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

by Samuel R. Delany

  The Brewster house was as modern and elegant as my mother’s was solid and working class: wide glass walls, deep carpeting, and the outside covered in silvery barn lumber. Our initial entrance? I recall opening a door and seeing a splatter of dead flies, victims of the first chilly days of autumn, lying on the carpet before the stairs to the second-floor studio.

  We sat in the living room around a huge coffee table, looking at evening grasses through the great glass window in the dark wooden wall. “We had a break-in here, too, last winter,” Rosemary told us. “One of the local bad boys got in, drank up some liquor”—we were all drinking gin by now—“and vandalized some of the art books. He just tore out the pictures of the naked ladies. You know perfectly well what he wanted them for. He was really a very sad fellow. I felt sorry for him. But there was nothing we could do.”

  I remember standing before the bookshelf in the upstairs room where Marilyn and I were staying, looking at the spines of three dark red books, François Villon, Volumes One, Two, and Three, by Tiffany Thayer. They were beautifully boxed and, apparently, as I pulled one out to examine it, formed a vast historical trilogy—that, as I tried a page here and a page there, seemed all but unreadable. Among the startling new historical theories that Mr. Thayer was presenting in his magnificently researched work (explained a little publicity card inserted in the front of the first book) was the newly revived idea, gaining a wider and wider hearing among reputable scientists today, that the earth was actually flat.

  When we got ready to leave, Rosemary gave me an ancient portable typewriter—so old, in fact, that I had never seen its particular sideways machinery before. “But it works just smashingly. I had it when I got my first advertising job. I hope it brings you as much luck as it brought me,” she said. “But you’re a writer, and you have to have something to type on.”

  “You know, I write too,” Marilyn said, jocularly, from the other side of the room, where she’d just set down a bag for the car. But everyone heard the hurt that underlay the humor—and which I knew was because she had written so little in the last months and because she was so unhappy about it.

  We drove back to the city.

  23.21. Now, with the new typewriter, I settled down seriously to work on Out of the Dead City. The book came fairly easily, moving smoothly toward its end.

  23.3. Here are three things that happened in October ’62, a year after the miscarriage, two years after my father’s death.

  23.31. I woke to sirens, rolled in the sweaty sheets of the persistent Indian summer—I remembered no scheduled test. Just then, outside the apartment, a jet snarled somewhere in the sky. Could that be the plane with the bomb, I thought, idly. Lying there, I got chills—and immediately tried to reason them away. This was the sort of coincidence, I thought (blinking at the dull window), that can ruin a good day.

  Then the window filled with yellow light.

  I leaped from the bed, taking the sheets with me. My throat cramped, my heart exploded in my chest, while I watched gold fire spill window to window down the tenement across the street.

  The fireball!

  The thought quivered beyond the pain in my body that, in each of its parts, had gone, individually, into terror. The light’s here now, I thought. The shock and sound will arrive in four seconds, five seconds, and I will be dead. …

  Four seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, ten seconds later, I was still standing there, trying to think of some place to hide.

  The clouds, in coincidence compounded, had simply pulled away from the sun. The plane was gone. The little electric clock on the bookshelf said noon. The siren—which, of course, went off at that time every day—lowered its pitch, softened its whine, and ceased.

  23.32. That was the month, of course, of the Cuban missile crisis. Over the days of the event, newspaper and radio—we had no television—were filled with nothing else. History has remembered the event as one of Kennedy’s successes that somehow compensated for the embarrassment of the previous year’s Bay of Pigs invasion. But what the American public lived through was an anxious week when, yet again, World War III seemed momentarily imminent.

  23.321. On the day of the special UN session, Marilyn and I were visiting my mother’s where, indeed, we watched the special session, running on all channels, with most of New York City, with most of the country.

  At the UN, the United States would speak. Russia would speak. And Cuba—the country at the center of the dispute—would speak. All the major TV channels were covering the sunny afternoon’s proceedings at the same time—as, indeed, were most radio stations. Perhaps because we owned no television ourselves, when Marilyn and I came into my mother’s apartment, to hear the coverage we turned on the radio out of habit.

  A small educational station, Riverside Radio, was giving its report on the all-day goings-on at the United Nations.

  “You know it’s on television too,” my mother said; so I turned on the TV in the corner. The sound coming from the radio and the TV speakers—the opening remarks by the Secretary General—was identical, so there was no reason to turn the radio off.

  We settled down on the couch to watch and listen.

  The US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, made his statement. At the end there was a shuffling of papers; a few people coughed.

  CBS switched, after a few moments, to a news analyst, who gave a minute or two of commentary of the US statement, while on the radio behind us, the noise of coughing and shuffling continued in the General Assembly hall, until the Secretary General stepped to the podium to introduce Ambassador Valerian Zorin from the USSR—and once more the sound from the TV speaker and the radio speaker became congruent.

