Last week, when I got back from my vacation trip across the Canadian Rockies, I found — finally! — Professor Kermit’s reply, sent in care of me. Professor Kermit’s description of the state of your letter on its arrival in the desert (see below) does not even approach the state of his on its arrival here! Besides the indecipherable over-stampings, there was clearly a heel-print on it. At one point the letter had obviously been wetted, Lord knows with what. (Visions of incontinent camels are called up just by the smell!) As well, the whole had been ripped in half and the envelope badly taped together. The sheets inside were still in two pieces. Because of the wetting and the generally deteriorated state of the air-letter paper, I decided it might be best if I transcribed it for you. I just wouldn’t trust it to another trip through the mails. Also, Kermit does not exaggerate about his handwriting. With diligence one can make it out, though the transcription took me a full three days and about 25 consultations with various friends over this or that squiggle, masking a j, y, or g; over that or the other near-contourless line, ghosting an m, n, or u. (I recall Hyder Rollins’s labor over the hen-scratchings of the ‘Keats Circle’ and gain new respect!) I hope you don’t object. If you could see the state of the original, I’m sure you’d understand.
My best wishes,
(signed:) Samuel R. Delany
[Transcription follows:]
June
My dear Hoequist,
Your letter, dated February, reached me yesterday — and it is June! Though would you believe, not one of us here at the dig has been sure precisely what day of June it has been for two weeks now? Sometime when the next provision caravan passes through and I can start my answer to you off on its circuitous way back to New Haven (I just assume you are at Yale, in the shadow of that great, transparent library where writing is at once displayed, displaced, and entombed, like a gleaming metaphor of its own historical position), perhaps we here will be able to orient ourselves again. But since Professor Wellman, hauling that architrave from the cinder basin, smashed up his Seiko LED, we have truly dwelt in a land without time. My own watch has only its sturdy little Donald Duck hands, semaphoring about the day — and no date window.
Really, we could be living in the middle ages, here at the site, rather than in the last quarter of the 20th Century. (It is the 20th Century, isn’t it?) Unless you are familiar with the absurdly primitive techniques expediency makes traditional for the archeology of this region, I doubt you would believe the arrival of your letter: in the haversack of a pack camel, the envelope crumpled, soiled, opened at least three times (as is all the mail that reaches us here — a fraction of that which is sent, I’m sure), and re-sealed and over-stamped with the blurred colophons of Iraqi Government Security (why all our mail must go by way of Iraq, which does not even border on this country, to reach us here, is beyond me — unless it’s because the wealthy Kuba family of that nation, still out of favor, has footed part of the expedition’s costs), in runny blue and screech orange. In this half-excavated oasis, two hundred miles from any place with a pronounceable name, much less a post office, I feel I am sequestered in some parallel world of the sort Leslie used to make me smile over when we had our separate rooms in that shabby student house just outside Ann Arbor. (Field work delayed my doctorate until 1968, when I turned thirty-one, the same year that the then-nineteen-year-old Ms Steiner took her first advanced degree in math.) How many hundreds of years ago is that now? Communicating with what I’ve nostalgically taken to thinking of as civilization could not feel more exotic here than if I were sending up smoke signals to be seen from Mars.
Indeed, in terms of communication your letter brings me information that you apparently assume I have been apprised of long since, but which, alas, I simply had not known. For example, yours is the first indication that the ‘article’ I wrote at Leslie’s somewhat hysterical behest, two and a half years ago in a tent on the icy foothills of the Kapwani Mountains, has actually been published.
How bizarre. How unexpected.
There, as far away from anywhere as I am now, I drafted it in longhand at a single marathon sitting over the back of some foolscap sheets, on the other side of which was a mimeographed proposal for a UNICEF grant to study water-tables in the suburbs outside Leah-Sohl, that had somehow ended up among the paleontology journals I’d stuffed in the book-carrier on the side of my canvas suitcase. Leslie stood outside the while, puffing and pacing in the snow, waiting a good four hours for me to finish it — that is, when she was not spatting with Yavus, who’d come skulking up the blustery slope behind her, all the way from Ephesus, where she’d apparently picked him up again, a continent or so away. Research assistant indeed! The only pay Yavus ever received back at the museum was for unloading boxes from the rickety army trucks that occasionally carted in crates of artifacts, that summer we were all together in ‘Stamboul. That pay, incidentally, came directly out of my meagerly lined pocket! Oh, yes, he can be an entertaining, even an affectionate, companion from time to time, nor is he without a certain street-wise humor that, of an evening’s stroll together down Istiqlal, can be quite charming. But Leslie is a rather heavy young woman — whereas I am a thin, even gaunt, middle-aged man. And Yavus, our handsome black-marketeer, simply made his choices along the lines to be expected of his class and race. But really, I am just assuming you know our — how shall I say? — broad-beamed Hypatia? Is a better term ‘large-bottomed’? Perhaps ‘a generous-breasted, round, brown Venus of Willendorf’? How she gets to the places she does leaves me awestruck! Once she simply ‘dropped in’ to say hello at the bottom of an Afghani cave-complex I was excavating with old Pace and young Dr Kargowsky. The circles in which her work or mine — not to mention the overlap — is likely to attract attention are notoriously small. Though in print we feign an impersonal formality, really — everybody knows everybody! I wouldn’t be surprised if, at one time, I had actually met you, Hoequist, perhaps at some university conference or other (the arrival in blistering heat by commuter plane; Professor Rockeye’s archaic ‘52 MG taking us to our limply chenilled guest rooms) held in the Indian Artifact Museum: two adjoining classrooms in the upper corridors of Fopping-Twee Hall, converted into a display area by the over-enthusiastic anthropology elective of 1938, its wallhangings and glass cases dusted religiously, once a year, during Spring Intersession, ever since. What college would it have been…? There was the obligatory underripe Brie on the cheese board and sherry in plastic champagne glasses — with a stack of paper cups at the table corner, in case. If I recall rightly, Professor Widenose, in very dirty sneakers, kept apologizing for the failed air conditioning. Professor Parsnip yodeled out the conclusion of a story I’d heard her begin some years ago at another conference (with the same name, a different number, and the identical Brie and sherry) about her 1957 exploits among the Grungy-Grungy of the Lower Muddypigpuke. And sitting in the corner, working through her sixth champagne glass of Christian Brothers, bored out of her corn-rowed natural, was Leslie, the tedium relieved by (for her, and just a whit less for me as only about one out of three was launched — dazzlingly! — my way) the smiles of that shy, white-blond, six-foot-seven Adonis of Polish-Ukranian extraction, as at home on the gridiron as he was in the stone-quarries, where, since his fifteenth year, he had taken an annual summer job, but here, in this high and humid eyrie of abstraction, just the most engaging bit out of place. I found all this out by a gambit which began: ‘And what is your connection with our little group? Are you one of Leslie’s star students?’ Oh, no, he was just well, hell, thinking of giving Professor Steiner a hand, if she really did decide to go off and dig in that Peruvian pot-hole next September. Above that bronzed cheek, with its faint, ephebic scars from a boyish brush with acne, between those gray-gold lashes, his blue eyes were challenged by nothing else in that room save his own (size fourteen and a half! Later I had an opportunity to check) adidas.