Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And then I’m coming up on the silver garbage cans and I can see him, his hair dangerous in the streetlamp light, he’s in the door, three or four steps above the street level, and saw me and didn’t move for a moment till he saw something in my walk or thought something, and ducked out of sight. I put my hand down on the first can and nothing. And so on, no juice. The cops had spoken, and he’d cooled it, and maybe he’s on the phone now calling Kallman that I’ve got a gun. And Jim, I know I’m going to do a dumb thing that might throw me forward into what I won’t know I need until I see I know it all along: do you develop by knowing the greedy oppressor and reciting your history like Juan my friend? Why is he in here? He does not say. But oh you have these thoughts, Jim—

  —that is, deceive—

  —that is, knowing that the goods and the bads on the Outside are getting their share of the bomb also—the ones with bags over their heads or haloes, with pistols in their hands or fellow feeling—you know at the last sub-second particle of our unconscious that everything on the Outside is as it was and the bomb is cleanly modeling something awful next door or at a never-fear maximum security center overlooked by all except the media who have the infrared filters and the resolution and the extrapolation capability and the cool, high Horror Threshold to give you this truth in your homes, Jim, journeyman journalist that you are, to make you understand without having to go through it save for a documentary tour, I forget d’l say one day a month we’re fasting against executions? (for colloidal communion is but one way to work with others and a self-induced rotating magnetic field must be another if you think of all that alternating current our loner-genius of the eighties and nineties could generate who later in ‘93 disproved in his head at least the curved space that new-fangled gravity graphs so potently and disproved the claim that we are walking-around bombs in the mere matter of our bodies). No, it was our young friend Larry (who was bringing his girl but they broke up) whom I told of Jim Lee State, totally bald since adolescence and they said had a pretty odd amber shine to his skull that you thought you could see through into his long-structured Indian- (apparently) type brain, who fasted except for one cup of water and half an avocado per day for three weeks prior to his execution date, this is in the Middle West, and wanted no part of last meals (sharing quadruples on ice cream with fellow condemned—"con2"—(smile)) or chaplain supplying last words; and he slit his own trousers because he wanted it to be his trip subject to the normal balance of manual/automatic in the system; and he was writing a story in his cell trying to complete it for his lawyer to have in lieu of fee, but it was nine-thirty P.M. and only ninety minutes till Time to go. But Jim Lee State fell asleep at the new manual typewriter a recent parolee had left him and slept through his own execution—that’s right—because no one told him the judge had granted his lawyer a stay that afternoon. He was tired, he found out.

  I had a letter from him before I came here and he said he would be thinking of me up there on the Canadian border—the dreams of all that night’s work he singled out were two, and he does not recall at all the dream he had had off and on for months that was as close as he came to a dream of the Chair, but the two he had the night he slept through his execution were adjoining like a two-room apartment you can’t live in all of at the same time. His wife was cooking very hot and dry Mexican food, the pinto beans, the chopped meat, the chili peppers, her own corn tortillas, and singing at the top of her lungs so he could hear in the next room when actually he was right there where he’d been all day but now behind her sitting so close he could have reached out to touch her hips and she could have sat down on him had she not been busy stirring a pot and turning the tortillas and folding them but holding them a little open.

  Meanwhile in the next dream she was lying in bed half-covered and drops of bathwater on her body and face so he could feel the dampness against the sheets and she didn’t see he was standing right there speechless with love but she was talking to him like he was in the next room and he couldn’t tell her he was there. She worked at a supermarket checkout, I learned. The two dreams were one after the other, repeating, but then they were at the same time too, and she was about to discover he was behind her listening to her sing and she could sit down on his lap, and at the same time she was lying in bed with drops of water on her about to discover she was looking right through him talking to him like he was in the next room one hand near the bedside light and he was about to speak but couldn’t till she saw him, and these dreams went back and forth all night it seemed, but later he had the idea that they occurred at about eleven, but how could he check with the guards? they said he talked in his sleep all the time anyhow.

