Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

I need to be alone, abruptly retorts the interrogator (read aborts) glad his "interlocutor" (electrical jargon) is wired to the chair in the next room, not this; you can (his retort continues) lose touch with your feelings, engorged with fact like a mosquito or a penis con came (that is, with blood, in Spanish, he adds, instinctively testing us to see if we’ll admit we know that came means not blood but flesh as in "fleshed out."

. . boring, as boring as family life yet not so moving, not so rich; for the current events of fam-life are richer than a lump of uranium; interesting because boring, which is not a paradox to wake the Interrogator, such as, that the reasonings which are our history’s twin valve for keeping abreast of itself concluded at the pointed end of the ABM decade that anti-ballistic missile systems for defense of city and family would step up the arms race, whereas ABM for defense of military strategic bases wouldn’t at all escalate us.

Wake? did we say — as if a part of us woke up, or didn’t. A part of us that if it were not there would have to be encountered. Gibberish, softly calls the Interrogator from sleep, but dreams two pistols with one source not one with two. He is being watched by many in his and their sleep. A singer, for one, who has to think off of both sides of her tongue and knows she has been seduced yet maybe to be a new Judith to this mufti warrior finely furnishing her king-sized bed; he is half-covered, up just to his knee, and she passes her mind’s hand over that knee and becomes that knee so that unknown to this sometime interrogating lover of hers who is a fellow national (though strictly she carries a Swiss passport), she looks back at herself from that knee and can’t believe what her ribs and fingers and mouth and blood have done, she sees her life all summed up in one damned minute (but which one?) and, back in herself again, leaving the knee where it is, she sees through the skin of this Chilean naval intelligence, and though she hears us of whom she is a part whisper Holofemes, hollow furnishing, hollow furnace, she knows he is quite real and is possessed of myriad tissues too fine each in itself to allow space for hollowness.

And while he sleeps on, her father is surely awake under house arrest thousands of miles from here controlled by the system this lover represents here in New York where he has asked her more questions than she wants to answer yet has given her more attention than would her potential executioner, and she believes he loves her and does not think her a traitor (but is he right?), and she wonders if she could interrupt this life of his as he apparently might interrupt the life of a friend of hers though exactly why may remain unclear except that the friend, an economist who was in the previous government and was living very quietly here with his wife who is still more a friend of hers, never stopped analyzing the fascist regime, or being the man he is has not stopped thinking. Has she stopped thinking, a famous singer highly visible?

Singing can seem an alternative to everything else, to thinking and to consuming life; and an alternative to (in the guise of) love. And yet to have been your lover’s knee for a brief breath of time recalls what we, even we, can’t quite bring ourselves to think upon while inertly we too move among self-righting, self-wronging systems, themselves often non-inertial.

"Interrupt? Interrupt?" murmurs the Interrogator, from his inertial sleep system. "Do not think our old-fashioned electricity couldn’t, if we told it to, attack both sides of our mouth that you speak out of: your words interrupt a life might mean break into —into a house or other sealed container or broadcast — or mean stop, as in thief or time, or heart-beat breath-flow (as we say in strategic forces training). So what is it going to be?"

It looked like the dumbest joyride there in the cemetery to take Bob Yard’s pickup truck and interrupt Brad’s Falling-Apart, or interrupt its conclusion (which was Brad-Together-Again, at graveside); but Jim turned right at the stone gate to his surprise, and heard the motor whine upward to be shifted and at that instant he nearly ran down someone’s collie itself spinning round and round at the edge of the road ready to race him, and by the time he was past the dog he found he had stepped on the worn-through metal of the clutch pedal and shifted gears.

And a mile down past the golf course and a brown field of strewn corn stalks and a two-horse trailer all by itself and a couple of narrow frame houses, he decided without warning and without checking behind him to turn around, and he needed to shift down after he stepped on the brake but, upon swinging grandly round from shoulder to shoulder so he felt in his buttocks just that first shadow of tipping, he found in his mirror if not in some new weight that a boy about his age had jumped out of nowhere into the back, a stocky boy without a shirt or (Jim later thought) shoes who’d been working in the sun all summer and had a prickle of stubble around his chin and on his upper lip, maybe the son of some indigent piners back in the woods around the lake (that the Democrat ran a piece on "the problem of" about once a year); and as Jim skidded his rear wheels completing the U-turn so he’s headed back toward the cemetery, he found he had shifted down without thinking.

And when the stocky kid, his hands braced upon the side of the truckbed where he sat, looked comfortably back down the road at their dust like he didn’t care where they were going, Jim without thinking leaned the wheel to turn again, reaching the brink of the ditch this time so he scraped gravel and dirt into it from the shoulder and this time thought about shifting down but didn’t kick the clutch pedal quick enough and the transmission screamed; but by then he was turning again and by the time he was ready to shift up, he looked in the mirror and the kid wasn’t in back any more, Jim had shifted O.K., but a little too soon. The kid wasn’t in the road or anywhere to be seen.

Jim braked. He looked back through the cab’s rear window while opening his door with the stuck handle. He stood on the running board surveying the ditches and fields and the woods a half mile beyond: but the kid was gone as if Jim’s violent maneuvers had thrown him away into the air.

But he slowly turned the truck again to head it back the way he had come, toward the cemetery, toward town, his first driving ever and never taught, and then he did see his fugitive passenger. He was striking across a field behind a little yellow frame house and Jim waited to watch him go through the fence at the far end and enter the woods without once looking back. He wore dungarees with side pockets down the leg, and his shoulders surged as he went along. Sure he would have taken a ride to town but, swung off the truck’s turning circle, he found himself aimed toward the woods, which was O.K. also. Jim tasted applejack in his throat. An old school bus passed him, shading the white line, four or five kids inside, farm kids. Jim wondered how his grandmother had gotten out to the cemetery. They were all waiting when he carefully shifted down like he’d been driving for years and turned left, in through the gate, and rode the clutch to the exact spot where Bob had parked parallel to a low curb half-obscured by grass. They were crazy, standing there as if they would always be there.

And when his beloved grandmother said from her distance, "Jim! What’s the meaning of this? What did you think you were doing? You could have—" he found words come out of him that he enjoyed more later than now because he could not believe he had said them. . "Sorry, I forgot the body."

You can hardly, says the now-ruminant Interrogator, expect belief in a tale like that about Jim driving not so much licenseless as without any practice — unless we had here a heroic episode? — have you an epic in New Jersey, all worthwhile states yield at least one, and Jersey is no exception.