Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Oh," Lanya said, matter-of-factly.

  The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead's thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, "Hey!" and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) "Join the party, mother-fucker! You gimme one of yours, I'll give you one of mine."

  "Knock yourself out." Kid backed from the door, with Lanya's hand in his.

  The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

  "What's going on in there?" Blond Denny pushed between them.

  "Stay out of there, cocksucker." Kid put his arm around the boy's chest, pulled him back.

  "Why?"

  "Because I'd get jealous as hell."

  Denny frowned, shrugged, "Okay," and wormed loose.

  Lady of Spain jogged against Kid's shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: "Shit! What a way to go. I guess we're going, ain't we?" She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya's shoulder.

  Lanya tugged Kid's arm. "This way," she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside ("Hey, how you doing, Kid?"), who pushed back a bottle at his face.

  At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. "Are you having ... a party?" They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions'.

  "Is this Nightmare's ... Is this Nightmare's nest?" a girl asked and pushed up past the first two.

  "Lanya!" She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.

  "Milly!" Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly's wrists. "What are you doing?" Lanya's voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began-to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.

  He pushed between the people crowding the hall. "Fuck!" he shouted at somebody once. "Get out of the way!"

  Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), "No, man, this is the Kid's nest. Nightmare ain't here. Nightmare ain't anywhere around."

  "Kid-?" which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate, and talking about, not to him. "You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn't know that was the Kid. How do you like that?"

  Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:

  It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzical: Deadly rays!

  A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn't it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.

  With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.

  He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam's bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.

  The suede boot was blotched with what he'd always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn't rained. Below the wrinkled leather- forty feet below-cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.

  He examined his left hand. I don't like what they look like, he thought. I don't like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.

  He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he'd bitten to blood. He'd always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what callouses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hands horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the inner flesh with her tongue, make love to them like gnomes, while he, voyeuristically, observed and mocked and felt tender.

  He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers behind them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into his lap, and began to click his pen.

  Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.

  Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn't what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint's button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.

  Lanya crashed Kid's ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion's head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds: Then at Kid: "You're still writing on that . . . ?"

  "No." The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya's voice. "No, I've been finished a few minutes now."

  Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, "Hey . . ." she frowned. "It's going down!"

  Kid nodded. "You can see it falling almost."

  The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.

  Denny came through the doors, paused, a hand on each, to screw his face in the glare. Then, silently, he sat on the rail beside Lanya, gripped his knees, his arm an inch from hers.

  Denny comes: some fantastic object. She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.

  Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said "I like that."

  But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile; but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.

  Anyway a smile's what they gave him back. Denny said, "It's going down," unnecessarily for her. One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.

  Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he
thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don't know who she is! He gripped harder.

  She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.

  So he dropped his hand.

  With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.

  While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, "Why aren't you afraid?" Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.

  She said: "Then I won't be either."

  The boy who'd come out was the pimply, stubble-

  bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as

  though he felt he might have interrupted something,

  seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid

  wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?),

  when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.

  Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding

  hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn,

  small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.

  "It's going down, see," Denny repeated.

  He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can't get the same reactions.

  Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.

  Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.

  The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.

  There were too many people.

  Milly brushed at her cheek.

  Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She's guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She's guilty . . . ?

  There were too many people.

  The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.

  They didn't move.

  "What are you going to do with that?" Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.

  The scorpion's breath was thunderous.

  "I don't know." That sounded thunderous too.

  "Let me take it." She tore off the three pages, corrected, and re-corrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. "I have your notebook at home. I'll put these with it. I want to go." She turned to Denny. And the shadow had rolled Somewhere beneath her chin; in the creases of her eyelid he could see sweat. "You want to walk me home?"

  Kid wanted to protest, decided no; offer to come too?

  She touched Denny's arm. Her nose and ear were shadowed: the incredible disk had lowered so that what remained was small enough that everyone around them, beneath a folded elbow, behind a heel on reddened tile, under frayed denim where a sleeve had been torn off, or within and behind the curves of flesh in flesh of the ear, had once more grown shadows. She looked afraid.

  Lanya stood, and people stepped apart.

  Denny, like someone just awakened, clambered from the rail, and, blinking about him (at the others as much as Kid) followed her.

  Denny left, and people closed around.

  "When it goes down ..." the pimply scorpion began.

  Kid, and the two people who held his hand, looked.

  Something white had dried on his mouth. His lashless lids were pink and swollen.

  The two looked away.

  "When it goes all the way down, there won't be any fuckin' light at all, again . . . ever." He shook his head, scuffed his boots, rocked on the doorsill. "Black as a fucking bitch . . . yeah!"

  They've gone, Kid thought. No light at all?

  Fifteen minutes later, when it had set completely, the sky had returned to its ordinary grey. He woke ... alone?

  Someone was climbing to the loft ladder.

