Dhalgren (36 page)

Bobby's spoon, silent the exchange, crunched again.

June's eyes had stayed down, but once more her finger moved.

From the doorway Kidd glanced back at her (as moments before her father had glanced back at him) and tried to set her against George's and Lanya's conversation of the previous afternoon. But, with blonde head bent over the paper at the edge of dark wood-blonde and pink reflection fuzzed in the polish—she seemed as at home among the fluted, white china cups, the brass pots of plants, the green rugs, the blue flowered drapes, her mother, her brother, the wide windows, or the green wallpaper with its paler green florals.

Down on seventeen, he came into the apartment (unchained, unlocked) and thought: Why didn't we take the rugs up
first?
That was silly, not to have taken the rugs up. Like mottled eels (the underpad, a smaller darker eel, printed with a design that, till now, he'd only seen on corrugated ceilings) the rugs lay against the living room wall. Outside the window, pale leviathans swam. Piles of books sat on the floor.

Pilgrimage
was on top of one.

For the third—or was it the fourth? Or the fifth?—time he picked it up, read at random pages, waiting to be caught and driven into the work. But the receptivity he tried to bring was again and again hooked away by some pattern of shadow on the bare vinyl tile, some sound in the apartment below, some itch in his own body: and there went all his attention. Though his eye moved over the print, his place and the print's sense were lost: At last he lay the book back on the pile, and put a book from another pile on top, as though—and wondered why he thought of it this way—the first book were his own.

He stood up—he had been squatting—and gazed around: still to be moved were bridge tables from the back storage closet, folding chairs with scrolled arms, green cushions, and black metal hinges; and toys from Bobby's room, scattered among them. A set of four nest tables was crowded with small, bright breakables.

He wandered down the hall (there was the carton of papers from Mr Richards' den) and turned into Bobby's room. Most of what was left was evidence of the older brother who'd once shared it: a handkerchief that had fallen out of a bureau drawer yesterday, showing the monogram: EGR; propping the closet door were three small cartons with
Eddy
written across them in magic marker; on the floor was the Bellona High School Yearbook. Kidd picked it up and paged through: Edward Garry Richards
(Soccer team, G.O. Volunteer,
"The Cafeteria Staff's favorite two years running…") was
Camera Shy.

He lay the book down on the boxes, wandered across the hall into June's room: on the window sill was the tepee of an empty matchbook and a white plastic flower pot still filled with earth which, June had told him yesterday, had once grown a begonia her aunt Marianne had given her two Easters ago.

In memory he refurnished the space with the pieces he'd taken upstairs the previous day and tried to pull back, also from memory, the image of June that had come to him in George's overheard converse. Memory failed at a sound outside.

Kidd stepped back into the hall as Bobby came from the living room; he grunted, over an armful of books, "I'm taking these upstairs."

"Why don't you take about half of them?"

"Maybe—" two books fell—"I better."

June came in: "Oh, hey, I'll take some of those…" They divided the stack, left.

Where, he wondered as the door closed (the unlatched chain swung and swung over green paint), is my notebook? Of course; down the hall in what had been the back bedroom, from when he'd stopped in this apartment out of habit when he'd first come in the morning: He had momentarily forgotten that the Richards were living in nineteen now.

In the back bedroom another file box stood off center in the middle of the floor.

The notebook was on the window sill. Kidd walked up to it, looked at the worn, smeared cardboard. Outside, small darknesses moved below the mist. What, he thought, should I say to Mr Richards about my money? Suppose Mr Richards comes back this evening and doesn't bring up the subject? Kidd considered writing down alternative opening lines and rehearsing them for Mr Richards' return. No. No, that's exactly the wrong way! It's almost nine o'clock, he thought, and too smoky to tell people from shadows at seventeen stories.

Something thumped; a girl cried out. A second thump, and her pitch changed. A third—it sounded like toppling furniture—and her cry swooped. A fourth ended it.

That was from the apartment below.

Breaking glass, much nearer, brought his eyes from the floor.

