Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  The chain around him tingled and tickled as though the memory had sent current through it. But the particular odor (wet leaves over dry, and a fire, and something decayed . . .) was gone. And cool as the darkness was, it was dry, dry . . .

  Edged by a vertical wall, light a long way away diffused in smoke.

  At the corner, Tak looked back. "Checking to make sure you were still with me. You don't make much noise. We're going across there." Tak nodded forward and they crossed the street, shoulder bumping shoulder.

  Beyond plate glass, an amber light silhouetted black wire forms.

  "What sort of store was this?" Kid asked, behind Tak who was opening the door.

  It sounded like a machine was running in the basement. Empty shelves lined the walls, and the wire frames were display racks. The light came from no more than a single bulb somewhere on the stairwell. Tak went to the cash register. "First time I came in here, would you believe there was still eighty dollars in the drawer?"

  Tak rang.

  The drawer trundled out.

  "Still there."

  He closed it.

  In the cellar the sound stopped, then started again: only now it didn't sound like a machine at all, but someone moaning.

  "We want to go downstairs," Tak said.

  Someone had scattered pamphlets on the steps. They whispered under Kid's bare foot. "What was this place?" Kid asked again. "A bookstore?"

  "Still is." Tak peered out where the single hanging bulb lit empty shelves. "Paperback department down here."

  Tacked to an edge was a hand-lettered sign: ITALIAN LITERATURE.

  A youngster with very long hair sat cross-legged on the floor. He glanced up, then closed his eyes, faced forward, and intoned: "Om . . ." drawing the last sound until it became the mechanical growl Kid had heard when they'd entered.

  "Occupied tonight," Tak said, softly. "Usually there's no one here."

  Between the checked flannel lapels, the boy's chest ran with sweat. Cheek bones glistened above his beard. He'd only glanced at them, before closing his eyes again.

  It's cool, Kid thought. It's so much cooler.

  Beside ITALIAN LITERATURE was POLITICAL SCIENCE. There were no books on that one either.

  Kid stepped around the boy's knees and looked up at PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (equally empty) and walked on to PHILOSOPHY. All the shelves, it seemed, were bare.

  "Ommmmmmmmrnmmrnmmrnrnm. ....."

  Tak touched Kid's shoulder. "Here, this is what I wanted to show you." He nodded across the room.

  Kid followed Tak around AMERICAN LITERA-TURE which was a dusty wooden rack in the middle of the floor.

  The unfrosted bulb pivoted shadows about them.

  "I used to come down here for all my science fiction," Tak said, "until there wasn't anything on the shelves any more. In there. Go ahead."

  Kid stepped into the alcove and stubbed his booted toe (thinking: Fortunately), hopped back, looked up: The ivory covers recalled lapped bathroom tiles.

  All but the top shelf was filled with face-out display. He looked again at the carton he had kicked. The cover wagged. As he stared into the box, something focused: a shadow, first fallen across his mind at something Lanya had said at the nest, almost blurred out by the afternoon's megalight, now, under the one, unfrosted bulb, lay outlined and irrefutable: As manuscripts did not become galleys overnight, neither did galleys become distributed books. Many more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had corrected proofs with Newboy in the church basement.

  Frowning, he bent to pick out a copy, paused, reached for one on the shelf, paused again, looked back at Tak, who had his fists in his jacket pockets.

  Kid's lips whispered at some interrogative. He looked at the books again, reached again. His thumb stubbed the polished cover-stock.

  He took one.

  Three fell; one slid against his foot.

  Tak said: "I think it's very quaint of them to put it in POETRY," which is what the sign above said. "I mean they could have filled up every shelf in the God-damn store. There're a dozen cartons in the back."

  Thumb on top, three fingers beneath, Kid tried to feel the weight; he had to jog his hand. There was a sense of absence which was easiest to fill with

  BRASS ORCHIDS

  lettered in clean shapes with edges and serifs his own fingers could not have drawn, even with French curve and straightedge. He reread the title.

  "Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . ." The light blacked and went on again; the ". . . mmmmmm-mmmm ..." halted on a cough.

  Kid looked over the six, seven, eight filled shelves. "That's really funny," he said, and wished the smile he felt should be on his face would muster his inner features to the right emotions. "That's really . . ." Suddenly he took two more copies, and pushed past Tak for the stair. "Hey," he said to the boy. "Are you all right?"

