Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Well, help me.

Oh, it lasted. It would have lasted longer if I had said these things to Joy instead of you.

I’d rather go back to L5 and check out the future from your daydreams and forget where they came from.

I’d just as soon retreat to us.

No, you can’t do that. You said "via," and you have to say what that means.

Some came through her from her occasional paramour, a man named Wagner, a dog I once almost cured of his habits.

Through her from him?

Some dreams she had and some he had. And they would tell them to each other, according to her. It was like her going back into her family history for the whole last year we were married, a glut of family lore, she read some old letters that had been stuck inside her father’s piano and she found she had some close relations she didn’t even know about and it was big drama for several months and took her mind off—

What about her and Wagner and their dreams?

I reckon some were made up.

Do you?

It was the use they were put to.

They were telling each other things through these dreams?

How did you know?

Maybe the gods were communicating with them.

Let’s get back to us.

Or communicating with each other.

You’re some scientist.

Was it raining upward at the pole?

I myself have no memory of that and cannot be made to confess to ever having believed it. Not even at the South Pole does it rain upward.

Amy told me—

Oh yes, you said you knew her.

— that in your grandmother’s day, when I gather she claimed to have been pursued all the way across the continent by an Indian you never told me about, they had winds that blew straight up from the ground; so why not rain?

I do recall an overhead mirror in an indoor pool someone took us to in New York once. I went off the high board and thought what if I spring high enough to reach the pool in the ceiling, there were these huge oblong panes of tarnished mirror-glass. Later I entertained some daydream of very-low-gravity swimming pools.

In your space doughnut?

What’s more it can’t be held against me.

You spoke to me of Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, one night at Cape Kennedy.

That was the motel that launched us, I remember that time. You weren’t so much of an interrogator then.

I have to know things if I’m going to pray for you.

Pray or pry?

Cry for you. You remember speaking to me of Nansen?

He locked his ship into an ice floe and tried to drift up the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Sure. Nansen.

It’s like nothing has happened since you told me that stuff.

Then there were the Norwegians who figured out weather fronts.

What is "93"? Is it the distance to the Sun in millions of miles?

No. It’s the year Nansen tried his stunt.

That isn’t quite what you said.

Well, I am subject to factual error. It’s the story of my life.

I’ll share the burden with you, Jimmy, but let’s include the mountain that compacted to next to nothing.

Let’s get back to us.

We are.

Feels more like me.

Your daughter, according to Amy—

— Amy doesn’t know my daughter—

— but works for a man who knows people your daughter does know—

Flick has traced toxic waste right into the conversation of mutual acquaintances.

Amy said Flick thinks the Indian pursuing your grandmother across the continent is a terrific putdown of native Americans and probably some old family legend.

I didn’t know she thought that. I did know that she had figured out two of the possible ways this mythical Navajo met his death.

Also, she wants to be called Sarah.

Maybe so.

You’re getting mad. Did you say Let’s get back to us?

We are.

O.K.

But we have had other curves to trace, trusting at times they would be parallel in their surprising ways like the pot calling the lid empty, or the lid we seek for our unconscious life mirroring with its dark storefront underside our incessant approach to it, uncertain if all this means People Matter or Are Matter, Are The Matter, or, by turn (potentially) of mind, first Equal (=), hence ARE (if not already Were), thus R (ARE’s real sound that hence turns back to us the (phenomenon, hence) law (of the letter) Rotation containing our now verb rotate) M — once the study of our child in the next room who went on beyond Rotation to other things, leaving us turning and turning in wonder and love at having been exposed to this multiple child, for, left alone now in a room that recalls departed tenants and so much major that by turns proves margin, we feel (or feel we feel) that, if less group-safe than Grace Kimball officially backed rape-proof group sex for being, our own group-shared discovery of a new reincarnation ensured that the Anasazi healer’s prophecy would not come true, for no one of us much less one "young person" (quote unquote) bears sole responsibility for discovering that wonderfully commonplace if mind-bent simultaneous One-into-Two, the S.R. that the Anasazi surely meant when, prior to the cloud he became, he predicted that the discovery of a new reincarnation would doom its discoverer (—though to what? for S.R. was always there) a l-screen-into-2 basis for that 2-into-l coup that might lead like Matter’s largely Rest Energy to Bad News as well as Good News, from knowing your spouse so well you might so become his attaché case or her bag and/or its absolutely familiar and known contents or, say, your spouse’s body and with it his-or-her desire to jump out of it so that at a moment’s lack of notice you’re willing to risk said spouse or spouse-hood (all the same thing) in a game of chance — all the way to, say, knowing a loved parent so ill with one power of your soul that you redo that parent inside you without first asking and wind up possibly legal tender (to recall the name of a famous Pennsylvania reincarnationist’s child) for a future transaction in which you lend yourself to that miracle witnessed by a ruddy-tan daydreaming adolescent lying bemused on his slightly sagging bed in an upstairs room of a New Jersey house whereby two regular people (maybe accustomed to twin candles at the evening dinner table) are trans-mattered (perfectly safely!) outward into Earth-Moon space arriving as one person, not two, at the destined pioneer place so as to give new sense to our question Where you coming from? and since two persons, two personalities, have become one, should not their parallel warps of past come to rest in some new time? For how do we compound a deadfall animal trap set upon a western mountain and a treehouse nailed and wedged into an eastern maple? how mingle memories of an elder voice haunting you from behind as you stare at a dismembered Statue, and an explorer’s sight-unseen fantasy of that Statue’s harbor and that harbor’s city while the identical voice warns you not to embark eastward toward that fantasy? We already remember, as if we always knew.

His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare a shadow rubbing her neck along the sinew of a sky-gray tree like others recently seen. And a smell that nearly spoke to him, spoke like mist from this curious, long silvery cloud close overhead that had materialized above him at night containing waters of light. His bed a river edge of earth, leaf mold, cold web of boughs. His fireless camp tonight alone at such distances, yet many of them all one.

At a distance now from those farmhouse doorways he had been passing. A distance no different from where he might journey another day, rain or shine. Other farmhouse doorways, maybe Virginia under the same sky, or the territory whose name of New York was heard for a generation and more among his People through the tall and talking knower named the Hermit, Hermit of New York, who had lately described with his own hands steep, cloud-high houses of rock that would be built in the city of Chicago where the East Far Eastern Princess had been and would be built soon in his own harbor home of New York, and some of rock carried from mountains down to the water, and some of rock that could be mixed like adobe out of water, bricks laid so that the walls would give with the wind like sail. So that the name of Hermit must mean him who knows and talks much. Whose voice was now near at last, and with it the territory of New York, the place which the Hermit and his ancestor had left to come to the People in the Southwest so many summers to sojourn near the mountains that could think or dream.