Joseph McElroy - Plus

“Vanity,” she said into his mouth.

But if it did not matter that the dark glasses saw him, it did not matter if he saw them.

Imp Plus’s approaching sliver slowed and hung. It did not keep moving like the light that lowered.

But as it stopped it made a length of shadow on the milky membrane below it. Imp Plus now saw the sliver’s true or longer length not from the shadow site above which the nearly vertical sliver, like the shadow, was little longer than a point; no, Imp Plus saw the true or longer length from another place as if the eye corners where he often saw the strands of resilience loosening and tightening looked back at him.

What would he do?

This was a question, but was it the right one?

One thing he could do he found by having done it.

This was to hear Ground’s transmissions as silence. Yet when and how weren’t sure.

Ground asked the meaning of This morning , but Imp Plus eyed the new sliver instead.

He saw the sliver’s longer length with a ray of brain behind it. Yet then at once he saw another still longer length from a new angle’s height so his view had for background an arc of capsule bulkhead and the cool shadowy end of one of the spokes on which now no crimson vein showed here and there. But this was not enough. A desire once part of him now acting alone for him brought one more view, small and not leaning at all and smaller than it really was because the view was cut into by a spoke whose length was unclear because of the angle of the view which seemed to be from the far and under side of the brain. Yet now this set of four views moved into one, with the pain of caving-out which was not as keen now though more painful than the other distance-pain that maybe did not hurt. And with the pain came a shimmer. It was a pulse and was a new brightness of haze and so less clear, yet a new size which was not bigger and not smaller. It was the whole sliver, the all-sided thing now milky-hazed, now crystal clear, but whole as a memory he could not put his finger on. He knew memory , but saw that it was not the same as remember .

But the new whole sliver was not now any one of the four co-views.

But was their sum. Their product. Their home. Their figure.

Here a pain worse than cave-crash skewered him on a cylinder he did not see. Cylinder and pain were an axis fine as a blade that being a locus was also the curve of cylinder wall. Pain so bad. Pain like splitting the speed of light where he was light, and it was silent — what? — and so bad it seemed final: but was not. And when it passed shivering back down its axis of distance, he remembered a shade of what he had remembered at the endless point of that pain: it was a light called coherent light banked, divided, remade, in a dark room not as far from the newsstand as were California and then Mexico. And he as he then had been had been in charge. Not the Good Voice planning. Or the Acrid Voice chalking. Not the brown woman with a gold ring who had brought a long sliver in to his arm when he was in pain. The pain had come so soon after the day at the shearwater beach that he could not understand how his body whose illness was a beginning of Operation TL could change so fast.

What could he do?

Hear words from Ground: THIS MORNING WHAT, IMP PLUS. YOU SAID THIS MORNING. THIS MORNING WHAT? COME IN IMP PLUS.

He (who was you) had the stretch-cave burn again all over and an idea that was not green came to him, that from the spoke-limbs his solid sight to the brain had found more than was being found from here in the brain outward. Here he looked from chance angles and corners. A fort so living you did not know where you would chance to see out of it next. The spoke-solids of pointless sight had wonderful colors of thickness. They moved away from him, he thought. Spines of membrane, spines fattening. He felt he saw in one and then another a budge. Like a thing inside. Had shoved another. But more came after. Or he thought he could see this, and thought he could be there in them more clearly than he could have them by looking from the brain and its configuring changes outward.

Ground asked a new question: Was he not remembering as much?

A wave felt like a collar going through him, and it left him less. And a voice that was the Dim Echo said, “Wonderful, wonderful. Say again.”

But the wave was a thought. A thought that everything would be taken away from him. A feel would be taken from his flesh as already flesh from feeling. A hand taken from his hand, a Mexican song retracted from his ear. A salmon-nippled tongue subtracted from the fork of his legs.

Ground asked if Imp Plus felt O.K.

Ground added: FRANKLY IMP PLUS WE ARE GETTING NOTHING FROM CERTAIN AREAS. ARE YOU INTEGRATING SENSORY INPUT?

Pale green ripples rose in the middle of a limb. He wondered if the Dim Echo was trying to speak.

But the ripple wasn’t quite a motion. More a gradient. A bony gradient that layover something but also was that something.

And was matched elsewhere on the outlying spoke by another gradient form as alive but this time darkest red. Which stretched like a mouth going to open.

The milky membrane was most slick and thick between these two areas.

Dark blue and pale brown were on the spoke or wing adjacent. (Or did he only remember?) And on it lay the long point or brief rung of shade cast down through the capsule’s empty space by the now more leaning sliver Imp Plus had sprung.

Rung . He did not know rung . But with its cast shadow, it was an idea. Yet not like the green thing, the algae.

Though, like the green thing, someone else’s idea. But rung or not, Imp Plus had had the feel of that shadow across his seeing before: and now knew he had already known that the membranes were what he saw with. Though not eyes.

Sometimes he saw through; sometimes not.

If the news vendor kept his mouth open because he saw with his teeth, maybe the colored and discolored and loose and also absent teeth came and went and came again.

Beyond the ripple districts the membrane tissue began to fade.

The limbs were not all membrane. Their sticky shine was sometimes hard as plating.

One of the spokes seemed to move away from him, he was not sure. What could he do? But the center district between the green and dark red ripples was now bigger.

He felt under the membranes levels and laminations that he was going to see, and he could feel right down to the vegetative and animal poles of one cell lucky enough to be part of what the membrane was becoming part of.

Vegetative was not the vendor’s vegetable . Imp Plus did not know animal , but only recalled it. What could he do?

“Remember to survive of course.” That was what the Acrid Voice had said into the chalky greenboard in a pale green room as if he did not mean the words to go to Imp Plus. But remember what?

The woman at the California beach was all flesh. She stood straight against him and he forgot his ill body. Forgot the Mexican thorn that had cut his feet (near the silver-leaf flower that sprang up under the flashlight) — and the fingers that went away from his hand at the winter newsstand in which the hooded vendor with always open half-laughing mouth and rotten teeth had a bandage so loose you could see in one socket a pale red purse like a body hole. All came together loosely arrayed by a force. It was there and touched Imp Plus who could feel it but not reach it.

It was like an idea, other ideas besides resilience: like the resilience the strands were of — the strands in corners of all eyes loosening and tightening, loosening and (now he thought with the full closeness of his former look) losing a process of strand before tightening back. The chlorella bed had seemed to him an idea long ago. But then he tried to stop himself, for he did not know idea . He had recalled it; but he did not know it. He knew the green chlorella, knew that it gave him part of his air. Wasn’t that all? And now also knew that the spokes had membranes with sight. But he persisted in feeling that the spread and the poles and the open chances of this sight were more than sight and more than what they’d felt like.