Atlantis: Three Tales

by Samuel R. Delany

  Sam said: “Wow . . . !” though his “Wow” was at the gilded stones, the burnished panes, the towers before him, rather than at the words that wove from behind through the woof of towers ahead. He glanced back at the man, then turned to the city again, where, in a building he couldn’t name, copper light fell from one window—“Oh . . . !” Sam breathed—to the window below. “Wow.

  “Atlantis,” the man repeated. “And the only way to get there is the bridge: the arched nave of this loom, the temple of this stranded warp, the pick of some epiphenomenal gull among them as it shuttles tower to tower, bobbin, spool, and spindle. The bridge—that’s what brings us exhausted devils, in the still and tired evening, to Atlantis.”

  “That’s . . . I mean—”

  “Atlantis? There, you can see it, when the sun’s like this—the city whose kings ordered this bridge be built. Better, the city grows, weaves, wavers from the bridge, boy—not the bridge from the city. For the bridge is a woob—orbly and woob are Sammy’s words: a woob’s something halfway between a womb and a web. Roebling’s bridge, Stella’s bridge, my bridge! Trust me—it wasn’t gray, girder-grinding, grim and grumpy New York that wove out from this mill. Any dull, seamy era can throw up an Atlantis—Atlantis, I say: city of mirrors, City of Dreadful Night, there a-glittering in the sun! Vor cosma saga. Look at those towers—those molte alti torri, those executors of Mars, like those ’round Montereggione. Vor shalmer raga. Look at them, listen: O Jerusalem and Nineveh—among them you can hear Nimrod’s horn bleating and Ephialtes’ chain a-rattle. Whose was the last funeral you tagged behind, when the bee drowsed with the bear? What primaveral prince, priest, pauper, Egyptian mummy was it, borne off to night, fire, and forever? What mother’s son—or daughter—was it, boxed now and buried? Per crucem ad lucem. Everything living arcs to an end. Nabat. Kalit. The hour to suffer. It’s a dangerous city, Sam. Et in Arcadia ego. Anything can be stolen from you any moment. But all you get bringing up the rear of funerals in November is shattered by the sea—for death’s as marvelous a mystery as either birth or madness. Go strolling in our city parks, Caina, Ptolomea, Judecca. (The only one I don’t have to worry about getting frozen into, I guess, is Antenora—if only thanks to the change of season.) Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent. Go on, ask: ‘Maestro, di, che terra è questa?’ No, not penitence, but song. I’m still not ready for repentance. See, I’m looking for Atlantis, too, Sam—sometimes I think the worst that can happen is that I’ll be stuck with the opportunists in the vestibule—maybe even allowed to loll among the pages of the virtuous Pagan. But then I’m afraid you’re more likely to find me running in circles on burning sand, under a slow fall of fire—that’s if I don’t just snap and end up in the trees, where harpies peck the bleeding bark. Mine and Amfortas’s wounds both could use us some of Achilles’ rust—if not a little general ataraxy. In Atlantis you spend every night carousing with Charlie Chaplin—and celebrate each dawn with randy icemen at your knees. In Atlantis, you can strut between Jim Harris and the emperor every day, Mike Drayton squiring Goldilocks behind. In Atlantis, all poets wake up in the morning real advertising successes—and cheese unbinds, like figs. Step right up, sit down with your own Sammy, drink a glass of malmsey, and share a long clay stem. When this Orlando is to his dark tower come—when I split my ivory horn in two, bleeding from lip and ear (you think my pop will be my Ganelon and finally pluck me from my santa gesta?)—will they hear me eight miles or thirty leagues away, the note borne by an angel? You’re sensitive, boy—sensitive to beauty. I can tell from your ‘Wow!’—it’s a sensitive ‘Wow!’ So—Wow!—I know you know what I’m talking of. As well, you’re a handsome boy—like Jean. Only handsomer than Jean; I’d say it if anyone asked me. But there—I have said it; and it’s still true! That’s the job of poets, you know—to speak the terrifying, simple truths, that, for most people, are so difficult they stick in the throat from embarrassment. I mean, what’s poetry for, anyway? To write a reply on the back of a paper somebody slips you at the baths with their address on it whom you don’t feel like fucking? To celebrate some black theft of goose, cigar, and perfume—rather than toss it out the window at Thompson’s?”

