by Nisi Shawl
“Oh,” says Melanie, who is most impressed. “My. God.”
Picture two exhausted thirty-somethings doing a happy dance in Mel’s living room. Gawd we designed a great movie, sure to raise a few bucks and maybe, just maybe, attract an actual producer, although that was my private dream, for it is I who sat down to write:
JANE and GAYLE, two friends on a road trip, are tricked into taking along genial TIFFANY from the office. They don’t like her all that much, but she’s cheerful, and offers to pay for dinners and first-rate motels. TIFFANY is too big for those print dresses, but she loves those flower prints, heavy jewelry, and heavy perfume; at the beginning of the trip TIFFANY’s all happy riding along in the back seat, making jokes and having little accidents, e.g. falling off her platform shoes, comic relief until they stop at secluded Overmount Overlook. JANE and GAYLE put quarters into the 360 binoculars at the edge. JANE swivels to see: TIFFANY unzipping the print dress, the fat suit, to reveal DUANE, lithe and sinister in his black unitard—transvestite, transgendered, who knows? Only time will tell. DUANE has blood in his eyes. Or something worse.
Well, you can imagine the rest. OUR PROJECT TAKES OFF!
I think it was the cat-and-mouse rollercoaster ride when they all get back in the car, intent on violent sex plus nonspecific violence (DUANE), or escape (JANE and GAYLE). Partly it was friends pledging tens and twenties, partly it was strangers happy to gamble a few bucks just to see a movie about trans whatever-it-is, not even close to our goal which was Senski’s ten thousand, but, hey. The thermometer climbed up to the thousand dollar mark the first night!
Then the project caught fire.
A thousand ten, forty, sixty dollars on Thursday and then, wham, Zot. On Friday, a MYSTERY BACKER pledged the rest. Overnight, the red on the thermometer hit the top. Somebody had kicked in nine thousand! Interesting. In addition to funding pledged, our mystery backer had a cashier’s check, made out to Mel and me, FedExed to my house.
Senski’s price, on the button.
That’s not a patch on the hundreds that came in to Jumpfunders later, so the thermometer went up like Krakatoa, and that was only the beginning. Guys, hey, guys, a real producer pledged big money, along with Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, who have feelers out to Ryan Gosling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as we speak, so you’ll get your movie as soon they sign up Lars Von Trier or John Woo to direct, depending on who pledges the most, and they can begin casting. Turns out our producer wants to go out to the studios with a package and pick up the balance, but that comes later.
Mel placed a blind ad on Craig’s List the day the cashier’s check came, and surprise, the next day, bingo, voila, Senski sets a meet and names the place.
That night we pull on sweats and hoodies and go to Millie’s Roadside Dine and Dance at 11:45 p.m. exactly—Senski set the time. He’s at the dimly lit far end of the bar; we’re sure that’s him—tall, shrouded in a black trench coat, I think; could be a cape. The place is so dark that you can’t even see what you’re drinking, but there he is, in a slouch hat that totally hides his face, although I think Mr. Senski has a strong jaw and an even stronger face. I whisper, “There!”
Mel sidles closer, “Are you him?”
As if he’ll acknowledge. Handsome, I think, but who knows? He cuts to the chase. “I know what you want.”
Mel says, “We have this problem.”
For a second I see a point of light in the shadow of that felt brim—the eyes. Glinting. A flash of white teeth. “And you want me to get rid of it.”
Forgive me, Mel. I blurt, “As long as you don’t hurt him!”
“Shut up, Sarah.” Mel is like steel.
He says, “You want him off your backs and out of that office.”
Anxiety makes me stupid. “Without us getting life?”
“Or the chair?”
The shadows shift: Senski wheels to go. He doesn’t have to say, I am very good at what I do.
` Is that really me pleading, “Wait!” It’s that magnetic field.
He turns back. It isn’t just the slouch hat, or those eyes, visible even in shadow. Like that, Mel hands off the money. Cash, neatly bundled. He takes it and wheels, striding away.
“Wait,” Mel says. As if that will keep him here.
“Later. Done deal.”
“When? And how?”
“You don’t need to know.”
Drawn and scared because I am, I go all business on him, like that will slow him down. “How do we know you’ll make good?”
“You’ll get what you want,” he says, slipping the bundled bills into his messenger bag. Over his shoulder he adds, “Whether or not you want it.”
Then he’s gone. He just is.
Leaving me gnawing my knuckles, conflicted. Is Senski the devil and we look the same, but he put our souls inside that messenger bag along with the bills? “Well.”
Mel grins, sort of. “I guess that’s it.”
“Unless it isn’t.”
It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen the next day or the next one, either. We kept watching the office door for signs; we kept checking back at Jumpfunders; the mercury was still at the top, cashier’s check notwithstanding, so our benefactor didn’t de-pledge. And the big money that made the thermometer explode into the ether and jump-funded our imaginary movie so it’s actually heading for a theater near you?
That comes later.
Then there’s the $10K cashier’s check. The meeting with Senski. Maybe our mysterious benefactor is just that. Someone with no interest in funding made-up movies. Somebody who knows what we really need that ten thousand for.
It’s been days, more like weeks, since our mysterious meeting with Senski. I am very good at what I do. Well, dammit, start doing it! We hit a new low near midnight on a Monday; Jumpfunders thermometer stable. No more pledges, and unless we find some way to start our imaginary movie, we’ll never get the cash. Standing outside GIRLZ with Dumbo sealed inside that office doing God knows what, Mel mutters exactly what I am thinking. “Looks like we should have kept that check.”
Then the hairs on the back of my neck rise up and tremble. The air in the room changes, signifying a disturbance I don’t know about.
Mel feels it too. “We need to go.”
It’s odd. At 11:45, Dumbo’s usually glued to his computer, searching body parts on the web. Instead he’s up and running. We can see his big, restless shadow through the frosted glass: Dumbo, pacing back and forth. “He’ll come out and hit on us.”
“Again.”
“It’s too late,” I say again, without knowing why, only that it’s true. This is the nadir. “We’re stuck.”
“Us and him.”
But behind that glass, something is happening; we’re just too depressed to see Dumbo’s outline changing, changing. “Out ten K and what do we have to show? ‘I am very good at what I do.’ Yeah, right.”
Mel says bitterly, “Ten thousand dollars and he hasn’t done shit. What’s that?”
Behind that glass, there is an explosion of ugly guttural noise, like nothing human makes. “He’s up to something. Run!”
She grabs my arm. “Wait. Something’s happening.”
Whatever it is, it’s tremendous. There is much flailing, much crashing of furniture, muffled sounds that mean nothing or everything. Senski at work? Is that Senski, wrestling Dumbo to the mat, or is something worse going on in there? We don’t know.
We want to leave. We have to stay.
Mel and I have been here all night and except for the pizza guy and the UPS guy, who left as soon as they made their deliveries—food, new clothes at this hour?—except for them, nobody went into that office. Dumbo has his own bathroom with the fax in there, and enough food in that mini-fridge to keep him going for as long as it takes.
If it really is Senski, how did he get in, and what’s he doing in there to cause all the thrashing and the gurgling? Strangling Dumbo or stabbing him or some worse crime that will end us up in jail? Will there be blo
od and we’ll have to explain it to the cops?
Clinging to each other’s biceps with white knuckles, Mel and I grit our teeth and wait. Dumbo’s shadow seems to get bigger and bigger—unless it’s two shadows, grappling to the death. It’s hard to know. Near morning the shadow gets huge. Then something happens and the whole, shapeless mass drops to the floor. There’s groaning and gasping followed by a long pause and then a strangled, genderless shriek. Then it stops.
By this time Mel’s fingernails are so deep in my arm that I gasp. One look at her grim, lockjaw squint tells me that we’re hurting each other, so we let go and sag against the wall, settling on our haunches to wait. For a long time, nothing happens. It may have been minutes. It seems more like hours. No, like days. We roll our desk chairs into the long aisle between GIRLZ and the sealed, silent office, and we keep watch, waiting for somebody or something to come out that door. No Senski. Was he ever here? No Dumbo. What is he, dead in there? We sit and watch until sunrise warns us. We need to act before the morning shift comes in and calls 911, meaning that whatever happened behind that door, they’ll blame us first.
Should we stay? Should we go?
Mel and I sit riveted, too tired and anxious to talk. In the long silence, everything I know about pacts with the devil runs on a loop inside my head, along with every detail of “The Monkey’s Paw.” Oh fuck, I think, and that’s all I can think, just. Oh, fuck. We go in there and find out that we got what we wanted and it’s not what we wanted at all.
Then there is a stir. The shadow rises behind the frosted glass. It’s Dumbo, but not Dumbo. There are unexpected noises, outline of distressed creature forging back and forth behind that glass, reaching for things. There are muttered curses that sound like Dumbo, except they don’t, but before we can get out of those chairs and shake sensation back into our legs and feet, before we can turn to run, before we can think…
The office door opens and this huge, flailing, genderless being comes shambling out. It’s Dumbo all right, but Dumbo miraculously morphed into a shapeless, hideous version of Chester Underworth, our hated boss, except it’s a sort-of woman so fat that she could play TIFFANY in our movie, hideous in a garishly flowered muumuu with hairy legs rising above huge plush bedroom slippers that look like Hobbit legs or Wookie paws. H/she, or it, is simultaneously stuffing pizza into its face and gnawing on a cigar, while it runs sausage fingers through a new growth of hair on its head that’s, I don’t know. Puce, I think, a mass of artificial girly curls. Whatever this creature is, it isn’t interested in sex or power any more.
It wants one thing only. Huge, shapeless, and barely recognizable, Chester Underworth lunges right past us and out the office door with such urgency that I think it’s after either whiskey or more food, raw meat or all three.
So nobody died on our watch and we won’t be charged with this—insult or transformation or whatever Senski did to him. You bet he is very good at what he does. Furthermore, although the office closed for the day, it turns out Cecil Underworth signed the order. He arrived next morning first thing, in his right mind after all, and under his own steam. Dumbo’s hired thug was gone, along with the drugs and whatever else they were giving him. He came up in the elevator in a dandy motorized scooter and rolled back into our lives. His eyes were clear—no pills and no explanations. He took over the reins at UNDERWORTHOVERWRITE, so not only is Senski very good at what he does, he’s not about to turn up later and demand our souls.
Mel and I got what we wanted and, you know what? It’s exactly what we wanted after all.
Walking Science Fiction: Samuel Delany and Visionary Fiction
Walidah Imarisha
My second meeting with Samuel Delany was one of those near-perfect moments. One of those “I could die right now and I wouldn’t have any regrets” moments.
It was 2003, at the Franklin Institute Science Museum’s Planetarium (a locale I as a Black nerd was more than passingly acquainted with). For Black History Month, the Institute had assembled a panel of Black science fiction writers that took my breath away: Samuel Delany, the late Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and Touré. I think I got there at least an hour and a half early, to ensure that I got the best seat in the house. Spellbound by the impact of not only seeing so many of the writers whose work touched me so deeply it lived inside me, but seeing them all on one stage, I barely moved a muscle during the program.
In the middle of the event, when the lights went down and they turned on the planetarium overhead, I leaned my head back, staring at the miracles of space which seemed close enough to touch, while the voices of visionary Black writers filled my ears. I remember thinking, “Okay, life, you are gonna have one hell of a time trying to top this.”
After the event all of the writers stayed to sign books and chat with fans. I approached Samuel Delany tentatively, and was shocked into speechlessness (a singular rarity) that he remembered me from an interview I had done with him for a local weekly years before.
He talked for a few moments, then asked, “Have you met Octavia yet?” When I mutely shook my head no, he smiled brightly and said, “Well, come on then.” I have no idea how my legs carried me trailing after him, up to Octavia Butler, who smiled graciously and thanked me for coming.
