Joseph McElroy: Plus

The brightness was the Sun.

Impulses piled up in the head. Imp Plus had no skull. Imp Plus had no head. Imp Plus had always had a head for figures. Now what were the shadows if not the figures of birds? Imp Plus was in many parts and could fall toward them all at once. It was hard but he could not help it. It was seeing.

If it was by sprouts that Imp Plus persisted in seeing without eyes, then there were optic stalks. Imp Plus must have those. If not optic stalks, what?

Were such questions travelling in answer to the impulses?

Negative, negative.

A difference leaned between.

It was a change that inclined to and from the green thing. A change Imp Plus felt he made. But not to make the grade. A change that gave him an edge, so that through the message pulses Imp Plus knew a thing more than what they told. The message pulses came through this change.

The change was a gradient because Imp Plus had been told gradient and the pulses came down along it and he inclined to receive them.

From the message pulses through this change he knew his loss was real. His loss of all but a fraction.

All but a fraction of what?

Imp Plus had lost the knowledge of what had been lost.

The impulses he had had so long on the frequency from Earth asked for levels of light, of glucose. But he received them at many points, so there were many gradients. The impulses asked for a galvanometer reading — quantum yield of light radiation — which Imp Plus knew but also now for the first time did not. And the green thing was being named. But the names slid down a gradient that opened and inclined to be many gradients.

Imp Plus could give the answers. Now there were other things beside the answers.

Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination. A sharp drop.

And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He? Imp Plus had the word operation . The pulses did not stop; and often Imp Plus would hear the words read me , but then now through an alternative vent he would sometimes get the other order, me read , and wonder if it came from him or Earth. The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.

What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.

So some of the gradients were Imp Plus. Which was why he could fall into himself.

He heard the word hear . It was direct from the impulses, or it was by his coming between. Divide molecules reacting by photons absorbed, and get quantum yield. The words were not much inclined.

The news vendor with gauze loosely over the blind eyes was not here. Imp Plus knew that. And Imp Plus was here.

So were the shadows which were not of birds. Or magpies or flycatchers with tails longer than themselves. And the shadows were too slow to be the shadow of the frequency; and having thought this Imp Plus saw that as with the eyes of the green thing before him so with the frequency propagating waves, Imp Plus made acts of observation.

The brightness went and came, and bent and came. On gradients. And now the shadows had moved both away and closer. Imp Plus could see this.

The brightness came along lines. When he looked they turned and spun around and around.

The brightness that was the Sun or from the Sun passed him many times between what he knew and what he nearly knew. Sleep was on one side, then on the other, never on both, also at times on neither. The word for sleep was on only one side but now had come to be an audible line along the middle between the two sides. Audible because impulses from Ground said the word. But audible now along some middle because Imp Plus had the word. And when Ground said SLEEP, the word occurred also as that line along the middle so that only one side sank into sleep and not both. But this was new, and for a time Imp Plus did not need to know why Ground ran Gs — ran EEGs — thinking both sides of him were asleep when in truth during any given EEG — which Imp Plus now made into electroencephalogram —only one side had responded to Earth’s transmission SLEEP. Or both had, but only one side slept. But then he did not have just two sides, or so he thought — which meant he was in error. The Sun passed many times between sleep and not-sleep, and the impulses in Imp Plus were outside of him, and he recalled arriving here, and thought that soon now here for the first time sleep would occur, which meant waking too. He repeated here , for there was something in it.

Here.

Imp Plus recalled being in charge. And being changed. And falling into himself but then being put in mind of the impulses by means of the impulses.

Imp Plus knew more. Knew it through what he could have called sleep , which was sleep with something missing, sleep itself. Starlings flew by the Sun. They lengthened like cranes, and contracted like elbows. Too slow to be starlings. So slow, they didn’t move. And too big to be inside, which was what they were.

There was such a brightness arrayed round Imp Plus that there was heat. Or must be. There was a window that obeyed Earth and could keep the Sun from burning. The thought came to Imp Plus with one of the particles once just missing and now hunting him down, that since he had no eyes he was not seeing the brightness but only remembering it like the word array — solar array . The particle finding him vanished sharply in a charge of brightness.

Which remained as a flare of many single lines arrayed which would spin if Imp Plus looked. But when he tried to recall what they were from, they fell away from him and were themselves gradients — gradients adrift.

But gradients were here, while solar array was not. Yet solar array received the long lights of the Sun, for solar was Sun —and the long lights were here. If the solar arrays were not here, where were they? Solar arrays —they became more than one, like gradient , when he thought of them. So he, Imp Plus, made them more. So then in some way they were here. How long were the long lights of the Sun that were both here and received by solar arrays? — arrays that were both here and not here. Here and there Imp Plus found the absences where particles were just missing; and when these absences that were his went after those darting particles, they found them just at the moment when each particle came so close to one of another inclination that the two, meeting, vanished — into an absence so close to his heart he thought he saw it: a shared line, a line spinning around yet circleless into the chance of many lines, a radius gradient alight with absence that was motion for which gradient was only a name long years on Earth.

Imp Plus recalled years but not what one was. Or when.

How long was the start and where was the beginning? The last Apollos had left. But there are no beginnings, Imp Plus thought.

The last Apollos had left the Moon. They had raised their faceplates, lifted off their helmets with the gold sunshades, taken off their hoses and their boots. They had begun not to be new, not needed — though who knew what had got inside them through their suits to stay. Or to go out the other side after blazing a trace inside them.

A trace that would stay in a wall inside — inside what? — in a gradient — but stopped — in the wall of what? — stopped in a cell wall until a pulse could use that trace. But particles that passed thus through bodies might, as through grids, leave nothing.