Dhalgren Page 5

  "But the part about the student riots. And the bodegas ... I just came up from Mexico."

  "It doesn't say anything about student riots."

  "Yes it does. I was in a student riot once. I'll show you." He reached for the book (she pulled back sharply from the orchid), spread his free hand on the page (she came forward again, her shoulder brushing his arm. He could see her breast inside her unbuttoned shirt. Yeah) and read aloud:

  "'. . . thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student happenings with spaghetti filled Volkswagens, dawn in Seattle, automated evening in L.A.'" He looked up, confused.

  "You've been in Seattle and Los Angeles, morning and night, too?" Her green-eyed smile flickered beside the flames.

  "No ..." He shook his head.

  "I have. It's still not weird." Still flickering, she frowned at his frown. "It's not about you. Unless you dropped it in the park ... You didn't write it, did you?"

  "No," he said. "No. I didn't." Lost (it had been stronger and stranger than any deja vu), the feeling harassed him. "But I could have sworn I knew . . ." The fire felt hottest through the hole at his knee; he reached down to scratch; blades snagged raveled threads. He snatched the orchid away: threads popped. Using his other hand, he mauled his patella with horny fingers.

  Milly had taken the book, turned to a later page.

  The green-eyed girl leaned over her shoulder:

  "Read that part near the end, about the lightning and the explosions and the riot and all. Do you think he was writing about what happened here-to Bellona, I mean?"

  "Read that part at the beginning, about the scorpions and the trapped children. What do you suppose he was writing about there?"

  They bent together in firelight.

  He felt discomfort and looked around the clearing.

  Tak stepped over a sleeping bag and said to John: "You people want me to work too hard. You just refuse to understand that work for its own sake is something I see no virtue in at all."

  "Aw, come on, Tak." John beat his hand absently against his thigh as though he still held the rolled paper.

  "I'll give you the plans. You can do what you want with them. Hey, Kid, how's it going?" Flames bruised Tak's bulky jaw, prised his pale eyes into the light, flickered on his leather visor. "You doing all right?"

  He swallowed, which clamped his teeth; so his nod was stiffer than he'd intended.

  "Tak, you are going to head the shelter building project for us ... ?" John's glasses flashed.

  "Shit," Tak said, recalling Nightmare.

  "Oh, Tak . . ." Milly shook her head.

  "I've been arguing with him all night," John said. "Hey." He looked over at the picnic table. "Did Nightmare come by for the stuff?"

  'Yep." Brightly.

  "How is he?"

  She shrugged-less bright.

  He heard the harmonica, looked:

  Back on her blanket, the other girl bent over her mouth harp. Her hair was a casque of stained bronze around her lowered face. Her shirt had slipped from one sharp shoulder. Frowning, she beat the mouth holes on her palm once more. The notebook lay against her knee.

  "Tak and me were up looking at the place I want to put the shelters. You know, up on the rocks?"

  "You've changed the location again?" Milly asked.

  "Yeah," Tak said. "He has. How do you like it around here, Kid? It's a good place, huh?"

  "We'd be happy to have you," John said. "We're always happy to have new people. We have a lot of work to do; we need all the willing hands we can get." His tapping palm clove to his thigh, stayed.

  He grunted, to shake something loose in his throat. "I think I'm going to wander on."

  "Oh ..." Milly sounded disappointed.

  "Come on. Stay for breakfast." John sounded eager. "Then try out one of our work projects. See which one you like. You know, those are some strange streets out there. You don't know what you're gonna find in 'em."

  "Thanks," he said. "I'm gonna go . . ."

  "I'll take him back down to the avenue," Tak said. "Okay, so long, you guys."

  "If you change your mind," Milly called (John was beating his leg again), "you can always come back. You might want to in a couple of days. Just come. Well be glad to have you then, too."

  On the concrete path, he said to Tak: "They're really good people, huh? I just guess I..." He shrugged.

  Tak grunted: "Yeah."

  "The scorpions-is that some sort of protection racket they make the people in the commune pay?"

  "You could call it that. But then, they get protected."

  "Against anything else except scorpions?"

  Tak grunted again, hoarsely.

