east to the Susquehanna Iroquois who he had heard nearby would tell him the meaning of two dreams he had had after fighting to the death a Plains Cree warrior with six rifles lashed to his horse over the way he had wasted half the body of a great queenly bison in order to get her hide to paint his conquest of her on—in the middle of one solitary morning’s vast and silver dawn during the spring when he discovered invisibility both in the presence of his father and far away while watching a Thunder Dreamer at a campfire wrestle a many-fingered yucca-creamflower-eating mestizo until the two of them became one suspiciously looking for the young nomad Navajo studying them while chewing a local winter-loving plant like prince’s pine but up there called by the Cree pipisisikweu ("it breaks it up into small pieces")—though he felt so firmly his invulnerability to their single-minded search for him that he knew the leathery leaves and pink and dark-pink flower had dispersed his material appearance sufficiently for him to be quosi-quaia unseeable for a time . . .
and north to the Iroquois of the New York State where Margaret said a relative of her family had visited a league of Indian nations so devoid of poverty he had written her big-footed cousin Alexander that to be poor in America was your own fault in general and here was a society where no one stole, and white men in other worlds had heard of this and would copy it . . . the Navajo Prince, thinker and studier of things, will not put mere vision of one or two pale-faced boys over truth, guessing from the Hermit that, just before leaving, Margaret was with child: so it was way too soon for those two to be his own sons looking pale-faced up at the sky: nor need they be two! for suddenly they are one again in the face of the pale-haired woman wrapped in a green blanket here at what she pitied as not much of a camp at all, talking to him about being out of work and of a man who will lead an army of jobless soon and she was his beloved cousin near here along the Susquehanna but is not any more, while the Navajo Prince knows perhaps in her honest face that the vision of the two boys who were one and then one again is their vision and theirs is of him, here, and thinking of the waste of his forces wandering these continental paths in search of knowledge and the Princess and the eastern coast, he feels the sweat of his buckskin pocket’s bison tongue and wakes to such residue of that current that flew through him forth and back into the farm doorways he has visited that he is stabbed to understand that the hunter couple crossing that disintegrating isthmus were a nearly unthinkably long time past and the boy or boys seen by him are ahead in time so that while he cannot understand how that can be, for he knows that that boy is not yet born, he knows he is seen by the boy, watched in wonder, it comes to him in the midst of the woman’s words about a man named Jacob Coxey he doesn’t know and a cruel town named Chicago he does know though through the Hermit, who had watched over Margaret there and had studied the shadow of the wind blasting off the Chicago Lake and the secrets of new stone buildings in which people would work—knew of Chicago also through Margaret, who found it a wonderful meeting of all nations—meanwhile as that boy who is at once a man lying as if buried where he sleeps looks straight upward not over here toward the Navajo Prince in 1894, the Navajo Prince by some turn knows himself to be there before that boy’s eyes, light that glances off the boy’s speaking lips and that bends vision to oneself and gets bent and divided by it into other people’s stories that ours become, divided by it into the useful and the great, the colored and the penetrating, and is a mask through which the orphaned Prince recognizes the holes in his head, the eyes forming and the nose and mouth, holes opening even before the face forms in some time held glimmering within a cloud maybe like the cloud above him that he knows contains his old acquaintance the Anasazi in his interim and humorous compromise with reincarnation; and the Prince is glad that this future boy-man he has seen sees not only him but other worlds, other moons, other mesas, valleys, skies, new food sources that could keep hungry people from weakness (for Margaret’s circle cakes called doughnuts that she had said did not puff out well enough gave strength though made one want more and more, indeed like Margaret’s words), even new beings in those other worlds of the future that like the bison’s tongue-flesh could compact the past and life of other beings into power that the Great Spirit or all the gods dispersed in smaller scale could receive and return as creative force for living at peace; and the Prince now could read the very light on the lips of that boy who is somehow Margaret’s boy, and the lips meet and part, meet and part, was he recalling happily something eaten? was he saying Margaret’s name?, for the Navajo Prince can’t be sure he’s not finding himself on that dividing mouth, having found his creature self inside that glimmering cloud, with something like light running out of it which was only unfriendly when it came from farmhouse doorways that did not understand a stern, hungry Indian who refused to steal field roots or chickenhouse eggs, only unfriendly when it was that current that passed out into and through him and then passed back, returning into the farmhouse doorways from which it came so that he did not want to wake to what it was, lest he feel pain or die, until now he realized it was Time.
How long have you been here? the pale-haired vagabond woman asks and she sits down beside him tight and tall in her blanket as the cloud closes above them and his wrist presses the metal of his pistol and its designs.
How long is the future? he asks.
