Dhalgren

  When Kid stood to place the cube, she added:

  "But that wouldn't stop me."

  She snapped the lid and turned toward Denny.

  Kid grinned, watching her backbone like an arrow into her buttocks' heart. I do not know, he thought, what goes inside her. All I'm sure is that it's very different from what it looks like is going on.

  "There're still some up top." She started up the ladder.

  "I don't see any more here." Kid started behind her.

  "Hey-!" Denny said.

  Then something locked around Kid's neck, scraped his sides, and hung on.

  "Fuck, what the-"

  "Carry me!" Denny shouted, clinging. "Go ahead, carry me on up."

  "Fuck you!" Kid shouted, sagging on his grip. He tried to shake the boy loose. "Don't choke me to death, you stupid . . . bastard!" He hauled up another rung.

  Lanya crouched on the ledge. "You'll drop him-!"

  Kid hauled up one more. "Get on up there, cock-sucker!"

  Lanya was tugging at Denny's arm.

  Kid tried to heave Denny up.

  "Hey-!"

  Kid felt Denny slipping. Bare feet pawed his hip. Then something scrambled over his head. "Hey," Denny repeated in a different voice. He tugged at Kid's shoulder. "Are you all right?"

  Lanya sat behind him, slapping first her thighs and then her stomach, once more helpless with laughter.

  "Fuck you." Kid crouched on the loft edge. As he leaned forward, something hissed across his chest.

  "Hey, my chain!"

  "What?" Denny pushed himself backward, pulling the blankets from the board. He reached, without looking, for his own anklet.

  Kid wondered if that was what had scraped so at his side.

  Lanya watched, her lips apart.

  "My chain." Kid repeated; he turned to sit on the edge of the loft, and looked down. The end, dangling from his foot, swung inches above the floor. He reached down to pull it up. "It broke this morning . . . somebody broke it."

  "Who?" Lanya asked.

  "Somebody broke it. I tried to fix it, but I knew it probably wouldn't hold."

  With two fingers he followed it across his shoulder. The break was at the same link. He pulled the ends together.

  "Wait a second," Lanya said. "You don't have any nails. Let me look." She crouched before Kid, so close her hair tickled his chest. How can she see, he wondered. "I just about got it."

  She did something with her teeth.

  "Hey?" Kid said.

  "There," and pushed herself backward.

  Behind Lanya, Denny asked now, "Who broke it?" Denny lay his foot on Lanya's knee. He put down the box, and brought his arms around her stomach, pulled her to him, laid an arm along hers.

  "Don't those get in your way?" She glanced over Denny's leg at his dog-chained ankle. "Sexy, I suppose."

  "Who?" Denny repeated his question.

  "I don't know," Kid said. "I really don't."

  He fingered for the weak link. Part of it was the dimness, but he doubted he could find that link now even in full light. He tugged, first here, then there. "You really fixed it?"

  Lanya, her shoulder under Denny's chin, bit her lip to retain laughter. The words ". . . in time," fell through his head, and he was unsure what they referred to. I've found something, he thought, in time. Who needs monasteries? He laughed out loud for Lanya's caged humor.

  She let go Denny, and picked up the box, looking about her legs to see if any more pieces had fallen out. A cube gnawed the side of Kid's foot. "Here!" Lanya recovered herself to hold out the box. Kid tossed the cube in. She put the box on her thigh to fit the cube in place.

  "You really think you're a funny little cocksucker, huh?" Kid stood up, crouched, moved forward. His head tapped the ceiling. Not hard, but he staggered. "Yeah?" He crouched again, turning toward Denny and rubbing his groin. "Look at you. You suck a nice dick. You give some good head, what do you think that makes you?" He nudged Lanya with his elbow. The cubes rattled; she looked up. "Yeah, I like his tongue up my ass. But you think that makes you anything more than lukewarm shit- Hey, look at Denny!" Kid pointed between Denny's legs. "See, I do like that and he's got a hard-on already." He sat down and smiled. "Come on, let's get out of here."

