Dhalgren

last two lines ('cannot' became 'can't'), and closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.

Then he stood.

Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He shook his head, and finally managed to get the world under him at the right angle. The back of his legs were cramped: he'd been in a near-fetal squat practically half an hour.

The dizziness gone, the cramps stayed with him for two blocks. As well he felt choked up in his breathing. That put him in touch with a dozen other little discomforts that he had ignored till now. So that it was not for another block after that he noticed he wasn't afraid.

The pulling in the back of his right shin, or the mental disquiet? He gave up pondering the preferable, looked at a street sign, and noticed that Brisbain N had become Brisbain S.

Click-click, click-click, click-click: realizing what he was doing, he put the pen in his shirt pocket. Along the street, beside him, was a stone wall. The houses across from him, porched and lawned and spacious and columned, all had broken windows.

The car — a blunt, maroon thing at least twenty years old — grumbled up behind.

He'd jumped, in surprise, turning.

It passed, leaving no impression of the driver. But two blocks ahead, it turned in at a gate.

Willow fronds draped the brick above him. Walking again, he ran two fingers along the mortared troughs.

The gate was verdigrised brass, spiked at the top, and locked. Ten yards beyond the bars, the road got twisted up in the shaggiest pines he'd ever seen. The brass plate, streaked pink with recent polish, said: ROGER CALKINS

He looked through at the pines. He looked back at the other houses. Finally he just walked on.

The street ended in brush. He followed the wall around its corner into bushes. Twigs kept jabbing beneath his sandal straps. His bare foot went easier.

In the clearing, someone had piled two crates, one on another, against the brick: children after fruit or mischief?

As he climbed (notebook and paper left on the ground) two women behind the walls laughed.

He paused.

Their laughter neared, became muffled converse. A man guffawed sharply; the double soprano recommenced and floated off.

He could just grasp the edge. He pulled himself up, elbows winging. It was a lot harder than movies would make it. He scraped at the brick with his toes. Brick rasped back at knees and chin.

His eyes cleared the top.

The wall was covered with pine needles, twigs, and a surprising shale of glass. Through spinning gnats he saw the blunt pine tops and the rounded, looser heads of elms. Was that grey thing the cupola of a house?

'Oh, I don't believe it!' an invisible woman cried and laughed again.

His fingers stung; his arms were trembling.

'What the fuck do you think you're doing, kid?' somebody behind him drawled.

Shaking, he lowered, belt buckle catching a mortice once to dig his stomach; his toes hit at the thin ledges; then the crate: he danced around.

And went back against the wall, squinting.

Newt, spider, and some monstrous insect, huge and out of focus, glared with flashbulb eyes.

He got out an interrogative 'Wh…' but could choose no defining final consonant.

'Now you know—' the spider in the middle extinguished: the tall redhead dropped one freckled hand from the chains looping neck to belly—'damn well you ain't supposed to be up there.' His face was flat, his nose wide as a pug's, his lips overted, his eyes like brown eggshells set with tarnished gold coins. His other hand, freckles blurred in pale hair, held a foot of pipe.

'I wasn't climbing in.'

'Shit,' came out of the newt on the left in a black accent much heavier than the redhead's.

'Sure you weren't,' the redhead said. His skin, deep tan, was galaxied with freckles. Hair and beard were curly as a handful of pennies. 'Yeah, sure. I just bet you weren't.' He swung the pipe, snapping his arm at the arc's end: neckchains rattled. 'You better get down from there, boy.'

He vaulted, landed with one hand still on the crates.

The redhead swung again: the flanking apparitions came closer, swaying. 'Yeah, you better jump!'

'All right, I'm down. Okay—?'

The scorpion laughed, swung, stepped.

The chained boot mashed the corner of the notebook into the mulch. The other tore the newspaper's corner.

'Hey, come on—!'

He pictured himself lunging forward. But stayed still… till he saw that the pipe, next swing, was going to catch him on the hip—was lunging forward.

'Watch it! He's got his orchid on…!'

He slashed with his bladed hand; the scorpion dodged back; newt and beetle spun. He had no idea where they were under their aspects. He jammed his fist at the scaly simulation — his fist went through and connected jaw-staggeringly hard with something. He slashed with his blades at the retreating beetle. The spider rushed him. He staggered in rattling lights. A hand caught him against the cheek. Blinking, he saw a second, sudden black face go out under newt scales. Then, something struck his head.

'Hey, he cut you, Spitt, man!' That was the heavy black accent, very far away. 'Oh, hey, wow, Spitt! He really cut you. Spitt, you all right?'

He wasn't all right. He was falling down a black hole.

'The mother fucker! I'm going to get him for that—'

He hit bottom.

Pawing across that leafy bottom, he finally found the remnants of a thought: His orchid had been hanging from his waist. No time had he reached down to—

'Are… you all right?'

— slip his roughened fingers into the harness, fasten the collar about his knobby wrist…

Someone shook him by the shoulder. His hand gouged moist leaves. The other was suspended. He opened his eye.

Evening struck the side of his head so hard he was nauseated.

'Young man, are you all right?'

He opened his eyes again. The throbbing twilight concentrated on one quarter of his head. He pushed himself up.

The man, in blue serge, sat back on his heels. 'Mr Fenster, I think he's conscious!'

A little ways away, a black man in a sports shirt stood at the clearing's edge.

'Don't you think we should take him inside? Look at his head.'

'No, I don't think we should.' The black put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

He shook his head — only once, because it hurt that much.

'Were you attacked, young man?'

He said, 'Yes,' very thickly. A nod would have made it cynical, but he didn't dare.

The white collar between the serge lapels was knotted with an extraordinarily thin tie. White temples, below grey hair: the man had an accent that was disturbingly near British. He picked up the notebook. (The newspaper slid off onto the leaves.) 'Is this yours?'

Another thick, 'Yes.'

'Are you a student? It's terrible, people attacking people right out in the open like this. Terrible!'

'I think we'd better get inside,' the black man said. 'They'll be waiting for us.'

'Just a minute!' came out with surprising authority. The gentleman helped him to sitting position. 'Mr