Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  Glass said, "Thanks," when he got his.

  "Well," Kamp said again. "Thanks again. Well now. If I don't see you before, Kid, I'll see you in three Sundays." He pushed the gate. "Do you fellows want to come-"

  "No," Kid said, and realized Glass had gotten himself ready to say yes.

  "All right." K-k-klank. "Good night, now."

  Glass shifted from one foot to the other. "Night." Then he said: "Those curbs are too much in all this dark shit. Let's go down the middle of the street."

  "Sure."

  They stepped off the sidewalk and started back.

  You'll get to see what it looks like inside in a couple of weeks, Kid thought of saying and didn't. He also thought of asking why Glass was a scorpion, how long he'd been, and what he'd done before.

  They did not talk.

  Kid constructed the stumps of a dozen conversations, and heard each veer into some mutually embarrassing area, and so abandoned it. Once it occurred to him Glass was probably indulging in the same process: for a while he pondered what Glass might want to know about him: that too became fantasized converse, and like the others, embarrassing. So their silent intercourse moved to another subject.

  "All this walking ain't worth five bucks," Glass said at the North-South connection.

  "Here." Kid held out his bill, crumpled by the hour in his fist (the crisp points had blunted with perspiration). "It probably ain't worth ten either. But I don't need it."

  "Thanks," Glass said. "Hey, thanks, man."

  He was both surprised and amused that the interchange released him from his preoccupation with who Glass was.

  They ambled the black street into the city, neither moving to illuminate his projector, in memoriam-Kid realized-to the sun.

  How long had they been? Three hours? More? The distance between then and now was packed full of time during which his furious mind had prodded the outsides of a myriad fantasies and (if he were asked he would have said) nothing had happened. Thoughts of madness: Perhaps those moments of miscast reality or lost time were the points (during times when nothing happened) when the prodding broke through. The language that happened on other muscles than the tongue was better for grasping these. Things he could not say wobbled in his mouth, and brought back, vividly in the black, how at age four he had sat in the cellar, putting into his mouth, one after the other, blue, orange, and pink marbles, to see if he could taste the colors.

  They passed another lamp.

  Glass's face was dry.

  The way anywhere in this city was obviously to drift; Kid drifted, on kinesthetic memory. To try consciously for destination was to come upon street signs illegible through smoke, darkness, or vandalism, wrongly placed, or missing.

  When they crossed Jackson, Kid asked, "I want to go back to the party."

  "Sure, mother-fucker." Glass grinned. "Why not? You really want to?"

  "Just to see what happened."

  Glass sighed.

  Across the pavement, at the other end of the block, Kid saw the dim trapezoid. "Light's still on."

  Of the cluster of three lanterns inside the door, one still burned. Inside, the doors to the hall were closed.

  "Don't sound like nobody's there."

  "Open the door," Kid said because Glass was ahead of him.

  Glass pushed, stepped in; Kid stepped after.

  Only two lanterns were working: a third, in the corner, guttered. The meeting room was empty; the party's detritus lay in ruin and shadow.

  Near the one-winged statue, fallen among the prickly plants, the tip of the barrel on his belly, the butt on the linoleum, the black guard whom they had talked to outside lay on his back and snored. The tracked plaster, overturned chairs, and scattered bottles momentarily brought Kid an image of a drunken shooting, the barrel swinging around the room moments before he'd passed out-but he saw no bullet holes.

  He could see no one in the balcony.

  On a chair by the far wall, muffled in an absurd overcoat, the only other person in the room swayed to one side, froze, recovered, swayed once more, once more froze at an angle that challenged gravity.

  "What does he have inside him, a gyroscope?" Glass asked.

  "More like half a spoon of skag."

  Glass laughed.

  In the hallway, a door that had been closed before . now stood ajar on a stairwell.

  "You wanna go exploring?" Glass asked.

  "Sure," Kid said.

  Glass pinched at his broad nose, twice, sucked in both lips, cleared his throat, and started down.

  Kid followed.

