Dhalgren

That wasn’t buildings on the other side of the street: Trees rose above the park wall, black as shale. Loufer headed toward the entrance.

“Is it safe in there?”

“Looks pretty scary.” Tak nodded. “Probably keep any criminal with a grain of sense at home. Anybody who wasn’t a mugger would be out of his mind to go in there.” He glanced back, gri

Stone lions flanked the entrance.

“It’s fu

“Queers.”

Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. “Yeah.”

The dark wrapped them up and buoyed them along the path.

There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?

“What were you in prison for?”

“Morals charge,” Tak said.

He was steps behind Loufer now. The path, which had begun as concrete, was now dirt. Leaves hit at him. Three times his bare foot came down on rough roots; once his swinging arm scraped lightly against bark.

“Actually,” Tak tossed back into the black between them, “I was acquitted. The situation, I guess. My lawyer figured it was better I stayed in jail without bail for ninety days, like a misdemeanor sentence. Something had got lost in the records. Then, at court, he brought that all out, got the charge changed to public indecency; I’d already served sentence.” Zipper-jinglings suggested a shrug. “Everything considered, it worked out. Look!”

The carbon black of leaves shredded, letting through the ordinary color of urban night.

“Where?” They had stopped among trees and high brush.

“Be quiet! There…”

His wool shushed Tak’s leather. He whispered: “Where do you…?”

Out on the path, sudden, luminous, and artificial, a seven-foot dragon swayed around the corner, followed by an equally tall mantis and a griffin. Like elegant plastics, internally lit and misty, they wobbled forward. When dragon and mantis swayed into each other, they—meshed!

He thought of images, slightly unfocused, on a movie screen, lapping.

“Scorpions…!” Tak whispered.

Tak’s shoulder pushed his.

His hand was on a tree trunk. Twig shadows webbed his forearm, the back of his hand, the bark. The figures neared; the web slid. The figures passed; the web slid off. They were, he realized, as eye-unsettling as pictures on a three-dimensional postcard—with the same striatums hanging, like a screen, just before, or was it just behind them.

The griffin, further back, flickered:

A scrawny youngster, with pimply shoulders, in the middle of a cautious, bow-legged stride—then griffin again. (A memory of spiky yellow hair; hands held out from the freckled, pelvic blade.)

The mantis swung around to look back, went momentarily out:

This one, anyway, was wearing some clothes—a brown, brutal looking youngster; the chains he wore for necklaces growled under his palm, while he absently caressed his left breast. “Come on, Baby! Get your ass in gear!” which came from a mantis again.

“Shit, you think they go

“Aw, sure. They go

Suspended in wonder and confusion, he listened to the conversation of the amazing beasts.

“They better be!” Vanished chains went on growling.

The griffin flickered once more: pocked buttocks and dirty heels disappeared behind blazing scales.

“Hey, Baby, suppose they’re not there yet?”

“Oh, shit! Adam…?”

“Now, Adam, you know they’re go

“Yeah? How do I know? Oh, Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady, you’re too much!”

“Come on. The two of you shut up, huh?”

Swaying together and apart, they rounded another corner.

He couldn’t see his hand at all now, so he let it fall from the trunk. “What…what are they?”

“Told you: scorpions. Sort of a gang. Maybe it’s more than one gang. I don’t really know. You get fond of them after a while, if you know how to stay out of their way. If you can’t…well, you either join, I guess; or get messed up. Least, that’s how I found it.”

“I mean the…the dragons and things?”

“Pretty, huh?”

“What are they?”

“You know what is it a hologram? They’re projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser. It’s not complicated. But it looks impressive. They call them light-shields.”

“Oh.” He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. “I’ve heard of holograms.”

Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.

“Are there more of them around?”

“Maybe.” Tak’s upper face was again masked. “Their light-shields don’t really shield them from anything—other than our prying eyes from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck.” Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. “You forget people don’t know about scorpions. About Calkins. They’re famous here. Bellona’s a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they’ve forgotten we’re here.”

“No. They haven’t forgotten.” Though he couldn’t see Tak’s eyes, he knew they had narrowed.

“So they send in people who don’t know their own name. Like you?”

He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.

Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. “Oh, yeah! You’re quite a kid.” Laughter trailed on.

“Where we going now?”

But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.

From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanics. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

4

“Tak!” she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. “Who’d you bring?” She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.

A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.

The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak’s cuff, close enough now to have a face again. “We haven’t seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for di

“I wasn’t worried.” A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. “Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is.” Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. “You’re closer to breakfast time than you are to di