Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  ‘AIDS,’ Luis says. ‘What’s that, now…? That’s where you get real sick…?’

  ‘You really haven’t heard of it?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure, I’ve heard of it. But I don’t know nobody who’s got it.’

  ‘You should ask Joey about it,’ I said. Joey and I have talked about it a couple of times in the bar.

  Luis ran his tongue under his upper lip, securing his bridge. ‘Yeah, well…you know, Joey’s got a lot of other things to worry about, right through here. I don’t think he’s eatin’ too well, you know. Does he look too skinny to you?’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s got it?’ Then he grins at me. ‘Naw, he just don’t eat enough.’

  ‘Probably.’ I nodded.

  ‘Hey, have you heard about all the murders…?’

  There seems, indeed, to be a whole level of gay activity in New York that goes on as if nothing has happened. (Anecdotal evidence: AIDS is an almost exclusively middle-class disease…Yeah, sure.) And yet, on this same level, it’s certainly thought about. You get odd examples of it here and there. In a pornographic movie house about a block from the bar, there used to be a very active Hispanic midget, who, when he came up for air, would walk down from the back balcony to sit on the steps and chat with the queens who hung out there. We always used to say hello. A few months ago he disappeared, and somehow I got it into my head that he’d probably gotten AIDS. I made up my mind to ask, and finally inquired of a slender black Dominican with whom I’d often seen him talking and whose nickname, as far as I’d been able to make it out from overheard conversations, was Panama: ‘Say, whatever happened to Shorty?’ Adjusting a knitted skullcap above a gold-toothed smile, Panama had told me in a heavy accent: ‘He in Peru, now. Shorty get scared of all this AIDS shit, and take off, man!’

  Luis and I looked up as, in his tank top and shabby jeans, Joey came back into the bar. ‘Okay, man,’ Joey said to Luis. ‘You’re on my shit list again…’

  ‘Huh?’ Luis says. What do you mean? Aw, come on!’ He looked at me, shaking his head. ‘Twenty minutes ago, I’m his best friend! Now I ain’t no more.’ Luis got off the barstool and, still muttering, still shaking, wandered toward the door.

  Joey sat down and put his tattooed forearms over white-and-black wool. ‘You know what I just found out that little bastard done…?’ And he began to tell me.

  8.54 ‘I may be a junky, but I ain’t no thief,’ Joey says frequently. ‘I ain’t been arrested for nothin’ since I was thirteen!’ this may be the single line I have heard from him more than any other.

  He’s certainly never stolen or pilfered anything from me—sometimes there may have been loose change lying around on a table or the bar counter: whenever there is, he always says: ‘Come on, put that away now. Later, when you can’t find it, I don’t want you thinkin’ I run off with it!’ and once, when my passport fell out of my pocket (the most resalable of commodities on the strip), he came running up to return it to me.

  For part of the first winter I knew him, he managed to get down to Florida for a month. I hung out with him the day he did his pretravel laundry and saw him off on the bus; when, a few months later, I ran into him after he got back, he told me that while he was down there he’d been arrested for ‘prostitution’: ‘I’m in a peep show in Miami, and this guy comes over to me and says, “I’ll give you twenty dollars to suck your dick.” And I say, “Fuck, yeah!” And his partner, right next to us, arrests me!’ He laughs. ‘I wished the fuck he had sucked on it. I can’t get a hard-on no more anyway, you know? I even come soft—when I come at all. It’s the fuckin’ dope, man! Anyway, I thought: imagine, this fuckin’ cop’s gonna suck on a soft dick for twenty bucks? He really should have! Served him right!’ He scratched his head as we walked together up the street. ‘I knew he wasn’t no cock-sucker when he asked me, you know? I knew it! He didn’t look like no cocksucker. Shit! He looked like a cop is what he looked like!’ But, since recounting the happening (over which he spent thirty days in jail), he’s gone back to his ‘ain’t been arrested since I was thirteen’ line.

  8.55 How can one make a recognizable pattern that isn’t a document of its times? Take the limiting case of, say, Kostelanetz’s visual fiction Modulations (Assembling Press: Brooklyn, 1975): without any words, pictures, or even numbers, a geometrical configuration of black hairlines and circles shifts by an element or two from small yellow page to small yellow page. Even if you don’t take from it the strong suggestion of, if not reference to, an urban sensibility as clear as in any Mondrian painting, isn’t it a document?

