Dhalgren

section over.

Denny started to beat his hands together.

'Just five times,' she said. 'Then shout I'll bring you in. Let's try it.' They did. Denny hooted like a choo-choo train, which broke Kid up laughing.

'Come on,' Lanya said. 'You guys don't have to overdo it!'

They tried again.

'That's it. Put your earphones on, and we'll lay it in.'

The rubber rims clasped Kid's ears and damped the room's silence down a level.

'I'm going to be playing something entirely different.' Lanya's voice was crisp and distant through the phones. 'But I'll signal you two in with my elbows.' She flapped one at them and put on her own phones. The vest swung from her sides. 'There we—' she turned on the tape. Momentarily the silence in Kid's phones crackled—'go.'

Kid heard Denny's chair leg squeak; but it was on the tape.

Then, a long note bent.

Over it, Lanya began, as the beat cleared, to rattle out, like insects, high triplets, first here, then up half a step, then down a whole one. Her mouth jerked across the organ and she dragged a growl up from the windy lower holes. Then jerk: bright triplets rattled. The old melody wound, beneath them and decorated by them: each time the third batch arrived, they thrust it into a new harmony, and toward Kid's and Denny's cadenced entrance:

Denny leaned forward, eyes wide, hands out and up, cradling an invisible globe. Kid's fingertips tickled his palm… His head was down, to feel the rhythm; his eyes were wedged at the top of his sockets, to watch her.

Lanya swung her whole body back and brought both elbows in to her sides.

Denny's globe collapsed.

Kid's palm stung. And stung again. And again. And again — the sound, and his head, rose — and again: his face burst with noise and sudden joy.

Through the phones, from under his own cry, the rough fabric of the ending, with the little trill falling into it again and again, secured in its foreign key, brought all to its proper close.

Denny, still seated, looked about to explode. And, after five seconds shouted: 'Whoop-eee!' and bounced in his chair.

'You like that, huh?' Lanya grinned over her shoulder, ran the tape back. 'I want to lay in one more track. You guys have to do the same thing again.' To Denny's frown, she explained: 'Because I want it to sound like a whole room full of people clapping, not just you two. See if you can shout on a different note. I mean, if you hooted high before, hoot low. And vice versa.'

'Sure,' Denny said. 'Where'd you learn to do this?'

'Shhh,' Lanya said. 'Let's just do it. I don't have too much to play on the harmonica this track. But don't let what I do throw you off.'

Kid nodded, pulled apart the phones at his ears — two rings of perspiration cooled — then let them clamp back.

'Here we go.' She glanced back. 'Ready?'

The crackle…

The chair squeak…

Then the long note, bending…

Lanya reinforced the first phrase with middle notes, dropped the harp from her mouth, took a step back, and whistled a phrase over the quiet beginning. One of the harmonicas, already recorded, took it up. Kid suddenly understood the movement between soft and loud built into the two tracks already down; Lanya whistled again. Again the harmonicas carried the whistling into their organ-like development. She put the harp to her mouth, gave some bass strength to another section, waited, glanced at Kid, at Denny. Another thirty seconds of music gathered itself together: suddenly she whistled shrilly, and her elbows came down.

Kid and Denny clapped.

So did Lanya, taking a large step back from the mike, bobbing her head and whacking the back of her harmonica hand against her palm. They clapped through the ringing five, and all shouted together with the voices already taped. Once more Lanya was at the mike, harp at her mouth, weaving high shatter-notes through the ending tapestry.

Then silence.

She said, softly, breathing hard: 'There…' and pressed a button. The tapes halted.

'Jesus…!' Denny stood. 'That's wild! Where'd you get the tape recorder? I mean, how'd you learn—'

'Paul borrowed it from Reverend Tayler for me.'

'You do a lot of that stuff before?' Denny asked.

'Nope.' Lanya took off her own earphones, hung them over the mike's jutting bar. 'It's just something I wanted to try out. I've worked with tapes before but-'

Kid said: 'Let's hear the whole thing!' Taking off his earphones, he came up beside her.

'What are you gonna call it?' Denny clacked, his earphones down on the table.

'— Watch it,' Lanya said. 'Those are delicate.'

'Sorry — What's its name?'

'For a while—' she ran her thumb across Kid's chest—'I was thinking of calling it Prism, Mirror, Lens. But then—' Denny disappeared in his ball of light; Lanya squinted, stepped back—'what with that big thing we saw up in the sky… I don't know. Maybe I'll just call it Diffraction. I like that.'

Holding his lips between his teeth, Kid nodded. 'Go on.' His lips came loose and tingled. 'Play it.'

Denny turned on like a frozen node of incandescent gas, moved center floor.

Tapes turned.

'Here we go…'

Denny stilled.

'…I want you to note—' Lanya lay her harmonica on the table, then raised one finger—'that something like that usually takes six or eight hours to do; we have been at this no more than two hours.'

From the speakers beneath the table, Denny's chair leg squeaked.

Kid put his own phones down softly and listened (thinking: Temporal diffraction? Two hours? It had seemed perhaps twenty minutes!):

The long note bent.

Somehow, lost in a machine, I have been able to grasp and strip from the body of experience three layers of living theme: she inscribed them with her music, laid them over one another so that, thinned by tape and transistors, their transparent silences and aural aggregates, as she, the inventor, conceived them, clear for me, the invented one, at last. (On the tape Lanya whistled and played with her own whistling, the harmonica cradling its brittle, upper notes with low, breathy ones.) Is that where it goes (thinking:) when it goes? This is melody and there-the shrill whistle which Kid realized now was the real, musical signal for the clapping to begin-which began! He listened to a room full of people clap in time. One of the tracks was heavily echoed and made the clapping seem to come from dozens. The claps mounted; a final clap, and the dozens shouted — among them he recognized his own voice, and Denny's, and Lanya's; but there were many others. Their shouts died over a discord no single harmonica could make.

But probably any three could.

The finale cleared in its higher, supporting key; trills of notes fell into, and trills of notes rose out of, the moaning chord. The sound clutched at him, tightened his stomach.

Lanya listened, arms at her sides, head down, frowning with concentration. The white pips of her upper teeth dented one side of her lip.

The piece ended.

She still listened.

Then Denny applauded and laughed. Another Denny, on top of him, shouted, 'Whoop-eee!' And Denny across the room, encased in light, said: 'Hey, you know we got company in here? Look back there…'

Lanya's head came up suddenly. She turned off the tape.

Denny's light was over near the darkened corner. 'Back behind the blackboard there.'

'Huh?' Kid stepped forward.