Dhalgren

Mrs. Richards sat straight, eyes closed, small knuckles against her stomach, her other hand mashing the couch. The loose flesh between the ligaments over her collar pulsed either with slow heart beats or quick breathing.

“Ma’am…?”

She swallowed, stood up.

They punched again: he could see the chain shake.

“Go away!” Her hands were claws now. “Go away! I said go away!”

Footsteps—three or four pair, one, high heels—chattered to echo.

“Mother…?” June rushed in.

Mrs. Richards opened her eyes, her mouth, and took a breath. “They’ve done that—” turning to him—“twice today. Twice. They only did it once yesterday.”

June kept raising and lowering her knuckle to and from her mouth. Behind her the wall was covered with rough green paper, shelves of plants in brass pots, unwaterably high.

“We’re going to move into another apartment.” Mrs. Richards took another breath and sat. “We wrote to Management. We haven’t got an answer, but we’re going to anyway.”

He put his notebook on the table beside the chair and looked at the door. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know; I don’t care. But they’re about—” she paused to pull herself together—“about to drive me mad. I think they’re…children. They’ve gotten into the apartment downstairs. So many people have left. We’re going to move upstairs.”

June kept looking over her shoulder. Her mother said: “It must be very difficult for you, living in the park.”

He nodded.

“You’ve known Mrs. Brown a while? It’s nice of her to send somebody to help. She goes out, meets people. Myself, I just don’t feel safe walking around the city.”

“Mother hardly ever goes out,” June said, very fast, yet still with the hesitancy he remembered from last night.

“It isn’t safe, and I don’t see any reason for a woman to take that sort of chance. Perhaps if I were someone else I wouldn’t feel that way.” She smiled. Her hair was salted brown, recently and simply done. “How long can you work?”

“As long as you want, I guess.”

“I mean how many hours? Today?”

“The rest of the day, if you want. It’s pretty late now. But I’ll come earlier tomorrow.”

“I’m talking about the light.”

“Light?”

“The lights aren’t working in most of the apartments.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll work till it gets dark. What time is it now?”

“The clocks.” Mrs. Richards turned up her hands. “The clocks have stopped.”

“Your electricity’s out?”

“All except one outlet in the kitchen. For the refrigerator. And that goes off too sometimes.”

“In the hall, there’s a light on. And the elevator’s working. You could run a cheater in.”

Mrs. Richards looked puzzled.

“An extension cord. From the hall light, into your apartment. That would give you some electricity.”

“Oh.” Lines deepened in her forehead. “But then we’d lose the hall light, wouldn’t we? We have to have some light in the hall. That would be just too—”

“You get a double socket. You put a bulb in one and run a cord from the other, under the door.”

“From the hall?”

“Yeah. That’s what I was talking about.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “But the hall lights aren’t on our utilities bill. Management wouldn’t be very happy about that. They’re strict here. You see, the hall lights, they’re on another—” Her hands fluttered—“meter. I don’t think we could do that. If someone saw…” She laughed. “Oh no, this isn’t that kind of place.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you’re moving. So I guess you don’t have to. The apartment you’re going to has electricity?”

“One of the things we have to find out. I don’t know yet.” Her hands went back together in her lap. “Oh, I hope it does!”

“I’ll work till it gets dark, Mrs. Richards.”

“Very good. Oh, yes, that’ll be fine. At least you’ll be able to get started today.”

“Maybe you better ask your husband about the extension cord. I could do it for you. I used to be a super.”

“Were you?”

“Yeah. And I could do it, no trouble.”

“I will…” She pinched at her skirt, noticed, then smoothed it. “But I don’t think Management would go along with that. Oh no, I don’t think so at all.”

The door bell rang twice.

“That’s Bobby!” from June.

“Ask who it is!”

“Who is it?”

Muffled: “Me.”

The chain rattled loose.

“Okay, I got your—”

June interrupted him: “You know they came back and did it again! You didn’t see anybody, in the halls, did you?”

“No…?” Bobby’s questioning was toward the living room. “Who’s he?”

Bobby (fourteen?) was holding a loaf of bread too tightly. Around his left wrist, in a bright bracelet, were half a dozen loops of the optical chain.

“Come in, Bobby. This is a young man Edna Brown sent over.”

“Gee.” Bobby stepped into the living room. Blond as his sister, where her features suggested shyness, his sharper nose, his fuller mouth hinted belligerence. Under his arm was a newspaper. “Are you just living out in the street, huh?”

He nodded.

“You want to use the bathroom or wash or something?”

“Bobby!” from June.

“Maybe,” he said.

Mrs. Richards laughed. “Isn’t it rather difficult for you, and dangerous?”

“You…have to keep your eyes open.” That sounded inane enough.

“We’ll go upstairs and look around.”

“I wa

“We’ll go together, Bobby. All of us.”

“Oh, Bobby,” June said, “come on!”

Bobby stalked through the living room, threw the paper at the coffee table, said, “Okay,” and went into the kitchen. “I have to put the bread away first.”

“Well, put it away,” Mrs. Richards said. “Then we’ll go.”

“I could only find half a loaf,” Bobby called.

“Did you ask for a whole one?” Mrs. Richards called back. “I’m sure if you’d asked them politely for a whole loaf, they would have tried to find one for—”

“There wasn’t anybody in the store.”

“Oh, Bobby—”

“I left the money.”

“But you should have waited for somebody to come back. Suppose someone had seen you going out. They wouldn’t have known you’d—”

“I did wait. Why do you think I was gone so long. Hey, this has got mold in it.”

“Oh, nooo,” Mrs. Richards cried.

“Not a lot,” from the kitchen. “Just a little spot on one corner.”

“Does it go all the way through?”

“It’s on the second slice. And the third—”

“Oh stop tearing in it!” Mrs. Richards exclaimed, punched the cushion, stood, and followed her son into the kitchen. “Let me see.”

Perhaps it was discomforting lucidity centered in the recapitulation: he said to June: “Last night, did you ever find—?”

Cellophane rattled from the kitchen.

By the door frame, June’s eyes widened in recognition—finally. Her forefinger brushed her lips awkwardly for silence, brushed, and brushed again, till it wiped all meaning from the gesture.

She blinked.

The cellophane rattled.

Bobby came out, sat in front of the coffee table, and pulled the paper onto his lap. When he saw his sister, he cocked his head, frowning, then looked back at the paper, while June’s hand worked down the front of her sweater to her lap.

“It’s through,” a

Mrs. Richards put a fist against her hip.

Bobby did not look up.

“What is it talking about today?” in a gentler tone. The fist dropped.

Bobby read on.

He said, “That whole business last night, with the moons.”

“What?”

June offered, “I…I told you, Mother. Last night, when I went out—”

“Oh, yes. And I told you, June, I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. We’d better go upstairs. Bobby?” who only grunted.