Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Samuel R. Delany

  Acknowledments

  Also by Samuel R. Delany

  FICTION

  The Jewels of Aptor

  The Fall of the Towers:

  Out of the Dead City

  The Towers of Toron

  City of a Thousand Suns

  The Ballad of Beta-2

  Babel-17

  Empire Star

  The Einstein Intersection

  Nova

  Driftglass(stories)

  Dhalgren

  Equinox

  Hogg

  Trouble on Triton

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Distant Stars

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  Neveryóna

  Flight from Nevèrÿon

  Return to Nevèrÿon

  They Fly at Çiron

  Atlantis: Three Tales

  The Mad Man

  Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories

  Hogg

  Phallos

  Dark Reflections

  NONFICTION

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

  Starboard Wine

  The American Shore

  Heavenly Breakfast

  The Motion of Light in Water

  Wagner/Artaud

  The Straits of Messina

  Silent Interviews

  Longer Views

  Times Square Red/Times Square Blue

  Shorter Views

  1984: Selected Letters

  About Writing

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  Empire (artist, Howard Chaykin)

  Bread & Wine (artist, Mia Wolff)

  Copyright © 2012 by Samuel R. Delany

  Magnus Books

  Cathedral Station

  PO Box 1849

  New York, NY 10025

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is printed by permission of the author, Samuel R. Delany, and his agent Henry Morrison, Inc., Bedford Hills, NY.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress cataloging-In-Publication Data available.

  Portions of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany first appeared in somewhat different form under the title “In the Valley of the Nest of Spiders” in Black Clock 7, Valencia, CA. Editor, Steve Erickson. Black Clock © 2007 California Institute of the Arts. A section was published in Coilhouse #1, in 2007. In 2010 another appeared in The Boston Review. And in 2011, in a slightly different version, section [0] appeared in the anthology The Unbearables’ Big Book of Sex, edited by Ron Kolm, et al. (Unbearable Books, Auntonomedia, Williamsbergh, NY, 2011). The lyrics on page 949 to 952 for “Dawn Passage” are by Marilyn Hacker and copyrighted in her name.

  First Magnus Books Edition 2012

  Edited by: Donald Weise

  Cover by: Linda Kosarin, The Art Department

  ISBN: 978-1-936833-014-6

  www.magnusbooks.com

  To Dennis Rickett

  & for

  Brian Evenson

  A Note on Dialect

  The southern contraction “yall”—plural of “you”—is most often written with an apostrophe. But I have dropped the apostrophe in this text for consistency. If we take “y’all” as a valid pronoun in its own right, it would be the only one that had one. As well, the multiple apostrophes it allows to worm their way into the possessive forms would be ludicrous. Thus I have omitted them.

  “Except there’s garbage, which is part of what we’re trying to include in our work and our thought, which is to say, we are attentive still to what remains, what gets tossed away and off. We want to include the trash in many ways, thinking of this refuse according to all sorts of disposal systems.”

  —Avital Ronell, quoted in Examined Life

  Horas non numero nisi serenas.

  [I count no hours save the serene ones, and I tell time only when the sun’s out, as well as At the time of my death, only the serene hours count.]

  (Inscribed on a Venetian sundial by an anonymous monk)

  “It’s like appropriating, even though it’s controversial on all sides of the barrier, the N word into your speech. Or saying, ‘We’re queer, we’re here’ and accepting and hi-jacking the very word—here’s the trash can again, watch out—that is meant to insult and hurt and devastate. You take it on, you appropriate and use it, like a ballistic shield, a weapon.”

  —Avital Ronell, quoted in Examined Life

  “Joy is power. Real power.”

  —Rane Arroyo

  [G] THROUGH THE SECOND-FLOOR Atlanta apartment screen, out by the streetlight in the July evening, crickets scritched. Inside, his dad’s floor lamp slid its gleam down along—and back along—the Bowflex bar’s matte gray.

