The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘I won’t,’ Pheron said.

  Behind him, his father blew out first one, then the other lamp, so that the only light came from the one still on the floor, below the table.

  Pheron lay in the dark (seven years later), not thinking of his father’s death three years before, but of this; and of squatting before his handloom on the roof, moonlight bleaching the colors from his design’s intricacies, while he wove on into night.

  7. A woman writes from the Northwest:

  ‘What really angers me about the AIDS business is that women, we, find ourselves again in the position of helping men. Out of the goodness of our hearts…Where were they when we were fighting the health-care system because of what it routinely did to women? Nowhere, that’s where…It pisses me off to find myself in the Helpmeet Business again, especially since the whole situation is so bad—the right wing screeching, “God hates gays!”—so that, in all conscience, really, I can’t do anything but be appalled by the disease itself and the homophobic capital being made out of it.

  ‘What we must do, politically, is make it clear that the bigotry that sees AIDS as a sinner’s punishment (or merely assumes that gay men’s lives are expendable or trivial or not important) is the same bigotry that hates and fears women and wants to keep us in our place, i.e., squashed. This is the same ideology that allows most people, of both sexes and all sexual persuasions, to swallow a government that is spending more and more billions on war toys and lining somebody’s pockets thereby…I’m afraid that only the usual radicals are making this connection (but they always made it)…

  ‘Of course the epidemic is a terrible thing—and the satisfaction with which so many Americans regard it as God’s fulfillment of their own extremely disgusting system of values and fantasies is worse. I HATE the antisexual use of AIDS even more than its use against homosexuality per se. To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasures is surely the weirdest human quirk ever. It is utterly silly, especially when one knows nothing but myth anyway. (Here the usual voices come in, ‘But violence—’ Of course I don’t approve of rape or murder!)

  ‘People are biologically so constituted that they not only like being sexually aroused and satisfied, but they tend to get antsy or cranky when none or far too little of this is happening. This seems to me quite simple and totally amoral.’

  7.1 Conferments in the High Council Chamber; conferments before and after that in several lower ones.

  Discussions in the throne room. (In still another room someone declared: ‘Oh, she will stamp her small foot, but Lord Kordar will have his way.’ No foot was stamped, however, and the conference with the Child Express Ynelgo lasted a third the time the most sanguine courtier had predicted. Later, however, the Empress called her aged vizerine to her to meet privately.) Details, pronouncements, instructions made their way through the High Court; messengers were dispatched—finally a messenger returned; so that on a balmy morning in the month of the Ferret, Imperial couriers shouted from every street corner—indeed, the announcement was first made at dawn but was repeated throughout the day and the city, both by proclamation and rumor, till, that evening, few did not know it:

  ‘Her Royal Highness, the Child Empress Ynelgo, in a reign both greathearted and gracious, has sent an Imperial deposition to the very borders of her empire to confer with the man known to the people as Gorgik the Liberator, with an invitation to come to the capital, Kolhari, and assume the post of minister at the High Court of Eagles, where he shall work with the empress and her other ministers and employ his talents for the betterment of the nation and the alleviation of the suffering of all classes, high and low, slave and freeman.

  ‘He has consented.

  ‘In honor of this joyous occasion, a week of Carnival will shortly be declared throughout Kolhari, at which time all employers must cut their work to half-time for five days, so that no one labors more than six hours consecutively, followed by an entire day of leisure and license. The city and the nation will officially celebrate with carnival the coming of the Liberator to the High Court of Eagles!’

  7.11 And that, said the minister, should get their minds off this unbearable plague!

  7.2 For several years she had traveled with her cart about the land, telling stories—now in the great houses scattered over the country, now in the markets of outlying cities, now to strangers who stopped by her evening camp. Her rewards had been as varied as her tales: sometimes food, lodging, and entertainment; sometimes money; sometimes the simple satisfaction of a grin from a young girl or a smile from an old man whom she had brought to some affective understanding of the taking of joy or sorrow or wonder. Sometimes it was introductions, verbal or written, to other great houses, other markets, where there would be more food, more money, more children and oldsters, and more introductions.

  It is the rare society that does not abuse its artists, and Nevèrÿon was not rare. Norema had suffered its abuse, but she had come through it with a minimum of bitterness, a maximum of goodwill, and a little money saved—with which, on returning to Kolhari, she had rented a small room for a while, planning to relax, recuperate, think.

  Recently a friend whom she’d found after long searching had gone off again—this time probably for good. But then, after she’d been in the city only three days, while walking in the Old Market of the Spur, she’d run into another friend she’d thought lost to her forever—a wealthy merchant woman who lived in her walled estate in Sallese and for whom Norema had once worked as secretary years before. The woman had welcomed her warmly and had been materially helpful to her several times since, so that, once more, for both better and worse, life had again gone against expectations.

  But the man who lived in the room beside her—talking to him a few times when she’d first moved in, she’d decided she liked him—was very ill. When she went out for her own water to the cistern in the back, she had taken to filling one of the chipped jars to bring back for him. Now and again she went in to help him clean himself or to bring him food from the market.

  As the evening put bright copper along the edge of her window, and the air outside fell into dark blue, in her room Norema sat on the bench by the clay wall and thought—

  7.3 CMV, ASFV, HTLV, Hepatitis-B model, retro-viruses, LAV, the multiple agent theory, the ‘poppers’ theory, the double-virus theory, the genetic disposition theory (the eternal Government Plot theory!), the two-population theory; and I just learned today that the average person with AIDS is in his upper thirties, rather than in his mid-twenties, as I’d thought—that is, he’s much closer to my age than, say, to some of the more sexually active people I know. To date (March 1984) there are 19 cases under 20; 831 between 20 and 30; 1,762 between 30 and 40; 813 between 40 and 50; and 330 over 49, with another 19 cases where the age is unknown.

  A hundred-fifty-eight of these are women; and because the women with AIDS are, so insistently, both socially (most are IV drug users and/or the sexual partners of men who are) and statistically marginal, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they are getting the truly shitty end of an already inhumanly shitty stick. Should I change Toplin, Pheron, or Lord Vanar, then, to make them more characteristic…?

  Should I modify them as to age, sex, or class to make them even less so…?

  To tell any tale in such a situation is to have press in on you the hundreds, the thousands (the most recent headline: GUESS WHAT HITS FOUR THOUSAND?) you aren’t telling.

  I could write a small pamphlet on every one of the above acronyms—as could, I guess, just about every nontechnophobe gay male in New York City at this time.

  The CMV theory still makes good sense, but I put a lot of hope in the two-population theory (a comparatively small, vulnerable population, a comparatively large immune one) if only to preserve sanity—though I am highly interested in the LAV work (as is everyone this month—along with the ‘too good to be true’ Dapsone treatment for KS, with its entailed ‘variably acid-fast’ Mycobacterium theory), as we wait for the re
lease of a report by the Atlanta CDC that’s expected later this month from the French Institute Pasteur—officially confirming LAV as the agent—in hopes that it will begin to consign this period to the past of historical nightmare, from which we can start to shake ourselves awake. It’s much the same sort of excitement, however, as we had about ASFV six months ago.

  What was the old Chinese curse?

  ‘May you live in interesting times!’

  This kind of entry, incidentally, is just what makes a great book like John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World all but unreadable to later generations.

  Still, no one will understand this period who does not gain some insight into these acronyms and retrieve some understanding of how they must obsess us today, as possible keys to life, the possibility of living humanely, and death.

  7.4 It is not that easy to flee, Norema thought. When I was younger, the world was a series of loud and foaming oceans. One after the other, I launched out into each, with as much excitement as fear. Today it is a sequence of badly tended fields, each to be struggled across, the waves and the cities as difficult as the woods. Someone ran by outside, banging a ceramic drum, shouting. The mention of Carnival, and they act as if, finally and at last, they’ve trapped their Liberator, hauled him back from what moment of flight, and fixed him in one of their empty halls, like a beast or a prisoner chained in some void cistern. Will he be strong enough to act from within court walls, to make himself heard through the granites that from now on, surrounds him? Will he be able to thrust his arm through the fog of protocol, tradition, habit, the very constitution of power with which he now becomes one? Will he be powerful? What is possible from within the paralyzing citadel? She looked about the darkening room, at wooden statues by the fire, at ornamental jars on the table, the parchments beside them on which she kept notes for her tales. Some were piled at the corner, some—the most recent—were spread on the table itself. What an array of aids to memory! There’s the small, glazed jar of rinds and spices given me by that old dear in Ka’hesh. Open it in a room where all real filth has been cleared away, and it will cleanse the remaining mustiness from the air inside an hour. Opening it here three months ago, pungently I recalled the giver. (Polished bone rings on her earth-stained fingers…) Sitting on high rocks by the sea, I inked my skins with notions for ‘The Game of Time and Pain’: Lean-masted ships sailed into the sun-shot harbor…among dark bushes children muttered magical rhymes…that morning the Queen ordered the captured slave-girl to dress herself as a count. That parchment’s on the table now. Looking at it this morning, what did I recall? (What do I recall I recalled…) Perhaps the question is: Who is the giver in such situations? Myself? The sea? The rocks I sat on? Time? Or the nameless god of language skills, who is at once so niggardly and so profligate with the blessings she holds back from living song to bestow on silent record?

  Twice as I roamed this country, I’ve been set on by bandits. Both times I was lucky and escaped. (Both times they thought me a smuggler.) Both times, when they found my cart contained nothing of salable value, but rather the old marked-on skins where I work out my tales, they let me go with only the most prefunctory threats.

  It happened once, and I moved on through the forest after it in a transport of self-congratulation and gratitude. Six months later, it happened again; this time when the scarred criminal who set upon me recognized what I carried was writing, he became furious as he pulled the vella out and threw them in the leaves, now ripping this, now crumpling that. Indeed, he ruined many of them, while I staunched all urge to plead with him that he cease, lest he think his ravages did me more harm than they did, leading him on to destroy systematically what he now ruined at random. When I finally got to go on my way through the dappled wood, I was nowhere near as joyful as before—and chose my routes more carefully.

