We gotta get outa here, Lar’ thought—a piece of him out there beams back but not so fast as light to its old spot in his shoulder-neck-tension field finding in its place there a living-breathing eye{), wait, an eye in his newly relaxed neck-and-shoulder area? as he concentrated it became an all-purpose heart (up there) and in touch with feelings though others’ (don’t please try to explain it!) as fast as light, attractive as somebody else, and charged with such communicative volts it flares the contradictory decadence of the would-be returning weak piece into one a billion times less weak as if to take the measure of—
"I think I just saw my father’s death—" Phone ring again before he seize (about to sneeze) . . . "—but it didn’t look like him."
‘That’s heavy, Larry," said Donald Dooley from the bedroom, "but—" Way ahead of him, Larry took the call and sneezed beyond it, receiving in return a current of nothings sidestepping him as they came at him and flowed by, while the voices in the ear-mike of the receiver were not the Chinese woman in the shop who was as real and there as D.D. or D.D.’s girlfriend approaching through the City—or the raspberry on Mayn’s cheekbone acquired in an uptown police station the night he got home and he told Lar’ about it, O.K., O.K., but meanwhile here’s this phone call, ‘n . . .
"God bless," interjects the quieter edge of man’s formality like an interruption before he has begun, though opening upon (what?) marriage?, for the courteously strong foreground voice is heard against a woman’s in the background, oh along the waves of a whole life strung out behind him not just accented like his but speaking in Spanish, so Larry, who’s (a big piece of his Body-Self) light yards back in bedroom with new friend Dooley, is hardly into this call and picks up from this female background a hysterical "curva" something, and a moment later (curva what?) amongst all the other words a highly dramatic "curvadura" (it sounds like), the man meanwhile calmly asking if he may speak to James Mayn "eef hee ees theyr": and here it is again, this living web that’s nought to do with Lar’ who’s anyhow so far from it back with new friend Donald the noise level rising behind the Spanish-accent man comes down over Lar’ too as if it’s a hood over his heart beamed to Donald’s voluble hands with which he talks, but fuck it’s this outer crisis again, this living maybe even breathing web Lar’s let go (man) & doesn’t matter if Lar’ turn out on someone else’s breakdown to be, unbeknownst to him, an employee of this courteous Spanish-accented gentleman, Lar’s having his own crisis, and he names himself (Larry Shearson) at this distance of curve and of letting go and of courtesy and asks if Mayn gave the man this number, and the man’s voice with hassle or anxiety skipping a breath tells clearly the truth that he found it on a pad on his secretary’s desk with another number and Mayn’s name (Let’s get outa here, Let’s get outa here!): but sure enough the intrigue of these older people’s lives is nipping through the screen or something, and Lar’s own crisis you can’t put an equals to or formula, its task though is To Be Real—yes, with new friends and the ordinary stuff like the random Chinese woman on the ragged phone books, O.K.? "Sorry to trouble you," the man has said. "No trouble," said Larry. But the man went on: "Everyone has trouble." So Larry: "But not everyone takes it." And the foreign man, who has turned into his sound, is answering strangely (Ah is this the young man who has understood a strange pattern of reappearance, interhemispheric reappearance?—a young woman of the Spanish-accented gentleman’s acquaintance reported she heard this from the man Mayn himself), while Larry, sidestepping whatever trap this is, coming at him with the woman weeping in the charged background and carrying on (curvadura, he’s sure he hears but it’s another woman’s voice there), and Larry’ll see this cluster not on old two screens but (shrug) one, he knows that the curve (not Rail’s economic graph line or some part of the body) having left him has taken some spinoff force decaying off his Let-it-go into Let’s get outa here:
(who cares?
both true—
hey Don!
that you?)
