Dhalgren

Kid pulled his orchid from his belt loop (the loop, worn from the blade, snapped) and fitted his wrist into the harness. “What’s in here?”

“Nothin’,” De

The short hall ended on a room full of cardboard boxes. (The wrapping paper in Apartment 19-A. Why?) They had fallen from half-stacked shelves, they covered the floor; they had been pushed into piles and had fallen again.

“What are we doing, huh?” Kid asked.

“Keeping our asses out of trouble,” De

They stepped out into darkness that became three-quarter dark. Kid sniffed. Something had burned in here too. His arm brushed hanging plastic. They snuck through racks of shower curtains, into bath mats and accessories.

“Sure this is the mezzanine?”

“The railing should be over there.”

“You been in here before?”

“Keep it down,” De

“What—” Kid whispered: “What is Nightmare trying to do in here?”

De

They reached towels. By an overturned counter, they walked across mounds of terry cloth. The cool, charred dark stopped at a glass balcony rail with a brass bar. There was light up from below; leaning out (“Hey, watch it,” De

There’re people in here, Kid thought. There’re people in here, walking around, with guns. He looked over the balcony, down at counters and the paths between where grey ribbons of light lay over riotous indistinguishables.

Some one, some two scorpions ran out among them.

De

Three more, like mazed mice, zagged through the aisles.

“Hey, what the hell do you people think you’re—” shouted by somebody who sounded like he was in a stairwell.

Five heads, deployed among lingerie and watchbands, swiveled. Two of the scorpions went on like flash bulbs—a rooster and some sort of baby dinosaur.

Kid pulled back from the light. De

“Douse your God-damn lights!” which was Nightmare.

The gun-clap filled the double story. The echo settled.

Some flat reflex that held neither fear nor excitement took him back from the rail (for a moment he saw De

“Hey, they got in! Hey, they God-damn got in—”

“Mark?” A woman. “Mark? Mark, what’s down there…”

“You get back! Did they get in? You didn’t see—”

Echo botched all meaning in a fourth, fricative voice.

Someone nearer tried to interrupt: “What are you—? Why don’t you—? Hey, look…”

“I saw their lights! For God’s sakes, I saw their lights! Somebody called out, too. I saw…”

Draped plastic dragged Kid’s shoulder. And the woman standing behind it shook the rifle at them, said, “Hhhhhhhhaaa…” and started walking backward.

Mutually, Kid thought, paralyzed with terror.

But De

Neither was the woman. She staggered backward in the sudden glare and fired somewhere between them. The rifle gave a breathy crack, and Kid recognized her green dress: It was the woman, Ly

He thought she would throw the gun at him.

But she held it, and when she didn’t let go on the second jerk (the blades of the orchid clicked on the barrel he grasped), he turned it hard and kicked her. She jerked her twisted hands away, shook them, turned. He smacked her shoulder with the rifle butt, and she dodged in darkness.

He turned, mainly to see what De

A ten-foot blob of light, colorful and disfocused, ran into itself like an amoeba erupting.

It went out, and De

Waving the gun, they stalked through the mezzanine shadows.

“Huh?”

“Your shield.”

“Oh. About a month ago, something happened to it. I shorted something, I guess, and the projection grid—it’s plastic—melted or something. So it comes out like that. I sort of like it.”

“What did it used to be?” They turned past bolts of fabric.

De

With the woman, Kid thought all of a sudden, did that really happen?

People were screaming again. Below, Nightmare cried, “Hey, man, look at that!” and his excited laugh.

They went into a stairwell: it was pitch-black. Three steps down Kid said, “Wait up—”

Half a flight down, De

“My sandal strap broke. I lost my sandal.” Listening to De

De

“I can’t find it,” Kid said. “Thanks for what?”

“I guess you saved my life.”

“Huh?”

“That woman. She would have shot me if she got a chance.”

“Oh.” Kid’s toes stubbed the wall. “It wasn’t anything. She would have shot me too.” He thought: a bee-bee gun? Fifteen-year-old De

“Lemme make a light,” De

Kid moved to see if his sandal was under his shadow. “Maybe it fell over…” He glanced across the banister. “Look, never mind…put that out, will you.” The luminous amoeboid collapsed. The stairwell filled up with darkness, to his eyes, and over. “Can you hear anything?”

The pulsing blot on the black said, tentatively, “No.”

“Come on then.” Kid started down.

“Okay,” was whispered in front of him.

—shot me if she got a chance: would she have if she recognized me? Or would I have wrested the rifle if I hadn’t recognized her? (He collided softly with De

De

Kid glanced at the figure standing just beyond the doorway beside him (which was, of course, a dressing mirror, in a wooden stand, slightly tilted so that the reflected floor sloped) and—in a gym locker-room, that opened onto the field, someone had once thrown snow at his naked back.

Looking, he re-experienced (and remembered) the moment from that Vermont winter. Then forgot it, looking at the reflection, trying to recall, now that he stared for a third, a fourth, a fifth second what had struck him first. He raised his hand (the reflected hand raised), turned his head a little (the head turned a little), took a breath (the reflection breathed); he touched his vest (the reflection touched its khaki shirt), then suddenly raised his hand to knuckle his chin (the reflection’s knuckle dug into its full, black beard), and blinked (its eyes blinked behind black plastic glass frames).

The pants, he thought, the pants are the same! There was a white thread snaking across the black denim of his thigh. He (and the reflection) picked it warily away, suddenly arching his naked toes on the carpet (the tips of the black engineer boots flexed), then once more raised his hand toward the glass. He opened his fingers (reflected fingers opened): the string dropped (the string dropped).