  Sam had been used to people down home saying, “The Bishop has some fine looking boys!” He’d even had two or three girls at the school get moony and giggly about him, fascinated with the silliest thing he’d say. But the notion of himself as really handsome . . . ? He pushed his fingertips over the green bench planks, beneath his thighs.

  “Actually,” the man said behind him (again Sam looked at the city), “I’m probably as good a poet as I am because I’m quite brave. I’m not some Jonathan Yankee nor yet, really, a Pierrot. But I’ve trod far shadowier grounds than those Wordsworth preluded his excursion to cover—precisely because they are not in the mind of man. Sure. I mean, here a logical fellow must ask: okay, what finally keeps me from it? We have the river’s flow—instead of certainty. I could be any old priestess of Hesperus—wrecked on whatever. Am I really going to sing three times? It’s a pretty easy argument that, whether in Egypt or at the Dardanelles, with any two towns divided by water, one can always play Abydos to the other’s Sestos: for every Hero somewhere there’s a Leander, and every Hero has her Hellespont. There’s always hope as long as he remembers how to swim. I mean what are you going to do with Eve, La Gioconda, and Delilah—replace the latter two with Magdalene or Mary? Do I covet the extinction of light in dark waters? Three Marys will rise up and calm the roar: sure—Mary Garden, Merry Andrews, and Mary Baker Eddy.

  “But we have the bridge.

  “Oh, surely, it starts with your having a satori in the dentist chair, and the next you know you’re at work on your hieros gamos and giggling over what Dol Common said to Sir Epicure. There are some folks to whom the thunder speaks; but there are others who need poets to rend and read into it their own trap-clap. (I hope you’re not sure, either, who that their own refers to.) It ends, however, here, with me talking to you—I certainly didn’t think I would be, half an hour ago. Not when I first saw you. The ones who terrify me are always the short, muscular blonds—and the tall, dark, handsome ones. Like you. ‘Tall, dark, and handsome’? That’s trite for terror. But it’s true. I live with a short, muscular blond. We have a nice, six-dollar a week room. Only, I confess, it’s the eight dollar room I lust after. That’s Roebling’s room. My blond’s a sailor. His old man’s the building owner. Now he’s got the view—but he tells me I can come in and use it whenever I want. They’re nice, that way. You can’t imagine what it took, getting up nerve to speak to him—but I said, his name’s Emil—to talk with him; and really talking with someone is different from simply speaking. I mean, you and I are speaking. But are we talking yet? Perhaps we ought to find out if we can. Still, suddenly, Emil and I—my handsome sailor, my golden wanderer, off after his own fleece—we were talking—telling each other how we felt. About one another. About the world. We talked till the sun came up; then he kissed my eyes with a speech entirely beyond words, and I’ve been able to do nothing but babble my happiness since. We decided it really would be terrible if we ever left each other. So he asked me to move in with him. All life is a bridge, I told him. Even the whole world. He’s like an older brother—it’s like living with a brother. And once again I’m hearing things before dawn. I’m three years younger than he—and two inches taller! But sometimes, it’s true, I feel like I’m the elder. His father can’t imagine that anything could be going on that shouldn’t be—if anything is going on at all.” Sam heard him shrug . . . “It’s a hoot. The last person to pick him up and suckle at his schlong was Lauritz Melchior. Now, because they both speak Danish, we get to lurk backstage at the Met, about as regular as The Brooklyn Eagle. But it’s very pure. Very severe, between us—Emil and me. But he is a sailor—and he goes on voyages. He’s away, now—in South America. But in Atlantis, I live forever, in my room with my Victrola and my love. It makes my dark room light and light.” Suddenly the man leaned forward again. (Sam
could hear him, not see him, closer at his back.) “Tell me, Sam: Have you ever tried to kiss the sun? I mean, deep kiss it—French kiss it as they’ve just begun to say. Maul it with your lips and tongue? Flung your arms around it, pulled it down on top of you, till it seared your chest and toasted the white wafer cheek of love, poached the orbs in your skull, even while you thrust your mouth out and into its fires till the magma at its core blackened the wet muscle of all articulation? Well, Atlantis is the town in which everybody, man and woman, can kiss the sun and still have the moon smile down on them—not this stock, market culture of the stock market. And believe me, sometimes when the sun’s away, you’ll find yourself needs reaching for the moon. All I do is sweat with imagined jealousies while he’s gone—Emil, I mean. But someday, he’s going to come home, just while I’m in the throes of it, down on the daybed, with you or some guinea fisherman’s randy brat—does it matter which? And . . .” The man sat back. Sam couldn’t see him for the city—though he heard his fingers snap: “That’ll be it! But that’s not for today. That’s for another time. Do you want to come back to the place with me—have a drink? We could be alone. I’m a good man to get soused with, if you like to get soused—and what self-respecting Negro doesn’t? Come on, relax. Spend a little time—come with me, boy-oh-boy, and we’ll get boozy and comfortable.”

