Donald had raised his chin aiming his brown beard at the photograph of Sequoya, the Cherokee genius whose English-alphabet syllable notation for his people’s language enabled them to put out their own newspaper and influenced them to write their own constitution. The picture had been given to Larry by Mayn and had come from Mayn’s father’s basement in the old hometown in New Jersey. A relative of Mayn’s had taken the photograph. Donald said he wasn’t sure they ought to be discussing reincarnation, because it didn’t feel too good today, he didn’t know why, did Larry know what Donald meant? And Larry, who was envisioning Donald’s girl, whom he had never met, recounted a dream he had had the night before.
First, however, he added that he had an elder friend who claimed never to have had these regular sleeping dreams, and Donald, who turned out to be surprisingly just Larry’s age to the week and with whom Larry realized he wanted to be . . . not outa here, though it’s like that, but—outa here and here at the same time, or left alone ... but with Donald (or whoever) who had seemed militant and superior when Larry had heard him in Eco class try to carve Professor Rail limb from limb, silver horseshoe belt buckle and all, but now was just Donald (yea D.D.!)—nodded rapidly as if he too had known someone who didn’t dream, and, though listening to Lar’ here, then abruptly so softly interjected, "You might be dreaming/or him—know what I mean?"
In Larry’s dream, driven on but braked and reined in ("You’re a dream, guy," sillies D.D. suddenly), a dream that in fact Larry had set out to dream so maybe it didn’t really count or so he’d told himself as he dreamt it—and Donald shook his head reassuring Larry that it did count)—Larry had (and here was the point) lost his father’s name. Martin, Dave, Donald (!), Ted, Stanislas, Asa, Lou, Beebe (! there was a first name for you), Jaime, Manny, Angel, Sandy. But then it came back to Larry underground like a thing or animal and so he could introduce his father to an eligible woman who by chance had shaved herself according to the cunt-positive program of his mother’s friend Grace Kimball who dropped in on Larry and rapped about whatever he wanted to rap about and licked the drip flow off the rim of the buckwheat honey jar having generously sweetened her coffee hit—for Lar’s into making finest (home-ground) Colombian lately. Donald Dooley frowned at all or some of this, maybe the Cunt Positive?, but tilted his face to show he was still here—and it was still hard to see through a piss-saffron shower-curtain-type robe which in the dream Larry knew was no big deal, it was like taking a pee, and the "underground" through which his father’s name came back to him in the dream was ducted into Larry’s vein so when that name "Marv" came back to him it was wired into circulation desde luego (at once) if he could only figure how, but in the dream his heart was a big octopus-eye with its friendly arms curved back into it and it knew how the stuff in the dream got wired into circ but didn’t let on how except within the motion of its own "dream" system, except Lar’ felt that where the curvature of the at least left ventricle was greatest the pressure of the emotion was, too—which was the reverse of some Dreaded-Modulus-mode ratio stuck in the back of his mind like he had a windpipe in his mind but the curvatures in question under varying degrees of dilation might contour-code an actual other person which in some mode you were—under certain unknown pressures. Yet, God knew, Larry was so tired coping (and mainly with his parents), that—he had given up and woken, knowing that his father was not here and knowing, as he resisted the coincidental drive to make waking up congruent with getting up, that it would be all right to lie in bed—chewing chalk, his gums felt like—and let his dreams—(Be good to your body, said Donald.)
