Dhalgren

“Come on. Tell me, Tak.” She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. “Who have you brought John and me this time?” while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.

Tak said: “This is the Kid.”

“Kit?” she asked.

“Kid.”

“K-y-d-d…?”

“-i-d.”

“…d,” she added with a tentative frown. “Oh, Kidd.”

If Tak had an expression you couldn’t see it.

He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.

She reared her shoulders back, blinking. “How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?” To Tak: “Isn’t it amazing how we’re always turning up people like that? You think you’ve met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who’s been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out—”

“That’s how we met Tak,” John said. To Tak: “Isn’t it, Tak?”

Tak said: “He’s new.”

“Oh. Well,” John said, “we’ve got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?”

“Well, we figure—” Mildred’s shoulders came, officially, forward. “We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can’t be at each other’s throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this—” He was sure her gesture, at ‘this,’ included nothing beyond the firelight—“to degenerate into something…well, awful! So we’ve set up I guess you’d call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that’s getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don’t take in everybody. But when we do, we’re very accepting.” There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn’t sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. “You are new? We’re always glad when we get somebody new.”

He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?

Tak said: “Show him around, Milly.”

John said: “Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something,” tapping his newspaper again. “Oh, here. Maybe you want to take a look at this?”

“What? Oh…” You couldn’t worry so much about things like that. Often, though, he had to remind himself. “Thanks.” He took the folded paper.

“All right, Tak.” John, with Tak, turned away. “Now when are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you—”

“Look, John.” Tak put his hand on John’s shoulder as they wandered off. “All you need is the plans, and you can—”

Then they were out of earshot.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.” She was pretty.

“Well, if you are—come, let’s go over here—we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That’s not too far off.”

“You been up all night?” he asked.

“No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early.”

“I have.”

“We do a lot of work here—” she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs—“during the day. We don’t just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It’s pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all.” She smiled.

“I’ve been up; but I’m not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything.” He looked down at her legs.

As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. “Oh, we wouldn’t mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don’t want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand.”

“Yeah, I understand that.” He’d been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.

“Why do you go around wearing an orchid?” she asked. “Of course, with the city in the state it’s in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But…”

“Some people gave it to me.” He turned the rolled newspaper around.

SERIOUS WATER

He let the tabloid fall loose.

SHORTAGE THREATENS

The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. “What the hell is that?”

She looked concerned. “Well, there’s not very many people around who know how to keep things ru

“I mean the 1995?”

“Oh. That’s just Calkins.” On the picnic table sat a carton of ca

“Oh.” He sat beside her. “Do you have tents here? Anything for shelter?” still thinking: 1995?

“Well, we’re pretty outdoors oriented.” She looked around, while he tried to feel the city beyond the leafy, fire-lit grotto. “Of course, Tak—he’s promised to give John some simple blueprints. For cabins. John wants Tak to head the whole project. He feels it would be good for him. You know, Tak is so strange. He feels, somehow, we won’t accept him. At least I think he does. He has this very important image of himself as a loner. He wants to give us the plans—he’s an engineer, you know—and let us carry them out. But the value of something like that isn’t just the house—or shack—that results. It should be a creative, internal thing for the builder. Don’t you think?”

For something to do, he held his teeth together, hard.

“You’re sure you’re not hungry?”

“Oh. No.”

“You’re not tired? You can get in a few hours if you want. Work doesn’t start till after breakfast. I can get you a blanket, if you’d like.”

“No.”

In the firelight, he thought he might count twenty-five years in her firm, clear face. “I’m not hungry. I’m not sleepy. I didn’t even know Tak was bringing me here.”

“It’s a very nice place. It really is. The community of feeling is so warm, if nothing else.” Probably only twenty.

The harmonica player played again.

Someone in an olive-drab cocoon twisted beyond the fire.

Mildred’s te

“I wish you wouldn’t wear that.” She laughed.

He opened his big fingers under metal.

“I mean, if you want to stay here. Maybe then you wouldn’t have to wear it.”

“I don’t have to wear it,” and decided to keep it on.

The harmonica squawked.

He looked up.

From the trees, light brighter than the fire and green lay leafy shadows over sleeping bags and blanket rolls. Then ballooning claws and barbed, translucent tail collapsed:

“Hey, you got that shit ready for us?”

A lot of chains hung around his neck. He had a wide scab (with smaller ones below it) on the bowl of his shoulder, like a bad fall on cement. Chains wound around one boot: He jingled when he walked. “Come on, come on. Bring me the fuckin’ junk!” He stopped by the fireplace. Flames burnished his large arms, his small face. A front tooth was broken. “Is that it?” He gestured bluntly toward the picnic table, brushed tangled, black hair, half braided, from his shoulder, and came on.

“Hello!” Mildred said, with the most amazing smile. “Nightmare! How have you been?”

The scorpion looked down at her, wet lip high off his broken tooth, and said, slowly, “Shit,” which could have meant a lot of things. He wedged between them—“Get out of the—” saw the orchid—“fucking way, huh?” and lugged the carton of ca