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

by Samuel R. Delany

  “And there isn’t … any other copy?”

  We didn’t say much after that.

  Take the ache, now, and move it, very carefully—don’t jostle it, because the slightest jar will make the buttocks, belly, and jaws clamp and the eyes blur with water, breaking the world into flakes of light—just to the start of what comes next. Not the motivation for the feeling, certainly. (The manuscript was not lost till five years later.) But rather the feeling itself: the absence, the obliteration, the frustration, the absolute oblivion—for such a feeling was at the center of what I’m going to write about now. And it was made more intense because, unlike the loss of a novel in which you have carefully cut up and considered and organized and selected and placed—from your selections—over three years everything that was important in your life, this ache seemed, everywhere I looked, without any motivation I could grasp.

  40.2. That summer, I didn’t sing at all. Rather, over those hot city months, I got well on my way to becoming one of the common, garden-variety madmen you see wandering about New York: filthy clothes all unbuttoned and unchanged for weeks, going nowhere, mumbling to themselves. Drugs had never particularly interested me (having had my single peyote trip, I was quite content with it and never sought to repeat it); but one day when Ana came by with the most ordinary joint, and I took the most ordinary toke, I found the surge of good feeling rising and rising till it became a kind of pain and I grew dizzy, then terrified. A few days later, one evening at a party she gave in her flat on Second Avenue, another sociable toke on a joint of very mediocre pot put me in bed with a breathing crisis that lasted nearly six hours. After that, I avoided all drugs—including coffee and beer.

  Daily, though, I managed to get to the supermarket.

  Daily, I managed to cook dinner for Marilyn and myself.

  40.3. One afternoon, when Marilyn was out working, I sat in the kitchen with Dave, telling him about this fear of falling—under a train, off a roof, out of a window. Suddenly Dave put his coffee cup down and said, “Hey, we’re gonna try something.” He reached over mine and took my wrist firmly. “Come on. With me.”

  “Huh—?”

  “Come on,” he said. “How does that feel? I’ve got you real tight. I’m bigger and stronger than you, right?”

  “Yeah …?”

  “So you probably couldn’t break free even if you wanted to. Or at least it would take you some time if I really fought you.” We were standing up now; Dave walked me toward the apartment door. “Come on outside.” We went into the hall, and Dave started up the steps.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Huh …?”

  “To the roof.”

  “Oh, man,” I said. “You don’t have to do—”

  “No,” Dave said. “I’ve got you. I’m holding you real tight. You may get scared. But you know it: you won’t be able to fall. And you won’t be able to pull away and jump. I promise you. Are you frightened now? Go on, tell me.” He halted, halfway between the fourth and the fifth floor.

  “No …” I said carefully, behind him. I looked at my arm in his grip.

  “Then come on.” We went up to the next landing, and then again up toward the metal door that led to the roof.

  In front of it, Dave stopped again. “Are you at all frightened now?” His fingers around my wrist were hot and rigid.

  “No … I don’t think so.”

  He pushed the door open on blue sky. It grated over the sill, the weight that had held it closed rising on the chain that ran through a metal ring high on the left. We stepped outside onto tar paper.

  “Are you frightened now?”

  A roof away, a pigeon coop waved gray feathers from its chicken wire window. A year ago, I’d come here to watch the scrawny kid with his tortoiseshell glasses, his ballooning and collapsing T-shirt, and his limber baton wave his flock around and across the sky. But I hadn’t been able to for months. On another roof a few stories higher, a water tower’s stilts rose under the laddered barrel.

  “A little … now.” I took a breath.

  “Are you very frightened?”

  “No.”

  “Think about the fact that I’m holding you real tight.” Still holding my wrist, he put his other arm around me and gripped my far shoulder. “I’m not afraid of heights at all. And because I’m holding you, you don’t have to be—you can be if you want. But it doesn’t matter. Come on. And you tell me how you feel.” He walked me toward the roof’s edge. “Don’t look down if you don’t want. Look up, at the clouds, at the sun.”

  Three wild pigeons swooped from the blue to drop below the cornice.

  “It’s … nice up here, in October like this,” I said.

  “Yeah. I really like to come up on the roof in the city. When it’s Indian summer. You can breathe.”

  Slowly we walked along the edge, and turned at the corner. There was just a little wall there, maybe eighteen inches high. Dave was on the outside, I was on the inside.

  He said: “Tell me how you feel.”

  I breathed. “Actually,” I said, “right now I’m so scared I could shit my pants.”

  “Yeah, you’re sweating. I can see. …”

  “But it’s okay. …”

  Dave laughed. He made his grip firmer. “If it gets too bad, you just say something. But remember I’m holding on to you.”

  We got to the next corner and turned.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ve been around the whole roof—we don’t have to overdo it. You’re really shaking, huh?”

  Then, deliberately, he walked me back across toward the door, releasing his grip on my shoulder but not my wrist. As we stepped through to the sheltered stair, only flakes of blue coming through the fouled skylight, Dave said. “Hey, you okay? What’s the matter? What’re you doing?”

