Dhalgren (13 page)

"After the people who were here abandoned it." She did not brush her hands off. She extended one. It might have been the same gesture. "I'm glad to meet you."

He shook. "Glad to meet you."

"I hope you come to our services. This is a time of stress for everybody. We need all the spiritual help we can get… don't you think?"

Her grip (like Joaquim's) lingered. And it was firmer. "Hey, do you know what day it is?"

She looked down at the paper. "Wednesday."

"But… How do you know when it's Sunday."

She laughed. It was very self-assured laughter. "Sunday services happen when the paper says Sunday. Mr Calkins confuses dates, I know. But there's never more than one Sunday every seven days. Or one Tuesday, either. Now, Thursdays slip up. I went to see him about that. A very polite man. And very concerned about what goes on in his city, despite what some people find a trying sense of humor. I had noticed about the frequency of Sundays myself. He explained about Tuesdays; but he held out for arbitrary Thursdays. He quite nicely offered to declare a Thursday any time I asked—if I would give him twenty-four-hour notice." Her perfect seriousness ruptured with a smile. And she dropped his hand. "The whole business
is
funny. I feel as strange talking about it as you must hearing it, I'm sure." Her natural hair, her round, brown face: he liked her. "Will you try and come to our services?"

He smiled. "I'll try." He was even vaguely sorry to lie.

"Good."

"Reverend Taylor?"

Her sparse eyebrows raised as she looked back.

"Does this street go toward… Mr Calkins's?"

"Yes, his home is about a mile up. You have to cross Jackson. Two days ago some brave soul had a bus running back and forth along Broadway. Only one bus. But then it doesn't have any traffic to fight. I don't know if it's still going. But that would take you to the newspaper office, anyway. Not his home. I suppose you could walk. I did."

"Thanks." He left her, smiling after him from the doorway. No, he decided. That probably
wasn't
the monastery. He pictured the tape winding and winding as the music dimmed, chord after chord falling from glimmering reels.

Jackson Avenue was a wide street, but the crowded houses, blurred with noon-smoke, were mostly wood. Trolley wires webbing the intersection were down, in a snarl, on the corner pavement. Two blocks off, wreckage fumed. Billows cleared charred beams, then rolled to.

A block in the other direction a heavy figure with a shopping bag paused mid-trek between corner and corner to watch him watching. Though it was an arbitrary Wednesday afternoon, the feel was of some ominous Sunday morning.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful street. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

This is what a
good
neighborhood in Bellona looks like?

The ground floor windows were broken in the white house there; curtains hung out.

The street was clean.

Bare foot and sandal, bare foot and sandal: he watched the pavement's grain slip beneath them.

A door beside him stood wide.

He kept walking. Easier to think that all these buildings are inhabited, than that their vacancy gives me license to loot where I will—not loot. Borrow. Still, it's unnerving.

Loufer had said something about shotguns.

But he was hungry after all and he was going to—borrow food soon.

He broke a window with a stick he had found wedging back a garage door, (eight jars of instant coffee on the kitchen shelf) and sat at the formica dinette table to eat a cold can (can-opener in the drawer) of Campbell's
Pepperpot.
(Easy!) Marveling between fingerfuls of undiluted soup (salty!), he looked from the paper he'd taken from Faust, to the notebook he'd gotten from Lanya. Made himself a cup of coffee with hot water—after running ten seconds, it was steaming and spitting—from the tap. Finally, he opened the notebook at random and read, in the terribly neat ballpoint:

It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. In the summer country, stitched with lightning, somehow, there is no way to conclude…

He looked up at creakings. But it was only some slight architectural shift. Nobody, he subvocalized, lives here now. (The kitchen was very clean.) Without particularly understanding what he'd read (or not understanding it, for that matter) the notes by the absent journalist, coupled with the creak, made the back of his neck tingle.

Déjà vu
is a thing of the eye.

This was like reading lines that echoed some conversation he might have followed idly once on a crowded street. The book hinted he pay attention to part of his mind he could not even locate.

lability, not affectation; a true and common trait. But if I tried to write down what I say as I move from speech

He flipped more pages. There was only writing on the right-hand ones. The left-hand ones were blank. He closed the book. He put the coffee cup in the sink, the can in the empty garbage pail: when he caught himself doing it, he laughed out loud, then tried silent justification: he could always stay here, make this place nicer than Tak's.

That made the back of his neck tingle again.

He closed the notebook and, with the paper rucked beside it, climbed back out the window.

He scratched himself on broken glass, but only noticed it a block away when he looked down to see a drop of blood had trickled across the notebook cover, red-brown on the char. He nudged at the new, purple-red scab with the blunt of his thumb, which just made it itch. So he forgot about it and hurried on up Brisbain. It was only… a scratch.

Distance? Or destination?

He had no idea what to expect of either. These lawns and facades needed sunlight, or at least light rain, to be beautiful. The corner trees might be clear green. But mist blurred them now.

Odd that the elements of pleasure were so many greys, so much fear, so many silences. That house there, gaping through drear drapes with intimations of rugs still out in July—someone had
lived
there. A Doctor sign hung beside the door of that one: he mulled on the drugs closeted behind the Venetian blinds. Well, maybe on the way back…

Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall on the far corner. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street's gritty stink. Through a cellar window, broken, a grey eel of smoke slithered the sidewalk to vaporize in the gutter. Through another, intact, flickerings… The singular burning among the dozens of whole buildings was the most uncanny thing he'd seen.

He crossed quickly to the next block.

The loose rhythm of the day carried him through the streets. Once it occurred to him that he was tired. Later, he looked for the tiredness and found it had dispersed, like the eel.

This had to be the Heights.

