Dhalgren

  "Oh . . . yeah." Denny frowned. "Sometimes I can't piss in a john if somebody's staring right at my dick." He turned away, glanced back, away again. "Wow."

  Like something had been given back to him.

  He went to the wall. "Now I never knew that," he said.

  When she came up, he was looking at the harmonica; turned and handed it to her across my shoulder.

  "You know how to play it?" she asked.

  "Naw."

  "The scale starts here," she said. "See, at the fourth hole."

  We went down (putting on clothes half here, half there), and in the living room got into the discussion with some of the people mentioned (Fireball, Filament, et al) that I wanted to write down some of the things Lanya said in it in the first place. (When I started this, I'd thought that the business about Lanya being turned on by all those funny thing about me, and what had happened on the roof would make a good prologue, because in the discussion she referred to them) but again I'm tired of writing it down, now that I've gotten to the substance.

  It had to do with the differences (and similarities) between the girls who were scorpions and the girls who just hung around with us. With reference to the guys who were members and the guys who just hung. It was a good

  discussion to have and a dull one to reconstruct. And I guess it was mainly for Mike's benefit anyway (Mike is one of said guys who hangs, a long-haired friend of Devastation's; sleeps here most of the time but also doesn't want to join) and I guess/think/ suspect one difference between members and non-members

  One of the things that also went down in the discussion was an argument about getting food, which I guess was really what started the whole thing, and this other part just came up; but my mind follows funny tracks. anyway is that members know the difference already and don't have to talk about them (that politeness again) though from some of the things Tarzan says, I wonder.

  works them?" I asked.

  But Faust was walking a-head between the shadowed presses. "Here," he said. "This is what you want to see, isn't it?"

  I stepped up to the work table. Battleship linoleum glittered with lead shavings.

  "There." He pointed at a full-page tray of type with a yellow index nail.

  Raised grey-on-grey p r o-claimed:

  OHCOaa 3HT ,HOOHOIT03JJOO

  ïJO 3OHTUA 3HT KQHaaiHOHO 23ASE

  "But . . . ?" "That's you, ain't it?" His cackle echoed among the ceiling pipes.

  "But I haven't given Calkins the second collection! He doesn't even

  an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and the twenty-second, bless. Grain, blabbed on slip-time, told its troubles to the tree (all runny in the oozey gyre's incarnadine). She won't run Thursdays. The underside of the little hand is tarnished; why is muk-amuk cononized so easy? Truck-tracks crow-foot crators drooling half-and half. She didn't remember how or when, last time. Pavement sausages split; the cabbage remembers. Lions with prehensile eyes pick up their paws, apocopate, and go to town. Get with-it, mauve-peanut! Make it, thing-a-ma-boob! You won't catch me slipping my sticktoitiveness under your smorgasborg. Fondle my nodule, love my dog. Lilting is all is easy. Knitting needles receed around the vision, baring his curviture, clearing her underwear. So that's not what it's for. French fried pickelilly and deep-dish-apple death won't get you through that wake up in the morning alive. Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won't move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphore if I ever heard one. Timed methods run out: coo, morning bird. I could stop before breathing marble basonets. Salvage a disjunctive, it's all you Middle of the ring around the Harley Davidson bush, blooming, blooming, shame, socks, derth and passion pudding, flowers, or Ms Crystaline Pristine. Her backwoods mystification is citified in the face. Penticle pie and hungar city, oh my oh too much, my meat and mashed potatoes pansey, my in the middle of it biche. Hart's blood is good fly-catching bait. So's fresh sheep-shit Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn't your running the mill broad loom, sword, or side. She's right on the guache circuit where a principle's a principle with all hell lined up to get paid. Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanley, Fibrilation, Factotum, Susquahana, Summer-fine-day. It's all the same know there is one!"

  "Maybe he's just making a good guess."

  "But I don't want him too-"

  "They're supposed to got obituaries too, prepared on all the famous people around here who might die."

  "Oh, come on," I said. "Let's get out of here."

  "You keep askin' me to show you where they printed the thing I started away from the desk. "But I don't see any rolls of paper around.

  The presses aren't going. You mean a thirty-six page newspaper comes out of here every day?"

  But Faust was already walking away, still chuckling, his white hair-sides, beard, and back-covering the bright choker.

  "Joaquim?" I called. "Joaquim, when do they actually print it? I mean this doesn't look like anybody's been in here since before the

  going out along Broadway. The smoke was as bad as I've ever seen it-rolling from side-alleys, gauzing the streets in loose layers. Down one block, the face on an eight-(I counted)-story building was curtained with it, leaking out broken windows, to waterfall to the street, mounded and shifting.