  Then, at eight-forty, Eric finished his workout. “Okay—I’m done!” Sitting up in his green gym pants, the elastic loose in one frayed cuff and a soiled yellow stripe each side, he swung his bare foot over and off the bench. “It’s all yours!” Standing, he stepped from the carpet swatch they’d used since the rubber mat split.

  In scuffed work boots and baggy jeans, Mike walked in. “You wanna watch some TV in my room while I work out?” Shrugging his denim work shirt from a hard, dark shoulder, he turned to hang it by the collar over the head of a black and gold ceramic leopard crouched on a side shelf.

  “Naw. I’m takin’ a shower,” Eric explained, “then I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “You wanna use mine up here?”

  The plaster on the walls and between the ceiling beams was painted ivory.

  “That’s all right.” For ten months now, Mr. Condotti had let Eric have the room off the garage, with its phone booth of a shower and commode—a big improvement over Mike’s living room foldout, though he missed the lamp’s warm light. “I’ll use the one down in my place.” Eric had agreed to pay his dad half the twenty dollars more a month. Then the bike shop shut, where Eric had swept up and sometimes trued wheels. He’d given Mike eighty of the first year’s one-twenty.

  Even with forty owing, it was better not having Eric always upstairs under foot. “Well, remember, take one.” A senior welder at work, recently Mike had gotten a raise; so he’d swallowed the rest—only somewhat grumpily. “Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m drivin’ you down to your mama’s in Diamond Harbor. You’re gonna be seventeen in…what? Eight days, now?” Stepping around the coffee table corner, Mike grasped one handle of the exercise machine. “Barb’ll wanna see how much you growed up. You get to Diamond Harbor smellin’ like a goat, and she ain’t gonna be happy.”

  “Don’t worry! I told you, I’ll take one.”

  “You’re probably gonna miss your football buddies, huh?” Other than a pudgy Puerto Rican, Scotty, who, in his ancient Willy’s, twice had picked Eric up for Saturday morning practice, Mike had met none of Eric’s teammates outside a game.

  Eric shrugged, took his T-shirt from the couch, and said, “Maybe. Yeah.”

  Mike thought: What I should say is, You ain’t at the bike place no more. Get a job. Everyone said it’s what good kids did. Well, that would be Barb’s problem now. He glanced at the yellowish T-shirt Eric held. “You got another one, downstairs in your chest-of-drawers?”

  “Yeah—pro
bably.”

  “Then—please—leave that one here. I’m doin’ a laundry tonight. I know you love it—you ain’t had it off all week.”

  “I don’t have a thing for this one especially.” Eric tossed the shirt back on the couch. It slid to the floor. Mike let go of the bar and stepped toward it, but Eric said, “Naw. I dropped it. I’ll get it.” He swiped it up and returned it to the couch arm.

  With his shaved head and brown leather wrist brace, lighter than his dark, dark skin, Mike Jeffers was an easy-going black man from East Texas. He’d been a welder eleven years.

  Buzz cut for summer, Eric was blond, with steel-blue eyes, the issue of a two-week affair between his mother—Barbara was Dutch and Swedish—and a long-vanished Atlantic City blackjack grifter, a smiling, tow-headed twenty-six-year-old of Scots-Polish parentage, called Cash. Barbara had never known Cash’s last name. Seventeen when Eric was born, at nineteen she’d become an exotic dancer in Baltimore, where she’d met Mike. He’d adopted two-year-old Eric a month after their marriage—but before jail. Afterward, it would have been harder.

  Though Mike had made nothing of it since the decision two weeks ago (Barb had phoned to suggest it, out of the blue), Eric’s coming move was convenient for two reasons.

