Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Huh?"

  "Three people have told me how great your dress is," which was true. "Denny's doing a good job."

  "You're a doll!" She clapped his cheeks between her palms and kissed him on the nose.

  Cathedral, California, and Thruppence ambled below them on the path, light and dark shoulders together. I feel responsible for them, he thought, recalling her initial efforts. He laughed.

  Her dress began to broil with green and lavender.

  She saw and asked, "Where's Denny gotten off to? Let's go look for him."

  They did and could not find him, spoke to others, and then Kid lost her again.

  From the high rocks of-"October," said the plaque on the rust-ringed birdbath-he looked down toward the terrace.

  Two women he had not met, with Bill (whom he had) between them, had cornered Baby and were talking at him intently. Baby smiled very hard, his paper plate just under his chin. Sometimes he dropped his head to nod, sometimes to scrape up another and another forkful. Once in a while someone across the terrace, when they were sure they were unobserved, would glance- two ladies, one after another, maneuvered for the better view, noticed they were observed, and walked away.

  Someone was in the bushes behind him.

  Kid looked around: Jack the Ripper backed out; from the movement of his elbows, he was closing his fly. He turned. "Huh? . . . oh, it's just you, man." He grinned, bent, adjusted himself. "Scared somebody gonna see me back there takin' a leak."

  "There's a bathroom in the house somewhere."

  "Shit. I didn't wanna go askin' around for that. My piss ain't gonna kill no flowers. This is a real nice place, huh. A real nice party. Everybody's real nice. You havin' a nice time? I sure am." Kid nodded. "You catch Baby when he came in?"

  "No," the Ripper drawled with a wildly interrogative cadence.

  "You said you wanted to see what the reaction was. I missed it. I was wondering if you caught it."

  "God damn!" The Ripper snapped his fingers. "You know I wasn't even looking?"

  "There he is."

  "Where?"

  Kid nodded toward the terrace.

  The Ripper stuck his hands in the back of his pants. "What they talkin' about?"

  Kid shrugged.

  "Hey, man!" The Ripper's hands came loose again. "I gotta go down and hear this." He grinned at Kid who started to say something. But the Ripper was off along the rocks.

  At the four-foot terrace wall, the Ripper straight-armed up, scrambled over-half a dozen looked-and jumped. A bopping lope took him to the bar. The white bartender gave him two drinks. He came to the corner, thrust one glass at Baby and said loud enough for Kid to hear: "Now I know you want a drink, Baby, 'cause you gonna need something to keep you warm."

  Several people laughed.

  Baby took the drink in both hands-he had put his plate down on the wall-and looked as though he were about to dive into it. But Bill and the two women merely made room, and continued.

  Seconds later, the Ripper, all weight on one leg, heavy lower lip sucked in and long head quizzically cocked, stood rapt, nodding in unison with Baby.

  Curious at their low converse, Kid walked away from it into March.

  Only one light worked here, anchored high and harsh on an elm. Captain Kamp stood silhouetted at the vertex of his shadow. "Hello, now, I was just coming back this way . . . you enjoying yourself?" Backlight made him ominous; his voice was cheerful. "I was just over there taking a-" (Kid expected him to say "leak")-"look in the August gardens. There're no lights in there, so I guess people are staying clear. But you can see down into the city. A few street lights are still on. I'm not too good at this ersatz host business. And this party takes some hosting." Kamp stepped up. Kid turned to walk with him. "Now I sure wish Roger would get here."

  "Doesn't look like anyone's missed him too much."

  "I have. I'm just not used to all this . . . well, sort of thing. I mean, trying to be in charge of it."

  "I guess I'd like to meet him."

  "Sure. Of course you would." Kamp nodded as they came nearer the house. "I mean he's giving this party for you, for your book. You'd think he'd . . . but now I'm pretty sure he'll get here. You don't worry now."

  "I'm not and don't mean to start."

  "You know I was thinking-" they walked up the stone steps-"about some of the things we were talking about when I first met you."

