Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Mmhmm" is the way the other creature speaks, then surprisingly, "Sure": for China’s opening up now, we’ll have to think again about Chile, have to get a visa to China, China’s opening up. Choor, then, only a matter of time till Choor has a nuclear capability? — no, nothing so obvious — rather, till Choor can be mapped so that when there’s an underground event in Tibet shock-waved off the scale-scope Choorward, we don’t always have to jump to another map to check the event’s warp through Choor or Choor’s registering of event while in doing so we no longer sure if quake-plode-quoia originated in Tibet or the indestructible Great Salt Dome of Kamchatka whose peninsula moves toward Choor or on another map America bearing its whole weather system with it, together with selected coastline whose breaks correlate with zero-pressure pockets above but do not show up to naked eye.

"But Jim — hey you asleep? — what’s ‘choor’? ‘something-choor’?" He explains it is probably a made-up place with precise alternative locations for contingency movement. "You mean like bombing?" He laughs in his half-sleep. She’s too young for him, he thinks he is too old to fall in love with a future mother, he chuckles still or rumbles, and nearly gets to dreamland but he has never dreamed — only hallucinated, he laughs — and she pinches his nose so he feels it behind his trick knee, What’re you doing? she says when she is the one doing. Her name again is Barbara-Jean, and she overlaps the times he is in, answering his "Is the Earth possibly undergoing long-term separation trauma?" before he answered it himself: Yes, she thinks so. The symptom of this urge, he says, waking up a bit, is the urge to figure out what it all means.

But she: You mean when Earth doesn’t suffer separation trauma any more, the urge will pass?

But, he goes on, you got to ask, How was the Earth made?

Well?

Oh, it got itself together, he concludes. But she has not concluded, and digresses to his account of Apollo 17, four, five months ago. "But Jim, I don’t know when you told me, it must have been this afternoon but I don’t remember but those meetings are very clear to me, in the correspondents’ phone room, then five hours later outside the suiting-up building when the Apollo 17 astronauts came out and got into their van to drive to the pad, then under the grandstand when he was waiting for someone, then on the infield during the hold, at the Voice of America table, then Mackenna’s off talking to the creep you don’t like, and you think they got something going, so I see the meetings clearly, but why did this guy make such an impression on you?"

"It’s possible," he murmurs.

So if the event-quake in Tibet-Choor territory (wait it out, it feels like a monster’s monstrously silent sneeze) remains only intermittently monitor-prone, and while we are seeing about a visa to China, somewhere along the long white mountain in Manchuria, the path marked by great sprinkles of green pods of unripe peppercorns — or along some above-the-surface Tibet (nonetheless safe from the nose-to-the-ground Beagle of Darwin discovering an American corporation full incarnate in Chile), a mammal can be seen, thing all hairy muscle-fat gaping out of a hole in the top of a root he inhabits like top of many-limbed trunkless tree that dreams its way growth wise up, up, from way deep in the ground until it just reaches the surface where this creature—

— What kind of choor did you—? hey! did you say choor? —

— "make the economy scream," Nixon ordered for sick Chile, as CIA Helmsman took notes.

Mayn’s not quite with her, or it, and she’s asking, "Jim. You awake?" reaching for the light and thinking better of it—"Who was second cousin to the weatherman? and who married Tall Salt? — is that the name? did the weatherman have an uncle who married an Indian woman named Tall Salt? did he stay with her if he was a New York hermit? is that an Indian name?" "Oh, Choor was a place my grandmother knew about. A place a Princess went adventuring from."

Forget; "create"; take the "choor" — let the credit — no, the continents are adrift this year, next year they will have never budged — such reliable fact as the drift station now being set up itself which is to be a source of fact, freeze an aging Coast Guard icebreaker of the Wind class into a floe and let drift be our guide, plus the Norwegian Nansen who set out like a Viking in 1893 (a big year in our family) convinced that like an old wreck that he knew about, trapped northwest of Alaska that wound up in Greenland not to mention trees from Siberian forests, he might "sail" up the Arctic Ocean to within spitting distance of the North Pole: but if you can (fact) keep the bears off your equipment and believe that your receivers are really telling you how and when (and which) high-energy particles are bombarding the sky at the top of the world and thank God for our weather satellite what did we do without them for so long? — but we need the oil, we may annex Alaska leastways any land arguably moving — but there remains the long white mountain that has now gotten moving, compacted for the moment to next to nothing, and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we find that Choor now positions itself by what events occur naturally around it, and since we can’t find that mountain suddenly except in self-styled angel voices living us and tracking some Wide Load traveling a highway by night (no big problem, just get the route straight, the mileage figures and approximate bearings), and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we figure that Choor, or feel that this mountain, may have gone underground or (off-loaded by day) may get to where we see it is not any place except what’s happening around it.

"My hair goes quite light in the sun," he hears (of another season, not Florida — a future as well, he feels: of going to the beach; living). Her hair is too dark to go light, yet she’s reliable: she finds it incredible but eerily so, believably incredible, that he has never dreamed but she has not yet said, You just don’t remember. "But, you know, you don’t show your moods so much, whereas you have a lot of them." "Sounds like New York talk," you grumble. "Now what was this Choor, these Choor monsters? I mean didn’t you say that your mother before she — well, obviously before she — or was it just Choor she asked about?"

A curve of news passes so near it is surely Mayn’s, but, making it his own, he feels in his mouth a tongue of prediction: Mayn will fall in love again if, and only if, he finds the formula joining (i) his uncontrollable power to witness two persons transferred by frequency into one; (2) his faith that the Chilean economist matters more even than his connection with post-Allende politics and the Spence link; and (3) his lifelong inability to dream.

Then a tender compliment feels you where you live but some countdown the end of whose unseen hand sure reminds him he’s forgotten a little lower-back dread born of today though of a future known in one’s system if not spelled out except in some longer, tough stranger-tongue in the old animal mouth: that you yourself are this vagrant stump-tail monkey-bird Choor Mon’, still not quite shaped despite all these generations, and of which the mountain really remains to be found, for the coastline breaks that won’t stay put when you go looking for them hours after your infra-red aerial scan has jointed and correlated them with unfamiliar uncaused weather pockets of non-pressure mount up, until the impossible shape asking more and more to be called ancient threatens to be understood by not the curves and equations of some loner Meteorologist of New York but actually him whom you never dreamt of identifying with earlier Hermit-Inventors of New York historied by a grandmother whose tales made up to fill a grandson’s mother-gap became extra-true at a bad time for you. You are the He who belongs to that Mountain of Choor, but what’s a monster nowadays, and if — God! — angels have had to get into evolution and haven’t the power they once had to be absent and/or give potentiality, why more and more monsters with or without new role models may also be deciding to join the human race. Let me get this straight, she’s saying, your aim was… to succeed in not changing the world?