  First, it put off a confrontation Mike had let slide since school had ended. June was done. It was two days beyond the fireworks and rowdiness of the Fourth: What was Eric doing with himself? He’d read comics and history books in his garage room. He’d walked or biked around the city. For a while he’d been a bit of a couch potato. The only TV was in Mike’s bedroom, with the computer. But now Eric did extra Bowflex workouts (two-and-a-half years ago, Mike had bought the machine off Jake at work for a hundred-twenty bucks) and—he said—didn’t even turn the television on. Whatever occupied him involved no real friends Mike knew of. With small talk about the places he’d been exploring, Eric was always home for dinner. Three quarters of the time he cooked it—or at least heated it in the microwave. One or two afternoons each week he spent at a gaming store on lower Peachtree, where…well, loser-dudes is what they were, played Magic and Risk and sometimes D&D. And the police hadn’t brought him home yet, the way, regularly, back in East Texas during the early eighties, they’d brought home Mike’s older brother, Omar, for petty vandalism and siphoning gas—and, a few times, Mike.

  Eric asked, “You really want me to have the machine?”

  “Soon as I finish tonight, while the laundry’s workin’, I’m takin’ it apart and puttin’ it in the box—” Mike’s walk-in bedroom closet held more computer cartons and Game-Boy boxes and Styrofoam packing forms than clothes—“so I can stick it in the trunk tomorrow. It’ll give you somethin’ to do down there. If I really want to keep it up, I can get another one. Or some weights. When you get downstairs, put as much of your stuff together as you can, now. We wanna be outta here tomorrow by eight or eight-thirty.”

  The second convenience involved two women, only one of whom Eric knew about. Mike was considering moving in Doneesha, a black nursing student, once Eric had been gone two weeks and Mike was sure Barb wouldn’t phone hysterically to take him back. (Mike was certain that, for the first few days, Barb would be ridiculously strict. Then, after the fifth or sixth blow-up, she would give in and let him run wild. Not that he’d do anything terrible. Eric was a good kid—and had a brain.) Eric had liked Doneesha, the time Mike had taken them all for dinner at Applebee’s. Till then Mike could have some fun here with the other, Kelly-Ann, Jake’s new office intern. (Kelly-Ann was a chestnut-haired, green-eyed Dominican.) Even Jake didn’t know they’d made it—in the Chevy, pulled off among the trees behind a derelict window frame factory, the second time Mike had driven Kelly-Ann out to her aunt’s.

  “I already started packin’—I told you when we were eatin’.”

  Mike liked his kid. He’d miss Eric.

  Mounting the bench, leaning back on the object somewhere between a time machine and a bicycle, Mike gripped the bar and smiled. “I don’t know why I keep rememberin’ this.”

  At the change in his father’s voice, Eric looked over.

  “One time or another, I’ve thought about this every day for the three years you been here. Maybe I’m tellin’ you now ’cause you’re goin’ off.”

  Eric had the indulgent look of someone pretty sure what Mike was going to say. Actually Mike came out with the story regularly.

  “When I got home on the bus—that time I come back from the pokey, when we was in Hugantown—the door was open, so I set my suitcase on the porch and walked in. I wasn’t even sure I had the right house. But you was standin’ in the hall, and you seen me. And your eyes got so big—I thought at first you was scared. But then you opened your arms and got this…smile! And I realized you recognized me. So I grabbed you up and hugged you, and you laughed, and laughed. You was so happy!” Eric had been five when Mike had spent fourteen months in jail—his third arrest, his single conviction (coke). Inside, Mike had done a fair amount of lifting. He’d told lots of people since, jail had knocked some sense into him. That had been when he and Barb had been in West Virginia, before he’d got to Georgia. “I started callin’ out for Barb. She was in the back and come in. I’d been afraid you wasn’t gonna know who I was. You hadn’t seen me in more’n a year. Then we’re sittin’ in the kitchen, all three of us, you on my lap. And you reached up and started pattin’ my head—’cause, you remember, I didn’t shave it back then. At first I didn’t know what you was doin’. So I sat there—and so did Barb. You turned to your mama, and you said, ‘Daddy’s got puffy hair. Mama, I want puffy hair. Like Daddy’s. I want puffy hair, mama. Why can’t I have puffy hair?’ And we started laughin’, and I hugged you so hard.” Both Mike and Eric had neat, small heads with neat, small ears, though Mike’s features were broad, full, and black while Eric’s were sculpted and Slavic, gilded by Georgia summer. Even so, because of their shared head shape, some people, who’d never known Barbara, assumed Mike was Eric’s blood father despite the extremities in hair, in hue. It tickled Eric and—sometimes—annoyed Mike. “I mean, I’d always wondered how that was for you: a white kid with a black dad. But right then, I realized, you was my kid. I mean, completely and absolutely mine.”