This was the only time I met Octavia Butler, and in my mind it is so fitting that my interaction with her came about through Samuel Delany, as that is the role he played figuratively for so many. So long seen as the lone Black voice in commercial science fiction, Delany held that space for all the fantastical dreamers of color who came after him. The space he held was one in which we claimed our right to dream. To envision ourselves as people of color into futures, and more, as catalysts of change to create and shape those futures. To recognize that, as Avery Brooks, who played Deep Space 9’s Captain Sisko, said in an interview several years ago, “Brown children…must be able to participate in contemporary mythology, must use the imagination, to see themselves whole some eons hence.”1
Delany was instrumental in supporting the decolonization of my imagination, truly the most dangerous and subversive decolonization process, for once it has started, there are no limits on what can be envisioned. This type of science fiction/speculative fiction, “visionary fiction”—as opposed to mainstream SF that reinforces dominant paradigms of power and oppression—is the foundation of my work now, thanks to visionaries like Delany, Butler, Due, and many others.
As I said, though, the Planetarium event wasn’t the first time I met Samuel Delany. That was in 2001, at a crowded Philly Center City diner. Less than a year into my migration to the so-called City of Brotherly Love, I had moved up from just-out-of-college intern (read: grunt) at City Paper to freelance reporter. When my editor asked if I wanted to interview Delany, who was touring for the re-release of his seminal work Dhalgren, I blurted out “Yes” before my editor even finished asking the question.
But as I got off the El and walked toward the diner and the interview, I felt shaky. Were my questions too simplistic? Or were they trying too hard to be clever and original (because I was trying my damnedest to be clever and original when I wrote them)? What if I couldn’t think of anything to say in the beginning? What if this went down as the worst interview he had ever done in his life?
I was so ridiculously nervous because Delany’s work, his presence, and his clarity around the intersections of identities meant the world (in fact, multiple worlds) to me.
His work was vital to me even before I had a framework through which to articulate its vitalness. As a Black radical nerd in high school, I felt that Delany’s work connected with me via race; I had found only a handful of Black science fiction writers at that time, and I treasured each one as a reinforcement of my very right to exist in a world that often made me feel like I shouldn’t. A reinforcement of my right that Brooks spoke of, to re-imagine this world, and to imagine many others.
I’ve since taught courses on science fiction in which I assign students the iconic Dark Matter
anthologies, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas. Delany’s essay “Racism and Science Fiction” in the first collection is a powerful articulation of racism as a system of oppression, rather than just individual acts of prejudice, an exploration of how racism functions within the science fiction genre and community.
His writings in general, but especially Delany’s nonfiction, modeled for me that I didn’t have to engage in a politics of respectability (really a politics of assimilation) as a Black writer. I did not have to write what felt safe to the mainstream, what was expected of me by those whose ideas had been shaped by shallow stereotypes. Rather than bemoan the fact that the larger white society labeled me a “Black writer,” which to them meant fitting me into a very narrow box, I was able to claim the mantle as fully mine, and know that mantle in no way constrained my vision or my work. If anything, it allowed me to stand in concert with ancestors, elders, and contemporaries who were showing that Blackness, like space, is vast, seemingly infinite, and continually expanding. As hip-hop emcee Q-Tip put it simply, “Black is Black.”2
Part of Delany’s Dark Matter essay intones the names of those Black writers before him who used the fantastic to explore conditions of identity and power, honoring their work and connecting it to his. In the same way I connect my writing, work, and vision to Delany, to Butler, through them I also connect to Black folks enslaved in this country, who were the ultimate science fiction creators, alchemists, miracle birthers. I co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements with adrienne maree brown, another Black woman, and we carry with us strongly the idea that we are walking science fiction.
By this we mean that we are living, breathing embodiments of the most daring futures our ancestors were able to imagine. Enslaved Black folks had no reason to believe generations without chains would ever exist. In fact, every part of society screamed it was unrealistic to hope for an end to slavery; the most they could hope for was reform, “a kinder, gentler slavery.” But our enslaved ancestors dreamed of freedom, and they bent reality and reshaped the world to create us, all of us Black people who walk the Earth today. We believe all of us who come from communities with historic and institutional trauma and oppression are walking science fiction, and that the ancestors’ futuristic envisioning does not culminate with us.
