Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "I'm not a scorpion."

  "You mean you just like to dress up that way? And wear a shield around your neck? Mmmm?"

  "Somebody gave me these clothes when I got my others messed up." Kid took the jar and picked up his projector at the end of its chain. "This doesn't have a battery or something. I just found it."

  "Ah, then you're not really a scorpion yet. Like Pepper, right? Pepper used to be a scorpion. But his battery's run down."

  "I guess that's what it is." Pepper rattled the links of his shield among his other chains. "I gotta get hold of another one and see."

  "Pepper used to be the most charming bird of paradise. Red, yellow, and green plumes-one could almost ignore its relation to the common parrot. Then he began to flicker, more and more, splutter, grow dim. Finally-" Bunny's eyes closed-"he went totally out." They opened. "He hasn't been the same since,"

  "Where could you pick up one? A battery, I mean."

  "Radio store," Pepper said. "Only the guys have about stripped all the places around here. A department store, maybe. Or maybe somebody's got an extra one. Nightmare's got a lot, I bet."

  "How exciting, to anticipate your glowing aspect, to puzzle over what you'll turn out to be."

  "Inside here-" Pepper snapped his shield apart- "they got a little thing in here that's supposed to be what it is. But it just looks like a whole lot of colored dots to me. The battery goes in there." He picked at the mechanism with a grey nail-"This one . . ."-and pried loose a red and white striped oblong with blue lettering: 260 Volts D. C., below a colophon of gathered lightning. "This one ain't worth shit." He flipped it across the room.

  "Not on the floor, Pepper love." Bunny picked up the battery and put it on a shelf behind some porcelain frogs, vases of colored glass, and several alarm clocks. "Tell me, Kid, now that you've found me, just who were you looking for?"

  "A girl. Lanya. You know her: You spoke to her one night in the bar when George Harrison was there."

  "Oh, yes: She-who-must-be-obeyed. And you were with her. Now I do remember you. That was the night they made George the new moon, wasn't it? The way that poor man has driven all those silly dinge-queens out of their flippy little minds is just terrible!"

  Kid turned his jar. "He has a pretty heavy fan club."

  "More power to him, I say." Bunny raised the cup overhead. "But if George is the New Moon, darling, / am the Evening Star."

  Pepper loosed his consumptive giggle.

  "I want to go out and look for her," Kid said. "If she comes into Teddy's after it opens, will you give her a message for-"

  "'I can't think of any reason why I should. She has a much easier time getting hers than I do getting mine. What do you want me to tell her?"

  "Huh? Just that I was around looking for her, and that I'll be back." "Smile."

  "What?"

  "Grin. Like this." Bunny's bony face became a death mask around bright, perfect teeth. "Let's see an expression of ecstatic happiness."

  Kid twisted his lips back quickly and decided this was his last politeness.

  To Kid's leer, Bunny returned a wistful grin. "You just don't seem to have any special points of attraction. Actually, I'd put you rather low down on my list. It's completely personal, you understand. I suppose I can afford to tell your girl friend you're looking for her. I will if I see her."

  "Everybody's somebody's fetish," Kid said. "Maybe I still got hope?"

  "That's what I keep telling Pepper. But he just won't believe me."

  "I believe it." Pepper said from his end of the couch. "You just won't believe you ain't mine."

  "Oh, I don't think I'm revealing any embarrassing secrets when I say that you can be very sweet and affectionate once you relax. No, Pepper is just terribly uncomfortable at the idea that anyone could find him attractive. It's that simple."

  "It ain't happened that often so I'm what you'd call used to it." Pepper squinted into the bottom of his cup, rocked up to his feet, and walked to the counter. He gave Bunny a passing nudge on the arm with his elbow. "Bunny's a good guy, but she's a nut."

  "Ow!" Bunny rubbed the spot, but grinned after Pepper.

  Kid grinned too and tried not to shake his head.

  "Why are you two here now, anyway?" Bunny asked. "What are the scorpions doing today? Shouldn't you be out working?"

  "You trying to kick me out again?" Pepper stooped to open a cabinet and took out another jug which he put on the counter beside the one now empty.

  Kid saw four more gallons and decided to leave after this glass. "Where was Nightmare's gang off to this morning?"

  "You said you saw them. How many were there?"

  "Twenty, twenty-five maybe," Kid said.

  "Maybe he's gonna pull that Emboriky rip-off today. How you like that?"

