The three of them at me, there, shook me and pleasured me, bit at me — yes, in several places, my shoulder, my inner thigh, they sipped blood — while I rebounded in the web.
Do you understand? Moments before, I had been by a dying man, with whom I’d constantly felt I was not present to his words — a man who had urged me to exchange promises with him, as if we’d been a pair of lovers, yet to whose urgings, my own perceptions had been so blighted I could not tell if he knew or not I was unable to respond, for he might as well have been addressing the lion skull, already dead, by mine.
But now, with these three lovers upon me, my bodily perceptions were cajoled, caressed, excited to a pitch, an altitude, where language could not follow, so that promises themselves were impossible. As I floated and flowed and soared above words, listening to their mewings and scrittings, I let a sound that was wholly animal, as inhuman as if the beast’s skull beside me had for a moment returned to life.
I finally slid down the web. On the burned earth, when at last I could stand, I looked about for my clothes, pulled on my leggings, my boots, my gloves.
The three Winged Ones all perched on the branch, as indifferent to my fumblings below with belt hooks, bootlaces, and button fastenings as lords of the air might be.
I threw the puma skin over my back and, fastening it, stumbled off into the trees — unable to look back, bereft of all my initial desire: to survey the damages among my troops.
I remembered it only when I was again walking between the shacks in some narrow alley. Reaching the end, I saw I was back at the common — with no progress at all in my project.
But perhaps you can understand why this is not an event I often tell. Really, I can’t think how it concerns your own researches. It might, if you have any sense of delicacy, be better left unmentioned. As I said, put yourself in my place….
In evening light, the Calvicon historian listened to the little stones the waves raked away, then, returning, flung up the shingle. He sipped from his drink and nodded (for the historian was tired, and as they’d sat in the small yard, his host had refilled both their glasses several times), not certain just what he’d been asked.
Afterword
Something happens when a writer’s readership grows substantially larger than the dozen odd members of a university workshop or even a full auditorium of listeners at a college or a library reading. Approximately every seven or eight years, with each book of fiction and nonfiction I’ve written (though not every essay collection), I’ve cycled through the experiences I’m about to discuss.
I will meet a new person, sometimes a young woman who has just published her first book and with whom I’m giving a reading, or an editor who has recently joined a publishing house to whom my own editor is introducing me in an office hallway, or a stranger who has recognized me a moment after I have stepped from the door of Barnes & Noble onto Union Square North. Over fifty years these people have been male, female, black, white, Asian, Native American, Dominican, Inuit, African, southern or northern European, Haitian, Jamaican, Martinican, half a dozen sorts of Latino and Latina; they have been gay; they have been straight; they have been transgendered or cis-gendered; they come from New York or San Francisco, Boston or L.A., from Peoria or Salt Lake City, and many places between; they have been Jewish, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, disabled, or temporarily abled. Sometimes it’s a teacher at a university or a high school where I’m giving a talk, sometimes it’s a student — though once, as I was walking down Eighty-second Street, leaning on my cane, a city sanitation worker in a green T-shirt, who, recognizing me from a picture in a recent Entertainment Weekly article, leaped from the back of his groaning truck, ran up and gripped my shoulder with an oily orange rubber glove, to tell me what I will tell in its time, and, six months ago, when I was returning to New York from a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, it was the uniformed fellow at the curbside baggage stand outside the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare, who, after I’d gone inside to wait for a wheelchair (arthritis makes getting around airports on my own all but impossible these days), ran in after me, stood in front of me, and declared: “Samuel R. Delany…? The writer guy? I’m right, aren’t I? Hey, my absolutely favorite book of yours is…”
That’s what so many of them want to tell me.
This one or that one will name Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, my most recent novel, or my very first, which you have in this book, or my tenth, or my fifth, or my fifteenth, or my book of science fiction and fantasy stories, Aye, and Gomorrah, or my book of naturalistic novellas, Atlantis, Three Tales, or one of my contemporary novels, Dark Reflections, or The Mad Man, or a science-fiction novel like Nova or Trouble on Triton. It can be a nonfiction work. The book named can be an award winner or a one-time bestseller or something published by an independent publisher that not two thousand people have read. It can be my twentieth, from a press out of Normal, Illinois, and Tallahassee, Florida, specializing in avant-garde fiction. It can be my 1,200-plus-page fantasy series in four volumes, Return to Nevèrÿon, or a ninety-page novella once sold as a stand-alone paperback, such as Empire Star.
And it can be — and has been, repeatedly, over fifty years as well as at least once over the last seven or eight — each of the novels here.
It pleases me to think there might be a connection between that experience and the way I write. Do I know there is? No, I can’t know. No writer can. (So we decide — or hope — it’s because we’re quite smart…as we take a wrong turn, lose a laptop, drop and step on our reading glasses, or inadvertently call a business acquaintance the name of someone she or he despises, who, the moment we met, came to mind — or something else stupid.) Because such indications of popularity, however poorly they correlate with quality, hinge on reception rather than creation, they suggest — even if it’s never a sure thing — a reason to gamble on reprinting.
The forty-five-odd experiences over the more than fifty years from which I’ve culled these instances might seem a lot, because I’ve crammed more than half of them into not a page and a half, with a number doing double, even triple, duty — the woman outside of Barnes & Noble, the most recent one to mention The Jewels of Aptor, was a Mormon here in the city with her brother (who’d never heard of me); the last young man who liked The Ballad of Beta-2 was a student and an African Muslim (in a motorized wheelchair). Sometimes three or four such encounters have happened in a year. Some years have gone by, though, with no such encounters at all. Were you waiting for the next one, you’d be more frustrated than not.
Here’s something that better suggests how little public attention that is: only three times in fifty years have I seen someone reading a book of mine in public. Once, while I was sitting on an IRT subway car in 1964 or ’65, I saw a woman across from me reading the second volume of my Fall of the Towers trilogy. Once, when Marilyn and I were returning from London a week before Christmas in 1974, coming through Kennedy Airport we saw a book rack full of just-released Dhalgrens and, minutes later, a sailor in unseasonal whites relaxing at his flight gate reading a copy. (With his knees wide in a tubular chair that they used in airports back then — he must have been flying back to somewhere in the Caribbean or Central or South America — as we walked by with our daughter in a stroller.) Finally, on a Philadelphia bus, three years ago, I saw someone, certainly a student at Temple where I teach, reading a trade paperback of Atlantis, Three Tales, a week after the publishers had released a new printing.