Larry had a lot of dreams, a real load of dreams, while this older friend the newsman Mayn claimed never to have ‘em at all, and Lar’ privately, because it was complicated to get into with Donald, knew that Mayn awaited Larry’s latest and (who knew?) definitive views on Simultaneous Reincarnation—not, he hoped, so Mayn could retell them over a fatherly beer with Amy (who Larry knew now could never love him), or even to a humorous, husky, and husky-voiced man named Ted though Ted had only a few more months to live and wanted to spend it in memorable conversation—but to settle if Jim’s past life could really have been in future, for Larry cared about Jim and not in just the sense that all people matter more or less). Jim, O.K., did have waking dreams, though ofttimes thorough and far-grasping. Larry could say almost anything to Jim but could not for some reason disagree with him on this if only to the point of reminding him that infants dreamed far more than grownups. Champion of all dreamers was, you know, the fetus. And if with twins or triplets (the Ur consciousness-raising group) your fetus didn’t have on average as much privacy and freedom of growth to get the circuitry developing, maybe on the other hand sibling interference multiplied the voltages, and if during gestation the individual fetus didn’t have much content to dream about, God, think what it had been recently through, arriving into being !—plus the fact that humans had nothing to do during gestation unlike shark fetuses that had teeth from the seminal moment or absolute beginning— Conceived with teeth? challenged D.D.—and went after each other in-womb, getting right down to it, obstacles each to each uniting a good fight and nutrient value where only one can win, that is, the one that survives for the mother-sub to fire forth her one surviving offspring (but shit! it’s astern, of course) full-speed on B-day.
"Ur?" asked Donald, and Larry explained, while envisioning with some happiness or other the Chinese woman seen the night he and a tight-lipped Mayn had gone in search of Amy at the foundation ("Nice space here," Donald indicated the apartment as a whole) and Jim when they were on their way downtown later gave Larry a five-dollar bill when he left the cab. But now Larry hardly heard himself answer like homework the "Ur" query, for he and Donald had not necessarily stopped discussing the heart, and a beatless, perhaps timeless measure came to him and was gone as if it had thought better of him!—md he reported that Mayn had told of a lighting designer-dealer whose girlfriend had had four miscarriages and had been told by her doctor that now she was again with child she would have to take it super-easy virtually like a flat-on-her-back invalid, and the man, who had once been Jim’s wife’s employer (when she had been, obviously, Jim’s wife) had actually seen the thumb-size fetus, and the fetus (if you want to hear the news) was all heart, and he talked to it and hoped it would know his loving voice when it came out; but Larry could tell that other parts of the body could dream, so why not a heart?
This was Larry’s first new friendship since his parents had split up— hey, he had just come out and said that! to himself, that is—yes, first since his parents had split up, launching him into a Manhattan apartment with his dad, while his mother and her friend lived on the Island (whom Larry wanted to talk to Donald about but he was shy about betraying his mother and also didn’t really know much on the new road of their life—their life? their life?—which was in the house in Long Island where Larry grew up. Donald pointed out that your feet and arms could go to sleep, so presumably they could dream. They laughed and Larry said there was some vino in the fridge. Donald asked if there was a vacuum handy and Lar’ said he’d been cleaning house when D.D. arrived. Good, said D.D. Yeah, said Lar’, what did he need it for? His typewriter needed a vacuum, said Donald, tapping his pack beside him on the floor. Larry felt that Donald liked taking off his backpack with its twenty-degrees-below-freezing down bag rolled on top, and putting it back on. Donald was rural-oriented but also, he said, urban-oriented; and Larry could see he liked being on the move. Larry had not been reaching for the phone to dial anyone when Donald Dooley had rung from the lobby to say that he was here, unexpectedly, and he would like to come up (because D.D. made statements more than asked questions).
Out by the elevator, there was a giant dark-orange couch left by the opera singer Ford North ("Please call me Ford, won’t you?"), and it had tasseled cushions and had been arrested there in the public hall on its way out of the building, perhaps to a new apartment, but it hadn’t moved in three or four days, and anybody could ste
er around it or could sit on it, for example the liquor deliveryman, while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to Larry too small for the couch even if they took the roof off; and this little guy Ford’s friend with the big eyes and a huge charge of dark-haired energy sat there waiting for the elevator or something like Napoleon on hold, but he had had a fight with Ford North, and Larry had learned from Grace that this strange little dancer-type gay guy who wrote music was probably going to be in her first Men’s (Nude) Workshop. And if Larry had any outside obstacles (not his own) to dropping all this obstacle (well, not course, but) hunt, he had no objections to their leaving him (alone, that is—that is, alone with his new-type friends). So Larry knew that there was a lot going down, but he had not been inclined to reach for the phone (like, to call Mayn, who was back). Mayn had gone to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington at a hell of a time, when Amy had been missing and Larry had had an insinuating call from a son of a bitch who asked if Larry had the phone number where Mayn’s daughter was staying, and Larry had had a dumb inkling, like a gentle dopy looping boomerang that came back to him, that the caller already knew the phone number.
