Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— the two places, she interrupted, and for a second, though he had no middle-range insight into the future and didn’t want whatever bond with action it might confer, he knew that this fine and dear woman was going to be hideously interrupted herself one day, yet no one would ever know if (or not) it was because she had interrupted him in order to keep him with his story as if there were power for someone in it.

The two places, he said — well, it’s going on in the future, this thing that might seem strange to you but I know that I have been in it — and again he felt himself for a second in the middle-range future and telling someone else about this far future and the place it enacted and telling someone, as he was doing now in i960 with her, without concealing the fact (for it was) that he was there in that future. And this radiance, he said in i960 to the South American woman who knows where they import it from? I’m just as ignorant there in the future as I am here cast back from there, but it’s tied into the magnetosphere cascades, cascades, did I say? no one ever told me about cascades out there but that’s where they are at, strictly speaking the territory near the magnetopause on the earth side I’m told, where you reach the limit of the earth’s magnetic field where the sun’s wind presses against it hard enough to squash it — while those cascades, which are right there in my head though I have no right to them and haven’t been able to let them settle, are some reverse radiance flowing off from the magnetosphere like fish upstream into the solar wind but that isn’t really it because someway the earthward wind draws these cascades of field from the direction of earth, I guess it would be sunward wouldn’t it? but yes! the point is that they can draw this radiance off from the magnetosphere in this future place I’m talking about, and have harnessed it, so the place isn’t entirely bad. .

She laughed and made a note.

Oh it comes down out of the jointed plates of the—

— the bubble around them, said the woman like a partner in discovery.

That’s it: you got it: you know as much as I do.

She laughed and so did he. Her laugh made him think of the very short dress she was wearing, though he was looking at her eyes and her skin, though feeling unfaithful about her angelic sympathy with certain crackpot ideas.

She laughed because she was acquiring a language as different from Romance or Anglo-Saxon as Japanese. . where they stand, he said, one in front of the other, an Indian-file twosome and they are transferred a hundred thousand miles or so out to the torus, it’s a colossal doughnut, do you have doughnuts in—

— the libration point, she put in—

— that’s where it’s at, he said — one of them, one of the colonies they would build by spraying metal coat by coat layer by layer on an inflated doughnut two, three miles wide, maybe more, a balloon in the shape of what they call a torus — build up the site by rotating this monster inner tube past the spray gun firing metal froth—

— Assembly line, she said.

— Endless, said Mayn; you know how Henry Ford got the idea from the Chicago stockyard meat choppers who worked off overhead conveyors.

Do we know for certain that’s where he got the idea?

There’s plenty of ways to build a colony, and that’s how they do this wheel-shape torus at that libration point between gravities out between the Moon and the Earth, a circular balloon is how it’ll begin.

You’re way ahead of me, she said, and they laughed again. He didn’t fall in love with her. He saw her bend her head, turning her neck stiffly or politely in a show of trying to understand; he admired her and did think of touching her along the two parallel lines of her wrists. But he was already in love, and Joy was pregnant with his son.

Someplace in the seventies of (we add) the century in question, on the same day that he heard of a Chicago intellectual who had said, 4 4No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country," Mayn was able to describe the vacuum-vapor method of squirting boiled aluminum onto the Relevant Inflated (i.e., the Appropriate Other, we intrude but only on ourselves), for they had the process by then. But back in ‘60, knowing a son would be born to him and knowing he the father might never be able to say the truth of where he, a shadow, was being cast from but not like the flat shadows of the Moon’s newly televised dark-side Sea of Dreams (the Russians named it) he was yet incompetent to see into the middle future and see his son going to college in the seventies, and leaving college to be a scientist, a lawyer, an architect (please not another dumb one)—

— an astronaut, she said.

And he continued with what he could see: the distant future, where, to answer her question, the two people standing on the titanium plate under the bubble of jointed electromagnetism when they rematerialize at their libration point far out from Earth are one person.

Aha, she said, and wrote a word or two down on her small pad beside her half-finished margarita, and then felt free to laugh briefly: What sex? she asked.

That’s what Larry asked seventeen eighteen years later, and we hardly remembered he was still (read here) there, he’s consented to be given a new Atala ten-speed by his father though he liked his old beat-up ten-speed Raleigh from the Island and now has an offer of a hundred dollars for it from Grace Kimball — he breathes so little in order to bring all he can bear upon his internalized systems, none at all finished we understand, many started like variant radii aimed in at a locus of centers where may be found backward a hermit-inventor’s new weather precipitated possibly from alterations in the charge-field of coastline configurations, not at this late date by that north-polar wind shift (you’ll have sensed by now) that turned the clouds and altered rainfall shapes in the time of the gifted, hapless Anasazi six hundred years before the East Far Eastern Princess met the Hermit-Inventor in New York and saw herself in his glinting eye whose new weather at our aforementioned locus of centers got carried on by the hermit-inventor nephew of that old khaki beachcomber who came to the Jersey shore to speak to Margaret before he should die of what whole-grain toxins trekked through his system for years of breathing fire and smoke of bodies flying by his tenement windows, of using alcohol and tobacco, of pouring through himself all sugars of the City and all salts of the elaborate harbor where weet-wit weet-wit the purple sandpipers hosting their southern kinflock of turnstones even more lost than they await the beaches of an earlier day, yet that earlier Hermit-Inventor managed to store one horned metabol adrift in his viscera drawing the rest of his substance toward it like a lip or a flower or flume. Upon which he took the train to Windrow, was found by Bob Yard the electrician sometime lover of Jim Mayn’s desperate mother on Margaret and Alexander’s porch, and was driven to that shore point Mantoloking and to Margaret who was walking on the sand alarmed for her daughter burning on the black towel, Jim and Brad’s mother, yet Margaret recollected still the bridges of New York that now by our reckoning in the eighth decade of the century in question come to nine majors not counting the lighted statue through which the Hermit-Inventor of New York in late 1893 or early 1894 or at least once upon a time conducted the East Far Eastern Princess reportedly as a mist, and secreted her toward home and safety in the East as once some years before in the presence of the then as yet unassembled parts of the giant Statue he had put young Margaret in mind of westward travel and transformation.