Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Anyway (but God! nothing was any way), the next morning and early afternoon Larry had bothered to check out Amy’s fate, though she was drifting away from him, well always close at heart for he would never change toward her, he’s her friend for God’s sake and prob’ly on some strange parallel trip to hers, meet for a beer some year or cross jaws on some far-future phone waiting maybe just around the rincon if some angel (Hell’s or other or all of the above) hasn’t ripped its hookah out by the roots in anger at the system, drifting ‘way from Lar’ along her own parallel path, but his own orbit had to be his course, which was no-going-in-circles any more but was heady-looking toward unknown new friends, new people, wing out to the West Coast (New York’11 be here waiting) so, then, if, given, a heady orbit into the immediate future, well just a bit of a spin, if skewed — but fuck skew! let it go, let it crawl up Dr. Rail’s blackboard graphed out of someone else’s mind who was controlling the economy if not every day — Amy, Amy, the fine beautiful elsewhere-skew-orbital Amy’s all right — she had come to work at noon, having called in; and Larry had finessed the switchboard lady into telling him that Amy was wearing what he knew to be the same clothes as those in which she disappeared the night before, though then he contemplated her underwear and that upset him, skewed him, he didn’t know why, it was because (yes) he started to take off her clothes only to fear her helplessness. But having finessed the switchboard operator he then spoke to Amy in the flesh and she sort of said she was sorry. Oh she had been summoned on an unexpected research chore— What chore? Lar’ didn’t block himself from asking— Oh a deadline, some music, some ethnic music, they had to get some information on it, her boss needed her, she should have left Larry a— Sure, sure, he said — but she was O.K. And Larry did not seem to surprise her by not pursuing the matter.

But now four days later, Larry thought he was over Amy, and Larry’s Economics classmate Donald Dooley, a new friend, put his great backpack on the floor of Larry’s room and leaned up against the edge of Larry’s rolltop desk purchased for Larry by his mother shortly before she had split (split? but she was the one who had stayed — or, that is, stayed on in the Long Island house). Donald was agreeing at length, that the heart as a bodily organ had little to do with your feelings, for that was bullshit, though your chest was for sure a key area in the feelings and the heart of course could be affected by the feelings, even a plastic heart, if there were any yet; feelings, whether heart-rooted or not, must never be dismissed, especially your own, and happened to be the basis of most thought (not all) and might be more (than brain) why thought went on and on, though sometimes it was hardly, you know, thought.

You say "sometimes" quite a lot, Larry said. Actually, Donald and Larry awaited Donald’s girlfriend, who was meeting Donald at Larry’s apartment house in Murray Hill. Larry and Donald were discussing not exactly anatomy or "capital pun." or Mai thus in a Radioactive Era or straight Economics assignments, but reincarnation; God, Donald had brought it up, not Larry, Larry was sure of that, though they shared the view that there were different forms, some in action from moment to moment though Donald wasn’t sure how.

Donald had raised his chin aiming his brown beard at the photograph of Sequoya, the Cherokee genius whose English-alphabet syllable notation for his people’s language enabled them to put out their own newspaper and influenced them to write their own constitution. The picture had been given to Larry by Mayn and had come from Mayn’s father’s basement in the old hometown in New Jersey. A relative of Mayn’s had taken the photograph. Donald said he wasn’t sure they ought to be discussing reincarnation, because it didn’t feel too good today, he didn’t know why, did Larry know what Donald meant? And Larry, who was envisioning Donald’s girl, whom he had never met, recounted a dream he had had the night before.

First, however, he added that he had an elder friend who claimed never to have had these regular sleeping dreams, and Donald, who turned out to be surprisingly just Larry’s age to the week and with whom Larry realized he wanted to be. . not outa here, though it’s like that, but — outa here and here at the same time, or left alone… but with Donald (or whoever) who had seemed militant and superior when Larry had heard him in Eco class try to carve Professor Rail limb from limb, silver horseshoe belt buckle and all, but now was just Donald ( yea D.D.!)— nodded rapidly as if he too had known someone who didn’t dream, and, though listening to Lar’ here, then abruptly so softly interjected, "You might be dreaming/or him — know what I mean?"

