Dhalgren

The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead’s thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, “Hey!” and gri

“Knock yourself out.” Kid backed from the door, with Lanya’s hand in his.

The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

“What’s going on in there?” Blond De

“Stay out of there, cocksucker.” Kid put his arm around the boy’s chest, pulled him back.

“Why?”

“Because I’d get jealous as hell.”

De

Lady of Spain jogged against Kid’s shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: “Shit! What a way to go. I guess we’re going, ain’t we?” She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya’s shoulder.

Lanya tugged Kid’s arm. “This way,” she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside (“Hey, how you doing, Kid?”), who pushed back a bottle at his face.

At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. “Are you having…a party?” They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions’.

“Is this Nightmare’s…Is this Nightmare’s nest?” a girl asked and pushed up past the first two. “Lanya!” She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.

“Milly!” Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly’s wrists. “What are you doing?” Lanya’s voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began—to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.

He pushed between the people crowding the hall. “Fuck!” he shouted at somebody once. “Get out of the way!”

Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), “No, man, this is the Kid’s nest. Nightmare ain’t here. Nightmare ain’t anywhere around.”

“Kid—?” which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate; and talking about, not to, him: “You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn’t know that was the Kid. How do you like that?”

Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:

It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzical: Deadly rays!

A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn’t it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.

With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.

He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam’s bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.

The suede boot was blotched with what he’d always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn’t rained. Below the wrinkled leather—forty feet below—cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.

He examined his left hand. I don’t like what they look like, he thought. I don’t like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.

He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he’d bitten to blood. He’d always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what calluses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hand horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the i

He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers between them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into the lap, and began to click his pen.

Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn’t what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint’s button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.

Lanya crashed Kid’s ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion’s head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds. Then at Kid: “You’re still writing on that…?”

“No.” The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya’s voice. “No, I’ve been finished a few minutes now.”

Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, “Hey…” She frowned. “It’s going down!”

Kid nodded. “You can see it falling almost.”

The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.

De

De

She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.

Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said, “I like that.”

But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile: but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.