Stories for Chip (45 page)

“I'll come now.”

“Not yet,” said the reggaezza. “Grow some. Get in some trouble. Look at dose legs you got!—dancer, ain't you? Well, baby brudder, yull dance much better with yo heart broke bad.”

“The best dancers need a broken heart?”

“Yup.”

“Is your heart broken?”

“Oh,
sure
. And fresh everyday. Yull see.” The reggaezza lay her head on the boy one's shoulder and closed her eyes.

The reggaezzo said, “I member how bad it was, Johnny boy, but you just got to stay patient. By and by some night you gon' hear all ten, twelve living come up duh road, and a tousand ghosts. Duh sweetest Song you ever heard by far. Duh singers all singing, some with carry-drum playing, and I be dere with duh guitarristas. You come on down dancing and join us. Climb high up duh Ladder-to-Heaven. We'll take you over Mevilla. Get you some lights like dese.”

A galaxy spiraled on the reggaezzo's cheek, clotted at the center with stars algae-colored and luminous—he reached to touch one. And felt nothing but hot human skin, though his fingertips came away flickering green. He brought up the glimmers to his face, wanting to see them better, but the bright motes suddenly winged off his hand, back to the reggaezzo's cheek where they'd been. The shock of it was like a roach scuttling away, then abruptly bursting into flight back toward your head. With a squeak and jump, he stumbled over some hairy half of broken coconut, and fell in the sand. The pretty reggaezzo laughed, showing bright teeth. “Scared you, huh?”

As a keepsake of this night, he wanted to know: “What is your name?”

“Ain't got one. Soon as you one of us, yo name just wash away out of duh world forever.”

“But what was it before? Your name back when you lived with your Mamans and your Papas?”

“I told you: I don't know. The name missing and won't be found. Like a wave come to duh beach last year, where dat wave now? If God know all things, She forgot
my
name. It's just gone. Call me
reggaezzo
, call her
reggaezza
, if you want. We nothing else.”

The reggaezza leapt up, the poncho falling away, and she cried out, “I feel good! I feel good! Let's go way over dere where it's more room and brudder you just play me a fast song, a wild song, duh strongest song you got! Let's go, let's go, let's go!”

She tore away through the crowd and the reggaezzo snatched up his guitarra and ran away after her.
Stay put
, Batalha had said, and those words pulled him back down, chained to that spot in the sand, or he'd surely have followed. He reckoned it was all right to reach over and gather back his poncho just lying there abandoned. So he did. Then a new thing stirred in him and the chains broke.
Get in some trouble
, she had said. He stood up.

“
O ermano mio
.” O my brother!

He looked back towards the cry and there came his sister staggering. She was bloodsoaked, awash in gore, the knife hanging from her grip and dripping, it was that wet.

“Batalha! They cut you? Where are you hurt?”

“Me? No. I'm fine.” Seeing the condition of her knife, she stropped off the wet black shine onto her ruined poncho, and slid the blade back in its sheath. “That other time I stuck the saltdog just a little and it was enough to scare him off.” Batalha sounded very sad, nothing like herself. “This dude though—he just wouldn't quit. He wouldn't go away. I had to cut him down stone dead.”

[
Todas las noches
]

[ ] saw the reggaezzi once before. He was too young to remember.

As a baby, at the Festival of San Maurizio: when the reggaezzi come down in force to give a show on the seafront Board. Then, Johnnys bring out their ailing loved ones, their sick of heart, their babies and any family grown elderly or close to passing. Great blessing will visit whosoever attends San Maurizio. No reggaezzi miss who yet live. If all are there, then surely those bereft parents in the crowd need only crane their heads, and blink away the tears, to catch a glimpse of their doomed youth,
their
child. Which one? What was his or her name? They no longer know—but perhaps the one on drums, or that other one there, dancing, had been theirs.

Savary takes him off the breast and turns him round. She sits him up on the shelf of a forearm. “There, [ ]! You see them?”

