Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Oh, man - " Thirteen coughed and handed Red the jar. "You can't keep anything like that around here more'n five minutes. We don't get much anyway. Once somebody brought in a whole pillow case full, man! A whole pillow case with a plastic lining full of all sorts of speed. This Mexican guy." "Was he Mexican?" Smokey asked. "He was thick-set, blond . . ."

  "He talked like a Mexican," Thirteen said. "I mean that was a Mexican accent he was speaking. It wasn't no Spanish-from-Spain accent. Or Puerto Rican. They sound different."

  I nodded.

  "Anyway," Thirteen said, "it was gone like that!" He grinned back across his shoulder; "She was maybe five pounds lighter. But that's the only way you'd of known it was here. How we went through all that shit so fast- man!"

  "You must have every kind of- Oh, thanks." Mak took the pipe from Red, sucked, and said: "It's out."

  "Here, just a minute." Thirteen struck another match.

  "You must have every kind of junkey in this city," Mak said.

  Smokey, with the jar now, was handing it to Copperhead, who said: "I don't think I've ever seen a skaghead in Bellona, you know?" .

  "I have," I said.

  Glass laughed.

  Tak said: "We don't have much dope here. No money, no dope. To speak of, I mean."

  "I think-" Thirteen said. "Wouldn't you say, Kid? I mean, you could say this about most of your guys, huh? Most people here have taken a lot of dope. But we don't got too many people here who need it If you know what I mean."

  "That sounds pretty good," Mak said.

  "I mean if you need it," Thirteen said, "there just ain't no place to get it. I've put everything in my arm, or up my nose, or down my belly I could, just about, one time or another. Liked all of it, too. But I don't need anything, you know? Of course-" he reached over and took the jar from me-"I do enjoy my toke."

  Everybody laughed.

  Me too.

  And all the smoke loosed out my nose and stung.

  "Now did you ever think what a specialized city Bellona is?" Tak was saying. He had come in front of the bed, fists in his scuffed pockets, holding the leather off his hairy stomach. The red quilt lining was torn in two places. "I mean Bellona's got a lot of some things and none of a lot of others. I used to know a guy who could not go to sleep unless he had a radio playing. He can't live in Bellona. There are people who have to have movies to go to; or they get twitchy. They can't live in Bellona. Some people must have chewing gum to survive. I've found stale candy bars, Life-Savers, Turns; but all the chewing gum is gone from all the candy-stores' racks. Gum chewers can't live in Bellona. Not to mention cigarettes, cigars, pipes: the tobacco in the vending machines went stale a couple of weeks after we got cut off and I guess the cartons and packaged shag was the first thing the scavengers cleared out. You never see a smoker in Bellona."

  "Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days-" I said.

  "They can't live in Bellona," Tak went on. "In Helms-ford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car. They can't live in Bellona. Oh, we have a pretty complicated social structure: aristocrats, beggars-"

  "Bourgeoisie," I said.

  "-and Bohemians. But we have no economy. The illusion of an ordered social matrix is complete, but it's spitted through on all these cross-cultural attelets. It is a vulnerable city. It is a saprophytic city- It's about the pleasantest place I've ever lived." He grinned around at Tom, Red, Mak. "I'm curious to see whether you guys will like it enough to settle down, make it your home, become part of the community."

  The jar circled Tak for the third time; he swayed at the center.

  "Here." Tom, still leaning on the sill, held it out. "You didn't get any."

  "Never touch the stuff." Tak waved the sides of his jacket. "No, I'm a poor, anti-social juice-head. Not a man of my times at all. Gets me in trouble, too."

  Somebody suggested we go back to the nest. Tak, his three discoveries pretty well parked at Thirteen's curb, decided to drift-after Thirteen, in a flurry of patriarchal politesse, broke out his jug (same as ours; he must be rifling the same busted plate glass window on the street sometimes marked Lafayette, sometimes marked Jessie). The late afternoon got lost in the day's momentum.

  "Why don't we go back to the nest," somebody suggested again. Which, again, everybody thought was a good idea.

  Where Lady of Spain, with Raven, I guess it was, had gotten a big fire going in the yard and all sorts of canned shit, scalloped tops bent back, bubbling on the cinder-blocks, their labels blacked and bronzed by the flames. The tree trunks glimmered; and the fence; and the triangle of glass in the second floor window of the house beyond.

  We stood around, listening to the fire. Red, still bare foot and shirtless, squatted, staring at the coals, the back of his jeans tugged way the hell down his ass. Circling his hips three times-he wore it down below the waist of his jeans so you couldn't see it normally-was the optic chain.

  Just then he glanced back at me over his shoulder, surprised; maybe he thought I was staring at his crack.

  "God damn, I burned fuckin' hell out of myself-!" Jack the Ripper shook his hand furiously on the other side of the fire, hopped and whirled. Fire glistened in his mud and sputum eyes.

  I looked down at the beads across my chest, my stomach, around my arm; could feel them around my leg. I looked up and saw Red was looking too; then his eyes went down to the place below bis hip's blade pushing above the beltless loops. And up at me again. His hands, out for balance, were bloated the way some winos' get. He started to speak.

  I said: "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know where you got it. I don't want you to ask me where I got mine. Fuck you, man. I just don't want to hear-" catching my voice lowering and a fury rising neither he nor I understood.

  Black Mak watched me, frowning.

  White Tom dug in a can of beans (hot on one side and cold on the other?) with his fingers.

  Red swallowed.

  "Sure I eat pussy!" California shouts and shoves Tarzan backward.

  "Hey, man, hey-" D-t moves along with them.

  "You God-damn right I eat pussy!" and shoves again.

  "Come on, now, man, what you-"

  "I'd eat your fucking pussy if you had one!" and Tarzan crashes back into the fence.

  "Now come on!" D-t, a hand on either of California's shoulders, moves him away, and Tarzan, abandoned, suddenly starts to-

  -but Gladis's laugh turned shriek, letting me hear (remember?) a second crash's echo. Among all the concerned "What's . . ." and "Who's . . ." and unconcerned laughter (mostly Dollar's, bright and insistent), it got figured out that somebody had hurled a hot can at Gladis, which tipped her shoulder and splattered on the steps.

  Red wasn't at the fire any more. And a moment past the rage, I felt that surge of good feeling to rival those acid moments of unbearable friendship when the gates will not shut. Later, I went up behind Dollar and caught him across the back of the head, hard.

  "What'd you do that for. . . ?" he whined, lids crimped around eyes gone orange under the fire.

  "For throwing that God-damn can."

  His eyes crimped more and his mouth opened on that slate-chip laughter (clear, a little shrill, like a boy's on the short side of puberty) and he said: "Oh, man, did you see the way she hollered? I bet she was scared enough to drop it right here," and wheeled away, laughing, while D-t shook his head, watching, and said, gravely, "Shit, man."

  Tom and Thruppence were arguing about geography which took us from the yard to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the front steps, from the front steps to the yard. Everybody was staggering and bending and belly-clutching with laughter.

  Then this altercation with Denny: "Man, I don't like to go to bed with you when you're drunk," he explained, three times, sadly, only I knew if Lanya was there, he would have come; he did anyway. Woke up later to find him gone; woke again, even later, lying on my side, with his small hot butt pressed against my belly, the continent of his back, mu
scular and vertebral, going away in the grey. No hangover when I got up, but my gut was a little loose so that I knew the first coffee or even water I drank would make me shit like hell. I'd gone to sleep in my pants. Getting them back together, I stepped into the hall.

  Red came from the bathroom, gave me a funny look, and went out on the service porch while I went on up the hall, trying to figure what had changed about him. Glanced out at him when I passed the door: there was a projector chain hanging around his neck; figured he'd gotten it off the manikin in the bathroom. I opened the bathroom door: Check. %

  Shit now? I wondered.

  Wandered back to the service porch instead.

  ". . . you mean the one that's gonna have the baby?" Red was asking, which Dollar answered, as I stopped to watch them: "Fireball, what's the matter with you! Not the pregnant one; the other one!"

  "Oh. The other one. Sure."

  (So some time while I'd been asleep, Red had acquired his first chain and a name.)

  I leaned against the door frame. "Fireball?"

  Red turned.

  A half cup of wine spilled back and forth across the bottom of the gallon jug hooked on Dollar's forefinger. He lifted it to his mouth with both hands, dropped it again, and looked at me with eyes bright, wet, and pink. "Me and Fireball are gonna go get us some pussy, if she's still puttin' it out, you know? You comin'?"

  I said to Red/Fireball: "Where're your friends, Tom and Mak?"

  "They split."

  "We scared 'em off, huh?"

  "You know; they're pretty . . ." He gestured with his hand. It meant finicky/normal/unimaginative-the same hand-joggle one patient in a mental hospital will use to another to describe a third who's particularly out of touch that morning: palm down, fingers wide and waggling. "They're nice guys, though. They gave me a ride all the way down here. They treated me nice. Then, when the truck broke down, they didn't seem to mind if we hung out together, you know?"

  "Come on," Dollar said. The jug clicked the doorframe as he stepped out.

  We went with him up the hall.

  I opened the door to the back room and went in first, Dollar and Fireball right behind me. It was very warm. California, squatting in the half-dark, stood up beside us and chuckled: "God damn! Copperhead and Glass are having themselves a fuckin' contest," heard himself and decided to change the emphasis: "A fucking contest, man." He chuckled again, swaying so close the hair over his shoulder brushed my arm.

  Gladis and Mike, sleeping: knee to knee, forehead to forehead, his hair, long and light, lay over hers, tight and black, his arm over her brown collar, her arm above her belly. She snored. (Conceit: They curled, facing, like single quote marks enclosing an ellipsis pared to a unit point.

  Before the lion, rampant on the sill, scorpions slept or sat. Jack the Ripper, wandering around, stepped over sleeping Gladis and one of the non-members who occasionally crashes here. Lady of Spain-black vest, black jeans, black boots, with black chains a-tangle over tightly folded arms and an intent, midnight frown-leaned against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with Revelation, who was naked, gold hair at his head a matted snarl and, down-sloping from gold-matted groin, what I guess was half a hard-on, deeper pink than the rest of his perpetual blush. He'd tucked his hands between his buttocks and the wall, his expression, though as intense as Lady of Spain's, empty of content.

  Risa grunted: Copperhead-moaned? growled? on top of her, his freckled ass bouncing between her darker knees. The sleeping bag they'd started out on (Raven's, opened over the charred mattress) had bunched into a green python under her back. Her elbows came away from his (Copperhead still wore his vest), flapped, and fell, one hand slapping the mattress, the other catching his arm.

  Glass sat in the corner, knees up, forearms over them, head back on the wall, taking long, loud breaths.

  "Hey?" California put his hand on my shoulder and whispered: "You gonna get a piece?"

  "Let's see how she's doing when he gets off." But my cock was about half-hard, and I could feel my heart in it for a dozen beats, till I shifted my leg.

  "She's really wild," California said. "She wants everything you can figure out, man! Right now, most of the

  ladies except-" he nodded toward Lady of Spain who was saying something to Revelation who didn't seem to hear), then went back to watching -"are out now. But they were all in here working on her a little while ago! Black Widow, baby? Whew . . . ! What a T-V spectacular that was-"

  "Hey!" Lady of Spain said from her place on the wall.

  Life in the Behavioral Sink, Episode Sixteen Thousand, Six Hundred and Thirty-Seven: Heavy Cathedral, who is getting heavier, squatted last evening with his back to the house, discussing the behavior of overcrowded rats, with a half-dozen of us who stood around, listening- Gladis had just come by cradling a poor, dead mouse that had to be flushed down the toilet. "Sure," counters astute, diminutive, and dark Angel, who is drunk, "the similarities between rats and people are very large. But the differences, I suspect, are on the order of the factor of the differences in body weight between an under-nourished mouse and an eight-month pregnant woman!" (Is art and sex replacing sex and death as the concerns of the serious mind? Life here would make me think so.) "Don't lay any of that shit on us." Her chin jerked up. "That wasn't nothing like what you guys are into."

  "Yeah," Revelation said. He squinted, scratched his upper lip with nails you could see were clean from here. "That was something different." He put his hand behind him again. "That wasn't like this."

  "Hell," California said. "They was having sex with the broad-!" He glanced at Lady of Spain who'd gone back to watching. "Well, they was playing with the broad in a . . . sexual way. Anyway, it turned me on." Suddenly he grinned, leaned closer: "Only this pig likes to get her pussy poked with a pecker. So-naturally-she called in the shock troops. Well, man, there ain't nothing I like to eat out better than pecker-poked pig-pussy!" California's grin grew huge; he began to shake my shoulder: "Shit, am I glad to see you, Kid: You get in there and there'll be something between her legs that won't turn my stomach when I get down there eatin' it out, you know?"

