Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "He . . ." he dredged from flooded ruins, "I ... don't know." He wished she would ask what he meant by "he," but she only sighed on his shoulder. He said, "I don't want to scare you."

  She said, "I think you do. I mean, it's hard not to think you're just trying to get back at me for something somebody else did to you. And that's awful."

  "Am I?"

  "Kidd, when you're off someplace, working, or wandering around, what do you remember when you remember me?"

  He shrugged. "A lot of this. A lot of holding each other, and talking."

  "Yeah," and he heard a smile shape her voice, "which is a lot of the most beautiful part. But we do other things. Remember those too. That's cruel of me to ask when you're going through this, isn't it? But there's so much you don't see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt. That's cruel to say, but it's hard to watch."

  "No." He frowned at the long dawn. "When we went up to see Newboy, did you like-" and remembered her ruined dress while he said:

  "At Calkins'-did you have fun?"

  She laughed. "You didn't?" Her laugh died.

  Still, he felt her smile pressed on his shoulder. "It was strange. For me. It's easy sometimes to forget I've got anything to do other than . . . well, this."

  "You talked about an art teacher once. I remember that. And the tape editing and the teaching. You paint too?"

  "Years ago," she countered. "When I was seventeen I had a scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York, five, six years back. I don't paint now. I don't want to."

  "Why'd you stop?"

  "Would you like to hear the story? Basically, because I'm very lazy." She shrugged in his arms. "I just drifted away from it. When I was drifting, I was very worried for a while. My parents hated the idea of my living in New York-I had just left Sarah Lawrence, again, and they wanted me to stay with a family. But I was sharing an awful apartment on Twenty-Second Street with two other girls and going part time to the League. My parents thought I was quite mad and were very happy when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist about my 'painting block'. They thought he would keep me from doing anything really foolish." She barked a one-syllable laugh. "After a while, he said what I should do is set myself a project. I was to make myself paint three hours each day-paint anything, it didn't matter. I was to keep track of the time in a little twenty-five cent pad. And for every minute under three hours I didn't paint, I had to spend six times that amount of time doing something I didn't like-it was washing dishes, yes. We had decided that I had a phobia against painting, and my shrink was behaviorist. He was going to set up a counter unpleasantness-"

  "You had a phobia about dishwashing too?"

  "Anyway." She frowned at him in the near dark. "I left his office in the morning and got started that afternoon. I was very excited. I felt I might get into all sorts of areas of my unconscious in my painting that way . . . whatever that meant. I didn't fall behind until the third day. And then only twenty minutes. But I couldn't bring myself to do two hours of dish washing."

  "How many dishes did you have?"

  "I was supposed to wash clean ones if I ran out of dirty ones. The next day I was okay. Only I didn't like the painting that was coming out. The day after that I don't think I painted at all. That's right, somebody came over and we went up to Poe's Cottage."

  "Ever been to Robert Louis Stevenson's house in Monterey?" "No."

  "He only rented a room in it for a couple of months and finally got thrown out because he couldn't pay the rent. Now they call it Stevenson's House and it's a museum all about him."

  She laughed. "Anyway, I was supposed to see the doctor the next day. And report on how it was going. That night I started looking at the paintings-I took them out because I thought I might make up some work time. Then I began to see how awful they were. Suddenly I got absolutely furious. And tore them up-two big ones, a little one, and about a dozen drawings I'd done. Into lots of pieces. And threw them away. Then I washed every dish in the house."

  "Shit.. ." He frowned at the top of her head.

  "I think I did some drawing after that, but that's more or less when I really stopped painting. I realized something though-"

  "You shouldn't have done that," he interrupted. "That was awful."

  "It was years ago," she said. "It was sort of childish. But I-"

  "It frightens me."

  She looked at him. "It was years ago." Her face was greyed in the grey dawn. "It was." She turned away, and continued. "But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner . worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry top, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all."

  "You like washing dishes?"

  "I haven't had to in a long, long time." She shrugged again. "And when I have to now, actually I find it rather relaxing."

  He laughed. "I guess I do too." Then: "But you shouldn't have torn up those paintings. I mean, suppose you changed your mind. Or maybe there was something good in them that you could have used later-"

  "It was bad if I wanted to be an artist. But I wasn't an artist. I didn't want to be."

  "You got a scholarship."

  "So did a lot of other people. Their paintings were terrible, mostly. By the laws of chance, mine were probably terrible too. No, it wasn't bad if I didn't want to paint at all."

  But he was still shaking his head.

  "That really upsets you, doesn't it? Why?"

  He took a breath and moved his arm from under her. "It's like everything you-anybody says to me . . . it's like they're trying to tell me a hundred and fifty other things as well. Besides what they're saying direct."

  "Oh, perhaps I am, just a bit."

  "I mean, here I am, half nuts and trying to write poems, and you're trying to tell me I shouldn't put my faith in art or psychiatry."