He cannot see
much.
Why won't they let him down and free, to wriggle forward through the crowd as Batalha had? They're all crushed among jostling hundreds back here, though nobody is frightened, so he's not either. Certainly [ ] can hear the
song
. Sweet and powerful, a choir delves deep and soars high, all to the greater glory of one soloist, some apocalyptic soprano. Drumbeats, wild and precise, overwhelm the rhythms of his own heart and breath; in time, ecstatic, [ ] shudders, held perched to Savary's breasts. But glimpses are few and far between, as are the gaps among arms and backs and shoulders of the crowd. There's nothing much to see, really, save occasional flashes of green light.

“
Mamita,
really now! How's the baby supposed to see from way down there? Give me him.” Jahs lifts him away and up, a full foot higher to her shoulders where at last there's some bit of view. Those gorgeous lights belong to
people
. Green glow freckles their skin, and some great master, perhaps the music itself, exerts sublime puppetry on the abandoned leaping of their bodies. Still, he can only see top halves, only torsos.

“More, more!” [ ] beats fists atop the head against his belly, punishing its offensive and inadequate height.

“Baby,
stop
. What are you doing? What's the matter with you?”

Jahs's chief attributes are goodness, clarity, and strength. The thing called for now, however, is
stature.

“Papa, up up!” he shouts, stretching his hands toward Redamas: much the tallest being in the crowd, and from whose shoulders, once [ ]'s hefted there on high, the vantage is astounding.

Grace is down
here
, available to the flesh for embodiment at every single moment. These wonderful creatures are showing him how to
do
it! Wildly [ ] sobs, shaking his head, wrapping his arms tight about Redamas's brow, when Jahs reaches to lift him down for mothercomfort. “No no no,” he screams. I want to “see!” I want to “see!” Beauty's only ever a soft thing? It never harrows?

“Woman—
ow.
Why are you hitting me, Jahs? Don't hit! You see the boy is holding on for dear life. He wants to
watch.
”

“Man, my baby is crying! You hand him down to me, Redy, or I will
cut you like a pirate
right here in the streets!”

Michael Swanwick

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete.

Samuel R. Delany,
The Einstein Intersection

The novel began with a lilt of alliteration, a half-hidden sexual pun on the holiness of holes, the promise of a plot that would run some unspecified gamut to its endpoint, and the metaphoric conflation of music, violence, and work in the description of a tool which was suited for all three and was thus a stand-in for the as yet unintroduced protagonist. There was quite a lot going on in those first fourteen words. It was a young writer's sentence—exuberant, leading with the chin, aglow with the joy of a newly-mastered facility with words. The unlovely adjectival “holey” broke the easy laminar flow of words, tugging at the reader's mind and grabbing it down into the gutter of language, demanding that one pay closer attention not only to what was said but how.

Samuel R. Delany was twenty-five when
The Einstein Intersection
was published and I was seventeen.

I was living in Seven Pines, Virginia, at the time, just outside of Richmond, in a cockroach-haunted rental in a cookie-cutter development surrounded by a gothic Southern culture alien to a boy from small-town Vermont. My father had contracted early onset Alzheimer's and was in the process of losing all that made him human. As a direct result, I had surrendered my lifelong ambition of becoming a scientist and now aspired to literature. John Gardner has written that writers are hurt into being. Certainly that was true of me. I read books with a savage hunger not for escape and entertainment, important though those were to me, but for information I could use to teach myself the art of fiction.

No single book fed this hunger better than
The Einstein Intersection
.

The novel was slim, 150 pages or so in paperback original. A biographical note, which I read last, mentioned that Delany's first novel was written when he was nineteen, and that this one was composed “primarily during a year of travel in France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and England.” His condition could hardly have been more different from mine. Most of my reading material then came from the library or used book stores, but, this book being new, I probably bought it off a revolving wire rack in a drug store.

On a day otherwise lost to memory, I began reading.

The first chapter was a scene-setter establishing an ambiguously bucolic world, liberally dropping hints—many misleading—about the nature of that world, and introducing various characters. On the prose level, I could see that Delany's most elaborate sentences with their
eye flakes of sun on water
or
belly pulsing out from the sides of him, leaves flicking each other above
were allowed to soar only so far before being brought back down to earth by a no-nonsense line like
Anyway, not only do I bite my fingernails disgracefully, I also bite my toenails.

