Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Go on," I said. "You've got it too simple. But go on."

  His jaw moved a few times, but he didn't speak.

  "How come you don't come down to see us?" I asked. "You get hungry, come on down to the nest. Tak'll bring you there if you ask him. Left over flower-power, in all this pollution, was never my thing either." I was wondering about him and the department store people but I didn't say anything.

  "Well, you guys . . ." Jack turned a little from side to side. (Thinking: His palms are now glued to the wood, but he doesn't want to be noticed trying to tug them loose.) "You guys . . . I just don't know. All you got down there is niggers anyway, don't you? After what I done-what they said I done, what's a bunch of bad niggers gonna do when I come walkin' in? You guys play a little too rough . . . robbin' people in the street. And killin' people." He blinked inflamed lids. "I don't mean, personal. You're a nice guy. And you're their chief, huh . . . ? But that's what I heard, you know? And I don't wanna get into shit like that. I don't got nothin' against it, but . . ." He frowned, shaking his head. "People talk. And people talk. People talk, tryin' to make you into something you ain't.

  And after a while, you almost don't know what you done and what you didn't do your own self. People talkin' about me, about what I done, that day when the sky was lit across with that funny kind of light, and that nigger they got in the pictures was after that white girl and the colored people had a riot and tore the hands off the church clock down in Jackson; they say cause I climbed up on the roof and shot the nigger, from the roof, I'm responsible for the riot, for the whole thing, for everything that happened here. Just for shootin' a damn nigger . . ." His lips, lined with brown, touched, parted, touched: "I had a gun. I didn't shoot . . ." He spoke slowly. "I didn't shoot that black man. I mean, I even met him three or four time. Right in this bar. With Tak. He was a nice man. I shot him . . . ? I didn't shoot . . ." Suddenly he knuckled at his lips' scabbed corner. "I went down there. I did that. To check the place out. And with my gun! You climb up the steps behind the Second City Bank building and get up the rest of the way by the fireladder. You can hunker

  I don't remember ever getting corrected in high school or college for writing who instead of whom. But except to be funny, I've never said whom in my life. Which makes me think there are two other words: who and who'- the apostrophe standing for the syncopated m. I've been using who' in this notebook for maybe a week, but it still looks funny. So I'll cut it out. down behind the cornice and aim out over the whole damn street. Man, if you could shoot at all, you could pick off anyone! An' I shoot pretty good . . ." He looked at me, narrowing his thickened lids. "You think I done it?"

  'That depends," I said. "Did you check it out before or after he got shot?"

  Something happened on Jack's unshaven face: the skin between his eyebrows wrinkled, the skin below his jaw slackened. Something happened behind it too. "Oh God," he said as flatly as, once, I heard a man say "elevator". "Oh God . . ." He turned back to the bar. "They all want it to be so bad, they gonna make it be no matter what I done or not. They gonna make it be. Just by wantin' it."

  "I know," I told him.

  "What can I do? I don't know what to do."

  "You have to know who you are," I said. "No matter what they say."

  He didn't look at me. "You know who you are?"

  After a second I said: "About two thirds of it; so I guess at least I'm on my way. Maybe I'm pretty lucky." I finished my beer. "You come down to the nest. Whenever you want. Just don't bring your gun."

  "I wish," Jack said after a few seconds, "I could just get me some kind of job. A job where I could make some good money. Then I could get me a girl friend; then I could buy my own drinks. I don't like to sit in a bar and hustle nice guys for drinks."

  "When I first got to town," I told him, "I had a job, moving furniture. Five bucks an hour. You'd've dug it. It was made for you."

  But he was looking at the dollar bill.

  Since the frustration was making me mean, I decided it was time to go. I stepped from the bar.

  "Hey, Kid?"

  "What?"

  "Ain't you gonna take your change?" He put his middle finger on the wrinkled dollar and slid it over the wet wood.

  I thought a second. "Why don't you keep it?"

  "Aw, no, man- Naw, I don't like to take no handouts. I need a job; make some good money; pay my own way."

  "You take this hand-out," I said. "You need it."

  "Well, thanks, man . . . ?" His finger, holding the paper to the counter, slid it back. "Thanks a lot! I'm good for it, too. You'll get it back, once I get some money. You're a pretty nice guy."

  Comments anyway: I want to help. And feel help would be impossible. Almost. Which is simply almost forgetting how much help I've had.

  I hope he comes to the nest.

  Off his head about everything else, he's right on about the pussy. Despite George, and a city consecrated by twin moons, I know there must be some greater, female diety (for whom George is only consort) a sin yet to name her (as that sun is never, named); we have all glimpsed her, sulking in the forest of her knowledge-every tree a tree of that knowledge-and there is nothing but to praise

  This afternoon Lady of Spain and Filament staggered through the front door in volcanic laughter, lurched up the hall supporting each other-

  "Hey," I said. "What happened with you?"

  Filament faced me, pursed her lips, inflated her cheeks, widened her eyes, and rattled her chains before her breasts, miming something I did not understand. Her cheeks exploded with more laughter. Lady of Spain, dragging Filament's arm, hauled her away.

  Dollar pushed around me, grinning. "Hey!" he called, "What happened? Did you do it?"

  Filament turned and repeated the mime.

  Dollar-I'm not sure it meant more to him than it did to me-crashed back against the wall, holding his stomach and howling: "Oh, wow . . . ! You mean . . . ? Really . . . ? Wow . . . I" and followed them up the hall, his laugh shriller than either of theirs.

  Then Tarzan stepped in from the service porch and said: "Look, ladies, people are sleeping in the back room, huh?" There are twelve tones of voice in which you can say that: three of them would have gotten him an apology with muffled giggles. He chose, at random, from the other nine.

  "Fuck off, man!" Dollar said, straightening. "It's their nest too!" His had actually been the only laugh with edge to wake.

  "Now look!" Tarzan said.

  Sex between nest members is rare enough- I can think of six, no seven exceptions, including me and Denny-to make me wonder if basically I don't have here an exandrous and/or exogynous totem group. Most sex comes walking in, invited or not-and even- "These bitches come running in here yelling and shouting! Somebody's got to tell 'em to keep-"

  "Now you look," Filament said. She had about as much use for Tarzan as he had for t he other Caucasians in the nest. "You may be Tarzan. But I am not Jane!"

  "I'd fuck him," Lady of Spain said. Black, and an occasional partaker in long, Intense conversations with Jack the Ripper, for Tarzan she had acquired something of the apes' aura. (Because of this was she more tolerant of him?) "I really would. But Tarzan don't fuck nothin'." Only one of the twelve

  could make that come out right. She chose it with such ease, I hope he took a lesson.

  "Aw, hey, now: I was just asking you to keep it a little-"

  D-t, naked and half asleep, loomed in the back doorway, forearms high on the jambs, boney hips cocked askew, big hands (with their funny thumbs) and head hanging. The head came up and he blinked. "Tarzan, when he eventually walks out. The seventh exception was Filament's surprising (to me, anyway. Lanya says, "Why were you surprised?" I don't know why I was surprised. I was surprised, that's all.) affair with a tall, Italian looking girl named Anne Harrimon, who, her first night here, took lights and chains and the name Black Widow. Always standing hand in hand, always sitting knee to knee whispering, running through the house giggling or asleep at any time in any room, one's h
ead against the other's breast, one's breast beneath the other's hand, intense, innocently exhibitionistic, and almost wordless, they developed, within hours, a protective/voyeuristic (?) male circle that ran with them everywhere and that, incidentally, dissolved the apes for the duration (the two were not Tarzan's favorite people). After a couple of weeks, the Widow came to me and returned her chains. Those few minutes of conversation in the yard were the only time I really got to know her, decided I liked her; decided I would offer them back to her if I ever saw her again (recalling Nightmare and Lanya): she left. Filament was sad but did not talk about her; then returned to older ways. Seems to be the place to mention it: I once asked Denny why he had no nickname.

