Joseph McElroy - Plus

Ground did not ask for the differences; Ground did not ask if Imp Plus had stress. Ground requested readings, and Imp Plus let the Dim Echo answer. But the Dim Echo did not. And Imp Plus had to give the readings.

But what differences? Between the Earthly dream and what was here in orbit. Differences from more than dream.

Which were they?

Imp Plus informed himself. A flood of blinding quanta headed through the brain, yet stayed. This made the sea of glia cells shine into snow bedding the bursts of neuron fire, neurobodies firing forth thought that he saw but could only know was his. Imp Plus recalled flesh against a flashlight. And here in the brain’s four bellies the Sun flood bulged so the bellies touched and swelled their light into a single brimming, But beyond the ventricles — they were ventricles, the bellies — Imp Plus found in all the incandescence curls of clefts too and the sealed banks of canals like light laid upon the field of light. Saw them while now he saw further the fountain crown of optic radiations line by line. But below them, where Imp Plus on his prior trip had not been ready to go, he thought he saw where the Sun’s flood furled to a gland of flame.

Imp Plus was ready to see these insides containing the Sun’s flow. From outside his brain he looked into it through a gray-amber flesh, through glaring oxides of saffron cytoplasm, through platinum-fired sheaths of glue cells, even to the edge of that gold gland of flame. Layer on layer swarmed with those ovals the cell’s power plants each with its path of particles breathed through blood-blanched locks of enzyme. Imp Plus might as soon use for these baked-potato ovals the Dim Echo’s stored and pointless and (he saw) now fading word mitochondria , as smell through it an acrid ill will now merely remembered: or see an alien ellipsoid feeding an Earthly fire.

Yet not as soon, maybe. For the Earthly fire was far away. And a memory unprepared.

Yet a frequency that went on mixing its signal of scrub and thorns until the fibers of crackling campfire came apart and he heard the signal.

Or saw: for the Earthly fire was in the night and in Mexico, unlike the Sun stream running through the brain, and unlike crimson veins winking life into tails of shadow.

Or smelled: for the potato shapes that neither fed the faraway fire nor were fed, had smelled like that for years and years.

But as they blackened into the mouthing coals, they were seen through: for amid the long potato shape — potato? mitochondrion! — was a daylight window; and a small bird black-white-and-gray with a touch of red on its side and a forked tail three times its body swept over a line drooping between poles against the plateau of sky: so a voice could say words about the sac hanging from the dark line: it was a nest woven by the cousin of the scissor-tailed bird, and both birds were called flycatchers.

The words were out loud. The voice had wanted to take a breather from Operation TL, get away from California for a few days and nights. The voice was his, and it was talking. The car’s daylight window had moved, like the glove compartment with its books of California matches, into the nighttime campfire where not one but two potato shapes roasted.

For there was a second voice. It had not come from California. It did not laugh and was not the same that had lain in the water, and it was dry but not acrid. She had seen the scissor-tailed flycatcher from the car window. And now waited for her potato among the thorns and scrub of the tierras templadas . And this voice said this was good — oh she’d wanted to get away to the Sun.

But the Earth with the campfire had turned away from the Sun. And the voice across the fire with its eyes closed would go away, and Operation TL would not. So Imp Plus had leaned along the ground and moved around the fire. The voice, hers, was not speaking; it sang: he heard templado , not templadas and not tierras .

Imp Plus got to her. Except he was not yet Imp Plus. With the start of Operation TL he would no more be what he had been, and maybe this had been why he had been moving around the fire toward the voice that sang with eyes shut.

When she was done she opened them. He had been touching her blue jeans and she had been holding a silver flashlight that shone in the fire.

He had been thinking what would come and remembering what he was to become in four weeks. This thinking had been clear and it had been touched by desire; so it came to him now in orbit. But he could move from spoke to spoke of his sight around the radiant brain. For this was new, this was not remembering. Or the spokes were new. For they were his sight, each one a solid. Yet where their light was dimmer they could be seen through, and yet his sight was maybe not sure.

His sight, though, was solid. But was not only spokes.

More wings or necks.

He didn’t know where they came from, but he knew they went to the brain.

Knowing this he saw there in the brain a blue dart come like the crimson veins in the shadows before. This blue was a line and then a radius. But a radius become the locus of a width. Which was how it plowed sideways broadside. He knew locus .

The knowing and seeing of these things went or came with the tearing twist of pain. It twisted round tight but did not untwist. For instead it found in its tightening spiral new dimensions by which it then burst inward. And was the reverse of torn. A thick new membrane. He stepped back to view the cloudy silk of it which was close to him on the way to the brain along his solid but unsure sight.

But he had nothing with which to step.

Yet now he went right over the membrane along the spoke to the brain. Close up he saw the blue line that had plowed or washed sideways between a cavernous canal and an infinitesimal drag or suck that he did not see why he could see. But the wash sank in, and its dim trace faded against the Sun’s flood charging the brain.

Imp Plus passed without thought from one spoke to another; he would see if he could see the blue trace. But it was not there, and in that field of absence the other, once-known pain that was not the burning twisting caving came to him along its axis of distance.

There were shoes of yellow hide standing by the fire. They had marks on them that were a map of how to get back. In California a shoemaker’s axle had spun against a rim of sole, but the shoemaker was not making the shoe. Imp Plus took steps through the night in Mexico, he was following the voice and the flashlight that bobbed ahead of him. The voice was not singing or speaking, the sound she made broke between breathing and humming at once. He stepped on thorns which he did not see. The shoes were back at the fire. He cried out “Ow.” The light stopped bobbing and the beam wheeled, hitting the car which was at a distance elsewhere. The light passed a pale thing close to it, and then the beam came to him. The woman was not making the sound now. She said, “All I wanted was some sun.” He wanted to tell her about TL but she was afraid she had nothing to give back. The empty shoes of yellow hide were back by the fire near the baking potatoes. He wanted to lick a honey-sweetness but it was in himself. He was thirsty but for what was already in him. One desire filled the place of another; a thing tightened on him like shoes.

Feet came to him along the axle of the other pain that was not the crashing, caving pain, and was barely out loud. But then they were his own feet in daylight. Toes stroked a throat, and they went on under the California water to a mass with a nipplelike knob he squeezed. The toes under the Sun-drenched cloud of water were his. He was up to his shins and not in Mexico.

The toes that squeezed were under the water somewhere and under the basking woman. The bigger toe he knew had an oval hornlike plate set into its end. Next to it, a thinner longer toe had a small square plate. A long weekend was what he and the woman had ahead. Yet she was travelling light, she said, as if she knew something about Operation TL. Or was glad to have only themselves. Now she rested wafting face down in the shallows of the sea. He pinched, not tight. She rolled her head back out of water and said, “What you want.”