Joseph McElroy - Plus

For all the points of these optic fibers were blindly sprouting sideways outward in his pain. But pain that did not kill and was all he had but made him more.

What he was in might well be not other than he.

Even if he had lost his body.

Imp Plus thought he would not stop pain by being someplace else, or wanting to be. But he would react. And reach toward whatever he would want.

He was in a motion of other sizes; he saw he had wanted them. On one hand, he passed through a silent white glue, or numberless glues. And each let out tongues onto stems that had long roots and short feelers, and the stems sent off and got many glints of bond to or from other stems. Yet at the places where the glue cells tongued onto the stems, there were not these sparking glints. Instead a fine sheath of spiral layers. The sheath absent in places where Imp Plus could see into the stem. And inside the stem floated shapes he knew. They were baked-potato shapes, or ellipsoids with two skins, a smooth one and an inner skin or membrane with ingrown tufts and puckers and folds and therefore much more surface area. And he waited for the Dim Echo to specify something, for the Dim Echo was present.

Sizes passed him, coming and going. Yet he did not just stay while they went. And they did not seem his.

Imp Plus moved in those sizes. He flew through stems where nothing happened, no sparks at the feelers, spines, and twigs, no glints spurting off roots. Impelled to speak he watched instead a capacity increase. Capacity for speech. In these stems or him. Capacity for silence which was a solution in which these growing stems as if breathing in but then not out divided.

Imp Plus was moving out but through a new fold.

He could not see himself but knew the fold’s crease widened, saw the brightness and knew he had never stopped seeing it.

He was seeing the hide and fur of the Sun even before he was out onto the outside.

But on the outside through the looser waters like the sweet humor round the rainbow in her eyes, Imp Plus was still held back in the glue cells below and inside. For these were not only a sea for the stems; these glue cells did something.

If Imp Plus let them.

Yet they did not seem always his.

“It may be up to you,” a voice in the large green room on Earth had said. “There’s action in every reaction, don’t forget.”

Well, if Imp Plus let the glue cells drag him back into their slow adhesive, then he wanted to.

He was outside in the light where the Sun drew from the plant-nutrient test-beds a shivering inhale. But he was held at one end of himself inside among the stems. Both those that fired and those that were quiet. Inside also among the soft impeding other things, the glue cells.

But only if he let himself.

For though impeding, they were not so sticky as they had seemed. They floated and nursed the branchlets and tendrils and shoots and strings of their neighbor cells.

Imp Plus stared through the tendrils, shoots, hairs of the neighbor stem cells, and the motion of his gaze stirred dim strands in the corners of all his eyes, strands stirred he thought by sight, strands loosening and tightening, strands of resilience — and his gaze also stirred sound among the hairs as if he caused some to twitch with fire but the sound was not of her speech, for among some of these stems and glues there was only the capacity for speech; the sound was of a wind like the rays of the seashore Sun swinging grains of salt water out onto the air and sand. And seeing as not before that in the moment of his passing through this sphere to the outside and then — as if he were the map — being drawn back by a part of himself impeded by the smooth glue cells, some of these had spread, he then found his own Earthly speech and was telling her her hair was dry, stop shaking it, it gave him a headache; and the laughter spiralling like ribs all the way up not his blind side but his open front he found to be not her laughter but his. And looking close again at the glues or gels, he saw these cells flash.

As if, through Imp Plus reaching down from outside to inside, the Sun had flared down through the fold. He had known down but he thought he did not know it now.

The flash lit up a new flow. Gold fiber loosened or dissolved, and once more in the corners of all his eyes he thought he saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening but did not know what they were. The glue cells were again a cushioning sea of white but there were more of them, this was the thing, and looser in themselves so the neighbor stems leaned into the bland gel like a finger into flesh.

He did not say when but wished to and would. But slipping back up the fold, he looked at the masses of stems and more at the white sea cells so much more numerous, and now saw one thing come before the other.

The flashes came from some but not all of the stems. From the hairy or twig ends. And each flash swelled and thinned and dispersed a glue cell, and then — so that Imp Plus thought his being outside and inside had hit him with an impedance of double vision, for a glue cell breathed in and breathed out at the very same time, and did so with a blast that recalled Imp Plus to Earth and the Earth word pain and with a blast that sent waves of decrease up Imp Plus and to the outside to make the bright shadows on the capsule bulkheads turn and stretch so he again saw high, crying shearwaters eyeing now the skin of two bare upright forms on the beach — what the flash from the stem end had started in the glue cell opened there a cleft which had unfolded but unfolded a division.

So that the smaller green room on Earth and the larger green room were at first further apart. Then they were present, there was more of them. Which crammed them and made them communicating rooms.

“You are entering on a new life,” the Good Voice had said pointing to a green wall with white fissures drawn on it that spread now into particles of seashell, which Imp Plus could not have known had not the Dim Echo known what the seashells were made of — but which Imp Plus could not himself have seen, he felt, like the other new things he had sensed or seen down in the folds and tracts without a thing that was happening to him. Happening where? In the corners of all his eyes? the loosening and tightening strands?

And whether by glue or its dissolving, the green rooms recalled became more. He remembered hearing the Acrid Voice say, “No telling what the Sun will do up there, no telling; so don’t listen to all they tell you next door.” Remembered hearing this but thinking that far off in another place on Earth the blind news vendor might have something; for he said to Imp Plus, “I could have been a vegetable but I took hold; my liver’s good; I made up for what I lost; I think I see shadows sometimes, know what I mean; but what it is, it’s all over, that’s what I feel and so that’s what I decided.”

The green chlorella and the blue-green anabaena had not been in the fold, he had only thought them there. They were out here. Yet he saw the folds there, the one he had passed in, borne by her aqueous humor that had become his, and the one he had passed out. And in between the folds, Imp Plus saw where, as the Dim Echo had said or if not should have said, each optic nerve had been cut, and each hole at the head of the tract was that disc of nothing, the blind spot. The glue drew him to her. He had said he had no blind spot, and she had laughed but like the Acrid Voice, and then she had not laughed, but then had done a thing to him that he then could not take hold of in his remembering.

But now he had no blind spot, no question.

Because he had no socket for an eye to be in to have a retina. No blind spot to monitor therefore.

He had not enough to do. Was that it? So Ground had given him these small things to see. But some were not here in orbit. They were on Earth.