In Larry’s dream, driven on but braked and reined in ("You’re a dream, guy," sillies D.D. suddenly), a dream that in fact Larry had set out to dream so maybe it didn’t really count or so he’d told himself as he dreamt it — and Donald shook his head reassuring Larry that it did count) — Larry had (and here was the point) lost his father’s name. Martin, Dave, Donald (!), Ted, Stanislas, Asa, Lou, Beebe (! there was a first name for you), Jaime, Manny, Angel, Sandy. But then it came back to Larry underground like a thing or animal and so he could introduce his father to an eligible woman who by chance had shaved herself according to the cunt-positive program of his mother’s friend Grace Kimball who dropped in on Larry and rapped about whatever he wanted to rap about and licked the drip flow off the rim of the buckwheat honey jar having generously sweetened her coffee hit — for Lar’s into making finest (home-ground) Colombian lately. Donald Dooley frowned at all or some of this, maybe the Cunt Positive? but tilted his face to show he was still here — and it was still hard to see through a piss-saffron shower-curtain-type robe which in the dream Larry knew was no big deal, it was like taking a pee, and the "underground" through which his father’s name came back to him in the dream was ducted into Larry’s vein so when that name "Marv" came back to him it was wired into circulation desde luego (at once) if he could only figure how, but in the dream his heart was a big octopus-eye with its friendly arms curved back into it and it knew how the stuff in the dream got wired into circ but didn’t let on how except within the motion of its own "dream" system, except Lar’ felt that where the curvature of the at least left ventricle was greatest the pressure of the emotion was, too — which was the reverse of some Dreaded-Modulus-mode ratio stuck in the back of his mind like he had a windpipe in his mind but the curvatures in question under varying degrees of dilation might contour-code an actual other person which in some mode you were —under certain unknown pressures. Yet, God knew, Larry was so tired coping (and mainly with his parents), that — he had given up and woken, knowing that his father was not here and knowing, as he resisted the coincidental drive to make waking up congruent with getting up, that it would be all right to lie in bed — chewing chalk, his gums felt like — and let his dreams — (Be good to your body, said Donald.)

Larry had a lot of dreams, a real load of dreams, while this older friend the newsman Mayn claimed never to have ‘em at all, and Lar’ privately, because it was complicated to get into with Donald, knew that Mayn awaited Larry’s latest and (who knew?) definitive views on Simultaneous Reincarnation — not, he hoped, so Mayn could retell them over a fatherly beer with Amy (who Larry knew now could never love him), or even to a humorous, husky, and husky-voiced man named Ted though Ted had only a few more months to live and wanted to spend it in memorable conversation — but to settle if Jim’s past life could really have been in future, for Larry cared about Jim and not in just the sense that all people matter more or less). Jim, O.K., did have waking dreams, though ofttimes thorough and far-grasping. Larry could say almost anything to Jim but could not for some reason disagree with him on this if only to the point of reminding him that infants dreamed far more than grownups. Champion of all dreamers was, you know, the fetus. And if with twins or triplets (the Ur consciousness-raising group) your fetus didn’t have on average as much privacy and freedom of growth to get the circuitry developing, maybe on the other hand sibling interference multiplied the voltages, and if during gestation the individual fetus didn’t have much content to dream about, God, think what it had been recently through, arriving into being ! — plus the fact that humans had nothing to do during gestation unlike shark fetuses that had teeth from the seminal moment or absolute beginning— Conceived with teeth? challenged D.D. — and went after each other in-womb, getting right down to it, obstacles each to each uniting a good fight and nutrient value where only one can win, that is, the one that survives for the mother-sub to fire forth her one surviving offspring (but shit! it’s astern, of course) full-speed on B-day.