Dhalgren (43 page)

Kidd said, "Let's go up and take a look at—"

"No," Lanya said, surprisingly loud.

Newboy blinked.

"No, I really don't want to go back up there."

"But…?" Kidd frowned.

"Roger did ask us all not to go in that wing," Newboy said, uncomfortably. "But I had no idea it was—"

"I closed the doors." Lanya looked at the blue silk in her fist. "I should have left this up there."

"Maybe some wild party got out of hand?" Kidd asked.

Lanya said: "It didn't look like any party to me."

Newboy, Kidd suddenly saw (and realized at the same time that Lanya saw it too) was upset. Lanya's response was: "Is the coffee hot? I think I'd like a cup."

"Certainly." Newboy stood, went to the urn.

"Go on, Kidd," Lanya said. "Read another poem," as Newboy brought her the cup.

"Yes." The elderly poet, collecting himself, returned to his chair. "Let's hear another one."

"All right." Kidd paged through: they were all in some conspiracy to obliterate, if not Lanya's news itself, at least its unsettling effect. And he's got to live here, Kidd thought. There were only three more poems.

After the second, Lanya said: "That one's one of my favorites." Her hand moved over torn blue, folded over the wall.

And he read the third. "So now," Kidd said, primarily to keep something going, "you've got to give me
some
idea of what you think of them, whether they're good or bad," a thought which hadn't occurred to him once since he'd come; only previous mental rehearsal brought it out now.

"I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you read them," Newboy said. "But for anything else, you simply have to say to yourself, with Mann: I cannot know, and you cannot tell me."

Kidd smiled, reached for three more cookies on the tea-wagon, tried to think of something else.

Newboy said: "Why don't we take a stroll around the grounds? If it were a bright sunny day, it would be quite spectacular I'm sure. But it's still nice, in an autumnal sort of way."

Lanya, who was looking into her cup, suddenly raised her eyes. "Yes, that's an idea. I'd like that."

And that, Kidd realized, was Newboy's kindness to Lanya. Somehow after her initial confidence, a moodiness had surfaced, but she had jumped to dispel it with movement and converse.

She put down her saucer, got down from the balustrade.

Kidd started to ask her: "Are you gonna take your…?"

But obviously she wasn't.

What, he wondered as they walked along the terrace and turned down the low steps, would be the emotional detritus from the violence upstairs in himself? But, as he wondered, Lanya, at the bottom step, took hold of his little finger in a hot, moist grip.

They walked across grass till rock rose from under it.

They climbed stone steps. They crossed a bridge with wrought railings.

A waterfall rushed beside them, stilled beneath them.

"This is
April,"
Mr Newboy informed them from the plaque in the bridge's center.

They crossed it.

The corner bit Kidd's heel.

"You must know these quite well," Newboy said to Lanya.

"Not really. But I like them." She nodded.

"I've always meant to ask Roger why he has
September
and
July
in each other's place."

"Are they?" Lanya asked. "I must have walked around here fifty times and never noticed!"

They left the bridge to stroll under huge-leafed catalpas, past bird baths, past a large bronze sundial, tarnished brown and blank of shadow.

Stone benches were set out before the hedges in
August.

Beyond the trees he could see the lawns of
September.
They passed through high stone newels where a wrought iron gate was loose from the bottom hinge, and, finally, once more, they were on the gravel driveway curving through great, squat evergreens.

Mr Newboy walked them to the front gate. By the green guard-shack, they exchanged Good-bye's, So-long's, I really enjoyed myself's, You must come again, and more good-bye's, during which, Kidd felt, as the gate-latch clanked behind them, each person had spoken one time too many.

He turned on the sidewalk to take Lanya's hand, sure she would bring up the shattered Observatory Wing the moment silence settled.

They walked.

She didn't.

After a dozen steps she said, "You want to write, don't you?" which, he realized, was what this compulsion to articulation was.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess I'll stop off at the bar, maybe do something there."

"Good," she said. "I'm going back to the park, first. But I'll come by Teddy's later."

"Okay."

