Dhalgren

Copperhead grinned and got

Walked around the streets this afternoon with Nightmare, listening to his reminiscences of Dragon Lady: 'Man, we used to do some freaky things, all the time, any time, anywhere, right in the middle of the fuckin' street, man, I swear.' We ambled; he pointed out doorways, alleys, a pickup truck parked on its axles—'Once with her sitting in the cab and me standing on the fuckin' sidewalk, a hand on either side of the door, and my head just in there, eatin' out all that black pussy — Baby and Adam running around someplace across the street-then I fucked her in the back there, on the burlap. Oh, shit!' — and where, by the park, she had pushed him up against the wall and blown him; where she used to make him walk down the center of the street with his genitals loose from his fly, 'with her sitting on the curb and doing things with her mouth, man, before I even got there, so I had a hard-on out to here!' He talks out these celebrations as though they are religious rituals recently banned. Forty minutes of this, before it hit me how lonely not only Nightmare is, but all of us here are: Who can I discuss the mechanics of Lanya and Denny with? I don't even have the consolation of public disapproval. He probably has never talked about any of this before. On the marble steps of the Second City Bank building (he tells me) he made her take off all her clothes—'Just like Baby, man. I mean people can go around in the street stark naked here, and it don't mean nothing.' — and urinate, while he stood behind her, one arm over her shoulder, catching her water in his palm. 'And once she made me lie on my back, you know, in the center of the pavement—' the incident illustrated with much gesturing and head-shaking as we search his memories out of the dry mist—'naked, man, and she just walked around and around and around me, a big woman!' (He repeats this last a lot, as though her circling defined some terribly necessary boundary on this wild terrain.) '…made me eat her out for half an hour, I swear, right—' he looks around, surprised—'here, man. Right here! It was just getting light, and you couldn't hardly see her…' As my attention drifted from his account, I thought of all the cliches about how to act among violent people, current among the non-violent: Rise to the first challenge or you'll be branded a coward for the rest of your stay; a willingness to fight gains the group's respect; once you beat him, the bully will be your friend. Somebody coming into the nest with these as functioning propositions would get killed! (Thinking: Frank?) Nightmare's shoulders rocked. His fists, wrists bound in leather, bobbed. He recounted hoarsely: 'She used to get me drunk and I'd have her suck me off, my ass up against any old, cold, God-damn wall, with my pants down around my fuckin' knees, and her tryin' to get two fingers up my ass — don't remember how she figured out I like that.' Suddenly he looked up, frowning. 'You think I was right?'

'Huh?'

'When we had that garden party back at the nest.' His meaty hand returned to the fresh scars down his arm. 'You think I done right?'

'Dragon Lady is her own woman,' I said.

Nightmare asked: 'What would you do if somebody pulled that shit on you?'

'I think,' I said, 'I would have cut their head off. Just messing up her arm for a couple of weeks — well, you both showed great restraint.'

'Oh.' His hand, knotting, slid down his chest to knuckle his belly, pensively.

'But nobody has ever pulled that on me,' I said. 'At least Dragon Lady hasn't, yet. So I still dig you both.'

'Yeah,' Nightmare said. 'Sure. I understand. But nobody would do you that way. They think you're too smart. They think they can talk to you. Maybe that's why I gave you the nest, you know?'

That surprised me.

'Yeah,' he went on, 'like I said: It's time for me to get out of this mother-fuckin', sad-assed excuse for a —'

Behind his voice, children's voices: we were passing the curtained windows of Lanya's school. Nightmare looked. The door was ajar on darkness; laughter, juvenile shrieks, and chatter…

I stepped up the curb over the gutter grate. Nightmare followed. I glanced back: his thick forehead skin creased in a squint; his lips pulled up and down from the whole (and one broken) teeth.

I stepped through the door.

On the table, above the empty chairs, spools glimmered and spun on the tape recorder. We watched a while, waiting. Beside me, Nightmare mauled and kneaded his bald shoulder, listening to the recorded noise in the vacated room. Scars, chains, and office, some thrust away, some new received, habits without correlatives, jumbled in the great bag of him, as though his achievements and losses completed a design mapped in the layout of the streets around us. Thinking: I may never see this man again after today, if all

own eyes, for somewhere in this city is a character they call: The Kid. Age: ambiguous. Racial origin: same. True name: unknown. He lives among a group (whose alleged viciousness is only surpassed by their visible laziness) over which he holds a doubtful authority. They call themselves scorpions. He is the supposed author of a book that has been distributed widely in town. Since it is the only book in town, that it is the most discussed work of the season is a dubious distinction. That and the intriguing situation of the author tend to blur accurate assessment of its worth. I admit: I am intrigued.

Today I cut down the block where I'd heard the scorpions had their nest. 'What kind of street do they live on?' In the grammar of another city, that sentence would hold the implication: What kind of street are they more or less constrained by society to live on, given their semi-outlaw status, their egregious manner and outfit, and the economics of their asocial position? In Bellona, however, the same words imply a complex freedom, a choice from hovel to mansion — complex because every hovel and every mansion sustains through that choice some remnant of our ineffable catastrophe: In any house here movement from room to room is a journey from a place where twin moons have cast double shadows of the window sills upon the floors to a place where once, because the sun had grown so immense, no shadow was cast at all. We speak another language here. Is the real importance of his pamphlet that I've been browsing over all morning that, unlike the newspaper, it is the only thing in the city written in this language? If it is the only thing said, by default it must be the best thing. Anyone sensitive to language, living in this mess/miasma, must applaud it. Is there any line in it, however, that would be comprehensible outside city limits?

Five were sitting on the steps. Two leaned against the wrecked car at the curb. Why am I surprised that most of them are black? The flower-children, whose slightly demonic heirs these are, were so emphatically blond, and the occasional darky among them such an emphatic mark of tollerence! They were not sullen. There were three girls among them, one an ebullient young black girl, capped with a large natural and vastly pregnant. They wore chains, some as many as fifteen strands, some as few as two. They were dirty and gregarious. They smiled and talked a sort of quiet half-talk to one another. Boots, leather vests — no shirts—

This remains with me from my last conversation with Tak about Calkins and the party: 'I had the funniest dream last night, Kid. Not that I particularly care what it means — I interpret other peoples' dreams and just try to enjoy my own. Anyway, I had this little black kid, about thirteen or fourteen, up at my place — Bobby? I think you were catching a nap there once when he came by. In the dream, he was just standing there in a T-shirt, with half a hard-on. (Half a hard-on on Bobby goes out to here!) Suddenly I looked up and George was coming across the roof toward the door, as though he'd just come up for a visit. When he stepped in, he saw us. All the posters of him across the wall, I think but I'm not sure, were staring at us too. And he had this sort of mocking look that said, 'So that's what you're after.' And I felt very guilty. Oh, the point of it was that in the dream Bobby

and chains made them look like some 'cycle club in, Coventry. A tall, skinny, black boy on the top step had a gallon of wine between his boot heels which periodically passed on its way to the curb and back. The white

guy with no vest and the scarred stomach was the only one who wiped the neck — with a hand so grubby the other colored girl, tall and hefty, refused to drink after him. The others laughed as if her rebuke contained more than was apparent. They did not look at me as I strolled on the other side of the street. It is rumored that these men and women can transform themselves in darkness to any one of a gallery of luminous beasts; that they have weapons to turn the slung fist into a five-way cutting tool. I wonder if anyone that I saw there was the Kid—