  "Now?" Lanya asked.

  "Yeah, now!"

  Denny crawled over to look in the box. "We got all the pieces." He sighed.

  "Um-hm," she said quietly, and closed the lid.

  Denny put the box in the corner. Kid pulled out his vest and put it on.

  Lanya sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. Kid could not decide if her expression were pensive or absent. "Come on." He tossed her blouse, and did not wait to see what she did with it, but reached for his pants.

  "Did everybody leave the house?" Lanya asked.

  "It sure is quiet." Denny said.

  Kid looked back.

  Lanya pushed another button through its hole. The blouse tails lay a-tangle in her lap.

  Denny stooped listening, his cock, finally, lowering.

  "I'm hungry," Kid said. "I haven't done anything but fuck for twenty-four hours: you, him, his girl friend-"

  "You're a busy-" Lanya pulled on her jeans-"son of a bitch."

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing."

  "-him, then you again." The two hooks came through the belt. "Jesus!" He looked up.

  Denny said: "It sure is quiet. Maybe everybody went out."

  "That'd be nice," Lanya said.

  "Do you guys keep food in the house?" Kid asked.

  "Not very long." Denny tossed Kid his projector.

  Lanya started down first. She held the laces of her tennis shoes in her teeth. "I can't carry them and climb too," she had to say three times before they understood.

  While Denny dropped over the edge, Kid turned to get the orchid.

  The light around the window shade was neon orange. As he picked up the clustered blades, red gleamings poured down the edges. Kid frowned and backed to the ladder.

  In the hallway, Lanya asked, "Has the smoke cleared up outside?" The window in the hall door was filled with light like bloody sunrise.

  "I guess they all have gone out." Denny looked in another room.

  "Do you think maybe it is clearing off?" Lanya asked. "Let's go outside and see."

  Kid followed them to the front door.

  Lanya opened it and went down the steps. "There're still clouds all over the sky." She reached the sidewalk, turned around, looked up-and screamed.

  While Kid and Denny hurried down, the scream lost voice and became just expelled air.

  On the sidewalk, they turned to look up in the direction she stared:

  From the edge of the sidewalk, three-quarters of the disk was visible above the houses. The clouds dulled it enough to squint at, but it went up, covering the roofs, and up, and up, and up. What they could see of it filled half the visible sky. And, Kid realized, half of the sky is huge! But that fell away into impossibility. Or unverifiability, anyway. The rim was a broil of gold. Everything was like burning metal.

  Lanya pressed his shoulder, gasping.

  Denny was saying, "Huh . . . ?" and taking a step backward, and saying, "Huh . . . ?" again. He backed into Kid. ï His head snapped around, and the expression (the sockets of his eyes were cups of molten brass spilling down his cheeks) was maniacal. "Hey, that's really . . . something, ain't it?" The question was not rhetorical. "Ain't it something?" He turned to squint again. "What is it?" Lanya whispered.

  "It's the sun," Kid said. "Don't you see, it's just the sun."

  "My God we're falling into it . . ." Lanya caught her breath, released it, then began to cry.

  "Aw, come on!" Kid said. "Cut it out, will you-"

  "My God . . ." she whispered and looked again.

  He watched her face, open and glistening and shaking.

  "Is it dangerous?" Denny whispered. "I'm scared as a mother-fucker!"

  "It's getting bigger!" Lanya shrieked, turned, and crouched with h
er hands against the side of her face.

  "No, it's not," Kid said. "At least not fast enough to see! Hey, come on!" He hit at her shoulder.

  The orchid swung from the chain on his chest, tickling and glittering. It isn't a dream, Kid thought. I was dreaming already. It isn't a dream; that would make it ... Bands of muscle made his throat so tight it hurt. "Hey!" He pounded his fist on Denny's back. "Hey, are you okay?"

  Eyes wide, and chest all filled up with air, Denny got out, "Yeah!"

  Lanya knuckled at her face, pulling creases into it, as she squinted at the great, great, great circle.

