Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  among them, one

  an ebullient young black girl, capped with a large natural and vastly pregnant. They wore chains, some as many as fifteen strands, some as few as two. They were dirty and gregarious. They smiled and talked a sort of quiet half-talk to one another. Boots, leather vests-no shirts-

  This remains with me from my last conversation with Tak about Calkins and the party: "I had the funniest dream last night, Kid. Not that I particularly care what it means-I interpret other peoples' dreams and just try to enjoy my own. Anyway, I had this little black kid, about thirteen or fourteen, up at my place-Bobby? I think you were catching a nap there once when he came by. In the dream, he was just standing there in a T-shirt, with half a hard-on. (Half a hard-on on Bobby goes out to here!) Suddenly I looked up and George was coming across the roof toward the door, as though he'd just come up for a visit When he stepped in, he saw us. All the posters of him across the wall, I think but I'm not sure, were staring at us too. And he had this sort of mocking look that said, 'So that's what you're after.' And I felt very guilty. Oh, the point of it was that in the dream Bobby and chains made them look like some 'cycle club in, Coventry. A tall, skinny, black boy on the top step had a gallon of wine between his boot heels which periodically passed on its way to the curb and back. The white

  guy with no vest and the scarred stomach was the only one who wiped the neck-with a hand so grubby the other colored girl, tall and hefty, refused to drink after him. The others laughed as if her rebuke contained more than was apparent. They did not look at me as I strolled on the other side of the street. It is rumored that these men and women can transform themselves in darkness to any one of a gallery of luminous beasts; that they have weapons to turn the slung fist into a five-way cutting tool. I wonder if anyone that I saw there was the Kid-

  Also wonder if writing about myself in the third

  person is really the way to go about losing or making a name. My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggests mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread

  of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will

  and I weren't going to have sex. He wanted to show me something on his cock-some sore or something. And I felt all uncomfortable, like I'd been trapped into being something that I'm not. I mean given my choice of types- types and not individuals-I'd rather have a Georgia farm-boy any day. Not that I've ever kicked Bobby out of bed. But it was a strange dream."

  My first reaction was that Tak, who had always seemed a pretty big man, became much smaller. Later I realized that the big man simply contained many componants, among them a small one.

  It's not light yet. (Will it ever be?) Just returned from the third and what I hope is the last run on the Emboriki. Don't even want to write about this one. But, as usual, will. (At least, he said and can you hear the cap's, They Will Not Be Bothering Us Again. Tarzan's bizarrely reflective comment (echoing something he heard from me?): "It's easier here than any place else") Raven, Priest, Tarzan, and Jack the Ripper kept telling me, "Man, don't take Pepper along!"

  "Anyone goes who wants to go," I said. By the time we went, though, Pepper wasn't around anyway. Dragon Lady was waiting for us in front of Thirteen's; Baby, b.a. as usual, pimple-pocked and sullen, stood in the shadowed doorway. His arms slung through his chains, Adam sat on the curb, grumbling glumly. Cathedral, Revelation and Fireball had brought the cans of have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial. (It is Troy, Sodom, Abel Cuyuk, the City of Dreadful

  an ocean of smoke and evening. I tried to smell it, but my nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blurr. We neared the fogged pearl of one functioning lamp, and her face got all twisted. She stopped, turquoise, hem to knees, exploding high as her scarlet waist. "Should we . . . ? Oh, Kid! Do you know what they said!" "Will you

  please..." I asked her. My throat hurt with running and the raw air. "Will you please tell me what . . . what they said!"

  Both hands came up to cage her mouth. She was a shower of sliver on metallic black. "Someone, up on the roof of the bank: The Second City Bank -oh, a Goddamn sniper!"

  "Who, for Christ's sake?" I grabbed her small elbows and the hair shook around her head. "Will you tell me who they got?"

  "Paul," she whispered. "Paul

  Fenster! The

  school, Kid . . . everything!"

  "Is he dead?"

  Her head shook in a way that meant she didn't know. Her hands twisted silver cloth at her hips: scarlet bled

  Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop- was it eight o'clock yet?-stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a long-haired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I'd left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please o please I can't I please don't let it down from one; yellow snaked across her belly from the other. "In the burning," she said very quickly. "In the fire ... all your poems, the new ones; they burned . . . !" Her lips kept touching and parting, sorting more words, none of which fit. "Everything, all of them ... I couldn't. . ."

