A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  Again I began to breathe.

  Out in the bathroom once more, I turned for my towel, among four others filling the rack. My glance crossed the mirror, and, remembering I had a beard, I was glad again I didn’t have to shave. But I wondered—for the first time in years—if I’d look foolish speaking in public with bushy black whiskers.

  When I was again sitting on the commode and my legs were dry, I pulled on my dress slacks. Outside the closed door, Professor Clareson went on, “You know, Chip, I was thinking this morning. My favorite book of yours has always been The Ballad of Beta-2. I must have read it four, even five times since it came out—but I keep returning to it. The reason, it occurs to me, is because it’s about learning.”

  Inside, I thought: I hope I’ve learned not to do this again….

  I stood once more, stepped over and got the blue toy from the stall, turned, and put it on the bathroom shelf where I noticed my aerosol deodorant. I’d thought I’d left it in my room and would have to go back for it—

  “You’ve told me about your dyslexia. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Though there’s nothing about that in the book. Still, it’s about learning—yes. But I mean a particular kind of learning, one I have so much trouble as a teacher getting my students to do: getting them to understand texts that don’t make a lot of sense unless they also acquire some historical knowledge that clarifies what was really going on, why it was important, even to the point of what actual phrases mean—in Charles Reade, in Spenser, in Milton, and in Melville. Your book deals with a problem very close to me. And it deals with it interestingly—at least each time I reread it, I find it so. And each time in a new way.”

  While I finished drying, I told myself I’d take the toy to the kitchen and put it in the parents’ mail cubby next time I went in, then started for the door to get my deodorant from my room—with my hand on the knob, I remembered it was on the bathroom shelf, turned back, got it.

  And knocked the toy—it was a blue airplane—onto the floor. I sighed, left it, took the aerosol can and sprayed under one arm and the other. (The antiaerosol campaign to help preserve the ozone layer and retard the greenhouse effect was a few years off.) It was cool—cold even, but not as cold as the cold water. I put the deodorant can back on the shelf. At least that stayed there.

  After pulling my T-shirt down over my head, I shrugged into the dress shirt I’d carried in, buttoned it—incorrectly, I realized—unbuttoned it, breathed three times, sat again and rebuttoned it. Looking around, I realized I had left my socks in my room.

  Standing, opening the door, jeans hanging from one fist, I stepped out barefoot into the hall.

  Still in his wicker-back, Tom smiled.

  I said, “Well, thank you—for telling me.” It was at least three minutes since he had stopped talking, and I felt foolish.

  The full version is, Oh, why thank you so much for taking the time to tell me. That’s very nice of you. Before (and since) I’ve used it in such situations. That morning, however, I hadn’t made it all the way through, and had waited too long—and was wondering if the hungover version had only been confusing. Or if I’d sounded very foolish. In that state, though, every other thing you do is infected with foolishness, and you spend a lot of time wondering how and why nothing you say or do feels right.

  Feeling foolish, I walked to my room, glancing at smiling Tom—who got up and followed. Inside, putting my jeans over a chair back and sitting on the iron stead’s mattress edge, I got my socks, shoes, and sport jacket on, reached over, and picked up my notebook and my talk.

  We went out and down the steps to the door. I felt foolish because I went out first then realized I hadn’t let the older Tom step from the house before me. I mistook the car he indicated and felt foolish as I walked on to the one, in a moment, I realized was his. Tom drove us to breakfast, and I sat—foolishly—on the front seat beside him, fixated on the fact that my attempt to thank him for his compliment had been so inept.

  I was quiet, but my mind kept running on, obsessively, unstoppably, uncomfortably: nobody had suggested I say it, you understand. Rather, after several encounters with people who had complimented me without warning—with the result that I’d felt awkward and clearly they’d felt awkward too—I’d sat down, a few years back, and decided, since probably I’d be in the situation from time to time, that I’d better put together a response that let people know I hadn’t been annoyed and that acknowledged their good intentions. “Why, thank you so much for taking the time…” is what I’d come up with; if I responded with that, both of us would feel a little better and neither of us would leave the encounter feeling…well, like a fool. I sat beside Tom, mumbling it over and over without moving my lips and wondered if I should say it out loud again, properly this time—but I was sure, if I did, it would sound…foolish. (The next time it happened, months later, it worked perfectly well.) At that point, however, the most foolish thing since I’d waked seemed Tom’s preference for Beta-2. (Was I becoming a writer who couldn’t bear his previous work…?) I hadn’t felt this way yesterday.

  Could all this be chemical…?

  Then we were walking into a San Francisco breakfast place, with loud construction for the new BART line outside, and aluminum doors and mirrored walls inside, on the way to the MLA convention hotel, to join Tom’s wife, Alice. She had dark hair and sat smiling in one of the booths.

  I ate some toast and bacon (I wasn’t up to eggs) and drank some black coffee—and was surprised I could.

  We got to the MLA hotel twenty minutes before my talk.

  Among the anecdotes above, whether someone is talking about a book in detail or just running up and saying, “Hey, I really liked…” and running off again, I have not been recounting all this to speak about either popularity or quality.

