Dhalgren

“Good-bye,” Kidd said, at the door, and went. (The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said “good-bye.” Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave.) In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn’t even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not.

5

He carried the nest tables into 19-A.

Mrs. Richards stood in the middle of the room.

“Um,” he said, “I thought I’d bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the…” then went and put them by the balcony door.

“Your clothes,” she said. “I was going to give you some of my…son’s clothes.”

“Oh. I got these…” They were all black, too.

Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

“Is June all right?”

She kept nodding.

“I thought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you’d already gone up.”

The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her face.

“I’ll go bring the rest of the stuff up, ma’am.”

He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs. Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he’d considered Bobby’s toys, but decided he’d better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby’s room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.

Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip…

He paused; he re-wrote:

Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped…

Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the ed’s and reorder three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable limit. He took a breath, and a clause from the first three lines, to close the passage; and, writing it, saw only one word in it was necessary, so crossed out the others.

Mrs. Richards came into the room, circled it, searching, saw him: “You’re writing. I didn’t mean to disturb your…writing.”

“Oh, no.” He closed the book. “I’m finished.” He was tired. But he was finished.

“I thought perhaps you were writing some sort of…elegy. For…” and dropped her head.

“Oh. No…” he said, and decided “Elegy” was the title. “Look, you’ve got everything up here. Maybe I should just go on and leave.”

“No.” Mrs. Richards’ hand left her neck to reach for him. “Oh, you mustn’t go! I mean you haven’t talked to Arthur about your pay, have you?”

“Well, okay.” He sat back.

Mrs. Richards, all exhausted nervousness, sat across the coffee table from him.

He asked: “Where’s June?”

“She’s in her…” ended by vague gesture. She said, “It must be awful for you.”

“It’s worse for you.” He was thinking: Her son’s clothes? She couldn’t have meant Bobby, we weren’t anywhere near the same size. Edward’s? “Mrs. Richards, I can’t even say how sorry I—”

She nodded again, chin striking her knuckles. “Oh, yes. You don’t have to. I understand. You went down there and brought him—” in the pause he thought she was going to cry—“back. How can I say thank you for that? You went down there. I saw you when you brought him up. How can I say—”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Richards. Really.” He wanted to ask her about the structure of light that had been in the elevator car with him; and could think of no way. Momentarily he wondered, maybe she hadn’t seen it. But moved his jaws on one another to dispel those implications. “I don’t have to wait here, for Mr. Richards. I can catch him another time. You might want to be alone with him when…”

The disorganized movements of her face stopped. “Oh no, I want someone here! Please stay, stay for me! That would be—” she began to look around in the seat of her chair—“the kindest thing. You could do.”

“All right.”

What she looked for, she did not find. “I want somebody with me. I need somebody.” She stood. “With me here.” Again, she circled the room. “It’s so strange, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll say. I wish I could phone him; on the phone it would be so much easier. But I just have to wait. He’ll come in the door. And I’ll say, Arthur, this afternoon, June backed Bobby into the elevator shaft and he fell down seventeen flights and killed himself…” She looked into the kitchen, crossed the room, looked down the hall.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t feel better if I went?” He wanted to go, could not conceive her wanting him to remain, even though she waved her hand at him, even though she said:

“Please. You have to stay.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will.”

She came back to her chair. “It doesn’t feel like we live here. The walls are blue. Before they were green. But all our furniture, it’s all in the proper place.”

“The rugs aren’t down yet,” he suggested. Well, it filled the silence.

“Oh, no. No, I don’t think it’s the rugs. It’s the feeling. It’s the feeling of trying to make a home. A home for my husband and my…” Then she pressed her lips together and dropped her head.

“Look, Mrs. Richards, why don’t you go in and lie down or something till Mr. Richards gets back? I’ll put the rugs down,” and thought abruptly: That’s what she wanted me to say; so I’ll have to tell him!

Who told the damn kids to take the rugs up anyway? And couldn’t remember whether it was him or her.

But she shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep now. No. When Arthur comes back…no.” The last was calm. She put—pushed her hands into her lap. Bobby’s pile of books still sat in the corner…Kidd wished he had put them away.

She stood.

She walked the room once more.

Her motions began definitively but lost focus in a glance—first out the balcony doors, next into the dining room, now toward the hall.

She stopped beside her chair.

“Arthur,” she said, followed by what sounded more like a comma of address than of apposition, “he’s outside.”

“Ma’am?”

“Arthur is outside, in that.” She sat. “He goes out every day. I can watch him from the window turn down Forty-Fourth there and disappear. Into the smoke. Like that.” Outside the balcony door, buildings were blurred. “We’ve moved.” She watched the fog for the length of five breaths. “This building, it’s like a chessboard. Now we occupy a different square. We had to move. We had to. Our position before was terrible.” Smoke pulled from the window, uncovering more smoke—“But I didn’t know the move would cost so much.”—and more. “I am not prepared for this. I’m really not. Arthur goes out there, every day, and works in Systems. Maitland Systems Engineering. Then he comes home.” She leaned forward. “Do you know, I don’t believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don’t believe he goes anywhere. I don’t believe there’s anyplace to go.” She sat back. “I don’t think I believe there ever was. I’m very much in love with that man. And I’m very much in awe of him. It frightens me how much I don’t understand him. I often suspect that he isn’t happy, that going out to work everyday in that—” she shook her head slightly—“that it doesn’t give him anything real, the i