Dhalgren

The tearing stopped, anyway.

He raised his eyes again, looked out the porch window at the horizon again—

When he’d first moved to New York City to go to Columbia, he had brought with him an absolute panic of the Bomb. It had been October; he had no Thursday morning classes, was still half-asleep in the sweaty sheets of a persistent, Indian summer. Sirens woke him—he remembered no scheduled test. A jet snarled somewhere on the sky. He got chills and immediately tried to logic them away. This is the sort of coincidence, he thought, blinking at the dull window, that can ruin a good day.

Then the window filled with blinding yellow light.

He’d leaped from the bed, taking the sheets with him. His throat cramped and his heart exploded while he watched gold fire spill window to window down the tenement across the street.

The fireball! he thought, beyond the pain in his terrified body. The light’s here now. The shock and the sound will arrive in four seconds, five seconds and I will be dead…

Four seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds later, he was still standing there, shaking, panting, trying to think of someplace to hide.

The clouds, in coincidence compounded, had pulled away from the sun. The plane was gone. The clock radio in the bookshelf said noon. The siren lowered its pitch, softened its whine, and ceased.

What he’d felt then had been active terror.

What he felt now was its passive equivalent.

It couldn’t be a fireball, he thought. That was impossible.

Beyond the mist, it shone through as moon or sun shone through an even veil of clouds. It was the color of the sunrise: Perhaps a sixth of the circle had risen, secanted by the horizon. But already it was, what? A hundred? Three hundred? Six hundred times the area of the platinum poker chip he remembered as the sun.

…If the sun went nova! he thought. Between his loudening heart he ferreted this information: If that’s what it was, then the earth would boil away in seconds! His heart stilled. What a silly fact to base one’s confidence on before this light!

The clouds over half the sky were a holocaust of pewter and pale gold.

Was the light warm?

He rubbed his bronzed forearm.

The verdigrised spigot on the wall dropped molten splashes on the muddy drain. Torn paper tacked to the frame of the window filigreed a shadow on the wall beside him.

When he had thought the bomb had fallen, back in New York, he had been left with a tremendous energy, had paced and pondered and searched for something to do with it, had ended up just walking it away.

I may be dead, he thought, in…seconds, minutes, hours? He squinted at the brilliant arc, already perhaps thirty houses wide. The thought came with absurd coolness, I’m going to write something.

He sat quickly on the floor (despite callous, he noticed again it was so much easier to distinguish textures in the gritty boards with the foot he kept bare than the one he wore booted), pulled the paper Siam had left up from the top of the crate. (His pants pulled across the place he’d scraped his knee climbing into the loft.) The Times was often sloppily laid out with frequent white spaces. Paging through, he saw one, and pulled his pen out of his vest.

I had a mother, I had a father. Now I don’t remember their names. I don’t remember mine. In another room, two people are sleeping who are nearer to me by how many years and thousands of miles; for whom, in this terrifying light, I would almost admit love.

He opened the pages back and placed the paper on the crate. The pages were yellow in the new light.

And it was not blank space.

The bottom quarter was boxed for an advertisement. Inside, two-inch letters a

BRASS

ORCHIDS

In smaller, italic type beside the title, set off in quotation marks, were lines of verse.

He mouthed: “…at this incense…” and balked. He threw back his head at the chills on his neck (and closed his eyes against the light: inside his lids was the color of orange rind), opened his eyes to look at the paper. A misreading: “…this incidence…” He let his breath out.

Why had they taken those lines, he wondered. Without the two before or the one after, they meant…nothing? He puzzled on the severed image, clicking his pen point.

What was the purpose of it?

(What had he wanted to write?)

His forehead moistened; his eye drifted to the column of type down the left of the…advertisement; and snagged on “…Newboy…” He went to the top, to shake loose the confusion:

We have lost our poet in residence: To be precise, at six-thirty, after a farewell breakfast prepared by Mrs. Alt—Professor Wellman, Mr. and Mrs. Green, Thelma Brandt, Colonel Harris, Roxa

A moving incident at the regretted departure: a young man whom Mr. Newboy had been encouraging with his poetry came to wave an admiring farewell at the mouth of Bellona’s own Pons Asinorum. So, another celebrity leaves loved. But Bellona, it would seem, in all its impoverishment, holds myriad fascinations.

We had heard rumors of the coming of our most recent guest; still we had, frankly, entertained some doubts as to whether this visit would, as it were, come off. Communication with the outside world, as all of you know who have tried it, is an exhausting, inaccurate, and frustrating business here at best. How convenient! In the same trip with which our Nick delivered Mr. Newboy onto his journey to Pittsblain, he was able to meet, as per tentative arrangements, with Captain Michael Kamp. They arrived in Bellona shortly after three o’clock. Captain Kamp is indefinite about the length of his stay. We ca

Incense had come as a misreading of incidence; did illustrious echo illusion? Kid wondered.

He raised his eyes to the bright vista, squinted, and thought: The problem of hallucinating red eyes, even a great red one rising into the sky…

The thought came with a load of monstrous comfort: this is impossible. He stopped clicking his pen. Momentarily he wanted to laugh.

Hallucination?

He gazed into the light, tried to open his eyes full to it; they hurt and refused.

He had wanted to write something?

This wasn’t even hallucination. I’m probably lying in bed, somewhere, with my eyes closed…is that called dreaming?

After-images deviled the walls.

He turned his head away, and into darkness…dreaming?

His cheek was on a blanket. One arm was cramped beneath his side. He was filled with the tingling one has after having laughed a long time. He lay, trying to remember what had just passed, gnawing at his fingers till he tasted blood. And kept gnawing.

Lanya shifted, made some slow, sleepy sound.

Kid took his hand from his mouth, curled his fingertips tight against his palm. “Hey,” he said. “Are you asleep…?”

Lanya stretched. “More or less…” She lowered her chin and looked down at the blond head between their hips. “What was his name?”

Kid laughed.

De

“What’s your name?” She pushed back cords of his hair.

De

Kid held his laughter in this time.

Lanya shook her head, her hand at Kid’s forehead pushing at his coarser hair.

“How was he?” he whispered, from somewhere down in his chest.

“Mmmm?”

“I heard you two when I was sort of half-asleep.” He cupped her cheek and she turned to lip the ham of his thumb. “How’d he do?”

She turned back. A smile and a frown mixed themselves on her face. “Now which one of you was that—” She laughed when he shook her ear. “Very sweet and very energetic.” She glanced down again. “Sort of…up and down, you know? He’s got quite a sense of humor.”