When I came to, in leaves and dirt, I had cuts and abrasions all along one side…

  He sat up to hold back the vest’s torn edge, so that fire lit the scratches and scabs on his ridged, brown flank. ‘The animal…? I not find,’ he said, again taking up infantile English. ‘I look. But she gone, now.’ He shrugged. ‘It not fly, now, anyway, no more.’ Shaking his head, he let the vest fall to and leaned again on his knees. ‘The wings, now, be all…’ He made a few tearing motions.’ But I…am here now. You see? Flying. All the way here. All the way. I come from a far when…’ He paused, lifting one hand to indicate something vast and inexpressible. ‘A distant once…across never…’ Frowning, first he, then I looked toward the Hudson, at Jersey’s massed, Imperial lights. ‘Across the river,’ he said, then looked back at me. ‘You believe that?’

  I smiled, shrugged, and shifted in my squat.

  We stayed a little longer, while the flames lowered among bits of old board. He blinked his eye and joined his hands, waiting for me to suggest we go somewhere, that I buy him something to eat, perhaps, or that we stay, or whatever.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘since you’ve only been here a little while, how do you find our strange and terrible land? Have you heard that we have plagues of our own?’

  Curious, he looked at me across the fire, turned to the river, glanced at the city about us, then looked at me again.

  And I would have sworn, on that chill spring night, he no longer understood me.

  —New York

  May 1984

  Appendix A: Postscript

  1. I BEG MY READERS not to misread fiction as fact. The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals is, of course, a work of imagination; and to the extent it is a document, largely what it documents is misinformation, rumor and wholly untested guesses at play through a limited social section of New York City during 1982 and 1983, mostly before the 23 April 1984 announcement of the discovery of a virus (human t-cell lymphotropic virus [HTLV-3]) as the overwhelmingly probable cause of AIDS.

  AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is a disease in which the body’s immune system ceases to function, and the body becomes prey to many opportunistic infections, including, among the most common, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, an otherwise rare form of pneumonia, and Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS), an otherwise rare form of cancer of the capillary linings that often manifests itself as purple skin lesions, frequently on the legs. In the last five years, over six and a half thousand cases of AIDS have been reported. There have been no recoveries, and forty-five percent of those to contract the syndrome in these five years are now dead as a result.

  There is no evidence that AIDS is transmitted by casual contact (that is, it is not spread by air, food, water, skin contact, sneezes, or the handling of exposed clothing, bedding, or objects). The evidence is overwhelming, however, that it can be spread by sexual contact in which bodily fluids or secretions (semen, saliva, urine, feces, or blood) pass from partner to partner—though it has not been determined how these secretions must enter the partner’s body for infection to take place (that is, it is not known if lesions, tears, or small cuts must be present in the mouth, body skin, rectum, or vagina for infection to occur). To date, approximately seventy-two percent of those to get the disease have been homosexual men. The great majority of the men to get it live in, or frequently visit, large urban centers, with New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago far in the lead. The next highest-risk group is intravenous drug abusers: unsterilized and infected needles going directly into the bloodstream are apparently an indisputable point of contagion. Approximately four hundred women have gotten AIDS, the vast majority of whom are either I-V drug abusers, or the sexual partners of men who are I-V drug abusers. AIDS symptoms include unexplained loss of weight, unexplained bruises or lesions on the body (particularly on the legs), swollen lymph nodes (particularly in the neck), along with malaise and general weakness. At the onset of any these symptoms, singly or in combination, especially in someone in one of the high-risk groups, medical attention should be sought immediately. To date, no adults who have contracted the disease have lived with AIDS beyond three years; and death may come as quickly as six weeks after the onset of symptoms, depending on what opportunistic infections settle in and how they are treated.

  The above is some of what is known about AIDS to date (October 1984), though what is known has been changing month to month for more than a year and will no doubt continue to change until after a vaccine is developed. (All these statistics will be tragically outdated by the time this book is published.) What follows is generally considered reasonable speculation by the informed, or is based on it.

  Various gay men’s groups have advised gay men to put a sharp curtailment on their number of sexual contacts outside of monogamous relationships, or to confine them within known circles, closed if possible. Given the situation, total abstinence is a reasonable choice. Whatever adjustment one makes, one must bear in mind that the social path of the disease is difficult to trace, as the incubation period has been generally estimated at seven months; and, in some cases, three years or more may have passed between infection and the outbreak of symptoms. There is no hard-edged evidence as to when—or for what length of time—someone can transmit the disease during incubation. The possibility of carriers with no symptoms is, therefore, highly likely*

  Those wishing further facts and guidelines should send their questions, stated briefly, too:

  Gay Men’s Health Crisis

  446 W. 33rd Street

  New York, NY 10001

  AIDS Hotline: (800) 243-2437

  2. September 1987 Up-date: Since October ’84 when I wrote the above, the number of reported AIDS cases in the US has passed forty-two thousand. Fifty-seven percent of these are dead. There are probably as many unreported cases as there are reported ones. Some three million carriers with no symptoms are estimated. (HTLV-3 is now usually abbreviated HIV.) And both The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals and the note are documents of a more naïve time. The abstinence suggested above is unworkable. And information in any but the most clear, common, and comprehensible language is immoral.

