Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Oh ancient showerer, you are wet by the flesh-inch, stubble to stern, but, in the timeless shower (which nonetheless you know she will someday turn off), not all here. What did she mean by Recycled Man? You are a couple of hairy shoulders, a still evolving chest solidifying its sternum; you are a bladder like a balloon brain; and you recall being a monster along some grand mountain shelf where there were no angels and no dreams in those days. You are still one who does not at least remember one solitary dream. But you are being soaped by someone else’s dream and soaped intently while the good New York water hung tine by tine to the shower head’s silver disk is talking to you as if she asks no more of you than you being here:

What Does She Want Of You?

You’re also in another leg of yourself and you’re so awake the young woman here doesn’t know that whatever time you’re in, Standard, Pacific, Mountain, or Water Time, or new east-west time vein fibered through you on a tropic curve off to a stage across the north lid of New Mexico lagged three, four degrees south of New York City — hearing information, stories (one you retold yourself) — were they the runaround? — you’re in two places at once, you see neither one works without the other — an acceptance like divorce from someone you really love — but the truth is that you’ve been in not the present sort of stuck in past but in the future looking back like crazy to the present which you’ve brought into existence again through undreamt-of particles in you that make you a window you fall out now and again.

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo Raymond Vigil’s purpose tracked in his Spanish-rounded easy-West-American body of voice just behind you on the floor of the desert goes on like there is no today and you’ll always be standing here (now again in a New York shower) hearing a fission of our Indian past and future; for Ray’s detailing hopes for breakthrough of resource revenue as if the brown stalagmite that’s risen hundreds of feet sheer up into a cave of sky isn’t there to absorb you and your eyes and as if the other person, this healthy-’n-well-off-looking woman Dina West from Albuquerque who was so nice but wants something, wasn’t standing there on the dry road also; "it’s gonna happen," says Vigil: what he means is ("up-ahead") more sensible control of Indian uranium and oil currently rented out. Wind brings a smell of rock into your throat; you saw the wells back on the Gallup road, the oil pumps right here a mile from Rattlesnake Wash and two miles from the Rock, and your organism slows down sensing it might not get a drink for hours, and if plants thought, what would a cactus for all those weeks between desert deluges—" — but listen, Jim, you wait —because this leasing the rights when we should control the whole operation — I thought I knew who was behind it in the Tribal Council at Window Rock but now I don’t know — maybe you know" (Anglo news-hunter visitor from everywhere else but here), the flat spaces of continent beginning to get ripped by this senseless wind, "not to mention the geothermal—"

"— geothermal! the country here’s not right for it, Ray, you don’t have any deep steam around here—"

"— wouldn’t be so sure, fella, but we deserve our cut — show me an Indian on the payroll at Los Alamos."

"That’s only a pilot project, hot rock drill you know Spacelab stuff."

Feel him pointing off to the right thirty miles where you know the colossal stacks of the power plant govern space as you go on staring here at the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock in front of you and at it only but those stacks don’t go away any more than Consolidated Edison chimneys horizoning the blue New York sky so finely rust-rinsed it’s a movie of itself what do you need to spend time going out West to see some Four Corners New Mexico gasification project with vast, near, dark, strip-mined hills of slag that at this distance in a New York shower two thousand downtown miles under the brow of the continent, where they take the deep surface of coal and turn her into "natural" gas to pipe to California, there to keep body and soul together, and would generate new gas-powered TV sets by next year or at least by 1978 on which to look eastward at their fuel source, were not the new upper-air electricity soon to be tapped by the cloud-needle project exploiting the grand and ancient cumulonimbus formations traditional to the American Indian airspace.

"— more jobs over there at the plant for Navajos than they’ll admit; more than before — and the irrigation project is coming along slow, but right here the uranium and oil still belong to us, well the coal does too but we won’t revoke the lease — say who told you there’s no geothermal here, some Anglo geologist?" It’s a good-hearted joke in the middle of nowhere, where the Nowhere is that he doesn’t know what he wants from you.

Who said there’s no geothermal right here? Well, it’s sort of a fact, like that some Indians aren’t talkers to speak of (you told your daughter in a letter, who passed it on to your son), but that’s Navajos — out in the desert in shacks or isolated hogans or navigating a pickup truck with a fifty-gallon drum of water in back, and talking little even at one of their own rug auctions — but other Indians talk much — the Co-op People, for instance, in a nine-hundred-year-old rent-controlled multiple dwelling under a cliff though granted they phased out that cliff site, and the multiple dwellings you had in mind are Pueblo and the co-op family-owned, but we let them keep the nine hundred years.

"Geothermal’s California, Raymond; geothermal’s Hawaii; geothermal’s up North."

But Los Alamos that day only a week previous: work on geothermal’s begun and wouldn’t you know we’re back at Los Alamos, where once upon a time they got toward the heart of things, but now they’re shooting for clean magma power, keep the deep steam from getting away; not even a press briefing, thank God, nothing going on but daily work, yet you’ll get your breakthrough assignment one day soon like in the as yet uninflated farming of wind some year soon — press handout cum voice-over tells all you need to know except who’s turned the profit into some other mystery of Nature before you can say, Hey that’s joint property acquired during the marriage (i.e., between us Indians and them Entres, short for Entrepreneurs, that just didn’t work out but there’s marital property and extramarital and the marriage was naturally here first) — your old pal and croaking colleague Red (of face-nose) Harley sounded like a Marxist with his Phillips head turning the wrong way when you ran into him on the train until you don’t hear his words n’more and others shower inside the general brain: corporate psychosis — spending into a black hole where competition sucks back inside its own abstract the screaming scam that at a slower rate sounded for centuries like grown man’s insured drawl — cannot last another decade, he said, the corporate psychosis: the only hope is cooperation: Veblen (Mayn had heard of him) didn’t predict hunger and atomic power (or did he? Red asks himself) (Mayn didn’t know) but Veblen said technology’s neutral: that’s the place to begin if you’re going to really own it; it’s no monster in itself (though was not sure: all that menial repetition coupling with the surety that you’re powering some Important Thing. .) and what color tax will a corporate structure pay to a revenue service that we’ve (Harley merges with Mayn to adopt the word of this pair-showering girl) "internalized" to hear inside us the corporate voice incarnal spinning off its true power at all the centers far be they from us, that, hell, so much of their take goes down the ruling sink might’s well be socialism: