Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  Denny still didn't say anything, almost as though embarrassed.

  In black jeans and leather vest, Kidd went into the front room.

  "Oh, man!" Dragon Lady was saying. "This is just too much-"

  The crying was louder here.

  "Dragon Lady," Smokey said, tugging at the tassels of her macramé belt, "why do you shout things up there like that? It... it isn't necessary!"

  "Well," Dragon Lady said, thumb hooked around hers, "if I was making that big a fool of myself, after about an hour, I don't know as how I wouldn't appreciate somebody telling me to cut it out-like they meant it!"

  Which Smokey seemed to think was funny; Thirteen's reaction, though, was silent, hand-throwing frustration. He moved, almost protectively, between the two women; Smokey didn't seem to mind.

  "Look," Thirteen said, with settling gestures of the palms, "if your neighbor, I mean your own neighbor is going through that, you're just obliged, obliged, see, to put up with-"

  Dragon Lady threw her glass. It missed Thirteen. Smokey ducked too. "Hey, watch . . ." Thirteen shouted. Pieces of glass rocked on the floor. Wine licked down the wall. Smokey just blinked and looked like she didn't know whether to be amused or angry.

  But Dragon Lady launched into doubled-over laughter. "Oh, Thirteen . . . Thirteen, you are so-" Chains swung, flung back around her neck as she stood. "You are so chicken shit!" She laughed again.

  Maybe, Kidd thought, scorpions just yelled loud, laughed a lot, and threw things.

  "Baby!" Dragon Lady shouted. "Adam! We gonna get out of here, soon . . ."

  "Good-bye," Kidd said, at the door, and went. The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said "good-bye". Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave. In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn't even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not. He carried the nest tables into nineteen-A.

  Mrs Richards stood in the middle of the room.

  "Um," he said, "I thought I'd bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the . . ." then went and put them by the balcony door.

  "Your clothes," she said. "I was going to give you some of my .. . son's clothes."

  "Oh. I got these . . ." They were all black, too.

  Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

  "Is June all right?"

  She kept nodding.

  "I thought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you'd already gone up."

  The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her

  face.

  "I'll go bring the rest of the stuff Up, ma'am."

  He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he'd considered Bobby's toys, but decided he'd better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby's room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

  He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point. Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

  Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip . . .

  He paused; he re-wrote:

  Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped . . .

  Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the ed's and re-order three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable limit. He took a breath, and a clause from the first three lines, to close the passage; and, writing it, saw only one word in it was necessary, so crossed out the others.

  Mrs Richards came into the room, circled it, search-ing, saw him: "You're writing. I didn't mean to disturb : your . . . writing."

  "Oh, no." He closed the book. "I'm finished." He was tired. But he was finished.

  "I thought perhaps you were writing some sort of . . elegy. For . . ." and dropped her head.

  "Oh. No . . ." he said, and decided "Elegy" was the title. "Look, you've got everything up here. Maybe I should just go on and leave."

  "No." Mrs Richards' hand left her neck to reach for him. "Oh, you mustn't go! I mean you haven't talked to Arthur about your pay, have you?"

  "Well, okay." He sat back.

  Mrs Richards, all exhausted nervousness, sat across the coffee table from him.

  He asked: "Where's June?"

  "She's in her . . ." ended by vague gesture. She said, "It must be awful for you."

  "It's worse for you." He was thinking: Her son's clothes? She couldn't have meant Bobby, we weren't anywhere near the same size. Edward's? "Mrs Richards, I can't even say how sorry I-"

  She nodded again, chin striking her knuckles. "Oh, yes. You don't have to. I understand. You went down there and brought him-" in the pause he thought she was going to cry-"back. How can say thank you for that? You went down there. I saw you when you brought him up. How can I say-"

  "It's all right, Mrs Richards. Really." He wanted to ask her about the structure of light that had been in the elevator car with him; and could think of no way. Momentarily he wondered, maybe she hadn't seen it. But moved his jaws on one another to dispel those implications. "I don't have to wait here, for Mr Richards. I can catch him another time. You might want to be alone with him when . .."

  The disorganized movements of her face stopped. "Oh no, I want someone here! Please stay, stay for me! That would be-" she began to look around in the seat of her chair-"the kindest thing. You could do."

  "All right."

  What she looked for, she did not find. "I want somebody with me. I need somebody." She stood. "With me here." Again, she circled the room. "It's so strange, I haven't the faintest idea what I'll say. I wish I could phone him; on the phone it would be so much easier. But I just have to wait. He'll come in the door. And I'll say, Arthur, this afternoon, June backed Bobby into the elevator shaft and he fell down seventeen flights and killed himself . . ." She looked into the kitchen, crossed the room, looked down the hall.

  "Are you sure you wouldn't feel better if I went?" He wanted to go, could not conceive her wanting him to remain, even though she waved her hand at him, even though she said:

  "Please. You have to stay."

  "Yes, ma'am. I will."

  She came back to her chair. "It doesn't feel like we live here. The walls are blue. Before they were green. But all our furniture, it's all in the proper place."

