The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  As mounted figures rode out into the market square, people cheered. People ran off the bridge to gather at the fountain. The man with the hammer stopped to face the waist-high wall that was the bridge’s railing. Taking the handle in both hands, he swung the hammer back over his shoulder, then struck the stone.

  He reared back, then struck again.

  On the third strike a crack shot through the wall.

  At the fourth and fifth, rock splinters fell to the walk.

  Some running toward the crowd truly did not see him. A few others saw and sensed in his violence some unmentionable rage and passed on as if they did not see.

  The first to take active notice was a sixty-year-old mummer with gold paint still on his eyelids and blue dye darkening his lips. Though a spry old man, he did not look overly strong. He had just finished his skits in the market and was off to join the mummers’ wagon, gone by another route to another neighborhood where their performance was wanted to enrich the revelry.

  ‘…excuse me he said, not terribly loudly. (The white flame set nearest shook at the blow.) Then, perhaps, because he saw something in the unsteadiness between the hammer strikes that, with his years, he recognized and that reassured him, he spoke out in a resonant tone that stopped even some of the passersby. ‘Come now, you can’t do that!’ He stepped up and took the man’s shoulder.

  The man shook the actor’s hand away with a convulsion of his whole body—but he stopped hammering; and looked at the old, made-up face.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ the mummer said. ‘That’s not right, battering like that at public property.’

  Blinking, the man looked angry and confused. ‘I’m tearing it down, breaking it up—this overground cesspool! This is where you all come! You can be sure, here is where you give it to one another, like a deadly secret you whisper in the dark from this one to that. Can’t you see it? This is where it comes from—!’

  The mummer’s lips tightened. ‘Look, friend.’ He took the hard shoulder in his hand again. ‘You—simply—have no right. It’s not for you to take it upon yourself to do this.’

  ‘No right?’ Again the man tried to shrug away the actor’s hand; the hammer swung between them. ‘To protect myself and the other good people of this city from this sickness that kills all who catch it? What rights do I need! What rights must I have? Aren’t I doing you fools a favor in the bargain, those too stupid and indifferent to take up a mallet beside me?’ He tried to pull away.

  ‘Listen to me.’ The actor pulled him back. ‘Rights, you say? You’re not going to get the plague. You know that as well as I do! Me and my kind, we’re the ones in danger. And do you think for a minute if I thought there was any right, reason, or efficacy to be gained by tearing down this bridge, I wouldn’t have been here days ago with a hammer myself? But that’s for us to decide. Not you—’ The actor paused, because, from the bandy-legged worker’s eyes, two very fat tears, first as glimmerings along his lower lids, then as irregular spills in the torchlight, moved down his dark cheeks toward his beard. ‘You can’t take that on yourself,’ the mummer went on, ‘to protect us from whatever foolishness you think we indulge, no matter how deadly.’ Seeing the tears, the actor spoke more gently. ‘Now what is it? You have some happy-handed acquaintance who’s ill, dying, or dead of the plague? And now you want to destroy the bridge, to assuage your own fears of a most unlikely contagion?’ Behind the mummer the mounted entourage clattered by. People shouted and cheered. More ran about them now. The actor’s articulated voice cut through: ‘Is that what it is? Or perhaps a cousin, a brother. Even a son…?’

  More cheers rose at the horses behind them. People stumbling into them pushed the two men closer, the crowd’s noise covering the stoneworker’s answer. But it was easy enough for the mummer to read his lips. The man blinked; he shook his head. He said:’…I have a lover. Not much more than a boy—a student, out at the school. And he’s…!’

  Two or three people trying to see the passing Liberator jarred against one or the other of them, so that they were thrown to hold each other, supporting one another in mutual surprise—till the stoneworker pulled away, flinging his hammer a last time against the wall (that it did not strike someone or fall on someone’s foot was a wonder), and reeled away in the crowd.

  9.41 Two men had observed the encounter. Indeed, both heard the exchange as we have written it, up until the actor’s final question—even as they had missed the stoneworker’s final answer.

