Joseph McElroy - Plus

Ground had been saying, REPEAT COME IN IMP PLUS. COME IN COME IN.

The transmission cut across a length Imp Plus now saw was his. And from a point on this length the Dim Echo rose like a need for nourishment: READ YOU, GROUND.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS. WE WERE ABOUT TO SEND A REPAIRMAN.

Imp Plus could feel the Dim Echo like a held breath that is spread, dispersed, and absorbed, but never let out. The Dim Voice said, IMP PLUS TO GROUND. ACTIVITY IN OPTIC TRACT. (But then Imp Plus found he had withheld the Dim Echo’s next words, which were Discoloration at optic chiasma.)

That was the crossing where the pale olive of the fibers had faded to no color; the Dim Echo had stored the word chiasma , and Imp Plus had prepared to remember optic chiasma, where the eye nerves cross.

He tried to think why, but what he saw was that the Dim Echo was of him while also between him and Ground. What crosses crosses from one side to the other. So there were sides.

IMP PLUS YOU ARE IN ERROR, Ground was saying to the Dim Echo. NO MONITOR IN OPTIC TRACT. MAYBE YOU MEAN ALGAE READINGS OR IS IT DILATOMETER, IMP PLUS?

Imp Plus stretched to see the shadows on the capsule walls move larger.

Ground said: IMP PLUS WE WANT TO GO BACK WHERE WE WERE WHEN YOU REPORTED LOBE SOURCES OF PLEASURE AND OTHER REACTIONS HARD TO TELL APART. WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THEN AND NOW IMP PLUS? LONG TIME NO HEAR.

Imp Plus stretched. The pain itself stretched, and this was a decay like breath breathed in but never out. But could he be reaching and stretching to see the shadows? The shadows happened at the same time as he stretched.

Ground said where and when together. Thirst got rusty. The decay cracked. It was more and much more than a reaction other than pleasure . Imp Plus saw the shadows move a little larger, a very little that was as small as what he had seen when he had been down through the folds where Ground had now said on the contrary no monitor was.

IMP PLUS WE READ OTHER THAN BUT AFTER THAT WE DO NOT READ. SAY AGAIN.

The shadows grew larger but also nearer. This shadow growth was not after he stretched, and not before. When was it?

Ground said where and when together. They did not belong together. The shadows happened at the same time as the stretching burning pain, but not in the same place. The larger shadows were of the larger pain. The pain did not get exactly worse; it was larger, it held more. The Acrid Voice and the blind news vendor with years of bad teeth were both on Earth but not together. Why had Imp Plus not thought of that? The answer was, he had; but he had stopped thinking of it.

When?

Pain did not give up the answer. The vendor sold today’s papers with yesterday’s news. The pain was other than the stretching, burning pain that went on crackling. The blind man said, “I could have been a vegetable, a head of cabbage rotting on the ground living off my disability.” He grinned wet like an animal awake and bit then into some nourishment he had manipulated from behind the layers of papers, and maybe he didn’t mind his gapped teeth brown, yellow, black, blue, gray, green, hard enamel cream, because he could not see them. This was at an earlier time that was a very different time from when the Acrid Voice had drawn figures on a framed green wall of slate that told what did, would, but also could, go on in the algae beds in orbit. For if there would be no bent knees, no hungry neck, and no perspiring pancreas to monitor, there were still chlorella and other reactions; and Maybe , said the Acrid Voice — coughing so hard it caved out and groaned in— maybe you’ll turn green .

Imp Plus felt the terrible stretch was now between the blind bad teeth and the Acrid Voice, but was glad.

What was it he felt in between? The absence of what the Acrid Voice had said Imp Plus would not have left when those mechanics finished with him: spleen, liver, gland, heart.

What were they?

Ever seen, then or now?

Never, maybe. Yet then perhaps never any more than he had ever stopped monitoring them, there or not. But they didn’t seem ever to have been his own. He had not seen much even of his bones.

On Earth he had thought of stalks. His insides caved out, they cracked like bone strands. He saw her laugh and he had to want the pain if he wanted to see. He came so close to her laugh it became absorbed in her face which he lost; and in the cracking of new very small parts he found what had come between her two sets of words, and at first it was a like sound and a word and the word was kiss but then a wordless gap where flesh and even bone met and moved like making words. The association took him unforeseen. As if he were an object astounded by brightness.

“No telling what the Sun will do up there,” the Good or not-Acrid Voice had said. “It may be up to you.”

But at a later time and in the smaller green room on Earth, “No telling what the Sun will do up there” were words said by the Acrid Voice, “don’t listen to all they say next door.” So now, unforeseen, the ill will that almost a year before the operational launch Imp Plus had smelt in the Acrid Voice’s smoke winding into the folds of Imp Plus’s sinuses so that he did not wait for the Acrid Voice to answer his “Say that again” but instead had burst out, “I’m ill”—the ill will by which yes Imp Plus had known his ill body was being divided as if in one of those chalk figures on the green slate, this ill will instead seemed aimed at the next room and the Good Voice; and as in the moment here when he’d said, “I’m ill,” Imp Plus felt drawn into some reach of his own not the Acrid Voice’s ill will through a mutual torque.

Under the pale, northern California sun the Good Voice would say, “Let’s face it, there’s power up there waiting to be milked.”

So Imp Plus prepared to remember what the Acrid Voice taught.

But through the chalk figures Imp Plus saw things he also prepared to remember. Hungry stalks with headlamps climbing dark bends to forked crossings. The danger of getting separated. The hide and thirsty fur and face of light — touched, attended, sheared, divided into life. More. He did not know face .

Remembering had once taken a turn for the worse. That was it, a turn for the worse. All but a fraction of something had stopped. Many lights and alternately many darks had divided him into an unknown without weight. Between gyrations of light and dark he had fallen into a hole and become little more than the Dim Echo whose words and knowns gave undivided attention to Ground’s frequency.

Then like a hole in the unknown that he had become, Imp Plus had wanted to recall what he had wanted. Face might be that hole. There had been a bad phase of dark, and down one of the dark cycles stored sugars had slid past him. He had not slept when told to sleep. Was there part that slept and he didn’t know? He had stuck up arms he did not have, like the thoughts of unwalking wounded, and pressed against the clear curved skull he did not have, until it lifted off; the cycle of light had come again, and with it the green thing that was now like an idea. And with all this the caving too — and the humor and the desire for the folds, for the eye paths, for the splitting, and the great wet membrane.

The splitting burn was now, then, a crystal gut yanked through his parts steadily. He had no skull. He knew this but could not think what he was doing. The fold he had just been in had opened as he came out and was now no longer a cleft; he felt he saw it from several views. What was several? Four , he first thought.

The Dim Echo reported a stretching. The sea lost some wrinkles and drew taut so high birds and deep fish could be seen in it. Imp Plus went round but went ahead or up or down and could not tell if this was good movement or was his own spiral laughter at the Dim Echo absorbed somewhere.