Dhalgren (6 page)

She frowned. "It really isn't anything." Framed in heavy red, it was a gentle frown. "What's that?" She pointed. "Around your wrist."

His cuff had pulled up when he'd leaned.

He shrugged. Confusion was like struggling to find the proper way to sit inside his skin. "Something I found." He wondered if she heard the question mark on his sentence, small as a period.

Her eyebrow's movement said she had: which amused him.

The optical glass flamed over his knobby wrist.

"Where do you get it? I've seen several people wear that… kind of chain."

He nodded. "I just found it."

"Where?" Her gentle smile urged.

"Where did you get your scratch?"

Still smiling, she returned a bewildered look.

He had expected it. And he mistrusted it. "I…" and the thought resolved some internal cadence: "want to know about you!" He was suddenly and astonishingly happy. "Have you been here long? Where are you from? Mildred? Mildred what? Why did you come here? How long are you going to stay? Do you like Japanese food? Poetry?" He laughed. "Silence? Water? Someone saying your name?"

"
Um
…" He saw she was immensely pleased. "Mildred Fabian, and people
do
call me Milly, like Tak does. John just feels he has to be formal when new people come around. I was here at State University. But I come from Ohio… Euclid, Ohio?"

He nodded again.

"But State's got such a damned good Poly-sci department. Had, anyway. So I came here. And…" She dropped her eyes (brown, he realized with a half-second memory, as he looked at her lowered, corn-colored lashes—brown with a coppery backing, copper like her hair) "…I stayed."

"You were
here
when it happened?"

"…yes." He heard a question mark there bigger than any in the type-box.

"What…" and when he said, "…happened?" he didn't want an answer.

Her eyes widened, dropped again; her shoulders sank; her back rounded. She reached toward his hand in its cage, lying between them on the bench.

As she took a shiny blade tip between two fingers, he was aware of his palm's suspension in its harness.

"Does… I've always… well, could you make an…" She tugged the point to the side (he felt the pressure on his wrist and stiffened his hand), released it: A muffled
Hmmmmm.
"Oh."

He was puzzled.

"I was wondering," she explained, "if you could make it ring. Like an instrument. All the blades are different lengths. I thought if they made notes, perhaps you could… play them."

"Blade steel? I don't think it's brittle enough. Bells and things are iron."

She bent her head to the side.

"Things have to be brittle if they're going to ring. Like glass. Knives are hard, sure; but they're too flexible."

She looked up after a moment. "I like music. I was going to major in music. At State. But the Poly-sci department was
so
good. I don't think I've seen one Japanese restaurant in Bellona, since I've been in school here. But there used to be several good Chinese ones…" Something happened in her face, a loosening, part exhaustion, part despair. "We're doing the best we can, you know…?"

"What?"

"We're doing the best we can. Here."

He nodded a small nod.

"When it happened," she said softly, "it was terrible." "Terrible" was perfectly flat, the way he remembered a man in a brown suit once say "elevator." It's that tone, he thought, remembering when it had denuded Tak's speech. She said: "We stayed. I stayed. I guess I felt I had to stay. I don't know how long… I mean, I'm going to stay for. But we have to do something. Since we're here, we have to." She took a breath. A muscle leaped in her jaw. "You…?"

"Me what?"

"What do you like, Kidd? Someone saying your name?"

He knew it was innocent; and was annoyed anyway. His lips began a
Well,
but only breath came.

"Silence?"

Breath became a hiss; the hiss became, "…sometimes."

"Who are you? Where are
you
from?"

He hesitated, and watched her eyes pick something from it:

"You're afraid because you're new here… I think. I'm afraid, I think, because I've been here… an awfully long time!" She looked around the campsite.

Two long-haired youngsters stood by the cinder-blocks. One held up his hands, either to warm them, or just to feel heat.

It is a warm morning. I do not recognize any protection in this leafy blister. There is no articulation in the juncture of object and shadow, no fixed angle between fuel and flame. Where would they put their shelters, foundations sunk on ash; doors and windows sinking in cinders? There is nothing else to trust but what warms.

