Oh ancient showerer, you are wet by the flesh-inch, stubble to stern, but, in the timeless shower (which nonetheless you know she will someday turn off), not all here. What did she mean by Recycled Man? You are a couple of hairy shoulders, a still evolving chest solidifying its sternum; you are a bladder like a balloon brain; and you recall being a monster along some grand mountain shelf where there were no angels and no dreams in those days. You are still one who does not at least remember one solitary dream. But you are being soaped by someone else’s dream and soaped intently while the good New York water hung tine by tine to the shower head’s silver disk is talking to you as if she asks no more of you than you being here:
What Does She Want Of You?
You’re also in another leg of yourself and you’re so awake the young woman here doesn’t know that whatever time you’re in, Standard, Pacific, Mountain, or Water Time, or new east-west time vein fibered through you on a tropic curve off to a stage across the north lid of New Mexico lagged three, four degrees south of New York City—hearing information, stories (one you retold yourself)—were they the runaround?—you’re in two places at once, you see neither one works without the other—an acceptance like divorce from someone you really love—but the truth is that you’ve been in not the present sort of stuck in past but in the future looking back like crazy to the present which you’ve brought into existence again through undreamt-of particles in you that make you a window you fall out now and again.
"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo Raymond Vigil’s purpose tracked in his Spanish-rounded easy-West-American body of voice just behind you on the floor of the desert goes on like there is no today and you’ll always be standing here (now again in a New York shower) hearing a fission of our Indian past and future; for Ray’s detailing hopes for breakthrough of resource revenue as if the brown stalagmite that’s risen hundreds of feet sheer up into a cave of sky isn’t there to absorb you and your eyes and as if the other person, this healthy-’n-well-off-looking woman Dina West from Albuquerque who was so nice but wants something, wasn’t standing there on the dry road also; "it’s gonna happen," says Vigil: what he means is ("up-ahead") more sensible control of Indian uranium and oil currently rented out. Wind brings a smell of rock into your throat; you saw the wells back on the Gallup road, the oil pumps right here a mile from Rattlesnake Wash and two miles from the Rock, and your organism slows down sensing it might not get a drink for hours, and if plants thought, what would a cactus for all those weeks between desert deluges—"—but listen, Jim, you wait—because this leasing the rights when we should control the whole operation—I thought I knew who was behind it in the Tribal Council at Window Rock but now I don’t know—maybe you know" (Anglo news-hunter visitor from everywhere else but here), the flat spaces of continent beginning to get ripped by this senseless wind, "not to mention the geothermal—"
"—geothermal! the country here’s not right for it, Ray, you don’t have any deep steam around here—"
"—wouldn’t be so sure, fella, but we deserve our cut—show me an Indian on the payroll at Los Alamos."
"That’s only a pilot project, hot rock drill you know Spacelab stuff."
Feel him pointing off to the right thirty miles where you know the colossal stacks of the power plant govern space as you go on staring here at the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock in front of you and at it only but those stacks don’t go away any more than Consolidated Edison chimneys horizoning the blue New York sky so finely rust-rinsed it’s a movie of itself what do you need to spend time going out West to see some Four Corners New Mexico gasification project with vast, near, dark, strip-mined hills of slag that at this distance in a New York shower two thousand downtown miles under the brow of the continent, where they take the deep surface of coal and turn her into "natural" gas to pipe to California, there to keep body and soul together, and would generate new gas-powered TV sets by next year or at least by 1978 on which to look eastward at their fuel source, were not the new upper-air electricity soon to be tapped by the cloud-needle project exploiting the grand and ancient cumulonimbus formations traditional to the American Indian airspace.
"—more jobs over there at the plant for Navajos than they’ll admit; more than before—and the irrigation project is coming along slow, but right here the uranium and oil still belong to us, well the coal does too but we won’t revoke the lease—say who told you there’s no geothermal here, some Anglo geologist?" It’s a good-hearted joke in the middle of nowhere, where the Nowhere is that he doesn’t know what he wants from you.
Who said there’s no geothermal right here? Well, it’s sort of a fact, like that some Indians aren’t talkers to speak of (you told your daughter in a letter, who passed it on to your son), but that’s Navajos—out in the desert in shacks or isolated hogans or navigating a pickup truck with a fifty-gallon drum of water in back, and talking little even at one of their own rug auctions—but other Indians talk much—the Co-op People, for instance, in a nine-hundred-year-old rent-controlled multiple dwelling under a cliff though granted they phased out that cliff site, and the multiple dwellings you had in mind are Pueblo and the co-op family-owned, but we let them keep the nine hundred years.
"Geothermal’s California, Raymond; geothermal’s Hawaii; geothermal’s up North."
