Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Where?" he asked, at her silence. "What'd we kill him for?"

  "Oh, for Christ's sake . . . !" Milly shook her head.

  "Yesterday," John said. "Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the . . . sun. Mildred was there-"

  "I didn't know about it till after I got home," she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.

  "Me neither," Kid said. "So do you want to tell me?"

  "No, I don't want to . . ." Milly exclaimed. "This is really just terrible! This is animal . . . !"

  "You were in charge there, Kid, weren't you?" John asked.

  "So everybody tells me."

  "Well, it seems that-now I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told . . ."

  Kid nodded.

  ". . . It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And . . . what? Wally tried to break it up?"

  "He may have started the fight," Milly said to the floor, "with them."

  "I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn't even know about it. It was downstairs." John repeated: "In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn't know until after she g back and Jommy told her." A movement of John's tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He had remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him . . .)

  "Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead."

  "Who did it?" Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.

  Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.

  John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: "Him!" who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.

  "You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?" Kid asked.

  "No!" He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.

  Nightmare sat, now, at Dragon Lady's feet. Head against the wall, he looked from speaker to speaker, with the smile of an enthusiast at a tennis match.

  "You beat anybody up?" Kid asked.

  "Beat the fuck out of 'im!" The scorpion's fists bounced on the couch's rim. "Yeah! With a fuckin piece of pipe. But I didn't know what kind of pipe it was! . . . or if he was dead!"

  "Shit, I sure did!" Glass chuckled. "I knew it when you hit the mother-fucker the first time. The second, third . . . all those other times you were banging on him, man, that was just extra."

  "You shut the fuck up!" (It was, Kid remembered, the scorpion for whom he had rescued the bronze lion.) "I didn't kill nobody."

  "But you did beat somebody over the head with a piece of pipe yesterday?"

  "Look, I didn't . . ." He stalled on the word, and stood, fists flailing about his shoulders to beat away the barrier to speech, then yelled, ". . . didn't kill any Goddamn body with no-"

  "SIT DOWN, GOD DAMN IT ... !" Kid bellowed, coming away from the door by three steps. That, he thought in the silence, was pretty theatrical. But he was astonished by its efficacy. Twitching behind his face, he felt an embryonic giggle. Both feet and hands were tingling. Shall I say the next thing, or shall I yell it? (The scorpion was leaning back on the couch, balanced on his fists, his seat not quite on the cushion, an expression not quite on his face.) "DID YOU BEAT ON SOME KID'S HEAD WITH A PIPE . . . ?" He'd made the choice to avoid laughing.

  The scorpion sank to the cushion. The expression was terror. "I guess so?" the scorpion asked quietly. "I don't know . . . ?"

  Kid shook both hands hard, by the hips, to return the feeling. He heard one of the people beside him creak a floor board and catch breath.

  "Look," he said to John. Milly, behind him, seemed more frightened than the scorpion on the couch. Little Jommy had an intent expression of cold interest. "Why don't you people just get the fuck out of here, all right?"

  "Um ..." John's thumbs had gone beneath the lapels with the rest of his fingers. "You know we haven't had a ... trial or anything." He glanced at the scorpion. "Mildred said maybe Wally started it, you know-"

  "I didn't see it," Milly reiterated. "Somebody just told-"

  Kid breathed in, and was still surprised that it cut the ribbon of her whisper like scissors. "You all get out."

  "Now we're not trying to . . ." John began; Milly, Jommy, and the others had all started for the door. He let go his lapels and followed.

  "What'd you do with Wally, huh?" Kid called.

  "Huh?" John stopped a moment. "We just left-"

  "No," Kid interrupted. "No, don't tell me about it!" He kneaded one fist in the other. Feeling was beginning to return. The gesture sent John pushing against the people in front of him to get out of the room, beating nervously against his leg.

  The scorpion on the couch looked very miserable. Clutching his lamp, or on the balcony crying; Kid thought: He's looked miserable every time I've ever noticed him.

  "Shit!" Kid said. (Outside, he heard the door close behind the commune deputation.)