  The sweating face lifted. "Huh?"

  "What's the matter with you?"

  "Oh, man!" The boy laughed weakly. "I'm sick as a dog. I'm really sick as a fucking dog."

  "What's wrong?"

  "It's my gut. I got a spastic duodenum. That's like an ulcer. I mean I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I've had it before, so I know what it feels like."

  "What are you doing here, then?"

  The boy laughed again. "I was trying yoga exercises. For the pain. You know you can control things like that, with yoga."

  Tak came up behind Kid. "Does it work?"

  "Sometimes." The boy took a breath. "A little."

  Kid hurried on up the steps.

  Tak followed.

  From the top step Kid looked around at the shelves, and turned to Tak, who said:

  "I was just thinking, I really was, about asking you to autograph this for me." He held up the copy and snorted rough laughter. "I really was."

  Kid decided not to examine the shape this thought made, but caught the mica edge: It's not not having: It's having no memory of having. "I don't like that sort of shit anyway . . ." he said, awed at his lie, and looked at Tak's face, all shadowed and flared with backlight. He searched the black oval for movement. It's there anyway, he thought; he said: "Here. Gimme," and got the pen from the vest's buttonhole.

  "What are you going to do?" Tak handed it over.

  Kid opened it on the counter by the register, and wrote: "This copy of my book is for my friend, Tak Loufer." He frowned a moment, then added, "All best." The page looked yellow. And he couldn't read what he'd written at all, which made him realize how dim the light was. "Here." He handed it back. "Let's go, huh?"

  "Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . ."

  "Yeah." Tak glanced down stairs and sucked his teeth. "You know?" They walked to the door. "When you took it from me, I thought you were going to tear it up." Kid laughed. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. And thinking it, decided what he had put was best. "You know-" as they stepped into the night, Kid felt his fingers dampen on the cover: fingerprints?-"people talk about sexual inadequacy? That doesn't have anything to do with whether you can get a hard-on or not. A guy goes out looking for his girl friend and doesn't even know where she lives, and doesn't seem to have bothered to find out. . . You said Madame Brown might know?"

  "I think so," Tak said. "Hey, you're always talking about your girl friend. Right now, do you have a boy friend?"

  Kid figured they had reached the corner. On the next step he felt the ball of his bare foot hung over the curb. "Yeah, I guess I do." They stepped down.

  "Oh," Tak said. "Somebody told me you're supposed to be making it with some kid in the scorpions." "I could get to hate this city-" . "Ah, ah, ah!" Tak's voice aped reproval. "Rumor is the messenger of the gods. I'm sort of curious to find out what you wrote in my book."

  At which Kid started to balk, found his own balking funny, and smiled. "Yeah."

  "And of course, the poems too. Well. . ." Kid heard Tak's footsteps stop.

  "... I go this way. Sure I can't convince you . . . ?" "No." He added: "But thanks. I'll see you." Kid walked forward thinking, Th
at's nuts. How does anybody know where anything is in this, and thought that thought seven or eight times through, till, without breaking stride, he realized: I cannot see a thing and I am alone. He pictured great maps of darkness torn down before more. After today, he thought idly, there is no more reason for the sun to rise. Insanity? To live in any state other than terror! He held the books tightly. Are these poems mine? Or will I discover that they are improper descriptions by someone else of things I might have once been near: the map erased, aliases substituted for each location?

  Someone, then others, were laughing. Kid walked, registering first the full wildness of it, the spreading edges; but only at the working street lamp at the far corner, realizing it was humor's raddle and play.

  Two black men, in the trapezoid of light from a doorway, were talking. One was drinking a can of beer or Coke. From across the street, a third figure (Kid could see the dark arms were bare from here, that the vest was shiny) ambled up.

  The street lamp pulsed and died, pulsed and died. Black letters on a yellow field announced, and announced, and announced:

  JACKSON AVENUE

  Kid walked toward them, curious.

  "She run up here . . ." the tall one explained, then laughed once more. "Pretty little blond-headed thing, all scared to death; you know, she stopped first, like she gonna turn around and run away, with her hand up in front of her mouth. Then she asks me-" The man lowered his head and raised his voice: " 'Is George Harrison in there? You know, George Harrison, the big colored man?' " The raconteur threw up his head and laughed again. "Man, if I had 'em like George had 'em . . ." In his fist was a rifle barrel (butt on the ground) that swung with his laughter.

