Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

A left arm and a right arm, of course. ("Shoot, kid," an old voice says in you.)

But the left arm is to the right of the noisy vacancy between two arms, and the right arm is on the left side of the space. Solution is that left arm and right arm belong to two men, not one. The arms pieces of muscle and bone turned by you in a flash into one flesh. You don’t go in for that type of thing, yet you are so much a part of other voices that you can’t hear them telling you you’re one type or another, you almost don’t hear voices. You are spoken. Like voices that hear you. It’s new — did something in you go to pieces light years ago?

Directly across the vacant space on its far side the thick (for lately mortal women hate the word chunky), pale woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. {Chunky I hate chunky, comes the abstracted voice (through aether or whatever other is the latest thing in filters of our life together) of a loved, onetime wife; and I hate pudgy, too. But you’re not pudgy. And plump, I hate that, too, and you may say they’re words but they’re used instead of — No, my own dear, they are just instinctively cruel, you mean.) Well, however you describe her, the woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. Grins at what someone says but looking straight across this vacant space.

The order’s been given, but are the words wrong? Doesn’t the squad know the word? — ’cause nothing happened. Nothing except the two arms slid an inch, narrowing the space — collapsing in. The woman on the far side of the bar flicks her chin up as if to say, "What did you want?"

Well, it might not be worth saying again.

So change it, forgo the firewater, the part that can be changed, your part, the second part of the order. You know in advance what you’ll say.

"If they have it," adds the other woman, your near woman, the younger woman, whose fingers are on your arm as if she depended on you, the younger woman for whom the glass of wine has been ordered in this redneck tavern along the Florida highway.

A house passes overhead far out, bearing its appliances lightly. You have only practical words for this vision: a shower, three sleeping stalls, magnets to hold food utensils on the heater-tray, telescopes to gear the eyes, and insulated urine freezers, experimental sunflowers. How many working journalists have already called it a "house" tonight? The house passes overhead but so far is empty of occupants. No need to reach for it, it loops the earth each hour and a half, so at some point it will come by again. And when it does, no need to duck, point it out to a friend, if the light is right. People will credit anything; it’s such a relief from their endless skepticism. You hear inside you a mountain that dreams.

The house awaits its housekeepers, and they it; they dream of it. They’ve rehearsed inside one just like it. But it will pass overhead many times before they take up occupancy.

"If they do," says Mayn.

The young woman beside him may think he means, "Yes, if they have white wine." What’s happening with these arms? they’ve moved again, they’ve inched back, opening vacant space before the one vacant bar stool.

"Glass of white wine and a club soda."

Mayn said it through the massed vibes of the juke box, the claims and the clamor of talk. The pale, heavy woman tending bar didn’t hear the first time. And they don’t have any white but they got red. Through the lowish light Mayn makes corrections for color, he’s had experience with barroom light, ships pausing in the night while it passes them; but speaking through this under-light comes hard tonight against sound all around him like fire. It’s doing what other stuff has been doing. Speeding up and slowing down. Trace shells flash gold before the big gun’s quake hits you like the future observer of a blast-off thirty years later at Kape Kennedy, and out of the gold flash comes the tracer’s red dot already one quarter of the way to its target as if the dot in an instant of another time stayed still for the Sicilian darkness to rush past it but then (reversing the rocket of a generation later which lifts so slow it’s afloat on some stalled phase of its burners yet then suddenly is off and far off) the red tracer braked on another track to a speed at which it covers the remaining three quarters. Speeding up, slowing down.

Try and step outside this sense. Maybe Mayn brought it down here with him. Not on assignment. And this simulated vacation — well, the void drifting through him confirms he should be used to it after twenty and more years in motion.

