Dhalgren (67 page)

"If you don't play, you don't watch."

He had been planning to squeeze them affectionately, maybe say something else funny, and let go. But, for a moment, he was aware they were two entirely different temperatures; and something in his own heat was defined) resolved, released. And Denny (his shoulder hot and still powdery dry) reached across Kid's chest, put two fingers against Lanya's cheek (her neck against Kid's arm cooler and softer, as though it had been recently dried after rain) and said. "You're…" and stopped when she reached out and put her palm on Denny's neck. Kid said: "Yeah…" She watched, something happening in her face, which became quiet laughter, her eyes going back and forth between Kid's and Denny's, pulling herself closer.

Denny's head suddenly moved. His laugh back was sharp, shrill. Still, whatever tensions were in it eased in it.

"You open your mouth after this morning, cocksucker," Kid said, "and it won't be my dick you get in it—"

"Kid…!" Lanya's protest was real.

But Denny caught Lanya's forearm, turned his face into her palm.

Something in the machinery between Kid's belly and loin tightened. Denny was trying to climb over him. Kid moved a leg between them—something scraped. Lanya got one elbow under her. Kid's hand dragged her back. It's clumsy, Kid thought. It
is
clumsy! and a despair that he had been trying to hold in suspension for—how long? broke. He thought he was going to cry. What came out was a great, voiceless gasp.

Denny lay his head down on Lanya's hand that was on Kid's chest. Then he said, softly, "Aren't we gonna take our clothes off… this time?"

Lanya moved her other hand down Denny's head till she was holding his ear.

"Don't pull," Denny said. "I'm not pulling," she said. "I'm tickling."

"Oh," Denny said. And then: "That's nice." And then, raising his head, "I think you better take
that
thing off—at least."

(Kid looked at his hand still in the air. It was quieter in the other room.)

Lanya suddenly sat. "Oh wow. Sure." She wore one of her stranger expressions. "I didn't even see!"

Kneeling over him, she took Kid's wrist, got the clasp. Kid was completely astonished when Denny's hands joined hers and, with no clumsiness, the blades opened, fell away: the harness was lifted from his tingling wrist.

Lanya put it on the window ledge by the blind, where it stood, upright, a long, bright crown.

Kid turned his freed hand in the air, looking at the hirsute joints and ruined tips flex, horny palms and knuckles folding, opening, till, tired, it began to waver, fall. Someone tugged at his belt. Someone pulled at his vest shoulder. He laughed, turning, while through some door in another room a lot of people left.

They made love.

It was energetic. It was graceful. It was intense. He was a warmth that moved around and between them. They were warmths that moved around him, between him and each other. Once, eyes closed against the damp blanket, he moved his hand across her rib cage, brushing beneath her breasts with the knuckle of his thumb (she caught her breath…) till he reached her arm (…then let it out) and followed her arm to where her elbow bent on Denny's belly, and on to where her hand held Denny's penis.

After moments, his hand came away, against the embankment of her hip, crossed it. He pressed his fingertips in the hair over her pubic bone, slid them down to cup, to press in. First one, then the other, he touched their genitals. Finally he pushed himself to his knees, put one knee across them, watched them watch him, blinked. Sweat dribbled his cheek. A drop caught in his eyelash and shook. He bent his head.

Is it
only
an hour, he wondered, that encompassed three people's four orgasms? Now I know why, though foreplay can be delineated in all its fascinating and psychotropic detail, a poet must use asterisks or blank paper for orgasmic mechanics that satisfying: they open to something so wide you can now understand why, when sex is
that
good, you may say, "The sex is not the most important part," and feel these words analogue some shadow of truth.

Then he remembered, amidst his auto-pontifications, there were
two
other people who would have to agree with him before he could even suspect such maunderings correct. Grinning, he pushed up on his hands, climbed over one of them (stopped to stare at the sleeping face, full up, lips momentarily pressing, nostrils flaring, two fingers coming to scratch the nose and fall away, still in sleep), looked over at the other (this one on the side, lips parted, lower eyelid mashed slightly open revealing an albumen line, breath whispering against curled knuckles) and, after taking the pen from Lanya's pocket and putting it in a bottom hole of his vest, climbed down, dragging his clothes on top of him.