  "What you tell her?" the heavier one asked, and drank again.

  " 'Sure he's inside,' I told her. 'He better be inside. I just come out of there and I sure as hell seen him inside. So if he ain't inside, then I just don't know where else he might be.' " The rifle leaned and recovered. "She run. She just turned around and run off down the block. Run just like that!"

  The third was a black scorpion with the black vinyl vest, his orchid on a neck chain. It's like, Kid thought, meeting friends the afternoon the TV had been covering the assassination of another politician, the suicide of another superstar; and for a moment you are complicit strangers celebrating by articulate obliteration some national, neutral catastrophe.

  Remembering the noon's light, Kid squinted in the dark. And wished he were holding anything else: notebook or flower or shard of glass. Awkwardly, he reached back to shove the books under his belt.

  The three turned to look.

  Kid's skin moistened with embarrassment. *

  ". . . She just run off," the black man with the gun finally repeated, and his face relaxed like a musician's at a completed cadence.

  The one with the beer can, looking left and right, said, "You scorpions. So you come down here a little, huh?"

  "This is the Kid," the black scorpion explained. "I'm Glass."

  His name, Kid thought (he remembered Spider helping with Siam's arm on the rocking bus floor . . .): It isn't any easier to think of them once their names surface. They might as well be me. Surfaced with it was a delight at his own lack. But that joy still seemed as dull and expected as a banally Oedipal dream he'd had the first night he'd been assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital.

  "You the Kid?" The man hooked the can's bottom on the top of his belt buckle. "You fellows gonna come down here and give us protection?"

  "Yeah, they all shootin' up black people now, you come on down to Jackson."

  Far inside, other blacks were talking and laughing. "What happened?" Kid asked.

  Glass stepped over closer to Kid. (Kid thought: I feel more comfortable. He probably does too.) The others moved to accommodate the shift.

  "Someone been shooting up down here?" Glass asked. "That was this afternoon?"

  "Sure was." The barrel went into the other hand. "Like a sniper, you know? Ain't that something. I mean, this afternoon, with that thing hanging up there." "What happened?"

  "Somebody climbed up on the roof of the Second City Bank building down on the corner, and started shooting people with a gun. Just like that." "Did he kill anybody?" Kid asked. The man with the can pursed his lips to a prune. The man with the gun said: "About seven." "Shit!" Kid said.

  "Like he got four people together, you know-bip, bip, bip, bip. The woman wasn't dead yet, but she couldn't move very far. A little later some people came out to help them, 'cause they thought he'd gone. But he stood up again and picked off three of them. Then he run."

  "It was a white boy, too." The other gestured with his can. "And he gonna come all the way down here to shoot niggers." "The woman died, hey . . . when?" Glass asked.

  "A little later. She didn't say nothing about the guy did the shooting though. Some others saw. That's how they know he was white." He grinned, finished the can, tossed it. "You scorpions gonna-" it clunked and bounced-"gonna come down to Jackson and give us some protection? Keep them crazy white mother-fuckers from shooting up people in the street?"

  The gun came up. "We don't need no scorpion protection," and a deprecating: "Shit."

  "That's good," Kid said. "Because we don't protect anybody." This all sounds sort of familiar. Didn't somebody get shot from a roof . . .

  The two men looked at each other, looked uncomfortable.

  Glass repeated, finally, "That's not what we do."

  The man with the gun slid the barrel up to his shoulder. "Naw, we don't need no protection."

  "We don't need no mother-fuckers standing on the roof of the Second City Bank building shooting people, either." The other man's hands moved on his belt to finger the buckle, as though he wished the can back. "You know, without having no doctors. Or undertakers."

  "What'd they do with them?" Glass asked.

  "Put them in a house way down there. And after about three or four days, people gonna start crossing the street when they was going past that stretch."

  The man with the gun didn't laugh. "What you scorpions doing over here? Cause that sun comes up-" the butt clacked down on the concrete-"you gonna come on down here?"

  "George told me to come down and see him," Kid said. "I saw him over at Reverend Amy's church and he told me to come down and visit."

  "Yeah," Glass said. "We comin' to see George."

  After a while one said, "Oh."

  "Well, go on in," the other said. "Sure, go on inside. He's in there."