And Larry hears and smells motley clothes skin-deep laying another’s matter on him (dig that! another is mattering him—so what if it’s the current moon we’re passing through or period we live and light and have our We in)? and another’s bent brain, like potential, arrowing through his own (Nothing to write home about, we want to emphasize, but... ) and Lar’ has wordlessly and in an instant said No to this alter embodiment, toward which "a piece of him" has got Curve-slung, like look no matter how much People Matter (which can be a drag on an off-day), nor R matter in the poor but earfelt phone pulses that they become in order to get reconstituted at the long end of the line by the in-house soul attached to the ear, like this Curve itself that is not so on its own since let go by Lar’ to find other articulate host-solids to Be through that it decays in-continentally into that old We, muttering or would-be mattering some refraction where Larry just now isn’t, "If P R M, when, as ever, MRM, then maybe P R P" (People R People—where R for Rotation that here means "Rotationally Activate oR Turn To"—embracing also the sense of "get cracking"—oR "Turn Mo" or for that matter "Equal"—read also "Will Be"): yet, jettisoned by Larry along with its sometime-angel-fleshed ever-lonely-abstract Curve, this communal breakthru is lost on the aforementioned bluebird waiting for its fencepost which, cut from osage orange and not knowing it could serve as a feeding station, has gone in search of aforementioned crow lost on the Spence or Person the Curve bends into:
Who is both called up and unknown by that faithful gap Larry shares with the Chilean economist, whom Larry, making a minor mental note hanging up the phone and wondering if that sound was Don and why Don did not answer, has to like and whose secretary (the Amy he is supposed to be getting over, having never kissed more than her lips) would never let herself be called "secretary":
and this Person (turned to and from Crow, let’s stick with that), like a third phone-party though not talking at the moment to this extended son of the man Mayn he Spence most watched (until very recently) or to the distinguished exile the Curve now recalls he has hounded on business since shortly before they met at a Moon shot four years ago, stands before himself in an office with a full-length mirror sniffing still the odor of his serious and funny and tough messenger’s silver paint, his own strangely (for he’s never been able to do anything about it like his orphanhood) sandy face—yes, sandy— lit up by the desk lamp near him and returned to him by the mirror and by the smiling frown he also conveys into the phone as he works his way (they really both know) around the resistance of this woman Dina West with "a family" (he said) in Albuquerque (So what? she said) and a husband running a radio station, only to himself skid up short round the bend half past ("Hey, here’s another Dina I didn’t know!"). ("You didn’t know me at all, Mr. Spence") ("Oh I mean I know you’re in the Indian Youth Council water-rights litigation and all—") ("Well, that’s slightly inaccurate, Mr. Spence") ("—and I gather you’ve had a few things to say to the Interior people but you turn out to be as environmentalist-oriented as Mayn’s little girl"—) bent on documenting what she thinks Spence already knows ("Well, don’t you?" Dina West asks) from having scanned those many pages Flick Mayn turned in to her father while Dina West hears a man she imagines insecurely contemplating his technique or himself ("Oh hell, lady, I’m standing here in a nothing old office looking at myself in a full-length mirror and if you want to believe I know what’s in Flick Mayn’s document, I can’t stop you, ma’am").
Hearing a scream of tires at his end and the gunning of an engine right afterward, she asked what it was (adding, "Oh we’re just talking, it’s just words"), and Spence said, Business as usual; and she said, You are in the business of information, and he, I’m getting out of it and go settle in the West, run me a boots-and-tack shop someplace small, maybe manage a supermarket; she said she hardly believed him and he said he hadn’t known about that supermarket or the boot shop till he had said the words.
There, she said, you see?, but she caught at a gentleness they both felt in her vowel, and she sai
d, I’m sick of city phoning, I’m all phoned out, I want to talk to you face to face. Who had she been speaking with on the phone, he asked, that is since she had brought it up, and in the moment of her being nonplused by his "move," she brought up his strange charge of four or five days ago, four or five? the City made her lose track, did he even know what he was making up? she asked—Collusion? he asked, and their voices met beyond them, seemingly beyond any concrete shape of line or spark of arc—He knew what she meant, she said, oh she needed to talk face to face, she hadn’t even known what National Technical Means Capability was when he accused her of teaming with Mayn’s daughter whom she didn’t even really know against O.K. her least favorite company at least in the West, that was destroying land and life.
