Dhalgren

Anyway a smile’s what they gave him back.

De

One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.

Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don’t know who she is! He gripped harder.

She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.

So he dropped his hand.

With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.

While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, “Why aren’t you afraid?” Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.

She said: “Then I won’t be either.”

The boy who’d come out was the pimply, stubble-bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as though he felt he might have interrupted something, seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?), when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.

Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn, small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.

“It’s going down, see,” De

He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can’t get the same reactions.

Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.

Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.

The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.

There were too many people.

Milly brushed at her cheek.

Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She’s guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She’s guilty…?

There were too many people.

The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.

They didn’t move.

“What are you going to do with that?” Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.

The scorpion’s breath was thunderous.

“I don’t know.” That sounded thunderous too.

“Let me take it.” She tore off the three pages, corrected, and recorrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. “I have your notebook at home. I’ll put these with it. I want to go.” She turned to De

Kid wanted to protest, decided no; offer to come too?

She touched De

Lanya stood, and people stepped apart.

De

De

“When it goes down…” the pimply scorpion began.

Kid, and the two people who held his hand, looked.

Something white had dried on his mouth. His lashless lids were pink and swollen.

The two looked away.

“When it goes all the way down, there won’t be any fuckin’ light at all, again…ever.” He shook his head, scuffed his boots, rocked on the doorsill. “Black as a fucking bitch…yeah!”

They’ve gone, Kid thought. No light at all?

Fifteen minutes later, when it had set completely, the sky had returned to its ordinary grey.

3

He woke…alone?

Someone was climbing up the loft ladder.

He struggled to choose between dreams and…the rest. Because they had all left the muraled house, and wandered back to the nest. Milly had talked to him, aimlessly, in the sloped street, mostly all surprised that he was the same Kid everybody had been talking about, and how glad she was to know that she knew him, till he’d decided she was trying to put the make on him and had gotten angry. “Get the fuck out of here, you stupid bitch!” he’d yelled in the street and made to hit her. She’d run away; he’d laughed, loudly, till he was staggering. Copperhead had come up to him and beat him on the shoulder, laughing too. “I didn’t like that one either. Shit, you can have one of mine…” He’d kept laughing, so he wouldn’t have to speak, thinking with perfectly maniacal pride: I have, I have already—

“Kid, are you okay?” De

“Yeah…?”

De

“They’re making food—” and at the word, Kid smelled it—“inside. Nightmare and Dragon Lady just came back. You sleepin’?”

“Come—” and at the word, De

“Lanya’s got a nice place,” De

“Yeah?” Kid thought: he’s so light; but his edges are sharp. “You ball her again?”

“…Yeah,” De

Surprised, Kid opened his eyes. Cracks crossed the dim ceiling. “Oh.” He shifted De

“She’s got a nice place,” De

“Why’d she want to go?” He nubbed his rough chin for the itching.

De

“Class?”

The L about the window shade had finally taken on the deep color of evening.

“Her kids. She’s been looking out for this group of kids, you know? About eight and nine years old. Black kids mostly.”

“No, I didn’t know.” He let his lips purse to a tent where, with the help of air, they were off his teeth. Well, he hadn’t seen her much. How many days gone? She’d said she had a place, yes; “No, I didn’t know.”

He frowned at the top of De

“I like her,” De

“Guess she does,” Kid said. “Did she check…her class?”

“No,” De

Kid looked at the ceiling again. “How long she had the kids?”

“A couple of weeks,” De

“What’s it like?” A couple of weeks? He was too exhausted to be upset.

“Real nice.” Some of De

“Well, you’re good for something, cocksucker. Hey!” Kid bunched the muscles of his leg under De

De