Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Meanwhile, if such a new friend as Donald Dooley (cum, or not-cum girlfriend) might intellectualize at length upon genetic engineering, weather modification, seismic surveillance of nuclear tests, and taking the measure of Earth and its chains (food chain, profit-tradeoffs chain, crisis-intuiting chain, et al.), Lar’ nonetheless felt from these new folk who mattered in his life their physical nearness, their waiting energy of concern in terms of concentrically expanding small-scale self-help vis a vis total-global — their moment-by-moment, particle-by-particle evolution in Spontaneous Creative Faith — an experience coined by a woman writer apparently so important he had heard her quoted without ever being named.

But back in Lar’s room D.D. proved to be reading a poem or poems aloud and talking to it, or them, or the poet; yet talking to Larry too, it might seem, who, on reentry, said that that was his mother, his "ma," and it had been heavy. D.D. shook his head smiling and said, "Cut the tie if you can’t loosen it," and asked if she ever played music to him when he was a child because Mira played the piano in the evenings, like Schumann stuff and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Chopin, nothing heavy or loud, music to unwind to. Larry said sure he knew what Donald was talking about, and he hoped to hear Mira play, and Donald threw out his brown-bearded chin, "Say ‘when,’ Larry, just say the word." Larry said if we got it together globally we might not need dreams in the future and when asleep we might just hear music. But not cut-rate prescription, courtesy of Big Brother, put in D.D. — No, Lar’ went on, hearing the door buzzer go, more like a fantastic waterfall flowing out of the mountains of the right brain into the— Was Lar’ going to answer that? — Lar’ said he didn’t want to — but D.D. said it might be Mira and stood up and left the room, Lar’ saying, Sorry—"It’s O.K., it’s O.K., I know where you’re coming from," he heard his new friend quietly say. Lar’ went to look at the book of his that D.D. had picked up and put down, and on that page was a poem of D. H. Lawrence Lar’ had never seen and didn’t know Lawrence wrote poetry, "Piano" it was called and was about a woman softly singing to you, but at a glance it wasn’t just about that and probably when you got past that, you found it was about — but Lar’ got just as far as "betrays" when D.D. came back, looking puzzled. "Must have had the wrong door, got a glimpse of his back and his hair, then he went out of sight from your peephole, should I have opened the door and—" but Larry said No, it was O.K., though if it was someone off the street the doorman should have buzzed but maybe they did buzz the right apartment. Donald was telling how he and Mira had the whole floor, where they were, and it was good space but too much, and this older guy he had run into at the college told him he had moved back into a pad he had lived in years ago (Hey maybe it’s a friend of mine, he did that, said Larry) and someone had stacked it full of junk (—Same thing, said Lar’), couple three statues of women, y’know, and a rusted-out drill press and some other useless machines and he discovered while he was clearing all this shit out and thinking, Is it worth it? and is this junk telling me the place doesn’t want me? that it was his own body he was. . (Getting in touch with? said Larry — No, said D.D. — Looking for? said Larry — Well, . —Looking to find, said Larry; unearthing, he added; it almost sounds weird enough to be my friend; there was a weird bust of some woman he didn’t know where it came from, and a busted machine with a lot of small functions he didn’t have a clue about and gave it to the super or the doorman but they threw it out, but this was different because he had kept control of the apartment during the time he had been living in other places after his marriage broke up and his wife and kids moved away). . "Right," said D.D., staring at Larry’s photo of Sequoya: this guy was pretty interesting, he had been around the country a dozen times and had slept in many rooms and once was sure he himself was the person in the next room yelling in his sleep (You know it does sound like my friend but he doesn’t dream and never did)—"O.K., O.K.," said D.D. trying to reach the point, "because then he woke up, y’see, and the person next door was a woman (he’d only dreamt she was a man yelling) and she wasn’t asleep at all but being given the third degree by a man you could hardly hear until it got very quiet and then the man started yelling" and this guy D.D. had run into right outside Eco class and. . and. . (What? said Larry). . "and I hardly ever saw him again," said D.D., puzzled and staring preoccupied at Sequoya. "But you had quite a rap for just first meeting him, you know." "Well, he said that he felt incredibly empty like he was surrounded by nothing and he went back to sleep in that room and dreamt he was burnt to an ash, a perfect ash facsimile of himself and woke up and was afraid to move for fear he would crumble and had a shipyard foreman he had to go interview about his work when he was really looking into some smuggling racket he had heard was using dry dock work as a cover for unloading, and he was lying in bed ("Strange, it could almost be this friend of mine," said Larry) — and he knew then and there that it would be good for him to live with somebody, like maybe a family, and as soon as he said that to himself he felt really together and jumped out of bed and knew it was impossible, he could never find anyone nor could bring himself to do it, but ("Did he ever find his body in all the junk in that other apartment?" said Larry, unsure of his own empathy for whatever’s happening right now with D.D., who said:) He really dreamt that, but he knew it had happened in the past and it made him go buy a horse and stable it in New Jersey, he didn’t have a clue why although he had ridden in the West now and then."

"He’s one of those missing persons," said Larry, wanting to go out and look through the peephole." "That’s right," said Donald Dooley, "can’t afford to have them turn up because they’re living your life and you didn’t know it." "Didn’t want to know it," said Larry, and left the room because D.D. was about to discover Simultaneous Reincarnation. "God, we can’t stay off reincarnation," called D.D. as Larry strode to the front door and, through the peephole, saw an ageless man in the outer hallway in a (best) western-style fringe jacket and bluejeans and a ponytail at his age, standing next to Ford North’s giant couch but not like waiting for the elevator: Larry imagined the Chinese woman jumping down off her phone books, removing one to look up a number, putting water on to boil, sitting down again on two phone books, saying hello as he entered her store to turn away from a street full of parallels trying to turn into people where this man in the hall by the elevator was, say, Mayn reincarnate but not because Mayn was dead and returned for we had here (5.R.) Simultaneous Reincarnation like the two screens of truth that, on his previous bike, Larry had reached by descrambling Mayn’s informations about some future existence in a very real torus-shaped libration-point space station and his conviction that his grandmother had done a number of peculiar and heroic things out West as someone else, a princess or something, plus much more information that when Lar’ had descrambled it yielded theory weeks ago, and Larry felt it wearing him down and bothering his very existence as the man out there moved from the couch to ring Ford North’s bell, and like a body of light went up close in case North’s peephole was open so Lar’ himself, riding some curve of (call it) relativity away from his new friend and the Chinese woman so he might be in danger of — and Mayn’s voice, on the topic of his romance, came into Lar’s body — of standing in someone else’s place. So keep away from being inhabited by that curve. Oh how (but Lar’ knew the answer) could we be simultaneously incarnate elsewhere (he tried to wipe from his head, returning now to D.D.).