  The Soviet ambassador made his statement. The translator’s words came over, the Russian, like a ghost, leading the halting English version, through both the speaker behind us and the speaker before us. The statement was greeted with a similar silence, similar shufflings, similar coughs. Once more CBS cut to a news analyst; and once more the radio simply overlaid it with shufflings and coughings and the sounds from any large meeting hall between activities. (On the radio, now, an announcer’s voice, with the timbre of adolescence, came on to identify the station, once more, as Riverside Radio.) When the Secretary General resumed the podium, a minute later, again the speakers’ sounds became one. The Cuban ambassador was introduced. In Spanish, he began to talk.

  In English, the translator followed him. There was a very different feel to the Cuban’s speech. It seemed far less peremptory. He spoke of US atrocities committed regularly against his country. He spoke of his country’s unsettled position, geographically close to one great power, ideologically closer to a more distant one, and the huge experience of risk this created across his island. He spoke of the pain and death of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, to which the recent buildup of Soviet missiles in Cuba was (partially) a response.

  The body of his speech over, he leaned back from the podium to take a breath—

  And something happened I’ll never forget.

  CBS, the major television channel on which we were watching the UN coverage, again cut to a live news analyst, who began to explain that the Cuban ambassador had just said more or less what was to be expected, full of emotion, but without content.

  Meanwhile, on Riverside Radio, the ambassador, after his breath, clearly had leaned forward again, to continue speaking. The translator ended his pause and continued translating. The actual speech came to a close perhaps half a dozen sentences on. Beyond what the TV audience heard, it ran on another—oh, a minute and a half—possibly two. Confused, though, I’d already gotten up and begun switching TV channels, to see if any of the TV stations were staying with the UN—as the FM radio behind me was. On channel after channel I stared at, and listened to, the same analyst, talking calmly, as if, indeed, the Cuban ambassador’s speech had reached its conclusion just like the other two. All the networks shared the same picture.

  Behind me, on the radio, the Cuban’s speech actually e
nded—and I heard a sound.

  It was applause—the applause of the General Assembly and the whole audience. Neither of the two other ambassadors had received any such ovation. It was applause that rose, over the first two or three seconds, to a volume to equal that of the traffic on the industrial avenues in the city just before noon. The applause came on and on. There were shouts of approbation in it. I have been in theaters and know the difference between the sound of an ordinary ovation and a standing ovation. And I will tell you, though I did not see it, in the General Assembly of the United Nations, as they applauded, people stood.

  On TV, on all channels available, the analyst went on (do I add, in memory, a vague sense of flusteredness to his words, as if he had not been prepared to start as early as he had, and had been still making notes, considering what he was to say, when he’d been directed to go on—now!) but what had happened was that someone, sensing what the reaction to the speech would be, had decided that the American people should not see the General Assembly audience go wild with support for Cuba, and so had made a decision, given a direction; and the Cuban ambassador’s speech had been truncated, and the analyst had been purposely brought in to obliterate both the ending to the speech and the overwhelming reaction to it among the delegates from the rest of the world.

  I suspect whoever did this still thinks of himself as a hero. I suspect many who saw it or abetted it finally convinced themselves that it was, at best, an unimportant snafu, since the major information had, in fact, been given.

  I suspect if it was ever questioned, excuses of time and programming were given, and, however absurd the excuses sounded, heads were shaken and the thing was more or less internalized, repressed, and forgotten.

  But it remains one of the most direct and terrifying manipulations of the media I have ever seen.

  23.33. I’m not sure which of the above two incidents, the false bomb scare, or the UN General Assembly session, came first. I don’t know whether both, one, or neither came just before (or just after) the incident below.

  23.34. Some prologue, to explain the third incident: Of the fifteen hundred-odd graduates each year from the Bronx High School of Science, only fifteen were allowed to apply to Harvard. (There were other application quotas to other Ivy League schools.) Of those fifteen applicants, Harvard traditionally accepted four. During my early years, this quota system had even been questioned, and a representative from Harvard’s admissions office had been quoted in the Times as saying that if Harvard had accepted Science’s entire graduating class, it would do nothing but raise the academic standing of the university. But if we did that, the man had gone on to say, then our entire Freshman class would be nothing but New York Jews.

  This blatant anti-Semitism had raised something of a furor—but not a furor large enough, by my junior and senior years, to change the application quotas.

  I had received advanced standing in both English and mathematics—and had been one of my year’s fifteen Harvard applicants. But after what seemed an extremely successful interview in one of the crimson-lined offices of the Harvard Club, I was rejected. One of the four to make it, however, was a particularly bright senior named Geoff Hayworth.

  During his first months at Harvard, Geoff became interested in sculpture and managed to study in Europe over the following summer with a couple of very well-known artists; then he came back to this country—at which point he had the first of several breakdowns and spent some time in a hospital. We’d been moderately friendly in school, but once, while Marilyn and I were living on East Fifth Street, I ran into him on Avenue B. A tall, gangling, genial youngster with glasses (and a nail-biter spectacular enough to shame Joey or Auden or fishmonger John), he’d rented a storefront studio only a few blocks up, where he was now working. He’d invited me to drop up and see him—he was always up early, he assured me.

