Dhalgren

  "Oh, Kidd, no . .."

  "-and the sounds that come out of that apartment when they don't think anybody's listening are just as strange as the ones that come up from Thirteen's, believe me. Maybe she's got good reason not to want her old man to know, and if Bobby was threatening, in that vicious way younger brothers can have, to show the poster to her parents, well maybe just for an instant, when she was backing him down the hall, and the door rolled open, from some sort of half-conscious impulse, it was easier to shove-or not even to shove, but just not say anything when he stepped back toward the wrong-"

  "Kidd," Lanya said, "now come on!"

  "It would be just like the myth: her lust for George, death and destruction! Only-only suppose it was an accident?" He took another breath. "That's what frightens me. Suppose it was, like she said, just an accident. She didn't see at all. Bobby just backed into the wrong shaft door. That's what terrifies me. That's the thing I'm scared of most."

  "Why?" Lanya asked.

  "Because . . ." He breathed, felt her head shift on his shoulder, her hand rock with his on his chest; "Because that means it's the city. That means it's the landscape: the bricks, and the girders, and the faulty wiring and the shot elevator machinery, all conspiring together to make these myths true. And that's crazy." He shook his head. "I shouldn't have give her that poster. I shouldn't. I really shouldn't-" . His head stopped shaking. "Mother-fucker still hasn't paid me my money. I was going to talk to him about it this evening. But I couldn't, then."

  "No, it doesn't sound like the most propitious time to bring up financial matters."

  "I just wanted to get out of there."

  She nodded.

  "I don't want the money. I really don't."

  "Good." She hugged. "Then just forget about the whole thing. Don't go back there. Let them alone. If people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them do it."

  He raised his hand above his face, palm up, moving his fingers, watching them, black against four-fifths black, his arm muscle tiring, till he let his knuckles fall against his forehead. "I was so scared . . . When I woke up, I was so scared!"

  "It was just a dream," she insisted. And then: "Look, if it really was an accident, your bringing that poster didn't have anything to do with it. And if she did do it on purpose, then she's so far gone there's no way you could possibly blame yourself!"

  "I know," he said. "But do you think . . ." He could feel the place on his neck her breath brushed warmly. "Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?"

  "Of course it does," she said. "San Francisco and Rome are both built on hills. I've spent time in both and I'm sure the amount of energy you have to spend to get from one place to the other in either city has more to do with the tenor of life in each one than whoever happens to be mayor. New York and Istanbul are both cut through by large bodies of water, and even out of sight of it, the feel on the streets in either is more alike than either one than say, Paris or Munich, which are only crossed by swimmable rivers. And London, whose river is an entirely different width, has a different feel entirely." She waited.

  So at last he said. "Yeah . . . But thinking that live streets and windows are plotting and conniving to make you into something you're not, that's crazy, isn't it?"

  "Yes," she said, "that's crazy-in a word."

  He slid his arm around her and could smell her wake-up breath, cuddling her. "You know, when I pulled him out, blood all over me, like a flayed carcass off a butcher hook . . . you know, I had half a hard-on? That's too much, huh?"

  She reached between his legs. "You still do." She moved her fingers there; he moved in her fingers.

  "Maybe that's what I was dreaming about?" He laughed sharply. "Do you think that's what I was-?"

  Her hand contracted, released, moved forward, moved back.

  He said: "I don't think that's going to do any good .. ." Against his chest he felt her shrug. "Try." Not so much to his surprise, but somehow against his will, his will ceased, and it did.

  I let my head fall back in this angry season. There, tensions I had hoped would resolve, merely shift with the body's machinery. The act is clumsy, halting, and without grace or reason. What can I read in the smell of her, what message in the code of her breath? This mountain opens passages of light. The lines on squeezed lids cage the bursting balls. All efforts, dying here, coalesce in the blockage of ear and throat, to an a-corporal lucence, a patterning released from pleasure, the retained shadow of pure idea.

  The leaf shattered in his blunt fingers: leaf and flesh-he ground the flakings with his roughened thumb -were the same color, a different texture. He stared, defining the distinction.

  "Come on." Lanya caught up his hand.

