Atlantis: Three Tales

by Samuel R. Delany

  I tried to think of all the reasons I hadn’t called out. They might have beat me up, or hurt me more than they had. What would neighbors—or the police—have thought, coming in and finding me like that? Or thought of John? I might have gotten DeLys in trouble with Costas, from whom she rented the house. Or I might have gotten Costas in trouble with the police: he was a nice guy—a Greek law student at Harvard, home for spring break, who probably wasn’t supposed to be renting his house out to foreigners anyway. But, lying there, I couldn’t really be sure if any of those thoughts had been in my mind while it had been happening.

  Again, I pushed out like I was trying to shit.

  The stinging was just as painful. Then a muscle in back of my left thigh cramped sharply enough to make me cry out.

  III

  Oh, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks; and when inspiration is gone, he stands, like a worthless son whom his father has driven out of the house, and stares at the miserable pense that pity has given him for the road.

  —Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion

  At five-thirty, since neither of us was asleep, John got up to make coffee. The sun came sideways through the shutters. Birds chirped. John kept touching a bruise on his cheek with three fingers pressed together. “Now they were not nice boys at all!” In his light blue robe with the navy piping, he shook out yellow papers of grounds, of sugar, into the long-handled pot on the Petrogaz ring. “Why I brought home two, I’ll never know! You’d think I hadn’t done this before. But when I first met them, they were both so sweet.” He turned on the water in the gray stone sink. “One of them hit me.” He turned it off again. From the shelf he took down a jar of marmalade, examined the green and gold label, shook his head, then put it back. Again he touched his cheek. “Scared me to death! Once he hit me, though, I decided I’d just let the two of them do anything they wanted.” He fingered his bruise again. “He took money from me, too,” he said, confidingly. “I don’t like it when a boy takes money from me. I don’t mind giving a boy a few drachma, a few lira, especially if he’s in the army—or the navy. Nobody could be expected to live off what they pay you there. That’s why the entire Greek army hustles.” He touched the bruise again. “You know, you really didn’t have to clean the piss up off the toilet floor this morning.” The near corner of the bed with its ivory crocheted cover, the ancient refrigerator with the circular cooling unit on top, and the blue table with the three blue chairs with flowers decaled on their backs made a kind of crowded triangle on the red tile. “I would have done it myself if you’d left it. That was just rudeness. Believe me, they weren’t that drunk! You know?” Moving about on bony feet, he pulled out first one chair, then the other. “I really thought, because you were colored, they weren’t going to bother you and isn’t that—” he went on, as though it were the same sentence—“the dumbest thing I could possibly have said this morning! But that’s what I thought. Come, sit down now. And have some coffee.”

  I stepped away from the doorway where, just inside the hanging, I’d been leaning against the jamb. I’d put all my clothes on, including my shoes. For all the dawn sunlight, the house was still nippy.

  “But when that boy struck me—who’d been just as sweet as he could be, an hour ago—the chunky one . . . ?” Pouring little cups of coffee like liquid night from the brass pot, John took up his apologia again. “A perfectly dreadful child, he turned out to be. The other, I thought—the tall one—was quite nice, though. Basically. I don’t think he would have done anything, if his friend hadn’t put him up to it. But I was as scared as I’ve ever been before in my life! I’m awfully glad somebody else was here. Not that it did much good.”

  IV

  This vast irregular sheet of water, which rushes by without respite, rolls all colors toward nothingness. See how dim it all is.

  —Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or The Architect

  I got my ticket for London that morning. When the man behind the brass bars said I’d be taking the Orient Express, it was kind of exciting. There’d be no problem, he explained, my stopping off in Munich.

  Back up in Anaphiotika, I came in to find an ecstatic John: “Really, I don’t carry on like this when I’m at home. But you know, in ’Stamboul, because, I guess, it’s part of the culture—every father of a teenaged son is busy negotiating which of his wealthiest friends is going to get his boy’s bum—you just don’t find it running around in the street, the way you do here. You’d think, after last night, I wouldn’t be back in business for at least a fortnight. But it’s like getting up on the horse as soon as you fall off: here, it’s not even one o’clock in the afternoon, and I’ve already had three—and three very nice ones, at that!”