  Because I’m not talking about popularity, that’s why, except in one case—to come—I give only one example per person. (That’s also why I’m not giving numbers, of people or of books.) Of course it happens with some books more than with others. Those mentioned more often are ones that have been better advertised—though not always—by whatever method—or have simply been more available; and we all know what a meaningless indicator advertising or hearsay is for quality.

  Well, then, what am I talking about?

  A lesson comes with someone running up to you, taking the time and putting out the energy to cross the natural barrier that exists between strangers (and though I’d known Clareson a couple of years, I’d only met him in person four times), telling you she or he liked something you wrote. The lesson is not entirely about politeness—or kindness, either. The lesson occurs, yes, when someone tells you why he or she likes a particular work, and—through the fog of your own current concerns (we always have them even if we’re not hungover)—it even makes a kind of sense. It also occurs when you encounter a full-fledged academic paper that seems preternaturally astute (or completely wrongheaded).

  It occurred fourteen years later too on an afternoon when I was at a theater in New York City for the matinee of a musical. I was stouter. My beard was bushier—and largely gray.

  And I had a ten-year-old daughter, whom I’d brought with me. (With a music teacher at Columbia and a Chase bank vice president, I’d helped found a gay father’s group, which met monthly and now had more than forty members—though, at this point, it has little to do with the tale, in parentheses it will play it part. Marilyn and I had separated for good nine years earlier, though we’d arranged for joint custody.) Just that week a well-known rock musician had taken over the lead in the show, and at that matinee the rest of his band had come to sit in the front orchestra seats to see their lead singer’s first performance that afternoon. During intermission, a third of the audience had moved to the balcony rail to gaze down at them, and, once we stood up, from our own seats in the balcony’s rear, both my daughter and I could see that downstairs, another third in the theater’s orchestra had moved to the front to crowd around the young men, who were be
ing friendly and behaving as if they were old hands at this; but there was no leaving the theater for them to get a breath of air outside, as my daughter and I were getting ready to do.

  My daughter attended a school where, if there were not a lot of celebrities, there were a few celebrities’ children. As she looked down, she commented: “They’re not even letting them leave. That doesn’t seem very nice.”

  “Probably,” I said, “they’re tourists, and they haven’t seen a lot of famous people before.”

  My supremely cool New York ten-year-old turned away, and we went to the orange stairway and down to street level, to stretch and get a breath before the bell rang, the lights under the marquee blinked (a custom discontinued in Broadway theaters how many years ago?), and we returned to our balcony seats for the second act.

  Occasionally I’ve written about how rarely our lives actually conform to the structure of stories that writers have been using for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But, sometimes, they do. A reason I remember that day is because, through coincidence and propinquity, things approached one.

  After the show, while we were standing out on Eighth Avenue at the bus stop, the bus pulled up, the door folded back, and two teenage boys got off as I was getting ready to guide my ten-year-old on, to take her home. (My sister had given us the tickets; back at the apartment, my partner—and Iva’s co-dad since she was three—had said he’d make spaghetti, Iva’s favorite, that evening.)

  One of the young men frowned at me:

  “You’re Samuel Delany, aren’t you? You wrote that book I really liked. What was it, again…?” The young man’s friend had read it too and supplied the title.

  “Yes, I am. Why, thank you for taking the time to tell me. That’s very nice of you.” I smiled.

  They smiled—and walked off.

  My daughter and I got on. We went to the rear of the bus and sat as it started. Then my daughter pushed her ponytail back from her shoulder. “Dad, are you famous?”

  I smiled. “Fortunately, no. The band at the theater today is famous. But things like people recognizing me in the street who’ve read something of mine only happens once, maybe twice a year—occasionally two or three times in a week, the way it did right after I was on the Charlie Rose Show, or when that newspaper article came out in the Times. Now, though, it’s right where I can enjoy it. Too much more, however, and it would get really annoying.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  And that’s the single time in my life—and my daughter’s—where I was able to make such a point, with comparative examples coming within an hour.

  Forty-four years after Tom Clareson helped me through a hangover, and thirty years after I took my daughter to the theater matinee, the point is still true.

  The lesson, then, is this: there exists a possibility of something happening when someone reads a book that is important enough for the person to respond to the writer who wrote it in that manner. And it doesn’t happen because of direct communication from person to person any more than sunrise occurred this morning because the sun lifted itself from behind the horizon into the dawn sky.

  A possibility. Not a certainty. (There are too many other reasons for running up to speak when you see someone you recognize in public.) The lesson is about possibility and potentiality, not about a probability for communication to have gotten through. It is no more—but no less—than that.

