Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And this globe-net of centers engrosses from Capetown to Kansas City, Brussels to Kyoto to Santiago, all data which the econometric projections and new random models embrace while registering results of events so fast that within certain templates of right-to-know publicity-pattern — and so in the minds of many — the events-to-come have come already, do you see, Amy? (You, for whom one’s fantasies may never be translated out of one’s right brain onto whatever handicapped digital screen; you, whose research in your real daily salaried job yields research that will help, say, cerebral-palsy victims speak and learn with a richness and rapidity heretofore impeded if not just bleeped off and schlonked out by the honchos of the industry who have been more interested in the first two days of birth-defect kids than in the void of boredom and solitary confinement that yawns out like an expanding universe for disabled unknown veterans of the theater of debut, Amy.) So, then, a given new model of consumer behavior, or model of models, may embrace, say, first, such events as, say, these three: may embrace, Amy, first, the impending takeoff of a plane containing pre-flattened, mildly yellowed, but cute orphans from a point in Asia; second, may embrace the plane of plate glass fronting a long, narrow, moderately multinational feminist health-food restaurant where a lean and hungry, hard-to-read young man whose pale, jutting chin contains two subtle scar points of what the mujer with him abruptly calls acne, and whose thoughts (he is aware) undergo breathtaking transformations, sits eating his companion’s sesame roll and butter and facing over his menu a depth of field which embraces both the glimmering plate glass twenty feet away like a lid upon the longish, noisy, aromatic restaurant room, the older woman opposite him who is asking him what he’s having for dessert and is herself torn between two desserts, and on the other side of the glass as if in a next room furnished with an orange compact car, a parking meter, and a hydrant, three persons, two women and a man, who appear bent on destruction; and may embrace, third, meanwhile, hours away, the Chief, who, having lined up his putt, grins, shakes his head, estimates the slope and the break, and with a rhythm that is all sensitivity, putts.

The jets of Operation Adoption somewhere in Asia whine down the curve foreshadowed by the rich click shared between presidential ball and club face, while for the multinational eater, about to be pressure-cooked by means of not sealing but of breaching the gasket-bedded lid, what matters is the parallel, staggered trajectories of bomb and fire and bullet to be launched from the three outside, not that these curves actually come from the projections loomed template upon template by the housework of a system as if its thinking has rewired the world. But to take second things for a second first, where are these events coming from? The system has surveyed Asiatic futures to see what best return can be had from the long-term but now terminated overseas investment there of machines, material, men, bombs, and, more vital, demolition knowhow: what return will be suitable on such an investment? Friendship with those who have been ploughed had been run through the conceptual templates, likewise an agribusiness feedback and cultural exchange such as music and dance groups and eastern theories of peace cum Buddhist child care; but the only future seeming both to approach the desired congruence with the original input and simultaneously counteract certain domestic trends like guilt and the decline of marriage is a transfer of orphans which will fill a near-unquantifiable lag or gap or absence. Yet the system’s economy is to multiply consequences both in scatter-parallel and sequence (like alternatives in sentencing the convict to concurrent or consecutive death penalties or other terms) and the system foresees an East-West secret junta so dead set against the orphan solution, so certain this substitute is not the destined congruence of prior investments, that it must liquidate the moderately yellowed, pre-flattened contents of the plane as a counter act.

Elsewhere the steel industries will have agreed that with the decreasing leverage of unions a few union leaders still powerful because early in the game they were foresighted enough to diversify themselves will succeed in urging a certain bloc of workers that the compounding of steel-substitute and rubber-substitute production, whereby (though only a few know which) either rubber-sub will be made from steel-sub or steel-sub from rubbber-sub, is destined to make the industries so much more invulnerable that unions’ traditional interest in getting a bigger wedge of the pie within the newly stabilized economy where durable-goods sectors no longer show cyclical swings has no more chance now than a chronic slump or for that matter one Indifference Curve to cross another.

Therefore, since the Chief Executive (drawing triangle deltas on a pad to represent the finite increments within his variable putt and his invariable program) will be inclined — can be foreseen — to certify with a very slight hike in steel prices an experimental temporary downturn-to-come in the economy; and since increased prices will not affect demand, so the coefficient of demand elasticity for the products in question is virtually unity, as seen in the influential equation (good for elasticity of supply or demand); and since armament futures are sticky if not in a state of international instability over the effect of these events on mutual exports; and since new domestic disturbances, some even within union families where wives tend to be non-union and work harder for less money, put unions (even marriage) in an all-time popularity trough — the system conceives an explosive resolution to the moderate pressures bearing against the new stability: a dramatic assassination traceable to those in the hire of union honchos and international forces, dependent both upon a substance which (active for no more than five minutes after exposure to the air) explodes when touched by a golf ball that has been in contact with, in this order, a steel-faced putter and a stretch of Bermuda grass, and upon the Chief Executive’s habit of sinking putts only of such short distance that the consequent explosion in the eighteenth hole can comfortably reach him.

Elsewhere, a model restaurant contains, among twelve tablefuls of women plus (and including) a complement of men, two former golf widows, two known underground journalists — man and woman — getting an underground interview with a distinguished but generally unknown South American economist-in-exile who, consenting to be approached, had picked this spot because of his absent wife who knows of it in turn because of two new women friends who know and admire the proprietors who, through many turns, are a couple no longer divorced from each other having reopened a marriage if not a barricade supplied in part by the man’s lucrative lobby against toxic fertilizers including some from South America, and in part by the woman’s organic farm in Dutchess County snatched with a windfall from stock in a body-scan company bought and unloaded during the ten months of her divorce — my divorce, she says; my divorce, he says. Now, sets of sequence set in motion by the global system can break down, and the bombing of the restaurant now so vividly envisioned as to be actual seems in its train of causes — a new Invisible Hand — to be as much too fast to follow as it now seems deliberate, while diners reach gently for a second half-piece of crumbly stone-ground bread or, on a consumer’s whim, some broccoli tart or an earthenware vessel of spring water — or nod and nod and go on slowly munching while on the other side of the plane of glass the three plotters having been so actually plotted along the template curves of the global prediction sequences sidle by the still furniture of the street outside.