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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Why—despite Barbara’s skepticism—shouldn’t someone be able to read them?

  The parentally enforced change from left hand to right was, of course, only partially successful.

  Because of my undiagnosed dyslexia, early schooling was a welter of repeated intelligence tests, eye tests, hearing tests, remedial tutors, and supplementary education. The tests, at least, reported me as having superior intelligence. Still, here’s an example of what I might have turned in as a paragraph in a paper during the third grade:

  Lost even I done too thee sootre of or my mother but, I forgt the charge of the countre. Went I when back of rit I, asked Mrs onlye, the strokepeer if, of rnow no, she might pit up on the pper bag alone with the millk and oranges. Shee thoutotaht saw yrev ynnuf tub, said, no, I’d do better do cray if upstares in my hand look veryboy elce ddi.

  My teacher’s comment on something like this would be: “How come almost the only word spelled correctly in this whole thing is ‘oranges’? How can you spell ‘oranges’ properly and misspell ‘paper’? I can’t begin to mark it. I literally don’t know what it’s about!”

  One sixth-grade English teacher, Miss Alexander, her black hair pulled back in the severest of buns, determined to break me of what she repeatedly insisted, to me, to my parents, and to the whole class, was “pure, simple laziness,” ordered me to look up every word I misspelled in the dictionary. You do not know what torture is until you have stood in the corner of the school library, over the large dictionary on its metal stand for two hours, trying to find the word “running.” You’re sure there’s a “u,” an “r,” and an “n” in it, but you have no idea which of the three comes first. …

  If, however, you’d asked me to read aloud what I’d written in my illiterate paper, I would have recited, probably without a hitch:

  Last evening I went down to the store for my mother, but I forgot the change on the counter. When I went back for it, I asked Mrs. Onley, the storekeeper, if, from now on, she might put it in the paper bag along with the milk and oranges. She thought that was very funny, but said, no, I’d do better to carry it upstairs in my hand like everybody else did.

  At least I would have recited that for a day or two. …

  But by now even I had noticed that, once time passed and I no longer remembered the precise wording I’d intended, my writing became almost as opaque to me as it was to others.

  I studied spelling lists and sometimes did very well on tests: but five hours later would find me writing the same words, incomprehensibly jumbled. (“But I know you can spell ‘oranges.’ Last week you spelled it correctly. Why, this week, have you left the ‘e’ off the end, then put an ‘o’ where the ‘a’ should be?”) Yet with each new page, I would be surprised, bewildered, and finally hurt that it was an all-but-incomprehensible jumble of elisions, transpositions, inversions, and substitutions. Why weren’t the things I wrote as lucid and praiseworthy as Debby’s or Geoff’s or Priscilla’s?

  Once, in seventh grade, I handed in an eight-page paper on the Special Theory of Relativity; at my aunt’s in Montclair, I’d read George Gamow’s fine book on the topic for youngsters, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland; back in New York, I’d supplemented it with several encyclopedia articles and One, Two, Three … Infinity. The paper was an extra project, and I was terribly proud of my examples of relative velocities and my own explanation of FitzGerald’s contraction and Grelling’s paradox. I was also wholly unaware that I had written it in the same broken and jumbled mishmash as my account of my trip to the grocery store.

  I was very fond of my English teacher, Mrs. T. (as we called her). In the previous month she had opened up the whole world of etymology for me. And, during the unit on sentence diagramming, again and again she had called on me when the rest of the class had been bewildered by an antecedent or unable to locate the referent for some modifier. But when I went in for my conference on my paper, she was clearly upset. After a few silent, frowning moments, she said: “I don’t understand this at all. It’s very disturbing. And I don’t even think I want to talk to you about it.” And she handed it back to me.

  Today I am sure she had considered her response and had decided that I might be shocked out of what she felt, on my part, could only be an intense literary slovenliness.

  I was certainly shocked; I was also confused and hurt: “Well, if you can’t understand the Theory of Relativity, I don’t want to talk to you either!” I jumped up from the chair beside her desk, ran out into the hallway, and began to cry.

