Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

We too: that is, along the curve of our resolve to be just lying or just sitting, not think angelic we can do both at once regardless of that same old brother’s-keeper-type interrogator bent on making us toe a line while he painfully (read painlessly) unhinges one of our toes each time we say two things at once like that crocodiles when extinct will not be able to grow new teeth: when we already remember it’s best to be all the elements in a dream, the person bravely setting forth, the sea chopping at the gunwales, the pickle sweating in the wax paper on the thwart, the boat itself so regardless of the person said to be sitting hunched amidships that the boat can be seen as empty, all the elements we are, the Moon mistaking itself for the Sun (as Mel mistook Pearl’s telephoned dream for his own), or even the double Sun that the bodiless Anasazi healer on his post-mortal tour was amazed at the last to see when he arrived above the famed fog-towers of northern Maine and felt the sleeping light in the cloud that was his transitory form turn literally liquid to some point of his own happy satisfaction.

Is it feasible (read bearable) that we may never see these people again whom we already forget their names? Or may never have seen as we may never get to see our own heart? If they are parts and parcels of us, we must be biggish and can’t even see our knee. What is (read was) length, anyway, another shape of void? We are a function of our habit of periodic one-hood not to be confounded with that last-gasp or between-histories (read B.H.) sans-space sans-time sans-everything Singularity, a trans-essential Absence within, though, a non-rotating overall Absence inferable from accelerating activity in its vicinity threatening yet not, in turn, to be confused with Presence so deep, so far inside (± Y) our/your head that one has gone beyond the chance of coming out the other side until the rotation once taken like inertia for granted yields untold other sides coming to and from us: and we would tell the interrogator and his abstract incarnations that sometimes the distance between our eyes is two feet five inches so if he upped and tried to single us out, firing right between the eyes, he wouldn’t go far wrong if we were still there by the time the fire arrived.

For who knows where it will end? who the hell knows ( I certainly don’t, ‘least since Schlesinger blew into Defense from the Atomic Energy Commission in ‘73 and dreamed up selective-strike target packages, says M. as Barbara-Jean has taken to calling him) that is, where this late-century last-minute course-correction reciprocity race will end (we thought) whereby the homed-upon target itself acquires shift capability and an entire town according to our pre-negotiated input can be moved off "Home-Zero" at the eleventh hour screwing up a multiple-reentry vehicle’s target-package program that itself can make multiple random course corrections at will: is this keeping things in balance or is this escalation (read speculation)! especially when with research reaching breathtaking informalities or even small-scale intimacies of in-flight breakthrough, the other side’s disguised improvisations as word of them is fed in are capable of being countered by original "Command-Thought" within a real on-board micro-lab already launched weapon carrier’s and thus countered faster even than old Light itself could have moved with its still very special speed regardless of its late inclination to, incredibly, Change — change traced not only dawn to dusk in two pairs of lancet windows in a cathedral each showing, he was pretty sure, a man on another man’s shoulders with a fifth lancet in the middle with definitely Mary carrying her child on her left arm, but change of light toward Rest, which light heretofore has had none of but now seems ready to be given (given back? given back its original Rest Energy?) yet Mayn will settle for the dawn-to-dusk change of light in that cathedral he will casually visit again in this upcoming "business" trip he has mentioned to B.-J. (sometimes Jeanie) — if he can just get away (well, he has to) on time — it’s a non-official therefore maybe interesting National Technical Means conference (Barbara-Jean surprisingly didn’t know NTM, "means" of surveillance) — para-disarmament, para-national oh god a brains convergence (though for cause) in the French Alps near Grenoble (fly to Geneva), geologists and thinkers and a black CIA executive named Andrew B. (for Blue-sky) Jackson posing as a "close-look" satellite-camera designer, eee-und some happy gentlemen and ladies who interpret reflected-microwave signatures like uniquely readable wakes left by all manner of missiles passing through Earth’s already troubled ionosphere — National Technical Means to catch present and unknown future cheating within of course the Balance of Terror. Meanwhile Mayn’s deadline seems brought closer and closer by a prisoner’s message (incidentally floated upon his announcement that he is getting free of his personality in order to exist within his essence) that Mayn had better attend that fringe Shakespeare opera: that he had guessed independently from his daughter’s marginal but stubborn involvement with unreliable elements and his friends’ curious convergence on a local cluster of events including though hardly keying upon the opera production, all this regardless of how close the prisoner in question often had said they two already were through a (what he called) colloidal awareness (colloidal? said Barbara-Jean, thinking) mutually multiplying this fragmented dispersion of particles bonding their knowers one to another by this universe of surfaces and their concomitant surface-frictions (Mayn thought it was), but more than the message and the opera (and word from Flick, nee Sarah, that her brother, his implicitly estranged son in outer space up in Boston, had phoned her and was to appear in New York), there were these events surrounding (or surrounded by!) the surfacing of an old high-school teacher, and the nagging interrogations of a person (B.-J., Barbara-Jean, or, by her preferred, Jean, by name) whom he had come to love, plus the street death of a man he had talked deeply with on a pickup ride from Windrow to the City who it had turned out was coming back into his life and shifting some key point from Nowhere to a cemetery if not to the home of which it once had been a part or, ‘least, that home by its other name.

That was your name for the town? I like it.

My grandmother’s name for it. No, ours.

How do you make up a name together?

You just do it.

You have to be in love.

Well, she did teach me how to whistle.

Did your mother love you?

She said she was so frustrated by her life she could kill herself.

When did she say that to you?

I think more than once. Probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.

And you didn’t say anything? — or you told her not to kill herself?

No: you make me remember: I said it must be terrible to feel that.

What did she say?

I remember. She said, No it wasn’t. Because I said, O.K.

Did she accept that?

She said, Your father doesn’t approve of O.K.

What did you say?

I think I went out. I don’t remember where. I asked my grandmother Well, what about O.K.?

You always went to her?

Depended which way the wind was blowing.

What did she say?

My grandfather told me what O.K. came from, but something else— another meaning some friend of theirs. . I don’t know.

Did your mother love you?

So much else has happened since then.

Didn’t she?

Yes.

I know she did. How did she?

By being herself. By telling me to be.