Dhalgren

  I'm sorry!" She released him, put her hand on Lanya's

  shoulder. "I didn't mean to spy. But you knew I was

  there . . ." She looked imploringly at Lanya. "I just couldn't resist!" And she laughed.

  He blinked; he smiled. ". . . that's all right." The memory of the melody came again; it had not been a private moment he'd overheard, but one meant for a friend. Had that, he wondered, given it its beauty? Lanya was laughing too.

  So he laughed with them.

  At the furnace, Jommy banged his ladle on the caldron. "Come on! Soup's ready! Come and get it!"

  About the clearing, with mess-pans and mess-pots, crocks and tin cups and bowls, two dozen people gathered at the fire.

  "Come on, let's eat," Lanya said.

  "Yes, you too, Kidd!" Milly said. "Come on."

  He followed the girls toward the crowd. A thin, ginger-haired spade with gold-rimmed teeth gave him a dented enamel soup plate. "I got two, man. You can take this one." But when he reached the front, at the furnace, for his ladle-full, it was John (with swinging vest and eye-glasses full of flame), not Jommy, who served. The sky was almost dark. Though firelight lay coppery against Milly's hair, he could not make out, on either bare leg, as he followed Milly and led Lanya out among the crowd, trying to balance his bowl, that scratch.

  Dusk had come quickly-and lingered, holding off dark. They sat on the rumpled blankets at Her Place. He squinted up between lapped leaves while the sky drizzled powdery rubbings, gritty and cool.

  "One more day's work at the Richards, and I'll have them moved."

  "You've . . . well, you've got a name now. And a job. Are you happy?"

  "Shit-" He stretched out on his back and felt beneath him twigs, creases, pebbles, and the beaded chain around him. "I haven't even decided how to spell it. And they still haven't paid me more than that first five dollars."

  "If they don't pay you-" she stretched out too- "why do you go back?"

  He shrugged. "Maybe they know if they gave me my money, I wouldn't come." He shrugged again. "It doesn't matter. Like I told Madame Brown, I'm just an observer. They're fun to watch." Thinking: Someday I'm going to die. He glanced at her: "Do you know, I'm afraid of dying. A lot."

  "Hm?"

  "I am. Sometimes, when I'm walking around, I think maybe my heart is going to stop. So I feel it, just to make sure it's going. Which is funny, because if I'm lying down, about to go to sleep, and I can hear my heart going, I have to move into another position, or I get scared-"

  "-that it might stop and you'll hear it?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  "That happens to me sometimes. When I was fifteen, in boarding school, I sat on the edge of the main building roof for a long time and thought about committing suicide."

  "I've never wanted to kill myself," he said. "Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to-because I'd gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn't worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn't fix it up-that's if I couldn't get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn't stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes-and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop-action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like-" he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped-"that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten . . . before the thought goes and you only remember, the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes."

  "Yes . . . yes, that's happened to me."

  "Well, I think all the buildings and the bridges and the planes and the books and the symphonies and the paintings and the spaceships and the submarines and . . . and the poems: they're just to keep people's minds occupied so it doesn't happen-again." After a while he said: "George Harrison ..."

  She said: "June Richards . . ." and glanced at him. When he said nothing, she said: "I have this picture, of us going down to the bar one night, and you saying, 'Hey, man, come on with me. I want you to meet a friend of mine,' and George says, 'Why sure!'-and he probably would, too; he knows how small the world is he's acting moon for-so you take him, in all his big, black, beautiful person up to that pink brick high-rise with all the broken windows and you get a-hold of Miss Demented-sweetness-and-light, and you say, 'Hey, Lady, I've just brought you His Midnight Eminence, in the flesh. June, meet George. George, meet June." I wonder what they'd talk about-on her territory?"

  He chuckled. "Oh, I don't know. He might even say, Thank you. After all, she made him what he is today." He blinked at the leaves. "It's fascinating, life the way it is; the way everything sits together, colors, shapes, pools of water with leaves in them, reflections on windows, sunlight when there's sun, cloudlight when it's cloudy; and now I'm somewhere where, if the smoke pulls back at midnight and George and the moon are up, I might see two shadows instead of one!" He stretched his hands behind him on the blanket. He knocked something-which was his orchid, rolling across his notebook cover.

  "When I was at Art School," she said, "I remember an instructor of mine saying that it was only on days like you have here that you know the true color of anything. The whole city, all of Bellona, it's under perpetual north light."

  "Mmm," he said.

  What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.

  "You . . ." he said, suddenly. It was dark. "Are you happy, I mean, living like that?"

  "Me?" She breathed a long breath. "Let me see . . . before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who'd just arrived in New York's Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI, FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence." And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him.

  "Gotta run." Click. The tie knot rose.

  "Hey, Mr Richards?" Kidd put down his own cup.

