Dhalgren

He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down “Pearl”), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an afterimage on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It’s only, he thought, when we’re stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else’s notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else’s survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that’s exactly where it’s important and where it’s not. The Kid? He thought: I’m going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can’t remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I’m somebody famous? No, I do remember too well what I’ve done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn’t what it’s about. I’m too used to being liked.

Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his callused thumb, he turned another corner.

Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings. Clap-clap, the doors. He looked at the balding driver squinting out the windshield as if for traffic.

Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.

“You got a transfer?”

“Hey, I’m sorry. If you need fare or something—” He stepped back.

But the driver motioned him on. “This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on.” Clap-clap: the bus rocked forward.

An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.

A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.

A couple—he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom—were making a point of not looking at him.

Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.

Where am I—but wouldn’t think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the brillowy ball.

He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.

She blinked.

He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.

They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.

He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.

After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct, was “Three Stars says the Times.” On the next, R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckles on blades.

On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.

Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, gri

ECK  N    W’S

S R             OGS

ND

T  E  G  TA    Y

a

Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights in his own body sensation cast in the nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It’s the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.

He looked out the window.

Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):

E

M

B

O

R

I

K

Y’

S

Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with canvas. A crack in another zagged edge to edge.

Kid pulled the frayed ceiling cord, then held on to the bar across the back of the seat before him till the bus, a block later and somewhat to his surprise, stopped. He jumped off the back treadle to the curb and turned; through the dirty window, he saw the couple, who had not looked at him when he’d gotten on, stop looking at him now. The bus left.

He was standing diagonally across from the five, six, seven, eight story department store. Uneasily, he backed into a doorway. (People with guns, hey?) He felt for his orchid—looked at it. It was a very silly weapon. People shooting out the windows? Several, higher up, were open. Several more were broken. Across the street a gutter grill waved a steamy plume. Why, he thought, get out here? Maybe the people in there have all gone and he could just cross the street and—the skin of his back and belly shriveled. Why had he gotten off here? It had been in response to some u

Cross the street, motherfucker, he told himself. You get up close to the building and they can’t see you out the windows. This way somebody can just aim out and pick you off if they’ve got a penchant for it. He told himself some other things too.

A minute later, he walked to the opposite corner, a sidestep for the fire hydrant, stopped with his hand against the beige stone, breathing long, slow breaths and listening to his heart. The building took up all the block. There were no show windows down the side alley. Save from the front door, there was no place from the store he could be seen. He looked across the avenue. (From what letters still remained on that broken glass, it must have been a travel agency. And down there…? Some kind of office building, perhaps? Burn marks lapped great carbon tongues around the lower stories.) The street looked so wide—but that was because there were no cars at either curb.

He started down the alley, ru