Dhalgren

What were the dozen people standing around thinking?

What was I thinking?

I grabbed the barrel with one hand and hammered the heel of the other against the stock so hard I thought my wrist had green-sticked. Thinking (all part of the first feeling of displaced familiarity): I’ve done this before…No…I’ve never done this before, but if I’m ever going to, I’ve got to do it now! And if I didn’t get shot in the chest, it was because the guy was too scared or just not used to killing people. For which I’m very glad. I twisted, with my arm on fire, and watched his face go from surprise to pain as his fingers wound in the trigger guard.

The gun cracked! I thought the explosion had happened in my mouth. But the barrel was pointing over my right shoulder. (If you’d asked me then, I would have said I felt the bullet tip my ear—but that’s impossible, I guess.)

The gun dropped/fell/slipped(?) from him; I swung it away, swung it back and wopped it against his hip. He staggered, grunting. He started to come at me, but Lady of Spain grabbed him; then Cathedral.

I hit him again in the stomach with the butt of the gun.

Afterward, John kept saying: “Kid, you’re crazy, man! Man, you’re crazy, Kid!” in a paroxysm of gleeful hysteria, while Cathedral et the five other al kept their shoulders near mine. My thoughts were carbonated (Yes, I shouted after the guy, when he got up and limped away, “Get the fuck out of here and get your own food!” because it was the easiest thing to say that would give what I did a reason; but while everyone was standing there yakking about how tough it was getting hit up for food all the time, and maybe they wouldn’t come back for a while and leave them alone, I kept thinking I should just take the carton of food with me [with the stash under the house we didn’t need it] because we didn’t need it.) but the detritus was: Take it; because that was the only way to make them understand why my reason for doing it was.

I forgot it—the carton.

I was halfway back to the nest with Cathedral and the others going on loudly about how cool the whole thing was when I remembered three times (and forgot) what I’d decided to do. I told them about it, which took a lot of energy to start. But they didn’t understand (“Yeah! Yeah, that’s what we should have done!” from Tarzan; and from Lady of Spain: “That would’ve been all right. They wouldn’t of minded.”) and kept yelling.

I’m not a poet.

I’m not a hero.

But sometimes I think these people will distort reality in any way to make me one. And sometimes I think reality will distort me any way to make me appear one—but that’s insanity, isn’t it? And I don’t want to be crazy again.

I don’t.

“I should have taken their fucking carton.”

“Yeah,” Lady of Spain said. “Yeah. That’s what we should have done.”

Tarzan said: “Yeah. That would have been all right. They wouldn’t have minded.”

“You’re too much,” Priest said again, and Cathedral laughed and shook my shoulder.

They kept it up all the way into the nest. Tarzan and Priest came in with me. Cathedral, Lady of Spain, and Angel got stopped outside where they began to tell the story. Well, I guess that was all right. There were enough people around drunk—a bunch of nonmembers who were apparently friends of Devastation or something, I didn’t care—to absorb it.

I was going down the hall when De

I thought he was going to say something about what happened in the park. “Hey what?”

He just blinked.

So I started down the hall again.

He followed and said, “Lanya’s in the room, in the loft but—” I looked like I was about to go in—“I think she’s busy.”

So I stopped.

De

“What’s she doing?”

“Balling.”

“Here?” I said, not that loudly. Beside being surprised, I remember I thought it was not very cool for someone as down as she was on the gang-bang bit (but basically pretty together when it came to keeping her thing in front of assaulting-type male personalities) to be making it with one of the guys from the nest in my loft.

Somebody was coming up the hall from the john.

“Come on,” I said to De

“Some guy I picked up downtown.”

I was surprised. “—you picked up?” I hadn’t expected to be relieved, though. “You balled him too?”

“Naw. Naw, it was her idea.”

“This sounds very familiar,” I said. “What do you mean, her idea?”

“She asked me to go out and find somebody who wanted to fuck her for money…for five dollars.”

“Whose five dollars?” I asked. “His or hers?”

Tarzan and D-t came up the steps and through the porch door, Tarzan to listen, D-t to wait for Tarzan to finish listening.

“It’s hers now.” De

“We didn’t talk about hustling a lot.”

“Didn’t stop her from listening. She told me she was curious. She said she wanted to try it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure.” I cuffed his shoulder. “I just want to know why you’re not in there doing your thing.”

“Shit.” De

“Jesus Christ.” Tarzan leaned against the sill of the screenless window frame. “You let your old lady…?” and stopped; probably because of the way I looked at him.

I said: “Let her what?”

“You know, mess around with…well…you know.”

I took the orchid from the chain around my neck, I raised my hand and slipped it into the harness, and the sky darkened outside the windows, the sky roared outside the window screens, and I snapped the collar on my wrist, and the light split in two, each arm growing, regged-rimmed, with magnesium bright edges, arching the sky, and I swung my hand up at Tarzan’s chest.

“Tarzan,” I said, “if my old lady wants to fuck a sheep with a dildo strapped to her nose, that is largely her concern, very secondarily mine, and not yours at all. She can fuck anything she wants—with the possible exception of you. That, I think, would turn my stomach. Yes, that, I think, I would not be able to take. I’m going to kill you.” On my hand—it swung up at Tarzan’s chest—was the orchid. “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to play tic-tac-toe on your face, and them I’m—”

“Hey…” Tarzan whispered, “you’re crazy…!” looking very scared, looking at De

“Yeah?” I nodded. “You didn’t know I was crazy?”

I held the clutch of blade-points right in front of his left tit. While everybody held their breath, I thought: It would be easier here than any place else. Then I said: “Aw, shit! Run, motherfucker!”

Tarzan looked confused.

I dropped my hand. “I want to see you run! And that’s the last I want to see of you till after the sun comes up tomorrow. Otherwise, I will beat the shit out of you, carry your broken, bleeding, and unconscious body back to your mother’s and father’s door sill, apartment 19-A, and leave you there!”

“They don’t live in…” Then his mind clicked back to where he was; he sighed—I guess it was a sigh—and lunged for the door. He collided with a pigeon-chested man in the bluest shirt I’ve ever seen (“Hey, watch it! You okay…?”) and fled down the hall.