  "Yes, Kidd?" Mr Richards, already in the doorway, turned back. "What do you want?"

  Bobby spooned at his frosted cereal. There was no milk. June traced a column in the Friday, October 24, 1985 Times with her forefinger. It was several weeks old.

  "I want to know about my money."

  "You need some more? I'll have some for you when ï I get home this evening."

  "I want to know how much I'm getting." "Hm?"

  "Oh. Well, we'll have to figure that out. Have you been keeping track of how long you've been working each day?"

  "More or less," Kidd said. "Madame Brown told me you were going to give me five bucks an hour."

  Mr Richards took the door knob. "That's pretty high wages." He shook his head, thoughtfully.

  "Is that what you told her?"

  The knob turned. "We better talk about it later on this
evening." The door closed on his smile.

  Kidd turned back to Mrs Richards.

  She sipped, eyes flickering above the china rim.

  "I mean that's what you told her, isn't it?"

  "Five dollars an hour is quite high. For unskilled labor." The cup lowered to her chin.

  "Yeah, but not for furniture movers. Look, let me go downstairs and finish bringing up the rugs and the clothes. It's only going to take another half-dozen trips. I'll be through before you get started on lunch." Kidd got up too noisily and went to the door.

  Bobby's spoon, silent the exchange, crunched again.

  June's eyes had stayed down, but once more her finger moved.

  From the doorway Kidd glanced back at her (as moments before her father had glanced back at him) and tried to set her against George's and Lanya's conversation of the previous afternoon. But, with blonde head bent over the paper at the edge of dark wood-blonde and pink reflection fuzzed in the polish-she seemed as at home among the fluted, white china cups, the brass pots of plants, the green rugs, the blue flowered drapes, her mother, her brother, the wide windows, or the green wallpaper with its paler green florals.

  Down on seventeen, he came into the apartment (unchained, unlocked) and thought: Why didn't we take the rugs up first? That was silly, not to have taken the rugs up. Like mottled eels (the underpad, a smaller darker eel, printed with a design that, till now, he'd only seen on corrugated ceilings) the rugs lay against the living room wall. Outside the window, pale leviathans swam. Piles of books sat on the floor.

  Pilgrimage was on top of one.

  For the third-or was it the fourth? Or the fifth?- time he picked it up, read at random pages, waiting to be caught and driven into the work. But the receptivity he tried to bring was again and again hooked away by some pattern of shadow on the bare vinyl tile, some sound in the apartment below, some itch in his own body: and there went all his attention. Though his eye moved over the print, his place and the print's sense were lost: At last he lay the book back on the pile, and put a book from another pile on top, as though-and wondered why he thought of it this way-the first book were his own.

  He stood up-he had been squatting-and gazed around: still to be moved were bridge tables from the back storage closet, folding chairs with scrolled arms, green cushions, and black metal hinges; and toys from Bobby's room, scattered among them. A set of four nest tables was crowded with small, bright breakables.

  He wandered down the hall (there was the carton of papers from Mr Richards' den) and turned into Bobby's room. Most of what was left was evidence of the older brother who'd once shared it: a handkerchief that had fallen out of a bureau drawer yesterday, showing the monogram: EGR; propping the closet door were three small cartons with Eddy written across them in magic marker; on the floor was the Bellona High School Yearbook. Kidd picked it up and paged through: Edward Garry Richards (Soccer team, G.O. Volunteer, "The Cafeteria Staff's favorite two years running . . .") was Camera Shy.

  He lay the book down on the boxes, wandered across the hall into June's room: on the window sill was the tepee of an empty matchbook and a white plastic flower pot still filled with earth which, June had told him yesterday, had once grown a begonia her aunt Marianne had given her two Easters ago.

  In memory he refurnished the space with the pieces he'd taken upstairs the previous day and tried to pull back, also from memory, the image of June that had come to him in George's overheard converse. Memory failed at a sound outside.

  Kidd stepped back into the hall as Bobby came from the living room; he grunted, over an armful of books, "I'm taking these upstairs."

  "Why don't you take about half of them?"

  "Maybe-" two books fell-"I better."

  June came in: "Oh, hey, I'll take some of those . . ." They divided the stack, left.

  Where, he wondered as the door closed (the unlatched chain swung and swung over green paint), is my notebook? Of course; down the hall in what had been the back bedroom, from when he'd stopped in this apartment out of habit when he'd first come in the morning: He had momentarily forgotten that the Richards were living in nineteen now.

  In the back bedroom another file box stood off center in the middle of the floor.

  The notebook was on the window sill. Kidd walked up to it, looked at the worn, smeared cardboard. Outside, small darknesses moved below the mist. What, he thought, should I say to Mr Richards about my money? Suppose Mr Richards comes back this evening and doesn't bring up the subject? Kidd considered writing down alternative opening lines and rehearsing them for Mr Richards' return. No. No, that's exactly the wrong way! It's almost nine o'clock, he thought, and too smoky to tell people from shadows at seventeen stories.

