Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

I was naked. "Restless?"

"Yeah." I came over, squatted by the bed, hugged her.

"Go ahead. Pace some more. I need another couple of hours." She turned over. I took up the old notebook here, sat around cross-legged on the floor, contemplating writing down what had happened till then.

Or a poem.

Did neither.

Looked in the top desk drawer — the wood looks like paper had been glued all over it and then as much pulled off as possible. She said some friends lugged it from a burned-out windshield warehouse a few blocks down the hill.

I took out the poems she'd saved, spread them on the gritty wood, on every kind of paper, creased this way and that (red-tufted begonia stalks doffed), and tried to read them.

Couldn't.

Thought seriously of tearing them up.

Didn't.

But understood much about people who have.

Looked back at Lanya; bare shoulders, the back of her neck, a fist sticking from under the pillow.

Prowled some more.

Got back into bed.

Denny jerked his head up, blinking. He didn't know where he was. I rubbed the back of his neck and whispered, "It's okay, boy…" He settled back down, nuzzling into Lanya's armpit. She turned away from him toward me.

I woke alone.

Leaves arched over me. I looked up through them. Blew once to see if they'd move, but they were too far. Closed my eyes.

"Hey," Denny said. "You still asleep?"

I opened my eyes. "Fuck you if I was."

"I just walked Lanya over to school." He leaned against the edge of the doorway, holding his chains. "It's nice around here, huh?"

I sat up on the side of the bed.

"But there ain't too much to do … it's nice of her to have us over here, I mean to stay a while, huh?"

I nodded.

frames, glass and brick hurled across the street.

They screamed — I could hear it over the explosion because some were right around me — and ran against the near wall, taking me with them and I crashed into the people in front of me, wind knocked out of me by the people behind, screaming; someone reached over my shoulder for support, right by my ear, and nearly tore it off. More people (or something?) hit the people behind me, hard.

Coughing and scrambling, I turned to push someone from behind me. Across the street, girders, scabby with brick and plaster, tesselated luminous dust. I staggered from the wall among the staggering crowd and stumbled into a big woman on her hands and knees, shaking her head.

About two hours later he told me he was going out. I spent the rest of the morning staring at blank paper or prowling.

Madame Brown, coming out of her office, saw me once and said: "You look strange. Is anything the matter?"

"No."

"Are you just bored?"

"No," I said. "I'm not bored at all. I'm thinking a lot."

"Can you leave off long enough for a lunch break?"

"Sure." I hadn't had breakfast.

Tunafish salad.

Canned pears.

We both had a couple of glasses of wine. She asked me for my character impressions of: Tak, Lanya, Denny, one of her patients I had met at the bar once; I told her and she thought what I said was interesting; told me hers, which I thought were interesting too, and they changed mine; so I told her the changes. Then the next patient came by and I went back to staring at my paper; prowling; staring.

Which is what I was doing when Lanya and Denny came in. He'd gone back to the school to help out with the class.

"Denny suggested we go on a class trip, outside to look at the city. We did. It turned out to be a fine idea. With two of us we didn't have any problem handling them. That was a good idea, Denny. It really was." Then she asked if I'd written anything.

"Nope."

"You look strange," she told me.

Denny said: "No he don't. He just gets like that sometimes."

Lanya Mmmmed. She knows me better than he does, I guess.

Denny was really into being useful — a trait which, pleasant as he is, I've never seen in him before. I helped them do a couple of things for Madame Brown: explore the cellar, take one chair down, bring up a dresser she'd found on the street and managed to get to the back door.

It was a >nice evening.

I wondered if I was spoiling it by sug-

I tried to pull her up, but she got back down on her knees again.

What she was trying to do, I realized, was roll a pile of number ten tomato- and pineapple-juice cans and crumpled cookie packages back into her overturned shopping bag. Her black coat spread around her over crumbs of brick.

One can rolled against my foot. It was empty.

She began to go down, even further, laying her cheek on the pavement, reaching among the jangling cans. I bent to pull her once more. Then someone, yanking her from the other side, shouted, "Come on!" (Cüm öhn! the vowels, long and short, braying: the m soft as an n; the n loose as an r.) I looked up without letting go.

It was George.

gesting: "Maybe we should go back to the nest tonight?"

Lanya said: "No. You should use some of this boring peace and quiet to work it."

"I'm not bored," I said. And resolved to sit in front of a piece of paper for at least an hour. Which I did: wrote nothing. But my brain bubbled and bobbed and rotated in my skull like a boiling egg.

When I finally went to bed I fell out like an old married man.

One of them or the other got up in the night to take a leak, came back to bed brushing aside the plants and we balled, hard and a little loud I think.

In the morning we all got up together.

I noticed Lanya noticing me being quiet. She noticed my noticing and laughed.

After coffee we all walked to the school. Denny asked to stick around for the class. Now I noticed her wondering if two days in a row was a good idea. But she said, "Sure," and I left them and went back to the house, stopping once to wonder if I should go back to the nest instead.

Madame Brown and I had lunch again.

"How are you enjoying your visit?"

"Still thinking a lot," I told her. "But also think all the thinking is about to knock me out."

"Your poetry?"

"Haven't written a word. I guess it's just hard for me to write around here."

"Lanya said you weren't writing too much at your place, either. She said she thought there were too many people around."

"I don't think that's the reason."

We talked some more.

Then I came to a decision: "I'm going back to the nest. Tell Lanya and Denny when they get back, will you?"

"All right." She looked at me dubiously over a soup spoon puddled with Cross & Blackwell vischysoise. "Don't you want to wait and tell them yourself when they get back?"

I poured another glass of wine. "No."

When the next patient rang, I took my notebook and wandered (for five, funny min-