  A door at the bottom was open. Kid's foot crushed a Times, which caught some low draft (the dirty stair was cold; the banister pipe warm) and doffed down. It rasped again beneath his boot on the last step.

  Kid came up behind Glass in the doorway:

  The couch had been opened into a bed. The gaunt, brick-haired girl who had been with George, her neck looped with the optical chain, slept beneath a rumpled blanket, bearing small, light-coffee breasts, dolloped with dark nipples.

  A lamp by the bed had a shade of glass from which a triangle was broken away. The wedge of light, molding to body and bedding, just touched one aureole at the height of her blowy breath.

  "Hey, man!" Glass whispered, and grinned.

  Kid breathed with her, swaying on the bottom step, and had to move his feet apart.

  "How'd you like some of that?"

  "I think I could eat about three helpings," Kid said. "Where's George?"

  "Man, he probably gone off with the other one-" Glass's emphatic whispers broke into and returned from falsetto.

  Then: "What the fuck are you doing!" She sat up, sharply, face going from sleep to anger like two frames of film.

  "Jesus Christ, lady," Kid said, "we were just looking."

  "Well stop looking! Go on, get the fuck out of here! Where the hell is everybody? You, both of you, get out!"

  "Sweetheart, don't go on like that." Glass said. "Now you got your door wide open-"

  "Did that nut leave the damn door unlocked-" She pulled up the sheet, reached down by the bed, and whipped up some article of clothing. "Come on. Out! Out! Out! I'm not kidding. Out!"

  "Look-" Kid glumly contemplated the difficulties of rape (a surprising memory of his arms filled with the bloody boy; he moved his feet back together) and wondered what Glass was contemplating-"if you just stop yelling, maybe we can discuss this a little; you might change your mind-?"

  "Not on your fucking life!" She shook out the wrinkled jump suit, swung her legs off the bed, and stuck her feet in. "I don't know what you got on your mind to do. But if you try it, you gonna get your ass hurt!"

  "Nobody wants to hurt anybody-" Kid stopped because Glass was looking up at the small, high window. Kid felt his cheeks wrinkling and the pressure of surprise on his forehead.

  She started to say something, and then said, "Huh?"

  The foggy air outside had lightened to blue. - Then Glass turned and ran up the stairs.

  "Hey!" Kid followed him.

  Behind, he could hear her fighting with shoes.

  Kid ran down the hall, swung outside.

  Glass, a dozen feet from the sidewalk, stared along the street.

  Kid joined him, stopping to look back, at the sound of footsteps: She stopped at the edge of the door, leaned but, her face contorted. "Jesus God," she said softly, stepped out and raised her head. ". . . it's getting . . . light!"

  Kid's first thought was: It's happening too fast. The uneven roofs descended in a paling V, vortex blurred with smoke. He stared, waiting for an eruption of bronze fires. But no; the arch of visible sky, though modeled and mottled with billows, was deep blue, except the lowest quarter, gone grey.

  "Oh, man!" Glass looked at Kid. "I'm so tired." Below one eye, water tracked his dark cheek. Blinking, Glass turned back to the morning.

  Kid got chills. And kept getting them. I don't trust this reaction, he thought, remembering the last late-night TV drama where the frail h
eroine's tearful realizations of burgeoning love had caused him the same one. I'm going on like this because there's a nigger next to me about to bawl, and another in the doorway who looks so Scared and confused I'm about to . . . No, it's not the light. No.

  But the chills came on, frazzling his flesh, till even his thoughts stuttered. Chills sandpapered his spine. His palms hummed. He opened his mouth and his eyes and his fingers wide to the raddled and streaming dawn.

  Sunday, April 1, 1776-There is reason to speak of this on page two rather than lend the phenomenon the leading headline it could so easily claim. We, for one, are just not ready to grant the hysteria prevailing beneath this miasmal pollution the reinforcement of our shock.

  We saw this one ourselves.

  But in the city where we live, one doubts even the validity of that credential.

  We went so far as to entertain a while the idea of devoting this issue to accounts only by those who had slept through, who were busy in the cellar or windowless back room when, or-hope on hope-could claim to have been strolling about yesterday afternoon and observed during, nothing extraordinary in the sky.

  But if the advent in our nights of George is anything to go by, we should have to look outside our misty and deliquescent city limits to find a negative witness. At least we hope so.

  Please, return to page one. The plight of Jackson's Lower Cumberland area, where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water main on my last Thursday (how dangerous that is for the rest of us nobody can say because nobody can estimate the losses from the fractured dam in terms of our decreased population) is a real dilemma. More real we would like to feel, than yesterday's portent.

  We are not anxious either to describe or even name what passed. Presumably some copy of this will get beyond our border; we should like to keep our good name. We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park. But another writer (page one, continued page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first-hand account. And, anyway, in his words, ". . . chances are, no one lives there any more."

  Dubious to time, the arc became visible in the late afternoon of the overcast day. In a spectrum ranging only through grey, black, and blue, you would have to see to judge the effects of those golds and bronzes, those reds and purplish browns! Minutes later, most of us here had gathered in the August Garden. The view was awesome. Speculation, before awe silenced it, was rampant. When, after fifteen minutes, perhaps a fourth of the disk had emerged, we had our first case of hysteria . . . But rather than dwell on those understandable breakdowns, let us commend Professor Wellman on his level-headedness throughout, and Budgie Goldstein on her indomitable high spirits.

  More than an hour in the rising, the monumental . . . disk? sphere? whatever? eventually cleared the visible buildings. There is some question, even among those gathered in August, as to whether the orb actually hovered, or whether it immediately changed direction and began to set again, slightly (by no more than a fifth of its diameter) to the left-this last, the estimate of Wallace Guardowsky.

  The lower rim, at any rate, was above the horizon for fifteen or twenty minutes. Even at full height, it could be stared at for minutes because of the veiling clouds. Colonel Harris advised, however, that we curtail prolonged gazing. The setting, almost all are agreed, took substantially less time than the rising, and has been estimated between fifteen minutes and a half an hour. We have heard several attempts now, to estimate size, composition, and trajectory. We doubt recording even the ones we could understand would be much use-the merest indulgence in cleverness before something so ... awful! Do we hear objections from you eager for meaningful cosmologic dis-tractions? May we simply ask your trust: of the explanations heard, none, frankly, were that clever. And we do not choose to insult our readers.

  We recall, with distrust and wheedling astonishment, the speed at which the last such celestial apparition acquired, by common consent of the common, its cogno-men. How heartening, then, that this vision should prove too monstrous for facile appellation. (One has been suggested from a number of quarters, but all common decency and decorum forbids us to mention it; we have defamed the young woman, many feel, enough in these pages already.) Indeed, though a label might cling to such when we review it with a smile, certain images lose their freedom and resonance if, when we regard them with a straight face, we do so through the diffraction of a name.

  "What do you think of that?" Faust asked, coming a little ways across the street.

  Kid laughed. "Calkins is pretty quick to call a spade a spade. But when it comes to naming anything else, he's still chicken-shit!"

  "No, no. Not that." Faust had to toss the rolled paper three times before getting it into the second story window. "I mean on page one."

  Kid, sitting on the stoop, leaned down to scratch his foot. "What-?" He turned back to the front of the tabloid. "Where is Cumberland Park, anyway?"

  "Lower Cumberland Park?" Faust craned his ropy neck and, beneath his corduroy jacket, scratched his undershirt. "That's down at the other end of Jackson. That's where they got some really bad niggers. It's where the great god Harrison lives."

  "Oh," Kid said. "Where I was last night. It says here something about nobody living there any more."

  Faust hefted the bundle on his hip. "Then all I know is that I leave a God-damn lot of papers in front of a God-damn lot of doors, and they ain't there the next day when I come back. Damn, splashing around in all that water in the street yesterday morning!" He squinted back at the window. "It was better this morning though. Hey, I see you again tomorrow. That your book the office is full up with?"

