Taffy, he told himself. Now to check if you’re stealing my marrowbone.
Well, spray-painting signs on rocky eminences was standard practice these progressive youth-oriented days—the graffiti of the heights. Though he recalled how at the beginning of the century the black magician Aleister Crowley had spent a summer painting in huge red capitals on the Hudson Palisades DO WHAT THOU WILT IS THE ONLY COMMANDMENT and EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR to shock and instruct New Yorkers on riverboats. He perversely wondered what gay sprayed graffiti would have done to the eerie rock-crowned hills in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness” and “Dunwich Horror” or “At the Mountains of Madness,” where the hills were Everests, or Leiber’s “A Bit of the Dark World,” for that matter.
He found his stone seat of yesterday and then made himself smoke a cigarette to give himself time to steady his nerves and breathing, and relax, although he was impatient to make sure he’d kept ahead of the sun. Actually he knew he had, though by a rather slender margin. His wristwatch assured him of that.
If anything, it was clearer and sunnier than yesterday. The strong west wind was sweepingthe air, making itself felt even in San Jose, which now had no visible pillow of smog over it. The distant little peaks beyond the East Bay cities and north in Marin County stood out quite sharply. The bridges were bright.
Even the sea of roofs itself seemed friendly and calm today. He found himself thinking of the incredible number of lives it sheltered, some seven hundred thousand, while a slightly larger number even than that were employed beneath those roofs—a measure of the vast companies of people brought into San Francisco each day from the metropolitan area by the bridges and the other freeways and by BART under the waters of the Bay.
With unaided eyes he located what he thought was the slot in which his window was—it was full of sun, at any rate—and then got out his binoculars. He didn’t bother to string them around his neck—his grip was firm today. Yes, there was the fluorescent red, all right, seeming to fill the whole window, the scarlet stood out so, but then you could tell it just occupied the lower left-hand quarter. Why, he could almost make out the drawing…no, that would be too much, those thin black lines.
So much for Gun’s (and his own) doubts as to whether he’d located the right window yesterday! It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.
But the seeing was certainly exceptionally fine today. How clearly pale yellow Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, once Frisco’s tallest structure, now a trifle, stood out against the blue Bay. And the pale blue gilded globe of Columbus Tower—a perfect antique gem against the ordered window slits of the Transamerica Pyramid that were like perforations in a punchcard. And the high rounded windows of the shipshaped old Hobart Building’s stern, that was like the lofty, richly encrusted admiral’s cabin of a galleon, against the stark, vertical aluminum lines of the new Wells Fargo Building towering over it like a space-to-space interstellar freighter waiting to blast. He roved the binoculars around, effortlessly refining the focus. Why, he’d been wrong about Grace Cathedral with its darkly suggestive, richly colorful modern stained glass inside. Beside the unimaginative contemporary bulk of Cathedral Apartments you could see its slim, crocketed spire stabbing up like a saw-edged stiletto that carried on its point a small gilded cross.
He took another look into his window slot before the shadow swallowed it. Perhaps he could see the drawing if he ‘fined the focus….
Even as he watched, the oblong of fluorescent cardboard was jerked out of sight. From his window there thrust itself a pale brown thing
Well, spray-painting signs on rocky eminences was standard practice these progressive youth-oriented days—the graffiti of the heights. Though he recalled how at the beginning of the century the black magician Aleister Crowley had spent a summer painting in huge red capitals on the Hudson Palisades DO WHAT THOU WILT IS THE ONLY COMMANDMENT and EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR to shock and instruct New Yorkers on riverboats. He perversely wondered what gay sprayed graffiti would have done to the eerie rock-crowned hills in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness” and “Dunwich Horror” or “At the Mountains of Madness,” where the hills were Everests, or Leiber’s “A Bit of the Dark World,” for that matter.
He found his stone seat of yesterday and then made himself smoke a cigarette to give himself time to steady his nerves and breathing, and relax, although he was impatient to make sure he’d kept ahead of the sun. Actually he knew he had, though by a rather slender margin. His wristwatch assured him of that.
If anything, it was clearer and sunnier than yesterday. The strong west wind was sweepingthe air, making itself felt even in San Jose, which now had no visible pillow of smog over it. The distant little peaks beyond the East Bay cities and north in Marin County stood out quite sharply. The bridges were bright.
Even the sea of roofs itself seemed friendly and calm today. He found himself thinking of the incredible number of lives it sheltered, some seven hundred thousand, while a slightly larger number even than that were employed beneath those roofs—a measure of the vast companies of people brought into San Francisco each day from the metropolitan area by the bridges and the other freeways and by BART under the waters of the Bay.
With unaided eyes he located what he thought was the slot in which his window was—it was full of sun, at any rate—and then got out his binoculars. He didn’t bother to string them around his neck—his grip was firm today. Yes, there was the fluorescent red, all right, seeming to fill the whole window, the scarlet stood out so, but then you could tell it just occupied the lower left-hand quarter. Why, he could almost make out the drawing…no, that would be too much, those thin black lines.
So much for Gun’s (and his own) doubts as to whether he’d located the right window yesterday! It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.
But the seeing was certainly exceptionally fine today. How clearly pale yellow Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, once Frisco’s tallest structure, now a trifle, stood out against the blue Bay. And the pale blue gilded globe of Columbus Tower—a perfect antique gem against the ordered window slits of the Transamerica Pyramid that were like perforations in a punchcard. And the high rounded windows of the shipshaped old Hobart Building’s stern, that was like the lofty, richly encrusted admiral’s cabin of a galleon, against the stark, vertical aluminum lines of the new Wells Fargo Building towering over it like a space-to-space interstellar freighter waiting to blast. He roved the binoculars around, effortlessly refining the focus. Why, he’d been wrong about Grace Cathedral with its darkly suggestive, richly colorful modern stained glass inside. Beside the unimaginative contemporary bulk of Cathedral Apartments you could see its slim, crocketed spire stabbing up like a saw-edged stiletto that carried on its point a small gilded cross.
He took another look into his window slot before the shadow swallowed it. Perhaps he could see the drawing if he ‘fined the focus….
Even as he watched, the oblong of fluorescent cardboard was jerked out of sight. From his window there thrust itself a pale brown thing
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