Joseph McElroy - Plus

And he gathered, or came to feel, that the gathering of different distances into focus was like the muscle pricks of spasm-flows of charge. So at each moment of sight on some tip end of growing, his sight would be a center, or not a center, or lead toward the thing seen and draw other membrane-eyes after it all angling toward the thing to be seen, angling even through all the bodies inside what had been the brain for they could be transparent or not. At will, if not his. He found that many things at once were his — but to see or think. And when it came to saying, why he could not say many things at once. And if like an old lost center he gathered, was it just because the pieces, some of them, consented?

The limb body that had sucked away the two islands from above the gland of flame and resleeved out into the capsule’s space had now for the time being merged with bodies on either side, and the islands were not to be seen. The brain and what layout beyond felt more one. The dividing went on, but he had gotten used to the pain which was like the old sense of blood running around his body.

Now a limb body reached the window, for he thought he had long wanted to. The sprout tip tried the thick waters of the glass which he could nonetheless also see was so easy to see through it was like an absence of obstacle, so the Sun’s touch on the plant beds could work itself through without any shifting net of impurity. But water was not thick. He knew water. There was water here, but not a sea.

His sprout tip seemed at the aching instant before it bumped the glass to fold inward to make a suction cave. From the several other distances (which were membranes) from which he saw this event, the frond of himself waved and headed its snout toward the window lengthening.

Moving what it was already.

But somewhere lengthening, though through the flesh of its skin that got harder to see through in the morning light.

It moved. But also grew.

Both.

And in some compound he did not know except it was his.

Yes, he had wanted to move to the window. The going part, the frond or limb, he came to see in its fine growing light of outline and its shifting substance, was a fresh beginning. So were the others. Alone or when they joined to be bowl-sides exhaled from a floor that was what had been the brain.

But if some of those islands now more than two that had been (by him himself) sucked from the brain core had flowed away into what he’d once thought the new body or bodies, and if tendrils and nerve-twig firings and snowy glues and other matter and what had been centers had shifted from brain to bodies, surely the gland of flame stayed.

And near it the blocks of cells in which were plugged fibers — color-coded, he thought, though saw only olive; and under these two blocks all those radiant areas he had left alone in double distance of red and violet, left alone like the gland of flame or glimmer, while looking so closely at the block of fiber-plugged connections near the optic tracts that he had missed, or desired to miss, a salt-sweetness of connection so plain he tried to turn away from it to see if the Dim Echo knew the right words for it, for each block of plugged-in fibers was a layered depth of what elsewhere he had sighted in a cup so membrane-thin he felt it now as a flat map. But he had no right, for each of the two cups plugged point-for-point to the two layered depths could not be his own and must be hers, the woman at the beach, and each flat-spread map was a cup-curved thinness a part of him could not call the retina.

And ahead he understood that he had called for the Dim Echo to give him that word, but had found only the word itself, retina , not the Dim Echo, and not any word for the block of plugged-in fibers, color-coded he heard more than saw — and he heard again the words What happens to the brain’s three-dimensional map of the retina when there is no more retina to send to? And he felt an arm and a leg sitting in him folded so he could concentrate on the retina question, concentrated until there were two retinas, the second outside of him and invisible and an idea — a prepared memory, was that it? That had been it.

But the question had preceded the memory. The question came from Earth, but not now.

Who had asked it?

He would look out the window his limb body had reached for. For in his bones he felt that all he saw here in himself was just what he had prepared to see.

He used the small, insucked tuck at the tip of this body to suction the tip onto the glass, and he arched this limb body toward where the bulkhead curved into overhead. So doing, he saw that he made the move he felt and he felt what he’d wanted to feel: the cave-in of growth, the very cave of growth. So when he saw out the window by training his milky membrane, a thought spread and he gave himself the feeling of turning, for he thought he wanted to find that thought in its full whereabouts. But found instead that he wanted to breathe himself into sleep, to sleep — and found that he had not been equal to the thought which had occurred in all his substance.

So out the window he saw what was inside. For he had to face eyes. Eyes before seeing. Eyes not of sight but of red and violet: firing in the double-deeps radiating below the fiber-plugged bodies but with each firing wink spreading (he thought) quick shades through all the cortex. Eyes he must face for they were not hers, but his. Yet not his but the absence of his. Which he had known all along. But without following the optic fibers where they diverged from the disused tracts because there were no eyes to home on.

Looking back, now, from the window, Imp Plus found more Sun. It swam as on other days and in other weeks and over months, swam in itself, but no more through the same brain and body.

How many days Imp Plus did not know, but knew one day was light, another light and dark.

He would not ask Ground how long the project had gone on.

Ground did not know how glucose held at maximum.

Ground could not see the radiating red and violet below the fiber plugs.

Ground took away.

Imp Plus saw the substance in the brain and in the outlying bodies shrug, and Imp Plus had recalled shoulders spoken of, but did not tell when he had recalled shoulders, before or after the big shrug of substance. Looking close he could not see the big shrug, and the breath cycle hung unmoving and in that moment of equals between brain and body which he could not call brain and body any more, Imp Plus out ahead of himself knew Ground would take away the radiations, stake out the new-found optic membranes, tick off the limb-bound islands lost.

Islands of the limbs, but how long among the shifts of substance could true islands stay limb-lost? Limbic , for short. But Imp Plus had not thought up limbic; it had come out to him; and not from Ground.

But through parts so empty he tried to look down at himself in a way he therefore now recalled. From head to toes, down curves of his old body, its curves that tried to come up to him but must keep their distance. Yet now there was no point in the memory, and what there was of him he saw from many equal points or slides of membrane which dilated as he used them so that the old body came back to him but in the shape of distance increasing for which there was a word discomfort that came out to him but not from Ground. The word came in a voice once his though now just pulses on a frequency reaching further and further back to Earth, for that was the Ground where his body was except a piece which he must call brain but was a piece of body blown off up the tube and axis and distance of distance where the curves of his chest would not return to him nor his chest hairs like fingers, fingers in the Sun if he could only stop but he could not. Distance where the curves of chest were as free of him as of sutures, and curves of stomach so flat he could almost not see its good shape though it was not good like the Good Voice and was even bad because ill though even then dividing into an unknown. Distances dividing down faint dual troughs of belly that were not those lighted bellies of the brain now stretched like limbs seeking to become their source. Bellies curving in along beside suddenly much more hair which also was not fingers but then became fingers with blood red that loved him, someone else’s fingers: and up at the final spinning end of that exploded axis which became then fixed as the axis of distance, he knew the voice; and the voice was his, steadily giving information back like a terminally stranded astronaut to Ground that some future sense dimly present then told him was not his Ground now: but there amid the multiplying distances of the launch, the launch, it was his voice that reported to Ground discomfort —the voice Imp Plus now light-years later heard signal inside him discomfort , so in retort to the Dim Echo’s prepared word discomfort (for it was the Dim Echo), he said: pain, sad, alone, distance .