Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

yes, Beyond even paraday and night: to what you may have meant when you agreed with but would not support those who counsel emergency Silence, for you wanted (what can I name it but) Paraspeech. But I have not on this Sphinx bond paper of yours created Parawrite after all, have I. On the way back from the Hillsdale station and drawn in a kind of pressure between his family and the trees, my father listened to me tell about Al’s father, how he’d bought us ice cream Thursday and how tonight we’d done the Heatsburg puzzles, and how Tuesday he was taking us to a Legion game. And my father asked my mother what progress she had to report, and she tilted her head humorously and said she and Emily were giving a recital after all on the Labor Day weekend, and my mother talked about how Emily’s cousin who ran the Hour was depressed about costs and didn’t know how long he could keep going. My words to you have taken me unexpected places where, though no one is waiting to receive me, it was something just to get there, or here. The Puerto Rican said to Bob lucky for him he had his girlfriend to back him up, and as the Italian with an eye on us picked the stick out of the street and leapt back to the middle of the sidewalk as Petty came around the front end of the delivery rig, Petty and Bob spoke words that began and ended together and had the same number of syllables: “He doesn’t need me ” and “She’s not my girlfriend.”

“I seen you with her,” said Joey, “she got nice tits.” But gallant Perpetua Belle Pound over her own words had heard Bob’s “She’s not my girlfriend,” and Bob knew she had, and yet Bob hadn’t exactly meant it. And so he jumped through Joey’s bike frame and as he and Joey shoved each other’s shoulders I raised my guard and moved around the rear of the bike and in on the Puerto Rican.

I was jabbing him up onto the first few steps of this brownstone stoop that was an absolute home ground though we didn’t happen to know who lived there, but as on impulse I turned to see Petty clout Joey’s ear from behind, I caught our stickball stick on my left arm right to the bone, which was better than getting it in the back which was what the Italian had tried for, and when the little Puerto Rican came off the steps to grab me from the side thinking I was occupied with Ginzo, I got the Puerto Rican and heaved him round so Ginzo had to let up as he went to swing on me again.

Where was everyone? But it was a few seconds, no more.

Wit Holmes — a brave guy whom my parabola has had to use now here only as a mere equidistance in order to make any headway at all, but a man whose tragic story I vow I’ll tell you or someone someday, Dom — Wit Holmes, seeing the Italian wind up on me, cut in behind Petty (for Wit wouldn’t have thought of doubling up against Joey, who’d been smashed in the face by Bob) and as Joey turned on Petty and gasped “Fuckin’ cunt,” the Italian saw Wit Holmes and elbowed his swing in so that as Wit fell forward to make a diving tackle the stick caught him in the head for extra bases. But Petty had backed away from Joey to the stoop and as Hugh said jokingly, “Unhand her, sirrah” as she was approached by Joey who’d had enough of Bob (and Bob said, obviously to Hugh, “Oh that’s what we need, that’s a big help”) — she scooted right up past the Italian to just outside the vestibule and called that she’d ring “their” bell but Bob said with that oddly paternal leadership voice, Don’t you dare.

Joey was up after her; and now the Italian halfway up the stoop tried with the stick to duel Bob back down but Bob got against the opposite railing and eluded the stick sidestepping up the stoop after Petty and that poor jerk Joey; and then I got under the Italian’s stick and lifted him by the knees right over the other railing and dumped him stick and all ye gods backward a hell of a clattering drop into the next areaway. Joey and Petty were jumping around inside the vestibule, he had his hands on her, and Bob got into the doorway and said, “Kraut crud” and when I saw just their legs and Petty said with an astounding semblance of calm, “There’s a knife,” I swear in the back of my head the two secret vector-fontanels (neither of which ever has grown together like the one on top and neither of which I’ve ever told any of my various doctors about) saw Hugh put a hand on the stair railing at sidewalk level and say, “Let’s fight fair,” and in the corner of an eye I found a tall Trace in a sleeveless daffodil frock walking and running down the sidewalk calling, “Cy, what did you do to him!” Thank God nothing happened to Abra. My father wanted once to know why we called her Abra, and I said we call her A.B. too.

If, earlier, I had tried to parallel (a) my rush up into that clambering vestibule and (b) the position of the young Cyrus when because of his childhood survival he became the reason Harpagus lost his only son, I could have done it. But I can’t now. I know the two histories, one verbatim in the graceful English of Herodotus, the other poly-vectored in my doomed memory. Neglecting royal orders, Harpagus hadn’t seen personally to the murder of the infant Cyrus, whom soothsayers had foretold would supplant the king. Therefore, Harpagus’s only son was cut up, variously cooked, and served to his dad while the other guests got mutton. And when he had eaten his fill — and I speculated to Cadbury’s distaste that Harpagus found future and past in the boy’s living liver — he was brought a platter and told to lift the lid. I felt Stingy Bill’s field glasses on me down that long angle from his roof at the far, dead end of my street and looked and saw him at a parapet like a sinister sentry.

You can see, Dom, my ancient history wasn’t unimaginative. Dr. Cadbury had to sit by in my narrow margins and grumble at the Alexandrian longitudes and Pythean latitudes by which I caught in intersection the kindred ways (say) in which “those two fabulous travelers, the monarch from Macedon and the astronomer from Marseilles, made a Mediterranean world o’erflow east to the Hindus and north to triangular Britain.” My father and my teacher must have been right to worship fact even when in Herodotus the fact was really the man, who (let’s add) is to be pitied for having lived a century too soon to tell us the truths about where Phocean Pytheas really went, north from Gibraltar. Cocky was I, but now I see. And better to have seen too late than never to have seen at all. If I’m not arrested for entering your open apartment and occupying (though not exactly stealing) your typewriter paper I’m going up to the marine nutrients station next week to carry on your interest in the phytoplankton breakthrough. It will cost me more than my farm camp savings and the money Bob lent me that summer of V-J Day that I sent off to a famous writers correspondence course. But I’ve journeyed to your screen-lit kitchen to look at your excuse-list again, and I’m even surer that in the beginning I was the one meant to hear your off-the-hook phone, study that maudlin script, and thence come to EARTH = SPACECRAFT.

On my return journey to this table there were two sets of steps, mine inside and someone else’s outside. After mine got lost in Dot’s vast acrylic carpet the footfalls outside turned to tiptoe, Richard taking out some hugger-mugger insurance that my steps would not hear his. But the tiptoes stop — maybe ten feet from your door. In a second I’ll forecast Richard’s next moves but before I do I must tell what I see for the First Time Ever about my old ancient history: I see that whether from an only child’s insulation or some other costive formula, I was overconfident in fact about the lack of bearing all that stuff had upon my life: so I could and would in my expatiations blithely abduct from context and casually charm contraband into my locus: for I was Utmosis the Last.