Dhalgren (74 page)

"Naw. I'm looking for Lanya."

Tak enfolded his beer with his big, pale hands and looked down the bottle mouth. "Oh." Then he said: "Then come with me somewhere else. I want to show you something. You probably want to see it, too."

"What is it?"

"On the other hand, maybe you have seen it already and you're not interested."

"But you're not going to tell me what it is?"

"Nope."

"Come on," Kid said. "Show me."

Tak clapped Kid's shoulder, then pushed away from the bar. "Let's go."

Between the buildings black bulged down like a tarpaulin filled with rain.

"This is the sort of night I'd give anything for a star. When I was younger I used to try to learn the constellations, but I never really got them down. I can find the Big Dipper." Tak opened his zipper. "Can you do that?"

"I know them pretty well now. But I learned them a few years ago, back when I was traveling, and on boats and stuff. There're the only things that stay the same when you're really moving around a lot. I picked up this pocket book for fifty cents, when I was in Japan—it was an American book though. In about two weeks I could pick out just about anything."

"Mmmmm."
Tak glanced up as they neared the corner lamp. "Just as well we can't see them, then. I mean, are you ready to have to learn a whole new set?" The shadow drew over his face like a shade. "This way."

The street sloped. At the next corner they turned again. Half a block later Kid asked, "Can you see anything at all?"

"No."

"But you know where we're going…?"

"Yes."

The smell of burning had again become distinct. The air was cooler, much cooler: he felt a crack in the pavement beneath his bare foot. Something with edges rolled away from his boot. The woody odors sifted. For one instant they passed through a smell that brought back-it hit with the force of hallucination: a cave in the wooded mountains where something had crackled in a large, brass dish on the wet stone, while above he had seen, glittering…

The chain around him tingled and tickled as though the memory had sent current through it. But the particular odor (wet leaves over dry, and a fire, and something decayed…) was gone. And cool as the darkness was, it was dry, dry…

Edged by a vertical wall, light a long way away diffused in smoke.

At the corner, Tak looked back. "Checking to make sure you were still with me. You don't make much noise. We're going across there." Tak nodded forward and they crossed the street, shoulder bumping shoulder.

Beyond plate glass, an amber light silhouetted black wire forms.

"What sort of store was this?" Kid asked, behind Tak who was opening the door.

It sounded like a machine was running in the basement. Empty shelves lined the walls, and the wire frames were display racks. The light came from no more than a single bulb somewhere on the stairwell. Tak went to the cash register. "First time I came in here, would you believe there was still eighty dollars in the drawer?"

Tak rang.

The drawer trundled out.

"Still there."

He closed it.

In the cellar the sound stopped, then started again: only now it didn't sound like a machine at all, but someone moaning.

"We want to go downstairs," Tak said.

Someone had scattered pamphlets on the steps. They whispered under Kid's bare foot. "What was this place?" Kid asked again. "A bookstore?"

"Still is." Tak peered out where the single hanging bulb lit empty shelves. "Paperback department down here."

Tacked to an edge was a hand-lettered sign:
ITALIAN LITERATURE.

A youngster with very long hair sat cross-legged on the floor. He glanced up, then closed his eyes, faced forward, and intoned:
"Om…"
drawing the last sound until it became the mechanical growl Kid had heard when they'd entered.

"Occupied tonight," Tak said, softly. "Usually there's no one here."

Between the checked flannel lapels, the boy's chest ran with sweat. Cheek bones glistened above his beard. He'd only glanced at them, before closing his eyes again.

It's cool, Kid thought. It's so much cooler.

Beside
ITALIAN LITERATURE
was
POLITICAL SCIENCE.
There were no books on that one either.

Kid stepped around the boy's knees and looked up at
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
(equally empty) and walked on to
PHILOSOPHY.
All the shelves, it seemed, were bare.

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm…"

Tak touched Kid's shoulder. "Here, this is what I wanted to show you." He nodded across the room.

Kid followed Tak around
AMERICAN LITERATURE
which was a dusty wooden rack in the middle of the floor.