  "That was a strange evening. But it came after a strange day."

  "Sure did. Have you seen Roger's observatory?" Kamp interrupted himself. "Perhaps you'd like to go up and see it."

  Kid was curious at the transition rather than the suggestion. "Okay."

  Coming down the terrace, Lady of Spain, Spider, Angel, Raven and Tarzan, circled gangling D-t:

  "D-t, man, you gotta see this!"

  "I ain't never seen no garden like this before. All them flowers-"

  "-and a big fountain that works and all."

  "Come on. We gonna show you." Lady of Spain tugged his arm.

  "D-t, you ain't never seen no garden as pretty as this in your whole life!"

  "I guess-" Kamp opened the door for Kid-"I'm just not used to it. I mean all these different . . . kinds of people. Like that boy back there walking around with no clothes on? And everybody going on just like there was nothing wrong." The large, dark room was lined with books. In candlelight some dozen people sat on the floor or on hassocks. Several looked up from a tape recorder from which organ music flowed. One man (Kid remembered his making some joke in November about the smoke) said, "Kid? Captain? Would you like to join us? We were just listening to some-"

  "We're going to the observatory." Kamp opened another door.

  The organ piece ended; after a slight pause, a long note bent. Then another . . . They were playing Diffraction.

  Kid smiled as he walked after Kamp down a hall nearly black. He could hear Lanya's whistle. At the top of a stairway Kid saw faint light. The carpeting was thick and so warm under his bare foot he wondered if there were heating on.

  "I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Roger was here. But being left in charge of a party for a bunch of people that, frankly, I'd put out of my house . . ."

  Kid was quietly amazed and wondered what Kamp was thinking in the pause.

  ". . . I just don't know what to do. Do you know what I mean?"

  Anything, Kid thought, I say will sound angry and stupid. He said, "Sure," and followed Kamp up the stairs.

  "A few months ago," Kamp said, "I was in some experiments. They didn't have anything to do with the moon. In fact I had to get a special release from the Space Program to participate. Some students of a friend of mine at Michigan were running tests, and I guess he thought it would be a feather in his cap to get me for a guinea pig. Now, it'd been so long since I had anything to do that wasn't in some way connected with the Program, I went along with it. They were experiments on sensory deprivation and overload." At the head of the steps, Kamp waited for Kid before starting up a third flight.

  He led Kid across a brick floor to a double doorway.

  "I was in the overload part. It was all pretty amateurish, actually."

  Kid stepped onto what first seemed a semi-circular balcony.

  Faintly, below, a room full of people began to clap in time to the music-

  "I guess they'd all been reading too many articles on LSD-"

  -and shouted.

  "-I took LSD back in the late fifties-more tests,

  that this psychiatrist friend of mine was running. But I've

  always been a little ahead of what's going on. Anyway, I

  know what it's like, LSD. And I'm pretty sure most of

  ' those kids setting up those experiments in Michigan didn't."

  The terrace was enclosed in a glass dome. In the center was a six-foot in diameter celestial globe of clear plastic. Light from the garden below struggled in the smoke above, glowing like dilute milk.

  "Now I guess you've taken LSD and all that stuff."


  "Sure."