  One section of pavement had been replaced by metal

  !n the bitch's kitchen. You look for the dice this time. Maybe you can wind up a winner. Summary, Mopery, Titular, Wisdom, Thaumaturgy, Fictive, Samoa and five hands over. When I grow up I'm going to get a vasectomy all my own. (A dendrite in the glans is worthy of the bush.) Why does he insist on winter all the time? You can stutter in the water but that's not the way to think. Not thinking but the way thinking feels. Not knowledge but knowledge's form. If there're enough raisins, splay feet, and guilded hornet-heads, you can wish, dream, lie like a Saxon though you only pravaricate like a Virginia ham. George! the inginuity I've expended to fill five missing days.

  Conversation with furry Forest at Teddy's:

  "What are you writing now?"

  "I'm not writing anything," I said. "I haven't been writing anything and I'm not going to write anything."

  He frowned, and I hoped a lot the lie had at least the structure of truth. But how can it? Which is why I haven't been able to write anything but his journal in so long. And thank the blinded stars, I feel the energies for that going.

  What other days from my life have gone? After a week, I can't remember five. After a year, how many days in it will you never think of again? plates (some incomplete repair) clanging when I crossed. After another half hour the buildings were taller and the street was wider and the sky grey and streaked like weathered canvas, like silvered velvet.

  On the wide steps to a black and glass office building was a fountain. I went up to examine: Wet patches of color on the dusty mosaic at the bottom; rust around the pentangle of nozzles on the cement ball; I climbed over the lip to look in what I guessed had held plants: dried stem stumps poked from ashey earth; beer and soda-can tabs. I stepped once on a wet patch of green and yellow mosaic-tiles with my bare foot; took my foot away and left a chalky print.

  The bus came around the corner. It didn't scare me this time. I vaulted the fountain edge and sprinted down the steps.

  The doors flap-clapped open even, before it stopped.

  "Hey," I called. "How far up Broadway do you go?"

  Do you know the expression on somebody's face when you wake them out of a sound sleep with something serious, like a fire or a death? (Small, bald, oyster-eyed black man, obsessed and trundling his bus from here to there.) "How far you going?"

  I told him: "Pretty far."

  While he considered how far that was, I got on. Then we both thought about the last time I was on his bus; I don't know if the little movement of his head back into the khaki collar acknowledged that or not. But I'm sure that's what we were t
hinking. I also thought: There are no other passengers.

  He closed the doors.

  I sat behind him, looking at the broad front window as we shook on up the street.

  A sound made me look back.

  All the advertising cards had been filled with posters, or sections from posters, of George. From over the window his face looked down there; here were his knees. The long one over the back door showed his left leg, horizonal, foot to mid-thigh. A third of them were crotch-shots.

  He feels the experience whose detrius is interleaved in the Orchids' pages/petals has left him a perfect voice with which he can say nothing; he can imagine nothing duller. (For that sentence to make sense, it must be ugly as possible. And it isn't-quite. So it fails.) The sound again; so I got up and handed myself down the aisle, bar after bar. The old man-pretending to sleep-was so slumped in the back seat I couldn't see him till I passed the second door. One brown and ivory eye opened over his frayed collar slanting across the black wrinkle of an ear. He closed it again, turned away, and made that strangling moan-the sound, again, that till now I had suspected was something strained and complaining in the engine.

  I sat, bare foot on the warm wheel case, boot on the bar below the seat in front. The smoke against the glass was fluid thick; runnels wormed the pane. Thinking (complicated thoughts): Life is smoke, the clear lines through it, encroached on and obliterated by it, are poems, crimes, orgasms-carried this analogy to every jounce and jump of the bus," ripple on the glass, even noticing that through the windows across the aisle I could see a few buildings.

  The bus stopped. The driver twisted around; for a moment I thought he was speaking to the old man behind me: "I can't take you no farther," gripping the bar across the back of the driver's seat, elbow awkward in the air. "I got you past the store." He pauses significantly; I wish he hadn't. "You'll be all right."

  Behind me the old man sniffled and shifted.

  I stood up and, under George's eyes

  The falsification of this journal: first off, it doesn't reflect my dayly life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous.

  What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of my life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.

  To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet . . . anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbane. They are moments when I had the intensity to, (and knees and hands and left foot and right tit), stepped on the treadle. The doors opened. I got out on the curb.

  The pavement was shattered about a hydrant, which

  leaned from its pipes. I turned and watched the bus turn.

  From the doorway at the end of the block a man

  stepped. Or a woman. Whoever it was, anyway, was naked.

  I think.

  I walked in that direction. The figure went back in. What I passed was a florist's smashed display window. At first I was surprised at all the greenery on the little shelves up the side. But they were plastic-ferns, leaves, shrubs. Three big pots in the center only had stumps. Back, in the shadow, by the aluminum frame on the glass door of the refrigerator, something big, fetid, and wet moved. I only saw it a second when I hurried by. But I had goose bumps. The reason the bus driver hadn't wanted to go on was that Broadway grew ornate scrolled railings on either side and soared over traintracks forty feet down a brick-walled canyon. A few yards out, a twelve foot hunk of paving had fallen off, as though a gap-tooth giant had bitten it away. The railing twisted off both sides of the gash. From the edge, looking down, I couldn't see where any rubble had landed.

  Beyond the overpass, to the left, a rusted wire fence ran before some trees; through the trees, I saw water patched with ash. To the right, up a slope blotched with grass, was the monastery. Like that.

  I walked up the steps between the beige stones. Halfway, I looked back across the road.

  Smoke reeds grew from the woods and clotted waters to bloom and blend with the sky.

  I reached the top of the steps with the strangest sense of relief and anticipation. The simple journey was the resolve that till now I'd thought suspended. The monastery was several three-storey buildings. A tower rose behind the biggest. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling my leg muscles move as I walked; one finger went through a hole.

  see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.

  They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?

  I don't really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words. Thinking: You arrive at a monastery halfway through a round of pocket-pool. Sure. I relaxed my stomach (it had tightened in the climb) and ambled, breathing loudly, over the red and grey flags. Between dusty panes, putty blobbed the leaded tesselations. At the same moment I decided the place was deserted, a man in a hood and robe stepped around the corner and peered.

  I took my hands out of my pockets.

  He folded his over his lap and came forward. They were big, and translucent. The white-and-black toes of very old basketball sneakers poked alternately from his hem. His eyes were grey. His smile looked like the amphetamine freeze on a particularly pale airline stewardess. His hood was back enough to see his skull was white as bread dough. A sore, mostly hidden, like an eccentric map, was visible under the hood's edge: wet, raised, with purple bits crusted inside it and yellow flaking around it. "Yes," he asked. "Can I help you?"

  I smiled and shrugged.

  "I saw you coming up the steps and I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you, anyone in particular you wanted to see?"

  "I was just looking around."

  "Most of the grounds are in the back. We don't really encourage people to just wander about, unless they're staying. Frankly, they're not in such hot shape right through here. The Father was talking yesterday at the morning meal about starting a project to put them back in order. Everybody was delighted to get a place right across from Holland Lake-" He nodded toward the other side of the road. "But now look at it."

  When I turned back from the lacustrine decay, he was pulling his hood further down his forehead with thick thumb and waxy forefinger.

  I looked around at the buildings. I'd been trying to find this place so long; but once found, the search seemed so easy. I was off on some trip about-

  "Excuse me," he said.

  -and came back.

  "Are you the Kid?"

  I felt a good feeling in my stomach and a strong urge to say No. "Yeah."

  His chin and his smile twisted in a giggle without sound. "I thought you might be. I don't know why I thought so, but it seemed a reasonable guess. I mean I've seen pictures of ... scorpions-in the Times. So I knew you were one of them, but I had no way of knowing which one. That you were the . . ." and shook his head, a satisfied man. "Well." He folded his hands. "We've never been visited by any scorpions before, so I just took a guess." His wrinkleless face wrinkled. "Are you sure you weren't looking for someone?"

  "Who's here to look for?"

  "Most people who come usually want to see the Father-but he's closeted with Mr Calkins now, so that would be unfeasible today-unless of course you wanted to wait, or come back at some other-"

  "Is Mr Calki
ns here?" In my head I'd been halfway through an imaginary dialogue which had begun when I'd answered his first question with: The Kid? Who, me? Naw . . .

  "Yes."

  "Could I see him?" I asked.

  "Well, I don't . . . as I said, he's closeted with the Father."

  "He'd want to see me," I said. "He's a friend of mine."

  "I don't know if I ought to disturb them." His smile fixed some emotion I couldn't understand till he spoke: "And I believe one of the reasons Mr Calkins came here was to put some of his friends at a more comfortable distance." Then he giggled. Out loud.

  "He's never met me," I said and wondered why. (To explain that the personal reasons which make you want to put friends at a distance had nothing to do with Calkins and me? But that's not what it sounded like.) I let it go.

  A bell bonged.

  "Oh, I guess-" he glanced at the tower-"Sister Ellen and Brother Paul didn't forget after all," and smiled (at some personal joke?) while I watched a model of the monastery I didn't even realize I'd made-the three buildings inhabited solely by the Father, Calkins, and this one here-break down and reassemble into: a community of brothers and sisters, a small garden, goats and chickens, matins, complines, vespers . . .

  "Hey," I said.

  He looked at me.

  "You go tell Mr Calkins the Kid is here, and find out if he wants to see me. If he doesn't, I'll come back some other time-now that I know where this place is."

  He considered, unhappily. "Well, all right." He turned.

  "Hey."

  He looked back.

  "Who are you?"

  "Randy . . . eh, Brother Randolf."

  "Okay."

  He went off around the comer, with the echo of the bell.

  Beneath the chipped keystone the arched door looked as though (a slough of rust below the wrist-thick bolt) it hadn't been opened all year.

  And I got back on my trip: I had looked so long for this place; finding it had been accomplished with no care for the goal itself. For minutes I wondered if I couldn't get everything in my life like that. When I finally worked out a sane answer ("No."), I laughed (aloud) and felt better.