Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Dumb, you say? Not the coolest?

You didn’t say (but you communicated these words in our way though you’re just beginning to be in touch with your own C.U. and told me in the friendliest tone that "Dreams don’t settle anything"). And — dumb? uncool? — I’d have felt your point like misery in the lower back or an itching far inside the ear or wanting to go on a long sleep-walk in the middle of the night or our old question What do I do with my life? — had not the Way come to me where it and I always were waiting for each other, the Way of using what I had always had, using those grownups scattering on the rainy beach, using the knuckles that had dropped me in the dream, using the rainwater that was to spread and leave the photo on my table dry and the metal bed in which I came to, using the basis of the electricity more than it itself that Miriam’s father accused the good witch her diminutive aunt one foul spring day of switching on when he could be seen approaching his string of garbage cans with an offering of trash — using the blood that ran upward into my eye and congealed on my mustache though none touched Juan’s darkroom fist as the reminder from a dream those two guys had no way of knowing about, that it wasn’t the knuckles’ fault no more than mine and while I thought what was in my eye was the red light of the darkroom when really it was blood that flowed upwards from my crooked nose I knew in a flash — clear as by instinct I knew the heels and soles approaching our lab door to be a guard who’d heard angry sounds — that I would tell Jackie and Juan what they would comprehend and I would turn their measure of me (which at that moment would have been no truer than the guard’s measure of all three of us) to a finer bond intrinsic to what I’d just seen on those two negatives at the end and rescued.

"I’m sorry I had to do that," I said to Juan, his back to me, shaking his head.

They listened to me. I was way behind them in the mechanics of the camera, the tricks of film, not even a beginner, not started; yet I was way ahead, too.

They could not see at first.

"Wait, man, don’t let the light in!" Jackie called to the hand that gripped the door knob and that (far outside us as if beyond the very walls) said, O.K., what’s going on in there?

But the hypo did its stuff, while the record was in my mind; and when the guard opened the door, I could use that light to show what I meant.

They looked at what I meant. The guard, as I talked, I kept my face away from him; he’s in the doorway.

"‘you say so, George," said Jackie, not smiling, after I had pointed out to their more normal eyes what had been seen by the camera.

Was it a bright half-head (say, of a Puerto Rican iron-pumping Marxist) against a lighter corridor sharply sleep-patrolled darker in the three spots where there were lights? Not at all — only for those whose future is past.

No, Jim, what was it? I almost don’t have the words.

What was it? A moment of Juan’s true power a blur only to negative eyes that have to look ahead to that computerized correct flesh and bone and liquid — you know, Jim? — of our species’ face.

But not blurred if we’ll only see.

Juan’s power, then, caught at that moment that’s always waiting: between scattering we come from and dispersion we flow toward. Rain-dream material. But vision. No dream. So you don’t have to say, Dreams don’t settle nothing.

So the blur, the beginning, of half Juan’s head was no blur, no beginning; it carried on what was there, the core of his force if he find it to live with it to use it (and even if he could not). I said to them that it was Juan’s power mingling with his total environment which was rough if you were not into it because with photography you were going to get your nice perspective and some old corridor. Here you had more.

("You see the stairs," said Juan, low. "Yeah, the hypo got developer on it," said Jackie. "Oh shit," said Juan, the guard was in the doorway at our backs.)

I started to go on about him without designating him, that guard; but all but one of Juan’s immediate family had been on the film, and I had said enough, told what I had seen for all our sakes, leaving out just private stuff (they would think was just me not them). Here, I mean the shadow in my rain cage far below me wafting, budging, whatever it was doing with a blond silver shine about its eyes down there around the bed whose wood was growing from several points, I was fascinated to find that kid suspended in the particles of Juan’s power opened in the mass of light-sensitive stuff I had arrested the development of (smile) (you smile, you think I darken counsel by words without knowledge? true enough, Jim, as we will see a few days past this turning point) — the kid? you’ve guessed — the kid who swam out of the sun in under our raft. And now with the guard behind me and Juan’s power before me under the red bulb, I recalled ducking my head to keep an eye on that kid only to see him wriggling in the wrong direction back under the raft among the loose extra rope fat and slimy suspended here and there doubled and half-tangled near one of the anchor ropes that was taut through the murk.

Then I knew what Juan was going to say, Jim, don’t ask how I remembered — it comes later. I had seen a mind, Jim, a suspension within that film paper, the very small pieces it was in at that time of my life— swamped but too dry: I knew Juan would say, "Where do you get this stuff, Foley? Was you up at Clinton?"

Jackie laughed. He had not been smiling. I knew that through doing whatever it was with the great surface area of all the faceted particles increasing their area with each division that split the work and spread it far and wide, I had given those words to Juan who to this day doesn’t quite know the power of the Colloidal Unconscious to find him where he is, but is used by it, and not badly, Jim, for for all our waste of this power, it is always there, and always more.

So much of this was the work of a moment.

4’Auburn," I answered Juan.

But the guard had spoken, he was the one I had taken a picture of, I didn’t see how he’d gotten all the way down here to where we were. "You on D Block," he said, question but no question.

I turned halfway round and agreed; he asked me my number and I knew it.

"You look at me," the guard said, and the murk of power when I turned to see it, knew I saw it in all its tangled shorts and sparkings.

"You are not ready for this program yet," he said, "you don’t get into this program till you been around awhile."

"Around?" I said — it hit me, but funny; was it the prison system or this particular facility where I was now hanging out?

"It was cleared," said Juan quickly.

Jackie had done the clearing, with the help of Charlie, who asked me my second day how he could help me settle in.

"I said," the guard repeated, "you’re not ready for this program. What you got on your nose?"

"O.K.," I said, "I’m not ready."

"I said," the guard repeated, "what you got on your nose?"

"Blood," I said, wondering where the blood in my eye had gone.

"You hit him?" the guard said to Juan. "I heard you."

"You see that developer," I said, nodding at a thing that looked like a giant microscope. "You’ll find a piece of my nose on it, I ran into it."

"You keep your nose out of here till you get clearance," said the guard, who wanted to know how long we would be.

Jackie said the film was still in the hypo. The guard said he wasn’t having us hanging around there and didn’t I have anything to wipe my nose with. He left.

Juan told me the big thing was an enlarger.

The guard opening the darkroom door had let Juan and Jackie see what I showed them. So after all you don’t know who you’re working for. The guard, who I get along with now because to the ear I am quiet and I read and sit looking at my pictures, was working for me that day and didn’t know it, or the part of that day that had such consequences for me. And I was working for Juan and Jackie though Jackie thought he was working for me and for Juan separately. And six months later the guard asked me if I got cleared for photography because that’s a good program to be in — they all know it is— but I said I decided against it. And that first and only day in the darkroom my work for Juan went almost to waste because he wasn’t ready; but there was the enlarger I hit my face on (smile), plus a with-the-grain something in what I tried to show Juan and Jackie, so that soon afterward Juan worked for me.