Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

I went back [into] the kitchen.

Rose was looking out the screening, a brown fist up beside her facechin. I went up behind her and looked too. The other four children were outside.

Sammy was standing at the place where the curb cracked away into the street. With the toe of his sneaker, he touched the coil of Nightmare's chain.

Stevie, who'was sitting on the steps, stood up.

Sammy started to pick up the chain.

Stevie said, "Don't you touch that, nigger!"

Marceline laughed, but I don't think at that.

Sammy looked up andlooked embarrassed, went to pick up a board lying out in the street, and played by himself.

I touched Rose on the shoulder and she jumped.

"Don't you want to play with the other kids outside?"

She just blinked. (Somebody should do something about the blackspade confusion of her hair — cut it short, I guess.) ThenShe went out and sat on the steps as far away from the others as she could get

Only Stevie and Marceline are really friends. Woodard (who is sort of mustard colored, both his skin and his wooly top) merely hangs around them.

I feel sorry for them all.

Later that evening, Iusing a piece of pine plank for a writing hoard, I /went out to/ sit tingon the steps /and/ was working onplaying in mya poem. I had been there perhaps two hours when I noticed the chain /was/ had been removedgone.

I sat a few minutes more. Then I went inside.

Just after Denny went out this morning, Lanya brought hack my notebook — this one. The first thing I did was look inside the front cover. "What about the new poems?" I asked.

"Since they're all on loose sheets I decided I'd keep them in my desk drawer. If you want them…?"

"No," I told her. "That8['?]s probably better. They'd just fall out."

"Did you see the article /in the Times/ about you and the children?" [s]he asked when we went out into the back yard.

"No," I said.

So she told me.

It made me feel strange.

Once we went back /up/ into /into the loft/ to get something. She found a piece of paper down tween/between/ the wall and the mattress. "Are you finished with this one?"

I looked at it. "I guess so. It isn't complete, really. But I'm not interested in it any more."

"I'll just take it back to my place and keep it with the others," and she put it in her [-?] shirt pocket; then she jumped down, cried out when [she?] landed, "Owwww!"

I thought she'd twisted her ankle.

But it wasn't serious.

We went into the kitchen; she looked into the coffee pail on the stove and frowned at the mess.

D-t came in with a paper. "Hey, man, that's something, huh?" He had it folded back to the article.

It was on page three.

"What I want to know," Lanya said, looking through the living room door at Stevie and Woodard (Tarzan was trying to ride them across the floor like a horsie), "is what you're going to do with them."

I was leaning againstI was leaning against the refrigerator door with my fingers hook ed arounding at the rubber flange that goes around the inside of the door."It doesn't even mention George." I waspull inged. "It makes it sound like I saved them all by myself. It was George's God-damn idea. I was just along—"

Rose walked in, banging the screen, and stared at Lanya on her way to the next room. Lanya smiled: Rose didn't and kept walking. At the doorway she stopped, looked at Tarzan and the boys, sighed, turned around, went back— bang! — onto the front steps.

Sammy was playing in the middle of the street and did not look at her.

D-t moved the junk aside on the table (Marceline in the room with Tarzan was calling out, "Let me! Let me…! Come on, let me!") and sat on the up-ended milk crate to read the article to us. The crate was so low the table top hit him just below the tit. /He read the part about: "…/ during the holocaust, broke into a wooden frame house adjoining a grocery store already in flames and let out five youngsters trapped in the second floor rear bedroom. It is reported the bedroom door had been clumsily secured by the back of a chair beneath the door knob—"

"It wasn't a chair," I said. "Somebody had taken a fucking piano bench and turned it on its end. The God-damn music had fallen out all over the hall rug. Why. doesn't it mention George?"

"Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing right there Watching you," D-t said.

I said'"There wasn't anybody," I said. A piece of rubber pulled free, only I dropped it and couldn't see where it had fallen between the refrigerator and the sink. "Just George."

"The[n] how did they know to write about it?" Lanya asked.

"I don't know," I said. "George actually got the door open. All I did was yank at the legs. The bench came open and all the music fell out On the rug. The top of the bench was still jammed up in there."

"Maybe George met a reporter later that evening," Lanya said. "He could have told the papers, Kid."

"…'The children are reported to be safe, but we do not know'…"

"Of course it doesn't sound like George to cut himself out." Lanya sighed and made a funny movement with her hand, grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. "Oh, Kid…"

InsideTarzan neighed loudly and Woodard's hiccuppy laugh shrilled above it, covered in turn by Marceline's squeal.

"The real question—" Lanya looked up—"is what are you going to do with them. Are you going to keep them here[?]"

"You're out of your fucking head—" I said.

D-t said, "The guys like them—"

"How many days ago was it?" I said. "How many days ago, Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other? Look!" I went to the living room door. "There's blood all over the fucking God-damn wall—!"

Fist against his chin, Stevie was looking at me.

Tarzan had sat back on his heels and, concertedly, wasn't.

"Ride me!" Marceline said. "You rode Woodard before. Now you ride me!"

"Yeah," Woodard said. "You ride her now."

I stepped back into the kitchen.

"What are you going to do with them?"

I told her, "I don't know."

Tarzan neighed again.

Three staples on the bottom of the above page hold a creased rectangle of newsprint. The end of the column has either been ripped off or (the bottom is torn on a second crease) handled so frequently it had come away:

BRASS ORCHIDS

BLOOM BENEATH

A CLOUDED SKY

This handsome book, or rather booklet, has already become a Bellona commonplace, on night-tables by the reading lamp, in the back pockets of youngsters in the park, or tucked, along with the Times, under the arms of people going about the city. This reviewer only wonders how our anonymous author achieved such vivid visualisations with such simple language. Before subject matter so violent and so personal, yet so clearly and wittily voiced, few familiar with Bellona's landscape will be able to avoid strong reactions, negative or positive. If the poet's own emotions seem disjointed or strange, they are still expressed pointedly, incisively, and in an intensely human mode.

True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual-

This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I'd gone to bed, they'd been laid out neatly on Raven's sleeping bag he'd opened up full for them by the couch:

Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers threatthrough a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out.shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead's back. whoFor some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.