He drank off his bourbon, one and only one tonight or he’d get corned enough to mail this angelfood shit to his daughter who by instead not receiving it will achieve equality with her brother, his son, whom he knows only in imagination constantly split by Andrew’s blinding-binding disappointment at his dad’s calling it a day, he did not want to look at his son’s face. He buzzed the lobby, did not speak Spanish, learned that a man had asked for Mayn and rung the apartment and hung up saying nobody home and Manuel told him he’s surprised, but—What’d he look like?—Good-looking suit, good boots, dark blue pinstripe with red flower in buttonhole—you get the picture.
"But I was here. I picked up."
"Said he catch you the next time. He sound Spanish."
"Thanks, Manuel."
Mayn dialed the Albuquerque woman’s hotel and dropped the handwritten pages into the wicker wastebasket where they came together as a unit, and when asked if he had left a message before, he said, "Yes . . . Spence."
"Oh yes."
"I want her to meet me for breakfast, I forget what I said the first time."
"You said . . . you recall, I’m sure, sir."
"And did a well-dressed gentleman, blue pinstripe, slight Spanish accent, leave a message at the desk for her?"
"No, she had another phone call but he didn’t leave a message; we’re really not supposed to tell you that."
We’re not s’posed to tell you what we already told you. A memory misfires during orbit, o fires as i, i as o, a "bit-flip." Jot it down, then you can forget. But what if it don’t forget you? Mayn will turn into a phoneman like Spence, funds transferred by electric diaphragm—puts the receiver back down where it belongs. But dialed Amy’s number, eyes fired, with a faintly loaded sense in his hands of someone possibly dialing him direct to potential clot in bloodstream. But got a busy: but then, in the innovation-operative midst of busy signal, got Larry, but not to say Hello or to give what Mayn remembers he has half been waiting for from the founder of Obstacle Geometry, expounder of the Modulus, and determined non-victim of Open Marriage or the hoots and hollers of the opera basso’s weeks’ delayed departure and ("Off-off-4Center’ ") Hamletin negotiations down Larry’s hall of this multiple dwelling from which Larry is this evening absent—for he is at Amy’s of course in order to report that while briefly out purchasing (as Mayn thinks, the most rudimentary obstacle for them to get through) a pizza for the two of them, Larry suffered her loss; for upon reentering her unlocked home (after all even at her and his age), he found her trenchcoat gone from the kitchen, her wallet from the bedroom, her address book from the upright piano, her beret from a bowl molded into the back section and rear feathers of a large china goose leaving there her doubtless second set of housekeys glittering, valuable, seeming to invite Larry to leave. He was not too upset by thinking he had been forcing the pepperoni and sausage pizza baked by this Korean pizzeria at the corner upon Amy, to add that he was through chasing an older female when it was probably Mayn or her boss that she—no, no, Larry corrected himself, no, Jim, it’s jtist that I’ve had it, my dad now hates my mother, she’s really not coming back and she let us think she was (didn’t she?), and she phoned me from the Island to say she wanted me to live with her and her heavy-duty friend and hated herself for leaving for God’s sake.
Does the front door lock automatically or do you have to lock it yourself?
It locks automatically.
"It" was not the time to find out what Lar’ had come up with.
