—the two places, she interrupted, and for a second, though he had no middle-range insight into the future and didn’t want whatever bond with action it might confer, he knew that this fine and dear woman was going to be hideously interrupted herself one day, yet no one would ever know if (or not) it was because she had interrupted him in order to keep him with his story as if there were power for someone in it.
The two places, he said—well, it’s going on in the future, this thing that might seem strange to you but I know that I have been in it—and again he felt himself for a second in the middle-range future and telling someone else about this far future and the place it enacted and telling someone, as he was doing now in i960 with her, without concealing the fact (for it was) that he was there in that future. And this radiance, he said in i960 to the South American woman who knows where they import it from?, I’m just as ignorant there in the future as I am here cast back from there, but it’s tied into the magnetosphere cascades, cascades, did I say?, no one ever told me about cascades out there but that’s where they are at, strictly speaking the territory near the magnetopause on the earth side I’m told, where you reach the limit of the earth’s magnetic field where the sun’s wind presses against it hard enough to squash it—while those cascades, which are right there in my head though I have no right to them and haven’t been able to let them settle, are some reverse radiance flowing off from the magnetosphere like fish upstream into the solar wind but that isn’t really it because someway the earthward wind draws these cascades of field from the direction of earth, I guess it would be sunward wouldn’t it?, but yes! the point is that they can draw this radiance off from the magnetosphere in this future place I’m talking about, and have harnessed it, so the place isn’t entirely bad . . .
She laughed and made a note.
Oh it comes down out of the jointed plates of the—
—the bubble around them, said the woman like a partner in discovery.
That’s it: you got it: you know as much as I do.
She laughed and so did he. Her laugh made him think of the very short dress she was wearing, though he was looking at her eyes and her skin, though feeling unfaithful about her angelic sympathy with certain crackpot ideas.
She laughed because she was acquiring a language as different from Romance or Anglo-Saxon as Japanese . . . where they stand, he said, one in front of the other, an Indian-file twosome and they are transferred a hundred thousand miles or so out to the torus, it’s a colossal doughnut, do you have doughnuts in—
—the libration point, she put in—
—that’s where it’s at, he said—one of them, one of the colonies they would build by spraying metal coat by coat layer by layer on an inflated doughnut two, three miles wide, maybe more, a balloon in the shape of what they call a torus—build up the site by rotating this monster inner tube past the spray gun firing metal froth—
—Assembly line, she said.
—Endless, said Mayn; you know how Henry Ford got the idea from the Chicago stockyard meat choppers who worked off overhead conveyors.
Do we know for certain that’s where he got the idea?
There’s plenty of ways to build a colony, and that’s how they do this wheel-shape torus at that libration point between gravities out between the Moon and the Earth, a circular balloon is how it’ll begin.
You’re way ahead of me, she said, and they laughed again. He didn’t fall in love with her. He saw her bend her head, turning her neck stiffly or politely in a show of trying to understand; he admired her and did think of touching her along the two parallel lines of her wrists. But he was already in love, and Joy was pregnant with his son.
Someplace in the seventies of (we add) the century in question, on the same day that he heard of a Chicago intellectual who had said, 4 4No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country," Mayn was able to describe the vacuum-vapor method of squirting boiled aluminum onto the Relevant Inflated (i.e., the Appropriate Other, we intrude but only on ourselves), for they had the process by then. But back in ‘60, knowing a son would be born to him and knowing he the father might never be able to say the truth of where he, a shadow, was being cast from but not like the flat shadows of the Moon’s newly televised dark-side Sea of Dreams (the Russians named it) he was yet incompetent to see into the middle future and see his son going to college in the seventies, and leaving college to be a scientist, a lawyer, an architect (please not another dumb one)—
—an astronaut, she said.
And he continued with what he could see: the distant future, where, to answer her question, the two people standing on the titanium plate under the bubble of jointed electromagnetism when they rematerialize at their libration point far out from Earth are one person.
Aha, she said, and wrote a word or two down on her small pad beside her half-finished margarita, and then felt free to laugh briefly: What sex? she asked.
