Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  I’m pursuing you. You discussed all this with Mayga. Also, now that I’ve postponed my food trip to Africa I feel I want to justify my existence, so I’d like to know if they grew potatoes in Styrofoam with the roots hanging free and if they developed whole-wheat rabbits and sun juice from specially treated squeeze-paper—all the fruit juices direct so you bypass the fruit.

  Oh I knew, as surely as I made that trip down to the shore playing the detective at the suicide site, that when they made that air-lock cut in the torus so that for a few days while they added a segment the torus was like a pair of nearly closed calipers, it let some of us or maybe it was only me make an unofficial escape.

  Maybe you were a dream the system in the torus had.

  You know me. I wouldn’t count myself among the distinguished or the mad.

  You went around convinced you were in the future and needed to warn others what had happened.

  Why didn’t I, though? I went on with my job.

  You always say that. But what are these things happening around you? Old meteorologists, your daughter involved with a journalist named Lincoln who stagehands for an opera starring a friend of the woman who runs Lincoln’s women’s workshop.

  Waste.

  The mountain that compacted to next to nothing. What about that mountain?

  I don’t remember. Was it made of moon matter flown in to the L5 station?

  When did this future all begin?

  I don’t know. But I always got transferred Earthside out of the break in the torus, let me draw it for you, no, touch my heart; and when I arrived, I was in both places, the future and the present, and some weeks the present was my past and I had just about made it up, but this was all in my head, and years later it still happened, sometimes when I had a couple too many or woke up in a new room, a motel in the desert, where I had been sent, I felt, not just by assignment, and I would think the problem was tequila or the worm in the mescal but it was like the things that happened when I was fourteen, fifteen: I had been returned unofficially to earth, which was both past and present and insofar as it was past, I had to make it up, but it was real enough, the M/E transfer zones where colonists went two by two and stood on this plate to be launched, to be really off’d into the Earth-Moon-space settlements and would tell them what was happening to them but they wouldn’t believe me, and at some point in time but not always time I might see that the settlements weren’t dazzling or original but heartrendingly functional, and God I’m boring you too.

  You’re interesting, Jim, don’t you know that? Or did you mean you had bored Mayga? I keep wondering about Mayga. She died.

  And I would find myself back in that settlement and later on in my life I would have stuff to add to that picture, although it’s not my bag, I’m a humdrum type, professional—

  But how did you get back?

  Well, that’s what’s odd. I would wind up back there, swimming in a very low-gravity pool where the water waves stacked up slowly and then subsided like sandy gravel; but while I was the same, I knew that I had gone through the same thing the colonists had gone through, I mean again.

  But you would have had to go through it with someone. Probably some woman.

  But I couldn’t remember.

  Neither could the other twosomes who got scrambled into frequencies and wound up in the space colony one person rather than two. Maybe it was happening over and over again.

  Maybe I had some memory of it. Search me. All because I didn’t dream.

  You need to think so.

  It was important to me to let the world know what was going on, though you know I was never a muckraker investigative type like what my daughter might have wanted. And so I would arrive suddenly on Earth and go to one of the departure centers where these metal plates with electromagnetic-plate domelets received and processed pioneers two by two (so there were always at least six on the way because the units wouldn’t work singly but only three at a time), and I would stop these people and sometimes they were descending from government buses and I would say, Hey, when you get there you won’t be two people, you will have been turned into one. Do you see how this isn’t me? how it doesn’t get us anywhere? not even to Mayga, who was a nice woman and I have never understood her death, it cast a long shadow—

  Onto you?

  Yes; onto me. I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—

  A particular one, you mean?

  I think so, yes; I was reading a dream, the author had put in a dream which switched on and off as if it was ... I don’t know . . .

  Each dream was displayed on the side of a box kite? How about that?