  "Come on," Kid said to Glass.

  Halfway down the hall, Glass said, "You think he ever had a gun before? The way he was banging it around, he gonna shoot off his ear or his nose or his head or something."

  "Or my head," Kid said. "Yeah, I was thinking that too."

  Three lanterns hung together. Their magnesium-white light harshened the battleship linoleum, the institutional yellow walls. Through an iron elevator gate, Kid could see a web of shadow on the cinder block.

  He knew he reacted, but could not tell by what it showed. "Where to put the bodies? I'm not going to like it when I run into that a third time."

  Glass was watching him.

  "Why're you wearing your orchid around your neck? When I first saw you the day we broke into the department store, you had it in a piece of leather."

  "I know," Glass said. "But you were wearing yours that way."

  "Oh. That's what I thought."

  Beyond the turn they could hear people.

  "Hey."

  Glass turned. Slabs of light slid across his black vinyl. "Huh?"

  "What did you guys think when I showed up, I mean back at the department store?"

  Glass laughed through his nose. He looked embarrassed. He pulled his pants across his stomach, scratched the twice-crossed T of an appendectomy scar showing above his belt. His knuckles were much darker than the rest of his skin; the places between his fingers looked like they had been brushed with ash.

  "What did you think? Tell me."

  Gl
ass shrugged and shook his head to settle the smile about the yellow corners of his eyes. "We . . . well, we knew you were coming. Only we didn't know you were coming then. I mean, you remember the morning we woke you up in the park?"

  Kid nodded.

  Glass nodded too as though the reference explained something, then looked up the hall.

  Kid walked on.

  At a party, I hand out a hundred and fifty copies of my book, and they all turn down the music and sit around cross-legged on the floor, reading so intently I can walk among them, lean down, and examine each expression flickering from humor through compassion to the visage of the deeply moved.

  He sweated under the books in his belt. A drop rolled, tickling his buttock.

  Kid and Glass stepped inside the wide-swung doors. He'd thought there was music.

  ". . . wants more of it, can't get enough of it, how to get out of it: Time-" a woman cried over the loose crowd-"is the hero!" She swayed in dark robes on some platform-or maybe just a table-that brought her knees high as the highest, close-cropped, black (with a brown bald spot vague in the middle) head. "Time is the villain!" Reverend Amy Tayler, thirty yards across the balconied hall, shook her head and her fist, glared around at craning women and men with faces of humus, sand, and all in-between colors earth can have. "Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truths and lies. Not truth and falsity- Oh, no. No. Nothing so grand. Here we are sunk on the abyss of discrete fibs, innocent misobservations, brilliant speculations that turn out wrong and kill- Oh, there is so much less truth in the universe than anything else. Yes, even here we founder on the fill of language, the quick ash of desire." Glass touched Kid's arm. His expression looked stranger than Kid's felt. Lanterns hung on the walls. Shadows were multiple and dim on blood-colored linoleum. Near them, strung crepe-paper had fallen behind the potted . . . not palms. Cactuses! "So you have seen the moon! So you have seen George-the right and left testicles of God, so heavy with tomorrow they tore through the veil to dangle naked above us all? Then what was that in the sky today? God's womb punched inside out and blazing with Her blood, looking like a moment ago She had passed the egg of the earth and its polar body we've so cavalierly dismissed from singularity? Is God a sow who devours Her young and gets heartburn? Is God the garter-snake Ouroborus, gagging on the tip of His own tail? Or is God just a category-concept mistake, like Ryle's mind, a process the materia of the universe preforms, indulges in, or inflicts on itself, through necessity or chance, for arcane reasons you and I will never discover? Being is a function of time, ey, Martin? Well, now, where does that get us? Now seems pretty specious to me ... for it's just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we've been allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch, watching that flow, terrible for all of us, tragic for some of us, in which the future hisses through to heap the potter's field of the past. Very deep, indeed; and dried up. And dusty. And spiked with bone like pongee pits. Was it a heart of fire, up there today? Or just a dollop of what burns, squeezed out of the cosmic gut-to its great relief! Maybe it was our sun, hurtling by, on its way somewhere else; and all that's left to us now is to grow colder and older, every day in every way, gracefully as possible. How long did this light last? Oh, my poor, sick, doomed, and soon to be obliterated children, ask instead how long is the darkness that follows it!"