  "I don't know," Kid said. "Is it?"

  Faust frowned. "You should come up to the office sometime and take a look where they print the paper and things. Come up with me, some day. I'll show it all to you. Your book went in the day before yesterday-" Faust snapped his fingers. "And I put cartons of it in the bookstores last night. Soon as it ... well, you know, got dark."

  Kid grunted and opened the Times again, to look at something not Faust.

  "Get your morning paper!" The old man loped down the block, hollering into the smoke: "Right here, get your morning paper!"

  What he'd opened to was another quarter-page advertisement for Brass Orchids. He left it on the stoop, and walked toward the corner, when a sound he'd been dimly aware of broke over the sky: Roaring. And nestled in the roar, the whine a jet makes three blocks from the airport. Kid looked as the sound gathered above him. Nothing was visible; he looked down the block. Faust, a figurine off in a milky aquarium, had stopped too. The sound rolled away, lowering.

  Faust moved on to disappear.

  Kid turned the corner.

  It's different inside the nest, he thought, trying to figure what should be the same:

  The crayoning on the dirty wall-

  The loose ceiling fixture-

  In his hand, the knobs squared and toothy shaft rasped out another inch-

  A black face came from the middle room, looked back inside; shook his head, and went down to the bathroom. Among voices, Nightmare's laugh, and:

  "Okay. I mean, okay." That was Dragon Lady. "You said your thing, now what you want us to do?"

  While someone else in the hubbub, shouted, "Hey, hey, hey come on now. Hey!"

  "I mean now . . . yeah!" Nightmare's voice separated. "What do you want?"

  Kid went to the door.

  Across the room, Siam and Glass noticed him with small, different nods. Kid leaned on the jam. The people in the center, their backs to him, were not scorpions.

  "I mean-" Nightmare, circling, bent to hit his knees -"what do you want?"

  "Look." John turned to follow him, holding the lapels of his Peruvian vest. "Look, this is very serious!" His blue work shirt was rolled up his forearms; the sleeves were stained, dirty, and frayed at one elbow. His thumbnails, the only ones visible, were very clean. "I mean you guys have got. to . . ." He gestured.

  Milly stepped out of the way of his
arm.

  "Gotta what?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder. "Look, man I wasn't there. I didn't know nothing about it."

  "We were someplace else." Dragon Lady turned a white cup in her dark hands, shoulders hunched, sipping watching. "We weren't even anywhere around, you know?" She alone in the room drank; and drank loudly.

  Mildred brushed away threads of red hair and looked

  much older than Dragon Lady. (He remembered once

  thinking when neither were present that, for all their differences, they were about the same age.) Dragon Lady's

  lips kept changing thickness.

  "This is shit!" Nightmare kneaded his arm. "I mean this is real shit, man! Don't load this shit on me. You want to talk to somebody-" His eyes came up beneath his brows and caught Kid-"talk to him. He was there, I wasn't. It was his thing."

  Kid unfolded his arms. "What'd I do?"

  "You-" Mildred turned-"killed somebody!"

  He felt, after moments, his forehead wrinkle. "Oh, yeah?" What cleared inside was distressingly close to relief. "When?" he asked with the calm and contrapuntal thought: No. No, that's not possible, is it? No.

  "Look," John said, and looked between Nightmare and Kid. "Look, we could always talk to you guys, right? I mean you're pretty together, you know? Nightmare, we've always done right by you, hey? And you've done right by us. Kid, you used to eat with us all the time, right? You were almost part of our family. We were gonna put you up the first night you got here, weren't we? But you guys can't go around and murder people. And expect us to just sit around. I mean we have to do something."

  "Who'd we kill?" he asked, realizing, they don't mean me! They mean us. The feeling came cold and with loss.

  "Wally!" Milly said from the edge of hysteria. "Wally Efrin!"

  The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam; Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he'd once asked to help him get wood who'd said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we'd seen his girl friend? One he'd seen but never noticed? One he'd never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)