  "Oh no!" She folded her hands on his chest, and put her chin there. "I'm saying I decided not to. But I wasn't nuts. I Was just lazy. There is a difference, I hope. And I ï wasn't an artist. A tape editor, a teacher, a harmonica player, but not an artist." He folded his arms across her neck and pushed her head flat to its cheek. "I suppose the problem," she went on, muffled in his armpit, "is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and other takes up." She paused a moment, moving her head. "My blue dress . . ."

  "That reminds you of the problems with the outside?"

  "That, and going up to Calkins'. I don't mind living like that-every once in a while. When I've had the chance, I've always done it rather well."

  "We could have a place like Calkins'. You can have anything you want in this city. Maybe it wouldn't be as big, but we could find a nice house; and I could get stuff like everybody else does. Tak's got an electric stove that cooks a roast beef in ten minutes. With microwaves. We could have anything-"

  "That-" she was shaking her head-"however, is when the inside problems start. Or start to become problems, anyway. Sometim
es, I don't think I have any inside problems at all. I think I'm just giving myself something to worry about. I'm not scared of half the things half the people I know are. I've gone lots of places, met lots of people, had lots of fun. Maybe it is all a matter of getting the outside problems solved. Another not nice thing: When I look at you, sometimes I don't think I have a right to think I have any problems, inside or out."

  "Don't you want to do anything? Change anything; preserve anything; find any . . ." He stopped because he felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  "No." She said it very firmly.

  "I mean, maybe that would make it easier to solve some of the outside problems, anyway. You know, maybe you'd feel happier if you could get another dress."

  "No," she repeated. "I want wonderful and fascinating and marvelous things to happen to me and I don't want to do anything to make them happen. Nothing at all. I suppose that makes you think I'm a superficial person ... no, you're too intelligent. But a lot of people would."

  He was confused. "You're a marvelous, deep, fascinating person," he said, "and therefore you should be world-famous this instant."

  "For twenty-three, I'm famous enough, considering I haven't done anything. But you're right."

  "How are you famous?"

  "Oh, not really famous. I just have lots of famous friends." She rolled her head once more to her chin. "It said in that article that Newboy had been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. I know three people who've actually won it."

  "Huh?"

  "Two in the sciences, and Lester Pearson was a good friend of my uncle and would come spend weeks with us at my uncle's summer place in Nova Scotia. The one in chemistry was very pleasant-he was only twenty-nine -and connected with the university. We were very close for a while."

  "You went out on dates and things. With all your famous friends?"

  "No, I hate that. I never go on dates. These are people I met and I talked to and I liked talking to, so I talked to again. That's all."

  "I'm not famous. Would you be happy in a place like Calkins', living with me?"

  "No."

  "Why not? Just because I'm not famous?"

  "Because you wouldn't be happy. You wouldn't know what to do there. You wouldn't fit." Then he felt all her muscles, thigh to shoulder, tighten on him. "That isn't true! I'm being awful." She sucked her teeth. "Do you know, I was terrified to go up to Roger's with you. It had nothing to do with what / was wearing: I thought you'd behave dreadfully-you'd either Ooooh and Ahhh the whole afternoon to death, or you'd shut up and be a big silent hole in the day."

  "You think I've never been in any nice places before?"

  "But you weren't like that," she said. "That's the point! You were perfectly fine, you had a good time, and I'm sure Mr Newboy enjoyed it. If anyone spoiled it, it was me with my silly dress. And I'm a mean, small, petty person for worrying about such things in the first place." She sighed. "Do I get points at all for keeping it to myself this long?" She sighed again. "No, I guess not."

  He blinked at the wild sky and tried to comprehend: he could follow her logic, though the emotions behind it confused.

  After a while she said: "I grew up in some awfully big houses. Some were almost as big as Roger's. When I was at boarding school, once, my uncle said I could have some kids to the summer place for my birthday. It came on a long weekend and they said I could have ten kids up from Thursday night till Sunday afternoon. There was one boy at the Irving School-the boys' school next to ours- named Max, whom I thought was just great. He came from a poor-well, poorish family. He was on scholarship. He was intelligent, sensitive, gentle . . . and gorgeous-I was probably in love with him! I would have been perfectly happy to take him off for the weekend all by himself. But I had to plan a party: so I planned it all for him. I got two girls who just loved to listen to intelligent boys talk- I wasn't a very good listener at the time, and Max could go on. I invited this perfectly dreadful colored boy who Max said he'd admired because he was second on the debating team and never did anything wrong. I scoured four schools for the most marvelous and charming people -people who would entertain him, complement him, offer just the right contrast. No two people from the same clique, you know, who would stick together and make a little indigestible dumpling in the stew. The weekend was dreadful. Everyone had a fabulous time, and for the next two years kept asking me when I was going to do it again. Except Max. The plane ride, the horses, the boats, the maids, the chauffeurs, they were just too much for him. All he said the whole four days was, Thank you,' and, 'Gosh.' About forty-four times each. Oh, I guess we were just very young. In another couple of years he would probably have been a socialist or something and might have attacked the whole thing. That would have been fine! I had people there who could have argued. At least there would have been communication. I don't know-maybe I'm still young." Suddenly she turned over. "I could be the older woman in an eighteenth century French novel right now." She turned back. "Twenty-three! Isn't that awful? And they say the twentieth century has a youth hangup." She giggled against his chest.