  "Unnn . . ." Something went right into my stomach without using gut or throat for entrance, I said, "Unnn. . ." She let go her skirt.

  "That's .. . good I guess," was all I could say. "I didn't like them. So it's good they're .. . gone."

  "You should have kept them in your notebook! I was wrong! You should . . ." She shook her head. "Oh, I'm so sorry!"

  I started to cough.

  "Look," she said, "I know half of them by heart anyway. You could reconstruct-" "No," I said.

  "-and Everett Forest made that..." "No. It's good they're gone."

  "Kid," she said, "what about Paul . . . ? Up on the Second City Bank building. Were you .. . ? Oh, please try to remember!" Then she started as though she'd seen something (behind me? above me? were my lights still on? I don't remember!), and turned. And ran, blazing gold a moment before shadow took her and I ran after, into the

  brush, feet crashing in leaves and ash. Her bright hem whipped back till she became some darker color. (Thinking: Who is in control of her? Who, less than fifty yards off, is following through the undergrowth, twisting the nobs, pushing the switches that change her from scarlet to ultramarine?) My bare foot passed

  This morning Filament brought around a woman who' I first thought was Italian and who became Black Widow this evening. Overheard her in a discussion in the back yard just now- one of the few here that has even veered near any politics outside the city: "It's not that men and women are identical, it's just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of 'innate' differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history ove
r mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to Ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage." I was impressed. But I have heard similar from Nightmare, Dragon Lady, Madame Brown, Tak, 0-t, Bunny, even from concrete to grass. The night billowed and sagged. Did habit guide us through the maze of mists?

  I saw the quivering fires.

  The brass dish, big across as a car tire, had been dragged twenty feet over the ashy grass. I felt very high. Thought swayed through my mind, shattered, sizzled like water on coals. Something in the smoke-? I raised my arm.

  Brass leaves, shells, claws-from the ornamented wrist band, over-long blades curved up around my hand. In the dish, small blue flames hung quivering over the red. Fire light dripped down the blades.

  I took another step, flexing just the scarred fingertips.

  Something tickled my shoulder.

  I whirled, crouching. The leaf rolled down my vest, fluttered against the chains, brushed the worn place at my knee, spun on to the ground. Gasping, I looked up the leaning trunk. Above, shadow coiled in the bole of some major branch, struck away by lightning.

  The air was still. But suddenly dead leaves I could not see thundered above, loud as jets. Holding my mouth wide as I could, I leaned forward. The side of my foot pressed a root. Thigh, belly, chest, cheek lay up against the bark. I breathed deep for the woody smell and pushed my body into the trunk.

  With my bladed hand I stroked the bark till I felt the trunk move. Sweat rolled under my vest. Chains bit my belly; glass

  Tarzan. Is Bellona, then, that unbelievable field where awarenesses, of such an order, are the only real strength? That they can occur here is what makes possible the idea of leaving for another city.

  About a third the nest say "must of," distinct and clear. They think it, too. They aren't saying "must've," or must'a'," either. I notice it specifically in D-t, Filament, Raven, Spider, Angel, Cathedral, Oevestation, Priest. So: they are going through a different word to word process than the rest of us (Tarzan, for instance, who says "must'a'")-I don't think we feel any verb in that at all, while the people who say "must of" do feel something prepositional, or at least genitive. A word hits my ears and inside my head a sensory recall forms -a memory of an object, dim and out of focus, the recollection of a sound, a smell, or even a kinesthetic expectation. The recalls are unclear-there is always margin for correction. As word arrives after word, the recalls join and correct each other, grow brighter, clearer, become precise: a ... huge . . . pink . . . mouse! What do I mean when I say a word means something? Probably the neuro/chemi- bits pressed about me; bark gnawed my cheek. Above, in the roaring, I heard a crack; not the sound wood makes broken against the grain, but when it splits longways. And there was a smell, stronger than the smoke: vegetative, spicey, and fetid.

  Another crack: but that was gun or backfire, louder than leaves and across the park. I pushed back from the trunk, blinking away the water in my eyes. Something fell, rocked on the grass among the roots; and something else-shards of bark, twelve or twenty inches across. Bark split in front of me, sagging out a few inches. What was behind it, I could see by the light from the dish, was red; and moist; and moved. Something crashed down through the

  cal process by which one word sounded against the ear generates one inner recall. Human speech has so little variance to it, so little creativity: I sit on the steps and scan an hour's conversation around me (my own included) and find once two words in new juxtaposition. Every couple of days such a juxtaposition will evoke something particularly apt about what the speaker (usually Lady of Spain or D-t; seldom me) is talking about. But when it happens, everyone notices:

  "Yeah, yeah! That's right!" and laughter.