  "Oh, no!" Bunny put the cup down-"Oh well."- then picked it up again, to sip pensively.

  "He's been talking about it for a month, but he wants a whole damn army."

  "Why's he need so many people?" Kid asked. "What's Emboriky?"

  "Big downtown department store."

  "Lovely things," Bunny said sadly. "Perfectly lovely things. I mean it isn't just your run of the mill five-and-dime. I just wish I could have some of their stuff in here. Give some class to this place. Oh, I hate to think of you guys clomping around in all that beautiful stuff."

  "Nobody's gotten to it before?"

  "Guess not." Pepper said.

  "Maybe just a little," Bunny explained. "But you see, now it's 'occupied.' Some kid got killed back a little while ago trying to break in."

  "Killed?"

  "Somebody leaned out the third-story window," Pepper said, "and shot the mother-fucker dead." He laughed. "A couple of other people got shot at, who were just passing by. But they didn't get hurt."

  "Perhaps it's Mr Emboriky, protecting his worldly goods." Bunny contemplated the cup bottom, looked over at the fresh gallon, but thought better. "I wouldn't blame him."

  "Naw, naw," Pepper said. "It's a whole bunch in there. Nightmare's one of the people who got shot at. He said shots came from lots of places."

  Bunny laughed. "Imagine! Two dozen sales clerks valiantly holding off the barbarian hordes! I hope those poor children don't get hurt." * "You think it's the sales clerks?" Pepper asked.

  "No." Bunny sighed. "It's just whoever got to the Gun Department in Sporting Goods first."

  "Nightmare's got this real thing about it. He really wants to get in there and see what's going on. I guess I would too if somebody'd shot at me out the third-story window."

  "You?" Bunny exploded at the ceiling. "You'd be back here with your head under the pillow so fast! Why aren't you out there with them now? No, no, that's all right. I'd rather have you here safe and sound. If you got your ass full of buckshot, I just know it would be for something stupid."

  "I think getting your ass full of buckshot is pretty stupid for any reason."

  "Fine!" Bunny pointed an admonishing finger. "You just stick to that idea and keep momma happy. One honorable man!" Bunny's hand returned to the cup. "Yea, even for the want of one honorable man. Or woman- I'm not prejudiced. That's really what Bellona needs." Bunny regarded Kid. "You look like a sensitive sort. Haven't you ever thought that? Lord knows, we have everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to know that somewhere around there was one good and upright individual -one would do, for contrast."

  "Well, we've got Calkins," Kid said. "He's a pillar of the community."

  Bunny grimaced. "Darling, he owns that den of iniquity in there where I display my pale and supple body every evening. Teddy just runs it. No, Mr C won't pass, I'm afraid."

  "You got that church person," Pepper offered.

  "Reverend Amy?" Bunny grimaced again. "No, dear, she's sweet, in her own strange way. But that's absolutely not what I mean. That's the wrong feeling entirely."

  "Not that church," Pepper countered. "The other one, over on the other side of the city."

  "You mean the monastery?" Bunny was pensive as Pepper
nodded. "I really don't know that much about it. Which speaks well for it, I'm sure."

  "Yeah, someone mentioned that to me once," Kid said, and remembered it was Lanya.

  "It would be nice to think that, somewhere inside its walls, a truly good person walked and pondered. Can you imagine it? Within the city limits? Perhaps the abbot or the mother superior or whatever they call it? Meanwhile the scorpions play down at the Emboriky."

  "Maybe if you went to the monastery, somebody'd shoot at you too."

  "How sad," Bunny looked at the jug again. "How probable. That wouldn't make me happy at all."

  "Where is this place?" Kid asked; with the memory occurred the fantasy that Lanya, with her curiosity about it, might have gone there.

  "I don't actually know," Bunny said. "Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope that down-hills and up-hills, work- ing propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You'll find it eventually. As we are all so tired of hearing, this is a terribly small city."

  "I heard it's on the other side of town," Pepper said. "Only I don't even know which side of town this is."

  Kid laughed and stood up. "Well, I'm gonna go." He drained the wine, and tongued the bitter aftertaste. Wine first thing in the morning, he pondered. Well, he'd done worse. 'Thanks for breakfast."

  "You're going to go? But honey, I have enough in here for brunch, lunch, high tea, and dinner!"

  "Come on," Pepper said. "Take another glass. Bunny don't mind the company."