  And I had just picked up the book but I didn’t need to go back to the beginning to find out what the dream was referring to or what the dreamer felt about it all, and it was obviously the author’s way of taking care of some tricks he couldn’t pull off in the regular story, but mainly you felt the story got stuck in there in place of something else or to communicate between parts maybe, in place of some work, y’know, I mean some real work of storytelling.

  Oh that’s it: dreams don’t take enough work; that why you don’t go in for them?

  Oh in the book it wasn’t just the past. It was the future that was so slick: the guy had this dream and then he knew what to do next, his life had made sense, and the author didn’t put him through a scene that demanded some thinking and some guts, but just made up this . . . where did you get the kite you mentioned?

  But why shouldn’t this dream of yours come from somewhere?

  I told you the thing wasn’t a dream. I was awake.

  But why shouldn’t it come from somewhere?

  Well, I wasn’t any junior birdman, and it didn’t come from studying Galaxy up on the roof at night, though I did have a subscription to Popular Science the year I was in the Boy Scouts and I didn’t like Buck Rogers in the movies any more than I liked jungle nonsense, I went for westerns, the saddles, the boots, the hats, the horizon. What about the kite?

  We could cover them all at the same time, the four-paneled dream-kite flown by a couple of newly weds making plans, the visit on opera day to Mel Mayn and the cemetery, attendance later at the opera, and some experience of waiting for what must long since have happened to a young Navajo whose tracks turning up here and there across the American landbridge from sea to sea break for stretches sufficiently impressive to account for his joining the un-precedentedly low-leaning noctilucent of the late Anasazi but not remaining with that old spirit young in cloud—as if making way across the also moving but inertial continent, he merged his non-inertial coordinate system with the inertial coordinate system of the Anasazi’s stably humid afterdeath. We could cover them at the same time had we the people available. Which means for us actually finding a preferably live body (Coxey’s or the dime-museum orator Browne’s only if the era was right) in which to incarcerate this idea one of us might have, might be, if the price is right, if the chemistry is right, and the idea might be just our self (helped) or selves, sometimes a locked-pelvis-type-focused person, sometimes a man such as Mayn feeling again the ache of wings long-halyard-vectoring to "where" he knew he was telling the truth about the future and more nearly to his father’s house where two cars parked in driveway so we would not have Mel to ourselves hearing an elder doctor-friend of someone’s intone that the last thing you decide (according to a patient of his who had gotten back with his waif) is what comes first (prioritywise though in a coordinate system full of a multiplicity of small-scale inertias you better not wait too long or she will be gone and waiting elsewhere if in motion)—so that, seeing the cars and knowing his daughter had come already bearing the diaries that a guy in a fringe jacket and black-and-tan hair had left with the doorman of Lincoln’s apartment house, Ma
yn could contemplate bypassing this visit and going straight to test his Trace heritage at the cemetery with or without the wonderful girl who might rather stay with Mel and Flick before she and Jim returned to the City for an opera called Hamletin, and he could be glad that, tired as he was, first he and Jean here in the car passing as one unit a chain of bright-capped bicyclists as they approached the turnpike turnoff, had settled the dream question even if at his expense.

  The mountain that compacted into next to nothing, she had persisted. What about that mountain? Obviously, he said, I talk too much; was that at Cape Kennedy? I don’t recall telling you a story about such a mountain; I don’t have one, in fact; but there is a mountain around at the moment. Yes, she said, I’ve heard—it’s both around and approaching; but you don’t talk too much. Try not to disagree with me, Jeanie. I could try, she said, except it’s a losing battle. Well, you’re so damn smart, he was saying while she said, Some things I don’t know: like "Visa to China" then "Along the white mountain" (is that a pop song of the forties, sir?). And some things like "Beagle onto corporation," then "Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving."

  You’re speaking telegraphically.

  I have to be careful about attributing: I feel I’m on dangerous ground.

  This is a service road, the town’s up aways.

  When did you first know you were not dreaming?

