Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "I mean a friend of mine came over," Tak explained, "and we'd sort of like ..."

  "Oh, yeah . . ." Kid closed his eyes tight as he could, opened them, and sat up while the chains rattled down his chest, and blinked:

  Black, perhaps fifteen, in jeans, sneakers and a dirty white shirt, the boy stood by the door, blinking on balls of red glass.

  Kid's back snarled with chills; he made himself smile. From some other time came the prepared thought: Such distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself. And the autonomic nerves, habituated to terror, nearly made him scream. He kept smiling, nodded, got groggily to his feet. "Oh, sure," he said. "Yeah, I'll be on my way. Thanks for letting me crash."

  Passing through the doorway, he had to close his eyes, again, tight as possible, then look, again, hopeful that the crimson would vanish for brown and white. They will think I'm still half asleep! he hoped, hoped desperately, his boot scraping the roof's tar-paper. Morning was the color of dirty toweling. He left it for the dark stair. Shaking his head, he tried not to be afraid, .so thought: Ousted for someone younger and prettier, wouldn't you know. Well-beneath the lids the eyes were glass and red! He reached a landing, swung round it, and remembered the nervous woman with skirts always far too long for the season, who had been his math instructor his first term at Columbia: "A true proposition," she had explained, rubbing chalky fingertips hard on one another, "implies only other true propositions. A false one can imply, well, anything, true, false, it doesn't matter. Anything at all. Anything . . ." As if the absurd gave her comfort, her perpetual tone of hysteria had softened momentarily. She left before the term's completion. He hadn't, damn it!

  Nine flights down he walked the warm hall. Twelve steps up? Thirteen he counted this time, stubbing his toe on the top one.

  Kid came out on the dawn-dim porch hung with hooks and coiled with smoke. He jumped from the platform, still groggy, still blinking, still filled with the terror for which there was no other way to deal with save laughter. After all, he thought, ambling toward the corner, if this burning can go on forever, if beside the moon there really is a George, if Tak kicks me out for a glass-eyed spade, if days can disappear like pocketed dollars, then there is no telling. Or only the telling, but no reasoning. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets where the material was already fraying, and turned the corner.

  Between the warehouses, dealing and fading in moving smoke, the bridge rose and swung out into oblivion.

  Among the consorted fragments of his curiosity, the thought remained: I should have at least made him give me a cup of coffee before I went. He cleared his sticky throat, and turned, expecting the suspension cables any moment to fade forever, while he (forever?) wandered the smelly waterfront that somehow never actually opened on water.

  This wide avenue had to lead onto the bridge.

  Kid followed it for two blocks around a dark, official building. Then, beyond a twist of figure-eights and clover-leafs, the road rolled out between the suspensors, over the river.

  He could only see as far as the start of the second span. The mist, among folds and tendrils, condensed the limits of vision. Foggy dawns should be chill and damp. This one was grit dry, tickled the back of his arms and the skin beneath his neck with something only a breath off body temperature. He walked up the edge of the road, thinking: There are no cars, I could run down the middle. Suddenly he laughed loudly (swallowing phlegm caught there in the night) and ran forward, waving his arms, yelling.

  The city absorbed the sound, returned no echoes.

  After thirty yards he was tired, so he trudged and panted in the thick, dry air. Maybe all these roads just go on, he theorized, and the bridge keeps hanging there. Hell, I've only been going ten minutes. He walked beneath several overpasses. He started to run again, coming around a curve to the bridge's actual entrance.

  The roads' lines between the cables began a dozen perspective V's, their single vertex lopped by fog. Slowly, wonderingly, he started across toward the invisible

  .shore. Once he went to the rail and looked over through the smoke to the water. He looked up through girders and cables past the walkway toward the stanchion tower. What am I doing here? he thought, and looked again into the fog.

  The car was back among the underpasses half a minute while its motor got louder. Maroon, blunt, and twenty years old, it swung out onto the gridded macadam; as it growled by, a man in the back seat turned, smiled, waved.

  "Hey!" Kid called, and waved after him.

  The car did not slow. But the man gestured again through the back windshield.

