Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Here you go." Adam shoved a plate at Copperhead. He took it, saluted Kid with a fork with twisted tines, then dropped his shoulders and shoveled.

  Denny's girl friend (should I find out her name?) with a coffee cup of the hash, came out of the kitchen, crossed to sit right by Denny on the floor and made a big thing of not looking at Kid. The girl in the pea jacket, next to Copperhead on the couch, occasionally picked food from Copperhead's plate with a spoon: Copperhead more or less ignored her.

  "You had a party?" Nightmare exclaimed in answer to a question Kid hadn't heard asked. "We ran! Adam, Baby, the Lady, and me! I was so scared I didn't think I was gonna make it. Shit, I'm still scared."

  The last laughter to trail away was Dragon Lady's gusty chuckle.

  "We were in the park." Nightmare waved his fork above his head; more people sat down. "Baby, Adam, Dragon Lady, and me. You know the old weather tower in the park?"

  (What, Kid wondered, had George been doing in the brazen light of the noon? What had June?)

  "When it began, I mean after it began-first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire-after we could see what it was-" he shook his head at somebody who started a comment-"no, no, I don't know what the fuck it was. Don't ask me. After we could see it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn't we?"

  Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed.

  "We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down." Nightmare whistled. "Jesus Christ!"

  We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities.

  "You were out there in it," the scorpion in vinyl asked, watching, "until it was all over?"

  Copperhead protested: "We watched it going down-"

  "All over?" But Nightmare's mouth hung open, mocking his interlocutor. "What's all over?"

  Adam rubbed the chains on his chest: the rest were still.

  "You think it's all over?" Nightmare demanded.

  The blond girl in the pea jacket held her spoon in both hands tightly between her knees. "When it went down," she said, "it was just like regular day again . . . here. And then it was light for four or five hours till it was time to get dark." She looked back over her shoulder at the black glass; the brass lion on the windowsill watched the night from beneath his bulbless stalk.

  Dragon Lady's laughter built in the silence.

  "Shit." Nightmare filled his mouth again and yelled at his plate: "You don't know if the sun is ever gonna come up again! We could all be burned up to death by tomorrow. Or frozen. What were you saying, Baby, about maybe the earth got pushed off its orbit or something like that, maybe into the sun, or out past it-"

  "I didn't say that." Baby looked down at himself, pimply chest, uncircumcised genitals, bowed knees, dirty feet; his nakedness for the first time was out of place. "I wasn't sayin' it that serious-"

  "There'd be an earthquake if that happened." Brown Adam, with his Philadelphia accent, held his chains in his fist. "I told you that. A big earthquake, or a tidal wave; both maybe. Nothing like that's happened. And there'd have to be if the earth got pushed somewhere-"

  "So maybe-" Nightmare looked up-"in ten minutes there's gonna be a big fuckin' earthquake!"

  Then the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling dropped to quarter dimness.

  Kid tried to swallow his heart; it threatened to burst and fill his mouth with blood.

  Someone was crying again.

  Kid looked to see if it was Denny. But it was another scorpion (Spider?) on the other side of Nightmare. Denny's face, even in the yellowish half-dark, was cut with blades of shadow from his hair.

  "Oh, come on!" Smokey edged from behind Thirteen's shoulder: "Look, it used to do that four or five times a day when we stayed here."

  In the kitchen something hummed: the light returned to full brightness.

  Nightmare ate doggedly.

  No one else did.

  "You guys make up any more of this shit?" Nightmare nodded toward Adam and Baby. "It's good." Then looked around. "You don't know if it's over or not."

  "I could use some more," Dragon Lady said.

  Baby came forward with his hands out for their plates.

  "The mistake-" Kid surprised himself by speaking, took a mouthful to stop, but went on anyway-"isn't thinking that it's finished." I'm imitating Nightmare, he thought, then realized, no, I'm doing what Nightmare did for the same reason. "The mistake is thinking it began this afternoon."

  "Right on, mother-fucker!" Nightmare shook his fork for emphasis.

