Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"You sound thorny," she added — to what had gone unsaid. This thing down here beside her wasn’t the Mayn family pistol she had heard about, was it? That? he said. But she really didn’t care. The driver sees more along the road than the freer passenger and might talk and question more. She said that a bicyclist in her rear-view mirror back a half mile had been sideswiped by a car and had disappeared smoothly into a ditch. Jim suggested that turnpikes shouldn’t have ditches. She said that as long as they existed you might as well use them. She said she didn’t see anything moving along the ditch’s horizon. She put her hand on his.

Jim explained that he had given up trying to see recent developments as unimportant or as necessarily unconnected to mysteries and oddities he himself was marginally confounded with. She laughed and asked if this would interfere with his work on anti-missile particle-beam weapons. Work on? he said, and laughed. Oh sure, she said, why wouldn’t he dream up a missile or two on his own? Or an anti -missile, he said like a proposition to her knowing she would not confuse it with some old anti-missile missile. Made of anti-matter? she suggested. Too easy, he said. Anti-light, she said. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been downright fond of the modest short-range Sprint in its day, one of the only mildly threatening curiosities of Mr. N.’s regime, and it had been trotted out again after the ABM ban in ‘72 as a short-range tactical. You sound like a salesman, she said restoring her right hand to the wheel. For "enhanced radiation," he went on, finding her thigh with his left hand. . low thermal yield, cut down on damage, leave motels and churches and the Congressional Office Building standing, kill the T62 drivers but leave their vehicles intact right there in the main streets of Dusseldorf and Paris— Livermore Labs were playing around with it for God’s sake in the fifties when she was having Babar and Little Miss Muffet read to her.

Men know so much junk, said Barbara-Jean (Jean!). Hey, he said, she could explain the fusion doughnut to him better than Lawrence Livermore himself, and she hadn’t even been there. Simple, she said, you get this ring of magnetic material, keep changin’ its field real fast so you induce an electric field that’ll give a bunch of particles a push and then another push and then another and oompa-pa oompa-pa, but there isn’t any Lawrence Livermore. Well, that’s a linear accelerator, he said, I can tell, and thanks — anyway that particular one was trying for fusion energy, which is more sanitary and peacekeeping. Oh, she sighed half-intelligently half-contemptuously, we all end up the same either way, right? But she was there with him, turning turning to him constantly though she never took her eyes off the "ribbon of highway" he briefly hummed. That bullshit about fusion makes me mad, she said, it’s so fucking expensive you know. Actually, he countered, he’d prefer to wind up ashes more than dust. She laughed and took one affectionate hand off the wheel: Angel dust, she added, to whatever he was thinking, if anything. He said he imagined she didn’t know what angel dust was. What are T62S? she asked. Russian tanks by the hundred was the answer.

Had bicyclist been resurrected? No, she murmured, without looking, but — can’t even see his ditch. Mayn reported a multiple-car wreck between Lausanne and Geneva along the lake road, in fact extravehicular and intramural (—what? — hit a wall), an acquaintance named Karl, this was a year ago, expert on arms-limitation protocols and on potential Russian cheating on the overall strategic-launcher ceiling, anyway he was declared by doctors on his arrival at hospital to be a miracle, and with that he died.

A miracle? Yes, that he had arrived in two pieces.

Why are you telling me this?

Because this is an arms negotiator who sat at the tables of our international power vacuum always armed with a small pistol.

What’s that got to do with your daughter and your grandmother’s trip west and your grandfather’s diaries that your daughter is returning to your father today and your grandfather’s briefer trip west, and dreams, and us?

Because if you don’t dream, you get something else.

What?

A fairly advanced design, your doughnut, Jim.

Oh sure, I had all that energy left over from not dreaming.

You read the old Galaxys.

Never heard of it. I don’t even know now exactly why a torus is better than a dumbbell-shape or a sphere or cylinder, I know it’s the inside usable surface and the strength of the shell, but—

And it had spokes?

They were just like a bike, but not all the same length; but the wheel—

Doughnut—

Torus. . was circular just the same, except, yes, there was a break, there was a break.

It broke in two? she asked.

It separated at one point and they added to it, but it stayed in one piece. God I’m tired. Why are we pursuing this total fantasy?

I’m pursuing you. You discussed all this with Mayga. Also, now that I’ve postponed my food trip to Africa I feel I want to justify my existence, so I’d like to know if they grew potatoes in Styrofoam with the roots hanging free and if they developed whole-wheat rabbits and sun juice from specially treated squeeze-paper — all the fruit juices direct so you bypass the fruit.

Oh I knew, as surely as I made that trip down to the shore playing the detective at the suicide site, that when they made that air-lock cut in the torus so that for a few days while they added a segment the torus was like a pair of nearly closed calipers, it let some of us or maybe it was only me make an unofficial escape.

Maybe you were a dream the system in the torus had.

You know me. I wouldn’t count myself among the distinguished or the mad.

You went around convinced you were in the future and needed to warn others what had happened.

Why didn’t I, though? I went on with my job.

You always say that. But what are these things happening around you? Old meteorologists, your daughter involved with a journalist named Lincoln who stagehands for an opera starring a friend of the woman who runs Lincoln’s women’s workshop.

Waste.

The mountain that compacted to next to nothing. What about that mountain?

I don’t remember. Was it made of moon matter flown in to the L5 station?

When did this future all begin?

I don’t know. But I always got transferred Earthside out of the break in the torus, let me draw it for you, no, touch my heart; and when I arrived, I was in both places, the future and the present, and some weeks the present was my past and I had just about made it up, but this was all in my head, and years later it still happened, sometimes when I had a couple too many or woke up in a new room, a motel in the desert, where I had been sent, I felt, not just by assignment, and I would think the problem was tequila or the worm in the mescal but it was like the things that happened when I was fourteen, fifteen: I had been returned unofficially to earth, which was both past and present and insofar as it was past, I had to make it up, but it was real enough, the M/E transfer zones where colonists went two by two and stood on this plate to be launched, to be really off’d into the Earth-Moon-space settlements and would tell them what was happening to them but they wouldn’t believe me, and at some point in time but not always time I might see that the settlements weren’t dazzling or original but heartrendingly functional, and God I’m boring you too.

You’re interesting, Jim, don’t you know that? Or did you mean you had bored Mayga? I keep wondering about Mayga. She died.