And while the world doesn’t interfere now with this elder maverick’s work, he does have a few correspondents left. One is a native American adolescent, New Mexico Pueblo Indian, y’know, who calls the Hermit-Meteorologist "great-uncle" and mails him bright chalk pictures (they’re in the other room) of sunsets and faces and mesa-based Apollo rockets like individual ears of corn; the second correspondent is an established inmate of a penitentiary, and he sends—God!—tips of some telepathic iceberg, y’know, reflecting what he found in his mail: write a lot of letters, you get a lot, the Hermit observes: oh this fellow’s much exercised about the high cost of opera tickets (that popular art!) and the current claims of women yet their "will"(!) to give themselves up for their men; but more to the point, letters re: precipitation of New Weather in new self-supporting communities. In return for all these letters, the Hermit’s afraid he’s sent back only a postcard now and then (like the one you got, you bet, brief-scrawled so it looked like a sketch: COME AHEAD—naming this afternoon).
The Hermit like a discoverer in this bare room chock-a-block with his concepts and his weather: it was there to be found. (That epithet "Hermit-Inventor" adhering like a given name he has lived up to—did you actually hear it given this man? There’s some hum he makes you resist around him of catastrophe. With it comes calm as sharp as a second voice, female far away in some next room of this dilapidated "railroad," babbling soft and old and dearly.) He has pivoted one coastline so it runs cross-country, you’d swear. He has replicated another so it comes on like crabbed waves across the continent. Mountain range, you suggested (to say something). What about a mountain? the man demands.
Is some time-defying coincidence afoot here? Hermit-weathermen-inventors-of-New-York talked their way into and out of histories your spirited grandmother told you portions of; your mother did not tell stories. Were those hermit-inventors all one hermit, as you were one boy? "Great-uncle" to an Indian? It hardly rings a bell; coincidence anyway is against your religion. Jim Mayn will settle for just this oldtimer, tall and irritable, who can’t afford an unlisted number to cope with these screwballs and probably foreign powers who call up (he guesses you’re O.K.), and so is phoneless, hence more concentrated on what’s here: snowflake-fringe coasts and diagraphs of pressureless voids that look like meteorite showers of infinitesimal equation on the wall of this Greenwich Village railroad flat—these could make their clouds of fingerprints considerably more than New Weather (as you clock these curious clouds—their curves of whorls blowing down to smaller and smaller whorls)—no, not just coasts of a weather but, up there on the walls across vertical piece after piece of brown paper, mountains seemingly as well (for your money) or just any old graph contour of some expert’s risk-benefit analysis yet coming right at you or your brain anyhow (friendly dried-out polyp of a still two-gun arsenal, leftrightleftright) receiving obstacles of turbulence that your guy’s differential equations for the evolution of the atmosphere and doubtless half a dozen other things at same time and/or unseen aren’t going to help you with (and if you’re this recycled man some woman called you warmly you have to admit the other day look around at the accelerated evolution of practically everything including these . . . what? you feel the word move your throat and mouth, the word "angels," where’d it come from?) and hell anyway this elder maverick New York Hermit-Meteorologist says forget it if you’re not up to them, the equations, he as for him never got family relation straight, left it to the women—second something twice removed—"Great-uncle to an Indian?" you ask—"Oh my gosh who knows what the boy meant by that? Second cousin I would have guessed, if my uncle or was it great-uncle was his grandfather. Leave that to all our kinship hunters in the field," your host mutters . . . "—where’d you say you’re from? Jersey?" People underrate the grandeur of New Jersey, he laughs the very laugh you heard in his postcard replying to your humble inquiry. Pretty much over your head, you had inquired if radioactive mists might breed atmospheric "sports"— freak fronts, stacked weather—say, like a tree with no trunk, you half-see, half-hear (but did not say in your letter), or a mountain you can’t see.
