Dhalgren (68 page)

"I dig that scene—"

"So I noticed. You're sweet too."

"—but she was sort of funny about the whole thing. I didn't like it, I mean with her."

"So I gathered. Also he's a little boy, isn't he? Or is he another baby face like you?"

"He's fifteen. She's seventeen. I think."

Lanya sighed. "Then perhaps you just have to give them time to grow into their own perversions. And by the way, how are you?"

"Fine." Kid grinned. "I'm really fine."

And laughing, she pushed her face toward his.

Hands scrabbled on Kid's belly; Denny grunted.

An elbow hit Kid's stomach. A knee hit his knee.

"Hey, watch it," Lanya said.

"I'm sorry," Denny said, and fell on top of them.

The scent of Denny's breath, which was piney, joined Lanya's, which reminded Kid of ferns.

"Oof,"
Lanya said. "Would you please tell me what your name is?"

"Denny," Denny said loudly in Kid's ear. "What's yours?"

"Lanya Colson."

"You're the Kid's old lady, huh?"

"When he remembers who I am." Her hand on Kid's wrist squeezed.

Kid rubbed the back of Denny's neck with one hand and held Lanya's with the other. Again he felt how chalky Denny's skin was. Lanya's was warm.

"You like this?"

Lanya laughed and moved her arms farther around Denny's back.

"Up here, where I live." Denny suddenly pulled back. "You like this?"

They watched him hunker on the blankets. The side of Kid's thigh on hers was warm. The top, where Denny had been, cooled.

"You can't stand up," Lanya said. "But it must be good for sitting and thinking."

"I stay up here a lot," Denny said. "Cause it never gets that hot. Then sometimes I don't come up here two or three days." Suddenly he sat back and pulled a plastic envelope into his lap. "You like this?"

"What is it?" Lanya asked and leaned forward.

"It's a shirt." Denny said. "It's a real pretty shirt."

Kid looked too.

Beneath the plastic cover, and over green satin, gold strings tangled: the fringe was attached to the velveteen yoke. Velveteen cuffs sported gilt and green glass links.

"I found it in a store." Denny reached behind him. "And this one."

Silver thread elaborately embossed the black.

"Those were the two I liked," Denny explained. "Only you can't wear stuff like this around here. Maybe if I go someplace else…" He looked between the two quickly.

Kid scratched the hair between his legs and drew away a little.

Lanya had leaned closer. "They are pretty!"

"What is that one made of?" Kid asked.

Lanya pressed the plastic covering with her palm. "It's crepe."

"And I have these." Denny pushed the shirts behind him. "See."

When the lid clicked off the plastic box, the cubes inside bounced.

"It's a game," Denny explained. "I found it in another store. It's too complicated for me to play, and there's nobody here to play it with. But I liked the colors."

Lanya picked up one of the green blocks. On each face was an embossed gold letter:
p,q,r,s,o,i…

Denny blinked and held the box open for her to replace the playing piece.

She turned it in her fingers a long time, till Kid's awareness of Denny's restrained impatience made him uncomfortable.

"Put it back," Kid said, quietly.

She did, quickly.

"And this." Denny pulled out an oversized paperback book. "You got to look at those close. They're very funny pictures—"

"Escher!" Lanya exclaimed. "They certainly are."

Kid reached over her arm to turn the page.

"Where did you get those?" Lanya asked.

"In another… store." (Kid idly wondered at the hesitation but didn't look up.) "In somebody's house," Denny corrected himself. "We broke in. This was there, so I took it. You seen 'em before, ain't you."

"Um-hm."
Lanya nodded.

Kid turned another page of etched perspective imploded on itself and put back together inside out. Lanya bent to look now.

"This!" Denny said.

They both looked. And Kid took the book from Lanya and handed it back to Denny. ("That's all right," Denny said. "She can look at it," ignoring Kid's gesture.) He showed them a silver box. "Ain't this a neat radio? It's got AM and FM and it even says Short Wave." It was the size of a box of kitchen matches. "And all sorts of other dials."

"I wonder if they do anything," Lanya said.

"That one says the 'volume'," Denny explained. "The button's there, that one is the AFC thing so it doesn't slide around. But you can't tell around here because radios don't work here any more."

