Dhalgren

De

“Just five times,” she said. “Then shout. I’ll bring you in. Let’s try it.” They did. De

“Come on,” Lanya said. “You guys don’t have to overdo it!”

They tried again.

“That’s it. Put your earphones on, and we’ll lay it in.”

The rubber rims clasped Kid’s ears and damped the room’s silence down a level.

“I’m going to be playing something entirely different.” Lanya’s voice was crisp and distant through the phones. “But I’ll signal you two in with my elbows.” She flapped one at them and put on her own phones. The vest swung from her sides. “There we—” she turned on the tape. Momentarily the silence in Kid’s phones crackled—“go.”

Kid heard De

Then, a long note bent.

Over it, Lanya began, as the beat cleared, to rattle out, like insects, high triplets, first here, then up half a step, then down a whole one. Her mouth jerked across the organ and she dragged a growl up from the windy lower holes. Then jerk: bright triplets rattled. The old melody wound, beneath them and decorated by them: each time the third batch arrived, they thrust it into a new harmony, and toward Kid’s and De

De

Lanya swung her whole body back and brought both elbows in to her sides.

De

Kid’s palm stung. And stung again. And again. And again—the sound, and his head, rose—and again: his face burst with noise and sudden joy.

Through the phones, from under his own cry, the rough fabric of the ending, with the little trill falling into it again and again, secured in its foreign key, brought all to its proper close.

De

“You like that, huh?” Lanya gri

“Sure,” De

“Shhh,” Lanya said. “Let’s just do it. I don’t have too much to play on the harmonica this track. But don’t let what I do throw you off.”

Kid nodded, pulled apart the phones at his ears—two rings of perspiration cooled—then let them clamp back.

“Here we go.” She glanced back. “Ready?”

The crackle…

The chair squeak…

Then the long note, bending…

Lanya reinforced the first phrase with middle notes, dropped the harp from her mouth, took a step back, and whistled a phrase over the quiet begi

Kid and De

So did Lanya, taking a large step back from the mike, bobbing her head and whacking the back of her harmonica hand against her palm. They clapped through the ringing five, and all shouted together with the voices already taped. Once more Lanya was at the mike, harp at her mouth, weaving high shatter-notes through the ending tapestry.

Then silence.

She said, softly, breathing hard: “There…” and pressed a button. The tapes halted.

“Jesus…!” De

“Paul borrowed it from Reverend Taylor for me.”

“You do a lot of that stuff before?” De

“Nope.” Lanya took off her own earphones, hung them over the mike’s jutting bar. “It’s just something I wanted to try out. I’ve worked with tapes before but—”

Kid said: “Let’s hear the whole thing!” Taking off his earphones, he came up beside her.

“What are you go

“—Watch it,” Lanya said. “Those are delicate.”

“Sorry—What’s its name?”

“For a while—” she ran her thumb across Kid’s chest—“I was thinking of calling it ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens.’ But then—” De

Holding his lips between his teeth, Kid nodded. “Go on.” His lips came loose and tingled. “Play it.”

De

Tapes turned.

“Here we go…”

De

“…I want you to note—” Lanya lay her harmonica on the table, then raised one finger—“that something like that usually takes six or eight hours to do; we have been at this no more than two hours.”

From the speakers beneath the table, De

Kid put his own phones down softly and listened (thinking: Temporal diffraction? Two hours? It had seemed perhaps twenty minutes!):

The long note bent.

Somehow, lost in a machine, I have been able to grasp and strip from the body of experience three layers of living thesis: She inscribed them with her music, laid them over one another so that, thi

But probably any three could.

The finale cleared in its higher, supporting key; trills of notes fell into, and trills of notes rose out of, the moaning chord. The sound clutched at him, tightened his stomach.

Lanya listened, arms at her sides, head down, frowning with concentration. The white pips of her upper teeth dented one side of her lip.

The piece ended.

She still listened.

Then De

Lanya’s head came up suddenly. She turned off the tape.

De

“Huh?” Kid stepped forward.

“There’s a big old nigger bitch in here, and, man, she’s about to shit!”

“De

Kid pushed away the blackboard, looked down.

The board-stand’s wheels stopped creaking.

The woman wore a black hat and a black coat, hem rumpled on the floor around her. She blinked up at them, feeling for the string handles of the shopping bag beside her. Catching the bag up, she breathed a word all wind.