Dhalgren

He said to Lanya: 'Then you were expecting…?' The half-dozen questions in his mind were halved again when Milly said:

'I couldn't keep close enough to hear everything you were saying. If I had, I would have made too much noise. I just cut straight through and caught the paths on the snake-turns. Oh, Lanya, it is a lovely song! Really, you've got to play it for other people. See, you can play it all the way through. I told you you could. You knew I was listening, and you got through it. Just don't let people embarrass you… Kidd—?' Milly frowned. 'You look so confused, Kidd!' Suddenly she hugged him; red hair brushed dry against his face. He nearly stumbled. 'Really, I'm sorry!' She released him, put her hand on Lanya's shoulder. 'I didn't mean to spy. But you knew I was there…' She looked imploringly at Lanya. 'I just couldn't resist!' And she laughed.

He blinked; he smiled. '…that's all right.' The memory of the melody came again; it had not been a private moment he'd overheard, but one meant for a friend. Had that, he wondered, given it its beauty? Lanya was laughing too.

So he laughed with them.

At the furnace, Jommy banged his ladle on the caldron. 'Come on! Soup's ready! Come and get it!'

About the clearing, with mess-pans and mess-pots, crocks and tin cups and bowls, two dozen people gathered at the fire.

'Come on, let's eat,' Lanya said.

'Yes, you too, Kidd!' Milly said. 'Come on.'

He followed the girls toward the crowd. A thin, ginger-haired spade with gold-rimmed teeth gave him a dented enamel soup plate. 'I got two, man. You can take this one.' But when he reached the front, at the furnace, for his ladle-full, it was John (with swinging vest and eye-glasses full of flame), not Jommy, who served. The sky was almost dark. Though firelight lay coppery against Milly's hair, he could not make out, on either bare leg, as he followed Milly and led Lanya out among the crowd, trying to balance his bowl, that scratch.

Dusk had come quickly — and lingered, holding off dark. They sat on the rumpled blankets at Her Place. He squinted up between lapped leaves while the sky drizzled powdery rubbings, gritty and cool.

'One more day's work at the Richards, and I'll have them moved.'

'You've… well, you've got a name now. And a job. Are you happy?'

'Shit—' He stretched out on his back and felt beneath him twigs, creases, pebbles, and the beaded chain around him. 'I haven't even decided how to spell it. And they still haven't paid me more than that first five dollars.'

'If they don't pay you—' she stretched out too— 'why do you go back?'

He shrugged. 'Maybe they know if they gave me my money, I wouldn't come.' He shrugged again. 'It doesn't matter. Like I told Madame Brown, I'm just an observer. They're fun to watch.' Thinking: Someday I'm going to die. He glanced at her: 'Do you know, I'm afraid of dying. A lot.'

'Hm?'

'I am. Sometimes, when I'm walking around, I think maybe my heart is going to stop. So I feel it, just to make sure it's going. Which is funny, because if I'm lying down, about to go to sleep, and I can hear my heart going, I have to move into another position, or I get scared—'

'— that it might stop and you'll hear it?' she asked.

'Yeah.'

'That happens to me sometimes. When I was fifteen, in boarding school, I sat on the edge of the main building roof for a long time and thought about committing suicide.'

'I've never wanted to kill myself,' he said. 'Never in my life. Sometimes I thought I was going to — because I'd gotten some crazy compulsion, to jump off a building or throw myself under a train, just to see what dying was like. But I never thought that life wasn't worth living, or that there was any situation so bad where just sitting it out wouldn't fix it up — that's if I couldn't get up and go somewhere else. But not wanting to kill myself doesn't stop me thinking about death. Say, has this ever happened to you? You're walking along a street, or sitting in a room, or lying down on the leaves, or even talking to people, and suddenly the thought comes — and when it comes, it comes all through you like a stop — action film of a crystal forming or an opening bud: 'I am going to die.' Someday, somewhere, I will be dying, and five seconds after that, I will be dead. And when it comes it comes like—' he smashed cupped palms together in the air so sharply she jumped—'that! And you know it, know your own death, for a whole second, three seconds, maybe five or ten… before the thought goes and you only remember, the words you were mumbling, like 'Someday I will die,' which isn't the thought at all, just its ashes.'

'Yes… yes, that's happened to me.'

'Well, I think all the buildings and the bridges and the planes and the books and the symphonies and the paintings and the spaceships and the submarines and… and the poems: they're just to keep people's minds occupied so it doesn't happen — again.' After a while he said: 'George Harrison…'

She said: 'June Richards…' and glanced at him. When he said nothing, she said: 'I have this picture, of us going down to the bar one night, and you saying, 'Hey, man, come on with me. I want you to meet a friend of mine,' and George says, 'Why sure!'—and he probably would, too; he knows how small the world is he's acting moon for — so you take him, in all his big, black, beautiful person up to that pink brick high-rise with all the broken windows and you get a-hold of Miss Demented-sweetness-and-light, and you say, 'Hey, Lady, I've just brought you His Midnight Eminence, in the flesh. June, meet George. George, meet June.' I wonder what they'd talk about — on her territory?'

He chuckled. 'Oh, I don't know. He might even say, Thank you. After all, she made him what he is today.' He blinked at the leaves. 'It's fascinating, life the way it is; the way everything sits together, colors, shapes, pools of water with leaves in them, reflections on windows, sunlight when there's sun, cloudlight when it's cloudy; and now I'm somewhere where, if the smoke pulls back at midnight and George and the moon are up, I might see two shadows instead of one!' He stretched his hands behind him on the blanket. He knocked something — which was his orchid, rolling across his notebook cover.

'When I was at Art School,' she said, 'I remember an instructor of mine saying that it was only on days like you have here that you know the true color of anything. The whole city, all of Bellona, it's under perpetual north light.'

'Mmm,' he said.

What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.

'You…' he said, suddenly. It was dark. 'Are you happy, I mean, living like that?'

'Me?' She breathed a long breath. 'Let me see… before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who'd just arrived in New York's Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI, FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.' And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him.

'Gotta run.' Click. The tie knot rose.

'Hey, Mr Richards?' Kidd put down his own cup.

'Yes, Kidd?' Mr Richards, already in the doorway, turned back. 'What do you want?'

Bobby spooned at his frosted cereal. There was no milk. June traced a column in the Friday, October 24, 1985 Times with her forefinger. It was several weeks old.

'I want to know about my money.'