  Flakes fluttered away (some he felt cling); notebook under his other arm, he stood up from where he'd been leaning on the end of the picnic table. "I was just thinking," Kidd said, "maybe I should stop off at the Labry's and try to collect my money."

  "And keep Mr Newboy waiting?" Lanya asked. "Look, you said you got them all moved!"

  "I was just thinking about it," Kidd said. "That's all."

  A young man with a high, bald forehead and side hair to his naked shoulders sat on an overturned wire basket, one sandal resting over the other. He leaned forward, a burned twig in each hand. They had smudged his fingers. "I take these from you crossed," he said to a girl sitting Indian fashion on the ground before him, "and give them to you crossed."

  The girl's black hair was pulled back lacquer tight, till, at the thong whipped a dozen times around her pony tail and tied, it broke into a dozen rivulets about the collar of her pink shirt: her sleeves were torn off; frayed pink threads lay against her thin arms. With her own smudged fingers, she took the twigs. "I take these from you-" she hesitated, concentrated-"uncrossed and I give them to you-" she thrust them back-"uncrossed?" Some spectators in the circle laughed. Others looked as bemused as she did.

  "Nope. Got it wrong again." The man spread his feet, sandal heels lining the dirt, and drew them back against the basket rim. "Now watch." With crossed wrists he took the sticks from her: "I take these from you . . . uncrossed-" his wrists came apart-"and I give them back to you . . ."

  John, scratching under the fringed shoulder of his Peruvian vest with one hand and eating a piece of bread with the other, came around the furnace. "You guys want some more?" He gestured with the slice, chewing. "Just go take it. You didn't get here till we were already halfway through breakfast." Gold-streaked hair and gold wire frames set off his tenacious tan; his pupils were like circles cut from the overcast.

  Kidd said: "We had enough. Really."

  In the basket on which the bald man sat ("I take these from you uncrossed and I give them to you . . . crossed!" More laughter.) a half dozen loaves of bland, saltless bread had been brought over by two scorpions who had taken back two cardboard cartons of canned food, in exchange.

  Kidd said: "You're sure that's today's paper?" which was the third time he'd asked John that over the last hour.

  "Sure I'm sure." John picked the paper up off the picnic table. "Tuesday, May 5th-that's May-day, isn't it?-1904. Faust brought it by this morning." He folded it back, began to beat it against his thigh.

  "Tell Milly when she gets back thanks again for the clean shirt." Lanya tucked one side of the rough-dried blue cotton under her belt. "I'll bring it back later this afternoon."

  "I will. I think Milly's laundry project-" John mused, beating, munching-"is one of the most successful we've investigated. Don't you?"

  Lanya nodded, still tucking.

  "Come on," Kidd said. "Let's get going. I mean if this is really Tuesday. You're sure he said Tuesday now?"

  "I'm sure," Lanya said.

  ("Nope, you're still doing it wrong, now watch: I take them from you crossed and I give them to you uncrossed." His fingers smudged to the second knuckle and bunched at the base of the ch
arred batons, came forward. Hers, smeared equally, hesitated, went back to fiddle with one another, started to take them again. She said: "I just don't get it. I don't get it at all." Fewer laughed this

  time.)

  "So long," Kidd said to John, who nodded, his mouth

  full.

  They made their way through the knapsacks.

  "That was nice of them to feed us ... again," he? said. "They're not bad kids."

  "They're nice kids." She brushed at her clean, wrinkled front. "Wish I had an iron."

  "You really have to get dressed up to go visit Calkins' place, huh?"

  Lanya glanced appraisingly at his new black jeans, his black leather vest. "Well, you're practically in uniform already. I, unlike you, however, am not at my best when scruffy."

  They made their way toward the park entrance.

  "What's the laundry project?" he asked. "Do they have some place where they pound the clothes with paddles on a rock?"

  "I think," Lanya said, "Milly and Jommy and Wally and What's-her-name-with-all-the-Indian-silver found a laundromat or something a few days ago. Only the power's off. Today they've gone off to find the nearest three-pronged outlet that works."

  "Then when did the one you have on get done?"

