Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "I believe-" the voice was dry-"implicit in what you originally asked was that so necessary distinction between those who do good and who are good."

  "Sure," I said. "But explicit in what you said was that bit about making do with what you can get. I can get George if I need him. He's genial enough for a god, with some nicely human failings like a history of lust."

  "I think I'm still Judeo-Christian enough to be uncomfortable with expressly human demiurges."

  "In the state approved religion, the governor is God's appointed representative on earth, if I remember right. Isn't that, when all is said and done, what makes the relation between the head of the state and the head of the church as ticklish as you were just telling me it is? You're as much of a god as George, minus some celestial portents and-of course, I'm just guessing-a couple of inches on your dick."

  "I suppose-one valid purpose of poets is to bring

  blasphemy to the steps of the altar. I just wish you hadn't felt obliged to do it today. Nevertheless, I appreciate it as a political, if not a religious necessity."

  "Mr Calkins," I said, "most of your subjects aren't sure whether or not this place even exists. I'm not presenting any long considered protest. I wasn't sure there was a Father till today. I was just asking-"

  "What are you asking, young man?" What I'd intended to come back with got cut away by my realization of his real distress. "Um ..." I tried to think of something clever and couldn't. ". . . is the Father a good man?"

  When he didn't answer, and I began to suspect/recall why, I wanted to laugh. Determined to go in silence, I got off the arm of the chair. Three steps, though, and my blubbering broke into a full throated giggle that threatened torrents. If Calkins could have seen, I would have flashed my lights.

  Brother Randy, robes blowing about his sneakers, stepped around the corner. "You're going?" He still wore bis methadrine grimace.

  "Um-hm."

  He turned to walk with me. The breeze that had been dull in my left ear now grew firm enough to beat my vest about my sides; it tugged Randy's hood off. I looked at the lone Australia on the South Pacific of his skull. It wasn't nearly as big as I'd imagined from the edge. He saw me looking; so I asked: "Does that hurt?"

  "Sometimes. I think the dust and junk in the air irritate it. It's a lot better now than it used to be. Before, it was all down over my ear and the back of my neck-when I first got here. The Father suggested I shave my head; that's certainly given it a chance to heal." We reached the steps. "The Father knows an awful lot about medicine. He's made me put some stuff on it and it seems to be clearing up. I thought for a while he might have been a doctor or something, once, but I asked him . . ."

  In the pause I nodded and started down. I'd swear he was on something, and the moment he'd started talking I'd gotten auditory visions of the endless rap.

  ". . . and he said he wasn't.

  "So long." He waved his big, translucent hand.

  All the way across the broken overpass I tried to assemble what I had of the man behind the wall (my lights flashing through two flowered grills of stone, a web of light around his body); I even wondered what he'd felt during our conversation. The one thing that cleared when all my speculations fell away was that I had an , urge to write. (Do you have that restless . . . ? like it says in the back of the magazines. Sure.) But sitting here, in a back booth at Teddy's, tonight, while Bunny does her number to not-quite-as-many-as-usual customers (I asked Pepper if he wanted to come with me but he really has this thing about going in here, so I brought my notebook for company), I see all it has produced is this account-and not what I wanted to work on. (Bunny lives in a dangerous world; she wants a good man. What she can get is Pepper ... no, an image Pepper at his best [when he can smile] consents to give, but he's usually too tired or ashamed to. Is it my place to tell her that, bringing my blasphemey to the altar steps, sharing with her the data from my noon journey? I just wish I enjoyed his dancing more.) This is not a poem. It is a very shabby report of something that happened in the Year of Our Lord it would be oh-so-nice to write down, month, day, and year. But I can't.

  If Dollar doesn't stop pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will kill him. If Dollar stops pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will let him alone. If Copperhead is going to kill Dollar, then Dollar will not have stopped pestering Copperhead. If Copperhead lets Dollar alone, then Dollar will have stopped pestering Copperhead. Which of the above is true? The one with the fewest words, of course. But that's faulty logic. Why? Three times blessed is the Lord of Devine Words, the God of Theives, the Master of the Underworld, duel sexed in character, double dealing in nature, yet one through all defraction.

  her elbow across his jaw.

  John said, "Hey . . . !" and went back, hands up, palms out.

