Machine Dreams

keep him from distracting her,and he was smiling as he walked up the aisle. Felt good, walking that carpeted incline with a big image mixing up the dark behind him, and when he got to the lighted lobby he asked the boy at the counter for a large buttered.
    Waiting, he could still see a bit of the screen; as he watched an abstract movement of color, the colors suddenly went silent and flashed, eaten into mottled holes by a racing black edge. “The film’s on fire,” Mitch told the boy, and the lobby lights went off, the room lit only with what daylight filtered through the double doors from the street. “Hell,” Mitch swore, starting back into the dark. Just as he stepped forward, he heard a woman yell, “Fire, fire!” The stupid fool, it was only the film had burnt, but there was the chilling sound of everyone rising at once, and then he was fighting his way through the crowd running past him to the entrance. The goddamn fools, some of the women screaming and kids crying, Christ, he pushed them aside and moved toward Katie, hoping she’d have sense enough to stay put. He reached their places and saw the empty chairs. Grabbed the blanket, that way, the street exit down by the screen, surely she’d gone that way, terrified by now if they hadn’t run over her already. He shouted her name and felt himself shoved along, spilling with the crowd into the alley back of the theater.
    He saw her then, leaning against the wall of the opposite building, her shoes gone, her coat unbuttoned. Her eyes were big and shocked, and as he pushed his way toward her she waved to him feebly, apologetically, as though afraid she’d done wrong. He thought she was trembling but saw as he reached her that her body was shaken by the pounding of her heart; she was breathless and didn’t speak. He picked her up in his blanketed arms and walked quickly across the street to the Pontiac. As he opened the passenger door she looked over his shoulder at the crowd, fascinated, and said in a small voice, “Was that like the war?”
    He got her to lie down across the seat and drove home; after he’d put her in bed he tried to phone Reb, who wasn’t at his office or at home or at the Elks’. He called Bess at the hospital; she’d gone upstreet, the switchboard girl told him, but she’d get the message to come home as soon as she got back. He went in to Katie then and she was sitting quietly, reading a comic.
    He felt her forehead.
    “I’m okay now,” she said. “It’s just my heart beats like that when I get scared.”
    “Everyone’s heart beats faster then,” he told her. He thought of carrying her over to the hospital, but he might only scare her again.
    “There wasn’t really any fire at all, was there?”
    “No, just some fool woman yelling.”
    “I lost my shoes,” Katie said. “When I got up and ran so fast, the shoes came right off my feet.” She raised her brows for emphasis.
    “I’ll go by the movie house after your Mom gets here, see if I can find the shoes.”
    “It was exciting,” Katie said softly, “after I got over being scared.”
    “I know it was, Fritz. Now I want you to lay down and close your eyes. You need a rest.”
    He sat watching her. In just a few minutes, she was sleeping lightly and easily, her breathing regular. He supposed the best thing was just to sit here till Bess came. He had a presentiment then that he might still hurt Katie somehow, be bad luck for her sitting in the room, so he stood and walked out, crossed the hall into the living room. He sat down in one of the seldom used velvet chairs and felt for the first time the total exhaustion of his relief. He touched his hand to his eyes.
    There had never been so many goddamn flowers, so many the sides of the box were obscured by deep waxen petals of the lilies and roses, spider fronds of the mums, and she looked as though she were floating on a fat crescent of blossoms that filled that side of the room, leaving scant space to stand close. After everyone sat down, he looked straight ahead at the minister but felt a ripple of movement from the silent flowers, as though the island of color and the body itself moved on an eddy of current. Jesus, would the bastard minister never shut that book, give us some help here, won’t you, and finally he quit with the Scriptures and wandered on, all of them wading in his sonorous performer’s voice as the kid floated placidly on her moon of flowers, delicate alabaster stonein her white organdy