Free Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany Page B

that?"
    "On my way here."
    "Outside the city?"
    "It says 'Made in Brazil'… I think."
    Tak shook his head. "Bellona has become a city of strange—" he burlesqued the word with a drawl—"craftsmen. Ah, the notions that are engineered here! Orchids, light-shields, that chain you're wearing—our local folk art."
    "I'm not going to take it off!" The conviction surprised him; its articulation astounded him.
    Tak laughed. "I wasn't going to ask you to." He looked down at his chest, ran his forefinger, in the hair, from one pink dot to the next—still visible where he'd pressed the orchid prongs. "You've got some nerve thinking you were ever any crazier than anybody else."
    His shirt lay beside him on the bed. He pulled his hands together into his lap, fingers and knuckles twisted around one another—scratched his dark, creased stomach with his thumb. "Look, about… being nuts." He felt self-righteous and shy, looked at the doubled fist of flesh, hair, horn and callous pressed into his groin; it suddenly seemed weighted with the bones in it. "You're not, and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think… you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see… until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts… Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense—stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety—is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself … in a way other people just can't." He pushed his shirt down to the foot of the bed, pushed his sandal free of his foot with his other toes. "You see?" He was far more conscious of the texture of the floorboards with the foot that had been bare.
    "All right." Tak spoke gently and appeasingly. "Why don't you take the rest of your clothes off?"
    "Look, I'm awfully dirty, man—" He raised his eye. "I probably stink like hell. If you don't want—"
    "I know just what you stink like," Tak said. "Go on."
    He took a breath, suddenly found it funny, lay back on the hard pallet, unhooked his belt, and closed his eyes.
    He heard Tak grunt. One, then another boot, thumped the floor and fell over.
    A moment later a warm hip pressed his. Palms and fingers pressed his stomach; the fingers spread. Tak slid his hands to the jeans' waist, tugged.
    Heels and shoulders pressed on the hard pad, he raised his buttocks.
    Tak slid the jeans down, and—"Jesus Christ, man! What's the matter with you—that stuff all over your dick!"
    "What… huh?" He opened his eyes, propped his elbows under him, looked down at himself. "What do you…?" Then he grinned. "Nothing's the matter. What's the matter with you?"
    "You got dandruff in your crotch?"
    "That's not dandruff. I was with a woman. Just before I met you. Only I didn't get a chance to wash."
    "Was she sick?"
    "Naw. Didn't you ever fuck a woman?"
    Tak had a strange expression. "I'll be honest: I can count the attempts on the fingers of one hand." He narrowed his already thin mouth.
    "If my God-damn feet don't turn you off, that's sure not going to hurt you!" He reached to brush off his rough groin hair. "It's just like dried… come or something." The chain glittered across it. "It happens with some women, when they're very wet. It's nothing wrong." He stopped brushing, let himself back down on his elbows. "I bet it turns you on."
    Tak shook his head, then laughed.
    "Go on," he said.
    Tak lowered his head, looked up once with bright blue eyes: "It turns you on, doesn't it?"
    He reached down from the hairy shoulder, pressed: "Go on."
    Thick arms joined under his waist. Once Tak, twice—full fist between