Word of this man’s bulletins launched from a local radio station near Cape May had come to you—the Coast Guard had complained—then elsewhere he was fired by an offshore pirate television station because, according to (he laughs) his prison correspondent, the hermit has powers of warning communicable in a beeline to others—so no need for wire service, radio, or TV. (Wait—the powers communicable? or the warning?) But "the grandeur of New Jersey"? For a second the old tales wander back—all of them and for just one second.
The old geezer’s not after publicity. Unless it could get him the funds to hire the plane and the infra-scan gear and a human or two on the ground to prove his guess. Oh you’re willing to believe weather and coastline connect: this is no hare-lipped hype for the news-margin traders—you could name one who will send and, yes, buy photo-illustrated rumor linking a mountain of mineral matter with an intelligence strategy undermining what might have been one of the more interesting socialisms in South America: whereas the hermit’s meteorology finds only a relation between unprecedented atmospherics and the behavior of little stretches of coast that may alter infinitesimally overnight: work he’s done that’s solid and odd: but hardly your staple all-points conspiracy theory like what the South American (Connecticut-resident) owner of newspaper chain you James Mayn currently work for asked you to look into: that has a Chicago industrialist’s estranged son thousands of miles south arranging President Kennedy’s Texassassination to impress a Chilean woman he is pursuing while he’s studying magic music-stories with which Araucanian Indian brujas in the South demoralized their Spanish conquerors, but at same time north of there near the port of Valdivia helping rebuild after an earthquake: and the woman? she’s a member of far left MIR (M for Movement) but soon to flip her coign to equally anti-liberal rightist revolutionary hive; nor is this New York maverick weather-discoverer’s coastline-atmospheric-pressure correlation any suspense-loaded Doom ding-a-ling in all probability, certainly not mystery’d like family closet within closet complete with (remember the Edison light bulb that goes on and off with the) door, so let’s make it last and leave the madness, folly, deaths, and their relevant skeletons back in there—for this isobar-tailed atmosphere freak in a railroad flat in New York’s legendary Greenwich Village is coming up with science that resonates. And while you don’t grasp all he’s saying, if he has found a New Weather of enclosed voids that like "strangers" do not draw outside pressures inward, the old guy’s right to call it "weather-possibly-without-a-cause" and at the same time relate it to "outlandish parallel phenomena" he describes as infinitesimal breaks in fanatic coastline indentations directly beneath the weather in question—breaks that are not supposed to be there—"where" both weather and coastline turn out to be expressible in these (he calls ‘em) "erratic shape equashuns"—"regular monsters, ‘fya look close, like each surprised by the other, sky, land, sky."
Oh, some middle room of a Greenwich Village "railroad" and someplace along the hall you passed the room with that babbling lady voice—a mother as old as she sounds far from children, who her hermit-companion says tells him to "go tell it—tell your message." The weather diagrams polygonally strengthened here and there by the appearance of the supermarket bag’s bottom look like coastlines, but also vertical layeroids rising one upon another: the rock of history, not the history you don’t believe in but some history of rocks you do.
O.K., this meteorological speculation plus this broken and rebroken face hosting you is another beginning less necessary than equal, more equal than prior—work of an out-of-work savant, unfrocked more than unemployed, who beams his suspicion through you as if you, James Mayn, have sensationalized him, made him a household word. He didn’t know your name when you announced it, did he? He of course knows all these other things you don’t, the fact and math—even the grandeur of New Jersey—O.K., but not who you are, except your job.
His
face is changing on you again, fabulous geezer—O.K. Cut . . .cut, please.
For in still another beginning, a man and a woman—had once been married—but they didn’t know each other necessarily—because it had not been to each other they’d been married. Which is an O.K. opening for a friendship. Or Open Marriage (OM), as we once said in sanction of some liberty to fuck our freedom. But they’ve not really met yet, and on this new beginning we now leave them, you see, it takes so long for people to meet. Others have to meet first.
