Dhalgren

He was walking away.

I made it around the corner, went into a doorway to take off the orchid and put the three bills in my pocket. Then I stooped down and rolled up my cuff to look at my leg. It was just the tiniest scratch, down the side of my calf and back toward my ankle, like a swipe past a nail or a broken board or a

out on the front steps, met Dragon Lady: Denim vest laced tight, arms folded (making the laces above them look a little loose), looking pensive.

Haven’t seen her in a while.

Back now.

What’s she been doing?

Nothing.

Where’s she been?

Around.

I put my arm around her but she obviously didn’t feel like being mauled. So I dropped it and just walked with her.

As we circled the house, she relaxed a little, dark arms still folded.

Baby and Adam with you?

Yeah, they’ll be here.

I have to keep mentioning this timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time’s passage registers, so that instants, seconds, minutes are painfully real; but hours—much less days and weeks—are left-over noises from a dead tongue.

Reached the yard (telling her, “It’s good too see you back,” and she smiled her stained-tooth smile) and delivered her up to the apes and Tarzan who were goofing around there. The atmosphere cedes us a day featureless as night. I didn’t know what time it was; the noise and raillery surrounded her as she went to sit under the tree, fists between her knees, with a troubled look that did not stay on anything. Wondering how (late? early?) it was, I decided I would fix the sink in the service porch (because I’d gone into the cabinet under the kitchen sink for something else and seen some tools; again, topology preordinates) and after I’d turned off the water and wrenched off the first nut, I decided I’d take the whole thing apart and then see if I felt like putting it back together.

I took the cap off the bottom of the elbow drain and lots of hair and purple gunk fludged out on the floor. Took the taps off. Should have done that before I took the cap off, because there was a little surge of rusty water out of each—that went down the drain and onto the floor. Then I unscrewed the collars from inside the taps.

I’ve lost a name. So? If the inhabitants of this city have one thing in common, it is that such accidents don’t interest them; that is neither lauded here as freedom nor wailed as injury; it is taken as a fact of landscape, not personality.

D-t came out, squatted, and watched a while, sometimes handed me tools; finally asked, whimsically, “What the fuck are you doing?” and helped me wobble the sink from the wall (standing suddenly when it almost fell) on its enameled claw and ball.

“I’m putting the sink back together,” I told him because I’d just decided to.

D-t grunted and shoved at the bowl-back. The forejoints of his thumbs are both crooked; which I’d never noticed before.

There was some string on the windowsill, and I brought in a can of putty from the kitchen. But when I’d pried up the lid with the screwdriver, the surface was cracked like Arizona. And I didn’t know where any oil was. D-t came back with a bottle of Wesson, and I couldn’t think of any reason why not. D-t settled back to watch.

“Now we could of got a place without no leaky sink,” D-t said. “But then I guess there wouldn’t be nothing to do.”

I laughed as much as I could holding the cold-water pipe up while trying to screw the fitting back down over it.

I asked him something or other.

Don’t recall his exact answer, but somewhere in it, he said; “…like when I first got here, I used to walk along the street and know I could break into just about any house I wanted, and I was just scared to death…”

We talked about that. I remembered my first walks in the streets. (D-t said: “But I broke in, anyway.”) While we talked I recall thinking: It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of then. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow, there is no way to conclude; but here, conclusion itself is superfluous. I said something to D-t about: “What this place needs is a good wind, or a lightning storm. To clean it out. Or thunder.”

“Oh, man,” D-t said. “Oh, man—No! No, I don’t think I could take that. Not here,” and chuckled (like, I suspect, someone under sentence). We really got into some talk. In that quiet way where you’re into the feeling, if not the information. Once he asked me how long I thought I could keep it up, here, and I said: “I don’t know. How long can you?” and he laughed too. I was wrapping string around the joint and the fastening on the other end of the cold-water pipe when someone in the doorway said: “Hi, Kid.”

Reading over my journal, I find it difficult to decide even which incidents occurred first. I have hysterical moments when I think finding that out is my only possible hope/salvation. Also wonder at some of the things I have not written down: the day with Lanya when she took me to the city museum and we spent from before dawn to after dark sitting around in the reconstructed 18th century rooms (“We could live here, like Calkins!” and she whispered, smiling, “No…” and then we talked about a run here: and again she said, “No…” this time not smiling. And I won’t. But all the talking we did there, and wandering, growing hungrier and hungrier in the pearl light through the ceiling panes because we could not bear to leave), should make this the longest and most detailed incident in this journal because it was where she showed me thing after thing and told me about them, to make them mean something for me; she became a real person, by what she knew and what she did, more than anyway she ever could by what was done to her, done to her, done: which was so easily the way I’ve always wanted to define her. Wanting her to take De

We laughed.

So I hung seventeen paintings upside down—“Come on! Stop…” she insisted, but I did anyway. Because, I explained, anyone who comes along will notice them like this, frown, maybe turn them right-side up again. And will end up looking at them a little longer. “I’m only doing it for the ones I like.”

“Oh,” she said, dubiously. “Well, okay.”

But it is more memorable unfixed. And to me, that’s important. (Only while I’m actually writing, for an instant it is actually more vivid…) So I’ll stop here, tired.

Except to tell about that fu