  “I’m crying,” I told him. “What the hell do you think I’m doing?”

  Then we went back down and returned to cold coffee in cups on the kitchen table.

  40.4. Still, by the end of October ’64, while Marilyn went to work at another magazine editorial job, I was making one or two circuitous, ambling trips each day to the Second Avenue subway station at Houston Street by the bocce courts, where, finally, past the turnstile, I would sit at the top of the stairs from the underground concourse to track level, clutching the banister rails, feeling myself drawn to the platform, while some unlocatable force impelled me down, pushed me to throw myself before the next incoming train. When, below, I saw the first cars rush in roaring beside the platform, I’d hug my chest and face to the bars and hold my breath till I broke into a sweat. (I didn’t want to kill myself. Nothing in my life specifically dissatisfied me—making the compulsion even more unnerving!) I only realized how much I needed help one evening when a young policeman came up and pried me loose from the bars I was holding with his billy club to shoo me out of the station with the logical question that, in my obsession, I’d somehow never asked: “If you’re afraid of the subways, why do I see you come sit here every day?”

  40.5. In November Dick arranged an appointment for me with his own psychiatrist. The meeting was about ten minutes long. I doubt that the doctor made his diagnosis on what I said so much as the way I looked and my general affect:

  “Do you want to go into the hospital tonight,” he asked me, “or do you want to wait until tomorrow morning?”

  “I think I’d better go home and tell my wife,” I said. “So tomorrow would be better.”

  “All right. Here’s the address. You can just go right in at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I’m phoning them this evening. They’ll have your name there.”

  40.51. Fifteen years later, Marilyn and I helped a writer friend get some psychiatric help. His wife had come to us. The situation was extreme, and she and their five-year-old daughter were finding it almost unlivable. Twice he’d been picked up by police wandering naked and dazed in the street. At home he was nervous, distracted, and masturbated almost cont
inuously. The apartment was a shambles from his rearrangements and rearrangements. A year before, his wife and daughter had occasionally spent a day in the country with the wife’s mother; but the trips had grown over the intervening period, first, to full weekends away from the city apartment, leaving her husband to himself. Then the weekend trips away had expanded to where now she only returned to the apartment one, sometimes two days a week, to do minimal cleaning, to buy cold cereal, bread, peanut butter—which was all the man would now eat. (There was no cooking done, and he was too distracted to go out and shop for himself.) Often, sometimes after as little as an hour or two, she would return to her mother’s for another six-day “weekend.”

  Yet when it came time for her husband to see a doctor, and she had to give permission for treatment, for medication, she grew angry, hostile: there was nothing wrong with him. He wasn’t crazy! He was a talented, successful writer, who’d authored several long-running plays, had edited a major literary review, and had written a highly regarded nonfiction book. Someone had to talk to him and simply tell him to stop acting like this. That’s all …

  It took some two or three hours to break through this with her and (even though she’d first approached us for help) to get her at last—and still with some misgiving—to cooperate.

  Marilyn and I were both surprised by her reaction; but it was clear to us what happened.

  The hostility official intervention in behavioral derangement often causes in those immediately near it is complex. As behavior shifts over a period of months, even years, the strategies that near ones devise to live around those eccentricities, because those strategies develop just as gradually, often allow the severity and larger psychological meaning of the eccentric behavior to vanish in the near ones’ eyes. And it is wrong to read that hostility as a manifestation of individual character—rather than a situational horizon simply more common than not.

  But because we’d been through it before, we both understood it: when I came home and told Marilyn that the doctor had said I should enter Mount Sinai’s Day/Night psychiatric program the next day, she became angry, derisive—then, after an hour, dropped the subject. Ignoring it was the best way to live around it: hospitalization itself was just another part of my growing strangeness, best handled, like the rest of it, by not mentioning it.

  40.6. On a cold autumn morning, sweating, my back against the station wall, waiting, taking a great, almost yawning breath every minute or so, I made myself get on the subway and ride up to 103rd Street on the East Side. Then I walked from Lexington Avenue to Mount Sinai Hospital. Inside, yes, someone had my name on a chart. I was taken upstairs. The layout of the program was explained: there were various occupational games and projects, largely available all day—though certain hours were set aside for my particular group to use them. There was an icebox, open to all patients, which was supplied with simple, ready foodstuff—milk, juice, cold cuts, bread, yogurts, puddings, small cups of Jell-O: the young psychiatric resident showing me around explained, “A lot of anxiety centers about food.” She put the clipboard she was carrying under the arm of her white jacket. “By making this kind of thing easily available, as well as regularly scheduled meals, it takes a lot of pressure off the patients.” (This was before the age of “clients.”) There would be a daily group therapy session. Twice a week I would have individual therapy with my group leader, Dr. G. I was introduced to the other patients, largely a very friendly group—none of them, for this program, too radically disturbed.

  In about an hour I’d be having my first session with Dr. G., so he could get to know me. Later on, I’d be getting a thorough physical examination—also by Dr. G. After that I’d be put on an experimental medication program. (I wondered if it would turn out more like my math class or my physics class.) Why didn’t I sit down now, relax, and make myself comfortable here, talk to some of the other patients if I wanted to?

