Dhalgren (59 page)

"He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!" The water roared around in Kid's chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. "I got off the bus, and I came—" He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown. "—came here." The water reached his eyes, (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.

He kept rubbing at his eyes with one hand.

Something burned the knuckles of the other: coffee had slopped over.

He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.

"Oh, give that here!" She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. "I'm
not
fooling you!"

His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.

Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. "I'm not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven't seen you since!"

At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.

"Look, you said Mr Newboy was here with the galleys. You can't set type on a whole book overnight, can you?"

"Oh…"

"When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too."

"Talking about me?" He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.

"About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody's life."

"Huh?"

She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.

The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and there was a hard thing over one breast—her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. "Oh, for God's sakes," she whispered.

"I'm not fooling you either!" He didn't sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. "I saw you this morning. I… I thought I saw you this morning."

"You've been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you're some kind of hero or something."

"What'd you think?" Her hair brushed his moving chin.

"Shit. That's what I thought: 'Shit.' You want to go off in that direction. Fine. But I don't feel like getting messed up in anything like that. I really don't."

"This afternoon," he said. "I mean it was by accident I found them. And I didn't save anybody's life. That was just…"

"Look at you," she said, not moving away. "You're dressing like them; you're hanging out with them. I mean go on: If that's what you want, go on. But it's not my scene. I can't go there with you."

"Yeah, but… Hey, look. You: you say you've got a house and all. Where are you staying now?"

"Would you mind," she said softly, "if I didn't tell you?" But opened her arms and put them around him. "Just for a while?" The harmonica corner cut his chest.

He wondered could she feel the anger inside him, pulsing under her hands. "I," he said, "saw you this morning."

She pulled back, all his anger on her face. "Look!" She made fists at her hips. "Either you're lying to me for some kooky reasons I don't even want to know about, and I shouldn't have anything to do with you, right? The night before I saw you last, you lost three hours. Now you've lost five days. Maybe you really are
crazy.
Maybe I shouldn't have anything to do with you! That's pretty irrational, isn't it? I haven't seen you in five days and Christ, am I angry at you!"

"Then why the fuck were you looking for me!" He turned and stalked down the hall, a great bubble about to burst inside his ribs.

At the piano, he realized Harrison must have opened the curtains on the low stage. The backdrop—and there were stands with photographer's floods—showed a painted moon, some seven feet across, and indications around it of trees.

He turned at the apron, surprised again to find her behind him. "Why did you come?"

"Because this is the first time I've known where you were. I didn't
know…."
She gasped. "I didn't know if you were all right. You didn't come back. I thought maybe you were angry at me for something. You used to always come back. And suddenly, for all that time, instead of you, all I got was what people were saying about you. You and the scorpions, you and the scorpions." Something spent itself in her eyes. The lids lowered on the shadowed green. "Look, so far we haven't had one of those 'I'll-follow-you-anywhere' relationships. I still haven't made up my mind if that's where I want to go. And I just get a little nervous when I find myself thinking I might. That's all."

"A week." He felt his face twist. "What the hell did I do for … five days? When did I…" He reached for her.

Her face crashed against his, hitting his mouth, but she pushed her tongue against his, and was holding tight to the back of his neck. He kept trying to pull her even closer, leaning against the stage.

He loosed one hand to dig between them, till he could pull the harmonica from her blouse pocket. It rattled on the stage behind them.

"You're not going to hurt anyone," she said once. "You're not going to hurt me. I know that. You're not."

The hysteria with which she made love to him on that dark stage was first furious, then funny, (wondering if someone was going to walk in, and excited by the idea); he lay on his back while she bucked above him, clutching his shoulders, wondering should he feel this way. But the sound she was making that he'd thought was crying cleared to laughter. Her buttocks filled his hands, and he dug between them.

She reared too high, and lost him to the annealing chill. While she reached for him, he rolled her to her side. Legs in the clutch of denim, he crawled down to the sweaty corner of her blouse and pushed his tongue through her salty hair. She lifted a knee to let it fall wide. After she came, (he had worked his pants free of one foot) he straddled her, pushed his penis into her again, lowered his belly to her belly, his chest to her chest, his wet face against the crumpled shoulder of her blouse, and began long final strokes, while her arms tightened on his back.

Coming burned his loins (he remembered the spilled coffee) and left him exhausted and still burning (he remembered how it felt after masturbating when all you started off with was a piss-on), and exhaustion won. Lakes of sweat cooled around his body. She nodded in the crook of his shoulder, where he knew his arm would numb soon, but didn't feel like doing anything about it. He slid his hand down his own chest, till his fingers caught in the transverse chain, beneath angular shapes.

Times' voices in agon? Who wants to hear hunchbacks and spastics haggle? Even, if there are no others in concert. We should not be lying here, cooling, half naked, half asleep. A good reason to do it. I am still angry at her. I am still angry. Would she have it I choose scorpions all for negative reasons? Have they been a surround? No: it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory is a moon that gives odd light. It is safe here—

He woke: which was suddenly arriving in that space between the boards and the touch of eyelid against eyelid, the weight of his loose fist on his pelvis and the boards pressing his backside.

She's gone, he thought, with her harmonica to sit on the couch and play. He listened to the music from the other end of the hall.

But you can't make that discord on a harmonica.

He opened his eyes and rolled to his side (the batteryless projector clacked onto the floor at the end of the rattling chain) and frowned.

