Dhalgren (112 page)

"What you gonna do with that?" Priest went to sit on the chipped steps. He'd been complaining about the sore on bis foot.

"That's a telescope," Lady of Spain said. "The kind with a mirror, right?"

"That's right." Kamp stepped to the other side.

"See," Lady of Spain said. (The telescope reminds me of a conversation with Lanya and a whole bunch at the nest I wanted to put down.)

"What are you gonna do with it?" Priest asked, leaning forward to bend the toe of his sneaker up and down. His chain swung against his brown sunken chest and out, clinking.

Kamp squinted at the clouds. "Probably not much of anything. Occasionally I've seen a few breaks in the overcast. It occurred to me, now perhaps I might get a look at your sky here. After all those stories about double moons and giant suns…"

In the quiet, I thought about all the times people had not said anything about them.

"After all—" you hear about voices breaking the silence? I learned how strong that silence had been from the way his
After all
snapped in my head—"I saw… some of it." How long, now, had that silence gone on? "I thought I'd bring the telescope down here to the park- they said the hill here was one of the highest points in the city—and perhaps see if I could just check whether any planets were where they're supposed to be. I found an Ephemeris in the library up at Roger's. Only my watch hasn't been working all week. None of you guys happen to know what the date is, now, do you?"'

When none of us answered, he sucked his teeth, turned back to the white aluminum cylinder (black rings around the middle) and looked down the open end. "Well, somebody'll come along who does, now."

I wondered if George or June knew.

"The paper said it was November ninth," California said, "this morning."

To which Kamp didn't even look up. "If the planets are where
they're
supposed to be, that more or less means the Earth's where
it's
supposed to be." He glanced aside long enough to grin. "In the face of all this cosmological confusion, finding that out should make everyone feel a little better."

"Suppose it's not?" I asked.

"I," Kamp said, "think it is. But
knowing
it will make us all happier."

"I guess that's a pretty good reason," Angel said. He stepped up and looked down into the tube. "Hey, I can see my face upside down in there!"

"I think it would be a good idea, politically, to be able to print in the paper, now, that we know that—much. It would calm things down—some people have gotten very upset. And I can see why." Kamp looked up the same time Angel did; their eyes caught. "Now you boys—" which he used as an excuse to look away at Lady of Spain and add an inclusive nod—"aren't interested in politics, I guess, but it seems to me…"

In the pause, Cathedral said: "You're into politics, huh?"

"I'm into… politics, I guess so now." His hands lay across the white tube. He moved the bones about inside his flesh as though it were a glove. "But I think your Mr Calkins is a pretty conservative politician. Now don't you?"

Cathedral, with dark thumb and forefinger, moiled his thick earlobe. A darker pucker where the gold ring went through meant he'd only had it a little while.

"I'm sure he thinks he's radical. But I think I'm the radical and he's the conservative." I thought he would laugh: he squinted at the clouds, at the telescope. "Now I guess that's what I've been thinking."

"You're so conservative," Lady of Spain suggested, "it comes out the other way and gets radical?"

"No." Captain Kamp laughed. "No. That's not it. Maybe I'm not really… into politics." He paused. "But it's just that this is such a big country now. Roger… well, I guess it's hard for anyone to know… that it's such a big country."

"Unless you've seen it," I asked, "from a space ship?"

"Rocket," he said. "No. No, that's not what I mean. The Megalithic Republic—now, the Megalithic Republics: the Republic of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the People's Republic of China—they're very different kinds of political entities from, say, France, Borneo, Uruguay, or Nigeria. The people who live in small nations know it, but they don't know why. The people who live in the Megalithic Republics simply look at the little ones as alien, exotic, bewildering, but aren't even sure why the little ones' histories read the way they do. Two hundred million people, ninety percent literate, all of them speaking one language! Now hold that up beside a country like…" During his pause, I wondered how many examples he had. "Greece, now. Only eight million people—less people in the country than in New York City. Guy from Macedonia can't understand a guy from the Pelaponnesus. Hell, the guy from the north side of Crete can't understand a guy from the south side. My wife, she said we should go there. And we stayed for six weeks. That was my first wife now. But there's no place in Europe where you can go in a straight line more than eight hours by mechanical transportation without running into a different language, different currency, a different culture! How do they expect to teach three thousand years of European politics to American kids in American schools, or Russian kids in Russian schools, in a land where you can go three days by car in any direction and not cross a border? You have to have been there to understand. I mean, have any of you ever been to Europe?"

Cathedral nodded.

Angel said, "I was in Germany, in the army."

"I never been there," California said.

"I've never been," I echoed, remembering Japan, Australia, Uruguay.

Lady of Spain said: "I haven't."

But even two had undercut Kamp's point. "Yes, well I guess you know what I mean now. America… America's so big. And Bellona's one of the half-dozen biggest cities in America. Which makes it one of the biggest in the world." He frowned, mostly at Cathedral. "But you guys here, Calkins too, just have no idea how big that is, and how different that makes the people in it."

"You going to be able to see anything with that?" I asked. "When there is a break, it doesn't last very long."