"Like the shirts," she said. "When you go someplace else, you'll have something nice."

"If we go someplace else," Denny considered, "I'll probably leave all this stuff here. You can get lots of nice things anywhere around. You just pick it up."

"I meant somewhere outside the…", Kid watched her realize that Denny had not.

Suddenly she touched the radio. "It isn't square!" she announced. The black and metal box was trapezoidal. She flattened her hands to the sides of it. "It
is
beautiful," she said in the voice of someone admitting that a puzzle was still insoluble.
(What
was the name of his roommate in Delaware who had had so much trouble with the paper on mathematical induction? Another thing he couldn't remember… and was sad at his ruined memory and happy for Lanya.) "It really is… just lovely."

Kid leaned close to her and kneaded the inside of his thighs. He'd laid the Escher against his calf. The corner of the book nicked; he didn't move it.

"You seen these pictures too?" Denny brought out another paper-covered book.

Lanya said: "Let me see."

She turned over the first page and frowned.

"…Um,
did Boucher ever paint religious pictures?" Kid ventured.

"Not," Lanya said, "for three-dimensional, laminated-plastic dioramas."

"I think 3-D pictures are great," Denny said, while Kid felt vaguely embarrassed.

"These are strange." Lanya turned another page.

A crowned woman in blue stood one foot on a crescent moon while below her two naked men cowered in a rowboat. Ghosts of the same picture at other angles haunted the striated plastic.

"What's the next…" Lanya asked.

A man who looked like a classical Jesus, in a loincloth, limped on a single crutch, one hand, with stigma, extended.

"Spanish…?" she mused.

"Puerto Rican," Kid suggested.

Lanya glanced at him. "It doesn't have any writing anywhere."

A woman, perhaps the virgin, as likely an empress, rode on a tiger. "The rocks and moss and water in the background, that's lifted from Da Vinci." Lanya turned to the next. "These are really…" She closed the book to a white cover on which was a crowned and bleeding heart behind a cross. "You can't tell
me
those are Christian. Did you find this in somebody's house too?"

"In a store," Denny said. He was hunting at the edge of the blanket again. "And these."

In his cupped hands were three glass cubes set with glittering stones.

"Dice?" Kid asked.

"I had four of them," Denny said. "One broke." He rolled them against Lanya's leg.

Three, two, and six: counting the top numbers was difficult because of pips on other faces.

"You're really into collecting pretty things." Lanya picked up a cube.

Denny sat back against the wall and hugged his knees.

"Um-hum."

"Me too." She watched him. "Only I leave them where I find them. Like buildings. Or trees. Or paintings in museums."

"You just—" Denny let his knees fall open—"notice where they are; and go back and look at them?"

She nodded.

Denny tangled his fists in the blanket between his feet.

"But you don't have to do it that way here. You can just take what you want. Well, maybe not the trees and the buildings. But the paintings, if you find one you like, you just carry it with you. Shit, you can go live in a fuckin' building if you like it! In front of the fuckin' tree!"

"No." Lanya let her thin back bend. "I'm into collecting pretty, useful objects. Yours are just pretty."

"Huh?"

"But if they're supposed to stay useful, I have to leave them where they are."

"You think there's something wrong with taking that stuff?"

"No … of course not. As long as you didn't take it
from
somebody:"

"Well it must have belonged to somebody once."

"Do
you
think there's something wrong with taking it?"

"Shit." Denny grinned. "Nobody's gonna catch me. You like taking stuff?"

"It's not—"

"Say," Denny came to his knees. "You ever hustle?"

"Huh?" Lanya recovered from her surprise with an unsteady grin. "I beg your pardon."

"I mean take money for going to bed with somebody."

"No, I certainly haven't."

"Denny has, I bet," Kid said.

"Yeah, sure," Denny said. "But I just wanted to know. About you."

Her amusement faltered toward curiosity. "Why?"

"Would you?"

"I don't know… perhaps." She laughed again and took his knee in her hands. "Are you planning to set me up in business now? There isn't any business here."

Denny giggled. "That's not what I meant." Suddenly he picked up the plastic box, opened the lid, tossed.

"Hey!" Lanya shrieked, and scrambled back under the cubes of colored wood.

Denny picked up a fallen cube and threw it at her.

"Oh, cut that out—"

He threw another one and laughed.

"Damn it—"

Scowling, she picked up a handful and flung them back, hard. He ducked: they clicked the wall.

She hurled another that hit his head.

"Ahh…!"
He flung one back.

She laughed, and threw two more, one with the left hand and one with the right. Both hit. Denny rolled away in hysterics, and scrambled after more gaming pieces.

"You're gonna lose the…" Kid started. Then he stretched across the front edge of the loft to keep the pieces from rolling over. Denny's laughter bobbed between octaves. Kid thought, His voice hasn't even finished changing.

Lanya was laughing too, almost so hard she couldn't throw.

A cube hit Kid's hip. He knocked if back onto the blanket. Another went over his shoulder, clattering to the floor. He watched them turn and duck and toss and wished they would throw pieces at him. After a while they did.

He threw them back, tried to guard the edge, gave up, by now laughing himself, till it hurt beneath his sternum, and couldn't stop laughing, so hurled the bright cubes with gold
p's, q's, K's,
and
r's.

"It's not fair!" Lanya cried against Kid's arm, then laughed again, when they had made him abandon the loft edge.

"Just 'cause you throw so hard!" Cube in hand, Denny ducked first left, then right.

"Come on… now…" Kid panted, and couldn't laugh any more.

Denny looked over the edge. "There're a lot of them on the floor."

Lanya pulled back, threw another. It deflected from Denny's thigh. She ducked behind Kid.

Denny glanced back. "There goes another one."

Lanya looked out tentatively. "Maybe we better go down and pick them up."

Frowning, Denny turned back for the box. "Yeah…" He stopped to place the shirts and books and the glass dice in the corner. Koth regarded the board from his day-glo poster.

A shirt casing had gotten torn.

"Let's go down," Kid said.

Lanya followed him on the ladder.

They picked up cubes. When Denny came down, she threw one at him as he stepped to the floor.

"Hey, don't—" Denny said, because the cube went off into the junk beneath the platform.

"I'm sorry!" Lanya snickered again. "Here, let me help." She followed him into the leaning tools, piled chairs, cartons. She held back an ironing board while Denny dropped down. "Got it…"

She came over with the box, and held it for Kid to put in his handful. While he fingered them clumsily into place, she asked, "Have you ever taken money for having sex with somebody?"

"Yes."

"Men and women?"

One cube stuck against another; Kid pressed, and another jumped out of the matrix. "Just men."

"Maybe I should try it," she said after a moment. "Everybody thinks about it."

"Why?" Kid stopped for another cube by his foot.

"And maybe you've just made a good point."

When Kid stood to place the cube, she added:

"But that wouldn't stop me."

She snapped the lid and turned toward Denny.

Kid grinned, watching her backbone like an arrow into her buttocks' heart. I do not know, he thought, what goes inside her. All I'm sure is that it's very different from what it looks like is going on.

"There're still some up top." She started up the ladder.

"I don't see any more here." Kid started behind her.

"Hey—!" Denny said.

Then something locked around Kid's neck, scraped his sides, and hung on.

"Fuck,
what the—"

"Carry me!" Denny shouted, clinging. "Go ahead, carry me on up."

"Fuck
you!"
Kid shouted, sagging on his grip. He tried to shake the boy loose. "Don't choke me to death, you stupid… bastard!" He hauled up another rung.

Lanya crouched on the ledge. "You'll drop him—!"

Kid hauled up one more. "Get on up there, cocksucker!"

Lanya was tugging at Denny's arm.

Kid tried to heave Denny up.

"Hey—!"

Kid felt Denny slipping. Bare feet pawed his hip. Then something scrambled over his head. "Hey," Denny repeated in a different voice. He tugged at Kid's shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Lanya sat behind him, slapping first her thighs and then her stomach, once more helpless with laughter.

"Fuck you." Kid crouched on the loft edge. As he leaned forward, something hissed across his chest.

"Hey, my chain!"

"What?" Denny pushed himself backward, pulling the blankets from the board. He reached, without looking, for his own anklet.

Kid wondered if that was what had scraped so at his side.