Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

If, as the detective tenor said to the nervous woman, you are killed and you did it yourself, I can’t call it the anniversary of Doug’s suicide: only the anniversary of its eve: or if a Field-Rear Agnostician insists upon an anniversary, then say tonight was the calendar night Doug and I had it out while Al looked on embarrassed, and thus it is the anniversary of one of the three or four days on which Emma could have been conceived.

But that isn’t tonight any more.

Hugh saw it with his eyes before I did, but I felt it: but I felt it together with (at various distances, none equal): Akkie’s scissors poised open undecided whether to clip an article or not; Freddy Smith turning the plastic-enveloped contents of his fat black wallet from Lauren Bacall to Ann Sheridan to Bogart though thinking of my own Tracy Blood; Bernie Scheindlinger’s solemn red-haired daydream about the tennis team’s match tomorrow above what I was almost certain was his Problems of Democracy book (memory course, one-term course, sure A); and I felt too the minute-wand of the old clock on the north wall as it jerked up a notch nearer the hour-ending bell; and believe me felt so much else that you couldn’t donate enough reams of paper for me to etch in all that moment’s vectors and vectresses. Akkie had raised all the windows and I could smell the impinging wholeness of grass and ground and the stretched, shiny-dyed cloth of bookbindings and even the clean ropy odor of new fuzz on a Dunlop ball and somewhere ink with its medicinal and promissory order.

But Bob was running for the middle window, not the usual outside window that was almost on a line from his starting point behind his desk; so he was at an angle when he cut around the rear end of the last lengthways aisle and took three strides to his new take-off. Ye gods there was nothing wrong with his calculations and he could not have been thrown off by Hugh’s shrill but meaningless whistle which Akkie was too alerted to locate for punishment.

First, I saw Bob only from the waist up, over the heads, and then his feet left right kicked his legs out and as he passed through the middle window and his arms were up like a symphony conductor’s preliminary sign, the original angle of approach had been bent almost straight.

But at a slight cost in momentum.

Yes, that may have been it. Or it may have been a stray vector mistaking him for an only child and saying, “Middle window or outside window, you’ve been here before, Champ, and your old man wants you to go to Princeton and from what Cy said you missed maybe half the short answers yesterday from Meade and Sedgwick to Jubal Early and the states covered by the Emancipation Proclamation (which you know was 1863 but weren’t asked), and you’re probably kidding yourself about the essay question.”

I need not interrupt this scene; it interrupts itself. Since Bob’s feet-first proneward flight passed a hair more slowly than heretofore into the window’s area, his ready palms met the high-raised bottom edge of wood with insufficient force for him to ram himself back in across the sill. Instead, when Bob made contact and pushed, he succeeded only in making the window slide down a foot — and sensing that it might now come all the way down on his neck or chest leaving the rest of him outside the window arched and bent and maybe with a cracked back, he let go the moving window and flipped over, nearly losing the sill, and in our amazement at seeing all but his fingers and large white knuckles disappear, all fifty-odd of us sat still enough to hear in the fragrant air outside, that powerful long “Aoaww” of our harsh-tongued but much-beloved athletic director who had looked up to see not his air space violated by Bob’s flannels but an unmeasurable threat to another space in his soul, some hygienically toughened schedule in his school mind joining us to the athletic afternoon which would begin at ten to, and joining us with no other or better future than that: well of course it was measurable, what he saw, all of Bob hanging, and hanging three floors above a space of ground near but not near enough the in-any-event not soft enough broad jump / pole vault pit, and I imagined wrongly that our athletic director rushed for this place either to catch all one hundred seventy-five pounds of Bob or just to be there.

And then as I rose sideways out of my desk Bob’s hands lost grip and were not there.

A record number of vectors shot in like auto-retractable steel tape measures, but now for a timeless instance all Intention spread dissolving through my body from my quick neck and sharp shoulder blades down my able back through my butt to the inside bend of my knees under the old desk with its carvings and ink doodlings, and not a drop of Intention was left in my head and I was content and believed I could hold every one of us right on up to Akkie and his hound’s face right where they were, and this I did for what would have been quite a time if the instance hadn’t been timeless. Then, like a spatial extension of this helpless and intentionless magic, there were two voices below and it seemed impossible our athletic director was bawling Bob out, cawing right under our windows (in the wrong sequence no doubt because he was stricken with his own irrelevance), “Got a game tomorrow. Hey whadda you think you’re doing!”

You thought only the thirsty media cared for you, Dom — to drink you down and piss you out: the meteoric you at San Gennaro taking a flap in the face from one of those flag-exposing twin guinea hens who run Empire Hardware while yours truly watched through the fence with Joseph and Mary and their boy behind me; or you not quite upstaging sweet Seeger on the Hudson babbling huskily over your bourbon to a black news-chick while the skipper and his banjo sang us down the stinking tide; you bleeding right onto a hand-mike a raincollared TV reporter darted to you like an electric prod, against a field of dark Barrio stone on the edge of live gunshots one summer night when you were supposed to be not in Spanish Harlem but giving a big birthday party for Dot in Edinburgh; you getting mugged all alone on Brooklyn Bridge a month ago by three kids who it turned out didn’t know who you were then or even by name later in some station house; you vomiting on a TV talk show, pointing at the eggy pool and calling it “Magma,” and after mopping your mouth and tongue-tip, answering the host’s original question straight and mild.

Are those excuses posted in the kitchen for any and all callers? And what about “EARTH = SPACECRAFT”? That addendum hardly seems an excuse for anything. Would you use it to put off a media representative? Or is it a hot-line excuse for the President of the United States to whom if he phoned you to congratulate you on being you you could say, “Sorry, can’t talk now: the earth is a spacecraft.” I’m losing you, Dom, though along with you also my fear that maybe I’d been in part responsible for your evacuation tonight. I have used you during what was tonight, Dom, but in order to dig away at less spectacular puzzles.

To save paper I’ve just for the last few moments been merely talking not writing.

Why write? to remember? or to give? or at last to forget. But soon after I opened my mouth and spoke I heard someone out by the elevator.

Ev says it’s all a phase, my quest for an exit from my well-paid foundational anthroponoia, anthropolymetry, indeed even from my after-all-well-subsidized inquiry into the changes in the ceremonial geometry of the residential ground-grid of Brooklyn Heights. Dear Ev calls it a phase.

Ev can’t know that Al did tell me about phoning her. Last year Al said, “You really should have brought Ev along this weekend, we expected her. You’re a lucky man to have a woman like her. Did you know she took the trouble to phone me and ask me never to tell you she knew about that horror show with her first husband? She was afraid of what you might think she thought.”