Dhalgren (83 page)

Denny's chair leg squeaked on the floor.

Lanya scowled back over her shoulder, and positioned herself at the mike. Without lifting her sneaker heel, she began swinging her knee to keep time. Her shoulders rounded from the armholes of Denny's vest. She blew a long, bending note. And another. A third seemed to slide from between them, bent back, hung in the half-dark room—light glowed in three of the dials; red hairlines shook—and turned over, became another note, did something to Kid's eyebrows so they wrinkled. And Benny had turned off his shield.

She played.

Kid listened, and remembered crouching in dim leaves, leaves tickling his jaw, while she walked beyond him, making bright music. Then something in the playing brought him to the here and now of the room, the plastic reels winding, the tension-arm bouncing inside its tape loop, the needles swinging, three (of the four) signal lights glowing like cigarettes. The music was more intense than memory; emotional fragments, without referent scenes, resolved through the brittle, slow notes. She moved her mouth and her forehead; her two forefingers rose vertical over the silver (her nails were slightly dirty; the music was wholly beautiful), then clamped. Silver slid between her lips. She played, played more, played some phrase she'd played before, then turned the tune to its final cadences, taking it to some unexpected key, and held and harped on the resolving chord sequence; a little trill of notes kept falling into it, every two beats; and falling; and falling.

She dropped the harp, clutching it in both hands, against her bare breasts, and grinned.

After maybe ten seconds, Benny applauded. He stuck out his legs from the chair, bounced his heels, and laughed. "That's pretty good! Wow! That's pretty nice!"

Kid smiled, pulled his bare toes back on top of his boot, pushed his shoulders forward; in his lap his hands knotted. "Yeah…"

Lanya grinned at them both, stopped the tapes. "I'm not finished yet. You guys have to help on the next part." She plugged in one earphone set, tossed it to Denny: "Don't drop—"

He almost did.

She started to toss another set to Kid; but he got up and took it. Tangled cords swung to the floor. "I'm going to lay in another track on top of it. Remember that little part just before the end? Well, this time you have to clap there, five times, each time a, little louder. And sort of shout or hoot or something on the last clap." She played the section over.

Denny started to beat his hands together.

"Just
five times," she said. "Then shout I'll bring you in. Let's try it." They did. Denny hooted like a choo-choo train, which broke Kid up laughing.

"Come
on,"
Lanya said. "You guys don't have to overdo it!"

They tried again.

"That's it. Put your earphones on, and we'll lay it in."

The rubber rims clasped Kid's ears and damped the room's silence down a level.

"I'm going to be playing something entirely different." Lanya's voice was crisp and distant through the phones. "But I'll signal you two in with my elbows." She flapped one at them and put on her own phones. The vest swung from her sides. "There we—" she turned on the tape. Momentarily the silence in Kid's phones crackled—"go."

Kid heard Denny's chair leg squeak; but it was on the tape.

Then, a long note bent.

Over it, Lanya began, as the beat cleared, to rattle out, like insects, high triplets, first here, then up half a step, then down a whole one. Her mouth jerked across the organ and she dragged a growl up from the windy lower holes. Then jerk: bright triplets rattled. The old melody wound, beneath them and decorated by them: each time the third batch arrived, they thrust it into a new harmony, and toward Kid's and Denny's cadenced entrance:

Denny leaned forward, eyes wide, hands out and up, cradling an invisible globe. Kid's fingertips tickled his palm… His head was down, to feel the rhythm; his eyes were wedged at the top of his sockets, to watch her.

Lanya swung her whole body back and brought both elbows in to her sides.

Denny's globe collapsed.

Kid's palm stung. And stung again. And again. And again—the sound, and his head, rose—and again: his face burst with noise and sudden joy.

Through the phones, from under his own cry, the rough fabric of the ending, with the little trill falling into it again and again, secured in its foreign key, brought all to its proper close.

Denny, still seated, looked about to explode. And, after five seconds shouted: "Whoop-eee!" and bounced in his chair.

"You like that, huh?" Lanya grinned over her shoulder, ran the tape back. "I want to lay in one more track. You guys have to do the same thing again." To Denny's frown, she explained: "Because I want it to sound like a whole
room
full of people clapping, not just you two. See if you can shout on a different note. I mean, if you hooted high before, hoot low. And vice versa."