  "The rugs aren't down yet," he suggested. Well, it filled the silence.

  "Oh, no. No, I don't think it's the rugs. It's the feeling. It's the feeling of trying to make a home. A home for my husband and my ..." Then she pressed her lips together and dropped her head.

  "Look, Mrs Richards, why don't you go in and lie down or something till Mr Richards gets back? I'll put the rugs down," and thought abruptly: That's what she wanted me to say; so I'll have to tell him!

  Who told the damn kids to take the rugs up anyway? And couldn't remember whether it was him or her.

  But she shook her head. "I couldn't sleep now. No. When Arthur comes back . . . no." The last was calm. She put-pushed her hands into her lap. Bobby's pile of books still sat in the corner . . . Kidd wished he had put them away.

  She stood.

  She walked the room once more.

  Her motions began definitively but lost focus in a glance-fi
rst out the balcony doors, next into the dining room, now toward the hall.

  She stopped behind her chair.

  "Arthur," she said, followed by what sounded more like a comma of address than of apposition, "he's outside."

  "Ma'am?"

  "Arthur is outside, in that." She sat. "He goes out every day. I can watch him from the window turn down Forty-Fourth there and disappear. Into the smoke. Like that." Outside the balcony door, buildings were blurred. "We've moved." She watched the fog for the length of five breaths. "This building, it's like a chessboard. Now we occupy a different square. We had to move. We had to. Our position before was terrible." Smoke pulled from the window, uncovering more smoke-"But I didn't know the move would cost so much."-and more. "I am not prepared for this. I'm really not. Arthur goes out there, every day, and works in Systems. Maitland Systems Engineering. Then he comes home." She leaned forward. "Do you know, I don't believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don't believe he goes anywhere. I don't believe there's anyplace to go." She sat back. "I don't think I believe there ever was. I'm very much in love with that man. And I'm very much in awe of him. It frightens me how much I don't understand him. I often suspect that he isn't happy, that going out to work everyday in that-" she shook her head slightly-"that it doesn't give him anything real, the inner things he needs. Whatever it is he does out there, it frightens me. I picture him going to a great empty building, filled with offices, and desks, and work benches, and technician shops, and drafting tables, and filing cabinets, and equipment closets -no people. He walks up and down, and looks into the open office doors. I don't think he opens the closed ones. Sometimes he straightens a pile of papers on somebody's desk. Sometimes he looks through a pile of circuit plans, but he puts them back, neatly. That's all. All day. With no one else there. Do you think any of the windows are broken? Do you think he sometimes turns on a light switch and only one of those long fluorescent tubes flickers, faintly orange at one end? There's something wonderful about engineering, you know. I mean, you go in and you solve problems, you make things, with your hands, with your mind. You go in, and you have a problem to work with, and when you've finished solving it, you've . . . well, done something with real, tangible results. Like a farmer who raises a crop; you can see that it's there. You don't just push a button, again and again, or put endless piles of paper in the proper drawers. Engineers are very wise. Like farmers. They can also be very dense and stubborn. Oh, I don't know what's out there, where he goes to do every day. He won't talk about it. He used to. But not now. I don't know where he goes, every morning. If he walked around the streets all day, I could tell that. That's not it. But whatever it is, it isn't good for him. He's a good man. He's more than a good man; he's an intelligent man. Do you know he was hired right out of his class in college? Oh, they were doing that a lot a few years ago. But it wasn't as common as all that when we were in school. He needs . . . something-I'd seem like a silly woman if I said 'worthy of him.' But that's what I mean. I've never understood what was out there." She looked again through the balcony doors. "I've suspected, oh, I've suspected that whatever was there wasn't really what he needed, what would make him-happy? Oh, I learned a long time ago you don't look for that. But the thing you do try for-excellence? Contentment? Oh no, oh no: not in a great empty office building, where the lights don't work, where the windows are broken, where there aren't any people."

  "There're probably people there," Kidd said, uncomfortably. "Probably a skeleton staff. Madame Brown and I were talking about that. It's probably like at ... the Management office."

  "Ah." Her hands met in her lap. "Yes." She sat back. "But I'm only telling you how it feels. To me. When the smoke thins, I can look across at the other buildings. So many of the windows are broken. Maybe the maintenance men in Arthur's office have already started putting in new panes. The maintenance is always better in a place of business. Well, there's more money involved. I just wonder when we can expect some sort of reasonable return to normal here. There's a certain minimum standard that must be kept up. They should send somebody around, if only to let us know what the situation is. Not knowing, that's the worst. If I did know something, something for sure about plans for repairing the damages, for restoring service, lights, and things, when we could expect them to start .. ." She looked oddly annoyed.

  "Maybe they will," he suggested, "send somebody around."

