The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  For my twelfth birthday, my father’s best friend (another tall, good-looking black man), Bebe, made me a hand-carved sailboat. It was nearly two and a half feet long. Bebe had cast the keel in lead himself. The deck had been scored with burn lines from a soldering iron to suggest planking. The rudder was functional. Under the removable cabin, down inside, was a sponge to soak up any water that got into it; and its single mast carried the triangular sails, forward and aft, of a tall schooner. Indeed, the boat was not actually finished by April, though I was taken to see it, and there was a promise that, as soon as it was done, Bebe, my father, and I would go out to sail it in the lake in Central Park, below the walls and minarets of Castle Belvedere. A month or so later, on a Sunday morning with the boat, that’s where we were.

  Bebe had never built a boat for sailing before, and even with the lead on the keel, the balance was not right. The moment it went in the water, the mast listed a good twenty degrees. My suggestion was to put a couple of rocks, which I dug up from the grasses beside the lake, down in with the sponge. It corrected the list till the mast was only about five or ten degrees off plumb. Then we began the endless adjusting of the sails.

  All around us, people were sailing other boats—some with remote-control motors—easily and neatly. But beautiful job of carving that it was, Bebe’s boat would move out, turn sharply, come back, and bump the shore. Or if the breeze had any strength at all, the boat would simply turn on its side and drop its mast to the water. Bebe was an easygoing guy—all my father’s close friends had to be—and was sitting back while Dad sputtered and pulled at this string and that, and tried to tighten the other bit of slack. That’s when I looked up and saw the elderly man standing a few feet off, watching.

  He was just about my height, was wearing a gray sweater, somewhat baggy pants, and cloth shoes. His white hair tufted from both sides of his head. He had a full, gray mustache, and he stood with a pipe held up against his chest in one rather slender hand. I recognized him immediately, from endless pictures in Life, in Newsweek, in Time. Now he stepped up, and when he spoke, the German accent confirmed what I was already sure of. “Excuse me,” he said. “Perhaps I can help give you a little hand?”

  Without looking up, my father launched into an explanation of what, if he could just get … this thing here over there … he was trying … to do.

  Bebe asked, “Do you sail boats?”

  The man smiled and nodded.

  “He built that one himself,” I said. “All by hand.”

  “That’s very nice,” the man said with evident appreciation.

  “It’s my birthday present,” I went on. “But they’re playing with it.”

  “Ah!” The man laughed. He looked down over my father’s shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “If you will loosen the back sail there, you won’t have such a problem with the way it leans …”

  My father looked up.

  “May I …?” the man said.

  A little flustered, my father said, “Well, all right … go ahead, if you want.”

  The man knelt down at the boat. As soon as he took it in his hands, he frowned. “Oh,” he said, looking up at us. “Well, you do have a problem here. It really is just too top-heavy.” He sighed and loosened the sail anyway.

  “That’s what I told him,” Bebe said, meaning my father.

  “This probably won’t help then,” the man said, finishing his knot and standing, while the boat bobbed at the lake’s edge, “very much. But it certainly looks nice.”

  “Thank you anyway,” I said and held out my hand. I was not going to let our visitor get away without a handshake. He took my hand firmly in his. “Thank you,” I said again.

  The ritual once started, Bebe shook hands with him, and finally, standing, my father did too.

  The man smiled, nodded, gestured with his pipe, and turned away. I didn’t think my father knew who he was, but I was sure Bebe had recognized him. But Bebe was looking over my dad’s shoulder again; and Dad was again squatting over the boat. I glanced back at the man, who was now thirty yards away and almost invisible through the park’s Sunday strollers.

  “Hey,” I said, “do you know who that was?”

  “Huh?” Dad said.

  “That old guy?” Bebe asked.

  “That was Albert Einstein!”

  Bebe looked up, with a big frown. “Oh, no, it couldn’t.…” Then he strained to see through the crowd. “You know, it did look like him, some.”

  “Not ‘some’,” I said. “It was him!”

  Now my father was frowning, too. “What would Albert Einstein be doing in Central Park on Sunday morning, playing with boats?”

