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

by Samuel R. Delany

  After it was over, we were told to file up the stairs, cross the roof, and go down the far steps of the building to the exit. This was the way, it was explained to us, we would enter the school for the next year. (The Science Annex was actually an elementary school for the first three floors, and the entering first-year high school students used only the top two stories.) Everyone was neatly lined up along the right edge of the stairwell, in single file, parents and children. The progress was unbelievably slow, but the left side of the stairwell was still clear, thanks to our lineup.

  Then an electric blue and blond streak dashed past, on up the stairs, and toward the roof: the parentless youngster had decided he’d had enough of this inefficiency-in-the-name-of-order and had used the free space to run on up, over, and out.

  6.2. That summer was my final one at Camp Woodland—in the oldest “work camp” group. My five summers there were an astonishing lesson in humanity, tolerance, and the workings of the social world as truly caring men and women tried to envision them.

  That particular year there was a youngster at camp named Ben. He’d suffered from TB as a kid and had been left with several major motor difficulties. He wore glasses, as I did. He was somewhat fleshy. His movements were awkward, and his speech was highly distorted. Nevertheless, Ben was a dyed-in-the-wool genius. He played the piano wonderfully. He was also a lightning calculator. You could ask him questions like, “Ben, what’s three thousand seven hundred fifty-two point seven-six times twelve thousand five hundred seventy point three?” and he would answer, “It’s forty-seven million one hundred seventy-three thousand three hundred nineteen point oh-three,” in about the time it would have taken him to recite his name.

  Though Ben was my age—thirteen—he was already a sophomore at Science.

  With his speech defect and his motor difficulties, plus his gigantic intellect (his range of information was certainly not limited to number crunching), he still lacked anything any other thirteen-year-old could relate to as a sense of humor.

  He was something of a misfit at camp.

  Nevertheless I liked him.

  Also—and I think this was certainly a point of sympathy between us—we both masturbated in the same way, rubbing ourselves against our mattresses, rather than the more socially accepted hand method. In Ben’s tent, thirty feet up the hill, this was the occasion for some teasing. (I was in the boys’ bunkhouse below, and once the first comment was made to me about it, I made sure I only did it well after lights-out.) Ben, however, was hardened enough to derision that he made no special effort to keep it from the other boys, most of whom were, after all, pursuing the same ends by manual means.

  By the time I’d left elementary school, back in May, I’d managed to give myself a rudimentary knowledge, largely self-taught, of differential calculus; but, if only because it was self-taught, there were great gaps in my knowledge, and though I’d made it through the first half of the elementary calculus textbook I’d taken it on myself to master, the second half (on integral calculus) had defeated me.

  Ben, I think, would have responded to anyone who was friendly with him and patient. At any rate, we had lots of sessions together that summer, when he tried to cover over the holes in my self-apprehended mathematical interests. Although sometimes he lost patience, he was moderately good at it. And I was flattered to be paid attention to by a certified genius, however well or poorly I actually understood his formulas, diagrams, and mouth-muffled explanations.

  I certainly knew a lot more by the end of the summer than I did at the beginning.

  The kids at Woodland were in general a decent lot. They had their devilment. (Once they tied up a particularly annoying kid named Tim and pretended they were going to hang him.) But by and large they were caring and compassionate. Nevertheless, Ben could be trying for the most large-hearted bunch of youngsters. The counselors, who I think were rather in awe of Ben (all of us could relate to his extraordinary musical ability, and he played for the whole work camp on several evenings), occasionally told us, more or less seriously, “Listen to Ben. You might learn something.”

  Once the following story came back to me from one of the boys in Ben’s tent. Some of Ben’s bunkmates were making a concerted effort to pay some attention to him, and Ben took the opportunity to tell them he was going to show them one of the most beautiful things in the whole world. Dutifully, they’d all fallen silent—whereupon Ben began to outline some particularly abstruse point in analytic geometry about the generating formulas for endocycloidal curves.

  The guys listened for about three minutes with straight faces. Then, one after another, they began to giggle. Finally, they broke into open laughter. Ben got upset and began to sputter and rage and, finally, cry. When the counselor at last showed up, what Ben was crying was: “You’re all idiots! Everyone is an idiot! Chip is the only person who understands me! Just Chip! Everybody else is just an idiot! Everybody! Except Chip …!”

  “Chip,” at Woodland, was my nickname.

  6.21. Because I liked Ben and could follow some of his mathematical discussions, I have at least a sense of our sessions together as having been useful. Also, as a student in the high school I would be attending, Ben gave me some notion of what I was getting into, for which I was grateful. But there at camp, I also felt somewhat saddled with him, and I wanted to spend more of my time with other kids. There was one redheaded boy from New Jersey named Johnny (whose twin sister Margie was also at the camp), who, after lights out, would call me out of the main bunkhouse into his bed on the porch—the only bed on the bunk porch, besides the counselor’s (and the counselor didn’t come in till a couple of hours later)—and we would do warm, friendly, and pleasurable things to each other’s body in the most innocent and good-natured way. (At the same time, I had an official girlfriend, a young black camper, who pursued me with a kind of muffled hysteria into after-evening-activity necking and petting sessions, with a sense, far more developed than mine, that because we were the two black campers in that age group, we had to go together—a notion that struck me as interesting, if strange.) I very much wanted to be Johnny’s “best friend all the time,” during the day as well as at night. But Ben made that a little hard. Therefore, at August’s end, when camp was over, I was somewhat relieved to go home.

  6.3. On the first day of school I took the D train up to 182nd Street, walked the two blocks up the Grand Concourse, and turned left, a block later crossed through the lozenges of sunlight falling through the Jerome Avenue elevated tracks to the concrete, and kept on down the sloping sidewalk beside the telephone company with the other students walking to the Annex, and gathered with them in the basement cafeteria, as we had done three months before at orientation. I spotted the blond boy I’d seen the last time right away—today he was in a white shirt and khaki pants. I probably went up to him and said something immediately. (Ben, a junior by now, was off in the Main Building.) I’d been voted the most popular kid in my grade a year before, and my picture of myself was that I was Someone Who Could Make Friends Easily: so, however scary it was, I’d decided I was going to make them. And as rewarding as friendships with the Bens of this world might be, I’d decided my friends here were going to be good-looking, more or less normal people.

  The boy’s name was Chuck. He’d come to Science from a city Catholic school, Corpus Christi. He’d grown up in Luxembourg. His father was a career man in the US Air Force. (Chuck even spoke some Luxembourgeois.) But he and his younger sister lived with his mother here in the city. His parents were divorced.

  We’d been given little cards which guided us to our class, and luck had it that Chuck and I had been assigned to the same freshman homeroom. We took our places together in line and, once again, walked up the crowded stairwell. It was nowhere near as orderly as it had been when half the group had been parents. So there was no running on ahead for Chuck today. We talked a bit more, but for a while, together in the crush, I remember he seemed to lose interest in whatever we were speaking of, and I wondere
d what I would have to say to catch his attention again while we made our slow way up.

  Out on the red-tiled roof, with its high wire fence around the chest-high wall, the student congestion came to a complete halt under the cloud-flecked blue—as it would for three to thirteen minutes every morning for the rest of the year. Finally we crowded into the far stairwell.

  6.31. Downstairs on the fifth floor, I walked into the classroom.

  Chuck followed me.

  I took a seat in one of the nailed-to-the-floor wooden desks toward the front of the room.

  Chuck sat at the desk behind mine.

  Our homeroom teacher—standing behind the desk now with his hands in his pockets, greeting us, telling us to take seats, those in the back please hurry up, we have a lot to do this morning—was the freshman algebra instructor, Mr. Tannenbaum. (He turned now to write his name on the board for us.) A thin, homely man, he wore baggy tweeds and had a shy sense of humor. He was a remarkably gentle man, for all his bony forehead and drawn-together shoulders. And he smiled if you made a joke, sometimes in spite of himself. But one of the things Science’s average 140 IQ meant was that the teachers respected the students. The school was as strict in hiring instructors as it was in admitting pupils. We all had a sense that the teachers themselves were special, as was, indeed, the whole school—despite its dilapidated housing.

  Mr. Tannenbaum began to call out the names of the various kids in the class—“Please answer ‘present’”—while I looked around.

  Before the end of the first session, I learned that Chuck’s full name was Charles Edward Rufus Rastus McSweeney O’Gorman Van Pelt Abramson!

  (“Is that really your whole name …?”

  (“Yeah. But Charles Edward Abramson is about all most people can take,” and here, on a piece of notebook paper, while I strained around at my desk, he drew a monogram, involving a C, E, and A, and the date—’56—which, over the next year, I would find written on bathroom walls, carved into table tops, or, once, fifteen years later, but still readable, gouged with a compass point into the back of a pew at Corpus Christi Church.)

  At Dalton, the classes of twelve and fourteen students had sat in movable chairs at wide blond wood tables, or pushed the tables aside and drawn the chairs into an informal circle for discussion. But here were forty-two students in a single room, desks fixed to the floor and scarred by doodling generations. Even as I was talking with Chuck, it hit me that this was not the entire freshman grade but only one class—that, indeed, there were five others of the same size at the school.

  At Dalton, the entire eighth grade had been smaller than this homeroom group.

  For the last year, people had been talking to me about the “transition from elementary school to high school.” But the transition was really between private school and public school—and nobody had prepared me for that.

  Mr. Tannenbaum announced that we were all to get up, leave the seats we had taken, and find seats in alphabetical order, starting with the first seat in the first file and working back, then continuing with the first seat in the second file, and so on.

  Well, I thought, slipping out of my desk, that was the end of sitting next to my new friend. We milled around, asking each other our names, laughing, exchanging remarks. Somehow, though, it panned out that (as an “Abramson”) Chuck ended up the first student in the first file of desks, and, after we’d gone through the other A’s, B’s, and C’s, I (as a “Delany”) ended up in the second seat of the second file. I wasn’t in front of him. But I was now one seat diagonally behind him.

  The person sitting directly behind Chuck and, therefore, right beside me, was a bright, personable kid from Queens, with glasses, named Danny. He made some comment on some exchange between Chuck and me, and within minutes, had joined the pair of us as friends in a trio that stayed solid through the year.

  “Come to order now,” Mr. Tannenbaum said, and, once more, the general level of student whispering quieted. “It seems the next thing on our agenda is to elect the class representative to the Student Government Organization.”

  There was a general groan, and a girl named Debbie raised her hand to protest. “That seems awfully silly right now. None of us really knows anyone else.”

  Stacking “Delaney Cards” together for his roll book (part of an archaic filing system that only incidentally mirrored my name), Mr. Tannenbaum gave one of his inward, ironic smiles. “I think the idea is that it will help get the process of knowing each other started.”

  I kind of agreed with Debbie. But diagonally in front of me, Chuck immediately waved his hand. When Mr. Tannenbaum glanced at him, Chuck declared, “I nominate Chip Delany—this guy right here,” twisting around and pointing down with his upraised hand at the top of my head.

  Danny’s hand was up a moment later. “I second the nomination.”

  “I guess we’re getting started then.” Mr. Tannenbaum got up to write the nominees on the blackboard. “Any other nominations?”

  There were three others—one was a friend of mine from Woodland, named Gene. But he’d been sitting some seats behind me, so we hadn’t, in those first minutes, done more than nod and grin at one another.

  Another, a golden, good-looking Irish kid like Chuck, was named Mike.

  The last was a native Bronx boy called Leo, with an incredible amount of body hair and a winning, easy manner, who, at thirteen, easily looked eighteen or older.

  The four of us were called on to say something about ourselves. I don’t remember what I said—but Gene used his time to tell a silly joke that fell flat. Moments after our impromptu campaign speeches, Mr. Tannenbaum told us to go out in the hall, where we milled about and glanced at one another, trying not to feel self-conscious; and inside the class discussed the four of us and voted. Somebody came to beckon through the wire-reinforced classroom door window.

  We went back in.

  I had been elected.

  “All the GO representatives are meeting this afternoon,” Mr. Tannenbaum told me “in room. …” He gave me the number. “It shouldn’t take very long. It’s just to set things up.”

  Chuck turned round and whispered, “I’ll wait for you, and we can go home together.”

  Later, I asked Chuck if there’d been any discussion, and, if so, what had been said that got me elected. But he just brushed it off: “Nobody really said anything at all.”

  At lunch, however, when I got Danny alone (Danny’s and Chuck’s friendship had been cemented through the happenstance of their ending up in the same German class; and by now, we knew, all three of us had the same English teacher, a rotund gentleman with glasses, Mr. Kotter, who, when a young man had given him a not particularly sharp answer, had planted his hands on his hips that morning and said, “You know, I don’t think you’d have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot,” at which point we’d all fallen in love with him), Danny explained that when Mr. Tannenbaum had called for comments on the nominees, it came out that all the other nominators had indeed been friends of their nominees at previous schools, and Chuck, logically and coolly, had explained that’ he had never known me until today, but simply in the few minutes’ conversation we’d already had, he’d been struck by my “intelligence, levelheadedness, and insight,” and these seemed to him better credentials than simply old friends nominating old friends. The argument had carried most of the remaining students—possibly it was a better argument than I was a candidate.

  The student representative meeting that afternoon was simple and untaxing. Another math teacher, a woman even taller than Mr. Tannenbaum, gave us a brief rundown of our all but nonexistent duties.

  A few minutes before the end of the meeting, Chuck’s blond head swerved around outside the window; he waved to me. I kind of nodded back. The teacher saw him gesticulating outside the door, walked over, and opened it. “Are you looking for something?” she asked. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I was waiting for a friend,” Chuck said.

  “Then why do
n’t you just come in,” she said, “and sit down quietly.” So Chuck came in with his first day’s haul of textbooks in his arms and slid into a seat near mine.

  About five minutes later, the meeting ended.

  As the young reps were standing to leave, the front door of the classroom opened again and, rather breathlessly, a long-haired girl in glasses strode in and announced, half to the teacher and half to everyone else: “This is the student representatives’ meeting, isn’t it? I’m the GO Alternate. So I belong here.”

  The teacher looked at her with the smile I was becoming so familiar with. She said: “Actually, I don’t think you do.”

  “Oh, no,” the girl said. “I belong here.” She repeated, “I’m the Alternate for my class.”

  “I mean,” the teacher said, “the meeting’s finished. We’re all going home now.”

  “Well, I do belong here,” the young woman said again.

  Then, realizing what was happening, she said loudly, “Oh. …” As she looked around the room, perhaps we saw each other. Perhaps we even smiled. Then she turned and strode out of the room.

  Behind me, Chuck said: “Chip, that girl is weird!”

  I couldn’t help thinking of Ben, though, busy in the Main Building being a genius. Certainly by comparison, she wasn’t weird at all.

  Chuck and I rode home together on the downtown D train.

  6.32. One other friendship I must speak about formed in that same time. Elements of it coalesced during the same minutes as those I’ve already written of. It was probably more important, at least to me as a writer, than those with Chuck or Danny. Reviewing it, however, what strikes me is how quickly the written narrative closes it out—puts it outside of language. Reading over what I’ve already written of that first day, searching for a margin in which to inscribe it, within and around what’s already written, I suspect it might well be printed in the column parallel with the above, rather than as a consecutive report—certainly that’s the way I experienced it.