Dhalgren

  There was a sudden stinging in my throat from the smoke; smoke blew away. I shouted: "What are you doing?"

  The Mexican dragged his boots back against the curb. The woman put her other hand on the mute's shoulder.

  I watched their movements of surprise. Translated to their hands on the blind-mute's arms, it gave him his only knowledge of me. His face tilted forward; his hand closed on the woman's-my knowledge of what he knew. Thinking: It takes so little information . . . Though I am cased in light and their eyes orbited with plastic, in the over-determined matrix, translated and translated, perhaps his knowledge of me is even more complete.

  I was frightened of their red eyes?

  What does my blue beast become behind scarlet caps!

  People shouted.

  I shouted louder: "What's going on? What's happen- ing? Do you know?" and ended coughing in more smoke.

  The brick-haired Negress shook her head, a hand before her mouth, hesitant to quiet me, pinch her own lips close, or push me away. "Somebody put a bomb in ... Didn't they? Isn't that what they said? Somebody put a-"

  "No!" the Mexican said loudly. He tugged the blind-mute's shoulders. "There wasn't any-anything like that . . ." He got the blind-mute on his feet.

  I turned to see men and women stumbling toward me, against the luminous mist. And something behind the mist flickered. I lurched into the street.

  "There wasn't any bomb!" the man or the woman behind me shrieked. "They shot him! From up on the roof. Some crazy white boy! Shot him dead in the street! Oh, my God-"

  Something warm splattered my ankle.

  Water rolled between the humped cobbles, bright as mercury beneath the discharges on the collapsed, black sky. The street was a net of silver and I sprinted across it, catching one woman with my shoulder who spun-shouting-her scraped face after me, almost lunged into another man, but pushed off him with both hands; a sudden gust of heat stung the roofs of my eye-sockets. Lids clamped, I got through it and more dust, catching my boot-toe on something that nearly tripped me. I coughed and staggered with the back of my hand over my mouth.

  Something went over the back of my neck, so cold I thought it was water. But it was just air. Eyes tearing, my throat spasming and hacking free of the dust caught in it, I staggered through it a dozen steps, till somebody grabbed me and I came up, staring at another black face.

  "It's Kid!" Dragon Lady shouted to somebody and got her arm around me to keep me from falling.

  A few steps behind her Glass turned around to see me. "Huh?"

  Beyond him, against a screen of slowly moiling clouds, the side came off a twenty-story building, collapsing slowly away from the web of steel. But that must have been five blocks down.

  "Jesus Christ . . . !" D-t said, then glanced back at me. "Kid, you all-?" and the sound got to us, filling up the space around us the way a volcano must up close.

  The brunt of it past, I could hear people behind me still shouting: Three different voices bawled out instructions among some fifty more who didn't care.

  "God damn it!" D-t said. "Come on!"

  Someone had strewn coils of what looked like elevator cable all over the sidewalk. It was greasy too; so after the first dozen steps across it, we went into the street.

  And the shouting behind us had resolved to a single, distant, insistent voice-"You wait, God damn it! You hear me, you mother-fuckers wait for me!"-getting closer -"Wait for me, God damn it! Wait-!"

  I looked back.

  Fireball, fists pumping, bent forward from the waist and head flung back, ran full into Glass, who caught him by the arm. Fireball sagged back, gasping and crying: "You wait for me, God damn it! You damn niggers-" he sucked in a breath loud as vomiting-"why didn't you wait!" He was barefoot, with no shirt; a half dozen chains swung and tinkled from his neck as he bent, gasping, holding his stomach. In a pulse of light I saw he had a scrape down his jaw that went on across his shoulder blade as though something had fallen on him while he ran. His face was streaked with tears that he scrubbed with the flat of his fist. "You God damn fuckin' niggers, you wait for me!"

  "Come on," D-t said. "You all right now."

  I thought Fireball was going to fall down trying to get back his breath.

  Somebody else sprinted up the street, out of the smoke. It was Spider. He looked very young, very tall, very black, very scared. Breathing hard, he asked: "Fireball okay? I * thought a damn wall fell on him."

  "He's okay," D-t said. "Now let's go!"

