Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

and while Larry’s feeling a shade less Real than, say, he had planned to, in this and other phone exchanges, the stuff that’s piling down the wire out of Mayn is (granted) told like conversation along a well-tended bar; like chat in transit through the Happy Hour, while conversely what’s this guy doing, where’s he coming from, ‘z’he just like Larry? and why why this absolute stream of talk taking for granted that Larry had no other reason for phoning than to be there: for example, to hear what one knew already, that standing on the subway platform in Lower Space doing some last-second drifting so as to end up in front of the subway-car doors, you never knew any more which half of the two doors was going to open since now only one did; and before long (the man Mayn spoke as if he’d been away from the City a long time and was coming home, well he was moving back into an apartment he had once lived in) the (said) subway doors wouldn’t open at all and hopeless passengers would turn into a new mode of expectations, stand hopeless on the platform in Lower Space, watch linked cars roll into the station, stop, and slide out without opening their doors, and, interjected Larry, if you looked hard into one of the windows you would see two workmen inside the car sitting legs crossed chatting as if there wasn’t a platform with its dim exhibit of stalled passengers outside, and a toolbox on the floor of the car near one workshoe, and a kit at the belt, and a length of rope. Mayn remarked that his grandmother had taught him to look at things and had traveled widely in the last century when the family newspaper in New Jersey had still been going strong. Larry said he was envious. But no news can be good news, said Mayn, for Andrew Jackson in whose behalf the Democrat was founded went right ahead, first week of January, decimated countless seasoned British troops because the news of peace signed Christmas Eve didn’t reach New Orleans for what is sometimes known as a fortnight, so that for Jackson no news was good news, otherwise known as first win the war, then win the battles — Larry, there’s a key there if I could only find it, for — (I mean history has its laws, said Larry) — If so, said Mayn, I haven’t spotted them, they’re like the laws of a humanly lazy if insane visiting despot, there’s just no telling, except they are barricaded behind Fort Nightmare which we can pass through and never feel, like books almost read in one’s youth such as the heavily grandfather-recommended Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens —while, thought Larry, was he kidding about his grandmother at some pre-twentieth-century age maybe still in her teens (he certainly seemed to like her) traipsing off to the crystal fountains of Chicago’s World’s Fair then changing her plans and traveling West further than the eye can see, fields of globe mallows and all manner of southeast Utah and Colorado May flowers, magenta, darkening violet, down to the very finest royal purple locoweed swaying not far above the ground— but Larry’s phone is lost to that We that’s bigger than the both of them — that drives a whole canyonful of color-blind Indian horses to the winds of princely addiction and was known once in the beat of its digested purple to penetrate through her soft Indian gift-saddle to the actual blood of its noble rider the East Far Eastern Princess who must have sat her horse at least as well as this Mayn’s grandmother Margaret tripping out there a decade and less after the botanist Marcus Jones negotiated the terrain on a bicycle who, when he ran out of names for all the specimens of locoweed he found there, named the next one desperatus, bicycling such rockland! — the cliff-dwelling circuit— (Wait a minute, breaks in Lar’ like an emergency operator, a nineteenth-century botanist bicycling hundreds of miles through southern Utah? — but Larry’s always got the little-known Modulus, it will be known as Larry’s Modulus, it came from math but made him its own, working turning and remixing.) Mayn’s talk into-onto the good old screen closer to home so if Mayn persists in not sensing that this phone call was because Lar’ had a thing or two on his mind, Lar’ will do the understanding for Mayn — cliff dwellings, Mayn went on, I’ve seen some of them; apartment houses call them, the sun shines up against them and makes shadows that seem to wander way way back into those apartments: one of them had eight hundred units but whether the Anasazi six hundred years ago had co-op ownership like your modern Pueblo Indians (and the pueblo at Taos is thought to be nine hundred years old) I don’t happen to know, and just about all I know about anything I just happen to know. What are you doing out there in a pay booth? did I say I had basketball tickets? I’ll call you back — and Lar’ thinks Mayn hangs up without having been told the pay number. Larry is absorbed by the thought that Mayn himself passes easily between one thing and another, the peculiar Princess he’s got one or two low-profile stories about — a guy whose interest in meteorology, perilous dusting of our atmosphere in, for example, the Junge-layer of aerosol particles above the tropopause, and the mother-of-pearl night-lucent clouds and the "twilight" effects first pondered when Krakatoa blew a shitload of volcanic dust into the stratosphere, takes him two thousand miles west to check out reports of sky scraping windmills, though it’s one of those somewhat technical though probably not boring assignments of his: a guy who has done, for his boss, as much homework on arms limitation as, if not more than, the government guys whose fringe personal habits he’s got anecdotes about as if he doesn’t want to deal with the "bolts" (for example, one missile delivery system he specializes in, he knows all about that one, yeah); a guy who flies from a Vienna conference to Stockholm, where the disarmament information center is, but then to New Mexico in order to examine strip-mined land at first hand to see if he believes the corporate claim that that landscape can be duly re vegetated within twenty-five years (for whom?), while he stands thirty miles away scratching his head afloat upon desert in front of a giant rock-thing through which he passes himself hardly thinking about the Four Corners coal-into-gas plant but of a red convertible automobile driving across the water of a New England lake once when he was in the vicinity of his daughter and his son, at any rate a man (whatever his unknown personal life) up on what’s being thought right now even though just a journeyman journalist, he claims, and inclined to keep lowest possible profile, anyway a journeyman, an "adult," really into the East Eleventh Street "sweat equity" windmill, called by local Puerto Rican kids "the helicopter" and by the East Eleventh Street older residents "the fan": yet so easily, with Larry, this guy Mayn seems to — What’s "sweat equity," Jim? — Oh, fancy talk for, well, more fancy talk. . "urban homesteading," Puerto Rican low-income tenants’ tenement renewal, do it yourself, in this case a five-story disaster area becomes the pioneer wind-energy installation if the thing doesn’t fall off the roof, don’t forget New York’s a harbor city — so easily seems to, yes, switch between his son in college who doesn’t talk to him, and his daughter in Washington whom he gave an old white "auto" (he calls it), and an environmentalist group in New Mexico urging him to come back and report in "depth" what strip-mine interests are doing to the land — (which Jim says means "their side of it" — though granted the right side) so where’s the chance Lar’s ever going to broach with James Mayn the Two-on-or-in-One Quantum-Regress shifts, when Mayn’s got not only QR shifts of his own but Larry as a mere function of it, so it’s more germane to ask where is Larry in this momentary empty breath along the phone connection, i.e., where (to wit) is Lar’ except in the husky space nearly guaranteeing Mayn is there still, and Lar’ names the numbers: so now Mayn rings back, which in the middle of the visible noise of the City gives Lar’ the illusion of inventing a way to beat the system and more of being able like a pedestrian who flags a vacant vehicle and is given a free ride which the materializing driver will be repaid for elsewhere in the system and not necessarily in kind, a sense of being able naturally to use the public furniture of the City, a comfort subtler than mere economy.)