Dhalgren

  "Do your friends in the nest like your book?"

  "I don't think most of the guys read too much."

  "Hey, man!" Nightmare called out. "I ain't even in his fuckin' nest and I read every fuckin' one!" which caused someone else to call: "Yeah, they're great! The Kid writes great," and someone else: "Sure, ain't you got this party for him?"

  Kid leaned back and laughed and closed Ms eyes. His own laughter had begun in the calamity of shouts and calls.

  "Come on," Bill said loudly. "Come on, now. I just want to ask the Kid a few more questions. Come on . . ."

  Kid opened his eyes and found his lashes wet. Light around the garden glittered and streaked. He shook his head.

  "I want to ask you, Kid-"

  "Come on, be quiet!" Lady of Spain said. "Come on, shut up, man! He's trying to ask the Kid some questions!"

  "-want to ask you: How would you sum up what you're trying to say in your poems?"

  Kid leaned his elbows on his knees. "How the hell am I supposed to do that, sum up what I'm trying to say?"

  "I guess you'd rather we just read-"

  "Shit, I don't care if you read it or not"

  "I just meant that-"

  "I'm trying to-" Kid looked up at Bill, frowning in the pause-"to construct a complicitous illusion in lingual catalysis, a crystalline and conscientious alkahest."

  "... again?" Bill asked.

  "You listen to that too carefully and you'll figure out what it means." Kid let the frown reverse into a grin. "Then the words will die on you and you won't understand any more."

  Bill laughed. "Well, do you feel that your work accomplishes what... ever you set out to do?"

  "How am I supposed to decide that?" Kid sat back again. "I mean suppose one person liked something I wrote. I'd want to make what I say here mean something to him. Suppose somebody else didn't like it. I'm a snob. I'd like to be able to talk to him too. But somebody you've had a good time with and somebody you've had a bad time with, you talk to in different ways. There isn't much overlap in what you can say to both. Maybe, just, I did it." Kid sat back. "And maybe, you know, other people can think of reasons not to even insist on that too much. Look, the guys are getting fidgety. I've made too much noise already." He looked around at the gathered nest. "I guess Mr C just isn't going to make it this evening."

  Ernestine Throckmorton (Spider stood beside her, his belly lashed with gauze and adhesive) said: "I guess he isn't. He'll be absolutely mortified he missed you. I just don't know where-"

  "You think something happened to him?" Raven looked around with swaying top-knot. "You want us to go out and look for him?"

  "Oh, no!" Ernestine said. "No, that's not necessary. When he left, he said he ... might be late. That's why he put the Captain and myself in charge."

  Neither the Captain nor Frank were present. Paul Fenster, with a beer can at his hip, stood directly opposite.

  "Look, we've got most of my guys here, just about." Kid stood, feeling among his neck chains. "It's getting time for me to split. Any of you guys who want to come along with me, come on." He caught his shield (nicked his thumb knuckle on an orchid prong and thought: The price of dramatic exits) and flipped the pip.

  The scorpions on the grass squinted in blue light. Denny did something with the box and laughed: And Lanya stood up a-swirl in crimson and indigo.

  Where Dragon Lady had been, her dragon rose.

  "Uh . . . thank you." Bill looked about. "Eh, thank you an awful lot. 'I'm sure Roger will have what he ... I mean you gave some very interesting . . ."

  People got to their feet amidst the glowing, growing menagerie.

  The 3-D Rohrschach that was Denny turned and turned and moved through the crush.

  Kid doused "long enough for Lanya to see him. She caught his hand. Branches cut through the insubstantial luminosities wheeling the garden.

  "How'd I do?"

  "Lord," she said. "This has been a party! Roger doesn't know what he missed-then again, maybe he does."

  In another garden, beyond some dozen guests, Kamp and Fenster had become deeply embroiled in animated agreement.

  Heavy Cathedral, with white California (greasy hair swinging long as his chains), was very drunk in the corner:

  "We goin'? Oh, shit. . . Oh, shit, I can't go . . ."

  "What we goin' for?"

  "I think we gotta go, you know . . . ?"

  "We gotta go already . . . ?"

