summary In a forest somewhere outside the city, the protagonist meets a woman and they have sex. After, he tells her that he has "lost something"—he cannot remember his name. She leads him to a cave and tells him to enter. Inside, he finds long loops of chain fitted with miniature prisms, mirrors, and lenses. He dons the chain and leaves the cave, only to find the woman in the middle of a field, turning into a tree. Panicked, he flees. Many characters in the novel wear the same sort of "optic chain"; all are loath to discuss how they came to do so. On a nearby road, a passing truck stops to pick him up. The trucker, hauling artichokes, drops him off at the end of a suspension bridge leading across the river to Bellona. As he crosses the bridge in the early morning darkness, the young man meets a group of women leaving the city. 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. 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. Tak has moved to Bellona and stayed there ever since. Upon learning that he cannot remember his name, Tak gives him a nickname—the Kid. 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. One stop is at a commune in the city park, where Kid sees two women reading a spiral notebook. When Kid looks at it, we see what he reads: The first page contains, word-for-word, the first sentences of Dhalgren. As he reads further, however, the text diverges from the novel's opening. 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. Shortly they become lovers. Their relationship lasts throughout the book. We meet or learn about several other characters, including George Harrison, a local cult hero and rumoured rapist; Ernest Newboy, a famous poet visiting Bellona by invitation of Roger Calkins, publisher and editor of the local newspaper, The Bellona Times; Madame Brown, a psychotherapist; and,