Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  I ramble.

  More than likely I shall not be at the house for a while.

  Until we do meet, I remain,

  Sincerely, Roger Calkins

  RC;wd

  too dark to see.

  So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside-

  and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing, and everybody was pouring in to see what was going on: "Night run!" I told them. "We're gonna make a night run!" Which we did-to the build-ing with the stained glass windows (the lions of the city, a particolored flicker from our lights) with Lanya along, mouse quiet; and there was a funny almost-fight with three men on the street. But after they got as nasty as they dared, I guess it struck them how stupid they were being; a couple of times they got pushed into a wall, though.

  At the nest, Denny filled up a bottle from the pail on the stove; I took it on the porch and wrote some more.

  Lanya came to squat behind me, hands on my Shoulders, cheek on my cheek. "You're really up-/ going/ aren't you? Maybe staying at my place

  I heard Denny say: "He's asleep."

  I opened one eye against my arm. The other stared With the other I could see the top of the doorway. -Then her Then steps below / and somebody moving something to get by / were Lanya['s] I lay waiting for the circle of her hair to dawn at the loft's edge.

  "You aren't sleeping." She grinned and came on over. "I got all the kids stored away."

  "Good," I said. "Why were you so pissed off at me when I brought them in that morn-ing?"

  "What?"

  I raised my head out of my arm and asked again.

  "Oh." She turned around on the edge and slid her butt against my side. "I'm just lazy- almost, but not quite, as lazy as you. And I don't like imposing on people." She put her hand In the sleeve hole of my vest. "Besides, I thought you should have kept them." Her fingers, cool,-were touched the chain.

  "You did?"

  She nodded.

  That upset me. "I really misunderstood you."

  "I know you did. I read what you wrote I said about it in the kitchen / about / when D-t brought in the article."

  "And that's not what you said at all, huh?"

  "What I said was: What are you going to do about them? What arrangements were you going to make about getting them over to the school, if any; getting a couple of changes of clothes for them; maybe a permanent mattress that was theirs-things like that."

  "You really think they'd be better off here?"

  "Where you found them, somebody was trying to burn them alive. I could always pack them off with the Richards-"

  "What about some of the black families of the kids you've got?"

  "You have a very funny picture of this city," she said. "There aren't any black families here. Some of my kids hang around the wasn't such a bad idea?"

  "It was a good idea."

  She said, sweetly: "I was fucking pissed, you know, when Madame Brown told me you'd split. But when I got here and everybody said you were writing, it was okay." She picked up the sheaf of blue paper. "I'm going to steal these away to read. I'll bring them back in twenty minutes. All right?"

  "Yeah," I said. "You know I feel better about these than any I've written before. Not that that means anything."

  "Good enough to have a second collection?"

  I grinned at her. "I think I'm even more anxious not to have one."

  She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them,

  Wrote till I

  George Harrison circus. Or whoever will put up with them. Some, as far as I can tell, are completely on their own."

  "Where did you park them?"

  "With the commune, mostly."

  I lay back down. "They would have been better off here."

  "Mmm," she agreed. "Rose went with a woman who's been keeping three girls for a couple of weeks. Everybody was pretty nice about it." Her fingers moved. "But you should have kept them."

  I rolled over on my back.

  Her hand dragged around my stomach.

  "I didn't want them."

  "Maybe somebody else around here in the nest would have. Everybody liked them . . . I wanted them."

  "You don't live here," I said. "Except five days out of a week. And you've got them: in school."

  "Yeah," she said. "Five days out of a week. But you have a point." She took her hand away. "Tell me, how do you do it?"

  I asked: "What?"

  "How do you-well, I was Just thinking about the article."

  "Have you heard people talking about my article?" .

  ". . . yours?" That her smile held less mocking than it might was how I knew she mocked.

  "About me. You know what I mean."

  "Funny . . ." She drew her feet up cross-legged / wrinkling/-on the blanket; "Last night at the bar people were talking about you-as usual. But they didn't spend too much time on the kids' rescue. It jars with your image, I think."

  I thought about that

  She explained: "It isn't two-sided enough for you. It's just straight heroics."

  I heard Denny come into the room, move things under the loft looking for something and not finding it. Lanya glanced down and leaving.