She ambled beside him, shoulder brushing his, sometimes looking at the houses beside them, sometimes at the pavement before them, sometimes glancing up at the willow-lapped wall.

He said: "You want to go off and play your harmonica, don't you?" knowing it by the same pattern of silent cues she had known his desire. He put his arm around her shoulder; their walks fell into sync.

"Yes."

He thought his own thoughts, occasionally glancing to wonder what hers were.

Silent on the circuit of the year, speech is in excess of what I want to say, or believe. On the dismal air I sketch my own restraint, waking, reflexively, instant to instant. The sensed center, the moment of definition, the point under such pressure it extrudes a future and a past I apprehend only as a chill, extends the overlay of injury with some retentive, tenuous disease, the refuse of brick-and mortar-grinding violence. How much more easily all machination were such polarized perception to produce so gross an ideal.

Speech,
the notebook's owner had written across from the page where Kidd wrote now,
is always in excess of poetry as print
…

"Hello."

He looked up from the counter (in the cage the silver dancer bowed to thin applause and flicked through the black curtain), then down as the dog gave a short bark.

"Muriel—!"

"Hello, Madame Brown. I haven't seen you in a while."

"Odd: I haven't seen you either." She laughed, high to low. "God, this place is dead tonight. May I sit down? You can pretend to buy an old woman a drink."

"Sure—"

"But I'm interrupting your work."

He shrugged. "I'm sort of at a stopping point."

As Madame Brown sat, the bartender brought her usual and replaced Kidd's beer. "What are you writing. Another poem?"

"A long one. It's in the natural rhythm of English speech."

She raised her eyebrow, and reflexively he closed the book; then wished he hadn't. "How are Mr and Mrs Richards, and June?"

"Oh." She flattened her knuckles to the wood. "Like always."

"They like their new place?"

She nodded. "I was over there for dinner night before last. But this evening they're having other guests, apparently. It was quite amusing to watch Mary try and make sure I didn't just accidentally drop around tonight." She didn't laugh. "Oh, yes, they're quite settled in now." She sat back. "I wish there were some more people. The city soaks them up; or maybe people are just… leaving?"

Kidd put the orchid on the cover of his book where it balanced on the three longest prongs.

"I guess you have to carry that around, don't you." Madame Brown laughed. "Perhaps I ought to get one. Perhaps I've just been very lucky in this dangerous city?"

From opposite sides he moved his hands together till his blunt fingertips bumped in the cage, and the blade points tugged back the skin between, burning now, about to cut. "I've got to go back to see them." He separated his fingers a little. "About my money."

"You haven't been paid?"

"Five dollars, the first day." He looked at her. "That morning I met you in the park, you said they'd told you they'd pay five an hour."

She nodded and said something softly. He thought he heard "…poor kid," but could not tell if "poor" were preceded by "you" or followed by comma and capital.

"How
did they tell you?"

She looked at him questioningly.

"What did they say to you, exactly?"

She turned her frown to her glass. "They told me that if I found a young man who might help them with their moving, I should tell him they would pay him five dollars an hour."

"Mr Richards?"

"That's right."

"It's one of the reasons I took the job. Though, Lord knows, you don't need it here. But I guess they knew what they were doing, then?"

"You should have spoken to him. He'd have given you something."

"I want him to give me what he said he was going to—shit, I couldn't ask him that last day."

"Yes, it would have been a little odd."

"I'm going to have to go back and talk to him, I guess." He opened his notebook. "I think I'm going to write some more now, ma'am."

"I
wish
there were more people here." She pushed back from the bar.

"Well, it's early."

But she wasn't listening.

He went through the pages till he found: …
as print is in excess of words. I want to write; but can fix with words only the desire itself. I suppose I should take some small comfort in the fact that, for the few writers I have actually known, publication, in direct proportion to the talent of each, seems to have been an occurrence always connected with catastrophe. Then again, perhaps they were simply a strange group of…

"Ba-da," he whispered and turned over the notebook to the blank page, "ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da."

The letter was still in the mailbox.

