Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY

“I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco

“Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review

Dhalgren

“Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem

“A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

“A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review

The Nevèrÿon Series

“Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna

“The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World

“This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today

“The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson

“Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon

“One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

“Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post

“What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday

Nova

“As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction

“A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time

The Motion of Light in Water

“A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson

“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby

“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany

This book about many things

must be for many people.

Some of them are

Joseph Cox, Bill Brodecky, David

Hartwell, Liz Landry, Joseph

Manfredini, Patrick Muir, John

Herbert McDowell, Jean Sullivan,

Janis Schmidt, Charles Naylor, Ann

O’Neil, Baird Searles, Martin Last,

Bob & Joan Thurston, Richard Vriali,

& Susan Schweers

and

Judy Ratner & Oliver Shank

also

Thomas M. Disch, Judith Merril,

Michael Perkins, Joanna Russ, Judith

Johnson, & Marilyn Hacker

Contents

The Recombinant City: A Foreword by William Gibson

I Prism, Mirror, Lens

II The Ruins of Morning

III House of the Ax

IV In Time of Plague

V Creatures of Light and Darkness

VI Palimpsest

VII The Anathēmata: a plague journal

A Biography of Samuel R. Delany

“You have confused the true and the real.”

GEORGE STANLEY / In conversation

The Recombinant City

A Foreword by William Gibson

SAMUEL DELANY’S DHALGREN IS a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors. Once established in memory, it comes to have the feel of a climate, a season. It turns there, on the mind’s horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity, a tidal force urging the reader’s re-entry. It is a literary singularity. It is a work of sustained conceptual daring, executed by the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science fiction.

I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it. This has never caused me the least discomfort, or interfered in any way with my pleasure in the text. If anything, the opposite has been true.

Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its “riddle” was never meant to be “solved.” I do not believe that this has to do with any failure of coherence on the part of either the author or the text. I find both to be exceptionally coherent. Author and text are determinedly self-aware, in ways that less exploratory authors and their tales never are. Dhalgren is quite literally an experimental novel, an exploration of the cultural envelope of fiction. Delany, equipped with the accumulated tool-kit of literary modernism, heads straight for the edges and borders and unacknowledged treaties of the consensual act of fiction. And, most remarkably—almost uniquely, in my experience—he succeeds; the text becomes something else, something unprecedented.

To enter Dhalgren is to be progressively stripped of various certainties, many of these having to do with unspoken, often unrecognized, aspects of the reader’s cultural contract with the author. There is a transgressive element at work here, a deliberate refusal to deliver certain “rewards” the reader may consider to be a reader’s right. If this is a quest, the reader protests, then we must at least learn the object of that quest. If this is a mystery, we must be told at least the nature of the puzzle. And Dhalgren does not answer. But what of this recombinant city, the reader asks, this metamorphic Middle American streetscape, transfigured by some unspecified thing or process, where nothing remains quite as it was, and the sky itself is alight with primal signs of Tarotic portent?

And Dhalgren does not answer, but goes on.

Revolving. A sigil of brass and crystal, concrete and flesh.

I place Dhalgren in this history:

No one under thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial.

But something did happen: a city came to be, in America. (And I imagine I use America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized nations of the American Century.) This city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid. Its inhabitants nonetheless knew, at any given instant, whether they were in the city or in America. The city was largely invisible to America. If America was about “home” and “work,” the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for America to see. There may have been those who wished to enter that city, having glimpsed it in the distance, but who found themselves baffled, and turned back. Many others, myself included, rounded a corner one day and found it spread before them, a territory of inexpressible possibilities, a place remembered from no dream at all. We would find that there were rules there as well, but they would be different rules. Down one half-familiar street, and then another, and perhaps we came to a park…

It proved to be possible to die in the city, and no book was ever kept of the names of those dead. Many survived there, but did not return. (Some said that those who did return had never quite been there.) But for those who remained, something else gradually happened: the membrane eroded, America and the city seeping into one another, until today there is no America and there is no city, only something born from their intermingling.

I would not suggest that Dhalgren is any sort of map of that city, intentional or otherwise, but that they bear some undeniable relationship. (Those who would prefer to forget the city say that it produced no true literature, but that too is denial.)

In Dhalgren, the unmediated experience of the singularity has survived, free of all corrosion of nostalgia.

