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

by Samuel R. Delany

  The desire to write my book was a palpable urge in my hands, in my head. … Yet there was no real way to work on it down here.

  I saw less and less of Bob. Right now, while I was in, he was out. Elmer had let me go—fired me, actually (“Really, there ain’t nothin’ I can use you for, boy, right now.”) because of the seasickness. Firings were constant, offhand, and fairly impersonal along the docks—as were hirings and rehirings: men moved from deck to deck in a summer-long game of musical boats. I was getting ready to find a new one, but it seemed like a perverse misplacement of energies with my novel not a quarter completed in New York—

  “I could send you a plane ticket,” Marilyn said.

  I said: “You could?”

  “Sure. Can you hang around the phone booth? I’ll call you back in about twenty minutes. Or, if somebody is using the phone down there, you call me …”

  The next day Ron lent me some money.

  Later that evening I walked up a few streets into town and got a room with stained, blue-flowered wallpaper, cigarette burns on the white-painted windowsill, an iron frame bedstead and the thinnest mattress I’ve every slept on, on the second floor of a rooming house that catered to the Aransas fisherman. The landlady had white hair, wire-framed glasses, and wore a sweater around her shoulders against the sweltering breeze the electric fan in the downstairs sitting room window managed to stir through the house. The rent was three dollars a night—this was the expensive rooming house, as the cheap one a block over (where rooms went for two-fifty) was full up.

  My plan was to wait and see if Bob’s boat came in tomorrow in order to say good-bye—if not, I’d left messages with Ron, Jake, and the guy at the hamburger place, one of which would get to him. And I’d take off hitching for the Houston airport.

  I put my guitar case in the corner, stretched out on the chenille spread, opened my copy of E Pluribus Unicorn and read:

  … I shipped out with Kelley when I was a kid. Tankships, mostly coastwise: load somewhere in the oil country, New Orleans, Aransas Pass, Port Arthur, or some such—and unload at ports north of Hatteras. Eight days out, eighteen hours in, give or take a day or six hours … There were a lot of unusual things about Kelley, the way he looked, the way he moved; but most unusual about him was the way he thought. …

  The next morning, I was leaving the breakfast place two buildings away. As I stepped off the porch, two two-seater Triumphs pulled up, and a blond guy about my age climbed over the side of one. He wore tan chinos, a shortsleeved white shirt, and white tennis shoes. Coming up on the porch, he asked, in an accent that bespoke middle-class Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, “Hey, do you know if they’ll take travelers’ checks in there? We’re looking for breakfast. How’s the food?”

  “I just had some pretty decent sausages and eggs. Do you like hominy grits? As far as the check, though—” I pointed across the street—“I think you’ll do better over there.”

  The young man turned. A small bank building stood on the other side of the square.

  He looked back at me and smiled, embarrassed at not having seen it.

  I guess it was my own northern accent that made them stop to talk a while on their way back from cashing their check. His friend, in the other car, joined him in the conversation. Their names were something like Tommy and Timmy. Recently graduated from a midwestern university, they were passing through to visit relatives. The sportscars they drove were graduation presents—matched for the two university friends—from their fathers.

  What about me? they wanted to know.

  Well, I’d just finished up a stint working on the boats. Now I was planning to get to Houston to catch a plane back to New York.

  They were heading for Houston, it seemed. We could give this guy a ride (Timmy asked Tommy), couldn’t we?

  I guess so (Tommy told Timmy).

  They’d go in and have breakfast, first, though.

  I sat on a flaking white metal garden chair on the porch, took the paperback out of my pocket, and read another Sturgeon story. I was all set for them to come out and explain that, actually, on thinking it over, it would be a little difficult to take me along. …

  The reservation they emerged from the screen door with, after praising the country breakfast, was, however, much simpler. They still had some stuff to do in the neighborhood. If I would be here at four o’clock, they’d pass back through and pick me up.

  It sounded fine to me.