  Was it the mention of the fisherman? Was it the mention of the moon? Suddenly Sam stood and turned around. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to get a policeman.”

  The man frowned, put his head to the side.

  “I’m going to get a policeman. This isn’t right—” He thought: How do you explain to this fellow that the boat was really empty, that a man had really drowned?

  “But you don’t have to do—”

  “I’m sorry! But I have to tell somebody! Look, we just can’t—”

  The man was looking at Sam’s hands—which, in his excitement, had come loose to wave all over the day.

  “I know all about it—the force of the club in the hand of the working man. Really,” the man added, with a worried look, “policemen are so dull. Laughter’s what you want here. Celebration of the city. Beauty. Higher thoughts. Get yourself lost in that lattice of flame. Humor’s the artist’s only weapon against the proletariat—and, in this city, my friend, the police are as proletarian as they come. Hey, I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t—I mean I only asked . . . only offered you a sociable drink—”

  “I’m going to get a policeman,” Sam repeated. “Now.” He added: “Maybe we’ll be back—!” He started away. “In a few minutes.”

  From behind him the man called out, almost petulantly: “That’s not the way to Atlantis!”

  Sam glanced back.

  “And you’re a damned fool if you think I’m going to wait around for you.” The man stood now, one hand on the bench back, like someone poised to run. His final salvo: “Don’t think you’ll ever get to it calling the law on people like me!”

  Sam started again. Really, the fellow was a fool! What in the world had made him sit there listening, letting the man drench him in his lurid monologue? Sam broke into a lope, into a run—turned and, practically dancing backwards, looked once more:

  The man was hurrying off, into Brooklyn, into Flatbush, or wherever he’d said he lived, moving away almost as fast as Sam was moving toward the city. Sam turned ahead, in time to take the stairs down the Manhattan stanchion—two at a step. Three minutes later, he almost missed the narrow entrance down to Rose. He had to swing around the rail, come back, and, at the entrance, plunge in silence by gray stone.

  He found a policeman coming along the black metal railing by City Hall Park, where tall buildings’ shadows had already darkened the lower stories to gray—save when Sam passed an east-west street, gilded with sudden sun. He hurried up to the officer. “Excuse me, sir. Please.” On the other side of the park’s grass, light glinted on the edge of the sprawling trolley terminals tin roof—where some of the green paint had come away . . . ? “But I think someone’s drowned—in the river, sir. I was up walking across, into Brooklyn, and—”

  “You saw someone do a Brodie off the bridge?” Below the midnight visor, webbed in forty-plus years’ wrinkles, river-green eyes were perfectly serious.

  “Someone jump, you mean? No. He was in a boat. I could see it, down in the water. And later on, I saw the boat again—and it was empty. A green rowboat—I think.”

  The policeman said: “Oh. You saw him go over?”

  Sam watched the man’s dull squint and his ordinary thumb laid up against the belly of his shirt between his jacket flaps, like something inevitable. He thought about putting his own hands in his pockets, but kept them hanging by force. “Well, no—not really. I mean, I didn’t actually see it. But later—I saw the same boat. The oar was floating behind it. And there was nobody in it.”

  “Oh,” the policeman said again. The ordinary thumb rose, and the officer scratched ash-blown blond, cap edge a-joggling on the walnuts of his knuckles. “And how long ago was this?”

  “Just a few minutes,” Sam said, trying to figure how long he’d been talking with the man on the bridge. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes.” Probably it was over thirty. Could it have been an hour? “But, well, you know. It takes some time to get all the way back over, to this side, from Brooklyn.”

  “It was on the Brooklyn side?”

  “It was closer to the Brooklyn side than ours.”

  “Then why didn’t you try to get some help over there?” The officer dropped his hand to put a fist on his bullet-belt.

  “I didn’t see anybody over there. And I was coming back this way, anyway—I mean, I don’t think there’s anything anybody could have done. Not now. Even then. But I still thought I ought to tell somebody. An officer. That it happened—that it probably happened . . . I mean.”

  “Oh,” the policeman said a third time. “I see.”

  Sam looked around, looked at the policeman, who seemed to be waiting for him to leave, and finally said a hurried, “I just wanted to tell you—Thank you, sir,” and ducked around him, embarrassment reddening his cheeks, rouging his neck.

  At the corner, Sam glanced back, hoping the officer would be marking it down on his pad—at least the time or the place or something—in case, later, it came up. (Above, incomplete construction marked the day with girders and derrick, flown against the clouds in sight of the sound; for a moment Sam recalled the white workers who, with saw and torch, would hang there, humming, through the week.) Would that white man remember? But the officer was walking on, crossing silver tracks in a fan of sunlight, one untroubled hand flipping his billyclub down, around, and up—now one way, now the other.

  Starting purposefully uptown, Sam mulled, block after block, toward the twilight city, now on the disappearance of the fisherman, now on the ravings of the stranger on the bridge, now on the three girls coming down the steps when he’d arrived at the underpass, whose delicate descent had innocently initiated it all, now on the policeman who’d brought the afternoon to its inconclusive close. A knot had tied low in his throat—an anxious thing that wouldn’t be swallowed, that kept him walking, kept him thinking, kept him rehearsing and revising bits of the day in their dialogue—till, stalking some greater understanding still eluding him, he got as far as Fifty-second Street.

  Nestled in the grip of gilded tritons and swept round by cast nereids’ metal drapes, up on the pediment of a bank, with its brazen disk, from arrow-tipped hands, down-cast, short one right and long one left (a wonderful water clock, he thought suddenly and absurdly, in which the water had all run out), Sam realized it was just after . . . twenty-five-to-five!

  Along all four legs of the intersection, he looked with electric attention for a subway stop’s green globes. He’d been due at Elsie and Corey’s almost forty minutes ago!

  e

  Mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey,

  The neighboring lamps throw grey stained gold—

 
Houses in the distance like mountains seem,

  The bridge lost in the mist—

  The essence of life remains a screen;

  Life itself in many grey spots

  That trickle the blood until it rots . . .

  —SAMUEL BERNHARD GREENBERG,

  “Serenade in Grey”

  Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,

  the dark ships move, the dark ships move . . .

  —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Middle Passage”

  Sam got to Elsie and Corey’s after five.

  Elsie’s school books—she was studying for her Master’s in Education—had been moved to the windowsill. The table had been carried from the kitchen into the living room and the wings attached. The peach colored cloth was already spread. Knives, forks, spoons, and linen napkins were laid—and in front of Lucius, in New York for the week, a bread-and-butter plate was crummy with half a dinner biscuit, butter knife propped on the rim. Lucius was saying: “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to wait for him. Where you been, boy? We’ve all been sittin’ around here hungry!”

  Originally Lucius’s apartment, eventually (Sam knew) it had housed all his older brothers and sisters—getting in each other’s way, helping each other out, arguing with one another, going out for the evening so this one might study or that one entertain, scuffling to get together the forty-five dollars a month rent, generating a thousand stories to tell on holiday trips back to Raleigh. Even Jules, during her year in the city, had lived here. (They’d all moved now, except Corey and Elsie.) Even Hubert.

  “Well, he’s here now,” Corey said. “That’s what’s important. There’s no harm done.” (All had lived here—except Sam.) “Go wash your hands, Sam—then bring in those soup plates for Elsie.”