  "Sorry." Kid moved his jar from Bunny's reach. "Thanks." He smiled. "I'll come back another time."

  "I'll only let you go if you promise me." Bunny suddenly reached for Kid's chest. "No, no, don't jump. Mother's not going to rape you." Bunny put a finger beneath the chain that crossed Kid's belly. "We have something in common, you and I." With the other hand, Bunny lifted the white silk to show the optical chain around a slim, veined neck. "Nightmare and I. Madame Brown and Nightmare. You and Madame Brown. I wonder if I betray it by mentioning it." Bunny laughed.

  Kid, unsure why, felt his cheeks heat and the rest of his body cool. I can't have absorbed the custom of reticence so completely in so little time, he thought. And -still wanted anxiously and urgently to leave.

  Bunny was saying, "I'll tell your girl friend what you said if I see her. You know even if you did have one of those . . . ahem, smiles I find just too irresistible, I'd still deliver your message. Because then, you see, I'd want you to like me, and to come back. Doing something you wanted me to do would be one way to get that. Just because I'm not a good person-" Bunny winked-"you mustn't think I'm a bad one."

  "Yeah. Sure. Thanks." Kid tugged away from Bunny's finger. "I'll see you."

  "Good-bye!" Pepper called from the counter where he'd gone for more wine.

  Now the street sign said FILBERT and PEARL. The ladder and the lady in greens were gone.

  He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down "Pearl"), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an after image on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It's only, he thought, when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

  His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else's notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else's survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that's exactly where it's important and where it's not. The Kid? He thought: I'm going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can't remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I'm somebody famous? No, I do remember too Well what I've done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn't what it's about. I'm too used to being liked.

  Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his calloused thumb, he turned another corner.

  Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings. Clap-clap, the doors. He looked at the balding driver squinting out the windshield as if for traffic.

  Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.

  "You got a transfer?"

  "Hey, I'm sorry. If you need fare or something-" He stepped back.

  But the driver motioned him on. "This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on." Clap-clap: the bus rocked forward.

  An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.

  A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.

  A couple-he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom-were making a point of not looking at him.

  Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody, and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.

  Where am I-but wouldn't think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the brillowy ball.

  He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.

  She blinked.

  He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.

  They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.

  He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.

  After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct was "Three Stars says the Times." On the next R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckle on blades.

  On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.

  Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, grinning and hanging his neck from slung shoulders.

  eck n w's

  S ROGS

  ND TEG TTA Y

  announced the next marquee. He looked at broken store windows-in one was a pile of naked dummies. The street widened and once smoke rolled by so that he could make out no letters at all upon the final marquee of the strip.

  Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights his own body sensation cast in t
he nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It's the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.

  He looked out the window.

  Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):

  E m

  B O R

  I K Y'

  S

  Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with canvas. A crack in another zagged edge to edge.

  Kid pulled the frayed ceiling cord, then held on to the bar across the back of the seat before him till the bus, a block later and somewhat to his surprise, stopped. He jumped off the back treadle to the curb and turned; through the dirty window, he saw the couple who had not looked at him when he'd gotten on, stopped looking at him now. The bus left.

  He was standing diagonally across from the five, six, seven, eight story department store. Uneasily, he backed into a doorway. (People with guns, hey?) He felt for his orchid-looked at it. It was a very silly weapon. People shooting out the windows? Several, higher up, were open. Several more were broken. Across the street a gutter grill waved a steamy plume. Why, he thought, get out here? Maybe the people in there have all gone and he could just cross the street and-the skin of his back and belly shriveled. Why had he gotten off here? It had been in response to some un-named embryo feeling, and he had leapt out of the bus, following it to term. But now it was born; and was terror.

  Cross the street, mother-fucker, he told himself. You get up close to the building and they can't see you out the windows. This way somebody can just aim out and pick you off if they got a penchant for it. He told himself some other things too.

  A minute later, he walked to the opposite corner, a sidestep for the fire hydrant, stopped with his hand against the beige stone, breathing long, slow breaths and listening to his heart. The building took up all the block. There were no show windows down the side alley. Save from the front door, there was no place from the store he could be seen. He looked across the avenue. (From what letters still remained on that broken glass, it must have been a travel agency. And down there . . . ? Some kind of office building, perhaps? Burn marks lapped great carbon tongues around the lower stories.) The street looked so wide-but that was because there were no cars at either curb.