Dhalgren

optical chain. 'I see all the people running around wearing these things. Him…' He nodded at Kid. 'You see all of them walking around with them. Come on, gimme that one. I'm gonna be a hippie too and wear them little glass beads.'

'Ohh!' She complained, 'George!'

'You give me those, and you can get some more, right?'

'No honey.' She lifted them from his fingers. 'You can't have these.'

'Why not?'

'Cause you can't, that's all.'

'You know where to get them. You just give me these, and you go get yourself—'

'Not these, honey.' She shouldered back into the bend of his arm. 'You tell me what else you want and I'll give you that, okay?'

'Well, that's what I want!'

'Oh, George.' She snuggled, closer — and out of his line of sight.

'All right, you just watch it. I may not get them now, but I'm sure gonna get them later.' Harrison guffawed.

The gaunt girl smiled, but raised her hand where ribs and sternum ridged her skin, and covered the chain with her small, brittle-looking palm.

'What is all this?' Kid asked. The books pressed one of the prisms into the top of his left buttock. Uncomfortable, he shifted. The prism dragged. 'I mean, what's everybody doing here? And the preacher—?'

'Got to give the preacher lady a place to preach!'

'She sure been going on,' the gaunt girl said. 'She just don't stop.'

'This here is my house,' George said, with a grave nod. 'Got a lot my friends in here, you know? And you welcome, too. Any time. Got me an apartment downstairs. Some of the rooms upstairs people done fixed, you know? This is the big meeting room, like. The preacher lady, see, she figure after this afternoon, she wouldn't be able to fit 'em all in the church. So we say, come on and we gonna open up the big meeting room. And you just put a sign out say everybody come on over.'

'I think that's real nice,' Plump Pink said in an accent that, during three weeks at the Georgia border loading melons, Kid had learned to identify as South Alabama Flats. 'She always preaching about George and telling everybody about George. So I think it was very nice of George to say why not come on and do it here.'

'Don't look to me like there any more people than she could fit in the chapel,' the girl said.

'We got a bar over there—' the blond woman turned up her hand to point—'where you fellas can go get a drink. Then you can go listen to the preacher lady. George just wants everybody to make themselves at home.'

'Shit,' George said. Then he laughed.

Glass laughed too; the blond woman looked satisfied, did something with two fingers under the flowered cotton of her bodice, smiled.

'Gotta give the preacher lady a place to preach,' George repeated. He nodded, dropped the gaunt girl's waist.

'Who lives in this city?' Reverend Amy's voice came on through a lull. 'Logicians love it here!' George turned to listen. So did the gaunt girl and Glass. 'Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you. What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated plurima. No, Che, no Fanon, you are not niggers enough! Look—' Once more she waved her fist high. Her black sleeve flung out below it. 'I have a handful of monads here. Listen — They're chattering and gossiping away like eight-operation logic-cells calling up order from a random net…' At the mention of Che an (unrelated? Kid wondered) wave of noise had started in one corner of the hall. Now another, which had at its center crashing bottle glass, rose over her voice. On the brown scape of the Reverend's face, a constellation of droplets gleamed on each temple. Her mouth moved, her head bent, her head rose; her eyes sealed, snapped open, stared intently; and again Kid could hear none of her dithyramb.

He did hear George chuckle. Harrison stood with his hands in the pockets of his dirty khaki slacks.

Glass, a few steps away, was craning to see something over somebody's head. The blond woman was shouldering her way forward with smiles and 'excuse-me's,' right and left; the gaunt girl stood, pensive, still watching the preacher, her left hand on her right shoulder, looking pained and picturesque.

'You know your girl friend was outside looking for you again,' Kid said.

'Yeah?' George said. 'Which one?'

'A little blond seventeen-year-old white girl.' The sweat, Kid realized, was not just under the books. The shoulders of his vest slid on it. The backs of his knees and the skin under his jaw were wet. 'She was outside, asking… asking for you: 'Is George Harrison in there? Is George inside?' '

George's nose and cheeks like sanded teak, his heavy lips wrinkled as hemlock bark, the planes around his off-ivory teeth and eyes, moved into an expression fixed loosely among irony, amusement, and contempt: It was the expression on Tak's first poster. 'Lots of little white girls come around here looking for me.'

'Her name rhymes with moon, and she—' Kid's right fist clamped, fingertips and knuckles scraping his jeans—'she killed her brother for you: George? She had your poster, all big and black and naked and he saw it, her little brother. He saw it and was teasing her — you know how little brothers are, George? He was teasing her and he was gonna tell on her, you see? He was gonna tell her mother, tell her father: only she was afraid if he did, they'd know — know that it wasn't just a picture; know that she'd found you once; know that she was trying to find you again! See, they'd already threatened to kill her older brother. Already. And he'd run away. So she pushed him, her little brother, down the elevator shaft — sixteen, seventeen, eighteen stories down…! I don't quite… remember!' Kid shook his head. Something that was not pain pulsed in it, pulsed in it again. 'Oh, Christ, there was… blood! I had blood all over me. I had to pull him up out of the basement, by the armful! And carry him back upstairs. After he was dead. But… it was for you! That's why she… that's why she did it! That's why I…' What pulsed became pain. 'She told me herself. She told me that she was afraid he was going to tell. And that she…' Kid stepped away, stepped again, because the first step was unsteady and he had to catch himself on the second. He looked back.

George watched, as if from a long hall whose walls moved with indifferent faces, black and brown.

His eyes will explode like blooming poppies, Kid thought. His teeth will erupt like diamonds spat by the mouthful. His tongue will snake the yards between us, nearly touch my mouth before it becomes pink smoke. Steam in two columns will hiss down from his nostrils…

George stared with — and recognizing it, Kid suddenly turned away and lurched away — the indulgence reserved for the mad.

Is this, Kid thought (saying, 'Hey, I'm sorry, man…' and patting someone's shoulder he'd just bumped), one of those moments that, momentarily, will slip out of mind to join my purpose, age, and name? He made it between those two; then somebody, laughing, steadied his arm and handed him on. He came up against the thin metal bars with his cheek and both hands, clutched them, leaned back, looked up:

Someone was coming down the spiral stairway. The fat, bald man (whose skin looked now more like oiled wrapping-paper) in the bib-overalls, descended, by Kid, stepped from ringing, black, triangular steps that circled the central pole, up, around, and up through the open square in the balcony floor—

When Kid looked down again, the man was working sideways through the people wandering about the center of the room.

'You all right?'

'Yeah, I…' Kid looked around.

'Good.' Glass, with a bobbing walk, almost slow motion, came toward him. 'I was just wondering. You know…?'

'I'm all right…' But he was cold; the sweat was drying on his neck, his forearms, his ankles. 'Yeah.'

Glass ran his thumb along his belt. Vinyl flapped back from the appendectomy scar in his dark, matte skin, swung over it again.

Multiple Caucasian laughter fell down through the spiral railing.

Glass and Kid looked up together, looked down together.

A lantern high on the wall brushed soft highlights on Glass's arms, slapped harsh ones on his vest, and slipped a line of light along an orchid petal against his chained and chain-lapped chest so bright Kid squinted.