  On his way from the Spur after seeking out Namyuk to ask him if he knew anything about where this Calling of the Amnewor would be held (it was the kind of shady thing his brother would certainly know), crossing the Bridge of Lost Desire, Zadyuk had halted to watch the madman with his hammer banging at the bridge wall and the old queen trying to stop him.

  With a single eye, a strip of rag tied around his head to slant across the sunken socket and a metal slave collar around his neck, a short, lank-haired man had been pushed from the crowd and, on recovering his balance, had paused to watch the hammering vandal and the old man in makeup. The one-eyed man had entered Kolhari with the Liberator’s party—indeed, had been associated with that great man for some time. But today he’d chosen to walk beside his master’s horse rather than to ride. Several times the crowd’s pushings and peerings and jumpings about the Liberator’s mount had jostled Noyeed away. In the surge of people at the bridge, it had happened again. Once more he had been left behind as the Liberator rode on through the city.

  9.42 Not only did Noyeed and Zadyuk both see the incident, they saw each other—were, indeed, left looking at one another when the mummer and the stoneworker had finally moved off from between them in their different directions.

  9.43 Zadyuk thought: He’s one of those in the collars who roams the bridge looking for violent sex—so, though he’s not like my friend, Pheron, he’s one of them. No doubt the way he watches me with his good eye, he thinks I’m one too. I wish he didn’t. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with it…after all, I want to help them. Still, I want to be known for who I am. Not mistaken for…well, for anything! That, I suppose, is the worst part: to be among them at all means that, to any man or woman who looks at you, you must be one. Otherwise, why would you be there at all? It’s like some appalling contagion that dwarfs the plague itself. I love Pheron, and would help him any way I could. Yet, I cannot shake off this sense of contamination. I want to get back soon and tell Nari where we go to find the Calling of this new-named monster.

  9.44 Noyeed thought…well, it’s hard to say what Noyeed thought. To wear the iron collar, even for the Liberator, was to masquerade as a certain kind of monster, a masquerade whose rules Noyeed had chosen to live by long enough so that we would be ill-advised to specify which were merely theater and which were really him, which he had profoundly changed himself to accommodate, and which he only nodded to in their indifferent observance. He looked at Zadyuk. (Zadyuk saw that.) He looked at the hammer fallen among the stone chips by the cracked wall. He looked after the Liberator, riding away by the torches—the fabled figure was almost invisible now for the crowds about.

  9.441 Zadyuk started again through the Carnival throng.

  9.442 Noyeed, even disliking the torchlight, lingered on the bridge.

  9.45 Some of the things Ted told me:

  He met an old trick in a movie house, a tall black guy he’d done some S/M with half a dozen years ago. They were talking vaguely about getting together again, when the black guy mentioned his lover had died about a year or so back.

  ‘Did he die of AIDS?’ Ted had asked. You hear about anybody our age who’s gay, dying (Ted said), and it’s just the first thing I think of, whatever it turns out to be.

  The guy looked very surprised. ‘Well, actually, yes. I was—’ Ted was freaked. ‘Look, you’ve got to tell people that before you set something up with them!’ he said. And cut out. He was making it on and off with some concert pianist, who let drop that his lover had made it with som
eone who’d had AIDS and who’d recently appeared on a TV special about the disease—a day before he’d died. Ted had seen the special. He cut out once more. And in still another movie house, where he’d been going to cruise regularly, he found written in red paint on the John wall:

  AIDS PATIENTS CRUISE HERE!