  "Milly and I washed a whole bunch by hand in the ladies' john yesterday, while you were at work."

  "Oh."

  "Recording engineer to laundress," Lanya mused as they passed through the lion gate, "in less than a year." She humphed. "If you asked him, I suspect John would tell you that's progress."

  "The paper says it's Tuesday." Kidd moved his thumb absently against the blade of his orchid he'd hooked through a side belt loop; inside it, the chain harness jingled, each step. "He said come up when the paper said it was Tuesday. You don't think he's forgotten?"

  "If he has, we'll remind him," Lanya said. "No, I'm sure he hasn't forgotten."

  He could press his thumb or his knuckles against I the sharp edges and leave only the slightest line, that later, like the other cross-hatches in the surface skin, filled with dirt; but he could hardly feel it. "Maybe we'll avoid any run-ins with scorpions today," he said as they crossed from Brisbain North to Brisbain South. "If we're lucky."

  "No self-respecting scorpion would be up at this hour of the morning," Lanya said. "They all sleep till three or four, then carouse till dawn, didn't you know?"

  "Sounds like the life. You been in Calkins' place before, you keep telling me. It'll be okay?"

  "If I hadn't been in there before-" she slapped her harmonica on her palm-"I wouldn't be making this fuss." Three glistening notes. She frowned, and blew again.

  "I think you look pretty good scruffy," he said.

  She played more notes, welding them nearly into melody, till she changed her mind, laughed, or complained, or was silent, before beginning another. They walked, Lanya strewing incomplete tunes.

  His notebook flapped his hip. (His other hand was petaled in steel, now.) He swung, in twin protections, from the curb. "I wonder if I'm scared of what he's going to say."

  Between notes: "Hmm?"

  "Mr Newboy. About my poems. Shit, I'm not going to see him. I want to see where Calkins lives. I don't care what Mr Newboy says about what I write."

  "I left three perfectly beautiful dresses there, upstairs in Phil's closet. I wonder if they're still there."

  "Probably, if Phil is," he said from within his protections.

  "Christ, no. Phil hasn't been in the city for ... weeks!"

  The air was tingly and industrial. He looked up on a sky here the color of clay, there the color of ivory, lighter over there like tarnished tin.

  "Good idea," Lanya said, "for me to split. I got you." Slipping her hand between blades, she grasped two of his fingers. Even on her thin wrist, turned, the blades pressed, rubbed, creased her skin-

  "Watch out. You're gonna ..."

  But she didn't.

  Over the wall hung hanks of ivy.

  At the brass gate, she said, "It's quiet inside."

  "Do you ring?" he asked, "or do you shout?" Then he shouted: "Mr Newboy!"

  She pulled her hand gingerly away. "There used to be a bell, I think ..." She fingered the stone around the brass plate.

  "Hello . . . ?" from inside. Footsteps ground the gravel somewhere behind the pines.

  "Hello, sir!" Kidd called, pulling the orchid off, pushing a blade into a belt-loop.

  Ernest Newboy walked out of shaggy green. "Yes, it is Tuesday, isn't it." He gestured with a rolled paper. "I just found out half an hour ago." He did something on the inside of the latch plate. The gate clanked, swung in a little. "Glad to see you both." He pulled it open the rest of the way.

  "Isn't the man who used to be a guard here anymore?" Lanya asked, stepping through. "He had to stay in there all the time." She pointed to a small, green booth, out of sight of the sidewalk.

  "Tony?" Mr Newboy said. "Oh, he doesn't go on till sometime late in the afternoon. But practically everybody's out today. Roger decided to take them on a tour."

  "And you stayed for us?" Kidd asked. "You didn't have to-"

  "No, I just wasn't up to it. I wouldn't have gone anyway."

  "Tony . . ." Lanya mulled, looking at the weathered paint on the gate shed. "I thought his name was something Scandinavian."

  "Then it must be somebody else now," Mr Newboy said. He put his hands in his pockets. "Tony's quite as Italian as you can get. He's really very nice."

  "So was the other one," Lanya said. "Things are always changing around here."

  "Yes, they are."

  They started up the path.