  At a certain time a certain artist was interested in a certain pattern. Knowing the certainty, the specificity, the complex meanings associated with any of the three (the time, the artist, the pattern), or the associations between them, is only a matter of reading.

  That a moderately sophisticated reader of current experimental work, not specifically familiar with Kostelanetz, would nevertheless recognize Modulations as a product of the ’seventies (and would be generally sure it was not a Dadaist work of the ’twenties, say, when similar aesthetic questions were being asked) only confirms that the pattern is overcoded, recognizable, readable, historical.

  If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its documentary aspect (i.e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?

  8.56 To the direct question, ‘Do you think of yourself as gay?’ Luis answered:

  ‘I don’t know. I like women…at least I used to. I ain’t been to bed with one in about two years, though. And I’ll tell you, I don’t miss it. But I like men too. I mean, in the last few years I been to bed with a whole lotta you guys, and I sure as hell like what I’m doin’. There’s some people I wouldn’t want to find out about it, though. I mean even people down here, some of ’em. You out sellin’ Valiums and j’s and pills and stuff around the corner on Forty-second, and they don’t wanna hear about no cocksucker down there. But, shit, man, it’s nice to suck a dick—especially when you’re high! I mean, even if you don’t get off on it, sometimes it just makes you feel better. Know what I mean?’ (I nodded.) ‘I bet you do!’ Luis chuckled. ‘And it’s real nice to get sucked, huh?’ He nudged me with his arm. I laughed. He snorted and looked forward again, shrugging. ‘So, I don’t know. Maybe I am. But I don’t even think about it, you know…?’

  To the same question at another time, Joey answered: ‘Sure I’m gay! I been gay since I was fuckin’ twelve years ago. I told you that, before!’

  8.61 I don’t even feel like writing out the ugly incident from a couple of days ago, the model for the opening of the section below. It began in a movie theater, when some effeminate Puerto Ricans sat down a few seats away from a (presumably) straight guy, a little man with the muscles of a laborer, a beer belly, thinning hair, and glasses (a down jacket over his lap), who suddenly decided to get abusive—well, since I don’t feel like it, I’m not: other than to say that when it was over, I felt pretty proud of Our Guys.

  8.62 The first morning of Carnival, some dozen tanners were walking together out through the half torn-up Avenue of Refuse Carters for their first six-hour day (rather than the usual ten) at the troughs. One was singing in a high, falsetto voice, making exaggerated mummerly movements to his friends. In an early gesture to the festivities, two—one a barbarian, for there were several tan and sandy southerners among the slim dark men—had tied long colored cords around their heads whose ends, now and again, they tossed back to catch a breeze (and whip at those behind). The women of Able-Ani traditionally wore such cords about their heads in festival times. Two at the back of the group were talking intensely about that—or something else—as they made their way around the heaps of dirt piled at the edges of the excavations that obstacled the avenue.

  Ahead, a sudden sc
uffle: a little man with the muscles of a laborer, a beer belly, thinning hair and weak eyes had brushed by one of the tanners as he came along in the opposite direction. ‘You!’ He stepped away, swinging an angry arm. ‘Don’t touch me, I say! Get away! I don’t want your lousy diseases! I don’t want one of you gettin’ anywhere near me. You’re sick. You’re all sick. I don’t want to catch any of your sicknesses. Don’t touch me!’

  Two of the tanners grunted and barked and mimed his hostile gestures back; and two more stepped up when he stepped forward; so, finally, he went on.

  The high voice took up its song again. But the laughter and chatter that had turned around it all along the warm morning avenue was gone.

  A dozen steps behind them, on her way to her yard (for everyone in Kolhari it seemed had a double load of linen in preparation for the festivities), Nari watched the little man lope away. She felt the heat of embarrassment momentarily bloom in her cheeks for the young men making their way ahead. As she turned off the avenue down the alley toward the Khora’s bank, she remembered something Pheron had told them one afternoon when she and Zadyuk had gone to visit him with cheeses and pickled eggs and spiced meats.

