Dhalgren (104 page)

Sammy,
move
/ standing by the far wall,
moved
/turned/ the toe of his sneaker
over
/on/ the floor and blinked.

The following letter is paper-clipped to the top and side of the page on which the next entry begins. The envelope, stuck beneath, has left its outline on the stationery:

How absurd—

—to apologize for an uncommitted injury. But I shall not have been at your party tonight—if Lansang delivers this. There is nothing less sympathetic than the vulgar pleading extenuating circumstances for their vulgarity. There is nothing more distressing to a man who admires formal honesty than to discover he can only offer "personal reasons" as honest explanation for his breach of form.

But, for personal reasons, I will not have attended your party when you read this. I am distressed.

I have been rude.

And I have often imagined
that
to be the most terrible admission I might ever have to make.

Forgive me.

It is not much consolation that the powerful are most successful as patrons when least in evidence. I am concerned with what I presumptuously consider my City. I have always felt every society must have its art; and for that art to have ultimate use, it must be free of intimidation from the centers of power.

Therefore I have not read your poems. Nor will I.

Were I less gregarious, or Bellona more populous, I could be content to read them and never meet you. But I am a very social being, and Bellona is the social size it is.

We
will
meet

And I eagerly await your second collection, whenever it should be ready. Its publication, hopefully, will be as expeditious as publication of your first.

My friend, I am fascinated by the mechanics of power. Who in his right mind would want the problems and responsibilities of the nation's president? Lord, I
would!
I would! But one cannot be president with a Jewish grandmother. A millionaire family with connections at Harvard helps. A moderately wealthy one with strong emotional ties to Wooster (paint-thinner manufacturers in Cleveland) can be a downright nuisance.

Shall I twist the knife?

A degree in corporate law from Yale is one thing; one in patents from N.Y.U.,
(cum laude,
1960, and still two tries at the New York bar. Personal reasons again…? The pain!) is something else again.

I ramble.

More than likely I shall not be at the house for a while.

Until we
do
meet, I remain,

Sincerely,      
Roger Calkins

RC;wd

too dark to see.

So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside—and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing, and everybody was pouring in to see what was going on: "Night run!" I told them. "We're gonna make a night run!" Which we did—to the building with the stained glass windows (the lions of the city, a particolored flicker from our lights) with Lanya along, mouse quiet; and there was a funny almost-fight with three men on the street. But after they got as nasty as they dared, I guess it struck them how stpud [stupid?] they were being; a couple of times they got pushed into a wall, though.

At the nest, Denny filled up a bottle from the pail on the stove; I took it on the porch and wrote some more.

Lanya came to squat behind me, hands on my Shoulders, cheek on my cheek. ["]You're really
up
/ going/ aren't you? Maybe staying at my place wasn't such a bad idea?"

"It was a good idea."

She said, sweetly: "I was fucking pissed, you know, when Madame Brown told me you'd split. But when I got here and everybody said you were writing, it was okay." She picked up the sheaf of blue paper. "I'm going to steal these away to read. I'll bring them back in twenty minutes. All right?"

"Yeah," I said. "You know I feel better about these than any I've written before. Not that that means anything."

"Good enough to have a second collection?"

I grinned at her. "I think I'm even more anxious not to have one."

She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them,

Wrote till I

was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the
left
loft where Denny was lying down already; we fucked on and off all night. Slept. Woke up before they did. Took all the pages I'd done out on the kitchen steps and in dawnlight almost too dim to read by, read them: made six more changes. Now they are finished.

Copied them out (and it was full day) but found I still [wanted?] to go on writing. So turned back to one of the pages with space left near the end. of the notebook (there are very few of them, and I have just started putting entries—like the beginning of this one—in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins) and wrote, this, continuing it on a page I found free here near the beginning.

I recall /and want/ this
wanting;

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you've been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on
the outer edge of
the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us /have/ come here by way of it.

Here the correction marks—except for one entry further on—stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had annotated the final, rather than the first, few pages; there are half a dozen passages to come where even these attempts at variora might be preferable to the most informed supposition. As to the marks employed: Indications of authorial deletions are self-evident; we can assume brackets mean editorial conjecture. The bracketed question, mark, however, with or without additional word or suffix, seems totally arbitrary. After much debate, we can only suggest that words in virgules are probably interlinear additions; but even the quickest perusal reveals this accounts only for most cases. While he plies us with quaint descriptions of paperclips and staples, he fails to record date and letterhead material in the Calkins' letter (perhaps there were none?), nor does he mention whether any (or all) of the entries were typed or handwritten. Internal evidence (it is a spiral notebook, not a loose-leaf) suggest the latter. Corrections, however, such as:
balnk [blank?], there8['?]s,
and
bendh [bench?]
bray out for the former. Also,
"Rose… a brown fist up beside her chin…"
and, a few pages later,
"Fist against his chin, Stevie…"
suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent
"entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins"—
that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber's editional adieu
("Here one page, possibly two, is missing.")
can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were—say—the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

"Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing

"The[n] how did they know

grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica.
(That superfluous 'n' again suggests a typing, rather than a handwritten, error.)

Are you going to keep them here[?]"

He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary
'sic'—Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other.—
for the mere lack of an upper-case 'D'!