  He recognized it for laughter. "I just don't want to get into anything like that. At least not on that side."

  "I'll take you back down to the avenue, Kid. It goes on up into the city. The stores right around here have been pretty well stripped of food. But you never know what you're gonna luck out on. Frankly, though, I think you'll do better in houses. But there you take your chances: somebody just may be waiting for you with a shotgun. Like I say, there's maybe a thousand left out of a city of two million: Only one out of a hundred homes should be occupied-not bad odds. Only I come near walking in on a couple of shotguns myself. Then you got your scorpions to worry about . . . John's group?" The hoarse, gravelly laughter had a drunken quality the rest of Tak's behavior belied. "I like them. But I wouldn't want to stick around them too much either. I don't. But I give them a hand. And it's not a bad place to get your bearings from ... for a day or two."

  "No. I guess not..." But it was a mulling "no."

  Tak nodded in mute agreement

  This park is alive with darknesses, textures of silence. Tak's boot heels tattoo the way. I can envision a dotted line left after him. And someone might pick the night up by its edge, tear it along the perforations, crumple it, and toss it away.

  Only two out of forty-some park lights (he'd started counting) were working. The night's overcast masked all hint of dawn. At the next working light, within sight of the lion-flanked entrance, Tak took his hands out of his pockets. Two pinheads of light pricked the darkness somewhere above his sandy upper lip. "If you want-you can come back to my place ... ?" "... Okay."

  Tak let out a breath-"Good-" and turned. His face went completely black. "This way."

  He followed the zipper jingles with a staggering lope. Boughs, black over the path, suddenly pulled from a sky gone grey inside a V of receding rooftops.

  As they paused by the lions, looking down a wide street, Tak rubbed himself inside his jacket. "Guess we're about to get into morning."

  "Which way does the sun come up?"

  Loufer chuckled. "I know you won't believe this-" they walked again-"but when I first got here, I could have sworn the light always started over there." As they stepped from the curb, he nodded to the left. "But like you can see, today it's getting light-" he gestured in front of them-"there."

  "Because the season's changing?"

  "I don't think it's changed that much. But maybe." Tak lowered his head and smiled. "Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention."

  "Which way is east?"

  "That's where it's getting light." Tak nodded ahead. "But what do you do if it gets light in a different place tomorrow?"

  "Come on. You could tell by the stars."

  "You saw how the sky was. It's been like that or

  worse every night. And day. I haven't seen stars since I've

  been here-moons or suns either."

  "Yeah, but-"

  "I've thought, maybe: It's not the season that changes. It's us. The whole city shifts, turns, rearranges itself. All the time. And rearranges us . . ." He laughed. "Hey, I'm pulling your leg, Kid. Come on." Tak rubbed his stomach again. "You take it all too seriously." Stepping up the curb, Tak pushed his hands into his leather pockets. "But I'm damned if I wouldn't have sworn morning used to start over there." Again he nodded, with pursed lips. "All that means is I wasn't
paying attention, doesn't it?" At the next corner he asked: "What were you in a mental hospital for?"

  "Depression. But it was a long time ago."

  "Yeah?"

  "I was hearing voices; afraid to go out; I couldn't remember things; some hallucinations-the whole bit. It was right after I finished my first year of college. When I was nineteen. I used to drink a lot, too."

  "What did the voices say?"

  He shrugged. "Nothing. Singing ... a lot, but in some other language. And calling to me. It wasn't like you'd hear a real voice-"

  "It was inside your head?"

  "Sometimes. When it was singing. But there'd be a real sound, like a car starting, or maybe somebody would close a door in another room: and you'd think somebody had called your name at the same time. Only they hadn't. Then, sometimes you'd think it was just in your mind when somebody had; and not answer. When you'd find out, you'd feel all uncomfortable."

  "I bet you would."

  "Actually, I felt uncomfortable about all the time .. . But, really, that was years back."

  "What did the voices call you-when they called?"

  At the middle of the next block, Tak said:

  "Just thought it might work. If I snuck up on it."

  "Sorry." The clumsiness and sincerity of Tak's amateur therapy made him chuckle. "Not that way."

