Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  It was not, Kid had noticed, a particularly quiet nor attentive crowd-save the thirty or forty actually clustered at the Reverend's podium. People wandered, talked; and now laughter began somewhere, obscuring her words. Up in the dark balcony, a few people, widely distant, slept like darker blotches among the brown wood seats. Somebody moved along the railing, checking spotlights; none seemed to work. Fat, bald, the color of terra cotta and wearing just some bib-coveralls, he stood up, wiped at his forehead with the back of his arm, and moved to the next dead light.

  On the walls, were high barred windows. As Kid's eyes came down the gates, a group of six middle-aged men and women ran across the floor: one woman knocked over a statue that one man caught and struggled to right, till a plaster wing fell. Plaster shattered over the floor. Others clustered to laugh, to shout advice.

  Beyond them, Reverend Tayler waved her arms, ducked her head and tossed it back, haranguing the powdered floor, the shadowed ceiling; but only a word or two could tear clear now of talk and laughter.

  The group fell apart from a sunburst of white footprints: George Harrison stalked through.

  One arm was around the neck of a yellow-haired, plump, pink woman, the other around the waist of a gaunt, tan girl with a brick-colored natural and freckles. (He'd seen her, at the church, with the blond Mexican, who had stopped him on the street, how many mornings later, how many mornings ago?) George saw Kid, veered over, and called: "Hey, so you gonna come here, now? Shit!" His sleeves were rolled high on biceps like French-roast coffee. "You sure pick a hell of a time to come. Right in the middle of super-night. This is super-night, ain't it?" and nodded and hallooed people passing ten yards away. "Today sure as hell was super-day, when that super-sun come up in the super-sky! Hey-?" He released the gaunt girl's waist. Between the lapels of her jump suit hung a glittering catenary. "What you got there? Lemme see." His black fingers (pink nails, scimitared with yellow) clawed up the optical chain. "I see all the people running around wearing these things. Him . . ." He nodded at Kid. "You see all of them walking around with them. Come on, gimme that one. I'm gonna be a hippie too and wear them little glass beads."

  "Ohh!" She complained, "George!"

  "You give me those, and you can get some more, right?"

  "No honey." She lifted them from his fingers. "You can't have these."

  "Why not?"

  "Cause you can't, that's all."

  "You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself-"

  "Not these, honey." She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. "You tell me what else you want and I'll give you that, okay?"

  "Well, that's what I want!"

  "Oh, George." She snuggled, closer-and out of his line of sight.

  "All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I'm sure gonna get them later." Harrison guffawed.

  The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking palm.

  "What is all this?" Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. "I mean, what's everybody doing here? And the preacher-?"

  "Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!"

  "She sure been going on," the gaunt girl said. "She just don't stop."

  "This here is my house," George said, with a grave nod. "Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn't be able to fit 'em all in the church. So we say, come on and we gonna open up the big meeting room. And you just put a sign out say everybody come on over."

  "I think that's real nice," Plump Pink said in an accent that, during three weeks at the Georgia border loading melons, Kid had learned to identify as South Alabama Flats. "She always preaching about George and telling everybody about George. So I think it was very nice of George to say why not come on and do it here."

  "Don't look to me like there any more people than she could fit in the chapel," the girl said.

  "We got a bar over there-" the blond woman turned up her hand to point-"where you fellas can go get a drink. Then you can go listen to the preacher lady. George just wants everybody to make themselves at home."

  "Shit," George said. Then he laughed.

  Glass laughed too; the blond woman looked satisfied, did something with two fingers under the flowered cotton of her bodice, smiled.

  "Gotta give the preacher lady a place to preach," George repeated. He nodded, dropped the gaunt girl's waist.

  "Who lives in this city?" Reverend Amy's voice came on through a lull. "Logicians love it here!" George turned to listen. So did the gaunt girl and Glass. "Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you. What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated plurima. No, Che, no Fanon, you are not niggers enough! Look-" Once more she waved her fist high. Her black sleeve flung out below it. "I have a handful of monads here. Listen- They're chattering and gossiping away like eight-operation logic-cells calling up order from a random net . . ." At the mention of Che an (unrelated? Kid wondered) wave of noise had started in one corner of the hall. Now another, which had at its center crashing bottle glass, rose over her voice. On the brown scape of the Reverend's face, a constellation of droplets gleamed on each temple. Her mouth moved, her head bent, her head rose; her eyes sealed, snapped open, stared intently; and again Kid could hear none of her dithyramb.

  He did hear George chuckle. Harrison stood with his hands in the pockets of his dirty khaki slacks.

  Glass, a few steps away, was craning to see something over somebody's head. The blond woman was shouldering her way forward with smiles and "excuse-me's," right and left; the gaunt girl stood, pensive, still watching the preacher, her left hand on her right shoulder, looking pained and picturesque.

  "You know your girl friend was outside looking for you again," Kid said.

  "Yeah?" George said. "Which one?"

