Joseph McElroy - Plus

Always was then. Yet now, too.

Though not just here, though he was here. The night felt like many nights — nights of nights. The night divided and went on.

He could not bear something. Another pain. This pain was not the cave or split of growing, nor the axis of distance. But the axis of distance was one turning spoke of it. The new pain was as small as silence, but now, he saw, as large — a silent stretch, the absence of crash. But more still: an absence in general, but gold and many-colored.

An absence which he found then that he filled: by looking from all the night arcs of blood sugar whose idea he smelled; and by looking and straining from them beyond the one huge arc-part with its wheeling falls; staring unequally to where all these wheeled from. He felt what he saw — was that it? He found himself both seeing from all his membranes’ unequal distances and simultaneously waiting to receive his sight. It — was this it? — was waiting for itself before it got there: he was what he was seeing: so was this why he could take the sights beamed from the membrane-limbs’ unequal distances and receive this sight’s gathering onset and (wait) by being what he saw, both pin his sight into a point as small as (wait) a nerve head, as small as a pump pried by sight itself off the act of its own suck into infinitesimal function: and through it, in turn, see big too, because it held invisible inside its sight an idea of enlargement. See greater than big — far greater than the spreading large-scale sight he felt even at instants when he saw micro-small.

Maybe he was getting warmer, but his look or wish was turned before it got far enough.

For Ground asked if Imp Plus was asleep, and asked again, like a child aiming to wake a grownup. Asked if Imp Plus’s gauge showed a drop in temperature, asked for temperature but asked so that Imp Plus thought in a way he now recalled. Or smelled: for it was the ill will dividing him up: for Ground said Imp Plus could take those readings in his sleep, and the crackling Imp Plus thought he knew in the transmitted words was acrid laughing all over again: not the humor that once flowed from the bare woman’s eyes in California — no, the crackling humor now from Ground was what Imp Plus had smelt in the large green room when the Good Voice answered the Acrid Voice and gave Imp Plus time off the last weekend, “away from this goldfish bowl,” the Good Voice had said; “remember all that overtime ahead, day in day out, catching the Sun. A little private recreation is called for.” For the Acrid Voice had first said what if Imp Plus changed his mind, and now in answer to the Good Voice the Acrid Voice had said like a dim reflection, “Recreation,” and smoke came out of mouth and nose. So now Imp Plus felt the Acrid crackling when Ground said Imp Plus could take the temperature readings in his sleep.

Warm or cold was what the readings were. But was no temperature drop like no power drop in the accumulator?

Cap Com said the capsule couldn’t be so warm as the Ground gauge read. Warm was what Imp Plus thought the Sun was. The woman at the California seashore had said so when she rose out of the water. But the Sun was not here now. Ground was also not here.

The Sun came and went.

But Ground was always there.

The Sun could be where Ground was, but not always. There was more to it, and Imp Plus thought the Dim Echo knew. But the Dim Echo slept.

Not Ground. Its messages kept coming on the frequency. The frequency could not be the waves coming into the slivers that were adrift, for these slivers were not now implanted in Imp Plus.

IMP PLUS IMP PLUS DO YOU READ DO YOU READ?

He could not stop receiving but he did not have to answer.

CAP COM TO IMP PLUS CAP COM TO IMP PLUS WE READ MAXIMUM POWER IN ACCUMULATOR. WHAT’S UP? ARE YOU CONSERVING POWER?

He thought he would answer Ground. But he could only seek this other pain that offered. So he went on leaning to get where all the arcs of flow rolled from. To do this he must stretch across something inside him. A distance. Yet he did not see the distance till he had stretched. The brain with its scattered centers seemed to find the power to disperse still more. The distance inside did not make him feel good. The distance he straddled kept unfolding in what he had been feeling was the brain. He defended against the distance; but the distance was not more — not there — unless he stretched for the pain.

So that splitting he thought himself in two, thought of how Ground’s word SLEEP was like a line along a middle, and tried to see if the Dim Echo was on one side. The more he stretched the more he straddled, but straddling he was not on two sides of the lean over which he persisted in being, he was on many. When he was stretched too far, he recalled legs. And when he did, he dropped and was burned at a distance by that deep gland that once had furled and unfurled its fire. The gland was below the bodies or islands. But seemed to enrich and power them by filling the spaces up between them. Yet he was not seeing the power of the now flameless gland, for reaching at him into his straddling fall it caught him in an underfork of himself exposed. Then his stretch collapsed back into itself and with it distance it had leaned to cross. But as it did so, and also thought to do the opposite and open and stretch again, he knew that he had brought the gland to him.

By demanding time.

And he knew that the cool wet woman rising along his Sun-warm legs was some of the time-off though she didn’t know that what she found on him was more than California Sun. For the bright glint off there in the dune was more than one; it was two. And each lens of the dune watcher’s dark glasses reflected more than Sun and the woman and Imp Plus as he was: they reflected as well the large green project room and the shadow cast after Imp Plus that last weekend in order not to give him what he wanted — time alone.

They had not trusted him.

To be outside.

The pain that was not the split and not just the axis of distance offered itself again.

Imp Plus stretched to meet across the void.

Like trust, it was a void he resisted but brought into being.

Along its new edges the arc-flows rolled. He could not follow them yet to where they began but must see that the void came into being just because he went against it. Knowing this, he did not drop, this time.

Again, the gland below fired some underpart of him.

Which underpart? In reply, he remembered a wonderful wanting cup of himself. It had once been a midpoint — now no more mid than point. But wanting still.

To do something.

Which proved to be: first think what it had once wanted and done at the same time when it had been a midbed of the body.

The body the woman had climbed in the Sun. Bringing all the salt out of the sea with her. To pause on that midpart of him for a time: a time that like this night divided and divided into its own measure of her: of her repose. Hence, a time so set off from the glint of the dune watcher that, seeing down through the optic crossing and through the lower islands named by the Dim Echo and now, behind the radiant gland whose force fired him, to a backward-slanting seam along which a field of cells shone yellow-soaked as if due to something else, Imp Plus felt her repose acting upon him and inclined to think he projected that yellow with his sight and inclined to find his sight solely a reflection of the gland’s warm power.

But thought so because of the woman. Because what she gave — the time she gave — that threw the project’s glinting dune shadow light-years away — had made him think his desire all hers.

Which was not so. For, like the Sun got by her from his body, the desire which the dune glasses in a flash fixed in him came from far behind those glasses. It came from a bolt probed into being in the midbed of his body in the large green room where he had asked for time off. Probed into being by that word recreation — a plan for the man they did not trust.