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

by Samuel R. Delany

  I had no idea of the year, the situation, or any context for the memory—certainly no picture of the room I’d rented. Or of who had brought me there or how I had chosen the place.

  I still don’t know the city.

  Indeed, the memory’s unfixed status made me several times wonder if it wasn’t a dream.

  During those same years, however, if you asked me whether I had stayed in a hotel during any of my hitchhiking trip to Texas, I would have said “No”—just as I would have said, “My father died in 1958 when I was seventeen. …” But the actual transcription of this section has fixed that loose and floating image to this trip—doubtless to the second night of it, too.

  There was no sudden and revelatory addition linking it by material and logic to something else from the same time. This awareness came, rather, as a growing conviction, a retrieval of memories I’d occasionally had about it, a solidifying certainty that, once in place, it is impossible for me to deny as any sudden and climactic knowledge would have been. There is no way to confirm such a shift in the status of a memory. But yesterday I would have said I did not know where this memory trace comes from. Today, I am equally sure I do.

  At this point, I can reconstruct at least this much context: the night in the bus depot with Bob had left me pretty tired—as had the actual hitchhiking, and I’d finally decided to spend six or seven dollars of my money on a room for the night. In true hustler fashion, when he hitchhiked, Bob had told me, he never stayed in hotels or motels unless someone else put him up. I was feeling guilty about my decision and had resolved not to mention it to him.

  He was on an entirely different road.

  Probably I never did. But by cutting it out of my own repertoire of things to say about the trip, I began to cut it loose from language and history, so that a year later it was an unanchored fragment: and I had taken a small, self-protective lie of omission and forgotten it was not the truth. Only bits of the visual image remained on the surface, to float and drift (wasn’t it from my later Europe trip? or from some subsequent stopover at an early science fiction convention?) till I’d actually forgotten where it belonged.

  Such gains in local knowledge of the stations of our lives are among the prizes a self-narration such as this can win. (And doesn’t that narration lose us as many such fragment sensations and images forever …?) But there are other memories that, for me, have always been part of the journey:

  For three hours I sat in the sun at the highway edge with a hot field of grain aroar with crickets around me, while all of six cars drove by. On the ground, cross-legged, beside my guitar, I wrote out a few journal pages in my notebook. I reread two Sturgeon stories—but not, yet, “A Way of Thinking.” Then I took my shirt off, sat on the case, and strummed and plucked for maybe fifteen minutes.

  But it was too hot.

  Squinting, squatting, I put the guitar away, stood up, and stuck out my thumb again.

  The seventh car veered over to the road’s edge and opened its door.

  For another hour (though I don’t know whether that hour was before or after my wait in the sun) I looked out some truck or car window at the passing road bank, matted with gray and green grasses, scrub and pine fringing its top. The ground had seared in the heat, with great scabs showing through every few yards of brick red Georgia earth.

  Near midnight, between a beach and a highway, I walked through the outskirts of Biloxi, Mississippi, stepping over branches scattered by a hurricane from the week before, the yellow neon from the carnival rides that comprised this section of town swinging above me, around me, lighting the sand, the macadam, my outstretched thumb, while cars drove past in the dark.

  And at three-thirty in the morning, the driver of the small pickup reached over, shook me awake by the shoulder, and said, “Here you go, fella.”

  “Oh … yeah.” I blinked. “Thanks.” Reaching down, I got my case and climbed out into the deserted suburban night, at some intersection in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  “You walk right down that way, ’bout three, four blocks. Like I said—” in his cap, the fat man leaned over to tell me through the half-open window—“you’ll be at the highway again.”

  Then, the single moving vehicle on the street, his truck pulled away while his red rear lights diminished in the black.

  Looking up at the wires crossing on the night, with the traffic light (turning now from green to red) hanging from the middle, I stood, centered in the silent street, the heavy part of my guitar case on the asphalt, the neck balanced under my hand. Dark houses stood on my left, on my right. I could taste the mucus that filmed my mouth. My face felt like some metallic plate instead of bone and flesh and muscle. Gathered in a crease of my neck during the last hour of head-hanging sleep, sweat dried in the dark.