  "Got any idea why it happened? I mean why you got-depressed, and went into the hospital in the first place?"

  "Sure. When I got out of high school, upstate, I had to work for a year before I could go into college. My parents didn't have any money. My mother was a full Cherokee . . . though it would have been worth my life to tell those kids back in the park, the way everybody goes on about Indians today. She died when I was about fourteen. I'd applied to Columbia, in New York City. I had to have a special interview because even though my marks in high school were good, they weren't great. I'd come down to the city and gotten a job in an art supply house that impressed hell out of them at the interview. So they dug up this special scholarship. At the end of the first term I had all B's and one D-in linguistics. By the end of the second term, though, I didn't know what was going to happen the next year. I mean about money. I couldn't do anything at Columbia except go to school. They've got all sorts of extracurricular stuff, and it costs. If that D had been an A, I might have gotten another scholarship. But it wasn't. And like I said, I really used to drink. You wouldn't believe a nineteen-year-old could drink like that. Much less drink and get anything done. Just before finals I had a breakdown. I wouldn't go outside. I was scared to see people. I nearly killed myself a couple of times. I don't mean suicide. Just with stupid things. Like climbing out on the window ledge when I was really drunk. And once I knocked a radio into a sink full of dishwater. Like that." He took a breath. "It was a long time ago. None of that stuff bothers me, really, any more."

  "You Catholic?"

  "Naw. Dad was a little ballsy, blue-eyed Georgia Methodist-" that memory's vividness surprised him too- "when he was anything. We never lived down south, though. He was in the Air Force most of the time when I was a kid. Then he flew private planes for about a year. After that he didn't do much of anything. But that was after mom died . . ."

  "Funny." Tak shook his head in self-reproach; 'The way you just assume all the small, dark-complected brothers are Catholic. Brought up a Lutheran, myself. What'd you do after the hospital?"

  "Worked upstate for a while. DVR-Division of Vocational Rehabilitation-was going to help me get back in school, soon as I got out of Hillside. But I didn't want to. Took a joyride with a friend once that ended up with me spending most of a year cutting trees in Oregon. In Oakland I worked as a grip in a theater. Wasn't I telling you about . . . No, that was the girl in the park. I traveled a lot; worked on boats. I tried school a couple more times, just on my own-once, in Kansas, for a year, where I had a job as a super for a student building. Then again in Delaware."

  "How far on did you get?"

  "Did fine the first term, each place. Fucked up the second. I didn't have another breakdown or anything. I didn't even drink. I just fucked up. I don't fuck up on jobs, though. Just school. I work. I travel. I read a lot Then I travel some more: Japan. Down to Australia- though that didn't come out too well. Bumming boats down around Mexico and Central America." He laughed. "So you see, I'm not a nut. Not a real one, anyway. I haven't been a real nut in a long time."

  "You're here, aren't you?" Tak's Germanic face (with its oddly Negroid nose) mocked gently. "And you don't know who you are."

  "Yeah, but that's just 'cause I can't remember my-"

  "Home again, home again." Tak turned into a doorway and mounted the wooden steps; he looked back just before he reached the top one. "Come on."

  There was no lamp post on either corner.

  At the end of the block, a car had overturned in a splatter of glass. Nearer, two trucks sat on wheelless hubs -a Ford pickup and a GM cab-windshields and windows smashed. Across the street, above the loading porch, the butcher hooks swung gently on their awning tracks.

  "Are we going in the way you came out... ?"

  The smoke around the building tops was luminous with dawn.

  "Don't worry," Tak grinned. "You'll get used to it."

  "/ remembered you being on the other side of the . . ." He looked across, again, at the three-foot concrete platform that stretched beneath the awning along the building opposite.

  "Come on." Tak took another step. "Oh- One thing. You'll have to park your weapon at the door." He pointed vaguely at the orchid. "Don't take offense. It's just a house rule."

  "Oh, sure. Yeah." He followed Tak up the steps. "Here, just a second."

  "Put it behind there." Tak indicated two thick asbestos-covered pipes inside the doorway. "It'll be there when you come back."

