Dhalgren

  "Do you want to serve that, Arthur?"

  At his corner Kidd contemplated being belligerently nice to the woman with the earring. But she was too far away. He turned to the woman beside him in green. "You work with Mr Richards?"

  "My husband used to," she said and passed him a white-capped dessert dish.

  He ate a spoonful: maple.

  "I," he said and swallowed, "have to talk to Mr Richards about some money. You like it here?"

  "Oh, it's a very nice apartment. You moved all the furniture for them, they told us."

  He smiled, nodded, and decided he just couldn't take grape jello with maple flavored whipped cream.

  The man beside the woman leaned around again: "I didn't really work with Arthur. I used to work for Bill over there who used to do statting for MSB-where Arthur works. So Lynn and me, we just came along."

  "Oh," Lynn said deprecatingly while Kidd drank coffee, "we just have to extend ourselves, you know, While all this is going on."

  "That's what I'm doing; that's what I'm doing, A bunch of us have gotten together, you see. We're living together in. . . well, we're living together. I mean we were just about to get chased out of our house. By son guys with those things, you know?" The man pointed the orchid. "But today, I'd wear one if I had it."

  "No, you wouldn't!" Lynn insisted. "You wouldn't"

  "It's pretty rough," Kidd said.

  "The way we got together," Lynn went on to explain, "it's much better for the children. You see?"

  "Yeah, sure!" He'd heard her suddenly helpless tone and he responded to it.

  "What's there around here to write poems about?" That was her husband again. "I mean, nothing ever happens. You sit around, scared to go outside. Or when you do, it's like walking into a damn swamp."

  "That's the whole thing," Lynn acknowledged. "Really. In Bellona, I mean, now. There's nothing to do."

  From her father's side, June said: "Kidd writes lovely poems." Under the candles, shadows doffed in the cream.

  "Oh, yes," Mrs Richards affirmed, setting down dishes of jelly before the large woman in corduroy and the blond man in tweeds. "Kidd, you will read something to us, won't you?"

  "Yes," Mr Richards said. "I think Kidd should read a poem."

  Kidd sucked his teeth with annoyance. "I don't have any. Not with me."

  Mrs Richards beamed: "I have one. Just a moment." She turned and hurried out.

  Kidd's annoyance grew. He took another spoonful of jello; which he hadn't wanted. So drank the rest of his coffee. He hadn't wanted that either.

  "Here we are!" Mrs Richards cried, returning; she slipped the blue-edged paper before him.

  "Oh," Kidd said. "I forgot you had this one."

  "Go on, read it."

  "Better be good," said blond and tweedy, affably enough. "Otherwise Ronnie will run the other way every time she sees you on the street because she thinks you're

  a-"

  "I don't go out on the streets," Ronnie said. "I want to hear what kind of poems you write. Go on."

  A man who wasn't Mr Richards said, "I don't know very much about poetry."

  "Stand up, Kidd," Mr Richards said, waving a creamy spoon. "So we can hear you."

  Kidd stood and said as dumbly as possible, "Mr Richards, I just came to see you about getting my money for the work I did," and waited for reaction.

  Mr Richards moved his shoulders back and smiled.

  Somewhere-outside in the hall?-a door closed.

  Mrs Richards, holding the edge of the table and smiling, nodded: "Go on, Kidd."

  Ronnie said to Mrs Richards: "He wants his money: He's a pretty practical poet." Though she spoke softly, everyone laughed.

  He looked down at Mrs Richards' copy of his poem, and drew his tongue back from his teeth for the first word.

  In the hall, a man screamed, without words or inflection; footsteps, some dull thuds-the scream changed pitch at each of them.

  Kidd started reading. He paused at the third line, wanting very much to laugh, but didn't look up.

  Footsteps: running voices arguing-a lot of them.

  Kidd kept reading till he reached Mrs Richards' omitted comma.

  Lynn, beside him, let out a little cry. From the corner of his eye, he saw her husband take her arm. Somebody banged on the wall outside with what sounded like a crowbar. And the screaming cracked to a hysterical, Mexican accent: "Oh, come on, please, come on lemme 'lone. Don't fool 'round like that-No! C'mon, c'mon-No. Don' please-"

  Kidd read the last lines of his poem and looked up.