When I think of Dhalgren, I remember this:

A night in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., amid conditions of civil riot, when someone, as the police arrived with their staves and plastic shields, tossed a Molotov cocktail up into the shallow stone bowl of the Admiral’s memorial goblet. The District’s lesser monuments were often in decay, and the Circle’s tall fountain had stood dry for however many summers, and I suppose trash had accumulated there, mostly paper, crumpled Dixie cups tossed up by children making baskets in imaginary hoops.

I did not hear the bottle shatter, only the explosive intake of gasoline igniting, flames throwing black shadows against the concrete; our shadows, running. We all were running, and in the eyes of a Kennedy-jawed girl from the Virginia suburbs I would see something I had never seen before: a feral shiver, a bright wet shard of ancient light called Panic, where dread and ecstasy commingled utterly. And then the first canisters fell, trailing gas, and she was off, running, like a deer and in that moment as beautiful. And I ran after her, and lost her, and sometimes I imagine she is running still.

Several years later, settling into the long slough of the pre-punk seventies, when Dhalgren was first published, I remember being simply and frequently grateful to Delany for so powerfully confirming that certain states had ever been experienced at all, by anyone.

The flame-lit park already so far behind.

I distrust few things more deeply than acts of literary explication.

Here is a book. Go inside.

It’s your turn now.

     Circular ruin.

          Hall of mirrors.

               Ring of flesh.

The smoldering outskirts reconfiguring with each step you take. Bellona.

Remember me to them.

Vancouver, B.C.

August 23,1995

I Prism, Mirror, Lens

TO WOUND THE AUTUMNAL city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges.

Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.

He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined.

The leaves winked.

What had been wind was a motion in brush below. His hand went to the rock behind.

She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows moved on her.

Fear prickled one side where his shirt (two middle buttons gone) bellied with a breeze. Muscle made a band down the back of his jaw. Black hair tried to paw off what fear scored on his forehead.

She whispered something that was all breath, and the wind came for the words and dusted away the meaning:

“Ahhhhh…” from her.

He forced out air: it was nearly a cough.

“…Hhhhhh…” from her again. And laughter; which had a dozen edges in it, a bright snarl under the moon. “…hhhHHhhhh…” which had more sound in it than that, perhaps was his name, even. But the wind, wind…

She stepped.

Motion rearranged the shadows, baring one breast. There was a lozenge of light over one eye. Calf and ankle were luminous before leaves.

Down her lower leg was a scratch.

His hair tugged back from his forehead. He watched hers flung forward. She moved with her hair, stepping over leaves, toes spread on stone, in a tip-toe pause, to quit the darker shadows.

Crouched on rock, he pulled his hands up his thighs.

His hands were hideous.

She passed another, nearer tree. The moon flung gold coins at her breasts. Her brown aureoles were wide, her nipples small. “You…?” She said that, softly, three feet away, looking down; and he still could not make out her expression for the leaf dappling; but her cheek bones were Orientally high. She was Oriental, he realized and waited for another word, tuned for accent. (He could sort Chinese from Japanese.) “You’ve come!” It was a musical Midwestern Standard. “I didn’t know if you’d come!” Her voicing (a clear soprano, whispering…) said that some of what he’d thought was shadow-movement might have been fear: “You’re here!” She dropped to her knees in a roar of foliage. Her thighs, hard in front, softer (he could tell) on the sides—a column of darkness between them—were inches from his raveled knees.

She reached, two fingers extended, pushed back plaid wool, and touched his chest; ran her fingers down. He could hear his own crisp hair.

Laughter raised her face to the moon. He leaned forward; the odor of lemons filled the breezeless gap. Her round face was compelling, her eyebrows un-Orientally heavy. He judged her over thirty, but the only lines were two small ones about her mouth.

He turned his mouth, open, to hers, and raised his hands to the sides of her head till her hair covered them. The cartilages of her ears were hot curves on his palms. Her knees slipped in leaves; that made her blink and laugh again. Her breath was like noon and smelled of lemons…

He kissed her; she caught his wrists. The joined meat of their mouths came alive. The shape of her breasts, her hand half on his chest and half on wool, was lost with her weight against him.

Their fingers met and meshed at his belt; a gasp bubbled in their kiss (his heart was stuttering loudly), was blown away; then air on his thigh.

They lay down.

With her fingertips she moved his cock head roughly in her rough hair while a muscle in her leg shook under his. Suddenly he slid into her heat. He held her tightly around the shoulders when her movements were violent. One of her fists stayed like a small rock over her breast. And there was a roaring, roaring: at the long, surprising come, leaves hailed his side.

Later, on their sides, they made a warm place with their mingled breath. She whispered, “You’re beautiful, I think.” He laughed, without opening his lips. Closely, she looked at one of his eyes, looked at the other (he blinked), looked at his chin (behind his lips he closed his teeth so that his jaw moved), then at his forehead. (He liked her lemon smell.) “…beautiful!” she repeated.

Wondering was it true, he smiled.

She raised her hand into the warmth, with small white nails, moved one finger beside his nose, growled against his cheek.

He reached to take her wrist.

She asked, “Your hand…?”

So he put it behind her shoulder to pull her nearer.

She twisted. “Is there something wrong with your…?”

He shook his head against her hair, damp, cool, licked it.

Behind him, the wind was cool. Below hair, her skin was hotter than his tongue. He brought his hands around into the heated cave between them.

She pulled back. “Your hands—!”

Veins like earthworms wriggled in the hair. The skin was cement dry; his knuckles were thick with scabbed callous. Blunt thumbs lay on the place between her breasts like toads.

She frowned, raised her knuckles toward his, stopped.

Under the moon on the sea of her, his fingers were knobbed peninsulas. Sunk on the promontory of each was a stripped-off, gnawed-back, chitinous wreck.

“You…?” he began.

No, they were not deformed. But they were…ugly! She looked up. Blinking, her eyes glistened.

“…do you know my…?” His voice hoarsened. “Who I…am?”

Her face was not subtle; but her smile, regretful and mostly in the place between her brow and her folded lids, confused.

“You,” she said, full voice and formal (but the wind still blurred some overtone), “have a father.” Her hip was warm against his belly. The air which he had thought mild till now was a blade to pry back his loins. “You have a mummer—!” That was his cheek against her mouth. But she turned her face away. “You are—” she placed her pale hand over his great one (Such big hands for a little ape of a guy, someone had kindly said. He remembered that) on her ribs—“beautiful. You’ve come from somewhere. You’re going somewhere.” She sighed.

“But…” He swallowed the things in his throat (he wasn’t that little). “I’ve lost…something.”

“Things have made you what you are,” she recited. “What you are will make you what you will become.”

“I want something back!”

She reached behind her to pull him closer. The cold well between his belly and the small of her back collapsed. “What don’t you have?” She looked over her shoulder at him: “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“You have the face of someone much younger.” She giggled. “I thought you were…sixteen! You have the hands of someone much older—”

“And meaner?”

“—crueler than I think you are. Where were you born?”

“Upstate New York. You wouldn’t know the town. I didn’t stay there long.”

“I probably wouldn’t. You’re a long way away.”

“I’ve been to Japan. And Australia.”

“You’re educated?”

He laughed. His chest shook her shoulder. “One year at Columbia. Almost another at a community college in Delaware. No degree.”

“What year were you born?”

“Nineteen forty-eight. I’ve been in Central America too. Mexico. I just came from Mexico and I—”

“What do you want to change in the world?” she continued her recitation, looking away. “What do you want to preserve? What is the thing you’re searching for? What are you running away from?”

“Nothing,” he said. “And nothing. And nothing. And…nothing, at least that I know.”

“You have no purpose?”

“I want to get to Bellona and—” He chuckled. “Mine’s the same as everybody else’s; in real life, anyway: to get through the next second, consciousness intact.”

The next second passed.

“Really?” she asked, real enough to make him realize the artificiality of what he’d said (thinking: It is in danger with the passing of each one). “Then be glad you’re not just a character scrawled in the margins of somebody else’s lost notebook: you’d be deadly dull. Don’t you have any reason for going there?”

“To get to Bellona and…”

When he said no more, she said, “You don’t have to tell me. So, you don’t know who you are? Finding that out would be much too simple to bring you all the way from upper New York State, by way of Japan, here. Ahhh…” and she stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Well, if you were born in nineteen forty-eight, you’ve got to be older than twenty-seven.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, hell,” she said. “It isn’t important.”

He began to shake her arm, slowly.

She said: “I was born in nineteen forty-seven. And I’m a good deal older then twenty-eight.” She blinked at him again. “But that really isn’t im—”

He rolled back in the loud leaves. “Do you know who I am?” Night was some color between clear and cloud. “You came here, to find me. Can’t you tell me what my name is?”

Cold spread down his side, where she had been, like butter.

He turned his head.

“Come!” As she sat, her hair writhed toward him. A handful of leaves struck his face.

He sat too.

But she was already running, legs passing and passing through moon-dapple.

He wondered where she’d got that scratch.

Grabbing his pants, he stuck foot and foot in them, grabbing his shirt and single sandal, rolled to his feet—

She was rounding the rock’s edge.

He paused for his fly and the twin belt hooks. Twigs and gravel chewed his feet. She ran so fast!

He came up as she glanced back, put his hand on the stone—and flinched: the rock-face was wet. He looked at the crumbled dirt on the yellow ham and heel.

“There…” She pointed into the cave. “Can you see it?”

He started to touch her shoulder, but no.

She said: “Go ahead. Go in.”

He dropped his sandal: a lisp of brush. He dropped his shirt: that smothered the lisping.

She looked at him expectantly, stepped aside.

He stepped in: moss on his heel, wet rock on the ball of his foot. His other foot came down: wet rock.

Breath quivered about him. In the jellied darkness something dry brushed his cheek. He reached up: a dead vine crisp with leaves. It swung: things rattled awfully far overhead. With visions of the mortal edge, he slid his foot forward. His toes found: a twig with loose bark…a clot of wet leaves…the thrill of water…Next step, water licked over his foot. He stepped again:

Only rock.

A flicker, left.

Stepped again, and the flicker was orange, around the edge of something; which was the wall of a rock niche, with shadow for ceiling, next step.

Beyond a dead limb, a dish of brass wide as a car tire had nearly burned to embers. Something in the remaining fire snapped, spilling sparks on wet stone.

Ahead, where the flicker leaked high up into the narrowing slash, something caught and flung back flashings.

He climbed around one boulder, paused; the echo from breath and burning cast up intimations of the cavern’s size. He gauged a crevice, leaped the meter, and scrambled on the far slope. Things loosened under his feet. He heard pebbles in the gash complaining down rocks, and stuttering, and whispering—and silence.

Then: a splash!

He pulled in his shoulders; he had assumed it was only a yard or so deep.

He had to climb a long time. One face, fifteen feet high, stopped him awhile. He went to the side and clambered up the more uneven outcroppings. He found a thick ridge that, he realized as he pulled himself up it, was a root. He wondered what it was a root to, and gained the ledge.

Something went Eeek! softly, six inches from his nose, and scurried off among old leaves.

He swallowed, and the prickles tidaling along his shoulders subsided. He pulled himself the rest of the way, and stood:

It lay in a crack that slanted into roofless shadow.

One end looped a plume of ferns.

He reached for it; his body blocked the light from the brazier below: glimmer ceased.

He felt another apprehension than that of the unexpected seen before, or accidentally revealed behind. He searched himself for some physical sign that would make it real: quickening breath, slowing heart. But what he apprehended was insubstantial as a disjunction of the soul. He picked the chain up; one end chuckled and flickered down the stone. He turned with it to catch the orange glimmer.

Prisms.

Some of them, anyway.

Others were round.

He ran the chain across his hand. Some of the round ones were transparent. Where they crossed the spaces between his fingers, the light distorted. He lifted the chain to gaze through one of the lenses. But it was opaque. Tilting it, he saw pass, dim and inches distant in the circle, his own eye, quivering in the quivering glass.

Everything was quiet.

He pulled the chain across his hand. The random arrangement went almost nine feet. Actually, three lengths were attached. Each of the three ends looped on itself. On the largest loop was a small metal tag.

He stooped for more light.

The centimeter of brass (the links bradded into the optical bits were brass) was inscribed: producto do Brazil.

He thought: What the hell kind of Portuguese is that?

He crouched a moment longer looking along the glittering lines.

He tried to pull it all together for his jean pocket, but the three tangled yards spilled his palms. Standing, he found the largest loop and lowered his head. Points and edges nipped his neck. He got the tiny rings together under his chin and fingered (Thinking: Like damned clubs) the catch closed.

He looked at the chain in loops of light between his feet. He picked up the shortest end from his thigh. The loop there was smaller.

He waited, held his breath even—then wrapped the length twice around his upper arm, twice around his lower, and fastened the catch at his wrist. He flattened his palm on the links and baubles hard as plastic or metal. Chest hair tickled the creasing between joint and joint.

