Atlantis: Three Tales Read online

  ATLANTIS

  BOOKS BY SAMUEL R. DELANY

  FICTION

  The Jewels of Aptor

  The Fall of the Towers

  The Ballad of Beta-2

  Babel-17

  Empire Star

  The Einstein Intersection

  Nova

  Equinox

  Dhalgren

  Trouble on Triton

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  Neveryóna

  Flight from Nevèrÿon

  Return to Nevèrÿon

  They Fly at Çiron

  The Mad Man

  Atlantis: Three Tales

  Hogg

  Bread & Wine (graphic novel, drawn by Mia Wolff)

  Aye, and Gomorrah (stories)

  Phallos

  Dark Reflections

  NONFICTION

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

  The American Shore

  Heavenly Breakfast

  Starboard Wine

  The Motion of Light in Water

  The Straits of Messina

  Silent Interviews

  Longer Views

  Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

  Shorter Views

  1984: Selected Letters

  About Writing

  Atlantis

  THREE TALES

  Samuel R. Delany

  Wesleyan University Press

  Middletown, Connecticut 06459

  Copyright © 1995 by Samuel R. Delany

  All rights reserved

  Produced by Incunabula, Post Office Box 31626, Seattle, WA 98103-1626

  A limited first edition of Atlantis: Three Tales was published by Incunabula in May 1995.

  Excerpts from an earlier version of Atlantis: Model 1924 first appeared in two issues of The Kenyon Review, Fall 1993 (Vol. XV, No. 4) and Fall 1994 (Vol. XVI, No. 4).

  Excerpts from an earlier version of “Eric, Gwen, and D. H. Lawrence’s Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling” first appeared in Callaloo, Spring 1991, Vol. 14, No. 2.

  Excerpts from an earlier version of “Citre et Trans” first appeared in Pacific Review (Spring 1991) and Fiction International #22 (Spring 1992).

  The author extends his warmest thanks to editor Ron Drummond and book designer John D. Berry; to Edward Brunner for Crane and train lore; and to Frank Robinson and Bill Blackbeard for sharing their expertise on ’20s pulp magazines and record players.

  Cover art: The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, 1920–22: The White Way I, by Joseph Stella, Collection of The Newark Museum.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG1NG-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Delany, Samuel R.

  Atlantis: three tales / Samuel R. Delany

  p. m.

  Contents: Atlantis—Eric, Gwen, and D.H. Lawrence’s esthetic of unrectified feeling—Citre et trans.

  ISBN 0-8195-5283-6

  I. Title

  PS3554.E437A85 1995

  813'.54—dc20

  94-48726

  For

  Iva Hacker-Delany,

  John R. Keene, Jr.,

  and

  Dennis Rickett

  All the little household gods

  Have started crying, but say

  Good-bye now, and put to sea.

  Farewell, dear friend, farewell . . .

  —W. H. AUDEN, “Atlantis”

  The long shadow thrown from this single

  obstruction to its own light!

  Thought flies out from the old scars of the sea

  as if to land. Flocks that are longings

  come in to shake over the deep water.

  It’s prodigies held in time’s amber

  old destructions

  and the theme of revival the heart asks for.

  The past and future are

  full of disasters, splendors

  shaken to earth, seas rising to overshadow

  shores and roaring in.

  —ROBERT DUNCAN, “Atlantis”

  CONTENTS

  Atlantis: Model 1924

  Eric, Gwen, and D.H. Lawrence’s Esthetic of Unrectified Feeling

  Citre et Trans

  Note to the reader:

  This icon falls at the beginning of various paragraphs thoughout the opening novel. It indicates alternative text to come, which the reader should read at a point of her or his own choosing in the midst of the marked paragraph or section. On a shaded gray background, the alternative text follows the paragraph (or section) with the icon. This is one-limited-way the writer encourages the reader to construct his or her own text.

  ATLANTIS: MODEL 1924

  Distinctly praise the years . . .

  —HART CRANE, “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”

  a

  It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks.

  —MICHEL FOUCAULT, Madness and Civilization

  Voyage through death

  to life upon these shores.

  —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Middle Passage”

  I.

  Skyscrapers—that’s what he was most eager to see. But before entering the city the train dropped between earthen walls tangled with winter trees, the dirt sometimes becoming out the window, for hundreds of feet, concrete.

  II.

  The tallest building in the world was in New York—the Wool-worth Building. Most people knew that; but he knew, counting basements and sub-basements, the Woolworth had exactly sixty stories—and not many people knew that.

  III.

  Bring such information out at the right time, and people said, “What a smart boy!” which made up a little for the guilt he felt over his school grades: they’d been bad enough to silence Papa—

  IV.

  recently elected bishop—and make Mama cry. Finally they’d decided to let him leave (clearly school was doing him no good) and come north to stay with his brother. Sam’s toes felt sticky in his socks.

  V.

  Last night, he’d decided not to take his shoes off, afraid his feet might smell. This morning, however, though he’d already gone into the little bathroom with its metal walls to wash his face and hands,

  VI.

  nothing about him felt fresh. Stretching, he arched his back, pulled his fists against his chest; the noblet of flesh on the left side—one male, milkless teat—caught a thread or fold in his shirt,

  pulling till it cut.

