Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"Where do you work, Mr Richards?" he asked as they got out.

"MSE… Maitland Systems Engineering. Honey, I wish I could take off from work. But things are even more confused there than they are here. This just isn't the time for it. Not now."

Mrs Richards sighed and took out a key. "I know, dear. You're sure Management said it would be all right?"

"I told you, honey, I got the key from them."

"Well, they never answered my letter. They answered in two days when I wrote them last year about the plaster in June's bedroom." The key went in with a sound like gravel. "Anyway—" she looked across Mr Richards' chest again—"this is where we're going to move to."

She strode into the pale blue room through rattling mountains of brown paper. "The lights," she said. "Try the lights."

Mr Richards and June and Bobby waited in the doorway.

He stepped inside, flicked the switch.

The ceiling light flared, went Pppp! and out.

June, behind him, let a small cry.

"That's only the bulb. At least you have some power."

"Oh, we can fix that," Mr Richards said and came inside. "Come on, kids. Get inside now."

June and Bobby squeezed through shoulder to shoulder, but remained sentinel at the jambs.

"What else has to go beside this paper?"

"Well." Mrs Richards righted a cane bottom chair.

"There're the other rooms, furniture and stuff." Brown paper roared about her shins. "All sorts of junk. And the dirt. And then of course, we'll have to move our things."

Blinds, fallen from one fixture, dangled their crushed aluminum slats to the floor. "Just take those all down. It'll be a nice apartment when it's clean."

"Did you know the people who lived here before?"

"No," Mrs Richards said. "No. We didn't know them. Now all you have to do is clean these out." She walked into the kitchen and opened a broom closet. "Mop, pail, Spic-n'-span. Everything." She came back. "There's all sorts of things in the other rooms."

"What were they doing with all this paper?"

"I dunno," Bobby said uneasily from the doorway.

Stepping into the lichenous leaves, his bare foot came down on wood, wire, glass: krak! He jerked his foot, kicking away paper.

The break in the cover-glass went through both faces: framed in black wood, husband and wife, bearded and coiffed, posed in nineteen-hundred clothing. He picked it up from the papers. The loose glass ground.

"What's that?" Mrs Richards asked, stepping around more overturned furniture.

"I guess I broke it," trying to feel, without looking, if he had cut his foot.

Between the parents, in matching sailor suits, a sister and her two brothers (one younger, one older) looked serious and uncomfortable.

"It was just lying on the floor."

Mrs Richards took it from him. The hanging-wire rattled on the cardboard backing. "Isn't that something. Who do you suppose they are?"

"The people who lived here before—?" June stepped up, then laughed. "Oh, it couldn't be. It's so old!"

"Daddy," Bobby said from the doorway.

"Yes?"

"I think Kidd wants to use the bathroom."

June and Mrs Richards both turned.

"I mean," Bobby said, "he's just been living in the park, and stuff; he's real dirty."

Mrs Richards sucked her teeth and June only just did not say, "Oh, Bobby!"

Mr Richards said, "Well…" smiling, and then, "Um…" and then, "Well… sure."

"I am sort of scroungy," he admitted. "I could use a washup, after I finish work up here."

"Sure," Mr Richards repeated, heartily. "I've got a razor you can use. Mary'll give you a towel. Sure."

"In this room—" Mrs Richards had leaned the photograph against the wall and was trying to open a door now—"I don't know what they put in this room."

He went to take the knob. Something scraped as he shoved the door in a few inches. A few inches more and he could peer: "Furniture, ma'am. I think the whole room is filled up with furniture."

"Oh, dear…"

"I can squeeze in there and get it out"

"Are you sure—?"

"Why don't you all just go downstairs? I can get started on this. It's got to be neat and clean. It's a mess now. There's not too much you have to show me."

"Well, I suppose…"

"Come on, Mary. Let the boy get to work."

He went back to the front room and began to push the paper over to one side of the room.

"Bobby, come on back from there. I don't want you getting in trouble."

The door closed:… the boy? Well, he was used to having his age misjudged. (Where do they want me to put this crap!) He turned around and, with his sandal, stepped on something else. He kicked back paper: a kitchen fork.

He put his notebook on the chair Mrs Richards had set right, and began to fold the wrapping paper to yard-square packets. Out there on the balcony, he could toss it over. Shit-colored angel flakes? And the furniture: crash! No, can't do that very well. Drag all that junk to the elevator, drop a traveling furnished room to the cellar. Punch around in the basement dark with it? Beating on the wall, thumping on the floor? Not that either. Put it all on one side of the room, sweep and scrub, then all to the other. Burn it in the middle? What does she expect?

At any rate, in ten minutes, half the floor was clear. On the black (with white marbling) vinyl, he'd already uncovered a saucer filmed with dried coffee; Time with a wrinkled cover he recognized from several years back; some paint-crusted rags—

The knock made him jump.

June called, "It's just me…"

When he opened the door, she stepped in with a bottle of Coke in one hand, in the other a plate with a sandwich. The sandwich had a hole at one side. She thrust them out and said: "Please, don't say anything about last night, at the bar! Please! Please?"

"I didn't say anything to your mother." He took plate and bottle. "I wasn't going to get you in trouble."

"They don't know anything about that…! The paper had the pictures, but they didn't have my name… though everybody knows it anyway!"

"All right—"

"They looked at them, Mother and Daddy. They looked at them and they didn't recognize me! Oh, I thought I was going to die… I cried. Afterward. Oh…" She swallowed. "Mother… sent that up to you. She thought you might be hungry. Please don't say anything?"

"I won't," and was annoyed.

"It was like you were playing with me. That was awful!"

He took a drink. "Did you find him, George Harrison?" It was bubbly but tepid.

She whispered, "No…"

"What did you want him for?"

Her totally vulnerable look made him grin.

He put the plate down on the chair, considering whether to accept what so resembled the once rejected; then he took the sandwich and tore through the hole with his teeth. Spam. And mayonnaise. "He was in there. You shouldn't've run off. He came out just a minute later." He swallowed. "Hey, you want a picture of him?"

"Huh?"

"I can get you a picture of him, if you want, not like they had in the newspaper."

"No. I don't want a picture of him. What kind of picture?"

"Big full-color poster. Buck naked."

"No!" She dropped her head. "You are playing with me. I wish you wouldn't. It's just awful."

"Hey, I just…" He looked from sandwich to bottle. He wasn't hungry, but had eaten in complicity. Now he wished he hadn't. He said: "If you play by yourself, you're just going to lose. If I play with you, maybe you'll … have a chance."

Her hair swung; she looked up, with a confusion he paid her the compliment of assuming feigned.

"Tomorrow I'll get you the—"

"You were supposed to wait for me," Bobby said from the doorway. "Mom said we were supposed to come up here together… Gosh, you almost got this room clean."