Their relationship lasts throughout the book. In Chapter II, 'The Ruins of Morning', Kid returns to the commune the next day and receives the notebook from Lanya Colson, one of the two women from the evening before. As he reads further, however, the text diverges from the novel's opening. When Kid looks at it, we see what he reads: The first page contains, word-for-word, the first sentences of Dhalgren. One stop is at a commune in the city park, where Kid sees two women reading a spiral notebook. Throughout the novel he is also referred to as 'Kid', 'Kidd', and often just 'kid.' Next Tak takes Kid on a short tour of the city. Upon learning that he cannot remember his name, Tak gives him a nickname-the Kid.

Tak has moved to Bellona and stayed there ever since. Once inside Bellona, an engineer, Tak Loufer, who was living a few miles outside of the city when the initial destruction happened, meets and befriends him. They ask him questions about the outside world and give him a weapon: a bladed “orchid,” worn around the wrist with its blades sweeping up in front of the hand. The trucker, hauling artichokes, drops him off at the end of a suspension bridge leading across the river to Bellona.Īs he crosses the bridge in the early morning darkness, the young man meets a group of women leaving the city.

On a nearby road, a passing truck stops to pick him up. Many characters in the novel wear the same sort of “optic chain” all are loath to discuss how they came to do so. He dons the chain and leaves the cave, only to find the woman in the middle of a field, turning into a tree. Inside, he finds long loops of chain fitted with miniature prisms, mirrors, and lenses. She leads him to a cave and tells him to enter. After, he tells her that he has 'lost something'-he cannot remember his name.

In a forest somewhere outside the city, the protagonist meets a woman and they have sex.

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