Dhalgren

  Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

  There was no one there.

  I walked to the furnace, between cans and package wrappers. On the bench was an overturned garbage carton. With my boot-toe, I scraped at some cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up red eyes which blinked, simplified, and clapped.

  "Lanya?"

  They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here hid awfully just a million savants at the pot. An open egret hung around a perch-still she could stay here any night. The honey worts and wolfling braces amazingly lined askew in weevils or along a post-hole should report.

  "Lanya!"

  An apple to discover? Still they should have saved around what or fixed her. Except in the underpinned white shell, here are some scabs in purple; every beach but effluvia. And they had bought us up to mix here so few concepts with the lazy drinks, had sat sober or reinstated our personal fixated intensity. Soon they cauterized what you, constancy and exegesis, were found very loose around him that we had each, without Denny explaining, fished to fascinate them, beautifully or lazily. They should have allowed her less than an alligator has an eyelid never pulled her from a quiver; terror still felt less alive.

  "Lanya?"

  I turned to fixative among the walkings.

  Beyond the leaves, the figure moved so that I still couldn't

  The blue envelope, barred along its edge with red and navy, is held to the bottom of the above page with yellow, bubbled Scotchtape. There are two, canceled, eight-cent stamps in the upper, right-hand corner. The postmark is illegible. The Bellona address reads:

  Mrs. Author Richards

  The Labry Apartments (#17-E)

  400, 36th Street

  Bellona, U.S.A.

  The return address, written in the same hand (both in green ink):

  Ms. Julia Harrington

  7 Lilac Vista

  Los Angeles, California The letter itself has either been removed, or lost.

  When I came up the stairs, her office door was closed. So I wandered from the study to the kitchen into Lanya's room and back. Finally I sat on the edge of the desk in the hall, tilted the Newboy volumes from between the statuettes, piled them beside me, and began to flip pages.

  Which was funny: after five minutes I still hadn't read one whole poem, or one complete paragraph from the essays or stories. My eyes could only focus before or behind the page. That part of the brain, directly behind the eye, that refracts the jewelry of words into image, idea, or information, wouldn't work. (I even wondered a while how much of that was because I'd heard him speak.) The books had generated ghosts of themselves, and I couldn't read the words for their after-images. I kept picking up different volumes, hefting them, closed, on my palm, putting them down, then hefting my emptied palm again, feeling for the ghost's weight. My stomach began to hurt because I was concentrating so widely. I put them all back-first I ordered them by size, then I pulled them out again and reordered them by the dates on the copyright pages-and walked for a while (remember the fourth day on speed?), returning to the desk, pulling the books out again, leaving -really finding I'd wandered away just as I'd turn around to go back.

  What is it around these objects that vibrates so much the objects themselves vanish? A field, cast by the name of a man, who, without my ever having read a complete work of his, the hidden machinery of my consciousness at some point decided was an artist. How comical, sad, exhausting. Why am I a victim of this magic? But for all I recognize out of me, I wonder furiously who would hold Brass Orchids on their hand, hefting for nominal weight?

  "Kid?" Madame Brown's body and face were sliced by the door. "You're here. Good."

  "Hello." I closed the The Charterhouse of Ballarat. "You ready for me to come in now?"

  She opened the door the rest of the way; I got off the desk.

  "Yes, let's begin. I hope I didn't keep you waiting...?"

  "That's okay." I walked into the room.

  Coming in to the dull green walls, dark wood up to the waist, a day bed with a green corduroy spread, three big leather chairs, a tall bookshelf, dark green drapes, I had to readjust my spatial model of the house: It was the biggest room on the floor and I'd never been in it.

  On the wall was a swing-out display rack, like in poster shops. I walked over, started to open it, glanced at Madame Brown-

  "Go ahead."

  -and turned the first leaf, expecting George:

  The raddled earth hung above tilted, lunar shale. On the next, a bulky astronaut stared out his half-silvered faceplate. All the pictures-I went through some dozen-were of the moon, or Mars, or the familiar faces of astronauts, necks ringed with helmet clamps-two of a younger, closer-cropped Kamp-or their polished angular equipment (the foil-wrapped module foot under which Kamp's moon-mouse had fled), plastic flags, or pale, cirrus clouds, hind-lit by exhaust-light as the rocket rose above its stanchions.

  Let Kamp smirk out on our session? No, I turned to a chalky scape, backed by an earth with clouds like a negative thumb-print. Or a saucepan of soured milk a moment before it boils; and went to a chair.

  "Comfortable there?" Madame Brown closed the door. "You can lie down on the couch if it's easier for you to talk that way."

  "No. I'd rather see you."

  She smiled. "Good. And I'd rather see you." She sat in one of the other chairs at a slight angle to me, a hand on the arm, a hand in her lap. "How do you feel about talking to me?"

  "A little nervous," I said. "I don't know why: I've talked to enough shrinks before. I was thinking, though, it's all right here because there aren't any mental hospitals left so you can put me away."

  "Do you feel that the other doctors you talked to- perhaps the doctors you saw before you went into the hospital the first time-put you away?" She said that pretty openly, not with any sarcastic quotes around put you away.

  But suddenly I was angry: "You don't know very much about crazy people, do you?"

  "What do you want to tell me about them?"

  "Look-I'm very suggestive. Labile . . . like they say. I incorporate things into my . . . reality model very quickly. Maybe too quickly. Which is what makes me crazy. But when you tell us we're sick, or treat us like we're sick, it becomes part of ... me. Then I am." And I wanted to cry, at once, surprisingly, and a lot.

  "What's the matter?"

  I wanted to say: I hate you.

  "Do you think I think you're crazy?"

  "I don't . . . don't think you think at all!" Then I cried. It really did surprise me. I couldn't move my hands. But I lowered my head to stop what hurt in the back of my neck. Water trickled the side of my nose. Thinking: Christ, that was fast! and sniffing when the silence got on my nerves.

  "Did you like the hospital where you were?"

  "Like it . .. ?" I raised my head. "You're the one who said to me . . ." Another tear rolled. I felt cold. ". . . no, you said about learning to love the people at hand? Well there were a lot of very hurt people there, who it was very hard to learn to love, very expensive-emotionally. But I guess I did."

  "Why are you crying?" "Because I don't believe in magic." I sniffed again; this time something salty the size of a clam slid back out of my nasal cavity and I swallowed it. "You're a magic person, sitting there. You're sitting there because you think you can help me."

  "Do you need help?"

  I was angry again. But it was deep and bubbled down below things. "I don't know. I really don't. But that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that that's what you believe."

  "You're angry at me."

  I took a deep breath. "Not. . . really." The bubbles, one after the other, broke. I absorbed the fumes that raged.

  My stomach was very tight.

  "It's all right if you are. You may have good reason."

  "Why should . . . ?" and stopped because I could think of about ten. I said: "You're smug. You're not sympathetic. You think you understand.
And you don't . . ."

  "I don't understand yet; and I don't know whether I'll be able to. As of now, you haven't given me any reason to be sympathetic. If I'm smug, well... I'd rather I weren't, but I can feel some reserve in myself about getting too close to you just yet; which may be what smugness is."

  "I don't think you can understand." I lugged both hands together in my lap and pushed them against one another. They felt numb. So did my feet

  "What do you feel like now?"

  "Like not much of anything."

  "Does it make you want to cry again?"

  I took another breath. "No. I don't..." I put my head back. "I think I lost it, whatever was coming out. . ."

  "Are you a very emotional person? Do you cry often?"

  "That's the first crying I've done in ... three years, maybe four... a long time."

  She raised her eyebrow. After a moment, she said: "Then you're probably under a great deal of pressure. What kind of pressure are you under?"

  "I think I'm going crazy. And I don't want to. I don't like it. I like life, I like living. I like what's going on around me, all of it to watch, and most of it to do. There're all sorts of people and situations around I really enjoy. And I'm at a place where I don't have to worry about all sorts of others I don't. I don't want to go nuts again. Not now."

  After a moment she smiled: "I've occasionally given therapy to some rather successful business executives; lots of money, happy families, some even without ulcers- who've said practically the same thing in the same way. We do know each other outside the office, and I must admit, from what I've observed myself, and from what Lanya's told me, I find it a little ironic; I mean that you express it in such similar words."

  "I said you wouldn't understand. I said I was afraid- and I am angry-that I don't think you can."

  "Tell me the symptoms of your going crazy."

  "I forget things. I don't know who I am ... I haven't been able to remember my name for months. I wake up, sometimes, terrified, everything in a blood-colored fog, which begins to clear while my heart beats so loud it hurts my chest. I've lost days, days and days out of my life. I see things, sometimes, like people with their eyes . . ." And I felt my back snarl with fear. Sweat rolled down the underside of one arm. "People with ..." I closed my mouth, so astonished I couldn't say it that I couldn't say it. I backtracked in my mind, looking for something I could loop with words. "Can I...?" I had to back up further; I was looking at the multiple loops of optic chain she wore around her neck. "Can I tell you about a ... dream?"

  "Please go right ahead."

  "I dreamed that I ... well, I was in a woods, on the side of a mountain. The moon was shining-one moon. And this woman, a nice looking woman, a few years older than me, she came walking up over the rocks and through the leaves. She was naked. And we balled, right there in the leaves. Like that. When we were finished, she got up and ran off through the bush-"

  "-you completed making love in the dream?"

  "Yes. After we came, she got up and ran off through the woods to this cave, and told me to go inside it."

  "And you obeyed her?"

  "Yes. I remember that very clearly. I remember I stepped on some leaves once, in some water; I jumped over a crack in the cave floor. In a niche in one wall of the cave there was a brass thing, big around as my two arms, filled with glowing coals and little flames. I climbed this rock edge, and I found ..." I touched the chain across my chest. "I dreamed I found these there." I hooked the chain with my thumb and watched Madame Brown. "I mean it must have been a dream; because of what happened later." She looked more intense; a fourth line crossed her forehead. "I put them on. But when I came out, she was gone. I looked for her in the woods, until I came to a moonlit road-just before, I remember, I stepped in a mud puddle. I was still trying to figure out where she'd gone when I saw her, there, in a meadow, on the other side of the road. So I started toward her, across the grass. And she turned into a tree. For some reason, in the dream, that terrified me. So I ran away, back down the road. Until I got to a highway. The rest of it is a little vague. I remember for part of it I was riding in a truck with this man with a sort of scarred-up face. Like bad pockmarks or acne. And this funny conversation about artichokes. Or maybe it wasn't really a conversation. One or the other of us just mentioned artichokes in some connection that I don't remember ..."

  "That's all?" Her fingertips came together.

  'That's all," I said, while her hands parted, touched her knees. "But it was so ... strange!"

  "What made it particularly strange?"

  "Well, everything happened so ... clearly. And when this woman changed, I was so scared. I mean I was incredibly frightened. I ran away, I mean ..."

  Madame Brown crossed her legs.

  Across her calf, glazed with nylon, a scratch curved down to her ankle.

  She asked: "What is it?"

  I tried to open my mouth, felt my face twitch.

  She waited a long time.

  I tried a couple more times.

  My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.

  But I tried.

  And sank backward into myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.

  "Tell me about Lanya."

  "Denny-" the cave wasn't where I lived, though- "and me, we like her a lot."

  She mmmed. 'Tell me about Denny."

  "Lanya and me like him ... a lot."

  My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.

  "What are you feeling?"

  "Scared."

  "That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?" "Huh?" That surprised me. "Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya's never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she's said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don't disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?"

  "Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren't coming to me for help; and they don't think they're going crazy."

  "More power to me!" She'd catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I'd dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was-it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: "You disapprove of people who come to you for help?"

  "Now, that's not what I-"

  "Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you-" I leaned forward -"what do you think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that's all anybody around here ever does- though I'm sure I'm just flattering myself. Tell me."

  She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: "What do you think of the Richards, Kid?"

  "I don't know . . ." Then I said: "She's frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won't hold. But that's sort of heroic, too. Him? He's despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit." Then I asked: "Do they even know you're black?"

  "Yes. Of

  Lanya surprises me once more: The whole nest out in the yard, and she asks, "Hey, how come Kid is the head scorpion in this nest? I mean Nightmare was before, and then Kid. I would have thought you'd have a black running things."

  "Yeah," Tarzan says. "Me too." While everybody else looks like they'd never thought anything of the kind. But I have; so I waited.

  Finally Glass laughs: "Well, of course Nightmare was sharing it with Dragon Lady. But I think more or less everybody has got it in their head that after one of these runs or other, the shit is gonna come down. Hard. When it does, you gonna see some niggers fade in the night like nobody's business. But the chief scorpion, maybe, ain't gonna be able to fade quite so fast. So that if this dumb-ass white mother-fucker-" Glass put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a big grin, "-wants to stick around here and play superman, ain't no nigger with any sense gonna stand in his way. I mean the guy
in charge is the one who gets zapped. At least, that's the way it works anyplace else . . ." Glass squints up at the sky.

  Copperhead seemed to think it was funnier than anybody else. course they do."

  "I'm surprised."

  "I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards."

  "Do they know you're gay?"

  M a d a m e

  Brown moved in the chair and Mmmed again, negatively. "Let me see," she said after a moment: "Black, lesbian, I'm also very middle class. And Mary and Author are my friends. But I wish sometimes I didn't think you were so right. It would make my life much easier. But then, I've never particularly wanted an easy life, really." She sighed. "I do find this in myself, Kid: When I occasionally get exasperated with Author or Mary, especially when they're going on about you, I wonder to myself-quite honestly -what they would say if I told them some of the things you've actually done-just for the upset it would cause. At that point, I tell myself it's because I 'approve' of you and don't 'approve' of them."

  "If you wanted to upset them, you could tell them some things about June, about Bobby and . . . what's his name? Eddie."

  "Of course, you side with the youngsters-"

  "No," I said. "I'm nearly thirty years old. And I wouldn't swear to which side of it I'm on, from what some people tell me. I'm not taking sides; I'm just pointing out some upsetting areas in their life that are a little closer to home."

  "To the Richards's home. What about yours?"

  "You were going to tell me what you thought about the Kid. Maybe you'll tromp on something and I'll twitch for you."

  "All right. I think ..."

  I looked at her leg.

  ". . . you are very disturbed. You are personable, intelligent, forceful, vital, talented. But your basic ego structure is about as stable as a cracked teacup. You say you've lost bits and pieces of yourself? I think that's exactly what's

  Fireball said: "He's white? I didn't know that. He's darker than I am!"

  "Man," Glass said, "the Kid is an Indian."

  "Now I didn't know he was white," Fireball repeated. "He' crazy as a nigger."

  Tarzan gave me a smile that dribbled strychnine.