Atlantis: Three Tales

by Samuel R. Delany

  They broke around him, running—and were gone.

  I don’t expect us to find anything from the Allen Ginsberg cabal that meets our criteria. So why don’t we close the door now.

  Beside the steps stood a wooden booth with a glassed-in window, before which were the same brass bars he’d become familiar with in front of tellers at the bank and clerks in the subway’s change booths and post offices. Below the wooden shelf with its worn depression for the change to slide into, was another sign—

  Toll:

  Pedestrians 1¢

  —faded and flaking. But perhaps the toll was not in effect today—or, indeed, had not been in effect for some time: the booth was closed; no one sat behind the bars to collect.

  Sam climbed the stairs and walked around the great stone column—on the near side of which a black-bronze plaque explained that the bridge had first been opened to traffic in 1883—forty-one years ago!

  He strolled out on the walkway, looking down over the green rail, at the tracks between him and the trolley wires.

  Dead in the afternoon—hasn’t the sky?—, gas lamps at intervals stood along the walkway’s sides. A sailor in early whites came toward him, hurled balled waxed paper from a late lunch over the rail, to follow it with a delicately flipped toothpick from his lips’ corner. He was carrying some kind of Japanese fan. Over its folds, pastel waves were painted in blues and blacks. The sailor hawked across the bar, returned from moving the other authority recently dropped, and gave Sam a grin: Sam imagined sputum sparkling down between girders to the water. The fellow sauntered away around the stone. (The fan. Where was it from? Where would it go? . . . Cathay.) Benches with wrought iron backs sat along the walkway, wrested as much of that severe sunshine as you need now. Now turning, Sam saw the lower city’s skyline, towers above the water—yes, and there, on the way you go, were his skyscrapers! And there in the other direction was the green woman with the upraised torch—Liberty! Tug and sail and barge traffic moved lazily about the sound.

  Cowley and Crane at Sweets. Fitzgerald and Agee at the Chrysler. Agee’s first poems bore a title from Crane’s exhortation to Emil Opffer: Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.

  But what Sam hadn’t been prepared for was the bridge itself. The reason why it happened only since you woke up—he walked along the planks, head high—is letting the steam disappear from those clouds. Imagine a giant harp, when the landscape all around is hilly sites. No, imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones—just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue.

  For there to be more air—

  He dropped his head, still walking, to look for a moment at his shoes—and had the disorienting experience of being suspended more than a hundred feet in mid-air above glass-green water!

  He stopped.

  The boards were again under his leather shoe soles.

  Heart pounding, he swayed a bit. Then, still looking down, he started to walk again: between each foot-worn three-inch plank and the next was a quarter-inch gap. What had happened, he realized, was that to move over them with any speed was to let the light from the river glitter up through the spaces, creating the illusion that the walkway had vanished—or at least had gone largely transparent! Green as trolley sparks, the water—thousands of millions of drops of it—flowed below.

  Precisely as we move, we move through time. Time is a function of motion—but of the microminiature motions of the atoms in their crystal lattices and the cosmic motions of stars and the collection of stars we inhabit.

  How many epochs could those waters clock, passing under the bridge?

  Sam strolled a dozen steps more, looking down, relishing the feel of this miraculous suspension above the brilliant river—till a dinghy, with chipped gunwales of flat gray-green, slid into sight. In a wide straw hat, a—shirtless?—man tugged and leaned on the oars.

  The boat looked smaller than some wooden bath toy, small as a match box—Sam sensed all over again how high he was.

  Again Sam stopped—man and boat vanished. He could just glimpse the boat’s rim moving under a single crack. Again Sam walked.

  Rower and river reappeared. Yes, the man was shirtless. Was it warmer down on the water than it was up here in the sky? The rower’s bare feet were wedged against one of the boat’s cross-braces. His pants were brown, and—small as he was—you could see one knee was frayed; a simple rip crossed the other, so that that knee—like a bone from Negro flesh—stuck out. The boat moved at an acute diagonal to the sunside of a shadow on the water—the shadow, Sam realized, of the bridge.