  We didn't say all those things in that way; but that is what we talked about Reading it over brings back the reality of it for me. Would it for him? Or have I left out the particular, personal emblems by which he would recall and know it? The sound she made was something I'd never heard out of anybody. She kicked at his leg, got him under the knee. He grabbed at her arm again but it wasn't there, so he pulled back.

  And stumbled over a root, right up against the trunk. Which made him really mad: he swung at her again.

  She jumped. Straight up. His fist landed against her arm. She came down raking at his neck. His shirt tore.

  He hit her, hard. But it didn't matter; I thought she was going to bite his throat out. She bit something. He hissed, "Shit . . . !"

  Denny grabbed my arm. "Hey, don't you wanna stop her ... ?"

  "No," I said. I was scared to death.

  John tried to punch her in the stomach.

  Both of them twisted, missing.

  Milly kept circling around them and Jommy started to say, "Hey, somebody . . ." and then saw the rest of us and just swallowed.

  John pushed her away in the face. She grabbed his arm and yanked. Not pulled, yanked. His elbow hit the tree. He yelled, and hit her flat-handed in the jaw.

  "FUCKER . . . !" she shouted so loud you knew it hurt her throat. "FUCKER . . . !"

  Her right fist came down from her left ear and hammered his face. Like an echo his head cracked back against the trunk.

  "Hey! Stop it ... Stop . . ." Then I guess he really tried to break out. He shouted, grabbed her wrist . . .

  She was meat red from the neck up, yanking her fist over, twisting his fingers; then grabbed one fist with the Other and swung it against his neck.

  "Jesus . . ." Jommy said, to me I realized. "She's crazy . . ." But he stepped back from the look I gave him.

  John tried to grab her in some sort of bear hug. He kicked out, and they both went down, him pretty much on top. Everyone stepped back together.

  Flailing out, she came up with a handful of grass. Then there was grass in his hair and he yelled again.

  His ear was bleeding. But I don't know what she'd done.

  "Hey, look!" Milly said, loud and upset. "Why doesn't somebody . . ." Then it struck her that if somebody was, the somebody was going to have to be her.

  She started forward. I touched her on the shoulder and she looked sharply around.

  "Fair fight," I said.

  He hit her three times, hard, one after the other: "Stupid. Bitch. Stupid . . ." but she somehow got him off. And reared back. She came down with both fists on his face, once glancing off his ear and hitting the ground and coming up for another hit, bloody. When she hit him again-he was just trying to cover his face, now-I saw hers was scraped up bad.

  About the sixth time she hit him-one knee went into his stomach-I thought maybe I should try and stop her. I thought about Dollar. I thought about Nightmare and Dragon Lady. But I wasn't as scared as I'd been at the beginning, when I'd thought her quivering, shaking rage would explode her.

  Denny's mouth was open. He let go my arm.

  She stood up, almost falling. "You fucking shit!" she said. It sounded like her jaw clicked between syllables.
She kicked him in the head. Twice.

  "Hey, come on . . ." one of the others said, and started toward her. But didn't touch her.

  Thinking: Maybe a tennis sneaker isn't that hard.

  Sure.

  She turned and came, blindly, toward me.

  As Denny fell back, she stopped, looked behind her and shouted, "You fucking shit!" and came on. Her face was all puffed on one side.

  Two of the guys kneeled beside John. Milly hovered behind them as though she still couldn't make up her mind.

  "Oh, wow!" Denny said. "You really creamed the bastard!"

  "The fucking shit!" she whispered, wiping at her face and grimacing. "The fucking . . ." One eye was all teary. She started walking. We walked with her.

  ï "It looks like he got in a couple too," Denny said.

  "She's walking," I said.

  "Hey, you did better than Glass did with Dollar," Denny said.

  "I had-" She took a breath. "I guess I had more reason." She rubbed her shoulder with her palm, fingers strained wide. And left blood on the workshirt sleeve. I don't think she knew she was bleeding yet.

  "Hey, Lanya?" Jack said. Frank stood behind his shoulder. She stopped and looked.

  She swallowed and I wondered if she remembered who he was.

  I was probably projecting.

  "Thanks," Jack said.

  She nodded, swallowed once more, and started walking again.

