Dhalgren (22 page)

"They don't know anything
about
that…! The paper had the pictures, but they didn't have my name… though everybody knows it anyway!"

"All right—"

"They looked at them, Mother and Daddy. They looked at them and they didn't recognize me! Oh, I thought I was going to die… I cried. Afterward. Oh…" She swallowed. "Mother… sent that up to you. She thought you might be hungry.
Please
don't say anything?"

"I won't," and was annoyed.

"It was like you were playing with me. That was awful!"

He took a drink.
"Did
you find him, George Harrison?" It was bubbly but tepid.

She whispered, "No…"

"What did you want him for?"

Her totally vulnerable look made him grin.

He put the plate down on the chair, considering whether to accept what so resembled the once rejected; then he took the sandwich and tore through the hole with his teeth. Spam. And mayonnaise. "He was in there. You shouldn't've run off. He came out just a minute later." He swallowed. "Hey, you want a picture of him?"

"Huh?"

"I can get you a picture of him, if you want, not like they had in the newspaper."

"No. I don't want a picture of him. What kind of picture?"

"Big full-color poster. Buck naked."

"No!" She dropped her head. "You
are
playing with me. I wish you wouldn't. It's just awful."

"Hey, I just…" He looked from sandwich to bottle. He wasn't hungry, but had eaten in complicity. Now he wished he hadn't. He said: "If you play by yourself, you're just going to lose. If I play with you, maybe you'll … have a chance."

Her hair swung; she looked up, with a confusion he paid her the compliment of assuming feigned.

"Tomorrow I'll get you the—"

"You were supposed to wait for me," Bobby said from the doorway. "Mom said we were supposed to come up here together… Gosh, you almost got this room clean."

June made shoulder motions which Bobby did not exactly ignore; neither did he respond. Instead, he said, "You got that stuff around your neck. Like this." He held up his bright wristlet.

"Yeah." He grinned. "Bet you won't tell me where you got yours."

Bobby looked more surprised than he'd expected. "I told Mom and Daddy that I just found them."

June said, petulantly, "You shouldn't wear them."

Bobby put his hands behind his back and
humphed,
as though this were an exchange from a frequent argument

"Why shouldn't he?"

Bobby said, "She thinks terrible things happen if you wear them. She's scared. She took hers off."

June glared at him.

"You know what I think?" Bobby said. "I think even worse things happen to people who wear them for a while and
then
take them off!"

"I didn't take it off."

"You did!"

"I didn't!"

"You did!"

"It
wasn't
mine! And you shouldn't have said you found it. I bet
really
bad things happen to people who
steal
them."

"I didn't steal it!"

"You did!"

"I didn't!"

"You did!"

"Oh
… !" In sibling frustration she flung her hands out to end the antiphon.

He took another bite of pulpy bread; swallowed it with warm Coke: bad idea. He put both down.

"I'm going back!" Bobby said. "You better come too. We're supposed to be together." And marched out the door.

She waited. He watched.

Her hand moved in the side folds of her skirt, started to come up. Then she raised her head.

"Maybe you better—"

"Oh, he's going to go exploring." Contempt?

"Why do you want to find… George?"

She blinked. A word lost itself in breath. "I… I have to. I
want
to!" Her hands tried to raise, each one, in turn, holding the other down. "Do you know him?"

"I've seen him."

For all her light-eyed, ash-like blondness, her expression was incredibly intense. "You just… live out there?"

"Yeah." He examined her face. "So far I haven't needed a…" Intense, but it told him little. "…I haven't been here anywhere near as long as you have." He forced his shoulders down; they'd hunched to fend something he had not even consciously acknowledged an attack. "I hope you find him." It wasn't an attack; it was just that intensity. "But you've got a lot of competition."

"What…?" Her reaction to his realizing it was to suddenly lose all of it. "What do you want?" She sounded exhausted, looked as if she would repeat it with no voice at all. "Why… did you come here?"

"To clean up… I don't know why. To play, maybe. Why don't you let me clean up? You better go back downstairs." He picked up another paper and folded it, growling and flapping, to manageable size.

"Oh…" And suddenly she seemed just a very young girl again. "You're just…" She shrugged; and left.

