Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "You sure do," Lanya said.

  Kid stood and took her arm. "Come on."

  "Where are we ... ?"

  Kid grinned: "Come on!"

  She raised a brow and came, intently curious.

  Denny followed them; his confusion looked much less sharp than hers.

  On the other side of the ivied stone, Ernestine apostrophized: ". . . chunk crab meat, not the stringy kind! Then eggs. Then a few bread crumbs. And bay seasoning. When I lived in Trenton, I'd have to have it sent up from Maryland. But Mrs Alt-nobody could have been more surprised than I was-found an entire shelf full in a store down on Temple . . ."

  At the silent edge, Dollar muttered reverently: ". . . God damn . . ."

  "Bay seasoning," Ernestine reiterated as Kid and Lanya and Denny passed around her, "is the most important thing."

  On the path to the next garden, Denny whispered: "Where are we going?"

  "Through here," Kid said. "The lights are out in here. . ."

  "August," Lanya said.

  They stepped into flakey darkness. Grass slid cool between Kid's toes. He clutched; it slipped away with the next step; tickling again.

  The next stop was surprising stone.

  He rocked his naked foot: Wet, cold . . . rough. His shod one stayed steady.

  "I think there's a-". Lanya's voice echoed. She paused to listen to the reverberations-"some sort of underpass."

  They came from under it four steps later.

  "I didn't even see us go in." Denny stepped forward in the night grass.

  Kid curled his free toes again, lifted his foot; grass tore.

  "Hey, you can see the city, almost," Denny said.

  Beyond a ruffed, stone beast, blurs of light were snipped off across the bottom by buildings. Implied hills, slopes, or depressions patterned the darkness around.

  "Calkins' place can soak up a lot of people." The high trees-like small cypresses-were carbon dark against the muzzy night. Kid tried to see down into Bellona. One tall . . . building? It had perhaps a dozen windows lit.

  "How odd," Lanya said. "All the limits go, and you can't believe there's really any more to it. We're used to objects like icebergs or oil wells where you know most of it is under ground or water. But something like a city at night, with great stretches of it blotted or obscured, that's a very different-"

  "You guys," Denny interrupted. "I don't envy you . . . I guess. But you two can talk about things that, you know, are just so far beyond me I don't even know how to ask questions sometimes. I listen. But sometimes when I don't understand-or even when I do, I just wanna fuckin' cry, you know?" When they were silent, he asked again, "You know?"

  Lanya nodded. "I do."

  Denny breathed out and looked.

  They stood apart and felt very close.

  Kid watched her dress catch what light there was and glitter dim crimson, with waves of navy, or green of the evening ocean.

  "What's that?" Denny asked.

  Kid looked beyond them. "A fire."

  "Where do you think it is?" Lanya asked.

  "I can't tell. I don't really know where we are." He stepped up and put his hand on her shoulder: The metallic cloth prickled. Her skin was cool.

  Denny's, under his other hand, was fever hot and, as usual, paper-dry.

  Kid wanted to walk.

  So they walked with him, a hip on either hip, hitting to different rhythms. He'd slipped his hands across their backs to their outer shoulders. The hand on Lanya's shoulder was still.

  Denny put his arm around Kid's back.

  Lanya's arms were folded, her vision distanced while she walked and watched the charred city.

  Then she put her head on his shoulder (still watching) , her arm around him, her shoulder more firmly in the place beneath his arm, brought her thigh against his thigh.

  And was still watching.

  They walked beside the waist-high wall. This is the largest garden, Kid thought. Denny shifted his step-

  "What?" Kid asked.

  "One of the spotlights that ain't working . . ." Denny had just stepped around it.

  They crossed cool flags.

  Leaves rasped away the silence. A breeze? While he walked beneath the loud, black fleece of some high elm or oak, he waited for the warm or cool gust. Silence returned; he'd felt neither.

  "Why don't it ever burn up here?" Denny asked, too softly, too intently. His shoulder twitched in Kid's hand. "Why don't it just all burn up or something, the whole thing? It just goes on and . . ." Kid ceased to knead, rubbed now.