  "Come on," Kid reiterated. "Let's go, huh?"

  Denny followed, too quickly to tell why.

  Lanya waited till they had gone three steps (Kid looked back), then ran after them, her face bewildered. She caught Kid's hand. Kid held his other one to Denny who took it tightly. Denny was sweating: "That is something." (Kid glanced up again.) "I never seen anything like that before in my life."

  Kid looked at Lanya who was watching him oddly, and not where she was going. "We're not falling into the sun or anything like that," Kid said. "Otherwise we'd be burned up already. It isn't even hot." He looked at Denny, who dropped his eyes from the sky and looked back. "Well, Jesus Christ," Kid said. "Don't you think it's pretty fucking funny?" They didn't laugh. "I mean, there's nothing you can do about it." He did, alone. It felt good.

  "What in the world is it?" Lanya repeated. Her voice was calmer.

  "I don't know," Kid said. "I don't know what the fuck it is!"

  Copperhead, hair like hell-bright rust, sprinted around the corner, and stopped in the middle of the street, boots apart, elbows bent, fists swinging about his hips and belly.

  The other scorpions caught up. Among them was Siam and Jack the Ripper and Denny's girl, but neither Dragon Lady nor Nightmare.

  Kid let go their hands and pointed to the sky. "Ain't that too fucking much!" He laughed, and the tight things in his throat loosened. He came out of the laughter which had closed his eyes and jerked the small of his back almost into spasm, to find them watching. "Hey, Copperhead! Where you going? You going to come with me?"

  "What . . ." Copperhead began to bellow, then coughed, and there was nothing left in his voice to sustain. "What is that?" His voice was tearfully inane. "Is it some kind of heat lightning?"

  Someone else said: "Does that look like lightning to you?"

  Kid blinked and wondered. "You better come on with me," he dared.

  "You all right, Kid?" the black in the vinyl vest asked from behind Copperhead, drifting there as Lady of Spain drifted behind him.

  "You," Kid spoke carefully, explaining to them as though it were a lesson, "come on with me!" He took a breath and started across the street. As he stepped up on the curb, a hand caught his shoulder. He looked back; it was Denny, and behind him, Lanya; black scorpions moved around them, passed in front of them.

  And footsteps.

  He didn't look back again.

  Perhaps, he thought, we are all going to die in moments, obscured by flame and pain. That is why this. And then, perhaps we are not. That is why this in this way.

  Scorpions milled and clustered, and he chuckled again.

  That was as silly as the blades tickling his chest.

  Laughter grasped the back of his tongue to shake it loose. Flesh lay too heavy in his mouth. So it retreated, and heaved itself against the spike of his spine. I am happy, he thought. And heard somebody else, a white girl (not Lanya; the scorpion, who wore a vest and was called Filament), laughing too. So he let his own.

  It doubled him up, staggering.

  Somebody-that was Lanya, and that was, almost, enough to stop him-cried out.

  But others laughed.

  Somebody else-that was Denny, and when he saw it was, he kept laughing through his puzzlement-ran past, picked up the lid of a garbage can leaning against the curb, and hurled it up the street. It went clattering against a stoop. Denny danced back in the blood-colored light.

  Gold nodes ground in the clouds.

  Kid reached out, had to lean to catch Lanya's fingers; his fingers, between hers, pummeled the back of her hand. She came up against his side, and watched in wonder as others pushed ahead on the cobbled street.

  "Pick a house," he told her.

  "Huh-?"

  "Just pick a house on the street," he whispered (she bent nearer to hear). "Maybe one you don't like very much."

  Copperhead bounded past them, flung his arm: the brick-shard flew across the street, shattered the window; Copperhead, full hair and sparse beard furious, turned back, grinning.

  "That one?" Kid asked.

  "No!" with an urgency he could not follow. "At the top of the hill. That one. There."

  "Okay." Kid wheeled.