  "A little blond seventeen-year-old white girl." The sweat, Kid realized, was not just under the books. The shoulders of his vest slid on it. The backs of his knees and the skin under his jaw were wet. "She was outside, asking . . . asking for you: 'Is George Harrison in there? Is George inside?' "

  George's nose and cheeks like sanded teak, his heavy lips wrinkled as hemlock bark, the planes around his off-ivory teeth and eyes, moved into an expression fixed loosely among irony, amusement, and contempt: It was the expression on Tak's first poster. "Lots of little white girls come around here looking for me."

  "Her name rhymes with moon, and she-" Kid's right fist clamped, fingertips and knuckles scraping his jeans-"she killed her brother for you: George? She had your poster, all big and black and naked and he saw it, her little brother. He saw it and was teasing her-you know how little brothers are, George? He was teasing her and he was gonna tell on her, you see? He was gonna tell her mother, tell her father: only she was afraid if he did, they'd know-know that it wasn't just a picture; know that she'd found you once; know that she was trying to find you again! See, they'd already threatened to kill her older brother. Already. And he'd run away. So she pushed him, her little brother, down the elevator shaft- sixteen, seventeen, eighteen stories down . . . ! I don't quite . . . remember!" Kid shook his head. Something that was not pain pulsed in it, pulsed in it again. "Oh, Christ, there was . . . blood! I had blood all over me. I had to pull him up out of the basement, by the armful! And carry him back upstairs. After he was dead. But . . . it was for you! That's why she . . . that's why she did it! That's why I ..." What pulsed became pain. "She told me herself. She told me that she was afraid he was going to tell. And that she . . ." Kid stepped away, stepped again, because the first step was unsteady and he had to catch himself o
n the second. He looked back.

  George watched, as if from a long hall whose walls moved with indifferent faces, black and brown.

  . His eyes will explode like blooming poppies, Kid thought. His teeth will erupt like diamonds spat by the mouthful. His tongue will snake the yards between us, nearly touch my mouth before it becomes pink smoke. Steam in two columns will hiss down from his nostrils . . .

  George stared with-and recognizing it, Kid suddenly turned away and lurched away-the indulgence reserved for the mad.

  Is this, Kid thought (saying, "Hey, I'm sorry, man . . ." and patting someone's shoulder he'd just bumped), one of those moments that, momentarily, will slip out of mind to join my purpose, age, and name? He made it between those two; then somebody, laughing, steadied his arm and handed him on. He came up against the thin metal bars with his cheek and both hands, clutched them, leaned back, looked up:

  Someone was coming down the spiral stairway. The fat, bald man (whose skin looked now more like oiled wrapping-paper) in the bib-overalls, descended, by Kid, stepped from ringing, black, triangular steps that circled the central pole, up, around, and up through the open square in the balcony floor-

  When Kid looked down again, the man was working sideways through the people wandering about the center of the room.

  "You all right?"

  "Yeah, I ..." Kid looked around.

  "Good." Glass, with a bobbing walk, almost slow motion, came toward him. "I was just wondering. You know ...?,"

  "I'm all right . . ." But he was cold; the sweat was drying on his neck, his forearms, his ankles. "Yeah."

  Glass ran his thumb along his belt. Vinyl flapped back from the appendectomy scar in his dark, matte skin, swung over it again.

  Multiple Caucasian laughter fell down through the spiral railing.

  Glass and Kid looked up together, looked down together.

  A lantern high on the wall brushed soft highlights on

  Glass's arms, slapped harsh ones on his vest, and slipped

  a line of light along an orchid petal against his chained

  and chain-lapped chest so bright Kid squinted.,

  "You wanna go see?" Glass said.

  "Sounds like the kids from the park." Kid pressed his lips, glanced up again; suddenly he swung around the rail, started up the steps, one hand on the gritty pole, one trailing on the banister. Glass, behind him, kept bumping Kid's fist with his fist on the rail. The toe of his boot caught Kid's bare heel one step before the top.

  From the shadowed kiosk at the head of the aisle, Kid looked down the balcony's raked seats. He heard Glass breathing inches behind his ear.

  They sat-six, no seven of them-just back from the balcony rail: The blond woman in the third row, leaning forward to see between the shoulders of the two men in front, was Lynn, the woman he had sat next to at the Richards, the woman from whom he had wrested the gun in the Emboriky.

  A tall, curly-haired man sat beside her, his hands locked around the barrel of a gun. He leaned forward, the barrel tip higher than his head; he looked almost asleep.

  Another man was still laughing.

  Another was saying, "Where is that damn woman's dog? Hey-" He half rose, looked over the empty seats: "Muriel! Muriel-"

  "Oh, for God's sakes, Mark, sit down!" Lynn, in her green dress, said.

  Another man, in a worn suede jacket, said: "I want to know where that damn woman is. She was supposed to be back by . . ." The last of his sentence was lost in laughter and applause from below, that must have had something to do with the Reverend; but Kid could not see her from here.

