Dhalgren

  They passed around. The other extension of the L-shaped sign said:

  JACKSON AVENUE George nodded heavily.

  Twenty yards ahead, a ton of fire fell onto the side

  walk.

  "What . . ." Kid began, "What are you doing here?" while he tried again to reconstruct the steps coming: D-t had said-

  "There may . . ." George's face lined over, straining at reason. "There may be people in there. We got to go help them."

  "Oh," Kid said with the thought: He's crazy, which is like (with the afterthought) the pot calling the kettle a rusty son of a bitch.

  They walked through the sun. George was still laughing. "What . . . ?" Kid asked, expecting no answer. George said: "You ain't scared?" "I think," Kid said, "if somebody jumped out right now and went boo, I would shit."

  "Watch it," George pushed Kid away, but Kid wasn't sure from which piece of rubbish about them.

  I just may live to be an old man, and live through the process called dying, then I won't be living any more, no matter what revelations I do or do not go through here, Kid thought and grew cold. He looked up; fire rip-sawed the night.

  "You think we going to get out of this alive?" George still grinned.

  What, Kid wondered, has June got to do with his moment in this man's life? The fire and her hair are two different golds! And yet she circles . . . ! Kid's eyes went round. "There-!" He pointed. "It isn't burning down that way! We can go-"

  "Boy, there may be people in here, burning up alive!"

  "You think there're people?" "Well, we ain't going to know unless we look." "Okay," Kid said because there was nothing else to do.

  A charred six by six lay across the gutter. Kid stepped over it.

  On the cobbles, puddles lay under it, alive and molten.

  Water, Kid thought as they walked between two, is molten ice. It was that hot.

  "Hey, George! George? . . . You hear something up there?"

  "Where?"

  The Anathimata: a plague journal

  [We do not know who typed this transcript, nor if every relevant entry was included, nor, indeed, the criteria for relevance. Previous publication of Brass Orchids possibly weighted the decision not to include their various drafts here. (The fate of the second collection we can only surmise.) Generous enough with alternate words, marks of omission and correction, the transcriber still leaves his accuracy in question: Nowhere in the transcript is there a formal key.]

  it into her shoulder and tore /it/ out.

  Dragon Lady let go all her breath in some way still not a scream. Nightmare danced back across the kitchen twisting his orchid, (jerking a little); as though/I

  think I think he was trying to under stand what he'd done. Dragon Lady threw herself at him, cutting for his face and kicking. (I kept-thinking Thinking; There's an art to these Weapons I don't begin to understand.)

  He fought himself away, bleeding from the jaw and neck.

  She flung herself again. I thought she was trying to-was

  going to- /would/ be impale[d].

  Her white jeans were bloody to the knee. A good deal of the blood was his.

  Copperhead, likea delayed reaction, said, "Hey..." with a voice I'd never heard: he was scared to death.

  Raven, Thruppence, and D-t hit the doorway [and] one another/ anothe[r], peering, over each- one another's shoul- ders. (Thinking:! used to break up Dollar's scuffles, but I would no more get into this than chop off my thumb.) Nightmare flailed backward out the screen door.-ithis forearm/ going/ making a cracked-tfee- on the jamb.

  Everybody poured after them-somebody knocked something off the sink. I heard a garbage bag fall and tear

  under someone's boots. Two of the little boys (Wood-ard and Stevie) were holding hands and butting their shoulders against each other, Rose, the youngest (seven?), and brightest -girl, was right up there up trying to see with everybody else. She went through the door with me.

  Dragon [Lady] was- snappinged her own bladed fist back and forth as though her arm were a whip. (Her elbow dripped. Nightmare spun away: gravel chattered against the bottom step. Drops splatted the ground. The sky gleamed dull as zinc.

  I looked up the alley-thinking: You can't /even/ see the end, when Thirteen came hurrying out of the mist. He stopped twenty feet away, Smokey and Lady of Spain behind colidcd with him.

