Joseph McElroy - Plus

The raft of membrane that Imp Plus had seen come from a limb and bend in around a join between brain and body, then push upward into the brain toward the top of the brain, had grown now right into the surface of the cortex where it lay glistening with the still brighter dot in the middle that made him see all the eyes he had ever seen with their small bright dots in the middle. He saw the membrane — or the membrane was seen — from frond tips of the rising body; but at the same time he saw them themselves at angles like spasms. And seeing that this membrane that had passed from the body to the brain was an eye membrane, he became aware of seeing by means of it not only the now subsiding frond tips (some of these merging like light the plasm of their outlines), but also the changing shades and red and blue glimmers the capsule ceiling gave back as it took and was the warmth of the morning.

And he knew but had no space to think about having once seen this capsule outside and in. Nor had space to hold in his head the Good Voice saying, “Go ahead, feel free to look around, it’s all yours, have a look inside.”

No space except for what was happening.

Except what was happening made less than no space more. He circled up and down, dividing and dividing his sense.

He was free, if not of Ground’s transmissions.

These were like where he had just been and left. And what he was just about to find — if he did or not — was like a gland of light ahead that with the compounds of his sight he saw not right ahead but abeam as he circled up and down.

He saw more than he used. But would not ask for less. His sights moved, and the rear bulb of the brain was seen to be flattening, which should hurt but did not. While from and through this rear, flattening bulb he saw that the tube sections below through the cleft were not of him but outside. And thereupon, his sight-wings pawed round to catch the tubes from outside; his sight angled as if from body membranes at different distances to see what he saw he’d once seen before but without thought. Then as he saw — saw the clear oblong underhousings where two tube roads entered the brain — there was added to what he saw a rush of parts from the brain along one tube clear to the entry point in the housing over the algae beds.

Some of these brain parts were packets of Sun and they glanced everywhere to see their way out of the track of the tube. Or then they were knots staring through a towering headache he didn’t feel. Knots banded into spinning spindles. Which the more he looked were radii. The packets were strands of radii hunting new circles. Packets still of Sun but his Sun and from him, running down the clear canal hung through hills of air.

Down the canal these packets went from one sort to another for he saw they had changed by the time they went in the algae’s houses. And he thought he saw the smallest orbits within orbits crack and re-form — the way the strands of resilience in the corners of his eyes loosened, lost pieces and gaps, and tightened again — yet also the cracking and re-forming orbits within orbits broke when hit by other Sun streams from the Sun outside — the Sun not his own.

Down the canal these were parts of him he was losing to the algae. Like seeing more than he used. But other parts came back up the other tube into the brain’s underhousing inside which a clear disc pumped back and forth the length of the housing, but when he inclined toward closer sight a motion he had not wholly noticed stopped. He had not first wished to incline; the inclining was the wish, and he knew he saw small and large because in being the very thing he saw he both pinned his sight to nerve heads and blew it up in the body of a future idea he felt in him. And the inclining to closer sight went with a halt. Which was a halt among the racing, revolving things in the upward tube so that though they kept revolving they stopped moving up the tube into the brain. But the halt that went with the closer sight and with this halt in the upward tube, was also in another motion: this motion (which, when it halted, Imp Plus’s inclining sight could see only by recall) was a breath of cycle, and its halting made the brain and the body for a moment look equal in substance and simultaneous: and the breathlike cycle which waited briefly when Imp Plus inclined toward this closer sight and resumed when he stopped inclining, was the palm of brain swelling to lift the fingers of body, then the brain subsiding and spreading and the body merging its members and showing in transparencies of density what Imp Plus had gone on to know: that all over was a drift of substance. A shift.

Of bends and bundles and bonds. So in three, four, five, or more limb bodies that extended from the brain’s hub could be seen now what had been only (he thought) in the brain before: snowy glial cells glue-mouthing branches that grew out of twigs firing and not firing and tonguing with a light that twisted free while binding its own loin of freedom: whereas in the old brain were to be seen now what had been in the limbs before: strips of cloudy membrane adrift and wiggling near the olive fibers of the optic ways. Then up near the cerebrum’s curved and lowering roof (he knew the word — the word roof? the word curved? no: cerebrum —it came echoing in to him) two translucent spines he knew had once been part of an outlying limb’s outline slid along a sight membrane likewise here in the cerebrum visiting from the limbs — until the trough or streambed of membrane curled lengthways to cup or wrap the spine; and for an instant of desire he saw this spine so whole it grew into the membrane. And thus wrapped, they swerved away from the lowering roofs of the brain until they found and leaned into the tendrils lengthening from the smell bulbs one of which now was drawn with its tract away from its root near the optic tracts and from what had been the brain’s core toward the probe of a new body approaching like an empty arm. And he saw this was a limb, a body limb, coming inside by reversing itself inside out leaving the outer reaches of the capsule and peeling a mouth open and turning itself inside out into a side area of the brain. And when a sliver popped from a fore area and Ground asked what was the story and asked again and again if Imp Plus detected outside influence, he let the Dim Echo answer that an exploratory probe had entered a lower left association area.

At this instant the crimson flash occurred near the core, and the thumb or head of the inside-out limb threw out a luminous emptiness to touch that red and instead drew from the core one of the small island bodies located above the gland of flame, and retracted this island body out into itself; And then into the outer area of the capsule — for the limb rebodied itself and lay out, wing or spoke, toward the shining gray bulkheads where the blue-mottled pearl of the hemisphere hung adrift, and Imp Plus had desired the limb to do this.

He had desired that one of his limb bodies suck itself into the brain to catch the crimson flashings that he had used to see in the outlying parts and that seemed to have been supplanted out there by the blue darts that had once been in the body of the brain.

Red and near-blue neared and fell back somewhere under where the islands of the core stood afloat, those that were left after the two had been sucked out into the long substances of outlying body which he could no longer call body. A thing he thought must be a thought was coming to him. It came also from him. It was a sight, too. Not the sight he now saw he wanted to get away from into doing. No, not that sight. Yet that kind of sight he would not get around. So he thought he would stop trying to get around it. It was kind of how he focused. What kind? He knew but must say. To say, he must start, but this could never be the start, for he could never see or have seen the start. He could go on, only, and in pieces, pieces that did for him, or, that is, pieces that would do. But as he did, he felt divided and redoubled into several places of himself, inside and out. How did he focus? There wasn’t one center. He gathered himself to see the algae beds and other plant tests he now saw he had lived with but not thought of. And he gathered himself to see now the radius-spindles of his own changing Sun flow down the tube from that underhouse near what had been the bun or little brain. He gathered himself as suddenly to see sight membranes that had gone from the limbs into the cerebrum and grown or ranged to the top, and the membrane that had the gray-glittering point in the middle. Gathered himself to see among the limb bodies now armed with substance parts of the brain lean toward focus.