  The crashes had moved from the wall to the door, and fell with timed, deliberate thuds. Within the crash, as though it were an envelope of sound, he could hear the chain rattle, the hinges jiggle, the lock click.

  As he looked around the table, the thought passed with oblique idleness: They look like I probably do when somebody's eyes go red.

  Outside, above the shouting, somebody laughed.

  Kidd's own fear, dogged and luminous and familiar enough to be almost unconscious, was fixed somewhere in the hall. Yet he didn't want to laugh. He still wanted to giggle.

  Out there, someone began to run. Others ran after.

  A muscle on the back of Kidd's thigh tensed to the crashing. He smiled, vaguely, confused. The back of his neck was tickly.

  Someone's chair squeaked.

  "Oh, for God's sake, why don't they-" and, where rhythm predicted the next crash, only her word fell: "-stop!"

  Footsteps lightened, tumbled off down steps, retreated behind banged doors.

  Kidd sat down, looked at the guests, some of whom I looked at him, some who looked at each other; the woman in corduroy was looking at her lap; Mrs Richards j was breathing hard. He wondered if anyone liked his poem.

  "They do that around here too, huh?" Sam forced, jocularly.

  Then a woman Kidd could not really see at the table's end spilled coffee.

  "Oh, I'll get a rag!" Mrs Richards screamed, and fled the room.

  Three people tried to say nothing in particular at once.

  But when Mrs Richards returned with a black and white, op-art dishtowel, one voice detached itself, a hesitant baritone: "For God's sakes, can't we do something about that? I mean, we've got to do something!"

  Of several feelings, the only sharp one Kidd felt was annoyance. "Mr Richards?" he said, still standing, "Mr Richards? Can I talk to you now?"

  Mr Richards raised his eyebrows, then pushed back his chair. June, beside him, surprisingly concerned, touched her father's arm, . . . restrainingly? protectively? Mr Richards brushed her hand away and came down the table.

  Kidd picked up his orchid and went out into the hall.

  The woman in corduroy was saying, "When you can think of something to do, will you please let me know what it is. You'll have my cooperation one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent, believe me."

  At the door Kidd turned. "We should get this five dollars an hour business settled now, don't you think, Mr Richards, because it'll just-"

  Mr Richards' slight, taut smile broke. "What are you trying to do, huh?" he demanded in a whisper. "What are you trying to do? I mean five dollars an hour, you must be crazy!"

  Mrs Richards, still holding the dishtowel, drifted up behind her husband's shoulder, blinking, in perfect imitation of Smokey with Thirteen.

  "I mean just what are you trying to do?" Mr Richards went on. "We don't have any money to give you, and you better understand that."

  "Huh?" because it seemed absurd.

  "Five dollars an hour?" Mr Richards repeated. "You must be crazy!" His voice was insistent, tense and low. "What does somebody like you need that kind of money for, anyway? It doesn't cost anything to live in this city- no food bills, no rent. Money doesn't mean anything here any more. What are you trying to do . . . ? I've got a wife. I've got a family. MSE hasn't had a payroll for months. There hasn't even been anyone in the damn office! I've got to hold on to what I have. I can't spend that kind of money now, with everything li
ke this. I can't-"

  "Well, isn't that what you told-?" He was angry. "Oh shit. Look, then why don't you . . ." Then he reached around to his pocket.

  Mr Richards' eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.

  But Kidd only dug at his pocket. "Then why don't you keep this too?" Mr Richards swayed when the moist, green knot, bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.

  Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it at two inches.

  Mrs Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.

  The astonishment Mr Richards returned him, as Mrs Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the door's clash.

  He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.

  In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices. There was no one in the lobby.

  Satisfied?

  His annoyance, at any rate.

  But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. "Ba-da ba-da ba-da?" he asked. "Ba-da ba-da," he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers on the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the beginning of one section: with the delight of resignation, he decided, with the change of a "This" to a "That", on his initial version.

  A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless

  projector's swinging shadow across the notebook opened

  on his naked thigh.

  Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letter, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). "Are you in there?" Lanya asked.

  "Huh?" He looked up at the door's layered scrawl. "Yeah. I'm coming out now." He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.

  "He said you were in there." She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. "Come on."

  "Huh? Where?"

  She smiled. "Come on." She took his hand.

  "Hey," he called, passing the bar. "You wanna keep this for me again?"