He finished the paper, put the revealed junk in the kitchen, up-righted more furniture, and thought about this family.

They filled his mind while he finally shouldered into the packed room; he reached innumerable decisions about them which he lost to scraping chair legs, collapsing bridge tables, drawers that would not fit in their chiffoniers. One thought, however, remained surfaced for the time it took to move five pieces into the swept front room: Trying to stay sane under that sort of madness drives us nuts. He contemplated writing it in his notebook. But none of the words (and he had taken out his pen) weighed enough to pull his hand to the paper. The thought vanished in the gritting hinges of the writing board to a rolltop desk. Who had stuffed all this junk in here? (Drive? Pressure? Effort?… but was exerting too much of it maneuvering a daybed, on its end, around a bureau.) With slick underarms and gritty neck, he toiled, contemplating hours and wages. But it was difficult to judge slipping time while shuffling and arranging so much hollow dialogue.

When he went out on the balcony, the sky was the color of dark stone. His nasal cavity stung. He thought he saw movement down in the grounds. But when he took the rail, to look over, it was only smoke. And his forearms were sore. He went inside. He ate the rest of the sandwich. He drank the Coke, now flat as well as warm.

Work till sunset in a city where you never see the sun? He laughed. Fuck
them
if they expected him to get all this stuff to the basement! He ambled, panting, through dressers, easy chairs, day beds, and buffets. The thought occurred to put it in another apartment on the same floor. His next thought was: Why not?

He turned, gigantic, in the belly-high furniture forest. There was no one else, for practical purposes, in the building. Who would know? Who would care? His bladder suddenly warmed; he started down the hall.

At the end of an alcove, a hint of tile over the doorsill identified the bathroom. Inside, he flipped a light switch: lights stayed off. But, as he turned, his shin bumped the toilet ring.

It was pitch dark but he thought, what the hell.

The particular sound of his water, reiterated by sudden, hot wetness against his foot, told him he'd missed. He varied his aim without the rattle of water on water to sing success. Stop his stream? The memory of the yellow burst of pain at the base of his penis… He'd mop later. And let it run.

He lurched from the darkness and said, "Shit!"

His wet foot left its spreading print on the notebook, where it lay outside the door. Had it crept after him for soiling? No; he remembered (black and white; no color… like some dreams) carrying it with the intention of writing something down. When the lights hadn't worked, he had dropped it there.

"It's me, Kidd."

"Oh, hey, just a second."

The chain fell. The door opened.

Behind her, candles flickered on the phone table. The light from the living room tossed unsteady shadows on the rug. A doorway up the hall let out wavering orange. "Come on in."

He followed June to the living room.

"Well." Mr Richards peered above the
Times,
folded small. "You worked on a good bit past sundown I'd say. How's it going?"

"Fine. There was a whole lot of broken glass in the back room. A vanity turned over."

"You got the furniture out?" Mrs Richards called from the kitchen.

"Everything's in the front room. I can do all the back floors tomorrow, and get the rest of the stuff out of there for you. It's not going to be hard."

"That's good. Arthur…?"

"Oh, yes," Mr Richards said. "Mary's put out a towel for you. Go right in and run yourself a bath. Do you use an electric razor?"

"No."

"I have one, if you want. I put out a safety, for you, anyway. Blade's new. We'd like to invite you to stay for supper."

"Hey," he said, wanting to leave. "That's very nice. Thank you."

"Bobby, you put candles in the bathroom?"

Bobby went
Umph
over his book.

"Life by candlelight," Mr Richards said. "It's really something, isn't it?"

"At least the gas isn't off," Mrs Richards called again. "That's something too." She stepped to the door. "Bobby, Arthur,
both
of you! This isn't enough light to read by; you'll ruin your eyes."

"Bobby, put your book down. You heard your mother. You read too much anyway."

"Arthur, he can't read too much. It's just his
eyes."
She went back into the kitchen.

