Dhalgren

'I don't really know,' Mr Newboy said. They reached the terrace flag. 'At least fifteen. Maybe twenty-five. The people he has for help, they're always changing. I really don't see how he gets anything done for looking after them. Unless Mrs Alt does all that.' They climbed the concrete steps to the terrace.

'Wouldn't you lose fifteen people in there?' Kidd asked.

The house, here, was glass: inside were maple wall panels, tall brass lamps, bronze statuary on small end- tables between long couches covered in gold velvet, all wiped across with flakes of glare.

'Oh, you never feel the place is crowded.'

They passed another window-wall; Kidd could see two walls covered with books. Dark beams inside held up a balcony, flanked with chairs of gold and green brocade; silver candlesticks — one near, one far off in shadow— bloomed on white doilies floating on the mahogany river of a dining table. 'Sometimes I've walked around thinking I was perfectly alone for an hour or so only to come across a party of ten in one of the other rooms. I suppose if the place had a full staff—' dried leaves shattered underfoot—'it wouldn't be so lonely. Here we are.'

Wooden chairs with colored canvas webbing sat around the terrace. Beyond the balustrade the rocks were licked over with moss and topped by birches, maples and, here and there, thick oaks.

'You sit down. I'll be right back.'

Kidd sat — the chair was lower and deeper than he thought — and pulled his notebook into his lap. The glass doors swung behind Newboy. Kidd turned. 'What are you looking at?'

'The November garden.' Arms crossed, Lanya leaned on the stone rail. 'You can't see the plaque from here. It's on top of that rock.'

'What's in the… November garden?'

She shrugged a 'nothing.' 'The first night I got here there was a party going on there: November, October, and December.'

'How many gardens does he have?'

'How many months are there?'

'What about the garden we first came through?'

'That one,' she glanced back, 'doesn't have a name.' She looked again at the rocks. 'It was a marvelous party, with colored lights strung up. And a band: violins, flutes, and somebody playing a harp.'

'Where did he get violins here in Bellona?'

'He did. And people with lots and lots of gorgeous clothes.'

Kidd was going to say something about Phil.

Lanya turned. 'If my dresses are still here, I know exactly where they'd be.'

Mr Newboy pushed through the glass doors with a teawagon. Urn and cups rattled twice as the tires crossed the sill. The lower tray held dishes of pastry. 'You caught Mrs Alt right after a day of baking.'

'Hey,' Kidd said. 'Those look good.'

'Help yourself.' He poured steaming coffee into blue porcelain. 'Sugar, cream?'

Kidd shook his head; the cup warmed his knee. He bit. Cookie crumbs fell and rolled on his notebook.

Lanya, sitting on the wall and swinging her tennis shoes against the stone, munched a crisp cone filled with butter-cream.

'Now,' Mr Newboy said. 'Have you brought some poems?'

'Oh.' Kidd brushed crumbs away. 'Yeah. But they're handwritten. I don't have any typewriter. I print them out neat, after I work on them.'

'I can probably decipher good fair copy.'

Kidd looked at the notebook, at Lanya, at Mr Newboy, at the notebook. 'Here.'

Mr Newboy settled back in his seat and turned through pages. 'Ah. I see your poems are all on the left.'

Kidd held his cup up. The coffee steamed his lips.

'So…' Mr Newboy smiled into the book, and paused. 'You have received that holy and spectacular wound which bleeds… well, poetry.' He turned another page, paused to look at it not quite long enough (in Kidd's estimate) to read it. 'But have you hunkered down close to it, sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your own humanity with that of the race?'

'Sir…?'

'Whether love or rage,' Mr Newboy went on, not looking up, 'or detachment impels the sighting, no matter. If you don't do it, all your blood is spilled pointlessly… Ah, I suppose I am merely trying to reinvest with meaning what is inadequately referred to in art as Universality. It is an inadequate reference, you know.' He shook his head and turned another page. 'There's no reason why all art should appeal to all people. But every editor and entrepreneur, deep in his heart of hearts is sure it does, wants it to, wishes it would. In the bar, you asked about publication?' He looked up, brightly.

'That's right,' Kidd said with reserve and curiosity. He wished Newboy would go on, silently, to the poems.

'Publishers, editors, gallery owners, orchestra managers! What incredible parameters for the creative world. But it is a purgatorially instructive one to walk around in with such a wound as ours. Still, I don't believe anybody ever enters it without having been given the magic Shield by someone.' Newboy's eyes fell again, rose again, and caught Kidd's. 'Would you like it?'

'Huh? Yeah. What?'

'On one side,' intoned Newboy with twinkling gravity, 'is inscribed: 'Be true to yourself that you may be true to your work.' On the other: 'Be true to your work that you may be true to yourself'.' Once more Newboy's eyes dropped to the page; his voice continued, preoccupied: 'It is a little frightening to peer around the edge of your own and see so many others discarded and glittering about in that spiky landscape. Not to mention all those naked people doing all those strange things on the tops of their various hills, or down in their several dells, some of them — Lord, how many? — beyond doubt out of their minds! At the same time—' he turned another page—'nothing is quite as humbling, after a very little while, as realizing how close one has already come to dropping it a dozen times oneself, having been distracted — heavens, no! — not by wealth — or fame, but by those endless structures of logic and necessity that go so tediously on before they reach the inevitable flaw that causes their joints to shatter and allow you passage. One picks one's way about through the glass and aluminum doors, the receptionists' smiles, the lunches with too much alcohol, the openings with more, the mobs of people desperately trying to define good taste in such loud voices one can hardly hear oneself giggle, while the shebang is lit by flashes and flares through the paint-stained window, glimmers under the police-locked door, or, if one is taking a rare walk outside that day, by a light suffusing the whole sky, complex as the northern aurora. At any rate, they make every object from axletrees to zarfs and finjons cast the most astonishing shadows.' Mr Newboy glanced up again. 'Perhaps you've followed some dozen such lights to their source?' He held the page between his fingers. 'Admit it — since we are talking as equals — most of the time there simply wasn't anything there. Though to your journal—' he let the page fall back to what he'd been perusing before—'or in a letter to a friend you feel will take care to preserve it, you will also admit the whole experience was rather marvelous and filled you with inadmissible longings that you would be more than a little curious to see settle down and, after all, admits. Sometimes you simply found a plaque which read, 'Here Mozart met da Ponti,' or 'Rodin slept here.' Three or four times you discovered a strange group heatedly discussing something that happened on that very spot a very long time by, which, they assure you, you would have thoroughly enjoyed had you not arrived too late. If you can bear them, if you can listen, if you can learn why they are still there, you will have gained something quite valuable. 'For God's sakes, put down that thing in your hand and stay a while!' It's a terribly tempting invitation. So polite themselves, they are the only people who seem willing to make allowances for your natural barbarousness. And once or twice, if you were lucky, you found a quiet, elderly man who, when you mumbled something about dinner for him and his slightly dubious friend, astounded you by saying, 'Thank you very much; we'd be delighted.' Or an old woman watching the baseball game on her television, who, when you brought her flowers on her birthday, smiled through the chain on the door and explained, 'That's very sweet of you boys, but I just don't see anyone now, any more, ever.' Oh, that thing in your hand. You do still have it, don't you?'

'Sir, maybe if—?'

Newboy moved his hand, looked back down. 'It starts out mirrored on both sides: initially reassuring, but ultimately distracting. It rather gets in the way. But as you go on, the silvering starts to wear. Now you can see more, and more, directly through. Really—' Newboy glanced up quickly, then returned his eyes to the page— 'it's a lens. The transition period is almost always embarrassing, however. While you are still being dazzled with bits of