  "What's the matter?" Denny asked about twenty yards later. "Your eye hurt?"

  She shook her head. "It's just that . . ." She really sounded upset. "Well, nice girls from Sarah Lawrence don't usually beat the fucking shit out of . . ." and gasped again.

  I put my arm around her shoulder. She fitted like usual. Only she didn't adjust her step to mine. So I adjusted mine to hers. "Did you want me to lend you a hand in there?"

  "I would have pulled your balls off!" she said. "I would have ... I don't know what I would have . . ."

  I squeezed her shoulder. "Just asking, babes."

  She touched her jaw again, gently, realizing it hurt. And left blood there. "The school was my thing. It wasn't yours. You didn't have anything to do with it. You didn't even like Paul . . . Oh, the fucking shit-!" and stopped walking.

  "I helped you with the class a couple of times," Denny said. "Didn't I?" and glanced back at the others.

  "Sure," Lanya said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Then she winced and reached down to rub her leg. Not limping, she still favored it.

  "I just don't understand why you lit into him," I said.

  "Oh, fuck you!" She pulled away from me. "You don't understand a lot of things. About me."

  "All right," I said. "I'm sorry."

  "So am I," she said, harshly. But when I caught up with her, she put her arm around my shoulder. And adjusted her step.

  "Hey," Denny said. "You wanna be by yourself for a while?"

  "Yeah," she said. "Yes I do."

  She walked with us to the park entrance, so that I figured she was going back with us to the nest. But by the lions she said, "I'll see you later," and just walked off.

  "Hey ..." I called.

  "She wants to be by herself," Denny said.

  I still felt funny. She did come back to the nest, late that night after we'd been in bed (me half drunk) about an hour. Vaguely I heard her talcing off her clothes, then climbing the ladder pole.

  She crawled across me, rolled me by the shoulder onto my back, and, a-straddle my chest, glared down, swaying like she was going to rip something out of me with her teeth. I reached between her legs and pushed two fingers through her hair between the granular walls; they wet.

  She leaned both hands on my chest, her arms pushing her breasts together and actually growled.

  Denny, wedged in the corner, turned over, lifted his head, and said, "Huh . . . ?"

  "You too!" she said. "You come here too!"

  I've never been balled like that before-puffy eye and sore leg notwithstanding-by any one. (She said she'd spent the afternoon and evening with Madame Brown, just talking. "You ever ball her?" Denny wanted to know.) In the middle of a heavy stretch, Copperhead stuck his head over the edge of the loft and asked, "What are you guys doing up here anyway? You're gonna tear the loft down!"

  "Get out of here," Denny said. "You had your chance."

  Copperhead grinned and got

  Walked around the streets this afternoon with Nightmare, listening to his reminiscences of Dragon Lady: "Man, we used to do some freaky things, all the time, any time, anywhere, right in the middle of the fuckin' street, man, I swear." We ambled; he pointed out doorways, alleys, a pickup truck parked on its axles-"Once with her sitting in the cab and me standing on the fuckin' sidewalk, a hand on either side of the door, and my head just in there, eatin' out all that black pussy--Baby and Adam running around someplace across the street-then I fucked her in the back there, on the burlap. Oh, shit!"-and where, by the park, she had pushed him up against the wall and blown him; where she used to make him walk down the center of the street with his genitals loose from his fly, "with her sitting on the curb and doing things with her mouth, man, before I even got there, so I had a hard-on out to here!" He talks out these celebrations as though they are religious rituals recently banned. Forty minutes of this, before it hit me how lonely not only Nightmare is, but all of us here are: Who can I discuss the mechanics of Lanya and Denny with? I don't even have the consolation of public disapproval. He probably has never talked about any of this before. On the marble steps of the Second City Bank building (he tells me) he made her take off all her clothes-"Just like Baby, man. I mean people can go around in the street stark naked here, and it don't mean nothing."-and urinate, while he stood behind her, one arm over her shoulder, catching her water in his palm. "And once she made me lie on my back, you know, in the center of the pavement-" the incident illustrated with much gesturing and head-shaking as we search his memories out of the dry mist-"naked, man, and she just walked around and around and around me, a big woman!" (He repeats this last a lot, as though her circling defined some terribly necessary boundary on this wild terrain.) ". . . made me eat her out for half an hour, I swear, right-" he looks around, surprised-"here, man. Right here! It was just getting light, and you couldn't hardly see her ..." As my attention drifted from his account, I thought of all the cliches about how to act among violent people, current among the non-violent: Rise to the first challenge or you'll be branded a coward for the rest of your stay; a willingness to fight gains the group's respect; once you beat him, the bully will be your friend. Somebody coming into the nest with these as functioning propositions would get killed! (Thinking: Frank?) Nightmare's shoulders rocked. His fists, wrists bound in leather, bobbed. He recounted hoarsely: "She used to get me drunk and I'd have her suck me off, my ass up against any old, cold, God-damn wall, with my pants down around my fuckin' knees, and her tryin' to get two fingers up my ass-don't remember how she figured out I like that." Suddenly he looked up, frowning. "You think I was right?"