  That’s when I think my teachers began to consider the possibility that I might be deeply disturbed. Because of the obvious gap between my intelligence and my appalling spelling, I was sent to a psychiatrist, finally to begin regular therapy at the North Side Center—on the chance that my failure to master English mechanics was emotionally prompted attention-getting behavior.

  I was always encouraged to write. My mother read to me constantly, and even my father now took time out to read me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter by chapter, each night. As one sensible, if frustrated, tutor told my parents: “He must write and write and write—as much as he can. Eventually he will improve.” And so I wrote: stories and plays and epic poems and even began several novels. With them I began to amass the strategies that began to control the disability, but I made no distinction between the ones that said, “After you have written the word, ask yourself what the first letter sounds like. Then rewrite it, making sure that letter is first,” and the strategy that said, “With everything you write, see if you can get Debby or Johnny or Priscilla to read it over first, correct the spelling for you, then recopy it.”

  If I could get someone to correct it first, then meticulously rewrote it, the improvement was notable—and the paper would usually be marked “Excellent,” except those times when, for inexplicable reasons, I accidentally copied the whole or part of it (“… taht saw yrev ynnuf tub …”) backwards: right to left instead of left to right.

  Even as late as my sophomore year at Science, my English teacher, Mrs. Levy, while returning papers, held up mine and asked, “Is this supposed to be a joke, Mr. Delany? The whole thing’s in mirror writing. Who do you think you are, Leonardo da Vinci?”

  42.72. Because, at the time, I had no word—dyslexia—for all this, the difficulty, embarrassment, and pain connected with writing could somehow be set aside, not spoken of; placed, if not outside of language, then into the same area of private speech into which I put all my sexual experiences, my fascination with hands, and my growing awareness of the mechanism by which writing created the experience called reading.

  The happenings I’ve written of here had all occurred—and to me. They were inchoately part of who I was, as was my response to them. (My “excellent” papers I saved; the one in mirror writing I tore up into pieces, flushed the strips with my name down the toilet, and stuffed the rest of the pieces as far down as possible under the paper towels in the trash receptacle in the boys’ john.) But without the word, I could think of myself as basically normal. I could give an account of myself that closed these experiences wholly outside of it, that made them even unmentionable, not only by me but—through the politics of politeness and the unmentionable—by others as well.

  So much of what I had learned, what I had done, what I had searched out could be seen as silent, brutal compensation for this heretofore unnamed condition. What would have been the differences in me, I wondered, there in the hospital, if I’d grown up thinking of myself as having a learning disability from the beginning? Would I have become a writer? Would I have become a science fiction writer?

  What might the word have given me?

  What might it have taken away?

  43. Dr. G. said: “You know, Chip, change is a very frightening thing,” recalling so many conversations between Marilyn and me in those first months of marriage. (“Change,” she had written, finally, exhaustedly, in something between despair and resignation, “is neither merciful nor just. …”) “And you�
�ve been going through nothing but change for the last three-and-a-half years. Think of a subway. Think of what it does. You’re walking through one part of the city. Now you suddenly go down steps, underground. You can’t see anything of the world above. Then, after a loud, racketing ride, you suddenly come upstairs, like a swimmer breaking through the surface. You walk out and everything is completely different—changed. You’re in a whole new place. Now you say you’ve been taking the subway here to the hospital every day. That’s very brave—maybe unnecessarily so. But the next time you come, as soon as you go down the steps, don’t let yourself get lost in where you are. Forget about being afraid or not being afraid. Instead, I want you to picture where you’re going. Try to picture the stop over on Lexington where you come out. Try to see in your mind what the street around that stop looks like. Concentrate on your destination.” He smiled. “Tell me how it goes.”

  It went a whole lot better!

  43.01. A black man …?

  A gay man …?

  43.1. The organist who played for the services at most of my father’s funerals when I was a child was a brown, round, irrepressibly effeminate man named Herman. It was an open secret that Herman was queer. The grown-ups in my family joked about it all the time. Herman certainly never tried to hide it—I don’t know if he could have.