  He unsnapped the wrist band, slipped his fingers from the harness, bent to lay the contraption on the floor behind the pipes.

  Tak, already at the head of a dun stairwell, started down.

  He stood up and hurried after.

  "Fifteen steps." Tak was already invisible below him. "It's pretty dark so you better count."

  There was no bannister so he kept one hand on the wall. His wrist prickled where the orchid's collar had been. Hairs, drying now, palled, tickling, from his skin. Every other step his bare foot hit the stair edge, heel on gritty marble, ball and toes hanging. Tak's boots thudded below . . . Thirteen . . . fourteen . . . The last step still surprised him.

  "Back this way."

  He followed through the dark. The cement under his bare foot was very warm.

  The steps ahead changed timbre. "Steps up now . . ."

  He slowed.

  ". . . don't get lost."

  This time he found a rail.

  He could anticipate landings from the variations in Loufer's gait. After the third flight, faint lines near head height indicated doors.

  Rhythm is the only thing secure. In this darkness, rising, I recall the Pacific stars. This ritual ascendance goes on in a city that has erased them and blurred its sun out altogether. Iron Wolf has something. I want it without the bother of definitions. The dangerous illumination, the light in the exploding eye, is not for this other city.

  "Last flight-"

  They had come up nine landings.

  "-and here we are."

  A metal door grated in i:s frame.

  As Tak stepped before him onto the tarred roof, he turned his head away from the cloud-colored dawn. After darkness, it was still too bright. Face scrunched against the light, he stopped on the sill, one hand on the jamb, the other holding back the ribbed and riveted door.

  Smoke lay waist-high on the air.

  He relaxed his face, blinking a lot.

  Beyond the brick balustrade, roofs and roofs checkered into the mist. The gap, there, must have been the park. Beyond it was a hill, scaly with housing. "Jesus." He squinted in the other direction. "I didn't realize this place was so far from the bridge. I'd just come o
ff it when you called to me down in the street."

  Tak chuckled. "No, you'd wandered pretty far."

  "I can just get a glimpse-" he stood on tiptoe- "of the river." And lowered himself. "/ thought it was just two, three blocks away."

  Tak's chuckle became a full laugh. "Hey, how'd you lose one sandal?"

  "Huh?" He looked down. "Oh ... I was being chased. By dogs." That sounded funny, too; so he laughed. "Yeah, I really was." He picked up his foot, rested it above his knee to examine the caked and calloused sole. The horny edge was cracked both sides. His ankle, knob and hollow, was grit-grey. Heel, ball, instep, and each dusty toe were gun-barrel black. He wiggled his toes: grit ground. "I guess it was-" He looked up frowning-"maybe a couple of days ago-" and put his foot down. "It was about three o'clock. In the morning. It was raining. No cars. So I took a nap on somebody's porch. About five, when it was getting light, I went back out on the road to hitch. But it was still raining. So I figured, hell, I'd go back and catch another hour or two, 'cause there weren't any cars. Only when I got back, there was this damn dog, who'd been sleeping under the porch all the time I'd been snoozing topside. He was awake now. And he started barking. Then he chased my ass down to the road. I ran. He ran. My sandal broke and went into a ditch somewhere-I just about didn't notice. While I was running, this old blue car pulled up-big, old lady driving, with her skinny husband, and the back seat full of children. I jumped in out of the rain, and we drove right across the border, into Louisiana! They were all off to spend the day with some other kid of hers who was at some army base." He stepped from the sill. "Bought me a good breakfast, too." The door creaked closed behind him. "But I guess that's when I first noticed I couldn't remember my name. She asked me for it and I couldn't tell her . . . But I don't think I've known it for a long, long time." And he was almost used to the light. "I mean, you don't go around thinking about yourself by your own name, do you? Nobody does-unless somebody calls to you by it, or asks you what it is. I haven't been around people who know me for ... for a while now. It's just something I haven't thought of for a long time, and somehow it's ... I guess just slipped my mind." He looked at the tops of his feet again, both filthy, one crossed with straps, one bare. "It doesn't bother me. Missing a sandal, I mean. I go barefoot a lot of the time."