  "I like that!" and someone grins.

  "Yeah, that's pretty good."

  In college I would scan and find one such language node in ten hours of speech, sometimes in two or three days. Though, there, people were much more ready to approve the hackneyed, the cliched, the inapt and imprecise.

  Is that why I write here?

  Is that why I don't write here much?

  In the middle of this, Lanya says: "Guess who I had dinner with last night."

  Me: "Who?"

  She: "Madame Brown took me to the Richards'."

  Me: "Have a good time?" I admit, I am surprised.

  She: "It was ... educational. Like your party. I think they're people I'd rather see on my territory than on theirs. Madame Brown feels the opposite. Which probably means I won't see much of them."

  Me: "What did you think of June?"

  She: "I liked her. She was the only one I could really talk to ... the hallway down stairs still stinks; weird going past it in the elevator and knowing what it was. I told her all about the House. She was fascinated. A few times Author and Mary overheard us and were scandalized. But not many." She rubs the lion's back (where bright metal scars the brown patina), looks out the window. "I think she's going to find George, soon. When she does, we all better watch out."

  Me: "Why? What'll happen?"

  She smiled: "Who knows? The sky may crack, and giant lightning run the noon's black nylon; and the oddest portents yet infect the branches, but caught in them. I heard more wood split, and something like a moan. "Lanya!" I shouted loud as I could. "Lanya!" Leaves swelled to a roar again.

  I took another step back- a sudden pain along my calf. I whirled, staggering. My bare heel had scraped the high, raised rim of hot metal. I danced away from spilled coals; rocking, the edge had scraped halfway to my knee. . There were more gunshots. I began to run.

  Very far ahead was a working nightlight. (Thinking: There's going to be a riot! With Fenster shot, the blacks are going to be out all over Jackson and there's going to be a debacle from Cumberland Park too . . .) I tried to remember which way the park exit was.

  In all the trees around the leaves were loud as jets.

  I thought of turning on my lights, but I didn't. Instead, I got off the path-stumbled, nearly twisted my ankle, the one I'd scraped. I climbed up some rocks where I couldn't see a thing; so I figured no one could see me. I sat there, wedged between stones, eyes half closed, trying to be still.

  I wondered if they were waiting for me. If I did get out of the park, it would be my luck to stumble out the Cumberland exit. Where the burning was heaviest, I ran my hand around the orchid's wrist band.

  Light through the leaves started me. I kneeled forward, sure it was going to be bright shields.

  ceiling of the skull." She was mocking with miss-quotation what I'd given her to read that morning. Her turning it into something inflated like that made me uncomfortable.

  She realized it and laid three fingers on my arm. But her touch was light as a leaf; I quivered. "You'd prefer to be hit than tickled, wouldn't you." She firmed her grip.

  "Yeah," I said. "Usually."

  She watched me, green eyes dark as gun metal in the crowded room. Almost everyone was asleep. We went into the front.

  The sky reaches in through screen doors and un-curtained windows and wipes color off the couches, tables, pictures, posters we've hung.

  Outside the streets are quiet as disaster-areas after evacuation, more claustrophobic than inside, rank as our den is with heat and sleepy shiftings.

  People think of us as energetic, active, violent. At any time, though, a third of us are asleep and half have not been out of the nest for two, three, four days (it is seldom noisy here; as seldom silent); we nestle in the word-web that spins, phatically, on and on, sitting our meaning and meanings, insights and emotions, thin as what drifts the gritty sky. It was a bunch of people with flashlights. When they passed-I pressed myself back against the rock, and one light swept right over me, for a moment directly in my eyes beyond the branches-it was pretty easy to see that they were mostly white; and they had rifles. Two of them were very angry. Then one among them turned ba
ck and shouted: "Muriel!" (It could have been a woman calling.) The dog barked, barked again, and rushed through a wandering beam.

  I closed my mouth.

  And my eyes.

  For a long time. A very long time. Perhaps I even fell asleep. When I opened them, my neck was stiff; so was one leg.

  The sky was hazy with dawn. It was very quiet.

  I got up, arms and knees sore as hell, climbed over the rocks and kept on down the other side till I came out of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

  The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed in.