  "All the good gossip about you usually has that dualistic two-sided thing of being bad was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the left loft where Denny was lying down already; we fucked on and off all night Slept Woke up before they did. Took all the pages I'd done out on the kitchen steps and in dawnlight almost too dun to read by, r e a d them: made six more changes. Now they are finished.

  Copied them out (and it was full day) but found I still [wanted?] to go on writing. So turned back to one of the pages with space left near the end. of the notebook (there are very few of them, and I have just started putting entries-like the beginning of this one-in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins) and wrote, this, continuing it on a page I found free here near the beginning.

  I recall /and want/ this wanting;

  Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you've been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer-edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

  The City suffers from the lack of it.

  But most of us /have/ come-to-here by way of it.

  and good at once-do you worry about your image?" she asked, suddenly.

  "Sure."

  "I'm surprised," she said. "You never seem to purposely do anything about it."

  "That's because it never has any relation to what I actually do do. My Image is in other peoples' heads. Keeping it interesting is there [their?] problem. I worry about it in the way I could worry about the reputation of my favorite baseball team. I don't for one minute think of myself as a player."

  "Maybe so." She picked up my hand and touched the / thickened thumb-knuckle I'd gnawed / raw /red- pink again. "I mean some day you're going to wash your hands thoroughly and show up with a perfect manicure. And I'll leave you forever. You really are schiz, you know?"

  Which made me laugh. "I just it [?] the article had mentioned George. I don't think-it's--/-HtWeaving him out is-" I'd started to say fair-"good for my image." Which made me laugh again. [Sere the correction marks-except for one entry further on-stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had annotated the final, rather than the first, few pages; there are half a dozen passages to come where even these attempts at var-lora might be preferable to the most informed supposition. As to the marks employed: Indications of authorial deletions are self-evident; we can assume brackets mean editoria
l conjecture. The bracketed question, mark, however, with or without additional word or suffix, seems totally arbitrary. After much debate, we can only suggest that words in virgules are probably interlinear additions; but even the quickest perusal reveals this accounts only for most cases. While he plies us with quaint descriptions of paperclips and staples, he fails to record date and letter" head material in the Calkins' letter (perhaps there were none?), nor does he mention whether any (or all) of the entries were typed or hand-written. Internal evidence (it is a spiral notebook, not a loose-leaf) suggest the latter. Corrections, however, such as: blank, there’s, and bench bray out for the former. Also, "Rose . . . a brown fist up beside her -face-chin..." and, a few pages later, "Fist against his chin, Stevie . . ." suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp description for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent "entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins"-that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber's editorial adieu ("Here one page, possibly two, is missing.") can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were--say-the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

  "Sounds like you had a reporter standing

  "Then how did they know

  grinding her palm on the grey formica. (That superfluous 'n' again suggests a typing, rather than a handwritten, error.)

  Are you going to keep them here?"

  He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary 'sic'-Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other.-for the mere lack of an upper-case 'D'!

  We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away- to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room-curious if she's ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

  I can't smell it.

  This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored sacks) and her friend Risa (who I wish looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys' jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

  Jack the Ripper: "Little girl, you must have been fucking on a God-damn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!" at which Denny, perched on the table's edge, laughs the shrillest.

  Gladis, under Spider's arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

  The Ripper's laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinderblock yesterday).

  Gladis leers and says, "Fuck you-" She's fifteen? Sixteen-?-"you big cocksucker!" with the inappropriate-ness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use "nigger" other than in rage.

  Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: "You don't get no belly like that sucking a cock!"

  "Well, Jesus Christ," Spider shouted, "well, Jesus Christ, if I'd 'a known that-" making much to get his fly open and his free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her, feet and lurched away.

  I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of Orchids, leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn't look at me.

  Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. "You like that?" I asked Risa.

  When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.

  "Uh-oh," from the Ripper. "What your girl friend gonna say when she come around?"

  "Fuck her," I said.

  "What's his boy friend gonna say?" Dollar asked from somewhere else.

  I said: "Fuck him too."

  Denny leaned across the table to pull the other jug over.

  Gladis, turning and turning in her loose green (they regard her as their personal catastrophe, an awesome delight; she looks as if she will foal now; claims, however, it's months away), settled, giggling, again, beside Spider.