Mildred's lips parted, her eyes narrowed. "You know what John did? I think it was brave, too. We had just finished building that fireplace; there were only a few of us here, then. Somebody was going to light it with a cigarette lighter. But John said, wait; then went off all the way to Holland Lake. That was when the burning was much worse than it is now. And he brought back a brand old, dried, burning stick. In fact he had to transfer the fire to several other sticks on the way back. And with that fire—" she nodded where one of the youngsters was now poking at the logs with a broken broom-handle— "he lit ours." The other waited with a chunk of wood in his arms. "I think that was very brave. Don't you?" The chunk fell. Sparks geysered through the grate, higher than the lowest branches.

"Hey, Milly!"

Sparks whirled, and he wondered why they all spoke so loud with so many sleeping.

"Milly! Look what I found."

She had put on a blue workshirt, still unbuttoned. In one hand was her harmonica, in the other a spiral notebook.

"What is it?" Milly called back.

As she passed the furnace, she swung the notebook through the sparks; they whipped into Catherine wheels, and sank. "Does it belong to anybody around here? It's burned. On the cover."

She sat with it, between them, shoulders hunched, face in a concentrated scowl. "It's somebody's exercise book." The cardboard was flaky black at one corner. Heat had stained half the back.

"What's in it?" Milly asked.

She shrugged. Her shoulder and her hip moved on his. He slid down the bench to give her room, considered sliding back, but, instead, picked up the newspaper and opened it—blades tore one side—to the second page.

"Who ripped out the first pages?" Milly asked.

"That's the way I found it."

"But you can see the torn edges, still inside the wire."

"Neat handwriting."

"Can you make out what it says?"

"Not in this light. I read some down by the park lamp. Let's take it over by the fire."

The page he stared at flickered with backlight, the print on both sides visible. All he could make out was the Gothic masthead:

BELLONA TIMES

And below it:

Roger Calkins,
Editor and Publisher.

He closed the paper.

The girls had gone to the fireplace.

He stood, left the paper on the bench, stepped, one after another, over three sleeping bags and a blanket roll. "What does it say?"

Her harmonica was still in one fist.

Her hair was short and thick. Her eyes, when she looked at him directly, were Kelly green. Propping the book on the crook of her arm, with her free hand she turned back the cardboard cover for him to see the first page. Remnants of green polish flecked her nails.

In Palmer-perfect script, an interrupted sentence took up on the top line:

to wound the autumnal city.

     So howled out for the world to give him a name.

That made goose bumps on his flanks…

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight-elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student

She lowered the notebook to stare at him, blinked green eyes. Hair wisps shook shadow splinters on her cheek. "What's the matter with you?"

His face tensed toward a smile. "That's just some… well, pretty weird stuff!"

"What's weird about it?" She closed the cover. "You got the strangest look."

"I don't… But…" His smile did not feel right. What was there to dislodge it lay at the third point of a triangle whose base vertices were recognition and incomprehension. "Only it was so…" No, start again. "But it was so … I know a lot about astronauts, I mean. I used to look up the satellite schedules and go out at night and watch for them. And I used to have a friend who was a bank clerk."

"I knew somebody who used to work in a bank," Milly said. Then, to the other girl: "Didn't you ever?"

He said: "And I used to have a job in a theater. It was on the second floor and we always had to carry things up in the freight elevator…"
These
memories were so simple to retrieve… "I was thinking about him—the elevator operator—earlier tonight."

They still looked puzzled.

"It was just very familiar."

"Well, yeah…" She moved her thumb over the bright harmonica. "I must have been on a freight elevator, at least once. Hell, I was in a school play and there were lights around the dressing room mirror. That doesn't make it weird."

"But the part about the student riots. And the bodegas… I just came up from Mexico."

"It doesn't say anything about student riots."