  What, I wondered, am I going to do at three-thirty in the morning in Shreveport—?

  Then it began to rain—gently, insistently, the drops a-tick and a-glitter on the blacktop under the intersection lights, in the leaves on the corner trees, peppering my face, my arms, my glasses.

  At three-thirty.

  In Shreveport.

  I lifted my guitar case and started down the street I’d been pointed along. It was the poorest of the four joining at the crossroads—there, indeed, the houses had been rather elegant.

  Ahead, I could see the highway under a phone pole lamp. The rain flickered beneath the tin shade’s edge. During the five minutes I walked toward it, no car went by.

  What happened next I used in a novel seven years later (save that I omitted the guitar case—which, by now, I wished I’d never brought). At a rundown house, twenty feet from the road, I went up on the porch and lay down on the warped boards by the wall—one arm around the case neck—to doze off under the water’s hiss and whisper on the shingles above.

  When the air was turning gray-blue behind the overcast through the porch rail, I pushed myself up, got my feet under me (I’d left my glasses in my shirt pocket because it was still raining), took up my case and walked down the steps into the drizzle, out the yard to the highway.

  There still weren’t any cars.

  At all.

  I squinted up, got a face full of droplets, and figured this was silly. I’d go back to my porch and try to sleep some more. I turned and walked back up the quiet, grassy street. But as I approached the dripping gray clapboard, with the dark windows and the overturned tricycle in the yard, I heard a growling and, the next thing, this big white and brown dog pushed out from under the porch beside the steps. And started barking.

  Apparently he’d been sleeping there when I’d been dozing topside. But he was awake now.

  I backed up.

  He stepped forward. And barked some more. A lot.

  I took two more steps backward—I wasn’t afraid of the dog so much as I was worried by the noise he was making.

  Then he charged me.

  I turned, slipped, got my balance again, and ran—guitar case swinging wide—for the road. Behind me the dog kept barking. Without halting his racket, maybe he stopped running a few seconds. But when I was on the highway, I gasped a breath, turned to look back—and, only about thirty feet behind me, he was running at me again.

  I barrelled forward—

  —and this dozen-year-old blue Chevy I hadn’t even seen went past me to pull to the side. Its door swung open—I didn’t even have my hand out. But I practically dove into the car. Somebody pulled me in—now by my arm, now by my belt. I could hardly see what was going on. The door got slammed behind me—but we were already moving. When I sat up, bruising my knee on the case, to look out the window, the dog, still barking, ran for a while, stopped, barked again—and dropped back into the tan, morning souse.

  “Thank you—” I blurted, looking around. “Thank you, I—” I coughed. “Thank you. …”

  I was in the front seat. There was a whole lot of very blond, very gray-eyed children in the back, ranging from about two to about fifteen. The woman in the print housedress wedged behi
nd the steering wheel was immense. The stringy-necked guy beside her who had gotten me in had a set of huge, callused hands on him. He was grinning at me, and bald, with iron-gray tufts over his ears.

  “His lungs ain’t good at all,” the woman was shortly explaining about her lanky husband. “You all right, after that? That’s good. ’Cause I seen that dog runnin’ after you and it like to stopped my heart.” As she turned the wheel, dirigibles of flesh emerging from her creased and flowered armholes swung from her upper arms. “Well, like I say, he’s real sick. But he wouldn’t stay behind, no matter what I said. He wanted to come and help out with the children—but he’s like that. He’s such a good man—it breaks my heart to see him this way. What was that nasty ol’ dog runnin’ after you for, like that, anyway?”

  I explained as best I could.

  Her husband just grinned; he only had about half of his teeth.

  “I know he’d offer you a cigarette,” the woman said, indicating her husband again, “but the doctor won’t let him smoke no more. That’s cause his lungs is so bad.” She, it seemed, was driving to see their oldest boy, eighteen, who was at an army base a state away.

  “Where’re you goin’?” the husband asked me, at last.

  “Aransas Pass—in Texas. …”

  “What you goin’ there for?” He didn’t sound sick, and his gap-toothed smile was just as friendly as it could be.

  The woman said, “Now don’t go pryin’ into the boy’s business. You gotta excuse him—he’s a good man, but his lungs are real bad. And he’s gotta go pryin’ into everybody’s business that don’t concern him. You don’t have to tell him nothin’ you don’t want to—all I know is, I don’t hold with no dog chasing nobody down no road in the rain, when you probably ain’t done nothing but walk by and say, ‘hello.’ Y’all take that guitar thing and put it in the back—and don’t go touchin’ it now. It’s his; it ain’t yours. What did you say you were goin’ down for?”

  “To Texas,” I repeated. “To Aransas Pass—to work on the shrimp boats. For the spring.”

  “Now, that’s nice,” she said. “He’s going down there to work at a job. On the boats. That’s nice work, I bet, when it gets real hot. He did outdoor work, too, till he got sick. Now see there, I told you he was a nice boy, when I seen him runnin’.”

  “You make good money there?” the man asked.

  “Now you don’t have to tell him anything about your money. He just wants to know everybody’s business. That’s all—he’s like an old woman, sometimes. Always wants to know everything about everybody that don’t concern him.” She laughed. The dirigibles wobbled. “What’s your name?”

  But while she asked, I was marveling at how, under this onslaught of warmth and domesticity, I had suddenly become the most ordinary of young men, hitchhiking south to work at a summer job, with all else—Bob and Marilyn and insistent truckers and timid salesmen—closed suddenly and totally out.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked.

  “You don’t have to tell him, you don’t want,” the woman said. “That’s your business, not his. You don’t have to pay no attention to any of his foolishness, once he starts asking questions. We just thought you looked like you needed a hand—don’t you touch that boy’s guitar case back there. Just hold it in your lap.”

  I coughed again. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry …” And realized, as I searched around for it, that for the next moments, I actually couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say, as if the fact of my identity had somehow managed to slip off the tables of consciousness and roll into some corner, to become—at least for a moment—invisible with the exhaustion, the confusion, the displacement. It only lasted seconds, though. “Chip,” I said. And coughed again. “That’s what everybody calls me. Chip. My real name’s Samuel, though. But you can call me Chip.”

  “Well, hello, Chip,” the husband said.

  Then the wife introduced me to all the children, and herself, and her husband—a gaggle of Lincolns and Ezras and Annies and Hues and Lurlenes—among which my own name seemed, once again, to get misplaced, as if, in spite of my smiles and my gratitude, my whole identity were somehow shut outside their pleasant, over talkative friendliness and simple Samaritan goodness, along with all I knew I could not possibly speak of here.

  Did I doze?

  When I woke, the windshield was rain speckled. We were just passing some sign that at first I thought was a state border. But it wasn’t—and we couldn’t have been going that long anyway. Once more, silently, I went scrambling around inside my head for my name: and, blessedly, found, “Chip …!”

  “Huh?” the man asked, hoarsely, turning to me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just coughed.”

  “We gonna stop and get breakfast up ahead,” the woman said. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “We’ll buy you a good meal,” the man said. “You don’t get to eat too well, out on the road, most of the time—I know that. My oldest boy—the one we goin’ to visit—told me.”

  “My boy hitchhikes too,” the woman said. “He hitchhiked all the way home from that army base to come see us, once.”

  The man laughed. “Wasn’t supposed to, neither. We had to take him back. He got in trouble for it, too.” He chuckled. “I tell you, he don’t like that army!”

  “But that’s why,” the woman went on, more or less ignoring him, “I always stop for young men on the road. I figure somebody maybe’ll stop for my boy. He’s a good boy, too. That’s why we’re goin’ to see him. He says he misses us somethin’ terrible over there. Broke my heart for him to get in trouble like that, just from missin’ his momma and daddy and comin’ to pay a visit. He’s a really good boy. Like you—well, guess this is breakfast.” And she eased us to a stop before some country breakfast place.

  Then, later:

  Was it morning?

  Was it evening?

  Some man who wanted me to talk to keep him awake had let me off just beyond Baton Rouge. It was right at the intersection of the detour my first ride had sent me off on and the last leg of the road Bob and I had originally traced out. The cars weren’t too thick, so I’d started walking along under the trees at the edge of the highway. When I’d gone about fifty yards, I saw a guy standing a little ways ahead—some local, I figured, walking along the road. But now he put his thumb out, turned to follow a passing car with his eyes. The low sunlight gleamed in his bronze hair. He wore a denim jacket.

  I frowned.

  I stopped.

  Then I called, sure that there would be no answer: “Hey, Bob …?”

  He turned and looked back.

  I grinned. “Bob!”

  His own frown opened into a smile. “Well, now fancy meetin’ you out here, a thousand miles away from anywhere. Howdy, there, stranger!”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Same thing you’re doin’. Tryin’ to get a goddamn ride.” He laughed. “Well, I see you ain’t lost your guitar. You got a chance to play it yet?”

  “Naw,” I said. “Not really. Joanne was right. I shouldn’t have taken it.”

  Bob chuckled. “But you can’t tell you nothin’.”

  “Hey,” I said, “can you imagine it, the two of us, meeting up like this, just by chance!”

  Bob shrugged. “We’re goin’ the same place, in the same direction—at about the same speed. Sometimes it happens three or four times.”

  “Well,” I said. “It sure surprised me.”

  “I been wondering why I haven’t caught up with you once or twice already.”

  I filled Bob in on my adventures with the first truck driver, the rain, the dog. Bob filled me in on his—most spectacularly, he’d gotten picked up by a college girl on vacation in a red Citroen, who took him to a motel near Virginia Beach where, apparently, “I ate pussy, man, like it was goin’ out of style!” Somewhere in the midst of it, he looked at me seriously. “You ain’t been callin’ Marilyn, have you.” There was an a
ccusatory tone.

  “Huh?” I said. “No. Have you?”

  “Just about every chance I get. That’s how I know you ain’t. But I told her she shouldn’t worry.” He shook his head a little. “You should call her, though, if you get a chance.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I will. How’s Joanne?”

  Bob shrugged. “I didn’t call her, I told you. I called Marilyn.”

  “Oh,” I said. There wasn’t a phone in their apartment, only in ours. And Marilyn would have had to run down the hall to get her.

  “I guess she’s okay,” Bob shrugged. “But she don’t expect to hear from me till after I get there, anyway.” He took a breath. “Well, about three hundred cars done gone by since we been standing here jawin’. We better get our thumbs back out if we wanna get anywhere.” He put his hands on my shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you again, sometime soon.”

  I laughed. “Okay—hey, I’m going ahead this time.” I lifted up the guitar case and started up the road, with my thumb out.

  I got the first ride, too—in an anonymous jalopy with no glass in the windows, its tan upholstery hanging in strips off the inside of the doors, the ceiling, the seats. Back on the road, I saw Bob laugh and give me the finger as I slid over into the seat.

  Complainingly, the car started.

  The driver was an immense, friendly, and sort of slow black guy. About twenty-six years old, he’d just broken up with his girlfriend and had decided he’d had it with St. Gable, which was just out of Baton Rouge. He was six-feet-eight, with forearms the size and color of charred legs of lamb. He wore size forty-four paint-splashed workman’s greens—and, incongruously, a white-and-navy striped polo shirt, torn where the oak stump of his neck emerged from the collar. At one point, with meticulous deliberation, he detailed all of his clothing sizes for me, from his sneakers (size 14) to his collar (size 18½”): not that I’d asked. But I guess other people did. Since the breakup last night, he’d taken off for somewhere else, anywhere else, he wasn’t sure. “Wha’ ’bout you?”