  Fireball nodded and lurched ahead.

  Glass let him go and moved beside me. His vinyl vest was hazed across with powdered plaster. "Hey," I said, "I've gotta find Lanya and Denny. They're supposed to be going * back to the nest-"

  "Oh, God damn, nigger!" Fireball twisted back to stare. His face was smeared filthy, and some of it was blood. "Leave them white mother-fuckers alone, huh? Don't you think about nothin' except your pecker?"

  "Now you just get yourself together!" Dragon Lady pushed Fireball's shoulder sharply with the heel of her hand; when he jerked around, she took his arm like they were going for a stroll. "Let's you just cut this 'nigger' shit, huh? What you think you are, a red-headed Indian?" Glass said: "We don't got any nest; not any more."

  "They got any sense," D-t said, "they gonna be trying to get out too. Maybe we meet up with them at the bridge."

  "What happened to the others?" I asked. "Raven, Tarzan, Cathedral? Lady of Spain . . . What about Baby and Adam?"

  Dragon Lady didn't even look back.

  "You were the last one out," D-t said to Spider. "You see 'em?"

  Spider looked from D-t to me and back. "No." He looked down where he was holding onto the end of his belt with his lanky, black fingers, twisting a little.

  "Maybe," Dragon Lady said, letting go Fireball's arm but still not looking back, "we gonna meet 'em." I could tell she was frowning. "On the bridge. Like he says." Or something else.

  I walked another five steps, looking down at the wet pavement, feeling numbness claw at me. My fingers tingled. So did the soles of both feet. Then I looked up and said, "Well, God damn it, the bridge is that way!" Which is when this incredibly loud crackling started on our left.

  We all looked up, turned our heads, backed away all together. Spider broke, ran a dozen steps, realized we weren't coming, and turned back to look too.

  Four stories up, fire suddenly jetted from one window. The flames flapped up like yellow cloth under a bellows; sparks and glass tumbled down the brick.

  Two more windows erupted. (I hit my bare heel on the far curb.) Then another-as far apart as ticks on a clock.

  We ran.

  Not down the way I said because that street was a-broil with smoke and flickering. At the end of another block, we turned the corner and ran down the sloping sidewalk. There was water all over one end.

  D-t and me splashed into it, watching the high brick walls, and the billowing clouds between them, shatter below our feet.

  Ten yards in it was up to my knees and I couldn't really run. We slushed on. Glass, arms swinging wide in a wildly swaying stagger, moved ahead of me, dragging fans of ripples from the backs of his soaked pants. Then the street started sloping up. I splashed toward the edge. What it felt like was something immense dropped into the street a block away. Everything shook. I looked back at the" others-Fireball and Dragon Lady were still splashing forward-when, in the center, was a swell of what looked like detergent bubbles. Then steam shot straight up. The water's edge rolled back from Fireball's dripping cuffs, leaving his wet feet slapping the glistening pavement.

  Glass back-tracked to grab Dragon Lady's hand, like he thought she (or he) might fall.

  The geyser spit and hissed and the water bubbled into it

  We went around the next comer together.

  I could see the bridge all the way to the second stanchion. Here and there clouds had torn away from the black sky. Something was burning down between the waterfront buildings. We rushed across fifty feet of pavement. Just before
the bridge mouth, it looked like someone had grenaded the road. A slab of asphalt practically fifteen feet high jutted up. Down the crack around it, you could see wet pipes, and below that, flickering water. Above, that amazing, loud lightning formed its searing nodes among the cloud canyons.

  "Come on," I said. "This way!"

  Metal steps lead up to the bridge's pedestrian walk. The first half dozen were covered with broken masonry. Glass and Dragon Lady charged right up. Plaster dust puffed out between the railing struts. Fireball stepped carefully on the first three steps, then grabbed both railings and vaulted up three more. His feet were caked with junk and he was bleeding from one ankle.

  "Get goin'!" D-t crowded behind. "Get goin'!"

  Spider and me went up the narrow steps practically side by side.

  At the top, Spider got ahead and we ran along the clanging plates maybe fifty yards when something . . . hit the bridge!