  Kid took another mouthful, and thought: I may throw up. And then thought: No, I'm too hungry.

  "We got some more out there in the big pot," Adam was saying. "Why don't you guys go out and get it till it's all gone."

  A shadow made Kid look up from the last of his eating.

  Adam stood there, hand out for Kid's plate, about (Kid realized) to burst out crying too. Kid gave it to him.

  Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and me get served first, Kid reflected as Baby brought his seconds. Well, Copperhead seemed at ease.

  Finished, Kid put his fork on the floor and stood up.

  "Hey, where're you going?" Copperhead asked, no belligerence, all bewilderment.

  "Taking a walk."

  On the bottom step of the house, he noted two streetlights in the distance. Burn up at any minute? Or freeze at the advent of an ice age, twenty minutes to completion? The air was the same excruciatingly bland temperature it had been night after night after night. The door opened behind him: Denny looked out.

  "I want to go over and see Lanya's place," Kid said, turning. "You want to show me the way?"

  "I ... I can't," Denny said. "She's upset. And she wants to talk ... to me."

  "Fuck you, cocksucker." Kid started down the block. "See you later." (He wasn't angry at all.) That was pretty good. Halfway to the corner, however, he realized Denny would be the only way to find Lanya's new place. (Then he was.)

  He could try the bar. But if she had a house now, what was the chance she'd be at Teddy's tonight?

  He looked back, ready to yell to Denny to get the fuck on down here.

  The door was closed.

  And I still don't know her name!

  He took a breath between his teeth. Maybe he'd find Lanya at the bar.

  At the corner of the hill; surprised at how many street lamps-perhaps one out of five-worked in this neighborhood. The one diagonally across the street gave enough light to make out the charred walls of the big house. (The stronger burned smell had made him stop.) The columns supporting the balcony over the door had charred through, so that the platform, with its rail of lions, hung askew. Even so it took Kid a whole minute to be sure what house it was. Only houses he could see around confirmed it.

  Four, five, six hours since they had screamed and laughed and yelled inside it?

  Chilled to gooseflesh in the neutral air, he hurried away. ".. . definitely saw it?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "You were already in the city?"

  "That's right."

  "You said earlier you didn't see the whole thing though."

  "I caught, I guess, now it must have been, the last ten or fifteen minutes. Roger came and woke me up to see."

  "You saw it from inside the house then?"

  "Well, first out my window. Then we went down to the gardens. I tell you, now, it was pretty strange."

  The others laughed. "Hey," Paul Fenster said, half standing to look at the others seated. "We've just about got the Captain boxed in here. Why doesn't somebody move back, there?"

  "That's all right. If I want to get out, I'll just bust on through."

  "I imagine-" Madame Brown reached down to play with Muriel's muzzle-"you aren't any closer to an explanation than we are."

  "I think that was about the strangest thing I ever saw, I'll be honest now."

  "As strange as anything you ever saw in space?" from the man in purple angora.

 
; "Well, I tell you, this afternoon was pretty ... I guess you'd say, spaced out."

  They laughed again.

  The heavy blond Mexican with the blanket shirt rose from beside Tak and walked to the door, passing within a foot of Kid, and left. Tak saw Kid. With tilting head, he beckoned.

  Kid, curious, went to sit in the vacated seat.

  Tak leaned to whisper, "Captain Kamp ..." A dozen others had pulled chairs up to listen to the crew-cut man in the green, short-sleeved shirt who sat in the corner booth.

  Tak sat and folded his hands across the bottom of his leather jacket so that the top pushed out from his blond chest.

  "What I want to know," purple angora announced, ". . . down, sweetheart, down-" Muriel had momentarily switched allegiances-"I want to know is, if it could possibly have been some kind of trick. I mean, is there any way somebody could have made that seem to happen? I mean . . . well, you know: in a man-made way."

  "Well . . ." The Captain looked among his listeners. "He's your engineer, isn't he?" His look settled on Tak- who reared back with a high laugh.

  That must be as self-conscious as I've ever seen him, Kid thought He'd never heard Tak make that sound before.

