Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Hey, when you going to bring Larry, I faced back an answer. College and from Outside.

Someone inside me knows more than I, and that’s the one you needed to ask. Unless it’s yourself, these later weeks, Efrain getting out, Smitty missing workshop one week, then not taping us the next, and saying little but keeping his eyes open now, telling me he did not believe in suicide.

Yourself, I said, for you said that sometimes going out on assignment you’d have this dumb idea you already had the facts. Was this to warn me of what I knew already from the tape, oh and from the capability of those colloid surface faces we share more than you may know, Jim — that you brought a message in units only I might put together from that fated man — his name you know; and he, as I told you on your last visit (not the most recent when you were not admitted) I have been in correspondence with — and he hinted Danger he is in from a journalist.

But these letters of his had begun again only after our workshop had gotten off the ground so there was something there between the two, a connection though not through the Colloidal unConscious with him — only with you, if you are not yet much of a chemist, so that in the evenings in this multiple dwelling while Charlie and others on Honor Block are watching the seven-o’clock news, I am catching the two of you — I’ll explain — there’s three Honor Blocks here — it’s not so easy to concentrate on Honor Block — but what I am explaining (since you and I accept no substitutes) is that you and the South American aren’t all I see, but it’s on not one but two screens, sounds like the latest thing, Jim, two separate screens you don’t tell the guard about, but he wouldn’t hear anyway up at the head of the tier reading the paper.

Two screens — separate but overlapping. It’s always that way — neither one complete, and I’m about to catch on one screen you and him both.

There’s his face listening at me like a window, but I know it is you he is facing even if you don’t know, and on the other screen there you are but not face-on (like a window) or back-to, instead in profile and you just finished talking, say to our mutual acquaintance who’s on Screen One, and there’s other stuff on each screen, women and children (I didn’t say "innocent" but you heard the after-image), an orchestra (I’m looking back and forth) and a stage with singers and some people I feel I know in the audience near me offscreen, a barmaid grinning straight up (with her kids yelling in the apartment upstairs, off-screen), an apartment furnished only with one unbaited mousetrap vacant for one and a half socially necessary love-hours, an arm in a sleeve I’ve seen on two men before and a hand swinging close-up back and forth, on-screen off-screen like it’s making the background of walls and stairs move, and then on the other screen as if I’m the owner two forearms and hands fitting a galvanized aluminum lid snug down over a garbage can so I know who it was in the other screen going downstairs, but whipping back I see the sleeve that’s going downstairs pull up above the wrist and there is undoubtedly the blue toe of my old man’s tattoo; then here’s a window full of shirts and jackets and when a bus passes I see me and Miriam in the glass and an out-of-state Dodge parked in a towaway zone and want to look some more — she takes my picture at the beach with her mother’s old box camera — but I’m seeing the other screen and a table with a million winged particles of steam above three bowls of real chicken soup I wish I could smell and we’re sitting watering at the mouth until her father’s hand comes up and grabs his spoon but before I can do likewise I’m back to the other screen but I’m in prison, not my head, and what else needs to be proved, you jerk you — and I don’t get to see me and Miriam but a familiar hand half in the dark reaching for a switch which is dark enough so it could be my father turning on the light on a Friday afternoon in spring when he’s home from the garage — but I know it isn’t, it’s someone else and the switch is for the garbage cans.

Meanwhile, hey Mir’, so what happened at school? She says Miss Heard substituted. It’s high school, Jim. I’m mad. I ask what happened. Miriam shrugs, smiles, throws me a curve, and screen becomes Heard’s first day substituting in junior high:

My name is Ruth M. Heard. / What’s the M for? / Mean Mother. / That’s two Ms, someone else adds. / M squared, would you be up to squares and square roots, love? / And in the snickering silence she gave a ten-minute account of square roots and squaring and cubing and no one gave her shit, then she reminded herself what class this was, but she shut us all up warning us this was a two-class-in-a-row substitution and she’s going to take us on an unscheduled trip soon. For tomorrow we had to walk one city block and write on two sheets of paper (one side only) everything "amazing" we saw. Plus, bring in, ready to tell class, the most plausible lie we could find — and when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist? — that’s a burglar with self-respect, luv — What’s that? the same kid said who now had his particles glowing and would try to make it his show. / Oh, you set fire to your neighborhood munitions factory, you blow up the government printing office. / Oh yeah, that’s me, a lot of us said. What does it pay? I asked. / Liars, she said; you don’t want to be anarchists.

But the screen cuts me back, Jim, to its counterpart. So off in Honor Block Charlie and the others catching the seven-o’clock news are receiving the first commercial, the price your eyes pay for the disasters shown so far and to come; while I, if not otherwise engaged, find on one screen (—am I the real prison guard? — ) a glass telephone booth all by itself under a night street light with the receiver off the hook lying on the ledge, shredded directory dangling by a chain like a higher power not yet recognized, and on the other I’ve got a woman’s arm and hand absolutely still, that’s all except for the address of the free dental clinic uptown, but on the first screen you see the woman all of her except that hand — and it’s my mother shaking her head slow, her eyes not coming to mine: and all I want is to get her on one screen, and is she watching the road? Look, let alone the once-a-week screamer that the Chiefs ignore (and it’s the Indians who’re always having a talk with him who screams once a week on Saturday morning, "The White Dog must go! The White Dog must go!") the real wilderness Jim is what’s not said by mouth which if they could hear it they would be making out transfers for one-eighth of the population conservatively and shuffling them off to Box A to have their rotten cells pulled at Clinton on the Canadian border where you say a Russian bomber has the capability of finding an unscreened layer to slip through over the prairies to detach us from our installations, and is that where the unscheduled mountain I hear about here at Ground Zero is coming from when it comes? a super-compact nugget that when you let the pressure out, swells to an overnight mountain? that’s right, what do you do if you don’t pick up on either screen? I’m beyond those speeches at the playground fence, discussions they were, while the German lady Mrs. Erhard (who says Yes under her breath after every fourth of your words) kept a watch down the block across the street; and sometimes I stopped in to buy a magazine, and I asked her when she would be ripped off again, Mrs. Erhard, for she had a little pistol, but I wonder if she’s alive in Florida.

And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his Times with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.