Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

See the neck on the right, above the T-shirt, below the crewcut hair. Hair light like straw (waiting for a match); light in weight; not thick: thinning, they used to say: balding, isn’t that what they say? You don’t have to do anything here, but the angle’s arms are multiplying and you aren’t all here, it’s only the extreme vividness of what’s here that makes you here. Rather than where? Somewhere — not a word for a news story — charted to the fourth-warped, foot-minute future-past, two hundred miles out in an orbit Mayn’s not up to saying he understands, a home awaits entry, a house waits to be held, an experiment in living, the eye of a compartmented lab will scan scars in Earth. Yes, this life of his coming up on the meg that he’s telling himself his own story of wouldn’t be shapely like that household overhead underfoot. Aren’t you talking to this girl all this time the words might seem to an outsider only inside you? He loves her maybe. The he that is you. That home could house an orbital bomb but is not itself a re-entry vehicle. Go back to the motel and get your brown Skylab press manual on the unmade bed under a sky-blue buttondown shirt you wish they would just take away and wash, though you never said that to your one-time loved now lost wife whose messages or auroral emissions you go on picking up though the bang-up in a vacuum of near silence is now years and years away so the distance hits you and waits the way the future stands ready. The one here called you recycled. You get the manual, get it into your hands and speak with authority. Say it slow this time; you’ve no story to file, no pressure to fire it off. You’d do it fast — like brushing up on the stuff. But you needn’t. It’s being written, phoned in, taped, computed on the AP computers — stories assembled by others all around you, though you trust not here in this highway tavern where you’re looking at the back of a neck in low light. Why have you slowed down and separated every word? To breathe? To laugh yourself out of getting a one-night crush?

Slowly it comes out. Red neck. The red back of a neck. Creased more hard than deep. Creased with a wildness and object-deep finality like scars that some writer maybe of fiction’lized journalism dive-bombs like he knows the entire infra-fraction of your American infra-redneck. Scars of what America was? Yeah, scars; that is, just scars. Say redneck. It means a blue-collar male American likely rural often southern maybe farm, who works pretty hard if he’s got work and ready for any outsider who happens to come along carrying his light instead of his bushel. Wait: say redneck: order yourself one: but here are two rednecks, turning on their two stools between which is the vacant stool, the one in the T-shirt very broad, the other in a red-and-white bandanna and attached to it in front a big red-and-white-and-blue leather medallion that looks like an eye with a hole in it.

Does it slip as he gets up? His hand rises to it like a woman’s. But he’s just going through the motions, next to the other man in the T-shirt who’s jerked half around already talking.

"You go on and tell her, go on tell about the heat shield."

"But," says Mayn to the void of the man’s unexpected face, "it’s not what I want to tell her about; she can tell me about it; why I can do without the micrometeoroid shield" (but where do these words come from?) "and I can dispense with the multiple docking adaptor and I’m already trading in my molecular sieve beds that purify the two-gas atmosphere of smells, heat, humidity, carbon dioxide — all but the smell of no -smell."

He took his mouth for granted. Some press release refracting like real life off a slice of brain? Future commonplaces from which he was leaning back into a 1973 past that was more vivid than present? His whereabouts comes at him along a long curve winging through him just as he is about to grasp it — the speech of some other hustler’s information, as for Mayn he just does his job. Is he picking up ripples of the girl’s learning?

"Think they’re going to get right away from the Earth," says the man, "but they be lucky if they find some old germs on Venus to live off of; that’s what I’ve seen and it’s not such a long ways."

The girl’s voice gets automatic: "Venus is too hot for viruses." She is changed by the other man who has bowed her toward the vacant stool while coughing and stepping away from his own and fingering his cowhide medallion and smiling and backing away along the bar until a friend in a yellow wind-breaker reaches an arm around his waist and speaks to him, and the man in the bandanna replies in an odd voice, a voice Mayn can’t place partly because the broad man with the thin crewcut — hair white-thin — is saying, What’s Skylab after the Moon? He’s saying, If they can bend a man round to the dark side of the Moon they better get on with the real business, send a man out to colonize Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, time’s short, split their time between this solar system and the next—"split your time, split timer" — what redneck is this infra-talking? — "But no, they got to shoot three fellows into a Skylab tomorrow so close it’s like spitting out the window (if the window’s open)"

"Tomorrow’s off," says Mayn, about to sit.

"They not going? Well, hot poop," says the man, ready to stare Mayn hard in the eyes.

The girl, who was going to sit on the outside stool vacated by the bandanna man, slips in front of Mayn into the originally vacant one in the middle next to the man in the T-shirt.

"We are not alone," says Mayn.

"Well, hot scoop." The face is definitely void but pressurized. "Put that thing on automatic’s what they’d ought to do; save the men for the real trip. Save the loot, spend it right. All the money they poured into space, I ain’t smelled a cent of it."

But as soon as the girl is sitting, she’s leaning back to look behind Mayn at the man with the leather eye on his throat, and says out of the side of her mouth, "You’re spending it right now," and Mayn across her arched chest wants to ask her if she was the one who mentioned these libration points because how would he know? But Mayn explains to the man in the T-shirt (who after all acts like he already knows, too) the multiplier effect. Look what happens to capital created by a U.S. firm when it sets up an operation in a South American country.

If they didn’t take it over first, adds the man and Mayn finds an effort converging in him and going on, the noise inside Mayn and outside is incommensurable except as levels, yes they talk about noise levels of course, but they multiply, not rise, if that’s feasible, and he’s lifted with them, an object of science (as close as he’ll get) immersed, afloat, so his own noise directed at the redneck with curvature of the brain comes from other levels of him, from his vibrating wishbone shoulder to the redneck’s vibrating wishbone shoulder, or from knee to knee voiced like old phlebitis spasm of burn or between each other’s half-inflamed veins of humor heart to heart, don’t think this drivel unless you really think it, for profit — is Mayn drunk on a curve of light, sight, drink, indifference? A superpower sneaks from each individual nostril and sniffs this angel as he is about to touch the girl’s wrist, his libration between a past Now and a later Then — it’s never been so bad — got to fight this compositeness or be pushed into waking up and erasing it all — plus this guy — say only what you’re sure you know, oh well Skylab is a modern custom kitchen.

Well, it’s the same thing (Mayn has floor now) or similar, with the President, with Congress, NASA, the contractors, you name them: Chrysler makes one stage of the Saturn in New Orleans, North American Rockwell makes the Command Module in California which gets the astronauts up to Skylab, Martin Marietta makes the multiple docking adaptor in Denver, and Whirlpool designs and launders your Skylab food system in Michigan, rotate your kitchen, it’s a lab — and the space suits come from Delaware, where there’s a lot of business being piloted through the water gap. This isn’t just money paid to contractors; they get it but they pay it out too — so your local sporting goods dealer sells three more two-man inflatable rubber dinghies, and your supermarket manager moves more six-packs, more soap, more cryogenic pizzas, he hires another boy, who gives twenty bucks a week to his mother, but people move like money and the bus company puts on another vehicle on weekends and one driver blows his overtime pay taking the wife and two kids for a pizza Saturday night — wait — no, he finds himself balancing thirty Saturday nights plus a piece of a third kid against the alternative, let’s say, of on the other hand a long-held dream of a pool — and wow this balance works out for twenty-eight Saturday nights, not thirty, and he finds himself buying a complete pool package circular four-foot-deep collapsible rust-proof aluminum so big it only seems to take up the whole back lawn turn your backyard blue—