Alerted by that opening sentence, I saw that these alternations allowed greater freedom on the figurative side while letting the unadorned prose do its work of efficiently moving forward the plot without inviting the reader's disdain, as merely-functional pulp writing so easily (and unfairly) can.

The second chapter opened with a long passage from the author's journal about the difficulty of writing the very book I was reading. Which was a matter of particular interest to a future writer such as myself. The excerpts and quotations heading each chapter formed a meta-commentary on the novel, alternately claiming the mantles of poets and intellectuals and mocking itself with, for example, the commercial slogan:
Come ALIVE! You're in the PEPSI generation!

This mixture of high and pop culture extended into the narrative, where the common religion was based on rock and roll and the Beatles were explicated as avatars of the Orpheus myth. At a time when the question of how long they would last—pop careers were notoriously evanescent—was a commonplace, this was prescient. (Though Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix, in the event, would have filled the role better.) Spike Jones, a musician who made a career of lancing musical pomposity, could not extend his material into the era of rock, he said, because it was a genre that refused to take itself too seriously.

My heart rocked. My heart rolled.
Similarly, Delany's prose wasn't afraid to mix the profound and self-mocking. This was very much a Sixties thing. But in TEI, its function was transparent.

Midway through the book, there was a scene which made obvious a quality, or perhaps lack is the better word, consistent throughout the novel. Lo Lobey, having taken a job as a dragon herder, arrived at an anticipated destination, an intersection in the ruins of an ancient city.

Here's how it was set:

The sky was blue glass. West, clouds smudged the evening with dirty yellow. The dragons threw long shadows on the sand. Coals glowed in the makeshift fireplace. Batt was cooking already.

“McClellan and Main,” Spider said. “Here we are.”

And that was it. No broken glass crunching underfoot, no smell of ancient PCBs leaching out of the sand, no reflection on a single shard of marble the size of a thumb—the nose, perhaps, from a shattered statue—sticking out of the sands that stretched lonely and lifeless to the horizon. These things weren't even implied.

This was where I learned that description is not an obligation but a choice—and, upon reflection, a moral one. Delany focused his descriptions on people and their emotions. The external world only mattered insofar as it impinged upon their inner lives. For this particular book it was the right decision.

Then, two-thirds of the way through the novel, the author's journal cited the poet Gregory Corso's conversational comment to Delany (who would, decades later, explain that for an eighteen-month period what seems now a racial slur, was then acceptable, provided only that the speaker was a credentialed hipster),
What's a young spade writer like you doing all caught up with the Great White Bitch?

At the time, science fiction was or seemed to be an all-white enclave of literature and its lack of writers of color was widely perceived by its practitioners to be a serious impediment to the progress of the genre. So this caught me by surprise. It sent me back to the first chapter, where Lo Lobey (who was, after all, a member of a tri-gendered race from Elsewhere who had taken on human form and were in the process of learning to become us; so no shame on me for not catching this on first go-round; and anyway, as the chapter headings constantly reminded, the book was an artificial construct, words on paper, fiction) described himself as having a brown face, a friend as having skin as black as obsidian, caused by a protein formed around silver oxide rather than “that rusty iron brown of melanin that suntans you and me,” and the Eurydice analogue, La Friza, as looking “normal: slim, brown, full mouth, wide nose, brass colored eyes.” Suddenly, what I'd read as an archetypal Greek village became an archetypal African one.

There is a lot to praise in this normalization of being non-Caucasian. Even at the time, I recognized it as a contribution to the long, slow discussion on race we Americans constantly tell ourselves we are not having. But what struck me more (for I was on a quest, remember, to become a writer) were two technical matters: First, by comparison to texts written by well-meaning white liberals, that it wasn't enough to have a dark-skinned hero, however omnicompetent he or she might be; to present people of color as ordinary citizens of the future, it was necessary that there be many of them, fulfilling the functions of everyday life. Second, that Delany had meant for the reader (the white reader at any rate; I imagine black readers were quicker on the uptake) not to realize this fact until later, with the triggering Corso quote. He had hidden their race in plain sight.