  Ass-fucking is your biggest risk. Don’t take it or give it, to men or women, without a condom—ever! French kissing has been declared low risk. But don’t do it if you have sores in the mouth or bleeding gums. Use condoms for all penetration, mouth, ass, or cunt. Though it’s been declared medium risk, don’t get cum, piss, or shit in the mouth or swallow it. The three best slogans for safe sex are:

  1: On you, not in you.

  2: Lots of physical affection is our best protection.

  3: [This one’s the hardest and, in the long run, the most important]: Talk about what we’re going to do for three minutes first.

  With such guidelines and a wide education program, San Francisco was able to stop the increase in the percent of cases each year. And New York City was able to curtail it sharply.

  Learn them. Live with them. Teach them.

  The address and phone number remain the same.

  —SRD

  3. As I finish the proof corrections for the Grafton edition of Flight from Nevèrÿon (July 1988), there have been over seventy-five thousand cases of AIDS reported in the United States, about half of whom are dead. In spring of ’84 I could write that personally I knew no one with the disease. Today it is the single largest slayer among my friends and acquaintances.

  The Lancet medical journal published a study (by Kingsley, et al., 14 Feb. 1987, pp. 345-9), in which twenty-five hundred homosexual men, who at the beginning of the study tested negative for antibodies to HIV, were monitored as to their sexual activity for six months. The paper states: ‘On multivariate analysis receptive anal intercourse was the only significant risk factor for seroconversion to HIV…’ in the 95 men who, in the course of the study, developed HIV antibodies (i.e., who seroconverted). It also states: ‘The absence of detectable risk for seroconversion due to receptive oral-genital intercourse is striking. That there were no seroconversions detected among 147 men engaging in receptive oral intercourse, accords with other data suggesting a low risk of infection from oral-genital (receptive semen) exposure. It must be mentioned that we were unable to determine the infection status of the sexual partners to whom these men were exposed. Perhaps these 147 men who practiced receptive oral intercourse were never or rarely exposed to HIV seropositive men. However this explanation seems improbable.’ In brief, this means that in the gay community, ass-fucking is still the killer.

  I would still follow the guidelines in the previous note. But if, from time to time, you don’t, the Kingsley study suggests which ones you should worry about most.

  Of the three people invited to brunch with me in §6.3 of ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ that July morning in 1983, one has since died of AIDS. But a few months ago I ran into ‘Joey’ on 8th Avenue. Walking on a single crutch, he had some story about how a quart bottle had come out an upper window to land on his work boot. He squatted to show me where the leather’d been cut. He had a job, he went on to tell me, as a carpenter’s assistant up in Boston but was down in New York for the weekend. He was hitchhiking back up the next day—

  ‘Joey,’ I said, ‘don’t take this wrong.’ We stood together under the grey sky. ‘But how come you’re still alive?’

  He didn’t even ask me what I meant. ‘Cause,’ he said, ‘I don’t share needles with no one, no how, no way. And I don’t take it up the ass without a condom.’ He looked at me askance. ‘You?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t use needles. And I don’t take it up the ass, period.’

  ‘Brag, brag, brag,’ he said. ‘Let’s go have a beer—you seen how the Fiesta’s been closed down?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’ll buy some and go back to my place.’

  So we did.

  —SRD

  4. When I completed correcting page proofs for this Wesleyan University Press edition of The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, I phoned the CDC (August 1993; 1-800 342-2437) for the following cumulative statistics, reflecting information collected up to June 1993: Since June 1st, 1981, the CDC reports 315,390 AIDS cases, 194,354 of whom are now dead. Of those cases, 36,690 are listed as women; 4,710 are listed as “Pediatric Cases” (i.e., children under thirteen); 172,085 are listed as “Men Who Have Sex With Men”; 73,610 are listed as “Injecting Drug Use”; 2,760 cases are listed as “Hemophilia and blood clotting disorders” (i.e., from blood transfusions or unscreened blood products); 19,557 are listed as “Men Who Have Sex with Men and Inject Drugs”; 21,873 are listed as “Heterosexual Contact.”

  The number of monitored studies of sexual behavior and its relation to AIDS (i.e., studies in which people who begin the study seronegative keep written accounts of their sexual behavior, which are then statistically correlated with the written accounts of those in the study who convert to sero-positive) remains appallingly low. Specifically, besides the Kingsley et al. study of homosexual men reported in postscript §3, I know of only one other, The Gay Men’s Health Study, conducted in San Francisco a year before Kingsley et al. Its conclusions were the same as the later Kingsley et al. study. Since the conclusions of these studies often go against popular prejudice, however, their information, if not their very existence, is often all but buried—even though they represent the only scientific information about sexual transmission realities.

  Though I hope in the next decade it will be very, very different, still, since 1984 when The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals was written, the despair of the sexually active about AIDS has, in general, not taken the form: “It is so prevalent, how can I avoid catching it?” Rather, that despair has almost always had the form: “Surely I must already have it. What does it matter what I do? Or what I say I do?” As a sexually active gay man in New York City, I have known that despair—for years at a time!

