Dhalgren

“Shit. I didn’t wa

Kid nodded. “You catch Baby when he came in?”

“No,” the Ripper drawled with a wildly interrogative cadence.

“You said you wanted to see what the reaction was. I missed it. I was wondering if you caught it.”

“God damn!” The Ripper snapped his fingers. “You know I wasn’t even looking?”

“There he is.”

“Where?”

Kid nodded toward the terrace.

The Ripper stuck his hands in the back of his pants. “What they talkin’ about?”

Kid shrugged.

“Hey, man!” The Ripper’s hands came loose again. “I gotta go down and hear this.” He gri

At the four-foot terrace wall, the Ripper straight-armed up, scrambled over—half a dozen looked—and jumped. A bopping lope took him to the bar. The white bartender gave him two drinks. He came to the corner, thrust one glass at Baby and said loud enough for Kid to hear: “Now I know you want a drink, Baby, ’cause you go

Several people laughed.

Baby took the drink in both hands—he had put his plate down on the wall—and looked as though he were about to dive into it. But Bill and the two women merely made room, and continued.

Seconds later, the Ripper, all weight on one leg, heavy lower lip sucked in and long head quizzically cocked, stood rapt, nodding in unison with Baby.

Curious at their low converse, Kid walked away from it into March.

Only one light worked here, anchored high and harsh on an elm. Captain Kamp stood silhouetted at the vertex of his shadow. “Hello, now, I was just coming back this way…you enjoying yourself?” Backlight made him ominous; his voice was cheerful. “I was just over there taking a—” (Kid expected him to say “leak”)—“look in the August gardens. There’re no lights in there, so I guess people are staying clear. But you can see down into the city. A few street lights are still on. I’m not too good at this ersatz host business. And this party takes some hosting.” Kamp stepped up. Kid turned to walk with him. “Now I sure wish Roger would get here.”

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s missed him too much.”

“I have. I’m just not used to all this…well, sort of thing. I mean, trying to be in charge of it.”

“I guess I’d like to meet him.”

“Sure. Of course you would.” Kamp nodded as they came nearer the house. “I mean he’s giving this party for you, for your book. You’d think he’d…but now I’m pretty sure he’ll get here. You don’t worry now.”

“I’m not and don’t mean to start.”

“You know I was thinking—” they walked up the stone steps—“about some of the things we were talking about when I first met you.”

“That was a strange evening. But it came after a strange day.”

“Sure did. Have you seen Roger’s observatory?” Kamp interrupted himself. “Perhaps you’d like to go up and see it.”

Kid was curious at the transition rather than the suggestion. “Okay.”

Coming down the terrace, Lady of Spain, Spider, Angel, Raven and Tarzan, circled gangling D-t:

“D-t, man, you gotta see this!”

“I ain’t never seen no garden like this before. All them flowers—”

“—and a big fountain that works and all.”

“Come on. We go

“D-t, you ain’t never seen no garden as pretty as this in your whole life!”

“I guess—” Kamp opened the door for Kid—“I’m just not used to it. I mean all these different…kinds of people. Like that boy back there walking around with no clothes on? And everybody going on just like there was nothing wrong.” The large, dark room was lined with books. In candlelight some dozen people sat on the floor or on hassocks. Several looked up from a tape recorder from which organ music flowed. One man (Kid remembered his making some joke in November about the smoke) said, “Kid? Captain? Would you like to join us? We were just listening to some—”

“We’re going to the observatory.” Kamp opened another door.

The organ piece ended; after a slight pause, a long note bent. Then another…They were playing “Diffraction.”

Kid smiled as he walked after Kamp down a hall nearly black. He could hear Lanya’s whistle. At the top of a stairway Kid saw faint light. The carpeting was thick and so warm under his bare foot he wondered if there were heating on.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if Roger was here. But being left in charge of a party for a bunch of people that, frankly, I’d put out of my house…”

Kid was quietly amazed and wondered what Kamp was thinking in the pause.

“…I just don’t know what to do. Do you know what I mean?”

Anything, Kid thought, I say will sound angry and stupid. He said, “Sure,” and followed Kamp up the stairs.

“A few months ago,” Kamp said, “I was in some experiments. They didn’t have anything to do with the moon. In fact I had to get a special release from the Space Program to participate. Some students of a friend of mine at Michigan were ru

He led Kid across a brick floor to a double doorway.

“I was in the overload part. It was all pretty amateurish, actually.”

Kid stepped onto what first seemed a semi-circular balcony.

Faintly, below, a room full of people began to clap in time to the music—

“I guess they’d all been reading too many articles on LSD—”

—and shouted.

“—I took LSD back in the late fifties—more tests, that this psychiatrist friend of mine was ru

The terrace was enclosed in a glass dome. In the center was a six-foot in diameter celestial globe of clear plastic. Light from the garden below struggled in the smoke above, glowing like dilute milk.

“Now I guess you’ve taken LSD and all that stuff.”

“Sure.”

“Well, all they’d been doing was looking at all the pretty pictures everyone had been drawing.” Kamp touched the globe, removed his fingers. Aries passed across Libra. The stars were glittering stones set in the etched constellations. “They had spherical rear-projection rooms, practically as big as this place here. They could cover it with colors and shapes and flashes. They put earphones on me and blasted in beeps and clicks and oscillating frequencies. Anyway, I was supposed to pick out patterns from all this. Later I learned that mine was the control group: We were given no patterns at all. I was told all the ones I had seen I had imposed myself…But after two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was just astounded at how…rich and complicated everything suddenly looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory-overload chamber. Rich…and I suddenly realized what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information-deprivation. It’s the pattern that colors and shapes assume that tell you whether it’s a cow or a car you’re looking at. It’s the very finest alternations in color differentiation over a surface that tell you whether it’s maple or pine, styrene or polyethylene, linen or fla