Dhalgren (53 page)

His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else's notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else's survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that's exactly where it's important and where it's not. The Kid? He thought: I'm going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can't remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I'm somebody famous? No, I do remember too well what I've done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn't what it's about. I'm too used to being liked.

Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his calloused thumb, he turned another corner.

Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings.
Clap-clap,
the doors. He looked at the balding driver squinting out the windshield as if for traffic.

Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.

"You got a transfer?"

"Hey, I'm sorry. If you need fare or something—" He stepped back.

But the driver motioned him on. "This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on."
Clap-clap:
the bus rocked forward.

An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.

A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.

A couple—he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom—were making a point of not looking at him.

Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody, and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.

Where am I—but wouldn't think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the billowy ball.

He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.

She blinked.

He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.

They passed a deserted street construction. Only one of the saw-horses had been broken. But from a truck with a flat tire, coils of cable had spilled the pavement.

He let his stomach untense, marveling that these disaster remnants still excited.

After the smashed plate glass of an army-navy surplus store came movie marquees: no letters at all on the first, a single R on the second; the one line on the next, he had time to reconstruct was "Three Stars says the Times." On the next R, O, and T were stacked on top of one another; E, Q, and U were followed by a space of three letters and then a Y. Contemplating messages, he fingered for the spiral wire of his notebook, but only bumped his knuckle on blades.

On a billboard, some six by sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his head to search or howl or execrate the night. The black, only recognizable by a highlight here and there, stood at the left; the right of the poster was filled with night-time forest.

Kid turned half around in his seat to watch it, then turned back to the bus in time to see the others turn. He put his fists on the seat between his parted thighs, and leaned, grinning and hanging his neck from slung shoulders.

ECK N  W'S
S R     OGS
ND
T E G TA  Y

announced the next marquee. He looked at broken store windows—in one was a pile of naked dummies. The street widened and once smoke rolled by so that he could make out no letters at all upon the final marquee of the strip.

Where am I going? he thought, thinking they were just words. Then the echoes came: his back chilled, his teeth clicked, then opened behind closed lips, staggered and jogged by the engine. He looked for shadows and found none in the dim bus, on the pale street. So searched what highlights his own body sensation cast in the nervous matrix. None there: in which to hunt a recollection of her face mottled and incomplete as though lit through leaves. He tried to laugh at his loss. Not because of this, oh no. It's the wine: Christ, he thought, where did they all go? The old man behind him moaned in his sleep.

He looked out the window.

Up the sand-colored wall, gold letters (he read it bottom-to-top first):

E
M
B
O
R
I
K
 Y'
S

Only one show window was shattered: boards had been nailed across it. Two others were covered with canvas. A crack in another zagged edge to edge.

Kid pulled the frayed ceiling cord, then held on to the bar across the back of the seat before him till the bus, a block later and somewhat to his surprise, stopped. He jumped off the back treadle to the curb and turned; through the dirty window, he saw the couple who had not looked at him when he'd gotten on, stopped looking at him now. The bus left.

He was standing diagonally across from the five, six, seven, eight story department store. Uneasily, he backed into a doorway. (People with guns, hey?) He felt for his orchid—looked at it. It was a very silly weapon. People shooting out the windows? Several, higher up, were open. Several more were broken. Across the street a gutter grill waved a steamy plume. Why, he thought, get out here? Maybe the people in there have all gone and he could just cross the street and—the skin of his back and belly shriveled. Why
had
he gotten off here? It had been in response to some un-named embryo feeling, and he had leapt out of the bus, following it to term. But now it was born; and was terror.

Cross the street, motherfucker, he told himself. You get up close to the building and they can't see you out the windows. This way somebody can just aim out and pick you off if they got a penchant for it. He told himself some other things too.

A minute later, he walked to the opposite corner, a sidestep for the fire hydrant, stopped with his hand against the beige stone, breathing long, slow breaths and listening to his heart. The building took up all the block. There were no show windows down the side alley. Save from the front door, there was no place from the store he could be seen. He looked across the avenue. (From what letters still remained on that broken glass, it must have been a travel agency. And down there…? Some kind of office building, perhaps? Burn marks lapped great carbon tongues around the lower stories.) The street looked so wide—but that was because there were no cars at either curb.

He started down the alley, running his hand on the stone and occasionally glancing up for the imaginary gunman to lean out a window and blast straight down.

There's nobody in there, he thought.

There's nobody coming up behind me—

At the end of the block something—moved? No, it was a shadow between two parked trucks.

"Hey," somebody said directly across the alley in a voice just under normal. "What the fuck you think you doin', huh?"

He bruised his shoulder on the wall, then came away, rubbing it.

A thick shoulder pushed from behind a metal door across the alley. "Don't get excited." Half of Nightmare's face emerged. Kid could see half the mouth speaking: "But when I count three, you get your ass over here so fast I wanna see smoke. One. Two…" The visible eye rose to look somewhere up the department store wall, looked back down. "Three."

Nightmare caught Kid's arm, and the memory of traversed pavement was battered out by bruises on his back, knee, and jaw—"Hey, man, you don't have to—" as Nightmare snatched him through the quarter-opened doorway.

He was in four-fifths darkness with a lot of people breathing.

"God damn," Nightmare said. "I mean Jesus Christ."

He said, "You don't have to break my head," softer than he'd started to.

Somebody very black in a vinyl vest, laughed loudly. For a moment he thought it was Dragon Lady, but it was a man.

