Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

We have warped to a soft set of coördinates that are not time, or are beside its point.

Ask me right out, Dom I’ll answer Yes I did it I guess I suspect I killed you and I will try to bear it. I could have kept you equidistant from yourself and corresponding and alive but

Where were we? My pages are gone, but on instinct when I got up to hide I put your pen in my shirt pocket. From my curtain-folds and with my back against the glass I heard them walking about this apartment, stopping and walking, sometimes moving into this room more or less toward me, off the heel-clicking sole-tapping bare surfaces of tile or wood onto this almost inaudible and wearproof dark gold pile of Dot’s living room carpet which you told an interviewer last year you’d leave as is because you were afraid if you took the carpet up, the walls would fall in. You did cut out an experimental strip across the room from just south of the white couch to the north corner of your giant portrait leaning against the wall, you ran a tape measurement along the middle of this incision. I thought they’d never finish rechecking the rooms. At a sudden distance of six feet came two sharp rustles, one when the sheets facing up in reverse order were gathered, and one when they were taken up off the antique table. With a gasp I began holding my breath. There was nothing said that I heard except a subordinate voice asking What’s the phone number here, and being told to make a note of it, but when the subordinate voice called, “Where is the phone?” a new voice with a continental accent said don’t bother, and gave the number one-two-three, and then when they were all leaving, that new voice with the accent said, “Leave lights on, officer, in case of burglars,” and was answered by an accosting question from the Irish voice, “Got papers there, Doc?” which the other voice (certainly Lila’s spouse) answered “Research paper of mine I asked him to read, I don’t think you’d find it—” “Well Doc why stuff all them papers in your inside pocket like that?” which I heard answered with unsteady pomp, “It is going to be published in… a medical—” “Ah Christ I want tell on you, Doc,” said the detective tenor — but did he or didn’t he suspect Lila’s husband of removing documents material to your suicide? — and after that the detective must have been in the hall outside the apartment, for his voice echoed reassuring the nervous woman she was purrfectly safe; and someone else asked what maniac did surgery on the carpet, and the accent, Lila’s spouse, your Hungarian son-in-law as the door closed behind him said, “Where is his typewriter? I did not see his typewriter.” Sealed off in the outer hall among echoing voices and the elevator trying unsuccessfully to close, the detective’s words seemed to be, “Search me , Doc. See any my people touch anything? All I saw was them papers on the table you picked up, you tell me what’s been touched, Doc. Apart from the telegram, of course.”

My pages are gone, though the pen is willing and the paper is from the same supply, and your silence revives as the door is locked this time by key. Across the street from this apartment the office corridors in that twelve-story turn-of-the-century edifice remain dark except for the glow from a red-and-white EXIT and if I stand up there is also the light at the rear of that room one floor down half blocked by stacks of flat boxes containing no doubt my lady’s sleepwear. I watched these through the window while I hid behind the curtain, noting also that the rain has let up. My pages are gone. I’d hardly have reread all those words to you, but anyway now they’re gone, I can’t go back and simplify.

“O.K., Doc, O.K. Let’s get one thing straight, I don’t have to show you any wire, O.K.? Good. Well, it’s signed ‘DARLA’—know any Darla? — and it says, ‘DISREGARD WHAT I SAID.’ And I’ll have to ask you for that key, Doc.”

“Do not call me Doc.”

If the points and lines would only stand still my parabolic arc would be fine. But how can you stay equidistant from something that’s cut itself loose from the foreseeable future. You’re the one who drank Topaz Neons, Dom, not I. It isn’t some unholy cirrhosis in me that has brought Al and Bob unreally together in the same midtown motel, it’s not some hardening of polyconnective tissue in me surely that has caused the Hungar shrink oddly to dismember himself from my divining scope — and welcome to those action-packed pages!

I think those men are all getting into the near, or west, elevator. There go my words. My writing, my confession thus far, my Memorial Span, my parallel lives, are gone. I can’t recall all I said but feel that we are somewhere we weren’t. When Al said he’d give his right arm to go to Harvard I couldn’t help visualizing, and I said it was his left the Pirates had once been interested in, and he said, “A catcher does more than throw.” (Long ago this evening they slid you downtown.) A catcher blocks the plate. He gives signs that are shaken off. His position embraces the space of the game and team.

We have more than time now, Dom. Did I mention the Newsweep shot? No special point — except that the photograph singled you out, you were alone, no competing forces, only your tightly growing dark hair and warm squinting pugnacity, your Neoned chops ravished by big trouble you’d had to go looking for yourself, you had to try to know nothing from other people’s say-so but begin it all yourself, and your reward is probably that the Newsweep lens failed to detail that various mass behind you — grays mild yet perhaps dead and as if originally blue — faces (three, I think) — lapels, probables — but, of your cowering America, made vivid only in your acts. Your trampoline jumps began long before our hostess at the private opening last week, Cora, told Ev there was the chance of a vacancy in this building. And after all let’s not forget: mortal risk was always not just a cost of your way of life but also the coast that guaranteed the commerce inland.

Supplied the charge that made the movements move, east to west, and so forth.

You were easy to misunderstand but hard to disregard. You can misunderstand anyone if you’re careful enough. Trace never took that care with me. She was too shy to fight. But she so well knew — which was a motor grip on my eyes, my arms, the small of my back (if not my spinal bulb, for I’d never wink at her except surreptitiously to flinch) — she knew and often knew I liked her legs but the inside of her curious legs from the wrinkles at the back of her ankle all the way up, and her blind abdomen, other parts of her, as much because I liked her, as I liked her because I liked all those motional surfaces. No interruption lapsed between the two likes. As late as last year near a construction site on Lexington when I came out of the branch library that was full of uniformed Cathedral schoolgirls whispering at the main desk or reading Sepia or writing plot summaries of The Devil’s Advocate , Hugh Blood could smoothly accost me and, as if we’d been meeting regularly, indeed as if repaying some taunt of mine a moment ago, ask me (as if he somehow knew of my interest in your life) what “we poor laymen” were meant to make (Dom, in last year’s book) of your strange bedfellows Interruption and the Act of Love, for really weren’t they strange bedfellows? after all didn’t Saint Mary McCarthy say coitus interruptus wasn’t quite de rigueur? (Or something, Hugh boy.) But Dom I didn’t have to phone another of my memorial stations, take a fix and by the plainest trig plot the ancient motive transiting the scar in poor (though now permanently tanned) Hugh’s transmission. You see, I ditched his sister once — Hugh hated me for having her and he hated me for not marrying her and he’d have passed into shock if I had married her. Here now, as two city buses end to end both bound for City Hall passed us and the gold-badged checker at the curb scowled and shook his finger at the second bus driver, I could only mutter merrily to Hugh that maybe you meant as well to interrupt the urge to interrupt, but — and of course I didn’t complicate my advice by saying No I didn’t know you Dom personally —“don’t make him be consistent in that crazy old-fashioned way, think of his notions operating in a field-state, Hugh: many forces acting in many directions through many distances that you could call—”