That’s what Larry asked seventeen eighteen years later, and we hardly remembered he was still (read here) there, he’s consented to be given a new Atala ten-speed by his father though he liked his old beat-up ten-speed Raleigh from the Island and now has an offer of a hundred dollars for it from Grace Kimball—he breathes so little in order to bring all he can bear upon his internalized systems, none at all finished we understand, many started like variant radii aimed in at a locus of centers where may be found backward a hermit-inventor’s new weather precipitated possibly from alterations in the charge-field of coastline configurations, not at this late date by that north-polar wind shift (you’ll have sensed by now) that turned the clouds and altered rainfall shapes in the time of the gifted, hapless Anasazi six hundred years before the East Far Eastern Princess met the Hermit-Inventor in New York and saw herself in his glinting eye whose new weather at our aforementioned locus of centers got carried on by the hermit-inventor nephew of that old khaki beachcomber who came to the Jersey shore to speak to Margaret before he should die of what whole-grain toxins trekked through his system for years of breathing fire and smoke of bodies flying by his tenement windows, of using alcohol and tobacco, of pouring through himself all sugars of the City and all salts of the elaborate harbor where weet-wit weet-wit the purple sandpipers hosting their southern kinflock of turnstones even more lost than they await the beaches of an earlier day, yet that earlier Hermit-Inventor managed to store one horned metabol adrift in his viscera drawing the rest of his substance toward it like a lip or a flower or flume. Upon which he took the train to Windrow, was found by Bob Yard the electrician sometime lover of Jim Mayn’s desperate mother on Margaret and Alexander’s porch, and was driven to that shore point Mantoloking and to Margaret who was walking on the sand alarmed for her daughter burning on the black towel, Jim and Brad’s mother, yet Margaret recollected still the bridges of New York that now by our reckoning in the eighth decade of the century in question come to nine majors not counting the lighted statue through which the Hermit-Inventor of New York in late 1893 or early 1894 or at least once upon a time conducted the East Far Eastern Princess reportedly as a mist, and secreted her toward home and safety in the East as once some years before in the presence of the then as yet unassembled parts of the giant Statue he had put young Margaret in mind of westward travel and transformation.
In fact, girls are interested in westward transition, though don’t worry it’s not your responsibility, we’ll get on it, checking all hitch-hikers between here and the roadblocks. Flick Mayn and her boyfriend united by his small car were seen to cross the April Mississippi and had been passing westward for miles and miles previous to this. Once the community’s infra-red satellite momentarily distracted by the unforeseen detour of its principal responsibility the Pan-Continental Wide Load, for which our road network was built only to become its baneful pressure to widen and expand, lost Flick and her boyfriend at Niagara Falls. They had to help us pick them up again, when, on our scope, they veered violently north to attend a tragedy at the Shakespeare complex at Stratford, Onta
rio, entering the bustling town as the sun fell.
Later, on their way (resumed under the infra-genic velvet dew of an Ontario dawn) to Midland, Michigan, we didn’t need the satellite to learn that Flick so asked the information office at the Dow Chemical plant there near the confluence of the Chippewa and other rivers with river namesakes elsewhere what it thought about dioxin’s suppression of immunity in guinea pigs, and what this thing was that dioxin did to mice exposed between the sixth and fifteenth days of gestation, that the voice of the information officer when it extended itself with suppressed anger informed Mayn’s daughter that agitators went no further than here and could apply by mail for information.
Yet Flick and her tall, dark, wired-up boyfriend, a former sometime actor on soaps, heard in the voice of its own answer that cleft palates aren’t caused only by dioxin, whether or not subcutaneously (or was it—torture-wise-san —sub-cuticley?) administered. And we hear the interrogator’s mind working overtime in multiples of Larry (who knows about Mayn what others without knowing might think useful). But the interrogator has said, not, Is it administered under the skin or under the cuticle and/or fingernail?—but has said, Sue (while others nearby are overcome by old lyric ceremonies of Navajo voices:
Far as man can see,
Comes the rain,
Comes the rain with me—)
"Sue . . . sue" the interrogator voices name exact but weighs which over which we can’t tell except in knowing we are the available relations— "you have admitted there was a room, there were traditional daiquiris in it, and it is quite long ago as the hailstones fly if we divide the labor of remembering a lime-green surgical blouse and matching trousers by reported dramatic weight loss, yet" (Wait, a budding community breaks in half-truthfully, that was the next room, the next room was where the green was surgical), "and a woman" continues the inquiry, "who had given birth yet wasn’t so sure what had happened, which is what you get when you go for this really un-natural, anti-traditional childbirth that irregardless promises the people hopefully increased consciousness of their personal histories"—and in that daiquiried room there was a Martin or Marvin—or both, in this age of plural priorities, if we make up our collected mind to go for both—but both, though it feels right to us, does not feel right to the interrogator in charge, who turns its potential he has no time for into the heated grin of a headset earphone fusing our ears with the molded plastic remelting them like they are same plastic family to be remolded, until through what we painfully hear, as our ear becomes the headset substance and is hard to tell apart from the sound of our own, well, torture, we hear the unmistakable pangs of a digital hand coming to birth from an analogous ear, why don’t we freak out? is it the revelation of it, the breakthrough transplant? why can’t we decide if this persuasion torture inflicted on us for having spoken out of both sides of our mout’ is real or not? was there some experimental anesthetic clocked into our re-system? we just dunno—and particularly about hand reborn from ear: it’s a new thing but our own, and the hand in question isn’t any garden-variety hand, or throw in a tree if you are all that confident, or human baby that like the coyote pup puts in its first year dependent on its parents: but is a hand that’s ready to go (to ir, in Spanish, fortgehen, which we already remember from our transplant meant Us, or go away, in aller-Mayn) which is why the interrogator with a generous, headsman’s execution basket suitable for dirty or clean laundry but just now full of exam questions for the hand (not afraid of being shot or chopped down) to take one cryptic potluck pick of, suspends the grabbag rule and with the utmost condescension as if we were black and white to be opened and shut asks what question wed like to be interro-gated on, for Martin (or whoever asked the newborn mother if she would have another daiquiri) may have been the name of a diver who cooperated with the police and a freelance documentary team trying to TV-produce out of New York’s East River the body of a girl-researcher and former Olympic swimmer reported with terrible inaccuracy to know too much about an impending prison break with hemispheric repercussions, but the diver and his man-hours came up only with a report of an unknown sound, he had been hearing in fact things down there (the Brooklyn Bridge groaning in its crypts via ghosts of the bends) and if girl-researcher lost in her strangely attractive low-gravity sleep down there manages like some women to "get herself found," she will still be an unknown saved (if saved)—while Marvin looks like being Larry’s father, the sometime husband not yet finally divorced of—
Sue be it, the interrogator jokes, reading the mere slip of a question which by ear-hand we fished from the bloody basket: to which our answer is that Sue, formerly of Marv, Sue, and Larry, would not have been at a party so pair-bound as all that: therefore, the woman who was heard to say "Sue" names another of that name or is urging action upon her hearer.
