368
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Come on," someone called, and they trotted to the building. The
gang rounded the corner, came back, stood with their hands on their
hips, looking at each other. Their fine little victim, the thin, narrow–
faced boy, had disappeared. They even boosted someone up
to
look in a
window, but he wasn ' t inside.
"We have not got him," one of them said and the others turned
and looked at him as he said slowly and blankly again, "We have not
got him." They walked off a ways and immediately forgot about the
narrow-faced boy. Such a disappearance would keep me and the other
secretive youths like me entertained, dazed, and content for weeks; we
would be lost and tantalized in it, our parents would think we were sick
or in love or in trouble with the cops. A disappearance would keep us
going, for we loved the impossibility, we couldn't resist it; I would even
go so far as to say we lived for it.
But the gang, of course, immediately forgot the victim had ever
existed. They wandered off and soon they could be seen, far off,
swarming across the prairie in running combat with another gang.
I went again to the corner of the building and stood with my nose
to the corner, my left eye staring down the endless south wall of the
building, and my right eye looking down the east wall. And I dis–
covered the gang's victim was still there
I
In his extreme thinness he had
become the corner, his narrow face and sharp nose becoming part of
the sheer line of the corner. I stared into his eyes and whispered, "I see
you."
The corner moved where his mouth was: "Don't tell."
"Yes. I'll tell them," I said. "Unless you give me something."
The corner closed as he closed his eyes and I could see the corner
straining around him as he tried to disappear totally. But he couldn't.
He opened his eyes. "All right," he said.
"What'll you give me?"
"I don't have anything. I'll let you hit me."
"Fuck that. I want something to show. Something I can think
about."
''I'll show you my place."
"I don't want to see your place. I
want
something."
"It's not where I live. It's my special place."
"Is it a club?"
"It's better than that. Something is there. In it."
"What?"
The corner wobbled as he shook his head.
"Is it a gang?" I said.
