Joseph McElroy: Plus

But the names came from the pale green rooms on Earth. He did not quite know those names. They might be camouflage, but they were not acrid laughter. Yet these names came some of them from the acrid laugher and not mainly in the large room where there was the acrid laughter and the acrid laugher’s words You don’t want to go on forever . The names came instead in a smaller room — our cell, he’d said — where the acrid laugher was only an acrid voice. And one of the names spoken by the acrid voice that now came as if Imp Plus himself should know it, was mitochondria . And two more were carbon dioxide .

But by now what had been damply nuzzling bumping to get out of that wall was not crackling any more. Though crackling was not really it. For there had been no sound.

What had tried to get out might as well have been the eyes that the green thing once had seemed to have.

But if Imp Plus had not exactly eyes and so could not have seen eyes in the green thing, this need not be why he knew now that the green thing hadn’t eyes after all.

I am Imp Plus, or a part, said Imp Plus.

He had been in another mode the word for which seemed unknown.

The cave-in came again dividing distance into more, so the cave-in was still further off from the dim echo busy with its arrangements. And this time the cave-in or cave-out had been a burst, an unknown cough individual in decay whose product was not hawked up to be gulped down, but instead the parts where the blast took place hadn’t been there before. As if after the smoke went, there they were. Or no, the smoke had come before the blast in reverse order.

But the smoke that cleared was not quite here. It was in a large pale green room on Earth where Imp Plus with reddening skin had said to acrid laughter Do you mind .

But if not here, then why had it cleared here? For it had cleared, and there were moving things in the chlorella which were not only chlorella; and the moving things spun and had names Imp Plus had prepared to recall but they didn’t matter except their sound of spin which Imp Plus desired Earth not to overhear and which he chose not to make even as a respiratory transmission to the dim echo right here which was saying to itself or to Imp Plus, “Chlorella contains photosynthetic cells, cells contain cytoplasm, cytoplasm contains chloroplasts which have membranes, membrane contains structure, structure contains chlorophyll.”

But the dim echo that Imp Plus felt part of him in the curve of what happened had said something that no more made these chloroplasts beat like glistening lids than had the acrid voice when it had shown Imp Plus the garden.

But here it was: green not as he had prepared or could have prepared to remember — not a dark beet-green or spinach-green or a dull jewel of buds called broccoli. And not a green that eyes in a late green room had seen. No, a green of its own breathing, its own breath.

If the cavings were a seeing, was that how he saw without eyes?

It could not be much.

And if Imp Plus had not known, with a desire like the windy flight of long-winged birds shearing the tips of the sea, that the dim echo was no real part of him but part of what Imp Plus was part of, he could have thought it the alien monitor or thought himself what the camouflage was meant to be an answer to.

Meant? Manipulated. Manipulated was the word. Said by a not -acrid voice in the pale green room on Earth. This had been a good voice. Not the acrid voice.

The acrid voice, to whom someone had said, “Say that again,” said near the end of things You don’t want to go on forever, do you? and had also said in a smaller pale green room, and not a full year before then, things similar to what came from the dim echo here now in orbit though with a feeling absent from the echo’s syllables and in words that now but even then caved out and in like some reach of Imp Plus. This reach seemed why he did now recall them, except he was the one who had said, “Say that again”—but whether in answer to the forever question or to these other things, he could not recall. Except that he had prepared to recall some of them but now not exactly these: cytoplasm (the acrid voice had said in the smaller room), cytoplasm you know about, and we are talking (said that acrid voice) about the cytoplasm of cells that are called eukaryotic cells, cells with an already well-formed kernel— nucleus to you (the voice had said — but meant what? — and Imp Plus had not known the tone of the voice except to feel he was stopped from asking, then stopped it seemed at times from listening: to words like mitochondria that had had to do with him but not so that he’d been led to respond while the acrid voice had gone on naming events in which, as the voice now said:) we need to see what happens between two kinds of organelles. The first are the structures which turn light into chemical energy— chloroplasts to you (said the voice with that sound of ill will so Imp Plus did not ask what organelle meant — yet he knew!). And the second kind are the structures in which enzyme systems help oxidize food then regain the resulting energy in the form of ATP, and are thus the cell’s power plants— mitochondria to you.

But why to Imp Plus?

For him it should be the other way around — power plants to Imp Plus. His supplemental briefing from the acrid voice built up in him a cold charge that was large, minus, and more than full. But the briefing then kept the charge from getting out into more than a single question he had wanted to ask so much that the walls of the smaller pale room on Earth had begun to move more in than out to increase his towering discomfort, and the charge got out only by jumping the room, let go by Imp Plus’s words I’m ill . Which was no news to the acrid voice.

Nor more new to Imp Plus than his own jumping words not quite a full year later, Do you mind: for these had been among the questions the cold acrid voice in the smaller room had inhibited in him, and if less to the point than the question What is an organelle? or What is oxidize? or What is the link between how enzymes inhibit and how they release? — the sudden Do you mind uttered by Imp Plus a year later in a larger pale green room amid acrid laughter had also been more to another point: and this point was nonetheless itself nothing like the project’s data on electrons shot by enzymes along a cell’s chain of respiration, or on the electron carriers called cytochromes, or concerning ordinary cytoplasm which the dim echo here now in orbit — how wholly far from the pale green rooms — reminded Imp Plus was the stuff outside the cell’s core. This an acrid voice on Earth cast on a screen to show lurking near the cell wall the alien ellipsoid — that known power plant the mitochondrion, which in great numbers must as a power plant have let off later the laughter which Imp Plus answered on impulse back there in a larger pale green room. Answered with a Do you mind shot at the acrid voice that had thrown up at him a supplemental mass of tobacco smoke. From this Imp Plus turned to a microscope on a table. He had guessed again the smoker’s feeling. It had preceded the emission of the smoke, but it held itself now behind the smoke. And Imp Plus had prepared to recall what the project controllers meant him to, but also something else he had thought: which was that the camouflage spoken of in this room, near the end of things — this camouflage that might be manipulated (one voice said) to persuade —might be used not on an alien monitor but on this unknown extra, this late addition to TL , namely Imp Plus.

But if that was what it meant, it was one more thing to try to remember, while always he tried not to think of the speed of light darting inside all of him decaying into holes he could not fill with any amount of desire if all his ill body could think about was lentil soup for lunch.