  “I still think black hair is more sensible and better lookin’.” Eric’s indulgence became a grin. “But it’s interestin’ to know how long I felt that way.” Three weeks ago, with the battery clippers, Mike had cut it for him again. “Nappy hair’s a lot better than the straight white…stuff I got.”

  “Well, next time I see you, if you got some fool white boy dreadlocks or come in here all cornrowed or anything else stupid lookin’, I’m gonna tell you straight out you look like an asshole.” With a smile and mock gruffness, Mike returned the indulgence.

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry.” Eric reached up to rub his eighth of an inch of white-blond growback. “Hey, it’s my head, ain’t it?”

  Mike grunted. Then they both laughed. A year ago, Mike thought, he’d have gotten mad at me for saying that, even as a joke. (Though he better not come back here with no dreads…) Yeah, he’s growing up.

  * * *

  [F] THRESHOLD UNDER HIS instep, the ball of his foot pressed linoleum. His heel lifted from carpet.

  In the kitchen, streaked with gray gravy, four foil trays from the Hearty-Beef Hungry-Man dinners they’d eaten earlier leaned in the sink—waiting to be rinsed before going into the trash. Beside the microwave at the counter’s back, Eric pushed through the stairwell’s blue door—his rear foot left smooth flooring. The forward one came down on cloth—while the repeating squeee-clink from what would be Mike’s last session followed him down the shabby runner, irregularly tacked to the stairs.

  By the mailboxes (MICHAEL MALCOLM JEFFERS/ERIC LINDEN JEFFERS, which Eric had lettered on an index card with blue, black, and red Sharpies, then taped to the steel face), he went into the dark garage, skirted Mike’s Chevy—underfoot, the concrete was cool—pushed open the door, and loped up f
our wooden steps to his room—the boards were warm—digging a forefinger into his nose, scraping loose what crust his nail caught, then sucking it off his finger.

  It was a habit he’d become addicted to in earliest childhood, which—at least for today—he was trying to do only when alone.

  The thick-tired wheels from his mountain bike hung on the green planks. In the corner leaned the frame. Three cartons stood open around the floor in which he’d already put his Magic cards, his Phillip Pullman and horror novels, his Tuckman, his Scama, compilation volumes of The Walking Dead and the Hernandez Brothers—on top of Howard Cruse, Belasco, all the issues of Meatmen he’d been able to find with any drawings by “Mike,” half a dozen Hun volumes, the two issues of Porky, and the single (so far) Brother to Dragons. With only the street light through the leaves outside the window, Eric pushed down his gym pants—he did not shower—and collapsed on the iron daybed’s sheet and rumpled army blanket, already masturbating. Five minutes later, he gasped in a big breath, then licked the ham of his thumb and three of his fingers, his palm, his wrist. Taking another breath, he wiped the rest on his belly, and rolled to his side. The last time he’d talked to Barbara on the phone, she’d said something about a porch doing for his room in Diamond Harbor. It didn’t sound too private. But she’d also said they were off in the woods, somewhere. (Barbara, he figured, was between boyfriends, which is probably why she wanted him now. With trepidation he wondered how long that would last.) Between the bed and the wall, a brown bench was his night table. When his breathing slowed to sleep’s rhythm, his fists were between his thighs, his gym pants were on the floor, and the digital clock on the bench said nine-oh-four.

  * * *