But can the future know all that was meant by such orders and communications? That is, if you, this Jim Mayn, have really come from there. Or are still partly there or will be there. There is no future, it’s sentiment about what might have been. What say we make a package and see the future gets it? Why, then the future does exist. Yet wait: it has gotten it, and inside is the history meant for the future, but the package is so flat it can’t be opened, it can only be "read" or reconstituted. History is cover, but the cover story is increasingly worthwhile. But the package is being opened after all by its unknown receivers.
Are they the two by two waiting for what is to happen to them at Locus T?, standing to begin with on a four-cornered metal plate of an alloy mined not lab-concocted, found in its pure impurity in a mountain of America, discovered and extracted and used As Is? No: call them a bad dream, though you don’t do dreams; and forget this business about your having shuttled back from that future where the people are waiting on that transformer plate.
They don’t know what they’re getting into.
It’s as well a legendary package about an Inventor of New York giving a secret sendoff to a regal young woman, only to receive her on her return almost a year later, all told by a steady grandmother who seemed to make up so much it threatened to be true; maybe it’s throwaway advice from a mother to go away where you belong (now you saw her, then you didn’t)—some fleshly difference between advice and prediction which is the filling between them, block that kick the crowd goes on and on except for a recognizable father who doesn’t say anything but watches him chase around the cold football field. Maybe it’s a fifth of sour mash; maybe it’s one compressed person for the agony of two—some loot for the future so they know.
But*he don’t know. A guy somewhere near the gap we were speaking about just said loudly that he don’t know.
But that’s not you, you’re a guy who knows, who knows an onus from a behoof. Yet wait: give the order. See yourself along some curve of inkling that in this Florida roadhouse, or void Between, you can know a thing or two right here worth knowing, send it or not to that future where people by twos are waiting to be transformed into one. No, that’s jumping the gun. Transfed to frequency then to be transmitted from Locus T elsewhere. And when the frequency reaches that other place, the two transmissible as one have become one and we shall have no right to miss one or the other. An economy the future holds like word that is carried but not known in so many words. Is there divorce there, after this two-into-one technology?
Forget there: you’re here, facing a gap between arms, this gap awaiting your order. Your stomach warps and you hang fire, you don’t need to be accounted for by some group you’re being interrogated by that sounds outside you.
Where you coming from? Is this just another life crisis in face of which you know you do your work? But you’re not down here on assignment, you said. And not on vacation, so what is it?, though here is this subtle young person whose heart swims toward your body.
What’s going down? It isn’t new love, this powerful drift. And it’s not mid-life consciousness infection sluicing you in/out of the Untapped Reservoir of voices you figure all belong to (those that honestly don’t dream, those that honestly do). And it’s no more Chile than violence: because your job is nuts and bolts—fundamentals—not slow-blowing a bloody cover so that in five years the truth of who gave who the business can come out covered by the healing objectivity of time’s clarity wherein is the only safety upshot column by column into a morning news of riveting investigative reporting to be read in order not to think about what happened last night. And if the Argentine owner of a string of papers you work for has a brother who fakes his death by plane on a foreign continent, where it leads is probably not worth even dreaming about; nor are you any more into tracing several underlings named, say, Contreras, several with same first name too, some in receipt of political asylum in Texas but some spirited to a reputedly apolitical mountain and put into it like value one day to become minable veins; nor if you can help it are you into fielding blind volts of hardball played by proprietors of a stadium where you don’t tell the spectators from the game.
Where you coming from? A metal plate ahead where people stood Indian file, butt to gut (or are they being held up?) waiting to be reformed into frequency and at once transited elsewhere—where when you wake up there’s one of you. Two become one: did the Hermit-Meteorologist have an equation for this little monster? Two times almost collide! Is that a new one? And again, unreportable! The miss slides one between the other. New front-like shapes in the coast-cum-upper-void weather diagrams of an elder maverick fired for speculating about new weather as well as reading his mail on camera on an off-the-Jersey-coast non-commercial pirate TV station. Meanwhile, you saw Locus T like never before. Why’s it recede, then? In this void, to call up the future is to recall it. (Like division of automobiles ordered to have their mildly poisonous air-conditioners reconditioned?)