  The scorpion bounced a little and blinked.

  "Aw, shit!" Kid turned and walked out of the room.

  Three steps down the hall, Kid heard a noise behind him, and turned.

  Nightmare swung around the door jamb, an incongruous grin on his face. "Man, you're too fuckin much!" Nightmare pranced, jingling, in the hall, slapped the wall. "Really! You're too much."

  Right behind him, Copperhead came out and asked, "Hey, what you want to do with Dollar in there?" He thumbed back in the room.

  So that's his name, Kid thought (Dollar?), while asking, "Huh?"

  "You want me to rough him up a little for you?" Copperhead asked. "Yeah, I'll do it. I don't mind doing shit like that. I mean if he . goes around hitting people over the head, he's gonna get us in trouble, you know? You want me to work him over?"

  Kid made a disgusted face. "No! You don't have to do anything like-"

  "If you want me to," Copperhead announced over Nightmare's shoulder, "I'll kill the little white bastard. Or I could just work him over to scare him, you know . . ."

  "No," Kid repeated. "No, I don't want you to do that."

  "Maybe later . . . ?" Copperhead said. "When you thought about it?"

  "Well, not now," Kid said. "Just leave him alone now."

  Nightmare laughed as Copperhead went back into the room. "What were you trying to do, huh? Man, you are too much!"

  "Just find out if he did it. That's all."

  Nightmare held his laughter in his mouth; it bellied his cheeks till he swallowed it. "Did you find out?"

  From inside, there was a sudden crack and a cry. Voices silenced around the sound of loud sipping:

  "Now the Kid told me I'm supposed to wait till later to work you over, cocksucker. But don't give me any shit, you hear? You go around breaking people's heads, I think I'm gonna have some fun breaking yours. Now get out of here."

  "I... guess so," Kid said.

  "I mean," Nightmare shook his open palms in front of Kid's hips, "I was just wondering if you found out. I wasn't there. You was, right? So you should know if he done it or not." He backed away, grinning.

  "Hey!"

  "What?"

  "Come here. I want to talk to you."

  Nightmare's arm folded low on his stomach, then raised up his broad chest so that the chains looped across his forearms. "Sure." He tilted his head, warily. "What you want to talk about?"

  "I just want to know what-hey, you come on with me."

  "Sure," Nightmare said; then his tongue went into the side of his jaw, licking for something among back teeth.

  They went up the hall and onto the service porch. Nightmare, arms still folded, stood in the doorway squinting. Dulling
smoke hung only yards beyond the screening. Kid asked: "What are you trying to do, huh?"

  "What do you mean?" Nightmare's forearms slid across one another to tighten toward a knot.

  "I mean you. And Dragon Lady and all. How come I suddenly get to be the boss about everything?"

  "You do it pretty well." "But I want to know why."

  "Well." Nightmare looked at the floor and let himself fall against the jamb. "It's gotta be somebody, right?" Boards around them creaked.

  "But what about you?"

  "What about me?" The boards creaked again, though Nightmare hadn't moved. "What you want to know about me?"

  "Just why, that's all. You want a new boss-why not one of the spades, or something. I mean what's with you?"

  Nightmare rolled his wet, red underlip back into his mouth, and nodded. His left eye, Kid noticed again, had the slightest cast.

  The water puddling in the sink shook beneath the crusty faucet.

  "I thought it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen if one of you brainy, crazed types was running things for a while. All the brainy niggers in Bellona had sense enough to get out. We don't got too much to choose from so we might as well make it interesting, right? I ain't gonna stay in this fucking fog hole the rest of my life. It's a real gas being Nightmare, you know? But I'm gonna get back to St. Louis, get me a little foreign car, do some work in the gym, and put two or three ladies back to work for me, and I'm gonna be Larry H. Jonas all over again. And I hope I don't ever hear about no Nightmare no more. If somebody shouts it out on Sixth Street, I'm gonna walk down Olive. I've done too many things here I'd just as soon leave here." He stood up. "You strip off the Nightmare, and I got me a name. I know people. In St. Louis." His hand slid up to his shoulder, big fingers working. "So I figured I'd leave you here. Besides, Denny likes you. That little cocksucker's got a head on his shoulders. Not like some of these dumb nuts. You don't look like you mind." Among the links sagging on his chest, bright beads caught more light than there was to catch, winking and dying and winking.