  The bartender leaned over for the notebook. "In the usual place, kid." He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.

  She paused at the door to ask, "How did it go with the Richards?"

  "I gave him back his fucking five bucks."

  Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. "That's too much! Tell me what happened." And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.

  "What happened?" she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.

  "He didn't want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?" He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid's harness jingled. "You know their kid, the little boy, they just left him . . ." He shook his head against hers. "Hell, I don't want to talk about that. Where we going?"

  "To the park. To the commune."

  "Why?"

  "I'm hungry, for one thing."

  "Just as well I'm not talking."

  She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. "This morning," Lanya said, "after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!"

  "Smoke's sure thicker."

  "Down there," she nodded, "before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn't even gotten dark yet."

  "There couldn't be any fires in the park," he announced suddenly. "The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn't it? It would either all burn or it wouldn't."

  "I guess so."

  "Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront." Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a cannister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. "Maybe you and John and his people could go."

  She shrugged under his arm. "No, really, I'd rather not go down there . . ."

  From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.

  "You're scared to death!"

  Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.

  "Why?"

  She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, "Come on," quietly, sharply.

  His bare foot went from concrete to grass.

  The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.

  He saw quivering fires.

  But they were from the commune's cinderblock furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.

  Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.

  One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It's the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there's something in this fog and smoke. No . . .

  John walked by the fire's edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak's weapon. Then, at John's wrist:-brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John's fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.

  Tak grinned and John moved away.

  Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya- she had moved from his side-talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.

  Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.

  Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to them, put together actions and conversation snatches: He searched the screen where perception translated to information, waiting for somebody to dance, to eat, to sing. He wished Lanya had told him why they had come. But he was very tired. So he moved around. Someday I'm going to die, he thought irrelevantly: But blood still beat inside his ear.

  He stepped backward from the heat, and backward again. (Where was Lanya?) But was too distraught to turn his head. Everything meant, loudly and insistently, much too much: smoke, untwirling over twigs; the small stone biting his heel; the hot band from the fire across his lowered forehead; the mumblings around him that rose here, fell there.

  Milly stood a few feet in front of him, bare legs working to a music he couldn't hear. Then John crashed down, crosslegged in the leaves,
beside her, fiddling absently with the blades around his hand.

  A while ago, he realized, he had thought once again: Please, I don't want to be sick again, please, but had hardly heard the thought go by, and could only now, disinterestedly, discern the echo.

  Something, or one, was, about to emerge into the clearing-he was sure; and was equally sure that, naked and glistening, it would be George! It would be June!

  "Isn't this stupid," someone Kidd couldn't see was saying, "when I could be in Hawaii-?”

  Tongue tip a pink bud at the corner of his lips, John stared at Milly's shifting calves. He raised his bladed hand (a reflection crossed his chin), and, with a sharp, downward sweep, cut.

  Milly gasped, bit off the gasp, but made no other sound. She did not step, she did not even look.

  Astounded, Kidd watched blood, in a torrent wide (the thought struck irrelevantly amidst his terror) as a pencil run down her heel. In Time of Plague

  "Look, leave me alone ..."

  "Come on; come-"

  "Tak, will you get your fuckin' hands-"

  "I'm not after your tired brown body. I just want to get you to the bar where you can sit down."

  "Look, please I'm . . ."

  "You're not drunk; you say you're not stoned or anything, then you damn well better sit down and relax!" Tak's beefy hand clamped his shoulder. (Kidd took three more unsteady steps.) "You were staggering around there like you were half in some sort of trance. Now come on with me, sit down, have a drink, and get yourself together. You sure you didn't take anything?"

  The ornate orchid at Tak's belt clashed the simple one at Kidd's.

  "Hey, look! Just come on and leave me alone . . . Where's Lanya?"

  "She's more likely to find you at Teddy's than wandering around out in the dark. You come on."

  In such colloquy they made their hesitant way from park to bar.

  Kidd swayed in the doorway, looking at rocking candle flames, while Tak argued with the bartender:

  "Hot brandy! Look, just take your coffee-water there, in a glass with a shot of . . ."

  June? Or George?

  Paul Fenster looked up from his beer, three people down (Kidd felt something cold but manageable happen in his belly at the recognition), and came over to stand behind Tak; who turned with two steaming glasses.