  Something thumped; a girl cried out. A second thump, and her pitch changed. A third-it sounded like toppling furniture-and her cry swooped. A fourth ended it.

  That was from the apartment below.

  Breaking glass, much nearer, brought his eyes from the floor.

  Kidd went to the living room.

  Mrs Richards, kneeling "over something shattered, looked up and shook her head. "I . . ."

  He stopped before her restrained confusion.

  "... I dropped one of the-"

  He could not tell what the figurine had been.

  "So thin-these walls are so very thin. Everything comes through. I was so startled . . ." By the nest tables, she picked faster in the bright, black shards, white matt overside.

  "I hope it wasn't anything you really-" but was halted by his own inanity.

  "Oh, that's all right. Here, I've got it all." She stood, cupping chips. "I heard that awful .. . and I dropped it."

  "They were going on pretty loud." He tried to laugh, but before her gaze, he let the laugh die in breath. "Mrs Richards, it's just noise. You shouldn't let yourself get so upset about it."

  "What are they doing down there? Who are they?"

  He thought she might crush the ceramic between her palms. "They're just some guys, some girls, who moved into the downstairs apartment. They're not out to bother you. They think the noises from up here are pretty strange too."

  "Just moved in? How do you mean, they just moved in?"

  He watched her expression lurch at fear, and not

  achieve even that. "They wanted a roof, I guess. So they

  took it over."

  "Took it over? They can't come in here and take it over. What happened to the couple who lived there before? Management doesn't know things like this are going on. The front doors used to be closed at ten o'clock, every night! And locked! The first night they started making those dreadful sounds, I sent Arthur out for one of the guards: Mr Phillips, a very nice West Indian man, he's always in front of our building till one in the morning. Arthur couldn't find him. He'd gone away. All the . guards. And the attendants for the garage. I want you to know I put that in my letter to Management. I certainly did." She shook her head. "How can they just come in and take it over?"

  "They just . . . Ma'am, there aren't any more guards, and nobody was living there; they just moved in. Just like you're moving into nineteen."

  "We're not just moving in!" Mrs Richards had been looking about. Now she walked into the kitchen. "I wrote Management. Arthur went to see them. We got the key from the office. It isn't the same thing at all."

  Kidd followed Mrs Richards around the stripped kitchen.

  "How do you know nobody was living there? There was a very nice couple downstairs. She was Japanese. Or Korean or something. He was connected with the university. I didn't know them very well. They'd only been here six months. What happened to them?" She looked back, just before she went into the dining room again.

  "They left, just like everybody else." He still followed.

  She carried the broken things, clacking, down the rugless hall. "I think something awful happened to them. I think those people down there did something awful. Why doesn't Management send some new guards?" She started into Bobby's room, but changed her mind and
continued to June's. "It's dangerous, it's absolutely, terribly dangerous, without guards."

  "Mrs Richards?" He stood in the doorway while she circuited the room, hands still cupped. "Ma'am? What are you looking for?"

  "Someplace to throw-" she stopped-"this. But you took everything upstairs already."

  "You know you could just drop it on the floor." He was impatient and his impatience embarrassed him. "I mean you don't live here any more."

  After the silence in which her expression became curious, she said, "You don't understand the way we live at all. But then, you probably think you understand all too well. I'm going to take this out to the incinerator."

  He ducked back as she strode through.

  "I don't like to go out in the hall. I don't feel safe-"

  "I'll take it out for you," he called after her.

  "That's all right." Hands still together, she twisted the knob.

  When the door banged behind her, he sucked his teeth, then went and got his notebook from the window. The blue-rimmed stationery slid half out. He opened the cover and looked at her even letters. With his front teeth set, he took his pen and drew in the comma. Her ink was India black; his, dark blue.

  Going back to the living room, he stabbed at his pocket several times. Mrs Richards came in with a look of accomplishment. His pen caught. "Mrs Richards, do you know, that letter's still down in your mailbox?"

  "What letter?"

  "You've got an airmail letter in your mailbox. I saw it again this morning."

  "All the mailboxes are broken."

  "Yours isn't. And there's a letter inside it. I told you about it the first day I came here. Then I told Mr Richards a day later. Don't you have a mailbox key?"

  "Yes, of course. One of us will go down and pick it up this afternoon."

  "Mrs Richards?" Something vented still left something to come.

  "Yes, Kidd?"

  His teeth were still set. He sucked air and they opened. "You're a very nice woman. You've really tried to be nice to me. And I think it's a shame you have to be so scared all the time. There's nothing I can do about it, but I wish there was."

  She frowned; the frown passed. "I don't suppose you'd believe just how much you have done."