  The blond girl in the pea jacket was falling back through the loose blacks. She was crying; she looked at the sky, and cried harder. Denny's girl put her arm around her, was talking, was making consoling motions with her head. Once she glanced at the great, burning wheel; her face was webbed with rage.

  Kid's hand went up across his cheek. Bristle clawed his palm. "This way!" He waved and turned again. They passed around him as he turned in the light. "Hey, Ripper, Denny, Copperhead!" He caught at the jouncing projector, and thumbed at the bottom pip. "How do you turn this thing on?"

  "Huh?" Ripper looked back. "Oh ... to the side. Not in."

  The pip slid.

  Of course, he thought, I can't see anything from inside. And wondered what he looked like.

  Lanya had stepped away and was looking all over him. Kid beat his knees, and swung about. And Denny had disappeared in his own deformed explosion.

  "Hey," the espresso-hued Ripper called, "we goin' on!"

  Figure passed figure as they milled about the cobbles. Kid looked where Copperhead was laughing; and Copperhead disappeared in his lucent arachnid. The menagerie formed in the terrible light.

  Thirteen, whom Kid hadn't seen till now, passed him. "Come on," he whispered to Smokey beneath his arm, "let's get out of here. This ain't gonna be no good-"

  "I want to watch!" she insisted. "I want to watch!"

  Kid reached the porch. Some people were running behind him. He'd broken down three doors in his life: so he expected to bruise his shoulder. (The light that was Denny blinked beside him: the boy was climbing the rail.) Kid crashed into the weathered wood. It flew back so easily he went down on one knee and grabbed at the jamb. (About him, the mystic aspects lurched.) At the same time, glass broke and light filled the hallway as Denny's apparition came through the shattered porch window.

  "Oh-Jesus ..." A girl's black face passed the door opposite.

  Then another's: "It's scorpions . . . !"

  A skinny black boy ran into the room with a stick. He opened his mouth and his eyes wide.

  "Jimmy, you come on-!"

  The boy (was he twenty? Kid staggered to his feet, a little scared, and not believing he was invisible behind some bright beast) kept on jerking at the stick.

  "Jimmy!" she shrieked, "come out of there! It's the scorpions, for God's-"

  Jimmy (Kid was surprised) suddenly closed his mouth, flung away his stick, and ran back through the doorway. Somewhere else in the house footsteps banged down steps.

  Denny beat Kid to the doorway and extinguished. He leaned through, then looked back with a puzzled grin (others had already surged into the room, to fling their shadows in the red light across the wall.) "Hey, you see the way those niggers run?" Behind Kid somebody overturned a chair.

  He frowned, realized no one could see it, stopped frowning, and slid the stud over the bottom of his projector.

  "Shit, man," Denny said. "Them was some scared, black mother-fuckers." Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.

  "Don't do that! Don't do that! Don't-"

  "What the fuck they got in here?"

  "Come on, God damn it, don't do that!"

  In the maroon light across the wall in front of
Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid's, raised.

  The hand clapped Kid's shoulder.

  "Hey," Copperhead said. "They got some place here! Carpet on the floor . . ." His other hand gestured down; and up: "And look at all that shit on the ceiling."

  Kid looked.

  Women in gauze and men in armor careened through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.

  Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. "Well." He looked back. "I'm gonna go see what they got in here." While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead's hand fell twice again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.

  She was standing just inside the door, and angry.

  "What's the matter?"

  "There were people living here!" she hissed. "What in the world . . ." She shook her head.

  "I didn't know that," Kid said. "You picked the house."

  "And I didn't know what you wanted to do with it!" She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. "What the hell did you want to do?"

  "Anything." He shrugged. "Let's go see."

  She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.

  Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.

  "Here." Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.

  "I gotta eat," Kid said. "First, I think." Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. "You want some?"

  "No thank you," she said softly, and held his arm

  with both hands. *

  As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, "I want-" the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness-"to write something down."

  He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. "Here. There's no pen on this. But you've got yours." He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall's end.

  He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them-

  Beneath the pea jacket, open around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead's freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said good-bye, to whom he had made love.