Dhalgren

Going back to the loft bed, I thought it would be nice if Lanya had stopped by and was waiting with Denny (knowing she wouldn't because I'd thought about it); she hadn't.

Up in the loft, I lay on my back for a minute; then I rolled over and hit Denny on the shoulder. He woke up. 'What?' 'Smell my dick,' I said.

'Huh…?' Then he made a disgusted sound, sat up, bent down, and sniffed. My fly was open.

Denny looked up, frowning. 'You got dandruff in your crotch.' He wrinkled his nose. 'Who is it?'

I laughed.

'The girl they got in the back, Risa.' I grinned at him. 'You get some?'

'Oh… I went in there before while you were asleep. It was mostly girls in there then. I didn't do nothing.' He settled again on the bed, his back to me.

Looking up at the ceiling, I began to fall asleep: the kind of falling where you watch yourself do it, and everything gets all tingly and you sink among the tingles.

And woke up with Denny on top of me, my arms across his back. He was breathing in short gasps, face against my neck, rubbing off on my belly. Wondered why I'd bothered to wake him up before with that routine which was pretty much calculated to turn him on. I didn't stop him, but I was annoyed; so when I began bad-mouthing him (growling into his hair: '…come on, you two-bit cocksucker; come on, you scrawny, shit-ass bastard…') it was real: he shot pretty quick. But by then I had a hard-on again. I was actually sort of digging him just lying there on top of it. But he got down to suck me off. I guess I'd wanted him to do that when I first woke him up; now I didn't. 'Don't waste your time,' I told him, dropping my chin to watch the top of his head. 'Can't you just go to sleep?' But he kept working (and playing with my asshole which I'd mentioned Nightmare mentioning to me) and I shot. He crawled back up beside me, and I held him around his belly with his back to me (like a warm dog) while he occasionally squirmed like he'd be more comfortable on the other side of the bed (yeah, like trying to sleep with a dog) while I wondered: If I'm starting to have to fantasize girls in order to come with guys, maybe I'm not as bisexual as I keep telling myself?

I know: I'm a closet monosexual.

My speech changes when I talk to different people; I go from 'ain't' to 'aren't', 'yes' to 'yeah', from a fixed to a formless diction. With Lanya, a lot of the time, it gets playful, arch. With others, it flattens. When I'm upset, it punctures with dozens of noise nodes: 'you know's', 'I mean's', and 'sort of's'. I left behind me a whole vocabulary and syntax at the colleges I passed through, which began to come back with Newboy, Kamp, that interview, and with Calkins at the retreat.It's lability, not affectation; a true and common trait. But if I tried to write down what I say as I move from speech context to speech context, it would read like lack of character, not a characteristic. I note all the eccentric words around me: Glass used the word '…radically…' this morning and several times I've heard Lady of Spain refer to an '…entity…' while among the others I've heard '…sententious…', '… caravan…', and '…conspicuous…' go by. But when I transcribe the conversation around me, I find myself purposely playing down the verbal range of it, so that it does not read like post-literate affectation…which it isn't. George's speech can't even be written down for the common reader; Throckmorton (at the party) speaks only in inane combinations of serial phrases that become satires on themselves as soon as they are recorded but that, during utterance, make miracles of communication. I suppose I'm just getting frustrated by what written words can't do. This afternoon, Gladis, wholely pregnant and half smiling, said through the kitchen screening: 'You got no…' paused and interjected three syllables of Jaughter '…know what I can see it in here. can I?' What marks of ellision, inflection, and melody could make that sound, or the sense of it, intelligible on paper?

Spent that afternoon trying to figure that one out. 

I strip and bleach so the faint pattern-ings of a real voice will show through; and end with something artificial as a henna job. And Calkins, determined not to read, waits for my next book in this jargon called the written word I've been stuck with!

Oh yeah. While he was blowing me, I stopped him in the middle and asked him what he was thinking about — to be a bastard. Very honest and very surprised, he told me Dollar (I flashed on the moment with Risa when our pet murderer went through my mind) which got me a little mad. But that's what I get. I note here (because sex does have something to do with love) Denny's said he loves me six times now, admitted it almost under his breath with this hung expression as though he was daring himself to say it — it always comes off the wall when we're busy doing something else: moving the couch across to the other side of the front room, chucking junk into the yard across the fence, or when I was trying to help Cathedral bend the motorcycle's kickstand back into shape. I don't really know what I feel about him, but I'm glad as hell one of them stays here. (I guess I wish it was Lanya; she's more interesting, in or out of bed… which isn't really the point; really, I just wish she was here.) When I woke up, he had wriggled out of my arms and was curled up in the corner against the walls.

When I got up and went into the living room, most of them were still asleep. Fireball sat on the edge of the couch eating something out of a cup with a spoon. He stood up when I came in (Filament with, oddly, Devastation were tucked together on the couch behind him; the pale Black Widow, with the dark Lady of Spain curled against her, slept on the floor among Tarzan-and-most-of-the-apes) as though he wanted to speak to me. I nodded.

Walking with Lanya today, I told her that She beamed: 'Yes, he's said it to me a half-dozen times too. It's charming.' 

'I don't know,' I said. 'I don't think so. I mean, I don't understand it. He loves you. He loves me. What the hell does that mean?' 

She looked surprised, even hurt Finally she said: 'Well — when somebody uses strange words to you that you just do not understand, you have to listen for the feeling and get at the meaning that way!' 

'I think,' I said after a moment, 'it may mean, when he says it he's going to leave me before you do — who say it so much less frequently.' 

'You think he'll leave us?' Me/us — it struck like that 'Give him a reason to stay. I've tried.' 

'That's a hard one, even in much simpler situations. I wonder if it just has to do with the kinds of people we're familiar with. To you, I'm replaceable. I'm a nice ape, who even happens to be more interesting inside than out I think one of the most interesting things to you Is the way the machinery jerks around by stops and starts. Like you say, though, you've known geniuses before. Ifs nothing new.' 

'Well!' 

'Denny, I think, is the first Denny you've ever known. For you, he's unique — whereas for me, everything from the foster homes he's lived in to the rhythm he bucks his ass at, the protective brutality, and even that well of playful sweetness you can never touch bottom in, the hard-headedness good and bad: sweet and fucked-up as he is, there're many, many, many of him floating around.' We turned the corner. 'Now for me, you're the irreplaceable one: I've never seen you up so close before, and I do not understand you at all. You say sometimes I act like I don't see you? I don't even know where to look! Living with you around is like like living with a permanent dazzle. The fact that you even like me, or look at me, or brush by me, or hug me, or hold me,

He nodded back. He didn't seem to be able to start, though, so he ate another spoonful.

'Come here,' I told him.

Still shoeless, he stepped over a confusion of feet — the Widow's dull black Wellingtons: Cathedral's floppy brown suedes. I put my hand on his shoulder. 'You like Dollar, don't you?'

Fireball said: 'He's a pretty funny little guy. But he's really okay, huh?' The scrawny, rusty-haired coon had a sleepy half-smile. His eyes looked like circles cut from our sky, tossed into the evenly milky coffee of his face.

'Good,' I told him. 'You look out for him. You make sure he doesn't get into any trouble around here, you hear?'

The smile wavered—

'Somebody's got to. And I'm tired of it. So you do it now. You hear me?'