But the Dow information officer complete with company cleft palate has been relieved by another who would hum these westward kids Flick and boyfriend a lullaby if he didn’t have all this information on tap: e.g., that some nine years ago the British producer of the chemical that dioxin inadvertently derives from thought of closing the plant since, like, they had an explosion and some of the help developed diversified complications—got things—erupting as chloracne (Flick doesn’t need to take notes)—acne (no joke) pustules, inflammation of the hair follicles, heart trouble, bronchitis, spleen rift, liver lesion, what had you, excess gravity in lower limbs, we just want to get back to breathing and more—but here at Dow-Midland we have what we call your "Fool-Safe" (Flick does take a note, her phrase): say, a disk ruptures in a reaction vessel, the reservoir discharges into a holding tank larger than your original reaction vessel so your reaction would be quenched with water in 105 percent of cases. So there’s hardly anything actionable in our—
—but dioxin’s a pesky beast or herb, it will take a rain check for a few man-days only to return in the form of—
—rain itself, for will not the wings we flush away with prove the thing we fly?
But this stuff that clears up acne, the bean the nut the bush—whatever —said Spence years before at the far end of a Washington bar where Jim has met the South American woman (his son now having been born) and enlarged upon his prior answer to her question, namely, What sex? Far as he knew, the colonists two into one wound up with such deep memories of the other sex that such memories are built in!
—this stuff that’s going to revolutionize acne, quietly calls Spence from his position, I gather it thrives on no rain, right? (and no doubt he has gathered the name of the magic bush, plus a way to peddle news of the bean though Mayn won’t give him the time of day, he and Spence are so different) so why don’t we grow the bush—
—"Only God can create a cleft palate," the father wrote the daughter in reply to her account of the chemical plant written to him from a campsite on yet another Chippewa River, this one in Wisconsin, the lights of the motel over the water promising rest right here where they were, with their green Coleman stove open for business: and the trees and the stars and a hundred and fifty miles to go to a region of a thousand lakes but, for now, free of the wide highway where we cannot add to that loved campsite a Wide Load’s tracks free and full of cash on delivery.
Which same chemical-related "cleft palate" the little woman named Lincoln recalled as she sipped a new cup of Mexican coffee, the forgotten woman perhaps, contemplating the new "table," since the glamorous Latin couple, the woman of the marvelous piled auburn hair, the elegant, hard foreign man in gray flannel, have gone away leaving still the small bell of recognition in the correspondent-woman’s memory which is then only the dull disappointment when the woman Clara kind of snubbed her at the Body-Self Workshop saying that this restaurant was recommended by a singer she knew: until now the group of five impending diners before her became a group of three, a heavy set man, a tall young woman, and a dark-haired boy-man talking intensely to the man but for the girl; and Lincoln, watching them over her coffee cup, found the singer in Clara’s comment yielding to the th
ought that things were summoned in order to be cleared away (or us from their presence), like of the original fivesome the two somewhat older—the smaller, dark; the taller, flaxen-fair—they quietly detached themselves from the other three (who had been a group to themselves coming in like they’d been doing something together other than what the two women had), and when they three had come they had first signaled, more by a contented not-talking than by, then, a burst of intense comment from the dark-haired youth, that they (the broad-shouldered man with the gray hair and the girl and boy, both around twenty) brought into the place a fun that was like gossip: though now that the two women had gone (the dark one having given the boy a kiss he didn’t expect though didn’t not), the man and his young people weren’t talking much again, and the correspondent-woman watching them in her unused extra spoon felt that one of the young ones was "his," though who was it?, it shifted, and he was father to neither.
So that the correspondent-woman found the Chilean economist’s wife Clara blocking her—not with that snub but with her elect authority picturing for them all during workshop a magical area of "Cambodian" Vietnam where secret societies flourished like the crops which earlier colonists had striven to establish, all as if to enable her to cite the Cochin sage who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers. So that the correspondent-woman wished to be at the other table sharing with the man the company of those nice kids and not to part with her own senseless memories of Mister Guerrilla Prisoner-san, barefoot flying twice in twos neatly bound, down from the sky into the land-like dark cushion of tree-crowns and out of the blare of choppers noisy as creation’s opening day and out of the experience of their pilots.
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