Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Which Jim Mayn in later life listens to. At least there’s the machine and there he is, the tape recorder on the table and he’s sitting by it, used to being two or so places at once, staring along the desk at a picture of a global weather network.

  Why has this life happened to him? Questions threaten to be unearned questions. He’s a guy—oh that explains everything!—a little more independent, more up on things by virtue of his work which he works hard at but at a leisurely slope. But why has what happened?

  Nothing much. But a turn that your head takes and you aren’t all there for a while. I mean you can work out, go to a movie, have dinner with a lady, take your plane, or like now hear the flown-in tape, make a note or two, stare at the sphereful of weather stations doubling as other centers: But he’s looking down at it, the globe with little towers like a satellite’s antennae, a Christmas orange that grandma’s just getting started sticking with twig-hard little cloves the ends blunt so she has to bear down against her own flesh; but wait: that pomander’s a secretly familiar obstacle to this uncanny other.

  He wouldn’t speak of it, this turn his head takes, they could lock him up for what he might know, but here it is, O.K.?, he’s listening to the dusty correspondent-lady twang—no, simply say—her Buddhist quotes against the paper-thin crackle of fire she’s also reporting, within the larger, quiet, flesh-smooth breathing of the flames subsisting on an imperial gallon of non-renewable fossil fuel, fed too, in Mayn’s head, among all our multiplied voices, by an official back in Washington who got round the obstacle of dire new taxes if not death by beaming right through his compartmented economic advisers who said you can have these but not this, these but not this, substitute tat for tit but not both, Mr. President, through this and these the aforementioned official—future inflation be damned—beamed a budgetary implication that the war in question would cost ten billion tops and be all over by fiscal year-end—until Mayn is back where he’s been before quite really, yes quite really, and where, double-bodied, he is mile-years (scale-wise) above this weather-sphere.

  He is in the future, not shedding light up to his full potential.

  That’s right; in it. And a future boding ill for that past of ours we’re now in, that he has now in helpless interest or sympathy doubled himself back into, so that it might as well exist. But he’s not the type for this warp-vision; rejects the patent. Not crazy or original, a newsman who’ll carry the ball if it comes to him but has never agreed to take a view of history, no not even that it makes no sense. But he can’t get out of the way of its waste-oriented debris that, once seen, relate—and thus graduate their vectors of distance, disaster, hence perspective out of thin air like mind (it occurred to us) till this process of relation could turn (read flush) waste into flesh.

  But he know that he in the future and from there hav’ thought back up a few familiar angles of the past our current present, which includes—

  But wait, for while we wait for it to pass, it was a Wide Load transferring itself down an interstate in the middle of the night roughly eastward in the middle roughly of the continent. We had heard this Wide Load was mineral matter relative to us; its frequent no-show felt like it had something to hide (you ol’ Wide Load!) if only itself: as highway widths changed, so did spot reports of the overlap, until margin was our main worry, but if mineral or other substance receded, where to? No one must have seen the Wide Load at this instant we feel from how it looks through the Flying Camera keeping pace with it above the telephone lines and fields and treetops, while, long-lensed and intimately at this distance of fifty or seventy-five feet, the camera ear listens in on at least two voices somewhere there inside that Wide Load behind shingled walls and moon-pale Venetian blinds. A Wide Load being shipped interstate and at this dark hour without benefit of advance patrol—wide and immobile as a home, this unit, and hanging out over the edge of its great, low carrier trailer and out over the edge of the road as if the road’s been narrowed or a mountain had arisen widely from a moving molehill, so if a section of us other than the camera being flown beside this night cargo came the other way now, we’d have to swerve off this speeding road, foray out into farmlands of uncomfortable earth ridged and mapped with memories of soy seed and feed corn, or a brief forest of some sleeper’s saplings shadowing the far side of a dubious bridge, landbridge or any edifice to travel through. But if this other part of us, at large upon the interstate at this hour, must hold the road in the opposite direction approaching this high truck cab and its sweeping Wide Load, we would have to make a leapfrog dive up and over like the nationally screened daredevil who stands in the approaching vehicle’s path till the last instant, or alternatively we’d have to be clotheslined like a fat (as they say "a little short") fast ball wham into the middle of Indiana or Ohio, or (to skip cartilage in favor of bone) we would have to have a gap in us between our land-gear / undercarriage and the rest of us for this Wide Load to pass with its fore and aft signs through us going the other way. Unless, that is, this Wide-Load container of at least two room-type spaces—this room and a next room—prove penetrable!—as that tired voyager Columbus imagined when, having been offered by the Indians an herbal pick-me-up, he found "the illusion of ‘arriving from the east at the Indies’ more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco," or the thought that he was the first and therefore the beginning. For Who Was Here First proves to be a function of Where You Coming From.

