Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But margin and center turned out to be fact or lunacy, too: total-waste-use apartment-complex project, or some movable mountain’s mineral "bank" capable of, upon installation wherever it surfaced, literally brainwashing all those dwelling within its range so as to pan, like gold it could become, the illusion that it had stood there for centuries. Margin or center? — the hopelessly rigged, hawsered, shrouded, and convincing stories where that Hermit-Inventor figured, and the (well) real man, skinny old geezer who really died fifty miles away in New York City and whom Jim had asked Margaret about, and, after her death, did not ask Alexander about any more than Jim had even, over the years, had to struggle to keep from linking these old matters with his sudden interest in the U-2 fiasco and, from then on, during the sixties, its cover story’s subject, which was real weather reconnaissance, a fictional cover story made out of actual meteorology.

Margin or center? — Margaret’s Hermit-Inventor’s reputedly incarnate nephew carrying on original weather work; and some elder maverick in this later routine life surfacing twenty years later in the seventies, sometime employed in Texas and in a Colorado "center" then later as expert consultant on a New Jersey pirate TV station where he first voiced his "coastal" theories till he lost that job, released to custody of self (and social security), there visited by Mayn — but, if disemployed, now at his free work and with barely enough from a forgotten patent to support an old unrelated woman babbling someplace in that railroad flat with shit-eating old walls—

No problem, this original man unwilling to spend time (and living space) telling workaday newsman (covering he’s not quite sure yet what) differential equations for minute variables in evolution of atmosphere — for a weather conceived as scene for or product of a unified field locking together the four great forces: a new weather (according to this lone, unfrocked weather thinker) in that not only precipitation and cloud formation but the apparently local precipitation of wind might be indirectly radioactive in origin: you begin to get a reading on the overhead dynamics in the vicinity of some eastern coastlines — to be specific, vertically stacked interfaces, these possibly due to an oscillating radiance you infer from graphs of upper-air heat-swings and of shifts of cloud cover. .

(which Mayn checked against the "pictures" done in black and red on opened-out brown-paper supermarket bags on the battered walls of the hermitlike maverick’s apartment; and heard the old lady’s continuing, rather musical talk in some next room; and found in an awful unframed window of understanding become his whole torso and head, that his elder host’s science-on-spec ("Oh, ‘guess science gets the halo nowadays — or am I out of date?") is tracing an old daydream seed of Mayn’s too long ago digested: so unthinkably far away from (apropos of future lasers penetrating storms and reflecting information perfectly back through turbulence) the old maverick’s humble mention of Lewis Fry Richardson (good English Quaker who resigned from the Meteorological Office when it was swallowed by the Air Ministry and who died — just three years after Margaret — having taken the study of wind distinct from its velocity so far as to have formulated a law of turbulent mutual dispersion of particles): and oscillating radiant (O.K., he’s hearing this succinct and separate man) energy product of relations between some near and stationary magnetism and some far and moving magnetism: these due to radioactive parcels or process, associated in some quirk-phenomena of the last decade, with coastline configurations themselves changing in some radical way measurable by image; meanwhile this radiance builds in intensity, mounts because of some mountain-like approach from the West.

Margin or center, or fact or term Mayn won’t yet make up. Two screens of material you don’t quite look at at the same time: old nephew of the Hermit-Inventor of New York who died and whose obsequies Margaret attended; and then this new, newsworthy actual person in an apartment with a face that looks broken and rebroken and complete, demoted to such contemplations as made Mayn contemplate some extra homework; and he had long since told his daughter of this maverick’s speculations, which made her nod moodily and say, O.K. but that word "mounting" made her think about the chance of radioactively produced weather threatening changes maybe due to some tide of slowly heaping government-sponsored wastes.

Margin or center? Mayn went on and on, angelic waste like education passing through him so he mattered so little he would just go on living contaminated to a ripe old age, the "rhyme" to Spence’s "reason" — think how, in quickly boning up what weather he could to at least grasp what the i960 U-2 plane was supposed to be watching while keeping the Soviet Union under surveillance, he could have discovered for himself why wind seems to us on Earth to curve like a bullet or anyway to the Anasazi Healer who could see whatever he felt was out there, but in fact blows straight as a latitude to any observer outside our rotation-obsessed Earth’s (God knows) inertial system— while failing to connect this after all fictitious (after some French mathematician) Coriolis effect with the Brad’s Day wrangle about curved winds — as if in condensing a news release out of California one weary day that, to wit, even forgetting our manned capacity to change the weather we might look forward to Canada and the U.S.S.R. turning hot and dry while some Third World disaster areas might turn into moist green savannahs, soft mountains, hectares of orange soil, black soil, we never connected this future with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and its itinerant clouds of acid droplets that caused the Little Ice Age by stratospheric blocking of the sun, not to mention the Hermit-Inventor’s symmetrical tornado of ‘83 which seems, within his inertial frame to have been the model for the monster of late ‘93 early ‘94 not reliably chronicled by the Navajo (though woven by Earth and sky) that coincided by convergence flow not strict causality with the afternoon of the long sunset when great forces came out — instead of "going home" and that one-in-a-lifetime alignment of clefts and the new post-mortem career launched all but weightlessly by the Anasazi healer’s will so much at rest among the disintegral dust remaining of him that he became a cloud whose name he had never known and, in his only shrug in honor of the reincarnation he eschewed (long, long before a woman named Grace Kimball was saying she disappeared into her workshop members like fragments of the goddess and then would resurface having swum through their circulations for days on end, and know that simultaneously she had never been away), he passed over Landbridge America aiming, if not before he died, so soon after as to be practically the same thing, to see what he had always been curious to see.

In the old sense of the word, Maureen seemed so sternly "gay" when we met at a swing in my building in late ‘75, so determined to say what she wanted you to do, and how and where and how fast and for how long — and again exactly how — for even moment-to-moment sex, let alone parenthood, takes planning nowadays — that her quite real tenderness hid itself away somewhere. It was like a spray of baby’s breath that at first you hardly notice in a white room I remember — you, I — in a white china vase near white curtains, and in summertime. Her tenderness strangely rested inside the seeming strength of all that up-front explicitness and the strict feminist management of personal power equaling the discovery of personal power — isn’t that how her Leader’s doctrine went? A spray of baby’s breath was what she had in her hand in the elevator one morning, sconced in dark-green tissue, and I didn’t yet know this lovely girl with a beautiful leather knapsack on her back; and though she stood four-square, doctrinally balanced on both feet — for as I learned she was into kung fu two evenings a week — her airy way kept her very light and she was scarcely in touch with the floor of the elevator rising, but "it" promised tenderness, whatever "it" was. She must have been taking those tiny buds of white bloom to her Leader, unless she was taking them for herself, to be with her while she was with her friend.