  "Nightmare used to call me B.J.," he explained. "Until I told him to cut it the fuck out. So I'm just Denny."

  "B.J.? What did that stand for?" . "I'll give you one guess."

  "Oh," I said. "Hey, what is your last name, by the way?"

  "For a while it was Martin. Once It was Cupp. Depended on the foster family I was staying with."

  Does the onomal maliability here make my own loss more barable? I went to sleep, you was complaining about something. Here it is with the sky all light, and you still at it?"

  "I was just telling them to be quiet so they wouldn't wake you up!"

  "Time for me to get up anyway, boy. And they did not wake me."

  "You seel" Dollar said. "You see, all your yellin' and carryin' on makes more noise than-"

  Filament put her hand on Dollar's chest and lowered her head. "Now you just wait too." She looked up again. "Tarzan, you like living here, right?"

  "What you mean?" Tarzan's chin jerked belligerently.

  "She asked you," Lady of Spain said, "if you like living here. Or not."

  "Yeah," Tarzan said. "Yeah. I like living here. What are you gonna do about it?"

  "I'm not gonna do anything," Filament said. "But you better. You better do the same thing Dollar is doing."

  "Huh?" Dollar said. "What am I-?"

  "And that is: Since you like livin" here, you better make a real effort to stay."

  D-t broke the silence with laughter. He shook in the doorway like a windy scarecrow.

  "Man," Tarzan said, "now what are you laughin' at?"

  D-t threw one arm around Tarzan's neck-

  ". . . Hey, man! . . ."

  -and, still laughing, dragged him down the hall, occasionally rubbing his knuckles on Tarzan's head, hard.

  ". . . Hey, cut it out . . . hey, stop it; that hurts . . . damn it, nigger! Cut it out . . . hey, what are you . . . stop . . . !"

  In the living room, D-t let Tarzan up.

  ". . . what the fuck you doin'?" Tarzan rubbed both hands in his yellow hair.

  "I'm just trying to see if your head is as hard as you keep on makin' out like it is, mother-fucker! We got any coffee?"

  Tarzan dropped one hand, rubbed harder with the other. "Yeah, I ... I think so. Somebody made up a pail about an hour ago." He was still confused.

  In the hall, Filament and Lady of Spain walked on. Behind them Dollar said: "He don't got no right to talk to you like that."

  "He's got a right to talk any way he wants," Filament

  said. "He's just got to be set to listen afterward, that's all."

  "That's what I mean," Dollar said; and so rarely do I agree with him about anything, I write this exception down so

  idea around with me like a cyst on the tailbone for (how long is that?) and today (the known part of that) walking in the grey (grey, a grey I'm tired of noticing and noting; I'm exhausted with that grey; which is what that grey means to me) street, this memory: I was passing the table where somebody had left one of those transparent plastic glasses, three quarters full of white wine (in the back closet Raven found the saran tube full of them) with the window open behind it; the glare on the interface between plastic and wine suddenly diffracted like an oil-slick and the glass was full of color. If I moved one way or the other more than three inches, it became just greasy plastic full of urine-colored liquid. First I thought the prismatic movement would be lost as soon as I went. But for the next hour, whenever I walked through the kitchen, I could find the spot from which it looked like that again easily.

  The idea stayed in my mind the same way, and I could find it just by passing near.

  I thought it would be good to try on Temple Avenue, but I couldn't find any street with that name on the sign. So I walked down a street as wide and as clean, with gates and doors and window-glass so intact that only the pewter sky told our catastrophe. I saw a lady in a black coat and blue scarf cross at the corner; but she went into a side street; when I looked after her, she was stepping into a doorway. I walked, excited and hollow and knowing my shape-how my body moved, my head-a-jog on my neck, the stagger in my one-boot walk-from the inside. Lamp posts and doorways and fire hydrants came at me from the smoke-

  I guess he was almost a block ahead, but for maybe a minute I wasn't sure he was there, in the smoke. So I hurried.

