Dhalgren

VI: Palimpsest

'… just watch out. Oh, yeah, you just better watch out. I know. I know.' He wagged his finger, backed away, talked Spanish. Then: 'They gonna get you—'

'Look, man,' Kid said. 'Will you—'

'It's all right. It's all right. You just watch out, now. Please? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' His thick neck sweated. He tugged at the wool. 'I'm sorry. You just lemme 'lone, huh? They gonna…' Suddenly he looked around, turned, and lumbered into the alley.

'Jesus Christ.' A smile hovered about Denny's face. 'What… was that about?'

'I don't know.' One book had fallen on the sidewalk. The other leaned against the curb.

'I mean this guy just comes up and starts to push you like that. I thought you were gonna hit him.' Denny nodded heavily. 'You should've hit him. Why'd he just want to come up and start messing on us like that?'

'He didn't mess on you any.' Kid picked up the books and put them back under his belt.

'He's just crazy or something, huh?'

'Come on,' Kid said. 'Yeah, he's… crazy.'

'Jesus Christ. That's really funny. You ever see him before?'

'Yeah.'

They walked.

'What was he doing then?'

'Just about the same thing… one time. The others? He was pretty normal.'

'A nut,' Denny pronounced, and scratched his groin inside both pants pockets. 'She lives over there. I thought you knew already. She didn't tell you?'

'No.'

Denny wrinkled his nose. 'All this shit in the air. I don't think it's very healthy, you know? What's the matter?'

Kid had stopped, to hook up a section of the chain across his stomach. A glass circle distorted the pad of his thumb into a zebra's flank: dirty troughs whorled the flesh.

'She lives right over there,' Denny reiterated, warily.

'All right.'

In step, they angled into the street.

'She got a nice place.'

A tension held, suspended: Kid wished he could examine it more closely: defract, reflect, magnify…

They turned the corner and went down the empty street. 'Looks like rain, doesn't it?' Denny said.

'It always looks like rain.'

'It doesn't feel like rain.'

'It never feels like rain.'

'Yeah, you know, that's right?' Denny hopped up the concrete steps, holding the aluminum rail. 'It never does!'

Kid followed, surveying the three-story facade. Denny thumbed the bell.

'They live on the top floor. The first two floors are empty so people won't think anyone's in the building.'

'It's a good idea not to attract attention, I guess.' Kid contemplated asking who was the rest of 'they' when footsteps clacked on a stairway.

'Who is it?' asked a woman. Voice familiar? He wondered from where.

'I'm a friend of Lanya's. I'd like to see her.'

The peephole darkened. 'Just a second.'

The door opened. 'You know, I didn't recognize your voice at first,' Madame Brown said. 'How have you been, Kid?' She took in Denny: 'Hello. It's nice to see you again… Denny, isn't it?' Her neck glittered.

'Lanya's living with you?' Kid, shocked, was unsure why.

'Um-hm. Why don't you come inside?'

Somewhere above the first landing, Muriel barked.

'Hush!' Madame Brown commanded the air. 'Hush, I say!'

The dog barked three times more.

'Come in, come in. Pull the door behind you. It locks itself.'

They followed her up the steps.

'I think,' she let fall behind, 'Lanya's asleep. Even with her school we've both been having an incredible time keeping to any sort of schedule. I don't know when she went to bed. I suspect it was rather late.'

'She'll want to see me,' Kid said. He frowned at the back of Madame Brown's red rough hair.

'Oh, I'm sure she will.'

They rounded the first landing.

Muriel, visible now, barked again.

'Hush! Now hush up! These are people you know, dear. It's Kid. And Denny. You played with Denny for hours the last time he was here. Don't carry on like that.' She reached for the dog's muzzle; Muriel quietened. 'Did I say Lanya was asleep? I doubt it after all that. Naughty! Naughty!'

Denny was looking up and down and sideways — not like somebody who'd played there for hours. Candlesticks were everywhere: three on a small table beneath a framed portrait, an iron brace full in the corner, two more on the windowsill between white curtains dulled by the sky behind.

'You got electricity here?' Kid asked.

'In two rooms,' Madame Brown explained. 'Oh, the candles? Well, we're so near Jackson, we thought we better have them around, just in case.'

Two rooms away, unlit: a wall of books, a desk, an easy chair.

'That's my office in there,' Madame Brown commented on Kid's stare.

Which brought his eyes to more candleholders in the next room. 'Um… this is really a nice place.'

'There're some marvelous houses all through this area, if you just look. They're not hard to find at all. Though I suppose we were lucky with this one. Most of the furniture was already here.'

'The rent must be a steal,' Kid said, 'if you don't mind the neighborhood.'

'Oh, we don't pay any—' After an emotionless moment (Kid stopped and Denny bumped into him) she laughed, loudly, shrilly. 'By the way, congratulations on your book! Mary Richards showed me a copy the other day. She just tells everybody about how she knows you now.'

'Yeah?' He'd intended the smile to be cynical; but pleasure pushed him into joyous, goofy sincerity. 'She does?'

'She reads people passages out loud after dinner. I'm sure if you came by, you'd get a positively ebullient welcome.' She raised an eyebrow. 'You really would.'

'Maybe from her,' Kid said. 'Not from him. Don't you think those people are…?' and, watching her, decided to let it drop.

But she took it on:

'What is it that writer all you youngsters were reading here a few years ago was saying: 'The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.'

Collected Poems 1930–1950, Stones, Pilgrimage, Rictus, The Dynamic Moment, A Sense of Commencement and The Charterhouse of Ballarat, all by Ernest Newboy, were book-ended at the back of the desk with two African statuettes. The last three volumes together were twice as thick as the first four.

'Well, they're not at my hand. I mean, I don't hold your friends against you. I got some pretty strange ones myself.'

'I didn't think you did, which is one of the reasons I like you. And they haven't done anything to me… yet.'

The 'yet' challenged him to possibilities. It also tested his reticence. So he asked, 'How'd you and Lanya get… together here?'

'Oh, she's a fine roommate! Energetic, lively… It's nice to have someone so sharp around. When I had to