Dhalgren

myself. Tell me.'

She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: 'What do you think of the Richards, Kid?'

'I don't know…' Then I said: 'She's frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won't hold. But that's sort of heroic, too. Him? He's despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit.' Then I asked: 'Do they even know you're black?'

'Yes. Of

Lanya surprises me once more: The whole nest out in the yard, and she asks, 'Hey, how come Kid is the head scorpion in this nest? I mean Nightmare was before, and then Kid. I would have thought you'd have a black running things.' 

'Yeah,' Tarzan says. 'Me too.' While everybody else looks like they'd never thought anything of the kind. But I have; so I waited. 

Finally Glass laughs: 'Well, of course Nightmare was sharing it with Dragon Lady. But I think more or less everybody has got it in their head that after one of these runs or other, the shit is gonna come down. Hard. When it does, you gonna see some niggers fade in the night like nobody's business. But the chief scorpion, maybe, ain't gonna be able to fade quite so fast. So that if this dumb-ass white motherfucker-' Glass put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a big grin, ' — wants to stick around here and play superman, ain't no nigger with any sense gonna stand in his way. I mean the guy in charge is the one who gets zapped. At least, that's the way it works anyplace else…' Glass squints up at the sky. 

Copperhead seemed to think it was funnier than anybody else.

course they do.'

'I'm surprised.'

'I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards.'

'Do they know you're gay?'

Madame Brown moved in the chair and Mmmed again, negatively. 'Let me see,' she said after a moment: 'Black, lesbian, I'm also very middle class.

Fireball said: 'He's white? I didn't know that. He's darker than I am!' 

'Man,' Glass said, 'the Kid is an Indian.' 

'Now I didn't know he was white,' Fireball repeated. 'He' crazy as a nigger.' 

Tarzan gave me a smile that dribbled strychnine. 

'An' he sure likes his little blond brothers and sisters.' Fireball (whose spade accent, more than any one else's, comes on and off for the occasion) pointed to Lanya and Denny. (Denny laughed.) 'The Kid is really something else, man. Really something.' (Lanya was pensive.)

And Mary and Arthur are my friends. But I wish sometimes I didn't think you were so right. It would make my life much easier. But then, I've never particularly wanted an easy life, really.' She sighed. 'I do find this in myself, Kid: When I occasionally get ex-asperated with Arthur or Mary, especially when they're going on about you, I wonder to myself — quite honestly — what they would say if I told them some of the things you've actually done- just for the upset it would cause. At that point, I tell myself it's because I 'approve' of you and don't 'approve' of them.'

'If you wanted to upset them, you could tell them some things about June, about Bobby and… what's his name? Eddie.'

'Of course, you side with the youngsters—'

'No,' I said. 'I'm nearly thirty years old. And I wouldn't swear to which side of it I'm on, from what some people tell me. I'm not taking sides; I'm just pointing out some upsetting areas in their life that are a little closer to home.'

'To the Richards's home. What about yours?'

'You were going to tell me what you thought about the Kid. Maybe you'll tromp on something and I'll twitch for you.'

'All right. I think…'

I looked at her leg.

'…you are very disturbed. You are personable, intelligent, forceful, vital, talented. But your basic ego structure is about as stable as a cracked teacup. You say you've lost bits and pieces of yourself? I think that's exactly what's happened. The point is, Kid, we still don't treat the mentally ill as though they were just sick. We treat them as though they were some strange combination of unclean, depraved, and evil. You know, the first mental hospitals in Europe were leprosaria, deserted all over the continent at the end of the middle ages because-for some reason we still don't know — there was a spontaneous remission in the disease over about seventy-five years, though it had been endemic for the last three thousand. Was it rising hygiene standards? A mutation in the germ? The point is that till then, though they had occasionally been shipped about on local rivers, the insane had never been hospitalized before. But when they were suddenly confined in these immense, empty buildings that, in some cases for hundreds of years, had held lepers, they took on as well the burden of three thousand years of superstition and fear connected with that unfortunate disease. And a good argument can be made that that's still more or less how we regard you today — complete with religious connotations. Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents have lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold. Tell me, what would you say to the idea that all your problems — the hallucinations, the depressions, even the moments of ecstasy — were biogenic? That the lapses of memory are an RNA depletion in the lower cortex; that the sudden fears are adrenal disruptions caused by random pituitary spasms; that the unreality that plagues you is merely a pineal cyst, inhibiting the production of serotonin?'

I looked up on the moonscape where there were no trees.

'That's sure as hell what it feels like,' I said.

'Then, you differ from the businessmen, in that they are usually rather reluctant to give up any of the extra- biological significance of their symptoms. The over-determined human mind would rather have everything relevant, even if the relevance is simple-minded.'

'When I was in the hospital—' remembering, I smiled—'I used to have a friend who'd say: 'When you're paranoid, everything makes sense.' But that's not quite it. It's that all sorts of things you know don't relate suddenly have the air of things that do. Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern.' Once more I looked at her leg. 'Only you never know which inch to move it…' I felt my face wrinkling over my skull with concentration.

She said: 'Your dream. Can you think why you particularly wanted to tell me about it?'

I looked at my lap; 'I don't know. I've just had it on my mind a long time.'

'You mean it isn't a recent dream?'

'Oh, no. I had it… I don't remember when; while I was still staying in the… park?'

'And it isn't a recurrent dream?'

'No. I only had it once. But it… I just keep thinking about it.'

One hand at her necklace, she fingered a lens. 'I asked you this before, but I want to check: In the dream, you made love, had an orgasm, and then went to the cave. It wasn't just a heavy necking session?'

'No. She came first. I remember it surprised me, because I was just about ready myself. I finished up about thirty seconds after she did — which is unusual with me. Usually it takes me a couple of minutes longer. When I shot my load, leaves blew against my side. And I opened my eyes and we talked for a while.'

Madame Brown mulled, a glass bead pressed to her chin. 'I was on a research team that did a study some years ago-dirty old lady that I am-about sex dreams. We had, admittedly, a small sampling — two hundred and thirty-nine; they'd all checked yes to the question: whether they felt they had satisfactory sexual outlet. We had men, women, a few late adolescents; some homosexuals, of both sexes. One overwhelmingly consistent pattern was that when sex, in a dream, led to actual orgasm, either the dream ended or the subject awoke. Of course there