Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

Asking who else it could have been, he said: "Yeah?" She answered: "He's jealous, Kid!" "Huh? of what," which was a statement, not a question.

  "You're both poets. You both have a book published. Look at all the attention you're getting. I doubt if this happened when his book came out."

  "That's awfully easy. Besides, I don't care why he said it, I just wish I knew if it were true- Oh, shit! Calkins didn't even read the poems when he decided to publish them. Maybe he did when they finally came out and was so embarrassed he decided not to show up this evening."

  "No! That's silly-" "And you remember how Newboy kept beating around the bush whenever I asked him if they were-" "He enjoyed them-"

  "Shit! He enjoyed me! If he was trying to say anything, he was trying to say he couldn't make the distinction."

  "And what makes you to think Frank is any more capable of making it? He resents you, he resents the way everybody has fixated on you: And then he tries to read the poems. At least Mr Newboy was honest enough to admit he couldn't make the separation. Hell, I like them!" "You're biased."

  "You think Frank isn't? Look, they don't-" She let go his thumb.

  He looked over.

  Her fists were knotted above her tidewise, swirling lap. "We're going about this wrong." Her bottom lip moved over her teeth, to fix her mouth for some new tone of voice. "He is right. About a lot of it, anyway."

  The simple hurt started in his throat. One swallow dragged it down to his stomach's floor.

  "He doesn't like your poems and he's probably sincere. About not liking them. Thelma likes them, and she's probably just as sincere."

  "I was trying to remember her name. It was sort of hard."

  "It should be just as hard to remember his. Being sincere doesn't mean they're right. It just means they believe they are."

  "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Sure. That's what Frank said, about the poems." "Sorry."

  "He's right about the people, about what everybody here thinks."

  "Not everybody," she said. "I suspect not even half. Do you care what people think?"

  "I care . . ." He paused. ". . . about people. The people here. So if they think that, I've got to care about that too. And I wish they didn't think what he said." She made a sound of assent.

  "Maybe we shouldn't have come to this party," he said.

  "You want to go?"

  "No. I want to stay and see what happens." Kid opened a hand on each knee. "It's something not to do again, maybe. But I don't think I want to leave in the middle. I'm learning too much." He pushed from the rail and turned to the bar.

  Denny said, "What's the-?"

  Kid put his arms around him: Denny's hands came up first to push, then all of a sudden went tight across Kid's back. Kid pushed his face against the dry, hot neck and thought: My face must feel cold. He held the hot shoulders and thought: My hands . . .

  Denny moved once, was still, moved again; let his arms half down, waiting to pull away. Kid raised his head. Two people passing looked away. Kid stepped back.

  Denny asked, "Are you all right?" then glanced at Lanya.

  Her eyebrows moved to answer him. "I'm okay," Kid said and wondered if he'd contradicted her.

  She asked "You're sure?"

  Kid put his hand on her bright knee. "I'm okay. Somebody said some nasty things about my poems. Whether they're true or not, it made me mad as hell."

  Lanya sighed. "I guess that's why I'm glad I'm not an Artist."

  "Why are you always saying that?" Kid pulled back. "There's a whole room full of people inside listening to Diffraction right now! And enjoying it!"

  "I mean-" Lanya looked uncomfortable-"I mean Artist in the way this party presupposes. Sure, I make a piece of music; or a fucking dress for that matter-you'd be astonished how similar they are! But I don't just think you can be that kind of artist any more. Lots of people do things lots better than lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well, and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things people do for their own different reasons, you can't call any thing the best for every person, or even every serious person. So you just pay real attention to the real things that affect you; and don't waste your time knocking the rest. This party-it's ritual attention, the sort you give a social hero. I guess that can be an artist if there're few enough of them around-" "-like in Bellona?"

  "Bellona is a very small part of the universe. And this party is a very good place to bear that in mind. Kid, all the criticism you're going to get here, good or bad, is going to be a ritual kind." She glanced down under his brows. "Maybe that's what Mr Newboy was trying to tell you?"

  "Maybe," Kid said, and put his face against her shoulder. "And maybe he was just too chickenshit to say what Frank did."

  "I don't think so." Lanya rubbed his hair again. "But that's just my personal reaction."

  "Frank said that too."

  "Then be generous and believe him." She pulled back. "You know, someday I'm going to shock you all and produce a philosophical treatise thick as The Critique of Pure Reason, The Phenomonology of Mind, and Being and Time put together! It'll be in neatly numbered, cross-referenced paragraphs, a third of it mathematical symbols. I'll call it-" she drew a thumb and forefinger across the air, top and bottom of an imaginary signboard- "Preliminary Notes toward a Calculus of Attentional and Intentional Perception, with an Analytics of Modular-I guess 'modular' is the adjective from 'modal'?-Feedback. Then you'll see. All of you!"

  "You could always call it: Lanya Looks at Life," Kid suggested.

  "Poets!" Lanya exclaimed, mocking despair. "Artists! -God!" and put her hot, pale hands around his, to cave the beasts his fingers were.

  He pulled them from the cave to rest them on the brass blades turning, tic-tic-tic, on his chest.

  She stood, shedding turquoise to the hem, and moved by Denny. The boy's hip pocket stuck out with corners from the control box. 'Take a walk," Lanya said. "You'll feel better."

  Kid nodded, started away from them, realized he was fleeing, and slowed.

  Dragon Lady swung around the newel at the bottom of the steps and said to Baby: "Now what you wanna go say that to that woman, for, huh? Huh?"

  " 'Cause she said I-"

  "Now why you wanna go say something like that?"

  Three steps behind them, Adam walked with Night-mare; Nightmare doubled with laughter, held his stomach and staggered up the stairs. From knee to cuff one scarlet pants leg was smeared from a fall.

  Adam's eyes were very wide behind loose, rough hair; his grin split, brown, over yellow teeth.

  "God damn!" Dragon Lady said. "You don't go around saying things like that."

  "Shit." Baby's hands were locked before his groin. His head was down and his blond hair swayed as though he worried something in his teeth. "If she hadn't said-aw, shit!"

  Nightmare's hand fell on Kid's shoulder. His face came forward, fighting to explain, but exploded in laughter. He smelled very drunk. At last Nightmare just shook his head, helplessly, and staggered, loudly, away.

  Kid took a breath and went on down, pondering madness's constituents. Later he could not recall where his thoughts had gone from there. And he pondered that loss more than days or names.

  Below, Frank said: "Wait a minute . . . wait a minute! Wait-!"

  Kid held the bridge's black metal rail and looked down at the path.

  They came, laughing, along the short-cut from March to October.

  The rocks were covered with moss and slicked with floodlight.

  "Look, now I know something that's sort of funny."

  "All right." Black-sweatered Bill stopped, still laughing. "What?"

  Thelma stood to the side.

  "You mustn't say anything nasty about him, Frank," Ernestine said. "I think they've all been perfectly charming, everything considered."

  "He's a nice guy," Frank said. "He really is. But I've met him a couple of times before, that's all. And I just-"

  "Well," drawled a man whose freckled skull was
ringed with white hair, "I haven't yet. But his friends are the funniest children I have ever seen. Oh, they put on quite a show. Gibbons, I tell you! A real bunch of little black gibbons!"

  Bill said: "Most of them aren't that little."

  "I just wonder," Frank repeated, "whether he actually wrote them or not." "Why would you think he didn't?" Bill asked, turning.

  "I met him," Frank said, "once down in that place- Teddy's? A long time ago. I'd lost a notebook a few weeks back and I was telling him about it. Suddenly he got very excited-very upset, and called the bartender over to bring him this notebook that he told me he'd found in the park. He told me he'd found it, already filled up with writing, I'm very sure of that. I flipped through it, and it was all full of poems and journals and things. He wanted to know if it was mine. It wasn't, of course. But at least two of the poems in that notebook- and I remember because they struck me as rather odd- I'd swear were identical with two of the poems in Brass Orchids. That notebook had a poem on practically every other page."

  "Are you serious?" Roxanne asked as though she thought the tale very funny. "Well, you mustn't ever tell Roger. He would feel quite had!"

  Bill let out a loud, "Ha!" at the sky. "If it is true, that's the funniest thing I've heard all night!"

  "I wouldn't make it up!"

  "It's a perfectly awful thing to say," Ernestine said. "Do you really think he would do a thing like that?"

  "Well, you've met him," Frank said. "He's not what I would call the literary type."

  "Oh, everybody and their brother writes poems," Bill tossed away.

  "You think, then-" which was Kamp's voice: It came from under the bridge where Kid could not see- "he took all the poems out of this notebook, now?"

  "Oh, perhaps . . ." Frank began. "I'm not accusing him of anything. Maybe he only took those two. I don't know. Maybe he only took a couple of lines that I just happened to recognize-"

  Thelma said: "You said they were identical," and Kid strained and failed to hear more than her words.

  "I said I thought they were," Frank said, which was not, Kid remembered with obsessive lucidity, what he had said at all.

  "That's interesting," Bill reflected, head down, all dark hair and black sweater. He started walking.

  The others followed him under the bridge.

  Frank said: "He told me that night he'd only been a poet for, I think he put it, a couple of weeks. And then, there was this notebook he'd found, all filled up with poems that-well, the two I looked at closely-are awfully similar to two in his book." The voices echoed beneath. "What would you think?"

  Thelma (he could not see her face) was the last to go under.

  "Well, you obviously think he took them-" The voice's identity was obscured by echo.

  "I think," someone's voice came back, "he's just a nice-I wouldn't say dumb, just non-verbal-guy that probably isn't too concerned with the significance of that sort of thing. Hell, I like him. With all those guys in the chains he's got running around for bodyguards, I sort of hope he likes us too."

  "He didn't sign his name to the book," the southerner said.

  "Oh, Frank, I think you're just-"

  Kid had to clear his throat so missed Ernestine's last words in the rattle. (Run to the other rail, hear what they said as they emerged . . .) He looked along the empty path.

  In an Oregon forest, back during that winter, on his day off, a log, loosed from the pile he'd been climbing, had crashed his leg, bloodying his right calf and tearing his jeans. He'd thought his shin was broken. But, finally, he had been able to hobble back to the bunkhouse, a quarter of a mile away-it took forty minutes. The whole time he kept thinking: "This hurts more than anything I've ever felt before in my life. This hurts more than anything I've ever . . ." He reached the empty cabin, with the thought repeating like a melody now, rather than an idea; he had sat down on the lower bunk-it belonged to a laborer named Dehlman opened his belt, got the seat of his jeans from beneath his buttocks, and in a single motion stripped them down his-

  He hadn't screamed. Instead, his lungs flattened themselves in his chest, and for the next ten minutes he could only make little panting sounds. Blood and flesh, dried to the cloth, had stripped the length of his leg, sending the pain into realms he had not known existed. When he could think again, the still running thought, connected with the memory of that so much lesser pain, seemed silly.

  He dropped his hand from the rail and thought about this (and for some reason the name of the man on whose bunk he'd lain with his bleeding calf) and tried to recall his reaction to Frank's criticisms of ten minutes ago.

  He could not fit both into anything like a single picture. (They took it so lightly!) He blinked at the empty path.

  I wrote . . . ?

  Kid's eyes stung; he wandered from the bridge. Raising his hand to rub his face, he saw blurred brass and stopped the motion.

  One foot hit something on the path and he stepped ahead unsteadily.

  I remember re-writing them!

  I remember changing lines, to make them more like something . . . mine?

  Kid blinked; and his rough fingers were circled with scrolled blades. Did the first terror precede the scream?

  . . . someone-Dollar? Dollar, beyond the hedge, screamed.

  Kid flung back his hands and ran-toward the sound. Because what was behind him was too frightening.

  As he sprinted into the garden, a low branch struck his face.

  He grasped away leaves with his bladed hand, came up short, and heard (though he could not see) Dollar scream again, thinking: My God, the rest of them are so quiet!

  Black and brown arms waved and spun (and among them was Tarzan's yellow hair and dough-colored shoulder), caught against someone buried in the brawl. Somebody grunted.

  Thelma, watching, sucked in her breath, rasping the silence.

  From out the fray: "Hey, watch it ... I Watch it...! Watch out for the ... Unh!"

  Their scrabbling boots were louder than their caught breaths and voices.