  "There're so many people in and out of here all the time I've given up trying to keep track. It's very hectic. But you've picked a quiet day. Roger has taken everyone down town to see the paper office." Newboy smiled. "Except me. I always insist on sleeping late Tuesdays."

  "It's nice to see the place again," Lanya consented. "When will everybody be back?"

  "I would imagine as soon as it gets dark. You said you'd stayed here before. Would you like to wait and say hello to Roger?"

  "No," Lanya said. "No. I was just curious."

  Mr Newboy laughed. "I see."

  The gravel (chewing Kidd's calloused foot) turned between two white columned mock-temples. The trees gave way to hedges; And what might have been an orchard further.

  "Can we cut across the garden?"

  "Of course. We'll go to the side terrace. The coffee urn's still hot I know, and I'll see if I can find some tea cakes. Roger keeps telling me I have the run of the place, but I still feel a little strange prying into Mrs Alt's kitchen just like that-"

  "Oh, that's-" and "You don't have-" Kidd and Lanya began together.

  "No, I know where they are. And it's time for my coffee break-that's what you call it here?"

  "You'll love these!" Lanya exclaimed as they stepped through the high hedge. "Roger has the most beautiful flowers and-"

  Brambles coiled the trellis. Dried tendrils curled on splintered lathe. The ground was gouged up in black confusion here, and here, and there.

  "-What in the world . . ." Lanya began. "What happened?"

  Mr Newboy looked puzzled. "I didn't know anything bad. It's been like this since I've been here."

  "But it was full of flowers: those sun-colored orange things, like tigers. And irises. Lots of irises-"

  Kidd's foot cooled in moist ground.

  "Really?" Newboy asked. "How long ago were you there?"

  Lanya shrugged. "Weeks . . . three weeks, four?"

  "How strange." Mr Newboy shook his head as the crossed the littered earth. "I'd always gotten the impression they'd been like this, for years . . ."

  In a ten-foot dish of stone, leaves rotted in puddles.

  Lanya's head shook. "The fountain used to be going all the time. It had a Perseus, or a Hermes or something in it. Where did it get to?"

  "Dear me," Newboy squinted. "I think it's in a pile

  of junk behind t
he secretary cottage. I saw something

  like that when I was wandering around. But I never knew

  it had anything to do with the fountain. I wonder who's

  been around here long enough to know?"

  "Why don't you ask Mr Calkins?" Kidd said.

  "Oh, no. I don't think I would do that." Mr Newboy looked at Lanya with bright complicity. "I don't think I would do that at all."

  "No," said Lanya, face fallen before the desolation, "I don't think so."

  At the brim's crack, the ground, oozy under thin grass, kept their prints like plaster.

  They passed another vined fence; a deal of lawn, and, higher than the few full trees, the house. (On a rise off to one side was another house, only three floors. The secretary cottage?)

  Set in the grass a verdigrised plate read:

  MAY

  From the five fat, stone towers-he sought a sixth for symmetry and failed to find it-it looked as though a modern building of dark wood, glass, and brick had been built around an old one of stone.

  "How many people does he have here?" Kidd asked.

  "I don't really know," Mr Newboy said. They reached the terrace flag. "At least fifteen. Maybe twenty-five. The people he has for help, they're always changing. I really don't see how he gets anything done for looking after them. Unless Mrs Alt does all that." They climbed the concrete steps to the terrace.

  "Wouldn't you lose fifteen people in there?" Kidd asked.

  The house, here, was glass: inside were maple wall panels, tall brass lamps, bronze statuary on small end-tables between long couches covered in gold velvet, all wiped across with flakes of glare.

  "Oh, you never feel the place is crowded."

  They passed another window-wall; Kidd could see two walls covered with books. Dark beams inside held up a balcony, flanked with chairs of gold and green brocade; silver candlesticks-one near, one far off in shadow- bloomed on white doilies floating on the mahogany river of a dining table. "Sometimes I've walked around thinking I was perfectly alone for an hour or so only to come across a party of ten in one of the other rooms. I suppose if the place had a full staff-" dried leaves shattered underfoot-"it wouldn't be so lonely. Here we are."