Dhalgren

Filament faced me, pursed her lips, inflated her cheeks, widened her eyes, and rattled her chains before her breasts, miming something I did not understand. Her cheeks exploded with more laughter. Lady of Spain, dragging Filament's arm, hauled her away.

Dollar pushed around me, grinning. 'Hey!' he called, 'What happened? Did you do it?'

Filament turned and repeated the mime.

Dollar — I'm not sure it meant more to him than it did to me — crashed back against the wall, holding his stomach and howling: 'Oh, wow…! You mean…? Really…? Wow…!' and followed them up the hall, his laugh shriller than either of theirs.

Then Tarzan stepped in from the service porch and said: 'Look, ladies, people are sleeping in the back room, huh?' There are twelve tones of voice in which you can say that: three of them would have gotten him an apology with muffled giggles. He chose, at random, from the other nine.

'Fuck off, man!' Dollar said, straightening. 'It's their nest too!' His had actually been the only laugh with edge to wake.

'Now look!' Tarzan said.

Sex between nest members is rare enough — I can think of six, no seven exceptions, including me and Denny — to make me wonder if basically I don't have here an exandrous and/or exogynous totem group. Most sex comes walking in, invited or not — and even-

'These bitches come running in here yelling and shouting! Somebody's got to tell 'em to keep—'

'Now you look,' Filament said. She had about as much use for Tarzan as he had for the other Caucasians in the nest. 'You may be Tarzan. But I am not Jane!'

'I'd fuck him,' Lady of Spain said. Black, and an occasional partaker in long, intense conversations with Jack the Ripper, for Tarzan she had acquired something of the apes' aura. (Because of this was she more tolerant of him?) 'I really would. But Tarzan don't fuck nothin'.' Only one of the twelve could make that come out right. She chose it with such ease, I hope he took a lesson.

'Aw, hey, now: I was just asking you to keep it a little—'

D-t, naked and half asleep, loomed in the back doorway, forearms high on the jambs, boney hips cocked askew, big hands (with their funny thumbs) and head hanging. The head came up and he blinked. 'Tarzan, when

tually walks out. The seventh exception was Filament's surprising (to me, anyway. Lanya says, 'Why were you surprised?' I don't know why I was surprised. I was surprised, that's all.) affair with a tall, Italian looking girl named Anne Harrimon, who, her first night here, took lights and chains and the name Black Widow. Always standing hand in hand, always sitting knee to knee whispering, running through the house giggling or asleep at any time in any room, one's head against the other's breast, one's breast beneath the other's hand, intense, innocently exhibitionistic, and almost wordless, they developed, within hours, a protective/voyeuristic (?) male circle that ran with them everywhere and that, incidentally, dissolved the apes for the duration (the two were not Tarzan's favorite people). After a couple of weeks, the Widow came to me and returned her chains. Those few minutes of conversation in the yard were the only time I really got to know her, decided I liked her; decided I would offer them back to her if I ever saw her again (recalling Nightmare and Lanya): she left. Filament was sad but did not talk about her; then returned to older ways. Seems to be the place to mention it: I once asked Denny why he had no nickname. 

'Nightmare used to call me B.J.,' he explained. 'Until I told him to cut it the fuck out. So I'm just Denny.' 

'B.J.? What did that stand for?' 

'I'll give you one guess.' 

'Oh,' I said. 'Hey, what is your last name, by the way?' 

'For a while it was Martin. Once It was Cupp. Depended on the foster family I was staying with.' 

Does the onomal maliability here make my own loss more bearable?

I went to sleep, you was complaining about something. Here it is with the sky all light, and you still at it?'

'I was just telling them to be quiet so they wouldn't wake you up!'

'Time for me to get up anyway, boy. And they did not wake me.'

'You see!' Dollar said. 'You see, all your yellin' and carryin' on makes more noise than—'

Filament put her hand on Dollar's chest and lowered her head. 'Now you just wait too.' She looked up again. 'Tarzan, you like living here, right?'

'What you mean?' Tarzan's chin jerked belligerently.

'She asked you,' Lady of Spain said, 'if you like living here. Or not.'

'Yeah,' Tarzan said. 'Yeah. I like living here. What are you gonna do about it?'

'I'm not gonna do anything,' Filament said. 'But you better. You better do the same thing Dollar is doing.'

'Huh?' Dollar said. 'What am I—?'

'And that is: Since you like livin' here, you better make a real effort to stay.'

D-t broke the silence with laughter. He shook in the doorway like a windy scarecrow.

'Man,' Tarzan said, 'now what are you laughin' at?'

D-t threw one arm around Tarzan's neck—

'…Hey, man!..'

— and, still laughing, dragged him down the hall, occasionally rubbing his knuckles on Tarzan's head, hard.

'…Hey, cut it out… hey, stop it; that hurts… damn it, nigger! Cut it out… hey, what are you… stop…!'

In the living room, D-t let Tarzan up.

'…what the fuck you doin'?' Tarzan rubbed both hands in his yellow hair.

'I'm just trying to see if your head is as hard as you keep on makin' out like it is, motherfucker! We got any coffee?'

Tarzan dropped one hand, rubbed harder with the other. 'Yeah, I… I think so. Somebody made up a pail about an hour ago.' He was still confused.

In the hall, Filament and Lady of Spain walked on. Behind them Dollar said: 'He don't got no right to talk to you like that.'

'He's got a right to talk any way he wants,' Filament said. 'He's just got to be set to listen afterward, that's all.'

'That's what I mean,' Dollar said; and so rarely do I agree with him about anything, I write this exception down so

idea around with me like a cyst on the tailbone for (how long is that?) and today (the known part of that) walking in the grey (grey, a grey I'm tired of noticing and noting; I'm exhausted with that grey; which is what that grey means to me) street, this memory: I was passing the table where somebody had left one of those transparent plastic glasses, three quarters full of white wine (in the back closet Raven found the saran tube full of them) with the window open behind it; the glare on the interface between plastic and wine suddenly diffracted like an oil-slick and the glass was full of color. If I moved one way or the other more than three inches, it became just greasy plastic full of urine-colored liquid. First I thought the prismatic movement would be lost as soon as I went. But for the next hour, whenever I walked through the kitchen, I could find the spot from which it looked like that again easily.

The idea stayed in my mind the same way, and I could find it just by passing near.