  That one, on top of all the others (he told me), just made me crazy! I kept turning it over in my mind—like one of those three-sided rulers. It could have been someone who knew something and was trying to warn people. It could have been somebody who just wanted to stop the cruising. Or it could have been somebody who didn’t get what he wanted there sexually and was just bitching. But any way you read it, I didn’t want to be there.9.46 And so, Ted explained, that evening I went walking up somewhere around —th Street, just beyond Ninth Avenue. I was crossing the bridge…? There was some kind of carnival going on, maybe one of the Italian street festivals. Only the costumes people were wearing, I’d never seen anything like them before! And there were a whole lot of people running around, men and women, with not too much on at all! They’d set up torches all along the bridge walls. I was looking around and feeling strange, when I noticed this guy cruising me, hard, too. A little guy. Our age. He didn’t have a shirt on or anything, and he was wearing this slave collar. When I looked at him directly, I realized he only had one eye! That was really weird. When he finally came over, I just had to ask him: ‘Aren’t you worried about the plague? I mean, this is very serious.’ (I know you’re supposed to call it an epidemic. But I swear, almost every time I ask anybody what they think about AIDS, they look at me and say: ‘Age? What do you mean, “age”?’ That’s happened to me three times now!) He just watched me. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m horny too, but there’re too many people around here, now. We’ll never find a place. Why don’t you come with me? I’m going to this…well, it’s like a ceremony. Or a program. For people who’re concerned about it. The Calling,’ I told him. ‘It’s the Calling of the Amnewor…’

  Now is that the weirdest thing? I don’t even know where the words came from. You tell me I was dreaming, and I won’t even argue. But that’s what I said. It sounds like something out of one of your stories, Chip. It isn’t, is it? (Nope, I said. Not yet.) I couldn’t tell you what I thought I was talking about when I said it. But I asked him, ‘You want to go there with me?’

  He nodded.

  I started across the bridge.

  And he followed me. We pushed through the crowd—only, somehow, I must have lost him. Or he changed his mind. Or maybe he knew what I was talking about, and I didn’t. I remember I got free of the people, crossed the street, and looked back—and, Chip, you know? There wasn’t anybody on the bridge at all! No torches. No Carnival. It was just one of those walled overpasses that runs across the train tracks, with the tall, bright streetlights at either end. And empty.

  Do you know what I mean?

  (Yeah, I told him.)

  And nobody on it.

  I’ll tell you, Chip. I’m not doing anything with anybody anymore. This AIDS has got me really upset!

  9.5 Last February I came down with flu. Two days after I got it, I was in bed with a 102° fever. I stayed in bed for four days, got up—still with a fever—and nearly collapsed when I tried to go to the store. I went back to bed for another week. (I haven’t been in bed for two weeks with anything since I had pneumonia when I was twenty-one.) At the end of that time, I felt much stronger, but my fever was still between a hundred and a hundred one. I put my clothes on, took it easy, but I felt I had to do some work around the house, or make the odd trip out. Slowly, I got back to a more or less normal schedule. But a week later, my temperature was still over a hundred. Now and again there would be periods of persistent aching in one or both my armpits, though no apparent swelling. Once, coming home from downtown, I realized my groin was so sore that walking was painful. I went back to bed for two days. Some people get swollen lymph nodes if they go near someone with a cold. Save for the swollen glands under my jaw I’ve gotten every spring since I was seven, I don’t. Next morning, I was up—still with a temperature; I decided I was long overdue to see a doctor.

  Had I thought about AIDS?

  Hour by hour, since I’d first gotten sick.

  From a handbook specializing in gay services (The Gay Yellow Pages), I got the name of a doctor, himself gay, who specialized in sexually related diseases usually transmitted by homosexual contact. I called. Apparently he was very busy, but I got an appointment for some six days later.

  I did not have any sexual contacts in the subway on my way to his office—though I could have had, twice.

  That office? Neat, well-equipped, efficient, and reassuring. There was a pile of pamphlets concerning AIDS on the white formica-covered table in the waiting room. (I took one, and its very sensible suggestions have been my sexual guidelines since.) In a small examining room, a nurse took my temperature. It was still over a hundred—five weeks and three days after the onset of whatever.

  A tall, peasant man in his late thirties, the doctor came in. I detailed my symptoms and history. (‘How many sexual contacts would you say you have in a year? I mean with different people, of course.’ ‘Till now,’ I said, ‘maybe three hundred on the average. That’s not counting my steady relationship, which can vary from three times a week to once every two weeks. We’re not monogamous.’ He said: ‘Mmmm.’) My underarms and neck and groin were prodded to the point of pain in a (happily, futile) search for swellings.

  After the more usual examination procedure, as well as a set of blood tests, the doctor said, ‘Well. You don’t have either syndromal or prodromal AIDS.’ (That’s the formal way of saying you don’t appear to have AIDS or a pre-AIDS condition that should be watched.) ‘So I wouldn’t worry. What it seems like is a very tenacious bout of this year’s flu. A number of people have been hanging on to this one for a month or more. Now I have a number of patients who do have AIDS; something to remember about AIDS, if you’re worried about it, is this: it isn’t a disease you wonder whether you have. If you get it, you will be very sick. Did you take one of our folders there in the waiting room…?’

  Three days later my fever went.

  9.6 An entertaining man, the Mummer said, I’ve made a few wise men smile, and more than my share of fools howl with laughter. I’ve fancied that to do it I must know something both of wisdom and folly—not that I claim much of either. Really, aside from my mimic talents and my ability to declaim a line or time a fall, I’m a very ordinary man.

  Wise men and fools?

  Aristocrats and cutpurses?

  Well, I’ve counted all sorts among my friends. I’ve always seen myself as able to speak to high and low, and to not a few whom others would simply dismiss as mad—like that poor man on the bridge. Certainly Carnival encourages unlikely interchanges. But in my profession, the air of Carnival hangs over even the ordinary work-a-day happenings. Certainly among my most interesting and oldest acquaintances is the Master of the academy near the edge of Sallese.

  (Odd, that at this particular moment, when, one might think, the general populace joins in the atmosphere I strive to create the year round, my own thoughts wander to such things as they do…)

  At his school, you know, he promulgates a doctrine of transformation, change, endless impermanence, the evanescence of the visible. Oh, I don’t denigrate the precariousness of the intellectual adventure he has undertaken. One most be truly brave to dare such uneasy waters, never stepping in the same stream twice, going with the flow, and all that. Still, he was born into one of the most solid families in the nation—economic rocks, every one!

  Fire, flood, earthquake? (With constant reports from my friends of the sickness, I fear to mention plague.) Oh, he’s got to worry about those as much as any of us.

  But somehow we don’t, very much.

  I doubt he does either.

  I think he got tired of my producing skits about him in the marketplace during which I poked fun at all I took to
be his little failings. Oh, he observed my efforts with great good grace, diligently sending his students down to see the enchantments I mounted at his expense, at theirs, indeed at everybody else’s. Then, back at the school, he would dutifully draw out the wisdom of it all, even from places I thought they were only clever. (I have never been able to resist a good line. I suspect he has the same failing.) But the truth is, he can afford a sense of humor. Mine is won by labor.

  About a year back, however, he began writing a series of dialogues, with ratty old me as the main character. He has his students read the various parts—often playing characters with their own names, when they’re not taking turns at being yours truly.

  Exercises in argument, he calls them.

  Recently he invited me out to a day-long performance. (They do go on!) I went. Good manners said I could do nothing else. Some of his students, who have grown fond of my market fare, had with great glee given me some warning of what was to come. I expected to see a few well-intentioned gibes, now at my eccentric clothing, now at my manner of speech, perhaps a few cuts at the sexual eccentricities of my youth (or, indeed, of my age), or at the general infirmities time gives to one of my years—the sort I myself mock out on the wagon platform. But what I saw performed in this untitled prince’s merchant’s imitation of an aristocrat’s countryard (his uncle, I know, still deplores that a lord of Nevèrÿon should gain his living in such a neighborhood) was truly insidious.

  With her false beard and scruffy tunic the little girl supposed to be me spouted one and another brilliantly reasoned and beautifully rational diatribes, devastating the callow boys loitering about her and asking one dumb question after the next, egged along in their eager absurdities by her/my eloquence.

  But were they my arguments?