"Sure," Denny said. "Where'd you learn to do this?"

"Shhh,"
Lanya said. "Let's just do it. I don't have too much to play on the harmonica this track. But don't let what I do throw you off."

Kid nodded, pulled apart the phones at his ears—two rings of perspiration cooled—then let them clamp back.

"Here we go." She glanced back. "Ready?"

The crackle…

The chair squeak…

Then the long note, bending…

Lanya reinforced the first phrase with middle notes, dropped the harp from her mouth, took a step back, and whistled a phrase over the quiet beginning. One of the harmonicas, already recorded, took it up. Kid suddenly understood the movement between soft and loud built into the two tracks already down; Lanya whistled again. Again the harmonicas carried the whistling into their organ-like development. She put the harp to her mouth, gave some bass strength to another section, waited, glanced at Kid, at Denny. Another thirty seconds of music gathered itself together: suddenly she whistled shrilly, and her elbows came down.

Kid and Denny clapped.

So did Lanya, taking a large step back from the mike, bobbing her head and whacking the back of her harmonica hand against her palm. They clapped through the ringing five, and all shouted together with the voices already taped. Once more Lanya was at the mike, harp at her mouth, weaving high shatter-notes through the ending tapestry.

Then silence.

She said, softly, breathing hard: "There…" and pressed a button. The tapes halted.

"Jesus…!" Denny stood. "That's wild! Where'd you get the tape recorder? I mean, how'd you learn—"

"Paul borrowed it from Reverend Tayler for me."

"You do a lot of that stuff before?" Denny asked.

"Nope." Lanya took off her own earphones, hung them over the mike's jutting bar. "It's just something I wanted to try out. I've worked with tapes before but-"

Kid said: "Let's hear the whole thing!" Taking off his earphones, he came up beside her.

"What are you gonna call it?" Denny clacked, his earphones down on the table.

"—Watch it," Lanya said. "Those are delicate."

"Sorry—What's its name?"

"For a while—" she ran her thumb across Kid's chest—"I was thinking of calling it
Prism, Mirror, Lens.
But then—" Denny disappeared in his ball of light; Lanya squinted, stepped back—"what with that big thing we saw up in the sky… I don't know. Maybe I'll just call it
Diffraction.
I like that."

Holding his lips between his teeth, Kid nodded. "Go on." His lips came loose and tingled. "Play it."

Denny turned on like a frozen node of incandescent gas, moved center floor.

Tapes turned.

"Here we go…"

Denny stilled.

"…I want you to note—" Lanya lay her harmonica on the table, then raised one finger—"that something like that usually takes six or eight hours to do; we have been at this no more than two hours."

From the speakers beneath the table, Denny's chair leg squeaked.

Kid put his own phones down softly and listened (thinking: Temporal diffraction? Two hours? It had seemed perhaps twenty minutes!):

The long note bent.

Somehow, lost in a machine, I have been able to grasp and strip from the body of experience three layers of living theme: she inscribed them with her music, laid them over one another so that, thinned by tape and transistors, their transparent silences and aural aggregates, as she, the inventor, conceived them, clear for me, the invented one, at last. (On the tape Lanya whistled and played with her own whistling, the harmonica cradling its brittle, upper notes with low, breathy ones.) Is that where it goes (thinking:) when it goes? This is melody and there-the shrill whistle which Kid realized now was the real, musical signal for the clapping to begin-which began! He listened to a room full of people clap in time. One of the tracks was heavily echoed and made the clapping seem to come from dozens. The claps mounted; a final clap, and the dozens shouted—among them he recognized his own voice, and Denny's, and Lanya's; but there were many others. Their shouts died over a discord no single harmonica could make.

But probably any three could.

The finale cleared in its higher, supporting key; trills of notes fell into, and trills of notes rose out of, the moaning chord. The sound clutched at him, tightened his stomach.

Lanya listened, arms at her sides, head down, frowning with concentration. The white pips of her upper teeth dented one side of her lip.

The piece ended.

She still listened.

Then Denny applauded and laughed. Another Denny, on top of him, shouted, "Whoop-eee!" And Denny across the room, encased in light, said: "Hey, you know we got company in here? Look back there…"

Lanya's head came up suddenly. She turned off the tape.

Denny's light was over near the darkened corner. "Back behind the blackboard there."

"Huh?" Kid stepped forward.

"There's a big old nigger bitch in here, and, man, she's about to shit!"

"Denny!" Lanya exclaimed, and ran through the edge of his light, which turned, laughing, after her.

Kid pushed away the blackboard, looked down.

The board-stand's wheels stopped creaking.

The woman wore a black hat and a black coat, the hem rumpled on the floor around her. She blinked up at them, feeling for the string handles of the shopping bag beside her. Catching the bag up, she breathed a word all wind.

"What do you want?" Lanya asked. "Are you… all right?"

The woman's eyes narrowed at the light that was Denny, came to Kid's and widened. She blinked again. "You got juice and cookies…"

"What?"

"This is the school?" Her voice was still breathy. "You got the juice and the cookies for the children? Oh, I'm sorry!" Her knuckle rose to dent her double chin, a gesture recalling June. "I thought I could get some from here, you know? I live in Cumberland Park? And the store where I go all the time ain't got none no more. I go in there every day and I get some every day, but I go in there yesterday and there just ain't nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, God… from the children! I'm so sorry!"

"Then," Lanya said, "why don't you go to another store?"

"Oh, I'm sorry! I really am…"

"You got juice and cookies?" Denny asked. "Whyn't you give her some?"

"Because this is…" Lanya's lips worried the teeth behind them. "You wait here." She walked from the circle of Denny's illumination; Kid heard a door.

The woman transferred her bag to the other hand. "Taking from the children. That's just so awful!" Her voice was weak and low as some man's.

Lanya stepped back into the light. In one arm were two number ten cans of grapefruit juice. In the other were two boxes of Tollhouse cookies, glistening in cellophane. "You take these. But don't come back here. Don't break in here and try and take stuff out. Find another store. There's one four blocks up from here that still has things in it. And there's another one a block and a half down, right by the burned-out dry cleaners."

The woman, her tongue tip pink between her lips, blinking, opened her bag.

The can and the boxes went chattering in.

Lanya walked to the front door and held it open.

The woman glanced at Kid, at Denny's light, quite distressed, and stepped unsteadily forward. At the door she hesitated, suddenly turned to Lanya: "You teach little children dressed like that, half naked with your breasts all hanging out like that? Why, that's
terrible!
It's a disgrace to God!" Then she fled, coat hem swinging above her splayed heels.

"Get that!" Denny (lights doused) ran forward. "You want us to take back our God-damn juice and—!"

"Denny!" Lanya blocked him at the door,

"I mean will you get that shit!" He turned in her restraining arms, shaking his head. "Why'd you give her the damn stuff?"

"Oh, come on. Let's go!"

"I mean, God damn, she didn't even say whether or not she liked your music!"

Lanya held on to Denny's shoulder. "Well, maybe if she was hungry she didn't really care about the music. Hiding back there for a couple of hours—"

"Then what's she care that much about your tits for?" Denny shrugged her hand away. "She could've come out. We wouldn't've done nothing. Shit!"

"Well, I'm not going to let it bother me," she said. "So don't let it bother you."

Kid thought: How did she get in here in the first place? Then thought: What was I just thinking… it was something I wanted to ask. "Yeah, let's go, huh?" He laughed, and thought: What was the thought that just slid off the tables of my mind?

Kid followed them outside. And thought: She is bothered.

"Close the door, will you?" Lanya said.

"By the way," Kid began, "how did she…?"

Denny glanced back at him.

Lanya didn't.

"You know?" Kid caught up to her. "I wonder if there're really any children ever in there? I mean I'm having a harder and harder time believing in anything I don't—"

"Huh?" Lanya looked up.

Deep in thought, she hadn't heard.

He grinned at her and rubbed the back of her neck.
"Diffraction,"
he said. "I like it."

"Mmmm."
She leaned her head back and shook it. Hair brushed his hand and wrist.