Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"There’s a word for you, suspended above your little brother like magic, Jim," said good close friend Ted, who perhaps because he could not put his finger on the word at that moment interrupted himself " — oh by the way," and Jim felt something coming, "the Chilean lady we used to see here who went back home to—" "Yes. Mayga." "Why she was killed last month, I heard it from…" Ted had discovered the weight of what he was saying. He went on deliberately: he had heard it from that colored guy, covered South American trade for a wire service (who, Jim in a dazed pocket of timelessness remembered, therefore had not seemed so colored, so Negro).

Mayn would not believe it. But he would believe that this was the way you heard. He wanted to dispute her death, or pretend he had known.

She had fallen from a cliff at Valparaiso (the manner of her death not under dispute). Somewhere behind that semi-circular bay so much more fine than the foul city important in direct proportion to its ugliness (where Darwin during the latter half of 1834 having disembarked from the Beagle survived a several-weeks bout with a worming ague induced by the wine of the country). The Chilean lady had been climbing in company with her husband, who had that very day arrived back surprisingly early from a business trip to B.A., and a third person, a rich printer from the North.

A what? gets asked somewhere communally way inside Mayn, who by habit takes information as matter, as grist.

Named Morgen — with an e —a printing magnate, North American, more recently exporting paper products from Jacksonville; kept an eye on things South American; was a humble descendant, Mayn already knew, of that mythical Alsatian mathematician who in the last century arrived in Chile from the California Gold Rush. Already knew because Mayga and Jim had shared these coincidences that barter themselves sooner or later and may seem mad or silly or nothing depending on how people feel no doubt, though he did not tell Ted, who saw still the feeling in his journeyman friend and must have felt the factual coinciding, etcetera, suddenly covered the shock of sadness which itself wasn’t at all unsayable because Jim said words to Ted at once, though aware of Ted exercising discretion in what he let himself imagine had gone on between professional acquaintances, that nice woman and this fella Mayn he’d known for donkeys’ years.

Arrived in Chile from the Gold Rush — from the middle of it, you might say: though having entered an American desert and for a time found no exit from it, at last traveled on one of the steamships licensed by ten-year monopoly from the senators in Santiago to that Yankee projector William Wheelwright, who was said by the Chilean lady’s friend Morgen (the math-man’s descendant) to have inspired Wheelwright to move inland of that country’s indefinitely (and in a later fractal meteorologist-maverick’s theory mfinitely) long Pacific coast so problematic in Chile’s economy. Wheelwright, having listened to his inner ear’s itemized interest rates all converging on the number five (percent), saw drawn on a perfectly good tablecloth (in the very tavern where Darwin had drunk a toast or two to Nature out of a local bottle with a difference) a somewhat numbered design (the original lost up North but remembered) depicting with lines that angled outward, like very slight arcs generated by the Earth, lines that felt like railroads to join among others two towns one of them coastal in a desert province where the great silver mines had been discovered.

"But you knew her really well," spoke a tinhorn husk of highish voice, downbar, and it was not that current curious old meteorologist of New York no doubt (someone else must add, since Mayn would not credit such coincidence) carrying on a late uncle-counterpart’s weather work that Jim’s grandma had described the East Far Eastern Princess experiencing in 1893 or ‘4. No, the voice was the photo-info dealer Spence’s, the year no less than 1963, some soiled-pollen aura of Earth tunnels about him as if he had been reared underground. And Ted replied, "So you did," as if adding only now the known times when he had left, or found, them together, Mayn and the round-faced striking lady with the high color, Mayga from Chee-lay, who had put down in her notebook some facts of that future Mayn was convinced of. Did he remember what women said more than men? Had he drawn her to him? Of course not. Did he believe in coincidence, convergence? But what belief? He was here because of his job but also he was here because he at the moment had not tried hard enough to be somewhere else, some hundreds of miles elsewhere.

But in these fugitive, not deeply bibulous chats he and Mayga had not found out why he had happened back here out of that future that, by no principle at all consistent with his habits of mind and happily pedestrian imagination, was present to this reimagined past (which went under the name of Our Present (1962, ‘3 and so forth) than they had reached Marcus Jones (visibly clearer in the narrow shoulders and wiry torso and rapid legs than from the neck up) bicycling the locoweed circuit of Colorado and adjunct lands.

How on earth—? (Ted’s topographical question)—

That’s it: on earth, his grandmother had stressed, fact-wise, and not in (Mayn observed) the domestic sky where run-about "outboard" rockets never quite made it into the consumer economy oh the minithrust type of moderately priced spinal rudder job’s O.K. for a quick hop to a rooftop supermarket, but, when it came to it, no more competitive against the new microbattery of the late century’s mirakelectric tri-wheel automobiles than bike copters on which old heads got high: whereas lean Jones, so lean that his head at some approaches to recollection approached two dimensions, took his lumps obsessed with unknown varieties of locoweed until, the night before he found his last one — which was the night or late afternoon he ran into the woman naturalist whose white lips testified to her own devoted acquaintance with the fierce javelina —"Marcus" (as younger followers of botanical history readily called him) found the famous bike’s hard wheels at last weirdly cogged right into that grand terrain like cog-mesh teeth seeking but finding an answering surface in the land: we mean the battered but undying experience of his wheels had come to fit what they met until, with things at last adjusted, Marcus thought he didn’t have to worry any more: contemplate tomorrow’s variety, and this morning s lone sunray, an ordinary western wildflower, wasn’t it? — but, wait! with a right-angle-growing stalk! — yet same gray-green leaves and broad yellow head — but no! this ninety-degree bend in mid-stalk! So that, trusting the unlooked-for sign, Marcus altered course to roll on toward whatever the stalk and neighboring events must point to. And never gave it a thought: until in the twilight of the Four Corners’ vast vicinity, the moons of the lady animalist’s lips looked more and more particular (yet not smaller!) as he approached so smoothly that his bike sailed through the land. She called, Who was he? her white lips navigationally fixed by an unidentified ground-level glint — which could be a shard of the dying day — but only if, Marcus Jones thought, ‘The sun out here in the West sets in the east — that’s it." And she asked him who he was on that bicycle, and if he had seen a hermit of the East who on vacation out here fed animals so carelessly as to upset the natural food balance supporting the fierce javelina whose study she pursued.

Whereupon, with a glint conscious in his eye as if she had said the word, Marcus Jones leaned his vehicle ‘gainst a waiting cactus (fleshy-speared cardoon-o’choke, New World style) whose eye was the eye of an owl — which thereupon turned around and shat its guts out — an elf owl that went on shitting blue particular guts out from strength to strength yet then to weakness. Marcus humorously and like a cavalier told how he had been directed to this convergence in the middle of nowhere — the bent stalk asking for (what?) some new significant existence — the right-angle bend an unusual growth in botany—