Dhalgren (70 page)

"Shit, man," Denny said. "Them was some scared, black motherfuckers." Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.

"Don't do that! Don't
do
that! Don't—"

"What the fuck they got in here?"

"Come on, God damn it, don't
do
that!"

In the maroon light across the wall in front of Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid's, raised.

The hand clapped Kid's shoulder.

"Hey," Copperhead said. "They got some place here! Carpet on the floor…" His other hand gestured down; and up: "And look at all that shit on the ceiling."

Kid looked.

Women in gauze and men in armor careened through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.

Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. "Well." He looked back. "I'm gonna go see what they got in here." While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead's hand fell twice again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.

She was standing just inside the door, and angry.

"What's the matter?"

"There were people living here!" she hissed. "What in the world…" She shook her head.

"I didn't know that," Kid said. "You picked the house."

"And I didn't know what you wanted to
do
with it!" She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. "What the hell did you want to do?"

"Anything." He shrugged. "Let's go see."

She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.

Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.

"Here." Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.

"I gotta eat," Kid said. "First, I think." Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. "You want some?"

"No thank you," she said softly, and held his arm with both hands.

As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, "I want—" the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness—"to write something down."

He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. "Here. There's no pen on this. But you've got yours." He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall's end.

He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them—

Beneath the pea jacket, open around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead's freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said good-bye, to whom he had made love.

"Oh," Lanya said, matter-of-factly.

The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead's thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, "Hey!" and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) "Join the party, motherfucker! You gimme one of yours, I'll give you one of mine."

"Knock yourself out." Kid backed from the door, with Lanya's hand in his.

The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

"What's going on in there?" Blond Denny pushed between them.

"Stay out of there, cocksucker." Kid put his arm around the boy's chest, pulled him back.

"Why?"

"Because I'd get jealous as hell."

Denny frowned, shrugged, "Okay," and wormed loose.

Lady of Spain jogged against Kid's shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: "Shit! What a way to go. I guess we're going, ain't we?" She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya's shoulder.

Lanya tugged Kid's arm. "This way," she said loudly and other people looked. Kid pushed somebody aside ("Hey, how you doing, Kid?"), who pushed back a bottle at his face.

At the bottom of the stairs, two familiar, long-haired children holding hands (from the park commune?) peered up. "Are you having… a party?" They came up the steps, squinting as the light hit their eyes; light pulled down across their faces like window shades, lending them false sunburns. Their torn tank tops, blotched mauve, fuchsia, and cerise, rearranged forms in the new illumination. Other white people milled behind them, their mixed voices moving in a different range than the belligerent-to-shrill of the scorpions'.

"Is this Nightmare's… Is this Nightmare's nest?" a girl asked and pushed up past the first two. "Lanya!" She stopped halfway up the steps, her red hair a-dazzle, her face twitching to avert itself from the glare.

"Milly!" Leaving Kid the pad, Lanya ran down to seize Milly's wrists. "What are you doing?" Lanya's voice was delighted. As her shadow blocked the glare, Milly began—to giggle? No, cry. Kid looked through a bedroom doorway and the window beyond bright as foil.

He pushed between the people crowding the hall. "Fuck!" he shouted at somebody once. "Get out of the way!"

Somebody behind Kid said (he looked back to see Siam waving his bandaged arm high to get through; but it was Priest who was speaking), "No, man, this is the Kid's nest. Nightmare ain't here. Nightmare ain't anywhere around."

"Kid—?" which was the ginger spade who had once loaned him a plate, and talking about, not to him. "You mean him over there? He used to be around the commune. I didn't know that was
the
Kid. How do you like that?"

Kid pushed out onto the narrow balcony, surprised to find it empty, and looked up:

It was wide enough to be cut off both by the roof across the street and his own roof. I remember this, he questioned, from the other side of sleep? Then added, somberly quizzical: Deadly rays!

A weathered pride glared from beneath the chipped rail, with hints of gold paint, inward (shouldn't it be out? Kid thought) toward the wooden doors, at isocephalic attention.

With light (he thought logically as music) from such a source, there could be no shadows.

He put his bare foot on the railing to examine it, to see if this new illumination told him anything. The rail pressed the ball up which stretched the toes down. The concavities at each side of his heel were scaly as the skin at the rim of Siam's bandage. The knuckle of each toe, with its swirl of black hair, pulled the skin on either side of itself, intimating age. I am closer to thirty than twenty, he thought, put that foot down and raised the other.

The suede boot was blotched with what he'd always called salt stains, that came from walking in rain puddles. Only it hadn't rained. Below the wrinkled leather—forty feet below—cobbles stretched off between the houses like a mahogany anaconda.

He examined his left hand. I don't like what they look like, he thought. I don't like them: Like something vegetative, yanked from the ground, all roots and nodules, with dirty, chewed things at the ends, like something self-consumed: And remembered the times, on acid, they had actually terrified him.

