Summary

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A drifter and former inmate of a mental hospital who cannot even remember his own name meets a strange naked woman in a wood. After they make love, she directs him to a cave where he climbs a rock face and discovers a chain festooned with mirrors, prisms, and lenses. Obeying some barely understood whim, he wraps the chain around his body. Drifting on, he travels to the midwestern city of Bellona where an apocalypse of some kind has occurred. As he enters the city, the drifter encounters a group of women who are leaving it. They give him a weapon known as an orchid, an arrangement of blades worn on a strap around the wrist.

On his first night in Bellona, the drifter meets Tak, a former engineer, who takes to calling him “kid” (during the course of the novel, he will be variously known as Kidd, the kid, or the Kid; readers never learn his real name). Tak introduces the Kid to a community of hippies living rough in the park. One of them, a harmonica-playing and independent-minded woman named Lanya, will become his lover. Lanya hands the Kid a notebook, the first words of which are the first words of Dhalgren. Whoever kept the notebook previously wrote on only one side of each page, so the Kid decides to keep the book and write his own poems on the facing pages.

For a while, the Kid has a job helping a family called Richards move their apartment. In the midst of the chaos and confusion that characterize the vastly depopulated Bellona, Mrs. Richards is desperately trying to hold onto her safe, middle-class lifestyle, but the cracks are clearly showing. The family becomes the first appreciative audience for the Kid’s poems.

The Richardses’ daughter, June, was the victim of what was either a rape or a consensual but violent sexual encounter with a large black man, George Harrison, on the very night of the apocalypse (there is a suggestion that the two events may have been in some way linked). June is now obsessed with George, who has become a celebrity in the city, but she is too nervous to approach him. When the Kid gives June a poster of a naked George, her younger brother Bobby threatens to reveal her secret, and she kills him by arranging for him to fall down an open elevator shaft. Trying to recover the body, the Kid is helped by a group of young squatters who belong to a gang called the Scorpions. The Scorpions, whose violent reputation is not entirely unjustified, take their name from the projectors they wear; the devices cast huge, multicolored images of various beasts about them as they roam the streets.

Bellona is a place cut off from the rest of the world, where the normal rules of behavior no longer apply. It is shrouded under permanent dense clouds, though once the clouds part to reveal two moons in the sky. On another occasion, the Sun rises so close that it fills half the sky. No radio or television signal reaches the city, the power supply is intermittent, and people scavenge for food, but there seems to be no shortage of drink. Time, in particular, is out of joint: The Kid meets a number of people who were born in the same year as he was but who are different ages. The city’s newspaper, published by the powerful but mysteriously elusive Roger Calkins, bears dates chosen more or less at random. Visitors come to stay with Calkins. One, an eminent poet named Newboy, reads the...

(This entire section contains 826 words.)

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Kid’s poems, and, although his response to them is ambiguous, he arranges for Calkins to publish them in a book to be calledBrass Orchids.

The Kid coincidentally meets up with the Scorpions as they raid a department store where the former staff have taken to firing pot shots at people from the store windows. His calmness under fire, taking a rifle away from one person and saving the life of one of the Scorpions, gives him a reputation as a hero. When he decides to join the Scorpions, he is automatically made the leader of the gang. He and Lanya form a sexual threesome with a Scorpion named Denny.

Further exploits, including spotting white snipers at a black church service and rescuing five children from a fire, cement the Kid’s reputation as a hero. His book is published to general acclaim. A book-launch party staged by Calkins is filled with sexual and threatening encounters. However, a series of meetings—with former astronaut Captain Kamp, with Calkins in a monastery garden, and with former psychoanalyst Madame Brown—cause the Kid to question the reality of his experiences, suggesting that the encounter that opened the book was just a dream. Finally, another cataclysm rends the city, causing him to lose touch with Denny and Lanya and forcing him to flee Bellona with nothing resolved.

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