Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"I thought he was coming on to me," said D.D., "he walked with me the first time — I don’t think you were in class, because Rail read your name off, and this guy asked what we were studying in class and whether there was good interaction and what type of fellow students we had, so he could have been looking for someone else."

And the second time D.D. had run into this guy was just last week near D.D. and Mira’s space and he said he had never been to college but had dreamt of D.D. finding a new home and asked if he had any friends at college who would be interested in horseback riding in New Jersey in, actually, the vicinity of a good undisturbed cemetery, and though this drew a blank, it turned out friend D.D. and this guy shared an interest in the relation of Earth chemistry to sudden layer changes in weather and D.D. had mentioned Larry as a likely contact for this guy ("He sounds like my friend Mayn," said Lar’, "heavy-set with gray hair, wears the business suit" — "Not the same guy," said D.D.) — and he asked if we were into any secret societies at college such as the antique hand-gun sect in Texas or the — come to think of it — Masonic offshoot he had heard of that seeks a lost degree of radioactive effect that divides people into two without their knowing it and — ("I think someone’s at the door," said Larry, "the buzzer doesn’t always work" — the Chinese woman was on her phone books, the weird guy in the hall was just stepping into the elevator and the light was still green, the man D.D. described was right out of Mayn, and Lar’ had to deafen himself to what was to come, a reversal economy by which two people then became one, although if Mayn never dreamt, how could he, this rational guy, find himself so sure of his presence in the workaday future of an Earth-Moon system? the Chinese woman was a random particular, Lar’ loved her, she was remote even from our after-all-quite-real smelling-of-ginger-grass (in a green bottle) Amy, who worked at the foundation in the same block as the Chinese woman, and the threat of abstraction wasn’t just abstract, there’s a memory maybe Lar’ needs to dream up that puts him in danger from these tangled others— otros —and in need of new friends, he feels the encroachment again of some special relativity that corresponds to oW-fashioned reincarnation (time travel yet you come back out there not here and you’re one, not two) and feeling drawn to new people because people matter but, by turns, are matter drawing seemingly him toward them as if they were empty chance landscaped pathwise (fuck gravity), he knows what he after all did not (so well) know, that people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined toward these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry of missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives, of tricking our old computers into passing right through, the way a medicine man Mayn joked of made his death an event horizon of new obstacle, which brings Lar’ so close to a threat to his life that he is back in company with Donald Dooley before almost either one knows it, and Larry knows now that the man D.D. reports knowing is of or in or from Mayn.

"So he was going out to N.J. to a town where they tell direction by the nature of the wind rather than the wind by direction, and winds have natures not compass prongs, he had to do some digging he said, some final digging, he said, and I said, You a newspaperman? and he said, More a photographer, and he was looking for some old Indian who had turned into a new species of weather in order to avoid being — yes! by God there it is! to avoid reincarnating as—"

"Please don’t," said Larry, "that was the Indian who made a prediction a hundred years ago that could fall on my head, I have to keep some stuff out of my head, Don, you got to help me but I can’t tell you what it is, though I will say that even if General Relativity does confirm Obstacle Geometry, I would rather pretend at least that General Relativity won’t help us understand local events, like life, for instance."

"Get your head out of here," said D.D., "especially if your mother’s freaking back when you’ve accepted her leaving. Anyway things aren’t always relative."

"What do you mean?" asked Larry, but the phone was ringing and he hated this need he had for privacy, and he rushed to the far phone yet it kept ringing (no doubt accented, no doubt demanding to know from him what he knew or had worked out, demanding surely some particular thing that then turned into events already going on in the hall by launch-elevator and opera-star couch) still ringing of course because in the curve or his small piece of it he had been abstracted once more to the front door which was not ringing, and in the peephole he saw only what he could not afford to believe was there, and D.D. was calling, Do you want I should answer it? while Lar’ saw also that these outer people were extremely dangerous like the embodiment of that tensor geometry of, really, Time which made Obstacle Geometry law but law he must leave to Time to work out, for the Chinese woman he had so treasured was there in the peephole approaching Ford North’s door with a very small non-Oriental child, and she had a key, and Larry rushed back to his room as the phone stopped (but not, blessedly, picked up by D.D.): "What did that guy look like?" asked Larry, leaning against the door jamb. "What’s it matter?" said D.D. "The main thing is you could help yourself." "Yes, I could do that." "Me and Mira got more space than we need, we got enough for three, or even four, depending — and the place is designed with plenty of acoustical privacy — and we need a share to swing the rent. So how about moving in with us? We discussed it, and Mira thinks you’re great… I mean…"

Larry’s heart stopped for a moment. Life accelerated, but he had felt that for quite a while, y’know. Life seemed as dangerous as finding what tensor may plot the obstacle curve of the heart and other interweaving parallels; and he said, "I want to, I really want to; but my father might need me and. .

I want to but I want to think about it." "Sure." "I might talk to a friend about it." "Sure." "This friend is upstairs, she runs these workshops." "Sure," said D.D.; "we like want to get somebody by next week, so there’s time." "I think I might not," said Larry, "but I really have to think about it."

And for an instant of nebulous future containing all the new people Larry would meet, with their strange but no doubt often familiar names, the eyes of Sequoya upon him as they had been upon that last-century relative of Mayn’ s who took the photo and recorded his travels told Larry he might economize and find the basic unit of value and that here at the edge, full circle but jogged up a notch, he might throw his light into the void and whether the void we had encircled with a kind of pseudo spiral went upward or downward, he need not worry about his light coming back to him.

We already recall what has just happened.

But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to be passed through, though this is due as well to the Obstacle penetrator’ s at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.