  What a question! First time it’s been asked. I remember a Thunder Dreamer, and I remember my brother Brad screaming at night and a voice passing through his screaming—there’s the cemetery, by the way, but we turn into town—and later I remember more screaming but different and a deeper voice passing through that, and in the morning my mother and Brad were comparing dreams, and I don’t remember his but I do remember hers, which my father kept interrupting like he’s calming her to a point where she won’t talk about it, though I doubt that he cared about what she was saying.

  What was hers?

  Now I can’t remember, except it had Thunder Dreamers in it and I never asked but kept this in mind but I thought about it at my, yes, at my grandmother’s house one afternoon, maybe the same day—it was raining, of course—and she could have read my brain because she told me a story about Thunder Dreamers getting pistols and music and carrying them hundreds of miles across mountains and passing them on and she said she had never told anyone this.

  Well, was that true?

  I love you for asking. I love you, Jeanie. I love you for picking something up. But it’s done with, and who knows or cares why what happened happened?

  Now you’re the sentimental one. But your eyes just lit up.

  Pay attention to the road. I told her she must have told my mother too, because my mother had mentioned dreaming that a Thunder Dreamer (what’s a Thunder Dreamer?—I’ll tell you some other time)—had passed music to a man who studied plants who had passed the music to a woman who had studied animals all the way from South America to North, and the Thunder Dreamer had passed a pistol to a man who used to cure people but now let them do it themselves, and there was a picture on the pistol but my father kept shushing her like a nurse soothing her.

  What did your grandmother say?

  She said my mother must have heard that stuff from someone else, maybe a friend of hers—because she had never told the western stories to her because they were . . . they were something, I’m not sure what. But where did you hear about the box kite with dreams on it? You turn there.

  Never mind. It’s attached to that mountain we’ve been hearing about.

  I’m an old factual hand but I’ve been dragged into that mountain at last; it’s the other reason we’re here.

  Seems like we’re here in New Jersey in order to get back to New York to the opera. It’s a long route.

  "Good grief," my father used to say whenever he began to get exasperated, and that’s as far as it went.

  We’re getting close.

  Pull over a second.

  "Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving." Ring a bell?

  Sure; you said it before.

  "Beagle ..."

  Same thing.

  "Visa to China."

  But the question is, who told my mother about that music and pistol? I mean it hardly matters now, but . . .

  These are direct quotations. And add also, "Compacting down to next to nothing—Indiana, Chile, Choor, blonde." Is that right? "Blonde, Choor"? Is that the end of a sneeze or some word I didn’t get all of?

  Are you asking me because I’m responsible? I didn’t know I had mentioned—

  Naturally you wouldn’t know.

  I can’t know everything.

  I don’t know why I’m so mad at you.

  You’re sort of in love.

  I hate "sort of" and it’s further from "twice" every additional year. Shall I turn off the motor?

  Where did that kite come from?

  It had dreams on it, and it was flying inside someone’s mind.

  It feels familiar without being.

  Your young friend Amy heard it from the Chilean economist who got it from a woman who flew in from Minnesota. It had been flying inside her mind from time to time since the time of her divorce.

  It’s a fine thing to hang your dreams on. Amy’s your friend, too.

  We share a messenger named Jimmy Banks, who has an incredible head, inside and out. The woman who helped him protect this bike of his that changed his life is a strange old woman who is always with a strange old man who is a defrocked meteorologist. I went to see them both, because of what I had heard through Jimmy, that this man had invented new weather according to the old woman and was a hermit but lived with her, and they were both from New Jersey and she named a town that was eerily familiar.

  You’re telling stories, said Mayn.

  You’re upset, M.

  Start the car.

  What was the other reason we came out here?

  I want to introduce you to my father.

  I feel I know him already.

