Dhalgren

Bobby ran through the room; Mrs Richards yelled at him.

Arthur Richards said something else.

Cream, spreading through the puddle in the bottom of his dish finally met glass all the way around. 'I think I'm going to have to go soon.' He looked up.

The gold knot of Mr Richard's tie was three inches lower on his shirt.

Had he loosened it when Kidd was not looking? Or did he just not remember? 'I have to meet somebody before it gets too late. And then…' He shrugged: 'I want to get back here to work early tomorrow morning.'

'Is it that late?' Mrs Richards looked disappointed. 'Well, I guess you need a good night's sleep after all that furniture-moving.'

Madame Brown put her linen napkin on the table. (Kidd realized he had never put his in his lap; it lay neatly, by the side of his stained and spotted place, a single drop of purple near the monogrammed R.) 'I'm feeling a little tired myself. Kidd, if you could wait a minute, I wish you'd walk with me and Muriel. Is there coffee, Mary?'

'Oh, dear… I didn't put any up.'

'Then we might as well go now. Kidd is anxious. And I certainly don't want to be out on the streets any later than I have to.'

Downstairs, somebody laughed; the laughter of others joined it, till suddenly there were a series of thumps, like large furniture toppling, bureau, after bedstead, after chiffonier.

Kidd got up from the table — held the cloth in place this time. His arm still hurt. 'Mr Richards, were you going to pay me now, or when I finished the whole job?' Getting that out, he was suddenly exhausted.

Mr Richards leaned back in his chair. His fists were in his suit coat pockets; the front chair legs lifted. 'I imagine you could use a little right now.' One hand came out and up. A bill was folded in it; he'd been anticipating the request. 'Here you go.'

'I worked about three and a half hours, I guess. Maybe four. But you can call it three if you want, since I was just getting started.' He took the dark rectangle; it was a single five-dollar bill, folded in four.

Kidd looked at Mr Richards questioningly, then at Madame Brown, who was leaning over her chair, snapping her fingers for Muriel.

Mr Richards, both hands back in his pockets, smiled and rocked.

Kidd felt there was something else to say, but it was too difficult to think of what. 'Um… thank you.' He put the money in his pants pocket, looked around the table for June; but she had left the room. 'Good night, Mrs Richards.' He wandered across green carpet to the door.

Behind him, as he clicked over lock after lock — there were so many—Madame Brown was saying: 'Good night, Arthur. Mary, thanks for that dinner. June…? June…?' she called now—'I'm on my way, dear. See you soon. Good night, Bobby — Oh, he's back in his room. With that book I bet, if I know Bobby. Muriel, come along, sweetheart. Right with you, Kidd. Good night again.'

The smoke was so thick he wondered if the glass were opaque and he only misremembered it as clear—

'Well—' Madame Brown pushed open the cracked door—'what do you think of the Richards after your first day on the job?'

'I don't think anything.' Kidd stretched in the over-thick night. 'I'm just an observer.'

'I take that to mean you've thought a great deal but find it difficult, or unnecessary, to articulate.' Muriel clicked away down the cement walk. 'They are perplexing.'

'I wish,' Kidd said, 'he'd paid me for the whole day. Of course, if they're feeding me and stuff—' another highrise loomed before them, tier on tier of dark windows—'five dollars an hour is a lot.' Smoke crawled across the facade. He had thought about them, of course; he remembered all his mulling while he worked in the upstairs apartment. And — again she was right — he'd certainly reached no synopsizable conclusion.

Madame Brown, hands behind her back, looked at the pavement, walked slowly.

Kidd, notebook before him in both hands (He'd almost forgotten it; Madame Brown had brought it to him at the door), looked up and could make out practically nothing. 'You're still working in that hospital?'

'Pardon me?'

'That mental hospital, you were talking about' Walking revived him some. 'With the children. Do you still go there every day?'

'No.'

'Oh.'

When she said nothing more, he said:

'I was in a mental hospital. For a year. I was just wondering what happened with—' he looked around at building faces whose wreckage was hidden behind night and smoke; he could smell smoke here—'with yours.'

'You probably don't want to know,' she said, walking a few more steps in silence. 'Especially if you were in one. It wasn't pleasant.' Muriel spiraled back and away. 'You see, I was with the hospital's social service department — you must have gathered that. Lord, I got twenty-two phone calls at home in two hours about evacuation procedures — the phone went dead in the middle of the last one. Finally, we just decided, even though it was the middle of the night, we'd better go to the hospital ourselves — my friend and I; you see, I had a little friend staying with me at the time. When we got there — walking, mind you — it was just incredible! You don't expect doctors around at midnight in a place as understaffed as that. But there was not one orderly, one night nurse, one guard around! They'd just gone, like that!' She flung up her hand, in stark dismissal. 'Patients were all up in the open night wards. We let out everybody we could. Thank God my friend found the keys to that incredible basement wing they first shut down fifteen years ago, and have been opening up and shutting down regularly — with not a bit of repair! — every three years since. You could see the fires out the windows. Some of the patients wouldn't leave. Some of them couldn't — dozens were logy in their beds with medication. Others were shrieking in the halls. And if all those phone calls about evacuation did anything besides scare off whatever staff was around, I'm sure I didn't see it! Some rooms we just couldn't find keys to! I broke windows with chairs. My friend got a crowbar, and three of the patients helped us break in some of the doors — Oh, yes: did I mention somebody tried to strangle me? He just came up in his pajamas, while I was hurrying down the second floor corridor, grabbed me, and started choking. Oh, not very seriously, and only for about two or three minutes, before some other patients helped me get him off — apparently, as I discovered, it takes quite a bit of effort to really choke somebody to death who doesn't want to be choked. And, believe me, I didn't. But it was a doozer. I was recovering from that in the S.S. office, when she came in with these.' He heard Madame Brown finger the chains around her neck: it was too dark to see glitter. 'She said she'd found them, wound them around my neck. You could see them flashing in flickers coming from outside, around the window shades.' Madame Brown paused. 'But I told you about that…?' She sighed. 'I also told you that was when she left… my friend. Some of the rooms, you see, we just couldn't get into. We tried — me, the other patients, we tried! And the patients on the inside, trying just as hard! Christ, we tried! But by then, fire had broken out in the building itself. The smoke was so thick you could hardly—' She took a sudden breath. Did she shrug? 'We had to leave. And, as I said, by that time, my little friend had left already.'

He could see Madame Brown beside him now.

She walked, contemplating either the past or the pavement.

Muriel wove ahead, barked, turned, ran.

'I went back once,' she said at last. 'The next morning. I don't want to go again. I want to do something else… I'm a trained psychologist! Social service was never really my forte. I don't know if the patients who got out were finally evacuated or not. I assume they were; but I can't be sure.' She gave a little humph. 'Perhaps that has something to do with why I don't leave myself.'

'I don't think so,' Kidd said, after a moment 'It sounds like you — and your friend — were very brave.'

Madame Brown humphed again.

'It's just—' he felt uncomfortable, but it was a different discomfort than at the table—'you made it sound, when you were talking about it at dinner, like you still worked there. That's why I asked.'

'Oh, I was just making conversation. To keep Mary entertained. When people take the trouble to bring out the best in her, she's quite a handsome woman; with quite a handsome soul — even if the quotidian surface sits on it a bit askew. I imagine some people find that hard to see.'

'Yeah.' He nodded. 'I guess so.' Half a block ahead, Muriel was a shifting dollop of darkness. 'I thought—' on