  But wait: elsewhere, they’ve started, apparently without us, and we want, kind of, to get over there. But we were always getting started, until of late we saw again us getting started, yes there was the word like the event itself, until we saw it wasn’t our fault, we were larger than life until life caught up and wouldn’t have if we hadn’t been larger as an incentive system. We can’t get out of the way of Mayn’s claim that he is at times in the future—because it is literal but also because it is so private as to be imaginary. He means what he said: and from that future that he at times is really in he has thought our current present up—not too consciously, though, and with help—thought it back up as if it were the past, which includes (within random wide-load boasting possibly two angry voices exploring the subject, and within the routine parameters of Mayn’s work where meteorology and arms control have met primarily since the reconnaissance scandal of the U-2 plane high as some satellite sculpture but without an orbit came crashing down through even its own surveillance upon another continent it was not meant to touch but beamed into as a bend of our own potency angles from the glass of the air into the layers and waters of our lands) . . . and takes in (because we don’t wait any longer) . . . wind and weather as a cover for the powers that be and also for a mother—

  But where is she? And won’t we find her amply covered with tales the grandmother Margaret told of the Eastern Princess nee of Choor who arrived by great-circle detour doubtless upon a large bird that consumed Navajo horses under its wing? Add to this the account of the headman’s son the Navajo Prince, who once far north of his home saw a herd of bison nudged like a shadow off a cliff and felt in the stillness of that fall through the late light a waiting force somewhere in the nature of their bodies as yet not found; same Prince who even more obstinately pursued the Eastern Princess not back to Choor but along a curve of Mother Earth across a continent to where the Hermit-Inventor of New York who had given emergency counsel in the West but earlier had urged her as a girl named Margaret to go west in the first place, turned her, at last back East near home, into a sun-drenched mist to make her escape from her literally continental lover into by one account the now assembled Statue that harbored her as her disguise then compacted her cooler and (by another account) shapelier, when swift, soft, footsore steps of one tired Indian wanderer were heard climbing nearer and nearer, ascending the foreign keep of the Statue’s towering interior till they passed through her, and she passed downward like the wind, leaving him her one-time Navajo Prince to reach for himself the Statue’s eyes and look out toward the ocean he had seen only i
n the curves and wave-motion of his home deserts, prairies, and plateaus. But had heard of it in the Hermit-Inventor’s talk who himself was curiously never to be challenged as to his name of "Hermit-Inventor of New York" or chosen by those people or by the Eastern Princess he helped get into trouble and get out, or the Margaret she also was or even the grandson she told tales to later. In fact the Hermit garrulously sojourned upwards of half the year in those western lands to which he had sent that girl and later woman Margaret whom at more than twice her age he secretly loved, and though he lived by himself the balance of the time in New York and worked alone, he talked loudly into the night and lived among his schemes of buildings yet unbuilt, wind shadows yet to be cast, underground-wind-powered subways, floating underground buildings made of mirror—designs of weather that he hoped would make his skyline prophecy resound in all the colors of its building material and the powers of people these future buildings contained— Which we now all together have been saying include— To go on . . . with no more waits ... for even Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s mother, who heard but one of Margaret’s tales the one Jim did not hear, of what happened when the Navajo Prince met the East Far Eastern Princess once of Choor and her long-time betrothed and who else or other trace of future lay windowed in that turf so patient, but . . .

  Wind and weather a secret familiar cover, as we said, for the powers that be, and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who went away where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap. And through this gap a future would always come back, as she did not: except a breath that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day, human, animal, those who are known and those who are also known.

  Choor Monster of the Long White Mountain

  That sounds good, somewhere. Close as the next room (if you happened to be downstairs). Soft, loud, high, low; not without end, but still continuing. Song, yet then again like argument talked—not to you, or anyway not you alone. Space between it and you. Soft, loud, like music you would overhear when you were growing up.

  But that’s it. It is that music. Or was it the person playing you "heard"? Was that the feeling? Heard but not seen! A sound of Experience itself. Weigh it, store it; luckily in your "life" you can be dumb about it. Her privacy inseparable from the noise of the instrument: piano or violin; some days both. The musician’s secure devotion. Practice, yet not to make perfect. Scale-like up-and-down workouts on violin that were more like real music when the in-between notes got crazily played. Early experience of somebody else’s, yes, thought earned. Or could it have been some teenage, fairly early experience for you of pausing: pausing to Look Back! But why back, when what you were hearing was your mother’s concentration right now? But where was it going?

  This was you going too. Does that just mean "growing"? Or that you doubled her going? Who could you report such claptrap to? Is it monstrous that to this day you have not thought much about her going? Fact was, she went, dead or alive.

  Decades late, an event now in the apparently near future may get away from you. Two persons stand upon a metal plate: alloy to the best of your knowledge unique among late-century alloys in being natural; occurring in a natural state, and mined, not made in the lab. But upon this plate two persons stand waiting to be elsewhere. And behind them, more twos wait.

