Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But she killed herself.

Even if she didn’t, she went away.

I know.

But the Interrogator, sleepwalking while on duty among his victims, must trace this albeit idiomatic "O.K." that he has heard. Secure in his victims’ relative dismemberment, he won’t settle for being just in or on someone else’s flesh, feeling himself them while at once himself. Absolutely will not settle for just living their informations, divvied near-sensually by their light, turned double and then back to single by their quaint myths of weather, cosmos, trajectory, charity — myths as gently sexual as

Oh Woman

Old Woman

scrape the sky

clear it up

make it good

all over

with your little knife

the copper one

scrape it down

good

but he must trace this "O.K." that he has heard because he knows in his ignorant heart that it is related to our long-aforementioned "D.K."

Yet in the dark thus, and, his torture workday over, gratefully so (despite games-theory mind-set employed in torture training to simultaneously tap one’s energy secret and auto-relax), he feels through his sleep some half-light coming off his would-be decaying victims as he strays across a next room stepping on our occasional flesh or going out (he smiles) on some strewn limb or steering clear of a passing clutch of bloodlessly extracted nerves beeping like Frau Doppler herself alone and seeing waves from a passing boat gather in frequency as they wash into the shore of a native Austrian lake which seems also to be moving (shore or lake?). Yet the interrogator is at least not talking in his sleep (whatever he might in his heart of hearts think), for we absolutely will not see ourselves as victims of voice-over for your reality is made by youse (the interrogator has heard) and is known as youse value or basic unit, nor need we be angels to know this, nor need we give off light to see him start tracing "O.K.":

first, to "O.M." (as in Open Marriage) from the Indian humdinger song about the "Oh Woman" with which the East Far Eastern Princess like Margaret the wife of Alexander was familiar:

thence to " M.K. ," short for that volcano-of-the-decade that an implicated young friend of Margaret’s grandson James named Larry time-framed (we’d already forgotten) ninety-four years after Krakatoa’s mountainous eruption with the also circa 1883 locoweed-naming spree of the botanist Marcus Jones and the rhythms of his original bike tires congruent to all surfaces through some adjustably cogged memory of any landscape, but also time-and-space-framed in an elastic year with all the weather work that Krakatoa opened up, the new twilight effects, the layers of stratospheric aerosols, the staggered New Mexico sunsets protracted sometimes by the cosmic-cleft synchrony the Anasazi healer explained:

and from "M.K." (with its proven fallout of noctilucent cloud so influencing the Anasazi’s sense of his own resolutely non-reincarnational future that he, who in fact gave us our word "fallout" for a certain kind of mild and generous death, planned on becoming such a cloud — (at an experimentally lower level) the interrogator, dreaming on from wherever he is to New York, New Mexico, and from w/zoever he is to being a roving intelligence officer (naval in training like the lover de Talca, high-caste and broadly cultured in origin, individual in personality), double-shifts (codein) to "D.M." — which may be the Dreaded Modulus of Lar’ fame whose meaning the interrogator has temporarily forgotten, though more likely (since lives hang upon it) is DeMilitarized, without the "Zone," which has disappeared in a puff of once-up-to-date bomb that rules all acts to be transitive, hence, as a prepositioned hit man "offs" an approaching or receding contract, "disappears" zones (a "zone bomb") much better than simply demilitarizing, or witness the reciprocals P.M. and/or P.R.M. (shorthand), each derivable we now know from the other (like Some People) with or without we disappear the R (he knows by rote): he hence leans toward that "old friend" (as he puts it in his second language) the Dreaded Modulus by which one system can be turned like tables to another (though the Friend concept functions more really in terms of the white American males Mayn and Larry, himself the user if not proved discoverer of D.M.) by which the even slightest Nanosecond-degree Rotation normally needed to turn from one pivotal view to another may, in sleep or some alternate refiguring, be bypassed, so that, say, hearing what some bond teaches you to hear can instantly by Modulus mean not the duplicity of answers tortured (or not) out of interrogees, but a woman’s thrilling hunger for her lover in an aria betraying maternal hunger for a son sung by a curvaceous diva to a man in her life listening in a small theater, fellow national at heart who this afternoon arranged the release of her faraway father precisely at a moment when a news flash erroneously had him falling from the roof of his sixth-floor bayview casa de pisos —doubtless a victim who only thought he was her father, dreams the interrogator, and anyway in the southern hemisphere we fall upward, we already remember, which gives a lightness and unreality to events and whole centuries — and for a second he knows he is not dreaming but witnessing in his sleep facts and could move with that implicated white male, age eighteen to nineteen, from the either I or system-switch of D.M. to the twain egal individualized screens seen bothland, and thence to the theory this newly real interrogator can embody so why trace it as a dreamed-up substitution (occupying conveniently a position) in the way, which might be calculated for Through and Around, but better instantly (codein) shift M., whatever this constant scrambled or unscrambled equals, and, through the D. of dread and the K. of that volcano thinking through its dream to spread twilight effects into the air we see for years beyond, even unto the present, reach D.K.: but by now he imagines he is no longer himself but solely into the flesh of that other, de Talca, and can leave a Don’t Know, with, inside it, at secret rest, the knowledge that, like information shared, Don’t Know is the answer to two or more questions.

Because people often don’t answer the question asked, Grace’s friend Maureen had been fond of saying — who had been all for going ahead with the "spontaneous light rape" plan (first man to enter Grace’s apartment after a randomly set hour is to receive multiple, painless, nurturing rape by sisters assembled —"like the millionth couple to make it across the Verrazano Bridge get an instant free legal separation," Grace joked with Spence).

Spence himself, it transpired, would have been the man in question, that day, if the first candidate had not failed to ring and gone away; but Grace had called it off, and when Larry had come up to see her soon after Spence had left, she had taken Larry into the bedroom to get away from it all and to give him support for changing his life at least so far as leaving his father and that apartment downstairs and moving in, à trois, with Donald Dooley and his girlfriend not because Sue, Larry’s mother, would then be more likely to move back in with Marv (which Grace figured she was going to do anyway because Sue was too sex-positive to accept a pair-bonded hyper-romance-serious Lesbian relationship) but while men living together was healing because it opened them to each other’s bodies, an experience pretty much taboo’d in male heterosexual society — Larry was a natural Top, Grace was convinced, and had lately run a number on himself in habit patterns of misplaced loyalty and compassion and identifying with one parent or the other, and had faked himself into playing Bottom, when his father Marv was the natural Bottom, which was probably what Marv was going to his new girlfriend for and likely why he didn’t bring her home but stayed at her place (didn’t he?). So Grace had supported Larry’s moving out, getting into threesome sex and healing self-sex at a time when he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. But the upshot was that Larry had thanked her and said he most probably would stick around for the time being, which only proved he was still Bottoming out while closet-Topping.