Dhalgren

'What are you here for?'

Tak held up a paper roll. 'Completing my poster collection. You been keeping yourself away from us a while? We were worried about you.'

'Shit!' fell from the residue of anger. 'You wanted to suck on my dick some, maybe? Come on. It's all slicked up with pussy juice. You like that, right?'

'Nigger pussy?'

'Huh?'

'Were you screwing a colored girl? And with the clap?'

'What are you talking about?'

'If it wasn't black meat and a little runny, I'm not interested. Since I had you last time, boy, I've gone on to levels of perversion you haven't thought about. What's the matter with you, anyway? You out of it again? Why don't you come up and tell me about it while I get drunk.'

'Aw, shit…' Not wanting to, Kid put his hands in his pocket and his head down in the night's chalky stench; they walked together to the curb.

'Your girl friend find you?'

Kid grunted.

'Did you have a fight or something? The last few times I spoke to her, I got the impression she was sort of getting ready for one.'

'Maybe we did,' Kid said. 'I don't know.'

'Ah, one of those?'

'She said you saw me get off a bus?'

'Yeah. Earlier this evening. I was down at the corner. I was going to call to you, but you turned first, down toward here.'

'Oh.'

A light moved in a window.

Fire, Kid thought. The flickering made him uneasy. He tried to imagine the whole block, the church and the buildings around it, conflagrated.

'I think somebody lives there,' Tak said. 'It's just candles.' They stepped off the curb.

'Where are we?' Kid asked when they stepped up again. 'I mean, Tak… what is this place? What happened here? How did it get like this?'

'A good question,' Tak answered over tapping boot heels. 'A very good one. For a while, I thought it was international spies — I mean, maybe the whole city here was just an experiment, a sort of test-out plan to destroy the entire country. Maybe the world.'

'You think it's something like that?'

'No. But it's comforting to consider all this the result of something organized. On the other hand, it could just be another ecological catastrophe. Maybe somebody filled in our swamp by mistake.'

'What swamp?'

'By every big city there's always some sort of large swamp nearby, usually of about the same area. It keeps the smog down, supplies most of the oxygen, and half a dozen other absolutely essential things. New York has the Jersey Flats, San Francisco, the whole mudded-out Oakland edge of the Bay. You fill the swamp in, the smog goes up, the sewage problem gets out of hand, and the city becomes unlivable. No way to avoid it. I think it's fair to say most people would find this unlivable.'

Kid sniffed. 'We sure got enough smog.' The blades at his belt tickled the hair on his inner forearm. 'Where's our swamp?'

'Obviously you've never taken the ride out past Holland Lake.'

Kid shrugged in his bindings. 'That's true.' The chain that wrapped him had worked down so that it rugged across the back of his left hip at every other step. He reached under his vest and moved it with his thumb. 'Do you think that's what happened to Bellona?' Some day I'll die, turned irrelevantly through his mind: Death and artichokes. Heaviness filled his ribs; he rubbed his chest for the reassuring systolic and diastolic thumps. Not that I really think it might stop, he thought: only that it hasn't just yet. Sometimes (he thought), I wish I couldn't feel it. (Someday, it will stop.)

'Actually,' Tak was saying, 'I suspect the whole thing is science fiction.'

'Huh? You mean a time-warp, or a parallel universe?'

'No, just… well, science fiction. Only real. It follows all the conventions.'

'Spaceships, ray-guns, going faster than light? I used to read the stuff, but I haven't seen anything like that around here.'

'Bet you don't read the new, good stuff. Let's see: the Three Conventions of science fiction—' Tak wiped his forehead with his leather sleeve. (Kid thought, inanely: He's polishing his brain.) 'First: A single man can change the course of a whole world: Look at Calkins, look at George — look at you! Second: The only measure of intelligence or genius is its linear and practical application: In a landscape like this, what other kind do we even allow to visit? Three: The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long enough to have an adventure. Here in Bellona—'

'Maybe that's why I don't read more of the stuff than I do,' Kid said. He had had his fill of criticism with Newboy; the noise was no longer comforting. 'Wasn't there a street lamp working on this block?'

Tak bulled out the end of his sentence: ' — in Bellona you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by yourself, or get your friends to.'

'It's funny, not that many people have that much.'

'A comment on the paucity of our imaginations — none at all on the wonders here for the taking. No — it's a comment on the limits of the particular mind the city encourages. Who wants to be as lonely as the acquisition of all those objects would make them? Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else. You learn something from that.'

'You've got more than practically anybody else I know,' Kid said.

'Then you know very few people.'

'Except Mr Calkins.' Kid thought about the Richards. 'And I don't know him.' But Tak had seen Mr Newboy earlier. Tak would know his book was set.

'There's a whole range between,' Tak said. 'You've limited your acquaintances to the people who don't want very much. Essentially a religious choice, I suppose. All things considered, I'd say it was a wise one. There are a thousand people — perhaps — in this city.'

'I did meet one family who—'

'There are many others. And most of them, as Paul Fenster keeps reminding us, are black.'

'George Harrison just told me I should come over and visit him in Jackson.'

Tak beat the darkness with his poster. 'There! The whole thing. Paul will tell you, but George will show you, if you give him half a chance.' Now Loufer sighed. 'I'm afraid I'm still pretty much a verbal type. I'd just as soon be told.'

'And look at posters.'

'And read books. Preferably science fiction. But like I say, Bellona is terribly hospitable. You can have your fantasy and… well, besides eating it too, you can also feel just a bit less like you're depriving anyone else of theirs. Home again.'

Kid looked around with blunt thumbs of darkness on his eyes. 'We are? Tak, didn't there used to be a street light working at the end of your block?'

'Went out a few days ago. This way. Watch out for the steps. There's all sorts of junk around.'

Some of it rolled beneath Kid's flexible leather sole. Soft darkness turned hard. The echo from the sound of breath and footsteps changed timbre.

They went through the hall, went downstairs, went up.

'First time you were up here,' Tak laughed, 'I made you park your weapons at the door. Boy, I don't know how some people put up with me.'

The roof door opened on distant, flesh-colored light.