Dhalgren

beneath the ceiling like smoke. George mounted into it.

At the bottom of the stairs Lanya said, 'Where've you been?' and blinked four or five times more than he thought she would have, in the silence.

'I… I couldn't find you this morning. I looked for you. I couldn't find you. At the commune, or down at the bar. What happened? Where did everybody go?'

Her eyes questioned. Her lips moved on one another, did not open.

'You want some coffee?' he asked out of discomfort, turned and went into the kitchen. 'I'll go get you some coffee. It's all ready, inside.'

At the urn, he picked up a cup, pulled the lever. 'Did you see Tak too? How'd you know I was here?' Amber bubbles burst at the rim; black liquid steamed. 'Here you—' He turned and was surprised that she was right behind him.

'Thank you.' She took the cup. Steam flushed before her lowered eyes. 'I saw Tak.' She sipped. 'He said you might be here. And that Mr Newboy was looking for you.'

'He just left. He had my book. The galleys, for the poems. The type's all set.'

She nodded. 'Tell me what you've been doing.'

'It was a pretty funny day.' He poured coffee for himself, deciding as he did he had already had too much. 'Really funny. After you went off, I looked for you. And I couldn't find you anywhere. I stopped in the john to wash up. When I got down to the camp site, I couldn't find you. And everybody'd run off.' He put his hand on her shoulder; she smiled faintly. 'I got in with some scorpions this afternoon… this evening. That was pretty strange. A guy got shot. We were on the bus, and he was bleeding. And I kept on thinking, what are they going to do with him? Where are they going to take him? There isn't any doctor around. We even had his arm in a tourniquet. I couldn't take it. So I just got off the bus. And came here. Because I was hungry. I hadn't had anything to eat all day except a God-damn pint of wine for breakfast.'

'You ate here?' She looked by both his shoulders. 'That's good.'

'What did you do?'

She was wearing a white blouse, clean but unironed, that he had not seen before. As she walked beneath the bulb, he saw her jeans were new enough to show the crease. 'You pick up some clothes this afternoon?' He followed her into the bare auditorium.

'Yesterday. I found them in a closet of the place where I'm staying now.'

'You have been busy, huh? You found a house an' all?'

'About three days ago.'

'Jesus,' Kid said, 'when did you get time to do that? I didn't think I let you alone long enough to go to the damn bathroom, much less find a house—'

'Kid…' She turned on the word to lean against the sofa arm. In the hall, shrill echoes returned. 'Kid,' much more softly, 'I haven't seen you in five days!'

'Huh?' The heel on the floor and the heel in his boot prickled. Prickling rose up his legs, spread about his thighs. 'What do you mean?'

'What do you mean what do I mean?' She spoke clumsily, breaking through three tones of voice. 'Where have you been?' Retreating from the clumsiness, her voice was left only with hurt. 'Why did you go away? What did you do all this time?'

Little things clawed between his buttocks, mounted rib by rib, perched on his shoulder to nip at his neck so he had to drop his chin. Lines of perspiration suddenly cooled. 'You're kidding with me, aren't you? Like with the moons?'

She looked puzzled.

'The night when the moons first came out, and later we were talking about them; you pretended that there had just been one, and that I had been seeing things. You're fooling with me like that now?'

'No!' She shook her head, stopped it in the middle of a shake. 'Oh, no…'

His cheeks felt like pincushions.

'Kid, what happened since the last time you saw me?'

'We woke up, when those sons of bitches were standing around us, right?'

She nodded.

'Then you went away, and I… well, I hung around for a little while, and then I went down to the john to wash up. I guess I took an awful long time. I should have hurried… But there was this guy there, Pepper, a scorpion.' The prickling had left his feet: it felt as though he were being poured full of cold water. It rose behind his knees. 'Pepper and me, we went down to the camp site, only it had been abandoned.'

'John and Milly didn't move the commune till the day after I saw you last; they thought it would be safer.'

'Then we went to Teddy's to look for you. Only it wasn't open yet. And I had a lot of wine with Bunny — you know the guy who dances there. I gave him a message for you.'

She nodded. 'Yes, he gave it to me… the day before yesterday!'

'No,' he said. 'Because I gave it to him this morning.' The water reached his loins, poured into his scrotum; his scrotum shriveled. 'Then I went out, and ended up at that department store downtown. That's where I met the other guys, and we broke into the place. There were people living in there. We got out. But they shot one of the guys. We just got him out of there, on the God-damn bus that happened to be coming along!'

'That happened two nights ago, Kid! Some of the scorpions came into the bar and wanted to know if anybody knew where they could get a doctor. Madame Brown went with them, but she came back in about ten minutes. Everybody was talking about it all yesterday.'

'He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!' The water roared around in Kid's chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. 'I got off the bus, and I came—' He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown. ' — came here.' The water reached his eyes, (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.

He kept rubbing at his eyes with one hand.

Something burned the knuckles of the other: coffee had slopped over.

He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.

'Oh, give that here!' She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. 'I'm not fooling you!'

His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.

Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. 'I'm not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven't seen you since!'

At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.

'Look, you said Mr Newboy was here with the galleys. You can't set type on a whole book overnight, can you?'

'Oh…'

'When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too.'

'Talking about me?' He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.

'About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody's life.'

'Huh?'

She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.

The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and there was a hard thing over one breast — her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. 'Oh, for God's sakes,' she whispered.

'I'm not fooling you either!' He didn't sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. 'I saw you this morning. I… I thought I saw you this morning.'

'You've been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you're some kind of hero or something.'