  He had short, black hair and wore a brown corduroy

  Writing this while taking a crap: small consolations-expected a really unhealthy turd, baloney yellow and spinach black after a node of mucus. Mercifully what came was mostly liquid and left the water too murky to examine. coat with a woolly collar; it was cooler than usual, but because there was no wind, I was still in my vest. His hands were in his pockets. The coat's belt hung down on either side.

  The belt was all I was staring at.

  Just as I started to overtake him, I scraped my leg on some piece of crating or junk lying on the sidewalk-I never did look back at what it was. But it surprised hell out of me. I wonder now if I would have done it if that hadn't happened: I mean, trying to ignore the surprising sting across my calf, maybe I also ignored that part of my head that would have made me just hurry on past him, reflecting on how close I had come. (Does the City's topology control us completely?)

  When I'd halved the distance, he glanced back. But kept walking. I guess he thought I was just going to walk past.

  I grabbed his shoulder and spun him back against the fence bars.

  "Hey . . . I" he said. "What's your problem!"

  I put the orchid blades right up against his throat. He flinched and looked surprised.

  "Give me everything in your pockets," I told him.

  He took a breath. "You got it." He wore glasses.

  I dug into his pants pocket while he held his hands up. I brought out three dollar bills. (I think an orchid point accidentally knicked his neck and he flinched again ) "Turn around and let me check your back pockets." He turned and I felt around under the flap of his coat until I realized his pants didn't have back pockets. I thought I might hit him or cut him then; but I didn't.

  I backed away and he turned to look at me. His mouth was pressed together. As I stepped away, I realized his side pockets were much deeper than I'd thought: I could see the clustered circles of change outlined low in the black denim.

  He glanced past one raised hand to the left.

  A guy was crossing the street, watching us. But when I looked, the guy looked away.

  The man made a disgusted sound, dropped his hands, and turned to go.

  I gestured with the orchid and said, "Hey!"

  He looked back.

  "You wait here ten minutes before you move," I said, ,

  and took another step backward. "If you call for anybody, or try to come after me, I'll cut your throat!" I turned and sprinted up the block; glanced back once.

  He was walking away.

  I made it around the corner, went into a doorway to take off the orchid and put the three bills in my pocket. Then I stooped down and rolled up my cuff to look at my leg. It was just the tiniest scratch, down the side of my calf and back toward my ankle, like a swipe past a nail or a broken board or a

  out on the front steps, met Dragon Lady: Denim vest laced tight, arms folded (making the laces above them look a little loose), looking pensive.
/>   Haven't seen her in a while.

  Back now.

  What's she been doing?

  Nothing.

  Where's she been?

  Around.

  I put my arm around her but she obviously didn't feel like being mauled. So I dropped it and just walked with her.

  As we circled the house, she relaxed a little, dark arms still folded.

  Baby and Adam with you?

  Yeah, they'll be here.

  Reached the yard (telling her, "It's good to see you back," and she smiled her stained-tooth smile) and delivered her up to the apes and Tarzan who were goofing around there. The atmosphere cedes us a day featureless as night. I didn't know what time it was; the noise and raillery surrounded her as she went to sit under the tree, fists between her knees, with a troubled look that did not stay on anything. Wondering how (late? early?) it was, I decided I would fix the sink in the service porch (because I'd gone into the cabinet under the kitchen sink for something else and seen some tools; again, topology preordinates) and after I'd turned off the water and wrenched off the first

  I have to keep mentioning this timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time's passage registers, so that instants, seconds, minutes are painfully real; but hours-much less days and weeks-are left-over noises from a dead tongue. nut, I decided I'd take the whole thing apart and then see if I felt like putting it back together.