Joseph McElroy - Plus

And Imp Plus saw not the lower voice that had said tiempo and moved on covered in fur, but the person round the Mexican fire and baked potatoes. For this was not California.

She was coming along the sidewalk, for this was not Mexico. Though Mexico had sidewalks though not around the campfire in the plateau. It was cold at the newsstand. As the person advanced, a smaller person went toward her which was away from Imp Plus and was like rising from the bottom of a scope to the top. The news vendor had said something in Mexican to the voice that had passed and now another voice that was also the news vendor said, “What’s your name? You like chewing gum?”

And Imp Plus now slid away from, then toward, the small then large crown, head, wig, vehicle of his own not scaleless yet now less heavily lighted brain. Leaned and staggered round the brain from spoke to neck to limblike stabilizer of what must be his solid sight which saw clefts, glints, craters, and full, pulsing flats potential in what were or had been clefts. But he couldn’t get off the chill axis of this distance-pain till the words came to him. Words once said to the blind news vendor: “She’s not here, she ran to meet her mother.”

For before seeing her rise from a low rim to the top of some scope of his, yes Imp Plus had been holding his child’s hand, his child. And while he had not yet been Imp Plus, he’d thought of being. For soon he had been back in California seeing crushed shells that had been remade into tubes, sticks, dowels of chalk draw angles that beamed like a flashlight right out to the curve of a flat ring. Beamed from one center on the Acrid Voice’s green blackboard. But the flat ring had two centers. And the second had the chill of space and the Acrid Voice called it empty . But from the first center he drew those angled segments that got wider and wider and like a searchlight beam hit the lip of the flat ring— ellipse , he knew ellipse — and that first center was the Sun, and the Acrid Voice was showing Imp Plus arcs of Earth’s orbit round the Sun.

And now as if from all four spokes of his solid sight — for several he found was four —Imp Plus found he saw like those white segment beams angled by the moving nest of the Acrid hand on a green slate. That is, saw with an equalness of spread down from the roof of that brain that he had half stopped thinking his, down down to the membranes along the solid limb of his sight right here close and toward him to the very brink of wherever on the four variously aimed limbs he looked from but then might see through in spots, for his sight was unsure. And he remembered dreaming his way through all the shapes and data on that slate, for it was a map to get back by. Yet instead he saw himself receding from his child, again his child running to meet her mother: to figure what hope had let go, he had to figure from the empty center of this ellipse: that is, see from the center unused by the Acrid Voice.

Until the Good Voice was telling at another time of the unknown force of solar light, the goodness of the project despite but also through its strange addition, telling also of the future and its goodness, while leading Imp Plus who was not yet Imp Plus out of the large pale green room on Earth though not to the smaller green room but to a place where he was to stretch out.

Which was what Imp Plus — with, behind him, birds, two women, potatoes, feet, and child — was doing now. Stretching out.

Else he could not have seen where a cleft now widened to show a silver pin like the points on the two floating slivers, and could not once more have gone into what he thought was his own brain. Looking for the crimson vein he found not crimson and not the shadows. He found what he then thought had made the shadows. He recalled the crease or cleft he’d half thought of, half hoped for. The Dim Echo was asking again to be laughed at. It reported 50 % increase in activity equally throughout Imp Plus which might include oscillation between hypothalamus and unknown areas. The Dim Echo reported capsule temperature lower.

Ground replied, WE HAVE BEEN GETTING THAT, IMP PLUS.

Imp Plus moved.

He spun round the four necks of his largely solid sight: and since at the same time he constantly opened and closed the brainward angle of his up-and-down scope, he made a spiral. Not the spiral of the blue-eyed woman’s laugh up his heavy spine that had turned him from his car engine; no, not that spiral but his own oscillating spiral. It was, first, all over. And a field more equal than that sweet humor of her blood and sugar laid once upon his ridges, his fissures. But what his spiral did now — though not with that polar spasm of refocusing like a funny-bone jab — was to spin in on a frontal crease which he’d half hoped half thought could get to be instead a crater or rich flat; and with the spiral’s contracted circuit but thus greater force, the spiral then stroked and spread that frontal crease, opened it much further.

A flash like a thought apart from him popped up.

It was a silver sliver. Like the slivers that hung in the light lowering near the algae. Crook-winged waves folded into it long distance. (The light was lowering everywhere.)

The sliver Imp Plus had popped out sailed on. It moved at a lean.

A figure shining through the heavens at an angle.

Proud filament launched by Imp Plus, its motion a long long breath drawn in.

Was why it moved why it kept moving?

“Vanity,” the woman said in the water. Lying there, she had not seen all he’d seen. But while she did not know his anger against the Acrid ill will much less the reach it had drawn him into by some mutual torque, she had seen his long deep breath swell him. It came in through his face. (He knew face.) She had said, “Vanity,” when he had taken in his deep breath; but he had also felt his face stretch and the flesh grow. (Vanity?) The growth was the mouth. He had made up his mind to smile — because he hurt again. (Where was the time going?) Particles of afternoon dune sand glinted closer.

One glassy facet a hundred meters from the car moved. It was somebody’s dark glasses. Imp Plus did not want the woman to know. (He wanted her the way she was.) Her figure folded and she leaned into his shadow. She sat up. Her breast pressed his shin stem. Her mouth came up. (Time went.) Sunlight passed in through his hair which was barely going gray; he did not do anything but stand inert; but not in vain, for in her slow rise up the axis of distance he too was in motion.

He said, “This morning”—but he wanted the quiet between her and him, so he stopped his words: though they had already launched his thought: it hung that morning between the smile of the Good Voice and the smile of the Acrid Voice. Imp Plus had been thinking between: that was it: thinking between these two: so it was thinking like a blindfold, thinking like an emptiness that didn’t exist all that much, an emptiness of attention: he wanted time off this last weekend but he camouflaged his wish (that was it) as the will to know: to know all that they in the pale green rooms could tell: about day and night, about glucose level, concentration loop, electrode monitors (“But so much is up to you,” the Good Voice beamed), G stress during launch, gyro rings in the inertial guidance system: “Ah, inertia,” said the Good big grin (knowing much that Imp Plus did not know); but the Acrid Voice said, “Inertia’s just self-preservation.” (His smile was short.) For the first time in a long time Imp Plus had not felt ill this morning. He wanted to get away from the green rooms and all the eyes full of wonder. Yet later at the beach he did not care if the eyes in the dark glasses saw.

If vanity was inertia, inertia might be vanity.

If inertia was self-preservation, self-preservation might be vanity.