Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And such assembled data as the Navajo Prince’s mother for whom a ceremonial sing was being held in order to find a way into her head through a hole chock-full of demons, and this old all-purpose hermit, Margaret’s ally, who needed a break once in a while and went out West to occupy one of the ancient units of the Anasazi multiple dwelling but not necessarily a break from himself:

all of which super-rapid communication joins simultaneously as a tear of anger blinds Larry’s eyes as he shifts to low gear approaching a light that’s still his so that two lunchtime Riquenos (or who knows "what" they are?) slowed down if not quite on hold or the worse for wear join in Larry’s tear for him just as he half brakes then accelerates between their merged units and, clipping a coattail, an elbow, a hand, feels the merest swipe of a furious limb as little as a finger or two upon his shoulder as he passes and, heading through the intersection wondering how he could do such a thing yet seeing, as clank gives way to whirr, that Marcus Jones when he couldn’t think of yet another name to call a new variety of royal locoweed called it after himself, his legs so weary, his porous mind desperately interested which at this moment of near accident that wouldn’t make the papers Larry (who has grandparents only in California) finds the grandmother Margaret was as well — desperate — now where did he get that? — but on the locoweed breathing into her from her soft-saddled horse or from some horse or some prior anguish wherein, for sure, that hermit in his portal-shadowed high unit gave her his eye to pivot her from self to self.

So, as the two Hispanic pedestrians, lurching — nay, lunching — across against the light, close ranks behind Larry’s bike, he feels the two of them like one kindred gap he’s passed through when they weren’t concentrating, feels their flesh by way of, first, one cluttered storefront window (in the next block) with two TV sets angled toward each other, one off, one on, as a hand reaches over a partition and switches channels — and second, a couple of seconds later at the other end of this new block, another storefront and another TV set being watched from the sidewalk by a broad-shouldered woman with two loaded shopping bags that like buckets and for balance’ sake she hasn’t set down, while the same TV’s watched from inside by a man sitting in a corner of the storefront window beside a Messenger Service sign, the man for that moment as odd in himself (his dark hair thickly threatening to grow down his short forehead to join forces with the frontier of his stubborn black eyebrows) as Larry, seeing on the screen Grace Kimball in boots (one of them crossed, man-like, across the other trousered knee) and a broad-brimmed hat beneath which she talked, knows that the screen with entirely other contents that he’d seen barely a moment ago at the other end of the block was switched to the same channel. Now how did he know that?

Well, it might be important, he hears — it might be important, Larry, the words say, voicing a female presence that he had an appointment with twenty minutes ago, a motherly voice that catches up with his silences to irritatingly say, What are you feeling, Larry? it might be important — and to say later, You’re irritated, Larry, that every little thing matters — Yeah, that’s right, that does irritate me — that you’re one of these people that every little thing matters to you, it’s, it’s — What, Larry? can you say it? — Oh shit it’s heavy, it’s, it’s, well greedy — But we deserve it, Larry, we’re working together for it, we deserve it — Wait a minute: who said it’s both of us that every little thing matters to? who said that? — Maybe that’s what we find out, Larry, what we’re always finding out, that every little thing matters — Greed is what my father’s paying thirty bucks into, but you’re getting all this stuff you’re going to use, you’re using it already, it’s greed doubled if you ask me — O.K., Larry, what’s wrong with using it? — You’re so moral: that’s what’s wrong — Wait, Larry — Laying down the law — But I’m not an authority figure, don’t make me into one — That’s it, Martha, you’re greedy and you’re moral about it — That’s good, we can work with that, Larry — You go right ahead — But every little thing does matter to you, Larry. . Larry? Breathe —What if I don’t? — and we hardly know each other and already we really have something to work on — But I don’t want to pay you my father’s money to attack you; after all who are you? — Why not?

The voice of Martha, in her ripe thirties, receded when he turned left; he rolled a block west, silently, fluently, and cut south down Eleventh Avenue (a narrower-feeling two-wayer with a divider), and the voice picked up when he turned north again until the moment when he cut between the two Hispanic lunchers threatening to be one who unanimously could offer him bilingual abuse, which helped to shift him recycled from between them and past the changing light into the new block, to be visited then by genius (I’ll be thinking of you, Larry, said Mayn, who also said that you wouldn’t get him on one of those things in today’s traffic) — genius? because now, at the very moment Larry’s wasting his black Raleigh bike (ouch) on the topographical feature length of Manhattan’s theoretic island, the ruts, crevasses, minor lakes dammed where a landmark sewer’s backed up out of sight and his naked tires can’t see beneath the surface the sharp mean trowels of broken glass (tooled from last week’s jettisoned boddles) he finds what he wouldn’t have if he’d kept this third date with (read the Electric Chair, read D-D-D-Destiny) Ma Therapist, Mahtha by name she’ll answer to ‘n come runnin’ while yet seem to stay where she was a minute ago at home curled stockin’ feet in her soft mobile chair who his father (who he wishes would stop thinking of him) has "brought in," though it’s Larry who’s being brought or biked in to the therapist but en route though receding from the therapist, has found, namely, the real action and Larry finds it is laid out for him somehow while the ground plan of it is half asleep there below him and his emotional bike dozing like only a city can doze, steady and gapped, like breath when it comes only faintly, don’ you know—

But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.

So saying, having been told to go ‘way yet retaining (like fluid) the stored (if irretrievable) impression that she had been the one to depart: and, thus, so saying, we betray in the best sense, that is to oneself (because we don’ need no one else to criticize us we can do it well enough alone), that we are we in two ways — a 2-folded we like him and I, and a all-type we (Do you mean, asks the interrogator all but forgotten except by our hellishly independent Pain, do you mean we all?).

But as soon, thinks Lar’, as that grand ground implied itself to him through the tight-sprung folds of a twenty-two-buck bike-saddle, it found itself obscured by the small tip of an elbow appearing just within the operative TV screen in the first storefront window of the block, before that silent screen was rechanneled to a segment of swarthy marchers flinging shouts, cries, arms, hands, bottles, one at the camera enabling it to pass to a revolutionary man or woman face down in the gutter one bent arm at rest along the curb. So, having registered the well-clothed host on the previous channel and the bright elbow resting on a talk-show chair arm right next to the host’s ribs, Lar’ could hear the broken English abuse projected bilingual rehearsed so often as to be now unrehearsed after him by the guys he’d nearly hit (hence distinguished for a moment one from the other). Which was an improvised audio for the swarthy marchers on the news channel especially since they were at once replaced on camera by the body holding its breath in the gutter. And a moment later, riding past the storefront TV displaying Grace Kimball like a message of wares within, Lar’ knows that the elbow was Grace’s elbow in the other TV in the first storefront where he now already recalls there were two TV’s angled half facing each other and one TV wasn’t on.