Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  Newboy arrived in Bellona yesterday morning and is indefinite about the length of his stay. His comment to us when asked about his visit was, after a reticent smile: "Well, a week ago I wasn't intending to come here at all. But I suppose I'm happy I did."

  We are honored that a man with such achievement in English letters and a figure of such world admiration should.

  "What are you doing?" she mumbled, turning from his side.

  "Reading the paper." Grass creased his elbows. He had wiggled free of the blanket as far as his hips.

  "Did it come out yet?" She raised her head in a haze of slept-in hair. "It isn't that late?"

  "Yesterday's."

  She dropped her head back. '"That's the trouble with sleeping out. You can't do it past five o'clock in the morning."

  "I bet it's eight" He spread the wrinkled page bottom. "What-" opened her eyes and squinted-"you reading about?"

  "Newboy. That poet."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "I met him."

  "You did?" She raised her head again, then twisted, tearing blankets from his leg. "When?"

  "Up at Calkins'."

  She pulled up beside him, hot shoulder on his. Under the headline, NEW BOY IN TOWN, was a picture of a thin white-haired man in a dark suit with a narrow tie, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, looking as though there were too much light in his face. "You saw him?"

  "When I got beat up. He came out and helped me. From New Zealand; it sounded like he had some sort of accent."

  "Told you Bellona was a small town." She looked at the picture. "Hey, how come you didn't get inside then?"

  "Somebody else was with him who raised a stink. A spade. Fenster. He's the civil rights guy or something?"

  She blinked at him. "You really are out meeting everybody."

  "I wish I hadn't met Fenster." He snorted.

  "I told you about Calkins' country weekends. Only he has them seven days a week."

  "How does he get time to write for the paper?"

  She shrugged. "But he does. Or gets somebody to do it for him." She sat up to paw the blankets. "Where did my shirt go?"

  He liked her quivering breasts.

  "It's under there." He looked back at the paper, but did not read. "I wonder if he's ever had George up there?"

  "Maybe. He did that interview thing."

  "Mmmm."

  Lanya dropped back to the grass. "Hell. It isn't past five o'clock in the morning. You know damn well it isn't."

  "Eight," he decided. "Feels like eight-thirty," and followed her glance up to the close smoke over the leaves. He looked down again, and she was smiling, reaching for his head, pulling him, rocking, by the ears, down: He laughed on her skin. "Come on! Let me go!"

  She hissed, slow. "Oh, I can for a while," caught her breath when his head raised, then whispered, "Sleep ..." and put her forearm over her face. He lost himself in the small bronze curls under her arm, and only loosened his eyes at faint barking.

  He sat, puzzled. Barking pricked the distance. He blinked, and in the bright dark of his lids, oily motes exploded. Puzzlement became surprise, and he stood.

  Blankets fell down his legs.

  He stepped on the grass, naked in the mist.

  Far away a dog romped and turned in the gap between hills. A woman followed.

  Anticipatory wonder caught in the dizzy fatigue of morning and sudden standing.

  The chain around his body had left red marks on the underside of his forearms and the front of his belly where he'd leaned.

  He got on his pants.

  Shirt open over tears of jewels, he walked down the slope. Once he looked back at Lanya. She had rolled over on her stomach, face in the grass.

  He walked toward where the woman (the redhead, from the bar) followed behind Muriel.

  He fastened one shirt button before she saw him. She turned on sensible walking shoes and said, "Ah, hello. Good morning."

  Around her neck, the jewels were a cluttered column of light.

  "Hi." He pulled his toes in in the grass, shy. "I saw your dog last night, at that bar."

  "Oh yes. And I saw you. You look a little better this morning. Got yourself cleaned up. Slept in the park?"

  "Yeah."

  Where candlelight had made her seem a big-boned whore, smoke-light and a brown suit took all the meretricious from her rough, red hair and made her an elementary-school assistant principal.

  "You walk your dog here?"

  An assistant principal with a gaudy necklace.

  "Every morning, bright and early . . . um, I'm going to the exit now."

  "Oh," and then decided her tentativeness was invitation.

  They walked, and Muriel ran up to sniff his hand, nip at it.

  "Cut that out," she demanded. "Be a good dog."

  Muriel barked once, then trotted ahead.

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  "Ah!" she repeated. "I'm Madame Brown. Muriel went over and barked at you last night, didn't she? Well, she doesn't mean anything by it."

  "Yeah. I guess not."

  "About all you need now is a comb-" she frowned at him-"and a towel, and you will be back in shape." She released her shrill and astounding laughter. "There's a public john over there where I always see the people from the commune going to wash up." Then she looked at him seriously. "You're not with the commune there, are you?"

  "No."

  "Do you want a job?"

  "Huh?"

  "At least you're not a long-hair," she said. "Not very long, anyway. I asked you if you wanted a job."

