Dhalgren

The city is a map of violences anticipated. The armed dwellers in the Emboriky, the blacks surrounding them, the hiss from a turned tap that has finally stopped trickling, the time it takes a group who go out to come back with bags of ca

Lady of Spain and I reached the nest, still laughing, astounded we were alive.

In the back yard, Lanya told me she had taken De

We can survive so much.

And crawling between them (more comfortable, I guess, than the familiar position when all is said and done) went to sleep again till Lady of Spain and Risa, laughing out in the hall, woke us up; I hoped they would come in. But they didn’t.

I looked up.

Frank stood there looking like he didn’t know whether or not to put his hands in his pockets.

“Hello,” I said and went back to the fixture.

“How’re you doing?”

I grunted.

“Glad I found you. Nobody seemed to know where you were. I wanted to know if I could talk to you about something.”

I was mad at him for interrupting; also because, ignoring him, I had to sort of ignore D-t. “What do you want?”

The door frame creaked; Frank shifted on the jamb.

Then the floorboards; D-t shifted his squat.

“Well,” Frank said, settling with the idea of talking to me while I wasn’t looking at him, “I was wondering—I mean: How could someone like me go about joining up with you guys?”

I looked around at him to catch D-t already looking, and looking away.

“I mean,” Frank went on, “is there some initiation, or something? Does somebody have to bring you in; or do you guys just get together and take a vote?”

“What do you want to know for?” I asked. “Aren’t you happy over at the commune? Or is this just research for an article you’re pla

“An article on how to get into the scorpions?” Frank laughed. “No. I just want to know because…well, things are getting a little tight in the park.” He glanced back out in the hall. “We got some real fu

“An oversight,” I said.

“Shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

I turned back under the sink, looked for something to do but couldn’t really find anything. So I kept looking.

“You guys seem to have a real thing going here. I’m not happy with what’s going on around me where I am. I want to know where I get my transfer, where I can buy a ticket—”

“Oh, man,” I said. “I can’t talk to you about shit like that now. I’m busy.”

“Sure Kid,” came out real quick, and he stopped leaning on the door frame. “Maybe later. I’ll just hang around…till you have some time.”

D-t handed me the string. “Hey, thanks,” I told D-t, “but I don’t think I should pack that grease trap.” So I didn’t, but it was pretty much all right anyway.

Glanced back.

Frank was gone.

So we scrubbed out the grease-streaked bowl, more or less quiet, questioning such idiot work and finding the value—a chance to do something with D-t—disappeared, defined. Well, the sink wasn’t dripping.

Something (I heard it) was happening in front of the house. I listened, surprised (looked at D-t look up at me), to somebody get up in the front room, run out of the front door—

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Come on.” We went into the hall together. D-t got ahead; I pushed by him out the front door; stopped on the fourth step.

“Jesus Christ!” Frank shouted. “Hey, watch it—!”

“You want a chain, huh?” Copperhead, crouched, wound the links once more around his fist, pulled back, and swung again. “I’m go

“God damn, man! Look, all I did was…!”

Some in the loose circle glanced up at me; so did Frank, then jumped back as Copperhead swung: “Hey—!”

Copperhead, concentrated as a pool player, raised his fist again.

“ALL RIGHT!” and I walked down the steps. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” which got everybody’s attention except Copperhead’s. “COPPERHEAD—! Cut It Out!” thinking: This is going to be the time when I have to tangle with him. Thinking also: It’s just not worth it. But he hooked around and I snatched the end of his chain and yanked. He let go and snapped his fingers back. It must have hurt his hand because it sure as hell hurt mine.

I went up to Frank (who looked as scared of me as he was of Copperhead) and said, “What is this, huh? All right, what are you doing in this—”

“I didn’t—” He started at some movement behind me.

I didn’t turn. “I think you better get out of here.” It must have been Copperhead in some feint. “Go on. Go on, now! Get going.”

He started to say, “Um…” and I realized how used I was to people doing what I told them when they weren’t doing anything else.

“Look,” I said, “though you are making it harder and harder for me to remember it, so far, you have been my most accurate critic; therefore you deserve some consideration. I’m giving you that consideration now: Scoot!”

Frank turned, went gingerly between Fireball and Lady of Spain, who broke the circle for him.

California came back this evening. Must have seen him three/five times before I noticed—we were on the back steps—he’d hung both a gold six-pointed star (Hebrew letters on it) and a black swastika (edged in silver) on his light-shield chain. Jack the Ripper, carrying on about something, started to call California “…a crazy Jew-bastard…” only he saw the star, the bent cross. I could hear the shape the unspoke epithet carved in the silence. Then the Ripper went on about something else. California, since he went away, has changed: his thin hands are tenser; his bony shoulders sit more forward; his blue eyes, between strings of his long hair, are wider and angrier. (How odd symbols are!) I think the change is like what I went through when I got my chain of prisms, mirrors, lenses…The Ripper’s sensitivity surprised me (he did call California a Jew-bastard five minutes later) but then, the derogatory terms we hurl around here with such seeming freedom are actually counters in a complicated game, and the point was the Ripper’s. Penalties for misplay can grow huge—recall the beating Dollar took at Calkins’. The rewards? I suspect, in this landscape, they are just as huge. Am I just being pompous, or is the real and necessary information these epithets generate (making them a real and necessary part of Bellona’s own language) the reminder that it is often just when we are most aware of the freedom of the field in which we move that our actions become most culture-bound?

I turned to Copperhead: “You must be really down on me, man. Because I’m always coming along to mess up your fun, right?”