No order, that; but you’re in Florida, not all these other places: like Choor, the homeland of Margaret’s Princess; a railroad flat in New York; a metal plate to turn pioneers to a transmissible frequency; marriage OMing into friendship; these other other situations. (There are no situations, there’s only people. You missed your chance to tell the Hermit-Meteorologist about the visits you would swear you paid to a future where pairs of people get transmitted from Earth elsewhere only to arrive as one person. A technological economy, literally breathtaking.) You have just come in out of Florida where the night will smell of unused daylight and, come to think of it, of used daylight, too. Which might just be the Fountain of Youth Vaca de Leon. You have happened into a roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center, and here is where you are. Give the order. Is that an order? It’s only for drinks. They’re waiting. That’s all you do, you’re the one that says the words, let others carry them out.
A home passes overhead in orbit, ‘least you saw it launched this A.M., an empty household fully equipped, built-in cabinets, now it’s over the Andes, downtown Won Ton, Tunis, you wouldn’t know, and sure to come by again in ninety minutes, no need to duck.
You know what you have to do. Think of those waiting. Nothing to it: it isn’t as if this is even a mock killing-at-a-distance—nor that you have to be one whole person to give this order at a protracted time when you are letting a divorced whim bring you down here to Florida looking for a once-encountered Chilean only to find one of the best women you can remember.
"Shoot, kid," came the father-type voice (meaning, "Speak") far away in time but close inside the void.
But you, you don’t have to do the shooting. You just give the order.
Just? (For somebody hammering away at somebody else in a self-help workshop has just shown us that the word "just" often is minimizing our own self’s felt needs, as in "I just called up to tell you.")
Yes, that’s what you do. You do just. They take it from there. Standing up. Against a wall. In a revolutionary courtyard or an appropriated playground. But you don’t know what shooting: because maybe we have here a trial run, with blanks. Trial run to gain experience. Or give the squad waiting to take their best shot the real thing of hearing the blankety-blank gust of the weapons’ waiting life. And as for the terminal others waiting opposite, assembled in one timeless scheme all together or coming up in another time one by one to face the squad, the trial run gives them the complementary experience of, say, passing out at the explosion the shock of which we’ll hazard they’d have been condemned to run the risk of not quite hearing (whether they went-to-the-bathroom then and there or not) if the blasts had not been blanks—which "Victim then fills in" as blanks are to be filled in, with indifference, hope, rage, self, the blindfold smell of self’s waste, or say some tortured failure of heart (for who would go through that fake execution again? don’t ask), or (to reverse the words and economize) heart failure (for risk’s a factor and there’s such a thing as torture that goes too far) while on the other hand (human nature being what it is) failure of heart threatens to widdle and resolve itself into mere you know temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette or arhythm; or, after all, temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette may be but terminal arhythm.
Dry run or wet, give the order. It’s waiting to come into existence in order to be executed. A mound of sanitary landfill waits to be a layer, a quantity of vegetable, animal, mineral-kindred (not controlled-toxic, though literally mind-boggling) landfill, and some of those waiting are to be under the layer, and some not. So give the order. You have to anyway. Don’t distract yourself with memories of the future and a metal plate with persons standing on it, two at a time, two to the zero power it comes to you. Save your breath. Think instead of those waiting here; be considerate, you have to bring the order to the point of execution. So give the order. Give it your best shot. Yet hold it.
Oh sure, talk about the weather while we don’t know enough about it any more unless we wire Venus for un analogue much less consult weather’s novel rethinker in his disintegrating apartment furnished faintly with a sound of a cheerful old female talking aimlessly: or unless we hold to those ancient cumulus towers given us by the very Great Spirit who’d never incarnate vast self even in sign, even in spiral idea, much less stiff hat and short braids. But before getting into the weather, first give the order. That’s what you do. Take the power that’s fucking yours. The mayor’s spiel has gone on long enough. Don’t look back down the short circus of the century to a bomb or some such which once upon a biggish bang was set off in a territory named New ‘merica by desert marksmen, who knew better or worse after the blast to confirm that their preliminary risk-yield analysis had shown that the blast just might kindle the atmosphere (its enthusiasm?), evacuate our oxygen, take our breath away right down even to what we’d saved. But like the vacant furnished household swung round overhead tonight every ninety minutes, that one-time risk will stay where it is and take care of itself while you give the order.
