Dhalgren

Kid frowned.

Nightmare conducted the next sentence with the folded book. “Yeah, you know; don’t tell me you didn’t put nothing about me in there.” He opened the cover, brushed over the pages.

Kid stepped around to see.

“Here!” Nightmare thumped the page with bunched fingers, leaving four prints. “That ain’t me you talkin’ about?” The whole page was grey with finger marks, the corners limp.

Kid took the book. The next page was clean. So was the page before. “Yeah…” Kid said. “I guess I had you in mind when I was writing that.”

“You did?” The question’s falling inflection rang with mistrust.

Kid nodded, closed the book and thought how inaccurate a truth he was perpetrating.

“Oh.” Nightmare pulled the book from him. The pages parted automatically at the questioned passage. “Well, reading a fuckin’ book and finding somebody talkin’ about you is some pretty weird shit, you know? I mean I haven’t made up my mind whether I like it…course, you didn’t say anything bad about me.” Once more he nodded, pursed his lips, parted them in a silent shape: “You don’t say anything good, either.” Again he stared at Kid. “That is pretty weird. I just wish I understood shit like this better, you know?” Suddenly, a grin opened around Nightmare’s broken tooth. “That really is me, huh? And you weren’t puttin’ me down or nothing? I told Dragon Lady that was me, and she tried to tell me I was full of shit. You just wait till I tell her.” He folded the book, tapped Kid’s arm with it, and stabbed at his back pocket a couple of times, till it went in. “You are a very strange person. And you do some very strange things.” Nightmare stood up and walked out of the room.

Kid saw Spitt and Glass, who had been standing just inside the kitchen door, going toward the table.

Nightmare mumbled very loudly:

“Too much.”

“You want to come to a party?” Kid called after Nightmare in the hall.

“Here?”

“At Roger Calkins’.”

Nightmare’s head went to the side. “What am I go

“It’s my party. Calkins is giving it for me at his place. Bring Dragon Lady along.”

“Just your friends? In his place?”

“His friends, too.”

“Oh,” Nightmare said. “She ain’t go

“Adam and Baby?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s all right. All of you come on up. It’s in three Sundays, by the paper date. Soon as it gets dark.”

“Calkins’ friends, them people you read about in the paper?”

“Probably.”

“That astronaut guy go

“I guess so.”

“Motherfucker,” Nightmare said. “You know, Baby don’t put no clothes on. I mean he’s fu

“He can come. If he wants to come buck naked, that’s all right with me.”

“Yeah?”

“You guys come anyway you want. Bring your lights. That’s all they probably care about.”

“I don’t got nothing to dress up in,” Nightmare said. “This ain’t a party you have to dress up for?”

“I’m coming like this.”

“You know I’m go

“Three Sundays,” Kid said.

“Maybe we all come over here first?” Nightmare offered.

“Okay. I’ll see you then, if I don’t before.”

From the nail hung the framed photograph with the broken cover glass. Father, Mother, the two brothers and the sister gazed reprovingly in their dated dress. With black marker, on the glass, someone had drawn, across the boy’s and the woman’s mouth, outsized mustaches.

“Hey, there, pops!” Nightmare saluted the bearded gentleman in the photo. “Kid, I’m go

Nightmare opened the door.

Their shadows spilled the steps into night.

“So long.” Nightmare trampled his own down to the sidewalk, waved, and stalked away.

Kid looked back down the hall. All three light bulbs were working, as well as the one in the bathroom. I guess, he thought, I picked a good nest. The films of his thought hanging beyond words curled and withered, made all the motions of the thi

Spitt stepped out of the living room. “We go

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

Behind Kid, the closing door clicked.

“He could’a stayed,” Spitt said. “We got plenty of food for tonight—”

Kid wandered down the hall.

I am a parasite. I have never made a home. Even here, I have not instructed a home to be made. In my whole stay, though I ca

He wondered what kind of party Calkins expected.

Breath bucked from his nose; that was laughter.

On the service porch, Kid looked down into the yard (firelight on the ceiling beams), grabbed the sill of the window, reared back, vaulted: “Whooop-peee!”

Others laughed.

“Jesus Christ,” Raven said. “You’ll break your fuckin’ neck!”

Kid staggered, agonized.

Three hands came to steady him.

And three voices:

“Man, that must be fifteen feet!”

“It ain’t fifteen feet—ten? Twelve? Here, Kid, have a drink. You know there’s a God-damn liquor store just around the corner and ain’t nobody even broken in the window?”

“It’s broken now. Shit. We’re go

Kid took another step, gri

“You all right, Kid?” That was one of the black girls with bare breasts joggling jingling links. “Man, you scared me good when you come leaping out like that!”

Kid took another breath and gri

The Ripper, with a can opener, kneeled over a big, odd-shaped can. “One of them ca

The fire crackled on the bottom of a kettle hung on a pipe propped on cinder blocks. “The gas isn’t working in the stove?”

“Yeah,” De

The first bubble on the…soup? stew? grey at the kettle edge, shook its reflection of the porch window frame, and burst. Another bubble grew.

Kid took his weight off his throbbing leg. Better. He flexed, feeling the tender machinery of knee and ankle jarred from place. It was his booted leg. Perhaps the soft sole had hit a rock?

“Don’t throw your God-damn bottle in the yard, man. Don’t you know about pollution? We gotta live here.”

“You shut up, or I’ll pollute you!” a short-haired white woman said.

“Throw your fuckin’ bottle over in the next yard, will you?”

“Okay, okay…”

Light snarled in the loops of chain, laid out dull splashes on dark leather, lit the trough beneath a black lip, put wires of light in greasy brass hair, glistened on the puffed rim of a lashless eye, sank in the graphite nap bushing an ovoid skull.

The Ripper laughed and bent and wiped at his mouth with his wrist. The orchid, from the chain at his neck, spun bright petals.

“Here…!” A bottle neck hit Kid’s mouth, clicked his teeth, hurting his gum.