  Herman was very fond of me and my younger sister. From somewhere, he’d gotten the idea I liked shad roe. I didn’t. (What seven-year-old does?—but then, perhaps he was teasing. He was so flamboyant in his every phrase and gesture—and I was such a literal-minded child—no one could be sure.) From various trips to see one sister in Baltimore or another in Washington, D.C., Herman would bring back large oval tins of shad roe as a present for me. Sundays, Mother would dredge it in egg and breadcrumbs, fry it in butter, and serve it for breakfast, exhorting me to eat just a taste, and, later, on one of Herman’s visits, while I waited, silent and awed at her untruth, would tell Herman how much I’d loved it!

  When, in August, some black delivery man, bent nearly double, with his shirtsleeves rolled up over wet, teak-colored arms, would push a bronze or mahogany casket on the collapsible rubber-tired catafalque slowly and step by step along the red runner into the chapel where Herman, in his navy suit and scarlet tie, was practicing (at the actual service a black tie would replace it. But during practice, as he put it, “Mother needs some color about her or things will be just too dreary—don’t you think?”), Herman would glance over, see the man, break into an organ fanfare, rise from the bench, clap both hands to his heart, flutter them and his eyelids, roll his irises toward heaven, and exclaim, “Oh, my smellin’ salts! Get me my smellin’ salts! Boy, you come in here and do that to a woman like me, lookin’ like that? My heart can’t take it! I may just faint right here, you pretty thing!” If the delivery man had been through this before, he might stop, stand up over the coffin with sweat drops under his rough hair, and say, “What’s a’ matter with you, Herman? You one of them faggots that like men?”

  But Herman’s eyes would widen in disbelief, and, drawing back, one hand to his tie, he’d declare, “Me? Oh, chile’, chile’, you must be ill or something!” Then he would march up, take the young man’s chin in his hand, and examine his face with popped, peering eyes. “Me? One of them? Why, you must have a fever, boy! I swear, you must have been workin’ out in the heat too long today. I do believe you must be sick!” Here he would feel the man’s forehead, then, removing his hand, looking at the sweat that had come off on his own palm, touch his finger to his tongue, and declare, “Oh, my lord, you are tasty! Here—” he would go on, before the man could say anything, and put both his hands flat on the delivery man’s chest, between the open buttons, and push the shirt back off the dark arms—“let me just massage them fine, strong muscles of yours and relax you and get you all comfortable so them awful and hideous ideas about me can fly out of your head forever and ever, amen! Don’t that feel good? Don’t you want a nice, lovely massage to relax all them big, beautiful muscles you got? Umm? Boy, how did you get so strong? Now don’t tell me you don’t like that! That’s lovely, just lovely the way it feels, isn’t it? Imagine, honey! Thinkin’ such nastiness like that about a woman like me! I mean, I just might faint right here, and you gonna have to carry me to a chair and fan me and bring me my smellin’ salts!” Meanwhile he would be rubbing the man’s chest and arms. “Oooooh, that feels so good, I can hardly stand it myself.” His voice would go up real high and he’d grin. “Honey, you feelin’ a little better now?”

  In the chapel corner the floor fan purred, its blades a metallic haze behind circular wires. In seersucker shorts and sandals, on the first row of wooden folding chairs painted gold with maroon plush seats, I sat, watching all this.

  Different men would put up with Herman’s antics for different lengths of time; and the casket delivery man (or the coal man or the plumber’s assistant) would finally shrug away, laughing and pulling his shirt back up: “Aw, Herman, cut it out, now …!” and my father, in his vest and shirtsleeves, would come from the morgue behind the chapel, chuckling at it all, followed by a smiling Freddy, Dad’s chief embalmer.

  I’d smile too. Although I wasn’t sure what exactly I was smiling at.