The future takes too long, she says. The workingman is forgotten every day. That is why Coxey’s Army will set out on Easter Sunday from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York to march to Washington.
The white workingman, the Navajo Prince replied, feeling in his right palm the sweat of unknown compactions breathing from the cut of bison tongue, word of him among his People, his going-away, his mutual teaching with an Anglo beloved whom he told of the original casa blanca not in white Washington but in sandstone Canyon de Chelly, oh word of him, his love for an Anglo and for his studies, his mother’s death, stories woven larger and larger in the future he now had a terrible belief in, or pressed smaller and smaller by ostracism and forgetting.
The woman opened her blanket and reached and gripped his shoulder to the bone. Tomorrow is what matters, she said.
Will they march from New Jersey? he asked, and wondered if the pale-faced boy who was not his son, yet was, and who he knew watched him here from years ahead in future but might not know he did, saw this night’s scene in his dream of the past or must rely on Margaret to tell him what he knew.
The woman said she did not know. She brought a loaf of bread out and asked if he had any food to go with it and asked him for a knife. The Mexican blue mare rubbed her neck along the shadow of a beech tree. The cloud, the night-lumen cloud, had moved. I have a horse, the Prince said, but then he said what he had meant: I have a woman.
He felt himself grow so sleepy the sounds of his horse were magnified.
What is Easter Sunday? he asked.
He was born on Easter Sunday, the woman said. It doesn’t matter.
The woman looked hungry and he found a potato and an apple in his bag and gave them to her. He got up and bade her goodbye. She was looking at what he had given her. She looked back over her shoulder at the horse, which snorted. You need to sleep, she said.
He changed his mind. He lay down beside her where she sat.
We too: that is, along the curve of our resolve to be just lying or just sitting, not think angelic we can do both at once regardless of that same old brother’s-keeper-type interrogator bent on making us toe a line while he painfully (read painlessly) unhinges one of our toes each time we say two things at once like that crocodiles when extinct will not be able to grow new teeth: when we already remember it’s best to be all the elements in a dream, the person bravely setting forth, the sea chopping at the gunwales, the pickle sweating in the wax paper on the thwart, the boat itself so regardless of the person said to be sitting hunched amidships that the boat can be seen as empty, all the elements we are, the Moon mistaking itself for the Sun (as Mel mistook Pearl’s telephoned dream for his own), or even the d
ouble Sun that the bodiless Anasazi healer on his post-mortal tour was amazed at the last to see when he arrived above the famed fog-towers of northern Maine and felt the sleeping light in the cloud that was his transitory form turn literally liquid to some point of his own happy satisfaction.
Is it feasible (read bearable) that we may never see these people again whom we already forget their names? Or may never have seen as we may never get to see our own heart? If they are parts and parcels of us, we must be biggish and can’t even see our knee. What is (read was) length, anyway, another shape of void? We are a function of our habit of periodic one-hood not to be confounded with that last-gasp or between-histories (read B.H.) sans-space sans-time sans-everything Singularity, a trans-essential Absence within, though, a non-rotating overall Absence inferable from accelerating activity in its vicinity threatening yet not, in turn, to be confused with Presence so deep, so far inside (± Y) our/your head that one has gone beyond the chance of coming out the other side until the rotation once taken like inertia for granted yields untold other sides coming to and from us: and we would tell the interrogator and his abstract incarnations that sometimes the distance between our eyes is two feet five inches so if he upped and tried to single us out, firing right between the eyes, he wouldn’t go far wrong if we were still there by the time the fire arrived.