Kamp
mmmm
ed in agreement. "You don't need much… information—like I was telling you once, back at the party? Mask out almost everything: still, even a little bit will tell you an awful lot." He looked at the sky again. The lines out from his eyes lengthened. His lips parted and thinned.

"Hey, we
been
in Europe," Angel said. "You gonna tell us about the moon? You the only one here's been there."

"Shit, I seen that on television," Lady of Spain said. "Live. I never seen anything in Europe on television. Except in pictures."

Kamp chuckled. "Now I was on the earth for thirty-eight years." He looked down. "I was on the moon for six and a half hours. And I've been back from the moon, well… a handful more years. But that six and a half hours is the only thing anybody is really interested in about me, now."

"What was it like?" Tarzan asked, as though that followed perfectly from what Kamp had said.

"You know?" Kamp stepped around the telescope. "It was like coming to Bellona."

"How do you mean?" Priest put both hands on the stone steps and leaned forward, waiting to see whether what Kamp had said was from hostility, or just a new thought; or both.

"When we got to the moon, now, we knew a lot about where we were; and at the same time, we hardly knew anything about it at all. And that's just what it's like here. After six and a half hours—" Kamp mused, his eyes narrowing in the smoke—"it was time to go. And if I can't figure, out where we are this evening, now, I think it will be time for me to leave here too."

Lady of Spain looked at the sky, then at me—"Where would you go?—" then at the sky again.

"Someplace where I can tell where I am."

The sky was fused, side to side.

"Good luck," Cathedral said.

"I guess that's good-bye too, then," I said.

Priest stood up from the steps.

Kamp nudged one leg of the tripod with the toe of his shoe. "Maybe it is." The metal tip scraped awfully loud.

"So long," Cathedral said.

We walked down the hill.

Angel wanted to know what Kamp had said about information at the party. I tried to reconstruct. Which turned Angel on, and he began a sort of dithyramb about how much everything, while we

Speech is always in excess of poetry as print is always inadequite for speech. A word sets images flying through the brain from which auguries we recall all extent and intention. I'm not a poet because I have nothing to give life to make it due, except my attention. And I don't know if my wounded sort is enough. People probably do hear watches go
tic-tok
. But I'm sure my childhood clock went
tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic
… Why do I recall this in a city without time? What hairy men find on their bodies is amazing.

walked through brash and rocks and brushes, told him about the park; that was much fun.

We came out of the trees, talking a lot to each other just as somebody jammed a log into the furnace. Sparks went high into the late, grey afternoon; the smoke plume thinned.

"Hey!" John said and came over, through, and around the kids sitting and standing. "How are you guys? How you guys been?"

I watched the smoke.

Thinning.

Two kids (pink tank-tops; long, straw-colored hair) hauled sleeping bags from under the picnic bench.

Overtaking John, Woodard, yellow as a leaf and woolly as … well, Woodard, came to a dead stop and blinked at me (us?). I think at first he'd thought he knew us, but then wasn't sure.

I was going to say hello but John overtook him, now, ruffling at the boy's hair, and said, "Kid, I haven't seen you around for a long time." His hands were just as clean, but his blanket-vest looked like he'd actually done something in it since that last I'd seen.

"How's it going?" I asked.

John gave a tepid grin. "About as well as it can, I guess."

I felt something was wrong; as if I was looking at a place I didn't recognize but should—or did recognize, even though I'd never seen it.

"Kid!" which was Milly.

They went on talking without giving me a chance to introduce the others, which I thought was silly, but Milly and John did things that way. Talking the most, Milly stepped forward over a sleeping bag where an older guy sat up and began to rub his-glasses on the tail of a Sweet-Orr workshirt.

Then I figured, fuck it, they better know who everybody was so I just said, loud enough to make them stop talking: "This is Cathedral. And this is…" going down the line. While I was doing that, I saw this guy walk into the clearing with a gun under one arm, which was what started the fight.

And which, after going through all this, I don't really feel like describing again because I've been over it with so many people at that bar and at the nest already. Lady of Spain was all enthusiastic and kept asking where the guy was from. John and Milly I think were going to say they didn't know, but Jommy said he was from the God-damn downtown department store, and Milly said, "You don't
know
he's from the Emboriky for certain," and Jommy said, Shit, he knew, and that they'd already run them from one side of the damn park to the other; which I didn't even know about. "Man," John said, beating at my shoulder and grinning, "You're really crazy, Kid; you're really crazy…" He shook his head, laughing like something was very funny. "Man!"

"You want the carton?" Milly was saying. "We should give that food to them, John. We used to give food to Nightmare."

"Shit," Priest said. "We got a whole cellar full of food."

"Come on," I said. Come on, let's get out of here and leave these poor-ass motherfuckers alone!" Which I delivered right at John (and it went right over his shoulder to Frank who was sitting on the table beside the food carton as if he was guarding it. And you know, all the bastards kept grinning right through). So we left.

Angel kept prancing around and started tugging on me just like John (Priest was carrying the rifle and had started examining it, and I said: "Man, throw that