  ‘Now you know,’ Pheron had said, leaning on the wall at the edge of his roof, where sometimes he wove in the evening and where today they had all brought their lunch, ‘how certain professions have more than—how shall I put it—their share of high voices and happy hands? Mummers, tanners, and those big, hearty wagon drivers that roll into the markets from the country at dawn—’

  ‘Now that’s not true!’ Zadyuk had said, turning from the cider jar, where he’d been deviling the cork at knife-point. ‘You’re not going to tell me that all those great, burly men I see each morning rolling and rattling by my stall are—’

  But Pheron closed his eyes and fluttered his hands above his ears (making them look their ‘happiest’), dismissing protest. ‘Anyhow—’ He slid his fingers under the sash around his waist, settling his weight on his other foot—‘when I was a kid and I first went to work at the tannery, my father took to saying to his friends, to my friends, to me: “Now don’t think that every tanner you see is like that. People shouldn’t just go around thinking that because someone works at the troughs, he has to be one of those.” And you know I didn’t think anything about it at first. That was just my old man: it was the best he could do. After all, he was right. There were, indeed, two fellows out there, working with us in all that stench, who I’m perfectly sure had never been to bed with a man in their lives, who were quite mad after the women, and just as nice as they could be to the rest of us. (Frankly I used to wonder what they were doing there!) Well, after my father and I had our little set-to on the bridge, and it was all out, at some point I heard him say it to someone again: “Just because some guy’s a tanner doesn’t mean he has to be like that.” So I said—oh, I was a dreadful snot back then; I’m sure he just thought he was protecting me—but I said: “Look. There are, indeed, two guys out there with us who are (probably) not “like that.” But why are you always defending them? You haven’t even met them. What about me?”’ Pheron raised a hand to slap his chest with widespread fingers. ‘And you know, he didn’t say it any more.’ He paused a moment under a sky as blue as any he could weave. ‘I do miss him. And, yes, I will have some of that, when you get the cork out.’ He stepped from the wall. ‘Want some help, Zad?’

  Along the alley a heavy young woman raised her hand and grinned, somewhat deferentially, toward Nari: the most recently hired among her barbarian washerwomen—no doubt why she was the first at work this morning. Nari nodded back. Employer and worker made their way together toward the unusual wooden door in the gate of the laundry yard.

  8.7 With a shaved head and an ornate turquoise ring, somewhat gaunt Ronald runs a somewhat sprawling, somewhat foundering antique emporium with his rotund partner, Roy. On summer evenings, if the Closed sign is out but there’re still people inside, you can come in for a vodka martini and find various neighborhood characters sitting around, talking, drinking. ‘Well, I had to do something!’ Ronald said to the gathering some time ago: ‘something’ turned out to be going for weekends to do volunteer work at a hospital with an AIDS clinic. Now, sitting beside a bit of Bayreuth kitsch mounted on an easel (a framed color print of Wagner at his piano in an elegant music room, pausing a moment with one hand on the keys, while a grayish cloud emerges from under the raised lid, among whose billows the artist has suggested swans, knights, ravens, gnomes, dragons, armed goddesses in winged helmets, an undraped Venus in the pose of the de Milo, a one-eyed wanderer, and the odd stormtossed ship), Ronald reared back in his rocker ($290.00 on a white gummed label stuck to the arm): ‘Now I work with almost seventy-five AIDS patients.’ (He has not switched to the more cumbersome ‘people with AIDS.’) ‘And every single one of them has mainlined regularly! Now have you ever seen anything like that in print, in either Time or the New York Native?’

  More anecdotal evidence.

  8.8 ‘You’re not going to the Carnival,’ Larla said, suddenly and accusingly. ‘You’re going to that awful thing they’re holding down in the Spur, aren’t you? I’ve heard you mumbling about it all week.’ She turned to snatch up a mug, a bowl, a cloth, all clutched clumsily in her heavy arms.’ You’re going to that—that Calling of the…oh, I can’t even pronounce it!’

  The old woman stood in the middle of the kitchen, wrapped in dark brown, while the kitchen girl bustled unhappily about her. She said: ‘The Amnewor. Yes, I’m going.’