  "You'd think they would. We have had trouble with them before; there was a huge crack, it opened up in June's ceiling. It wasn't our fault. Something upstairs leaked. It took them three months to send somebody. But they answered my letter right away. Meanwhile, I just have to muddle, muddle on. And every morning I send Arthur out of here, out into that." She nodded. "That's the crime. Of course I couldn't keep him back; he wouldn't stay. I'd tell him how dangerous I thought it was out there, all the awful things I'm afraid might happen, and he'd- Oh, I wish he'd laugh. But he wouldn't. He'd scowl. And go. He goes away, every morning, just disappears, down Forty-Fourth. The only thing I can do for him is try and keep a good home, where nothing can hurt him, at least here, a happy, safe and-"

  He thought she'd seen something behind him, and was about to turn around. But her expression went on to something more violent than recognition.

  She bent her head. "I guess I haven't done that very well. I haven't done that at all."

  He wished she would let him leave.

  "Mrs Richards, I'm going to see about that stuff in -the back." He thought there was some stuff in the back still to be put in place. "You just try and take it easy now." He got up, thinking: When I come back I can put down the living-room rug.

  There's nothing I can do, he justified, to sponge up her grief. And I can't do nothing.

  He opened the door to Bobby's room where the furniture had still not been put against the walls.

  And June's fists crashed the edges of the poster together.

  "Hey, I'm sorry ... I didn't realize this was your-" But it was Bobby's room. Kidd's apologetic smile dropped before her astounded despair. "Look, I'll leave you alone ..."

  "He was going to tell!" she whispered, wide-eyed, shaking her head. "He said so! But I swear," and she crushed the poster altogether now. "I swear I didn't do it on purpose . . . !"

  After a few moments, he said, "I suppose that's the first thing that would have occurred to anybody else in his right mind. But I didn't even think of it till just now." Then-and was afraid-he backed out of the room and closed the door, unable to determine what had formed in her face. I'm just an observer, he thought, and, thinking it, felt the thought crumple like George's poster between June's fists.

  Walking toward the living room, he envisioned her leaping from the door, to bite and rake his back. The doors stayed closed. There was no sound. And he didn't want to go back to the living room.

  Just as he came in, the lock ratched, and the hall door pushed open. "Hello, guess who I found on the way up here?"

  "Hi, Mary." Madame Brown followed Mr Richards in.

  "Honey, what in the world is that mess down in the lobby? It looks as though somebody-"

  Mrs Richards turned around on the couch.

  Mr Richards frowned.

  Madame Brown, behind him, suddenly touched her hand to her bright, jeweled chains.

  Mrs Richards squeezed the fabric of her skirt. "Arthur, this afternoon Bobby . . . June-Bobby-!"

  His eyelids, snapped wide enough to pain the sockets. He rolled, scrabbling on snarled blankets and crushed leaves, flung his hands at her naked back. Had he nails, he would have torn.

  "Unnnh," Lanya said and turned to him. Then, "Hey-" because he dragged her against him. "I know," she mumbled beside his ear, moving her arms inside his to get them free, "you want to be a great and famous-"

  His arms shook.

  "Oh, hey-!" Her hands came up across his back, tightened. "You were having bad dreams! About that boy!" He shook his head beside hers.

  "It's all right," she whispered. She
got one hand high enough to rub the back of his shoulder. "It's all right now. You're awake." He took three rough breaths, with stomach-clenched silences between, then let go and rolled to his back. The red veil, between him and the darkness, here, then there, fell away.

  She touched his arm; she kneaded his shoulder. "It was a really bad dream, wasn't it?"

  He said, "I don't . . . know," and stopped gasping. Foliage hung over them. Near the horizon, blurred in fog, he saw a tiny moon; and further away, another! His head came up from the blanket-went slowly back:

  They were two parklights which, through smoke, looked like diffuse pearls. "I can't remember if I was dreaming or not."

  "You were dreaming about Bobby," she said. "That's all. And you scared yourself awake."

  He shook his head. "I shouldn't have given her that damned poster-"

  Her head fell against his shoulder. "You didn't have any way to know ..." Her hand dropped over his chest; her thigh crossed his thigh.

  "But-" he took her hand in his-"the funny lack of expression Mr Richards got when she was trying to tell him how it happened. And in the middle of it, June came in, and sort of edged into the wall, and kept on brushing at her chin with her fist and blinking. And Mrs Richards kept on saying, 'It was an accident! It was a terrible accident!' and Madame Brown just said 'Oh, Lord!' a couple of times, and Mr Richards didn't say anything. He just kept looking back and forth between Mrs Richards and June as though he couldn't quite figure out what they were saying, what they'd done, what had happened, until June started to cry and ran out of the room-"

  "It sounds awful," she said. "But try to think about something else-"

  "I am." He glanced at the parklights again; now there was only one. Had the other gone out? Or had some tree branch, lifted away by wind, settled back before it. "About what George and you were saying yesterday-about everybody being afraid of female sexuality, and trying to make it into something that wreaks death and destruction all about it. I mean, I don't know what Mr Richards would do if he found out his sunshine girl was running around the streets like a bitch in heat, lusting to be brutalized by some hulking, sadistic, buck nigger. Let's see, he's already driven one child out of the house with threats of murder-"