  He struggled to choose between dreams and ... the rest. Because they had all left the muraled house, and wandered back to the nest. Milly had talked to him, aimlessly, in the sloped street, mostly all surprised that he was the same Kid everybody had been talking about, and how glad she was to know that she knew him, till he'd decided she was trying to put the make on him and had gotten angry. "Get the fuck out of here, you stupid bitch!" he'd yelled in the street and made to hit her. She'd run away; he'd laughed, loudly, till he was staggering. Copperhead had come up to him and beat him on the shoulder, laughing too. "I didn't like that one either. Shit, you can have one of mine . . ." He'd kept laughing, so he wouldn't have to speak, thinking with perfectly maniacal pride: I have, I have already-

  "Kid, are you okay?" Denny's ears were lit from behind and below. His face was dark.

  "Yeah . . . ?"

  Denny came up over the edge.

  "They're making food-" and at the word, Kid smelled it-"inside. Nightmare and Dragon Lady just came back. You sleepin'?"

  "Come-" and at the word, Denny, all shoulders and chin and elbows, wedged against him-"here. Yeah." He held the warm knobby shapes and lay there smelling grease and a hot, vegetative stench that defined no food he recognized; but he liked it anyway.

  "Lanya's got a nice place," Denny said.

  "Yeah?" Kid thought: he's so light; but his edges are sharp. "You ball her again?"

  ". . . Yeah." Denny said. "In her room, at her house. I guess that was all right."

  Surprised, Kid opened his eyes. Cracks cross the dim ceiling. "Oh." He shifted Denny to the side. "You got more energy than I do. I was tired when I got back here."

  "She's got a nice place," Denny repeated. "Real nice."

  "Why'd she want to go?" He rubbed his rough chin for the itching. -

  Denny squirmed to get comfortable. "To see about her class, she said." Denny squirmed again.

  "Class?"

  The L about the window shade had finally taken on the deep color of evening.

  "Her kids. She's been looking out for this group of kids, you know? About eight and nine years old. Black kids mostly."

  "No, I didn't know." He let his lips purse to a tent where, with the help of air, they were off his teeth. Well, he hadn't seen her much. How many days gone? She'd said she had a place, yes; "No, I didn't know."

  He frowned at the top of Denny's head.

  "I like her," Denny said. "I like her a lot." Denny's face came up from under the hair. "You know, I think she likes me too?"

  "Guess she does," Kid said. "Did she check . . . her class?"

  "No," Denny said. "Not while I was there. She was going to. But we got to fuckin' around again. Screwin', you know. She said she was going to, after I left. If she didn't go to sleep first. I think she was pretty tired."

  Kid looked at the ceiling again. "How long she had the kids?"

  "A couple of weeks," Denny said. "That's what she told me. She said she likes it. They meet a little way from her place. That's real nice."

  "What's it like?" A couple of weeks? He was too exhausted to be upset.

  "Real nice." Some of Denny's hair brushed and caught on Kid's chin.

  "Well, you're good for something, cocksucker. Hey!" Kid bunched the muscles of his leg under Denny's stiffening groin. "No, man. Fuck off. I don't want to now."

  Denny pulled himself back on all fours. "You better go eat something, then. They don't got that much. They'll eat it all."

  Kid sat, nodding. "Yeah, come on." He climbed groggily down, and stood in the doorway.

  Why (watching Denny climb) did she tell him all that about her new place, and her class, and not me? Why didn't I ask? he answered. He could smile at th
at, finally.

  "Come on." Denny took Kid's elbow and led him down.

  Halfway up the hall, Kid sucked his teeth and pulled free. It was a gentle pull; but Denny's head leapt away at the motion, frightened and anticipatory, despairing and wild. Without looking at him particularly, Denny stepped back to let him through.

  "Jesus Christ!" Nightmare exclaimed, turning with a full plate in his hand, gesturing first, then scooping with his fork. "Wasn't that something this afternoon? I mean, wasn't that too much!" He filled his mouth and spoke on, scattering little pieces. "We heard about you chasing out the niggers! Hey-" he gestured to Dragon Lady who sat against the wall-"we heard about what he did to those niggers."

  "Shit," Dragon Lady said dryly, and looked at Kid only from the corner of her eye. "I don't care what he do to any God-damn niggers."

  "I didn't even know they were in the house," Kid said.

  Dragon Lady took another mouthful. "Shit," she repeated, and pried with her spoon tip through what was on her plate.

  "Give 'em something to eat," Nightmare yelled toward the kitchen.

  "Baby!" Dragon Lady bellowed; her shoulders shook; nobody stopped doing anything. "Adam!" She flung the words up like grenades. "Bring some more food out for "em!"

  "Here you go!" Baby, still naked, pushed between the people at the door, leading (dangerously) with steaming plates.

  "This is yours."

  Kid ignored the dirty thumb denting what must have been a hash of canned vegetables (he pulled the fork out from where it had been buried: corn, peas, okra, fell off) and (he tasted the first mouthful) meat. (Spam?) Baby gave the other plate to Denny. He returned to serve Cathedral, Jack the Ripper, Devastation, all sitting about silently.

  Copperhead, not served yet, watched from the couch, and grinned and nodded when Kid looked at him.