Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

Another crack: but that was gun or backfire, louder than leaves and across the park. I pushed back from the trunk, blinking away the water in my eyes. Something fell, rocked on the grass among the roots; and something else-shards of bark, twelve or twenty inches across. Bark split in front of me, sagging out a few inches. What was behind it, I could see by the light from the dish, was red; and moist; and moved. Something crashed down through the

process by which one word sounded against the ear generates one inner recall. Human speech has so little varience to it, so little creativity: I sit on the steps and scan an hour's conversation around me (my own included) and find once two words in new juxtaposition. Every couple of days such a juxtaposition will evoke something particularly apt about what the speaker (usually Lady of Spain or D-t; seldom me) is talking about. But when it happens, everyone notices:

"Yeah, yeah! That's right!" and laughter.

"I like that!" and someone grins.

"Yeah, that's pretty good."

In college I would scan and find one such language node in ten hours of speech, sometimes in two or three days. Though, there, people were much more ready to approve the hackneyed, the cliched, the inapt and im-percise.

Is that why I write here?

Is that why I don't write here much?

In the middle of this, Lanya says: "Guess who I had dinner with last night."

Me: "Who?"

She: "Madame Brown took me to the Richards'."

Me: "Have a good time?" I admit, I am surprised.

She: "It was … educational. Like your party. I think they're people I'd rather see on my terratory than on theirs. Madame Brown feels the opposite. Which probably means I won't see much of them."

Me: "What did you think of June?"

She: "I liked her. She was the only one I could really talk to … the hallway down stairs still stinks; weird going past it in the elevator and knowing what it was. I told her all about the House. She was fascinated. A few times Arthur and Mary overheard us and were scandalized. But not many." She rubs the lion's back (where bright metal scars the brown patina), looks out the window. "I think she's going to find George, soon. When she does, we all better watch out."

Me: "Why? What'll happen?"

She smiled: "Who knows? The sky may crack, and giant lightning run the noon's black nylon; and the oddest portents yet infect the

branches, but caught in them. I heard more wood split, and something like a moan. "Lanya!" I shouted loud as I could. "Lanya!" Leaves swelled to a roar again.

I took another step back — a sudden pain along my calf. I whirled, staggering. My bare heel had scraped the high, raised rim of hot metal. I danced away from spilled coals; rocking, the edge had scraped halfway to my knee. There were more gunshots. I began to run.

Very far ahead was a working nightlight. (Thinking: There's going to be a riot! With Fenster shot, the blacks are going to be out all over Jackson and there's going to be a debacle from Cumberland Park too…) I tried to remember which way the park exit was.

In all the trees around the leaves were loud as jets.

I thought of turning on my lights, but I didn't. Instead, I got off the path — stumbled, nearly twisted my ankle, the one I'd scraped. I climbed up some rocks where I couldn't see a thing; so I figured no one could see me. I sat there, wedged between stones, eyes half closed, trying to be still.

I wondered if they were waiting for me. If I did get out of the park, it would be my luck to stumble out the Cumberland exit. Where the burning was heaviest, I ran my hand around the orchid's wrist band.

Light through the leaves started me. I kneeled forward, sure it was going to be bright shields.

ceiling of the skull." She was mocking with misquotation what I'd given her to read that morning. Her turning it into something inflated like that made me uncomfortable.

She realized it and laid three fingers on my arm. But her touch was light as a leaf; I quivered. "You'd prefer to be hit than tickled, wouldn't you." She firmed her grip.

"Yeah," I said. "Usually."

She watched me, green eyes dark as gun metal in the crowded room. Almost everyone was asleep. We went into the front.

The sky reaches in through screen doors and un-curtained windows and wipes color off the couches, tables, pictures, posters we've hung.

Outside the streets are quiet as disaster-areas after evacuation, more claustrophobic than inside, rank as our den is with heat and sleepy shiftings.

People think of us as energetic, active, violent. At any time, though, a third of us are asleep and half have not been out of the nest for two, three, four days (it is seldom noisy here; as seldom silent); we nestle in the word-web that spins, phatically, on and on, sitting our meaning and meanings, insights and emotions, thin as what drifts the gritty sky.

It was a bunch of people with flashlights. When they passed — I pressed myself back against the rock, and one light swept right over me, for a moment directly in my eyes beyond the branches — it was pretty easy to see that they were mostly white; and they had rifles. Two of them were very angry. Then one among them turned back and shouted: "Muriel!" (It could have been a woman calling.) The dog barked, barked again, and rushed through a wandering beam.

I closed my mouth.

And my eyes.

For a long time. A very long time. Perhaps I even fell asleep. When I opened them, my neck was stiff; so was one leg.

The sky was hazy with dawn. It was very quiet.

I got up, arms and knees sore as hell, climbed over the rocks and kept on down the other side till I came out of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed in.

Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

There was no one there.

I walked to the furnace, between cans and package wrappers. On the bench was an overturned garbage carton. With my boot-toe, I scraped at some cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up red eyes which blinked, simplified, and clapped up.

"Lanya?"

They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here hid awfully just a million savants at the pot. An open egret hung around a perch — still she could stay here any night. The honey worts and wolfling braces amazingly lined askew in weevils or along a post-hole should report.

"Lanya!"

An apple to discover? Still they should have saved around what or fixed her. Except in the underpinned white shell, here are some scabs in purple; every beach but effluvia. And they had bought us up to mix here so few concepts with the lazy drinks, had sat sober or reinstated our personal fixated intensity. Soon they cauterized what you, constancy and exegesis, were found very loose around him that we had each, without Denny explaining, fished to fascinate them, beautifully or lazily. They should have allowed her less than an alligator has an eyelid never pulled her from a quiver; terror still felt less alive.

"Lanya?"

I turned to fixative among the walkings.

Beyond the leaves, the figure moved so that I still couldn't

The blue envelope, barred along its edge with red and navy, is held to the bottom of the above page with yellow, bubbled Scotchtape. There are two, canceled, eight-cent stamps in the upper, right-hand corner. The postmark is illegible. The Bellona address reads: