Dhalgren

Mrs. Richards beamed: “I have one. Just a moment.” She turned and hurried out.

Kidd’s a

“Here we are!” Mrs. Richards cried, returning; she slipped the blue-edged paper before him.

“Oh,” Kidd said. “I forgot you had this one.”

“Go on, read it.”

“Better be good,” said blond and tweedy, affably enough. “Otherwise Ro

“I don’t go out on the streets,” Ro

A man who wasn’t Mr. Richards said, “I don’t know very much about poetry.”

“Stand up, Kidd,” Mr. Richards said, waving a creamy spoon. “So we can hear you.”

Kidd stood and said as levelly as possible, “Mr. Richards, I just came to see you about getting my money for the work I did,” and waited for reaction.

Mr. Richards moved his shoulders back and smiled.

Somewhere—outside in the hall?—a door closed.

Mrs. Richards, holding the edge of the table and smiling, nodded: “Go on, Kidd.”

Ro

He looked down at Mrs. Richards’ copy of his poem, and drew his tongue back from his teeth for the first word.

In the hall, a man screamed, without words or inflection: footsteps, some dull thuds—the scream changed pitch at each of them.

Kidd started reading. He paused at the third line, wanting very much to laugh, but didn’t look up.

Footsteps: ru

Kidd kept reading till he reached Mrs. Richards’ omitted comma.

Ly

Kidd read the last lines of his poem and looked up.

The crashes had moved from the wall to the door, and fell with timed, deliberate thuds. Within the crash, as though it were an envelope of sound, he could hear the chain rattle, the hinges jiggle, the lock click.

As he looked around the table, the thought passed with oblique idleness: They look like I probably do when somebody’s eyes go red.

Outside, above the shouting, somebody laughed.

Kidd’s own fear, dogged and luminous and familiar enough to be almost unconscious, was fixed somewhere in the hall. Yet he didn’t want to laugh. He still wanted to giggle.

Out there, someone began to run. Others ran after.

A muscle on the back of Kidd’s thigh tensed to the crashing. He smiled, vaguely, confused. The back of his neck was tickly.

Someone’s chair squeaked.

“Oh, for God’s sake, why don’t they—” and, where rhythm predicted the next crash, only her word fell: “—stop!”

Footsteps lightened, tumbled off down steps, retreated behind banged doors.

Kidd sat down, looked at the guests, some of whom looked at him, some of whom looked at each other; the woman in corduroy was looking at her lap; Mrs. Richards was breathing hard. He wondered if anyone liked his poem.

“They do that around here too, huh?” Sam forced, jocularly.

Then a woman Kidd could not really see at the table’s end spilled coffee.

“Oh, I’ll get a rag!” Mrs. Richards screamed, and fled the room.

Three people tried to say nothing in particular at once.

But when Mrs. Richards returned with a black and white, op-art dish-towel, one voice detached itself, a hesitant baritone: “For God’s sakes, can’t we do something about that? I mean, we’ve got to do something!”

Of several feelings, the only sharp one Kidd felt was a

Mr. Richards raised his eyebrows, then pushed back his chair. June, beside him, surprisingly concerned, touched her father’s arm,…restrainingly? protectively? Mr. Richards brushed her hand away and came down the table.

Kidd picked up his orchid and went out into the hall.

The woman in corduroy was saying, “When you can think of something to do, will you please let me know what it is. You’ll have my cooperation one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent, believe me.”

At the door Kidd turned. “We should get this five dollars an hour business settled now, don’t you think, Mr. Richards, because it’ll just—”

Mr. Richards’ slight, taught smile broke. “What are you trying to do, huh?” he demanded in a whisper. “What are you trying to do? I mean five dollars an hour, you must be crazy!”

Mrs. Richards, still holding the dishtowel, drifted up behind her husband’s shoulder, blinking, in perfect imitation of Smokey with Thirteen.

“I mean just what are you trying to do?” Mr. Richards went on. “We don’t have any money to give you, and you better understand that.”

“Huh?” because it seemed absurd.

“Five dollars an hour?” Mr. Richards repeated. “You must be crazy!” His voice was insistent, tense and low. “What does somebody like you need that kind of money for, anyway? It doesn’t cost anything to live in this city—no food bills, no rent. Money doesn’t mean anything here anymore. What are you trying to do…? I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a family. MSE hasn’t had a payroll for months. There hasn’t even been anyone in the damn office! I’ve got to hold on to what I have. I can’t spend that kind of money now, with everything like this. I can’t—”

“Well, isn’t that what you told—?” He was angry. “Oh shit. Look, then why don’t you…” Then he reached around to his pocket.

Mr. Richards’ eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.

But Kidd only dug at his pocket. “Then why don’t you keep this too?” Mr. Richards swayed when the moist, green knot bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.

Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it—ratch!—at two inches.

Mrs. Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.

The astonishment Mr. Richards returned him, as Mrs. Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the doors’ clash.

He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.

In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices.

There was no one in the lobby.

Satisfied?

His a

But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. “Ba-da ba-da ba-da?” he asked. “Ba-da ba-da,” he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers around the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the begi

A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector’s swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.

Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letters, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). “Are you in there?” Lanya asked.