Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He felt her know some moving part of him, then instantly swim away and know another part, and he loved her and he hated her for reading his mind. But she said, "You know me like a book." "A libretto," he murmured amazingly. But she shook her head sincerely with that ultimate sensuality that was not for him, her tongue tip tight against her upper lip: "Darling when you try to be clever . . . forget it."

  Atabrine, did she say? His presence drops him. His cerebellum wheels like the wind spoken of by Indians he has known. Can he cope? Is he equal? Hairline fracture arcs slowly slowly down the doctor’s face. Atabrine? Time to flush out the worm or worms? Has she, then, achieved the desired weight loss? Does he matter? He does not like the look of sehor who’s been introduced to him and he recalls this man’s name from somewhere, an important man, was that what it was? Latin, upper middle class, a light cruelty in the soft eyes (sex? tradition? some task?).

  Opera’s not for everyone, especially at these prices; and in itself is overweight. We willingly recede down the wormhole but with an expansible width-capability such that we can avoid passing out with the wormhole when it’s flushed away next day long after that specialist brunch. But at our end now let us not breathe so hard as to suck in the tunnel’s membrane, we know that that far end, now a pinhead of experience, was our end, too, and remember what we should have seen more closely (for luminaries are entitled to have fathers, too): the diva’s endangered father glistening somewhere newly incarnate in her eye, far away along a coast where he was born and she was, too—she who in Rome, Milan, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, London, and here in New York is acquainted with so many exiles better than herself; and, half-knowing, she knew ahead of time more fully than exactly how she would feel when, later, sometime between love, her dashing questioner of the night (not now in mufti) who is himself a question asks her what she in the deep recollection of her body needs to ask him: How is her father?

  For we have, you know, more than enough information on other matters. Yet for what? For remembering? To do what? We already remember we have changed toward life. The unexamined life is well worth changing. We knew life, yes even when we were least together. Though not how long it was. While knowing life was brief next to light. Had not the Latin thinkers called light longa? A good question, though just what light was seemed lost in mass and speed.

  We will—you will—change your life on May One (why wait? asks Grace K. gently touching up her voice with revelation). Buy yourself a plastic speculum and examine your body/self; you have a hand mirror already, feel yourself, look at the surplus, are you getting anything out of it? eat live food, take the time to chew and especially if the live food is moving—lasts longer and so will you if you can not be so available to your family all the time, right?, and look at your posture, you’re round-shouldered, what are you protecting?—got money of your own? this is nineteen seventy-seven almost. Do you even begin to know what you’re capable of, honey? even if (so long as he doesn’t specifically make the request) you are a Sunday cocksucker, investigate alternative sources of protein, information is all available but we don’t share it, honey, we didn’t share it like we should.

  Surplus of information such as that kid with a regular contact smoker’s hack at eleven studying rotation, is that the kid assembling facts on the sub-Iranian desert channels? Because if so time has passed; because in that next room the kid is four years older at least because he’s studying sunspots now and has learned that sunspots rotate around the sun they are part of that itself doesn’t rotate like something solid, and that when the sunspots along the sun’s equator speed up, this may mean an ice age is coming. Like the Little Ice Age which began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted seventy years and is called the Maunder Minimum and caused suffering in Europe. The seventeenth century is the sixteen hundreds.

  But sunspots have been on the scene for centuries, and, as an inventor based in nineteenth-century New York City told a very young woman from the immediate hinterlands on her way to and then later from experiences westward, sunspots and money seem close kin by cycles coming and going, but that is mathematical moonshine (she smiled) and little more (for she was interested in the planet Mars and how livings were made and Africa and the anti-vivisectionists and tall buildings in Chicago moving against the great cloudy American winds, and interested in Indians and not only in general). He and she had met eight years before in New York harbor on Bedloe’s Island, she scarcely twelve—1885—fledgling observer come with her father who brought out a small weekly newspaper in New Jersey to see the more or less uncrated pieces of the Statue of Liberty; and, standing in unmown scrub grass, she watched over the shoulder of a photographer taking the Statue’s detached face from the inside, which though inside out gazed through the open frame of its crate dolefully and dark-cheeked (and was there even a touch of the Native American or jojoba-au-lait there?) and with huge, curved Grecian pout gazed back at the photographer in front of the girl from the hinterlands yet stared (did the Statue) a hair to their left as if over their left shoulders like a person at something beyond them until this twelve-year-old who looked thirteen from New Jersey heard behind her a voice muttering sotto voce, "Too big— never get the damn thing together. Facing the wrong direction, for Pete’s sake. Unequaled, my foot," and she turned, amused, and he asked her, 4’What’s your name?" and when she said, "Margaret," he said, this weathered old Hermit-Inventor of New York, "Go west, young girl, that’s where you must go, and you will," and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will, a whole world outside tracing your window and bent like weather by light." And Margaret said, "Of course she won’t, because she’s only a statue," but Margaret stared hard into one of those understandable eyes and when she turned with her small leather notebook in hand, "How do you know?" she retorted; whereupon the Inventor of New York with the wind of the harbor uniting them, retorted in his turn, "I bet you can recite poetry." Thinking this tall, brownish man with squint-small cavernous blues for eyes rude and funny, but hearing her name called in warning from the far side of the Statue’s strewn sections, she thereupon recited what came to mind:

  . . . ever drifting, drifting, drifting

  On the shifting

  Currents of the restless heart;

  Till at length in books recorded,

  They, like hoarded

  Household words, no more depart . . .

  and furthermore,

  Far or forgot to me is near—

  But the brownish man with the blue eyes murmured, "Very good, very good." And Margaret went on:

  If the red slayer think he slays,

  Or if the slain think he is slain,

  They know not well the subtle ways

  I keep, and pass, and turn again . . .

  And when, on hearing her name closer by yet in a new way so she felt she was much older (this she told her grandson one day half a century later), she was asked by the Inventor her birthday, she told him hoping for a present; and then she felt a grip upon her arm that drew her away toward other pieces of the Statue so firmly the grip is like the tone of her father’s protective voice, with whom she is jointly visiting Bedloe’s Island. But(?) Go west, young girl, young woman? Who has the time?

  For we felt late.

  Yet replays are available. As we for them. So we saw whatever from new angles and in an order not up to us but we at least felt it could have been. Just as we got to be at high times the very angles we saw by, and knew in a rush this was none other than the angels sharing what they could with us— their intuitions not unlike what we term telepathy; their sympathy with another being or beings as close as what our own recent formulae infer to be Simultaneous Reincarnation; their patience much like the mind-bending trip our recent research promises, mapped of detours that arrive by curves that prove parallel by crossing. The replays will help and we should be able to replay them in future in any order why even a child could think up. But then we came down unavoidably and into another medium also watery but then we felt no more li
ke angels. We did feel collective knowledge in excess of the event our preparation targeted: an event which was almost too much like itself, to wit a sort of execution. Weren’t we sure? And weren’t we there? Weren’t we even the ones meant? Breath breath breath breath breath. If you’re upset it’s because you want to be, it’s coming from you, you know, not the squad facing you in the prime playground. We already remember, and have we even seen it? Whatever it is, it weighs less while costing the same, yet can get into the habit of looking like it weighs nothing or is divorced from the concept of weight until we step quickly to one side of its shadow and see that, sure, it has weight. And then we see we remembered, unlike prior angels who needed no such process.

  How we remember is something else, a whole nether question down the worm-road’s thread eroding some exact degree of blood between the diva’s doctor’s friend the Ojibway healer and guide and his one-third-Sioux part-Navajo cousin, a father-sky of turquoise upon his shoulders, a mother-earth beneath his pony’s hooves. And this cousin is in turn so distantly connected to a Navajo Prince of the early 1890s that we need even more justly define that kinship, maybe with this very patience coming to us periodically like refractions through waters of rain and bright dusts of air. So that in doing so we know more than we did or thought; and it will not go away, the northern bison tongue which that Navajo Prince held fast to the study of until violently interrupted and held fast to still, while he crossed the Pacific-Atlantic land-bridge between New Mexico and New York, holding always in his bag or pocket a section of bison’s tongue which he knew could yield active force immeasurable if only the layers of its fiber and light could be touched in a manner that the Great Spirit must already have told us in the loaded dreams some wide mountains experience. Meanwhile, we might just reduce that kinship to questions that are more lasting and alive than answers, if it had not already been done.

  By at least one of our number. A grandmother who told stories upon stories to a grandson James or Jim long before his mother took her life if not her drawn, apparitional face away from him, and sometimes afterward also. Stories that often did not finish and were easy to understand, he thought; stories that passed the time. Stories that he retold himself to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not.

  He kept an eye on both. This left him by our count one eye free for what was in between but put his moving feet in two places often at once like East-West magi even of that time, wise persons who they say could be in two places simultaneously, Grace Kimball on second thought among them though not for that feat (for she was always only here) but for having a total view, including healing change, finding as she must on what we will call her wheel a place and time and power for just everything:

  Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier—Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and we are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.

  (What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)

  And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?

  It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.

  What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.

  Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.

  Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.

  "So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.

  For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?

  The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he belonged to be human? the inquisitor wants to know, our hands are connected to the arms of the chair, the man conducting the interrogation can’t wait, his time is worth its while, O.K., he’s said, which is it? The earphones with hard-to-beat frequencies are almost upon us while the wire for the earphones uncoils by itself, the man says he’s going to offer us some encouragement, some inducement to decide which of two things we mean. (Wide Load!)

  Did we lie, then, speaking doubly?

  There in our inquisitor’s eyes are shades of our danger which maybe he shares by knowing what is going to happen to us here no matter what we say maybe, or in the other room which now that we’re here becomes what this room once was, namely the next room, hear the silence, you could cut it with an electric prod, and you should; hear within the silence a high-frequency tuner rising in pitch or volume you can’t tell maybe both.

  Just talk straight, honey, said Grace Kimball again and again, late in her century, tell it like Mama didn’t teach you; go public, come out (you know?—spelled TV O) be up front, like the money, everything else is guilt and manipulation.

  James Mayn on another track thirty seconds away by phone, two three four five hours by air, said, Include me out of this Discussion of the Void and what is supposed to fill it; look if they get me under the lightbulb how do I know what I might say, I’m not one of your great talkers but under that kind of interrogation I might become human, I mean I might elect to survive, I’ll do what I have to do if I’m lucky, I might even make up what I’m supposed to know, I might get
inspired, I’m human I don’t know how I’m going to react, I’ll say this, maybe I don’t even know my sources to divulge, maybe I can’t say what I saw or what someone said, but I would go easy on the jokes, I think, because those guys who do the interrogating have a sense of humor to begin with but on another wavelength which when it hits my skin-ends could just get into my wavelength or is it width, overloaded width? ouch, I’ll keep myself going maybe by thinking, What if I had this guy interrogating me alone man to man in a shopping-center parking lot, no secret weapons, nothing fancy, equals you know, just a couple of temporarily missing persons settling a difference.

  Yeah, yeah, that’s how men settle their differences, a female voice on two firm thighs is piped in.

  You mean how man, growls a male voice on two suspect knees.

  A child is heard observing to a fellow child, See I had this block that was chipped, my dad threw it against the wall, there’s where it hit, he got a long-distance call from my mom, and he came back and we were working on this launch pad and suddenly he picked up this block and threw it, you see where it got chipped?