Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Still, the super through the next two weeks maintained a kind of equidistance between our apartment and the course of my movements. When I said, Dom, that I had space to explain, did I mean among others the superintendent’s space I have just for this inflated moment occupied? I dislodge myself, Dom, from the super’s space of hopeful vacancies, Haitian pirates, a derelict plaque in the basement emblazoned “OUR CODE,” stacks of papers and (on the main floor) mail, and confess it’s been some years since I presumed either by parabolic passage or creative congruence to lose myself in other lives. In short, I tipped the super an opening five for his idioms and the eerie equivalence each item of his talk seemed to have with each other item, and before the week was out ascertained the mailman’s schedule and acted on it.

Saturday you never know; but eight-fifteen Monday through Friday he’s at the boxes with the two canvas sacks of house mail slumped on the floor. In ranked banks of twenty per official lock the eighty boxes are tilted out like bins and top-loaded. Now, that early in the day tenants don’t bother unlocking the front of the box but reach in the top while the mailman’s at work. My box, though remote from yours by floor, is right under yours, for one thing because we’ve the same letter apartments (though judging from the scale of this room not exactly the same apartments — did I say scale?). With a sigh and a matutinally murmured pardon I bumped the mailman and reached. Reached, removed — then perhaps turned with gracious surprise to greet the man who has half a Bermuda onion first thing before he walks his obese Corgi. My own mailbox I could unlock later, if Ev didn’t.

Now a public man not only rates more junk mail than a man like me but may oftener feel obliged to answer it. And it isn’t only junk mail that costs pointless intersections. Your recent wife was of the opinion your attack on Religious Leaders might lose you that new conservative interest you’d elicited from the vast para-urban constituencies even if you and I (in our separate but like-lettered apartments here in this old benighted building) knew that these constituencies merely used you as entertainment. It was clear to me your wife wanted you to sense that even going around in circles you were still the man she once took you for, and that if you took each other back, you two might now finesse an open-ended truce in this great apartment I’ve as yet not had time to case. Three of her letters misconstrued your work so subtly I almost resealed them and sneaked them back into your box. But I trusted my hand and deposited them in our floor’s incinerator chute whose little room at ten a.m. can fill so with back-up fumes due to the landlord’s failure to replace a defective baffle that the bulb above the porter’s deep slop-sink can be seen through the smoke only in sulphuric blur. My censoring in any case lessened the pressure on you. Perhaps not enough. Tonight something happened. I will need more than time to explain it to myself. I don’t have to raise the extensible rod and pull up your projection screen out of its case and hook it to know it’s a silver-gray lenticular. The DA-LITE label tells me.

What’s my line? Maybe you. But be warned, my course is partly coördinated by certain points and lines it never touches, it runs between them in a way and misses them but is derived from their distances. Take my paternal uncle Coolidge along the Potomac and my step-grandfather John stuck in Flatbush.

Yes, Dom, maybe you. But I’ve neither striven nor wished to be someone else. My complaining step-son Ted will read of your death and never guess my connection. A generation of complainers seek now from all those over thirty sweet peace as right rather than privilege — as a fringe benefit on the magic map of cost-to-cost plenty. But better off complaining than borne on mild old grass to some poly-deceleration of the head. Ted, thanks to the rhythms that be, isn’t interested in smoking ( period ) much less in syncopating his charismosomes. Oh for God’s sake, C.C., he says to me, pausing head down at the front door one evening he knows I wish he’d stay home, for God’s sake the way you talk —be spontaneous. Then back home at the crack of dawn he’s staring out the kitchen window pretending he didn’t hear me get up and no doubt hoping I’m still sunk in dense sleep, which shows you how much he knows about this desomniac dad of his (right?). I didn’t have to follow you to the other side of the country, Dom, to know what I know. But just the same, I went.

On the way out I stopped for the Intercontinental Rotary AGT, like you. We flew quickly into Chicago’s O’Hare on the same Astro-Jet. The lapel card I’d had laminated in a New York subway station before leaving here admitted me as a member of the Working Press and with barely a glimpse of the Loop’s broad and massive streets I made the select and newly sprayed Early-Bird Session of The Inner Group in time to grab the last of the Non-Participant chairs along the wall. Two leggy “Hi”-saying beauts from Utah U.’s U-shaped campus passed coffee and crullers to those sitting seminar round the frame of long leather tables, and after two Religious Leaders with hairy wrists led us in prayers (the second silent and in some instances secret), you were introduced by past-President Dr. Dave Dickens, a carrotcrested insurance mogul, whose inter-fingered hands on the table completed the comfortable corral of his fore-arms surrounding his coffee cup. Eventually you finished staring at your whitepowdered chocolate cruller and stared at Dickens who was by now calling you “virtually a national re source, a thinker yes, but a thinker meriting our particular attention in terms of his special field of moral cost-consciousness, the coördination of overall aims. How, that is, can we underwrite in our young people our nation’s ancient priorities?” You looked right at me and I let go the ghost of a grin. It was Tuesday. As you bit off half your cruller and at once began to speak muffled words, I thought two things: This man may do himself in; but what has his life to do with mine?

But long before you’d downed a leisurely length of sentence while chuckling (bitterly and I think even humming) through an initial premise that the U.S. heads for a field-state superposing new levels of both dilution and density, I was seeing again a prospect in acts of yours I observed during the year or two before we moved into this building.

It was back here in New York, and you had come from a platform where toward the end of your spiel the loyal abstractions Courage versus Love that you were squeezing springily together to the ritual shock and wry amusement of black and white leaders from the Old Settlement, Inc., began for me to fade among and become equal to a number of vivid physical distinctions: the woven kink of your hair like sea or land penetrated by the clean pale promontory of temple receding either side; the glass of yellow fluid you reached for and sipped in mid-peroration so a small part of its perspicuous self dripped to the floor delicately splashing your black wing-tips; the nail of your left little finger you hooked into your nostril turning away from the audience, and then at the mouth of that nostril the dot of blood you discovered when you put your nail up there again to try to finish the job. Appalled, you left the stage and just as you passed out of my sight you looked it seemed right at me as if startled by applause I had set off; for they were clapping, they thought you’d really finished. Well, an hour later I had followed you to B&A’s, where you spoke of the failure of your attack on liberal dogma but then were flattered by a denizen of that bar who with an erroneous east-coast Anglo-vowel called you “after all, a polymoth, a polymoth, no matter what. ” But in a high state of nerves you said you now saw you had not added to the Available Energy and then said, “My own medicine, my own medicine,” drank three Topaz Neons, picked off the brown clot and put it on the dark varnished bar at the right elbow of the denizen (from Scituate, Mass.) who said really he could hardly see it. Leaving your tie and billfold beside the blood, you passed behind the denizen and strayed out the door just missing my extended saddle shoe. The Life Insurance dome banged five p.m. and as I and the denizen behind me coming to the doorway watched the odd, though neatly duate, game you were playing with the premature witch who had just written VAYA CON EDIS on the hoarding next to the ocelot shop and who was on her daily way to collect free leftover macaroni salad before the business deli closed, we saw beyond you two the four insurance clerks advancing. If I interrupt this scene of interruption near its end just as the denizen pushes in front of me and before the four clerks arrive at B&A’s, it is in order to make best use of the much later event of Dickens’ Inner Group. Dr. Dave smiled privately. Several of the Inner Group were bending this way and that, and so was I in my Non-Participant chair, and my stomach roused.