  "No," Tak said. "No, I'm afraid that doesn't have anything to do with any engineering I'd know anything about."

  "What I want to know-now what I want to know," Fenster said. "You've been in space. You've been on the moon . . ." He paused, then added in a different voice: "You're one of the ones that was actually on the moon."

  Captain Kamp was only attentive.

  "We've had here some sort of ... astrological happening, and it's got us all pretty shook. I want to know if you . . . well, from being up on the moon, or like that, you might know something more about it."

  Kamp's face ghosted a smile. Kid searched for the names of the astronauts from the four moonshots he'd followed closely, tried to recall what he could about the fifth. Captain Kamp crossed his arms on the booth-table. He wasn't very tall.

  "Now it's certainly possible-" Kamp punctuated his southwestern speech with small nods-"that there's an astronomical, or better, cosmological explanation. But I'll be frank: I don't know what it is."

  "Do you think we should worry?" Madame Brown asked in a voice with no worry in it at all.

  Kamp, whose crew mixed grey and gold, nodded. "Worry? Well, we're all here. And alive. That's certainly no reason not to worry. But worry isn't going to do us much good, now, is it? Now yesterday-about this time yesterday-I was in Dallas. And if that thing was as big as it looked and really some sort of body in the sky, a comet or a sun, I suspect it would have been seen a long way off coming, with telescopes. And nobody told me about it."

  "It sounds, Captain, as though you don't believe it's serious."

  Kamp's smile said as much. Kamp said, "I saw it- some of it, anyway."

  "Then," Kid said, and others turned, "you don't know how big it really was."

  "Now that," the Captain answered, "I'm afraid, is it." His jaw was wider than his forehead. "Now you all, Roger too, described something which practically filled up half the sky. So obviously what I saw was only a little bit. And then there was the story about-George, was it?"

  Tak looked around the room, frowned, and again whispered to Kid: "George was here a few minutes ago. He must have gone out just before you came-"

  "Now I'm afraid nobody outside ... of Bellona, saw that one. And Roger tells me he didn't either."

  "I certainly did," Tak whispered.

  "I certainly did!" someone cried.

  "Well." Kamp smiled. "Not too many other people did, and certainly nobody outside Bellona."

  "You saw what happened today." Teddy, arms folded, leaned against the back of the next booth.

  "Yes, I guess I did."

  "You mean," Fenster jovially announced, "you went from here to the moon and back, and you didn't see anything on the way that would tell us something about all this thing this afternoon?"

  Kamp said, "Nope."

  "Then what use was it, I ask you?" Fenster looked around for somebody's back to slap. "I mean now what was the use of it?"

  Someone said, "You haven't been with the space program a while?"

  "Now you don't really leave it. Just last week I was down for medical testing for long-range results. That I don't ever expect to stop. But I'm much less involved with it now than some of the others."

  "Why did you leave?" the purple angora asked. "Was it your idea or theirs-if you can answer a question like that?"

  "Well." This, a considered sentence. "I suspect they thought it was a touchier question than I did at the time. But I doubt they wanted me that much if I didn't want them. My interest in the space program just about ended with splashdown. The tests, the research work afterward, that was important. The parades, the celebrations, the panels, the publicity-I think the fun in that was exhausted a month after I came out of the isolation chamber. The rest-probably more so for me than for the others, because that's the kind of person I am-was just a nuisance. Also," and he smiled, "I've occasionally been known to pick up a guitar at a party and a sing a folk song or two. Nothing political, mind you. But they still frown on that sort of thing."

  Everyone laughed. Kid thought: Is he for real?

  And a second thought, like a stutter: My reaction is as fixed as his action. And Kid laughed, though later than the others. Two or three glanced at him.

  "No," Kamp went on, "I suppose I saw myself as something of an adventurer ... as much as a navy test pilot can be. Apollo for me was an adventure-practically an eight-year adventure, with all the preparation. But when it was over, I was ready to go on to something else."

  "So you've come to Bellona," Madame Brown said, as Fenster said: "After the moon, where else is there?"