But no. Say what is so true that it recedes. Grasp it; it recedes. Grasp what? That that scene at Locus T was not future; it was a now, only one, mind you: the gathered point with one person in position right behind another person. They two are about to go. Isn’t it sad? But didn’t we toy with this for decades? Here it is, and not an experiment where hazard yield waits unknown.
The place is a station not a lab, though an all-white operator runs the trans-frequency send-off as if the controlled element were research, and after the send-off of each two the inspection of the transparent elevator-car-like bubble where they stood and its Locus alloy-plate might seem like tracing the still unknown. But unknown traces you, you can be either a jerk or a monster, your last choice, you have a moment to decide. The weight of your very own body is falling all the time. It’s your neck, look about you.
Bubble indeed! A million templates of electro-magnetism jointed continuously to make an ovaline so clear that with the help of a base plate made of a unique mountain alloy mined in its natural state, it throngs two waiting bodies with non-visible radiance, it brings out the cells in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin.
Till the instant when the million templates at what used to be the touch of a button collapse into one idea.
No experiment here, for this was no imaginary future; it was present. At least for you, who have not much in the way of imagination (you tell the girl beside you). But its vividness got so overdrawn on its own bearable present that you couldn’t stand what was happening to others, two by two and you were about to speak when you were cast out of that future (you won’t tell her any of this—yet, anyway) like a shadow though were you ever sufficiently dangerous and wasn’t your exit then also because you made up again an earlier time, well 1973? Where now you are for a while. While now those future scenes at Locus T are vivid—they live—because they’ve been seen before —for it’s, from Florida 1973, a future you’ve lived in, but as well because the scene at Locus T aligns itself with the arms and legs of that memory of two becoming one elsewhere in time—at a time when two becoming one did not mean this that is before one now in what can already be remembered as having once been foreseen as future. Seen, though, now with awful life because that memory helps the rememberer see that the T of Locus T isn’t just TRANSFER—the dissolving of a person or persons here in order to be reconstituted elsewhere in order not to have to slog from here to there through spaces as a running displacement of volume—but T means another change. It is a clean economy so clean who would notice it? So awful, yes, that if one can find the right past to call up, why then this clear economy transpiring at Locus T makes one’s notice recede (T for TRANSFER, T for TRANSFORM, t for future). You’re not a dreamer; you’re at best a trace.
When you told her you lacked imagination, she said she thought you were instead a recycled man. But then she said to forget she’d said it.
Two became one. This gets unbearable. You’re hard-headed, plodding; real as need be, but you’re invaded lately. Two become one. It might be
three, it might be more. Four become one if you make a good enough plate to stand on. Two-become-one seems, here in the future-become-present, to mean people made congruent to fit an aim that’s beyond them yet with which they are in tune and which if viewed wrongly and with alarm recedes, as this flawed witness unable to bear what he has seen would be bent simply (as if he’d had an attack of superfluous gravitation like a head cold) off toward Locus S, Locus G, or N, or P; Locus L.
The spoken L lets off L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, from marked memory; and you who kept subjects and faces target-distinct from one another, so as to never seem to know what you figured you did not, can’t tell how you know (but you do) that those Ls with the numerals aren’t lunar and aren’t locus, yet how you knew locus with all these letters escapes you (but into the friendly void). No. L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 are points in Earth-Moon space, quite comfortable space, yes, that’s it—libration points. What is libration? Libration points— that’s all you know and plenty more than a man like you needs to know, which is in turn a reassuring conclusion that, as soon as you divest yourself of it, feeds back in its recession some new stuff coming at you obstacle-like, the fact that at these libration points you can stay put because the pull of Earth and Moon balance out with another force you were not maybe to know. And around these libration points are gravity valleys; for every school kid knows that gravitation makes valleys in space as well as mountains, vales as well as hills—and wells, too, which is not to say Earth’s the bottom of the bucket, just the bottom of a bucket, or of the well of somewhat made-up gravitation like the Moon’s, but far greater: you forgot, you forget, for you’ve really been there—whereas this girl at your elbow (your bicep) in this infra-redneck roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center is sure to know, though she has not come from the future (though in turn will have been told by someone at school and/or college that she is the future): but as for you you don’t feel like the future, you feel like your future’s angling past, but this isn’t what you know to be the truth, that some future to come is what you’ve come from, and you’re not persuading yourself of this, you know it’s true and you don’t want to know.