What? he asked, she never heard of NTM? She knew about it now, she said. More than she used to, he bet ("Long-range satellite photography," she said angrily, "laser eavesdropping," she said, "sophisticated earthquake devices," she said, "God knows what they’ve dreamed up"—"But you know what it’s all/or," he said)—and she knew, she added, more calmly and with more assurance, that it didn’t much work except the earthquake-sensing stuff her husband said was better than nothing. Spence said he had thought her husband was involved in this, and she said, Couldn’t they meet face to face? it was important to her, and Spence said it was no skin off his nose if she and the Mayn girl were into exposing this destroyer of landscape as being also indirectly in the NTM hardware business as part of a long-term commitment to missile network in the western states, but this wasn’t what he was most concerned about.
She paused and said could they meet, could he come to her hotel? she would pay for his cab; he said O.K. she come to him, the corner up from where he was right now. Good, she said, and by the way, did he know somebody named Santee?—so they both felt they were suddenly looking at each other yet with something new between. Why yes he did (he sneezed and she did not say God bless you—Paint smell, he said) name of a part-Sioux he had had business dealings with—may have been part Ojibway too. She had never heard of that. Oh he had heard of some Creeks mixing it up a little. With what other tribes? she asked in his pause. He didn’t—oh he had heard it from someone. Who? she asked. Some hitch-hiker, he thought. Which hitchhiker? she asked (like a woman).
This guy was a professional.
He was? she said—I feel I’ve heard of him (and they both believed for a moment that she had).
Spence didn’t say anything, and they heard the phone line, which was there but nothing to speak of. All right, she said, if it wasn’t the missile trade he was concerned about, what was he concerned about? Survival, Spence said—but, he added, how about the mountain? All right, the mountain, what about it? she said with slight finality—did he mean the mountain she’s heard about here or the same one maybe that somehow she forgot she had heard the rumors of back home before she left? she’s getting talkative (Oh don’t say that, said Spence softly), the mountain that had some mineral resource that affected people near it, some said (she said) a mountain that was on the move, hidden by what was inside it. Did she come east looking for it? Spence joked; he had learned that some type of trace radiation had been picked up near a cemetery in New Jersey, but there was something going on right here in Manhattan and even closer than that—ask her friend Mayn—hard to know just why Dina West had come to New York, but had she brought her family with her?
Are you implying I came to see Jim? You really do look for trouble, she said. A surviving observer was all, he returned. More than an observer, she said; where had he learned about Mayn’s family. Oh, Mayn and he went way back, said Spence, long before the daughter knew the difference between bedtime stories and fact, fertilizer and explosive, before she knew the real Indians out there from that Prince who came a cropper. Well Mr. Spence I don’t know your ins and outs but if you knew how he was murdered, you must have found out the same way Sarah’s father did, and he was amazed at what she knew.
All I said was he came a cropper, said Spence, who knew what they both did—that each wanted something from the other, and they were just missing.
I been slightly acquainted with him for years, said Spence.
The Masons and the global network (was it weather stations or Masonic societies?), and the weatherman’s German relative in Chile and—
Oh there are still Masons in Chile, said Spence, and one of them is under house arrest.
You couldn’t resist saying that, but I don’t know what it means, it’s unreal to me, but I have to talk to you face to face, Mr. Spence. I feel you’re dangerous, to yourself anyway. I feel you’re right in my mind right now; I didn’t know it till I said it.
Just waiting to see, he said.
You’re probably not as bad as I heard, she said.
Spence identified his corner she was to bring the cab to, and he gave her directions. She asked him, before she got off the phone, who Harflex was, and he said, hesitantly, that he didn’t know, so they both knew that he had it back there somewhere but not quite on tap.
Well, you phoned me, Spence said, I didn’t phone you. She replied that he had phoned her two times at her hotel when she had arrived in New York.
Once, said Spence. Twice, she said; the second to have breakfast the message said.
