Dhalgren

“You have a very fu

“Where did you park them?”

“With the commune, mostly.”

I lay back down. “They would have been better off here.”

“Mmm,” she agreed. “Rose went with a woman who’s been keeping three girls for a couple of weeks. Everybody was pretty nice about it.” Her fingers moved. “But you should have kept them.”

I rolled over on my back.

Her hand dragged around my stomach.

“I didn’t want them.”

“Maybe somebody else around here in the nest would have. Everybody liked them…I wanted them.”

“You don’t live here,” I said. “Except five days out of a week. And you’ve got them: in school.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Five days out of a week. But you have a point.” She took her hand away. “Tell me, how do you do it?”

I asked: “What?”

“How do you—well, I was just thinking about the article.”

“Have you heard people talking about my article?”

“…yours?” That her smile held less mocking than it might was how I knew she mocked.

“About me. You know what I mean.”

“Fu

I thought about that.

She explained: “It isn’t two-sided enough for you. It’s just straight heroics.”

I heard De

“All the good gossip about you usually has that dualistic two-sided thing of being bad and good at once—do you worry about your image?” she asked, suddenly.

“Sure.”

“I’m surprised,” she said. “You never seem to purposely do anything about it.”

“That’s because it never has any relation to what I actually do do. My image is in other peoples’ heads. Keeping it interesting is there [their?] problem. I worry about it in the way I could worry about the reputation of my favorite baseball team. I don’t for one minute think of myself as a player.”

“Maybe so.” She picked up my hand and touched the / thickened thumb-knuckle I’d gnawed / raw/ red pink again. “I mean some day you’re going to wash your hands thoroughly and show up with a perfect manicure. And I’ll leave you forever. You really are schiz, you know?”

Which made me laugh. “I just it [?] the article had mentioned George. I don’t think it’s/I it’s leaving him out is—” I’d started to say fair—“good for my image.” Which made me laugh again.

So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside—and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing, and everybody was pouring in to see what was going on: “Night run!” I told them. “We’re go

At the nest, De

Lanya came to squat behind me, hands on my shoulders, cheek on my cheek. [“]You’re really up/going/ aren’t you? Maybe staying at my place wasn’t such a bad idea?”

“It was a good idea.”

She said, sweetly: “I was fucking pissed, you know, when Madame Brown told me you’d split. But when I got here and everybody said you were writing, it was okay.” She picked up the sheaf of blue paper. “I’m going to steal these away to read. I’ll bring them back in twenty minutes. All right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know I feel better about these than any I’ve written before. Not that that means anything.”

“Good enough to have a second collection?”

I gri

She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them.

Wrote till I was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the left loft where De

I recall/ and want/ this wanting:

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you’ve been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us /have/ come here by way of it.

[Here the correction marks—except for one entry further on—stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had a