Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate within him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing) — but chemical contact — with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose initials, de Talca added, were his real name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news — personal and private news — that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired him were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the Hamlet story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you — I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.

So Spence in turn must conclude that whatever of the "traced" burial ground he might locate or unearth within him, this being furthermore the day of the night when he must be present at the Hamletin dress rehearsal, he must post-haste visit Windrow itself as if it were in reality outside him. Meanwhile, he was feeling deep inside some need to arrive at a semi-permanent home where he could hang T.W.’s fur tail with the female figurine or stub his bare toes in the middle of the night. And while having for these final days to pursue what in some way he was pursued by (including the wonderful Pearl Myles, whose marital breakup Spence knew had come after an argument over an event indirectly caused by Spence), and follow out to some provisional ending his relations with the two Chileans and several other persons with the annoying outside chance that he might already be targeted for death, given the awesome excess of data de Talca with reckless menace had poured down into the compound pulses of the phone’s ability to hit the body system’s addictive brains within brains within brains. . Spence felt — he felt, and felt he felt — in possession of enough knowledge to live out the rest of his life if only he would decipher that knowledge in him though with help he knew was near in that common consciousness (was he speaking?) that was more than community spirit yet less organized and tense than the seeming collaborations spun, for instance, from the original words he was told of the opera in question if not leading to an anti-Nazi symphony about the very mountains that went way back into the American Southwest as if the same discovery had been made six thousand miles apart, certainly involving much traveling and explosive links with the Mayn family about which Jim Mayn’s personal unconcern must have been due to some numbing process caused by the very mass of these networks that clung to the world. Spence’s hair was growing out dark again, the jojoba oil might keep his natural black hair from looking, as it always had, dyed and false, he could see it grow so terribly slowly it had a mind as much its own as many. And if Spence began to make out conversations in a bagful of voices, he could secretly think of himself as We and begin to stop caring what Mayn’s relationship was with the young hunger technologist Jean in her Village apartment apparently festooned with Native American paraphernalia, or for that matter how it had come about that Jim’s former wife Joy had never made the acquaintance of the terrific and funny Grace Kimball and her army in the days when Joy lived in that odd, large old brick apartment house built the year Marcus Jones was in Montana, we believed, or for that matter how it had {if it had) escaped the attention of de Talca and his people that one of the two men who had been with the airline executive’s journalist wife Mayga Rojas Rodriguez was named Morgen, with an e, himself related to—. . examples by the gross with a continent of earth t’bury them. . mouths all by themselves talking… or an invisible event. . yet, beyond Spence’s mere head trips, circular possibly because of the slight torque given his emerging hair by the follicle root, work to do, the old woman yakking friendly in the street near the Wing lady’s racket, and the old guy with her, who was unquestionably into meteorology and had unquestionably been visited by Mayn as if that was all there was to it.