Dhalgren

'Oh. Okay. And thanks.'

'Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I'm sure.' Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time diesel.

He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion bobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.

Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.

Her calves were smooth.

His heart, beating fast, slowed.

Her calves were unscarred.

He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.

Her calves had no scratch.

When he took his hand away, she made some in-slumber sound and movement. And didn't wake. He opened today's paper and put it on top of yesterday's. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline:

MYSTERIOUS RUMORS!

MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS!

Would your editor ever like some pictures with this one! We, unfortunately, were asleep. But from what we can gather, shortly after midnight last night — so far twenty-six versions of the story have come in, with contradictions enough to oblige our registering an official editorial doubt — the fog and smoke blanketing Bellona these last months was torn by a wind at too great an altitude to feel at street level. Parts of the sky were cleared, and the full — or near full — moon was, allegedly, visible — as well as a crescent moon, only slightly smaller (or slightly larger?) than the first!

The excited versions from which we have culled our own report contain many discrepancies. Here are some: The full orb was the usual moon, the crescent was the intruder.

The crescent was the real moon, the full, the impostor… a young student says that, in the few minutes these downright Elizabethan portents were revealed, he made out markings on the full disk that prove it was definitely not our moon.

Two hours later, someone came into the office (the only person so far who claims to have caught any of this phenomenon through an admittedly low-power telescope) to assure us the full disk definitely was the moon, while the crescent was bogus.

In the six hours since the occurrence (as we write, into the dawn), explanations offered the Times have ranged from things so science-fiction-y we do not pretend to understand their arcane machinery, down to the all-purpose heat lightning and weather balloon, perennial explanation for the UFO.

I pass on, as typical, one comment from our own Professor Wellman, who was observing from the July gardens with several other guests: 'One, we all agreed, was nearly full; the other was definitely crescent. I pointed out to the Colonel, Mrs Green, and Roxanne and Tobie, who were with me, that the crescent, which was lower in the sky, was convexed away from the bright area of the higher moon. Moons do not light themselves; their illumination comes from the sun. Even with two moons, the sun can only be in one direction from them both; no matter which phases they are in, if they are both visible in the same quarter of the sky, both should be light on the same side — which was not the case here.'

To which your editor can only say that any 'agreement,' 'certainty,' or 'definiteness' about these moons are cast into serious doubt — unless we are prepared to make even more preposterous speculations about the rest of the cosmos?

No.

We did not see it.

Which leaves us, finally, in this editorial position: We are sure something happened in the sky last night. But to venture what it was would be absurd. Brand new moons do not appear. In the face of the night's hysteria, we should like to point out, quietly, that whatever happened is explicable: things are — though this, admittedly, is no guarantee we shall ever have the explication.

What seems, both oddly and interestingly, to have been agreed on by all who witnessed, and must therefore be accepted by all who did not, is the name for this new light in the night: George!

The impetus to appelation we can only guess at; and what we guess at we do not approve of. At any rate, on the rails of rumor, greased with apprehension, the name had spread the city by the time the first report reached us. The only final statement we can make with surety: Shortly after midnight, the moon and something called George, easy enough to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on Bellona.

2

'What are you doing,' she whispered through leaves, 'now?'

Silent, he continued.

She stood, shedding blankets, came to touch his shoulder, looked down over it. 'Is that a poem?'

He grunted, transposed two words, gnawed at his thumb cuticle, then wrote them back.

'Um…' she said, 'do you mean making a hole through something, or telling the future?'

'Huh?' He tightened his crossed legs under the notebook. 'Telling the future.'

'A-u-g-u-r.'

'Whoever wrote this notebook spells it different on another page.' He flipped pages across his knees to a previous, right-hand entry:

A word sets images flying from which auguries we read…

'Oh… he did spell it right.' Back on the page where he had been writing, he crossed and recrossed his own kakograph till the bar of ink suggested a word beneath half again as long.

'Have you been reading in there?' She kneeled beside him. 'What do you think?'

'Hm?'

'I mean… the guy who wrote that was strange.

He looked at her. 'I've just been using it to write my own things. It's the only paper I've got and he leaves one side of each page blank.' His back slumped. 'Yeah. He's strange,' but could not understand her expression.

Before he could question it with one of his, she asked, 'Can I read what you're doing?'

He said, 'Okay,' quickly to see what it would feel like.

'Are you sure it's all right?'

'Yeah. Go on. It's finished anyway.'

He handed her the notebook: his heart got loud; his tongue dried stickily to the floor of his mouth. He contemplated his apprehension. Little fears at least, he thought, were amusing. This one was large enough to joggle the whole frame.

Clicking his pen point, he watched her read.

Blades of hair dangled forward about her face like orchid petals, till—'Stop that!' — they flew back.