Dhalgren Read Online Free Page A

it?"
    "What'd they call it?"
    "An orchid."
    "Yeah, that's what it is."
    He walked over, squatted in the triple beam.
    "You wear it around your wrist. With the blades sticking out front. Like a bracelet"
    From an adjustable metal wrist-band, seven blades, from eight to twelve inches, curved sharply forward. There was a chain-and-leather harness inside to hold it steady on the fingers. The blades were sharpened along the outside.
    He picked it up.
    "Put it on."
    "Are you right or left handed?"
    "Ambidextrous…" which, in his case, meant clumsy with both. He turned the "flower". "But I write with my left. Usually."
    "Oh."
    He fitted it around his right wrist, snapped it. "Suppose you were wearing this on a crowded bus. You could hurt somebody," and felt the witticism fail. He made a fist within the blades, opened it slowly and, behind curved steel, rubbed two blunt and horny crowns on the underside of his great thumb.
    "There aren't too many buses in Bellona."
    Thinking: Dangerous, bright petals bent about some knobbed, half-rotted root. "Ugly thing," he told it, not them. "Hope I don't need you."
    "Hope you don't either," one said above. "I guess you can give it to somebody else when you leave."
    "Yeah." He stood up. "Sure."
    " If he leaves," another said, gave another laugh.
    "Hey, we better get going."
    "I heard a car. We're probably gonna have to wait long enough anyway. We might as well start."
    South: "He didn't make it sound like we were gonna get any rides."
    "Let's just get going. Hey, so long!"
    "So long." Their beams swept by. "And thanks." Artichokes? But he could not remember where the word had come from to ring so brightly.
    He raised the orchid after them.
    Caged in blades, his gnarled hand was silhouetted with river glitter stretching between the bridge struts. Watching them go, he felt the vaguest flutter of desire. Only one of their flashlights was on. Then one of them blocked that. They were footsteps on metal plates; some laughter drifting back; rustlings…
    He walked again, holding his hand from his side.
    This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perception themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.

3
     
     
    Beyond the bridge-mouth, the pavement shattered.
    One live street lamp lit five dead ones—two with broken globes. Climbing a ten-foot, tilted, asphalt slab that jerked once under him, rumbling like a live thing, he saw pebbles roll off the edge, heard them clink on fugitive plumbing, then splash somewhere in darkness… He recalled the cave and vaulted to a more solid stretch, whose cracks were mortared with nubby grass.
    No lights in any near buildings; but down those waterfront streets, beyond the veils of smoke—was that fire? Already used to the smell, he had to breathe deeply to notice it. The sky was all haze. Buildings jabbed up into it and disappeared.
    Light?
    At the corner of a four-foot alley, he spent ten minutes exploring—just because the lamp worked. Across the street he could make out concrete steps, a loading porch under an awning, doors. A truck had overturned at the block's end. Nearer, three cars, windows rimmed with smashed glass, squatted on skewed hubs, like frogs gone marvelously blind.
    His bare foot was calloused enough for gravel and glass. But ash kept working between his foot and his remaining sandal to grind like finest sand, work its way under, and silt itself with his sweat. His heel was almost sore.
    By the gate at the alley's end, he found a pile of empty cans, a stack of newspaper still wire-bound, bricks set up as a fireplace with an arrangement of pipes over it.