  "I wear sandals," he said, "when I put anything on my feet at all." -

  "That's all right. Oh, heavens, / don't care! I'm just thinking of the people you'd be working for."

  "What kind of work is it?"

  "Mainly cleaning up, or cleaning out I suppose. You are interested, aren't you? They'll pay five dollars an hour, and those aren't the sort of wages you can sneeze at in Bellona right through here."

  "Sure I'm interested!" He swallowed in surprise. "Where is it?"

  They approached twin lions. Madame Brown put her hands behind her back. Muriel brushed the hem of her skirt. The glut of chain and glass could catch no glitter in this light. "It's a family. Do you know where the Labry Apartments are?" To his shaking head: "I guess you haven't been here very long. This family, now, they're nice, decent people. And they've been very helpful to me. I used to have my office over there. You know there was a bit of confusion at the beginning, a bit of damage."

  "I heard about some of it."

  "A lot of vandalism. Now that it's settled down some, they asked me if I knew some young man who would help them. You mustn't take the long-hair thing seriously. Just clean yourself up a little-though it probably isn't going to be very clean work. The Richards are fine people. They've just had a lot of trouble. We all have. Mrs Richards gets easily upset by ... anything strange. Mr Richards perhaps goes a little too far in trying to protect her. They've got three very nice children." He pushed his hair from his forehead. "I don't think it's going to grow too much in the next couple of days." "There! You do understand!" "It's a good job."

  "Oh, it is. It certainly is." She stopped at the lions as though they marked some far more important boundary. "That's the Labry Apartments, up on 36th. It's the four hundred building. Apartment 17-E. Come up there any time in the afternoon." "Today?"

  "Certainly today. If you want the job." "Sure." He felt relief from a pressure invisible till now through its ubiquitousness. He remembered the bread in the alley: its cellophane under the street lamp had flashed more than his or her fogged baubles. "You have an office there. What do you do?" "I'm a psychologist."

  "Oh," and didn't narrow his eyes. "I've been to psychologists. I know something about it, I mean."

  "You do?" She touched the lion's cheek, not leaning. "Well, I think of myself as a psychologist on vacation right now." Mocking him a little: "I only give advice between the hours of ten and midnight, down at Teddy's. That's i
f you'll have a drink with me." But that mocking was friendly.

  "Sure. If the job works out."

  "Go on over when you get ready. Tell whoever's there that Mrs Brown-Madame Brown is the nickname they've given me at Teddy's, and since I saw you there I thought you might know me by it-that Mrs Brown told you to come up. Possibly I'll be there. But they'll put you to work."

  "Five dollars an hour?"

  "I'm afraid it isn't that easy to find trustworthy workers now that we've got ourselves into this thing." She tried to look straight up under her eyelids. "Oh no, people you can trust are getting rarer and rarer. And you!" Straight at him; "You're wondering how I can trust you? Well, I've seen you before. And you know, we really are at that point. I begin, really, to think it's too much. Really too much." "Get your morning paper!"

  "Muriel! Oh, now Muriel! Come back here!"

  "Get your morning- Hey, there, dog. Quiet down. Down girl!"

  "Muriel, come back here this instant!"

  "Down! There. Hey, Madame Brown. Got your paper right here." Maroon bells flapping, Faust stalked across the street. Muriel danced widdershins about him.

  "Hello, old girl."

  "Good morning there," Madame Brown said, "It is about time for you to be along, Joaquim, isn't it?"

  "Eleven-thirty, by the hands on the old church steeple." He cackled. "Hi there, hi there young fellow," handing one paper, handing another.

  Madame Brown folded hers beneath her arm.

  He let his dangle, while Faust howled to no one in particular, "Get your morning paper," and went on down the street. "Bye, there, Madame. Good morning. Get your paper!"

  "Madame Brown?" he asked, distrusting his resolve.

  She was looking after the newspaper man.

  "What are those?"

  She looked at him with perfect blankness.

  "I've got them." He touched his chest. "And Joaiquim's got a little chain tight around his neck."

  "I don't know." With one hand, she touched her own cheek, with the other, her own elbow: her sleeve was some cloth rough as burlap. "You know, I'm really not sure. I like them. I think they're pretty. I like having a lot of them."

  "Where did you get them?" he asked, aware he broke the custom Faust had so carefully defined the day before. Hell, he was still uneasy with her dog, and with her transformation between smoke and candlelight.

  "A little friend of mine gave them to me." She had the look, yes, of someone trying not to look offended.

  He shifted, let his knees bend a little, his toes go, nodded.

  "Before she left the city. She left me, left the city. And she gave me these. You see?"

  He'd asked. And felt better for the violence done, moved his arms from the shoulder ... his laughter surprised him, broke out and became huge.