  Dragon Lady staggered, swayed-I thought she'd tripped.

  But she shook her head, hard, gave a tiny cry, turned; and fled-down up the street.

  Smokey collided with Thirteen. Lady of Spain stepped back.

  Nightmare stood, panting, both arms going wide and around, getting back his breath.

  Among his chains, the optical one caught light. At first I thought it was lengthening . . . Broken, it slipped across his stomach and tinkled coiled made a tinkling/-puddla between his feet/ beside his boot /against his boot where the sole had pulled off the upper. Not seeing, he lurched away. The chain slipped half over the curb.

  Thirteen caught his arm him, "You're all right . . . ?" and staggered with him.

  Behind me the door creaked; two people had gone back in.

  Horsing around to the yard with Nightmare, Raven, Filament, and Glass, tripped and scratched my calf on the edge of the steps. Later, Lanya came into the loft and saw me. "Hey," she said. "You should put something on that. Don't play with it that way. You've practically rubbed it raw. You don't want it to get Infected."

  "You come on with me," Thirteen said, "now you just come on."

  Back in the living room, California was looking at the wall by the door. He'd pulled all his hair in front of his shoulder and was sort of hanging on it "Jesus Christ," he said. "Will you look at that. I mean, Jesus Christ That's where she splattered when she went through." He started to touch one of the dime-sized spots, already dried brown dry, but shook his- went back to hanging on his hair. "/! mean,/Jesus."

  Raven, Copperhead; and Cathedral came in frowning at the constellations of her blood, but kept on going-

  "You see the way she went at that mother-fucker," Pepper said somewhere out in the hall. "I thought she was gonna kill him. I wouldn't blame her, man. I wouldn't blame her one bit the way that mother-fucker done. Did you see the way they were going after each other, man? I never seen anything like that before in my life. I really thought we was gonna have chopped meat for dinner the way he lit into her with these that orchid, man, I really thought. . ."

  I went back [into] the kitchen.

  Rose was looking out the screening, a brown fist up beside her face chin. I went up behind her and looked too. The other four children were outside.

  Sammy was standing at the place where the curb cracked away into the street. With the toe of his sneaker, he touched the coil of Nightmare's chain.

  Stevie, who was sitting on the steps, stood up.

  Sammy started to pick up the chain.

  Stevie said, "Don't you touch that, nigger!"

  Marceline laughed, but I don't think at that.

  Sammy looked up and looked embarrassed, went to pick up a board lying out in the street, and played by himself.

  I touched Rose on the shoulder and she jumped.

  "Don't you want to play with the other kids outside?"

  She just blinked. (Somebody should do something about the black spade confusion of her hair-cut it short, I guess.) Then-She went out and sat on the steps as far away from the others as she could get

  Only Stevie and Marceline are really friends. Wood-ard (who is sort of mustard colored, both his skin and Ms wooly top) merely hangs around them. I feel sorry for them all.

  Later that evening, -I using a piece of pine plank for a writing hoard, I /went out to/ sitting- on the steps /and/ was working-on playing in my- a poem. I had been there perhaps two hours when I noticed the chain /was/ -had-been removed gone.

  I sat a few minutes more. Then I went inside.

  Just after Denny went out this morning, Lanya brought hack my notebook-this one. The first thing I did was look
inside the front cover. "What about the new poems?" I asked.

  "Since they're all on loose sheets I decided I'd keep them in my desk drawer. If you want them . . . ?"

  "No," I told her. "That's probably better. They'd just fall out."

  "Did you see the article /in the Times/ about you and the children?" [s]he asked when we went out into the back yard.

  "No," I said.

  So she told me.

  It made me feel strange.

  Once we went back /up/ into /into the loft/ to get something. She found a piece of paper down tween /between/ the wall and the mattress. "Are you finished with this one?"

  I looked at it. "I guess so. It isn't complete, really. But I'm not interested in it any more."