  "Well, all they'd been doing was looking at all the pretty pictures everyone had been drawing." Kamp touched the globe, removed his fingers. Ares passed across Libra. The stars were glittering stones set in the etched constellations. "They had spherical rear-projection rooms, practically as big as this place here. They could cover it with colors and shapes and flashes. They put earphones on me and blasted in beeps and clicks and oscillating frequencies. Anyway, I was supposed to pick out patterns from all this. Later I learned that mine was the control group: We were given no patterns at all. I was told all the ones I had seen I had imposed myself . . . But after two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was just astounded at how . . . rich and complicated everything suddenly looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory-overload chamber. Rich . . . and I suddenly realized what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information deprivation. It's the pattern that colors and shapes assume that tell you whether it's a cow or a car you're looking at. It's the very finest alternations in color differentiation over a surface that tell you whether it's maple or pine, styrene or polyethylene, linen or flannel. Take any view in front of you and cut off the top and bottom till you've only got an inch-wide strip and you'll still be amazed at all the information you can get from just running your eye along that. Well, all this started me thinking back to the moon. Because that had been a place-and it happened in every mile en route-where standard information patterns just broke down. And yet, that's something we haven't been able to talk about-to anyone-since we got back. We'd trained for prolonged free-fall by spending time underwater in diving suits. I remember when we actually hit sustained weightlessness, I broadcast back, 'Hey, it's just like being underwater!' and yet as I said that into the chin mike, I was thinking: You certainly could never mistake the two conditions for one another. But I couldn't think of any way to say what was different about it, so I just described the way everybody, who'd never been there themselves, had told me it was going to feel like. Later I thought, that's like telling someone the world is flat and sending him j off to the edge; but because he doesn't know quite how to describe such gentle roundness, he mumbles and stammers and says, 'Well yeah, I was at the ... edge.' And the thing about the moon itself, the one thing I've really never told anybody, because I don't think I would have known how before those experiments: it's another world, and when you're there, you have no way of knowing what anything means. Physically. That whole landscape tells you nothing about itself, on any level, in the way that the most desolate stretch of sand on earth tells you about winds that have blown over it, rains that have or have not fallen, or the feel it might have beneath your feet if you walked across it. 'An airless, waterless void . . .' the way they say in all the science-fiction stories? No, that refers to some desert on earth, or what space between the stars looks like when you're safely tucked under the atmosphere. The moon is a different world, with a different order that you don't understand. There isn't that richness-not because it isn't in bright colors, or because it's all brown, purple, and grey. It's because as you run your eyes over the rocks and dirt, you have no way to know what the tiny alterations in color mean. Even though it has a horizon and perspective, and . . . well, rocks and dirt, it's more like being in that sensory-overload chamber than anything else. And of course, it isn't like that at all. It wasn't horrible. Horror still has something to do with earth. I suppose it was frightening. But even that was absorbed in the excitement of it. I-" he paused-"do not know how to tell you about it." He smiled and shrugged. "And that's probably the one thing I really haven't told anybody before. Oh, I've said, 'You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.' But that's my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn't what I mean."

  Kid smiled back and wished he hadn't.

  It isn't his moon I distrust so much, he thought, as it is that first wife in Persia. "I understand," he said, "as much as I'll let myself."

  "Maybe," Kamp said after a moment, "you do. Let's go back down to the party."

  Walking down the steps, Kid felt self-betrayed and wondered if there were any benefit from the feeling. He wanted to find Lanya and Denny.

  Outside on the terrace, while the Captain, beside him, looked around as if for someone else to talk to, Kid thought: I feel the responsibility for him now he probably hoped I felt the night I walked him up here. That is not right, and I don't like it.

  Ernestine Throckmorton said, "Captain! Kid! Ah, there you are," and began to talk definitely only to Kamp.

  Kid excused himself, wondering whether she really was an angel, and went down into the gardens.

  Lanya was crossing the bridge in a fury of emerald and indigo.

  "Hey," he said. "Have you seen Denny?"

  She turned. "You haven't. He's feeling abandoned."

  Paul Fenster, holding his drink beneath his chin, stepped around Kid and said: "Jesus Christ, you'll never believe what was going on back there in April. I didn't think I was going to be able to make it." He laughed.

  Lanya didn't, and asked, "What?"

  "A whole bunch of black kids, back in April, they've got this whole routine worked out. They've got this white boy, called Tarzan: And they were just performing! And of course Roger's nice old colonel from Alabama was there-the one I was telling you about who gave me so much trouble when I was visiting-and of course he was laughing harder than anybody else. I kid you not, they were swinging from the God-damn trees!"

  "What did you do?" Lanya had begun to laugh.