  "Mr Newboy!" Kid took six running steps and shouted: "Good-bye! Good-bye, Mr Newboy!"

  The car diminished between the grills of cable, hit the smoke, and sank like a weight on loose cotton. A moment later-too soon, from his own recollection of the bridge crossed by foot-the sound of the motor ceased.

  What was that sound? Kid had thought it was some wind storm very far away. But it was the air rushing in the cavern of his mouth. Good-bye, Mr Ernest Newboy, and added with the same good will, you're a tin Hindenburg, a gassy Nautilus, a coward to the marrow of each metatarsal. Though it would embarrass you to Hollywood and Hell, I hope we meet again. I like you, you insincere old faggot; underneath it all, you probably like me. Kid turned and looked at the shrouded city, like something crusty under smoke, its streets stuck blind in it, its colors pearled and pasteled; so much distance was implied in the limited sight.

  I could leave this vague, vague city . .. But, holding all his humor in, he turned back toward the underpass. Now and again his face struck into grotesque. Where is this city's center? he wondered, and walked, left leg a little stiff, while buildings rose, again, to receive him.

  Free of name and purpose, what do I gain? I have logic and laughter, but can trust neither my eyes nor my hands. The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night. Reality? The only moment I ever came close to it was when, on the moonless, New Mexican desert, I looked up at the prickling stars on that hallow, hollow dark. Day? It is beautiful, there, true, fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but it is distorted as distance itself, the real all masked by pale defraction.

  Buildings, bony and cluttered with ornament, hulled with stone at their different heights: Window, lintel, cornice and sills patterned the dozen planes. Billows brushed down them, sweeping at dusts they were too insubstantial to move, settled to the pavement and erupted in slow explosions he could see two blocks ahead-but, when he reached, they had disappeared.

  I am lonely, he thought, and the rest is bearable. And wondered why loneliness in him was almost always a sexual feeling. He stepped off the sidewalk and kept along the loose line of old cars-nothing parked on this block later than 1968-thinking: What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations are too unfixed to hold it in so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape. He had a momentary image of all these walls on pivots controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after he had passed, they might suddenly swing to face another direction, parting at this corner, joining now at that one, like a great maze-forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable-

  When the heavy man ran into the street, Kid first recognized the green-drab, wool shirt with no collar. Lumbering from the alley sidewalk, he saw Kid, headed for him. The man had been one of the white men at the church last night.

  The fleshy face, red and sweat-flecked, shook above pumping fists. The top of the head was blotchy under a haze of yellow; on the forehead the hair lay out like scrap brass.

  Suddenly Kid started to move backward. "Hey, watch it-"

  "You-!" The man lunged. His fingers caught among, and tugged at, Kid's chains. "You are the one who . . ." At the Mexican accent Kid rifled his wounded memory. "When
I was . . . you didn't . . . no? You, please . . . don't . . ." the man panted through wet lips. His eyes were bloodshot coral. "Oh, please, don't you . . . you were in there, yes? I ... I mean you fool around like that, they gonna ..." His mouth compressed; he looked across the street, looked back. "You ... Oh, the Kid!" and yanked his hand from tangled links while Kid thought: No, he didn't say 'the Kid,' he maybe said 'the kid,' or even 'they did.' The man was shaking his head: "No, you gonna . . . Hey, don't do that. .."

  "Look," Kid said, trying to take his arm. "You need some help? Here, let me-"

  The man jerked away, nearly fell, began to run.

  Kid took two steps after him, stopped.

  The blond Mexican tripped on the far sidewalk, pushed up from his knee, and made it into the alley.

  Circling Kid's mind was the Mexican voice in the hall at the Richards'; various mentions by Thirteen; amphetamine-psychosis? And then the thought, clear and overriding:

  He was . . . crazy!

  Something cascaded, tickling like a line of insects, across his stomach. For a moment he mistook it for a chill of recognition; indeed, real chills ignited a moment after.

  But the optic chain had parted, probably under the man's tugging, and fallen down over his belt.