  Three others went splashing through the pool in May.

  And Copperhead began to laugh and point so vigorously, Kid thought: He's drunk enough to fall down in a minute. Moments later, however, along with Glass, the girl, Dollar, and Spitt, Copperhead was ambling across the terrace.

  Kid thought (and saw Captain Kamp look up and thought as counterpoint to that first thought: He's thinking the same thing): They're going to start breaking up the place.

  They didn't.

  "Oh," Kamp said to Ernestine, "you mean they're going now ... well, eh ... Good night!"

  Revelation said: "Hey, man, I can't go." He shook his head, deviling his hair to a gold cotton. Yellow chains rattled over his pink, pink chest. "I got something goin' here, you know? And I'm so fuckin' smashed . . . look, you go on, and maybe I'll see you back there in the morning."

  Kid nodded, pushed past and came up before Thelma who opened her mouth, said, "Um . . ." and was gone.

  Angel, at the bar table, picked up a full bottle of whiskey, put it under his thin arm, and started after the others.

  "Hey . . ." the black bartender said.

  Captain Kamp hurried up.

  I could be a hero, Kid thought, and make him put it back. Suddenly he said, "Shit . . ." pulled away from Lanya, and loped over to the bar. "Captain, weVe got a long-"

  "Your friend," Captain Kamp said, "just walked off with a full bottle of-"

  "-got a long walk back. And I just don't think one is going to be enough." Kid picked up another bottle (he chose it because it had the cap on, but saw, when it was in his hand that it was only half full: Well, it was a gesture) and, to the Captain's frown, flipped on his shield. "Tell Mr Calkins thanks. Good night."

  Kamp squinted and pulled back, his face washed with light the same pale blue as his shirt. His eyes, widening, rose.

  When Kid left the terrace steps and was halfway across the lawn, "You," Lanya told him, "are a perfect child!"

  "Fuck you. You want to go put it back?"

  "No. Come on."

  "Hey," Angel was saying to the young Filipino gate keeper, "you want a fuckin' drink? How come they didn't let you up to the party?"

  "Thank you, no. That's all right-"

  "You got just as much right to a party as we got! You wanna drink?"

  "Thank you, no. Good night."

  "God-damn mother-fuckers! Keep a God-damn gook down here workin' his ass off all night while everybody else is up having a good time-"

  "Come on," Kid said. "Let's get going. Go on, get out. Hurry up, will you."

  "Hey, gook; are you from Nam? I was in Nam . . ."

  "Come on!"

  "I was in Nam," Angel said. "We should give him a fuckin' drink!"

  As they herded, blindingly, through the gate, Lansang said: "Excuse me, I've got something for you."

  "Huh?" Kid turned.

  The brown hand went under the brown lapel for an inside pocket. "Here." On the envelope's corner was a small Times masthead. "Mr Calkins asked me to give this to you if, by any chance, he didn't get back before the evening was over."

  "Oh." Kid folded the envelope and slid it into his pants pocket beside Lanya's harmonica.

  "What's that?" Lanya asked. Her arm was around Denny's shoulder.

  Kid shrugged. "Where's Madame Brown?"

  "She left with Everett, a long time ago."

  "Oh."

  Spider, dragon, newt and waddling bird lit the street.

  "Hey, can I have some of that?" Jack the Ripper asked as they reached the corner.

  "Sure. You can
carry it too."

  "Thanks." The Ripper took the bottle, removed the cap, swigged, and belched. "God damn!" He put the cap back on. "That's good!" He shook his head like a terrier. "Yeah . . . hey, did you see that old white guy from Alabama with the bald head? He's supposed to be some sort of colonel or something . . ."

  "I saw him," Kid said. "Didn't meet him."

  "He's a funny guy," the Ripper said. "Man, he just loved me. Wouldn't let me alone the whole God-damn night."

  "What'd he want?"

  In the glow of shifting beasts, the Ripper smiled down at the bottle. "T' suck on my big, black dick."

  Kid laughed. "You let him?"