  Another parchment there on the table bears the sentence I wrote about the second of those two outrages, hoping at some point to use it in a tale: ‘The peg shook in the distended lobe.’ How long have I spent looking at it, rereading it, rewriting it now this way, now that. Should ‘distended’ be there, or not?…in the lobe’ hangs from the sentence’s end as the lobe of that rough man’s ear hung from the curvital cartilage, as he stood above me after he’d pushed me to the ground. ‘Distended,’ then, distends the phrase that gives the experience, miming it: two dancers make two identical gestures in one dance. That doubling bespeaks the art that belies the improvisatory quality of their practice. But we have all seen those carved pegs such men thrust through their ears; we know their forefinger thickness, their intricate scrimshaw. Perhaps, then, I want the words to move against the experience, to tug in tension with the reality, like a dancer moving away from himself in a mirror. (Drop ‘distended’ then…?) Certainly that’s no less artful. But which verbal gesture do I want? Support or opposition? And does Pheron ever weave and unweave at a single row as much?

  What to think about, instead of that man’s pain?

  Once, some weeks after his illness began, I sat in his room and watched him weave three hours. I drank a tea, chatting with him while he worked. Work, he says. Work is what makes him feel human, those days at a time he can do it. Now, I’ve watched women weave before. Did his slow, bright pattern bring it to mind, then. As his shuttles went in and out and under, carrying color over, dropping one hue beneath another, I thought: That is what I do when I make a tale! Whatever god oversees the making of webs and nets and fabrics must also oversee the construction of stories. Oh, putting them together is so very different from the assemblage of the words and phrases, the joining of hearsay to hoped-for by which common workers and wastrels make up the speeches they tell some laboring girl to aggrandize themselves in her blinking and distracted eyes, speeches in which truths and lies trip over each other the night long. More singing outside in the street broke up into laughter. One woman began to sing again. When I was younger, there was a plague in the islands. I will not rehearse what I lost there. They dare this merriment here only because the illness is so limited—to men, though I’ve heard otherwise, and, at least in the general mind, to men like Pheron.

  But what must such laughter say when it rings beyond the windows of those, women or men, who are sick to their death?

  When I was a child on my marginal island that I thought, then, was the world, inland tribes sometimes held festive navens, where everyone dressed up in everyone else’s clothes, the chief hunters and the head wives pretending they were beggars and outcasts, while the social pariahs were obeyed like queens and kings for the day. Women pretended to be men; men dressed as women. Parents made obeisance to their children, and children strutted like adults. It was a wonderfully healing practice. In the midst of it life itself became a wonder-studded tale with endless lessons for later use woven through with delight. I am truly pleased at this carnival time in Kolhari. Some go, rather, to a monstrous calling—not I. I will walk out in the streets, singing among the festival’s celebrants.

  For the Liberator has come to Kolhari…

  Still, when I think of what those songs, that laughter must mean to those who are excluded from it, I want to flee this city, this country, this land ready to think of anything but the pain within it. Only considering what lies on the other side of such flight stops me. And when I consider, I imagine in place of my personal exile, some text, a tale I might weave together, here, now, in this room at the end of this Kolhari alley, a luminous fabric that leaps from the loom of language for a monstrous, phthartic flight, soaring, habromanic, glorious as song and happy as summer, till finally it sinks into the savage and incicurable complexities of its own telling, to be torn apart by what impelled it: angry criminals fall to ravage a cartful of parchments.

  This will be a fine celebration.

  This will be a dark carnival.

  7.5 Historically the official reaction to plague in Europe was the one described by Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): ‘The government…appointed public prayers and days of fasting
and humiliation, [and encouraged the more serious inhabitants] to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgment which hung over their heads…All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such like-doings, which had bewitched the people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenance even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their Grave, not of mirth and diversion.’

  Defoe’s last few lines may betray that this is the official interpretation of the response as well as the official proscription: if there was, indeed, ‘no trade,’ why would these merry-makings need to be ‘forbid,’ ‘shut-up,’ and ‘suppressed’? At any rate, even in Artaud’s conservative schema, once ‘official theater’ is banished during the plague, the reemergence, here and there, of spontaneous theatrical gestures in the demoralized populace at large throughout the city represents, for him, the birth of true and valid art/theater/spectacle.

  Though not burdened with a modern theory of germs—not obsessed with acronyms—Nevèrÿon certainly has some intuitive knowledge of contagion. And despite (or because of) the inhabitants’ suspicions of its officially sanctioned Carnival and its official invitation to the Liberator to take part in its cabinet, this unusual response has opened a marginal space for a certain radical gesture.

  Do I, however, know what it is?

  7.6 That morning Pheron sat at the table, sore at groin, back, and flank, not thinking as much as possible between moments of yearning after his workshop. But his walk to the end of the block and back, which he’d been forcing himself to take (almost) every morning, had again confirmed that he was not strong enough to go the three-quarters of a mile through the busy city and return.