Dhalgren (42 page)

"That's right," Kidd said with reserve and curiosity. He wished Newboy would go on, silently, to the poems.

"Publishers, editors, gallery owners, orchestra managers! What incredible parameters for the creative world. But it is a purgatorially instructive one to walk around in with such a wound as ours. Still, I don't believe anybody ever enters it without having been given the magic Shield by someone." Newboy's eyes fell again, rose again, and caught Kidd's. "Would you like it?"

"Huh? Yeah. What?"

"On one side," intoned Newboy with twinkling gravity, "is inscribed: 'Be true to yourself that you may be true to your work.' On the other: 'Be true to your work that you may be true to yourself'." Once more Newboy's eyes dropped to the page; his voice continued, preoccupied: "It is a little frightening to peer around the edge of your own and see so many others discarded and glittering about in that spiky landscape. Not to mention all those naked people doing all those strange things on the tops of their various hills, or down in their several dells, some of them—Lord,
how
many?—beyond doubt out of their minds! At the same time—" he turned another page—"nothing is quite as humbling, after a very little while, as realizing how close one has already come to dropping it a dozen times oneself, having been distracted—heavens, no!—not by wealth—or fame, but by those endless structures of logic and necessity that go so tediously on before they reach the inevitable flaw that causes their joints to shatter and allow you passage. One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora. At any rate, they make every object from axletrees to zarfs and finjons cast the most astonishing shadows." Mr Newboy glanced up again. "Perhaps you've followed some dozen such lights to their source?" He held the page between his fingers. "Admit it—since we are talking as equals—most of the time there simply wasn't anything there. Though to your journal—" he let the page fall back to what he'd been perusing before—"or in a letter to a friend you feel will take care to preserve it, you will also admit the whole experience was rather marvelous and filled you with inadmissible longings that you would be more than a little curious to see settle down and, after all, admits. Sometimes you simply found a plaque which read, 'Here Mozart met da Ponti,' or 'Rodin slept here.' Three or four times you discovered a strange group heatedly discussing something that happened on that very spot a very long time by, which, they assure you, you would have thoroughly enjoyed had you not arrived too late. If you can bear them, if you can listen, if you can learn why they are still there, you will have gained something quite valuable. 'For God's sakes, put down that thing in your hand and stay a while!' It's a terribly tempting invitation. So polite themselves, they are the only people who seem willing to make allowances for your natural barbarousness. And once or twice, if you were lucky, you found a quiet, elderly man who, when you mumbled something about dinner for him and his slightly dubious friend, astounded you by saying, 'Thank you very much; we'd be delighted.' Or an old woman watching the baseball game on her television, who, when you brought her flowers on her birthday, smiled through the chain on the door and explained, 'That's very sweet of you boys, but I just don't see anyone now, any more, ever.' Oh, that thing in your hand. You do still have it, don't you?"

"Sir, maybe if—?"

Newboy moved his hand, looked back down. "It starts out mirrored on both sides: initially reassuring, but ultimately distracting. It rather gets in the way. But as you go on, the silvering starts to wear. Now you can see more, and more, directly through. Really—" Newboy glanced up quickly, then returned his eyes to the page— "it's a lens. The transition period is almost always embarrassing, however. While you are still being dazzled with bits of your own reflection, you have begun to suspect that it might, after all, be one-way glass—with a better view afforded from
out there!
Still, once used to it, you find the view more interesting. With only a little practice, you get so you can read both legends at once, without having to stop what you're doing to turn the thing around. Oh, and how many, many times you came close to clashing into someone you thought buck-naked only to find his Shield had grown transparent as your own. You become chary of judging too quickly who still has, and who has discarded, his. And when some youngster, glitteringly protected, through malice or, worse, some incomprehensible vision of kindness, shouts up at the dreadfully stark crag on which you happen to be panting, or down into the fetid ravine from which you are manfully trying to clamber with only one arm free, 'You're naked, don't you understand?' you may, momentarily, squint to make sure the double legend is still etched before you, but you are not liable to waste much energy setting him straight unless your own vision of kindness is as incomprehensible as his. There are more important things to do. As best you can, you go about doing them. But things still interrupt: now your eyes are deviled by a recurrent, polychrome flash. You try to ignore it. But its frequency increases. From habit, you check the cut runes to make sure. But, frankly, during the moments of illumination, it is practically impossible for you to read them, much less decide whether they still contain sense. The thing you have been baring, not to mention staring through all this time, has become an immense prism." Newboy leaned back now, his eyes somewhere on the underside of the balcony. "Did I say the first transition was embarrassing? This one is monstrous. And it is the same fear: one-way glass! If only you didn't remember all those other, endless, elderly ladies with their water-color sets, the old men with their privately printed poems, whom one had, out of politeness, brought flowers for or invited out to dinner, as well, even though their heads were wrapped in tin foil and they babbled ceaselessly about Poetry and Truth. After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. You even could discern two or three of the proper letters among the foil folds, admittedly cut from cardboard and taped there with sticking plaster. Are all these humbling fireworks some sort of cruel second childhood, a defect in the eye: You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own—never deny that for an instant—it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn't. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned—was it before you began?—the terrifying fact that
had
you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heal: indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been—and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs—and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority—that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all."

Newboy fixed his eyes on Kidd's. Kidd smiled and felt uncomfortable. Then he felt belligerent, which maybe tainted the smile. He was going to say, Do you always rap like this when somebody…

The notebook suddenly slipped from Newboy's knees. The poet bent, but Kidd snatched it up first.