  Kid lunged, grabbed, pulled, and only just remembered to get his orchid up out of the way. "Hey, what you-"

  Cathedral hit him as he pulled Thruppence off. Priest's head struck his flank hard enough to hurt. Kid swung his hand out and around, and Spider didn't shriek but hissed: "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . God-damn mother-fucker!" A filament of blood widened on Spider's belly.

  "GET OFF HIM!" Kid pulled the Ripper back. "God-damn it, get off him!"

  Raven, Tarzan, then Lady of Spain, still pummeling, got yanked back.

  As they recognized him, one by one they fell away among the guests who ringed the garden. More were edging in.

  Siam, in the central tussle, looked up, then ducked under Kid's arm; Kid stumbled forward, lunged between the last two (Angel and Jack the Ripper) who sprinted aside; he grabbed the back of Dollar's vest, his orchid still high.

  Dollar screamed once more, and then went into fetal collapse on the flags. "Don't kill me, please don't kill me! Don't kill me, Kid, please don't kill me! I'm sorry, Kid! Don't kill me!" Dollar's right cheek was bruised and bleeding; his left eye was puffy, and his mouth looked like it had dandruff. Trying to get him up, Kid almost slipped. Swiveling his head, he saw his blades flash; leaves like green scales of the night fell from his opening fingers. He saw the ring of scorpions and guests-

  Ernestine Throckmorton had jabbed both fists beneath her chin. Lanya, Nightmare, Denny, and Dragon Lady crowded the garden entrance. Baby and Adam pushed around them. Captain Kamp, on the other side of the fountain-water dribbled a rust-rimmed stain down a marble breast and across a cornucopia-looked angry and was about to step up. The southern colonel (with the ring of white hair) at his side was about to restrain him.

  "I didn't do nothing! I really didn't mean to do nothing. I didn't mean nothing by it, I swear, Kid! I swear I didn't do it!"

  Kid looked down. "WILL YOU GET THE FUCK UP!" He lowered his orchid.

  Dollar ducked his head.

  "Get on up
, will you?" He jerked the back of Dollar's vest again.

  Glass grabbed Dollar under one arm and helped Kid pull him to his feet Kid and Glass exchanged frustrated looks.

  "You okay?" Glass asked. "Can you stand up?"

  "Is it all right . . . now?" Ernestine Throckmorton asked.

  Kid turned to tell her just to go away-

  But she was ten feet off, and talking to Nightmare, who said: "Yeah, it's okay. Just forget it, huh? Yeah, it's all right."

  And other people were walking.

  Kid's senses had grown amphetamine bright. Listening, however, words blurred back to normal incoherence.

  "I didn't do-!" shrieked in his ear again as Dollar tried to wedge between Kid and Glass

  Tarzan said: "Oh, man, I'm not gonna hurt you!" He looked at Kid. "But if he's gonna go around callin' people 'nigger' he's gonna get his head broke."

  "Yeah!" from the hirsute Raven, behind Tarzan's left shoulder.

  "Huh?" Kid asked.

  And, "Yeah, I'm gonna break his fuckin' head!" from the Ripper, behind his right.

  "I didn't do nothin'l" Dollar pulled on Kid's arm and stumbled back against Glass who caught him up. "You all do it all the time! You all say it, why can't I say it!"

  "Aw, come on, man!" Kid said. "You all must be putting me on!"

  "He's gonna call the wrong nigger 'nigger' and he's gonna have to pick his head up off the ground and screw it back on!" D-t said.

  "All right," Kid told Dollar. "Who you calling names?"

  "Me, God-damn it!" Tarzan said. "And if that psycho little bastard's gonna-"

  "Aw, shit!" D-t said. "What he gonna call you 'nigger' for? He was bad-mouthin' the Ripper, and the Ripper don't like it. I don't like it either."

  "Oh," Tarzan said. "I thought he was talking to me . . . He was looking at me when he said it."

  D-t grunted. "God-damn, nigger, the Ripper was standing just behind your shoulder!" He pointed across the garden.

  Several people stepped aside from the line his finger projected over the lawn.

  Tarzan said, "Oh."

  "I told him to say he was sorry," the Ripper said. "I didn't want to start no trouble, here at the God-damn party. If he'd a' said he was sorry, I wouldn't of done nothing." "Okay," Kid told Dollar. "Tell him you're sorry."