  "You want to hear a story from me, now?"

  "Hm-hm." He felt her nod.

  "About when I was twenty-three. Your age."

  "Sure thing, gramps. That's about three years after you got out of the mental hospital?"

  "No, it's about going to nice places." He frowned. "One summer I was working up and down the gulf coast, as a header on the shrimp boats."

  "What's a header?"

  "He washes dishes and pulls the heads off the shrimp. Anyway, I'd just gotten fired in Freeport and was waiting around to get on another boat-"

  "Why'd you get fired?"

  "I got seasick. Now shut up. Anyway, I was sitting in front of this cafe, which was about the only thing there to do, when these two guys in black Triumphs came hauling around the dust. One yells, Did I know where he could get a traveler's check cashed in this God-damn town. I'd been there three days, so I told him where the bank was. He told me, Get in, and I showed him and his friend where to go. We got to talking: he was in law school up in Connecticut. I told him about going to Columbia. He got his check cashed and asked if I wanted to come along with them-which was better than two bucks a night I didn't have, so I said, Yeah. A whole bunch of kids were staying out on this island just off the coast."

  "Like the commune?"

  "One of the kids' fathers was head of a land development company down there. The company had moved the fisherman who lived on the island someplace else, built a bridge to the mainland, dug a canal, and built a whole bunch of hundred-and-fifty-thousand, two-hundred-thousand dollar homes, lawns in the front, swimming pool on one side, garage on the other, and boat house in the back on the canal so you could get your boat out to sea. They were all for the executives of Dow Chemical, who just about owned the city. So prospective buyers could check them out first, the houses were furnished, the freezers were filled with steaks, the closets stocked with liquor, towels in the bathrooms and all the beds kept made. The executives could bring their families in for a weekend to try out the house before they bought it. On Monday, a truck would come by with maids, carpenters, plumbers, and supplies to replace anything that had been used up, to clean out the mess, and fix anything broken. There wasn't anybody on the island, so the doors had all been left open. The kid's father had told him since he was in the area, why didn't he stay there. So the kid, with about twenty of his friends-they went from about seventeen to twenty-five-had moved in. They'd start on one house, drink up all the liquor, eat up the food, destroy the furniture, break the windows, tear up everything they could, then move on to another one. On Monday the maids, carpenters, and plumbers would fix the damages. I stayed with them for two weeks. I'd pick out a room, lock the door, and read most of the time, while all the noise went on outside. Every once in a while, you know, I'd come out to get something to eat-wade through the beer cans in the kitchen, scrape the grease out of some pan and fry a piece of steak. Then I'd go down to the swimming pool maybe if
it wasn't too bad and, if there wasn't too much furniture floating in it, or bottles, or broken glass around, I'd swim a while. Pretty soon, when it would get too crowded, I'd go back to my room. There'd be people screwing in my bed, or somebody would've gotten sick all over the bureau. Once I found some little girl sitting in the middle of the floor, out of her head-cocaine all over the rug, and that is a lot of cocaine: she'd pulled down the drapes and was cutting paper-dolls out of them. So I'd take my book and go lock myself in another room. A couple of days after I got there, the two guys who'd brought me suddenly decided to fly back to somewhere else. They gave me the keys to the Triumphs and said I could have them. I don't even know how to drive. One of them had got the front smashed in by now, but the other one was still good. The police came twice. The first time the kids told them to go fuck themselves and said they were supposed to be there, and the police went away. The second time, I thought it was better I split. When the shit came down, I wouldn't have any rich Texas relatives to run home to. There was one girl there who said she'd buy me a ticket into Houston if I would fuck her and stay on more than five minutes."

  "No . . ." Lanya giggled against his neck.

  "She bought me a bus ticket and a pair of jeans and a new shirt."

  Her giggling turned to laughter. Then she looked up. "That isn't really true, is it?" Her smile tried to force , through the dawn light.

  After a second he said, "Naw. It isn't. I mean I screwed her and she bought the bus ticket for me. But she didn't put it that way. It just makes a better story."

  "Oh." She put her head down again.

  "But you see, I know about nice places. How to act in them. You go in, and you take what you want. Then you leave. That's what they were doing down there. That's what I was doing up at Calkins'."

  Once more she balanced on her chin.

  He looked down over his.