  He sat forward quickly, trying to look disinterested, waiting for the soreness to fall from his chest. A minute on, when he sat back, cambric brushed him: the sensitivity had become, surprisingly, pleasant. Again, he felt himself shift within his wool trousers. Insistently alert to his body, sensual and stale under cloth, he glanced around the car—especially at the women in their seats, black and white, beginning to arrange themselves.

  Five times now he’d noticed, first with distress, then with curiosity, and finally with indifference, that if he sat on the rumbling plush, relaxed, and let his knees fall wide, through loose wool the train’s joggling gave him an erection.

  Pulling his knees together, he sat back again and arched his fingers on the cushion, so that blue nap slipped under his nails. (Amidst the wheels’ cacophony, Sam could hear a “. . .tut-tut-tut-tut-tut . . .” just like the song.) The first joints of his fingers (and his toes—but people didn’t see those) had grown too much: tall as he was, the initial joints had clubbed into those of someone even bigger. Digitus clavigerae, or something like it, his oldest brother, Lemuel, had said it was called. Not that that made him feel any bette
r about it. Youngest child, lightest child (hair once cornsilk pale before puberty had turned it rough and red—and adolescence darkened it further), a surprise child, Mama had called him. Mama’s pet, the others said, which, while sometimes it held their ire, now had become a term of fondness—for most of them, most of the time. But he was the one among the ten who hadn’t finished high school. Well, when he’d worked awhile in New York and grown more serious, the older ones could settle him into night school and help him toward a diploma. That’s what Papa said; and since she always listened to Papa, Mama said he could go. And see the skyscrapers.

  On either bank—Sam slid from one seat, moved across the aisle, and into another, to peer by purple tassels—against November gray, filigreed branches separated wooden houses, one and two drab stories.

  Watching the dawnscape, still iceless, flip along, he contemplated for the thousandth time the astonishing process by which the seamless and inexorable progression of the present slipped away to pack the past with memories, like numbered stanzas in a song, like cells in a comb, like cakes in a carton, to be called back (though, he’d already ascertained, most he’d never recall) in whatever surprising, associative order.

  There’d been, he remembered now, that poor-white family with the six children the white conductor had brought into the Jim Crow car last night and, after looking around, settled—with their twine-tied boxes and traveling baskets—in the three rows of seats at the car’s head. “If you all want to sit together, this is about the best we can do.” One of the girls and two of the boys had been barefoot, just as if it were summer. “In a couple of hours you all could come in here anyway.” The father’s coat had been out at both elbows and his hair stuck straight down from under his straw hat in blond blades. Holding the shoulder of his mother’s sweater, with a fall of silver silk over each ear and eyes like circles cut from gingham, above the seat back the littlest stared at all the car’s dark faces, to fix finally—pink lips lax in a thoughtless ‘o’—on Sam, four seats behind and across the aisle, as if Sam, and not they, were the anomaly here. Sam had slid his fingers under his thighs.

  But why did that make him remember, how many days before, Lewy, arguing with—well, discussing with—Mama, in an extraordinarily grown-up manner, how going north would be good for him—while Sam sat, silent, impressed, across the kitchen table, listening to them go on earnestly for fifteen minutes, as though he weren’t there.

  For moments Sam thought again about the memory he didn’t have—because he’d dozed through it: that moment, on leaving Washington, when the Jim Crow car in which he’d started out had become a car like any other, along with all the white cars on the train; and he and anyone in it could sit anywhere they wanted. Immediately on waking, with half a dozen others already up and collecting things, though it was after one o’clock in the morning, he’d gotten his two cases and moved. Sprawled against each other, the white man and the barefoot children slept on. Beside the biggest boy, who wore shoes like his parents, the white woman gazed at the black window. At her shoulder, the blue-eyed child stared up, as Sam pushed, sideways, by.

  Then there’d been the porter, whom, while he’d been exploring the train last night, Sam had caught smoking in the vestibule between cars; the two of them had stood in the chill chamber and had cigarettes together. The porter—whose name was John Brown, like his friend John at home—had not said: Ain’t you too young to smoke, boy? He’d said: “I’m usually on the Chicago-Calgary run—but I got deflected. I got to get me home to Chicago; eventually, somehow. That’s where my girlfriend live.” He’d chuckled as the night’s iced air whipped and snapped smoke back from the dark shelves of his lips. Sam told him about his friends, John and Lewy, and how John’s name was the same as his. “My daddy,” the porter said, “he was just John Brown crazy. Back when Dr. DuBois’ book come out, he made me read the whole thing out loud to him.” Sam laughed, and told him how his father had read it out loud to his whole family too—though he’d not been five years old; and often in bed. But he remembered lying awake, listening. Then the porter told Sam he’d just read another book about Brown by someone named Oswald Garrison Villard, who was the editor of a magazine. Sam didn’t remember the magazine’s name, but he remembered Oswald Garrison Villard because it sounded so eccentric he’d laughed.