  Denny took another deep breath, fast, then let it out over the next five steps.

  Lanya turned on Kid's shoulder, glanced across at Denny, and turned back.

  Kid tried to loosen the tension in his abdomen. There was a sudden, unsettling feeling: All his organs, gut, liver, belly, lungs and heart, seemed to have shifted inches down. He didn't break step, but the feeling passed through a moment of nausea that ended with his breaking wind. Which felt better.

  He pulled Lanya closer; the leg against his leg and the shoulder's tugging eased into Kid's and Lanya's rhythm. Translated through Kid's body, Denny's motion firmed and, to the tension, Kid's firmed too. She sighed with her mouth just slightly open, corner to corner, then stroked his arm with the back of her neck. Denny's hand slipped its knuckly padding between Kid's hip and hers.

  Another stone lion crouched on the wall, staring. By it, with leafless branches like shatter lines on the night's smoked glass, was a tree. Beneath Kid's foot the ground was bare, crumbly and-ashy? Recognizing the texture, he stepped from the charred grass to fresh. They circled the garden.

  It was too dark to tell if the small pool were full or empty. Lanya put her hand out and touched a tree trunk. She no longer watched the small burnings worm down in the night city. She walked more closely in step with Kid than Denny did. (Kid thinking: It frees her to think of things further away.) He felt protective of her meditations, and frightened by them.

  A memory of rustling italicized the silence. Kid listened for converse in another garden. Their own footsteps were so quiet.

  Beyond the wall, (miles away?) things smoked and flickered.

  A whisper: "Someone's coming-!" And another: "Oh, wait a minute. Watch out-!" Kid recognized one girl's voice but not the other. One branch among the bushes beat at the rest. The guy who stepped out, zipping his fly, belt loose down both hips, and grinning . . . it was Glass. "Oh," he said. "It's you all," and pulled his belt through the buckle.

  One of the girls said: "Just a second. Here it is . . ."

  "Can you see anything?" the other asked, then giggled-the girl in maroon jeans who had come with them from the nest: She pushed out between the brush.

  Somebody behind her was looking all around: that was Spitt.

  The other girl Kid first recognized as one of Roger's guests. Even in the three-quarter dark she looked rumpled. The second recognition was that it was Milly: her red hair fell over a dark, velvet jumper: She wore something metallic beneath it, unbuttoned now. Copperhead, a hand on each of her shoulders, guided her out.

  Lanya said, "Lord!" and laughed.

  "Oh!" Milly said. "It's you all!" in dissimilar accent, but identical inflection, as Glass. She pulled from Copperhead.

  She and Lanya clutched one another in a fit of giggles.

  Copperhead frowned at Kid and shook his head.

  Kid shrugged.

  "I can't find my comb!" Milly finally got out. "Isn't it amazing! I can't find my comb."

  Lanya looked back at Kid: "Here, I'll see you in a little while."

  Then, her arm around Milly's shoulder, they fled the garden.

  "Man," Glass said. "This is a pretty good party."

  Copperhead, deprived of Milly, settled beside the first girl. He bent to whisper to her. She whispered back.

  "God damn, nigger!" Spitt said. "You don't do nothin' but fuck, do you?"

  "Shit," Glass said. "I watched your pink ass poppin' up and down there a pret
ty good long while."

  "Yeah, sure." Spitt said. "But, man, you were in this one, then that one, then this one again- God damn!"

  Glass just chuckled.

  Then both of them saw that Copperhead and the girl were moving off.

  "Hey!" Spitt called and started after them.

  Glass loped to their other side.

  Phalanxed by black and white, the girl and Copperhead left.

  "Come on." Denny pulled away from Kid, who followed, wondering what of all that interchange had interested Denny most. But as soon as Denny got between the hedges-one shoulder feathered with shadow, the other bright under the lights of June-he stopped to adjust the control box. "There."

  Nowhere, Kid was sure, had he seen John. But then he hadn't recognized Mildred before.

  Guests surging Novemberwards cut them off from Copperhead and the others.

  After he'd left Denny, Kid thought: But the whole point was to spend some time with him. Kid sucked his teeth, annoyed with himself, and stepped onto another bridge.

