"Just taking a walk. Trying to get my cock sucked. Or something. Only nobody's out."

"Huh?" Denny looked puzzled, and then — to Kid's surprise — embarrassed. He flipped one finger three times on the chrome, then looked up again with his lips tight. "The downtown end of the park has got queers all over it, all day and all night. You know the part with the paths?"

"No."

"Well it does." Denny flipped his finger once more. "If you been walking around all night, you couldn't've been looking very hard."

"I was at this guy's house," Kid explained. "I thought he was gonna do me, but somebody else came over and he kicked me out. What are you doing out this hour of the morning?"

Denny nodded toward one of the unpainted buildings. "I'm staying in there now." Behind dirty window glass, the brass lion leered, pinioned on his brass stalk. The shade was gone. The socket held a broken bulb neck.

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." Denny, with three fingers tucked under the rim, was looking straight down. "I'll blow you."

"Huh?"

When Denny neither moved nor said anything else, Kid started to laugh. "Hey…"He stepped on the sidewalk, hit his thighs in imitation of Denny's drumming, then stepped back into the street. "Are you being funny…?"

Denny looked up. "No."

"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." Denny scratched his chest among rattling chains. "Go on, take it out. Right here, motherfucker." He shook his head. "I'll do you right here. You want me to show you I mean it? Right here?"

Kid glanced at the window curtain. "Sure, but those spades, they're staring out the damned window."

Denny let out his held breath. "I just told you; you think I give a fuck if they know?"

What he'd began 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…"

Denny leaned his head and glanced to the side with a concentrated expression — the look, Kid thought, of someone in a game of go trying to decide if a long-contemplated move, now made, was, after all, right.

"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.

Denny got down from the headlight and slid most of his fingers in his back pockets. "You come on with me."

Kid caught up to him on the unpainted steps. "Is this Nightmare's place?" He put his hand on Denny's small, warm shoulder.

Denny looked back. "Used to be." His vest, showing rough-out leather, then scuffed tanning, swung against his ribs. "Just about anybody stays there now. Even Thirteen's been crashing there. The way he goes on, you'd think he was gonna make it his new place."

Kid frowned. "What… happened to his old one?"

Denny frowned back. "Well, everybody's moved around since…" He nodded. "The kids in the commune, they all went to the other side of the park. Dragon Lady moved her bunch up this side of Cumberland. And Thirteen couldn't stay in that damn apartment no more… but you was there." Denny's frown questioned Kid's.

"Why…?" Kid asked, because there was no answer he could supply.

"The smell," Denny said, "for one thing," and went up the steps.

Kid followed. "Oh, yeah. That…" which made sense; but not the whole 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," Denny said. "Everybody's asleep." He pushed open the door. "It ain't even six o'clock in the morning, I bet."

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." Denny grinned back over his shoulder as Kid followed him down the hall. "Sometimes I sleep all day, too. You can do that here… but then I'm up all night."

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.

Denny glanced around. "You wanna do it in the bathroom?"

"No." Kid struck Denny's shoulder with his hand's heel. "I don't want to do it in the bathroom!" While Denny blinked, curious, the bathroom door at the end of the hall opened and Smokey walked out, sleepy, in nothing but jeans, her fly hanging open. With neither shielding nor greeting, she passed.

Leaning against the water tank, Kid saw the splotched dummy looped in chain — before the door swung to.

"I'm in here."

Which is where the Harley had been moved.

"How come you get a room all by yourself…?" Kid asked, realizing with the last word that three of the bundles among the shovels (why shovels?), pipes, lumber, and canvas, were people in sleeping bags.

Someone had built a loft.

Three steps up the ladder, Denny looked back over his shoulder. "You come up."

Denny's boots went over the edge. Kid climbed. The planks (they gave some with his hands and knees) were strewn with blankets. The size of a double bed, the platform was without pillow or mattress. "I keep all my shit up here," Denny explained, pushing himself back among wrinkled cloth. By his left hand was an army compass, a green shirt (with gold trim) fresh pressed and wrapped in plastic, a dagger whose handle was a ball-in-claw, and a gaming case on whose outside were long, alternately black and black-outlined triangles for backgammon.

Kid crawled forward through army drab and a weave of paler green rippled through with an electric-blanket cord. In the window that rose above the platform, a mottled shade let tan light on the tangle. He pulled his feet under him to sit and realized his arm was shaking. "How come you don't have half a dozen people sleeping up here with you?"

"I tell 'em to get the fuck out." Denny's hands lay knotted in his lap.

A zodiacal poster hung on the wall: Scorpio. And another of Koth, the Dark Angel. "It's sort of nice up here," Kid whispered. His throat was tight. I'm scared of him, he realized. And I like him. "Get the rest of your clothes off."

"Why?"

Kid let out a breath. "Nothing." He thumbed open the top button and tugged down his zipper. "Go on." He pulled his penis and testicles free of the closing V of brass teeth and let his shoulders relax against the plywood wall.