Dhalgren (8 page)

They walked around a skylight. Tak hit the door with his hand-heel. (Like he expected to surprise somebody…?) The door swung in. Tak stepped inside: click. Lights went on. "Come on, make yourself at home."

He followed the engineer across the sill. "Hey, this is pretty nice!"

Tak stooped to peer into a crackling kerosene heater. "It's comfortable… now I
know
I didn't walk out of here and leave this thing going. Someday I'm gonna come back home and find this whole place just a pile of ashes—of course, in Bellona that could happen whether I left it on or not." He stood up, shaking his head. "It gets a little chilly here in the morning. I might as well leave it go."

"Christ, you've got a lot of books!"

Shelves covered the back wall, floor to ceiling, filled with paperbacks.

And: "Is that a short wave setup?"

"Part of one. The rest is in the next room. I could just sit in bed and CQ all over the place—if I could get anything but static. The interference around this place is something terrible. Then, it may be something's wrong with my set. I've got my own power supply: a couple of dozen acid batteries in the back. And a gasoline charger." He stepped to the desk in the corner, shrugged his jacket down the gold rug of his back, and hung it on a wall hook. (He still wore his cap.) Blurred in blond, his forearm bore a dragon, his bleep some naval insignia. On one shoulder, a swastika had been tattooed, then, not very efficiently, removed. "Have a seat." Tak pulled a swivel chair from the desk, turned it around, and sat. Knees wide, he slid his hand under his belt to arrange himself where his genitals bagged the denim. "Take the bed… there."

An incongruous fur throw lay on the board floor. An India print draped down over what he thought was a daybed. But when he sat on it, he realized it was just a very thin mattress on the top of some built-out cabinet: or at any rate, just plank. Still, the place looked comfortable. "You're doing a little better than those kids in the park."

Tak grinned, took off his cap, and dropped it on the desk blotter. "I guess I am. But then, that's not too difficult." The military short hair jarred with his unshaven jaw.

The desk, except for the cap, was bare.

Shelves above it held binoculars, slide rules, drafting compasses and pens, two pocket calculators, French curves and templates, colored pentels, several cut and polished geodes, a row of ornamental daggers on display stands, a pile of plastic parts boxes, a soldering gun…

"Hey…" Tak slapped one knee. "I'm gonna make some coffee. Got some canned ham, too. Real good ham. And bread." He stood up and went to a door, hung, like the windows, with tan splints. "You just relax. Take it easy. Take your clothes off and stretch out, if you want." By his boot, the bubbling heater picked out what still glowed in the scuffed leather. "I'll be back in a minute. Glad you like the place. I do too." He ducked through bamboo.

On one wall (he had only glanced till now) were three, yard-high, full color, photographic posters:

On one, some adolescent weightlifter, Germanic as Tak, wearing only boots and a denim jacket with no sleeves, leaned against a motorcycle, stubby hands flat against his naked legs.

On the second, a muscular black, in what could have been Tak's jacket, cap, and boots, stood against some indistinct purple background, legs wide, one fist before his bared thigh, one against his bare hip.

On the third, a dark youth—Mexican or Indian perhaps?—shirtless and shoeless, sat on a boulder under a stark, blue sky, his jeans pushed down to his knees.

Their bared genitals were huge.

The photographs had been taken from crotch level, too, to make them look even larger.

From the other room he heard pans clinking; a cabinet opened and closed.

By the head of the bed, on a table near a tensor lamp, books were piled irregularly:

A bunch on the Hell's Angels: Thompson, and Reynolds/McClure; four cheaply bound, two-dollar paperbacks:
Angels on Wheels,
and
Weekend in Hell, a True Story of the Angels as Told by Millicent Brash—
he read the first paragraph of ill-lined type, shook his head, and put it down. A book called
Bike Bitch
was apparently the sequel to (same cover/different author)
Bike Bastard.
Under that was
The Poems of Rimbaud,
with English at the bottom of the pages; then a paperback
Selected Letters of Keats;
next, Dickey's
Deliverance;
a green, hard-cover book of logs and trigonometric functions, place held by a white enamel, circular slide rule. There was sundry science fiction by Russ (something called
The Female Man),
Zelazny, and Disch. The last book he picked up had a purple and gold reproduction of a Leonor Fini for cover:
Evil Companions.
He opened it in the middle, read from the top of the left-hand page to the bottom of the right, closed it, frowning, went to the bamboo, and pushed it aside.

"You ever see one of these in somebody's house before?" Tak thumped the grey cabinet with his elbow. "It's a Micro Wave oven. They're great. You can roast a whole rib roast in ten, twenty minutes. They cost about six hundred dollars. At least that's what the price tag said in the store I lifted this one from. Only I don't like to run it because it uses up so much power. Someday, though, I'm gonna give a dinner party for thirty or forty people. Hold it outside on the roof. For all my friends in the city. I'll knock their eye out with what this thing can do." He turned to the counter.

On two burners of a three-burner camp stove, pale flames from canned heat licked an enameled coffeepot and an iron skillet. Along the back of the counter were several gallons of wine, white and red, and a dozen bottles of whiskeys, liqueurs, and brandies. "This is sort of my work room." Back muscles shifted under hairy flesh. "Probably spend more time here than in the front." More bookshelves here; more shortwave components; a work bench slagged with solder, strewn with spaghetti wire, bits of pegboard in which dozens of small, colorful transistors, resistors, and capacitors had been stuck; several dissembled chassis. A single easy-chair, with stuffing pushing between worn threads across the arms, made the room cluttered. Above the tin sink, the bamboo had been pushed back from the glass. (The putty can stood open on the sill, a kitchen knife stuck in it; the panes were spotless—save a few puttied fingerprints.) Outside, two pairs of jeans and a lot of socks hung from a line. "You looking for the john, Kid? I just use the roof. There's a coffee can upside down outside with a roll of toilet paper under it. There's no drain. Everything goes right over the edge."

"Naw, that's okay." He stepped through. Bamboo clicked and clicked behind him. "I guess here—in a place like Bellona—you can have about anything you want. I mean, you just walk in and take it out of stores and things."

"Only—" Tak put a handful of something in the skillet—"I don't want very much." Steam, hissing, made the room smell, and sound, very good. "Figured while I was at it I'd make us up a full breakfast. I'm starved."

"Yeah…" At the pungence of thyme and fennel, the space beneath his tongue flooded. "I guess if you liked you could live here about as well as you wanted." And rosemary…

On a cutting board by the stove, a loaf of mahogany-colored bread sat among scattered crumbs. "Fresh food is hard as hell to come by. Meat especially. But there's canned stuff in the city enough to last…" Tak frowned back over his hirsute shoulder. "Truth is, I don't know
how
long it'll last. I lucked out on a couple of pretty well-stocked places nobody else seems to have found yet. You'll discover, by and large, people are
not
very practical around here—if they were, I guess they wouldn't be here. But when somebody else eventually does stumble on one of my classified, top-secret, hush-hush food sources, in a place like Bellona you can't very well say, 'Go away or I'll call the cops.' There're aren't any cops to call. Have a piece of bread. Another thing I lucked out on: Ran into this woman who bakes loaves and loaves of the stuff every week; just gives it away to anyone who comes by. For some reason I do not quite understand, she won't use any sugar or salt, so, good as it looks, it takes a bit of getting used to. But it's filling. She lives in the Lower Cumberland Park area—talk about nuts. She's very nice and I'm glad I know her, but she visits all sorts of people, many of whom are simply not in." Tak finished cutting a slice, turned and held it out. "Margarine's over there; haven't found any frozen butter for a while. Good plum preserves, though. Homemade in somebody's cellar last fall."

He took the bread, picked up a kitchen knife, and removed the top from a plastic butter dish.

"That should hold you till breakfast, which—" Tak swirled a spatula in the skillet—"is three minutes off."

Under the jelly and the margarine, bread crumbled on his tongue, oddly flat. Still, it goaded his appetite.

Chewing, he looked through the newspapers piled to one side of the cluttered workbench.

BELLONA TIMES
Saturday, April 1, 1919
BELLONA TIMES
Wednesday, December 25, 1933
BELLONA TIMES
Thursday, December 25, 1940
BELLONA TIMES
Monday, December 25, 1879

The headline for that one:

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
QUITS MONTEREY FOR FRISCO!

"Calkins has a thing for Christmas?"

"That was
last
week," Tak said. "A couple back, every other issue was 1984."

The next half dozen papers went from July 14, 2022, to July 7, 1837 (Headline: ONLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS TILL THE DEATH OF HARLOW!)

"It's a real event when he brings out two papers with consecutive dates. They're never two in a row with the same year. But sometimes he slips up and Tuesday actually follows Wednesday—or do I have that backward? Well, I'm just surprised people don't take bets; trying to pick the next date for the
Times
could be the Bellona equivalent to playing the numbers. Oh, he's got real news in there—articles on evacuation problems, scorpions terrorizing remaining citizens, what's happening in the poorer communities, pleas for outside help—even an occasional personality article on newcomers." Tak gave him a knowing nod. "You read it; but it's the only paper around to read. I read it up here. John, Wally, Mildred, Jommy—they read it down in the park. Still, it makes me incredibly hungry to see a real paper, you know? Just to find out how the rest of the world is getting on without us."

Did Tak's voice veer, once more, toward that unsettling tone? Only by suggestion, he realized, and realized too: The longer he stayed, the less of that tone he would hear. Whatever request for complicity, in whatever labyrinth of despair, it made of the listener, whatever demand for relief from situations which were by definition un-relievable, these requests, these demands could only be made of the very new to such labyrinths, such situations. And time, even as he munched flat bread, was erasing that status. "The rest of the country, it's fine."

Tak turned, with the knife.

He jumped, even though he knew Fire Wolf was only in the midst of some domestic slicing. "Yesterday, I think it was: I got a ride with a guy who had an L.A. paper in his car. Nothing's wrong on the West Coast. Then later, two women picked me up; and they had a Philadelphia paper. The Eastern Seaboard's all okay." He looked down at the papers on the bench again, watched his thick, nail-gnawed fingers grub there, leaving crumbs, margarine tracks, jelly stains.
"This
is the only place where…" He shrugged, wondering if Tak took his news as good, bad; or even believed it. "…I guess."

"Why don't you pour some coffee?" Tak said.

"Okay." He stepped around the armchair, lifted the enameled pot from the burner; the handle stung his knuckle as he poured.

In the cups, one after another, glistening disks rose, black without translucence.

"We'll eat inside." Above the plates of eggs, ham, and bread, two amber ponies rose on the tray between Tak's gripping thumbs. As Tak turned to the bamboo, the brandies ran with light.

Inside, sitting on the bed again, he lay his plate on his clamped knees till it burned. Lifting it by one edge, then the other, he speared ham chunks from the gravy, or pushed them on his fork with his thumb.

"It's amazing what Worcestershire will do for dehydrated eggs," Tak said through a mouthful of food, "Thank God."

He bit a tiny die of garlic; in his stinging mouth the scrambled flavors bloomed; the confusion of tastes recalled many good things, but gave no basic flavor (his plate was half clean already) to which he could fix his tongue.

"Since this is supper as well as breakfast—" seated at the desk, Tak poured himself another glass—"I guess brandy is all right."

He nodded, the amber bulb lost in his outsized fingers. "It's really good." He looked back at his plate and wished there was a vegetable; even some lettuce.

"You have any plans where you'll go?" Tak finished his second pony, poured another, and extended the bottle.

He shook his head to the drink and shrugged at the question.

"You can catch some sleep here."

Idly, he thought: Artichokes. Then he looked at the posters. "You're really into the S and M thing, huh?" He hoped the food in his mouth would muddle the comment.

"Mmm?" Tak's coffee chattered as he sipped. "It depends on who I'm with." He put his cup on the desk, opened the side drawer, reached in: "You ever seen one like this?"

It was an orchid.

The blades, twice as long as his, with greater curve, were brass. On the ornate band, brass leaves, shells, and claws gripped the bases of the damasked knives.

Tak placed the points around his left nipple, pressed, winced—let the weapon drop to his lap. "Not your thing, huh?" In the yellow hair, flushed points ringed his breast "It's a beautiful object." He smiled, shook his head, and put it back in the drawer.

"Can I put my brandy in my coffee?"

"You can do anything you like."

"Oh, yeah." He spilled the glass over the steaming black. "Uh… thanks." He raised the cup. Brandy fumed about his face. A deep breath made his tongue stagger in his throat. "It's a very nice breakfast." Squinting eyes observed his from beyond the cup's bottom.