Nightmare made some disgusted sound. The laugh cut off.

Nightmare's scarred shoulder (it was the first thing Kid saw as his eyes cleared of the dark) hid half of Denny's face as the door had hidden half of Nightmare's. The other faces were darker. "You don't think so?" Nightmare still held Kid's arm. With his other hand, he grabbed Kid's hair—"Hey!"—and marched him around 180 degrees: Kid's face came up against wire, behind some dirty glass, and behind that was—

"Now look up there."

Kid focused outside the dirty window on the second story of the department store.

"You lookin' good?"

—was a window where gold letters arched:
New Fashions.
And behind them, a man, with a rifle in one hand, scratched his thin neck under the too large collar of his blue sports shirt, then ambled on.

"Now what"—with sweetness—"the hell are you doing here?" Nightmare yanked Kid's head back from the window before he let go. "Come on. Tell me now."

"I just—" pain sat in him blankly as anxiety—"was coming by and—" Pain subsided.

"I should break your head open, you know?"

"Hey, man, you—"

"Shut up, Copperhead," Nightmare said.

The big, bearded, redhead spade leaned in the corner. "—you don't have to do that," he finished. "I'll do it for you, if you want." He nodded at Kid in damped recognition. "Give 'im to me."

"Fuck off." Nightmare waved a peremptory fist. "You just come by, huh? We been planning this three months and you just come by?"

"Well, Pepper told me you guys were maybe down here—"

Nightmare sucked some more. "We been
planning—"

"I got him," Denny said. "Let him go with us. He won't hurt nothing. I'll tell him what to do."

Nightmare glanced questioningly over his shoulder.

"Sure," Denny insisted.

In his corner, Copperhead turned his stick up behind his arm.

"He can go with my group," Denny repeated. "He won't get in the way."

Kid thought, unsure: Three against two.

Once more Nightmare flung round his fist; and growled.

"Come on," Denny said. "You come with me."

"You don't let him mess up anything!" Nightmare admonished with his chin.

"Yeah. The Kid'll be okay."

"He'd better be."

"He's a good guy, Nightmare. Come on, you said he was a good guy yourself."

Nightmare growled once more.

Kid stepped by him, tried and failed not to look at Copperhead. Copperhead blinked and started to smile. Kid decided it was worth his life to fail at anything among them again.

Denny clapped Kid's arm. "Let's go." He looked around and, louder: "You guys, let's go."

Some dozen (safer…) clustered; and they were walking through another door, following Denny. The hall of some sort of warehouse? Maybe the back corridor of another store? He looked at the faces around him. The real black guy in vinyl looked up from Kid's orchid, blinked, looked away; he wore one too, but in a leather strap.

"Here," Denny said, primarily to Kid. "We just wait here. You follow us when we go. Don't worry."

They stopped before another door. A window on one side showed the Emboriky's sandy wall.

Denny looked over the scorpions with him.

Kid thought: They top Pepper, I guess.

Denny folded his arms, leaned beside the window, occasionally looked out.

Like Copperhead's little blond brother.

They have a plan, Kid thought, caught in it

I am not thinking of Lanya.

One on wet leather, one on grit, his feet tingled. How did I get here? Did I choose to come? I want to control these people. (The tingling reached his head, subsided.) I chose. Observe and go, easy with them. He would ask Denny the details of the plan—began to tingle; so didn't. Observe? But his mind twisted in. Well. What did he think? Nightmare, with all his unreciprocity, he liked. Copperhead was efficient and detestable, a combination intriguing because, in his experience, it was unusual. Denny? Astounded, he realized: Denny had given him the clothes he wore, had first lopped the obtrusive
d
from his name, and now had him in custody. He squinted at two of the black guys leaning by the window (Denny glanced at Kid, at the floor, out the window) in webbed shadow. Nightmare's lieutenant… He tried to review the faces left at the hall's end; there were more than three women in the group. Prompted by the bus ride, he mused on Fenster's population percentages: What percentage were black? George? Waiting, chained and flowered (he'd seen half a dozen knives), I don't want to individualize them. Rather deal in their mass than texture. (Priest, Anthrax, Lady of Spain—these names had already been whispered around him: Devastation, Glass (the black in vinyl), California, Filament, Revelation (blond as Bunny but with brutally red skin), Angel, Dollar, D-t.) Fight that. Some two dozen strung down this grey in grey, waiting: there are probably more here who have killed by accident than by intent. That makes them dangerous. What do they become?

"That thing work?" Denny pointed to Kid's shield.

"No battery."

Denny shook his head, aping Nightmare's disgust. "You stay with me, then."

Either the people or the situation is boring. But either the situation or the people are intriguing. I cannot fix the distinction. Nor, having chosen, would it be useful. Again, I am somewhere where the waiting is more instructive than initial or terminal action. Not thinking of Lanya entails: Her green blinking when something I do surprises her, her expression (it always seems sad) seconds before laughter when something I do amuses. Is this like forgetting a name? I want to be among these people.
(Where
would
she
have gone?) It is difficult, because it grosses so little, to consider that I don't want to be with her. But these, who chew their teeth and shuffle, and engage in interesting waiting: what
is
their plan? Not so much afraid of what I don't know about what they do; the cool, absorptive fear I used to feel before stealing books and comics from corner kiosks, shoplifting small compasses and ornamental bullets from army-navy surplus stores.