For who knows where it will end? who the hell knows (I certainly don’t, ‘least since Schlesinger blew into Defense from the Atomic Energy Commission in ‘73 and dreamed up selective-strike target packages, says M. as Barbara-Jean has taken to calling him) that is, where this late-century last-minute course-correction reciprocity race will end (we thought) whereby the homed-upon target itself acquires shift capability and an entire town according to our pre-negotiated input can be moved off "Home-Zero" at the eleventh hour screwing up a multiple-reentry vehicle’s target-package program that itself can make multiple random course corrections at will: is this keeping things in balance or is this escalation (read speculation)!, especially when with research reaching breathtaking informalities or even small-scale intimacies of in-flight breakthrough, the other side’s disguised improvisations as word of them is fed in are capable of being countered by original "Command-Thought" within a real on-board micro-lab already launched weapon carrier’s and thus countered faster even than old Light itself could have moved with its still very special speed regardless of its late inclination to, incredibly, Change—change traced not only dawn to dusk in two pairs of lancet windows in a cathedral each showing, he was pretty sure, a man on another man’s shoulders with a fifth lancet in the middle with definitely Mary carrying her child on her left arm, but change of light toward Rest, which light heretofore has had none of but now seems ready to be given (given back? given back its original Rest Energy?) yet Mayn will settle for the dawn-to-dusk change of light in that cathedral he will casually visit again in this upcoming "business" trip he has mentioned to B.-J. (sometimes Jeanie)—if he can just get away (well, he has to) on time—it’s a non-official therefore maybe interesting National Technical Means conference (Barbara-Jean surprisingly didn’t know NTM, "means" of surveillance)—para-disarmament, para-national oh god a brains convergence (though for cause) in the French Alps near Grenoble (fly to Geneva), geologists and thinkers and a black CIA executive named Andrew B. (for Blue-sky) Jackson posing as a "close-look" satellite-camera designer, eee-und some happy gentlemen and ladies who interpret reflected-microwave signatures like uniquely readable wakes left by all manner of missiles passing through Earth’s already troubled ionosphere—National Technical Means to catch present and unknown future cheating within of course the Balance of Terror. Meanwhile Mayn’s deadline seems brought closer and closer by a prisoner’s message (incidentally floated upon his announcement that he is getting free of his personality in order to exist within his essence) that Mayn had better attend that fringe Shakespeare opera: that he had guessed independently from his daughter’s marginal but stubborn involvement with unreliable elements and his friends’ curious convergence on a local cluster of events including though hardly keying upon the opera production, all this regardless of how close the prisoner in question often had said they two already were through a (what he called) colloidal awareness (colloidal? said Barbara-Jean, thinking) mutually multiplying this fragmented dispersion of particles bonding their knowers one to another by this universe of surfaces and their concomitant surface-frictions (Mayn thought it was), but more than the message and the opera (and word from Flick, nee Sarah, that her brother, his implicitly estranged son in outer space up in Boston, had phoned her and was to appear in New York), there were these events surrounding (or surrounded by!) the surfacing of an old high-school teacher, and the nagging interrogations of a person (B.-J., Barbara-Jean, or, by her preferred, Jean, by name) whom he had come to love, plus the street death of a man he had talked deeply with on a pickup ride from Windrow to the City who it had turned out was coming back into his life and shifting some key point from Nowhere to a cemetery if not to the home of which it once had been a part or, ‘least, that home by its other name.
That was your name for the town? I like it.
My grandmother’s name for it. No, ours.
How do you make up a name together?
You just do it.
You have to be in love.
Well, she did teach me how to whistle.
Did your mother love you?
She said she was so frustrated by her life she could kill herself.
When did she say that to you?
I think more than once. Probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.
And you didn’t say anything?—or you told her not to kill herself?
No: you make me remember: I said it must be terrible to feel that.
What did she say?
I remember. She said, No it wasn’t. Because I said, O.K.
Did she accept that?
She said, Your father doesn’t approve of O.K.
What did you say?
I think I went out. I don’t remember where. I asked my grandmother Well, what about O.K.?
You always went to her?
Depended which way the wind was blowing.
What did she say?
My grandfather told me what O.K. came from, but something else— another meaning some friend of theirs . . . I don’t know.
Did your mother love you?
So much else has happened since then.
Didn’t she?
Yes.
I know she did. How did she?
By being herself. By telling me to be.
But she killed herself.
Even if she didn’t, she went away.
I know.
But the Interrogator, sleepwalking while on duty among his victims, must trace this albeit idiomatic "O.K." that he has heard. Secure in his victims’ relative dismemberment, he won’t settle for being just in or on someone else’s flesh, feeling himself them while at once himself. Absolutely will not settle for just living their informations, divvied near-sensually by their light, turned double and then back to single by their quaint myths of weather, cosmos, trajectory, charity—myths as gently sexual as
Oh Woman
Old Woman
scrape the sky
clear it up
make it good
all over
with your little knife
the copper one
scrape it down
good
but he must trace this "O.K." that he has heard because he knows in his ignorant heart that it is related to our long-aforementioned "D.K."
Yet in the dark thus, and, his torture workday over, gratefully so (despite games-theory mind-set employed in torture training to simultaneously tap one’s energy secret and auto-relax), he feels through his sleep some half-light coming off his would-be decaying victims as he strays across a next room stepping on our occasional flesh or going out (he smiles) on some strewn limb or steering clear of a passing clutch of bloodlessly extracted
nerves beeping like Frau Doppler herself alone and seeing waves from a passing boat gather in frequency as they wash into the shore of a native Austrian lake which seems also to be moving (shore or lake?). Yet the interrogator is at least not talking in his sleep (whatever he might in his heart of hearts think), for we absolutely will not see ourselves as victims of voice-over for your reality is made by youse (the interrogator has heard) and is known as youse value or basic unit, nor need we be angels to know this, nor need we give off light to see him start tracing "O.K.":
Women and Men Page 180