  Then Spitt came in with Glass (some argument about where a building was) and we broke up from our backyard loafing and reconvened on the front steps. Standing beside Copperhead, I looked down the street: Thirteen was coming up:

  "Hey!" called with the desperate good will of the

  seriously bored. "Any of you guys want to come on over? Hey, Kid, you ain't even seen my new place. You want to come over and meet some of the guy's. there?" In this city, where nothing happens, it is worth your sanity to refuse anything new.

  Somehow, with the wrangling and wine and lethargy, me, the national guard (Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass), and Denny went with him.

  Up a lot of dark stairs with Glass saying, "Man, I didn't know you were this close. You're just around the God-damn corner," and Thirteen saying: "I told you I was just around the God-damn corner; why ain't you guys never come over to see us?" and I looked up:

  Smokey stood at the head; when we broke around her, she turned with Thirteen, to follow (at his shoulder)

  breathing as though she'd held her breath since he'd left.

  Sitting on one of the beds at the end of the loft was a scrawny, shirtless guy in jeans-holes both knees- knuckling his eyes. He'd probably just sat up when he heard us on the stairs.

  Two other guys stood at the window. Thirteen started bobbing around, very excited: "Hey! Hey, you guys, this is the Kid. Hey!" He motioned me over.

  "Hi." A black guy in workman's greys got up off the window sill and held out his hand.

  His friend, a stocky blond (short-hair) in denim and construction boots, had his hand ready for seconds. "Hear you got a thing going here."

  The black guy locked thumbs with me in a biker shake.

  I figured the other guy would do the same. But he just

  started, then he laughed, and his hand joggled awkwardly.

  It isn't that the "heroic" incidents about me cullable from the Times are untrue (well . . . some of them), nor the "villainous" ones on the gossip round that distorted (well. . . ditto). But the six minutes here, the twenty seconds there, the forty-five minutes how-many-weeks later-the real time it takes to commit the "heroic" or "villainous" act-are such a microscopic percentage of my life. Even what can be synopsized from this journal-snatches gun from looter's hands; helps save children from flaming death; lead victorious attack (Ha! They were scared crazy!) on armed cita
del; hobbles, half-shod, shrieking in the street; rescues Old Faust from collapsing ruin (and once tried to write poems -) are things that have happened to me, not that I have done. What you look like you're doing and what you feel like you're doing are disparate enough to mute any mouth that might attempt description! So I caught it up for him and smiled. He was "Tom," from Thirteen, "and this is Mak. You guys rode in here, you say?"

  "In a pickup," Tom explained. "We were up in Montana, running down this way . . . till we run out of gas." A cowboy truck driver, he wanted to be friendly.

  "And that's Red," from Tom.

  So I locked thumbs with Red (hair like rusted Brillo), who blinked sleepy, ice-grey eyes in a face dark as mocha - another mustard-skinned spade, and this one, for all his hunched shoulders, good-looking as the devil.

  From the corner someone said: "Hello, Kid," and Tak, arms folded, stood up from the plank wall where he was leaning. He pushed his cap up and came forward, face visible from the pink crease on his forehead where his cap had been, down to bis gold chin. "I'm making my rounds again. I brought these guys here over to the commune and they felt about like you did. So I thought we'd drop in on Thirteen and say hello."

  "A good excuse to smoke some dope," Thirteen said. "Now ain't that a good excuse?"

  "Sure," Tom said. "Any excuse is a good excuse as far as I'm concerned." ,

  Smokey, who I hadn't seen go, came back with the jar.

  Thirteen took it, raised it in Ms tattooed hand. "Now you'd think," he said, "with a water pipe like this, I'd at least put some kind of water in it, huh?"

  "Or creme de menthe," Smokey said. "That's what you're always talking about."

  "Yeah. You ever smoke hash through a water pipe filled with creme de menthe?" Thirteen asked. "That's really something."

  Mak, still at the window, gestured toward the bed. "You got a bottle of ... what's that? Mountain Red?"

  "Naw," Thirteen said. "That ain't the same thing."

  Thirteen's cheeks hollowed; the jar filled with smoke.

  "You got any speed?" Tom asked.