He felt like an ocean voyage. (Don’t look like one! — his father’s one joke, on a rare occasion, these days, when he saw his father.) O.K. then, Mayn, wake up and die right (another expression of Mel’s), wake up and freeze yourself into the Arctic ice pack, take three years to drift from Siberia (near the "real" Choor?) to the Atlantic with his instruments if in return he file a slow-ocean story slowly fleshed-out reports unheard-of up to now, the southern rain falling upwards from the Pole. Time to feel the wind and tell the drift of ages of ice, study the bottom where some have faith it’s being pulled apart, drop your piston-corer through sediments of Arctic Ocean history, a year of leisurely hours to get the full story, the only deadline completion itself — you come out in Choor, for all you know, where things changed as soon as the Princess left in search of New World and monsters you recall reporting to your late mother when she who was not told these stories, except for one where one pistol became two, asked you what about this Choor, but never to the best of your knowledge asked what had changed in Choor (on Choor?) after the Eastern Princess left. But here he has not often been in Florida and he never understood Florida because it’s way down below the deep South as he thinks by the map, yet whereas they say "the South" (as in "will rise again") but they say "Florida" (like "Texas") and Florida definitely is closer (Fly me) than the deep or shallow South, so put that in your simulated vacation and feel it like you sometimes feel real tweed or real wood under the seat of tweed pants or smell shaving lather drying in the little wooden bowl or coffee once upon a time in Norway where modern meteorology began with fronts but where the coffee is not the least bit diluted but is as good as the prospect of coffee as you slowly get out of bed onto the floor so it takes you an hour of joint contemplation if in company, coffee getting out of bed so slowly it’s the sixties now — in beautiful, rebuilt Warsaw and twenty minutes later passing (not in his sleep) neatly dressed coffee drinkers less comfortable but more entrenched than cafe sitters in Paris (who seem to have more to do outside the cafe in their leisure or business, a teapot or a ruby kir), the Warsaw cafe missing also that fuller grain of (accept it, it’s likable) noise in Paris that slides density through the smells. He was followed and, bearing in mind the trip he was going to try and sandwich in to Cracow south of where his ass was at the moment, courteously led his shadow, a woman with dyed auburn hair, the short way to the Embassy where that morning all they had for him was a story on how China, which had not then begun to open up, had acquired the best collection of Ping-Pong players and railroad trains in the world. A story filed. But recollected. Like a vintage or a fine hobby.

Nor is this simulated Florida vacation of breakfast yesterday and today among the postcards of spacecraft and armadillos, the souvenirs and sunglasses and short sleeves and elusive mind of the media people, like having a drink of pisco with a Chilean-naturalized German beekeeper who wants not to be identified, watching the brandied December sun come up out of some Andean peak two days after fifty thousand middle-class Chilean ladies have banged their empty cookware marching against the Doctor President’s two hundred percent inflation and his alleged hundred pairs of shoes; and Mayn, upon finding some far window all but sinisterly traced inside him from valve to unseen valve of his inner organs by that rich burn lifting the sun out of catastrophe-knew-what mine of mineral information, Mayn, yes, caught himself trying to inject, lend, lard, connect into the loving picture of the simplicity of this rural beekeeping business (presented by his Chil-Kraut host who declined to discuss money he— paper-montyl —lost to some Santiago salesman for Investors Overseas Services) inquiries he had made into Du Pont’s preservation of the Delaware coastline from industrial development and his inquiries into an inquiry as to a Delaware canal’s potential water supply for two firms other than Du Pont, because the beekeeper has made a lot of money in nitrates and has a bank account in Wilmington like "American Switzerland" and corresponds about bees with a CIA bee-freak scholar in Washington, though such connections have never been Mayn’s yen: his business is get in get out. Of the subject, that is. Which isn’t the same as getting out of your mind, for you don’t want to wind up in that elusive media mind, though doesn’t he find when he gets out of his own there’s the next he’s right in? Where daydreams can’t be all his — some ancient trivia, yes — like what happened in Choor after the East Far Eastern Princess left on her mission to find New World and/or monsters — why some started up right in Choor — and did that fact come from Margaret or from her grandson listening?