The unfrosted bulb pivoted shadows about them.

"I used to come down here for all my science fiction," Tak said, "until there wasn't anything on the shelves any more. In there. Go ahead."

Kid stepped into the alcove and stubbed his booted toe (thinking: Fortunately), hopped back, looked up: The ivory covers recalled lapped bathroom tiles.

All but the top shelf was filled with face-out display. He looked again at the carton he had kicked. The cover wagged. As he stared into the box, something focused: a shadow, first fallen across his mind at something Lanya had said at the nest, almost blurred out by the afternoon's megalight, now, under the one, unfrosted bulb, lay outlined and irrefutable: As manuscripts did not become galleys overnight, neither did galleys become distributed books. Many more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had corrected proofs with Newboy in the church basement.

Frowning, he bent to pick out a copy, paused, reached for one on the shelf, paused again, looked back at Tak, who had his fists in his jacket pockets.

Kid's lips whispered at some interrogative. He looked at the books again, reached again. His thumb stubbed the polished cover-stock.

He took one.

Three fell; one slid against his foot.

Tak said: "I think it's very quaint of them to put it in
POETRY,"
which is what the sign above said. "I mean they could have filled up every shelf in the God-damn store. There're a dozen cartons in the back."

Thumb on top, three fingers beneath, Kid tried to feel the weight; he had to jog his hand. There was a sense of absence which was easiest to fill with

BRASS
ORCHIDS

lettered in clean shapes with edges and serifs his own fingers could not have drawn, even with French curve and straightedge. He reread the title.

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm…"
The light blacked and went on again; the
"… mmmmmmmmmm …"
halted on a cough.

Kid looked over the six, seven, eight filled shelves. "That's really funny," he said, and wished the smile he felt should be on his face would muster his inner features to the right emotions. "That's really…" Suddenly he took two more copies, and pushed past Tak for the stair. "Hey," he said to the boy. "Are you all right?"

The sweating face lifted. "Huh?"

"What's the matter with you?"

"Oh, man!" The boy laughed weakly. "I'm sick as a dog. I'm really sick as a fucking dog."

"What's wrong?"

"It's my gut. I got a spastic duodenum. That's like an ulcer. I mean I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I've had it before, so I know what it feels like."

"What are you doing here, then?"

The boy laughed again. "I was trying yoga exercises. For the pain. You know you can control things like that, with yoga."

Tak came up behind Kid. "Does it work?"

"Sometimes." The boy took a breath. "A little."

Kid hurried on up the steps.

Tak followed.

From the top step Kid looked around at the shelves, and turned to Tak, who said:

"I was just thinking, I really was, about asking you to autograph this for me." He held up the copy and snorted rough laughter. "I really was."

Kid decided not to examine the shape this thought made, but caught the mica edge: It's not not having: It's having no memory of having. "I don't like that sort of shit anyway…" he said, awed at his lie, and looked at Tak's face, all shadowed and flared with backlight. He searched the black oval for movement. It's there anyway, he thought; he said: "Here. Gimme," and got the pen from the vest's buttonhole.

"What are you going to do?" Tak handed it over.

Kid opened it on the counter by the register, and wrote: "This copy of my book is for my friend, Tak Loufer." He frowned a moment, then added, "All best." The page looked yellow. And he couldn't read what he'd written at all, which made him realize how dim the light was. "Here." He handed it back. "Let's go, huh?"

"Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…"

"Yeah." Tak glanced down stairs and sucked his teeth. "You know?" They walked to the door. "When you took it from me, I thought you were going to tear it up."

Kid laughed. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. And thinking it, decided what he had put was best. "You know—" as they stepped into the night, Kid felt his fingers dampen on the cover: fingerprints?—"people talk about sexual inadequacy? That doesn't have anything to do with whether you can get a hard-on or not. A guy goes out looking for his girl friend and doesn't even know where she lives, and doesn't seem to have bothered to find out… You said Madame Brown might know?"

"I think so," Tak said. "Hey, you're always talking about your girl friend. Right now, do you have a boy friend?"

Kid figured they had reached the corner. On the next step he felt the ball of his bare foot hung over the curb. "Yeah, I guess I do." They stepped down.

"Oh," Tak said. "Somebody told me you're supposed to be making it with some kid in the scorpions."

"I could get to hate this city—"

"Ah, ah, ah!" Tak's voice aped reproval. "Rumor is the messenger of the gods. I'm sort of curious to find out what you wrote in my book."

At which Kid started to balk, found his own balking funny, and smiled. "Yeah."

"And of course, the poems too. Well…"

Kid heard Tak's footsteps stop.

"…I go this way. Sure I can't convince you…?"

"No." He added: "But thanks. I'll see you." Kid walked forward thinking, That's nuts. How does anybody know where anything is in this, and thought that thought seven or eight times through, till, without breaking stride, he realized: I cannot see a thing and I am alone. He pictured great maps of darkness torn down before more. After today, he thought idly, there is no more reason for the sun to rise. Insanity? To live in any state other than terror! He held the books tightly. Are these poems mine? Or will I discover that they are improper descriptions by someone else of things I might have once been near: the map erased, aliases substituted for each location?

Someone, then others, were laughing. Kid walked, registering first the full wildness of it, the spreading edges; but only at the working street lamp at the far corner, realizing it was humor's raddle and play.

Two black men, in the trapezoid of light from a doorway, were talking. One was drinking a can of beer or Coke. From across the street, a third figure (Kid could see the dark arms were bare from here, that the vest was shiny) ambled up.

The street lamp pulsed and died, pulsed and died. Black letters on a yellow field announced, and announced, and announced:

JACKSON AVENUE

Kid walked toward them, curious.

"She run up here…" the tall one explained, then laughed once more. "Pretty little blond-headed thing, all scared to death; you know, she stopped first, like she gonna turn around and run away, with her han' up in front of her mouth. Then she a'ks me—" The man lowered his head and raised his voice: " 'Is George Harrison in there? You know, George Harrison, the big colored man?' " The raconteur threw up his head and laughed again. "Man, if I had 'em like George had 'em…" In his fist was a rifle barrel (butt on the ground) that swung with his laughter.

"What you tell her?" the heavier one asked, and drank again.

" 'Sure he's inside,' I told her. 'He better be inside. I just come out of there and I sure as hell seen him inside. So if he ain't inside, then I just don't know where else he might be.' " The rifle leaned and recovered. "She run. She just turned around and run off down the block. Run just like that!"

The third was a black scorpion with the black vinyl vest, his orchid on a neck chain. It's like, Kid thought, meeting friends the afternoon the TV had been covering the assassination of another politician, the suicide of another superstar; and for a moment you are complicit strangers celebrating by articulate obliteration some national, neutral catastrophe.

Remembering the noon's light, Kid squinted in the dark. And wished he were holding anything else: notebook or flower or shard of glass. Awkwardly, he reached back to shove the books under his belt.

The three turned to look.

Kid's skin moistened with embarrassment.

"…She just run off," the black man with the gun finally repeated, and his face relaxed like a musician's at a completed cadence.

The one with the beer can, looking left and right, said, "You scorpions. So you come down here a little, huh?"

"This is the Kid," the black scorpion explained. "I'm Glass."

His name, Kid thought (he remembered Spider helping with Siam's arm on the rocking bus floor…): It isn't any easier to think of them once their names surface. They might as well be me. Surfaced with it was a delight at his own lack. But that joy still seemed as dull and expected as a banally Oedipal dream he'd had the first night he'd been assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital.

"You the Kid?" The man hooked the can's bottom on the top of his belt buckle. "You fellows gonna come down here and give
us
protection?"

"Yeah, they all shootin' up black people now, you come on down to Jackson."

Far inside, other blacks were talking and laughing.

"What happened?" Kid asked.

Glass stepped over closer to Kid. (Kid thought: I feel more comfortable. He probably does too.) The others moved to accomodate the shift.