Dhalgren

don't have a thing ready.'

He smiled and contemplated murder.

And here, he thought, it would be so much easier to get away with… 'I don't think you'd like them.'

Hands together in her lap, she leaned forward: 'Please.'

He dragged the book into his lap (like I was covering myself, he thought. I could kill her). 'All right.' Something tickled the underside of his thigh. It was sweat catching on the chain that bound him. 'I'll read…' He opened the book, coughed: 'This one.' He took a breath, and looked at the paper. He was very hot. The chains across his back pulled: he was hunching his shoulders. When he opened his mouth, for a moment he was sure no voice would come.

But he read.

He dropped word after word into the room's silence.

Meaning peeled away from his voice and raveled.

Sounds he had placed together to evoke a tone of voice mis-sounded. The mouth's machinery was too clumsy to follow what his eye knew. He read each word, terribly aware how the last should have fallen.

Once he coughed.

For one phrase he grew quieter, easier. Then, frantically, at a place where his voice closed out a comma, he wondered, Why did I choose this one! I should have chosen any one except this!

Hoarsely he whispered the last line, and put one hand on his stomach to press away the small pain. He took some more deep breaths and sat back. The back of his shirt was sopping.

'That was lovely.'

He wanted to and didn't laugh.

'…Lost inside your eye…' she misquoted. No, paraphrased.

His stomach tightened again.

'Yes, I liked that very much.'

He arched his fingers there, and said: 'Thank you.'

'Thank you. I feel…'

He thought: I'm too tired to kill anyone.

'…feel that you have given me something of yourself, a very precious thing.'

'Uhh.' He nodded vaguely. Tension finally forced the laugh: 'You just like it because you know me.' With the laugh, some of the tiredness went.

'Definitely.' She nodded. 'I don't know any more about poetry than Arthur does. Really. But I'm glad you read it. For the trust.'

'Oh.' Something more terrifying than the possibility of murder happened in him. 'You really are?' A cold metallic wire sewed somewhere, taking small stitches. 'I better get back up to finish the mopping.' He began to move on the couch, preparing to stand.

'I'm very glad you read that poem to me.'

He stood. 'Yeah. Sure. I'm glad you… liked it,' and hurried for the door. It closed behind him far too loud. In the hall, his face heating, he thought: She was going to say something else to me! What else was she going to…? He hurried to the elevator.

In 19-B he filled the pail again, kicked off his sandal, and slushed the mop in suds. Foam, mop-strands and water returned him to varied beaches. He mopped angrily, remembering waves.

The water slopped his feet. It had been warm when he put it in the pail. Each stroke wet the baseboard further along.

They're cheating me, he thought and twisted the mophead. Among failing suds the water was black. I've got to tell them, he thought, that I know it. At least ask them why they're not paying me what they said. Of course they didn't say it to me. Not that I need the money, even… That made him even angrier.

He sloshed up more beaches in his mind, moving from room to room.

I don't have a name, he thought. Tides and tides, rolled from the tangled cords. These things I'm writing, they're not descriptions of anything. They're complex names. I don't want her to believe what they say. I just want her to believe I said them. Somewhere (Japan? Yeah…) I walked up the wharf from where the little boats were tied and the black rocks gave out to sand. And everything, even the sand slipping back under my feet, looked miles away like it used to all the time when I was tired, when I was a kid. One of the other fellows from the ship called to me. What did he call me? And how could I have possibly answered?

His eyes stung; he sniffed for the detergent smell.

Or was the smoke thicker? He wiped his face on his cuff.

In the hall, people laughed: footsteps. A door closed.

Gooseflesh enveloped him. His next heartbeat shocked loose his breath; he breathed. Perhaps ten seconds later he realized how tightly he was holding the handle. He laid the mop on the floor, went to the open door, and looked into the… empty hall. For at least a minute.

Then he got the mop and began to work again.

They're cheating me! he thought to replay the familiar. The tone was wrong. To think words set off pricklings.

More water.

His hands, soaked and soaked again, were translucent, the yellow all out of the horn, flesh white and ragged around the fragment nails and swollen crowns. Yeah, leprosy. He recalled Lanya sucking his middle finger with something like relief. What she liked was funny. Especially what she liked in him. Her absence mystified.

Slopping suds over recollected sands, he tried to hallucinate her face. It dissolved in water. He scrubbed the balcony sill, and backed into the room, swinging cords from side to side.

Confront them about his salary? Yes! Images of gifts for her. But he had not seen one store open; not one! Do they talk salary, he pondered, and I talk wages just to keep up?

But we haven't talked!

The inside of his mouth held much more room than the room. As he mopped, he seemed to stagger, shin- deep in tongue, bumping his knees on teeth, and his head against wet, palatal rugae, grasping for an uvula to steady himself. He flopped the mop in the water again, eyes a-sting, and passed his arm across his face; the blunted chain raked his cheek. Energies searched through the mechanic of his body for points to wreck changes. The rhythm and slosh lopped talk out of the brain. 'I live in the mouth…' he had been mumbling over and over, he realized as he stopped it. Stopping, he mopped harder at the swirling floor.

'You…?'

He blinked at June in the doorway.

'…didn't get…?'

He grunted interrogatively.

'You said you were going to get me a… picture of…' Her knuckle made its habitual strike at her chin.

'Huh? But I thought you didn't…'

Her eyes beat, banal and wild. Then she ran from the door.

'Hey, look, I'm sorry! I didn't think you…' thought about running after her, sucked his teeth, shook his head, didn't, and sighed.

In the kitchen, he changed the dirty water in his pail for clear, then dry-mopped as much as possible of the flood.

He worked methodically. Every once in a while he made a sound of disgust, or shook his head. Finally he got to swiping after his own footprints. Which was futile; you just made more.

Balancing on one foot in the doorway, he fumbled at his sandal. Leather and wet flesh: He might as well throw it away. But the tab slipped into the buckle. He picked up his notebook and clacked to the elevator.

Half a minute later, the door opened (from the door beside it, where he did not want to look, came hissing wind); he stepped in. The thought, when he recalled it later, seemed to have no genesis:

He did not press seventeen.

'16' glowed before his falling finger in the falling car.