He trudged on up the sloping street, by a window full of brass: three layers of glass doors in a foyer: the head of a white statue behind a high hedge—all the vulnerable, gloomy elegance bothered him. Break in for another cup of coffee? He wondered why the images of shotguns behind the curtains were stronger here. But laughed at them, anyway.

He moved, and the movement was a rush of sound among his body's cavities. He slapped the paper and bloody notebook on his thigh, thinking of Lanya, of Milly, of John. From his other hip the orchid swung. Chained in points of view, he loped along, an uneasy vandal, suffering for the pillage his mind wreaked among the fabulous facades. He moved, a point of tension, by homes that would have been luxurious in sunlight.

He was not sure why he decided to explore off the avenue.

In the center of the alley was an oak, set in a circle of cobbles, ringed in a decorative fence. His heart beat fast.

He passed it.

The backside of the trunk was ash. Instead of heavy greenery, the rear leaves were shriveled black.

Eyes wide at the vision, he turned as he passed it, to back away. Then he looked at the houses.

On both sides of him walls were sundered on smashed furniture, beams, and piled masonry. The demarcation between lawn and street vanished beneath junk. Twenty feet on, the cobbles were upturned. He felt his face squinch against the destruction.

Bulldozers?

Grenades?

He could not imagine what had caused this. Paving-stones were smashed, loose, or upside down in raw earth, so that he was not even certain where the next street began. Frowning, he wandered in the debris, stepped over a pile of books, vaguely seeking the source of a smoke plume waving fifty feet away, then, suddenly, not seeking it.

He picked up a clock. The crystal flaked out, tinkling. He dropped it and picked up a ballpoint pen, wiped the ashes against his pants, clicked the point in and out. Half under plaster was a wooden chest, slightly larger than an attaché case. With the toe of his sandal, he nudged up the lid. White powder swirled above forks, spoons, and knives bound in grey ribbon, then settled to the purple velvet. He let the lid clack, and hurried to the Avenue.

He practically ran Brisbain's next three blocks, past houses empty and elegant. But now he was aware of lawn poles askew, of shapeless heaps between them, of windows, which, beyond pale curtains, were light as the sky behind them.

He was still clicking the ballpoint pen. So he put it in his shirt pocket. Then, at the next corner, he took it out again and stood very still. If a wind came now, he thought, and caused any sound on this drear street, he would cry out.

There was no wind.

He sat down on the curb, opened to the notebook's first page.

to wound the autumnal city

he read once more. Hastily he turned the page over to the clear side. He looked down the four streets, looked at the corner houses. He sucked a breath through closed teeth, clicked the point out and began to write.

In the middle of the third line, without taking pen off paper, he swept back to cross it all out. Then, carefully, he recopied two words on the next line. The second was "I." Very carefully now, word followed word. He crossed out two more lines, from which he salvaged "you," "spinner," and "pave," dropping them into a new sentence that bore no denotative resemblance to the one from which they came.

Between lines, while he punched his pen point, his eye strayed to the writing beside his:

It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of language that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward

"Annn!"
out loud. There was not a pretty word in the bunch. Roughly he turned the notebook back around the paper to avoid distraction.

Holding the last two lines in his head, he looked about at the buildings again. (Why
not
live dangerously?) He wrote the last lines hurriedly, notating them before they dispersed.

He printed at the top: "Brisbain"

Lifting his pen from the "n", he wondered if the word had any other meaning than the name of the Avenue. Hoping it did, he began to recopy, in as neat a hand as he could, what he had settled on. He altered one word in the last two lines ("cannot" became "can't"), and closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.

Then he stood.

Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He shook his head, and finally managed to get the world under him at the right angle. The back of his legs were cramped: he'd been in a near-fetal squat practically half an hour.

The dizziness gone, the cramps stayed with him for two blocks. As well he felt choked up in his breathing. That put him in touch with a dozen other little discomforts that he had ignored till now. So that it was not for another block after that he noticed he wasn't afraid.

The pulling in the back of his right shin, or the mental disquiet? He gave up pondering the preferable, looked at a street sign, and noticed that
Brisbain N
had become
Brisbain S.

Click-click, click-click, click-click: realizing what he was doing, he put the pen in his shirt pocket. Along the street, beside him, was a stone wall. The houses across from him, porched and lawned and spacious and columned, all had broken windows.

The car—a blunt, maroon thing at least twenty years old—grumbled up behind.

He'd jumped, in surprise, turning.

It passed, leaving no impression of the driver. But two blocks ahead, it turned in at a gate.

Willow fronds draped the brick above him. Walking again, he ran two fingers along the mortared troughs.

The gate was verdigrised brass, spiked at the top, and locked. Ten yards beyond the bars, the road got twisted up in the shaggiest pines he'd ever seen. The brass plate, streaked pink with recent polish, said: ROGER CALKINS

He looked through at the pines. He looked back at the other houses. Finally he just walked on.

The street ended in brush. He followed the wall around its corner into bushes. Twigs kept jabbing beneath his sandal straps. His bare foot went easier.

In the clearing, someone had piled two crates, one on another, against the brick: children after fruit or mischief?

As he climbed (notebook and paper left on the ground) two women behind the walls laughed.

He paused.

Their laughter neared, became muffled converse. A man guffawed sharply; the double soprano recommenced and floated off.

He could just grasp the edge. He pulled himself up, elbows winging. It was a lot harder than movies would make it. He scraped at the brick with his toes. Brick rasped back at knees and chin.

His eyes cleared the top.

The wall was covered with pine needles, twigs, and a surprising shale of glass. Through spinning gnats he saw the blunt pine tops and the rounded, looser heads of elms. Was that grey thing the cupola of a house?