Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"Is that a story you tell to everybody who asks you to read their poems?"

"Ah!" Newboy raised his finger. "I asked you if I might be allowed to read them. It is a story I have told to several people who've asked me for a judgment." Newboy swirled blunted ice. "Everyone knows everyone. Yes, you're right." He nodded. "I wonder sometimes if the purpose of the Artistic Community isn't to provide a concerned social matrix which simultaneously assures that no member, regardless of honors or approbation, has the slightest idea of the worth of his own work."

Kidd drank his beer, resentful at the long-windedness but curious about the man indulging it.

"The aesthetic equation," Newboy mused. "The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industralized society which has learned to distrust magic—"

"You're here!" Lanya seized his arm. "You look so bright and shiny and polished. I didn't recognize you!"

He pulled her against his shoulder. "This is Ernest Newboy," glad of the interruption. "This is my friend Lanya."

She looked surprised. "Kidd told me you helped him up at Mr Calkins'." She and Newboy shook hands across Kidd's chest.

"I'm staying there. But I was let out for the evening."

"I was there for days but I don't think I ever got a night off."

Newboy laughed. "There is that to it, yes. And where do you stay now?"

"We live in the park. You mustn't look astonished. Lots of people do. It's practically as posh an address as Roger's, today."

"Really? Do the two of you live there together?"

"We live in a little part all by ourselves. We visit people. When we're hungry. Nobody's come to visit us yet. But it's better that way."

Newboy laughed again.

Kidd watched the poet smile at her banter.

"I wouldn't trust myself to hunt you out of your hidden spot. But you must certainly come and see me, some day during the afternoon." Then to Kidd: "And you can bring your poems."

"Sure." Kidd watched Lanya be delightedly silent. "When?"

"The next time Roger decides it's Tuesday, why don't you both come around? I promise you won't have the same problem again."

He nodded vigorously. "All right."

Mr Newboy smiled hugely. "Then I'll expect you." He nodded, still smiling, turned, and walked away.

"Close your mouth." Lanya squinted about. "Oh, I guess it's okay. I don't see any flies." Then she squeezed his hand.

In the cage, neon flickered. Music rasped from a speaker.

"Oh, quick, let's go!"

He came with her, once glanced back: the back of Newboy's blue serge was wedged on both sides with leather, but he could not tell if the poet was talking or just standing.

"What have you been doing all day?" he asked on the cool street.

She shrugged closer. "Hanging out with Milly. I ate a lot of breakfast. Jommy is cooking this week so I really had more than I wanted. In the morning I advised John on a work project. Kibitzed on somebody's Chinese Checker game. After lunch I took off and played my harmonica. Then I came back for dinner. Jommy is a love, but dull. How was your job?"

"Strange." He pulled her close. (She brushed his big knuckles with her small ones, pensive, bending, removed.) "Yeah, they're weird. Hey, Newboy asked us up there, huh?" She rubbed her head against his shoulder and could have been laughing.

Her arm moved under his hand. "Do you want this back now?"

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks," and took the orchid, stopping to fix the longest blade in his belt loop. Then they walked again.

He did not demand a name. What does this confidence mean? Long in her ease and reticence, released from an effort to demand and pursue, there is an illusion of center. Already, presounded, I am armed with portents of a disaster in the consciousness, the failure to suspect, to inspect. Is she free here, or concerned with a complex intimacy dense to me? Or I excuse myself from her, lacking appellation. Some mesh, flush, terminal turned here through the larynx's trumpet. The articulate fear slips, while we try to measure, but come away with only the perpetual angle of distortion, the frequency of an amazed defraction.

In the half — or rather four-fifths dark, the lions looked wet. He brushed his right knuckles against the stone flank in passing: It was exactly as warm as Lanya's wrist, brushing his knuckles on the left.

How does she find her way? he wondered, but thirty steps on realized he had anticipated the last dark turn himself.

Distant firelight filigreed through near leaves. Lanya pushed them aside and said, "Hi!"

A shirtless man, holding a shovel, stood knee deep in a… half-dug grave?

Another man in a denim shirt, unbuttoned, stood on the lip. A young woman in a scrape, her chin balanced on both fists, sat on a log, watching.

"Are you still at this?" Lanya asked. "You were this far along when I was here this morning."

"I wish you'd let me dig," the young woman said.

"Sure," the bare-chested man with the shovel said. He shook blond hair from his shoulders. "Just as soon as we get it going."

The woman dropped her fists between her patched knees. Her hair was very long. In the distant light it was hard to see where its color was between bronze and black.

"I wonder where John gets the ideas for these projects," the man in the denim shirt on the lip said. "I was just as happy running off to squat in the bushes."

The guy with the shovel made a face. "I guess he's worried about pollution. I mean, look at all this!" The shovel blade swung.

But other than the dozen people standing or sitting over near the flaming cinderblocks, Kidd could see nothing outside the bubble of night the flames defined.

"Can you actually see what you're doing there?" Lanya asked.

"Enough to dig a God-damn latrine!" The shovel chunked into earth again.

"You know," the one on the lip said, "I could be in Hawaii right now. I really could. I had a chance to go, but I decided I'd come here instead. Isn't that too fucking much?"

As though she'd heard this too many times, the woman on the log sighed, palmed her knees, stood up, and walked off.

"Well, I really could." He frowned after her, then back at the pile of dirt. "Did your old lady really want to dig?"

"Naw." Another shovelful landed. "I don't think so."

Slap-slap, slap-slap, slap-slap went a rolled Times against a thigh. John walked up, cutting out more light.

Chunk-shush, chunk-shush went the shovel.

"They're digging it awfully close to where everybody stays," Kidd said to Lanya, "for a latrine."

"Don't tell me," Lanya said. "Tell them."

"I've been wondering about that too," John said, and stilled his paper. "You think we're digging it too close, huh?"

"Shit," the one who wanted to be in Hawaii said and glared at Kidd.

"Look," Kidd said, "you do it your way," then walked off.

And immediately tripped over the foot of somebody's sleeping bag. Recovering himself, he just missed another's head. Millimeters beyond the circle of darkness were chifferobes, bureaus, easy-chairs, daybeds, waiting to be moved from here, to there, to someplace else… He blinked in the fireplace's heat and put his hands in his back pockets. Standing just behind three others, he watched the curly-headed boy (Jommy?) wrestle a barrel—"Isn't this great, man? Oh, wow! Look at this. When we found this, I just didn't believe it — It's flour. Real flour. And it's still good. Oh, hey thanks, Kidd. Yeah, push it this… yeah, this way." — around the end of the picnic table.