  "Shit." The Ripper wiped the bottle neck with the paler heel of his hand, then put the cap back on. "If I was in Atlanta, I could've got ten, twenty dollars out of that old guy, you know? Even a steady thing, you know, where you drop in every couple of days, pull down your pants and pick up your pay. It ain't so bad. But around here, there ain't even any God-damn money or anything, you know?" The Ripper reached among the heavy links, tucked his shallow chin back in his neck to look for his shield, found it, flipped it. ". . . But he ain't so bad," he repeated.

  Kid walked beside a raging mantis with swaying ruby eyes.

  Watching the walkers among the ballooning lights, Kid realized that the group was nearly a fourth smaller than the one which had come up with him. Nightmare's scorpion, on the corner, threw a half dozen amblers (Baby was the one recognizable) into silhouette.

  Listening to their silent progress down, Kid recalled their boisterous journey up. A street lamp pulsed above the corner (they had passed it before. Where?) and Kid saw the couple, hand in hand, beneath it.

  "Hey, you two."

  The woman turned, surprised, and raised her free hand: Bracelets clattered to her pale elbow. She blinked interrogatively, then smiled.

  The man looked over at Kid. "Hello." He brushed back long hair, the color of wild rice, from his cheek and smiled too.

  "What are you supposed to be doing here?"

  "Oh, we ... well, we were at ... your party." Over his double-breasted jacket, he wore a large lion's-head medallion that, in this light, looked like metallic plastic. It hung around his neck on a loop of the optical chain. "We have to get down to Temple, and we just thought we'd walk along with you, for the company."

  "It's all right, isn't it?" the woman asked.

  "Sure," Kid said. "You can walk anywhere you fucking well want."

  "Um . . . thanks," the man said.

  "You want a drink?" Kid looked around in the darkness. "Hey, Ripper come here!" He took the bottle from the tire-colored hands that jutted from the mantis. "Here, have a drink. We got a long walk."

  "Thanks, no," the man said. "I don't drink."

  "I do," the woman said and reached out a clinking arm.

  "Good." Kid nodded and gave her the bottle. He left

  them while she was still uncapping it, wondering where,

  over the last few moments, he had misplaced Lanya and

  Denny.

  He heard their laughter some twenty feet behind him.

  He turned to face the dark; and realized how dark it was.

  "You scared?" Denny laughed. "There ain't nothing to be scared of."

  Lanya said: "I'm not scared. Unlike you, I don't believe in ghosts."

  Kid turned on his lights.

  Lanya gave a little shriek and fell into Denny's arms, both of them blue and helpless with hysterics;

  "Are you drunk?" Kid asked.

  "No," she said. "I'm not drunk," and began to laugh again.

  "She smells like she's drunk," Denny said.

  "How would you-" Still laughing, she straightened up and nearly tripped at the curb.

  Which started all three of them off again.

  When they were halfway down the next block, Denny asked: "You like your party?"

  "Yeah," Kid said. "I wish I'd gotten a chance to say good night to the old girl with the crab cakes and the blue hair. She was my favorite."

  "Ernestine? She's priceless!" Lanya said. "Where's my harmonica?"

  Kid pawed in his pocket. Beside the mouth organ and the envelope, there was grit at the bottom. The metal was so warm on bis hand it might have been artificially heated.

  He gave her the harp.

  She played three chords, walking beside him, then started some improvisation in long, platinum notes that took her two, three, four steps ahead.

  Denny had turned on his lights (and apparently turned off her dress). Her back was silver, and as she played she trod the joined shadows of herself.

  Between two notes, something crackled at Kid's hip: The envelope. He pushed thick fingertips into his pocket to feel the folded edge.

  Copperhead, the girl in maroon jeans tucked tightly under his arm, bobbed into the dim penumbra. "Hey, Kid!" He grinned, broad-nosed, freckle-lipped, and bobbed out.

  Kid fantasized a conversation: Copperhead, did Mr Calkins ever hire you to keep people away from his place? I mean, were you working for him that first day you guys beat me up? No, he didn't want to know.

  Behind Kid, Angel, Glass, and Priest were in altercation.

  "No!" Glass interrupted himself at some request from Dollar. "What do you want any for? You just got through tellin' us how it makes you sick."