On top of the bookcase by Mr Richards' chair (neither he nor Bobby had ceased their reading) between an edition of
Paradise Lost
that said "Classics Club" and something thick by Michener, was a volume, thinner than both, with white letters down a black spine:
"Pilgrimage/
Newboy." He pulled the book loose. The candles flaked light across the cover. "Did Mrs Brown ever come?" He turned the book over. From the case, black ceramic lions looked somewhere else and glistened. The back blurb was only three uninformative lines. He looked at the front again:
Pilgrimage
by Ernest Newboy.

"She'll be here by the time we eat. She always is." June snickered, waiting for Father or Mother to object Neither did. "That's by that poet they told about in the paper. Bobby got it for Mother from the bookstore yesterday."

He nodded. "Ma'am?" He looked in the kitchen door. "May I look at this?"

"Certainly," Mrs Richards said, stirring, at the stove.

He went into the bathroom; probably laid out the same as the one he'd peed all over upstairs. Two candles on the back of the toilet tank put two flecks on each tile; and there was another candle up on the medicine cabinet.

He turned the taps, sat on the toilet top, and, with Newboy on his notebook, read at the "Prologemena."

The water rushed.

After a page he skipped, reading a line here, a verse paragraph further on. At some he laughed out loud.

He put down the book, shucked his clothing, leaned over the rim and lowered his chained, grimy ankle. Steam kissed the sole of his foot, then hot water licked it.

Sitting in the cooling tub, chain under his buttocks, he had scrubbed only a minute before the water was grey and covered with pale scalings.

Well, Lanya had said she wouldn't mind.

He let that water out, and ran more over his feet, rubbing the gritty skin from his insteps. He'd known he was dirty, but the amount of filth in the water was amazing. He soaked and soaped his hair, rubbed his arms and chest with the bar till the chain tore it. He grounded the balled washrag beneath his jaw, and then lay back with his ears under water, to watch the isle of his belly shake to his heart beat, each curved hair a wet scale, like the shingled skin of some amphibian.

Sometime during all this, Madame Brown's high laughter rolled into the hall; and a little on, her voice outside the door; "No! No, you can't go in there, Muriel! Someone's taking a bath."

He let out the water, and lay back, exhausted and clean, occasionally wiping at the tub-line of grit, wider than Loufer's garrison. He pressed his back against porcelain. Water trapped there poured around his shoulders. He sat, wondering if one could will oneself dry. And, slowly, dried.

He looked at his shoulder, peppered with pores, run with tiny lines he could imagine separated each cell, fuzzed with dark down. He brushed his mouth on his skin, licked the de-salted flesh, kissed it, kissed his arm, kissed the paler place where veins pushed across the bridge from bicep to forearm, realized what he was doing, with scowling laughter, but kissed himself again. He pushed to standing. Drops trickled the back of his legs. He was dizzy; the tiny flames wobbled in the tiles. He stepped out, heart knocking to the sudden effort.

He toweled roughly at his hair, gently at his genitals. Then, on his knees, he did a slightly better job washing away the hairs and grit and flaky stuff still on the bathtub bottom.

He picked up his pants, shook his head over them; well, they were all he had. He put them on, combed his moist hair back with his fingers, tucked in his shirt, buckled on his sandal, and came out into the hall. Behind his ears was cool, and still wet.

"How many baths did you take?" Mr Richards asked. "Three?"

"Two and a half." Kidd grinned. "Hello, Ma—Mrs Brown."

"They've been telling me how hard you've worked."

Kidd nodded. "It's not that bad. I'll probably finish up tomorrow. Mr Richards? You said you had a razor?"

"Oh yes. You're sure you don't want to use my electric?"

"I'm used to the other kind."

"It's just you'll have to use regular soap."

"Arthur," Mrs Richards called from the kitchen, "you have that mug of shaving soap Michael gave you for Christmas."

Mr Richards snapped his fingers. "Now I'd forgot. That was three years back. I never did open it. Grew a beard since too. I had a pretty good-looking beard for a while, you know?"

"It looked silly," Mrs Richards said. "I made him shave it off."

Back in the bathroom, he lathered his jaw, then scraped the warm foam away. His face cooled under the blade. He decided to leave his sideburns half an inch longer. Now (in two distinct stages) they came well below his ears.

For a moment, holding a hot washcloth across his face, he contemplated the patterns inside his eyes against the dark. But like everything in this house, they seemed of calculated inconsequence.