Dhalgren

Nightmare, forearms across his knees, was watching them with interest. 'You really into this hero bit. Tourniquet, huh? That's pretty good. Yeah, I like that.'

Kid stood, about to look disgusted: pain shot up his calves from the minutes spent crouched. So he didn't look anything, walked to Denny's seat, and sat.

Across the aisle, the old man with his head in his coat collar, who had been on the bus when it had been going in the other direction, pretended to sleep.

'You okay?' Denny asked. 'You look…'

Kid turned to the boy (two others, a scorpion and a passenger, were just turning away): Denny rubbed beneath his nose, blinked his blue—

The memory of crimson eyes in the Emboriky's lobby made Kid open his mouth: the eyes that watched now, intently and compassionately, became horrible as the discovered significance of what he had forgotten. Surprise blotted another memory — he felt it fade from his mind, struggled to keep it, failed — of something passed in a looking glass. What could he have seen in a mirror? Himself? Nothing else? I'm mad, he thought: like echo, This is insane, he had said there. Stripped of context — what had happened in the department store? — he shook before what it could have signified. Why did I say, This is insane? Something shook in him. His head waggled.

'Kid…?' which Kid was desperately aware was not his name.

Denny's hand had been on his forearm. He knew because now it moved away. Released, he tried to remember having been held, fixed by the warmth that was fading, had faded. Denny rubbed his upper lip again.

Breathing heavily, Kid sat back in the jogging seat.

Outside, movie marquees passed in cryptic cavalcade.

4

Under high, electric notes, low, wet ones burbled and troughed and erupted. A metallic chord; another metallic chord. Between them: tape-hiss.

Kid cleared his throat; it became a cough.

'Yes?' Reverend Tayler held her pencil by both ends. 'Can I help you?'

'I'm hungry,' Kid said. 'Um…' He pulled his hands from the half-door's sill. 'Some… somebody told me you used to have a free supper here?'

'Oh, we discontinued that some time back—' Behind her, like revolving eyes, the spools turned.

Kid took a breath. 'Yeah, I know…'

'Did you fall… or hurt yourself?'

'Huh? No, I… no.'

'You're just hungry?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'Really, we're not providing that service any longer, you see. It was far too…' Now she let her eyes drop, sucked her teeth, and considered: 'Well, perhaps coffee? And…' She looked up. 'Maybe there's something… and you can sit down for a little while.'

'Yes, ma'am.'

Wheels and swivel roared and squeaked through the music as she pushed away her chair. 'Come with me.' She stepped to the door, fluttering black robes.

He stepped back while she came through, followed her across the vestibule—'Now, you understand I'm not establishing a tradition. Just this once: I am not opening up the Evening Aid Program again. This is for you tonight. Not for your friends tomorrow.' — and down a stairway.

'Yes, ma'am.'

At the bottom, Reverend Tayler turned on a caged worklight hung on a nail. A high windowsill, level with the street outside, went from blue to black. The heavy cord curved up the steps. 'Let's see what we have.'

Columns fanned thick shadows across the basement auditorium. Folding chairs were stacked by one wall. A half-collapsed sofa sat by another. Before the closed curtains of a stage was an upright piano, its works bare.

'We're having a service this evening in the chapel upstairs. In just a little while. Maybe if you feel up to it, you can come upstairs to the chapel and join us.'

Another high window was open. The slight gust made him look instead of answer. Three leaves jittered to the sill's edge; one spun, before falling. It ticked down the wall, clicked on the piled chairs, to stop at the scuffed linoleum, like an erratic tick-tocking at last run down.

'In here.' Reverend Tayler waited by another door.

Inside, she snapped on another worklight.

Across a long, newspaper-covered table, Kid saw a wall hung with pots, potato mashers, colanders, and shelves stacked with thick, church-kitchen crockery. 'We were able to get bread for a while, I mean in large quantities. So we could make tinned meat sandwiches — that's when we had Evening Aid. But we lost our source. Without the staff of life, such a program dries up quickly. Beans take too long to cook and I didn't have the help for it.' From a wall cabinet she took a can dotted with white paper where the label had been removed. 'Beef stew.'

He took it from her.

'Taking the labels off,' she explained to his questioning expression, 'is one minor way to discourage pilfering. I don't like to put locks on things. Snoopers look in on shelves full of blank cans, and don't know whether it's rat poison, motor oil, or green peas, I just have to remember what's where.' She tried to look sly. 'I have my own system. You must know how these camp stoves work if you've been here any length of time…?'

'Yeah,' wondering whether he should explain that he'd learned, however, on a camping trip when he was twelve.

'The urn there is hot. I keep it going all day. I'm sure I'm drinking too much coffee. Can I more or less leave you on your own? I've got to get back to my notes.'

'Sure. Thank you, ma'am.'

'Wash things up; and let me know when you leave?'

He nodded.

At the kitchen door, she frowned, dark and broad. 'You're sure you didn't have some sort of accident? I mean, you're all smudged up there on the side.'

'Huh? … oh, I'm all right now. Really.'

Setting her lips at a blunt, black roundness, she nodded curtly, and left.

Looking over the pans and pots, he thought: No can-opener, and panicked.

It lay beside the stove.

He twisted and twisted till the last metal scollop popped, and the can-top, lapped with gravy, began to sink. He looked at the stove, at the can; then something happened in his gut. He went in with fingers, shoved grease, meat, and vegetable chunks into his mouth, licked cold gravy from his hand, wiped what ran on his chin with his forefinger and sucked that.

His stomach bubbled, clamped twice, hard, and he had a mouthful of gas still tasting of Bunny's wine. Anticipating nausea, he stopped, for several deep breaths. Then he took the can out, sat on the sagging sofa, and pushed his hand back into the ragged ring.

He chewed and licked and swallowed and sucked and licked.

When the coppered inside was clean except for the bottom corner for which his middle finger had been too thick, he returned to the kitchen, rinsed the can, and let black coffee steam into it from the urn's plastic spigot. Hot tin between his hands made him aware of his dry left, his sticky right.

Back on the couch, holding it between his knees, he watched the steam and grew sleepy, tasted (hot, bitter) some, decided he didn't want it, and let his eyes close…

'Yes, he's right here,' Reverend Tayler was saying.

Kid blinked awake. He had put the coffee on the arm of the sofa before he drifted