Dhalgren (40 page)

"There're probably people there," Kidd said, uncomfortably. "Probably a skeleton staff. Madame Brown and I were talking about that. It's probably like at… the Management office."

"Ah." Her hands met in her lap. "Yes." She sat back. "But I'm only telling you how it feels. To me. When the smoke thins, I can look across at the other buildings. So many of the windows are broken. Maybe the maintenance men in Arthur's office have already started putting in new panes. The maintenance is always better in a place of business. Well, there's more money involved. I just wonder when we can expect some sort of reasonable return to normal here. There's a certain minimum standard that must be kept up. They should send somebody around, if only to let us know what the situation is. Not knowing, that's the worst. If I did know something, something for sure about plans for repairing the damages, for restoring service, lights, and things, when we could expect them to start…" She looked oddly annoyed.

"Maybe they will," he suggested, "send somebody around."

"You'd think they would. We have had trouble with them before; there was a huge crack, it opened up in June's ceiling. It wasn't our fault. Something upstairs leaked. It took them three months to send somebody. But they answered my letter right away. Meanwhile, I just have to muddle, muddle on. And every morning I send Arthur out of here, out into that." She nodded. "That's the crime. Of course I couldn't keep him back; he wouldn't stay. I'd tell him how dangerous I thought it was out there, all the awful things I'm afraid might happen, and he'd—Oh, I wish he'd laugh. But he wouldn't. He'd scowl. And go. He goes away, every morning, just disappears, down Forty-Fourth. The only thing I can do for him is try and keep a good home, where nothing can hurt him, at least here, a happy, safe and—"

He thought she'd seen something behind him, and was about to turn around. But her expression went on to something more violent than recognition.

She bent her head. "I guess I haven't done that very well. I haven't done that at all."

He wished she would let him leave.

"Mrs Richards, I'm going to see about that stuff in the back." He thought there was some stuff in the back still to be put in place. "You just try and take it easy now." He got up, thinking: When I come back I can put down the living-room rug.

There's nothing I can do, he justified, to sponge up her grief. And I
can't
do nothing.

He opened the door to Bobby's room where the furniture had still not been put against the walls.

And June's fists crashed the edges of the poster together.

"Hey, I'm sorry… I didn't realize this was your—" But it
was
Bobby's room. Kidd's apologetic smile dropped before her astounded despair. "Look, I'll leave you alone…"

"He was going to
tell!"
she whispered, wide-eyed, shaking her head. "He
said
so! But I swear," and she crushed the poster altogether now. "I
swear
I didn't do it on purpose…!"

After a few moments, he said, "I suppose that's the first thing that would have occurred to anybody else in his right mind. But I didn't even think of it till just now." Then—and was afraid—he backed out of the room and closed the door, unable to determine what had formed in her face. I'm just an observer, he thought, and, thinking it, felt the thought crumple like George's poster between June's fists.

Walking toward the living room, he envisioned her leaping from the door, to bite and rake his back. The doors stayed closed. There was no sound. And he didn't want to go back to the living room.

Just as he came in, the lock ratched, and the hall door pushed open. "Hello, guess who I found on the way up here?"

"Hi, Mary." Madame Brown followed Mr Richards in.

"Honey, what in the world is that mess down in the lobby? It looks as though somebody—"

Mrs Richards turned around on the couch.

Mr Richards frowned.

Madame Brown, behind him, suddenly touched her hand to her bright, jeweled chains.

Mrs Richards squeezed the fabric of her skirt. "Arthur, this afternoon Bobby… June—
Bobby—!"

His eyelids, snapped wide enough to pain the sockets. He rolled, scrabbling on snarled blankets and crushed leaves, flung his hands at her naked back. Had he nails, he would have torn.

"Unnnh,"
Lanya said and turned to him. Then, "Hey—" because he dragged her against him. "I know," she mumbled beside his ear, moving her arms inside his to get them free, "you want to be a great and famous—"

His arms shook.

"Oh, hey—!" Her hands came up across his back, tightened. "You were having bad dreams! About that boy!"

He shook his head beside hers.

"It's all right," she whispered. She got one hand high enough to rub the back of his shoulder. "It's all right now. You're awake." He took three rough breaths, with stomach-clenched silences between, then let go and rolled to his back. The red veil, between him and the darkness, here, then there, fell away.

She touched his arm; she kneaded his shoulder. "It was a really bad dream, wasn't it?"

He said, "I don't… know," and stopped gasping. Foliage hung over them. Near the horizon, blurred in fog, he saw a tiny moon; and further away, another! His head came up from the blanket—went slowly back:

They were two parklights which, through smoke, looked like diffuse pearls. "I can't remember if I was dreaming or not."

"You were dreaming about Bobby," she said. "That's all. And you scared yourself awake."

He shook his head. "I shouldn't have given her that damned poster—"

Her head fell against his shoulder. "You didn't have any way to know…" Her hand dropped over his chest; her thigh crossed his thigh.