Among the bent and broken doors, red, white, and blue edging crossed this one, intact grille. He thought he could see the inking of a return address. I can pretend, he thought, it says Edward Richards, from a hotel in Seattle, Washington, off Freemont Avenue, on Third. He could make some things appear like that, when it was this dim… He turned and went to the elevator.

Someone, at least, had mopped the lobby.

He pressed the button.

Wind hissed from the empty shaft. He stepped into the other.

He'd come out in the pitch-dark hall before—as the door went
k-chunk—
he realized habit had made him push seventeen, not nineteen. He scowled in the dark and walked forward. His shoulder brushed a wall. He put out his hand and felt a door. He walked forward till he felt another.

Then he stopped—because of the smell. He scowled harder.

By the time he reached the next door (three, four doors on that side of the hall?) the odor was nauseous and sharp. "Jesus…" he whispered; his breath echoed.

He made himself go on.

The next door, which had to be the Richards' old apartment, swung in under his hand. The stench made him reel and lose kinesthetic focus. He hurried back, twice banging walls, one with his left shoulder, one with his right.

He was wondering how long it would take him to feel for the elevator bell…

K-chunk… k-chunk… k-chunk.
One of the doors had caught on something. Between
k-chunks,
reminiscent of his own breath, came wind.

He paused, disoriented in the putrid dark. The left elevator door? The right? Then fear, like the lightest fore-finger, tickled his shoulder. He nearly bent double, and staggered against the wall; which was not a wall, because it gave.

Inside the exit door, he caught the bannister, and stumbled down.

Faint light greyed the glass a flight below. Gulping fresh breath, he came out in the hall of sixteen. One bulb burned at the far end.

His next gulp checked explosive giggles. Kidd shook his head. Well, what the fuck were they
supposed
to do with it? He started down the hall, grinning and disgusted. Still, then why did I go to all that to drag it up?

When he knocked, on the door, rattlings suggested it was opened. When he pushed it in, a girl caught her breath. "Hey, who's home?" he asked.

"Who… who is it?" She sounded afraid and exhausted. The window let in dark blue over the iron bunks, piles of clothing, an overturned stool.

"It's the Kid." He was still grinning.

"They're all gone," she said, from the muddle of blankets. "There's just me. Please… they're all gone."

"I'm not going to do anything." He stepped in.

She pushed herself up on her elbow, brushed hair back from her face and blinked bruised eyes.

"You're… the one who was sick?"

"I'm better," she whined. "Really, I'm better. Just leave me alone."

"Thirteen, and the others? How long have they been gone?"

She let herself fall, sighing.

"Are they coming back?"

"No. Look, just—"

"Do you have food and things?"

"Please… yes, I'm all right. They split a couple of days ago. What do you want?"

Because he had once feared her, he stepped closer. "Don't you have any light?"

"Lights, huh?" Plurality and inflection baffled him. "Look, I'll be all right, just go away. Lights? Over there…" She gestured toward the mannequin.

He went to see what she pointed at. "Has Faust been coming to check you out? He was all worried about you last time I was here." Bald plaster breasts were snaked with chain.

"Yeah, he comes. Look around the neck." That was further instruction. "Some guy left them. He ain't gonna come back." She coughed. "They don't got no battery."

He lifted the heavy links from the jointed neck. The smile was paint streaked and chipped under one eye. "Lights? Light shield?" The thing linked to the bottom clicked on the plaster chin, nose, forehead.

"All right. Now just go, will you?"

"It doesn't have a battery?"

She only sighed, rustled her covers.

"All right, if you say you're okay, I'll go." Something in him… thrilled? That's what he'd heard people say. The fear was low, the physical reaction runneled and grave. He dared the mirror:

Her bunk was filled with shadow and crumpled blankets.

"All right," he repeated. "Good-bye. Tell Thirteen or Denny if they come back—"

She sighed; she rustled. "They're not coming back."

So he shut the door behind him. Ominous: but what would he have had her tell? He put the chain around his neck. A blade snagged the links. He pulled his bladed hand away.