Dhalgren (122 page)

My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.

But I tried.

And sank backward into myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.

"Tell me about Lanya."

"Denny—" the cave wasn't where I lived, though—"and me, we like her a lot."

She
mmmed.
"Tell me about Denny."

"Lanya and me like him… a lot."

My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.

"What are you feeling?"

"Scared."

"That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?"

"Huh?" That surprised me. "Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya's never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she's said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don't disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?"

"Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren't coming to me for help; and they don't think they're going crazy."

"More power to me!" She'd catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I'd dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was—it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: "You disapprove of people who come to you for help?"

"Now, that's not what I—"

"Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you—" I leaned forward—"what do
you
think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that's all anybody around here ever does—though I'm sure I'm just flattering myself. Tell me."

She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: "What do you think of the Richards, Kid?"

"I don't know…" Then I said: "She's frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won't hold. But that's sort of heroic, too. Him? He's despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit." Then I asked: "Do they even know you're black?"

"Yes. Of

course they do."

"I'm surprised."

"I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards."

"Do they know you're gay?"

Madame Brown moved in the chair and
Mmmed
again, negatively. "Let me see," she said after a moment: "Black, lesbian, I'm also very middle class.

And Mary and Arthur are my friends. But I wish sometimes I didn't think you were so right. It would make my life much easier. But then, I've never particularly wanted an easy life, really." She sighed. "I do find this in myself, Kid: When I occasionally get ex-asperated with Arthur or Mary, especially when they're going on about you, I wonder to myself—quite honestly—what they would say if I told them some of the things you've actually done-just for the upset it would cause. At that point, I tell myself it's because I 'approve' of you and don't 'approve' of them."

"If you wanted to upset them, you could tell them some things about June, about Bobby and… what's his name? Eddie."

"Of course, you side with the youngsters—"

"No," I said. "I'm nearly thirty years old. And I wouldn't swear to which side of it I'm on, from what some people tell me. I'm not taking sides; I'm just pointing out some upsetting areas in their life that are a little closer to home."

"To the Richards's home. What about yours?"

"You were going to tell me what you thought about the Kid. Maybe you'll tromp on something and I'll twitch for you."

"All right. I think…"

I looked at her leg.

"…you are very disturbed. You are personable, intelligent, forceful, vital, talented. But your basic ego structure is about as stable as a cracked teacup. You say you've lost bits and pieces of yourself? I think that's
exactly
what's happened. The point is, Kid, we still don't treat the mentally ill as though they were just sick. We treat them as though they were some strange combination of unclean, depraved, and evil. You know, the first mental hospitals in Europe were leprosaria, deserted all over the continent at the end of the middle ages because-for some reason we still don't know—there was a spontaneous remission in the disease over about seventy-five years, though it had been endemic for the last three thousand. Was it rising hygiene standards? A mutation in the germ? The point is that till then, though they had occasionally been shipped about on local rivers, the insane had
never
been hospitalized before. But when they were suddenly confined in these immense, empty buildings that, in some cases for hundreds of years, had held lepers, they took on as well the burden of three thousand years of superstition and fear connected with that unfortunate disease. And a good argument can be made that that's still more or less how we regard you today—complete with religious connotations. Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents have lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy,
not
the common cold. Tell me, what would you say to the idea that all your problems—the hallucinations, the depressions, even the moments of ecstasy—were biogenic? That the lapses of memory are an RNA depletion in the lower cortex; that the sudden fears are adrenal disruptions caused by random pituitary spasms; that the unreality that plagues you is merely a pineal cyst, inhibiting the production of serotonin?"

I looked up on the moonscape where there were no trees.

"That's sure as hell what it feels like," I said.

"Then, you differ from the businessmen, in that they are usually rather reluctant to give up any of the extra-biological significance of their symptoms. The over-determined human mind would rather have everything relevant, even if the relevance is simple-minded."

"When I was in the hospital—" remembering, I smiled—"I used to have a friend who'd say: 'When you're paranoid, everything makes sense.' But that's not quite it. It's that all sorts of things you know
don't
relate suddenly have the air of things that
do.
Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern." Once more I looked at her leg. "Only you
never
know
which
inch to move it…" I felt my face wrinkling over my skull with concentration.

She said: "Your dream. Can you think why you particularly wanted to tell me about it?"