  I raised an eyebrow.

  The huge grin became silent laughter. "I mean some of these mother-fuckers are animals, man!"

  "Animals?" Jack the Ripper came up, intense and soft "You're a fuckin' hog! Every other time some nigger pulls his dick out of that hole, this Jew bastard's down there on his hands and knees-" and the Ripper stuck out his tongue, and scrunched up his face snorting and grunting: which made California laugh out full voice. "Shit," the Ripper said (on the traditional two beats), and went out the door.

  "You want to do her both at the same time?" Dollar was saying, head together with Fireball. "See, I'll get it in her pussy, man, and you can work on her head. Course, if you want to do it the other way around-"

  "Oh, man-" California turned-"the bitch is tired! She's been going all night!"

  "She was doin' them freaky things before," Dollar said. 'Takin' on two guys at once-"

  "Sure," California said. "But that was back- Aw, never mind!"

  Copperhead finished, pushed back to his knees, stood slowly, then bent again to drag his green pants up around one leg; the other was bare. "Your turn?" he asked across the room to Revelation. Copperhead was breathing hard. "You better get your ass over here!" "I already been, once." Revelation glanced at me. "Glass wants to go again. And the Kid's here . . ."

  "You go on," Glass said from the floor. "It's gonna take me another five minutes to get my breath."

  "Then, fuck it . . ." Revelation came forward, when I didn't move, leaving Lady of Spain by the wall. "It ain't gonna take me no five minutes." Chuckling, he stepped over Devastation, who turned over and dragged his forearm over his face. "Like I said, I'm an in-and-out man, you know?"

  "Well, yeah," Copperhead said. "That's what you wanted seconds for, ain't it? Come on, white boy-" He stepped back, laughing. "You can fuck her. She ain't prejudiced."

  Risa made a sort of hoarse and
gravelly sound that went on, while her mouth opened and closed. Her hand slapped the mattress, her head came up. She looked around. (Her hair was stiff and long, like a spray of dark water that had shot from her head and frozen), still making that sound.

  It gave me chills. My cock went from half to full hard. I had to move it over with my thumb.

  "Man!" California said, watching me.

  "Okay, sweetheart!" Revelation stepped over D-t, who looked solid out. "Okay, I'm comin', I'm comin'!" Some of the guys laughed.

  ". . . shit!" Lady of Spain peeled forward from the wall and walked toward us, arms still folded, head shaking. Her frown had become a tough, ironic smile in which was a lot of disgust. She passed: I put a hand on her shoulder. "Hey, you ever go after it like that?"

  (Copperhead: "Get your tongue in her mouth, man. It ain't no fun if you don't tongue her . . . yeah, like that."

  (Glass: "She nearly chewed mine off." And laughed).

  Lady of Spain looked at my hand, looked at me, and, without breaking expression, said: "Get off my ass, cock-sucker."

  "Now hey . . . !" California frowned. "The Kid asked you a civil question. You don't have to go calling him no-"

  Looking at me straight, Lady of Spain said: "Now have I just called you anything that ain't true, or asked you to do anything in a-what is it? An uncivil tone of voice?" I nodded-"Right on-" and dropped her shoulder.

  Lady of Spain shook her head, sucked her teeth.

  "God damn," California said. "These bitches are always goin' around tryin' to cut a guy's balls off-"

  "Aw, fuck off," I said. "What does it take to cut yours off anyway- A dull spoon? Look: first, I have sucked my quota of dick. And enjoyed it. Second, my nuts are strung up there with two-inch steel cable. It takes a lot more hatchet work than that to make them even feel loose," which California thought was pretty funny again and started laughing all over. "Your thing," I said, "just isn't some other peoples' and there's nothing you can do about it."

  Lady of Spain shook her head again and pushed out between Dollar and Fireball.

  I guess Revelation did come pretty fast. He was getting back up on his knees, already, face still blank, cock still half hard. Risa held his arm with both her hands. Revelation shook his head, sort of sheepishly: "Like I say, sweetheart, I guess I just don't take that much-"