Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"Is Mrs Richards happy?"

"Not as happy as I'd like to see her. You know we used to have another — well, that's none of your affair. I won't put it on you. I've gone on too long already."

"That's okay."

"Better go. Have to be in the office by ten and the warehouse by eleven thirty."

"Hey, Mr Richards?"

Mr Richards turned in the doorway.

"You've got a letter in your mailbox. Airmail."

"Ah!" Mr Richards nodded. "Thanks." He went out.

"— and Mr Richards?" When there was no answer, he went to the hall. Both elevators were closed.

He put his hand in his pocket and felt the moist, crushed bill. He shook his head and started to work a dresser toward the door. Three feet, and he decided to take the drawers out.

After he'd moved furniture for a long time, he went out on the balcony. On the building across, smoke coiled. The mist to his right was bright as ivory. When he looked down, the top of a tree was just visible in pooling haze.

He moved the final large pieces of furniture; then, two at a time, he lugged off the cane-bottom chairs. On the last lay the notebook.

He rubbed his shirt pocket, wondering if he should take a break. The pen slipped under the cloth. He looked at the emptied room. In the doorway was the pail, the mop, the soap box. He moved his teeth on one another, took up the book and sat.

He wrote slowly. Every little while he looked sharply up, toward the door, and even toward the window. Eight lines later he put the pen in his pocket. The already enlarged front knuckle of his left middle finger was sore and dented from the pen. He yawned, closed the book, and sat for a while watching the fog stretch and constrict. Then he tossed the book on the floor, stood up, and carried his chair into 19-B.

He used a piece of cardboard for a dustpan, and carried the sweepings into the other apartment. Finding no can, he dumped them into a bureau drawer. Back in the kitchen, he clanked the pail into the sink. The water crashed on the zinc, swirled up in suds; crashing diminished to roaring, muffled more and more in foam.

"I just don't know what I was thinking of!"

"It's all right, ma'am. Really—"

"I just don't know what's the matter with me. Here they are—"

"That's all right, Mrs Richards."

"Right in the icebox." She swung the door back. "See. I made them. I really did."

Three sandwiches, each with corner hole, lay on a plate.

He laughed. "Look, I believe you."

"I made them. Then I thought I'd send June and Bobby up. Then I thought again, Oh no, it must be too early for lunch; so I put them in the icebox. And then—" She closed the icebox door halfway—"I forgot about them. You could eat them now."

"Thank you. That's fine. All I wanted to tell you is I got the furniture all out, and the back two rooms mopped, and the back bathroom."

"Take them." She opened the door again. "Go ahead. Go inside and eat. Oh!" The icebox door slammed and just missed knocking the plate from his hand. "Coffee! You'll want coffee. There, I'll start the water. Go on. I'll be in in a minute."

Maybe she is mad (he thought and went into the living room), too.

He sat on the L-shaped couch, put the plate on the coffee table, and peeled up the bread corners, one after the other: peanut butter and jelly, spam and mustard, and—? He stuck his finger in it, licked: Liver pâté.

He ate that one first.

"Here you are!" She put down his cup and sat on the other leg of the L, to sip her own.

"It's very good," he mumbled with a full mouth, joggled the sandwich demonstratively.

She sipped a while more. Then she said: "You know what I want?"

"Mmm?"

She looked down at the notebook lying on the couch and nodded. "I want you to read me one of your poems."

He swallowed. "Naw, I should go upstairs and finish mopping. Then clean up the kitchen. You can start getting your stuff together, and I'll take some of it up this evening."

"Tomorrow!" she cried, "Oh, tomorrow! You've been working terribly hard. Read me a poem. Besides, we don't have a thing ready."

He smiled and contemplated murder.

And here, he thought, it would be so much easier to get away with… "I don't think you'd like them."

Hands together in her lap, she leaned forward: "Please."

He dragged the book into his lap (like I was covering myself, he thought. I could kill her). "All right." Something tickled the underside of his thigh. It was sweat catching on the chain that bound him. "I'll read…" He opened the book, coughed: "This one." He took a breath, and looked at the paper. He was very hot. The chains across his back pulled: he was hunching his shoulders. When he opened his mouth, for a moment he was sure no voice would come.

But he read.

He dropped word after word into the room's silence.

Meaning peeled away from his voice and raveled.

Sounds he had placed together to evoke a tone of voice mis-sounded. The mouth's machinery was too clumsy to follow what his eye knew. He read each word, terribly aware how the last should have fallen.

Once he coughed.

For one phrase he grew quieter, easier. Then, frantically, at a place where his voice closed out a comma, he wondered, Why did I choose this one! I should have chosen any one except this!

Hoarsely he whispered the last line, and put one hand on his stomach to press away the small pain. He took some more deep breaths and sat back. The back of his shirt was sopping.

"That was lovely."

He wanted to and didn't laugh.

"…Lost inside your eye…" she misquoted. No, paraphrased.

His stomach tightened again.

"Yes, I liked that very much."

He arched his fingers there, and said: "Thank you."

"Thank you. I feel…"

He thought: I'm too tired to kill anyone.

"…feel that you have given me something of yourself, a very precious thing."

"Uhh." He nodded vaguely. Tension finally forced the laugh: "You just like it because you know me." With the laugh, some of the tiredness went.

"Definitely." She nodded. "I don't know any more about poetry than Arthur does. Really. But I'm glad you read it. For the trust."

"Oh." Something more terrifying than the possibility of murder happened in him. "You really are?" A cold metallic wire sewed somewhere, taking small stitches. "I better get back up to finish the mopping." He began to move on the couch, preparing to stand.

"I'm very glad you read that poem to me."

He stood. "Yeah. Sure. I'm glad you… liked it," and hurried for the door. It closed behind him far too loud. In the hall, his face heating, he thought: She was going to say something else to me! What else was she going to…? He hurried to the elevator.

In 19-B he filled the pail again, kicked off his sandal, and slushed the mop in suds. Foam, mop-strands and water returned him to varied beaches. He mopped angrily, remembering waves.

The water slopped his feet. It had been warm when he put it in the pail. Each stroke wet the baseboard further along.

They're cheating me, he thought and twisted the mophead. Among failing suds the water was black. I've got to tell them, he thought, that I know it. At least ask them why they're not paying me what they said. Of course they didn't say it to me. Not that I need the money, even… That made him even angrier.

He sloshed up more beaches in his mind, moving from room to room.

I don't have a name, he thought. Tides and tides, rolled from the tangled cords. These things I'm writing, they're not descriptions of anything. They're complex names. I don't want her to believe what they say. I just want her to believe I said them. Somewhere (Japan? Yeah…) I walked up the wharf from where the little boats were tied and the black rocks gave out to sand. And everything, even the sand slipping back under my feet, looked miles away like it used to all the time when I was tired, when I was a kid. One of the other fellows from the ship called to me. What did he call me? And how could I have possibly answered?