He wondered, if they woke, would they think he had gone to the bathroom.

In the doorway, he pulled on his pants, put on his vest. There was a cold line against his chest… The pen. The chain around him was hot. He ran his fingertips along it, concerned and trying to recall why.

In the strangely quiet hall, he went to the porch door, opened it. And squinted. Gold trapezoids lay high up the lapped-plank wall. His moist skin was slathered with bronze. Each hair on his forearm glowed amber.

He heard his own loud breath; he closed his mouth.

Looking down at his chest, before his vision blurred with tears, he saw that one prism had laid out on his skin a tiny chain of color.

The house was perfectly silent behind him.

He rubbed his eyes, shook his head.

The tearing stopped, anyway.

He raised his eyes again, looked out the porch window at the horizon again—

When he'd first moved to New York City to go to Columbia, he had brought with him an absolute panic of the Bomb. It had been October; he had no Thursday morning classes, was still half-asleep in the sweaty sheets of a persistent, Indian summer. Sirens woke him—he remembered no scheduled test. A jet snarled somewhere on the sky. He got chills and immediately tried to logic them away. This is the sort of coincidence, he thought, blinking at the dull window, that can ruin a good day.

Then the window filled with blinding yellow light.

He'd leaped from the bed, taking the sheets with him. His throat cramped and his heart exploded while he watched gold fire spill from window to window in the tenement across the street.

The fireball! he thought, beyond the pain in his terrified body. The light's here now. The shock and the sound will arrive in four seconds, five seconds and I will be dead…

Four seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds later, he was still standing there, shaking, panting, trying to think of someplace to hide.

The clouds, in coincidence compounded, had pulled away from the sun. The plane was gone. The clock radio in the bookshelf said noon. The siren lowered its pitch, softened its whine, and ceased.

What he'd felt then had been active terror.

What he felt now was its passive equivalent.

It couldn't be a fireball, he thought. That was impossible.

Beyond the mist, it shone through as moon or sun shone through an even veil of clouds. It was the color of the sunrise: perhaps a sixth of the circle had risen, secanted by the horizon. But already it was, what? A hundred? Three hundred? Six hundred times the area of the platinum poker chip he remembered as the sun.

…If the sun went nova! he thought. Between his loudening heart he ferreted this information: If that's what it was, then the earth would boil away in seconds! His heart stilled. What a silly fact to base one's confidence on before this light!

The clouds over half the sky were a holocaust of pewter and pale gold.

Was the light warm?

He rubbed his bronzed forearm.

The verdigrised spigot on the wall dropped molten splashes on the muddy drain. Torn paper tacked to the frame of the window filigreed the shadow on the wall beside him.

When he had thought the bomb had fallen, back in New York, he had been left with a tremendous energy, had paced and pondered and searched for something to do with it, had ended up just walking it away.

I may be dead, he thought, in… seconds, minutes, hours? He squinted at the brilliant arc, already perhaps thirty houses wide. The thought came with absurd coolness, I'm going to write something.

He sat quickly on the floor (despite callous, he noticed again it was so much easier to distinguish textures in the gritty boards with the foot he kept bare than the one he wore booted), pulled the paper Siam had left up from the top of the crate. (His pants pulled across the place he'd scraped his knee climbing into the loft.)
The Times
was often sloppily laid out with frequent white spaces. Paging through, he saw one, and pulled his pen out of his vest.

I had a mother, I had a father. Now I don't remember their names. I don't remember mine. In another room, two people are sleeping who are nearer to me by how many years and thousands of miles; for whom, in this terrifying light, I would almost admit love.

He opened the pages back and placed the paper on the crate. The pages were yellow in the new light.

And it was not blank space.

The bottom quarter was boxed for an advertisement. Inside, two-inch letters announced:

BRASS
ORCHIDS

In smaller, italic type beside the title, set off in quotation marks, were lines of verse.

He mouthed: "…at this incense…" and balked. He threw back his head at the chills on his neck (and closed his eyes against the light: inside his lids was the color of orange rind), opened his eyes to look at the paper. A misreading: "…this incidence…" He let his breath out.