  In no way is it any confirmation about communication, even when in practical terms you’d be willing to bet on it. That’s because we know that communication doesn’t actually “get through,” any more than the sun actually “rises” in the morning or the moon actually “sets” in the nighttime (or daytime): that’s simply how it feels, not how it works. Sunrise, moon-down, and language-as-direct-communication—all are effects of something more complex: a spinning planet among other spinning planets in their elliptical orbits about a stellar bole of violently fusioning hydrogen millions of miles away that is releasing immense energy and light—which is drenched in information about what created it as well as everything it deflects from in passing. That light spews its information through the multiverse at 186,200 miles per second to tell of the workings of other planets, other stars and their planets, the workings of other galaxies of stars or the workings of other minds a few years, decades, centuries, a few thousand miles behind the pages of a book, behind a Nook or a Kindle or an iPad screen, till it passes too close to a gravitational force too large for it to escape and falls into it—while its stellar source millions of light-years away goes on creating the heavier elements—and singing about them in its light waves. As we careen through the great spaces along our own galaxy’s swirling edge, our own sun takes its planets and their satellites, its belt of asteroids, its Oort Cloud, and its comets along with it (which is why so much of the turning moves more or less in the same direction), while our galaxy itself moves along the gravitational currents flung out by billions of galaxies in a veritable net throughout the multiverse,*4 much of whose material is dark matter that light (I use the term loosely for all electromagnetic waves) doesn’t seem to tell us about directly, but only by its absences.

  Then why don’t meanings move from me to you by means of the words that I say and that you hear—or that you read? Why do I say that’s just an effect too like the rising and setting of the sun, moon, and stars?

  They don’t, for the same reason we need a lens—the one in your eye, the one in your camera, the water drop on a spider web—to retrieve the information from the light—something to focus the data and repress the noise, which may or may not be another sort of data that to us isn’t as useful or (such as heat when it grows too great) is harmful to organic systems that are largely liquid and ultimately destructive to all systems composed of solids.*5

  Think about the electrical signals in the brain that are your thoughts and the electrical signals that make your tongue move and your larynx stretch or contract to utter sounds when you push air out over them, and the physical vibrations that go through the air and strike your own and others’ eardrums and the electrical signals that the minuscule hammer bone attached to the eardrum’s back that shakes as the eardrum vibrates, the tiny anvil bone and tiny stirrup bone transferring those shakings that, in turn shake the little hairs within the spiral of the cochlea, which transform those vibrations into the electromagnetic pulses that travel to the brain where other electrical impulses are created as sound (already a vast oversimplification) and are associated with the meanings of words, phrases, and much larger patterns of language already lodged in the mind/brain of the hearer, the reader—patterns that must already be there, or else we would say that the hearer does not know the language yet or understand it. (In the late 1920s and early ’30s, a Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky [1896–1934], observed that children tend to learn first to talk and only then to internalize their own speech as thinking, though it’s a continuous developmental process.) And because everyone learns his or her language under different circumstances, those patterns simply cannot be identical for any two of us. That they can adjust thoughts as far toward similarity as they do in many different brains is a result of the amazing intricacy of the learning materials and the stabilizing discursive structures that they are capable of forming.

  Rarely do we get a new meaning from the rearrangement of old ones, helped on by language and the part of language (the signified) we call experience. Still, perceived experience is one of three ways we can “experience” linguistic signifieds; another is through memory and imagination—sexual and secular, practical and preposterous—and generally conscious thought; a third is through dreaming. (And all three relate. And all three are different. And none of this should be taken to contravene Derrida’s notion that the world is what language cuts it up into.) But the meanings understood by an other are always her or his own meanings, learned however she or he learned them, and never the speaker’s or the writer’s, though the effect is usually that they are the same—because we are mostly u
naware of the stabilizing discursive circuits that we know so very little about, though we also learn those and learn them differently in different cultures.*6

  Unconscious thought, Freud was convinced by a lot of research and study, is a mode of thinking we don’t experience directly as such. I am pretty sure he was right. (Whatever that level of brain activity is, I suspect it controls the discursive levels of language.) But without unconscious thought, we literally would not know what other people are talking about, even though we recognize the words whose meanings we have already internalized.

  And, remember, every dolphin and whale and octopus and dog has some version of this problem and neurological solution; every pig, porpoise, penguin, or porcupine; every bird or four-legged animal or six-legged cricket that “receives” communication with its ears or an earlike structure, or emits communication by rubbing its legs together or whistling songs or clicking or crooning underwater or meowing or purring or barking or growling—that is to say every creature who has to negotiate sexual reproduction and/or attraction; every creature who, at a food source or a watering place, needs to communicate “move over” to a fellow with a push or a shove.*7 Without something akin to discourse, they (and we) wouldn’t be able to tell if the other was attacking or wooing or warning, or if they should hold it till the morning walk or until they reach a public john or do it in the litter box, or if they want their offspring to suckle them or their owners to stroke them—whether it’s time to play or to eat or to get off the couch. (The great mid-twentieth-century actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane were famous for owning a pair of dogs named “Get-Off-the-Couch,” and “You-Too.”) In humans, discourse learning and management are probably among the main tasks of the unconscious mind. But that’s speculation.

  In short, it’s not just humans who communicate indirectly. It’s all dogs, cats, bats, birds, and buffalos, as well as every creature that makes and hears sounds and sees movements that are meaningful; every creature that feels a touch or a lick or a bite from another.