  40.7. In a small gray room, with only a bare wooden table, Dr. G., his white jacket open over a blue shirt and dark tie, leaned back in the tubular aluminum chair and asked me, “Now your name is Samuel. But I’ve heard people calling you Chip. How did you get the nickname?”

  “I got it in summer camp,” I told him. “I kind of chose it myself. My father was a Sam, you see. My mother’s father was also a Sam. I was ‘Little’ Sam and I didn’t like it very much. When I was ten, I went to a new summer camp, and the counselor was asking everyone’s name. In our tent, he had us all lined up at the feet of our iron-framed bedsteads, and he walked down the line of us asking—” Here I looked down like a counselor staring at a kid—“‘What’s your name?’”

  Now I looked up like a kid looking at a counselor: “‘Belford Lawson the Third.’”

  And down: “‘And what do people call you?’”

  And up: “‘Stinky.’

  “Well, I realized, now’s my chance. Nobody knows me here. I can tell these people anything. I’ve got three seconds to come up with something.

  “The counselor reached me.”

  I looked down. “‘And what is your name?’”

  I looked up: “‘Samuel Ray Delany, Junior,’ which was the full-out moniker.”

  And down. “‘What do people call you?’

  “Lying through my teeth, I told him: ‘Everybody calls me Chip!’ (Nobody had ever called me ‘Chip’ before in my life!) But that’s what people started calling me there. And the name stuck. My younger sister was at the same camp that year. She picked it up and brought it home at the end of the summer.” I shrugged. “I’ve been Chip ever since.”

  Dr. G. was smiling. “I see.” He made a note. “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Books, plays, things like that?” he said. “You’d like to be a writer? But have you had any jobs recently?”

  “Oh, I make my living at it—as best I can, if you can call it a living.”

  “Have you ever published anything?” Behind his round glasses, he raised an eyebrow.

  “Three novels,” I said. “I have a fourth one coming out sometime in the next month or so. Another just sold.”

  He frowned. “How old did you say you were?” he asked.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Then you obviously like to tell stories …?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. Then I realized this was his gentle way of suggesting he didn’t believe me—that, indeed, my “novels” were perhaps my problem.

  But he asked: “I’ve got a note from the doctor you saw. But, in your own words, could you tell me why you think you’re here?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m homosexual. I’m married. I’ve written and sold five novels in three years. I’ve got this thing about subways: and I feel kind of like I’m coming apart at the seams …”

  The next day, though, I brought in copies of my published books to show him. “I just thought, maybe, you’d like to see them. They’re science fiction novels. A paperback book company puts them out, called Ace Books. I didn’t mean to bother you with them, and you don’t have to read them—”

  “Oh, no,” Dr. G. said, looking at them, turning one over, opening another, looking at a descriptive blurb on one that mentioned my age. Then he laughed. “It was a good idea. Otherwise, I’d have had a … very different picture of you than I have now.”

  41. Entering a mental hospital, even on a part-time basis such as I had with Mount Sinai’s Day/Night program, gives a reality to your problems that has both its good and its bad sides. It’s hard to go into a hospital situation and not spend a good deal of time wondering what exactly brought you there, figuring out who you are, or why this is where you’ve ended up, reflecting on the select elements of the past that led to this particular present. It’s probably as hard to avoid such an inquiry into the past in that situation … as it would be in the first month of a marriage.

  42. I thrust the chick’s head into the half-pound coffee can of water. The surface gleamed and shivered above the concentric circles stamped into the tin�
��s bottom. Light ran around my fingers. Above me Dave said, “What you doin’? You gonna drown it!”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, squatting on the kitchen floor. “I’m giving it a drink of water.”

  “Sam,” my father said, turning from the refrigerator, “take that chicken out of there!”

  “It’s thirsty. I’m giving it a drink of—”

  “Take it out, I said!”

  The feet kicking in my fist had stopped. As I lifted the head from the tin, diminished now from the size of a fluffy jack ball to that of a marble the greenish yellow of a hard-boiled egg yolk, it leaned down over my fist, limp and dripping. The white lids were three-quarters closed over the black eyes. Droplets gemmed the translucent beak, standing in and about an oval nostril.

  “Now, there,” Dave said, “you ain’t had it but three minutes and you gone and kilt it!”

  A leaf’s worth of light slid back and forth, tin wall to tin wall.

  At the sink my mother said, “I told you he wasn’t old enough to take care of a pet like that.” She rubbed another white crockery plate with the red-and-white dish towel.

  “I didn’t kill it,” I said, standing up and fingering the limp thing, still warm, still wet, “I was just giving it a drink of water …” But I was beginning to feel a cold and scary sinking. “It was thirsty.”

  “You got to let it drink its own water by its own self—when it wants to,” Dave said. “Give it here a minute. Lemme see.”

  “It’s not dead,” I said. Despite the feeling, I really thought it was alive, maybe sleeping or something. The fear was just the feeling you got whenever adults accused you of doing something bad. “I gave it some water. It’s asleep now.”