  We swayed back and forth a dozen feet! Metal ground against old metal. Cables danced in the dark.

  I grabbed the rail, staring down at the blacktop fifteen feet below, expecting it to split over the water a hundred feet below that.

  Beside me, Fireball just dropped on his knees, his cheek against the bars. Spider put his arms around the dead lamppost, bent his head and went, "Ahhhhhhhhh . . ." like he was crying with his mouth open-which, five seconds later, when the shaking and the creaking died, was the only sound. Dragon Lady swallowed, let go the rail, and took a gasping breath.

  My ears were ringing.

  Everything was quiet.

  "Jesus God," D-t whispered, "let's get off o'-" which was when everybody, including D-t, realized how quiet

  Holding the rail tight, I turned to look back.

  On the waterfront, flames flickered in smoke. A breeze came to brush my forehead. Here and there smoke was moving off the wind-runneled water. And there was nobody else on the bridge.

  "Let's go ..." I stepped around Fireball, passed by Dragon Lady.

  A few seconds later, I heard Glass repeat: "Well, let's go!" Their footsteps started.

  Dragon Lady caught up. "Jesus . . ." she said softly beside me. But that was all.

  We kept walking.

  Girders wheeled on either side. About twenty feet beyond the first stanchion, I looked back again:

  The burning city squatted on weak, inverted images of its fires.

  Finally D-t touched my shoulder and made a little gesture with his head. So I came on.

  The double, thigh-thick suspensors swung even lower than our walkway; a few yards later they sloped up toward the top of the next stanchion.

  "Who is ... ?" Glass asked softly.

  Down on the black-top, She was walking slowly toward us.

  Running my hand along the rail, I watched. Then I called: "Hey, you!"

  Behind me there was a flair; then another; then another. The others had flicked on their lights-which meant I was in silhouette before a clutch of dragons, hawks, and mantises.

  She squinted up at us: a dark Oriental, with hair down in front of her shirt (like two black, inverted flames); red bandanas were stuffed under the shoulder straps of her knapsack for padding. Her shirttails were out of her jeans. "Huh ... ?" She was trying to smile.

  "You going into Bellona?"

  "That's right." She squinted harder to see me. "You leaving?"

  "Yeah," I said. "You know, it's dangerous in there!"

  She nodded. "I'd heard they had the national guard and soldiers and stuff posted. Hitch-hiking down, though, I didn't see anybody."

  "How were the rides?"

  "All I saw was a pickup and a Willy's station wagon. The pickup gave me a lift."

  "What about traffic going out?"

  She shrugged. "I guess if somebody passes you, they'll give you a ride. Sometimes the truckers will stop for a guy to spell them on driving. I mean, guys shouldn't have too tough a time. Where're you heading?"

  Over my shoulder, Glass said: "I want to get to Toronto. Two of us are heading for Alabama, though."

  "I just wanted to get someplace!" Fireball said. "I don't feel right, you know? I ain't really felt right for two days ... !"

  "You got a long way to go, either direction," she said.

  I wondered what she made of the luminous light-shapes that flanked me and threw pastel shadows behind her on the gridded black-top.

  Glass asked: "Everything is still all right in Canada-?"

  "-and Alabama?" asked Spider.

  "Sure. Everything's all right in the rest of the country. Is anything still happening here?"

  When nobody answered, she said:

  "It's just the closer you get, the funnier ... everybody acts. What's it like inside?"

  D-t said: "Pretty rough."

  The others laughed.

  She laughed.

  "But like you say," Dragon Lady said, "guys have a pretty easy time," which I don't think she got, because unless you listen hard, Dragon Lady's voice sounds like a man's.

  "Is there anything you can tell me? I mean that might be helpful? Since I'm going in?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Sometimes men'll come around and tear up the place you live in. Sometimes people shoot at you from the roof-that is, if the roof itself doesn't decide to fall on you. Or you're not the person on top of it, doing the shooting-" "He wrote these poems," Fireball said at my other shoulder. "He wrote these poems and they published them in a book and everything! They got it all over the city. But then he wrote some more, only they came and burned them all up-" His voice shook on the fevered lip of hysteria.

  "You want a weapon," I asked, "to take in with you?"

  "Wow!" she said. "Is it like that?"

  Glass gave a short, sharp laugh.

  "Yeah," I said. "We have it easy."

  Spider said: "You gonna tell her about... the Father? You gonna tell her about June?"

  "She'll learn about those."

  Glass laughed again.

  D-t said: "What can you say?"

  She ran her thumbs down her knapsack straps and settled her weight on one hip. She wore heavy, hiking shoes, one a lot muddier than the other. "Do I need a weapon?"

  "You gonna give her that?" Dragon Lady asked as I took my orchid off its chain.

  "We got ourselves in enough trouble with this," I said. "I don't want it with me any more."

  "Okay," Dragon Lady said. "It's yours."

  "Where you from?" Glass was asking.

  "Down from Canada."

  "You don't look Canadian."

  "I'm not. I was just visiting."

  "You know Albright?"

  "No. You know Pern?"

  "No. You know any of the little towns around Southern Ontario?"

  "No. I spent all my time around Vancouver and B.C."

  "Oh," Glass said.

  "Here's your weapon." I tossed the orchid. It clattered on the blacktop, rolled jerkily, and stopped.

  "What is-?" The sound of a car motor made us all look toward the end of the bridge; but it died away on some turnoff. She looked back. "What is it?" "How they call that?" Fireball asked.

  "An orchid," I said.

  "Yeah," Fireball said. "That's what it is."

  She stooped, centered in her multiple shadows. She kept one thumb under her pack-strap; with her other band she picked it up. "Put it on," I said.

  "Are you right or left handed?" Glass asked.

  "Left." She stood, examining the flower. "At least, I write with my left."

  "Oh," Glass said again.

  "This is a pretty vicious looking thing." She fitted it around her wrist; something glittered there. "Just the thing for the New York subway during rush hour." She bent her neck to see how it snapped. As her hair swung forward, under her collar was another, bright flash. "Ugly thing. I hope I don't need you."

  I said: "Hope you don't either."

  She looked up.

  Spider and D-t had turned off their lights and were looking, anxiously, beyond the second stanchion toward the dark hills o
f the safer shore.

  "I guess," I told her, "you can give it to somebody else when you're ready to be among the dried and crisp branches, trying to remember it, get it down, thinking: I I didn't leave them like that! I didn't. It's not real. It can't be. If it is then I am crazy. I am too tired-wandering among all these, and these streets where the burning, burning, leaves the shattered and the toppling. Brick, no bridge because it takes so long, leaving, I haven't leaving. That I was following down the dark blood blots her glittering heel left on the blacktop. They slid into the V of my two shadows on the moon and George lit along the I walk on and kept. Leaving it. Twigs, leaves, bark bits along the shoulder, the hissing hills and the smoke, the long country cut with summer and no where to begin. In the direction, then, Broadway and train tracks, limping in the in the all the dark blots till the rocks, running with rusty water, following beside the broken mud gleaming on the ditch edge, with the trees so over so I went into them and thought I could wait here until she came, all naked up or might knowing what I couldn't, remember maybe if just one of them. He. In or on, I'm not quite where I go or what to go now but I'll climb up on the and wonder about Mexico if she, come, waiting.

  This hand full of crumpled leaves.

  It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can't remember any more if. I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

  -San Francisco, Abaqii, Toronto, Clarion, Milford, New Orleans, Seattle, Vancouver, Middletown, East Lansing, New York, London January 1969/September 1973

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Samuel R. Delany was born in New York City on April 1, 1942. He grew up in New York's Harlem district and attended the Bronx High School of Science At City College he served as poetry editor of the magazine Prometheus. He composed his first novel at nineteen and, at intervals between novels, worked in jobs ranging from shrimpboat worker to folk singer-in places as diverse as the Texas Gulf, Greece and Istanbul. Samuel Delany has won the coveted Nebula Award four times, twice for short stories ("Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and twice for novels (Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection). His Other works include The Fall of the Towers, The Jewels of Aptor, Nova and DHALGREN. In addition, he and his wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker, founded and edited the avant-garde science fiction journal Quark from their base in London, where they presently live with their infant daughter.