Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

My jaw clamped so hard my head shook. "I… I had it for a second! But then I…"

"It begins with 'F'." She called again: "Denny!"

"Wait a minute! Wait, I… no, I can't remember! But the first name—"

"— Michael Henry…" she prompted.

Denny ran up. "What…?" He put a hand on her shoulder, a hand on mine. "Come on, you wanna—"

"Tell him, Kid!"

I dropped Lanya's elbows and took both of Denny's.

He was breathing very hard. "My name is Michael—" another clap—"Henry… something. I don't remember the last one now." I took a deep breath (clap!). "But two out of three is pretty good!" I must have been grinning pretty hard.

"Wow!" Denny said. He started to say a couple of other things, but finally just shrugged, grinning back.

"I don't know what to say either," I said.

Lanya hugged me. She almost knocked me over.

Denny hugged us both, getting his head between ours and wiggling it back and forth and laughing. So Lanya had to hold him up with one hand. We all staggered. I put my arm around him too. Somebody pulled a chain against my back. It either broke or one of the people holding it let go. We staggered again.

Someone put hands against my back and said: "Hey, watch it! Don't fall!" Paul Fenster — I hadn't even seen him among the spectators — was steadying me as we came apart.

Lanya said: "It's all right if we fall, Paul. It's okay."

Someone threw another length of chain into the circle. Mantichore and iguanadon caught it up, blundering together, casting ghost-lights. Clap!

"Hey, I like your school," Denny said. "I've been helping Lanya with her kids."

"I was telling you about Denny, Paul? He was the one who suggested we take that class trip that turned out so well."

Re-reading this single description of Paul Fenster between these soiled cardboards, this thought: Since life may end at any when, the expectation of revelation or peripity, if not identical to, is congruent with insanity. They give life meaning, but expectation of them destroys our faculty for experiencing meaning. So I am still writing out these incidents. But now I am interested in the art of incident only as it touches life… but I have written that at least three other places among these pages. What I haven't written is that, because of it, I am less and less interested in the incidence of art. ("Sex without guilt?" Entelechy without anticipation!) I just wonder would Paul have done anything differently that evening in the park if he'd known he was going to be shot in the head and neck four times, six hours later.

I said: "I've never seen any children there. I've heard their voices. On the tape recorder. But I don't believe you ever had any real children in there."

Lanya looked at me oddly.

Fenster laughed. "Well, you brought us five of them yourself."

"But there weren't any…" Inside, it felt like two disjoined surfaces had suddenly slipped flush; the relief was unbearable. "I put five of them… in the school?"

"Woodard, Rose, Sammy…?" Lanya said.

"You remember," Denny said. "Stevie? Marceline?"

"I remember," I said. "I know who I am…"

"Michael Henry," Denny said.

I put my hand on Fenster's shoulder. "You go dance."

"Naw, I'm not into the bare-ass bit."

I frowned at the dancers; only fifteen or twenty were naked.

"Go on." I pushed at him; he stepped back. "You don't have to take your clothes off. You just go dance."

Fenster looked at Lanya. To stand up for him? I flashed on him pulling her shirt closed across her breasts, buttoning the top button, patting her head, and walking away.

"Go ahead." I was angry. "Dance!"

"Come on, Kid," Lanya said, taking my arm.

Fenster walked off now, laughing.

"You wanna sit down?" Denny asked.

"Come on," Lanya said. "Let's go sit down."

Denny took my other arm; but I twisted to look back.

Fenster walked between the dancers, now pushed, now helping a girl wearing just a sopping T-shirt who fell against him, now ducking beneath one of the glittering lines pulled between bright creatures prancing at the tree.

"What are you trying to do?" Lanya asked.

"Take off my clothes. I don't need anything… anything now." I tossed my boot on top of my vest. I lifted my chin and raised the seven chains and the projector. Links dragged my nipples. I held them up, swaying, and let go. Some hit my nose and cheek and ear. Some fell across my shoulder, and slid off, clattering, to the grass. I looked down to undo the twin hooks on my belt; pushed down my pants. Lanya held my arm so I wouldn't fall getting my foot out the cuff.

"Feel better?" Denny asked.

I tried to undo the clasp at the side of my neck. A file of insects, it felt like, charged down my belly, caught in the hair at my groin. The optic chain sagged around my ankle.

"I think you broke it," Lanya said.

"I can fix it again," Denny said. "I got nails—"

"No," I said.

From the commune, from the nest, and from the people who'd just come to watch, they clapped and leaped beside the fire. Seven more, barking, calling, and yipping, broke from the loose ring, turned among and beneath (one very black girl jumped over) the beaded chain that crossed and crossed the clearing. The heads of beasts blown out of light like glass broke scarves of smoke; our throats tickled from the harsh air.

Three silhouetted figures, heads together, came toward me, whispering. Copperhead, center, conferred with Raven and Cathedral. Raven and Copperhead were naked. (The different curl and color of their hair, suddenly bright at the sides of their heads with the fire behind them…) Copperhead had his hand on Raven's shoulder.

Copperhead was saying: "Protection! Did you get that? Calkins asking for protection—?"

Cathedral said: "Scorpions don't protect nothing."

Copperhead said: "They shot out practically every God-damn window in the God-damn fucking building. Man, it was something!"

Raven asked: "They shot up Calkins's place? The sniper…?"

Copperhead said: "Not Calkins' place! And it weren't no fuckin' sniper! It was them people back at that big store. You remember that big fuckin' apartment house Thirteen used to be in, up on the sixteenth floor? God damn, man, they shot the whole fuckin' place up, practically every God-damn window in the building!"

"Shit, man!" Cathedral shook his head. "The honkeys isbad as the niggers."

Copperhead humphed: "Protection!"

Raven laughed.

They walked away in the dark.

I watched the fire. One pants leg was still around my ankle. The optic chain, as I swayed, swayed against my calf. "I want to… to dance."

"Then get your foot out your pants cuff," Denny said. "You'll trip yourself." He sounded like he didn't want me to go, though.

Each Clap! struck something inside my skull that made a flash all its own. My ears thundered as though only inches from the drum. Each explosion left some crazy echo stuttering in the tattered noise. I stepped forward, moiling my genitals in my hand. They felt sensitive. I stepped again,

"Watch it—"

Lanya must have held my pants leg down with her foot, because they came off. I stumbled, but kept going. Toward the dance.

In a black turtleneck sweater he stood, with folded arms, among the spectators. He didn't see me looking at him. But Lady of Spain and D-t and a couple of others did and stopped dancing. Prisms and lenses hung down from my neck. Mirrors and prisms swung from my wrist. Lenses and mirrors dragged from my ankle behind me in the grass.

He shifted a little. Firelight shook its patina across his brown hair.

"Hey…!" I said loudly. "I know who I… who I am now. Who are you?"

He looked at me, frowning.