  One thing I realized was that this kind of fooling around (the word “camping” I didn’t hear for another half dozen years or more) was strictly masculine. It was 1948 or ’49. And if my mother or another woman were present, Herman’s horseplay stopped as assuredly as would my father’s occasional “goddamn,” “shit,” “nigger, this,” or “nigger, that.” Yet the change of rhetoric did not seem, with Herman, at all the general male politeness/shyness before women as was the case with my father and his other, rougher friends. Herman was, if anything, more attentive to my mother than any of the others. And she was clearly fond of him. With her, he was always full of questions about us children and advice on paint and slipcovers, and consolation, sympathy, and humor about any of her domestic complaints (not to mention the cans of shad roe, packages of flowered stationery, and bags of saltwater taffy from Atlantic City), all delivered with his balding brown head far closer to my mother’s, it seemed, when they talked over coffee upstairs in the kitchen, than my father’s or anyone else’s ever got.

  Nor did I miss when, minutes after they’d been sitting around laughing at his jokes and howling over some off-color comment he’d made (but well within the boundaries of what was acceptable for the times), just after he’d gone downstairs, one visiting cousin might declare, with a bitter face, “He’s such a little fairy! I think he’s disgusting,” or an aunt who’d come by might shake her head and say, “Well, he certainly is … strange!”

  Herman had a place in our social scheme—but by no means an acceptable place, and certainly not a place I wanted to fill.

  Some years later, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I remember Herman, bent over, sweating, fat, stopping in to visit Freddy or my father at the funeral parlor, walking slowly, carrying some bulging shopping bag. (He no longer played the organ for us.) I would ask him how he was, and he would shake his head and declare, “I ain’t well, honey. I ain’t a well woman at all! Pray to the Lord you never get as sick as I been most of the last year! But you lookin’ just wonderful, boy! Wonderful! Mmmmmm!”

  And when I was eighteen, I remember going to look at him, grown from fat to obese, squeezed into his own coffin in the back chapel—the one time he got to wear his red tie at a service, which only added to that feeling always haunting the funerals of friends that this was not real death, only practice.

  My own active adult sex life would begin that October—yes, the same month as my father’s death—with a nervous, white-haired, middle-aged man, recently returned from Israel, who pressed his thigh against mine in the orchestra of the Amsterdam Theater on Forty-second Street, one of the old, darkly columned movie palaces where I’d gone specifically to get picked up. He’d taken me back to his apartment in Brooklyn. There’d been large locks on the doors of each of its
three small rooms. After some very uninteresting sex, during which I had the only premature ejaculation of my life (but it would make me decide I was comparatively normal for at least three days; we’d been in physical contact, before and after, a minute and a half tops), we’d slept in separate rooms, he, locked in his bedroom for the night, with me left to doze on a couch in his living room, each of us idly wondering if the other weren’t a psychotic maniac or worse, who would try to break in any moment and slice the other up into tiny pieces. But of course neither of us was.

  But for now, as I looked at Herman in his coffin, I realized I had no notion what sexual outlets there’d been in his life. Had he gone to bars? Had he gone to baths? Had he picked up people in the afternoon in Forty-second Street movie houses or in the evenings along the benches beside Central Park West? Once a month, did he spend a night cruising the halls of the YMCA over on 135th Street where (with its decaying Aaron Douglas mural over the mirror in the barbershop), on Saturday afternoons, up till a few years before, I used to go so innocently swimming? Had there been a long-term lover waiting for him at home, unmet by, and unmentioned to, people like my father whom he’d worked for? For even though I’d pursued none of them myself, I knew these were the possibilities that lay ahead—and was desperately trying to work up the courage to explore them on my own. Was it possible, I wondered, that Herman’s encounters had been confined to the touch teased from some workman; or had it even been his arms around my shoulder, his thigh against my thigh, when, years before, beside me on the organ bench, he’d taught me the proper fingering for the scale on the chapel console, before running to my parents to exclaim: “You must get that boy some piano lessons! You must! There’s so much talent in his little hands, I tell you, it just breaks my heart!”—an exhortation my parents took no more seriously than they did any of his other outrageousnesses. (I was already studying the violin, anyway.) In short, had he any more outlets than I already had? I had no way to know. Herman was fat and forty when, as a child, I met him. By the time I was an adolescent who’d outgrown the child’s sexual options of summer camp after lights-out or the locker room after swimming but had not yet found where the adults went to play, Herman, in his fifties, was dead of diabetic complications.