  ‘That’s just terrible,’ Larla said, moving here, there, picking up that, putting down this. ‘That’s horrible. That’s no decent sort of religion. Gods don’t have names. I’ve known that since I was a child. And you know it too. What does someone like you know about the Amnewor, anyway?’

  ‘I remember…’ said the old woman. ‘A long time ago—a very long time. Something about death. And time. Lots of time. Real death, too. Human beings. You can’t appease it with dogs, cats, and chickens, either. It has to be real, violent—’

  ‘Oh, don’t go on! Please. Not for my benefit. I don’t want to hear about such things!’ She reached awkwardly out with one hand for a bowl (a knee up to keep held things from falling) to scratch at its inside in case the spot were dirt. ‘Is that what they’re talking about…?’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘All those poor, sick men Lord Vanar brought back here to talk? He must have twenty-five of them in there with him! And the two women. Are they really ill with it too? Women aren’t supposed to get it. That’s what I heard, anyway. That would be just horrible, if everybody could get it…’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman. ‘They’re not concerned with the Calling. Nor should they be. But there’re a few of us who think that, perhaps, if we work very hard, we can concern the Amnewor with them.’ She released a breath and began to walk across the kitchen, while Larla stood very still, hugging the things she’d gathered as if she were afraid; then she blurted: ‘How did you find out where it was going to be?’ Everything clattered to the counter.

  The old woman stopped at the door. ‘When His Lordship sent me to ask around the city for the homes of the other folks ill like himself, I had to talk to lots of people. I learned many things in those afternoons.’

  Larla looked up again. ‘Has he carried back every sick person in the city here, then?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the old woman repeated. ‘There’re many more of them than that. The ones here now are just a few of those still well enough to travel when a comfortable wagon is sent.’

  ‘They must be talking about that monster who roams through the city now, corrupting our Carnival in honor of the Liberator. Oh, it must come. Otherwise, you couldn’t call it. The one who’s Calling you’re going to. Why else would they be here? I’ve heard it said that a wizard is soon to—’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman a third time. ‘They have their own deaths to deal with. And the lives they’ve got to live till then. The Calling of the Amnewor is for us.’ S
he did not look back at the kitchen girl as she went out the scullery door. ‘At least I think it is…’

  8.9 Saw Joey again last night. He says there’ve been four more hack-jobs on the street-sleepers, and the most recent victim bought it the night before last. ‘I’m talkin’ to this guy, two o’clock in the morning, over on Ninth Avenue?’ he told me as we sat at the bar of the almost deserted Fiesta, with its orange lights, old jukebox (‘I Am What I Am’ silent for the first time that evening), and the neon beer sign in its front window making the night beyond the open blinds completely black. ‘And three hours later, the word comes down he’s had his heart cut out in the gooddamn park! That’s five more in three weeks! Nine all together this summer. Every single one of them hacked up like fuckin’ watermelons! And that ain’t counting one derelict four Puerto Ricans came by, one night, when he was sleepin’ on a park bench, and slit his throat. For the fun of it, you know? They caught them right away—for a while they thought maybe it was them, or some crazy kids gang that was out to kill us all. But it ain’t, I guess. Man, I don’t sleep during the night anymore. I sleep in the park in the daytime. I wake up now at five, six o’clock in the evening, and the office girls sittin’ around talking to each other after work all applaud when I get up.’ Joey clapped his wide hands at the end of his tattooed arms. ‘Yay! Yay! The fucker’s up!’

  9. The first evening of Carnival, Toplin’s mother sat on the side of his bed, supporting Top’s forehead with one hand, while he vomited and vomited into a broad crock on the bed’s edge: thin, frothy bile strung from his mouth. At the fifteenth or twentieth spasm, nothing much came. Still, every thirty or forty-five seconds, Toplin’s stomach clenched hard enough that she felt the shaking in his whole body. She did not say, ‘I knew you shouldn’t have gone out to the man’s estate today. You weren’t well enough. You’re very sick. You have to stay in.’ Actually she had said it before, just after the wagon brought him home (though she’d forgotten that) and there didn’t seem any point to it now. He’d begun to shiver between spasms, and his sight had gone in a welter of darknesses and little burning spots each time his stomach clutched on the wet emptiness inside it.