Joseph McElroy - Plus

Which was stretch and stretch the substance of a wing limb till it felt not thinner but the reverse — thicker — and was thicker, and split into two. Which with other twos around himself leaned across.

To make web-folds nothing like the folds of brain which had unfolded as the brain grew what it grew.

But he kept not seeing his body. Was that it? Or kept not seeing it as he thought he ought. Then a dark streak he could see down through showed on its surface a width of slick. So he thought a wing had passed a strip of wind across the streak. But the wings that had not divided into folded arms waved so little they looked still enough to be their own thought.

He was pinned on the end of the axis which was ready to turn like a radius, but now he felt not its pain, only a spray of foamy limbs making him wish to be not there — which was the same as the pain feeling but now was not pain. The axis stuck in him in his midbed: the axis of distance: a windmill stirred the Sun above him: the axis telescoped down close to an ocean: he was aiming at fish: he was the animal end of the axis which was a radius; audible words (not now) spoke of one-celled stuff layered below the sea surface thus causing upon it a slick; the axis was a tube coming up into him in his midbed like wind and the ocean end of this axis of distance he was stuck on had no vegetable news vendor but had vegetable nutrient. Until Imp Plus understood what was happening. Then the axis — which was distance — telescoped out the other way thousands of miles into audible words not of the first voice but of a second which was a woman not of the Mexican night or California beach or the dark woman of the syringe — and the new one was telling how from space fishermen could find what they could never see close up and could drop axis into whole green schoolrooms of plankton, but the first voice was both known to him and not here or now, and struck an unknown through him, for if the second was right the Earth end of the axis of distance was the animal pole and Imp Plus’s end or Imp Plus himself was vegetative; so he said again himself and him .

Whereupon with shifts of sliding substance the grains of lumen and the known pieces of brain now refractions swimming — as if growth were separated travel — in what he’d taken to be the body grown solely from the brain, made it hard for him to hold that first voice that came on the axis of distance. But he held on long enough to see it was the Acrid Voice talking low above an ocean under a mill that stirred the Sun, which he now saw was the kind of wind his body stirred. A solar wind.

This wind in turn laid across the dark streak the width of slick that came and went all around the body. For the streaks were of the same body that stirred the wind to make the slicks, through which when Imp Plus looked he saw motion though not any motion. Also the motion of new crowds of points, bright but as if deflected from brightness, maybe dissolution that was the shadow of a wholeness elsewhere. And because he saw blue darts in the limbs now he saw he gathered several distances into the one stranding of single sight — the gathering of flows into strains that hugged themselves long, then let go then hugged and hugged again till all their songs fell into one resolve: the gathering turned this compound membrane-sight at once back to the still unfolding head of growth, node of nodes, crown of clefts. And this in time to see and feel a wish to have to see a new sliver rise from a lobe bed spraying elbows or grasshopper knees into the Sun’s massing stream. And saw through the now nearly opened and flattened Premotor cleft a raft of once outlying membranes bend up through an arm-join into the brain and, having got in, plow up broadside slowly toward the brain’s gray-amber roof-skin pushing to get out onto it.

While somewhere else in the brain the crimson flashed warm that Imp Plus had seen before only in the outlying bodies.

He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces — he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think — was that it?

But a given focus in its spasms of gathering drew from various distances only some membranes, not all.

And looking sometimes through the brain’s bright work, he wondered why sight-gathering into the focal axis did not take in all membranes, all distances. But he thought the brain was like the body in being not always transparent.

Ground was asking Imp Plus to answer. Ground read maximum power and maximum glucose level, yet read rapid action in cortex. ARE YOU ALERT IMP PLUS? Rapid activity in motor and sensory areas. DO YOU READ IMP PLUS? PLEASE COME IN IMP PLUS. ARE YOU THERE?

He recalled an arm, an eye, a leg. Remembered remembering to remember eyes — just so — sitting with his arms and legs and concentrating on eyes until there was one preparation, then one eye, one eye inside beyond the two eyes he had and would lose. So the shift of beach sand under a wind came to him in each grinding drag of facet over facet, so if he wished he heard the grains of beach as rocks so that with a spasm of distance he could feel that next to the noise in his one recalled ear was a slice of rock sliver along his cheek. And knew he could no more tell Ground about the spasm than the movement of his lost hearing between a billion individual sands each with a noise of rock and the whole rustling shift of the fine beach surface where he lay next to the legs he had been standing against before in the shallows of the water. But if instead of explaining to Ground he wanted to suck or push or reverse one of his outlying limbs back into the brain to touch the red flashings there that had been in the limbs before, the real thing was he did not want to tell Ground.

Not because he did not know if Ground was the Good Voice or the Acrid Voice. Not because the Good Voice had been bad in sending the dune monitor to keep watch on Imp Plus the last weekend. And not because the Acrid Voice had been acrid and alone. The Acrid Voice had said Imp Plus might learn to use the Concentration Loop to talk to himself. Now along the axis of distance in a spasm he did not want, there was a movement near his lost ear, and it went down or up his lost cheek, and after all, he saw with his lost eyes that any motion at that place was on another cheek, the Acrid Voice’s cheek. It opened and there was another cheek that also opened. And below them a sound was seen spreading on the mouth into an Acrid laugh far and away from the woman’s laughter on the beach but laughter too, and shared. But over a distance that wasn’t an axis line. If the axis had ever been a line. But more a distance that was a shape. But as soon as Imp Plus thought that the distance between Acrid Voice’s laugh and woman’s laugh took in a third (which was his own — but then, not now), the distance grew past three to no less than a four-parted shape which would still be the axis of distance because the paining ping or spin or span of distance spasm’d again, Yet not exactly from beyond Imp Plus but from him himself.

But though the Acrid Voice (who was not good but was not bad) might say Imp Plus might learn to talk to himself on the Concentration Loop, he had no time to talk to himself, he must monitor what was happening. That was it, he must monitor what was happening here.