Kidd went to the living room.

Mrs Richards, kneeling over something shattered, looked up and shook her head. "I…"

He stopped before her restrained confusion.

"…I dropped one of the—"

He could not tell what the figurine had been.

"So thin—these walls are so very thin. Everything comes through. I was so startled…" By the nest tables, she picked faster in the bright, black shards, white matt overside.

"I hope it wasn't anything you really—" but was halted by his own inanity.

"Oh, that's all right. Here, I've got it all." She stood, cupping chips. "I heard that awful… and I dropped it."

"They were going on pretty loud." He tried to laugh, but before her gaze, he let the laugh die in breath. "Mrs Richards, it's just noise. You shouldn't let yourself get so upset about it."

"What are they
doing
down there? Who
are
they?"

He thought she might crush the ceramic between her palms. "They're just some guys, some girls, who moved into the downstairs apartment. They're not out to bother you. They think the noises from up here are pretty strange too."

"Just moved in? How do you mean, they
just
moved in?"

He watched her expression lurch at fear, and not achieve even that. "They wanted a roof, I guess. So they took it over."

"Took it
over?
They
can't
come in here and take it over. What happened to the couple who lived there before? Management doesn't know things like this are going on. The front doors used to be closed at ten o'clock, every night! And locked! The first night they started making those dreadful sounds, I sent Arthur out for one of the guards: Mr Phillips, a very nice West Indian man, he's always in front of our building till one in the morning. Arthur couldn't find him. He'd gone away. All the guards. And the attendants for the garage. I want you to know I put that in my letter to Management. I certainly did." She shook her head. "How can they just come in and take it over?"

"They just… Ma'am, there aren't any more guards, and nobody was living there; they just moved in. Just like you're moving into nineteen."

"We're not
just
moving in!" Mrs Richards had been looking about. Now she walked into the kitchen. "I
wrote
Management. Arthur went to see them. We got the key from the office. It isn't the same thing at all."

Kidd followed Mrs Richards around the stripped kitchen.

"How do
you
know nobody was living there? There was a very nice couple downstairs. She was Japanese. Or Korean or something. He was connected with the university. I didn't know them very well. They'd only been here six months. What happened to
them?"
She looked back, just before she went into the dining room again.

"They left, just like everybody else." He still followed.

She carried the broken things, clacking, down the rugless hall. "I think something awful happened to them. I think those people down there did something awful. Why doesn't Management send some new guards?" She started into Bobby's room, but changed her mind and continued to June's. "It's dangerous, it's absolutely, terribly dangerous, without guards."

"Mrs Richards?" He stood in the doorway while she circuited the room, hands still cupped. "Ma'am? What are you looking for?"

"Someplace to throw—" she stopped—"this. But you took everything upstairs already."

"You know you could just drop it on the floor." He was impatient and his impatience embarrassed him. "I mean you don't live here any more."

After the silence in which her expression became curious, she said, "You don't understand the way we live at all. But then, you probably think you understand all too well. I'm going to take this out to the incinerator."

He ducked back as she strode through.

"I don't like to go out in the hall. I don't feel safe—"

"I'll take it out for you," he called after her.

"That's all right." Hands still together, she twisted the knob.

When the door banged behind her, he sucked his teeth, then went and got his notebook from the window. The blue-rimmed stationery slid half out. He opened the cover and looked at her even letters. With his front teeth set, he took his pen and drew in the comma. Her ink was India black; his, dark blue.

Going back to the living room, he stabbed at his pocket several times. Mrs Richards came in with a look of accomplishment. His pen caught. "Mrs Richards, do you know, that letter's still down in your mailbox?"

"What letter?"

"You've got an airmail letter in your mailbox. I saw it again this morning."

"All the mailboxes are broken."

"Yours isn't. And there's a letter inside it. I told you about it the first day I came here. Then I told Mr Richards a day later. Don't you have a mailbox key?"

"Yes, of course. One of us will go down and pick it up this afternoon."

"Mrs Richards?" Something vented still left something to come.

