Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But Jim while I have sweated out the politics of why I’m here, I know what you meant when you said (be brief, you said, be brief) that you wondered what you were doing here (though you were kind enough not to wonder if there was any future in it — for what is there to journalize about inside?). So the circumstances under which I was implicated in the decease of a person known to me would have come to mind even if you had not pinpointed said circumstances by telling us that as of fiscal ‘76 fourteen thousand dollars (and counting) was what each of us more or less cost the state per year, subject to inflationary update, when we all know the inmate doesn’t get that fourteen grand unless he is very special. It goes into a waste flume except that those whose overweight ill health and expanding families this fund floats cannot get off on the insanity of this fund or, come to think of it, the beauty of (in many domestic establishments) a wife who does work worth $250 a week by 1970 par, roughly $13 grand per annum, my mother for example a crimeless victim, or Miriam, such a girl, Jim, that around her I could never say enough. Meanwhile you do not ask, What’s your story?

Now you said you were used to getting a substitute instead of what you were looking for, and that that was the story of your life as a newsman. Carlos takes the New York Times and asked if you had information you refused to reveal and if you knew any journalists who blackmailed their sources to get more info and if you often knew the answers before you went after the facts. But I am communicating now to ask you this: a government contractor, say, gave you what they wanted you to get, like their own press release, ‘stead of you always finding out what was truly going on, so for instance you said they say countermeasures equipment that keeps the peace protecting B-52 bombers by denying threat radars information as to our bombers’ range and azimuth position, but I am asking you this because it was hard to get your attention with a dozen criminal types monopolizing you. . now when you go down to, say, Venezuela or the Argentine (you said) — or, cell-bunk itinerant I, let’s say Vermont (you said), doing an in-depth on the ‘‘insurance cover" corporation you did not name, well what else are you going to go looking for except the truth? I mean, did you surprise yourself and get into insurance and forget what it’s covering?

You answered as I asked and so I understood: but wave-length, forget it, though alternating current comes closer: what it is, Jim, which I put together that I never could have Outside is the Colloidal Unconscious where contact works through the Schism. And I am not guilty of discovering this unconscious, much less that it found me through a lab-less chemistry unseen as deepest bonds. Not that we’re of one mind in here with seventeen hundred guys longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic and black, Irish and black Irish, but only one slot-machine massage Chair in the chapel confronting four rows of pews for player-piano historians with clout and the need to study a captive example, if not to throw up the menu in reverse, but you said you were acquainted with at least one man in your business who was capable of the blackmail Carlos brought up — and you sometimes thought the truth about the Mysterycorp in the points of its operation you had checked into might have been all the time in you. Or did I only guess that?

If the guys didn’t know what you were talking about, I did. Arizona where sacred mesas are not above shedding refuse; northwest New Mexico, where a rocky ship shrugs off a moving desert; oh Jim, hit Houston racing-dog farms, El Paso boot supermart where every pair fits someone who will die, Vermont cemetery-sculpture quarries, New York music; you went into the history of that ghost state Uruguay as sanctuary in the McCarthy period which is like before my time. You traveled some in South America, which half these guys are mapping runs to in their waking dreams. And you sent word back or flew back to your desk with the information you had developed — how does that work? — and had the stuff in the old attache case bringing it back thousands of miles to your office, well maybe (you said) dry run or wet, going and coming you carried the real facts on you at all times, do you recall saying that?

Why do I ask? Conspicuous leisure and lifetime bent.

Remember when you asked, Got any animals here? — which got a laugh because you meant real cats, real dogs, tiger in this think tank, camel with loose hump in the yard walking between the basketball game and the iron pumpers.

But on the heels of that laugh you asked what I read. Someone said, George never learned; someone else, He got his own rules.

Right then, Jim, I hear Miriam on the phone and see the clear, large color of her eyes. What’s your act, Foley? you asked with wordless eyes. And once gently asked on the way out, Don’t you want to kill or get killed in here? but I had felt the shadow of such words cast long since, and the answer was colloid not pacif-ass. And we’re onto something new but then it seems not much good to have you aboard.

Yet some of us who share interface reach other in a mind compounded chemically but far truer than the sums of its particles — call it Colloidal Unconscious for lack of more up-to-date name: and some whose interfaces lie a billion millimeters off do reach each other and know they are amid particles suspended and dispersed but — I said "colloid" — so much smaller than fat droplets in homogenized and pasteurized (carcinoma-emulsified) juice not from concentrate and so much smaller than the clay in what you call at a glance muddy waters that you (because as I came to see when I had to make up my own lab, we are colloid solutions) experience and maybe use them (only you don’t see them) and if the Colloidal Unconscious is unconscious of itself this is the same as ants in their towers in Africa, they’re all working together, Jim, cooperation life, competition death — and already I can’t help hearing Miriam on the phone at the tax-return office — and you talking to me, the noise, you’re blunt and brief, you leave stuff out. And when you asked me what I was interested in, well you can write back and tell me what you think of that Norwegian immigrant non-farmer who grew ideas you know his name — wore a fur cap that hid his long-headed predictions — didn’t do much more farming than I would give my labor away for twenty-five cents an hour the going rate here, the staying rate! — to be your own peasant outside the walls on the correctional farm correcting potatoes to be someday mashed in milk. And I have read all the philosophers — read them in the programs, Jim — and have found many as blind and slippery as the economists on my way to test myself at Toxic Mountain (rumored by a lone foul or fair-weather genius correspondent of mine) via the Colloidal Unconscious which goes down through monetary theory like laxative or in your planet like dry ice through cloud potential.

You said, Don’t call collect (like the hip social worker whose phone got cut off), but Write, and you’d write too but you didn’t save letters. I don’t want you should get a substitute for the real thing you wanted, you’re a man who met the great Goulart in Brazil on his way out so there’s a chance for me, and you’re after something more than helping a clutch of cons be journalists (my mother went to school twice a week on the sly at age fifty-one) (my substitute teacher aforementioned Ruth M. Heard always made me feel I was in for something special in my life and must watch patiently) — by the way please fill out the correspondence form, Jim — you see as I told my mother who comes up here all alone sometimes real independent with a pack of cards and who is brave but has her own way of understanding what I mean, what I’m in for has proved to be something else, Jim, a purpose: thus I found myself, and here not there, like you in New Mexico, if I got your meaning.