  Over it, he heard her sudden high howl. With her fist on her chest, she laughed too, "Oh, yes!" squinting. "She did! She really did. I was never so surprised in all my life! Oh, it was funny-I don't mean funny peculiar, though it certainly was. Everything was, back then. But it was funny ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa." She shook the sound about her. "She-" almost still-"brought them to me in the dark. People shouting around out in the halls, and none of the lights working. Just the flickering coming around the edge of the shades, and the terrible roaring outside . . . Oh, I was scared to death. And she brought them to me, in handfuls, wound them around my neck. And her eyes . . ." She laughed again, though that cut all smile from him. "It was strange. She wound them around my neck. And then she left. There." She looked down over the accordion of her neck, and picked through the loops. "I wear them all the time." The accordion opened. "What do they mean?" She blinked at him. "I don't know. People who wear them aren't too anxious to talk about them. I'm certainly not." She leaned a little closer. "You're not either. Well, I'll respect that in you. You do the same." Now she folded her hands. "But I'll tell you something: And, really, there's no reason behind it, I suppose, other than that it seems to work. But I trust people who have them just a little more than those who don't." She shrugged. "Probably very silly. But it's why I offered you that job."

  "Oh."

  "I suspect we share something."

  "Something happened," he said, "when we got them. Like you said. That we don't like to talk about."

  "Then again, it could be nothing more than that we happen to be wearing the same .. ." She rattled the longest strand.

  "Yeah." He buttoned another button. "It could be."

  "Well. I'll drop in on you at the Richards' later in the afternoon. You will be there?"

  He nodded. "Four hundred, on 36th Street . . ."

  "Apartment 17-E," she finished. "Very good. Muriel?"

  The dog clicked back from the gutter.

  "We'll be going now."

  "Oh. Okay. And thanks."

  "Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I'm sure." Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time diesel.

  He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion bobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.

  Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.

  Her calves were smooth.

  His heart, beating fast, slowed.

  Her calves were unscarred.

  He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.

  Her calves had no scratch.

  When he took his hand away, she made some in-slumber sound and movement. And didn't wake. He opened today's paper and put it on top of yesterday's. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline:

  MYSTERIOUS RUMORS, MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS.

  Would your editor ever like some pictures with this one! We, unfortunately, were asleep. But from what we can gather, shortly after midnight last night-so far twenty-six versions of the story have come in, with contradictions enough to oblige our registering an official editorial doubt-the fog and smoke blanketing Bellona these last months was torn by a wind at too great an altitude to feel at street level. Parts of the sky were cleared, and the full -or near full-moon was, allegedly, visible-as well as a crescent moon, only slightly smaller (or slightly larger?) than the first!

  The excited versions from which we have culled our own report contain many discrepancies. Here are some: The full orb was the usual moon, the crescent was the intruder.

  The crescent was the real moon, the full, the impostor ... a young student says that, in the few minutes these downright Elizabethan portents were revealed, he made out markings on the full disk that prove it was definitely not our moon.

  Two hours later, someone came into the office (the only person so far who claims to have caught any of this phenomenon through an admittedly low-power telescope) to assure us the full disk definitely was the moon, while the crescent was bogus.

  In the six hours since the occurrence (as we write, into the dawn), explanations offered the Times have ranged from things so science-fiction-y we do not pretend to understand their arcane machinery, down to the all-purpose heat lightning and weather balloon, perennial explanation for the UFO.

  I pass on, as typical, one comment from our own Professor Wellman, who was observing from the July gardens with several other guests: "One, we all agreed, was nearly full; the other was definitely crescent. I pointed out to the Colonel, Mrs Green, and
Roxanne and Tobie, who were with me, that the crescent, which was lower in the sky, was convexed away from the bright area of the higher moon. Moons do not light themselves; their illumination comes from the sun. Even with two moons, the sun can only be in one direction from them both; no matter which phases they are in, if they are both visible in the same quarter of the sky, both should be light on the same side-which was not the case here."

  To which your editor can only say that any "agreement," "certainty," or "definiteness" about these moons are cast into serious doubt-unless we are prepared to make even more preposterous speculations about the rest of the cosmos?

  No.

  We did not see it.

  Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night's hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: things are-though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.

  What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by all who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George!

  The impetus to appelation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.

  "What are you doing," she whispered through leaves, "now?"

  Silent, he continued.

  She stood, shedding blankets, came to touch his shoulder, looked down over it. "Is that a poem?"

  He grunted, transposed two words, gnawed at his thumb cuticle, then wrote them back.

  "Um . . ." she said, "do you mean making a hole through something, or telling the future?"

  "Huh?" He tightened his crossed legs under the notebook. "Telling the future."

  "A-u-g-u-r."

  "Whoever wrote this notebook spells it different on another page." He flipped pages across his knees to a previous, right-hand entry: