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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Return, then, for a minute, as we came down from the roof. …

  I walked into the classroom.

  Chuck followed me.

  As I slid into a seat behind one of the wooden desks toward the front of the room, I glanced aside at the students crowding up the aisle beside me, where I glimpsed a hand—a large hand—on which the broad nails were gnawed back behind a line of adolescent grime. The hand stayed there a second, two, tapped on a denim thigh, and was blocked by another student. I looked up, to see a tall boy—perhaps one of the two or three tallest kids in the class—with dark brown hair, peering over the heads of his classmates. He was wearing a dark brown, long-sleeved shirt. He sighed now, realizing that all the seats near the door were already taken, and began to make his way with the others around the desks to find somewhere to sit.

  Chuck sat at the desk behind mine.

  Our homeroom teacher, standing behind the desk now with his hands in his pockets, greeted us, telling us to take seats (“Those in the back, please hurry up. We have a lot to do this morning”) turned now to write his name on the board.

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

  Once the names had been gone through, behind me Chuck whispered: “I could have really messed up his day and told him my whole name. Charles Edward Rufus Rastus McSweeney O’Gorman Van Pelt Abramson.”

  I turned around laughing. “Is that really your whole name …?”

  Mr. Tannenbaum glanced over, and I looked back.

  “Yeah,” Chuck went on whispering, obliviously. “But Charles Edward Abramson is about all most people can take.” I looked over my shoulder again, where, on a piece of notebook paper, Chuck had begun to draw his monogram.

  Mr. Tannenbaum called out more names.

  The tall kid was sitting diagonally back in the room from me. I glanced around at the students, correcting their names through the roll call. His name was Joseph Torrent. (“Do people call you Joe?” Mr. Tannenbaum asked.

  (“Yeah—or Joey. …”A kind of squeakiness accented his premature adolescent baritone, as though his voice had not quite finished changing.)

  Moments later, Mr. Tannenbaum was announcing that now we were all to get up, leave the seats we had taken, and take 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. I moved quickly to the back, momentarily losing Chuck (who’d gone forward, knowing his name would put him toward the front), and angling toward the big kid. I nearly bumped into him. With the same determination I’d had when I initially spoke to Chuck, I said, “Joe, this has got to be a lot more confusing than it’s worth.”

  “Yeah,” he said. And grinned. “It sure is.” Then he frowned again. “What was your name again?”

  “I’m Chip.” I held out my hand. Not expecting that sort of greeting in the crush of students, he looked a little surprised, and then took it and shook. The skin was dry and warm, and slightly roughish. I liked that. Somebody toward the front said, “Hey, there were some more D’s and E’s—I know!”

  “That’s me,” I said. And took off, back toward the front of the room, to take my seat, realizing that it was only one seat diagonally behind Chuck’s anyway. “This isn’t so bad,” I told him.

  While the kid beside me said, “Was your name Chip? I’m Danny.”

  “Hi,” I said to the kid in the glasses with his spade-shaped face and hair that was nappier than mine, and shook hands. The fingers were thin, the nails ordinary length and clean, and not, to me, interesting at all. “This is Chuck,” I said.

  Chuck turned around. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum said, “Keep it down, now. We’re trying to do this with as little noise as possible.” He began to stack “Delaney Cards.” “It seems the next thing on our agenda is to elect the class representative to the Student Government Organization. …”

  While I waited outside the room with Gene, Mike, and Leo for the election to be over, I wondered whether Joey had voted for me or not. Someone beckoned us in through the window. As I came in, after Gene and before Mike, I glanced at Joe. He grinned, and I grinned back—then went to take my seat beside Danny and Chuck, as Mr. Tannenbaum announced, “Chip Delany is our GO representative,” and I looked at the board where my name was written, the ghosts of the three others just legible on the black slate under the sweeping marks of the eraser. Well, I thought to myself, chances were Joe had.

  Between two other classes where neither Chuck nor Danny was involved—I did not want any of my other friends to know about this friend—I talked to Joe some more. There were three lunch periods. Danny’s and Chuck’s was not the same as mine, that first term. And so I ate my lunch with Joe, asking him about himself, telling him a bit about me—and, every time I could without being obtrusive about it, glancing at his big, heavy-fingered hands, with their permanently grubby knuckles and their gnawed nails.

  When Chuck and I came down from the GO meeting, as I walked into the school’s dark foyer, out in the sun beyond the stained glass transom I saw Joe and several of his other friends standing around—apparently for some reason they had stayed after school too. They were just turning to leave—but I stepped up to the wall, where a wide bronze plaque hung (commemorating what in the elementary school’s nether history, I could not possibly say now) and demanded, “Now who do you think all these people could be?”

  Chuck looked back, came up, and in minutes we were joking about this name and that—for at least five minutes … time to let Joe get to the corner and out of sight. I even contemplated suggesting I’d forgotten a book upstairs, and asking Chuck to return with me. But certainly Joey was far ahead enough by now to obliterate any possibility of my having to talk with both at the same time—a burden that seemed to lie just beyond the edge of possible endurance.

  On days when I didn’t ride home on the subway with Danny or Chuck, however, I’d hunt up Joe and ride down with him, occasionally going a few stops past the 135th Street station, where ordinarily I got out, to the Ninety-sixth Street station, where he left the train. Sometimes, I even sat with him on the benches against the station’s tiled wall for half an hour, listening to him talk about adolescent problems that ran from his difficulties in getting along with his mother (like Chuck’s, Joey’s parents were divorced) to misunderstandings he’d had with some friends with whom, from time to time, he played basketball.

  Science’s 140 IQ average meant, of course, that many students were substantially above it. (I didn’t realize at the time that a kind of instinct made me seek out the brighter kids.) But it also meant that there were many below it—students of good or even ordinary intelligence, who had acquired good study habits, who were by temperament hard workers, and who were willing to put real energy into whatever tasks were put them.

  Chuck and Danny were students who glittered. Whether they did well or badly, whatever they were involved in was always interesting. Joe, on the other hand, fell squarely into the latter group. (He had done better than I on the entrance exam; no one had had to maneuver his name around on a waiting list.) The problem these students had at Bronx Science was that often, if only because of their diligence, they’d been the smartest or among the smartest students in whatever school they’d come from. But now because there was such a concentration of real brilliance around them—and all the eccentricity that went with it—they were reduced to the position of the normal. Often they were not happy with it.

  And that was very much Joe.

  6.321. The double narrative, in its parallel columns. …

  (When, thirty-three years later, I asked Chuck about his recollections of our first day in school together, he told me over long distance from Missoula, Montana, while sunlight through Amherst’s leaves dappled my uncurtained storm windows: “The thing I remember about that first day was that Mr. Tannenbaum wore ‘space shoes’ … that th
is man, who from the way he dressed, should have been wearing the most conservative dark-brown wing ripped Oxfords—he wore space shoes! In the newspaper, every weekend, there used to be that little advertisement, ‘Come get your feet poured …’ or something? And he had them—like your mother. I can remember her wearing them, in the library across from the Museum of Modern Art where she worked. ‘Space shoes’—they were really strange to see on someone back then.” But because my mother did wear them, Mr. Tannenbaum’s hadn’t made the same impression on me.)

  With the two (or more …) tales printed as they are, consecutively and not parallel at all, a romantic code hierarchizes them: the second account—full of guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge—displaces the first—overt, positive, rich, and social—at once discrediting it and at the same time presumably revealing its truth.

  Yet reread closely.

  Nothing in the first is in any way explained by the second, so that this “truth” that the second is presumed to provide is mostly an expectation, a convention, a trope—rather than a real explanatory force.

  (The third, Chuck’s “space shoes,” parenthetical, oblique, idiosyncratic, ironic, simply problematizes the first two, opening the space for a continuation of codes to write, to revise, to develop. …)

  The more historically sensitive among us will remember an older—and conservative—code from which the Romantic questioning, distrust, and uneasiness with the feelings grew. It holds that, in day-today occurrences, the desire- and deceit-laden narrative always develops alongside the “socially acceptable” one. Doctors, lawyers, and artists are privileged to discuss it when it impinges on their specialized domains: the body, ethics, representation. But for the rest of us, the old code says, it should be private (rather than subjective: it is the abolition of the private code by active medical, legal, and aesthetic intervention that creates, that necessitates, that constitutes Romantic “subjectivity”). As adults, we have the right—indeed, the duty—to keep it so.

  Why speak of what’s uncomfortable to speak of?

  What damage might it do to women, children, the temperamentally more refined, the socially ignorant, the less well educated, those with a barely controlled tendency toward the perverse?

  Since publishing it in most cases explains little or nothing of the public narrative, why not let it remain privy, personal, privileged—outside of language …?

  But if it is the split—the spaces between the columns (one resplendent and lucid with the writings of legitimacy, the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate, and even a third aglitter with ironic alterities)—that constitutes the subject, it is only after the Romantic inflation of the private into the subjective that such a split can even be located. That locus, that margin, that split itself first allows, then demands the appropriation of language—now spoken, now written—in both directions, over the gap.

  6.33. The second morning, Chuck and I somehow weren’t together among the students shoving each other up the steps. The traffic snarl out on the red-tiled roof, in the September cool and sun, was particularly bad that day. While I was standing in line, the girl with the long hair and glasses whom I’d seen the day before at the end of the GO meeting ran up through a hiatus in the crowd, in the absolutely opposite direction from anybody else, her coat flapping. She came to a halt before me, and, with a breathless smile, declared, “I just wrote three poems last night!”

  “Good for you!” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Marilyn,” she said. “Yours …?”

  “Chip,” I told her.

  Then, just as she’d left yesterday’s meeting, she ran on.

  “What was that?” which was Chuck, who’d just managed to join me; he’d recognized her from yesterday too. I shrugged. But Chuck, the most normal of fellows in his sexual orientation, would usually have a comment to make about any girl I talked to—and, indeed, any boy. Fortunately, I thought most of them were funny.

  That night I pondered the rooftop encounter. “I wrote three poems …!” What, I wondered, was the experience this young woman had gone through that was so exciting she’d blurted it to an all-but-stranger? In my third-floor room, sitting on my bed, back against the brown wainscot up to the yellow molding, I turned to a new piece of paper in my school looseleaf and wrote … five!

  A day or so later, when I ran into Marilyn again, I mentioned—very casually—the poems I’d written. But she had written even more by then. She even showed me some. And while I was prepared for my own concept of poetry, I wasn’t prepared for hers to be full of bright words and electric with inner music. I wasn’t prepared to find lines like:

  The time comes when I cannot fathom night …2

  or for such cascades of glossolalia as

  … Skies are strumming

  stormy coming

  and the yellow

  light is mellow,

  though the hazy

  morning daisy

  withers soon

  to afternoon …

  I aspire

  to a higher

  range of power

  up a tower

  in ascendant

  like a pendant on the gory

  neck of glory …

  I will run down

  in the sundown

  to redeem a

  tragic dreamer;

  so his sorrows

  or tomorrows

  not arriving

  will be thriving

  on the laughter

  rippling after.

  With his eyes on the horizon

  he will not per-

  ceive me grieve …3

  In short, I was not prepared for the poems to be—as far as any thirteen-or fourteen-year-old could tell, judging the work of another—good, however that is defined for or by the young. (Oscar Wilde once said, “The only true talent is precosity”) A year ahead of me, Marilyn was thirteen when I met her and an entering sophomore, though she turned fourteen two months later in November.

  Where I had gone to private school, she had gone to public. She had been able to read perfectly well at three, and one of her earliest school memories was being told to sit in a corner with a book (usually of the teacher’s choosing and well below the level of what she was already reading on her own) because she already knew the work. “For years,” she told me in those first weeks, “I really thought I was being punished for being smart—go sit in the corner. I mean, that’s what you tell dunces.”

  A year or so younger than most of the people in her class, even at Science, her best friends seemed to be among the brightest students in the grade ahead of hers. Because of this I met, and heard even more about, a whole circle of older students I would not have otherwise known.

  There’d once been a show, which, after a lengthy career on radio, moved briefly to television, called “The Quiz Kids,” on which bright youngsters in caps and gowns answered questions sent in by adults. For a season, when she’d been seven, Marilyn had been the youngest Quiz Kid. (To give her credit, for she was never a braggart, I didn’t even learn this till I had known her at least three years.) She was curious, hugely talented, deeply compassionate, and wonderfully generous; she was quite attractive, though in many ways she was physically awkward; and she had emotional blind spots that were glaring and, I suspect, as crippling as some of her physical limitations. She could be extraordinarily perceptive about other people. She was very excitable, very funny, and very smart. And we were very soon friends.

  6.331. A couple of months into the term, I sat down to begin writing a novel. Joey Torrent, I thought. Certainly his second name had all the romance one could ask for. But maybe “Joey” was a little ordinary. What about “Erik” Torrent? That was more dashing. I wrote out the title page:

  LOST STARS

  by Samuel R. Delany

  Then, on the next page of my looseleaf, I began to describe how tall, dark-haired Erik Torrent stood on the walkway of the George Washington Bridge, watching the sunlight flash and
flicker on the water hundreds of feet below, while farther out it became a sky blue slab of light, his fingers resting on the metal railing.

  And I described in detail after detail his hand.

  I had been looking at such hands on bus drivers, on the garbage man, on construction workers sitting with their lunches against brick walls, on a friend in school, on subway conductors, on a workman bellowing from the corner beside a flaming drum, or on strangers across from me on the train—black, white, and Hispanic—for years. (Their descriptions had been among the first naturalism to make its way into the purloined looseleaf.) I tried to describe his astonishing fingers (and I knew already that the astonishment was a bodily response such hands could produce in me when I saw them) in such a way that would fix this experience outside of language somewhere (I knew the fascination was private and sexual and couldn’t have spoken of it to Chuck or Danny or Marilyn—or, indeed, to Joey himself), somehow within it.

  6.332. Walking up the subway platform at 125th Street, school books dragging down my arms, through the people standing about, waiting for the train to take them to work, I saw Chuck standing before one of the gum machines attached to the columns at the platform edge. His books were on the cement at his feet. Squatting a little so he could see himself in the small mirror the machines had bolted to their faces, he was combing his blond hair with a black pocket comb, smoothing it each stroke with his free hand, pushing it a little one way, then the other.

  I’d heard people say, “You know, boys are just as vain as girls.” But I wondered if that didn’t mean Catholic boys; for besides Chuck, the only boys I’d ever seen do that were the Hispanic kids, on their way to Cardinal Hayes High School or—I just assumed in my adolescent smugness—to the various vocational schools in the city.