He examined the right hand. There were scabs along the places where he'd bitten to blood. He'd always considered his baby face, despite passing inconveniences, as, essentially, a piece of luck. But the hands, of some aged and abused workman, he felt wronged by. They frightened people (they frightened him); still he could not believe, because it was their shape and their texture and their hair and great veins, that breaking, by force, the habit of biting and gnawing and biting would do any good. (Sitting on the sidewalk, once, when he was ten, he had rubbed his palms on the concrete, because he wanted to know what callouses would feel like when he masturbated: had that, that afternoon, triggered some irrevocable process in the skin which, still, after a few days of labor, left his hands horn-hard and cracking weeks, even months, later?) He liked Lanya to cradle them in her soft ones, kiss them, tickle the inner flesh with her tongue, make love to them like gnomes, while he, voyeuristically, observed and mocked and felt tender.

He looked down at the chains: ran his fingers behind them; lifted up the hanging orchid and watched it turn under the sourceless gold. Then he sat against the shingled wall, with his feet at the feet of the lions, took the pad into his lap, and began to click his pen.

Among other sounds inside, somebody was shrieking and gasping and shrieking again, which meant somebody was doing something terrible. Or somebody thought somebody was.

Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again. But here, beneath this gigantic light, with the cardboard-backed phone pad covering the hole in my jean knee, that isn't what I want to write. I am about to write. I take my thumb from the ballpoint's button. I work the pen up till my fingers (hideous?) grip the point. I begin.

Lanya crashed Kid's ken like a small, silent iguanodon. Kid did not move. Lanya sat sideways on a lion's head and looked across the street for forty-five astounding seconds: Then at Kid: "You're still writing on that…?"

"No." The hypersensitivity left over from working had resolved with Lanya's voice. "No, I've been finished a few minutes now."

Lanya squinted at the immense semi-circle. Then she said, "Hey…" she frowned. "It's going down!"

Kid nodded. "You can see it falling almost."

The clouds that moiled the edge had deepened from gold to bronze. Three quarters of the circle had been visible above the roofs when they had first walked in the street. Now it was slightly under half. (And still half was awfully huge.) Lanya hunched her shoulders.

Denny came through the doors, paused, a hand on each, to screw his face in the glare. Then, silently, he sat on the rail beside Lanya, gripped his knees, his arm an inch from hers.

Denny comes: some fantastic object.

She comes: some object more fantastic, and with a history.

Lanya bent forward, picked up the pad, read. After moments, she said "I like that."

But what, Kid went on thinking, if someone were stupid enough to ask me for a choice? He tried an ironic smile; but the ironic part got fumbled in the machinery of his face. So he guessed it was just a smile.

Anyway a smile's what they gave him back.

Denny said, "It's going down," unnecessarily for her.

One hand pressed against her knee, the other went across her face, and she let out all breath.

Terror clanged in him like a spoon against a bent pan. Kid reached forward, touched her shin. Terror? he thought: When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don't know who she is! He gripped harder.

She frowned, moved the toe of her sneaker from his bare foot.

So he dropped his hand.

With her hand on her stomach, she took a breath, and raised her perspiring face, blinking and blinking her green eyes, to watch.

While somebody else came out, Lanya asked, "Why aren't you afraid?" Kid thought about dreaming, could think of nothing to say, so nodded toward the falling light.

She said: "Then I won't be either."

The boy who'd come out was the pimply, stubble-bearded scorpion. He looked around uncomfortably as though he felt he might have interrupted something, seemed about to turn and go (what is he feeling, Kid wondered; what makes him look this conventional part?), when Frank, the poet from the commune, came out.

Then two black girls (thirteen? twelve?) holding hands, stepped out, not blinking, their hair almost shorn, small gold rings in their ears. And there were more people in the doorway. (Will the balcony hold?) He wondered also at how much easier that was to wonder than about what blotted out the sky.

"It's going down, see," Denny repeated.

He enjoys, Kid thought, saying that to Lanya: But with nine people here, the equations are different; he can't get the same reactions.

Briefly he pictured Nightmare and Dragon Lady.

Milly pushed by Copperhead. The light stole the brilliance from the different reds of their hair by dealing equal flamboyance to everything. She kneeled at the rail. Light between two lions made a ragged bandage across her calf.

The scabs, Kid thought, are bright as red glass.

There were too many people.

Milly brushed at her cheek.

Why is a given gesture given as it is? Hers? She's guilty making any motions at all in a situation demanding immobility. (He looked at the scratch.) She's guilty…?

There were too many people.

The long-haired youngsters, hands linked, stepped through; one took the hand of the pimply, unshaven scorpion (who was also very drunk): he breathed loudly and swayed into people.

They didn't move.

"What are you going to do with that?" Lanya asked, softly enough to sound soft even in this silence.

The scorpion's breath was thunderous.

"I don't know." That sounded thunderous too.

"Let me take it." She tore off the three pages, corrected, and recorrected. (Does it take this much light to illuminate the material for another poem?) With a head movement (shadow spilled from the green target of her eye down her cheek) she stopped him. "I have your notebook at home. I'll put these with it. I want to go." She turned to Denny. And the shadow had rolled Somewhere beneath her chin; in the creases of her eyelid he could see sweat. "You want to walk me home?"