Its back cover had fallen open. Kidd frowned at the final block of handwriting that ran off the page bottom:

…The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

"Do you…" Kidd's hand fell on the page. He looked up slowly.

The chain snaked around his wrist up his arm. It crossed his belly, his chest, between the vest flaps. "Do you think that's what they mean?"

"Pardon me?"

Kidd hooked his thumb beneath the chain and pulled it. "These. Do you think that's what they're supposed to mean?"

Mr Newboy laughed. "I haven't the faintest idea! You have them. I don't. I've
seen
people with them, here, but no. No. I was just
using
them. Oh, no! I would never presume to say what they meant."

Kidd looked down again. "Do you always go on like that to people who bring you poems?" he asked, with nowhere near the belligerence he had intended: He grinned.

Newboy was still laughing. "Go on." Newboy waved his hand. "You read some of them to me now." He sat forward, took another sip, then put his cup down. "No, really, I want to hear some of them out loud."

"All right," Kidd said, expecting to feel resentment, but experiencing a different anxiety altogether. He noted, with concern, once more, the number of pages left with free sides.

"Read the one about the dog-thing. I liked that one."

"Murielle?"

Newboy nodded, hands together in his lap.

Kidd turned toward the front of the book.

He began to read.

Breathlessness left about the third line. Somewhere, something like enjoyment bloomed under his tongue and, rather than tripping it, somehow made it more sensitive, so that, without pause he realized how the vowels in both
loom
and
flow
took off from the same point but went different places. He found his face hollowing for the more resonant tones. He let them move the muscles about his mouth till staccato t'
s
and
k's
riddled the final line and made him smile.

"Lovely," Newboy said. "In a rather horrifying way. Read the one in front of it."

He read, and lost himself in the movements of his mouth, till a momentary convocation in the ear stunned him into a shriller voice. Then the long sounds quieted the answer.

"There are two voices in dialogue in that one, aren't there," Newboy commented at the finish. "I didn't pick it up just glancing at it."

"Huh? Oh, yeah. Maybe I should set them apart on the page—"

"No, no!" Mr Newboy sat up and motioned. "No, believe me, it isn't necessary. It would be perfectly clear in a page of print. It was my attention reading, believe me. Just go on."

He read.

What had come to him as images (among which he had pecked with tongue tip and pen point) returned, shocked, luminous—sometimes more, sometimes less luminous than memory, but so rich he thrust them out with his tongue to keep from trying to eat them.

"It's so much fun," Newboy said, "that you enjoy your own poems so much. Have you ever noticed how free verse tends to turn into iambic pentameter all by itself? Especially by people who haven't written much poetry."

"Sir?"

"Well, it's only nautral. It's the natural rhythm of English speech. You know, when the line goes
ba-da,
ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da? Oh, now don't sit there and look confused. Read some more. I'm not going to get pedantic again. I am enjoying this. Really."

Kidd was happily embarrassed. His eyes dropped to the page. Kidd read; turned; read… Several times he thought he must be going on awfully long. But Newboy motioned for another, and once asked to hear both versions ("I saw that you had two when I was looking through…" and, after the earlier version: "Well, most of your revisions are in the right direction.") and had him reread several more. More confident, Kidd chose others now, went back to one he had left out, then skipped ahead, gathering some enjoyment that was not pride, was greatest when he was least aware of the man eating cookies before him, was a supportive pattern in the caverns under the tongue.

He stopped to glance at Newboy—

The poet was frowning at something not him.

Lanya said (in a voice that made Kidd turn, frowning) ten feet down the terrace: "I… I didn't mean to interrupt." It was blue, it was shredded, it was silk.

"What's that?"

"My… dress." She came forward carrying it over her arm. "I looked upstairs in the Observatory Wing… for my dress, while you were reading. Christ, it's a mess up there!"

Mr Newboy frowned. "I didn't even know anybody was staying there."

"It doesn't look like anybody is," she said, "now."

"Is that on the third floor?"

Lanya nodded.

"Roger said something about not using that section—the doors were closed, weren't they? I thought it was something about plumbing repairs."

"They were closed but they weren't locked." Lanya said. "I just went right in. They were using it when I was here—I was just looking for the room Phil and I stayed in. But… the carpets have been pulled up off the floor; and torn. It looks like somebody yanked the light fixtures out of the ceiling, with about a foot of plaster each. In the bathroom off our bedroom, the sink's just sitting in the middle of the floor, and all that lovely blue Victorian tilework has been smashed. There're two holes in the wall that look like they've been put there with a battering ram—and somebody's slashed all the mattresses!" She looked down at the shredded material. "And my dress. It was balled up in a corner of the closet… the clothes bars were all pulled down and the clothes hook had been hammered back and bent or something." She held the dress up. "Somebody had to
do
this—it looks like somebody's been at it with a razor! But what in the world
for?"

"Oh, dear!" Mr Newboy said. "Why, that's perfectly—"

"I mean it doesn't matter," Lanya said. "About the dress. When I left it, I didn't think I was coming back for it. But why in the
world—?"
She looked at Kidd, at Newboy. Suddenly she said, "Oh, hey—I didn't mean to interrupt!" She pulled the dress together into a ball, leaned back against the balustrade. "Please, go on. Don't stop reading, Kidd—"