I have told you this, and you have told me you ran into this guy at Cape K.—coincidence, his zig your zag!—and later learned he was an economist in the Allende government which I knew. But since then he didn’t ever refer to you when I mentioned you in my letters, and once I detected a colloidal settling to the effect that you wanted the address for him that I was in possession of.
But it was always me who brought him up and I don’t know which of us was getting the information, Jim.
Except you’re still here. I mean coming. Like a once in a while letter from the old weather sciencer who takes care of an old lady friend who thinks she’s in New Jersey half the time.
And the information you’re getting—think of it! About inconspicuous photography, hidden work, Foley Plan for 5-20-yr development of this retirement compound, garbage bail-out into a Puerto Rican festival inside these walls leaving the Cessna to level an abandoned barn that had been recklessly commandeered by two lovers; the blue of the sky witnessed above the Yard, if I could only put it down, the stars and comet tracks that are always there, seen or not; the slow, sandy rasp of a super’s shoes (of Life Experience for college credit), Miriam’s father’s soles heard making the swollen-footed ascent to the For Rent apartment he prided himself on not permitting her to clean out after the last tenants in case of rats; and you’ve been getting multinational jokes, and the unknown soldiers cited at Cape Kennedy that impressed our mutual acquaintance from the Southern Hemisphere so he said "vacuum-packed for burial in space" as if he quoted from some store of learning; and speeches through the fence; and why the color of Miriam’s eyes looked like it did when she turned away from everyone else on Earth to me, the late winter sun in her teeth, our feet in the salt soft sand beside a driveway back of a beach house, for we’d kept going all the way out to Westhampton and we were going to enter this beach house and it’s a week before St. Patrick’s Day and counting, and we were too far out from the City to rely on public transit to get us home, but what to do with this visiting Volkswagen, green but at the edges muddy whose New Hampshire plates I had turned to a single New Mexico plate, and I desired to return this VW to a legal spot near where I’d just managed to ease it out of an illegal space from where it could have been towed at owner’s expense plus fine, and I even took good care of the finish out there swept by the Atlantic salt of Long Island’s South Shore, for when we got up the side stairs to the door and Miriam kept saying, Are you sure it’s all right and I said the friend who usually had the use of the place had told me just how to get in, I went down through the house to the garage, slid up the door from the inside, and pushed the VW in as easy as starting it, but all the time suspended in all my mind’s eyes was the color of Miriam’s itself due to the more narrowly physical side of this colloid mystery we have spoken of).
This a cover? you asked.
But speeches through the fence? You didn’t understand about them? On-the-job training for leadership. The little store with the newsstand outside is within earshot, and Mrs. Erhard moves from behind her counter to come outside and watch.
Hear the basketball smack. The one-on-ones have occupied the playground playing half a court going six-on-six making all the moves; and me, I’ve got a crowd on the sidewalk side of the high fence maybe five, six, seven kids taken up position (got there first) watching the game and listening to me, so then the speaker himself, me, talking as always Issues, turns to the fence and addresses those deaf geniuses making all the moves—did I say jungle training school?—charging, double-dribbling, traveling, hooking up toward the hoop but hitting the hard rim like a stoop so the ball kicks twenty feet out beyond them, it’s as if without the cord of the net the rim has that extra power and they’re all chasing the ball but each other, so the elbow’s connected to the neckbone, kneebone to pelvic area, and our famous High Kool with his great semi-albino hands, six-five at age fifteen, stops short transfixed, Jim, for he hears me say, "What is the southernmost state of the Union?" Big man is in a trance, he’s outside the game now transfixed, while two lesser talents colliding with him where he stands (occupying position having gotten there first) fall away from him stunned, bruised, maimed; for in the middle of my critiquing of the Los Angeles police not letting the Russian strongman Premier Khrushchev visit Disneyland and of K. himself who said to us and our system, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," I had asked out of the blue which was the southernmost state in the Union.
This had to be more message than I knew, for often words as clear as this current-event trick question to keep them on their toes and supplement their jungle education came out of me, out of me mind into me throat, out of the struggle of my life, to reach another with a charge from me that settled some particles over there in him or her like there’s nothing to choose between there and me. You said that all this was just my feelers, Jim, which I souped up—it’s more, you ought to see. A power no less, Jim. A swing-arm anti-weapon you’d not detect by most known scopes. Unique capability, I call it, waiting there all dispersed to be willing to work for you. Work? Oh feel what’s given in the particles and deposit it wordwise coded to the message in you all the time.
I mean me. You. The others, and Juan.
He has achieved all this inside. To me, Juan has at least lived the rock-bottom unit of value in here if he has not in so many words known it. For so many words keep him from it: the Decade of the People; the time of the Real Great Society; la lucha (the struggle) for a better life (a better way of doing things, the Chilean said).
