Dhalgren (96 page)

"Damn!" Kid said. "Thank you!"

"Would you like something to drink?" she suggested in the silence.

"Yeah. Sure. Let's get something to drink."

They walked to the table.

"I've written—and published—two novels." Thelma went on. "Nothing you're likely to have heard of. But the effect of your poems on me, especially the first four, the Elegy, and the last two before the long conversational one in meter, is rather the effect I'd always hoped my books would have on people." She actually laughed. "In a way, your book was discouraging, because watching your poems gain that effect showed me some of the reasons why my prose often doesn't. That condensed and clear descriptive insight is something I envy you. And you wield it as naturally as speech, turning it on this and that and the other…" She shook her head, she smiled. "All I can do is find a lot of adjectives that you've got to fill up with meaning for yourself: Beautiful, perhaps mar-velous, or wonderful…"

Kid decided they all applied, to her anyway; His delight was awesome. But holding it (the black bartender poured him a bourbon) was an entrancing irritation as pleasurable in building as a sneeze in relief.

Denny stepped up to the table, fingering inside his shirt pocket. "Hey, you wanna see something?"

Kid and Thelma watched.

And across the patio, Lanya's dress splashed around with orange and gold. The people she was talking with stepped back in surprise. She looked down at herself, laughed, searched about till she saw Kid and Denny, and blew them a kiss.

Thelma smiled and did not seem to understand.

Kid introduced Thelma to Denny. She introduced them to someone else. Bill, the reporter, joined them. Thelma left. Kid watched laddering relational torques and tensions, already interpreting them as likes, dislikes, ease and unease. Lanya brought Budgie Goldstein to meet him. Budgie, immense in green chiffon, explained how frightened she'd always been of scorpions but now how nice they all seemed, punctuating her explanation with sharp, short laughs. They had wandered from the terrace onto the-

"These? I believe there are… Toby, what
are
these?"

"The September Gardens, Roxanne. September, remember… And who is this young man? You wouldn't be the Kid?"

And he was handed on.

He liked it.

It took half an hour to realize he had been kept entirely away from the other scorpions.

Besides what he estimated at two dozen house guests, there were another thirty-odd invited from town, including Paul Fenster, Everett (Angora) Forest, and (Kid was surprised to see him leaning over against the stone wall, talking with Revelation) Frank.

There was a bridge between January and June.

Kid looked over the rail at wet rock; floodlights glistened on a vein of clotted leaves—there was no clear water. Lanya and Ernestine passed on the little path underneath.

Ernestine said into her drink: "The only thing I could think of to do was to physically
push
them at one another…"

Kid thought Lanya had not seen him, but a moment after she vanished she said, "Hello," behind him.

He turned from the rail. "You've been very busy."

Wrist against forehead, she mimed distress. "Phase one, at any rate, is over. Just about everyone knows now it's
possible
to talk to everyone else. Are you having a good time?"

"Yeah. They're all here for me." Then he grinned. "But they're all talking about you."

"Huh?"

"Three people have told me how great your dress is," which was true. "Denny's doing a good job."

"You're a doll!" She clapped his cheeks between her palms and kissed him on the nose.

Cathedral, California, and Thruppence ambled below them on the path, light and dark shoulders together. I feel responsible for them, he thought, recalling her initial efforts. He laughed.

Her dress began to broil with green and lavender.

She saw and asked, "Where's Denny gotten off to? Let's go look for him."

They did and could not find him, spoke to others, and then Kid lost her again.

From the high rocks of—"October," said the plaque on the rust-ringed birdbath—he looked down toward the terrace.

Two women he had not met, with Bill (whom he had) between them, had cornered Baby and were talking at him intently. Baby smiled very hard, his paper plate just under his chin. Sometimes he dropped his head to nod, sometimes to scrape up another and another forkful. Once in a while someone across the terrace, when they were sure they were unobserved, would glance—two ladies, one after another, maneuvered for the better view, noticed they were observed, and walked away.

Someone was in the bushes behind him.

Kid looked around: Jack the Ripper backed out; from the movement of his elbows, he was closing his fly. He turned. "Huh?… oh, it's just you, man." He grinned, bent, adjusted himself. "Scared somebody gonna see me back there takin' a leak."

"There's a bathroom in the house somewhere."

"Shit. I didn't wanna go askin' around for that. My piss ain't gonna kill no flowers. This is a real nice place, huh. A real nice party. Everybody's real nice. You havin' a nice time? I sure am."

Kid nodded. "You catch Baby when he came in?"

"No," the Ripper drawled with a wildly interrogative cadence.

"You said you wanted to see what the reaction was. I missed it. I was wondering if you caught it."

"God damn!" The Ripper snapped his fingers. "You know I wasn't even looking?"

"There he is."

"Where?"

Kid nodded toward the terrace.

The Ripper stuck his hands in the back of his pants. "What they talkin' about?"

Kid shrugged.

"Hey, man!" The Ripper's hands came loose again. "I gotta go down and hear this." He grinned at Kid who started to say something. But the Ripper was off along the rocks.

At the four-foot terrace wall, the Ripper straight-armed up, scrambled over—half a dozen looked—and jumped. A bopping lope took him to the bar. The white bartender gave him two drinks. He came to the corner, thrust one glass at Baby and said loud enough for Kid to hear: "Now I
know
you want a drink, Baby, 'cause you gonna need something to keep you warm."

Several people laughed.

Baby took the drink in both hands—he had put his plate down on the wall—and looked as though he were about to dive into it. But Bill and the two women merely made room, and continued.

Seconds later, the Ripper, all weight on one leg, heavy lower lip sucked in and long head quizzically cocked, stood rapt, nodding in unison with Baby.

Curious at their low converse, Kid walked away from it into March.

Only one light worked here, anchored high and harsh on an elm. Captain Kamp stood silhouetted at the vertex of his shadow. "Hello, now, I was just coming back this way… you enjoying yourself?" Backlight made him ominous; his voice was cheerful. "I was just over there taking a—" (Kid expected him to say "leak")—"look in the August gardens. There're no lights in there, so I guess people are staying clear. But you can see down into the city. A few street lights are still on. I'm not too good at this ersatz host business. And this party takes some hosting." Kamp stepped up. Kid turned to walk with him. "Now I sure wish Roger would get here."

"Doesn't look like anyone's missed him too much."

"I have. I'm just not used to all this… well, sort of thing. I mean, trying to be in charge of it."

"I guess I'd like to meet him."

"Sure. Of course you would." Kamp nodded as they came nearer the house. "I mean he's giving this party for you, for your book. You'd think he'd… but now I'm pretty sure he'll get here. You don't worry now."

"I'm not and don't mean to start."

"You know I was thinking—" they walked up the stone steps—"about some of the things we were talking about when I first met you."

"That was a strange evening. But it came after a strange day."

"Sure did. Have you seen Roger's observatory?" Kamp interrupted himself. "Perhaps you'd like to go up and see it."

Kid was curious at the transition rather than the suggestion. "Okay."

Coming down the terrace, Lady of Spain, Spider, Angel, Raven and Tarzan, circled gangling D-t:

"D-t, man, you gotta see this!"

"I ain't never seen no garden like this before. All them flowers—"

"—and a big fountain that works and all."

"Come on. We gonna show you." Lady of Spain tugged his arm.

"D-t, you ain't never seen no garden as pretty as this in your whole life!"

"I guess—" Kamp opened the door for Kid—"I'm just not used to it. I mean all these different… kinds of people. Like that boy back there walking around with no clothes on? And everybody going on just like there was nothing wrong." The large, dark room was lined with books. In candlelight some dozen people sat on the floor or on hassocks. Several looked up from a tape recorder from which organ music flowed. One man (Kid remembered his making some joke in November about the smoke) said, "Kid? Captain? Would you like to join us? We were just listening to some—"

"We're going to the observatory." Kamp opened another door.

The organ piece ended; after a slight pause, a long note bent. Then another… They were playing
Diffraction.

Kid smiled as he walked after Kamp down a hall nearly black. He could hear Lanya's whistle. At the top of a stairway Kid saw faint light. The carpeting was thick and so warm under his bare foot he wondered if there were heating on.

"I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if Roger was here. But being left in charge of a party for a bunch of people that, frankly, I'd put out of my house…"

Kid was quietly amazed and wondered what Kamp was thinking in the pause.

"…I just don't know what to do. Do you know what I mean?"

Anything, Kid thought, I say will sound angry and stupid. He said, "Sure," and followed Kamp up the stairs.

"A few months ago," Kamp said, "I was in some experiments. They didn't have anything to do with the moon. In fact I had to get a special release from the Space Program to participate. Some students of a friend of mine at Michigan were running tests, and I guess he thought it would be a feather in his cap to get me for a guinea pig. Now, it'd been so long since I had anything to do that wasn't in some way connected with the Program, I went along with it. They were experiments on sensory deprivation and overload." At the head of the steps, Kamp waited for Kid before starting up a third flight.

He led Kid across a brick floor to a double doorway.

"I was in the overload part. It was all pretty amateurish, actually."

Kid stepped onto what first seemed a semi-circular balcony.

Faintly, below, a room full of people began to clap in time to the music—

"I guess they'd all been reading too many articles on LSD—"

—and shouted.

"—I took LSD back in the late fifties—more tests, that this psychiatrist friend of mine was running. But I've always been a little ahead of what's going on. Anyway, I know what it's like, LSD. And I'm pretty sure
most
of those kids setting up those experiments in Michigan didn't."

The terrace was enclosed in a glass dome. In the center was a six-foot in diameter celestial globe of clear plastic. Light from the garden below struggled in the smoke above, glowing like dilute milk.

"Now I guess you've taken LSD and all that stuff."

"Sure."

"Well, all they'd been doing was looking at all the pretty pictures everyone had been drawing." Kamp touched the globe, removed his fingers. Ares passed across Libra. The stars were glittering stones set in the etched constellations. "They had spherical rear-projection rooms, practically as big as this place here. They could cover it with colors and shapes and flashes. They put earphones on me and blasted in beeps and clicks and oscillating frequencies. Anyway, I was supposed to pick out patterns from all this. Later I learned that mine was the control group: We were given no patterns at all. I was told all the ones I had seen I had imposed myself… But after two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was just astounded at how…
rich
and complicated everything suddenly looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory-overload chamber.
Rich…
and I suddenly realized what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information deprivation. It's the
pattern
that colors and shapes assume that tell you whether it's a cow or a car you're looking at. It's the very finest alternations in color differentiation over a surface that tell you whether it's maple or pine, styrene or polyethylene, linen or flannel. Take any view in front of you and cut off the top and bottom till you've only got an inch-wide strip and you'll still be amazed at all the information you can get from just running your eye along that. Well, all this started me thinking back to the moon. Because that had been a place—and it happened in every mile en route—where standard information patterns just broke down. And yet,
that's
something we haven't been able to talk about—to anyone—since we got back. We'd trained for prolonged free-fall by spending time underwater in diving suits. I remember when we actually hit sustained weightlessness, I broadcast back, 'Hey, it's just like being underwater!' and yet as I said that into the chin mike, I was thinking: You certainly could never
mistake
the two conditions for one another. But I couldn't think of any way to
say
what was different about it, so I just described the way everybody, who'd never been there themselves, had
told
me it was going to feel like. Later I thought, that's like telling someone the world is flat and sending him off to the edge; but because he doesn't know quite how to describe such gentle roundness, he mumbles and stammers and says, 'Well yeah, I was at the… edge.' And the thing about the moon itself, the one thing I've really
never
told anybody, because I don't think I would have known how before those experiments: it's another
world,
and when you're there, you have no way of knowing
what
anything means.
Physically.
That whole landscape tells you nothing about itself, on any level, in the way that the most desolate stretch of sand on earth tells you about winds that have blown over it, rains that have or have not fallen, or the feel it might have beneath your feet if you walked across it. 'An airless, waterless void…' the way they say in all the science-fiction stories? No, that refers to some desert on earth, or what space between the stars looks like when you're safely tucked under the atmosphere. The moon is a different world, with a different order that you don't understand. There
isn't
that richness—not because it isn't in bright colors, or because it's all brown, purple, and grey. It's because as you run your eyes over the rocks and dirt, you have no way to know what the tiny alterations in color mean. Even though it has a horizon and perspective, and… well, rocks and dirt, it's more like being in that sensory-overload chamber than anything else. And of course, it isn't like that at all. It wasn't horrible. Horror still has something to do with earth. I suppose it was frightening. But even that was absorbed in the excitement of it. I—" he paused—"do not know how to tell you about it." He smiled and shrugged. "And that's probably the one thing I really haven't told anybody before. Oh, I've said, 'You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.' But that's my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn't what I mean."