Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
by
Samuel R. Delany
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.
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“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.”
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.]
“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.”
“Joy is power. Real power.”
[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 — probably.”
“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.”