Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Now I can’t remember, except it had Thunder Dreamers in it and I never asked but kept this in mind but I thought about it at my, yes, at my grandmother’s house one afternoon, maybe the same day — it was raining, of course — and she could have read my brain because she told me a story about Thunder Dreamers getting pistols and music and carrying them hundreds of miles across mountains and passing them on and she said she had never told anyone this.

Well, was that true?

I love you for asking. I love you, Jeanie. I love you for picking something up. But it’s done with, and who knows or cares why what happened happened?

Now you’re the sentimental one. But your eyes just lit up.

Pay attention to the road. I told her she must have told my mother too, because my mother had mentioned dreaming that a Thunder Dreamer (what’s a Thunder Dreamer? — I’ll tell you some other time) — had passed music to a man who studied plants who had passed the music to a woman who had studied animals all the way from South America to North, and the Thunder Dreamer had passed a pistol to a man who used to cure people but now let them do it themselves, and there was a picture on the pistol but my father kept shushing her like a nurse soothing her.

What did your grandmother say?

She said my mother must have heard that stuff from someone else, maybe a friend of hers — because she had never told the western stories to her because they were. . they were something, I’m not sure what. But where did you hear about the box kite with dreams on it? You turn there.

Never mind. It’s attached to that mountain we’ve been hearing about.

I’m an old factual hand but I’ve been dragged into that mountain at last; it’s the other reason we’re here.

Seems like we’re here in New Jersey in order to get back to New York to the opera. It’s a long route.

"Good grief," my father used to say whenever he began to get exasperated, and that’s as far as it went.

We’re getting close.

Pull over a second.

"Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving." Ring a bell?

Sure; you said it before.

"Beagle…"

Same thing.

"Visa to China."

But the question is, who told my mother about that music and pistol? I mean it hardly matters now, but. .

These are direct quotations. And add also, "Compacting down to next to nothing — Indiana, Chile, Choor, blonde." Is that right? "Blonde, Choor"? Is that the end of a sneeze or some word I didn’t get all of?

Are you asking me because I’m responsible? I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know.

I can’t know everything.

I don’t know why I’m so mad at you.

You’re sort of in love.

I hate "sort of" and it’s further from "twice" every additional year. Shall I turn off the motor?

Where did that kite come from?

It had dreams on it, and it was flying inside someone’s mind.

It feels familiar without being.

Your young friend Amy heard it from the Chilean economist who got it from a woman who flew in from Minnesota. It had been flying inside her mind from time to time since the time of her divorce.

It’s a fine thing to hang your dreams on. Amy’s your friend, too.

We share a messenger named Jimmy Banks, who has an incredible head, inside and out. The woman who helped him protect this bike of his that changed his life is a strange old woman who is always with a strange old man who is a defrocked meteorologist. I went to see them both, because of what I had heard through Jimmy, that this man had invented new weather according to the old woman and was a hermit but lived with her, and they were both from New Jersey and she named a town that was eerily familiar.

You’re telling stories, said Mayn.

You’re upset, M.

Start the car.

What was the other reason we came out here?

I want to introduce you to my father.

I feel I know him already.

We already remember the difference between dream and wake. We heard of a seminar, all-day, all-weekend in fact, part under the table, part up against it as the interrogator translates into colloquial. We remember the seminar as a generally articulated structure capable of accommodating a multitude of small-scale resource and promotion weaponry. We learned later that in the next room we could have learned something about receding from our embodiments into pure idea under command or electromagnetic auspices or mere stress. Later still we learned that we had been doing this anyhow, as if it came natural to us, angels, porcupines, closet-exhibitionist hermits, incarnations of others who have already remembered in order to forget. Until one of us, a journalisto named Mayn clustered his signals together enough to see a dark-haired beautiful young woman-technologist speaking to an old spine-crust of an unemployee who said he needed a vacation and had one in mind — north-coast working vacation — who might be called Hermit-Inventor of New York, though not possibly connected with those wages of exploration and stupid risk and disperson that we have made become us in honor of such late persons as Margaret Mayne and Alexander her spouse, plus the Navajo Prince and so forth.

Then you don’t see how I could treat the Hermit-Inventor down in the Village as separate from—

Was that "Choor" the end of a sneeze?

It comes to me, it came to me, it came on top of something, it didn’t come from Margaret, it doesn’t matter where it came from but where it goes to. But I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know. Here we are. Your father has two cars?

Are you being caustic?

About your not knowing? No. Historical.

Why would I naturally not know?

Because you said these things in your sleep, some in Florida that time and some in my place the night before election day.

In my sleep?

Got you now!

In bed I relax. I blather, I run on, I sort of chat.

Like you sort of love me. It was night. You were asleep. Believe me.

I believe you. But even the night allows space for daydreams.

Even nightmares allow space for someone who cares about you to be there and not get translated into a frequency.

I love you. My father doesn’t have a car. He has visitors. I knew my daughter was ahead of us. There must be one of his local friends here, too. Maybe this isn’t a good time. Who is the old woman who is with that old man down in Greenwich Village?

Your pal Spence has been visiting her, but she’s crazy probably, according to Jimmy Banks.

I have to go out to the cemetery by myself, but I want to take you in and introduce you.

That’s so incredible it’s almost not rude.

We’ll get back into town in time to have dinner before that thing.

If you have been dreaming all these years, how do you account for that leftover energy you said enabled you to travel into the future?

I don’t know about any of that. Maybe I can dream now.

Maybe by forgetting your dreams you found energy for the other trips.

Mayn introduced (B.-J.) Jean to Mel. Flick was downstairs with the books. The diaries lay on the table. Mayn excused himself, hearing his daughter speaking with someone downstairs. It was her boyfriend he hadn’t met. He said he was very upset and wanted to go to the cemetery. Jean said he was very tired. Mel put a hand on Jean’s elbow and asked Jim if he wasn’t going away to Europe. Jim said he supposed so. Mel said he didn’t understand. Then he laughed. "Don’t know," he said. " ‘D.K.,’ your grandmother’s friend the hermit said, because I heard him."

The news woke us. It was like having holes in our heads in the right places, all the right places. We had proved just among ourselves that radioactive decay acts generally so we can figure it ahead of time but is not only capable of accommodating a multiplicity of unpredictables it is made up of them, the parts that are not greater than the whole but just not predictable in the same way if at all. We had proved that this proof was like other proofs that would displace it. We absorbed Larry to us in order to prove to him that he was one part pure abstraction — one part pure, he jibed back, bodiless — and while we had him we learned that Simultaneous Reincarnation might not be simultaneous when occurring between divergent frames of reference and because he was disembodied while voicing this he was apparently not a candidate for that doom the Anasazi healer predicted for some young person who would describe and therefore have to take responsibility for a new form of reincarnation. All events are connected by their horizons, independent words say, and the dream Mayn enjoyed in the cemetery might seem to come before the opera but came after it, as witness the time of day, and, ultimately, witnesses who came there for related reasons: