Joseph McElroy: Night Soul and Other Stories

At least once during my first dreams, the man with the boomerangs threw them all so that they did not come back. Two French friends of mine said he sounded a little crazy (the way in the United States they say that some poor person is “harmless”). A private citizen was how I took him, a survivor-craftsman testing the air. The boomerangs I dreamt were not some American dream’s disposable weapons; my twilight companion’s resources proved renewable, his boomerangs reusably old and known; this wasn’t some Apache spilling the blood of vowels F. Scott Fitzgerald rendered out of Rimbaud, but a native true to the wood from which the aboriginal implements were cut. I made him up out of what I knew, and I assumed he was too authentic to have time to make me up.

The phone rang and I went out to meet a friend. I checked the Mont-St.-Michel tides and saw a French child on a train wearing a University of Michigan sweatshirt. I came out of the Chartres cathedral and went back inside. I returned to the Jeu de Paume to hear American spoken without hesitation or apology and, from within that temple of light and color, to view through my favorite window the gray spirit of the riverbank — its founded harmonies of palace and avenue, whose foreground proved to be where those water lilies hang, safe-locked in the sister temple of this tennis court, where my three-dimensional fellow wanderers, refusing to disappear into the “Moulin de la Galette” we’re all admiring, crowd about me as if I were my mind. Here, what went up must come down — downstairs, I mean. “What gains admission must find exit,” they say with justice.

But what goes out — does it come back? I cannot help the signs and symbols; they are as actual as the knocking on my Montmartre door at the moment of my dream when at last I completed the invention of the man with the bagful of boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne. It was more urgent even than a phone ringing in the middle of the night, that knock at my front door — was it the concierge? — and I must wake from my dream just when I have at last found the French with which to accost the person I have made up. The stamp dealer went home eight hours ago. Who can it be at the door? Well, you can’t always choose your time to make the acquaintance of a neighbor. I’m out of bed, croaking, “J’arrive, j’arrive” (pleased to recall the more accurate English), walking half in my sleep through someone else’s curtain-insulated rooms to ask in French, “Who’s there? What is it?” only to realize I have heard no more knocks, and to suspect that they were not here upon this front door in the pitch-black hall but back in that bedroom where I left the dream. What a way to gain entrance to an apartment! Knock on the door at three in the morning until you rouse your prey, then express such concern over the nightmare yells and cries he did not even know were coming out of his sleep, that helplessly he opens the door to thank you.

But that was a New York dream. I found the light; I sat on my bed and remembered hearing the French I needed in order to address the boomerang-thrower, only in my dream fluency to pass to a stage in which he spoke to me . Till all the interference in my solitary situation left me in that empty apartment, and the sounds of knocking that had brought me stumbling through rooms I hardly knew faded from me with the French I had found but now lost, though not its sense.

For the boomerang man from the Bois had told me what I could not have learned had I not already known it: that if it was worth telling, it was worth keeping secret, how he shied those pieces of himself down into the late autumn, his aim at some distance from him, his boomerangs quarrying not prey but chance which was to cast that old and various loop beyond routine success, dreaming the while of a point where at its outward limit the path’s momentum paused upon a crest of stillness and by the logic of our lunatic hope did not return. In this way, although he will not hear me, he is still there when I go, and here when I come back.

Yet if this is unbelievable, I tried something more down-to-earth. One cold afternoon I spoke; I approached the man and said in French that I had not seen a boomerang thrown “since” thirty years. He answered. He had been throwing them that long and longer, he said. I asked if he had hunted with them. He looked me up and down, his eyebrows raised, his forehead wrinkled. He had not, he said. And were these the same old boomerangs he had always used? Only this one, he said, raising the one in his hand. Speaking for all of us, I asked if his aim was accurate, though not having the French noun for “aim” (which proves to be but ), I asked if, when he threw ( lancé ) he was toujours exact . In English, then, he said, “American?” We smiled briefly; we nodded. “You jog,” he said slowly, “I throw boomerangs.”

“I used to throw a boomerang as a child,” I said in French.

He was looking downrange, shaking the boomerang in his hand downward at arm’s length, first one big shake, then a series of diminishing shakes. “Moi aussi,” I heard him say.

Like a knife-thrower pointing at his target, he launched his toy. Like a passerby, I continued on my way.

The rider coming off the North River bike path, at risk even at two in the morning cutting across the highway and into an old side street, must have been recognized. That was what he later believed summoning from memory the figure who had emerged almost from nowhere, a warehouse doorway, into the rain just as he could feel his rear tire go. Across slick cobblestones a man was making his way toward him as he bent to look down at his wheel, forgetting his back and straightening up in some pain. He’s in no doubt he can defend himself but the man’s slight but curious limp is a challenge, not some panhandling drifter but on home ground, street lamp out, steam escaping a manhole cover twenty yards down the block. It was late. A car speeding north along the highway flashed shadows, and then a car southbound. “You don’t want to ride on the rim,” the man said. He was younger. Behind him a crack of light where a warehouse door was propped open. “The bad news is I can’t get to it till morning.”

Each man wearing a camouflage jacket, trimmed beard, glasses, sneakers — some fool thing shared between them, you almost felt. “Street fails you, cut through the house,” said the younger man, leading the way. No joke exactly, it sounded like some tactic of the war encroaching that you might have to use yourself. “I’ve got a flight in the morning,” said the other wheeling his bike. What was he getting into? “You’ll make your flight.” “It’s a long one.” “Sleep on the plane.” The younger man stole a look at him.

“I missed my turn but I know this street,” said the bicyclist. “You don’t miss much, eh?” said the other.

Through a nomad’s door they left the street now for a space of overhead floodlights like a new outside or a shoot. Areas of dim dimension reached through to the back of the building and seemingly beyond it southward. Orange peel somewhere, paint thinner, the insidious metal burn of welding earlier in the day in a plan not yet realized, a loose rot of garbage needing to go out, warm scent of sawn lumber, pipe tobacco and sweat close as a thought, all building the flow here, the host muttering some welcome — what did he say? — deciding if he wanted you here setting foot in the place, but he did.

An alcove in progress of raw sheet rock framed up. Computer video units, old, facing off at a distance. Sander disks. Filled poly-prop bags like logs wound for strength in a spiral form. Manuals stacked, working drawings spread out, a convection heater on a yellow extension cord running under a swivel chair, reappearing near a futon, a brick wall half demolished taped to it a photograph of Bonaparte on horseback facing the Sphinx with its nose broken off. Stacked next to a barbell and two dumbbells were ten- and twenty-pound weights. Over here the teeth of a worm-gear assembly honorably glistening on layers of Sunday Classifieds and a brass binnacle compass gimbal-mounted with a healthy needle when you tripped on it. A mess, all this, of things in themselves to work with, sheets of plexiglass, two aluminum studs bent but usable, resin blocks, gray areas of litter, even a perfectionist buried in here somewhere in future space, an extension ladder going going. A cork bulletin board crammed with intelligence, a lighting plot tacked up, a clipping of a couple dancing, a drinking zebra taken by a crocodile jumping up out of the water, tracing-paper maps like overlays of riverfront with shots of two city bridges. How did the guy keep it all straight?