The new plug-in instrument (in addition to the kitchen wall-phone) seldom rang, but when it did, it felt in its off-key tinkle like the middle of the night: which it lately had been, for his mother Susan phoned him once at midnight, he told Donald—and once at three-seventeen A.M. in red on his clock radio —in tears, wondering how Larry was (so he said, Are you awake?, the very words Amy had said when she called to ask when Mayn was coming back and if Larry knew if Mayn knew this guy Spence and a messenger named Gustave part of a strange group of retarded messengers Spence was said to employ in connection with a warehouse-theater over on the West Side)—Sue’s call and her words and her tears were light years from that Larry’s gotta get laid crap in front of other people, Grace Kimball’s friends many like healthy-looking TV-commercial actors/actresses, none into marriage though some still in it, lots of eye-contact friendliness boo-buoying up a confidence training itself by supporting others-others-others, some of these folk in training to see who can be most trim-line, most "up," most free of habit patterns but confusing when they called work "addiction" and love likewise, and listen, quaaludes were definitely not the same thing and less like love than like heroin, O.K.?, so Larry held to his small corner of history, of conviction, surprised that never in the dark of her Major Life Change (though Marv had always done dishes, some cooking, shopped for food, bartered money for forage after hunting down the money in hill and valley), never had she plugged into the available jack of probability circuit in order to imagine that her son upon the Person, Object, though no Obstacle ("Treat me like a piece of meat, Larry!") of Diane of Port Adams already had lost his virginity (if of guys it be so called), for he had given it and to himself as much as to Diane of the Visine-rinsed eye whites and mouth and eye sockets relaxed into soft stone, Diane of the slow tongue and of the shopping-center shortcut when they all lived in Port Adams—while Susan where she was with the Other or ‘‘Great Spirit" she’s trial-living with seemed for the moment to be doing all the dishes and cooking—simultaneously apologized for waking him up, it didn’t sound like her and not because it was three-seventeen till his red L.E.D.s turned three-eighteen, she didn’t sound like that toughie she used to be, but oh the luxury of having this extra ear against his and being able, through the bedside plug-in, to turn on either side or on his back, to curl up or down (curving his whole reception of the voice so it became part of him), it made other people only as important as they were, not more: unless you gave in to them so you let yourself think about waiting for them to phone, which if he had done with his mother (who was still a strong mother through these flowing, glistening, misting tears, but he might just not say that kind of thing because) it would be understood as pigeonholing women into vulnerable, weak, etcetera, which wasn’t what he was feeling at all!
And while receiving feedback from Donald Dooley on reincarnation as arising out of crisis in your life when the void opening in front of you could outguess you if you put yourself into it so you found you were more than one person which was O.K. and scary and creative, Larry went on savoring the dream of the names, savoring even some reach within the nest of them to a next he didn’t quite get his head around where he was subject of a prediction.
Donald agreed that the evolutionary reincarnation ensued through social history as a whole, not in literal reappearance of souls in new forms they had earned or longed for—speaking gently, slowly as if knowing that Larry had something wonderful and troubling to continue with. But savoring Donald’s words and friendly manner, Lar’ wanted to detour around reincarnation, and not because he savored the dream of names: from Martin (which was one letter off his father’s and the closest but really far away from his father’s self) to Angel (a Puerto Rican name in all probability), Lar’ comprehended a nest of dreams coming up out of good ground bearing more messages than he had regular time for or light to see by, and these included his dad’s own name, which had proved upon waking no substitute for his dad’s presence standing under the shower so quiet inside the falling water, bending his head and curving his whole contentment along the path of the steam iron ironing some shirt of his (he didn’t iron Larry’s, and neither did Lar’!).