  "Sweated a lot," Fenster said. "And tried to think of some way to leave. You know, guys who come to parties like this in berets and talk about liberating the furniture: Now I'm pretty into that. But I guess that type all had sense, enough to get out of Bellona while there was some getting. This Stepin Fetchit stuff, though-well, all I can say is, it's been a while!"

  "Suffering's supposed to be good for the something-or-other," Kid said.

  "It damn," Fenster replied, "well better be!" He grunted and walked on across the bridge.

  Lanya took Kid's hand. ". . . Denny?"

  "Yeah."

  "I just left him." Her dress was shimmering black. A silver circle rose on the hem. "In March." She gestured with her head. He said, "You're beautiful."

  He thought, she's wistful.

  "Thank you. You really like the dress?" He nodded, kept nodding, and suddenly she laughed and closed his mouth with her fingers.

  "I believe you. But I was beginning to think it was too much. Of course I was expecting just to stand around in some elegantly arbored corner holding court; not run around working. Where, I wonder, is Roger?"

  Kid held her cool hands against his face with his warm ones. "Let's find Denny."

  Dawn broke on her waist. "You find him," she said. "I'll see you a little later." A scarlet sun, haloed in yellow, eclipsed the silver moon.

  He wondered why but said. "Okay," and left her on the bridge.

  The stream became a pool in March, scaled with immobile leaves.

  "I told that bitch!" Dollar stood and rocked on bowed legs. "I told that bitch. After what she tried, you know? I just told her."

  Denny sat cross-legged on the stone bench and didn't look like he was listening too hard.

  Kid walked around the pool. "You trying to get in trouble at my party?"

  Dollar's head jerked: he looked scared.

  Denny said, "Dollar's okay. He ain't done nothing."

  "I ain't done nothing," Dollar echoed. "It's a real nice party, Kid."

  Kid put his hand on the back of Dollar's pitted neck and squeezed. "You have a good time. Don't let anything get you, you know? You got a whole lot of space to walk around in. Something gets you here, you walk on over there. Something gets you there, you go on someplace else. If it happens a third time, come tell me about it. Understand? T
here's no strange sun in the sky tonight."

  "Nothing's wrong, Kid. Everything's okay." The distressful smile went; Dollar just looked sad. "Really."

  "Good." Kid let go Dollar's neck and looked at Denny. "You having a good time?"

  "I guess so." Denny's shirt, unbuttoned, hung out of his pants. "Yeah."

  A group came through the ivied gate, scorpions and others, following Ernestine Throckmorton.

  Dollar said, "Oh, hey!" and jogged, jangling, after them, around the pool and out another entrance.

  "I'm going to take this off." Denny shrugged from his vest, got the control box from his pocket, slipped out of his shirt, and sat, turning the box in one hand, the other slung among his chains. "Lanya says I've been doing a good job. This little thing is something, huh?"

  Kid sat down and put his hand on Denny's dry, knobby back. In the boy's glance some relief flickered.

  Kid rubbed his back.

  Denny said, "Why you doin' that?" But he was smiling at his lap.

  "Because you like it." Kid moved his hand up the sharp shoulder blade and down, pressing. Denny rocked with each rub.

  "Sometimes," Lanya said and Kid turned, "I envy you two."

  Kid did not stop rubbing and Denny did not look up.

  "Why?" Denny moved his shoulders, reached up to scratch his neck.

  "I don't know. I supposed it's because you can let people-let Kid know you want things I'd be afraid to ask for."

  "You want your back rubbed?" Kid asked.

  "Yes." She grinned. "But not now."

  "I watch the two of you," Kid said, "when you're playing. When you're throwing things at one another; tugging one another around all the time. I envy you."

  "You . . . ?" Lanya reached for Denny's shoulder.

  But Denny suddenly stood and stepped forward.

  Kid wondered if he'd seen her reaching, watched her face pass through hurt and her hand withdraw.

  Denny turned on the pool edge and laughed. "Aw, you two are all-" He twisted a knob.

  From neck to hem she glittered black; black granulated silver; scarlet poured about her. "Hey, see, I got it good!"