Dhalgren (75 page)

"Someone been shooting up down here?" Glass asked. "That was this afternoon?"

"Sure was." The barrel went into the other hand. "Like a sniper, you know? Ain't that something. I mean, this afternoon, with that thing hanging up there."

"What happened?"

"Somebody climbed up on the roof of the Second City Bank building down on the corner, and started shooting people with a gun. Just like that."

"Did he kill anybody?" Kid asked.

The man with the can pursed his lips to a prune.

The man with the gun said: "About seven."

"Shit!" Kid said.

"Like he got four people together, you know—bip, bip, bip, bip. The woman wasn't dead yet, but she couldn't move very far. A little later some people came out to help them, 'cause they thought he'd gone. But he stood up again and picked off three of them. Then he run."

"It was a white boy, too." The other gestured with his can. "And he gonna come all the way down here to shoot niggers."

"The woman died, hey… when?" Glass asked.

"A little later. She didn't say nothing about the guy did the shooting though. Some others saw. That's how they know he was white." He grinned, finished the can, tossed it. "You scorpions gonna—" it clunked and bounced—"gonna come down to Jackson and give us some protection? Keep them crazy white motherfuckers from shooting up people in the street?"

The gun came up. "We don't need no scorpion protection," and a deprecating: "Shit."

"That's good," Kid said. "Because we don't protect anybody." This all sounds sort of familiar. Didn't somebody get shot from a roof…

The two men looked at each other, looked uncomfortable.

Glass repeated, finally, "That's not what we do."

The man with the gun slid the barrel up to his shoulder. "Naw, we don't need no protection."

"We don't need no motherfuckers standing on the roof of the Second City Bank building shooting people, either." The other man's hands moved on his belt to finger the buckle, as though he wished the can back. "You know, without having no doctors. Or undertakers."

"What'd they do with them?" Glass asked.

"Put them in a house way down there. And after about three or four days, people gonna start crossing the street when they was going past that stretch."

The man with the gun didn't laugh. "What you scorpions doing over here? Cause that sun comes up—" the butt clacked down on the concrete—"you gonna come on down here?"

"George told me to come down and see him," Kid said. "I saw him over at Reverend Amy's church and he told me to come down and visit."

"Yeah," Glass said. "We comin' to see George."

After a while one said, "Oh."

"Well, go on in," the other said. "Sure, go on inside. He's in there."

"Come on," Kid said to Glass.

Halfway down the hall, Glass said, "You think he ever had a gun before? The way he was banging it around, he gonna shoot off his ear or his nose or his head or something."

"Or my head," Kid said. "Yeah, I was thinking that too."

Three lanterns hung together. Their magnesium-white light harshened the battleship linoleum, the institutional yellow walls. Through an iron elevator gate, Kid could see a web of shadow on the cinder block.

He knew he reacted, but could not tell by what it showed. "Where to put the bodies? I'm not going to like it when I run into that a third time."

Glass was watching him.

"Why're you wearing your orchid around your neck? When I first saw you the day we broke into the department store, you had it in a piece of leather."

"I know," Glass said. "But you were wearing yours that way."

"Oh. That's what I thought."

Beyond the turn they could hear people.

"Hey."

Glass turned. Slabs of light slid across his black vinyl. "Huh?"

"What did you guys think when I showed up, I mean back at the department store?"

Glass laughed through his nose. He looked embarrassed. He pulled his pants across his stomach, scratched the twice-crossed T of an appendectomy scar showing above his belt. His knuckles were much darker than the rest of his skin; the places between his fingers looked like they had been brushed with ash.

"What did you think? Tell me."

Glass shrugged and shook his head to settle the smile about the yellow corners of his eyes. "We… well, we knew you were coming. Only we didn't know you were coming then. I mean, you remember the morning we woke you up in the park?"

Kid nodded.

Glass nodded too as though the reference explained something, then looked up the hall.

Kid walked on.

At a party, I hand out a hundred and fifty copies of my book, and they all turn down the music and sit around cross-legged on the floor, reading so intently I can walk among them, lean down, and examine each expression flickering from humor through compassion to the visage of the deeply moved.

He sweated under the books in his belt. A drop rolled, tickling his buttock.

Kid and Glass stepped inside the wide-swung doors.

He'd thought there was music.

"…wants more of it, can't get enough of it, how to get out of it: Time—" a woman cried over the loose crowd—"is the hero!" She swayed in dark robes on some platform—or maybe just a table—that brought her knees high as the highest, close-cropped, black (with a brown bald spot vague in the middle) head. "Time is the villain!" Reverend Amy Tayler, thirty yards across the balconied hall, shook her head and her fist, glared around at craning women and men with faces of humus, sand, and all in-between colors earth can have. "Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truths and lies. Not truth and falsity—Oh, no. No. Nothing so grand. Here we are sunk on the abyss of discrete
fibs,
innocent misobservations, brilliant speculations that turn out wrong and kill—Oh, there is so much less truth in the universe than anything else. Yes, even here we founder on the fill of language, the quick ash of desire." Glass touched Kid's arm. His expression looked stranger than Kid's felt. Lanterns hung on the walls. Shadows were multiple and dim on blood-colored linoleum. Near them, strung crepe-paper had fallen behind the potted… not palms. Cactuses! "So you have seen the moon! So you have seen George—the right and left testicles of God, so heavy with tomorrow they tore through the veil to dangle naked above us all? Then
what
was that in the sky today? God's womb punched inside out and blazing with Her blood, looking like a moment ago She had passed the egg of the earth and its polar body we've so cavalierly dismissed from singularity? Is God a sow who devours Her young and gets heartburn? Is God the garter-snake Ouroborus, gagging on the tip of His own tail? Or is God just a category-concept mistake, like Ryle's
mind,
a process the materia of the universe preforms, indulges in, or inflicts on itself, through necessity or chance, for arcane reasons you and I will never discover? Being is a function of time, ey, Martin? Well, now, where does that get us? Now seems pretty specious to me… for it's just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we've been allowed, for an eye's blink, to perch, watching that flow, terrible for all of us, tragic for some of us, in which the future hisses through to heap the potter's field of the past. Very deep, indeed; and dried up. And dusty. And spiked with bone like pongee pits. Was it a heart of fire, up there today? Or just a dollop of what burns, squeezed out of the cosmic gut—to its great relief! Maybe it
was
our sun, hurtling by, on its way somewhere else; and all that's left to us now is to grow colder and older, every day in every way, gracefully as possible. How long did this light last? Oh, my poor, sick, doomed, and soon to be obliterated children, ask instead how long is the darkness that follows it!"

It was not, Kid had noticed, a particularly quiet nor attentive crowd—save the thirty or forty actually clustered at the Reverend's podium. People wandered, talked; and now laughter began somewhere, obscuring her words. Up in the dark balcony, a few people, widely distant, slept like darker blotches among the brown wood seats. Somebody moved along the railing, checking spotlights; none seemed to work. Fat, bald, the color of terra cotta and wearing just some bib-coveralls, he stood up, wiped at his forehead with the back of his arm, and moved to the next dead light.

On the walls, were high barred windows. As Kid's eyes came down the gates, a group of six middle-aged men and women ran across the floor: one woman knocked over a statue that one man caught and struggled to right, till a plaster wing fell. Plaster shattered over the floor. Others clustered to laugh, to shout advice.

Beyond them, Reverend Tayler waved her arms, ducked her head and tossed it back, haranguing the powdered floor, the shadowed ceiling; but only a word or two could tear clear now of talk and laughter.

The group fell apart from a sunburst of white footprints: George Harrison stalked through.

One arm was around the neck of a yellow-haired, plump, pink woman, the other around the waist of a gaunt, tan girl with a brick-colored natural and freckles. (He'd seen her, at the church, with the blond Mexican, who had stopped him on the street, how many mornings later, how many mornings ago?) George saw Kid, veered over, and called: "Hey, so you gonna come here, now? Shit!" His sleaves were rolled high on biceps like French-roast coffee. "You sure pick a hell of a time to come. Right in the middle of super-night. This is super-night, ain't it?" and nodded and hallooed people passing ten yards away. "Today sure as hell was super-day, when that super-sun come up in the super-sky! Hey—?" He released the gaunt girl's waist. Between the lapels of her jump suit hung a glittering catenary. "What you got there? Lemme see." His black fingers (pink nails, scimitared with yellow) clawed up the optical chain. "I see all the people running around wearing these things. Him…" He nodded at Kid. "You see all of them walking around with them. Come on, gimme that one. I'm gonna be a hippie too and wear them little glass beads."

"Ohh!"
She complained, "George!"

"You give me those, and you can get some more, right?"

"No honey." She lifted them from his fingers. "You can't have these."

"Why not?"

"Cause you can't, that's all."

"You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself—"

"Not these, honey." She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. "You tell me what else you want and I'll give you that, okay?"

"Well,
that's
what I want!"

"Oh, George." She snuggled, closer—and out of his line of sight.

"All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I'm sure gonna get them later." Harrison guffawed.

The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking palm.

"What is all this?" Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. "I mean, what's everybody
doing
here? And the preacher—?"

"Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!"

"She sure been going on," the gaunt girl said. "She just don't stop."

"This here is my house," George said, with a grave nod. "Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn't be able to fit 'em all in the church. So we say, come on and we gonna open up the big meeting room. And you just put a sign out say everybody come on over."

"I think that's real nice," Plump Pink said in an accent that, during three weeks at the Georgia border loading melons, Kid had learned to identify as South Alabama Flats. "She always preaching about George and telling everybody about George. So I think it was very nice of George to say why not come on and do it here."

"Don't look to me like there any more people than she could fit in the chapel," the girl said.

"We got a bar over there—" the blond woman turned up her hand to point—"where you fellas can go get a drink. Then you can go listen to the preacher lady. George just wants everybody to make themselves at home."

"Shit," George said. Then he laughed.

Glass laughed too; the blond woman looked satisfied, did something with two fingers under the flowered cotton of her bodice, smiled.

"Gotta give the preacher lady a place to preach," George repeated. He nodded, dropped the gaunt girl's waist.

"Who
lives in this city?" Reverend Amy's voice came on through a lull. "Logicians love it here!" George turned to listen. So did the gaunt girl and Glass. "Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you. What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated plurima. No, Che, no Fanon, you are not niggers enough! Look—" Once more she waved her fist high. Her black sleeve flung out below it. "I have a handful of monads here. Listen—They're chattering and gossiping away like eight-operation logic-cells calling up order from a random net…" At the mention of Che an (unrelated? Kid wondered) wave of noise had started in one corner of the hall. Now another, which had at its center crashing bottle glass, rose over her voice. On the brown scape of the Reverend's face, a constellation of droplets gleamed on each temple. Her mouth moved, her head bent, her head rose; her eyes sealed, snapped open, stared intently; and again Kid could hear none of her dithyramb.

He did hear George chuckle. Harrison stood with his hands in the pockets of his dirty khaki slacks.

Glass, a few steps away, was craning to see something over somebody's head. The blond woman was shouldering her way forward with smiles and "excuse-me's," right and left; the gaunt girl stood, pensive, still watching the preacher, her left hand on her right shoulder, looking pained and picturesque.

"You know your girl friend was outside looking for you again," Kid said.

"Yeah?" George said. "Which one?"