Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But somewhere else you see folk standing on a metal plate in fact of an alloy unique among late-century alloys in origin. Somewhere else — forget the chain of fire sphering the planet (call it Earth), forget that orbiting household (it’ll be there), forget that stand-up firing-squad routine did you think you were some young Chilean lieutenant? — no, forget all that, for people are standing on a metal plate you recall at a site called Locus T.

And they’re waiting for what better than what could happen.

Which they would embrace but it embraces them and raises them to its power to rid them of their twoness — elsewhere, not here in Fla — where the night smells of sugar percentage in the ketchup field.

And the couples waiting at Locus T — married? lovers? comrades? — seem cool and content, made of titanium, say, and about to be alloyed with a corrosion-resistant future. And only you know something, and you’re carrying it on you. It must be communicable, herd-wise; what is it? A number of those here seem not to find you dangerous. Hell, we all show traces of this ‘n that.

You were in future: that’s why you’re slow to execute. A shadow of the future? Hell no! You’ve no less than come back from the future. You have a power. Naturally don’t want to overuse or underuse it.

But here you are to give the order. Your teeth press your lower lip, or is that the floor, it’s so rough.

Give the order, give it through the gap. The gap? This vacant space between the arms. Left arm, right arm. The order can’t be executed if it isn’t heard (it says here). So execute, man, execute. You’ve been well coached, you have desire. Where’s the inspirational coach who said, "My guys like to hit and be hit"? The football coach in New Jersey, which if it had a decent mountain could have been a great state (had the coastline, the weather, the soil, the horses, had the good position north and south), New Jersey where you were a boy and where some story-book truth about (was it?) a hermitage invented of New York — we don’t ever get that right — not to be confused with the defrocked meteorologist whose wall diagrams you interview — not to be confused much less alloyed with some geezer arising in your monster-and-Choor-Princess-and-Navajo-Prince discussions in the late thirties and early forties with your grandmother Margaret down the street, but that was not on the football field where the coach should by now be laid to rest in the end zone staring up with all his heart at one stump of a goal-post timber impaled above him in the sod of state soil where the confined but still-functioning beep-bleep of his athlete soul picks up year-round the cleat-beats of his own executed plays thundering downfield, the football coach who wears a baseball cap to practice, to skull sessions, who hardly feels his tongue say execute when he takes his field general to task during drill for an intersectional clash (for we’ve graduated into America now, and the coach has been turned by sheer frequency of voice into many coaches). And where’s the general in the field or behind the scenes — a rebel of the junta (so goes the report), a revolutionary, but against what? — where’s the general who’ll say, "Execute them," much less, "Have them shot" or "Off them" (like your economical syndicate voice), when just plain "Take them away" will do the trick? Or (in fewer words compounding the economy of removing-without-replacing) "Remove them." Or, to effect this liquidation, he may confine himself to a look, a look intent and/or blank, the look his lieutenant sensed well and truly like the light clamp on the butt the first-base coach gave the rookie after a clothesline single who stood on the bag and now takes a healthy lead off first, his arms hanging from his shoulders.

But can the future know all that was meant by such orders and communications? That is, if you, this Jim Mayn, have really come from there. Or are still partly there or will be there. There is no future, it’s sentiment about what might have been. What say we make a package and see the future gets it? Why, then the future does exist. Yet wait: it has gotten it, and inside is the history meant for the future, but the package is so flat it can’t be opened, it can only be "read" or reconstituted. History is cover, but the cover story is increasingly worthwhile. But the package is being opened after all by its unknown receivers.

Are they the two by two waiting for what is to happen to them at Locus T? standing to begin with on a four-cornered metal plate of an alloy mined not lab-concocted, found in its pure impurity in a mountain of America, discovered and extracted and used As Is? No: call them a bad dream, though you don’t do dreams; and forget this business about your having shuttled back from that future where the people are waiting on that transformer plate.

They don’t know what they’re getting into.

It’s as well a legendary package about an Inventor of New York giving a secret sendoff to a regal young woman, only to receive her on her return almost a year later, all told by a steady grandmother who seemed to make up so much it threatened to be true; maybe it’s throwaway advice from a mother to go away where you belong (now you saw her, then you didn’t) — some fleshly difference between advice and prediction which is the filling between them, block that kick the crowd goes on and on except for a recognizable father who doesn’t say anything but watches him chase around the cold football field. Maybe it’s a fifth of sour mash; maybe it’s one compressed person for the agony of two — some loot for the future so they know.

But*he don’t know. A guy somewhere near the gap we were speaking about just said loudly that he don’t know.

But that’s not you, you’re a guy who knows, who knows an onus from a behoof. Yet wait: give the order. See yourself along some curve of inkling that in this Florida roadhouse, or void Between, you can know a thing or two right here worth knowing, send it or not to that future where people by twos are waiting to be transformed into one. No, that’s jumping the gun. Transfed to frequency then to be transmitted from Locus T elsewhere. And when the frequency reaches that other place, the two transmissible as one have become one and we shall have no right to miss one or the other. An economy the future holds like word that is carried but not known in so many words. Is there divorce there, after this two-into-one technology?

Forget there: you’re here, facing a gap between arms, this gap awaiting your order. Your stomach warps and you hang fire, you don’t need to be accounted for by some group you’re being interrogated by that sounds outside you.

Where you coming from? Is this just another life crisis in face of which you know you do your work? But you’re not down here on assignment, you said. And not on vacation, so what is it? though here is this subtle young person whose heart swims toward your body.

What’s going down? It isn’t new love, this powerful drift. And it’s not mid-life consciousness infection sluicing you in/out of the Untapped Reservoir of voices you figure all belong to (those that honestly don’t dream, those that honestly do). And it’s no more Chile than violence: because your job is nuts and bolts — fundamentals — not slow-blowing a bloody cover so that in five years the truth of who gave who the business can come out covered by the healing objectivity of time’s clarity wherein is the only safety upshot column by column into a morning news of riveting investigative reporting to be read in order not to think about what happened last night. And if the Argentine owner of a string of papers you work for has a brother who fakes his death by plane on a foreign continent, where it leads is probably not worth even dreaming about; nor are you any more into tracing several underlings named, say, Contreras, several with same first name too, some in receipt of political asylum in Texas but some spirited to a reputedly apolitical mountain and put into it like value one day to become minable veins; nor if you can help it are you into fielding blind volts of hardball played by proprietors of a stadium where you don’t tell the spectators from the game.