Juan had further muscles to flex, he went to prison ninety days before the great Garbage Barricade of ‘69 in East Harlem when the famed Sanitation Department declined to release city brooms to the people of El Barrio’s 110th Street to clean it up themselves and the people achieved overnight a consolidation of area garbage like one long, quiet upper that was a statement but still, as garbage, had to have alerted if it did not blow the mind of Miriam’s container-oriented father downtown, while as rampart and beachhead it was its own defense/offense without benefit of ventilating tradewinds that recycle out into the Caribbean Sea from that other, southern island, the isla verde of Puerto Rico proper, the smell of garbage strewn on a city beach for a population of free-range pigs raised there to harvest. But Juan inside got firsthand reports of the 110th Street Barricade from his visitors, so you see, Jim, this multiple dwelling sixty miles up the parkways past the guard-rail’s low barrier posts whose flicker-frequency could lock your normal speeder’s eyeball into gagged epilepsy, proved a contact between that neighborhood in upper Manhattan and my own to the south. I mean like you and your on-site inspection of the insurance corp. that quietly works into the earth and up into the troposphere, so you look at a quiet executive I can see him standing on his inner-office carpet in Vermont fantasizing a whole home quarried out of local granite, appliances too, an extension ladder, granite notepads for the wife, even granite you-know-whats. But I mean also, Jim, you take a trip up the river to find out what’s happening back where you come from. And you here with Foley looking for some hard info re: Chilean, and you find me waiting along the wall with a new method of communicating, don’t you know.
So coming from heterogeneous points in the city, Juan uptown, I down, we met at a point in the continuum intrinsic for both of us. For Juan it became soon afterward a time of new dedication to work for a socialist-humanist state, yet of near-madness since his studies had led him to see that the time he was doing had been provided by taxpayers whose sweat’s already being fleeced of its fruits and now Juan and the rest of us yardbirds are forced to go on exploiting these workers because of our tenancy in this place.
I showed him that we were getting the rent of our cells dirt-cheap if we ignore the value put on day labor in this retirement compound. But I couldn’t cheer him up—"Cheer up," Ma said when my father shook his head and scrunched deep into the easy chair and said he couldn’t have done better than stay where he was in the transit system all these years—or better still, help Juan right ove
r the edge toward roaring derangement, because at the Death Row chaplain’s cadre session he had just come from, so absorbed had my friend been in cramming for his Chem final that the single thing he had heard, having heard it before but not from this source, was the remark by a part-time missionary I had had words with once who on this evening was sitting in and might have wanted to get a laugh, to the effect that there were folks on the Outside laboring to make time available for us guys Inside to do. And so, coming back to the block from cadre, Juan was murderous and seething, for what would he ever have to do with discovering lattice structures to substitute for rubber (outdated textbook of course) or to experiment with sewage-disposal solvents for the benefit people? His work, I learned, through my abstract evening bars where he paused to bid me goodnight was in Revolutionary Theory.
But we had a going joke about that page of Chem.
The kid on the north side of my cell was listening to his own latest message to his wife on the Jap tape player he’d recently been allowed to import but which I didn’t envy him.
Now I swiftly saw the relevant page of this book belonging to the man Juan about to retire for the night to his cell on the south side of mine and in the mere moment before the officer called Let’s go (which is a funny thing to say when one man has just come on his shift after a thirty-mile commute and the other man has just arrived back at his cell for the night), I was able to see Juan’s work and place run simultaneously with my own grain.
He had not asked for help exactly when he’d exclaimed with that angry grin like some movie star, "Christ is it a suspension or is it a solution?"— what did he know, he said, except what some once-a-week visiting authority said by the book they had been required to read. Well, to this he and I in unison like we were telling the teacher chirped, "It’s a colloid system," and for the last time I gave my friend his book back through the bars like I’m putting it on the shelf, and we crossed brothers’ thumbs and palms.
In he went for the night with the mountainous clank-bang I no longer hear except in my understanding, but for a second, only a second; but of crucial import I smelled, like pollen that no longer afflicts me seasonally, the collective flumes of all Johns on the tier. Oh sweet privacy—a high percent of these guys can experience it only here, not home with their family sharing a bath, not in the armed forces I’m told, not in a mountain monastery, definitely not at Y camp. But wait, Jim, understand it was only for a minute, that smell (however timelessly recorded in that girl sports writer’s "treatment" of this facility). For—will you wait one instant more?—with an end to that minute that I suddenly saw I always made by myself (and an end that your mere outsider engineer’s got his book explanation of, such as shooting centrifugal force at all particles of said dispersed odor so that through their sedimentation potential they concentrate at the outer rim and you get rid of them like particles of smoke in a poisoned city made to coagulate, precipitating out in one dark, industrially flushable lump all the dispersed specks and films of smodge we lumpens go on breathing of our fuel and work)—I as I say grasped suddenly without trying the power I saw I’d grown to be grasped by.
