The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  I looked up at him. He grinned—and, as anomalously, in the face that had seemed so handsome, I saw there were no front teeth. Long and yellow, two thrust down at either side of the upper gum’s gap, showing lots of his tongue when he talked: “Ya’ all right there, little fella’? You gotta watch where you’re walkin’ out here!” He loosened his grip. “It can be dangerous. Heads up, now!”

  He blinked his light, light eyes.

  He smiled his tongue-filled grin.

  “Thank you, sir!” I blurted. “I’m all right—thank you!” Then I pulled away and dashed back to my father—trying to pay a little more attention to the rushing and hurrying people on the evening street.

  Beside Dad again (who was still examining the ornaments), I looked back at the flaming drum.

  The workman was shouting again to the men at the truck—but he dropped his hand now, called a curse, then loped from the curb, out between the cars and across the cobbles, firelight dulling on his jacket back.

  Later that evening, in still one of the other market buildings, Dad bought a big blue tin of an oriental spice someone had told him about, which simply went by its chemical name: monosodium glutamate. (After the first week when we tried it on everything we ate, I wasn’t to hear of it again for another half dozen years.) And the next year he bought a canned plum pudding that had to be boiled for forty minutes and that tasted … well, interesting. And still another year when I went with him, he purchased a set of elliptical Christmas ornaments of pearly glass, painted with metallic reds and greens and blues, a whole eight of them, larger than any we’d ever owned. Each was bigger than my—no, as big as my father’s … no, as big as that workman’s fist! And when the first one fell from the tree and broke, I could see in the concave silver within, distorted and reflected, the whole of our Christmas living room.

  5.31. At my Aunt Dorothy’s and Uncle Myles’s Brooklyn brownstone, on McDonough Street, there was an umber commemorative dish, on which, carved from white ivory, the 1939 World’s Fair Trylon and Perisphere were raised in relief. In the upstairs living room that frequently smelled of my uncle’s cigars, by the green leather chair, the dish stayed on a rotating knickknack table. Books, some of them leather, with flaking spines, sat in the turning shelves beneath. At seven or eight I’d stand, gazing into the plate, trying to imagine what “the future” had been like at the Fair before I was born. My father and Uncle Myles had explained to me that the long-vanished Fair, which they’d both so enjoyed and at which they’d seen so many marvels, had been all about the future. …

  5.4. From age six on, I spent my summers at camp. That first July, in tears at separating from my family, I rode off on the bus, sobbing beside my cousin Mickey. The camp turned out to be a nightmare of a place, run by a light brown, heavy jowled woman who, though she was basically a good and cheerful sort, simply hadn’t the temperament for taking care of children; nor was she capable of gathering around her people who did. At ten, when I was enrolled in a new camp, Woodland, I was sure I was headed for more summer misery.

  Were this a full-out attempt at biography, auto- or otherwise, the five summers I spent at Woodland would require a disproportionate number of pages. In terms of society, art, and—yes—sex, they simply contained the most wonderful experiences of my life till then.

  The camp worked to get kids from all economic levels, races, and sections of the country, then immersed us in an array of projects to benefit the local community. We staffed and ran a folk museum; and when there was a forest fire, water canisters and hand-pump hoses strapped to our backs, we patrolled and wet down the firebreak, alongside local adolescents.

  On my first day at Woodland, we dragged our trunks up the steep hill road the buses could not negotiate, all the way past the main house, the recreation and dining halls, out along a leafy, sun-blotched cinder road, beyond a small barn building, red on the outside, gray on the inside, called incongruously Brooklyn College (“Why is it named that?” “Well, when Norman and Hannah first bought the property, they found a blackboard inside with the words ‘BROOKLYN COLLEGE’ written across it. The name stuck.”), by the girls’ bunks and across the knoll into the Tent Colony—a circle of army-style tents put up every year on permanent wooden platforms over weathered two-by-fours. I wedged my violin case on top of my wooden cubby, back under the sloping cloth. The first of July’s sunlight still penetrated the double layer, gone caramel through tan canvas. Then I went outside to ask my new counselor where we were supposed to go to the bathroom.

  A tall, sun-browned man from Florida, in faded jeans and light blue poloshirt, Evan stopped directing some boys who were putting their trunks, now empty, inside the flaps of one of the unused tents (filled with iron bedsteads and folded mattresses), and pointed to a dark, creosoted building with bellied screens off to the side of the seventy-five-foot clearing. “That’s the john,” Evan said. “You also take your showers in there.”

  “If I do number two,” I asked, “do you want me to bring you my toilet paper when I’m finished?”

  “Your toilet paper?” He frowned at me uncomprehendingly. “What on earth for?”

  “So you can see whether I … did anything or not.”

  Evan laughed. “Whether you ‘do anything or not,’ I really think, should be entirely your business—don’t you?”

  As I trotted over to the john, he called after me, “Come on back to the tent when you’re finished.” (I glanced again at him.) “We’re about to introduce everybody and learn each other’s names.” Then he turned to help a fat yellow-haired boy, whose name I already knew was Rusty, drag his trunk up onto the platform.

