Joseph McElroy - Plus

It was the face that rolled back. Did he know face? The pale thing the flashlight beam had passed in Mexico not four weeks before had also been a face. Another woman’s face. Pale and not California. Though when seen close up, wet like this. Though not so wet. Wept. Tear-damp.

But this woman half sunk in the Pacific sea let water run over the wide-set eyes of her turned-back head. They were blue where his were brown, he could see them. And her whites were clear blue-white.

His sight of her had come to him through the nipple fixed out of sight between his two toes. His sight of her had spiralled up to him. It had come through parts of him he was going to lose at the end of the long weekend and had begun to miss.

The sailing shearwaters and the flapping, crook-winged, hook-billed diver osprey had gone away into the open sea air. The woman had turned on her back.

He had seen swirls of foam and felt twists of ill will clouded in acrid smoke, and he had dragged a long breath in. So long he caught a film of spray and his front swelled out, and she said, “Vanity.” She laughed and the blue-green water tipped into her mouth and was her color. She coughed and sat up in the shallows and held him. Her breath woke a knee. Below her shoulder which was cool, her gentle gland turned outward pressed against his shin stem. Her armbone wet the back of his knees, and the end of her arm came around in front reaching up higher.

These good things came to him. And she coughed some more, and many gaps in his sudden and towering headache raced independently back and forth bringing the acrid camouflage of smoke — and when she got to her feet she rose up that axis of distance that was the once-known pain that was not the crab twist of cave-crash. What came to him out of the air and the distant glint of his car and of hard glassy particles in the sand of the dunes, were bodies of her nipples and then dark-blooded pores of her nipples and her whole face. And before he knew it he had followed the curve of her lower lip up over the sea-bright chap creases dried and cut in fine puffs, and in beyond the fleshy skin into the ingrown body the shining loin of the mouth saying the Sun was warm.

What had come to him then came now on a wing or spoke of his sight. And with it came the grinding crackle that turned him into a new blast-burnt hollow, and with it came the blue dart. And of all things the Dim Echo was saying, “Hypothalamus active.” The blue dart was this time so much into the brain that the blue line was right above the gland of flame he had stopped short of before. And so deep that the dart itself might have been what jabbed into him the caving rip of burn-pain. But Imp Plus knew that this time the pain was on the next spoke over. Where he saw he also was. Though this next spoke or neck of sight stood below and ran from another pole.

But what had come was this: that in the Sun of that spring seashore, he’d seen the ingrown body of her mouth: seen edges, tips, grooves, and arches of a tongue laid he only now saw with a velvet of cones or nipples small like light-receptor cells that did their own winking, each one: and here was the point, the point which had not hurt here except with the hum of distance but now with the other pain ground him and twisted him into an instant: the point was that he had looked into the mouth to find a formed emptiness that was the ingrown body and he had known he did not fear an unknown and brain-scrambling loss that would take place on an operating table the next week: and instead had had a new desire. There were words he had not prepared to remember for the point of the desire he now saw.

But the space of the desire that seashore afternoon on Earth had been he now saw as unknown as the tongue’s bed of velvet nipples had been to his eyes. The difference (and again pain came on the heels of the blue dart) was that here now in orbit the desire was a thing not lost. It was not the pale strip across the pores of her back and the groove of her spine, and it was not the fine smoke of rehydrated sweat from the armpit that far down his body his calf hairs had brushed while she sat in the sea and that had then gone up toward him along that axis of distance. No. What he understood now in orbit was that the desire’s aim had been unknown. And where his present microsight came to him by division upon division, this unknown desire that was in place of fear divided its long vacancy into the non-burning pain of waves that even then had always hummed an axis of distance.

And as the brain from several — how many? — spokes, wings, necks, or routes as if it had no scale — or, for that matter, thought of him — came at him and went back, came large and went back to less, he got the product of this multiple division.

The product was the other pain of the caving.

But as he got this product it changed.

For the blue discharge showed its dart at once and more than once not just in the spot the Dim Echo might have been calling hypothalamus right above the furled flame now still more tightly furled. This time the discharge of line or dart went on longer or stronger against the Sun’s flood.

But this was not the change. The change was that from the caving-out, the caving-in, the breakage like a stretch where cushions of blood shot into cords that twisted narrower and narrower into instants like quanta, there was no pain.

Though the pain was there. But held inside his knowing: and the knowing was that the caving blasts were a quotient got from dividing the old non-burning pain of distance by the desire-of-unknown-aim.

The car at the edge of the beach was the same that had gone from California to Mexico and back. It was not new but it had become an unknown quantity. This had caused the woman when she had been standing behind him to laugh a spiral up his spine. “Come swim,” she said, and then “your eyes are bloodshot.” He was going to leave the car behind, but not yet. They had to get from the beach to other places they were going. But at the end of the long weekend when the operation was to get under way, he would be glad to leave the car behind. But that was not what she laughed at. But if her words Travel light meant she knew of the project, then she might know he was leaving the car behind. But that would not have been what she would be laughing at. He knew her. But what did he know? The car was not new but the spokes were new. They did not have horny plates like toes. The spokes were several and he saw by all of them. The spoke of the cloudy membrane had moved, but so had another, but he could not tell if this other had moved down or up or out.

He had to change his thinking.

This thought restored the torn burn-pain, the tear of cave-crash. But so fast he didn’t spot the blue dart. For the Sun’s flood was now less. The gland of flame where he had not ventured had furled even more tight and thin.

But he remembered the launch. And that he was weightless now. Yet felt such a weight as he had not known.

Maybe it was the blind news vendor’s radar. The man had said, “I took hold, and now I got a regular radar.”

Imp Plus had said he felt the radar.

The blind man said, “I see more than you think.”

Imp Plus had asked him what was the more he saw with his radar. Imp Plus had felt the whole weight of the launch and had lost hold of a hold he had had whose presence he knew he had not then needed radar to name.

He had heard a dull gleam of metal clank into the funnel in front of a stack of newspapers. The funnel was tin, and what went into the tin was silver, his quarter but not dropped by him. “How much you give me?” said the blind vendor. “Somebody else put it in, right?”

“Right!” said another voice.

There had been more than Imp Plus there at the newsstand. There had been the other that the blind man had seen. Seen? Not out of his cold eye sockets covered by loose bandages. Imp Plus did not know right . But he knew the high voice. But then another voice had spoken different words hard to know, and tiempo was the word Imp Plus caught and remembered. This new voice was lower than the one that had cried, “Right,” and the blind news vendor was saying, “You got your kid with you.” And smacked his lips.