when suddenly I realized there was something more to this than simple noise alone. I listened again, as keenly as I knew how; near panicked realizing that it wasn’t only me listening, but there was another in that house who was listening right back at me. I tell you, I shivered, and it wasn’t only for the cold night. And it was you, m
y dumpling granddaughter. You, who was then eight years old and pretty as a roving butterfly, locked up in that awful home of a prison, declaimed as an orphan of the state. You had the power, and it was so darn strong I couldn’t believe it, stealing around the house that night, moving on the tips of my toes as I watched out for them phony watchdogs, not seeing a one, grabbing you out of that bed, and running with you, just running. I think we were lucky to get away. And I decided, sleeping that night in a ditch, with you laying on top of me so as not to get damp, that I’d tell you how I was your grandfather and we both had the power on account of our blood. But it was never so, my darling. I don’t know why you’ve got it or even why I’ve got it. But we do.”
And he continued sobbing, and she held him warmly, their relationship at last upon an equal and mature footing, and she stifled a laugh. Not because she was cruel: the laugh was because everything he had just told her, the words pouring out of him like fire from a dragon’s mouth, she had plucked piecemeal from his mind years before, knowing the whole story long before she turned ten. Grandfather’s powers had always been minimal compared to hers, and he never heard a thought of hers she did not intend for him to hear. But she loved him. Later that night he admitted he had only come to the Free City as a refugee and had lived there less than four years before his exposure. He had, in fact, been born someplace called Nebraska. But she knew this, too, and could never understand why it shamed him so.
After that one occasion, he never touched her body again, but when the old man died, Rodelphia gently tore his body apart molecule by molecule and took the component parts lovingly in the grasp of her mind and then heaved them spinning, high, high, tossing them straight toward the blazing disk of the noontime sun. It was a grand funeral. She loved him that much. After spending one more night inside the cabin, she blew it down the following morning and then hopped down the mountain to the nearest floater station. From there, the Free City was less than two hours away.
Now her tail end was getting sore from sitting. She began to thirst for action. She was tired of walking and also hungry. This place drove her screwy, the way they kept switching the weather every five minutes. Right now a brisk wind was madly blowing. The children, gathered around her in a loose circle, shouted what she guessed were obscenities, but not a word made any real sense to her.
But then, abruptly, a hand snaked around her mouth and another enclosed her jaw. She was lifted right off the curb and dragged, the heels of her feet scratching the concrete, across the sidewalk. The mind behind was thinking, Hold her, hold her, so she let him hold her. The children stared after her and one small cute boy laughed aloud, but the girl beside him turned and slapped his face so fiercely that his lower lip split, exposing blood. A dark doorway opened behind her and she was drawn through it, swallowed by a dimness that was not quite blackness.
The boy set her down in the dust, then scurried around with a finger upon his slender lips. “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said.
She was crouched inside the basement of one of the ramshackle houses. A rat came scurrying up—a ghostly gray specter—and sniffed at her feet, then bounded hastily back as she gave its brain a tickle. The boy sauntered back, returning from having shut the door. The dimness was now much nearer to real darkness, but behind, deep in the bowels of the basement, she could hear the sound of other voices.
The boy said, “He told me to bring you. That was the only way I know how. I’m sorry, but if I’d missed, if you’d got away . . .” He drew his forefinger swiftly across his throat and then gurgled passionately on his own imagined blood.
“Who’s he?” asked Rodelphia.
“Why, Abraham.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Him.”
“You’ve never heard of Abraham?”
“In the Bible.” She pretended to ponder. “And Lincoln.” The subject bored her. “Tell me your name”—though she knew.
“I’m Hungry,” he said.
“Oh, really?” she said. “So am I,” laughing.
But he had plainly heard this one before. “I can’t imagine your never having heard of Abraham. Are you sure you’re not lying? If you don’t know him, how come you’re down here? You’re not a third, and you’re nothing else, so you’ve got to be a derelict.”
“I hopped off the floater three hours ago.”
“From where?”
She waved toward the east. Where she thought the east must lie.
“And they let you in?” He pointed at her sack dress while his eyes made puzzled circles in her hair. “You?”
“I snuck in,” she confessed.
“I thought so but—” A fierce bellow cut him short. The sound came rumbling like thunder through the hollow twisting corridors of the basement, dashing like the heaving waters of a flash flood streaming down a dry Western riverbed. “Where are you, Hungry?” came the bellow.
The boy leaped to his feet and shouted back in a shrill, piping voice, “Right here, Abraham!”
“You got that girl?” came the rumble.
“Yes sir!”
“Then bring her here! Goddamn the Lord! Quit fooling around!”
“Quick,” said Hungry, pulling her upright.
Rodelphia shook him away. “Hands off me!” she cried extra loud.
Hungry paled at the sound of her voice, backing away, cowering, hands shielding his face.
“Oh, come on. I’m not going to hit you,” Rodelphia said, leading him away through the twisting mazelike passages of the basement. As they rounded each new corner, a tiny electric light glowed at their appearance. The room they sought was the center room—the prize at the middle of the maze—a tiny, cluttered, cloistered place filled with the stored junk and refuse of the hundred lives that were lived above. A child sat here upon the broken remnants of a couch, another on the floor scrawled her name carelessly in the dust, while a third child—a golden-haired boy— dangled like a cobweb from the rafters above. Maybe two dozen children in all—sliced neatly down the middle according to sex. An average age was probably sixteen. The girls seemed older than the boys.
“Hungry!” bellowed Abraham, seeing them coming. He sat sprawled in the very midst of his children, a giant wobble of a man, big and powerful as a whale, with a fierce jagged black beard dangling clear to his chest and red-painted lips that curled deliberately downward at their ends and blue eyes that managed to twinkle and glower simultaneously. He was dressed wholly in black rags, tattered torn fragments of cloth, a brazen combination of the styles and fashions of a generation. A stovepipe hat tottered precariously upon his head like a crown upon the head of a medieval prince.
He did not move, saying, “I am Abraham,” mocking politeness as Rodelphia strolled fearlessly forward. Then he stretched his hand toward hers. “Aha,” and he kissed her palm delicately.
“You’re lovely,” he murmured. Then: “Kids out!” evoking a rustling and bustling so tinged with undue haste that Rodelphia felt it necessary to close down her mind once more.
Then she and Abraham were alone except for Hungry, who lurked inconspicuously beside the doorway. Perhaps he was acting as a guard. But for whom? she wondered, finding his thoughts unclear on this point. Suddenly he tilted forward, so as not to miss a single word.
“Do you know us?” Abraham said. “We are thieves.”
She confessed her ignorance, sitting beside him. A recent arrival in the Free City. She explained everything. A displaced citizen from the near east. Innocent, she was. And lonely.
“Poor child. But I could have told you that,” Abraham said. “We are simple people, mere thieves only. I hope you do not misunderstand me as—” He licked his lips in obvious preparation for an extended dissertation. His tongue flamed red as the lipstick smeared. “We have a point.” Slamming his fist into the ground, raising an emphasizing puff of dust. “More than that. We have a purpose. We steal, yes, but that is hardly all. Now you tell me— believing it as you speak—you say, ‘Abraham, stealin
g is wrong.’
You say, ‘Stealing is a sin and you are a most evil man.’ And what do you expect from me in reply? A spasm of guilt? Anguish? Should I say, ‘My child, why yes, you are absolutely correct?’ And kiss you boldly upon the lips, repenting, and thus surrendering my profession, my livelihood. My life, in fact. Ho-ha! Stealing is not wrong! I’m telling you that it carries both point and purpose. In this society we have three worlds. The first which is idle and rich, the second which works to feed the others, and the third which is nothing. All right—but what of the others? The humble few? I mean us.” Thumping his chest. “Or just me, my love. We who are called derelicts, rejected by all, rejecting in turn. My story? I was born a first as most of my children were born seconds. I lived a most contented life. My mother was a lovely wisp of a woman, rumored to be close to a hundred in years, an original survivor of the first moon colony, and a lady never known to speak in a voice harsher than a whisper. My father was a lisping pervert, a lover of boys—a walking archetype of that form, or perhaps merely a cliche, a stereotype—with a wrist bent a full ninety degrees, creating me purely by mistake, wandering into the wrong bed one deluded night, mistaking my mother’s graceful rump for that of some boy, implanting the seed which grew to be me by slip alone. That is my family story, as told by servants, aunts, uncles—it’s something I heard my whole life. My father had gone to America in shame—New York, I think—and my mother died of cancer. At the side of her warm grave, these eyes” —pointing at the simultaneously twinkling/glowering orbs, already close to overflowing with moistness—”shed bitter tears, true tears of anguish and despair, wet and filled with the angry cruel salt of honest grief, and never since—not for one second—have I cried. I came here, living first in the sewers below, devoted to pits of the purest foul hell, then crawling on my belly this high to a damp, cold basement. True, we steal—myself and my children. We take from those who have it to spare and bestow these blessings upon those less fortunate—namely, ourselves. Or me.” He wept openly now, shedding unashamed rivers of tears. “We have no intention, however, of harming the fabric of this society. We. care not to bring it down upon our own ears. Anarchism is a monstrous aberration. We spit upon those who profess it.” He spat in the dust. “We love and adore this free city. And we do our part; yes, we steal.
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