Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Under his hair, strained from his bent-over position, he muttered: ‘Damned if I’m gonna blow this hit…!’ (That’s missing the vein and injecting under the skin, so that the liquid blows up a dime-sized bubble, absorbed into the body too gradually for the user to feel any effect.) But most of his accessible veins have collapsed.

  Later, he stood up, wiping his arms off with another paper towel, his pants’ leg still rolled up. ‘I look like a fuckin’ dartboard, don’t I?’ Forehead sweating with the first rush after his delayed success, he grinned, showing long under teeth and naked upper gum. ‘I was at the hospital a couple of months ago, and they’re trying to do this blood test…? And I tell ’em, please, please! Lemme do it! Please! You gonna be pokin’ around in my arm for an hour and you ain’t gonna get no blood.’

  Joey’s daughter, from his marriage when he was nineteen, is one month younger than mine. In the occasional comparisons of the dog-eared photo he had of her for a while and the school picture I carry, it isn’t just projection: the two girls look uncannily alike. Three times now, I’ve known him to get it together enough to make a trip up to Boston to see her. ‘I only spend a couple of hours with her,’ he explained on his return. ‘I don’t want to be no trouble for my old lady. Besides, I don’t want the kid to know her old man is a fuckin’ junky, sleepin’ on the street and sellin’ his ass.’ It occurs to me that for anyone—even a ten-year old—to spend more than a few minutes with Joey is probably to suspect that his situation can’t be too much else.

  The audience’s performance is always more or less stochastic.

  My accounts of Joey are only somewhat tightened up from my journals for ’82 and ’83, about a hustler (whose name does not begin with ‘J’ nor was he born in Boston), some murders (complete with the inaccuracies from ‘Joey’s’ account), and a police operation. While that may make them more historical, it does not make them less fictive.

  11.3 Earlier tonight, on a cold, rainy Easter Monday, twenty degrees below normal for the time of year (23 April 1984), after two days of hints in the papers and on TV, the six o’clock news announced an AIDS breakthrough. On the same news program were a few more details of Great Britain’s cutting off of diplomatic relations with Libya over the embassy murder of a policewoman in London; there was a minute and a half photographic retrospective for the death of eighty-two-year-old landscape photographer, Ansel Adams; judges called for harsher sentences for New York criminals, despite the fact that our jails are holding 116 percent of their capacity; Harlem dance teacher, Mary Bruce, is determined to fight eviction from the second-floor dance studio she has run at 125th Street since the thirties.

  And Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute has isolated a virus (HTLV-3—very similar to ordinary HTLV and possibly much like, or even identical to, LAV, the virus the Institute Pasteur has been studying), which, by reasonable assessment, is possibly the causative agent of AIDS. Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler at a press conference in Washington, with hair piled high, pale-framed glasses, and a high-collared red dress, announced across a forest of microphones that we are reasonably six months away from a general test for the antibodies for the virus and two years away from a vaccine—which will then be ready for another year of testing, before it can be used.

  That is, of course, if this is the actual virus.

  Shortly, amidst the peeling walls of the office of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a gaunt, huge-eyed man with AIDS explained calmly to an interviewer that, while it is hopeful news, it doesn’t do much good for the two-thousand-odd people still alive with AIDS today, none of whom, in a word, are likely to survive that long. It’s only his work and his will, he tells us, that have kept him alive. (And there have been c. 880 new cases reported in the first three months of this year, 1984.) Later, on Channel 2 there was a remarkably responsible report about AIDS in the Navy, Air Force, and Army. Basically the report says that there must be more cases than the five the armed forces have admitted to so far; the news commentator suggests that there are probably somewhat over thirty.

  But our microbically unagented terror has, after four years now and a toll of more than four thousand—possibly—developed its microbe.

  11.4 Expand this scene to some six/eight pp.:

  While the last of the night’s Carnival celebration goes on outside in the street, Nari and Zadyuk get home from the Calling of the Am-newor to their dark house, to find Pheron. (Wording: Squatting in the dark before the firebox, Zadyuk swung back the metal door. Coals glowed in the ashes. He picked out one of the hardwood sticks and blew on it. Its end flared above his fingers. With his other hand he reached for the lamp on top, first accidentally pushing it over a little, then getting it: he brought down the warm clay, touched the stick’s end to the wick, which, after a moment, flamed red. In the doorway, Nari breathed in sharply. Zadyuk looked at her, then at where she looked. A very, very thin man sat at the bench alongside their table, head forward on his arms. Zadyuk stood up; the lamp flame flickered wildly; red wavered and wobbled in the room. And the man at the table moved a long foot, then a thin hand, and finally lifted his head to blink at them with large, dark eyes, whites showing all the way around. Nari whispered: ‘Pheron…?’ Clean up some. Work on the red light over the—stone? wood? Omit or change: ‘accidentally,’ ‘alongside,’ ‘the way,’ ‘over a little,’ ‘after a moment’ Possibly okay. But clean and clarify: how Pheron got in, etc.) Pheron looked like a skeleton. (Wording: The elbows seemed large interruptions along the thinnesses of his arms. Okay? Maybe.) He told them that he’d spent the evening with some of the other people with the disease. (Where? At Lord Vanar’s? At his own house?) The boy who’d first brought him to the group, Toplin, had died earlier that day at his mother’s home. Top’s lover, a stoneworker who lived out in the district of Successful Artisans near the school, had come in to tell them, and had broken down in the group. Everyone had been shaken. And Pheron had realized that, besides the support of the group, he wanted to talk to his friends. So he’d had the wagon drop him off here—‘Look, I don’t want to be any trouble. I don’t, but I just needed to—please, you don’t mind…?’

  No, of course not. He was their friend; they were his. (Nari went to sit beside him on the bench. Zadyuk put the lamp down and sat on the other side of the table.) Really, they were glad he’d come. Clearly, though, they feel discomfort. ‘Are you all right?’ Zadyuk asked. ‘I mean, do you want us to take you back home…?’

  ‘No…No, please. I just wanted to talk. Let me stay, awhile. I’m so…I’m frightened, Nari. I want somebody to do something for me! But what can I ask them for?’

  Nari started to say that they’d gone to the Calling of the Amnewor for him; but Zadyuk stopped her with a look. Confronted with the reality of their friend, that, they both realized, had been for them.

  ‘I’ve always tried to do things for other people,’ Pheron went on. (Wording: His voice was breathy, as though he spoke behind cloth.) ‘I’ve always tried to help them—you, anybody I thought needed it. Haven’t I? Isn’t that true? That’s not bragging, is it? And now, I just want somebody to do something for me—only there’s nothing anybody can do, is there? And that’s not fair. And it’s so frightening. I can’t work anymore, Zad. I’m too weak; and I hurt too much. And when I can’t work I get frightened. I’m not afraid of dying. Not now. Not anymore. But I’m terrified of the next five days, or five weeks, or fifteen months—with their last minutes—I’ve still got to live through. Help me! Please, help me. Somebody, Nari, Zad…Please, I’m so frightened…!’

  They went on talking, for a long while; then, sensing his exhaustion and his illness as well, they helped him to lie down on their bed, where, after a little, he fell asleep. Zadyuk sat for a while on the bed’s edge; Nari stretched out beside Pheron. Finally Zadyuk lay down too, till all of them were in the uneasy slumber of three exhausted children, cowering in a forest, waiting for morning or a monster. No. Can’t write it out. Not now. Partly because it tou
ches too many emotional things in me. And partly because, seven weeks beyond my forty-second year, I’m cynical enough to wonder seriously if a young, heterosexual, working couple would give up, for a gay friend (even if he were dying), what amounts, after all, to a night’s sleep on the last day of Carnival before returning next morning to a full work schedule: ten, twelve hours for them both. (They probably would have gotten him home, whether he wanted to go or not, and left him there, feeling vaguely put out.) They cannot bear to think about it directly anymore than can the Master. The relation of those two feelings in me is, of course, the bottom-line political question for this particular scene. Is the cynical response to protect myself from the emotions? Or: Does my knowledge of a cynical truth make the emotions as painful as they are? Or: Are the emotions and the cynicism two valid responses to the world as I’ve known it at painful play within me, in no particularly contingent hierarchy? Certainly this last is what I suspect. Question: If the whole scene above took place not in the red glow of that particular oil, but in a brighter, butter-colored (i.e., more expensive) light, would that suggest the necessary differences in Zadyuk’s and Nari’s personalities/situation for me to believe the scene as outlined? At any rate, to sketch out what I hope would happen seems fair. To write out fully what I still can’t fully believe seems, however, to be cheating in just the way I wrote in §9.811. Well, for all those reasons, maybe in a while…

  11.4 By now I’m willing to admit that perhaps narrative fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose the radically successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do is break up, analyze, and dialogize the conservative, the historically sedimented, letting the fragments argue with one another, letting each display its own obsolescence, suggesting (not stating) where still another retains the possibility of vivid, radical development. But responding to those suggestions is, of course, the job of the radical reader. (The ‘radical metaphor’ is, after all, only an interpretation of preextant words.) Creators, whatever their politics, only provide raw material—documents, if you will. In terms of AIDS itself, there are all sorts of social practicalities one can endorse: better research, better information, support groups for people with AIDS, support groups for those around them. Yes, I feel the urge to fictionalize these last two, more than the first. (Pheron’s incompleteness, we now can be sure, is an incompleteness of the text, not of a person.) I also feel, as I don’t (yet) have AIDS myself, and have visited no such AIDS groups, I wouldn’t know precisely how to—though my own experience with the Gay Fathers’ support group certainly urges me to it, and even suggests what to look for: the first hopes that the group will solve all problems, then the disappointment when they don’t, finally the real and solid help such groups give apart from both expectations and disappointments, and, even, perhaps a measured realization that this particular group may not be for you (while, indeed, another may)—having nothing to do with expectations, disappointments, or benefits. (One could make Pheron far more ‘whole’ by thinking in fictional terms precisely where he was among all these possibilities that night with his particular support group, what precisely had happened, and how. Go on, then, mon semblable,—mon frère!)

  12.1 When I was kid, my family had a country house. Down the road from us a second or third cousin of mine used to come up sometimes to visit his grandfather. He was about my age, he had a younger brother, a dog, and played the saxophone.

  He’d been blind from birth.

  We were all very fond of him and his family. I was in and out of his house and he was in and out of ours all the time.

  One afternoon when I was about twelve and upstairs in our attic, working on the design for some electrical circuit in my notebook and listening to the radio (the unfinished attic of our country house was basically my room), some medical program came on talking about eye injuries and blindness. Thinking of my cousin, I perked up. The thing I’ve remembered from the program ever since was one small part of the discussion: ‘…he lost one eye through an injury in a car accident, and, two years later through sympathetic ophthalmia, he lost the sight in the other…’

  Sympathetic ophthalmia?

  Always a lover of big words, I’d encountered both before, but this was the first I’d heard them together. And the idea that, just because you’d lost one eye, through a weakening of the muscles and a failure of the nerves you risked losing the sight in the other seemed the grossest biological injustice! In the thirty years since, without really trying, I’ve had a couple of single-eyed friends or acquaintances. I’ve always thought of them as people who’ve managed to beat sympathetic ophthalmia. I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned it to any of them; still, their triumph seemed important to me.

  12.2 Anecdotal evidence at work last week: In 108 cases of AIDS tested, all 108 exhibited a certain intestinal amoeba. (Sarena says that for three years before he came down with AIDS, Herb spent a losing battle trying to shake these same intestinal parasites.) Perhaps the parasite coupled with excessive use of drugs (particularly amyl nitrite) weakens the system so that…

  Of course, what happens to the blood products theory?

  And for all the hope that the Easter Monday announcement brings, we’re still two years away from a vaccine only ready for testing.

