Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"Tak, I'm not stuck up. I always spoke to you!"

"Yeah, yeah, so's your old man!" Tak pointed with a thumb. "Is he your old man now?" Then he laughed. "Come on. Late supper at Tak Loufer's. Tak Loufer's gonna give a party. Jack, you were saying how hungry you were."

"Gee," Jack said. "I don't know if…"

Lanya suddenly turned to him. "Oh, come on! Now, you have to come with us. You've just gotten here. Tak wants to show you around." She positively beamed.

"Well…" Jack grinned at the table, at Tak, at the candelabra.

"I'll give you something to eat," Tak said.

"Hell, I'm not that—"

"Oh, come on!" Lanya insisted.

(He moved his hands over the notebook, stained with blood and charcoal, to where the newspaper stuck out from the sides…) Lanya reached across and laid one fingertip on his gnawed thumb. He looked up. Tak was standing to leave. Jack: "Well, all right," finishing up his beer; Tak pulled his coat from the bench back. Lanya rose.

He picked up the paper and the notebook and stood beside her. Jack and Tak (he remarked again the juxtaposition of sounds) went ahead. She pressed his arm and whispered, "I'd say I just earned my supper, wouldn't you?"

They skirted the Harrison party. "Hey, look a-dere go' ol' I'n' Wo'f!" Harrison grinned up from a hand of cards.

"Go drown yourself, ape," Tak jibed back, "or I'll tell everybody you're holding—"

Harrison pulled his cards away and rumbled into laughter — when suddenly the silver-haired dancer bounced into their midst, G-string mended; he grabbed Lanya's arm. "Darling, how do you always manage to leave here with all the beautiful men? Come on, everyone! A big smile for your mother… Fabulous! Can I come too?"

Tak swung his jacket, and the silver head ducked. "Get outa here."

"Oh, now, with that big old hairy chest of hers, she thinks she's just too too!"

But they pushed toward the door.

The red-headed woman and Purple Angora were talking quietly by the wall. Muriel, panting, lay between their feet. The flickering candles kept gouging lines in the woman's yellow face. She was not that made up, he realized as they passed, nor that old. But the roughness of her skin under the unsteady light suggested misplaced artifice. Over her jacket (he had not seen it before and wondered how he had missed it; unless simple profusion had misled him to think it was something else) were loops and loops and loops of the strange chain Faust, Nightmare, the dancer, indeed, he himself, as well, wore.

Muriel barked.

He pushed into the hall, behind Lanya, in front of Jack.

Teddy smiled at them, like a mechanical skull beneath his cap, and held the door.

The very blonde girl at the sidewalk's edge bit at her knuckle and watched them intently.

The cool was surprising.

He had reached down to make sure that the orchid still hung in his belt loop when she said: "Excuse me, I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but was—" her face held its expression unsteadily—"George Harrison… in there?" then lost it completely. Her grey eyes were very bright.

"Huh? Oh, yeah. He's inside."

Her fist flew back against her chin and she blinked.

Behind him Jack was saying, "Jesus, will you look at that!"

"Now that is something!" Tak said.

"You say he is in there? George Harrison, the big colored man?"

"Yeah, he's inside." At which point Lanya tugged his arm: "Kid, look at that! Will you?"

"Huh? What?" He looked up.

The sky—

He heard footsteps, lowered his eyes: the blonde girl was hurrying down the street. Frowning, he looked up again.

— streamed with black and silver. The smoke, so low and limitless before, had raddled into billows, torn and flung by some high wind that did not reach down to the street.

Hints of a moon struck webs of silver on the raveling mist.

He moved against Lanya's shoulder (she too had glanced after the girl), all warm down his side. Her short hair brushed his arm. "I've never seen it like that before!" And then, louder: "Tak, has it ever been like that before?"

(Someday I'm going to die, he thought irrelevantly, but shook the thought away.)

"Damn!" Loufer took off his cap. "Not since I been here." He was holding his jacket over his shoulder by one finger. "How do you like that, Jack? Maybe it's finally breaking up."

They started to the corner, still staring.

"That's the first time here I've seen the—" Then Lanya stopped.

They all stopped. He swallowed, hard: with his head back, it tugged uncomfortably at his Adam's apple.

Through one rent, the lunar disk had appeared; then as the aperture moved with the wind, he saw a second moon!

Lower in the sky, smaller, it was in some crescent phase.

"Jesus!" Jack said.

The smoke came together again, tore away.

"Now wait just a God-damn minute!" Tak said.

Once more the night was lit by the smaller, but distinctly lunar crescent. A few stars glittered near it. The smoke closed here, opened there: The gibbous moon shone above it.

Before the bar door another group had gathered craning at the violated night. Two, pulling a bottle back and forth, came loose, came close.

"What the hell—" The sky cleared again under two lights, crescent and near-full—"is that?" Tak demanded

Someone else said: "What do you think it is, a sun?"

"The moon!" One gestured with his foaming bottle

"Then what's that?"

One pulled the bottle from the other's hand. "That's another… that one's George!"

They reeled off, spilling liquor.

In the gathered group, people laughed;

"You hear that, George? You got a God-damn moon named after you!" and out of the laughter and chatter, a louder laugh rose.

Lanya shrugged closer beneath his arm.

"Jesus…" Jack whispered again.

"Not according to them," Tak said. "Come on."

"What is it?" Lanya asked again.

"Maybe it's some kind of reflection." He flexed his fingers around on her small shoulder. "Or one of those weather balloons. Like they used to think were flying saucers."

"Reflected from what, on to what?" Tak asked.

Flakes of smoke spun over. One or the other, and occasionally both moons showed. There was a breeze now. The sky was healing. Over half the sky clouds had already coalesced. Voices came from in the bar doorway:

"Hey, we got a moon! And we got a George!"

"Shine on, shine on harvest George—"

"Oh man, June and George don't rhyme!"

("Tak and Jack do," Lanya whispered, giggled, and pulled her harmonica from her pocket.)

"But you remember what he do to that little white girl—"

"Oh, shit, was that her name!"

Lanya blew harmonica notes in his ear. He pulled away, "Hey…!" and came back to her, perturbed. She reached up and held his forefinger. Something tickled his blunt knuckle. She was brushing her lips across the ruin of his thumb's first joint. The shoutings died behind them. Overhead, the lights blurred in returning clouds. She played lazy music by his chest, following the ex-soldier and the ex-engineer. Her motion pulled him. She paused to tell him, "You smell good."

"Huh? Yeah, I guess I stink," and cringed.

"I mean it. Good. Like a pear somebody's soaked in brandy."

"That's what happens when you bum around for three weeks and can't get a bath." She nuzzled the forking of his arm.

He thought she was funny. And liked her funniness. And realized that it was because she made it easier to like… whoever he was; and came out of the thoughts trying not to smile. She played randomly.

He beat the paper and notebook on his thigh, till he remembered John whom he did not like, and stopped.