Dhalgren

eyes glistened.

'…do you know my…?' His voice hoarsened. 'Who I… am?'

Her face was not subtle; but her smile, regretful and mostly in the place between her brow and her folded lids, confused.

'You,' she said, full voice and formal (but the wind still blurred some overtone), 'have a father.' Her hip was warm against his belly. The air which he had thought mild till now was a blade to pry back his loins. 'You have a mummer—!' That was his cheek against her mouth. But she turned her face away. 'You are—' she placed her pale hand over his great one (Such big hands for a little ape of a guy, someone had kindly said. He remembered that) on her ribs—'beautiful. You've come from somewhere. You're going somewhere.' She sighed.

'But…' He swallowed the things in his throat (he wasn't that little). 'I've lost… something.'

'Things have made you what you are,' she recited 'What you are will make you what you will become.'

'I want something back!'

She reached behind her to pull him closer. The cold well between his belly and the small of her back collapsed. 'What don't you have?' She looked over her shoulder at him: 'How old are you?'

'Twenty-seven.'

'You have the face of someone much younger.' She giggled. 'I thought you were… sixteen! You have the hands of someone much older—'

'And meaner?'

'— crueler than I think you are. Where were you born?'

'Upstate New York. You wouldn't know the town, I didn't stay there long.'

'I probably wouldn't. You're a long way away.

'I've been to Japan. And Australia.'

'You're educated?'

He laughed. His chest shook her shoulder. 'One year at Columbia. Almost another at a community college in Delaware. No degree.'

'What year were you born?'

'Nineteen forty-eight. I've been in Central America too. Mexico. I just came from Mexico and I—'

'What do you want to change in the world?' she continued her recitation, looking away. 'What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you're searching for? What are you running away from?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'And nothing. And nothing. And… nothing, at least that I know.'

'You have no purpose?'

'I want to get to Bellona and—' He chuckled. 'Mine's the same as everybody else's; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.'

The next second passed.

'Really?' she asked, real enough to make him realize the artificiality of what he'd said (thinking: It is in danger with the passing of each one). 'Then be glad you're not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else's lost notebook: you'd be deadly dull. Don't you have any reason for going there?'

'To get to Bellona and…'

When he said no more, she said, 'You don't have to tell me. So, you don't know who you are? Finding that out would be much too simple to bring you all the way from upper New York State, by way of Japan, here. Ahhh…' and she stopped.

'What?'

'Nothing.'

'What?'

'Well, if you were born in nineteen forty-eight, you've got to be older than twenty-seven.'

'How do you mean?'

'Oh, hell,' she said. 'It isn't important.'

He began to shake her arm, slowly.

She said: 'I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I'm a good deal older then twenty-eight.' She blinked at him again. 'But that really isn't im —'

He rolled back in the loud leaves. 'Do you know who I am?' Night was some color between clear and cloud. 'You came here, to find me. Can't you tell me what my name is?'

Cold spread down his side, where she had been, like butter.

He turned his head.

'Come!' As she sat, her hair writhed toward him. A handful of leaves struck his face.

He sat too.

But she was already running, legs passing and passing through moon-dapple.

He wondered where she'd got that scratch.

Grabbing his pants, he stuck foot and foot in them, grabbing his shirt and his single sandal, rolled to his feet—

She was rounding the rock's edge.

He paused for his fly and the twin belt hooks. Twigs and gravel chewed his feet. She ran so fast!

He came up as she glanced back, put his hand on the stone — and flinched: the rock-face was wet. He looked at the crumbled dirt on the yellow ham and heel.

'There…' She pointed into the cave. 'Can you see it?'

He started to touch her shoulder, but no.

She said: 'Go ahead. Go in.'

He dropped his sandal: a lisp of brush. He dropped his shirt: that smothered the lisping.

She looked at him expectantly, stepped aside.

He stepped in: moss on his heel, wet rock on the ball of his foot. His other foot came down: wet rock.

Breath quivered about him. In the jellied darkness something dry brushed his cheek. He reached up: a dead vine crisp with leaves. It swung: things rattled awfully far overhead. With visions of the mortal edge, he slid his foot forward. His toes found: a twig with loose bark… a clot of wet leaves… the thrill of water… Next step, water licked over his foot. He stepped again:

Only rock.

A flicker, left.

Stepped again, and the flicker was orange, around the edge of something; which was the wall of a rock niche, with shadow for ceiling, next step.

Beyond a dead limb, a dish of brass wide as a car tire had nearly burned to embers. Something in the remaining fire snapped, spilling sparks on wet stone.

Ahead, where the flicker leaked high up into the narrowing slash, something caught and flung back flashings.

He climbed around one boulder, paused; the echo from breath and burning cast up intimations of the cavern's size. He gauged a crevice, leaped the meter, and scrambled on the far slope. Things loosened under his feet. He heard pebbles in the gash complaining down rocks, and stuttering, and whispering — and silence.

Then: a splash!

He pulled in his shoulders; he had assumed it was only a yard or so deep.

He had to climb a long time. One face, fifteen feet high, stopped him a while. He went to the side and clambered up the more uneven outcroppings. He found a thick ridge that, he realized as he pulled himself up it, was a root. He wondered what it was a root to, and gained the ledge.

Something went Eeek! softly, six inches from his nose, and scurried off among old leaves.

He swallowed, and the prickles tidaling along his shoulders subsided. He pulled himself the rest of the way, and stood:

It lay in a crack that slanted into roofless shadow.