"Yes, Kidd?"

His teeth were still set. He sucked air and they opened. "You're a very nice woman. You've really tried to be nice to me. And I think it's a shame you have to be so scared all the time. There's nothing I can do about it, but I wish there was."

She frowned; the frown passed. "I don't suppose you'd believe just how much you have done."

"By being around?"

"Yes. And also by being, well…"

He could not interpret her shrug: "Mrs Richards, I've been scared a whole lot of my life too. Of a lot of things that I didn't know what they were. But you can't just let them walk all over you—take over. You have to—"

"I am moving!" Her head bobbed in emphasis. "We are moving from seventeen-B to nineteen-A."

"—do something inside yourself."

She shook her head sharply, not looking. "And you are very presumptuous if you think you are telling me something I don't know." Now she looked up. "Or your telling me makes it any easier."

Frustration drove the apology. "I'm sorry." He heard his own reticence modify it to something else.

Mrs Richards blinked. "Oh, I know you're just trying to… I am sorry. But do you
know
how terrible it is to live inside here—" she gestured at the green walls—"with everything slipping away? And you can hear everything that goes on in the other rooms, in the other apartments? I wake up at night, and walk by the window, and I can see lights sometimes, moving in the smoke. And when the smoke isn't so heavy, it's even worse, because then the lights look like horrible things, crawling around… This has got to stop, you know! Management must be having all sorts of difficulty while we're going through this crisis. I understand that. I make allowances. But it's not as though a bomb had fallen, or anything. If a bomb had fallen, we'd be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don't we, until the situation is rectified?" She leaned forward: "You don't think it
is
a bomb?"

"It isn't a bomb. I was in Encenadas, in Mexico, just a week or so ago. There was nothing about a bomb in the papers; somebody gave me a lift who had an L.A. paper in his car. Everything's fine there. And in Philadelphia—"

"Then you see. We just have to wait. The guards will be back. They will get rid of all these terrible people who run around vandalizing in the halls. We have to be patient, and be strong. Of course I'm afraid, I'm afraid if I sit still more than five minutes I'll start to scream. But you can't give in to it, any more than you can give in to them. Do you think we should take kitchen knives and broken flower pots and run down there and try to scrape them out?"

"No, of course not—"

"I'm not that sort of person. I don't intend to become that sort. You say I have to do something? Well, I have moved my family. Don't you think that takes a great deal of… inner strength? I mean in
this
situation? I can't even let myself assess how dangerous the whole thing really is. If I did, I wouldn't be able to move at all."

"Of course it's dangerous. But I go out. I live outside in it; I walk around in it. Nothing happens to me."

"Oh, Edna told me how you got that scab on your face. Besides, you are a man. You are a young man. I am a middle-aged woman."

"But that's all there is now, Mrs Richards. You've got to walk around in it because there isn't anything else."

"It will be different if I wait. I know that because I
am
middle-aged. You don't because you're still very young."

"Your friend Mrs Brown—"

"Mrs Brown is not me. I am not Mrs Brown. Oh, are you just
trying
not to understand?"

He gathered breath for protest but failed articulation.

"I have a family. It's very important to me. Mrs Brown is all alone, now. She doesn't have the same sort of responsibilities. But you don't understand about that; perhaps in your head, you do. But not inside, not really."

"Then why don't you and Mr Richards take your family out of all this mess?"

Her hands, moving slowly down her dress, turned up once, then fell. "One can retreat, yes. I suppose that's what I'm doing by moving. But you can't just give up entirely, run away, surrender. I
like
the Labry Apartments." Her hands pulled together to crush the lap of her dress. "I like it here. We've lived here since I was pregnant with Bobby. We had to wait almost a year to get in. Before that, we had a tiny house out in Helmsford; but it wasn't as nice as this, believe me. They don't let just anyone in here. With Arthur's position, it's much better for him. I've entertained many of his business associates here. I especially liked some of the younger, brighter men. And their wives. They were very pleasant. Do you know how hard it is to make a home?"