Dhalgren

'It's a real event when he brings out two papers with consecutive dates. They're never two in a row with the same year. But sometimes he slips up and Tuesday actually follows Wednesday — or do I have that backward? Well, I'm just surprised people don't take bets; trying to pick the next date for the Times could be the Bellona equivalent to playing the numbers. Oh, he's got real news in there — articles on evacuation problems, scorpions terrorizing remaining citizens, what's happening in the poorer communities, pleas for outside help — even an occasional personality article on newcomers.' Tak gave him a knowing nod. 'You read it; but it's the only paper around to read. I read it up here. John, Wally, Mildred, Jommy — they read it down in the park. Still, it makes me incredibly hungry to see a real paper, you know? Just to find out how the rest of the world is getting on without us.'

Did Tak's voice veer, once more, toward that unsettling tone? Only by suggestion, he realized, and realized too: The longer he stayed, the less of that tone he would hear. Whatever request for complicity, in whatever labyrinth of despair, it made of the listener, whatever demand for relief from situations which were by definition un- relievable, these requests, these demands could only be made of the very new to such labyrinths, such situations. And time, even as he munched flat bread, was erasing that status. 'The rest of the country, it's fine.'

Tak turned, with the knife.

He jumped, even though he knew Fire Wolf was only in the midst of some domestic slicing. 'Yesterday, I think it was: I got a ride with a guy who had an L.A. paper in his car. Nothing's wrong on the West Coast. Then later, two women picked me up; and they had a Philadelphia paper. The Eastern Seaboard's all okay.' He looked down at the papers on the bench again, watched his thick, nail-gnawed fingers grub there, leaving crumbs, margarine tracks, jelly stains. 'This is the only place where…' He shrugged, wondering if Tak took his news as good, bad; or even believed it. '…I guess.'

'Why don't you pour some coffee?' Tak said.

'Okay.' He stepped around the armchair, lifted the enameled pot from the burner; the handle stung his knuckle as he poured.

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.

'We'll eat inside.' Above the plates of eggs, ham, and bread, two amber ponies rose on the tray between Tak's gripping thumbs. As Tak turned to the bamboo, the brandies ran with light.

Inside, sitting on the bed again, he lay his plate on his clamped knees till it burned. Lifting it by one edge, then the other, he speared ham chunks from the gravy, or pushed them on his fork with his thumb.

'It's amazing what Worcestershire will do for dehydrated eggs,' Tak said through a mouthful of food, 'Thank God.'

He bit a tiny die of garlic; in his stinging mouth the scrambled flavors bloomed; the confusion of tastes recalled many good things, but gave no basic flavor (his plate was half clean already) to which he could fix his tongue.

'Since this is supper as well as breakfast—' seated at the desk, Tak poured himself another glass—'I guess brandy is all right.'

He nodded, the amber bulb lost in his outsized fingers. 'It's really good.' He looked back at his plate and wished there was a vegetable; even some lettuce.

'You have any plans where you'll go?' Tak finished his second pony, poured another, and extended the bottle.

He shook his head to the drink and shrugged at the question.

'You can catch some sleep here.'

Idly, he thought: Artichokes. Then he looked at the posters. 'You're really into the S and M thing, huh?' He hoped the food in his mouth would muddle the comment.

'Mmm?' Tak's coffee chattered as he sipped. 'It depends on who I'm with.' He put his cup on the desk, opened the side drawer, reached in: 'You ever seen one like this?'

It was an orchid.

The blades, twice as long as his, with greater curve, were brass. On the ornate band, brass leaves, shells, and claws gripped the bases of the damasked knives.

Tak placed the points around his left nipple, pressed, winced — let the weapon drop to his lap. 'Not your thing, huh?' In the yellow hair, flushed points ringed his breast 'It's a beautiful object.' He smiled, shook his head, and put it back in the drawer.

'Can I put my brandy in my coffee?'

'You can do anything you like.'

'Oh, yeah.' He spilled the glass over the steaming black. 'Uh… thanks.' He raised the cup. Brandy fumed about his face. A deep breath made his tongue stagger in his throat. 'It's a very nice breakfast.' Squinting eyes observed his from beyond the cup's bottom.

He drank, set the cup on the floor, thumbed the last of the ham onto his fork; still chewing, he set the plate down by the cup.

'More brandy?'

'No, thanks.'

'Come on.' Tak poured himself a third glass. 'Relax. Take your shirt off.'

He had known what was coming since he'd accepted the invitation in the park. Another time, he would have had some feelings about it. But feelings were muted in him; things had drifted to this without his really considering. He tried to think of something to say, couldn't, so unbuttoned the three buttons, pulled the tails from his pants.

Tak raised his eyebrows at the optical chain. 'Where'd you get that?'

'On my way here.'

'Outside the city?'

'It says 'Made in Brazil'… I think.'

Tak shook his head. 'Bellona has become a city of strange—' he burlesqued the word with a drawl—'craftsmen. Ah, the notions that are engineered here! Orchids, light-shields, that chain you're wearing — our local folk art.'

'I'm not going to take it off!' The conviction surprised him; its articulation astounded him.

Tak laughed. 'I wasn't going to ask you to.' He looked down at his chest, ran his forefinger, in the hair, from one pink dot to the next — still visible where he'd pressed the orchid prongs. 'You've got some nerve thinking you were ever any crazier than anybody else.'

His shirt lay beside him on the bed. He pulled his hands together into his lap, fingers and knuckles twisted around one another — scratched his dark, creased stomach with his thumb. 'Look, about… being nuts.' He felt self- righteous and shy, looked at the doubled fist of flesh, hair, horn and callous pressed into his groin; it suddenly seemed weighted with the bones in it. 'You're not, and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think… you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see… until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts… Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense — stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety — is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself… in a way other people just can't.' He pushed his shirt down to the foot of the bed, pushed his sandal free of his foot with his other toes. 'You see?' He was far more conscious of the texture of the floorboards with the foot that had been bare.

'All right.' Tak spoke gently and appeasingly. 'Why don't you take the rest of your clothes off?'

'Look, I'm awfully dirty, man—' He raised his eye. 'I probably stink like hell. If you don't want—'

'I know just what you stink like,' Tak said. 'Go on.'

He took a breath, suddenly found it funny, lay back on the hard pallet, unhooked his belt, and closed his eyes.

He heard Tak grunt. One, then another boot, thumped the floor and fell over.

A moment later a warm hip pressed his. Palms and fingers pressed his stomach; the fingers spread. Tak slid his hands to the jeans' waist, tugged.