  12.3 Here’s the ending as I got it to that ‘Jack the Ripper’ account. While walking up Eighth Avenue, I ran into Joey. He was wearing a new set of clothes, including a new leather (more probably plastic) jacket, and clearly feeling very chipper. He grinned and greeted me happily. Obviously, at least for a couple of days, things had been going well for him. I asked him if he was staying anywhere.

  He shrugged a little shyly: ‘I was stayin’ with this guy for a couple of weeks. But I’m back on the street now. Been in the Port Authority bus station for the last three nights.’ He examined the sleeves of his jacket. ‘I don’t look in too bad shape, do I?’

  ‘You look pretty good,’ I said, with the same phatic content as the usual, I’m fine/how are you? ‘Did they ever catch that guy who was going around killing the people?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Caught him two weeks ago.’ In the midst of his good humor, my question seemed to bother him.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I urged. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Just some guy. Some crazy guy who was goin’ around killing people. They said he killed five people. But they caught him.’

  ‘I thought you said he killed nine…?’

  ‘Naw. Somebody else killed the other four.’

  ‘Does that mean somebody else was running around, doing the others—’

  Joey put one hand on my shoulder. ‘Man, I’m on the street again. I’m doin’ pretty well, too. For a while, anyway. They caught him. It’s over with. He killed five guys; and I just got to the place where I don’t have to think about it all the time. So let’s talk about something pleasant, okay? Like cancer, or AIDS, or people starvin’ in China…? Now wouldn’t you think ‘I’d be dead of AIDS by now?’ He laughed. ‘Heroin, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. Well, I suppose I could be a hemophiliac Haitian too. Naw, if I had any kind of hemophilia, I’d be dead years ago, huh? Hey, when you gonna break down and help me get another room? I get some place to bring people and I can make a lot more money…?’ But grins to let me know he’s not (as) serious.

  12.4 Ted’s been reading the Nevèrÿon tales practically since they began coming out of my notebook. Once, last spring, when he came in, he told me: ‘I made it with Gorgik today.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, as we walked back into the living room. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was down at that movie on Third Avenue—you know. The one where I first met you? And I saw your character, Gorgik. The Liberator. Actually, I’ve seen him a few times. As far as I can make out, he’s one of the Saturday afternoon regulars. It was all I could do not to tell him: “Did you know you’re the exact image of a character in some stories a friend of mine’s been writing?” Really, Chip, if you want to see one of your ow
n characters come to life, you should go down there! Christ, he was sensational!’

  Yes, the temptation was too great. Next Saturday, sitting in the darkened balcony of what is reputedly the second-oldest theater building in New York City, while for the afternoon its screen was shared between a piece of commercial straight pornography and an espionage rerun, I saw a man some rows to my right and in front of me, pretty clearly the man Ted had gone on to describe: large, hulking, blond(!?), most likely Polish. But no, it would never have occurred to me to think he resembled my character. As I went down the narrow stairs into the sunlit lobby, to leave the movie house, I thought (and smiled): Well, to each his own Liberator.

  12.5 I was feeling rather down. In entry §5.1, I wrote that the most recent time I’d seen Joey he was doing pretty well: off the street, off drugs? I jotted that down in my notebook at five o’clock the morning after I saw him.

  Two nights later, crossing Ninth Avenue at Forty-third, on my way to an editorial meeting of the poetry magazine I’ve been working on since October, I saw a bunch of young men surging toward me, one of whom, as they broke around me, grinned—and for a moment I thought something was terribly wrong with his teeth. They were moving. And not all in the same direction.

  Then I remembered his bridge, just as he tongued it back up into place.

  ‘Luis,’ I said. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Okay.’ He shrugged, still smiling. ‘You seen your friend, Joey?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, I saw him a couple of nights back. He was looking pretty good.’

  Luis shook his head. (The guys with him had wandered on.) ‘He got beat up last night. They caught him, man, and wiped up the street with him!’ He started forward again.

  With a raised eyebrow, I turned to ask for more details. But Luis smiled apologetically, nodded after the others, who were already at the far corner, shrugged, grinned good-bye, and loped on.