Nor was there time to find time—or, more, not to find time—to locate the simplest answer why "all this now," the answer that answers the most starts, or Why we—who often have to not understand Who, What, When, we are—are slowed coming to the illumination that should giddy us up. Because these many starts ain’t mysteriously endless; there comes a day (as we optimistically say when we must mean "an afternoon" when all clefts align to open our danger and opportunity e’en if but to a zen golfer conceived by a lone green golf course visited by the speed of sun’s light, yet we better mean a borrowed hour, a minute borrowed from a theory we might have heard had we been deaf to the violin or piano whose solo ye theory proved concerto to, for we found when we tested the Earth earlier that we grow abstract in inverse ratio to some relative loss of power we had not decided we wanted or not upon last acquaintance with our best selves, for we were so busy knowing the truth of a new, more limited theory of reincarnation, say, that nonetheless answered the most questions of all the competing theories, that we many of us missed the quiet power we were experiencing being thus reincarnate) so THERE COMES A DAY WHEN WE’Z done with starts and R been found by what we thought to find, which Mn’t all bad, for as one used to say re: Moon exploring, You find it, you got it: whereas in later days of the Locus 5, many of these privileged settlers who’ve been compacted each one out of two original Earth persons (in most cases acquainted to start with) reported an unsettled sense of lasting content on arrival, later thought by the thinkers of those plexi-axial sun-tuned torus-states to have been due to the mythically rich feeling due in turn to the indubitable source of each individual in this and other space-positive settlements of nothing but individuals, i.e., originally a pair of persons, mostly female-male, often female-female, occasionally male-male, depending on long-term needs though all (literally) united by a Locus T platform plate celled by a milliard electro-magmatic chip-templates jointed to form an ovaline elevator-like capsule so clear that as the templates throng two expecting bodies (but we already remember learning this but without remembering that if you describe what happens, you are responsible for it) as the Hermit learned, describing these and more usual atmospheric, if violent, lumen phenomena that signaled the Princess to take her leave, as they did the girl’s nesting bird-vehicle that rose to the challenge of a mountain-jawed cat when neither cat nor giant bird knew bait from hunter and the cat ate one egg and either disappeared into the future which was the egg’s scent picked up hours later by the hind-gland of a javelina thrown off its eating routine by a between-meals snack given it by the botanist Jones, or disappeared into the form of a sudden timber wolf so great in the shoulder, muzzle, and loins it transcended Pueblo lore that called it devil and was taken to be a real wolf, after all butchered in mid-air by the bird, an event for which the Hermit the day of these departures in his responsibility as Describer of the How and Reporter of the What was punished, but only with exile from that territory. But he returned as his own nephew years later to describe experimentally to the Navajo a gauge on the roof of a multiple urban dwelling to predict, through coastline configuration differences between light and heavy air masses as well as to describe to the underemployed Navajo a future Two-for-One process—in those days a pilot project—whereby the two expecting bodies who are presently to be one elsewhere are thronged with more radiance than their God-given cells know what to do with in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin straining to see a future, while an old-style woman or man now and then sent out like Mayn to report feels extra mortal next to these colons compacted by an economy so simple it’s more question than solution, such as what should be the minimum daily allowances of negotiated or unnegotiated love-merger for these new beings who are the tacit annunciation of what they’ve been compacted to and are experiment they are making with their lives and for which they may be said to be answerable in the sense that a "respons-" is an "answer" and if the Two-for-One origin holds vivid its internalized dialectic should comprehend both question and answer (e.g., in issues of the reality of property out there, or the legal obligation to repay capital borrowed from Earth when, for example, the Moon ore from which so much of the torus’s oxygen is farmed does not create a "debt situation" though it comes from an organic Earth satellite, and the near-panic demand for the soccer-ball-scale tomatoes grown rapidly in high humidity in the frothy soil whipped from lunar earth revalues the interspatial basic-barter objects) in these great wheel settlements with their gravity-inducing rotations that make at some hours and
angles the giant spokes seem to turn backwards or bend their shimmering into fixity like the outer radiation-shield rim which seems to rotate with us we already recall and keeps down stresses on its light, vast structure paved with Moon mineral which communicates by reflected light as below through the ingested beans of its new soil a sense of secrets waiting in the otherwise open-and-shut "Given": so that as the boy Joseph Smith consuming and consumed by a pre-Mormon fungi-mold strangely empowering the rye loaves his mother baked him one harsh winter in the New York frontier village of Palmyra near Seneca Falls a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario conceived of secret documents and later hallucinated where to find them (though he was not responsible for their being gold or for plural-marriage doctrines implicit in the tablets), so did some Two-into-One econocolons eat beans and know in their hearts there had been built into the torus structure, like a color and promise of which the artist is but half aware, a point of cleft-potential at which the torus may be enlarged and enlarged again, boosting lengthward acreage for sorghum, potatoes, tomatoes, and, yes, the very beans that yield the secret of the growth point so that production will far exceed the mean projection of Earth planners.
Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in Celebrity Aura as wanting to change her shadow, quiero mudar de sombra, minus her footnote that the words are not hers.
There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead—in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo—not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.
A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare, her work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.
Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.
But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you don’t describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read project, read diverge, read dig, read Lurgi transformation, read matter, read people) is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.
And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or into him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We didnt ‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights—coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he has heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen
him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince—so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer—then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last—alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so he seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday—not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his—his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to Closed Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until ... as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found Y&rself crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid—it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible—until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read -ship) with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."
Women and Men Page 143