So when the phone rang, Larry saw he had been slipping away from Donald, yet was it because Reincarnation of which un branch was Simultaneous Reincarnation (S.R.) threatened Larry? No big deal because Jim Mayn looked forward to Lar’s definitive formulation in good heart and faith and a good casual smile lay between them and related to the possibility of breakthrough vis a vis S.R.; yet it was in the air, and Kimball breathed S.R. in and out and Mayn did not oppose research into it, and there’d been this near-dream involving Larry in it as target of a prediction, and somehow shit S.R. in its theoretical warp seems playing into the wilderness of those older people’s lives full-up with dejd vu (see recent scientific studies of) cum painful recollection cum should-haves and shouldn’t-haves etcetera so heavy all in all and wall to wall with after-lives that come to think of It they are downright abstract, and Larry doesn’t just now want these people’s sympathy and the strings attached, or even praise, specially for his no doubt epochal concepts. Nor wants to even, like, explain that he’ll settle for the mainland-Chinese lady sitting on the phone books.
And let Mayn muse in the night taxi that the noted man whom Amy gal-Friday’d for—where research might well cover surveillance—at the foundation, continued still, upwards of four years after the final manned Moon shot, to be mixed up with a hustler whom Mayn would like to throttle who even Mayn the world’s (according to him) least-prone-to-lurid-plot-speculation-much-less-conspiracy-peddling of "current historians" is coming to believe may now be engineering news without quite knowing it in order to make a buck out of being there when the lightning strikes; and let Mayn muse that he felt he might be indirectly responsible for the death of a fellow journalist in Chile in 1963—Mayn’s great to know, etcetera, but this morning Larry thinks he would never have moved back into that apartment where Mayn and his family had lived even if Mayn did have some co-oping deal with the landlord (according to Lar’s father) plus Lar’ knew of Mayn’s daughter-inspired interest in a landlord syndicate’s link with insurance groups, O.K., O.K. already— Larry would frankly rather listen to Donald Dooley reveal how tobacco firms borrow great sums from insurance groups in return for soft-pedaling cancer when approaching that mass of client-insurees who matter too deeply to their insurers to be asked to worry about the mysterious workings of inflation or cell play: and if, for an awful moment right out of some poetry that Lar’ had read in high school, a shadow passes Between, an unembodied smile, deja-vu’ing weeks-ancient words of the Dreaded Modulus that People (not just) Matter, People aRe Matter, till as—quite far from Lar’s dad Marv’s 1940s sexista /18 (‘less dey raise de age)—R turns into (and therefore equals) = , the wind, with perhaps that secret curve attributed to it in an "off-the-w
all family discussion" Jim Mayn half-recalled from "outer space or outer something," bore Larry toward the phone a la part slippage from Donald via daydream warmed by abstraction, part Donald’s fulsome conceptualism (where one sentence became an oration) since his girlfriend was coming over but it wasn’t Donald’s but Larry’s abstract and traced not by D.’s word-content but only by his voice-print though Larry knew Donald was taking off on some of Larry’s guarded remarks on reincarnation being Now and a matter of crisis and a void that opened in front of you that you filled before you hit it, in his opinion, and as Lar’ rose to go for the phone and heard D.D. say wine was good unless he had some Cuerva and saw gratefully the particular Chinese woman of four nights ago sitting on three phone books with covers ripped off, her gray wool socks puffed by her plump feet out of her slippers, he had to speak and hardly knew what he was fast saying (or, rather, why) between the first ring and the second: "Look, my mother is living with another woman out on the Island, and I was freaked out about it underneath all this insane fucking Open Marriage BiSexual Cool that’s going around, you know, but I didn’t know who to talk to but now I’m freaked out that she isn’t happy and probably wants to get back with my father but I didn’t see why they split in the first place but now I don’t feel good about them getting back together." He was moving out of the room toward the kitchen, looking back not at the plug-in phone but at Donald, who was nodding and smiling and saying, "You’ve had a lot to deal with, man, but it’s all right, you know?, it’s all right. It’s all cool. Let it go."
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