Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Jim felt sent away, but his mother was the one who had gone. To get salt in her lungs: but then evidently salt water if we could find her lungs; but sand in her eyes, Jim. But what is not being said here? Like we already remember we heard ourselves speak of an interim between his parents: is that not time between events? and did we mean just a regular old distance? To mean "interim" would be to go up to someone, isn’t that what was said? or was it angels using us voice-over flip-side to change their lives?

Jim sent away for what? To become human — was that what she had said? (He would like that hour back.) She mattered more than she had a right to in her absence! But as potential relations we have a right to know how did she go away — and if someone goes from you, do you go from them, too?

He turned secretly everywhere. He fell, but unlike his younger, less heavy brother, did not hit: he fell toward the horizon for both of them; fell right through solid objects as if they weren’t there; followed maybe where instinct led like a moving obstacle. But Jim Mayn, we remember, did not dream— did not have night dreams — that is what we know he claimed: if, looking at him, we can’t just say No to him on this — though how do you not dream? — mustn’t he have had something to put in place of dreaming? — and did he really not dream or only not remember come morning? He said it to his grandmother Margaret. And he said it to two or three others in his life of those he found in his way, halfway human like himself, women and men on errands that felt like detours or, next to all those bigger issues, not clear enough. He turned secretly everywhere, we already remember, but since this — his secret — was the future and was maybe what he put in place of night dreaming, he might (O.K.) expect these errands, his and others, like their warped course, to be in doubt.

But they might come together from what’s left of the original cities. Errands veering all inward hit and gather tribal like a fair. Grace Kimball in New York one middle of the night on radio heard someone say that someone they in turn couldn’t recall had foretold — and Grace felt she’d had the same idea — cities in future like periodic fairs, you know? a party of tribes for a few energy-transferring weeks. Show us that scene again, can you? Sure thing: the only cities left exist for a month or two from time to time. Festivals. Markets in the human sense. (A little business, too? Sure I don’t see why not. O.K., great — the market is unprecedented, we feel almost guilty.) Can you run it backwards, that future city, so we can check it out? Why sure why sure, we’ll get right on it. See, you’ve got your weak force that you get when things break down and run away on you and your strong force that brings things together and binds ‘em like the blessed tie (what things?); and you have the two together if you know what you’re doing, O.K.? two in one if you can jump between, kin you jump between? ‘cause jump, babe, there’s no power without the vac, jump the vac.

What’s vac? / Where were you? I What’s vac? / Oh we forget, give us the replay give us — oh now we remember—

Don’t want to know any more.

But you are electric? / Is that all? / You are magnetic. / And?

You shift before my eyes. Can it be our secret, our thing we do? Before my ears, you mean? I feel we have known each other all our life. Have I been in you like you have been in me? Oh like, but different. We can really talk to each other. You’re inside, you’re outside, then some days you are past all this mere physical jumping and have found peace past motion. If past jumping, then on both sides now: did we market that? Old angels they get a lot of them to the square inch of pinhead but they don’t get to be two places at once unless… but if they exist in thought, angels have done so for a long time, so if they now, some of them, are discovering within their matchless power to be real an inner potentiality not granted them before, they would be within human being not for the first time but in a new way — in the bodies of us who, speaking now, are dazzled by this chance that just as we think them so they now speak out of us yet are we dazzled only insofar as we are not they? When do they speak in all this and when not? Oh ask our twenty-four-hour-a-day power vac — right, we’ve heard of it — well, it’s not used any more — oh but it’s been internalized back to where it all began.

But if so, what happened to what we punched in? We punched in what we had and we didn’t write it down. Write it down, you run the risk of error, and that’s not the only risk you run, but I like the replays I like the replays.

But what are we going to do about the kids?

Their homework, you mean. We’ve tried to get a handle on it, we’ve looked up topology and rotation, and we’re just about read out. Displays and diagrams appear on the walls of the children’s space, interesting and decorative — damned decorative — till our heads spin with R and equals signs, and we with pride in our kids but authentic resentment too, think now that R is =, and all the = glance back at us for all the world like light off the wall.

Yet we need that child or children. (There’s one or two of them right in the next room.) We said to our child in the next room, to our babe, our love, our hope for ourself, our sweet honest force, "How much light is there, then?" for the all-purpose child is doing its four terms of science dwarfed into one-and-a-half class-weeks (pill-assisted memory-wise, but we didn’t dare ask) and it should (our child) come up with a few of the answers and should know a thing or two about light; and it answers, "Plenty to go around," it was us, not the kid, the kid knows a dumb question when it hears it (How much light is there?); yet then, inspired by pity, the child with angelic directness is heard to say, "Light is inside people so long as. ." and we add (because maybe that’s as far as our child is up to in class and because the light inside us feels deflected or busted, that sort of thing, though rebounding), "… so long as they turn," because we have found upon turning that there’s light that likes that, inside us, it makes sounds during eye contact and in turn finds others nearby who have just turned as well, though not necessarily to us—"as long as they," now continues the child formula from the next room, "turn it on!" This plus the cheer that accompanies the everyday discovery of the light that is cast by ice cream in the refrigerator.

We’re getting warmer. Harder than double-checking the god is double-checking a checklist for desensitizing the room of a "breather" with a known-to-unknown allergy. Ready: damp cheesecloth over forced-hot-air inlet; no auras; no toys or stuffed animals, no pennants, no books or bookshelves, no rug, no pillows made of mold-prone foam rubber, no chenille bedspread; no ornately carved furniture; no flowers; no large, luminous reptiles; use powerful tank-type vacuum cleaner (a good buy) and vacuum the vacuum before using, and (hear?) always air the room after vacuuming, and (hear?) never ever vacuum with a breathing child in the room.

Which child? One of them is a breather, one a bleeder, which is which? Let’s not take any chances. Shall we listen to them?

We wanted to hear voices. And then we did, but while the voices were promising and boiled down from a cloud of near-angel voices (awfully like ours on a good day) to now and then one voice, they proved to be a band of tortured archaeologists, or anthropologists anyhow: pros, but tortured by doubts and with a pair of earphones at the ready, you see they were sitting on top of something big, they knew of a hidden city and they were sitting on top of it. But they found themselves tortured by professionals in a room and a next room, above a dungeon in the Southern Hemisphere, rooms fitted only with bare needs, an outlet for the earphones, a chair to be seated in, a floor to be stood up on, familiarity waiting to receive routine, plus the sound of the sea and, for those who don’t smoke, the old smell of the sea’s cool sweat down your own little wormhole’s thread.