  I laughed. “Once, about six or seven weeks ago, John, I had three before nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “With your looks and at your age—? I just bet you’ve had a bloody dozen since you left here!”

  Actually, it had only been two. But I thought I’d better not say anything to John, in case his own conquests were more imaginary than real—to make him feel better about last night. “Are you doing anything this evening?” I asked. “Some friends of mine and I are going to go out.”

  “Out to do what sort of thing?”

  “Go to a concert—sort of.”

  John shook his head and his hands. “I’m afraid every free moment I have is booked. I’ve got half a dozen moviehouses to explore. I need to make an official inspection of at least eight public loos. There are parts of several parks, here and up town, I haven’t come anywhere near examining. No—I’m afraid my social calendar is filled to overflowing. But it was sweet of you to ask.”

  I laughed, relieved. Five minutes before, I’d decided not to invite him. He was so flamboyant, I could see him causing something of a problem with the others.

  I’d agreed to meet Trevor at sunset behind the wire-mesh fence along the top of the Theater of Dionysus—the big outdoor theater on the side of the Acropolis hill. Stravinsky was conducting his farewell concert that night. Lots of students and poor foreigners would gather there. You couldn’t see very well, but the famous acoustics of the Greek amphitheater easily lived up to their reputation.

  Earlier that month, I’d gone from being twenty-three to twenty-four; which meant Trevor had gone from being a towheaded English guitar player three years younger than I to a towheaded English guitar player four years younger. It seemed to make a difference.

  The sky out toward Piraeus was purple, flooded through near the horizon with layered orange. On good days you’re supposed to be able to see the sea from the Acropolis’s rim. But here, half a dozen yards below it, the waters beyond Piraeus were only a pervading memory.

  The white lights down on the stage told me for the first time that the platform there was gray-painted wood. During full daylight, just glancing at it when I’d passed, I’d always assumed it was rock. About ten of the orchestra had come out to take their chairs. Sloping down from the fence, the tiers of stone seats were filling. In silhouette, scattered before me, were hundreds of Athenian heads.

  Trevor let go of the hatched wire and glanced back. In its canvas case beside him, his guitar leaned against the metal web. Trevor wore two denim jackets, one over the other—though it was a pleasantly warm evening. In the quarter light, his cornsilk mop made his face look smaller, his gray eyes larger. “Hello,” he said. “It’s his last concert, tonight. I didn’t know that.”

  “Whose?” I asked. “Stravinsky’s?”

  “That’s right. He’s retiring. I knew he was conducting, but I didn’t know that this was it.”

  “I think I read something about it.”

  “The Swiss Bitch is supposed to come by, too. I hope she gets here before they start. I mean, you either hear him tonight or you don’t. It’s really quite special.”

  The Swiss Bitch was Trevor’s nickname for Cosima; I never saw anything particularly bitchy about her. I don’t think Trevor did either, but something about the euphony ha
d caught him. And the first time he’d referred to her as that, Heidi, who was Cosima’s best friend, had burst out laughing at the kafeneon table, so that it almost sounded as if she approved. Trevor had kept it up. “Cosima told me you were staying up at DeLys’s with some English poofter.”

  “John?” I asked. “I don’t know anything for sure about his sexual preferences—but he’s really quite a nice guy.” Although Trevor knew perfectly well I was queer, I liked generating ambiguity about anyone else who came up.

  “God,” Trevor said, “almost all DeLys’s friends are faggots! I can’t stand them—most of them—” which I guess was for my benefit—“myself. I wonder why that is, with some women?”

  Then, behind me, Cosima said: “Hello, you lot.”

  We moved aside, and Cosima stepped up between us to gaze through the wire. “I think they’re about to start. Is that the whole orchestra?—my, there’re a lot of them tonight.” Cosima was twenty-six and had black hair. She wore a gray jacket with a black fur collar. And a gray skirt. Now she said: “Well, how have you been, Trevor?”

  “All right.” He pretended to pay attention to something down on the platform.