Yet hold it, you know—hold the mayo; no, hold the mayor, no, hold the mushroom, hold the landfill, hold the lettuce (but don’t get caught holding the lettuce), hold the bacon it’s on the way home come to think of it for Mom had her first day on the job having broken the firing squad sex barrier—hold it, we said: but tell where we are, say we’re in a roadhouse late on a Florida evening and have approached the bar.
A young woman’s at our elbow while the micro-seconds that won’t settle into each other fall out of you into a noise umbrella like the we that you are and that you join.
But hold it, weren’t we a team, a squad? weren’t we about to do the necessary with the weapons at our disposal in the real field of a revolutionary system? Go on, don’t screw around, say it, say we’re one place or another. Go on, they’re waiting.
But somewhere else you see folk standing on a metal plate in fact of an alloy unique among late-century alloys in origin. Somewhere else—forget the chain of fire sphering the planet (call it Earth), forget that orbiting household (it’ll be there), forget that stand-up firing-squad routine did you think you were some young Chilean lieutenant?—no, forget all that, for people are standing on a metal plate you recall at a site called Locus T.
And they’re waiting for what better than what could happen.
Which they would embrace but it embraces them and raises them to its power to rid them of their twoness—elsewhere, not here in Fla—where the night smells of sugar percentage in the ketchup field.
And the couples waiting at Locus T—married? lovers? comrades?—seem cool and content, made of titanium, say, and about to be alloyed with a corrosion-resistant future. And only you know something, and you’re carrying it on you. It must be communicable, herd-wise; what is it? A number of those here seem not to find you dangerous. Hell, we all show traces of this ‘n that.
You were in future: that’s why you’re slow to execute. A shadow of the future? Hell no! You’ve no less than come back from the future. You have a power. Naturally don’t want to overuse or underuse it.
But here you are to give the order. Your teeth press your lower lip, or is that the floor, it’s so rough.
Give the order, give it through the gap. The gap? This vacant space between the arms. Left arm, right arm. The order can’t be executed if it isn’t heard (it says here). So execute, man, execute. You’ve been well coached, you have desire. Where’s the inspirational coach who said, "My guys like to hit and be hit"? The football coach in New Jersey, whi
ch if it had a decent mountain could have been a great state (had the coastline, the weather, the soil, the horses, had the good position north and south), New Jersey where you were a boy and where some story-book truth about (was it?) a hermitage invented of New York—we don’t ever get that right—not to be confused with the defrocked meteorologist whose wall diagrams you interview—not to be confused much less alloyed with some geezer arising in your monster-and-Choor-Princess-and-Navajo-Prince discussions in the late thirties and early forties with your grandmother Margaret down the street, but that was not on the football field where the coach should by now be laid to rest in the end zone staring up with all his heart at one stump of a goal-post timber impaled above him in the sod of state soil where the confined but still-functioning beep-bleep of his athlete soul picks up year-round the cleat-beats of his own executed plays thundering downfield, the football coach who wears a baseball cap to practice, to skull sessions, who hardly feels his tongue say execute when he takes his field general to task during drill for an intersectional clash (for we’ve graduated into America now, and the coach has been turned by sheer frequency of voice into many coaches). And where’s the general in the field or behind the scenes—a rebel of the junta (so goes the report), a revolutionary, but against what?—where’s the general who’ll say, "Execute them," much less, "Have them shot" or "Off them" (like your economical syndicate voice), when just plain "Take them away" will do the trick? Or (in fewer words compounding the economy of removing-without-replacing) "Remove them." Or, to effect this liquidation, he may confine himself to a look, a look intent and/or blank, the look his lieutenant sensed well and truly like the light clamp on the butt the first-base coach gave the rookie after a clothesline single who stood on the bag and now takes a healthy lead off first, his arms hanging from his shoulders.
Women and Men Page 8