Why had they taken
those
lines, he wondered. Without the two before or the one after, they meant… nothing? He puzzled on the severed image, clicking his pen point.

What was the purpose of it?

(What had he wanted to write?)

His forehead moistened; his eye drifted to the column of type down the left of the… advertisement; and snagged on "…Newboy…" He went to the top, to shake loose the confusion:

We have lost our poet in residence: To be precise, at six-thirty, after a farewell breakfast prepared by Mrs Alt—Professor Wellman, Mr and Mrs Green, Thelma Brandt, Colonel Harris, Roxanne and Tobie Fischer were among the guests who rose in time. After a rushed (alas) second cup of coffee, our driver, Nick Pedaikis, arrived from Wells Cottage to drive Ernest New-boy down to Helmsford.

A moving incident at the regretted departure: a young man whom Mr Newboy had been encouraging with his poetry came to wave an admiring farewell at the mouth of Bellona's own Pons Asonorum. So, another celebrity leaves, loved. But Bellona, it would seem, in all its impoverishment, holds myriad fascinations.

We had heard rumors of the coming of our most recent guest; still we had, frankly, entertained some doubts as to whether this visit would, as it were, come off. Communication with the outside world, as all of you know who have tried it, is an exhausting, inaccurate, and frustrating business here at best. How convenient! In the same trip with which our Nick delivered Mr Newboy onto his journey to Pittsfield, he was able to meet, as per tentative arrangements, with Captain Michael Kamp. They arrived in Bellona shortly after three o'clock. Captain Kamp is indefinite about the length of his stay. We cannot express what a privilege it is to have this illustrious gentleman with us in

Incense
had come as a misreading of
incidence;
did illustrious echo illusion? Kid wondered.

He raised his eyes to the bright vista, squinted, and thought: The problem of hallucinating red eyes, even a great red one rising into the sky…

The thought came with a load of monstrous comfort: This is impossible. He stopped clicking his pen. Momentarily he wanted to laugh.

Hallucination?

He gazed into the light, tried to open his eyes full to it; they hurt and refused.

He had wanted to write something?

This wasn't even hallucination. I'm probably lying in bed, somewhere, with my eyes closed… is that called dreaming?

After-images deviled the walls.

He turned his head away, and into darkness… dreaming?

His cheek was on a blanket. One arm was cramped beneath his side. He was filled with the tingling one has after having laughed a long time. He lay, trying to remember what had just passed, gnawing at his fingers till he tasted blood. And kept gnawing.

Lanya shifted, made some slow, sleepy sound. Kid took his hand from his mouth, curled his fingertips tight against his palm. "Hey," he said. "Are you asleep…?"

Lanya stretched. "More or less…" She lowered her chin and looked down at the blond head between their hips.
"What
was his name?"

Kid laughed.

Denny's hand uncurled on Kid's thigh. Then the blond head came up. "…huh?"

"What's your name?" She pushed back cords of his hair.

Denny's lids slid closed. He sighed without answering and lay down again.

Kid held his laughter in this time. Lanya shook her head; her hand at Kid's forehead pushing at his coarser hair.

"How was he?" he whispered, from somewhere down in his chest.

"Mmmm?"

"I heard you two when I was sort of half-asleep." He cupped her cheek and she turned to lip the ham of his thumb. "How'd he do?"

She turned back. A smile and a frown mixed themselves on her face. "Now which one of you was that—" She laughed when he shook her ear. "Very sweet and very energetic." She glanced down again. "Sort of … up and down, you know? He's got quite a sense of humor."

"That's one name for it."

Her eyes came up again; even in the shadow their green was bright between his fingers baring her face.

"Terribly, terribly sweet, mainly."

"And how are you?"

"Mmmmm." She closed her eyes and smiled.

"You know what he did this morning?"

"What?"

"He dragged me in here and said he was going to blow me, and then he got that girl in here."

She opened her eyes; "Oh, is
that
how it happened." He felt her eyebrows raise. "Well, I guess turn about is fair play."