  Archie also mentioned Hart Crane, whom he had once persuaded Fortune to take on for a trial. Hart had been completely unable to do it. It did not cross my mind that this had any relevance to me.

  Sam was about to stop and start again, to make the man disappear and reappear—but now the rower pulled in his oars, took off the straw hat—his hair was black and his shoulders were sun-darkened enough that, for a moment, still walking to hold the sight, Sam wondered if the fellow was colored. The man tossed the hat to the dinghy’s back seat, then stood.

  The fellow’s hands went to his waist; then his pants dropped—first to his knees, then to his feet! With the awkward step you use in a rocking boat, he got one foot free of them, then the other. Nor was he wearing underwear.

  The minuscule figure grasped his genitals—

  —and winked out to become only water. What had happened, Sam realized, was that the visible area was only the fraction of an arc directly below; and when he’d walked more than sixteen feet or so, the area he could see moved over: his arc of visibility no longer included the boat!

  Without even looking up, Sam swung around and began to stride back. Yes, there the fellow was, doing what Sam had assumed he’d been about to do: urinating. Ripples spread in translucent rings, through sunlight, from where, some feet from the boat’s side, the fellow’s waters conjoined the river’s.

  Man as water clock . . . ?

  Striding, Sam watched, wondering why any man, to do what all men do, had to strip himself naked in the midst of the water—

  When he collided, that is, banging his jaw on someone’s head, confused, with . . . yes, a man, who grasped him by the shoulders, steadied him, more fitness, pushed him out to arm’s length: “Hey, there, young fellow—!”

  “Oh . . . !” Sam said, read into the undeduced result. “Oh . . . ! I’m . . . Are you . . . ?”

  It was a white man, dark complected but not swarthy, maybe Hubert’s age, though at least a head shorter, with wire framed glasses like Mama’s. His jaw was broad, his mustache brown.

  “I’m sorry . . . Oh!” Sam repeated. “Are you all right?” His own jaw throbbed, though he did not want to touch it.

  “I’m fine. What about you? Heads up on the bridge now, young fellow!” Then, with a warm grin, the man walked on.

  After that, Sam thought about looking down again at the crazy rower pissing from his boat. He rubbed his jaw. But even though no one was nearer than land, it wasn’t something you wanted to be caught looking at. So after that, he raised his eyes again to the cables; and walked . . . more slowly.

  I must at once acknowledge an even greater indebtedness to Mr. Willis Clarke for his generosity toward me. In 1903 Mr. Clarke began to collect copies of letters and facts for a life . . . but was so baffled by conflicting statements that he dropped the work. His shorthand report of an interview with Crane at Brede is quoted in Chapters 1, 3, and 4 and 7 of this book.

  Well, the bridge was magnificent.

  Besides the man he’d collided with hurrying off, only half a dozen people strolled along the boardwalk. This means never—two cyclists pedaled across: a young man, followed by a young woman in blowing skirts, both in yellow hats with black ribbons. (Certainly they’d be in love .
. . ) Getting any closer to—a seagull swooped in rings between the cables, circled again to perch unsteadily on one slant cord, bobbed its tail, and, for all its unsteadiness, let fall its liquid waste, a white gleam along gray cable, before it splatted, in a lime-like star, over the planks fifteen feet ahead. The whole world, it seemed, was expectorating, urinating, defecating. Was that the basic principal operating behind spring in New York?

  A day of natural functions?

  He thought about it and continued walking. The time to look at skyscrapers, he decided (still entranced with the bridge itself)—rather than to the distracted entity of a mirage—, would be on the way back.

  Ten minutes later, Sam reached the second stanchion’s platform, to gaze over at the Brooklyn shore. No skyscrapers there. Right, low buildings hugged the water. Other than that, there was not too much of anything, really—save scattered wooden houses. As Sam came down the steps and started forward on the bridge’s landward leg, ahead and to the left was . . . an early cornfield!