  The lights on Kid's end worked.

  Frank came toward him, grinning hugely, squinting slightly, face full of floodlight.

  I must be in silhouette, Kid thought.

  "Hey!" Frank said. "It is a really good party they're having for you. Congratulations on everything. I'm having a great time."

  "Yeah," Kid said. "Me too."

  Beyond Frank, beyond the bridge, Kid saw a flash of metallic kelly. Lanya was still with Milly, whose complicated hair was now in place. They were still laughing. They were still going away.

  "You see my book?"

  "Sure."

  "What'd you think of my poems? I was sort of interested in what you'd think of them. I mean because you're a real poet."

  Frank raised his eyebrows. "That's really- Well . . ." He lowered them. "Would you like me to be honest? I make the offer, because I guess you've been getting a lot of compliments, especially here at your party. And real honesty is going to be a little rare-maybe this evening isn't the place for it and we should save it for some night at Teddy's."

  "No, go on," Kid said. "I guess you didn't think they were all that great?"

  "You know . . ." Frank grasped the rail with one stiffened arm and leaned. "I was wondering what I was going to say to you about them if you ever really asked. I've been thinking about you a lot. A lot more, I guess, than you've been thinking about me. But I keep hearing about you all the time, people always talking about you. And it occurs to me that I don't know you at all. But youVe always seemed like a good person. And I thought it would be good if somebody was just straightforward with you, you know?" He laughed. "And there I was, starting to say, 'They're great,' like everyone else. That's really not my character. I think it's better to be honest."

  "What did you think?" Kid heard the coldness in his own voice, and was astonished; listening to himself, he felt suddenly trapped.

  "I didn't like them."

  It's his smile, Kid thought and thought after that: No, you're just trying to tell yourself it's the smile you don't like. He said, He didn't like them, that's all. "What's wrong with them?"

  Frank snorted a laugh and looked down at the rocks. "You really want to know?"

  "Yeah," Kid said. "I want to know what you think."

  "Well." Frank looked up. "The language is extremely artificial. There's no relation, or even tension, between it and any sort of real speech. Most of the poems are pompous and over-emotional-I'm sure you were sincere about every one of them. But sincerity by itself, without skill, usually just results in mawkishness. The lack of emotional focus makes subjects that could have been interesting into Grand Guignol melodrama. They end up coming off pretty banal. The method's cliche, and often, so is the diction. And they're dull." After a silence in which Kid tried to figure the varieties of unpleasantness he was experiencing, Frank continued: "Look, you once told me you'd only been writing poetry a couple of weeks. Didn't it ever strike you as a little improbable that you could just jump into it and the first batch you produced would be worth reading? I guess the thing that's really got me upset over the whole thing is all this business." He gestured at guests both sides of the bridge. "Tak once told me you were as old as he is-two years older than me! Kid, most of the people here think you're seventeen or eighteen! That, along with the poor man's Hell's Angel bit, and all the gossip about the various kinky things you get into-people are just here for the show. As far as most of them are concerned, Brass Orchids is like a performance by a talking dog. They find it so cunning that he speaks at all, they couldn't care less what he actually said."

  "Un . . ." Kid had intended that to be an Oh. "And you-" which wasn't what he'd wanted to say either, but he went on because he had to make sure-"you think the poems aren't very good?"

  Frank said: "I think they're very bad."

  "Wow," Kid said, gravely. "And you think that's all the poems mean to any of the people here?"

  "To most people-" Frank put his hand, stiff-armed, on the rail again-"poetry doesn't mean anything at all. From a couple of things you said to me at the bar, though-about what you read and what you felt-I suspect it does mean something to you. Which is why I keep bothering to put my foot in my mouth the way I've been."

  "No," Kid said, "go on," thinking: But he hasn't stopped, has he?

  Kid's shadow cut Frank's face and purple shirt down the middle.