"Yes it does. I was in a student riot once. I'll show you." He reached for the book (she pulled back sharply from the orchid), spread his free hand on the page (she came forward again, her shoulder brushing his arm. He could see her breast inside her unbuttoned shirt. Yeah) and read aloud:

"…'thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student happenings with spaghetti filled Volkswagens, dawn in Seattle, automated evening in L.A.' " He looked up, confused.

"You've been in Seattle and Los Angeles, morning and night, too?" Her green-eyed smile flickered beside the flames.

"No…" He shook his head.

"I have. It's still not weird." Still flickering, she frowned at his frown. "It's not about you. Unless you dropped it in the park …
You
didn't write it, did you?"

"No," he said. "No. I didn't." Lost (it had been stronger and stranger than any
déjà vu
), the feeling harassed him. "But I could have sworn I
knew
…" The fire felt hottest through the hole at his knee; he reached down to scratch; blades snagged raveled threads. He snatched the orchid away: threads popped. Using his other hand, he mauled his patella with horny fingers.

Milly had taken the book, turned to a later page.

The green-eyed girl leaned over her shoulder:

"Read that part near the end, about the lightning and the explosions and the riot and all. Do you think he was writing about what happened
here—
to Bellona, I mean?"

"Read that part at the beginning, about the scorpions and the trapped children. What do you suppose he was writing about
there?"

They bent together in firelight.

He felt discomfort and looked around the clearing.

Tak stepped over a sleeping bag and said to John: "You people want me to work too hard. You just refuse to understand that work for its own sake is something I see no virtue in at all."

"Aw, come on, Tak." John beat his hand absently against his thigh as though he still held the rolled paper.

"I'll give you the plans. You can do what you want with them. Hey, Kid, how's it going?" Flames bruised Tak's bulky jaw, prised his pale eyes into the light, flickered on his leather visor. "You doing all right?"

He swallowed, which clamped his teeth; so his nod was stiffer than he'd intended.

"Tak, you
are
going to head the shelter building project for us…?" John's glasses flashed.

"Shit," Tak said, recalling Nightmare.

"Oh, Tak…" Milly shook her head.

"I've been arguing with him all night," John said. "Hey." He looked over at the picnic table. "Did Nightmare come by for the stuff?"

"Yep." Brightly.

"How is he?"

She shrugged—less bright.

He heard the harmonica, looked:

Back on her blanket, the other girl bent over her mouth harp. Her hair was a casque of stained bronze around her lowered face. Her shirt had slipped from one sharp shoulder. Frowning, she beat the mouth holes on her palm once more. The notebook lay against her knee.

"Tak and me were up looking at the place I want to put the shelters. You know, up on the rocks?"

"You've changed the location
again?"
Milly asked.

"Yeah," Tak said. "He has. How do you like it around here, Kid? It's a good place, huh?"

"We'd be happy to have you," John said. "We're always happy to have new people. We have a lot of work to do; we need all the willing hands we can get." His tapping palm clove to his thigh, stayed.

He grunted, to shake something loose in his throat. "I think I'm going to wander on."

"Oh…" Milly sounded disappointed.

"Come on. Stay for breakfast." John sounded eager. "Then try out one of our work projects. See which one you like. You know, those are some strange streets out there. You don't know what you're gonna find in 'em."

"Thanks," he said. "I'm gonna go…"

"I'll take him back down to the avenue," Tak said. "Okay, so long, you guys."

"If you change your mind," Milly called (John was beating his leg again), "you can always come back. You might want to in a couple of days. Just come. Well be glad to have you then, too."

On the concrete path, he said to Tak: "They're really good people, huh? I just guess I…" He shrugged.

Tak grunted: "Yeah."

"The scorpions—is that some sort of protection racket they make the people in the commune pay?"

"You could call it that. But then, they get protected."

"Against anything else except scorpions?"

Tak grunted again, hoarsely.

He recognized it for laughter. "I just don't want to get into anything like that. At least not on that side."