  "Hey, that scar on your shoulder?" Kid asked. "You and Dragon Lady getting on pretty good?"

  "Like a bitch. Sometimes." Nightmare's face twisted a moment about his broken tooth. "And then sometimes-" he frowned-"well, you know." After the faucet dripped three more times, he turned to leave, but paused to look over his shoulder. "You want to talk about anything else?" "No." Kid said. "That's all."

  Nightmare left.

  Across the hall was a room Kid had never been in. He opened the door.

  Dollar, silhouetted before the torn window shade, turned. The lion peered by his hip from the sill. The taste of burning at the back of Kid's throat flooded forward, into an amazing stench: on one of the overlapping mattresses was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton. Newspaper and magazine pictures had been pasted over one wall; many had been ripped off again.

  One of the three blacks sitting on the floor glanced at him. The little blond girl shrugged her pea jacket back up her shoulders and pulled it across her breasts.

  "What are you . . . I mean, hey, man . . . ?" Dollar stepped up unsteadily. "Kid, look, you're supposed to be an all-right guy, huh? You don't gotta hurt me. Please? Man, I ain't never done nothing like that before in my life, you know? . . . You want me to ... ?" He took another step. "Hey . . . what are you trying to do? Huh?" His hand strayed in the chains around his neck, twisted in them.

  "Whatever it is," Kid said, "it looks like I'm doing it." All the muscles in his face felt tight: he went back into the hall.

  Noise was coming from the front room. Nightmare's laughter rose. Dragon Lady's cut across it.

  As if they'd suddenly heated, Kid pawed beneath the back of his vest and, from his belt, pulled loose the books. Both were creased. The face of one was rubbed and dirty. So was the back of the other.

  "Hey, come on, come on, sweetheart!" Nightmare hollered. "What are you trying to do to me, huh? What are you trying to . . ." and exploded in laughter.

  "I just asked," Dragon Lady announced with hysterical deliberation, "if you wanted some more God-damned coffee . . ." The last syllable became a shriek, tumbling in counterpoint to Nightmare's laugh, till both splashed into the cistern of mirth.

  Kid took refuge in the bathroom.

  Pants about his knees, he sat. A fugitive bubble in the gut cramped his abdomen; the cramp faded. He broke wind and knew he was empty.

  He turned the books over, flipped through one, then the other. He wanted to read one poem, at least, through. A minute later, he realized he'd actually been deliberating not which poem, but in which book to read it. Was the discomfort in his belly a ghost of the gas? No.

  A book in either hand, he joggled them. Time had been spent writing these. The time was mornings with his forehead wrinkled and the grass obligingly silent beyond the blanket's edge; was evenings at the bar with candlelight scoring bottles with their different contents at different heights like pistons in an engine; was a broken curb on either side while he sat with the ballpoint burning his middle finger. Writing, he had not thought to retrieve any of it. But the prospect of publication had somehow convinced him magic was in process that would return to him, in tacto (not memorium), some of what the city had squandered. The conviction was now identified by its fraudulence, before the inadequate objects. But as it died, kicking in his gut, spastic and stuttering, he knew it had been as real and unquestioned as any surround: air to a bird, water to a fish, earth to a worm.

  He was exhausted, with an exhaustion that annihilated want. And all he could conceive of wanting was to try again; to make more poems, to put them in a book, to have that book made real by reproduction, and give that hallucination another chance!

  He had nothing to write. He could not imagine what another poem of his would be, how it might lilt, or even look. Is that, he wondered, why they call it "creation?" The texture on the eye, the corrugation on the air around him had absorbed all. There was nothing left (. . . about what you see about you, what's happening to you, what you feel. No.) No. Something had to be ... created. As these had been.