Grown partly I swear through the motion of my double screens.
And if it was not help Juan wanted at that eleventh hour such as my advice to fuck memorizing and get to the heart of the Contradiction as he will say—the Matter, as I—yet what do you know—it was help Juan gave me. My thoughts gelled and then by some return were swimming limitlessly, imprisoned in the locus of their own freedom, forget the Chem.
It was nothing I needed; but it was a gift no less. More a material to see through than a pay-off formula to say the word; for what is colloid but a name for the unnamable, a name to say, a word and little more. But holy mother wasn’t I then in the next few minutes not only chatting to the unseen Juan round the corner from my cell but signaling unknown to him through his wall because if I could not I also did not want to keep myself from using what I’d all the time been being. No accident that without a word spoken out loud from his friend he got to the heart of the matter right then and there remembering who he was and that the time to begin is no more the next day after than the place is the next room. Which is a way of saying it that, now it’s out, might come from Outside me—from you—from the Mind that’s not mere Body-Brain. You hear me now without words said or penned. Jim I had seen between suspension and true solution. On that historic page this was what I had seen. And I saw what I had done. Oh, Jim, what relief! To see and prove what I had done. That is, besides my work in economics and in dual screens. For I had been going round and round what I had done, these particles of all life, Jim, so fine: a string of garbage cans; a watery space under a float; two medium-size apartment tenements separated depending how close you see them; a private announcement, to one who smiled but cared, of Sunday’s— tomorrow’s—current-events message; particles, particles multiplying surfaces by the light they themselves multiplied so fast it began to stand still and give back all the time I had given up to understanding what I only now saw went part and parcel with how a state of body-brain turns to mind and mine to ours. A Miriam was here so many-sided that love for her got more and more: so many particles of all life and so fine no lens in or out of the lab we do not have at this bomb of a correctional facility could make them out: unseen, they’re what Juan’s old book here on my shelf calls "homogeneous"—all one stuff—but knowing them, they are you and all so different: Miriam walking away under a blue winter sky, her left arm close in holding her books, so her shoulders curved forward slightly; a forkful of mashed potatoes catapulted at my father’s T-shirt when he told Mom for the last time that they were lumpy; the blue of the ocean in a blind kiss, and all dynamite colors in a windy sunset so we didn’t hear the beach patrol until I jumped; and I had been scattering and settling these particles for a long youth, let me tell you—particles so fine as the voice of one guy telling either side of a playground fence by a fair-to-average city school the difference between the real smog which I was to read later is the mark of business mismanagement (as our womanizing Norse economist once saw) not of technology, and on the other hand the Russian ambassador, smiling Mike Menshikov’s small betrayal of the revolution in misrepresenting to Premier K. one sunny California day two small, innocent, fleece-lined clouds in a clear, but colloidally blue, Los Angeles sky as Smog, Smog, tut(ski) tut(ski)—but I hear the voice, me, the one guy at the playground fence, but more, going round and round even then before prison came into the picture, going round like what later was by chance at Juan’s moment of individualized evening lockup to acquire as if it needed it a scientific name and description—and did Larry get his visiting rites (smile) form?—and going round and then round one night a small tenement apartment building superintended by the father of his beloved, round and round so that the island of Manhattan all around that square block dissolved; as round and round the current of this one young guy’s voice itself (with contributions from the audience) might go and the playground fence disintegrate while that voice sought what power over current events only his buried spirit knew and did not yet tell, for to him it was as unconscious then at first as what swarmed deep behind his pride the day he concluded his sometime (by Eric, by Joey, by Hector Ramirez, and by others) interrupted remarks upon the need for blacks in city government and a new Israel in New Zealand and Australia where there’d be more space which might encourage Russia to unload more of its Jews—and halting in mid-word to find, hands in pockets diagonally down the block, Miriam’s father glaring from the newspaper store which had always been within earshot as, standing right behind him, Mrs. Erhard even when she would not muscle her bulk out from behind the sugar-and-nicotine counter and step outside to see with her protruding eyes what she had heard, would testify—if you are receiving all that, Jim.
Miriam had foretold that he would appear one Sunday I was there. He had had scarcely a word for me ever, but here and now was willing I should have words that happened to apply to him.
He never
spoke afterward of my plan for resettling Jews in the Pacific, but he almost never spoke to me anyhow. Miriam slept late that Sunday, later even than this dreamer. Two little girls with little white hats led my eye down the block to two double-parked cars bumper to bumper and when I caught sight of Miriam’s father who never got his Sunday News at Erhard’s, I didn’t know where Mir’ was. I was seeing screens even then but when you’re ahead of your time (smile), how you going to know it’s O.K. what you’re doing, it’s natural?
Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there—Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez—whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend—was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim—like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly don’t know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right?—little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.
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