Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Just turn your face into the talking tines of the silver disk of the latest-model shower head that foretells the imminent absence of both of you from this curtained bathtub — you first, your will says to her, its eyes shut; and hearing a stiff rustle of plastic and the slide of rings along the rod, then back along the rod as if she is tucking you in, your bladder tight-hot inside the watertight skin of your wet body’s belly lets go blind, down the watery drain, upon which you hear an "Ah" behind you, which is not some spirit wind upon the New Mexico plateau but Woman who exits right then reappears left, where she has peeked back in at one she probably loves but can’t see what your blind eyes feel bombarding your eyelids and you will not pass it on though terrible there in the shower head. Because you would not be believed.

Would not believe yourself. Would you? Don’t answer. It’s not at this late date a mother’s suicidal disappearance, it’s more a future you’re in from which you’re obliged to make up the present, you got the technology to do it (and it’s got you).

If this is the Void talking, well how come it’s got so much to say, an Empty Void (ha ha). To say about you is the answer. Now the girl got you into this hot shower and you can’t get out; but you do and she’s gleeful and now:

you’ve dried her, she’s dried you — you’ll keep — he and she. But each puts the finishing touch to themselves, with corners of one big draping towel which he feels is now legally part-his.

Then launched by the bathroom light switch you’re getting just off the ground into a new hall and into a room which, with its bright shades all the way down and except for the bed, looks darkly neat. The bed, whose own tossed wrap seems flat and simple like other beds, speeds you in your flight while the girl’s dark, pale room (but now with the pad of paper, the book, and the spot lamp on the night table on the near side) is a deep window, yes, that’s right, the room’s a window.

Is it the Void that tells you you will forget? — forget being in two places at once while you were in the bath’s tent of steam raining down through slippery light? (Do you believe in One Void?)

Or is it the girl, who, having flown you from a damp bathmat into a hall and over the pine-green pile of her bedroom carpet by a bureau with a deluxe blank check pastel-imprinted with a manageable landscape of butte, flowering desert, rose-tinted rock ridges, gullies, arroyo — into a flat cloud bank of cool bed, is asking if you wear gloves even when it isn’t cold, saying, "Hey I could borrow a car today, what about it?" while your palm rubs moisture down her shin, in the slowness that may catch up with the stillness of the window in you, and you wait for her to do something about that thumping on the front door that comes and goes and you’re beginning to think is future syndrome you’re in for, now that you’ve let a decision to come back to New York come to you.

No, you have not fooled the Void, you’ve used its flow to let yourself forget for a time not any new and unheard-of time belt beaming its numerous at-onces through your wet navel here, say, to your dry ears off at Ship Rock, say, hearing a Navajo sheepherder’s son turned tribal-spirited hustler brief you while you stare off at the Rock where the ghostly sun stands on the sheer brown face of its lower lofty sharded cliffs with all around it the sky that the businesswoman behind you says is supposed to be turquoise, male if clear, female if mottled, it’s business information nonetheless, and you think of breakfast, three brown eggs scrambled with sweet red pepper and mushrooms and onions and nutmeg and salt. What the hell is this Void you don’t get out of your head? — run for office like Lincoln to forget the Void but who is going to capture thirty votes by spending an afternoon cradling wheat in an Illinois field as if the men he worked beside were candidates he ran against? no, you’ve used its flow, alloyed with hers soaping you and flying you, to annihilate the shower head, latest model, steam needles you gargle, tines fine enough to breathe like a scented ozone of coke dust ripe for gasification, a hot-and-cold bombarding massage combing your skin as each arc like a drawn line dissolves its color into mere water of rivulets and drips and eddies.

But what about the shower head?

That it talks? or talks to you?

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo said. "You could help." Tell the world, that’s what you newsmen’s supposed to do — that was what your father on his front porch said: ‘77/ tell the world": if someone asked if, say, he’d seen his cousin’s daughter’s new boyfriend, the sulky-driver from upstate New York — and now here come the Indians, stealing a march even on the archaeologist Indian watchers in their cubicles in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the engineers down at Socorro — yes here come Indians turning turning turning beyond a burst of arrowheads far out in the cloud-feathered cradle of the sky hooped and woven in smoky inertias by (hey!) the first Indian women astronauts hunting happiness the grounds for which may be achievement, and right behind you this Navajo promoter turning beyond to what’s down not up, what’s right there underfoot — well, not right there but far down — the geothermal tap, the well of energy-steam which, given a shared technology, a Navajo operation proposes to mine.

Meanwhile, the blonde, serious Albuquerque businesswoman you smell behind you waits to renew her quiet theme. Her pitch isn’t like that of Raymond Vigil the Indian. His is a shade hidden by the ail-too-well-aged tale he tells as if you hadn’t had it already long ago in a life where you were a reader, he’s selling it and now it’s another story, the Enchanted Mesa of his cousins (Incorporated for better flow — a hundred cars a day comes to twelve hundred dollars a week American to support the pueblo as an institution, literally, no joke, you’re adding it up not counting private enterprise — and now here comes electricity). However, the Albuquerque businesswoman’s story hides less: what? her? what else? not her kids who go to bilingual school and whom she took to lunch at the Western Skies Hotel yesterday, and not what she frowns about, shakes her slightly silver-sheened blond-ash (good) head at, and just about breathes (out as in): the environmental impact of an airport they’re talking about for smaller planes under twenty thousand pounds: but (no) hides what else? a tender, firm, speechless sight of what could still happen in the land if only the river flows clear, if only the horizon can be tilted another way so the strip-mine boom (read bomb) towns may slide elsewhere whose concept breathes its (can that be chlorine-rinsed) air-conditioning off the drawing board’s horizon or off the wall onto the very neck of Ship Rock — and if only the toxic output from future plants can be solved not by water of San Juan River but by decision, by foresight — yet in this so abstract nation (of men within men within men) her tender freedom of sight equals also that American speechlessness you knew in the car coming out here through a reservation so great it can be comprehended only on a map or in the cleft lines in the blooded faces of sun-banished Indians your ignorance mixes up with other burnished Indian faces, and she said, "These little farms — it’s a museum! But the blood’s still here if we leave them alone."

New Mexico is more outside-controlled than any other state, yet in itself more foreign, magically foreign, you’re pretty certain the economist in Farmington said to you at the moment your eye sockets began to feel anesthetized from the mescal and thawed-out orange juice, and you saw this gentle old leftwinger from the McCarthy and even Roosevelt days now day-to-day studier and teacher of Indian resource economics (to Indians out at that underfunded outpost community college in the town named for the Rock Ship Rock) as a great man — yes, quietly and factually forewarning that in two, three years they would need more two-thousand-megawatt generating stations and you figure twelve new strip mines roughly for two stations, but is "out-of-state" anti-Indian? yes, because the supplier and profiter is non-Indian — even if he was here first, your bad knee jokes paining you — while the economist mentions a rug auction tomorrow evening and you both get into family and he speaks factually, not wearily, not intensely, of a still undivorced wife a little too near, and a daughter and almost imaginary grandchildren too far. He thinks the economy is history, he has a steady view, but he isn’t where he was a generation ago and the western world might wind up devaluing via police-state order and rebuild on the Austrian model and maybe nobody important wind up dying of gold hoarding: but he doubts that scamario, he thinks the corporate cooperative will have to self-destruct rather than rebuild out of world poverty and he wonders if you could design a nuclear device that would confine itself to non- or m-human target-structures — but he isn’t interested in black-humor technology, he is for local economics, the irrigation project — it didn’t sound like overall history, which you have always declined to take a view of.