Dhalgren

'What's in—' the reverberation halted him—'what's in here?'

'Go on,' and Tak was without face. He passed ahead of Kid. Each boot heel on the concrete cast back stuttering echoes.

It was very cool.

Blocked by eight-foot plank X's, spools big enough for underground electrical cable sat about the floor among twenty- and thirty-foot stacks of cartons. Kid passed two before he recognized what was wound on them.

Later he tried to figure out what the process of recognition had been. At the moment of seeing there was a period in which all emotions were dead, during which he had gone up to one — yes, he had put out his hand, pulled it back, and just stood there a long while.

In hanks, in dripping loops from the drum (hundreds of feet? Hundreds of thousands? And how many drums were there in the block-square warehouse?) the brass chain, set with prisms, mirrors, lenses, looped.

He stood before the ranked glitter, waiting for it to strike up some explanatory thought.

The end of the chain hung to the floor, where a few feet formed a full (c.300 stars?) Pleiades.

There was an open cardboard carton beside the spool. Kid bent down, pushed back the flap. They looked like copper beetles. He pushed his hand into the metal tabs, picked out one — there was a hole at one end — and tried to read what was embossed on it. The light was too dim, and the corners of his eyes were stinging.

On the carton, however, stenciled in white, was: PRODUCTO DO BRAZIL.

Kid stood.

Tak had wandered some forty feet down an avenue of cartons.

Kid's eyes had cleared to the dim light enough to make out the stenciling on the boxes piled around him.

FABRIQUE FRANCAISE

MADE IN JAPAN — the initial smudge must have been an 'M.'

IIPARMATA EAAENIKAI.

Kid turned back to the chain. He had begun his observations in curiosity, but what generated had so little to do with answers that even curiosity blanked.

'Tak!'

'What? Hey, come over here. You seen these?'

Kid sprinted up the aisle between the piled cartons.

Tak kicked back a board cover. Nails squeaked, and the echo rolled among pyramided crates. 'This is where you come to get 'em if you need any more.'

The holders inside the slats reminded Kid of the square cardboards on which eggs were racked.

Some dozen had been removed.

The ones remaining, the size of golf balls and the color of gun metal, were blistered with lenses. The switch-pips all pointed to the left side of the crate. To the right were the metal loops to link them.

Kid picked up his own projector, watched it swing on its chain.

'They don't have any batteries inside them,' Tak said. 'You have to get those from stores in the city.'

Stenciled across the Inside of the' crate top it said, 'SPIDER.'

On the crates piled around, Kid read:

DRAGON

LIZARD

FROG

BIRD OF PARADISE

SCORPION

MANTIS

MANTICHORE

GRIPHON

Kid lifted the corner of the holder. The layer beneath was full. 'There must be—' he frowned at Tak— 'thousands of them here?'

'I gotta get some stuff from upstairs,' Tak said. 'Come on.'

'Tak.' He looked at the myriad crates labyrinthed around. 'There must be thousands of these things here! Millions, maybe!'

Dust filled a slant column from the skylight's marbled panes.

Tak went to the metal steps against the wall. 'There's a whole lot of weird stuff in here.' He leaned over the banister, grinned at Kid, and started up.

'Hey.' Kid swung around the metal newel and followed him. 'What did you come here to get?'

'It's upstairs.'

The cardboard cartons piled by the wall were water stained. Plumbing rose beside them; the asbestos covering the pipes was mottled too.

'Here you go.'

They walked down the balcony. Kid ran his hand along the rail, looking out across the warehouse.

'This place always remind me of the last scene in Citizen Kane,' Tak said. 'This is what I want.'

Two bolts of… cloth (it was some sort of lame. Kid couldn't tell, in this light, whether it was gold or silver) leaned against the wall.

'For the dress?' Kid asked.

'She was talking about it, and I told her I remembered seeing some stuff lying around.' He picked up the bolt and unwrapped it. 'I don't know if this is what she wants. It's pretty special. Go on and explore, if you want. I'll give a yell when I'm leaving.'

Kid walked a dozen steps further, glanced back — Tak was still stretching out yards of cloth — then walked on.

The cartons near him — smaller and piled haphazardly — were stenciled with clumsy representations of zodiacal signs. He stepped around them. Another, opened like the box of tags downstairs, had been left in the middle of the plated walkway.

His own steps, even his bare foot, set off a metallic ring. The open top joggled with the shaking of the floor.

Diagonally across the cardboard was stenciled:

RED EYE-CAPS

He did not frown. All the muscles of his face urged him toward the expression. But something else was paralyzed. He squatted, pushed back the top.

They had probably all been stacked neatly together once. But movement had jumbled most of them. He picked up one. It was like a concave disk the size of a quarter, cut from a pingpong ball.

It was red.

He turned it in horny fingers. But it doesn't explain it, he thought. Then blinked, because his eyes were filled with water. It doesn't! Gooseflesh settled over his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, like gauze. What could anybody want with…

He blinked again.

The tear fell on the cap's matte surface. Where it spread, the color deepened to the luster of scarlet glass.

No: That was a double thought, with and without word, and hardly an overlap.

The cap cracked in his fingers.

He dropped it in the box, stood in a motion. He let out all his breath, took in some more, and swallowed in surprise at the echo.

He stepped back.

When do they put them on? When do they take them off?? Where do they put them… I would rather think (the thought kaleidoscoped and went lucid) that these have nothing to do, nothing to do