I looked at my lap; "I don't know. I've just had it on my mind a long time."

"You mean it isn't a recent dream?"

"Oh, no. I had it… I don't remember when; while I was still staying in the… park?"

"And it isn't a recurrent dream?"

"No. I only had it once. But it… I just keep thinking about it."

One hand at her necklace, she fingered a lens. "I asked you this before, but I want to check: In the dream, you made love, had an orgasm, and then went to the cave. It wasn't just a heavy necking session?"

"No. She came first. I remember it surprised me, because I was just about ready myself. I finished up about thirty seconds after she did—which is unusual with me. Usually it takes me a couple of minutes longer. When I shot my load, leaves blew against my side. And I opened my eyes and we talked for a while."

Madame Brown mulled, a glass bead pressed to her chin. "I was on a research team that did a study some years ago-dirty old lady that I am-about sex dreams. We had, admittedly, a small sampling—two hundred and thirty-nine; they'd all checked yes to the question: whether they felt they had satisfactory sexual outlet. We had men, women, a few late adolescents; some homosexuals, of both sexes. One overwhelmingly consistent pattern was that when sex, in a dream, led to actual orgasm, either the dream ended or the subject awoke. Of course there was nothing conclusive about the study, and I can make a list of biasing factors an ell long. But yours is the
first
dream I've ever encountered, during or since the study, where orgasm was achieved and the dream continued." She looked at me like she was waiting for a confession.

"What am I supposed to say?"

"Anything that comes to mind."

"You think I didn't have the dream? You think I'm lying, or that maybe the dream was…" I hunched my shoulders and felt silly. "I don't know…"

"You want me to suggest it
wasn't
a dream? That it was real?" She gave a sudden, small frown. "Yes, you
do,
don't you? Well, I can understand that—if it seemed real to you." Underlying her frown was a slight and slightly sad smile. "But it
was
a dream, Kid. Because…" She paused; and I wondered what moons and suns returned to devil her memory. "Well, let's assume it wasn't. Would you like to discuss it further? What's the first thing that comes to mind?"

"I'm frightened, all of a sudden," I said. "Again."

"Of what?"

"Of you." I tried a smile and felt it abort deep in the muscles of my face.

"What about me frightens you?"

I looked at her scarred leg. I looked at the bead she rubbed against her chin. (I remembered what she had said, when I first met her, about them; I remembered what Nightmare had said. What Nightmare had said made more sense. But I want to believe her. Doesn't that count for something?) "I don't… I can't…" I began to cry again. And I couldn't stop this time. At all. "It's got to be a dream! It's got to…" Could she hear it for my sobbing? "If it isn't a dream, then I… I'm crazy!" And I cried about all the things people can not understand when other people say them. I cried over the miracle that they could understand anything at all. I cried for all the things I had said to other people that had been misunderstood because I, not knowing, had said them wrong. I cried with joy about those times when someone and I had nodded together, grinning over an understanding, real or wished for. A couple of times I managed to choke out; "I'm so

frightened… I'm so frightened! I'm so alone!" I pushed my fingers into my mouth to stop the sound, rocking forward and back, bit on them, and couldn't stop.

Madame Brown brought me Kleenex. I blubbered, "Thank you," too inarticulate to be understood, and cried in despair that I could not even make that clear. I wandered back far enough in the cave to think, "This has
got
to be good for something," but climbed up the rocks where she told me to go, in the orange flicker, and didn't find anything there, so got scared again and cried and rocked in my seat, the pits above my kneecaps hurting, which is the place that hurts when I want to fuck bad, and kept crying and biting the sides of my hands for what seemed hours but was probably only fifteen, twenty minutes.

And it lessened; I felt weaker, better, and when I quieted, Madame Brown said: "You know, you asked me what I think of you? On the strength of the amnesia, the anxiety attacks, yes, that alone would make me suggest, if we were someplace else, that you go into a hospital. But as you say, there aren't any mental hospitals in Bellona any more. And, frankly, I don't know quite what they'd do for you if you went. It might take some of the pressure off you of being 'the Kid'. Perhaps that would allow some things to heal that are wounded, some things to settle in place that are swollen."

I nodded as though I was considering what she said—which wasn't what I was doing at all. "Do you…" I asked. "Do you believe… in my dream?"