He passed the longest end around his back: the bits lay out cold kisses on his shoulder blades. Then across his chest; his back once more; his belly. Holding the length in one hand (it still hung down on the stone), he unfastened his belt with the other.

Pants around his ankles, he wound the final length once around his hips; and then around his right thigh; again around; and again. He fastened the last catch at his ankle. Pulling up his trousers, he went to the ledge, buckled them, and turned to climb down.

He was aware of the bindings. But, chest flat on the stone, they were merely lines and did not cut.

This time he went to where the crevice was only a foot wide and stepped far of the lip. The cave mouth was a lambda of moon mist, edged with leaf-lace.

The rocks licked his soles. Once, when his mind wandered, it was brought back by his foot in cold water; and the links were warm around his body. He halted to feel for more heat; but the chain was only neutral weight.

He stepped out onto moss.

His shirt lay across a bush, his sandal, sole up, beneath.

He slipped his arms into the wool sleeves: his right wrist glittered from the cuff. He buckled his sandal: the ground moistened his knee.

He stood, looking around, and narrowed his eyes on the shadows. “Hey…?” He turned left, turned right, and scratched his collar-bone with his wide thumb. “Hey, where…?” Turning right, turning left, he wished he could interpret scuffs and broken brush. She wouldn’t have wandered down the way they’d come…

He left the cave mouth and entered the shingled black. Could she have gone along here? he wondered three steps in. But went forward.

He recognized the road for moonlight the same moment his sandaled foot jabbed into mud. His bare one swung to the graveled shoulder. He staggered out on the asphalt, one foot sliding on flooded leather, took a hissing breath, and gazed around.

Left, the road sloped up between the trees. He started right. Downward would take him toward the city.

On one side was forest. On the other, he realized after a dozen slippery jogs, it was only a hedge of trees. Trees dropped away with another dozen. Behind, the grass whispered and shushed him.

She was standing at the meadow’s center.

He brought his feet—one strapped and muddy, one bare and dusty—together; suddenly felt his heart beating; heard his surprised breath shush the grass back. He stepped across the ditch to ill-mowed stubble.

She’s too tall, he thought, nearing.

Hair lifted from her shoulders; grass whispered again.

She had been taller than he was, but not like…“Hey, I got the…!” She was holding her arms over her head. Was she standing on some stumpy pedestal? “Hey…?”

She twisted from the waist: “What the hell are you doing here?”

At first he thought she was splattered with mud all up her thigh. “I thought you…?” But it was brown as dried blood.

She gazed down at him with batting eyes.

Mud? Blood? It was the wrong color for either.

“Go away!”

He took another, entranced step.

“What are you doing here? Go away!”

Were the blotches under her breasts scabs? “Look, I got it! Now, can’t you tell me my…?”

Leaves were clutched in her raised hands. Her hands were raised so high! Leaves dropped about her shoulders. Her long, long fingers shook, and brittle darkness covered one flank. Her pale belly jerked with a breath.

“No!” She bent away when he tried to touch her; and stayed bent. One arm, branched and branching ten feet over him, pulled a web of shadow across the grass.

“You…!” was the word he tried; breath was all that came.

He looked up among the twigs of her ears. Leaves shucked from her eyebrows. Her mouth was a thick, twisted bole, as though some footwide branch had been lopped off by lightning. Her eyes—his mouth opened as he craned to see them—disappeared, first one, up there, then the other, way over there: scabby lids sealed.

He backed through stiff grass.

A leaf crashed his temple like a charred moth.

Rough fingers bludgeoning his lips, he stumbled, turned, ran to the road, glanced once more where the twisted trunk raked five branches at the moon, loped until he had to walk, walked—gasping—until he could think. Then he ran some more.

2

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin. Loping and limping in the ruts, it would be easier not to think about what she did (was done to her, done to her, done), trying instead to reconstruct what it is at a distance. Oh, but it would not be so terrible had one calf not borne (if I’d looked close, it would have been a chain of tiny wounds with moments of flesh between; I’ve done that myself with a swipe in a garden past a rose) that scratch.

The asphalt spilled him onto the highway’s shoulder. The paving’s chipped edges filed visions off his eyes. A roar came toward him he heard only as it passed. He glanced back; the truck’s red, rear eyes sank together. He walked for another hour, saw no other vehicle.