But Los Alamos that day only a week previous: work on geothermal’s begun and wouldn’t you know we’re back at Los Alamos, where once upon a time they got toward the heart of things, but now they’re shooting for clean magma power, keep the deep steam from getting away; not even a press briefing, thank God, nothing going on but daily work, yet you’ll get your breakthrough assignment one day soon like in the as yet uninflated farming of wind some year soon—press handout cum voice-over tells all you need to know except who’s turned the profit into some other mystery of Nature before you can say, Hey that’s joint property acquired during the marriage (i.e., between us Indians and them Entres, short for Entrepreneurs, that just didn’t work out but there’s marital property and extramarital and the marriage was naturally here first)—your old pal and croaking colleague Red (of face-nose) Harley sounded like a Marxist with his Phillips head turning the wrong way when you ran into him on the train until you don’t hear his words n’more and others shower inside the general brain: corporate psychosis—spending into a black hole where competition sucks back inside its own abstract the screaming scam that at a slower rate sounded for centuries like grown man’s insured drawl—cannot last another decade, he said, the corporate psychosis: the only hope is cooperation: Veblen (Mayn had heard of him) didn’t predict hunger and atomic power (or did he? Red asks himself) (Mayn didn’t know) but Veblen said technology’s neutral: that’s the place to begin if you’re going to really own it; it’s no monster in itself (though was not sure: all that menial repetition coupling with the surety that you’re powering some Important Thing . . .) and what color tax will a corporate structure pay to a revenue service that we’ve (Harley merges with Mayn to adopt the word of this pair-showering girl) "internalized" to hear inside us the corporate voice incarnal spinning off its true power at all the centers far be they from us, that, hell, so much of their take goes down the ruling sink might’s well be socialism:
Gossip and theory on a train commuting New York into Washington down the fine-toothed density of the coast, but now in the love and steam of a shower recalling Ship Rock and a week before it Los Alamos, the name or two you knew of people who were here ahead of you and maybe hacks no less than you that an information officer mentions in passing under the Los Alamos sun toward the high library, for instance, the buckskin photo-info agent Spence, whose high husky words are in your daydreaming ear a week later at Ship Rock along the breath of the Navajo Ray Vigil who mentioned Spence, and a year or more later in the truest showerbath of the decade— Spence lapses out of sight, then, until you hear your own name, and on his mouth or teeth talking still earlier in Florida when you first met this girl: and who was he ever to adopt that ponytail tone so fuck
ing quiet and friendly its alertness is saying some hustling thing to you, but what? (Acts like there’s something on anybody you want to name, and if on you, what’s he want?) His name is Ray Spence, you wouldn’t want to know him though would say not even that to information officer signing you up for a P.M. tour of the hot-rock drilling, who tells you Spence actually asked after you—had you been to Los Alamos recently?—following you maybe like you knew something no one else knew when, ‘far’s you could tell, the opposite was the case—thus following you by preceding you as he did months-into-years-now ago to absorb the attention of the Chilean economist at Cape Kennedy who turned up in New York soon after his scholarly friend Allende went down in history: but maybe this Spence expected you to have gone to Los Alamos, or had been thinking of you—you never gave it the thought it no doubt in any event did not merit. Spence was out for a buck. But at Los Alamos? Nothing happening on the Indian geothermal employment front lately you told this young woman who is in the shower with you who knows twice what you know about it anyway, and hasn’t been there. Spence’s name mentioned at Ship Rock too, preceding you there, if not in Ray Vigil’s affections.
All of which means nothing but that you are boneless on this Election Day and not even in the happiness of the shower that window through which somebody else might trace an information or curve of face, your job—except now you recall your grandmother reporting (as if it was her job) that a young woman who was your mother said she knew nothing about Indians except they were the last Americans with a native sense of design. People been at Los Alamos thirty years; design a bomb like that one, the only way after it is in. Some of the same folk enclosed by their Los Alamos classical-music station are working on geotherm, fast forward, the radio didn’t hold the band—car slips over the white line, what a radio will do to you. Why Gods your future (a voice homes on the billowing straight road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe)—which train you on, brother, the radio voice rises, you’re with the others, ain’t ya, in the rear car looking back at the speeding landscape while the engineer ain’t up front in the locomotive no more and you feel this but you don’t want to ask, right?, just a train (they’ll probably take it off service presently) just another train loose down the track with you and all the rest looking out the rear window of the rear car with enough supplies of fast grub and cardboard-soft cans of beer so we’ll never run out, that is before we hit bottom ‘cause God could be your future, you let him aboard, but this morning he ain’t.
Not here beneath a reverse geyser on Election Day massaging two slippery Manhattan selves nor there in her dry bedroom with a regular rug of a towel, a soft bedroom and two sets of keys on the bureau this morning where hadn’t she set down one last night when they came in from late dinner?, geothermal feels clean but hot and in the miles of downward piping maybe the jobs aren’t so many for Anglos or Skins.
"Maybe you’re thinking I mean the old volcano that was here at the Rock, these dikes out here for miles, lava once, heat underneath—but," Vigil had gone on, "forget that and think of the magma chambers simmered down centuries ago but maybe below all that is an ocean, an ocean of power on the bottom line."
Who, then, has first rights to Lower Space? The wind across the bright plateau, listen to it come. And against the sudden grid of agreements in fine print shadowed by gasification lobbyists lurking within grainier shadows of strip-mine futures, shadow grids of revenue-sharing partnership statistics floated/buffered/spaced-out with the figured factor of good will, you say, "O.K., O.K., just a second—let me have a look at this," where you stand two miles away from Ship Rock, which rises solitary fourteen hundred feet up off the floor of the mesa, where desert is a memory of wind and quiets the two voices, male and female sounds behind you, so you feel them scarcely more than the three points of your shoulder blades which with the small of your back hold in place the late-model car parked behind the three of you, so you wonder not where you are but why you listen to the two different things that the two people behind you are asking, and of you, as if you could give what they want—the talking Navajo, the Albuquerque businesswoman Dina and her passion-like commitment.
"It’s gonna happen," Raymond Vigil insists, less certainly; "you can help us."
"I’m not a lobbyist, Ray, but what’s going on over there at the plant’s worth reporting."
Stand on a lava flow gazing at a fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot-high throat, a volcanic neck that gagged once upon a time and you stare until the material it was made of stirs as if to rise like wind in the alleged ship’s soul looking for a sea, the stuff once molten inside the pipe of the volcano that hardened before it could get out and now is all that’s left because the conduit / pipe / cone / actual volcano / outside slope has been worked away / blown away by continents of wind. It isn’t hard to explain, is it? What’s left is Ship Rock, hugely visible from the Four Corners Power Plant thirty miles away as the plant is from the Rock.
"Look, I’ve been up to my ears in gasification this past week," you hear drawling out of you—"let me just look . . . look at this thing. Can one get up there?" Your fingertips feel the rock turn to sand.
Albuquerque woman Dina swaps a story about the Rock with the Indian Raymond yet then they’re arguing—and stories about stories, free location for TV westerns, or do you pay rent by the hour for using landscape? or by the mile? Your eyes, meanwhile, want to reverse the flow and give back the blast of fiery froth that bombed down to become so viscous it didn’t get out.
But stepping back under the shower’s waterfall, Jean’s now saying—not the blonde, middle-thirties, clean-tanned Albuquerque businesslady Dina West but the Jean whose New York place this is is saying—"I just saw you all over again."
Dance-like she cocks one leg out to the side, soaps herself, and you find the other cake which is thin and bends, but around what? And you reach through the steamy water and soap her moving arms, which stop moving.
"We’ve hardly met," you say.
"Because you’re condescending. You’re a funny kind of condescender and if I were you I still wouldn’t be able to know just how you condescend to me, and it doesn’t matter much now."
"I said," you threaten, "we’ve hardly met."
"You do a job but don’t know why," she says as if water weren’t cascading screening you both from the times and from dryness. Lecturing: "You’re O.K. at your job. But why were you at Skylab? You were mumbling in my head and I was half asleep and I know it had to do with why you were at Skylab but it wasn’t your job and I woke up the next morning feeling like you’d let me sit in your home but I didn’t take advantage of it—and Skylab wasn’t your job but it might have been. You know? And why you were at Skylab is like the other part of why you’re here with me. Is there something going on? I’ve seen you four times in three years, Jim."
"We’ve hardly met," you say in some other body which she would refer to as He.
"You’re not married, isn’t that so?"
"Not right now."
She turns her shoulder away and seems to be thinking of all that lies between you/him and the prospect of turning off her shower; it is hers.
She scrubs her face under the water without the soap running off: how does she do that? If you can talk to her you can stop being in two places at once (which is O.K. to be if you’re one of a growing number of gurus with multiple commitments and not enough time). She’s walking a beach in Florida with you; then last night on concrete here in New York months and months later and on that heavenly ceiling.
"After dinner you gave me hell not too sweetly."
"You thought I did."
She was coming to you closer and closer without moving in the shower, so you did not have to make her up looking back from the future, which was your combat status and is a capability lunatic to mention. Being in the future and being able to live back here in the present only by making it up. Jim Mayn and Jean stepped off a curb, the back of last night’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel gently crowding them down into the alley of old Lexing
ton Avenue, a men’s shoe store all lighted up behind them, this little range of the city no harder to make up than grandmother Margaret moving up Park Avenue in a carriage at the turn of the century, for you—he—look past the corner up the crosstown street to the hedges of Park Avenue.
"I know we hardly know each other but do you mind if we go to a movie?" she had said.
"Sitting in the movie will be like lying in bed."
"Thanks, Jim."
"We’ll get us a paper."
"No wait—" as if he was about to leave her to go locate a newspaper —"I want you to know why I want to go to the movies."
"I want to know."
"There was Cape Kennedy and that pool table and the motel and the canceled launch; and there was once in Washington; and we had some phone calls which I really liked; but I feel like the Other Woman—weird, I almost don’t give a damn about you, and I don’t talk like this, you know?—and I feel as devoted as the Other Woman is: as if we had been seeing each otheron the sly all these years a couple times a week and there’s just time to have a drink, dinner, and go to bed."
Women and Men Page 38