Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  the sparkling dancer with the other. Everyone laughed. The woman tried not to spill her drink and pushed at the rough, dark head. The dancer squealed: "Ooooo!" His G-string broke. He pulled the cord across his white hip, yanked the whole pouch away, and spun from the circling arm. A black hand smacked the chalky buttocks. The dancer dodged forward, threw back an evil look that ended with a wink, flipped the silver strap over his shoulder, and stalked off, cheek grinding cheek.

  "Jesus!" Jack said from the other side of the table. The rabbity tuft above the dancer's bobbing genitals had been dusted with glitter.

  Teddy moved about the joined tables, pouring. Other people were coming up to talk, leaving to drink.

  Lanya explained to his puzzled look: "That's George Harrison. Do you .. . ?" He nodded. "Oh."

  "Jesus!" Jack repeated. "You got all sorts of people in a place like this, you know? I mean all kinds. Now that wouldn't happen where I come from. It's-" he looked around-"pretty nice, huh?" He drank more beer. "Everybody's so friendly."

  Tak put his boot up on the bench and hung his arm across his knee. "Until they start to tear the place apart." He turned up his bottle to waterfall at his wide mouth. "Hey, you all want to come up to my place? Yeah, why don't you all come on back with me?" He put the beer down. "Jack, Lanya, you too, Kid."

  He looked across at her to see if she wanted to go. But she was drinking beer again. "Yeah, come on." Tak pointed at her, so that when her bottle came down from her mouth, she looked at the engineer and frowned. "Yow're not going to sit around this place all night and fight off the Horse Women of Dry-gulch Canyon, are you?"

  Lanya laughed. "Well, if you really want me, all right."

  Tak slapped the table. "Good." Then he leaned over and stage-whispered, "You know she's a real stuckup bitch. Back when she used to hang out here, she wouldn't be caught dead with the likes of me. But after we got to know each other, she turned out not to be so bad." He grinned across the table.

  "Tak, I'm not stuck up. I always spoke to you!" "Yeah, yeah, so's your old man!" Tak pointed with a

  thumb. "Is he your old man now?" Then he laughed. "Come on. Late supper at Tak Loufer's. Tak Loufer's gonna give a party. Jack, you were saying how hungry you were." "Gee," Jack said. "I don't know if ..."

  Lanya suddenly turned to him. "Oh, come on! Now, you have to come with us. You've just gotten here. Tak wants to show you around." She positively beamed.

  "Well . . ." Jack grinned at the table, at Tak, at the candelabra.

  "I'll give you something to eat," Tak said.

  "Hell, I'm not that-"

  "Oh, come on!" Lanya insisted.

  (He moved his hands over the notebook, stained with blood and charcoal, to where the newspaper stuck out from the sides . . .) Lanya reached across and laid one fingertip on his gnawed thumb. He looked up. Tak was standing to leave. Jack: "Well, all right," finishing up his beer; Tak pulled his coat from the bench back. Lanya rose.

  He picked up the paper and the notebook and stood beside her. Jack and Tak (he remarked again the juxtaposition of sounds) went ahead. She pressed his arm and whispered, "I'd say I just earned my supper, wouldn't you?"

  They skirted the Harrison party. "Hey, look a-dere go' ol' I'n' Wo'f!" Harrison grinned up from a hand of cards.

  "Go drown yourself, ape," Tak jibed back, "or I'll tell everybody you're holding-"

  Harrison pulled his cards away and rumbled into laughter-when suddenly the silver-haired dancer bounced into their midst, G-string mended; he grabbed Lanya's arm. "Darling, how do you always manage to leave here with all the beautiful men? Come on, everyone! A big smile for your mother . . . Fabulous! Can I come too?"

  Tak swung his jacket, and the silver head ducked. "Get outa here."

  "Oh, now, with that big old hairy chest of hers, she thinks she's just too too!"

  But they pushed toward the door.

  The red-headed woman and Purple Angora were talking quietly by the wall. Muriel, panting, lay between their feet. The flickering candles kept gouging lines in the woman's yellow face. She was not that made up, he realized as they passed, nor that old. But the roughness of her skin under the unsteady light suggested misplaced artifice. Over her jacket (he had not seen it before and wondered how he had missed it; unless simple profusion had misled him to think it was something else) were loops and loops and loops of the strange chain Faust, Nightmare, the dancer, indeed, he himself, as well, wore.

  Muriel barked.

  He pushed into the hall, behind Lanya, in front of Jack.

  Teddy smiled at them, like a mechanical skull beneath his cap, and held the door.

  The very blonde girl at the sidewalk's edge bit at her knuckle and watched them intently.

  The cool was surprising.

  He had reached down to make sure that the orchid still hung in his belt loop when she said: "Excuse me, I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but was-" her face held its expression unsteadily-"George Harrison ... in there?" then lost it completely. Her grey eyes were very bright.

  "Huh? Oh, yeah. He's inside."

  Her fist flew back against her chin and she blinked.

  Behind him Jack was saying, "Jesus, will you look at that!"

  "Now that is something!" Tak said.

  "You say he is in there? George Harrison, the big colored man?"

  "Yeah, he's inside." At which point Lanya tugged his arm: "Kid, look at that! Will you?"

  "Huh? What?" He looked up.

  The sky-

  He heard footsteps, lowered his eyes: the blonde girl was hurrying down the street. Frowning, he looked up again.

  -streamed with black and silver. The smoke, so low and limitless before, had raddled into billows, torn and flung by some high wind that did not reach down to the street.

  Hints of a moon struck webs of silver on the raveling mist.

  He moved. against Lanya's shoulder (she too had glanced after the girl), all warm down his side. Her short hair brushed his arm. "I've never seen it like that before!" And then, louder: "Tak, has it ever been like that before?"

  (Someday I'm going to die, he thought irrelevantly, but shook the thought away.)

  "Damn!" Loufer took off his cap. "Not since I been here." He was holding his jacket over his shoulder by one finger. "How do you like that, Jack? Maybe it's finally breaking up."

  They started to the corner, still staring.

  "That's the first time here I've seen the-" Then Lanya stopped.

  They all stopped. He swallowed, hard: with his head back, it tugged uncomfortably at his Adam's apple.

  Through one rent, the lunar disk had appeared; then as the aperture moved with the wind, he saw a second moon!

  Lower in the sky, smaller, it was in some crescent phase.

  "Jesus!" Jack said.

  The smoke came together again, tore away.

  "Now wait just a God-damn minute!" Tak said.

  Once more the night was lit by the smaller, but distinctly lunar crescent. A few stars glittered near it. The smoke closed here, opened there: The gibbous moon shone above it.

  Before the bar door another group had gathered craning at the violated night. Two, pulling a bottle back and forth, came loose, came close.

  "What the hell-" The sky cleared again under two lights, crescent and near-full-"is that?" Tak demanded

  Someone else said: "What do you think it is, a sun

  "The moon!" One gestured with his foaming bottle

  'Then what's that?"

  One pulled the bottle from the other's hand. "That's another ... that one's George!"

  They reeled off, spilling liquor.

  In the gathered group, people laughed;

  "You hear that, George? You got a God-damn moon named after you!" and out of the laughter and chatter, a louder laugh rose.

  Lanya shrugged closer beneath his arm.

  "Jesus ..." Jack whispered again.

  "Not according to them," Tak said. "Come on."

  "What is it?" Lanya asked again.
>
  "Maybe it's some kind of reflection." He flexed his fingers around on her small shoulder. "Or one of those weather balloons. Like they used to think were flying saucers."

  "Reflected from what, on to what?" Tak asked.

  Flakes of smoke spun over. One or the other, and occasionally both moons showed. There was a breeze now. The sky was healing. Over half the sky clouds had already coalesced. Voices came from in the bar doorway:

  "Hey, we got a moon! And we got a George!"

  "Shine on, shine on harvest George-"

  "Oh man, June and George don't rhyme!"

  ("Tak and Jack do," Lanya whispered, giggled, and pulled her harmonica from her pocket.)