"But—" he took her hand in his—"the funny
lack
of expression Mr Richards got when she was trying to tell him how it happened. And in the middle of it, June came in, and sort of edged into the wall, and kept on brushing at her chin with her fist and blinking. And Mrs Richards kept on saying, 'It was an accident! It was a terrible accident!' and Madame Brown just said 'Oh, Lord!' a couple of times, and Mr Richards didn't say anything. He just kept looking back and forth between Mrs Richards and June as though he couldn't quite figure out what they were saying, what they'd done, what had happened, until June started to cry and ran out of the room—"

"It sounds awful," she said. "But try to think about something else—"

"I am." He glanced at the parklights again; now there was only one. Had the other gone out? Or had some tree branch, lifted away by wind, settled back before it. "About what George and you were saying yesterday—about everybody being afraid of female sexuality, and trying to make it into something that wreaks death and destruction all about it. I mean, I don't
know
what Mr Richards would do if he found out his sunshine girl was running around the streets like a bitch in heat, lusting to be brutalized by some hulking, sadistic, buck nigger. Let's see, he's already driven one child out of the house with threats of murder—"

"Oh, Kidd,
no…"

"—and the sounds that come out of that apartment when they don't think anybody's listening are just as strange as the ones that come up from Thirteen's, believe me. Maybe she's got good reason not to want her old man to know, and if Bobby was threatening, in that vicious way younger brothers can have, to show the poster to her parents, well maybe just for an instant, when she was backing him down the hall, and the door rolled open, from some sort of half-conscious impulse, it was easier to shove—or not even to shove, but just not say anything when he stepped back toward the wrong—"

"Kidd," Lanya said, "now come
on!"

"It would be just like the myth: her lust for George, death and destruction! Only—only suppose it
was
an accident?" He took another breath.
"That's
what frightens me. Suppose it was, like she said,
just
an accident. She didn't see at all. Bobby just backed into the wrong shaft door. That's what terrifies me. That's the thing I'm scared of most."

"Why?" Lanya asked.

"Because…" He breathed, felt her head shift on his shoulder, her hand rock with his on his chest; "Because that means it's the city. That means it's the landscape: the bricks, and the girders, and the faulty wiring and the shot elevator machinery, all conspiring together to
make
these myths true. And that's crazy." He shook his head. "I shouldn't have give her that poster. I shouldn't. I really shouldn't—" . His head stopped shaking. "Motherfucker still hasn't paid me my money. I was going to talk to him about it this evening. But I couldn't, then."

"No, it doesn't sound like the most propitious time to bring up financial matters."

"I just wanted to get out of there."

She nodded.

"I don't
want
the money. I really don't."

"Good." She hugged. "Then just forget about the whole thing. Don't go back there. Let them alone. If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them do it."

He raised his hand above his face, palm up, moving his fingers, watching them, black against four-fifths black, his arm muscle tiring, till he let his knuckles fall against his forehead. "I was so scared… When I woke up, I was so
scared!"

"It was just a dream," she insisted. And then: "Look, if it
really
was an accident, your bringing that poster didn't have anything to do with it. And if she
did
do it on purpose, then she's so far gone there's no way you could possibly blame yourself!"

"I know," he said. "But do you think…" He could feel the place on his neck her breath brushed warmly. "Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"

"Of course it does," she said. "San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one than say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely." She waited.

So at last he said. "Yeah… But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said, "that's crazy—in a word."

He slid his arm around her and could smell her wake-up breath, cuddling her. "You know, when I pulled him out, blood all over me, like a flayed carcass off a butcher hook… you know, I had half a hard-on? That's too much, huh?"

She reached between his legs. "You still do." She moved her fingers there; he moved in her fingers.

"Maybe that's what I was dreaming about?" He laughed sharply. "Do you think that's what I was—?"

Her hand contracted, released, moved forward, moved back.

He said: "I don't think that's going to do any good…"

Against his chest he felt her shrug. "Try."

Not so much to his surprise, but somehow against his will, his will ceased, and it did.

I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body's machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-corporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.

The leaf shattered in his blunt fingers: leaf and flesh—he ground the flakings with his roughened thumb—were the same color, a different texture. He stared, defining the distinction.

"Come on." Lanya caught up his hand.

Flakes fluttered away (some he felt cling); notebook under his other arm, he stood up from where he'd been leaning on the end of the picnic table. "I was just thinking," Kidd said, "maybe I should stop off at the Labry's and try to collect my money."

"And keep Mr Newboy waiting?" Lanya asked. "Look, you said you
got
them all moved!"

"I was just thinking about it," Kidd said. "That's all."

A young man with a high, bald forehead and side hair to his naked shoulders sat on an overturned wire basket, one sandal resting over the other. He leaned forward, a burned twig in each hand. They had smudged his fingers. "I take these from you crossed," he said to a girl sitting Indian fashion on the ground before him, "and give them to you crossed."

The girl's black hair was pulled back lacquer tight, till, at the thong whipped a dozen times around her pony tail and tied, it broke into a dozen rivulets about the collar of her pink shirt: her sleeves were torn off; frayed pink threads lay against her thin arms. With her own smudged fingers, she took the twigs. "I take these from you—" she hesitated, concentrated—"uncrossed and I give them to you—" she thrust them back—"uncrossed?"

Some spectators in the circle laughed. Others looked as bemused as she did.

"Nope. Got it wrong again." The man spread his feet, sandal heels lining the dirt, and drew them back against the basket rim. "Now watch." With crossed wrists he took the sticks from her: "I take these from you… uncrossed—" his wrists came apart—"and I give them back to you…"

John, scratching under the fringed shoulder of his Peruvian vest with one hand and eating a piece of bread with the other, came around the furnace. "You guys want some more?" He gestured with the slice, chewing. "Just go take it. You didn't get here till we were already halfway through breakfast." Gold-streaked hair and gold wire frames set off his tenacious tan; his pupils were like circles cut from the overcast.

Kidd said: "We had enough. Really."

In the basket on which the bald man sat ("I take these from you uncrossed and I give them to you… crossed!" More laughter.) a half dozen loaves of bland, saltless bread had been brought over by two scorpions who had taken back two cardboard cartons of canned food, in exchange.