  I pushed through the screen door, stepped onto the cracked concrete, and went into the wooden stall. Sitting on the white toilet ring—a water heater, behind more wood, just then began to thrum—I looked at the graffiti lingering from former years. In red ballpoint the bulbous nose of a little World War II Kilroy had been drawn over a lower plank. Recalling the eliminatory rules and rigidities of my former camp (I told you it was nightmarish), I wondered if this unbelievable and astonishing freedom—you could actually go to the bathroom here, whenever you wanted—was really indicative of the summer to come.

  It was.

  Music was a hugely important ribbon weaving through our lives at Woodland. That summer I played the violin in the camp orchestra for a production of Herbert Haufrecht’s cantata, We Come from the City, about a bunch of young city people who arrive in the Catskills to work on the Downsville Dam. That same year, in the back of a pickup truck with a tape recorder, Norman Casden, and a half dozen other campers, I rode through the countryside to collect songs and stories from local folk shortly to be dispossessed from their neat homes (the leafy light over the gray porches and white-framed screen doors already suggesting the water that would soon cover their sites to a depth of forty feet) by the Lackawack Reservoir.

  Rapt through the evening, gathered in the stone amphitheater behind the recreation hall, we sat forward on our rocky seats, while down on the concrete platform, a log fire burning at its edge, Pete Seeger flailed out “The Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase” on his banjo. At the final twanging chord, he flung his fingers down the strings so hard that two of his stainless fingerpicks flew off to spin, glittering, among the first rows of listeners. At the same moment, a catch of water in the damp cement beneath the fire—burning an hour now—exploded like a guncrack, knocking over a log and sending cement bits clicking and furious sparks up twenty-five feet, swirling above Pete (turned to gape upward now), above the stage, above the trees, and into indigo evening.

  We all gasped—then applauded. And laughed.

  I knew I’d come to a magic place.

  My second year, at the Fourth of July celebration on the ski slope down the hill across the trestle bridge over the rocky and frothing Esopus River, I watched our new music counselor, Bob DeCormier, stand before the counselors’ chorus, crowded together with their music on the performance platform’s planks. Knees together, thumbs an
d forefingers touching, Bob began to conduct. Out over campers and townspeople from Ellenville and Kingston and Bearsville and Woodstock and Phoenicia, who’d come together for America’s birthday, they sang:

  The heart needs a brain,

  And the brain needs a heart;

  And the whole is greater

  Than any one part. …

  That same summer, under his direction, the campers’ chorus premiered DeCormier’s profound and lyric cantata about the life and sayings of Sojourner Truth.

  And in my third year I sang and danced the lead in another Haufrecht cantata, Boney Quillan, based on a local legend about a logger who ate his girlfriend’s flowers when she went off with another man, who tricked his bosses and danced out the nights and carried his ax through the Catskill mornings.

  That summer my favorite counselor was a slender, light tan woman named Mary. She had a mannish voice, and when we were assigned our parts in the chorus she was pronounced—to some surprise—a tenor rather than soprano or alto.

  She sat next to me during chorus rehearsals all summer.

  Mary usually came to the Wednesday night social dances in jeans and short sleeves. When somebody made some comment, and she finally consented to wear a skirt, I remember her, as we stood by the wooden wall, telling me: “I have a feeling I look very funny in this thing.”

  She did.

  My family knew Mary’s family; and, on visiting day, when Mom and Dad came up, my father asked her, surprised: “Why in the world did you cut all your hair off like that, young lady?”

  Jocularly, Mary answered: “Oh, the last time I was at the barber’s, I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up, he’d just gone on cutting—and it was like this.” It was a rehearsed answer for an untoward question. But both my parents looked sad. Still, Mary listened patiently, again and again, while we sat at the old upright in Brooklyn College, to my faltering, incomplete attempts that August to write my own cantata—and was even encouraging; which was more, I’m afraid, than the attempts deserved.

  All through those summers, professional musicians like Seeger and Luise Beavers came to make us music; and local musicians like Grant Richards sang to us about “Bessie the Heifer” and aging Mike Todd played the harmonica and clacked his rhythmic, rattling spoons in frantic chatter, stamping his boots while we listened, fascinated.

  Then, in my fourth year, suddenly I was in the older Woodland workcamp, further down the hill. Now, all the time, I was in and out of a building just up across the road, which I’d only glimpsed in previous years, called, beautifully and mystically, Butterfly Cottage.

  5.41. At moments of real tiredness, during mornings or afternoons, I would suddenly seem to recede down a hall, so that everything I looked at would appear to fall into the distance, as if I were observing the stairwell or the backyard or the street through a hollow tube from a paper towel roll. It didn’t particularly stop me from responding to or talking to people. In my early adolescence, I got so that—sometimes—I could make it happen; but shortly after I gained some control over it, it began to happen less and less until, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, it ceased.

  And:

  Each night, as I was falling asleep, suddenly I’d be shocked awake—rather as if some phantom, passing, had struck the soles of my feet. Once, when I was four, the little convulsion that went with it was enough to make me fall out of bed. This nightly myoclonic tremor grew milder and milder as I got older—but I often felt I couldn’t go to sleep until it had happened. For then, only minutes later, I would drift off again—and the next time I woke it would be morning. This continued into my early thirties. Sometimes it even happens today.

  And also:

  Daily—sometimes even two or three times a day—I would undergo a moment’s heart-pounding panic, as I realized that, someday, I would die … that, indeed, I would have to live through the last few seconds of my life and make the transition into permanent infinite nothing. (For all my religious upbringing, the consolations of heaven never seemed more to me than myth or metaphor—possibly, I suspected, a radically misplaced one.) At its best, this panic would last two to five seconds: if I were walking down the street, it would make me swallow, or perhaps speed my pace. My heart would hammer, twice, three times. My breath would grow rapid and shallow. These attacks were total—and almost blinding. When they lasted only a second or two, I was basically all right—once they were over. A four- or five-second one, however, could make me halt and lean against the wall of the building. I might even have to sit on a stoop. There were periods in my life when these attacks would last ten, twelve, or even fifteen seconds. At such length they left me physically devastated. When they lingered that long, I might even cry out in the midst of one, or have to lie down for half an hour afterwards. Sometimes I speculated that, should one ever last as long as a minute, I would probably not survive. This, too, I learned to control; for a while in my adolescence, by moving my thoughts closer and closer to the reality of death, I could bring one of these panics on. But since they almost always occurred as a surprise, there was seldom anything I could do to prevent one. Yet sometime in my early thirties, I realized what had been a daily occurrence all through my childhood now only happened every week or so. …

  Finally even these ceased.

  But consider these three things inscribed again and again, page by page, in a second column of type that doubles the one that makes up this book, a parallel column devoted only to those elements that are repeated and repeated throughout any day, any life, incidents that constitute at once the basal and quotidian—waking up, breakfast, lunch, dinner, washing, elimination, drifting off to sleep—as well as the endlessly repeated risings and fallings of desire.

  There is almost nothing I will write of—or have written of—here that is more than four minutes or four hours (and certainly no more than fourteen) from one or, often, all three.

  5.5. When I was about ten or twelve, my father used to take me to the movies fairly frequently. He’d always done it grudgingly, however, so that only later did it occur to me that he probably got a kick out of such movies too: for over those years, he took me with him to see Mighty Joe Young, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, This Island Earth, and Fort Ticonderoga (because, like Outer Space, it was in 3-D). My memories of those pleasant times are tarnished by the fact that, when he would grow angry at me, he would punish my transgressions (usually, at least in my memory, fairly small ones, like speaking to him in the wrong tone of voice or some other minor enthusiasm of mine he would take as disrespect) by not taking me to see one that I wanted to.

  Once he forbade me to see House of Wax (also in 3-D), as punishment for what I no longer remember. (A film I also had already missed, as another punishment, was The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, whose coming attractions I’d seen with my dad at another picture and been dazzled by.) When I went to spend my spring vacation with Mom over at my cousins’ in New Jersey, Dorothy (three years my senior) had taken me to see Call Me Madam with Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor (whom I instantly fell in love with, and went tap dancing around the house till I had to be told to stop), and Oh, You Beautiful Doll. And, after I went to see it with Boyd (five years older than I), I carried on so much about Burt Lancaster’s acrobatic performance in The Flame and the Arrow, that, when my father came over to visit us in Jersey, he scowled and said, “Didn’t I forbid you to see that …?”

  “No, Dad!” I protested with a sudden chill of guilt and fear, with the inchoate feeling every child has at such a parental accusation that, deeply and unknowingly, they’ve done something wrong. “That was House of Wax …!”

  “Oh …” he said (while Dorothy and Boyd glanced at each other uncomfortably, thinking their young cousin had tricked them into violating an unknown parental prohibition). “Are you sure …?” unable quite to understand how I could have enjoyed something so much unless it was in violation of his will.

  5.6. At Woodland, I read some of my first science fiction sto
ries.

  There I also began to play the guitar.

  After half a dozen years of violin lessons, and three years in my elementary school orchestra as first-chair violinist, a position (and desk) I shared with an older boy named Tony Hiss, the new instrument was very easy. Though when I’d begun, he’d played the violin no more than I did, my father had gotten a set of elementary books and for the first three months had been my teacher—for he was a man who could get music out of just about any instrument he picked up. He’d played the cornet until shortly before I was born and, when much younger, had sat in a few times with Cab Calloway’s band. He and my mother had been close friends of Cab and his wife, Lady Constance, and Christmas—Cab’s birthday—would see the four of them at an annual hockey game with which Cab celebrated, before his party, later, up at his home, the recreation room set up as a replica of the Cotton Club, the only way that anyone black who was not a performer working there could ever get to see it, as Negroes were not allowed in as audience.

  But now my father ran a Seventh Avenue funeral home.

  He was a tall man, and a number of distant female cousins or young women friends of the family would confide to me, after his death, that they’d always thought him dashingly handsome. My father was also a very nervous man. My mother’s sister, Virginia, frequently put it: “If there’s any way to worry about it at all, don’t worry, Sam will find it.” His intense anxieties put a constant strain on my mother, and certainly on my sister and me—which, in my case, led to frequent arguments and general hostility.