You sure that wasn’t a phone call you made to Mayn?
A Mr. Spence phoned twice, she said.
Sounds like you didn’t bring your family, he said.
What do you know about my family? she said, and hung up, though doubtless en route to a Manhattan cab. The phone rang and rang, stopped, then started up again.
Spence, on the pavement, and Senora Wing, decked in platinum opaque sunglasses as she emerged from the entrance to the warehouse-theater, seemed to catch each other simultaneously; they liked each other’s embodiments but not each other, which was suddenly now clear to each as he looked to his left only to find her as she pulled back the operating half of the old steel double-door and stepped forth into the bright, gray day. "You knew I was going to be here," she called; "I feel it." "I do now," he said. "You’ve been in here" (she tossed her head indicating the building she had come out of), "so you know." "Know what?" "I’m almost in the play," she said, "the opera. It’s destined." "What’s destined?" he asked, rotating his wrist to check his watch; he took a tooled-silver money clip from his jacket pocket and looked at his bills and returned it, and she touched a curl at her temple as if he should have understood something.
"Is the messenger still working for you?" "He was never working for me." "You make problems for yourself; anyway, he is not in the same place any more." "Oh is that where he is?" said Spence, and they both laughed. "You don’t know what you doing," Senora Wing said seriously, and she shook her head as if it were only her eyes and it was light she had to dislodge from between her and him. "I used to know," he said; "do you know the name of the old lady who comes around your place with that old guy?" "Does she have a name?" Senora Wing asked.
Spence followed some glint of her glasses and knew as he did so that the Chilean intelligence officer in, today, beneath his open overcoat, gray pinstripe, purple flower in the buttonhole (cum soft-looking black boots) was known to them both and that she knew this, too. He was crossing the street in their direction, and Spence stepped to Senora Wing’s side and asked, "Did the old guy ever call her Sarah?" "You would be amazed at what she knows," said Senora Wing, "for a nuts old lady."
The Chilean gentleman paused at the corner and deposited what looked like a sealed letter in an ashcan and then inspected the can’s contents. "You want me to ask you what you mean by that or forget it?" Spence asked. "Did you want to avoid me?" Senora Wing said, and they were both keeping an eye on the man at the corner. "I didn’t know you would be coming out of here," Spence said—"you always meet the ones you want to avoid, and it’s O.K." "Are you looking over my shoulder behind me?" she asked. "Yes, I was, there, for a second, I thought the door was opening again, it was in my head, an optical illusion." "Of course,"
said Senora Wing. "You make trouble for yourself," Spence said; "is your sister in there, too?" "You make trouble for jowrself." "That’s where we’re all coming from," Spence said, and Senora Wing, as he sidled around so his back was to the approaching Chilean, said, "You didn’t know you was going to say that, did you." "That’s right." "You going around in circles, Spence? What’s your business in here? you know these people doing the opera?" "You’re on the crest of something, Wing, you’re not just getting into the Off-Off-Midtown theater." They both felt the surprise coming before it came out of Senora Wing’s glitter-illuminated mouth: "That old lady told Goodie and Baddie she liked to see them fight because they didn’t hurt each other and she would always be their friend if she could come and watch, and they said they would remember. And she told them she knew of two brothers who carried messages from their mother and their father separately and stole them and never got caught. But they must never tell the people inside what she had said; and they didn’t until Goodie told Turnstein, who isn’t their real father, and Baddie told the old lady who told the old man right then and there, who got mad as hell and said that that was a long time ago in another state and Turnstein was sure the old lady knew about his freaks ripping off one of the clients and maybe she have second sight, who knows?"
The Chilean gentleman was upon them as a cab drew up on the northwest corner, the very curb where the wastebasket stood. There were two people in the cab, a man with a burnished face at the window glinting against the light from the day and the few drops of rain roaming in a light breeze. "She has a mole on her jaw," said Spence, and the Chilean bent abruptly past them as if to just turn in time, and inclined his handsome face so the whole curve of his behavior joined the two of them.
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