Dhalgren

'What's that?'

'My… dress.' She came forward carrying it over her arm. 'I looked upstairs in the Observatory Wing… for my dress, while you were reading. Christ, it's a mess up there!'

Mr Newboy frowned. 'I didn't even know anybody was staying there.'

'It doesn't look like anybody is,' she said, 'now.'

'Is that on the third floor?'

Lanya nodded.

'Roger said something about not using that section — the doors were closed, weren't they? I thought it was something about plumbing repairs.'

'They were closed but they weren't locked.' Lanya said. 'I just went right in. They were using it when I was here — I was just looking for the room Phil and I stayed in. But… the carpets have been pulled up off the floor; and torn. It looks like somebody yanked the light fixtures out of the ceiling, with about a foot of plaster each. In the bathroom off our bedroom, the sink's just sitting in the middle of the floor, and all that lovely blue Victorian tilework has been smashed. There're two holes in the wall that look like they've been put there with a battering ram — and somebody's slashed all the mattresses!' She looked down at the shredded material. 'And my dress. It was balled up in a corner of the closet… the clothes bars were all pulled down and the clothes hook had been hammered back and bent or something.' She held the dress up. 'Somebody had to do this — it looks like somebody's been at it with a razor! But what in the world for?'

'Oh, dear!' Mr Newboy said. 'Why, that's perfectly—'

'I mean it doesn't matter,' Lanya said. 'About the dress. When I left it, I didn't think I was coming back for it. But why in the world—?' She looked at Kidd, at Newboy. Suddenly she said, 'Oh, hey — I didn't mean to interrupt!' She pulled the dress together into a ball, leaned back against the balustrade. 'Please, go on. Don't stop reading, Kidd—'

Kidd said, 'Let's go up and take a look at—'

'No,' Lanya said, surprisingly loud.

Newboy blinked.

'No, I really don't want to go back up there.'

'But…?' Kidd frowned.

'Roger did ask us all not to go in that wing,' Newboy said, uncomfortably. 'But I had no idea it was—'

'I closed the doors.' Lanya looked at the blue silk in her fist. 'I should have left this up there.'

'Maybe some wild party got out of hand?' Kidd asked.

Lanya said: 'It didn't look like any party to me.'

Newboy, Kidd suddenly saw (and realized at the same time that Lanya saw it too) was upset. Lanya's response was: 'Is the coffee hot? I think I'd like a cup.'

'Certainly.' Newboy stood, went to the urn.

'Go on, Kidd,' Lanya said. 'Read another poem,' as Newboy brought her the cup.

'Yes.' The elderly poet, collecting himself, returned to his chair. 'Let's hear another one.'

'All right.' Kidd paged through: they were all in some conspiracy to obliterate, if not Lanya's news itself, at least its unsettling effect. And he's got to live here, Kidd thought. There were only three more poems.

After the second, Lanya said: 'That one's one of my favorites.' Her hand moved over torn blue, folded over the wall.

And he read the third. 'So now,' Kidd said, primarily to keep something going, 'you've got to give me some idea of what you think of them, whether they're good or bad,' a thought which hadn't occurred to him once since he'd come; only previous mental rehearsal brought it out now.

'I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you read them,' Newboy said. 'But for anything else, you simply have to say to yourself, with Mann: I cannot know, and you cannot tell me.'

Kidd smiled, reached for three more cookies on the tea-wagon, tried to think of something else.

Newboy said: 'Why don't we take a stroll around the grounds? If it were a bright sunny day, it would be quite spectacular I'm sure. But it's still nice, in an autumnal sort of way.'

Lanya, who was looking into her cup, suddenly raised her eyes. 'Yes, that's an idea. I'd like that.'

And that, Kidd realized, was Newboy's kindness to Lanya. Somehow after her initial confidence, a moodiness had surfaced, but she had jumped to dispel it with movement and converse.

She put down her saucer, got down from the balustrade.

Kidd started to ask her: 'Are you gonna take your…?'

But obviously she wasn't.

What, he wondered as they walked along the terrace and turned down the low steps, would be the emotional detritus from the violence upstairs in himself? But, as he wondered, Lanya, at the bottom step, took hold of his little finger in a hot, moist grip.

They walked across grass till rock rose from under it.

They climbed stone steps. They crossed a bridge with wrought railings.

A waterfall rushed beside them, stilled beneath them.

'This is April,' Mr Newboy informed them from the plaque in the bridge's center.

They crossed it.

The corner bit Kidd's heel.

'You must know these quite well,' Newboy said to Lanya.

'Not really. But I like them.' She nodded.

'I've always meant to ask Roger why he has September and July in each other's place.'

'Are they?' Lanya asked. 'I must have walked around here fifty times and never noticed!'

They left the bridge to stroll under huge-leafed catalpas, past bird baths, past a large bronze sundial, tarnished brown and blank of shadow.

Stone benches were set out before the hedges in August.

Beyond the trees he could see the lawns of September. They passed through high stone newels where a wrought iron gate was loose from the bottom hinge, and, finally, once more, they were on the gravel driveway curving through great, squat evergreens.

Mr Newboy walked them to the front gate. By the green guard-shack, they exchanged Good-bye's, So-long's, I really enjoyed myself's, You must come again, and more good-bye's, during which, Kidd felt, as the gate-latch clanked behind them, each person had spoken one time too many.

He turned on the sidewalk to take Lanya's hand, sure she would bring up the shattered Observatory Wing the moment silence settled.

They walked.

She didn't.

After a dozen steps she said, 'You want to write, don't you?' which, he realized, was what this compulsion to articulation was.

'Yeah,' he said. 'I guess I'll stop off at the bar, maybe do something there.'

'Good,' she said. 'I'm going back to the park, first. But I'll come by Teddy's later.'

'Okay.'

She ambled beside him, shoulder brushing his, sometimes looking at the houses beside them, sometimes at the pavement before them, sometimes glancing up at the willow-lapped wall.

He said: 'You want to go off and play your harmonica, don't you?' knowing it by the same pattern of silent cues she had known his desire. He put his arm around her shoulder; their walks fell into sync.

'Yes.'

He thought his own thoughts, occasionally glancing to wonder what hers were.

Silent on the circuit of the year, speech is in excess of what I want to say, or believe. On the dismal air I sketch my own restraint, waking, reflexively, instant to instant. The sensed center, the moment of definition, the point under such pressure it extrudes a future and a past I apprehend only as a chill, extends the overlay of injury with some retentive, tenuous disease, the refuse of brick-and mortar-grinding violence. How much more easily all machination were such polarized perception to produce so gross an ideal.