  "What I wanna know . . ." Angel said, thickly. "No, wait, man. Let him have it. Let the dumb white motherfucker get sick if he want to- Now, what I want to know is, where do all these niggers come from?"

  "Louisiana," Priest said, "mostly. But there're a lot of guys here from Chicago. Like you. Illinois, anyway."

  I just don't like, Kid thought, the idea of not wanting to know anything. He looked around luminous dark. "Hey, Copperhead?"

  But Copperhead's arachnid, scales bright as the undersides of submerged rose leaves sheened with air, ballooned ahead, drifted away. The legs, rigorous and hirsute, with a faint indigo after-image, deviled Kid's eyes behind sliding striations.

  What he'd expected most from this evening-information about Calkins-the whole over-determined matrix seemed bent on denying him.

  A gorgeous bird collapsed near him. Ahead, among a dozen others, a scorpion flickered. Harmonica music was drowned in breaking glass and laughter: someone had dropped the bottle. The bird ignited again; Kid glanced around to see the pavement glisten.

  They exhaust my eyes. My ears are on fire. There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it. It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark. Lights doused, scorpions crowded up the nest's stairs.

  He stood on the street, while she laughed sadly:

  "Hell, then-I might as well have gone back with Madam

  Brown-"

  He said: "I just want to check out that place we saw down the street that was on fire. I'll be right back-"

  Gangling D-t hooked one brown arm around Denny's neck, rested two brown fingers on Lanya's silver, and said: "I'll take care of 'em for you, Kid. Now you don't worry."

  Denny, looking even sadder, said: "If you go down there, you better be careful. . ."

  And Kid walked for fifteen minutes, turned one corner, turned another, turned another and thought: If the wind changes, I'll die!

  He squinted in the heat.

  The smoke! The smoke will be enough to kill me! How did I . . .?

  White fire, a flap with yellow and orange, engulfed the upper stories. Night roared in the street. He heard something huge fall behind one of the facades and edged along the brick, thinking: It could jump the street . . .

&n
bsp; A flicker between the cobbles:

  As his bare foot touched one, he saw that water, running between the humped stones, had made all the alley a web of light. He sprinted to the left. Smoke rolled to his right, pulled away from more fire beating up about the high masonry. This was what he had seen between the lions of August . . . ? This is what they had watched from Calkins' gardens . . . ?

  Not this gorge of flame!

  It couldn't be this big: Cold puffed against his cheek.

  More heat, then cold again; his sweaty jaw dried.

  Cool air ran around his bare foot, but the stones under it were warm.

  A hot gust flapped his vest out; a cold one pushed it back.

  Ahead fifty feet stood a figure, black with the fire behind it, dim with the smoke before.

  Oh, Christ, he thought, I can hear them calling me in the crackling around-

  Kid spun:

  The blind-mute's sockets were the perfect hollows of Spalding balls pressed into dough. The gaunt, brick-haired woman pulled her coat together and blinked. The heavy blond Mexican, one hand around her shoulder, the other touching the shoulder of the blind-mute, breathed loud as the holocaust; their faces were slathered in raging copper.

  The eyes of the Mexican and the woman were scarlet blanks.

  Kid felt his features wrinkle on the bone. His shoulders pulled so tight the flesh creased between them. The ball of his foot, working the wet stone, stung.

  No! he thought; he was trying to think: Why?

  He remembered the warehouse and wondered: Is this terror habit?

  Their lids slipped on the glass in lazy blinks: The woman and the Mexican were . . . watching him! The blind-mute's mouth was open; his face turned, tilting and tasting the smoke.

  The three reached the sidewalk-now they turned away-huddled. Flames-or a dog-barked. A smoky tarpaulin rolled between them.

  Kid stepped back, expecting fumes.

  But some gust shredded the billow, tossing off dark fluff. And they were gone, down some burning alley.

  Kid turned and hurried forward. ,

  "Hey!" a familiarly mauled voice ahead called. "Is that you. . . Kid?"

  Kid slowed closer.

  Shifting bronzes slicked the black face. Uncertain light made it look (Kid had never thought this before) like there was grey in that snarled wool. The temples were hollow, as on a very thin man, Kid thought; but not