  We already remember the difference between dream and wake. We heard of a seminar, all-day, all-weekend in fact, part under the table, part up against it as the interrogator translates into colloquial. We remember the seminar as a generally articulated structure capable of accommodating a multitude of small-scale resource and promotion weaponry. We learned later that in the next room we could have learned something about receding from our embodiments into pure idea under command or electromagnetic auspices or mere stress. Later still we learned that we had been doing this anyhow, as if it came natural to us, angels, porcupines, closet-exhibitionist hermits, incarnations of others who have already remembered in order to forget. Until one of us, a journalisto named Mayn clustered his signals together enough to see a dark-haired beautiful young woman-technologist speaking to an old spine-crust of an unemployee who said he needed a vacation and had one in mind—north-coast working vacation—who might be called Hermit-Inventor of New York, though not possibly connected with those wages of exploration and stupid risk and disperson that we have made become us in honor of such late persons as Margaret Mayne and Alexander her spouse, plus the Navajo Prince and so forth.

  Then you don’t see how I could treat the Hermit-Inventor down in the Village as separate from—

  Was that "Choor" the end of a sneeze?

  It comes to me, it came to me, it came on top of something, it didn’t come from Margaret, it doesn’t matter where it came from but where it goes to. But I didn’t know I had mentioned—

  Naturally you wouldn’t know. Here we are. Your father has two cars?

  Are you being caustic?

  About your not knowing? No. Historical.

  Why would I naturally not know?

  Because you said these things in your sleep, some in Florida that time and some in my place the night before election day.

  In my sleep?

  Got you now!

  In bed I relax. I blather, I run on, I sort of chat.

&nbs
p; Like you sort of love me. It was night. You were asleep. Believe me.

  I believe you. But even the night allows space for daydreams.

  Even nightmares allow space for someone who cares about you to be there and not get translated into a frequency.

  I love you. My father doesn’t have a car. He has visitors. I knew my daughter was ahead of us. There must be one of his local friends here, too. Maybe this isn’t a good time. Who is the old woman who is with that old man down in Greenwich Village?

  Your pal Spence has been visiting her, but she’s crazy probably, according to Jimmy Banks.

  I have to go out to the cemetery by myself, but I want to take you in and introduce you.

  That’s so incredible it’s almost not rude.

  We’ll get back into town in time to have dinner before that thing.

  If you have been dreaming all these years, how do you account for that leftover energy you said enabled you to travel into the future?

  I don’t know about any of that. Maybe I can dream now.

  Maybe by forgetting your dreams you found energy for the other trips.

  Mayn introduced (B.-J.) Jean to Mel. Flick was downstairs with the books. The diaries lay on the table. Mayn excused himself, hearing his daughter speaking with someone downstairs. It was her boyfriend he hadn’t met. He said he was very upset and wanted to go to the cemetery. Jean said he was very tired. Mel put a hand on Jean’s elbow and asked Jim if he wasn’t going away to Europe. Jim said he supposed so. Mel said he didn’t understand. Then he laughed. "Don’t know," he said. " ‘D.K.,’ your grandmother’s friend the hermit said, because I heard him."

  The news woke us. It was like having holes in our heads in the right places, all the right places. We had proved just among ourselves that radioactive decay acts generally so we can figure it ahead of time but is not only capable of accommodating a multiplicity of unpredictables it is made up of them, the parts that are not greater than the whole but just not predictable in the same way if at all. We had proved that this proof was like other proofs that would displace it. We absorbed Larry to us in order to prove to him that he was one part pure abstraction—one part pure, he jibed back, bodiless—and while we had him we learned that Simultaneous Reincarnation might not be simultaneous when occurring between divergent frames of reference and because he was disembodied while voicing this he was apparently not a candidate for that doom the Anasazi healer predicted for some young person who would describe and therefore have to take responsibility for a new form of reincarnation. All events are connected by their horizons, independent words say, and the dream Mayn enjoyed in the cemetery might seem to come before the opera but came after it, as witness the time of day, and, ultimately, witnesses who came there for related reasons: