All this more or less O.K. until—wait a minute—the next afternoon he heard the very same conversation through the slightly ajar music-room door, and Brad was even doing a bit of crying, same whimper-type really and the little shit couldn’t have just had the dream because he had been at school all day: Jim could guess it was lava boiling down out of the volcano in the movie the previous Saturday, even standing the other side of the music-room door, that gave his kid brother that dream of the town reversing itself to flow back into the volcano with everyone boiling back with it like stuck in the tongue of a titanic snake (sheep and people and even a farmer hoeing unconcernedly, etcetera), then his mother saying a "terrible" dream but a "good dream, Braddie," and Jim knew what came next before he heard it, which was, "It was a good dream Braddie because it was your soul rooting for you, telling you what’s inside you." Jim hadn’t ever heard his mother say "soul." But how had he known she was about to say, "It’s your soul rooting for you," except for her having said it last night when Braddie must have woken up out of a bad dream and she went in to him?
But she had been downstairs!
So was it that Jim could see the future? Or hear it! And so right then, surprised at himself outside this door, he thought that his mother coming up the stairs at two or three in the morning—with the book and the great comb he recalled combined so the comb was extending out of the book she was reading as she slowly came up the stairs—had been a ghost.
Though they had exchanged words.
And she had not really said to get back to bed, it was like they were meeting like friendly acquaintances downtown. Oh, hello, Jim—what a nice pair of pyjama bottoms you’ve got on today.
So later, after she had gone down the drain of the sea you might say cruelly, he looked forward to seeing her ghost again, because this other night when she was alive and Jim could have sworn had been just heard outside in the hall or in Braddie’s room sort of comforting Braddie out of his dream, she had evidently been a ghost out of the future. Of course as well as what she was. Which was reading late, while Jim on the landing had been hearing his father’s snoring and so you could feel that the breathing of one parent passed through you and met the nightwalking or breathing of the other parent. Were there thoughts there, too, along the breath-junction you made? He didn’t know. All he knew was that she said at least a couple of times that he only didn’t remember his dreams; it wasn’t that he didn’t have them. Until he once got mad and, yes, chilly at the same time, so didn’t say what he hoped to but did say she didn’t know what she was talking about, and some people definitely did not have dreams, like some did not see ghosts.
Was it her ghost? He got quite sure of it. But there was no proving it so he put it behind him.
Did he see ghosts where others dreamed? And had history repeated itself downstairs, or what?
He had little to go on, putting his mother together out of his later life. Until one day he regretted not asking people who had known her about her. Why hadn’t he? Because he thought it was up to her?
He went for the definite. Yet he did once see her later on. She was resting on her oars for a long time. He was playing squash in his freshman year at college in a cold court defending the center with hip and elbow and killing perhaps his partner’s very mind targeting the angles to make him dart forward or long-alleying a wall-hugger so the black ball found a home in a dead rear corner, yet always as if his variant wrist knew the future independent of its lord—and this was when he once saw his mother resting on her oars for a long time before some change that came would end this rocking pause.
He "decided"—how?—that she had felt herself not fit for relations with people, all these relations—was that it?
He had seen her row once, and off the beach at Mantoloking, which was crazy and fairly dangerous, and he, a child, had felt it. Though she had gone with a grinning lifeguard, who had shoved the boat, a white and high-bowed small boat across the barriers of magnet-strong low breakers to dig further into the swell. And they both got up onto the gunwales facing each other and grinning out there in the immediate distance of the boy’s watch kept for her, and then they both clambered down and she insisted on rowing. Why did Jim think "insisted"? A secret of the line between where he was and where she was, and the line between them was a foreign shore, and he knew he heard her speaking inside him or maybe him inside her—yet not then, but much later, after she was gone, he recalled this inside business and knew it had been felt by him then. He caught a follow-through of his partner’s racket on his right knee and was never the same again, though was playing two months later and played even better the following year though moving sideways was a bit risky. Out-thinking his "partner" was all it was, and yet he was there doubled in a future of the next second before it had come, it was waiting for him awful as a lost traveler’s inertia, you wouldn’t tell this about yourself even to the multitudes of eyes watching you from the totally imaginary Ship Rock of the northwest New Mexico desert—this future he couldn’t do more than joke about—with his daughter, that is—though once with the South American lady who had wandered thoughtfully into the bar of the hotel the night before or after the first U-2 announcement: and he and Ted were talking (hell) history, light history (Clear, two-plus-two causes; or Just Plain Accident; or the secret rooting capabilities of New Jersey beach sand and mid-1940s bare feet; or history’s trick of happening elsewhere if you paid close attention: well then, didn’t Buddha say speak only of what you know) and Ted had known an ancient relative of Greeley’s, like an old, comparatively valuable pistol, a tea-totaler incidentally whose great-great uncle had lived for a week at the semi-utopiate community in Greeley, Colorado, that Meeker and Greeley founded, and the ancient relative in question when living remembered sloops racing each other out the East River and to the other end of the harbor to the Narrows to meet an incoming ship and whip back to Manhattan to peddle the hot foreign news in the newssheets they had in those days before the great man had founded his Tribune partly to purge journalism of such obnoxious attractions as medical advertising of that day—
And Mayn—and Ted too—and maybe partly in the presence of "their" despised end-of-the-bar auditor Spence with the cruddy sideburns both bushy and patchy and the hide jacket frontier-fringed—showed off to the newcomer, the lady perhaps six or seven years Jim’s elder, a round-faced beauty with an exacting kindness waiting in the eyes, and independent; and she did put three fingers to her lips listening to Jim pass from the wind of sailpower running the news business all the way back to the 1680s when the law said no one might ferry across from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the sails of all the windmills were rolled up or in a rowboat ferry at least, which led to the friend of Ted’s who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights with a view from Grace Court of the ferry lights moving away from the Battery in the early evening and wanted never to look at that vast harbor again and had moved as far inland and slightly southwest as you could get without coming out the other side, and while one thing led to another, the foremost thing was that after the official NASA statement the next day that nobody believed, they had all foregathered (as Jim’s father would say)—pasf-gathered was more like it—here before Ted had gone off to dinner with an economist from Puerto Rico, and Spence, when Mayn had looked away for a moment from his exquisitely trustworthy interlocutress to whom he hadn’t mentioned he was married but wanted to because he was going to be friends with her, had seemed to appear—and for a horning-in moment inquired so incredibly what was the bean with the limitless oil that Mayn had recently been heard speaking of that’s like sperm oil and the planty bush survives up to two hundred years (which Mayn didn’t recall saying because he didn’t actually know how long and now said so, somewhat angrily, to this sidling character who shied away doubtless into his hole as Mayn turned back to the South American lady hearing Spence say, c"d you think I dreamed that?")—so incredibly, yes, that the woman said, Who is he?, as if she’d detected Mayn holding out on her:
—that is, he told
his daughter Flick years later (when she could be told things to was it before or after college?) the barest facts of what he had told the South American lady in i960 but did not think Flick would believe him and anyway cared much more for her than for conveying what became so hard to credit that it was a shadow whose very source had been cast with it—all this both a species of but distant possibility maybe of madness, and a vulgar violation of his most ordinary self.
This, Flick might have partly picked up, for she said to him (admittedly the evening he came to Washington to be met by her, and not in his gift to her the old white Cadillac she had that very weekend sold as a collectible), Well you aren’t exactly ordinary, Daddy, the places you’ve been, but this business of our living in the future, well, I’ve never seen that transparent bubble and the plate that people stand two by two on to get transferred into space.
She worried her feeling; she said she didn’t want to talk about the therapist she had been seeing for three months in Boston because it set up a triangle though she knew he wasn’t like that—just paid the bills, right?—but she was trying to hold on to some feelings she tended to discount, it was easy for her to let them get away: one was that she herself had been a reason he and Joy (she named her mother) had stuck it out as long as they had—she and Andrew, of course; and this made her more sad, or she tried to think but it was really more mad since she was thinking it had been her business when it had been theirs.
But it was her life, and he was relieved to feel equality between the mad-sad point and how in late ‘76-early ‘77 she went on about not the maniacal aliveness of dioxin tinting pale cells palely and promising like a habit only the future chance to look back (dioxin in the food chain thus not the point but held to through her pedagogic rhythm which was her own well-known stubbornness now made into policy). But this label of "ordinary" her father gave himself. "Ordinary"?
But the future he was literally in . . . well she sort of chose not to see and he loved her too far to have to make her see he meant literally this four-dimensional picture that included him that he had hardly more than once or twice stated to anyone—stated to his wife, who almost believed him and was frightened to think he was not speaking out of craziness, and so did not quite believe him, at least quite early in his marriage.
But he could state it all to the South American woman Mayga so persuasively that almost at once she was giving Locus T Transfer of Two Persons into One New Libration-Colonist back to him like a reporter checking respectfully fact upon fact, template to jointed template of radiant, matter-turning force, while she was even lowering her voice (so we pick it up) when Spence had returned to the bar from having taken a call in the hotel lobby (Mayn knew all this without looking up), and Mayn said that though the lingo couldn’t have been there in 1945 or ‘6, he was sure he remembered Locus and some mid-space balancing of forces or powers which he had never in fact had any interest in except as factual-type matter that came like the dream he never had at night, though he had been told it was the memory not the dreams he was missing out on.
Had a lot of people instead to reflect on. So that Larry bicycling his own Manhattan Project north, south, west, then sternly east might bury all his toy suicides as they came into his unhappy head by the side of the road where journeyman suicides are s’posed to be buried even when, hard by a type-green traffic light, the pothole in question won’t any too soon have claimed the axle of a cab whose driver wasn’t lucky enough to carry as standard equipment an instant camera to record the waiting ever-empty insatiable grave:
So that his new friend—the joy of new friends, of a "new friend"!— Jim Mayn, before Lar’ was even thought of—may joke his way through and almost out of an evening with the lady Mayga who will hear him out beyond his staggered jokes designed both to stop the folly of what he’s revealing to her and keep him going to the end, well we remember the terrible fine blade of grass in the voice-over concluding Hollywood’s first atomic-energy movie for this was seen by him his senior year in the Walter Reade theater in ‘47, so powerful an ending that the audience were perfectly evenly divided two by two and one to one between those who were physically transfixed and paralyzed and those who were only mentally and did not hear themselves chewing or obliviously tearing wrappers off candy bars they should not have had left at the end of the first of a double feature, such a single blade of grass as whose atoms alone would power your beloved car (your first car!) from coast to coast of a continent as sentimental as it is adrift from an external point of view. So, scrambling his message a trifle, he nonetheless blew smoke by joking but literally from a cigarette first her way unthinking then in the other three directions thus all four (i.e., of the traditional Indian—and not just Indian!— directions, east west north south), like one of the People ceremonially beginning a journey as he recollected from somewhere as remote as the recent information that one day U-2 planes would see through forest-fire smoke.
The South American woman observed that as for such phenomena of nature or science, it was "one of yours" who had been interested in such only as it might have lain in a person’s experience for a time: but it was she who persisted: Now, the transformer bubble these people stand under before they are turned into frequency and . . . recombined, is it? at those distant points of Earth-Moon space—
—Shared.
Sure ... at those . . .
—libration points—
Yes, those are them, she said. This method of dissolving people, their. . . mass, is it? . . . how does it affect them when they arrive at the space colony and want to get back to themselves? I mean out of frequency and back to their regular bodies. Are they cleansed? improved? She smiled, but strangely not with doubt. You said two to one, like odds; it’s two to one they do get there or they don’t, or do they get there and then it’s two to one they rema-terialize?
Here was humor, but she clearly did not say to him, Where is this belief of yours coming from?: and he was glad. The kindness stayed back in her eyes ready. She must have known Spence but not that he was always turning a buck with somebody’s contact, and twice he went away and came back to the fine old bar and sat near the curved brass divider that looked like the top of a boat ladder setting off the small service area of the bar: he came back and once slid up onto a stool much closer to Mayn and the South American woman, but that alertness of hers was less than her plain attention to him, which said she would be interested to know more of this actual place or time he was coming from, she gave it a foreign dignity he didn’t resist except to make a diversionary joke here and there as if to say, You don’t have to, you know—and once looked at his gold-banded wristwatch but she must have understood this was less offhand than curiously gallant even though Mayn did not make a habit of looking at his watch when in conversation with anyone, let alone a woman. Even so, the woman he had married sometimes neglected to let him have the credit of his behavior if she plotted, across his eyeball, some brief gateway, a glint that your normal observer would either not see or would have to wait for weeks, or travel, to see, like the sunset green flash.
Like the universe to itself—which, while not We, approaches (always a mile or two too late) the receding idea which proves that We ourselves are neither that universe, nor it us, nor are, very much of the time, that articulating commonalty heretofore capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, which, it has occurred to us as we have curved through the bodies of our history a work without a gear, locate us as (no joke, no future joke) what is within Mayn and within the elsewhere-busied Grace Kimball and others as what they don’t know they know about each other and a world, which "there" is outself-growing, too. Hence, a hotel in i960. Hence, speaking out as perpetual insiders collected as a concept, which is that our speech is a hypothetical indicator of the other, likelier, theory of our overall silence. Or we are what is sealed inside these people in order to reach forth, even like fourteen unbroken eggs in the remembered recipe for angel-food cake once, twice, three times magically made by Sarah
, mother of Jim Mayn, because unlike much other food it melted.
You are a journalist, Mayn said to the lady, yet you believe what you hear.
She had said that it seemed to her that in his account people were being turned into something communicable.
This was worth laughing about together. Yet she was laughing because the humor was true.
He explained that what "was" taking place at this future time was in two places at once and—and—he was a sane man, a journeyman male who played a bit of basketball, still ran and swam, and worked out on the light striking bag when he remembered to in the clubs of half a dozen cities if not countries, a bit of a social boozer and not averse lately to a social smoke though he had never rolled his own joints nor carried a lid like a pipe smoker; was not a particularly imaginative person, he thought, a newspaperman with hardly a view of history (its coming or its waiting or writing) who had gotten away from his hometown where his family had run a weekly paper until it quit during the War and it would not have lasted even if he lived on beyond high school and college to go in on it with his father who, though he had the same last name as his bride, had married into it—
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