  "I'll just take it back to my place and keep it with the others," and she put it in her [-?] shirt pocket; then she jumped down, cried out when [she?] landed, "Owwwwl"

  I thought she'd twisted her ankle.

  But it wasn't serious.

  We went into the kitchen; she looked into the coffee pale on the stove and frowned at the mess.

  D-t came in with a paper. "Hey, man, that's something, huh?" He had it folded back to the article.

  It was on page three.

  "What I want to know," Lanya said, looking through the living room door at Stevie and Woodard (Tarzan was trying to ride them across the floor like a horsie), "is what you're going to do with them."

  I was leaning against I was leaning against the refrigerator door with my fingers hooked around at the rubber flange that goes around the inside of the door "It doesn't even mention George." I was pulling. "It makes it sound like I saved them all by myself. It was George's God-damn idea. I was just along-"

  Rose walked in, banging the screen, and stared at Lanya on her way to the next room. Lanya smiled: Rose didn't and kept walking. At the doorway she stopped, looked at Tarzan and the boys, sighed, turned around, went back-bang!-onto the front steps.

  Sammy was playing in the middle of the street and did not look at her.

  D-t moved the junk aside on the table (Marceline in the room with Tarzan was calling out, "Let me! Let me...! Come on, let me!") and sat on the up-ended milk crate to read the article to us. The crate was so low the table top hit him just below the tit. /He read the part about: ".../ during the holocaust, broke into a wooden frame house adjoining a grocery store already in flames and let out five youngsters trapped in the second floor rear bedroom. It is reported the bedroom door had been clumsily secured by the back of a chair beneath the door knob-"

  "It wasn't a chair," I said. "Somebody had taken a fucking piano bench and turned it on its end. The Goddamn music had fallen out all over the hall rug. Why. doesn't it mention George?"

  "Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing right there Watching you," D-t said.

  I - said' "There wasn't anybody," I said. A piece of rubber pulled free, only I dropped it and couldn't see where it had fallen between the refrigerator and the sink. "Just George."

  "The[n] how did they know to write about it?" Lanya asked.

  "I don't know,'' I said. "George actually got the door open. All I did was yank at the legs. The bench came open and all the music fell out On the rug. The top of the bench was still jammed up in there."

  "Maybe George met a reporter later that evening," Lanya said. "He could have told the papers, Kid."

  "'... The children are reported to be safe, but we do not know...'"

  "Of course it doesn't sound like George to cut himself out." Lanya sighed and made a funny movement with her hand, grinding her palm on the grey formica. "Oh, Kid..." -Inside-Tarzan neighed loudly and Woodard's hiccuppy laugh shrilled above it, covered in turn by Marceline's squeal.

  "The real question-" Lanya looked up-"is what are you going to do with them. Are you going to keep them here[?]"

  "You're out of your fucking head-" I said.

  D-t said, "The guys like them-"

  "How many days ago was it?" I said. "How many days ago, Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other? Look!" I went to the living room door. "There's blood all over the fucking God-damn wall!"

  Fist against his chin, Stevie was looking at me.

  Tarzan had sat back on his heels and, concertedly, wasn't.

  "Ride me!" Marceline said. "You rode Woodard before. Now you ride me!"

  "Yeah," Woodard said. "You ride her now."

  I stepped back into the kitchen.

  "What are you going to do with them?"

  I told her, "I don't know."

  Tarzan neighed again.

  Three staples on the bottom of the above page hold a creased rectangle of newsprint. The end of the column has either been ripped off or (the bottom is torn on a second crease) handled so frequently it had come away:

  BRASS ORCHIDS BLOOM BENEATH A CLOUDED SKY

  This handsome book, or rather booklet, has already become a Bellona commonplace, on night-tables by the reading lamp, in the back pockets of youngsters in the park, or tucked, along with the Times, under the arms of people going about the city. This reviewer only wonders how our anonymous author achieved such vivid visualisations with such simple language. Before subject matter so violent and so personal, yet so clearly and

  wittily voiced, few familiar with Bellona's landscape will be able to avoid strong reactions, negative or positive. If the poet's own emotions seem disjointed or strange, they are still expressed pointedly, incisively, and in an intensely human mode.