The sound was much further away than he'd thought; and was organ music.

She's gone…?

Kid stood to pull his pants around on his leg.

The harmonica was not on the backdrop curving down over the floor.

He pushed his foot into his pants legs, sweaty in blotches. He picked up his vest, his orchid, and walked down the steps at the stage edge. Booted foot and bare left their alternative prints in the dust.

Also, his notebook was not in front of the couch.

At the room's center, he stopped to swallow something filling his throat. The sound with it was almost a sob.

Upstairs the organ played on. And there were voices, mumbling and growing and diminishing. It was silly to think she was upstairs. He put the orchid in his belt and shrugged up his vest as he climbed the steps.

A dozen black men and women milled from the chapel into the vestibule, from the vestibule into the street. Two women walking together glanced at him curiously. A man in a narrow-brimmed hat smiled at him and vanished. Others looked less friendly. The voices turned and blurred like smoke, or prickled with laughter that melted with the next dozen ambling by the closed office.

"Lovely service, don't you think…"

"She ain't gonna talk about all that stuff next time too, is she, 'cause I…"

"Didn't you think it was a lovely service…"

He stepped among them to leave. Somebody kicked his bare heel twice, but he racked it up to accident and didn't look. Outside, the evening was purple grey; smoke blunted the facades across the street.

Only a few white people passed through the trapezoid of light across the sidewalk. A woman with a flowered scarf tied around her head followed an older man, talking earnestly with a black companion; and a heavy guy, blond, in a shirt with no collar that looked as if it were made of army blanket planted himself before the door, while brown and darker faces passed around him. Now a gaunt girl, with freckles on her tan cheeks and brick-red hair, reached him. The two whispered together, walked into the darkness.

Kid waited by the door, watching the worshippers, listening to the tape. People strolled away. Some voices lingered, till the owners followed their shadows into the night. The dwindling crowd made him feel lost. Maybe he should duck back in to tell Reverend Tayler he was leaving.

Studs bright in scuffed leather, shadows slipping across his shaggy, blond stomach, cap pushed back off the yellow brush, Tak Loufer stepped out, looked at Kid with a single highlight in one shadowed eye, and said, "Hey, you still around here? I sent two people over looking for you. But I thought you'd be gone by now."

"What are
you
here for?"

Tak held up a paper roll. "Completing my poster collection. You been keeping yourself away from us a while? We were worried about you."

"Shit!" fell from the residue of anger. "You wanted to suck on my dick some, maybe? Come on. It's all slicked up with pussy juice. You like that, right?"

"Nigger pussy?"

"Huh?"

"Were you screwing a colored girl? And with the clap?"

"What are you talking about?"

"If it wasn't black meat and a little runny, I'm not interested. Since I had you last time, boy, I've gone on to levels of perversion you haven't thought about. What's the matter with you, anyway? You out of it again? Why don't you come up and tell me about it while I get drunk."

"Aw, shit…" Not wanting to, Kid put his hands in his pocket and his head down in the night's chalky stench; they walked together to the curb.

"Your girl friend find you?"

Kid grunted.

"Did you have a fight or something? The last few times I spoke to her, I got the impression she was sort of getting ready for one."

"Maybe we did," Kid said. "I don't know."

"Ah, one of those?"

"She said you saw me get off a bus?"

"Yeah. Earlier this evening. I was down at the corner. I was going to call to you, but you turned first, down toward here."

"Oh."

A light moved in a window.

Fire, Kid thought. The flickering made him uneasy. He tried to imagine the whole block, the church and the buildings around it, conflagrated.

"I think somebody lives there," Tak said. "It's just candles." They stepped off the curb.

"Where are we?" Kid asked when they stepped up again. "I mean, Tak… what
is
this place? What happened here? How did it get like this?"

"A good question," Tak answered over tapping boot heels. "A very good one. For a while, I thought it was international spies—I mean, maybe the whole city here was just an experiment, a sort of test-out plan to destroy the entire country. Maybe the world."

"You think it's something like
that?"

"No. But it's comforting to consider all this the result of
something
organized. On the other hand, it could just be another ecological catastrophe. Maybe somebody filled in our swamp by mistake."

"What swamp?"

"By every big city there's always some sort of large swamp nearby, usually of about the same area. It keeps the smog down, supplies most of the oxygen, and half a dozen other absolutely essential things. New York has the Jersey Flats, San Francisco, the whole mudded-out Oakland edge of the Bay. You fill the swamp in, the smog goes up, the sewage problem gets out of hand, and the city becomes unlivable. No way to avoid it. I think it's fair to say most people would find this unlivable."

Kid sniffed. "We sure got enough smog." The blades at his belt tickled the hair on his inner forearm. "Where's our swamp?"

"Obviously you've never taken the ride out past Holland Lake."

Kid shrugged in his bindings. "That's true." The chain that wrapped him had worked down so that it rugged across the back of his left hip at every other step. He reached under his vest and moved it with his thumb. "Do you think that's what happened to Bellona?" Some day I'll die, turned irrelevantly through his mind: Death and artichokes. Heaviness filled his ribs; he rubbed his chest for the reassuring systolic and diastolic thumps. Not that I really think it might stop, he thought: only that it hasn't just yet. Sometimes (he thought), I wish I couldn't feel it. (Someday, it
will
stop.)

"Actually," Tak was saying, "I suspect the whole thing is science fiction."