  "But you remember what he do to that little white girl-"

  "Oh, shit, was that her name!"

  Lanya blew harmonica notes in his ear. He pulled away, "Hey . . . !" and came back to her, perturbed. She reached up and held his forefinger. Something tickled his blunt knuckle. She was brushing her lips across the ruin of his thumb's first joint The shoutings died behind them. Overhead, the lights blurred in returning clouds. She played lazy music by his chest, following the ex-soldier and the ex-engineer. Her motion pulled him. She paused to tell him, "You smell good."

  "Huh? Yeah, I guess I stink," and cringed.

  "I mean it. Good. Like a pear somebody's soaked in brandy."

  "That's what happens when you bum around for three weeks and can't get a bath." She nuzzled the forking of his arm.

  He thought she was funny. And liked her funniness. And realized that it was because she made it easier to like . . . whoever he was; and came out of the thoughts trying not to smile. She played randomly.

  He beat the paper and notebook on his thigh, till he remembered John whom he did not like, and stopped.

  Look for shadow in this double-lit mist. A dark communion in the burning streets between the landscape and the smarting senses suggests more sterile agonies. Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don't need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire's base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light.

  With the jollity of their progress through the night streets, the repeated exclamations and speculations at the twinned satellites, moments into Tak's dark stairway- footsteps pummeling around him, down, across, then pummeling up-he realized he had no memory of the doorway through which they'd just entered out of the night, save the memory of his exit that lingered from the morning.

  "A great idea!" Lanya, behind, was breathing heavily. "A Full George party!"

  "// George was the full one," Tak said. "Excuse me; gibbous."

  "How far up do you live?" Jack asked, ahead.

  The orchid jogged on his hip. Notebook and newspaper-he'd read none of the paper yet-were still clamped in clammy fingers.

  "We'll be there in one more- Nope. I mis-counted," Tak called down. "We're here already! Come on! It's party time!"

  Metal creaked on metal.

  Both Lanya, behind, and Jack, ahead, were laughing.

  Above is light. What else does this city cast up on its cloudy cover, from ill-functioning streetlights, from what leaks tentatively out of badly shaded doors and windows, from flame? Is it enough to illuminate another bright, brief, careening, but less-than-standard body?

  He put the wine bottle on the roof's thigh-high wall. Below, the street lamp was a blurred pearl. He searched the dense and foggy distances, was lost in them.

  "What are you looking at?" She came up, surprising, behind.

  "Oh." The night was thick with burnt odors. "I don't know."

  She picked up the bottle and drank, "All right," and put it down; then said, "You're looking for something. You've got your eyes all squinched up. You were craning way out and ... oh, you can't see anything down there for the smoke!"

  "The river," he said.

  "Hm?" She looked again.

  "I can't see the river."

  "What river?"

  "When I came off the waterfront, across the bridge. This place, it was like two blocks away, maybe. And then, when I first came up here, you could just see the water, as though suddenly the river was a half a mile off. It was right through there. But now I can't see ..." craning again.

  She said: "You couldn't see the river from here. It's nearly ... I don't know exactly; but it's quite a way."

  "I could this morning."

  "Maybe, but I doubt it." Then she said: "You were here this morning?"

  He said: "There isn't any smoke over there. I can't even make out the lights from the bridge, or anything; even the reflections from the places on the waterfront that're burning. Unless they've gone out."

  "If they've gone out, the electricity's gone on somewhere else." Suddenly she pulled her shoulders together, gave a little shiver; sighed, and looked up. And said, eventually: "The moon." "What?"

  "Do you remember," she asked, "when they got the first astronauts to the moon?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I saw it on TV. A whole bunch of us were over at my friend's house."

  "I missed it, until the next morning," she said. "But it was . . . funny." "What?"

  She pulled her lips in between her teeth, then let them pop. "Do you remember the next time you were outside and you looked up and saw the moon in the sky instead of on television?" He frowned.

  "It was different, remember. I realized that for the

  last fifty thousand science-fiction novels it had still been

  just a light hanging up there. And now it was ... a place."

  "I just figured somebody had taken a shit up there,

  and why weren't they telling." He stopped laughing. "But

  it was different; yeah."

  "Then tonight." She looked at the featureless smoke. "Because there was another one, that you don't know if anybody's walked on, suddenly both of them were . . ." "Just lights again."

  "Or . . ." she nodded. "Something else." Leaning, her elbow touched his arm.

  "Hey," Jack said from the doorway, "I think I better go now. I mean . . . maybe I better go." He looked around the roof. The mist had wrapped them in. "I mean," he said, "Tak's awful drunk, you know? He's sort of . . ."

  "He isn't going to hurt you."

  Lanya poised her quick laugh at the rim of amusement, started back, and entered the cabin. He picked up the wine and followed. "Now here," Tak announced, coming from the bamboo curtain. "I knew I had some caviar. Got it on the first day up here." He grimaced. "Too much, huh? But I like caviar. Imported." He held up the black jar in his left hand. "Domestic." He raised the orange one in his right. His cap was on the desk with his jacket. His head seemed very small on his thick torso. "I got more stuff in there than you can twitch the proverbial stick at." He set the jars down among a dozen others.

  "Isn't it sort of late . . ." Jack's voice trailed off in the doorway.

  "Christ," Lanya said, "what are you going to do with all this junk, Tak?"

  "Late supper. Don't worry, nobody goes hungry up at the Fire Wolfs."

  He picked up a small jar (cut glass in scarred, horny flesh): "... Spiced Honey Spread ... ?"

  "Oh, yeah." Tak arranged the breadboard on the edge of the desk. "I've even tried some of that before. It's good." He swayed above pickled artichoke hearts and caponata, deviled ham, herring, pimento, rolled anchovies, guava paste, pate. "And another glass of-" He raised the bottle and splashed the liquid around inside. "Jack, some for you?"

  "Aw, no. It's getting pretty late."

  "Here you go!" He pushed the glass into the boy's hand. Jack took it because it would have dropped otherwise:

  "Eh . .. thanks."

  "... for me." Tak finished his and poured another. "Come on, everybody, now you help yoursel
ves. You like pimento?"

  "Not just by its lonesome," Lanya protested.

  "With bread, or ... cheese, here. Anchovies?"

  "Look," Lanya said, "/'// do it."

  Loufer gestured toward Jack. "Now come on, boy. You said you were hungry. I got all this damn caviar and stuff."

  "It's sort of . . ." Behind Jack, smoke filtered across the doorway. ". .. well, late."

  "Tak?"

  "Hey, Kid, here's a glass for you."

  "Thanks. Tak?"

  "Yeah, Kid? What can I do for you?"

  "That poster."

  From the center picture, the tall black glared out into the room, oiled teak belly gleaming under scuffed leather, his fist, a dark and gouged interruption on a dark thigh. The light source had been yellow: that made brass hints in the nappy pubis. The scrotal skin was the color and texture of rotten avocado rind. Between the thighs, a cock, thick as a flashlight haft, hung dusty, black and wormy with veins. The skin of the right knee intimated a marvelous machine beneath. The left ear was a coil of serpents. The brass light barred his leg, his neck, slurred the oil on his nostrils.

  "That's the spade who came into the bar, the one they named the moon after."

  "Yeah, that's George-George Harrison." Tak took the top off another jar, smelled it, scowled. "Some of the boys at Teddy's got him to pose for that. He's a real ham. That ape likes to get his picture taken more than just about anything, you know? Long as he doesn't get too drunk, he's a great guy. Ain't he beautiful? Strong as a couple of horses, too."

  "Wasn't there something about some pictures in the paper of him . . . raping some girl? That's what the newspaper man told me this morning."

  "Oh yeah." Tak put down another jar, drank more

  of his brandy. "Yeah, that business with the white girl, in

  the paper, during the riot. Well, like I said: George just

  : likes to get his picture taken. He's a big nigger now.

  Might as well enjoy it. I would if I was him."

  "What is this, Tak . . . octopus!" Lanya, with a

  wrinkled nose, bit. "Sort of tough ... it tastes all right."