Dhalgren

But the laugh came from me. William…? I shouted: “I know who you are!” and doubled with hysteria. “I know…!”

“Hey, Kid? Come on now…” Lanya—she and De

“Come on, man,” De

“That’s right,” Lanya said. “This way…”

I got dizzy and nearly fell. Fire and branches wheeled on a black sky. I came up against bark and turned my back to it:

“But I know what his name is! It has to be. He couldn’t be anybody else!” I kept telling them, then breaking off into a giggle which, when I let it go, twisted my face in a grin so huge my jaw muscles hurt and I had to rub them with the heels of my palms. “That’s got to be who he is! You understand why, don’t you? I mean you do understand?”

They didn’t.

But, for a while, I did.

And, bursting with my new knowledge, I danced.

I’ve never had more fun.

Then I came back and sat with them.

De

Bill, arms folded across his black sweater, among the other watchers, watched.

I sat and panted and smiled (sweat dribbling the small of my back) with contentment over the absolute fact of his revealed identity, till even that, as all absolutes must, began its dissolve.

“What—?” De

Lanya glanced at me, shifted her shoulder against mine.

But I sat back again, silent, marveling the dissolve’s completion, both elated and numbed by the jarring claps that measured and metronomed each differential in the change—till I had no more certainty of Bill’s last name than I had of my own. With only the memory of knowledge, and bewilderment at whatever mechanic had, for minutes, made that knowledge as certain to me as my own existence, I sat, trying to sort that mechanism’s failure, which had let it slip away.

Dragon Lady, with her boot, shoved in another part of the furnace’s cinderblock wall, then turned to add her raucous contention to the argument behind her.

“You know,” Lanya said, as somebody flung a burning brand that landed on the edge of the dish, flame end on the grass, “this place isn’t going to be here tomorrow.”

“That’s all right,” De

Lanya pushed back against me harder, drew up her knees to hug.

The dance was all around us. The battered grass was tangled with chains, plain and jeweled. Most of the scorpions blazed up, incendiary—

up to bring the brandy, that afternoon, to Tak’s place—I apologized about opening one of the bottles—he really looked surprised.

He came out of the shed doorway onto the roof, scratching his chest and his chin and still half asleep. But saying he was glad to see us.

De

So they came back to the shack.

De

Thought he meant George, but it was the interview with me from Calkins’ party in the Times. Tak had stapled it to the wall just inside the door. The edges were yellow.

“I keep that there,” Tak said, “for inspiration. I sort of like it. Glad to see, after all this, the papers says you’re having another book.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Thanks.” I really didn’t want to talk about it. It got across, because he was looking at me a little sideways. But Tak is good at picking up on things like that.

Around us, the sky was close as crumpled lead. The first stanchion of the bridge was just visible through it, like a single wing of some dim bird that might, in a moment, fly anywhere.

Tak pulled the cork out of the open bottle. “Come on. Let’s have a drink.” He squatted, his back against the shack wall. We sat next to him. De

“Tak,” I said, “could you tell me something?” I asked him about the bubbles around the inside of the glasses. “I thought it might have something to do with the water pressure for the city. Maybe it’s going down and that causes the ring to start higher?”

“I think,” Tak said to the green-glass neck, “it has more to do with who washes your dishes. You’re washing out a glass, see, and you run your finger around the inside to get off the crud, and it leaves this thin coating. But your finger doesn’t reach the bottom. Later you put water in the glass, and the air comes out of solution to form bubbles. But the bubbles need something to nucleate on. So the imperfections in the glass and the crud left above the grease line are easier to nucleate on; so you get this definite cutoff—”

“You mean,” I said, “the dishwasher sticks his finger less and less far down the glass every day?”

Tak laughed and nodded “Aren’t you glad you know some one with some idea of technology? Rising water tables, lowering pressure. You could get paranoid over stuff like that if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Yeah,” and I took the bottle and drank.

here any longer.

Curiosity took me, alone.

A bed had been overturned against the door but fell back clattering as soon as I pushed it in. They’d put bars up on the ground floor windows, but the panes were mostly smashed, and, in the one remaining, I found three of those tiny, multi-haloed holes you get from bullets. There were a couple of sleeping bags still around. Some nice stuff was up on the walls from where they had the place decorated: and a big, almost life-size lion wedged together out of scrap car-parts and junked iron. An acetylene bomb and nozzle leaned in the corner. (“I wonder what happened to the woman who was making that. She was Eurasian,” Lanya said when I told her about it, later. “She was a pretty incredible person; I mean even besides building that thing.”) The walls of two rooms were charred black. I saw a place where a poster had been burned away. And another place, where a quarter of one was left: George in the night wilderness. Upstairs I guess most of the rooms had never had doors. It was a wreck. Great pieces of plaster had been tugged off the walls. Once I heard what I thought was moaning, but when I rushed into the smashed up room—tools were scattered all over the floor, screwdrivers, nails, pliers, wrenches—it wasn’t a creaking shutter or anything. I don’t know what it was. Bolted to the wall was a plank on which they had carved their initials, names, phrases, some written in fancy combinations of colored magic markers, others scrawled in plank pen-tel. Near the bottom, cut clearly with some small blade: June R. Lanya says she’ll have to find some abandoned drugstore or someplace to get birth control pills now, in the next three months. De