  So one weekend morning during that same October, I left Marilyn asleep and, minutes later, came out on the cool, bright avenue, and walked up toward the address Geoff had given me.

  The number was over a small, streaked, plate glass window, rather dark inside. But when I knocked, Geoff bounded to the door, grinning. He was up and busy. He made me a blue mug of incredibly strong coffee, complaining the while that the place wasn’t really big enough to do full-sized work.

  On the shelf in the store’s window, however, he’d arranged a series of cardboard shapes, of different sizes, all of which had been painted a neutral gray. The shapes had been made from different-sized mailing tubes, various boxes, and what have you. Some of them were as high as two feet. Some were only a few inches tall. They were part of the “sculpture game” Geoff had invented for himself. To play the game (he explained), you tried to arrange the shapes in a pattern that looked pleasing both from inside the studio and from outside the store window on the street. Geoff “played” a round, and we stood back and admired his pattern.

  “Okay,” he said, “now you try it—” moving the pieces at random to destroy his creation.

  I spent a minute or two putting the pieces in a pattern, and we looked at it.

  “Mmmm …” Geoff said.

  But even before we spoke, I could tell that somehow my pattern was just not as abstractly pleasurable as his had been.

  “Just a second,” he said. He rearranged a few of them—clearly his revision was an improvement. We talked of other things awhile—of whom he had studied with the previous year, what famous sculptor he had a possible job with for the coming summer in Europe. But later, while I walked back to East Fifth Street, I contemplated the surprising fact that Geoff’s game had brought home to me. The rules governing abstract art were just as codified as those by which we judge “realism.” As an adolescent, you understand, there’d been periods when I’d practically lived at the Museum of Modern Art, and I was about as familiar as one could be with the modern collection at the Metropolitan. I was a regular visitor at the various galleries that, back then, clustered about Tenth Street and Third Avenue the way, today, they do in SoHo. But in the same way I had internalized the rules that—although I could not produce a terribly realistic drawing—nevertheless allowed me to recognize one, I had also somehow—although I could not make a very good one of my own—internalized the rules that allowed me to recognize a pleasing abstraction.

  23.4. For a moment, release these three incidents from their decimal enumeration and consider them—the false bomb scare, the media distortion, the aesthetic demonstration—as objects to be arranged or rearranged on the stage called “October 1962.” Which orders are most pleasing? Which orders are not?

  And why?

  If the UN Council session preceded the false bomb scare, it certainly suggests a particular psychological progression—but, alas, there is no way to be sure it did. And nuclear anxiety had been part of adolescent life since the air raid drills from the end of World War II on.

  And, of course, to bring the tale of the aesthetic demonstration to the fore by even this much is to assume for them all that the pleasure of their organization is, itself, primarily aesthetic.

  To say, by the same token, that all three inhabit the same “historical” field—or, even, that they generate it—is to hypostatize “History” out of our very ignorance of the relations between the “experiences” that produced it. For “History” is what we create by the scratching, the annoyance, the irritation of writing, with its aspirations to logic and order, on memory’s uneasy and uncertain discontinuities.

  Unlike the sculpture game, then, there is more than one game to play here: psychology, history, art—which is to say, while “story” is what we can create, what we can recount, what we can recall, “History” (as one evokes it in biography, in autobiography) is what most of us do not remember, what most of us cannot speak of.

  24. Across from the trucks at the Christopher Street Pier, earlier that summer, a bar changed owners, though the old name—yes, Dirty Dick’s—persisted. The new owner was a brassy, gregarious woman in her early thirties who went
by the name of Pat and who, several operations ago, rumor was, had been a man.

  The new clientele was largely gay.

  Now Marilyn and I went over one night. Catering to the late-teenaged dykes whom we would sometimes see sitting on the church steps as far east as Sixth Avenue, to colorful bevies of Puerto Rican drag queens, to a whole range of truck drivers from the yards around, to various guys who would have liked to have been mistaken for drivers, and to the odd tailored uptown businesswoman, the place was kind of a haven—even more so for Marilyn than for me.

  The bar was oval. There was a dance floor in the back. The story was that the straights stood on one side while the gays cruised the other, with everyone coming together to dance to the music. But such a cut-and-dried schema hardly ever pertained in the place. It only suggested a categorization that reassured the newcomer—if he or she needed reassurance. The jukebox hit that season was “Walk Like a Man,” which produced a galaxy of patriarchal parodies on the dance floor from both the men and the women.

  Some folks we met there were people we already knew, like Carol, who, with her boy-short hair (in that time when women’s hair was always long and men’s always short), dressed in slacks and men’s shirts, and had managed the Elysée before Bill and Terry; before Marilyn had gone to Mexico, she’d booked in one of my ersatz folksinging groups, either some transient resurrection of the Harbor Singers, or the duo I’d briefly formed with red-headed Ellen’s motorcycle-riding young husband from the Bronx (who was studying creative writing with Marguerite Young, when he was not working or rehearsing with me) under the name of Waldo and Oversoul. On our first night together there, Carol stood us for drinks and introduced us both to half a dozen other friends.