  How could a memory of laughter make you smile now? But, turning away from the window, Sam smiled.

  Four seats ahead was the middle-aged white woman who’d started three different conversations with him—the first on the train platform yesterday at noon, then twice more since Washington—the third even after he’d told her, during the second, that he was Negro. Now, she was fixing her wide, ivory hat to salted auburn, with one, then another, then a third (taking them from between her teeth) pearl-tipped hatpin. She’d said she was Scottish and lived in Flatbush—in the heart of Brooklyn. He’d said that, just the morning he’d left, his older sister, Jules, had decided the vat of soap out back of the house had bleached enough to slice loose some half dozen cakes, wrap them in waxed paper, and send them in Sam’s wicker trunk to his brothers and sisters in New York. (Holding a fold of her apron, there’d been Jules, in the yard, looking at the soap tray, eyes narrowed, lips pursed; she was comparing it with Mama’s or Elsie’s, he knew. What she really wanted was to get to her piano lessons with the little girls who’d start coming in at one—almost an hour after he’d be on the train. When would he hear Jules in the parlor, guiding scales again?) The white woman had said she’d made her own soap for a while, but it wasn’t worth it—there in Brooklyn. At Borough Hall she could get either subway or trolley into Manhattan, and a general store not three streets away from where she lived sold bars of store soap any time she wanted it.

  Ivory, like it said in the advertisements, was the best. He’d looked down at the flounce on her skirt, to see if he could glimpse an ankle—another memory.

  Sam thought about going to inquire of her now. (Ankles of ivory. Ankles like moons . . . ) But finally (for now was gone) he went back to ask John Brown, who, in his blue-black uniform, was just coming down through the car: “Sir, we in New York State yet?”

  Seemingly constructed of blue-black coal, Brown’s face turned in mild surprise: “Well, we just gone by Hell Gate.” And with that damnable dawn news, John Brown stepped around him, to move on between plush seat backs, bending here, leaning there, asking the older passengers if they would need help with any of their bags—the older white passengers, anyway, Sam noted: a stately Negro woman, with black hat and veil, blue coat frayed at the shoulders, and doubtless going to a funeral—well, the porter, like a dog avoiding another dog’s tree, had walked right around her!

  Sam breathed.

  If Mama had been with him, she’d have muttered, “. . . no-account!” then told Sam to go immediately to that woman and offer a hand: and would probably say something cutting to the porter. Mama could get quite self-righteous over the behavior of other Negroes she didn’t approve of—as if she carried responsibility for the whole race on her issue-free shoulders. Sam started to go to her—then remembered his own, two large cases, one leather, one wicker. Well, when he got them off and Hubert was there, he’d go back and help.

  Out the window a snarl of underpasses and stuttering sunlight became a tunnel, through which they roared a long time: the light from the white glass shades every two seats took on the yellowish cast they’d had at night.

  Genitals, buttocks, nipples, tongue all seemed so insistently present inside Sam’s mouth and twenty-four-hour-worn suit. Once, well back before dawn, when the train windows were still black and the other passengers slept, he had stared at one white round glass, thinking of the moon, when, at once, he’d stood, to bring his mouth closer and closer, as if to kiss this night light at the aisle’s end, pulling back only when the heat about burned his lips. He’d seen the Scotswoman from Brooklyn—she would be the one awake—turn away too, smiling. (Why do something like that? And, if you did, why remember it?) No, he didn’t w
ant to speak to her.

  “Here,” Lewy said, under the moon-mottled magnolia, “it’s my journal. It’s got everything I don’t want Sam and you to know about. Go on, look.”

  But when John opened the cover, Sam peering over his shoulder, it was in code—two columns, one barely comprehensible, the other complete nonsense. “You don’t want none of them jewboys to get hold of this,” John said. “They could figure it out on you.”

  The tunnel went on at alarming length.

  Then the white conductor ambled through, calling, “Grand Central Terminal coming up! Change trains for aaaaall connections! Grand Central Terminal . . . !” and people stood to haul their bags down from the overhead rack; men squatted in the aisle to lift them from under the seats. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning.

  And the train itself, he thought, will be only memory in moments: “. . . tut-tut-tut-tut . . .” Then he was lugging his cases down onto the rectangular stool the porter had kicked out the train’s door, its squared wooden corners clucking cement.

  As Sam stood on the platform among debarking passengers, swaying with the train’s remembered sway, Hubert, in his tan-wool overcoat, pushed up in front of him. A grin started out on Sam’s face. Then, as suddenly, confusion tore it away—because Hubert was focused all behind him, even before either of them could say hello.

  “Here, ma’am! I’ll get that for you!” Hubert said to someone beyond Sam’s shoulder—which, as Sam turned, he realized was the ponderous woman in mourning.

  “Just a minute now, ma’am,” which was John Brown, who, at Hubert’s intervention, had become as solicitous of her as if she’d been queen of the car’s whole hive, handing the heavy creature firmly down to the stool, passing her three bags one after another to Hubert, who swung them, over its metal rail, up on the broad cart with the other baggage that the porter from the sleeping car was loading for the redcaps clustered up at the platform’s head.