  They drove off. Wondering if they were really going to come back, I went down to the docks again. Bob’s boat had gotten in about an hour ago. Bob was ambling up the piers looking for me. He’d already gotten two of my three messages.

  “So you’re goin’ home and write your book?” he said. “That’s about the most sensible thing I heard outa you since we started off down here.”

  “What about you?” I asked. About ten o’clock in the morning now, the dock had gotten notably warmer in the few minutes since we’d met.

  “Joanne’s still up there, ain’t she?”

  “Yeah. That’s what Marilyn said.”

  “Then I’m stayin’ here. Don’t worry. I’ll be callin’ every time I’m in.”

  We hung out together through a noon hamburger and a bottle of beer at the hamburger place where I’d gone in my first hour in Aransas. Before I left, behind it, we hugged each other, tightly—the most physically intimate we’d been since we’d left New York. Yet as Bob went off to find his captain (who wanted him to go someplace and pick up something or other and bring it back to the boat), I wondered why, without Marilyn here, I (and probably he) had missed that intimacy so little.

  I went back to the rooming house. The landlady said I could stay in the room till three o’clock. I slept a while; then went down and sat out on the porch again to read one wonderful Sturgeon tale after another. My guitar case was stashed under the chair.

  At ten to four, one Triumph followed the other around into the dusty square.

  I was up and off the porch, the book now in my back pocket, my guitar case banging against my shin. It just made it into the boot of Timmy’s car. Tommy climbed back in without opening the door—so I did too.

  The motor gave its high-performance thrumm and, with the wind whipping at Tommy’s (or Timmy’s) hair, we drove out through the shabby houses.

  The plan, Timmy (or Tommy) explained to me, was this. We weren’t actually leaving for Houston till early the next morning. (As my plane wasn’t leaving till 7:30 the next night, I’d make it, they assured me, hours to spare.) Outside of Aransas there was an island—really an oversized sandbar. A few dirt-poor fishermen had once lived at one end. But that past year, a land development company (in which one of their uncles was a high-up executive) had bought the place, torn down the fishermen’s shacks, dug a canal through the island’s center, then built a series of luxury homes on either side. Each came with a swimming pool. Tributaries led off the central canal to the boathouse each home came with. Each house had its own two-story garage. Dow Chemical Company (a name familiar to me from their advertisements in the Scientific Americans that had arrived monthly for me throughout my childhood) was big in the area … owned the whole goddamned place, I’d heard the men working the docks say grumpily.

  The luxury houses were for the area’s Dow executives. To entice them to buy, now that the houses were finished, the development company had stocked each with food, filled up the bars with whiskey, put steaks and beer in the refrigerators, supplied minimal bedroom and living room furnishings, made the beds, laid out towels and linen in the bathrooms, and invited various prospective buyers to come down with their families and move in for a weekend—just to see how it felt living there.

  The boys had been given the key to one of the unoccupied houses and told they could stay there for the night.

  An hour later, we sat in the living room of one of these assembly-line mansions, a tan brick fireplace at our backs, a stairway beside us swirling up to an indoor balcony and the second floor bedrooms. Outsid
e the windows, we could see the lawn, about three-quarters covered in luxuriant green—that stopped at an austere line of broken right angles, where the sod had not yet been laid. Beyond stretched bleak sand.

  The switches on the wall, we’d discovered when we’d first come in and tried to turn on the lights, moved the heavy, gold-flecked draperies back and forth over the picture windows.

  With what I’d seen in the kitchen, I told them, I could put together a pretty good dinner—

  Timmy looked uncomfortable. Well, he didn’t know if we ought to do that.

  Tommy went on to explain: A few weeks ago, the college-age son of one of the other officers of the development company had been given a key, and had brought down a gang of his friends along with various stragglers they’d picked up en route. They’d started an endless party, drinking up all the liquor, eating up all the food, and even smashing the furniture. “Then, when they finished wrecking one place, they just moved into the next house and started all over again. They threw beds and bureaus into the swimming pools. They even had drugs down here!” Each Monday, apparently, a truckload of maids and carpenters and maintenance men came through to make up the beds, fix any minor damages the visiting executives might have done, restock the bar and the kitchen—and for about three weeks that’s more or less what happened, till someone realized the “minor damages” were getting out of hand.

  “They did thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of damage,” Timmy explained. “So we’ve got to be real careful. I mean, we’re really not even supposed to be here.”

  This story got interrupted once by the doorbell—it was a friendly enough security guard, who seemed to know the difference between a wild house-wrecking party and three young men sitting in the half-dark living room, talking.

  We decided to leave the kitchen alone. Tommy would drive back over the long, thin bridge to the mainland and bring back a pizza—which is what he did.

  We decided that one Coca-Cola apiece from the kitchen wouldn’t be missed. As we sat, eating our pizza on paper towels in our lap, the doorbell rang again. This time it was a somewhat surlier maintenance man who wanted to know what we were doing, but finally turned around and left. Each of us had his own bedroom that night. Mine opened up onto a covered balcony, larger than my whole three-room apartment back on Sixth Street, looking down over the pool and the boathouse.

  After a shower in the immense, tan-tiled bathroom, I went out to stand, naked, at the rail, flipping the switch on the wall that turned the underwater lights on down both sides of the tributary running from the boat house to the canal—permanently lit—itself, by which you could get your boat out to sea.

  The sky was dark and cloudless.

  I thought about the wild party that had recently progressed through the hulks of the other, ready-made mansions standing along the water. Here and there a light shone in one of the windows. I thought about Bob’s tale of the affair at Virginia Beach. I might even tell him I’d been to such a party, here, next time I saw him. He would know it was bullshit, but he liked a good story.

  I went inside and slipped into bed.

  Next morning, before eight, we were in the cars and off.

  Later that afternoon, while filling stations and piles of dusty tires passed by, I saw a green highway sign, informing me that we were in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, while at that moment, on the car radio, the Beach Boys sang, “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena”—about a suburb in another city entirely.

  Outside the terminal, I waved goodbye to Tommy and Timmy. Their sports cars roared away.

  At the airport counter, my ticket was waiting.

  I had two and a half hours till takeoff. I checked my guitar case and wandered outside around the field, now into some of the maintenance hangars, now back into the waiting room.

  This was my first airplane flight. By the time, with the other passengers, I walked across the hot tarmac to climb the roll-away steps into the silver-sided jet, my flimsy red ticket collected by the smiling stewardess, to look left and right for my seat number somewhere along the beige aisle, I realized that the taking off of the spaceships in the science fiction stories that had enthralled me since my childhood had nothing to do with the flight I was about to go on.

  In Asimov’s Foundation stories from the forties, or even in Bester’s The Stars My Destination from the mid-fifties, no matter how festooned with scientific gewgaws and technological gadgets, the “spaceports” in these tales were not modeled on any contemporary airport, but rather on some ancient train station, or even a set of boat docks such as the ones I’d just been working at.

  With this revelation, my seatbelt across my lap and the instructions of the stewardess as to oxygen and emergency exits still in my ears, I felt the plane beneath me rumble; we rolled forward and—with no change in feel from ground to air—up into Texas sky. The Houston-New York trip (in those days before fuel conservation) took three hours. It seemed to me that the plane went up, leveled off (by now it was dark out the oval windows, and I lay back in my chair, looking at the little starlike perforations in the tan-enameled strip that ran along the edging between the gently curved and padded wall and the overhanging storage compartments with their air nozzles, oxygen compartment doors, individual lights, and call buttons), and came down again.