  Wait: what was this Choor? she asked, a passing affection in her and even in her word was that let you feel you might plead ignorance (here when you were headed out the door) or chance the intimacy of denying her the answer. I never heard about any Choor, she said, humorously but it bothered you but didn’t surprise you because the stories your grandmother Margaret had been telling up until not so long ago were for you, not for this daughter of hers who was your mother ("independent as hell," your father said as if admiring, but you didn’t quite understand). Choor what, did you say? she said. What Choor? she persisted, it has a funny sound, are you sure it’s right?

  She meant to bother you, but you were the one who had dropped the mention: so on your way out of the house you stopped and you told her what maybe she wanted to know—your large, soft-oiled first baseman’s mitt enfolding a slightly reddened and browned American League hardball there beyond where your thumb and fingers reached that would always let the long mitt do its own finding of a ball coming at you high overhead or vacuum a low throw out of the dirt—a mitt with powers of trustworthiness beyond even the warlike leverage of your friend Sam’s black rubber fins at the lake, which were fun, but cheating—but magical.

  You told her only what you knew.

  Margaret made up Choor, you thought. This Princess got sent away on a mission or something by her father, who was King of Choor. Margaret didn’t tell them like stories much any more except once in a while referring to some Indian or mountain or agriculture or cure as if she was one of the listeners nowadays. Choor had a long white mountain, white in the summer too and just as white after some of the white broke off up into the sky and became one of the giant birds that grew there though they grew a good deal darker when they flew away. The Princess flew away on a giant bird on this mission and where she went to was really out West where Indians lived, but they weren’t all Navajos. (What mission? his mother asked. To explore the New World, he seemed to remember, see if they had any monsters. What did the bird look like? his mother asked, chicken-in-the-car-and-the-car-won’t-go, she added, sort of between the two of them. Hey that’s "CHICAGO," he said; no, her bird looked more like a big duck but the size of a house.) Margaret’s stories eventually got to be more like what you would have seen if you’d been there, you know what I mean? They had cures for everything.

  Such as?

  Well, tobacco ash makes your teeth white.

  How ‘bout tobacco smoke, Jimmy? (But his father was the one who got mad when Sam’s father told him the boys rubbed lemon juice on their first two fingers to clean off the stain.) But this Choor, she said, it was just some place to be from? was that it?

  Well, soon as the Princess left, things changed, he said.

  Oh, shrugged his questioner (his mother, the daughter of Margaret) sounding like now she didn’t need to know anything more, and to Go on, Jimmy, scat.

  And he did, sailing like a broad jumper off the porch, not hearing the screen door (is this true?) clap shut until he hit the sidewalk at the end of their walk—but today without that calm shout from his mother from inside to not let the DOOR slam.

  Meanwhile, decades later in the near future two persons stand upon a metal plate waiting to be elsewhere. And sure enough, behind them more twos wait their turn to step onto the plate and be transferred from sight. What becomes of these people? The plate is a type of transformer plate and the occasion is not a twenty-fifth-century movie in a theater in the 1940s where you know a dozen guys and girls plus your friend Sam, and your younger brother Brad is there in the dark somewhere with a real girlfriend. No, the people on the plate are bound for a frontier colony out in Earth-Moon space; and while it feels like home it is uniquely economy-oriented in that, unknown as yet to these pioneers, they wind up on arrival one person, not the original two. But what does that feel like? Is this Experience again? What happens to their clothes?

  This is a future where you have been, and not by dream, Jim Mayn, because you don’t do dreams; and not by vehicle or through the aether to the best of your knowledge. Which you heard of long after it had been found to be not there. (Is that a trend?) And how did you get to the colony? In your same body? Maybe you didn’t stand on the plate. Were you simultaneously reincarnate?

  But not dreaming, not dreaming.

  A curve felt through your nature cuts distance brain-like and seeks in you to have been there first and retroactive to have guarded you through absence or secreted your viral memory from itself for a generation during which the future went ahead, homogened, homosomed, heading these willing pioneers for the hills of, after all, near-spac
e, but getting there each pair as one person.

  Which would make for richly human letters frequency’d back home, you can imagine, reluctant journeyman. But it didn’t make hard news you might readily share, cast as you could feel from that future like a shadow, whatever half-known way you got there to begin with; and while you’re not listening for more, maybe it is listening for you, for it seems to be there, and who was There First is like what Came First (the Indians or their Great Spirit that sets in motion our own stake in it).

  But if two pioneers into one comprises one beginning ongoing, here is already another: a room, a city room, a mid-room of a railroad flat: and on the chipped walls big blood-red, blood-black working drawings on brown supermarket bags opened out, cut up, masking-taped together. And you are listening to an elder meteorologist with a broken yet rebroken and lengthened face expound too fast (then too slow, ignoring you, Mayn) that these represent another weather that may arise from convergence of atmosphere with some coastlines that of late actually have seemed disturbed, have varied suddenly like subtle fronts.