Dhalgren

'What?' she asked his lingering silence.

'Did I say anything?'

'You said, 'The scratch.''

'I couldn't tell…' He began to shake his head. 'I couldn't tell if I said it out loud.'

'Go on,' she said. 'What scratch?'

'John, he cut Milly's leg.'

'Huh?'

'Tak's got an orchid, a real fancy one, out of brass. John got hold of it, and just for kicks, he cut her leg. It was…' He took another breath. 'Awful. She had a cut there before. I don't know, I guess he gets his rocks off that way. I can understand that. But he cut—'

'Go on.'

'Shit, it doesn't make any sense when I talk about it.

'Go on.'

'Your legs, you don't have any cut on them.' He let the breath out; and could feel her frowning down in her chest. 'But he cut her.'

'This was something you saw?'

'She was standing up. And he was sitting down. And suddenly he reached over and just slashed down her leg. Probably it wasn't a very big cut. He'd done it before. Maybe to someone else. Do you think he ever did it to anyone else—?'

'I don't know. Why did it upset you?'

'Yes… no, I mean. I was already upset. I mean because…' He shook his head. 'I don't know. It's like there's something very important I can't remember.'

'Your name?'

'I don't even… know if that's it. It's just — very confusing.'

She kept rubbing till he reached up and stopped her hand.

She said: 'I don't know what to do. I wish I did. Something's happening to you. It's not pretty to watch. I don't know who you are, and I like you a lot. That doesn't make it easier. You've stopped working for the Richards; I'd hoped that would take some pressure off. Maybe you should just go away; I mean you should leave…'

In the leaves, the wind walked up loudly. But it was his shaking head that stopped her. Loudly wind walked away.

'What were they… why were they all there? Why did you take me there?'

'Huh? When?'

'Why did you take me there tonight?'

'To the commune?'

'But you see, you had a reason, only I can't understand what it was. It wouldn't even matter.' He rubbed her cheek until she caught his thumb between her lips. 'It wouldn't matter.' Diffused anxiety hardened him and he began to press and press again at her thigh.

'Look, I only took you there because—' and the loud wind and his own mind's tumbling blotted it. When he shook his head and could hear again, she was stroking his thick hair and mumbling, 'Shhhhh… Try and relax. Try and rest now, just a little…' With her other hand, she pulled the rough blanket up. The ground was hard under shoulder and elbow.

He propped himself on them while they numbed, and tried out memory.

Suddenly he turned to face her. 'Look, you keep trying to help, but what do you…' He felt all language sunder on silence.

'But what do I really feel about all this?' she saved him. 'I don't know — no, I do.' She sighed. 'Lots of it isn't too nice. Maybe you're in really bad shape, and since I've only known you for a little while, I should get out now. Then I think, Hey, I'm into a really good thing; if I worked just a little harder I might be able to do something that would help. Sometimes, I just feel that you've made me feel very good — that one hurts most. Because I look at you and I see how much you hurt and I can't think of anything to do.'

'He…' he dredged from flooded ruins, 'I… don't know.' He wished she would ask what he meant by 'he,' but she only sighed on his shoulder. He said, 'I don't want to scare you.'

She said, 'I think you do. I mean, it's hard not to think you're just trying to get back at me for something somebody else did to you. And that's awful.'

'Am I?'

'Kidd, when you're off someplace, working, or wandering around, what do you remember when you remember me?'

He shrugged. 'A lot of this. A lot of holding each other, and talking.'

'Yeah,' and he heard a smile shape her voice, 'which is a lot of the most beautiful part. But we do other things. Remember those too. That's cruel of me to ask when you're going through this, isn't it? But there's so much you don't see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt. That's cruel to say, but it's hard to watch.'

'No.' He frowned at the long dawn. 'When we went up to see Newboy, did you like—' and remembered her ruined dress while he said:

'At Calkins'—did you have fun?'

She laughed. 'You didn't?' Her laugh died.

Still, he felt her smile pressed on his shoulder. 'It was strange. For me. It's easy sometimes to forget I've got anything to do other than… well, this.'

'You talked about an art teacher once. I remember that. And the tape editing and the teaching. You paint too?'

'Years ago,' she countered. 'When I was seventeen I had a scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York, five, six years back. I don't paint now. I don't want to.'

'Why'd you stop?'

'Would you like to hear the story? Basically, because I'm very lazy.' She shrugged in his arms. 'I just drifted away from it. When I was drifting, I was very worried for a while. My parents hated the idea of my living in New York — I had just left Sarah Lawrence, again, and they wanted me to stay with a family. But I was sharing an awful apartment on Twenty-Second Street with two other girls and going part time to the League. My parents thought I was quite mad and were very happy when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist about my 'painting block'. They thought he would keep me from doing anything really foolish.' She barked a one-syllable laugh. 'After a while, he said what I should do is set myself a project. I was to make myself paint three hours each day — paint anything, it didn't matter. I was to keep track of the time in a little twenty-five cent pad. And for every minute under three hours I didn't paint, I had to spend six times that amount of time doing something I didn't like — it was washing dishes, yes. We had decided that I had a phobia against painting, and my shrink was behaviorist. He was going to set up a counter unpleasantness—'

'You had a phobia about dishwashing too?'

'Anyway.' She frowned at him in the near dark. 'I left his office in the morning and got started that afternoon. I was very excited. I felt I might get into all sorts of areas of my unconscious in my painting that way… whatever that meant. I didn't fall behind until the third day. And then only twenty minutes. But I couldn't bring myself to do two hours of dish washing.'

'How many dishes did you have?'

'I was supposed to wash clean ones if I ran out of dirty ones. The next day I was okay. Only I didn't like the painting that was coming out. The day after that I don't think I painted at all. That's right, somebody came over and we went up to Poe's Cottage.'

'Ever been to Robert Louis Stevenson's house in Monterey?'

'No.'

'He only rented a room in it for a couple of months and finally got thrown out because he couldn't pay the rent. Now they call it Stevenson's House and it's a museum all about him.'

She laughed. 'Anyway, I was supposed to see the doctor the next day. And report on how it was going. That night I started looking at the paintings — I took them out because I thought I might