  Though, in these very postscripts I have advocated them, personally I have never followed the “safe sex” tenets: I’ve had no anal encounters at all. At age fifty-one my oral-receptive encounters (with swallowing and the tenderest of bleeding gums) still number more than 50 a year in the New York City area (and, up to 1990, numbered between 150 and 300 a year), among which only a single partner of mine has used a condom—and then, only once. Still, according to the most recent of my annual HIV antibody tests this past September, I remain HIV-. And Magic Johnson, so famously and publicly HIV+, claims no male encounters and no needle use at all. But such “anomalies” are why monitored studies must be done—and why speculation on “possibilities of transmission” must be banished from our talk of AIDS.

  We need hard-edged information about probabilities.

  In a number of more recent reports, people have been asked, after HIV antibodies manifested themselves, “How did you pick it up?” These reports have produced statistics from “16 percent through oral transmission” through all the “Heterosexual Contact” cases reported, male and female (7 percent of the total). But such reports can a priori reflect only what is generally already believed; they can offer no revision of that general belief toward actual knowledge. And while such statements as mine (or Magic Johnson’s) can be useful in suggesting which monitored studies must be set up and performed, in no way can either take the place of such a study itself. And such studies are useless if their results are not made widely known.

  The fact is, the majority of AIDS educators are unaware of the studies that have been done, their form (i.e., whether a given study involved after-the-fact speculations or not), or their results. That, for example, a baker’s dozen years into the age of AIDS, there have been no such monitored studies of women (or, indeed, of heterosexual men) is a murderous crime.

  At this point in time, any talk of “possibilities of AIDS transmission” is talk of superstition. (Anal receptive sex is no longer a “possible route of sexual transmission”; it is the overwhelmingly probable route of sexual transmission, homosexual and heterosexual.) Superstitions sometimes turn out to have a basis in fact. But again, we need hard-edged and repeatedly supported information about probabilities. It is probability that allows air travel—with its fatal crashes killing hundreds—to remain a viable mode of transportation for you and me, rather than to be corporate mass murder. Information on probabilities alone can make a range of satisfying and fulfilling sexual acts viable again in our society, for all of us, gay and straight. Without such information, talk of “AIDS education” is absurd: there is no information to educate with. And the 315,390 cases these baker’s dozen years have netted trumpets the murderous inadequacy of the discourse of “possibilities” on which till now people have had to base their life decisions.

  —SRD* My warmest thanks go to Dr. Marc Rubenstein for helping me with this medical note.

  Appendix B: Buffon’s Needle

  from:

  Robert Wentworth,

  September 21, 1984

  DEAR MR DELANY,

  I thoroughly enjoyed your novel, Neveryóna, which I just finished reading. I wonder, however, if you would forgive my pointing out a few mathematical inaccuracies in your discussion of Venn’s solution to ‘Belham’s Problem.’

  My interest was piqued when I read about Venn’s proposed method in Chapter 12 for determining π. I was sure that I had heard of the method before, but I never understood why it worked. So, I sat down and did some mathematical analysis to convince myself that one can estimate π by tossing a stick onto a sheet of paper ruled with parallel lines spaced a stick-length apart. The mathematics told me that, yes, the results of this experiment can be used to estimate π but that the correct method is not quite as you have described.

  In particular, if you divide the number of times that the stick crosses a line (Nc) by the number of times that the stick lies free (NF),

  you find that the results get nearer and nearer 2/π-2, the more times you toss:

  (The arrow means ‘approaches’ and the wavey equals sign means ‘approximately equals.’) Thus Nc/NF does not directly give an estimate of π. You could of course estimate π from 2 + 2/(Nc/NF) but it is simpler to estimate π by multiplying the total number of tosses (N) by two and dividing this by Nc. This ratio does approach n as the number of tosses gets larger and larger;

  On page 356 of the first, mass market edition of Neveryóna, Venn says: ‘If you throw down the stick repeatedly, and if you keep count of the times it falls touching or crossing a line, and if you keep count as well of the times it lands between lines, touching or crossing none of them, and if you then divide the number of times it touches or crosses a line by the number of times it lies free, the successive numbers that you express, as you make more and more tosses, will move nearer and nearer the number you seek.’ From what I’ve been saying, this is, of course, wrong. Venn should have said (and I assume from the rest of your novel that in some ideal reprint you would like her statement correct): ‘If you throw down the stick repeatedly, and if you keep count of the times it falls touching or crossing a line, as well of the total number of times you toss the stick at all, and if you then divide twice the number of tosses by the number of times the stick touches or crosses a line, the successive numbers you express, as you make more and more tosses, will move nearer and nearer the number you seek.’

  There is also a more subtle error present in your discussion of the method. Belham later says that with five hundred tosses he is able to get an estimate of π more accurate than 22/7. Moreover, he claims that with another five hundred tosses the estimate will be ‘a good deal more accurate.’ While this level of accuracy is possible, it is not mathematically probable. If we use 2N/Nc to estimate π, then the expected fractional error in the estimate is given by: