Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And I would find myself back in that settlement and later on in my life I would have stuff to add to that picture, although it’s not my bag, I’m a humdrum type, professional—

But how did you get back?

Well, that’s what’s odd. I would wind up back there, swimming in a very low-gravity pool where the water waves stacked up slowly and then subsided like sandy gravel; but while I was the same, I knew that I had gone through the same thing the colonists had gone through, I mean again.

But you would have had to go through it with someone. Probably some woman.

But I couldn’t remember.

Neither could the other twosomes who got scrambled into frequencies and wound up in the space colony one person rather than two. Maybe it was happening over and over again.

Maybe I had some memory of it. Search me. All because I didn’t dream.

You need to think so.

It was important to me to let the world know what was going on, though you know I was never a muckraker investigative type like what my daughter might have wanted. And so I would arrive suddenly on Earth and go to one of the departure centers where these metal plates with electromagnetic-plate domelets received and processed pioneers two by two (so there were always at least six on the way because the units wouldn’t work singly but only three at a time), and I would stop these people and sometimes they were descending from government buses and I would say, Hey, when you get there you won’t be two people, you will have been turned into one. Do you see how this isn’t me? how it doesn’t get us anywhere? not even to Mayga, who was a nice woman and I have never understood her death, it cast a long shadow—

Onto you?

Yes; onto me. I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—

A particular one, you mean?

I think so, yes; I was reading a dream, the author had put in a dream which switched on and off as if it was… I don’t know. .

Each dream was displayed on the side of a box kite? How about that?

And I had just picked up the book but I didn’t need to go back to the beginning to find out what the dream was referring to or what the dreamer felt about it all, and it was obviously the author’s way of taking care of some tricks he couldn’t pull off in the regular story, but mainly you felt the story got stuck in there in place of something else or to communicate between parts maybe, in place of some work, y’know, I mean some real work of storytelling.

Oh that’s it: dreams don’t take enough work; that why you don’t go in for them?

Oh in the book it wasn’t just the past. It was the future that was so slick: the guy had this dream and then he knew what to do next, his life had made sense, and the author didn’t put him through a scene that demanded some thinking and some guts, but just made up this. . where did you get the kite you mentioned?

But why shouldn’t this dream of yours come from somewhere?

I told you the thing wasn’t a dream. I was awake.

But why shouldn’t it come from somewhere?

Well, I wasn’t any junior birdman, and it didn’t come from studying Galaxy up on the roof at night, though I did have a subscription to Popular Science the year I was in the Boy Scouts and I didn’t like Buck Rogers in the movies any more than I liked jungle nonsense, I went for westerns, the saddles, the boots, the hats, the horizon. What about the kite?

We could cover them all at the same time, the four-paneled dream-kite flown by a couple of newly weds making plans, the visit on opera day to Mel Mayn and the cemetery, attendance later at the opera, and some experience of waiting for what must long since have happened to a young Navajo whose tracks turning up here and there across the American landbridge from sea to sea break for stretches sufficiently impressive to account for his joining the un-precedentedly low-leaning noctilucent of the late Anasazi but not remaining with that old spirit young in cloud — as if making way across the also moving but inertial continent, he merged his non-inertial coordinate system with the inertial coordinate system of the Anasazi’s stably humid afterdeath. We could cover them at the same time had we the people available. Which means for us actually finding a preferably live body (Coxey’s or the dime-museum orator Browne’s only if the era was right) in which to incarcerate this idea one of us might have, might be, if the price is right, if the chemistry is right, and the idea might be just our self (helped) or selves, sometimes a locked-pelvis-type-focused person, sometimes a man such as Mayn feeling again the ache of wings long-halyard-vectoring to "where" he knew he was telling the truth about the future and more nearly to his father’s house where two cars parked in driveway so we would not have Mel to ourselves hearing an elder doctor-friend of someone’s intone that the last thing you decide (according to a patient of his who had gotten back with his waif) is what comes first (prioritywise though in a coordinate system full of a multiplicity of small-scale inertias you better not wait too long or she will be gone and waiting elsewhere if in motion) — so that, seeing the cars and knowing his daughter had come already bearing the diaries that a guy in a fringe jacket and black-and-tan hair had left with the doorman of Lincoln’s apartment house, Mayn could contemplate bypassing this visit and going straight to test his Trace heritage at the cemetery with or without the wonderful girl who might rather stay with Mel and Flick before she and Jim returned to the City for an opera called Hamletin, and he could be glad that, tired as he was, first he and Jean here in the car passing as one unit a chain of bright-capped bicyclists as they approached the turnpike turnoff, had settled the dream question even if at his expense.

The mountain that compacted into next to nothing, she had persisted. What about that mountain? Obviously, he said, I talk too much; was that at Cape Kennedy? I don’t recall telling you a story about such a mountain; I don’t have one, in fact; but there is a mountain around at the moment. Yes, she said, I’ve heard — it’s both around and approaching; but you don’t talk too much. Try not to disagree with me, Jeanie. I could try, she said, except it’s a losing battle. Well, you’re so damn smart, he was saying while she said, Some things I don’t know: like "Visa to China" then "Along the white mountain" (is that a pop song of the forties, sir?). And some things like "Beagle onto corporation," then "Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving."

You’re speaking telegraphically.

I have to be careful about attributing: I feel I’m on dangerous ground.

This is a service road, the town’s up aways.

When did you first know you were not dreaming?

What a question! First time it’s been asked. I remember a Thunder Dreamer, and I remember my brother Brad screaming at night and a voice passing through his screaming — there’s the cemetery, by the way, but we turn into town — and later I remember more screaming but different and a deeper voice passing through that, and in the morning my mother and Brad were comparing dreams, and I don’t remember his but I do remember hers, which my father kept interrupting like he’s calming her to a point where she won’t talk about it, though I doubt that he cared about what she was saying.

What was hers?