Dhalgren (19 page)

"Sure. If the job works out."

"Go on over when you get ready. Tell whoever's there that Mrs Brown—Madame Brown is the nickname they've given me at Teddy's, and since I saw you there I thought you might know me by it—that Mrs Brown told you to come up. Possibly I'll be there. But they'll put you to work."

"Five dollars an hour?"

"I'm afraid it isn't that easy to find trustworthy workers now that we've got ourselves into this thing." She tried to look straight up under her eyelids. "Oh no, people you can trust are getting rarer and rarer. And you!" Straight at him; "You're wondering how I can trust you? Well, I've seen you before. And you know, we really are at that point. I begin, really, to think it's too much. Really too much."

"Get your morning paper!"

"Muriel! Oh, now Muriel! Come back here!"

"Get your morning—Hey, there, dog. Quiet down. Down girl!"

"Muriel, come back here this instant!"

"Down! There. Hey, Madame Brown. Got your paper right here." Maroon bells flapping, Faust stalked across the street. Muriel danced widdershins about him.

"Hello, old girl."

"Good morning there," Madame Brown said, "It
is
about time for you to be along, Joaquim, isn't it?"

"Eleven-thirty, by the hands on the old church steeple." He cackled. "Hi there, hi there young fellow," handing one paper, handing another.

Madame Brown folded hers beneath her arm.

He let his dangle, while Faust howled to no one in particular, "Get your morning paper," and went on down the street. "Bye, there, Madame. Good morning. Get your paper!"

"Madame Brown?" he asked, distrusting his resolve.

She was looking after the newspaper man.

"What are those?"

She looked at him with perfect blankness.

"I've got them." He touched his chest. "And Joaiquim's got a little chain tight around his neck."

"I don't know." With one hand, she touched her own cheek, with the other, her own elbow: her sleeve was some cloth rough as burlap. "You know, I'm really not sure. I like them. I think they're pretty. I like having a lot of them."

"Where did you get them?" he asked, aware he broke the custom Faust had so carefully defined the day before. Hell, he was still uneasy with her dog, and with her transformation between smoke and candlelight.

"A little friend of mine gave them to me." She had the look, yes, of someone trying not to look offended.

He shifted, let his knees bend a little, his toes go, nodded.

"Before she left the city. She left me, left the city. And she gave me these. You see?"

He'd asked. And felt better for the violence done, moved his arms from the shoulder… his laughter surprised him, broke out and became huge.

Over it, he heard her sudden high howl. With her fist on her chest, she laughed too, "Oh, yes!" squinting. "She did! She really did. I was never so surprised in all my life! Oh, it was funny—I don't mean funny peculiar, though it certainly was. Everything was, back then. But it was funny ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa." She shook the sound about her. "She—" almost still—"brought them to me in the dark. People shouting around out in the halls, and none of the lights working. Just the flickering coming around the edge of the shades, and the terrible roaring outside… Oh, I was scared to death. And she brought them to me, in handfuls, wound them around my neck. And her eyes…" She laughed again, though that cut all smile from him. "It
was
strange. She wound them around my neck. And then she left. There." She looked down over the accordion of her neck, and picked through the loops. "I wear them all the time." The accordion opened. "What do they mean?" She blinked at him. "I don't know. People who wear them aren't too anxious to talk about them. I'm certainly not." She leaned a little closer. "You're not either. Well, I'll respect that in you. You do the same." Now she folded her hands. "But I'll tell you something: And, really, there's no reason behind it, I suppose, other than that it seems to work. But I
trust
people who have them just a little more than those who don't." She shrugged. "Probably very silly. But it's why I offered you that job."

"Oh."

"I suspect we share something."

"Something happened," he said, "when we got them. Like you said. That we don't like to talk about."

"Then again, it could be nothing more than that we happen to be wearing the same…" She rattled the longest strand.

"Yeah." He buttoned another button. "It could be."

"Well. I'll drop in on you at the Richards' later in the afternoon. You
will
be there?"

He nodded. "Four hundred, on 36th Street…"

"Apartment 17-E," she finished. "Very good. Muriel?"

The dog clicked back from the gutter.

"We'll be going now."

"Oh. Okay. And thanks."

"Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I'm sure." Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time diesel.

He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion bobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.

Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.

Her calves were smooth.

His heart, beating fast, slowed.

Her calves were unscarred.

He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.

Her calves had no scratch.

When he took his hand away, she made some in-slumber sound and movement. And didn't wake. He opened today's paper and put it on top of yesterday's. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline:

MYSTERIOUS RUMORS!
MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS!

Would your editor
ever
like some pictures with this one! We, unfortunately, were asleep. But from what we can gather, shortly after midnight last night—so far twenty-six versions of the story have come in, with contradictions enough to oblige our registering an official editorial doubt—the fog and smoke blanketing Bellona these last months was torn by a wind at too great an altitude to feel at street level. Parts of the sky were cleared, and the full—or near full—moon was, allegedly, visible—as well as a crescent moon, only slightly smaller (or slightly larger?) than the first!