  The reality of crossing in three hours what had taken me four days to hitchhike was shocking—far more and far more deeply than anything I’d ever experienced in terms of sex or emotions; so that when I walked off the plane at Kennedy, I kept saying to myself: “I’m not the same person I was when I got on! I’m a wholly different human being! I live in a wholly different world now—in a wholly different century! I will never be able to look out at the horizon, as only three days ago I did from the rail of Elmer’s boat, and experience it in the same way again. Never. I’m a member of the Twentieth Century now the way most of the people I’ve been working with and talking to for most of the last six weeks are not!”

  58.5. The above account of the stay in Texas is pretty exhaustive too—though not conscientiously so.

  But no simple, sensory narrative can master what it purports—whether it be a hitchhiking trip to Texas or the memories that remain from such a trip twenty-five years later. That age-old philosophical chestnut, the Problem of Representation (in its twin forms, the Problem of Verification and the Problem of Exhaustiveness) makes mastery as such a non-problem, with no need of haute théorie. Theodore Sturgeon’s fine insight is perhaps germane here: the best writing does not reproduce—or represent—the writer’s experience at all. Rather it creates an experience that is entirely the reader’s, forged and fashioned wholly from her or his knowledge, of her or his memories, by her or his ideology and sensibility, and demonstrably different for each—but which (according to the writer’s skill) is merely as meaningful (though not necessarily meaningful in the same way) as the writer’s, merely as vivid.

  In short, writing creates not a representation of the writer’s world but a model of the writer’s purport.

  (It creates a re-presentation, in a different form, of the reader’s world.)

  But to model is not to master.

  Finally, though, isn’t it a question of models that all narrative more or less leads to?

  I’m as surprised as anyone that the totality of this narrative (§§58-58.51), however interim, makes such an easy fiction—that it might even be, for some, a satisfying one. Yet even as I write this I’m aware that such a totality is purely one of memory—not at all of analysis, say. (It is as arbitrary as it is interim.) What account of those days might Bob write now? Might Marilyn? Might Ron? Might Captain Joe? Might Tony? Might Sandy? (These two names are, I confess, conscientious replacements for the real ones.) What might Red say, or Billy, or Elmer, or Jake, or Tommy, or Timmy? (These last two, I hope their consonance betrays, I do not remember at all. I only assume that the fellows had them, that once I knew them.) Could their totalities be inscribed, easily and uncritically, within the interst
ices of mine, overlapping transparently where they overlapped at all, filling my silence with sensory articulations in such a way as to suggest a smooth and rational continuity, an accessibility, the coherence of the real? What would actual documents—old airline tickets, phone bills listing long-distance numbers, times, dates, costs, and durations, journal entries, letters, weather reports for New York and Corpus Christi, newspaper clippings (did Red’s arrest make the Aransas Star? Was there a paper of that name?)—add to, detract from, or problematize in this account? Or would the alternate columns such accounts might make, when read side by side with this one, obscure, distort, and contradict one another, producing the aporias that force into conceptual existence that mental economy which, while it is as much a fiction as any other, alone might contain them all and which can only be called history?

  58.51 (When everyone “knows” what has occurred, there is no history—only a mythology that, for all its practical effects, is contemporaneous with the present.)

  Some readers will certainly want, here, some reconstruction of my meeting with Marilyn. (None of it exists in memory.) She didn’t come to meet me at the airport. I believe I asked her not to on the phone, when I called her just before the flight from Houston. I probably thought a great deal, in the bus from the recently renamed Kennedy Airport, about what that meeting was going to be like. When I unlocked the apartment door, with the keys I’d carried in my jeans down to Texas and back, and she looked up, probably from the kitchen table, I’m sure there were smiles between us. Certainly there was a hug. There were, I’m sure, anxieties. There were questions about Bob. At some point I probably excused myself to type another paragraph or two on the page still around the typewriter’s platen. And, still later, we must have sat at the kitchen table, talking. Probably we took a walk in the warm Lower East Side streets that night. Probably I ate. Perhaps there was some strained argument, sulks and silences from one or both of us, that, after a while, gave way to makeshift smiles again—and more conversation, back at the apartment, late into the morning.