  I had heard of his case, his composure, his writing, his claim that his murder had been the victim’s premeditation, not his; and I had written telling him of the fateful day when I’d had it up to here but had not known till afterward the degree to which unconscious premeditation, mine and others’, had turned a divided visitor into a perpetrator of the unknown. I got his answer as I left to come here; they might have forwarded it, but the post is uncertain. I wrote Jim Lee State to report the dream that awaited me upon arrival here, but he never got back to me and so I do not know what use-value he placed upon the dreams that determined him not to complete the story he had fallen asleep writing, which you have to figure was also the work that tired him toward those dreams which if I did not know better now I’d think were as lost to us as they are now to him and he to us. The story, you ask—because I feel that you are asking.

  The cons revered him for doing his own thing until the end like a leader concentrating on personal thought and meditation right up to the moment when he must leave his billet and go out to the barricades. He wrote me that they didn’t know the truth of how he felt; true, he did these things like when they came into his cell in death row to forcibly shave his beard off ("Want to see what you got under there, stud"), a rule-breaker right to the end; maybe you could hang yourself with a Father Time-type beard (smile); anyway he fought tooth and nail when they unlocked the cell door and three of them came in and stood shoulder to shoulder before they reached for him, he fought the way he believed he would the night they really came for him, having as a dividend not had to shave his head. Yet, Jim, it—the resistance, the calm typewriter, the close attention given everything even the guards’ pension plan and pay-increase schedule—this activity was mainly, he said, to keep his mind off the fear of time passing behind his back and not thirty years of future life, say, lost but mainly his inevitable vague death held in the hands of moral morons who at the moment of its passage didn’t hold it, but were held by a job which was to prevent it not happening, where its happening would be a high point of their work shift, topped only by its not happening, that is through the seated man in question (for when is it ever a woman? we wonder—while we’re saying, When is it ever a white? though are not a few white "burns" to be the cover for the true policy?)—bringing to a center all the live organic electric charge which the Colloidal Unconscious can draw to itself and because of a unique defense system which I only later in Juan’s abandoned book saw was due to the charges around each colloid particle being not a single but a double layer of opposite charges making the colloid suspension behave like an uncharged body, which when controlled by him who (not holds but) knows how to be held by his Colloidal Unconscious may theoretically receive two thousand volts of inorganic commercially generated mere alternating current and put them to peaceful communications use, but, since this effort of concentration can never succeed in suspending the heartbeat to a minimum as hard to pick up by stethoscope as colloid double charge by electroscope, what are you going to do if they think you are dead and load you onto the stretcher and do an autopsy? The backup mode is to resist as the unified sense of Colloid Unconscious is uniquely fitted to do against the AC system and theoretically repel it right back to the generator where it came from, thereby blowing out their circuits and their new equipment with perfect safety however to the perhaps m
asked functionary at the non-conducting lever, with at most a Mayday ring to other C.U. members who hear a sound-barrier-bust-type blow accompanied by their favorite music.

  Well, I wrote Jim Lee State but in my opinion he never got back to me, which was sad but not sad like saying so long to Efrain when he got out so recently which was not sad. Jim Lee State said that after the stay of execution and the dreams he came to see the stories as work for someone else: like the last was to pay his lawyer, though he also saw that this was just making the trip his own by paying a real debt not to some abstract Society but to counsel (smile), but if he thought of the story as not money but friendly communication which was the best he could do and his best work, its money-value would be real and then how many others would profit by it?

  Until, with no prodding by me to investigate the True Unit of Value because he was answering only my first exploratory letter, he saw that he was into Immortality—for a "him" he could never get hold of or know, so here again he was working for someone else, though I pointed out in that letter I never got a personal answer to that wide-spun readers of his Death Row tales would be an endless surplus distributed according to desire and need long after he had no more use for whatever value they returned.

  But on the night in question the dreams had drawn him away from this story he was working on—insofar as he recalled it, for he had destroyed it. He said it was based on a true incident, but in the story which begins on a big outdoor Visitors Day like our P.R. festivals here, a guy who’s got a clean lip under his mustache and is wearing under his correctional greens khaki chinos with a razor in the pocket and two freshen-up wet-wipes, and a but-tondown like he never had on his back before, he peels off here and there piece by piece and in the crowd gets into conversation with two girls who don’t (yet) know why they’re here—that is, they’re with an old lady who visits once a month to check on the rehabilitation of a con she’s been corresponding with for asshole years in the hope that he’ll never get out; and our hero, whom the old lady doesn’t know, just walks out the gate to the bus with the two girls and the old lady later that afternoon; he’s free and making his way to Florida before his greens have even gone to the dump for reprocessing with the paper plates and cups.

  But here is the point: he arrives in Florida and seeks employment in a supermarket chain as a security guard (smile). Before he knows it, he thinks up a better system which involves all the employees and a pattern of checkpoints superior to the tilted overhead mirrors or the closed-circuit videowatch, and he calls it security-sharing and Personnel is about ready to give him a change of uniform, the system is security-sharing and depends on the employees looking like average shoppers and tracking a three-cornered (three-person) line-of-sight routine which each employee is on his or her honor to share in at least once every ten minutes. But the day before he’s to be promoted, because they’re afraid his system will get more and more participatory, he’s on the scene when a hold up occurs. He gives the alarm, is wounded in the spinal column; in firing back from the meat lockers, he wings a butcher scale and hits a patrolman just arriving on the scene, who later dies of his chest wound because the hospital does not check to find out the cop was allergic to penicillin.

  But now our guard is identified as a vacationing con and when a hysterical out-of-work actor a member of the gang is asked point blank if the guard was their inside man and answers yes, yes, the other members of the gang aren’t listened to when they say, No, No, No, what’s this about a guard?

  The ending was in doubt, as was the trick by which in the first place the escape artist got onto the back of his hand the invisible visitors stamp which shows up purple under the machine on the way out. But that problem he left to others, if any, because the alternating dreams of his dead wife had shown him where he was coming from and the gap he had to fill, which was working together with others, and he would never write one of those stories again. He said, "I aim to be the oldest living con" (smile), and this was before his sentence was permanently commuted; and now he works steadily against the death penalty ("against death as a penalty") and for more meaningful careers for prisoners.

  But shortly after this initial exchange I wrote him a longer letter concerning the Colloidal Unconscious where center and margins are outmoded ideas, and while I did get an answer back, it was on the letterhead of the committee he’d founded and was from someone else who spoke for him, relaying his message that he was gratified I too was involved in my home state working toward a more meaningful prison experience; but I don’t believe those were his words.

  Which young Larry when I told him about Jim Lee State agreed marked a development that was practically a scale model of what went on Outside, and he asked if there was much vomiting Inside, he said his mother’s women friends did it all the time, I said it can’t be just morning sickness, but he was puzzled and he had to go, and we agreed that personal communication is our only hope, and he said Jim’s not hearing of the judge’s stay was hard to believe.

  Miriam’s father spotted me and ducked right back inside, not even pausing to defend his cans in the bright full moon of the streetlamp. And before I knew it, he was behind both of the old glass-plated doors of the vestibule that would protect him from the explosion of a small borrowed pistol that no doubt my mother, the police, he, and others had gotten a call about, when all I wanted was to tell him how I’d had it up to here so where’s he get off doing a job on me about the two hours I once spent with a woman not his daughter? So I could figure it only that he had failed to stop the Hungarian from marrying Miriam (I feel you shaking your head steadily at me)—and had taken it out on me—

  —that is, if I cared, you say Jim?

  Well, yes I cared: enough to face him in all of his faces, galvanized, switched-off, widower, Jew, father, boss of a tenement inhabited by renting tenants where he paid no rent except his twenty-four-hour attention to what he found himself responsible for.

  That was it: we’d once been responsible together for Miriam. I heard voices where turning shapes struggled through the dimly lighted glass. And thinking he had regained sole responsibility from me, I saw he couldn’t handle it and had turned the surplus back to me.

  That was it, a male figure not in color, agitated and vague, agitating the dim light through the milky glass, and another familiar figure, female but less small than Iris, turning me into a gunman when I would have been glad to make him a present of the gun, when all I wanted was a word with Miriam’s father, who was retreating to call the authorities and maybe turn his garbage cans on but he’s scared Miriam’s going to get shot in her effort to peacemake when she and I knew she’s scared I’d tell him what she and I had sometimes done, and where, and so I called him by name, his first name, to come out like a man. Windows started going up; tenants were getting their feet on the ringing metal grates of their fire escapes. I heard the old man’s voice calling but not to me, the figures merged and wrestled, rattled the glass, and a voice came from deeper inside that multiple dwelling.