  Kid picked up the loose end, found the other hanging across his chest-it had parted between lens and prism-and pulled the thin brass together. On one end still hung a tiny, twisted link. With great, stubby fingers, nearly numb inside their callous, he tried to get it closed. He stood in the street, pinching, twisting, sometimes holding his breath, sometimes letting it all out suddenly with a mumbled "Shit . . ." or "Fuck . . ." His armpits slipped with the sweat of concentration. His heels, one on leather, one on pavement, stung at different heats. His chin stayed tucked into his neck: he squinted in the dawn light, turning once so that his own, edgeless shadow slid from his fumbling nubs. It took practically ten minutes to fix.

  And you could still tell which link had parted.

  When he was finished, he was very depressed. Creatures of Light and Darkness

  When he had walked for several minutes, turned several corners, and the several tensions in his neck and back had ceased (he could think words now without striking up hysterical images on the screens of all five senses), he pissed in the middle of the street, hoping someone might pass and, with his fly half open and his fingers under his belt, walked again and asked himself: Now just what is the problem with seeing an occasional red eyeball, hey? It is: If I'm hallucinating that, how do I tell if anything else is real? Maybe half the people I see aren't there-like that guy who just ran up? What's he doing in my world? Some fragment of Mexico, recreated out of smoke and fatigue? How do I know there isn't a chasm in front of me I've hallucinated into plain concrete? (The entrance to the bridge . . . when I first came off it, was all broken and piled . . . with concrete . . . ?) Put the whole thing up to dreaming? When I was seventeen or eighteen I stopped that. Five days!

  I am mad again, he thought. Tears brimmed. He swallowed in a tightened throat. I don't want to be. I'm tired, I'm tired and horny, I'm so tired I can't make sense out of any of it and my mind won't work right half the time I try. I'm thirsty. My head's all filled with kapok coffee wouldn't clear. Still, I wish I had some. Where am I going, what am I doing, stumbling in this smoking graveyard? It's not the pain; only that the pain keeps going on.

  He tried to let all his muscles go and stepped aimlessly from sidewalk to gutter, his mouth dryer and dryer and dryer. Well, he thought, if it hurts, it hurts. It's only pain. All right (he looked at blurred house tops above the trolley wires), I've chosen, I'm here.

  To come upon the monastery? Yes, now, wherever it was, what ever. Walls and white buildings? Syllables to mumble away the meaning? He had passed nothing that could possibly have been one. The streets were strewn with refuse, months old, dried, and odorless: feces gone pale and crumbly, ossified fruit rind, old papers, once wet and now crinkly dry.

  He prodded the folds of his consciousness for sadness: the crystal had deliquesced to chalky powder.

  . . . she look like? he thought, and was too tired to panic. Her name, what was that?

  Lanya: and he saw her short hair, her green eyes, and she was not there.

  One of the street signs was marred with filth and scratchings; the other was an empty frame. He turned into the alley because of the beats; for seconds he could not figure what had happened - a row of tree trunks on the narrow sidewalk, each in a metal fence, had burned to charred spikes. Wonderingly, Kid started down the street, not wide enough for two cars.

  Denny sat on the fender of a lopsided auto, a-straddle the smashed headlight, drumming two fingers on the bent rim. Kid walked toward him, wondering when to

  "Hey, how're you!" Denny's surprise became delight. "What you doin' here?" He banged with all his knuckles once and stopped. "What you doin' huh?"

  "Just taking a walk. Trying to get my cock sucked. Or something. Only nobody's out."

  "Huh?" Denny looked puzzled, and then - to Kid's surprise - embarrassed. He flipped one finger three times on the chrome, then looked up again with his lips tight. "The downtown end of the park has got queers all over it, all day and all night. You know the part with the paths?"

  "No."

  "Well it does." Denny flipped his finger once more. "If you been walking around all night, you couldn't've been looking very hard."

  "I was at this guy's house," Kid explained. "I thought he was gonna do me, but somebody else came over and he kicked me out. What are you doing out this hour of the morning?"

  Denny nodded toward one of the unpainted buildings. "I'm staying in there now." Behind dirty window glass, the brass lion leered, pinioned on his brass stalk. The shade was gone. The socket held a broken bulb neck.

  On the other side of the street, a white curtain moved in a window almost as dirty. Two black faces pressed together, looked till Kid stared directly. The curtain dropped.

  "You want to get your cock sucked? Come on." Denny, with three fingers tucked under the rim, was looking straight down. "I'll blow you."

  "Huh?"

  When Denny neither moved nor said anything else, Kid started to laugh. "Hey . . ."He stepped on the sidewalk, hit his thighs in imitation of Denny's drumming, then stepped back into the street. "Are you being funny . .. ?"

  Denny looked up. "No."

  "Now suppose I took you up on that . . ." Kid said, trying to make it a joke; it wasn't. So he said: "You want to ... ?" Things that made the obscure obvious by overturning overturned.

  "Yeah." Denny scratched his chest among rattling chains. "Go on, take it out. Right here, mother-fucker." He shook his head. "I'll do you right here. You want me to show you I mean it? Right here?"

  Kid glanced at the window curtain. "Sure, but those spades, they're staring out the damned window."

  Denny let out his held breath. "I just told you; you think I give a fuck if they know?"

  What he'd began as banter was suddenly uncomfortable, because though all the actions were predictable, the feelings were not. "Hey, you know maybe you just better let the whole thing . . ."

  Denny leaned his head and glanced to the side with a concentrated expression-the look, Kid thought, of someone in a game of go trying to decide if a long-contemplated move, now made, was, after all, right.

  "We'd have to find someplace," Kid said. "A doorway, or inside or something. I don't want to do it right here." Fifteen? Kid thought. He's out of his head; this kid is a fucking nut.

  Denny got down from the headlight and slid most of his fingers in his back pockets. "You come on with me."

  Kid caught up to him on the unpainted steps. "Is this Nightmare's place?" He put his hand on Denny's small, warm shoulder.

  Denny looked back. "Used to be." His vest, showing rough-out leather, then scuffed tanning, swung against his ribs. "Just about anybody stays there now. Even Thirteen's been crashing there. The way he goes on, you'd think he was gonna make it his new place."

>   Kid frowned. "What . . . happened to his old one?"

  Denny frowned back. "Well, everybody's moved around since . . ." He nodded. "The kids in the commune, they all went to the other side of the park. Dragon Lady moved her bunch up this side of Cumberland. And Thirteen couldn't stay in that damn apartment no more . . . but you was there." Denny's frowned questioned Kid's.

  "Why . . . ?" Kid asked, because there was no answer he could supply.

  "The smell," Denny said, "for one thing," and went up the steps.

  Kid followed. "Oh, yeah. That..." which made sense; but not the whole shifting and rearrangement during the robbed duration. The whole tape of reality which he had been following had somehow overturned. It still continued; he still followed. But during some moment when he had blinked, days had elapsed and everything right had shifted left: Everything left was now right. "Hey, the last time you saw me, how long was I with-?"

  "Shhh," Denny said. "Everybody's asleep." He pushed open the door. "It ain't even six o'clock in the morning, I bet."

  And Kid suddenly did not want an answer. He asked instead in a softer voice: "Then what are you doing up?"

  "I get up real early some times." Denny grinned back over his shoulder as Kid followed him down the hall. "Sometimes I sleep all day, too. You can do that here . . . but then I'm up all night."

  By the hall baseboard, tight, black hair shocked from the end of a sleeping bag. Beyond a doorway, on a couch, a naked man with red hair all over his tan, freckled back-it was Copperhead-slept with a very blond girl wedged between himself and the couch back. Over his bare ankle, Kid could see her sandal, the neatly rolled cuff of her jeans. Her arm, pale from the sleeve of a navy pea-jacket, moved up the torn upholstery, then fell. Someone in another room stopped snoring, cleared his throat, coughed, was silent.

  Denny glanced around. "You wanna do it in the bathroom?"

  "No." Kid struck Denny's shoulder with his hand's heel. "I don't want to do it in the bathroom!" While Denny blinked, curious, the bathroom door at the end of the hall opened and Smokey walked out, sleepy, in nothing but jeans, her fly hanging open. With neither shielding nor greeting, she passed.