Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

She came up between us, screaming: "Ahh hhhhhhhh — Annnnnn! Don't touch me! Ahhhhhhhhh— don't touch me, nigger"! She staggered and reeled in our grip. I didn't see her look at either of us. "Ahhhhh — I saw what you done! — that poor little white girl what couldn't do nothin' against you! We saw it! We all saw it! She come lookin' for you, askin' all around, askin' everybody where you are all the time, and now you take her, take her like that, just take her like you done! And see what's happened! Now, see! Oh, God, oh help me, don't touch me, oh, God!"

"Aw, come on!" George shouted again as once more she started to collapse. He pulled again; she came loose from my grip. The coat stung my hands. As I dodged away, she was still shrieking:

"Them white people gonna get you, nigger! Them white men gonna kill us all 'cause of what you done today to that poor little white girl! You done smashed up the store windows, broke all the streetlights, climbed up and pulled the hands down from the clock! You been rapin' and lootin' and all them things! Oh, God, there's gonna be shootin' and burnin' and blood shed all over! They gonna shoot up everything in Jackson. Oh, God, oh, God, don't touch me!"

"Will you shut up, woman, and pick up your damn junk," George said.

utes, midway, I thought I was lost) back to the nest.

Tarzan and the apes, all over the steps, were pretty glad to see me. Priest, California, and Cathedral did a great back-slapping routine down the hall. Glass nodded, friendly but overtly non-commital. And I had a clear thought: If I left, Glass, not Copperhead, would become leader.

I climbed up into the loft, told Devastation's friend Mike to move his ass the hell over.

"Oh, yeah, Kid. Sure, I'm sorry. I'll get down—"

"You can stay," I said. "Just move over." Then I stretched out with my notebook under my shoulder and fell asleep, splat!

Woke up loggy but clutching for my pen. Took some blue paper to the back steps, put the pine plank across my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Went back into the kitchen for some water.

Lanya and Denny were there.

"Hi."

"Oh, hi."

Went back to the porch and wrote some more. Finally it was

Which, when I looked back, seconds later, was what she was doing.

George, ten feet off, squatted to haul up a slab of rubble that rained plaster from both sides, while another woman tugged at a figure struggling beneath. A handful of gravel hit my shoulder from somewhere and I ducked forward.

Ahead of me, turning and turning in the silvered wreckage, Reverend Amy squinted up, fists moving about her ears, till her fingers jerked wide; the up-tilted face was scored with what I thought rage; but it swung again and I saw that the expression struggling with her features was nearer ecstasy.

I climbed over fallen brick. The orchid rolled and bounced on my belly.

The blind-mute was sitting on the curb near the hydrant. The blond Mexican and the brick-haired Negress squatted on either side. She held his hand, pressing her fist, the fingers rearranged and rearranged, at each contact, against his palm.

I reached among my chains, found the projector ball, and fingered the bottom pip.

The disk of blue light slid up the rubbly curb as I stepped to the sidewalk.

They looked up, two with eyes scarlet as blood-bubbles.

The mute's sockets (he poked his head about) were like empty cups dregged with shadow.

There was a sudden stinging in my throat from the smoke; smoke blew away. I shouted: "What are you doing?"

The Mexican dragged his boots back against the curb. The woman put her other hand on the mute's shoulder.

I watched their movements of surprise. Translated to their hands on the blind-mute's arms, it gave him his only knowledge of me. His face tilted forward; his hand closed on the woman's — my knowledge of what he knew. Thinking: It takes so little information… Though I am cased in light and their eyes orbited with plastic, in the over-determined matrix, translated and translated, perhaps his knowledge of me is even more complete.

I was frightened of their red eyes?

What does my blue beast become behind scarlet caps!

People shouted.

I shouted louder: "What's going on? What's happening? Do you know?" and ended coughing in more smoke.

The brick-haired Negress shook her head, a hand before her mouth, hesitant to quiet me, pinch her own lips close, or push me away. "Somebody put a bomb in… Didn't they? Isn't that what they said? Somebody put a—"

"No!" the Mexican said loudly. He tugged the blind-mute's shoulders. "There wasn't any — anything like that…" He got the blind-mute on his feet.

I turned to see men and women stumbling toward me, against the luminous mist. And something behind the mist flickered. I lurched into the street.

"There wasn't any bomb!" the man or the woman behind me shrieked. "They shot him! From up on the roof. Some crazy white boy! Shot him dead in the street! Oh, my God—"

Something warm splattered my ankle.

Water rolled between the humped cobbles, bright as mercury beneath the discharges on the collapsed, black sky. The street was a net of silver and I sprinted across it, catching one woman with my shoulder who spun — shouting — her scraped face after me, almost lunged into another man, but pushed off him with both hands; a sudden gust of heat stung the roofs of my eye-sockets. Lids clamped, I got through it and more dust, catching my boot-toe on something that nearly tripped me. I coughed and staggered with the back of my hand over my mouth.

Something went over the back of my neck, so cold I thought it was water. But it was just air. Eyes tearing, my throat spasming and hacking free of the dust caught in it, I staggered through it a dozen steps, till somebody grabbed me and I came up, staring at another black face.

"It's Kid!" Dragon Lady shouted to somebody and got her arm around me to keep me from falling.

A few steps behind her Glass turned around to see me. "Huh?"

Beyond him, against a screen of slowly moiling clouds, the side came off a twenty-story building, collapsing slowly away from the web of steel. But that must have been five blocks down.

"Jesus Christ…!" D-t said, then glanced back at me. "Kid, you all—?" and the sound got to us, filling up the space around us the way a volcano must up close.

The brunt of it past, I could hear people behind me still shouting: Three different voices bawled out instructions among some fifty more who didn't care.

"God damn it!" D-t said. "Come on!"

Someone had strewn coils of what looked like elevator cable all over the sidewalk. It was greasy too; so after the first dozen steps across it, we went into the street.

And the shouting behind us had resolved to a single, distant, insistant voice—"You wait, God damn it! You hear me, you motherfuckers wait for me!" — getting closer—"Wait for me, God damn it! Wait—!"

I looked back.

Fireball, fists pumping, bent forward from the waist and head flung back, ran full into Glass, who caught him by the arm. Fireball sagged back, gasping and crying: "You wait for me, God damn it! You damn niggers—" he sucked in a breath loud as vomiting—"why didn't you wait!" He was barefoot, with no shirt; a half dozen chains swung and tinkled from his neck as he bent, gasping, holding his stomach. In a pulse of light I saw he had a scrape down his jaw that went on across his shoulderblade as though something had fallen on him while he ran. His face was streaked with tears that he scrubbed with the flat of his fist. "You God damn fuckin' niggers, you wait for me!"