  "Now, you're right. . ."

  Kid wondered which question Kamp was answering.

  "... but I'm just beginning to see that myself."

  "Are you here in any official connection?" asked another woman.

  "I'd imagine," Fenster said, "you're never officially disconnected."

  "No. I'm here unofficially."

  "What does that mean?" someone challenged.

  Fenster scowled, offended for Kamp, who merely said, "They know I'm here. But they gave me no instructions before I came. They won't ask me anything about what I did or saw after I come back."

  "Why don't we break up this Star Chamber?" Fenster stood. "Come on, the Captain is nice enough to talk to us all at once, but we've got to give the man a chance to circulate."

  "Now this is quite informal," Kamp countered,

  "compared to what I'm used to. I would like a chance to walk around though."

  "Come on, come on." Fenster made shooing motions.

  Some rose.

  The bartender rolled his cuffs above the blurry blue beasts and strolled to the counter.

  Tak's chair scraped.

  "Come on, now, let's let the Captain get himself a drink. Madame Brown, you look like you could use one too."

  Kid shook his hands below the chair edge to stop the tingling.

  Tak stood, stretched to tiptoe, looked around. "Wonder where George got off to. He was all curious when he discovered we had a genuine man in the moon with us."

  They walked to the bar.

  Teddy was returning chairs.

  Once the dozen clustered at the Captain's booth dispersed, the place looked empty.

  "I thought Lanya was here, maybe."

  Tak's hands locked. "I haven't seen her. Madame B. might know where she is." And unlocked. "Hey, I saw the big advertisement in the Times, all over page three. Congratulations." Tak frowned. "By the way, what did you do at the coming of the great white light? Orange, I guess it was, really. You got any opinions to pass the time with while we wait to see if there's going to be a tomorrow?"

  Kid leaned on meshed fingers. "I don't know. I didn't do anything much. I had some people with me. I think they were more upset than I was. You know, Tak, for a whil
e I thought ..." The bartender set down a beer bottle. ". . . no, that's silly." Kid pulled the bottle to him, leaving a sweat ribbon. "Isn't it?" The candles glittered in it.

  "What?"

  "I was going to say, for a while I thought it was a dream."

  "If I woke up right now, I'd feel a lot better."

  "No. Not that." Kid lifted his bottle once, twice, a third, a fourth, a fifth time from lapping rings. "When it was rising, I remember I went out to take a look from the back porch; and thinking maybe I was dreaming. Suddenly I woke up. In bed. Only, when I got up, later, it was still there. Finally, after it went down, I went to sleep again. You know, right now-" he smiled, to himself till it overcame the strictures of his facial muscles and burst stupidly onto his face-"I still don't know what I dreamed and what I didn't. Maybe I didn't really see any more than the Captain."

  "You went to sleep?"

  "I was tired." Saying that annoyed Kid. "What about you?"

  "Christ, I-" The bartender brought Tak's bottle. "What did I do?" Tak snorted. "I saw the light coming through those bamboo blinds I have, and I went out on the roof to take a look. I watched it rising for about three minutes. Then I freaked."

  "What'd you do?"

  "I went down into the stairwell and sat in the dark for about an hour or so ... I guess. I'd got this whole paranoid thing about radiation-no, don't laugh. We might all start losing our hair in the next six hours while our capillaries fall apart. Finally I got scared of just sitting in the dark and went up to look again . . ." He stopped moving his bottle around the wet circle. "I'm just glad I don't have a heart condition. It stretched over so much of the horizon I couldn't look at one edge and see the other. I couldn't look at where the bottom was cut off by the roofs and see the top." Tak's bottle rumbled about. "I went back down into the stairwell, closed the door, and just cried. For a couple of hours. I couldn't stop. While I was crying, I thought about lots of things. One of them, by the way, was you."

  "What?"

  "I remember sitting there and asking myself if this was what the inside of insanity felt like- Ah, there: you've taken offense."

  He hadn't. But now wondered if he should.

  "Well, I'm sorry. That's what I thought, anyway."

  "You were really that scared?"