  A muscle in his shoulder tensed.

  He'd once been scared of things like that: (. . . a blood-clot breaking loose from the vein wall to race toward the heart, jamming a valve!) Habit commenced a shiver.

  He caught up his breath, and his pants, and the books from where he'd dropped them. The leering mannequin, chained and bloody, leaned against the tank and smiled benignly up at Kid's left nipple. Kid scratched it, put the books back under his belt, and went out.

  In Denny's room he took two rungs of the ladder at once. His chin gained the loft. "Hey, wake up!" Denny didn't, so he climbed up the rest of the way, kneeled astraddle, and took hold of the boy's head. "Hey!"

  "God damn-!" Denny tried to roll to his back. One arm shot out and waved. "What the fuck are you . . ."

  "Come on, get up!" Kid's hands clamped, and Denny's came back to grasp his wrist.

  "Okay!" Denny said, his cheeks pushed together, distorting his voice. "Shit, man. I'm getting up, all right. . . ?"

  "You got to take me to Lanya's place." Kid raised his leg and sat back. "You know where it is, huh? You took her there. You know!"

  Denny grunted and pushed himself up on his elbows. Boots and chains by his head lay on a crumple of green. His vest's leather edge fell back from a pinkened line across one waxy pectoral. "Yeah, I guess so."

  "Get the fuck up, cocksucker." Kid gestured. "I want to go see her."

  "Okay, okay." Denny reached back for his boots and started to put them on. Once he glanced up and said, "Shit!"

  Kid grinned at him. "Move your ass."

  "Fuck you," Denny said dryly and ducked his head through rattling links. "Come on." He swung his feet over the edge and jumped.

  Kid swung over the ladder while Denny bobbed erect in the doorway.

  "What's all the rush for?" Denny asked. "Hey, stop pushing me, will you?" as Kid shoved him into t
he hall.

  "I'm not hurting you," Kid said. "Did you know Dollar beat some kid to death with a pipe?"

  "Huh? When?"

  "Yesterday."

  Denny tried to whistle. It squeaked at the beginning and was all air. "Dollar's a crazy mother-fucker, you know that? I mean he always was crazy. Hell, all the white guys in the nest are nuts."

  "Sure." Kid herded Denny toward the hall door.

  "Why'd he do it?"

  Kid shrugged. "I dunno."

  The hall door opened. Thirteen (Smokey behind) stepped inside, looking around as though he expected something . . . different, "Hey, Kid! Oh, hey man, I got to talk to you! You know Dollar? Well, we just got here, but ... somebody told me yesterday he got a bar, from a police lock, and beat some kid to-"

  "GET OFF MY ASS!" Kid said very loudly in Thirteen's face, hefting his fist. If I keep this up, he thought, I'm going to hit somebody. "Now just get off my ass, will you?"

  Thirteen, one hand against his green tank top (the "13" tattoo stretched wide), had backed against one wall, and Smokey, wide-eyed, against the other.

  Kid put his hand on Denny's shoulder. "Come on. Let's go!"

  They stalked between them and out the door; it swung to behind. Palimpsest

  ". . . just watch out. Oh, yeah, you just better watch out. I know. I know." He wagged his finger, backed away, talked Spanish. Then: "They gonna get you-"

  "Look, man," Kid said. "Will you-"

  "It's all right. It's all right. You just watch out, now.

  Please? I'm sorry. I'm sorry." His thick neck sweated.

  He tugged at the wool. "I'm sorry. You just lemme 'lone,

  huh? They gonna . . ." Suddenly he looked around, turned,

  and lumbered into the alley.,

  "Jesus Christ." A smile hovered about Denny's face. "What . . . was that about?"

  "I don't know." One book had fallen on the sidewalk. The other leaned against the curb.

  "I mean this guy just comes up and starts to push you like that. I thought you were gonna hit him." Denny nodded heavily. "You should've hit him. Why'd he just want to come up and start messing on us like that?"