  And one man had cuffed the man next to him. The other woman, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, was trying to separate them, laughing.

  A seat away, scuffed shoes on the back of the seat ahead, knees jackknifed in shiny slacks, and a rifle across his chair arms like a guard bar on the seat of a carnival ride, sat Jack. While the others joked and laughed, Kid could see his hollow, unshaven cheek pulse with swallowing as he balanced his chin on his joined fists and brooded down on the milling blacks.

  "Ain't some of those guys look awfully familiar?" Glass whispered, too loudly, it seemed, near Kid's ear. But none of them turned.

  Kid glanced back-"The department store . . ."-and saw Glass nod before he looked away.

  Widely scattered in the dark balcony (there were only two lanterns that someone had set up about twenty yards down the balcony rail; all the other light came from below), perhaps a dozen people lounged in the ply-backed seats. The bolts in the wrought metal braces holding the seat, in front of Kid's knee, to the dusty floor were half out-

  "What's she saying? Can you hear what the preacher lady's saying down there?"

  "On, come on! You can't hear anything up here except noise! I want to go downstairs and wander around the party!"

  "You want to go down there, with all of them? Go on, then!"

  "That guy down there looks all right . . . Who is he, anyway?"

  "The white guy over there?"

  "That's who I was pointing at, wasn't I?"

  "Man-" The curly-haired one dragged the barrel back against his chest. "We could really just pick them off from up here. Just like-" He suddenly raised his rifle to his eye. "Pow!" he said, then glanced over and laughed. "Just like that, right? Wish I knew which one was George Harrison." He sighted down the gun again. "Pow . . ." he whispered.

  "Cut it out," the man who was Mark said. "We just snuck in here to see what was going on."

  The curly-headed man leaned forward and called, "Hey, Reb? Don't you think we could stir up a little excitement down there with a few well-aimed ones-just for target practice, mind you? What you think of that idea, Reb?"

  Jack said, soberly and not looking over: "All you folks got some strange ideas. Everybody I met since I come here got strange ideas." Not soberly, came to Kid as a second thought: Jack's voice had the slurred gravity of a very grave drunk.

  "Why do you two want to bring guns to a place like this for anyway?" Mark said.

  "They had guns," the curly-headed man said, putting his rifle butt back on the floor. "You see the way them niggers tried to kick us out, because we had guns? Now that's not right. They had guns, we had guns-all men are created equal. Didn't you know that?- Hey, get your hand off!"

  "I just wanted to see it," the woman in the peasant blouse said. "Besides, I'm a better shot than you, anyway."

  "Yeah?" the man said. "Sure you are." He hung his curly head back against the barrel.

  "Well, I am!"

  "Which one is Harrison?" one of the other men said. "You know, they all do look alike." He laughed. "At least from up here."

  Jack put one shoe down. Other than that-elbows on the chair arms across his rifle, chin on his fists, and one shiny knee angling wide-he did not move.

  "What is that woman shouting about down there? Jesus . . ."

  Kid looked at Glass, who had stepped up beside him now. Glass, frowning, glanced back at the small group, with a small, disgusted head shake.

  Kid gestured down the spiral steps with his chin, turned, and started.

  The hall of milling men and women revolved and received him.

  "Too much!" Glass said at the bottom, stopping Kid with a warm hand on the shoulder. "I mean, Christ, man..."

  "Let's find George." Kid took a breath. "We'll tell him they're up there and see what he wants to do."

  "They probably ain't really gonna do nothing . . ." Glass said, warily.

  "Then we find George, tell him there's a bunch of white people up in the balcony, two of them with guns, who probably ain't gonna do anything." Kid wondered which way to go, saw an opening in the crowd, and loped into it.

  Behind him, Glass suggested on the run: "Maybe George already knows they're there?"

  "Fine," Kid said, back over his shoulder. "Then he can tell us that too."

  Three tubs near the wall held the four- and five-foot cactuses-the sort Kid had always heard sent roots thirty and forty feet down into th
e desert for water.

  On the nearest, among browned and crisscrossed needles, hung what looked like a pink tissue. Two steps nearer, and Kid saw it was the rag of a flower, wide as his hand, limp on the succulent's flesh.

  Before the furthest, George joked among a loud and jocular group. One woman with arms like brown sacks, wrinkled at elbows, wrists, and knuckles, waved a bottle, offering it here and there, with kisses and explosive shrieks.

  Kid glanced at the balcony. No, they were not visible from where he stood.

  Kid edged forward into the group. An arm pressed his arm, a hand steadied against his back to steady someone unsteady: He was sweating again. "George-! Hey, George?" He wondered why, and for answer found all the memories of ten minutes ago's encounter: the compulsive tale of June, his own terror, returning now. "George, I got to-" He took the bottle passed him, drank, passed it on. "George, I got to see you for a minute, man!" Am I afraid of him? Kid wondered. If that's all it is, then all I know to do is not be afraid of the fear. "George . . . !"