  "Huh?"

  "When we had that garden party back at the nest." His meaty hand returned to the fresh scars down his arm. "You think I done right?"

  "Dragon Lady is her own woman," I said.

  Nightmare asked: "What would you do if somebody pulled that shit on you?"

  "I think," I said, "I would have cut their head off. Just messing up her arm for a couple of weeks-well, you both showed great restraint." "Oh." His hand, knotting, slid down his chest to knuckle his belly, pensively.

  "But nobody has ever pulled that on me," I said. "At least Dragon Lady hasn't, yet. So I still dig you both."

  "Yeah," Nightmare said. "Sure. I understand. But nobody would do you that way. They think you're too smart. They think they can talk to you. Maybe that's why I gave you the nest, you know?"

  That surprised me.

  "Yeah," he went on, "like I said: It's time for me to get out of this mother-fuckin', sad-assed excuse for a-"

  Behind his voice
, children's voices: we were passing the curtained windows of Lanya's school. Nightmare looked. The door was ajar on darkness; laughter, juvenile shrieks, and chatter . . .

  I stepped up the curb over the gutter grate. Nightmare followed. I glanced back: his thick forehead skin creased in a squint; his lips pulled up and down from the whole (and one broken) teeth.

  I stepped through the door.

  On the table, above the empty chairs, spools glimmered and spun on the tape recorder. We watched a while, waiting. Beside me, Nightmare mauled and kneaded his bald shoulder, listening to the recorded noise in the vacated room. Scars, chains, and office, some thrust away, some new received, habits without correlatives, jumbled in the great bag of him, as though his achievements and losses completed a design mapped in the layout of the streets around us. Thinking: I may never see this man again after today, if all

  own eyes, for somewhere in this city is a character they call: The Kid. Age: ambiguous. Racial origin: same. True name: unknown. He lives among a group (whose alleged viciousness is only surpassed by their visible laziness) over which he holds a doubtful authority. They call themselves scorpions. He is the supposed author of a book that has been distributed widely in town. Since it is the only book in town, that it is the most discussed work of the season is a dubious distinction. That and the intriguing situation of the author tend to blur accurate assessment of its worth. I admit: I am intrigued.

  Today I cut down the block where I'd heard the scorpions had their nest. "What kind of street do they live on?" In the grammar of another city, that sentence would hold the implication: What kind of street are they more or less constrained by society to live on, given their semi-outlaw status, their egregious manner and outfit, and the economics of their asocial position? In Bellona, however, the same words imply a complex freedom, a choice from hovel to mansion-complex because every hovel and every mansion sustains through that choice some remnant of our ineffable catastrophe: In any house here movement from room to room is a journey from a place where twin moons have cast double shadows of the window sills upon the floors to a place where once, because the sun had grown so immense, no shadow was cast at all. We speak another language here. Is the real importance of his pamphlet that I've been browsing over all morning that, unlike the newspaper, it is the only thing in the city written in this language? If it is the only thing said, by default it must be the best thing. Anyone sensitive to language, living in this mess/miasma, must applaud it. Is there any line in it, however, that would be comprehensible outside city limits? Five were sitting on the steps. Two leaned against the wrecked car at the curb. Why am I surprised that most of them are black? The flower-children, whose slightly demonic heirs these are, were so emphatically blond, and the occasional darky among them such an emphatic mark of tollerence! They were not sullen. There were three girls