Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

She read a long time.

He came back twice to look at the top of her head. And went away.

"It…"

He turned.

"…makes me feel… odd." Her expression was even stranger.

"What," he risked, "does that mean?" and lost: it sounded either pontifical or terrified.

"Come here…?"

"Yeah." Crouching beside her, his arm knocked hers; his hair brushed hers as he bent. "What…?"

Bending with him, she ran her finger beneath a line. "Here, where you have the words in reverse order from the way you have them up here — I think, if somebody had just described that to me, I wouldn't have found it very interesting. But actually reading it — all four times — it gave me chills. But I guess that's because it works so well with the substance. Thank you." She closed the notebook and handed it back. Then she said, "Well don't look so surprised. Really, I liked it. Let's see: I'm… delighted at its skill, and moved by its… well, substance. Which is surprising, because I didn't think I was going to be." She frowned. "Really, you… are staring something fierce, and it makes me nervous as hell." But she wouldn't look down.

"You just like it because you know me." That was also to see what it felt like.

"Possibly."

He held the notebook very tight, and felt numb.

"I guess—" she moved away a little—"somebody liking it or not doesn't really do you any good."

"Yeah. Only you're scared they won't."

"Well, I did." She started to say more, didn't. Was that a shrug? Finally, she looked from beneath the overhanging limbs. "Thank you."

"Yeah," he said almost with relief. Then, as though suddenly remembering: "Thank you!"

She looked back, confusion working through her face toward some other expression.

"Thank you," he repeated, inanely, palms pressing the notebook to his denim thighs, growing wet. "Thank you."

The other expression was understanding.

His hands worked across each other like crabs, crawled round himself to hug his shoulders. His knees came up (the notebook dropped between them) to bump his elbows. A sudden, welling of… was it pleasure? "I got a job!" His body tore apart; he flopped, spread-eagle, on his back. "Hey, I got a job!"

"Huh?"

"While you were asleep." Pleasure rushed outward into hands and feet. "That lady in the bar last night; she came by with her dog and gave me this job."

"Madame Brown? No kidding. What kind of job?" She rolled to her stomach beside him.

"For this family. Named Richards." He twisted, because the chain was gnawing his buttocks. Or was it the notebook's wire spiral? "Just cleaning out junk."

"Well there's certainly enough junk—" she reached down, tugged the book loose from beneath his hip—"around Bellona to clean out." She lay it above his head, propped her chin on her forearms. "A pearl," she mused. "Katherine Mansfield once described San Francisco, in a letter to Murray, as living on the inside of a pearl. Because of all the fog." Beyond the leaves, the sky was darkly luminous. "See." Her head fell to the side. "I'm literate too."

"I don't think—" he frowned—"I've ever heard of Katherine…?"

"Mansfield." Then she raised her head: "Was the reference in the thing you wrote, to that Mallarmé poem…" She frowned at the grass, started tapping her fingers. "Oh, what is it…!"

He watched her trying to retrieve a memory and wondered at the process.

"Le Cantique de Saint Jean! Was that on purpose?"

"I've read some Mallarmé…" He frowned. "But just in those Portuguese translations Editora Civilizaçáo put out… No, it wasn't on purpose I don't think…"

"Portuguese." She put her head back down. "To be sure." Then she said: "It is like a pearl. I mean here in Bellona. Even though it's all smoke, and not fog at all."

He said: "Five dollars an hour."

She said: "Hm?"

"That's what they're going to pay me. At the job."

"What do you want with five dollars an hour?" she asked, quite seriously.

Which seemed so silly, he decided not to insult her by answering.

"The Labry Apartments," he went on. "Four hundred, Thirty-Sixth Street, apartment seventeen-E. I'm supposed to go up there this afternoon." He turned to look at her. "When I come back, we could get together again… maybe at that bar?"

She watched him a moment. "You want to get together again, don't you." Then she smiled. "That's nice."

"I wonder if it's late enough to think about going over there?"

"Make love to me once more before you go."

He scrunched his face, stretched. "Naw. I made love to you the last two times." He let his body go, glanced at her. "You make love to me this time."

Her frown fell away before, laughing, she leaned on his chest.

He touched her face.

Then her frown came back. "You washedl" She looked surprised.

He cocked his head up at her. "Not very much. In the john down there, I splashed some water on my face and hands. Do you mind?"

"No. I wash, myself, quite thoroughly, twice — occasionally even three times a day. I was just surprised."

He walked his fingers across her upper lip, beside her nose, over her cheek — like trolls, he thought, watching them.

Her green eyes blinked.

"Well," he said, "it's not something I've ever been exactly famous for. So don't worry."

Just as if she had forgotten the taste of him and was curious to remember, she lowered her mouth to his. Their tongues blotted all sound but breath while, for the… fifth time? Fifth time, they made love.

The glass in the right-hand door was unbroken.

He opened the left: a web of shadows swept on a floor he first thought was gold-shot, blue marble. His bare foot told him it was plastic. It looked like stone…

The wall was covered with woven, orange straw — no, the heel of his palm said that was plastic too.

Thirty feet away, in the center of the lobby — lighting fixtures, he finally realized — a dozen grey globes hung, all different heights, like dinosaur eggs.

From what must have been a pool, filled with chipped, blue rock, a thin, ugly, iron sculpture jutted. Passing nearer, he realized it wasn't a sculpture at all, but a young, dead tree.

He hunched his shoulders, hurried by.

The "straw"-covered partitioning wall beside him probably hid mailboxes. Curious, he stepped around it.

Metal doors twisted and gaped — like three rows, suddenly swung vertical (the thought struck with unsettling immediacy), of ravaged graves. Locks dangled by a screw, or were missing completely. He passed along them, stopping to look at one or another defaced nameplate, bearing the remains of Smith, Franklin, Howard…

On the top row, three from the end, a single box had either been repaired, or never prised: Richards: 17-E, white letters announced from the small, black window. Behind the grill slanted the red, white and blue edging of an airmail envelope.

He came out from the other side of the wall, hurried across the lobby.

One elevator door was half-open on an empty shaft, from which drifted hissing wind. The door was coated to look like wood, but a dent at knee level showed it was black metal. While he squatted, fingering the edge of the depression, something clicked: a second elevator door beside him rolled open.

He stood up, stepped back.

There were no lights in the other car.

Then the door on the empty shaft, as if in sympathy, also finished opening.

Holding his breath and his notebook tight, he stepped into the car.

"17" lit his fingertip orange. The door closed. The number was the only light. He rose. He wasn't exactly afraid; all emotion was in super solution. But anything, he understood over his shallow breath, might set it in fantastic shapes.