Dhalgren

“What did you guys think when I showed up, I mean back at the department store?”

Glass laughed through his nose. He looked embarrassed. He pulled his pants across his stomach, scratched the twice-crossed T of an appendectomy scar showing above his belt. His knuckles were much darker than the rest of his skin; the places between his fingers looked like they had been brushed with ash.

“What did you think? Tell me.”

Glass shrugged and shook his head to settle the smile about the yellow corners of his eyes. “We…well, we knew you were coming. Only we didn’t know you were coming then. I mean, you remember the morning we woke you up in the park?”

Kid nodded.

Glass nodded too as though the reference explained something, then looked up the hall.

Kid walked on.

At a party, I hand out a hundred and fifty copies of my book, and they all turn down the music and sit around cross-legged on the floor, reading so intently I can walk among them, lean down, and examine each expression flickering from humor through compassion to the visage of the deeply moved.

He sweated under the books in his belt. A drop rolled, tickling his buttock.

Kid and Glass stepped inside the wide-swung doors.

He’d thought there was music.

“…wants more of it, can’t get enough of it, how to get out of it: Time—” a woman cried over the loose crowd—“is the hero!” She swayed in dark robes on some platform—or maybe just a table—that brought her knees high as the highest, close-cropped, black (with a brown bald spot vague in the middle) head. “Time is the villain!” Reverend Amy Taylor, thirty yards across the balconied hall, shook her head and her fist, glared around at craning women and men with faces of humus, sand, and all in-between colors earth can have. “Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truths and lies. Not truth and falsity—Oh, no. No. Nothing so grand. Here we are sunk on the abyss of discrete fibs, i

It was not, Kid had noticed, a particularly quiet nor attentive crowd—save the thirty or forty actually clustered at the Reverend’s podium. People wandered, talked; and now laughter began somewhere, obscuring her words. Up in the dark balcony, a few people, widely distant, slept like darker blotches among the brown wood seats. Somebody moved along the railing, checking spotlights; none seemed to work. Fat, bald, the color of terra cotta and wearing just some bib-coveralls, he stood up, wiped at his forehead with the back of his arm, and moved to the next dead light.

On the walls, were high barred windows. As Kid’s eyes came down the gates, a group of six middle-aged men and women ran across the floor: One woman knocked over a statue that one man caught and struggled to right, till a plaster wing fell. Plaster shattered over the floor. Others clustered to laugh, to shout advice.

Beyond them, Reverend Taylor waved her arms, ducked her head and tossed it back, haranguing the powdered floor, the shadowed ceiling; but only a word or two could tear clear now of talk and laughter.

The group fell apart from a sunburst of white footprints: George Harrison stalked through.

One arm was around the neck of a yellow-haired, plump, pink woman, the other around the waist of a gaunt, tan girl with a brick-colored natural and freckles. (He’d seen her, at the church, with the blond Mexican, who had stopped him on the street, how many mornings later, how many mornings ago?) George saw Kid, veered over, and called: “Hey, so you go

“Ohh!” she complained. “George!”

“You give me those, and you can get some more, right?”

“No honey.” She lifted them from his fingers. “You can’t have these.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause you can’t, that’s all.”

“You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself—”

“Not these, honey.” She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. “You tell me what else you want and I’ll give you that, okay?”

“Well, that’s what I want!”

“Oh, George.” She snuggled, closer—and out of his line of sight.

“All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I’m sure go

The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking hand.

“What is all this?” Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. “I mean, what’s everybody doing here? And the preacher—?”

“Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!”

“She sure been going on,” the gaunt girl said. “She just don’t stop.”

“This here is my house,” George said, with a grave nod. “Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn’t be able to fit ’em all in the church. So we say, come on and we go