  “I’m not kidding,” I said. “I know it was him. I’ve seen pictures.” And twenty years later I first read about the famous physicist’s hobby: model sailboats.

  5.7. And at summer camp, where her mother was also working as a counselor, twelve-year-old Marilyn had a necking affair with a young man nineteen years old who worked there as a counselor. Suddenly and surprisingly, after a week or two, he stopped speaking to her. He all but pretended she didn’t exist. She was very hurt. Years later, telling me about it, she realized he probably thought he was some sort of pervert—perhaps he’d even received some sort of warning. At any rate, most certainly he’d realized he was in danger of losing his job.

  5.8. The April afternoon of my twelfth birthday, I sat on the swing in my Aunt Virginia’s backyard in New Jersey, the barrel-thick oak with its circular green bench on one side, my cousins’ walk-in playhouse with its shaggy bark walls on the other. Beside the white garage, the basketball hoop on its gray backboard in front between the two roll-down doors, ran a green board fence. Somewhere beyond it, a jay yawed distantly, raucously. Leaves rustled. And I thought:

  This is now. It’s my birthday. But this particular now will be gone in hours, minutes, seconds. Tomorrow it won’t be my twelfth birthday—where will I be on my thirteenth? And a year or five years or fifteen years from now it won’t be my twelfth birthday even more!

  Elbows around the chains, gently swaying below the branch, I tried to absorb the moment in all its sensory detail: the worn place in the grass below the swing moving under my sneakers, the hollow blue broken up by branches overhead, the trimmed hedge ending down the slope beside the gravel driveway, the flicker of leaf-light on my khaki knees, the smell of suburban noon.

  The night of my thirteenth birthday, I napped irregularly on the leather couch at Bebe’s, while in the back room Bebe and my father pulled one and another clumsy chord from the jazz guitar my father had just bought and which, in my acoustic purity, I wholly disdained. As I half dozed or lay listening, I thought:

  I was right. It isn’t my twelfth birthday any more. And here I am, moving through that strange and incomprehensible place, unknown to me a year ago, that was—that is—the future: swing, jay, grass, gravel, and leaf-light, as well as the year between then and this, are, now, wholly the past.

  Is it the future pouring into the present that shatters yesterday and makes of it such a jumble?

  6. In June 1956,1 left Dalton and got ready to go on to the Bronx High School of Science, a city public school (yes, in the Bronx) of megacephalic reputation, where, already, some of my older cousins went. One, Nanny, a year before, had written a couple of brief, reflective essays, one of which dealt with the time years before that, when she, her younger brothers, and my aunt (my father’s older sister) and uncle had lived upstairs from us in the building on Seventh Avenue. The essay had been published in the school’s literary magazine, Dynamo, for January 1955. My family made much of it, and I sat in my cousins’ dark living room, on Fish Avenue in the Bronx, reading it again and again, now looking at other pieces in the magazine, even memorizing some of the other poems in the issue by students I’d never heard of.

  Nanny had written:

  LEVY AND DELANY FUNERAL HOME was the sign that always greeted me when I came home from school. My uncle was Delany. Levy was dead and had been eve
n before I was born. This always used to remind me of “Scrooge and Marley,” except that my uncle was no Scrooge. He was tall, mild-mannered, and quite the opposite of Scrooge or any stereotyped mortician. He and his family lived on the second floor, while we lived on the third floor of the small brick house that seemed out of place between the towering Harlem apartments. At times I wished I didn’t live over a funeral home, especially when my friends teased me about ghosts and other horrible apparitions of the dead. Although I laughed with them to hide my self-consciousness, I never could see how a corpse could harm anyone. … My young brother, my cousin [that was me, I knew], and I thought nothing of playing hide-and-seek in the basement among the new coffins on display. … There were two entrances to the building. The door to the left led directly upstairs and the door on the right to the funeral parlor. Sometimes I used the right-hand door. Once inside the funeral parlor, members of the family could use another door which opened into the hallway leading to the stairs. One day, when I came home from school, I walked through the funeral parlor toward the door to the hallway and saw two large screens near this door.

  My curiosity was aroused, and by climbing up the stairs and holding on to the banister, I was able to peer around the doorway and over the screen. I caught my breath, for lying amid white satin was a most beautiful woman. She wore a long blue gown: a red rose was fastened in her dark hair. …1

  As I read and reread my cousin’s account of a memory of ten or more years before, while I recognized the tone and the timbre of her description of “the small brick building” where I now lived (my family—now—had both the second and third floors), I found myself curious over two things. First, how could she have described my father as “mild-mannered?” To me he was always an angry, anxious man. Perhaps, I thought, because he might read it, she’d had to say something nice. (Her own father, my Uncle Ed, had been, in my own memories of that earlier time, the mild and gentle man in the house.) Also (and oddly this bothered me even more), though the two doors into the building she’d mentioned in her essay were just as she’d described, she’d committed a fundamental distortion of the architecture.

  Opening from one of the offices into the stairway up to the second floor (yes, that office had once been a viewing room: I could remember the screens with their maroon crushed velvet in their wooden frames standing beside the caskets), that door was much too far from the foot of the stairs, by three or four feet, to allow you, in the hall stair, to look through it while standing on the steps themselves.

  Nanny was tall, almost six feet. But—and, back at home, I tried it again and again—you would have to have been at least nine or even ten feet tall to stand on the bottom step and lean forward far enough to see around the jamb and through the door into the other room. And of course with each step you went up, you’d have to be even taller. As I stood on the bottom step, holding the end of the banister and leaning out to test it, I found myself reflecting: Nanny’s clear and lucid memory was of a beautiful brown-skinned young woman with a rose in her hair, lying in one of the satin-lined caskets. Mine, from no more than a year back, was of walking, by myself, into the little morgue behind the chapel, where a dark, ordinary-looking black man, in his late twenties or thirties, lay, naked, on the white-enamel embalming table with its drain grooves leading to the trough around it. I walked around him a bit, looking at his genitals, his slightly turned-out feet, his lightly closed eyes, watching him under the fluorescent lights for a minute. Fascinated by what, I wasn’t sure, I reached over and took the cool and wholly limp hand in mine—and found myself getting an erection. …

  Surely somewhere a reality lay behind Nanny’s account—an account that, indeed, presented itself as real. The family was terribly proud of her piece, passing it around from one to the other; and my father said, again and again, how touched he was by her memory. (Would I, I wondered—a full year before I entered the school—ever have anything published in Dynamo?) But whatever that reality was, it had been sealed outside of, and by, the text. I would never have dared question it, to Nanny or anyone else—because I did not want anyone to question mine. Whatever had actually happened was held, in some other time and place, safely outside any language that I could bring myself to initiate, or that anyone else even thought to.

  That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing—to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself—for I was sure Nanny felt (ten years after the fact) that the impossible feat of elongation she’d described at the foot of the stairs was as true as—many years on—I would come to feel my sentence was about my age at Dad’s death.

  6.01. Secretly in those years, I would write down my masturbation fantasies in a black loose-leaf binder I kept beneath my underwear in the tall, stained-oak bureau against the wall in my third-floor room. They had nothing to do with corpses in the downstairs morgue, nor, really, with any of my childhood experiences and experiments with sex. They were, rather, grandiose, homoerotic, full of kings and warriors, leather armor, slaves, swords, and brocade, mixing the inflated language and the power fantasies of Robert E. Howard (Conan the Conqueror) and Frank Yerby (The Saracen Blade), whose books I hunted out in the local library or from the third-floor bookshelves of my Aunt Virginia’s Montclair home, with the street language of Seventh Avenue and the off-color anecdotes collected by the brothers John and Allen Lomax in their five-and six-hundred-page scholarly tomes that I found at the home of my Aunt Dorothy and my Uncle Myles—language whose erotics, in both cases, came not from any constellation of specific sexual associations but almost wholly because its “god-damn,” its “nigger,” its “shit,” its “kike,” its “piss,” its “wop,” its “prick,” its “fuck,” its “pussy” was—in our house—wholly forbidden; and the specifically sexual words were, I knew, by law, forbidden to ordinary writing.

  Yet I had already discovered a trade-off between writing and desire, at ten, eleven, twelve. …

  A fantasy I had not written out yet, or had only begun to write, would last me a long time, over several days—even a week or more. If, however, I wrote it down, filling in descriptions of place, atmosphere, thoughts, speech, clothing, accidental gestures, the whole narrative excess we think of as “realism” making my written account as complete and as narrationally rich as I could, my own erotic response was much greater; the orgasm it produced was stronger, more satisfying, hugely pleasurable. But, once this had occurred, the fantasy was used up. It became just words on paper, at one with its own descriptive or aesthetic residue, but with little or no lingering erotic charge.

  I would have to create another.

  Thus desire set two graphic poles:

  At one pole, everything tried to hold off writing, to delay beginning it, to halt it, to interrupt it, to keep the word at bay and restrain it from the paper, to retain it as a secret in the mind for longer, and longer, and longer, so that the pleasure of its inner repetition would endure. …

  At the other pole, all forces drove to realize the word on paper, to let the immediate feedback and intensifying potential of the letter enrich and specify, clarify and analyze, increase the imaginative specificity that was one with its insightful and experiential richness—a richness that made its resonances in my young body sing and soar—the richness art alone renders of the everyday … and which mysticism sometimes broaches with the extraordinary.

  My mother found the loose-leaf and, without telling me, gave it to my psychiatrist, Dr. Zeer—a pudgy Cuban, who wore glasses and smoked cigars, and whom I was seeing at the North Side Center. My terrible spelling and the erratic grades it produced had, at that point, been diagnosed as “probably attention-getting behavior,” and the biweekly therapy sessions, on the top floor of the New Lincoln School at 110th Street, had been the result.

  Dr. Zeer and I talked about them calmly and sensibly enough, though not with much comprehension on his part (or, finally, on his superior’s, Dr. Kenneth Clark, who excerpted them at some length i
n an article on “Prejudice and Your Child” in Harper’s magazine and then in a book of the same title) of their erotic function. But it was my first indication that the movement from private to public by way of writing was not as traumatic as desire, with its attendant terror of total, social, absolute, and individual rejection, often makes us fear.

  6.1. A citywide test had been required for entrance to the Bronx High School of Science, and there’d been some question about my score: I had not received a full acceptance, but had been put on a waiting list. Then Judge Delany, a friend of the principal, had done things to get my name moved toward the top. I’d been upset about it, and—for a while—had threatened not to go, deciding to attend another city science school, Brooklyn Technical High School, where my scores had honestly gotten me in. There’d been family arguments; I’d sulked. But somehow that was all past. I was to attend the Bronx High School of Science. My father had insisted. And by now I was looking forward to it.

  6.11. That June, Science held a student orientation meeting at the Science Annex. My mother, who never rode the subways, took me up to the school by several buses, and we joined the two hundred fifty entering freshmen in the basement cafeteria, big as my last school’s gym. (The entering sophomore class was several times larger.) The walls were rough yellow tiles. The windows were screened over with diamond-woven wire grilles, letting in the blue of the Bronx afternoon.

  Kids and parents sat on the cafeteria benches, on the tables, or crowded around the sides of the room and, toward the front, sat on the floor. A few seats away I noticed a striking boy, sitting on a table corner, brown loafers on the bench before him. Almost all the other students had come in slacks, many in sports jackets, the girls—only one in five of the Science students was a girl—in jumpers, skirts, and fresh blouses (this was 1956). But this boy had on jeans and an electric blue corduroy shirt, several buttons open over a bare chest. He was blond, gray-eyed, and good-looking. It was also clear, as I snuck glances at him, that he’d come without his parents. I don’t remember anything the principal, Dr. Morris Meister, said. I think the main purpose of the “orientation session” was to let the bulk of us know where the school was, since we came from all over the city’s five boroughs.