Dhalgren

and I weren't going to have sex. He wanted to show me something on his cock-some sore or something. And I felt all uncomfortable, like I'd been trapped into being something that I'm not. I mean given my choice of types- types and not individuals — I'd rather have a Georgia farm-boy any day. Not that I've ever kicked Bobby out of bed. But it was a strange dream.' 

My first reaction was that Tak, who had always seemed a pretty big man, became much smaller. Later I realized that the big man simply contained many componants, among them a small one.

Also wonder if writing about myself in the third person is really the way to go about losing or making a name. My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggests mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, or more upsetting, that the position of the characters will

It's not light yet. (Will it ever be?) Just returned from the third and what I hope is the last run on the Emboriki. Don't even want to write about this one. But, as usual, will. (At least, he said and can you hear the cap's, They Will Not Be Bothering Us Again. Tarzan's bizarly reflective comment (echoing something he heard from me?): 'It's easier here than any place else') Raven, Priest, Tarzan, and Jack the Ripper kept telling me, 'Man, don't take Pepper along!' 

'Anyone goes who wants to go,' I said. By the time we went, though, Pepper wasn't around anyway. Dragon Lady was waiting for us in front of Thirteen's; Baby, b.a. as usual, pimple-pocked and sullen, stood in the shadowed doorway. His arms slung through his chains, Adam sat on the curb, grumbling glumly. Cathedral, Revelation and Fireball had brought the cans of

have so changed by the book's end that the answers to the initial questions will have become trivial. (It is Troy, Sodom, Abel Cuyuk, the City of Dreadful

an ocean of smoke and evening. I tried to smell it, but my nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blurr. We neared the fogged pearl of one functioning lamp, and her face got all twisted. She stopped, turquoise, hem to knees, exploding high as her scarlet waist. 'Should we…? Oh, Kid! Do you know what they said!' 'Will you please…' I asked her. My throat hurt with running and the raw air. 'Will you please tell me what… what they said!'

Both hands came up to cage her mouth. She was a shower of sliver on metallic black. 'Someone, up on the roof of the bank: The Second City Bank — oh, a God-damn sniper!'

'Who, for Christ's sake?' I grabbed her small elbows and the hair shook around her head. 'Will you tell me who they got?'

'Paul,' she whispered. 'Paul Fenster! The school, Kid… everything!'

'Is he dead?'

Her head shook in a way that meant she didn't know. Her hands twisted silver cloth at her hips: scarlet bled

Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop — was it eight o'clock yet? — stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a long-haired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I'd left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please o please I can't I please don't let it

down from one; yellow snaked across her belly from the other. 'In the burning,' she said very quickly. 'In the fire… all your poems, the new ones; they burned…!' Her lips kept touching and parting, sorting more words, none of which fit. 'Everything, all of them… I couldn't…'

'Unnn…' Something went right into my stomach without using gut or throat for entrance, I said, 'Unnn…' She let go her skirt.

'That's… good I guess,' was all I could say. 'I didn't like them. So it's good they're… gone.'

'You should have kept them in your notebook! I was wrong! You should…' She shook her head. 'Oh, I'm so sorry!'

I started to cough.

'Look,' she said, 'I know half of them by heart anyway. You could reconstruct—' 'No,' I said.

'— and Everett Forest made that…' 'No. It's good they're gone.'

'Kid,' she said, 'what about Paul…? Up on the Second City Bank building. Were you…? Oh, please try to remember!' Then she started as though she'd seen something (behind me? above me? were my lights still on? I don't remember!), and turned. And ran, blazing gold a moment before shadow took her and I ran after, into the brush, feet crashing in leaves and ash. Her bright hem whipped back till she became some darker color. (Thinking: Who is in control of her? Who, less than fifty yards off, is following through the undergrowth, twisting the nobs, pushing the switches that change her from scarlet to ultramarine?) My bare foot passed

This morning Filament brought around a woman who I first thought was Italian and who became Black Widow this evening. Overheard her in a discussion in the back yard just now — one of the few here that has even veered near any politics outside the city: 'It's not that men and women are identical, it's just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of 'inate' differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strangth of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage.' I was impressed. But I have heard similar from Nightmare, Dragon Lady, Madame Brown, Tak, D-t, Bunny, even Tarzan. Is Bellona, then, that unbelievable field where awarenesses, of such an order, are the only real strangth? That they can occur here is what makes possible the idea of leaving for another city.

from concrete to grass. The night billowed and sagged. Did habit guide us through the maze of mists?

I saw the quivering fires.

The brass dish, big across as a car tire, had been dragged twenty feet over the ashy grass. I felt very high. Thought swayed through my mind, shattered, sizzled like water on coals. Something in the smoke—? I raised my arm.

Brass leaves, shells, claws — from the ornamented wrist band, over-long blades curved up around my hand. In the dish, small blue flames hung quivering over the red. Fire light dripped down the blades.

I took another step, flexing just the scarred fingertips.

Something tickled my shoulder.

I whirled, crouching. The leaf rolled down my vest, fluttered against the chains, brushed the worn place at my knee, spun on to the ground. Gasping, I looked up the leaning trunk. Above, shadow coiled in the bole of some major branch, struck away by lightning.

The air was still. But suddenly dead leaves I could not see thundered above, loud as jets. Holding my mouth