  A few feet away from us, two Greek boys wore short-sleeved shirts. One, with his fingers hooked in the wire above his head, swung now this way, now that, his shirt wholly open and out of his slacks, blowing back from his stomach.

  I had on my once-white wool island jacket—too warm for the evening. But we internationals—like the Paris clochards, in their two and three overcoats even in summer—seemed to wear as much of our clothing as we could tolerate, always ready to be asked over, to stay for a few days, or at least to spend the night. That way, I suppose, we’d have to go back for as few remaining things as possible.

  On the other side of us, half a dozen schoolgirls in plaid uniforms kept close together, to giggle and whisper when another arrived.

  “This is his last time conducting,” Cosima said.

  “So I read and so Trevor told me. Robert Craft is conducting the first half of the concert.”

  “Who’s Robert Craft?” Trevor asked.

  Cosima shrugged—a large, theatrical shrug. Often that’s how she dealt with Trevor.

  “He’s sort of a Stravinsky person,” I said. “He writes a lot about him; and he did a wonderful recording of Anton Webern’s complete works—about five or six years back.”

  “Who’s Webern?” Trevor asked.

  Cosima laughed. “Have you ever heard him conduct before? Stravinsky, I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Once, one summer when I was about fourteen—back in the States. It was at a place called Tanglewood. There’s a big tent there, and the orchestra plays under it. They did two programs that afternoon. Carl Orff had written some new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream—to replace the old Mendelssohn stuff everybody knows, I guess. They did the whole play. And a comedian I used to see on television a lot named Red Buttons played Puck—even though he was getting pretty old. The orchestra did the music, which was all in unison, with lots of gongs and drums. Then they took the whole stage down. A chorus came out. And Stravinsky conducted the premiere of a piece he’d just written, Cantium Sanctum. It was very atonal. The audience wasn’t very appreciative; when people left the music tent, there was a lot of snickering. But I liked it more than the Orff.” I stood on tip-toe because some of the paying audience just entering—about twelve feet in front of us—hadn’t sat yet. “Tonight Craft is going to conduct The Firebird. Then Stravinsky’s going to do The Rite of Spring. It’s an awfully conservative performance for him to go out on. But . . .” I shrugged. I’d read the whole concert program two days ago. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t wanted to tell Trevor.

  “Mmm,” Cosima said.

  Trevor said: “You’re going to be leaving in a couple of days. I bet, after you’ve gone, that English fellow, John, would let me stay up at DeLys’s—if I went there and asked him. Nicely, I mean. He’s supposed to like boys. And, after all, DeLys is my friend, too.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d stay away from him if I were you, Trevor. What are you going to do if he gets after your bum?”

  “I’d beat the shit out of him, if he tried anything!” Trevor pulled himself up, to turn from the fence.

  “But why would you go up there if you didn’t want him to try?” I asked. “Besides, people will think you wanted him to try. If you went up there, knowing the sort of fellow he is, if something happened, no one would ever believe you hadn’t egged him on to it. I certainly wouldn’t believe it.”

  A couple of times, when we’d hitched to Istanbul together, Jerry’s fear of John and anything else queer (except me) had annoyed me—like the afternoon he’d flatly refused to go up to see John for tea in Turkey. But Trevor’s “I’ll beat you to a pulp if you touch me, but aren’t you supposed to like me anyway because I’m cute?” (and often with a “Can you spare a hundred drachma while you’re at it?”), and all with perfect Dartington manners when he chose to drag them out, actually made me mad. John had had a tough enough time; I wanted to keep Trevor out of his hair.

  I waited for Trevor to say something back. But my own position as a self-confessed queer, married, and with an occasional girlfriend, made Trevor, if not most of my friends, not know what to say to me at all. I liked that.

  Cosima said, “Oh! They’re starting . . . !”

  Applause swelled as, in his black tails, Craft walked out across the platform in front of the orchestra.

  The Firebird, The Rite of Spring—they’re pieces you’ve heard so many times you’d think they couldn’t be interesting anymore. But precisely that music, when it’s done well, is so embarrassingly moving. The Athenians certainly applauded enough.

  Listening, however, I remembered when Trevor had gotten a recording of the Ninth Symphony. (Jerry hadn’t yet gone back to Kentucky.) Above the orchestral photograph, the Deutsche Grammophon label was brutal yellow. Cardboard on European albums is thinner than on American albums. And Trevor had held this one in both hands, in front of his jeans. Both the knees were torn. The sun made his hair look like some white plastic fiber pushed back from his soap-white forehead, reddened here and there by a pimple. I stood a step below him on Mnisicleou Street, while he said: “The Swiss Bitch told me all of us could come up to her place tonight and hear it. I hope you and Heidi can make it.”

  “All of us” turned out to be: my recent roommates, John (who was from London) and Ron (who was from New Jersey); and [English] John (the Cockney electrical engineer); and Heidi (we’d locked Pharaoh in her room, but he barked enough while we were going down the stairs that, in her wire-rimmed glasses and green apron, Kyria Kokinou came out and started arguing that the dog was not healthy for the children in the apartment upstairs—which, finally, we just had to walk away from; with Kyria Kokinou, sometimes you had to do that); and the tall redheaded English woman (who had been first Ron’s, then John’s, girlfriend); and DeLys (who was from New Orleans and whose gold hair was as striking, in its way, as Trevor’s); and Gay (the American woman who played Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen songs at the ’O kai ’E); and Jane (Gay’s tense, unhappy, mid-Western traveling companion); and Jerry (who, with his slightly stooped shoulders, was about twice as tall as anyone else, and had huge hands and feet like some German Shepherd puppy); and sports-jacketed law-student Costas (DeLys’s landlord, who kept laughing and saying, “Well, we’ll squeeze . . . I’m sure we can think of something . . . there’s always a way, now . . .”); and me.

  “Oh, my God . . . !” Cosima said, at the head of the stairs. “I don’t think we’ll all fit . . . ?”

  In a kind of attic tower, Cosima’s single room had a desk and a bed in it, with a couple of travel posters on the walls—one from Israel, one from North Africa. It wasn’t any larger, though, than the chicken-coop arrangement I’d left on the roof of Voltetsiou Street; or, indeed, than Heidi’s at Kyria Kokinou’s, which I’d left it for (though Heidi’s room had a shower). I wondered what
Trevor had been thinking when he’d invited us. The phonograph was one someone’s ten-year-old sister might have gotten for her birthday: a square box with a pink cover that swung up from a yellow base with dirty corners, on which the table turned.

  “I’m going to put it out here in the hall,” Cosima said, “so as many people can hear as possible.”

  We sat on the steps, most of us. DeLys, [English] John, and Heidi rested their heads against the gray, unpainted wall-boards. In his black sneakers and white jeans, all scrunched up on the step above Jane, Jerry took his pink-framed glasses off to listen, his eyes closed, his head to the side. (Probably he was taller than the tall sailor.) At the bottom, hands in his jacket pockets, Costas lounged against the newel. The orange light from Cosima’s open door fell down among us. A window high in the stairwell wall showed a few raindrops outside on the little panes.

  We were very quiet.

  Cosima started the record.

  The opening intervals of the Ninth dropped through the stairwell—from the scratchy speaker. Where I sat, the step above digging into my hip, my back pressed against the wall, I had one hand on Heidi’s knee; she put one hand on mine.

  After the first movement, while Cosima turned the record over, DeLys started coughing. Costas pulled out a handkerchief and handed it up to her—but she waved it away.

  “Oh, it’s clean,” Costas said, laughing. “Don’t worry.”

  “I know it’s clean.” DeLys coughed again, the back of one hand against her mouth, the fingers in a loose fist that grabbed after something with each head-lowering hack. “That’s not it at all and you know it . . . !” She coughed some more.

  Then Cosima played the scherzo and the adagio.

  When, after a record change, the choral opening of the “Ode to Joy” finished and the baritone solo began, Heidi squeezed my hand, and I thought of Beethoven, arthritic, deaf, believing his work a failure after he’d finished conducting the Ninth’s premiere, because he’d heard nothing behind him. Then the Soprano stepped down to take him by the arm and turn him to see the standing Viennese, clapping madly—