Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

After a moment she smiled: "I've occasionally given therapy to some rather successful business executives; lots of money, happy families, some even without ulcers- who've said practically the same thing in the same way. We do know each other outside the office, and I must admit, from what I've observed myself, and from what Lanya's told me, I find it a little ironic; I mean that you express it in such similar words."

"I said you wouldn't understand. I said I was afraid — and I am angry — that I don't think you can."

"Tell me the symptoms of your going crazy."

"I forget things. I don't know who I am… I haven't been able to remember my name for months. I wake up, sometimes, terrified, everything in a blood-colored fog, which begins to clear while my heart beats so loud it hurts my chest. I've lost days, days and days out of my life. I see things, sometimes, like people with their eyes…" And I felt my back snarl with fear. Sweat rolled down the underside of one arm. "People with…" I closed my mouth, so astonished I couldn't say it that I couldn't say it. I backtracked in my mind, looking for something I could loop with words. "Can I…?" I had to back up further; I was looking at the multiple loops of optic chain she wore around her neck. "Can I tell you about a… dream?"

"Please go right ahead."

"I dreamed that I… well, I was in a woods, on the side of a mountain. The moon was shining — one moon. And this woman, a nice looking woman, a few years older than me, she came walking up over the rocks and through the leaves. She was naked. And we balled, right there in the leaves. Like that. When we were finished, she got up and ran off through the bush—"

"— you completed making love in the dream?"

"Yes. After we came, she got up and ran off through the woods to this cave, and told me to go inside it."

"And you obeyed her?"

"Yes. I remember that very clearly. I remember I stepped on some leaves once, in some water; I jumped over a crack in the cave floor. In a niche in one wall of the cave there was a brass thing, big around as my two arms, filled with glowing coals and little flames. I climbed this rock edge, and I found…" I touched the chain across my chest. "I dreamed I found these there." I hooked the chain with my thumb and watched Madame Brown. "I mean it must have been a dream; because of what happened later." She looked more intense; a fourth line crossed her forehead. "I put them on. But when I came out, she was gone. I looked for her in the woods, until I came to a moonlit road — just before, I remember, I stepped in a mud puddle. I was still trying to figure out where she'd gone when I saw her, there, in a meadow, on the other side of the road. So I started toward her, across the grass. And she turned into a tree. For some reason, in the dream, that terrified me. So I ran away, back down the road. Until I got to a highway. The rest of it is a little vague. I remember for part of it I was riding in a truck with this man with a sort of scarred-up face. Like bad pockmarks or acne. And this funny conversation about artichokes. Or maybe it wasn't really a conversation. One or the other of us just mentioned artichokes in some connection that I don't remember…"

"That's all?" Her fingertips came together.

"That's all," I said, while her hands parted, touched her knees. "But it was so… strange!"

"What made it particularly strange?"

"Well, everything happened so… clearly. And when this woman changed, I was so scared. I mean I was incredibly frightened. I ran away, I mean…"

Madame Brown crossed her legs.

Across her calf, glazed with nylon, a scratch curved down to her ankle.

She asked: "What is it?"

I tried to open my mouth, felt my face twitch.

She waited a long time.

I tried a couple more times.

My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.

But I tried.

And sank backward into myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.

"Tell me about Lanya."

"Denny—" the cave wasn't where I lived, though—"and me, we like her a lot."

She mmmed. "Tell me about Denny."

"Lanya and me like him… a lot."

My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.

"What are you feeling?"

"Scared."

"That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?"

"Huh?" That surprised me. "Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya's never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she's said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don't disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?"

"Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren't coming to me for help; and they don't think they're going crazy."

"More power to me!" She'd catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I'd dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was — it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: "You disapprove of people who come to you for help?"

"Now, that's not what I—"

"Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you—" I leaned forward—"what do you think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that's all anybody around here ever does — though I'm sure I'm just flattering myself. Tell me."

She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: "What do you think of the Richards, Kid?"

"I don't know…" Then I said: "She's frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won't hold. But that's sort of heroic, too. Him? He's despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit." Then I asked: "Do they even know you're black?"

"Yes. Of

Lanya surprises me once more: The whole nest out in the yard, and she asks, "Hey, how come Kid is the head scorpion in this nest? I mean Nightmare was before, and then Kid. I would have thought you'd have a black running things."

"Yeah," Tarzan says. "Me too." While everybody else looks like they'd never thought anything of the kind. But I have; so I waited.

Finally Glass laughs: "Well, of course Nightmare was sharing it with Dragon Lady. But I think more or less everybody has got it in their head that after one of these runs or other, the shit is gonna come down. Hard. When it does, you gonna see some niggers fade in the night like nobody's business. But the chief scorpion, maybe, ain't gonna be able to fade quite so fast. So that if this dumb-ass white motherfucker-" Glass put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a big grin, " — wants to stick around here and play superman, ain't no nigger with any sense gonna stand in his way. I mean the guy in charge is the one who gets zapped. At least, that's the way it works anyplace else…" Glass squints up at the sky.

Copperhead seemed to think it was funnier than anybody else.

course they do."

"I'm surprised."

"I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards."

"Do they know you're gay?"

Madame Brown moved in the chair and Mmmed again, negatively. "Let me see," she said after a moment: "Black, lesbian, I'm also very middle class.

Fireball said: "He's white? I didn't know that. He's darker than I am!"

"Man," Glass said, "the Kid is an Indian."

"Now I didn't know he was white," Fireball repeated. "He' crazy as a nigger."

Tarzan gave me a smile that dribbled strychnine.

"An' he sure likes his little blond brothers and sisters." Fireball (whose spade accent, more than any one else's, comes on and off for the occasion) pointed to Lanya and Denny. (Denny laughed.) "The Kid is really something else, man. Really something." (Lanya was pensive.)