  In February of 1929, Edna St.-Vincent Millay had not yet heard of Hart Crane—according to Mary Blair’s soon to be divorced husband, Bunny Wilson.

  He began to slow his pace, found himself frowning, the half-meant, half-perceived motions. Really, this was, in its way, more disconcerting than the visual revelation of his height above the water at bridge center.

  Already Sam had learned to see the city, with its numbered streets and avenues, even with those exceptions like Hamilton Terrace—or Gay Street or Rose—, as a grid in which everything had its place, in which nothing could be lost. Even after a few months, the country had become in memory a kind of field, verdant and vasty, of fronds out of idle depths, pleasant to the eye, but in which nothing much could be found, especially if it wasn’t your own bit of it that you’d spent your whole life learning as best you could, but only a stretch—like this—like it: which are summer. The city behind him, in whose concrete crevices he’d been learning to find his way, the city he’d been learning to work in, to make himself comfortable in, even more, to have some bit of fun in . . . well, though it was still supposed to be New York, here was no city at all!

  Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land—land not terribly different from what he’d left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches. There was a cluster of white frame houses you might even call a township; and two, four, or twelve miles further along the road (he knew) there’d be another. But the bridge here, he realized, connected the city to the country. And country was what Sam thought he’d left behind.

  Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay took their lives that spring. Great gifts always set their possessors apart, but not necessarily apart from any chance to exercise them; this gift at that time pretty well did, what is meant is that this distant image of you, the way you really are,

  For the first time in months, he remembered the white woman on the train—Scottish—who’d been so eager to talk . . . who lived in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived—gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it—made him as uneasy as she had.

  Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.

  Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat—the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge had imperceptibly lowered, till it was only a third as high above the greeny river as it had been in the center. That was why it took him an eye’s blink, a heart’s beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger—the tiny thing—turning slowly, moving out from the rail’s edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water—a leg of the doffed trousers?

  what did you see as you fell, what did you hear / as you sank?

  Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below.

  No, the boat was empty.

  He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat—one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples . . .

  is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesitate, Sentimentality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation

  He saw nothing.

  I should have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have—though, he pondered a moment later, what good might I have done him even if I had seen him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even from here—to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.

  In the lunar year, the sun’s death month—and the death month of the young god—is the thirteenth month.

  No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it—or seen more of it?

  Had it been a young man? Or an old? Was it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean—but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark’s tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime’s collision with the sea?

  Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up?

  The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past—

  The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland’s edge—by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it.

  Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he’d left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge’s center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet—and the bridge’s shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it—so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn’t compensate.

  Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence.

  A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches and gaze off at the clouds over Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces: before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels, at least he should find a policeman and tell him what had happened. He even got up, thinking to start again for the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as he stood, he realized the one thing he would never find—among those fields and farmhouses—was a policeman.

  while morning is still, Hart Crane committed suicide on April 27, 1932, by jumping into the sea from the deck of a steamer bearing him from Mexico to the United States, and before the body is changed by the faces of evening

  Policemen were in cities.

  Sam sat again. Certainly boat, hat, and the man’s odd unconcern abou
t his nakedness seemed connected, in Sam’s mind, with the more rural—

  I, / Catullus redivivus

  “Excuse me,” someone said behind him. “But you’re Negro, aren’t you?”

  d

  The One remains, the many change and pass;

  Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Adonaïs

  . . . plough through thrashing glister toward

  fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,

  weave toward New World littorals that are

  mirage and myth and actual shore.

  —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Middle Passage”

  Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he’d bumped when he’d been staring through the planks.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “That’s right. I am.”

  “I know it’s none of my business,” the man said. “But I’d bet a lot of people meet you and think you’re white.”

  Well, a lot of people up here did. “Some of them.”

  “The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend—a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they’re much more like poems. You read them, and you can just see the sunlight on the fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls’ laughter. His name is Jean—”