The excited versions from which we have culled our own report contain many discrepancies. Here are some: The full orb was the usual moon, the crescent was the intruder.

The crescent was the real moon, the full, the impostor… a young student says that, in the few minutes these downright Elizabethan portents were revealed, he made out markings on the full disk that prove it was definitely not
our
moon.

Two hours later, someone came into the office (the only person so far who claims to have caught any of this phenomenon through an admittedly low-power telescope) to assure us the full disk definitely was
the
moon, while the crescent was bogus.

In the six hours since the occurrence (as we write, into the dawn), explanations offered the
Times
have ranged from things so science-fiction-y we do not pretend to understand their arcane machinery, down to the all-purpose heat lightning and weather balloon, perennial explanation for the UFO.

I pass on, as typical, one comment from our own Professor Wellman, who was observing from the July gardens with several other guests: "One, we all agreed, was nearly full; the other was definitely crescent. I pointed out to the Colonel, Mrs Green, and Roxanne and Tobie, who were with me, that the crescent, which was lower in the sky, was convexed
away
from the bright area of the higher moon. Moons do not light themselves; their illumination comes from the sun. Even with
two
moons, the sun can only be in
one
direction from them both; no matter which phases they are in, if they are both visible in the same quarter of the sky,
both
should be light on the
same
side—which was not the case here."

To which your editor can only say that
any
"agreement," "certainty," or "definiteness" about these moons are cast into serious doubt—unless we are prepared to make even
more
preposterous speculations about the rest of the cosmos?

No.

We
did not see it.

Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are
sure
something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night's hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: things are—though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.

What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by
all
who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George!

The impetus to appelation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.

"What are you doing," she whispered through leaves, "now?"

Silent, he continued.

She stood, shedding blankets, came to touch his shoulder, looked down over it. "Is that a poem?"

He grunted, transposed two words, gnawed at his thumb cuticle, then wrote them back.

"Um
…" she said, "do you mean making a hole through something, or telling the future?"

"Huh?" He tightened his crossed legs under the notebook. "Telling the future."

"A-u-g-
u
-r."

"Whoever wrote this notebook spells it different on another page." He flipped pages across his knees to a previous, right-hand entry:

A word sets images flying from which auguries we read…

"Oh… he
did
spell it right." Back on the page where he had been writing, he crossed and recrossed his own kakograph till the bar of ink suggested a word beneath half again as long.

"Have you been reading in there?" She kneeled beside him. "What do you think?"

"Hm?"

"I mean… the guy who wrote that was strange.

He looked at her. "I've just been using it to write my own things. It's the only paper I've got and he leaves one side of each page blank." His back slumped. "Yeah. He's strange," but could not understand her expression.

Before he could question it with one of his, she asked, "Can I read what you're doing?"

He said, "Okay," quickly to see what it would feel like.

"Are you sure it's all right?"

"Yeah. Go on. It's finished anyway."

He handed her the notebook: his heart got loud; his tongue dried stickily to the floor of his mouth. He contemplated his apprehension. Little fears at least, he thought, were amusing. This one was large enough to joggle the whole frame.

Clicking his pen point, he watched her read.

Blades of hair dangled forward about her face like orchid petals, till—"Stop that!"—they flew back.

They fell again.

He put the pen in his shut pocket, stood up, walked around, first down the slope, then up, occasionally glancing at her, kneeling naked in leaves and grass, feet sticking, wrinkled soles up, from under her buttocks. She would say it was silly, he decided, to show her independence. Or she would Oh and Ah and How wonderful it to death, convinced that would bring them closer. His hand was at the pen again—he clicked it without taking it from his pocket, realized what he was doing, stopped, swallowed, and walked some more.
Lines on Her Reading Lines on Her
he pondered as a future title, but gave up on what to put beneath it; that was too hard without the paper itself, its light red margin, its pale blue grill.

She read a long time.

He came back twice to look at the top of her head. And went away.

"It…"

He turned.

"…makes me feel… odd." Her expression was even stranger.

"What," he risked, "does that mean?" and lost: it sounded either pontifical or terrified.

"Come here…?"

"Yeah." Crouching beside her, his arm knocked hers; his hair brushed hers as he bent. "What…?"

Bending with him, she ran her finger beneath a line. "Here, where you have the words in reverse order from the way you have them up here—I think,
if
somebody had just described that to me, I wouldn't have found it very interesting. But actually reading it—all four times—it gave me chills. But I guess that's because it works so well with the substance. Thank you." She closed the notebook and handed it back. Then she said, "Well don't look so surprised. Really, I liked it. Let's see: I'm… delighted at its skill, and moved by its… well, substance. Which is surprising, because I didn't think I was going to be." She frowned. "Really, you…
are
staring something fierce, and it makes me nervous as hell." But she wouldn't look down.

"You just like it because you know me." That was also to see what it felt like.

"Possibly."

He held the notebook very tight, and felt numb.

"I guess—" she moved away a little—"somebody liking it or not doesn't really do you any good."

"Yeah. Only you're scared they won't."

"Well, I did." She started to say more, didn't. Was that a shrug? Finally, she looked from beneath the overhanging limbs. "Thank you."