  "With all the variety that's part of current poetry-" Frank blinked his visible, squinting eye-"perhaps it's silly for me to be passing judgments like this. There are lots of kinds of poetry. And sure, some kinds I personally prefer to others. I'll be honest: the kind that yours is trying to be isn't a kind I find very interesting at its best. Which is maybe the reason I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place. Well, look, I'm not passing judgments. I'm just talking about my own reactions. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, as far as I can tell-and I admit I'm biased-it seems pretty clear what you wanted to do in the poems. And pretty clear that you didn't come . close. I mean, that last one, in the clunky blank verse- now that may of may not be a good poem; I can't tell. It's unreadable." Frank's smile was wan. "But you have to admit, that's a stumbling block."

  Kid grunted what he had intended as polite assent. It sounded more like he'd been elbowed in the liver. And that's not, he thought, what I want to sound like. "Maybe some time at Teddy's or someplace you could go over one or two of them with me and tell me what you think is-"

  "No." Frank shook his hand, fingers straight, and his head, face a-scowl. "No, no. It isn't that kind of ... Look, I can't tell you how to be a poet. I can just tell you what I think. That's all."

  Kid grunted again.

  "Don't take it as anything more than that."

  Do you say thanks, now? Kid wondered. You say thanks for compliments. "Thanks." It sounded the most tentative question.

  Frank nodded, looked over the rail again.

  Kid stepped around him and walked toward the end of the bridge. Halfway, like a tic, he thought Frank was about to tap his shoulder. He turned, and realized, turning, it was some untransformed kernel, perfectly hostile, trying to emerge. Facing into the lights of May, Kid could not tell if Frank looked at him or away.

  Squinting, Kid swallowed the thought unworded and went on into the high paths of January; from which he could look down on the crowded terrace.

  They're all here, Kid thought, for me! He was desperately uncomfortable. Frank's smile-it had made his criticism seem as though he thought he was getting away with something. Well, that still didn't change what he'd said. Somebody else, Kid remembered but couldn't remember who, had said they'd liked them . . . and decided that wasn't what he wanted to think about now. But with the resolve erupted memories of seven other reactions: Puzzled, indifferent, interests fleeting or otherwise. He recalled Newboy's complex noncommittal and sensed in it betrayal-not so much Newboy's but his own-of something the poet had tried to tell and he had not been able to understand.

  "Th
is is like . . ." he started out loud, heard himself, and laughed. This was like the night in the park when his fantasized reception had pressed so heavily he'd been unable to write.

  He laughed again.

  A couple smiled and nodded.

  His look became surprised as he noticed them. But they passed.

  I want a drink, he thought, and saw he was already heading for the bar. I really want a drink very much.

  This isn't, Kid found himself repeating, what it should be about. Repeating it for the sixteenth or seventeenth time, he sat on the stone rail, looking across at the table and the bottles, still without a glass.

  "Hi!" Then her expression (and handfuls of scarlet fell down among green fires) changed. "What happened to you?"

  His hands went out against her hips: Around one, blue puddled, around the other, green.

  "Am I bleeding?"

  He slid them back to her buttocks, thinking, how warm she is; lay his face against her warm belly. She took hold of his hair. Before his blinking, black scales flittered to silver, to scarlet, to green.

  "No. But you look like you just walked into a wall and now you're waiting for it to go away."

  Kid made a sound supposed to launch the next sentence; it came out another grunt. So he backed off it and started again a little higher. "I was just . . . talking with Frank. About my . . . poems."

  She pulled loose and hoisted herself up on the wall beside him, shoulder against his shoulder, leg against his leg, to become a deviling glitter at the corner of his eye while he stared at his ruined thumbs, now pressed together on his meshed fists' calloused drum. She asked: "What did he say?"

  "He didn't like them, very much." She waited.

  "He said everybody here thought I was a talking dog. They all think I'm some sort of dumb nut, that I'm ten years younger than I am, and they'd all be just as astonished that I even spelled my name right-if I had a name . . ."

  "Kid . . ." which came out much softer than his voice. She put her hand over his. He raised one thumb. She caught it in her fist. "That's fucking nasty." "Maybe it's fucking true."

  "It isn't!" Her voice told him she was frowning: "That's Frank? The one who's supposed to have had a book of poems published out in California?"