  True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual. This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I'd gone to bed, they'd been laid out neatly on Raven's sleeping bag he'd opened up full for them by the couch:

  Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers -threat- through a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out.shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead's back. who-For some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.

  I got-them-the kids up noisily (when we were ready to leave, Copperhead had rolled the bag around himself, head out one end, boots out the other, and wedged under the couch; there was a tuft of stuffing caught on his beard) and took them to the school.

  I pushed the door open and herded them inside. Lanya was doing something with the tape-recorder and looked up, more startled than I'd thought she'd be.

  "Nobody else here, yet?" I asked.

  "Christ, you surprised me." She pushed the fast (forward? reverse?) button. Things clacked, crackled, and spun.

  "I brought the kids."

  Rose went and immediately sat on a chair in the corner. Woodard wandered toward the table. .

  Marceline said to Stevie, "You cut that out," only I wasn't sure /at/ what he'd done.

  "The other kids will be in soon," Lanya said.

  I said: "Good. What you have to do is when the parents come for the kids in the afternoon, you have to farm these here out to them." Lanya stood up fully and faced me. "God damn!"

  "I can't keep them," I said. "I told you that."

  She pulled her lips thin and looked angry.

  I was surprised that I had been expecting her to be just that way about it. j

  "What am I going to do with- Yeah, I know what you said."

  Stevie said sharply: "You better keep your hands off that, nigger!"

  Woodard turned off the from the tape-recorder, holding a spool of tape gingerly, blinking apple green eyes below his brush of mustard wool. He smiled uncertainly.

  Rose began to cry. The knuckles of her fist pressed together. Her chin bobbed, sobbing, and tears tracked from the inner and outer corners of both eyes.

  Sammy, move/ standing by the far wall, moved /turned/ the toe of his sneaker over /on/ the floor and blinked.

  The following letter is p
aper-clipped to the top and side of the page on which the next entry begins. The envelope, stuck beneath, has left its out-line on the stationery:

  How absurd-

  -to apologize for an uncommitted injury. But I shall not have been at your party tonight- if Lansang delivers this. There is nothing less sympathetic than the vulgar pleading extenuating circumstances for their vulgarity. There is nothing more distressing to a man who admires formal honesty than to discover he can only offer "personal reasons" as honest explanation for his breach of form.

  But, for personal reasons, I will not have attended your party when you read this. I am distressed.

  I have been rude.

  . And I have often imagined that to be the most terrible admission I might ever have to make.

  Forgive me.

  It is not much consolation that the powerful are most successful as patrons when least in

  evidence. I am concerned with what I presumptuously consider my City. I have always felt every society must have its art; and for that art to have ultimate use, it must be free of intimidation from the centers of power.

  Therefore I have not read your poems. Nor will I.

  Were I less gregarious, or Bellona more populous, I could be content to read them and never meet you. But I am a very social being, and Bellona is the social size it is.

  We will meet

  And I eagerly await your second collection, whenever it should be ready. Its publication, hopefully, will be as expeditious as publication of your first.

  My friend, I am fascinated by the mechanics of power. Who in his right mind would want the problems and responsibilities of the nation's president? Lord, I would! I would! But one cannot be president with a Jewish grandmother. A millionaire family with connections at Harvard helps. A moderately wealthy one with strong emotional ties to Wooster (paint-thinner manufacturers in Cleveland) can be a downright nuisance.

  Shall I twist the knife?

  A degree in corporate law from Yale is one thing; one in patents from N.Y.U., (cum laude, 1960, and still two tries at the New York bar. Personal reasons again . . . ? The pain!) is something else again.