Can’t speak of it. You have to give a simple order.
Through this present gap which is an opportunity. (Team’s fidgeting, squad’s waiting, squad’s right.)
If worse goes to worse you can make a package without knowing all that’s inside it.
Which represents a further economy. Hey, while we’ve got us here, say we make two or more places one, so we know where we are, even if in theory we sacrifice a few powers of people, there’s a limit to S.R. (standing room) when you feel you owe it to them to bring them out of frequency back into body. You saw what was happening, that the twosomes out of earshot on the metal plate waiting to be emigrated to libration-point space settlements necessitating unusual economies had not been told just how light they would travel, and you knew the (so to speak) theoretical "joke" was on them though in the interest of survival, and they really did know, somewhere in those beings of themselves that had invited mountains to come to them bearing natural alloys that made them invisible to people living in their vicinity.
Yet the basic economy was borne by those who left as two and arrived as one. So what were you to do? Warn others it could happen to them?
Give the order, give it through the vacant, noisy space between two arms.
A left arm and a right arm, of course. ("Shoot, kid," an old voice says in you.)
But the left arm is to the right of the noisy vacancy between two arms, and the right arm is on the left side of the space. Solution is that left arm and right arm belong to two men, not one. The arms pieces of muscle and bone turned by you in a flash into one flesh. You don’t go in for that type of thing, yet you are so much a part of other voices that you can’t hear them telling you you’re one type or another, you almost don’t hear voices. You are spoken. Like voices that hear you. It’s new—did something in you go to pieces light years ago?
Directly across the vacant space on its far side the thick (for lately mortal women hate the word chunky), pale woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. {Chunky I hate chunky, comes the abstracted voice (through aether or whatever other is the latest thing in filters of our life together) of a loved, onetime wife; and I hate pudgy, too. But you’re not pudgy. And plump, I hate that, too, and you may say they’re words but they’re used instead of —No, my own dear, they are just instinctively cruel, you mean.) Well, however you describe her, the woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. Grins at what someone says but looking straight across this vacant space.
The order’s been given, but are the words wrong? Doesn’t the squad know the word?—’cause nothing happened. Nothing except the two arms slid an inch, narrowing the space—collapsing in. The woman on the far side of the bar flicks her chin up as if to say, "What did you want?"
Well, it might not be worth saying again.
So change it, forgo the firewater, the part that can be changed, your part, the second part of the order. You know in advance what you’ll say.
"If they have it," adds the other woman, your near woman, the younger woman, whose fingers are on your arm as if she depended on you, the younger woman for whom the glass of wine has been ordered in this redneck tavern along the Florida highway.
A house passes overhead far out, bearing its appliances lightly. You have only practical words for this vision: a shower, three sleeping stalls, magnets to hold food utensils on the heater-tray, telescopes to gear the eyes, and insulated urine freezers, experimental sunflowers. How many working journalists have already called it a "house" tonight? The house passes overhead but so far is empty of occupants. No need to reach for it, it loops the earth each hour and a half, so at some point it will come by again. And when it does, no need to duck, point it out to a friend, if the light is right. People will credit anything; it’s such a relief from their endless skepticism. You hear inside you a mountain that dreams.
The house awaits its housekeepers, and they it; they dream of it. They’ve rehearsed inside one just like it. But it will pass overhead many times before they take up occupancy.
"If they do," says Mayn.
The young woman beside him may think he means, "Yes, if they have white wine." What’s happening with these arms? they’ve moved again, they’ve inched back, opening vacant space before the one vacant bar stool.
"Glass of white wine and a club soda."
Mayn said it through the massed vibes of the juke box, the claims and the clamor of talk. The pale, heavy woman tending bar didn’t hear the first time. And they don’t have any white but they got red. Through the lowish light Mayn makes corrections for color, he’s had experience with barroom light, ships pausing in the night while it passes them; but speaking through this under-light comes hard tonight against sound all around him like fire. It’s doing what other stuff has been doing. Speeding up and slowing down. Trace shells flash gold before the big gun’s quake hits you like the future observer of a blast-off thirty years later at Kape Kennedy, and out of the gold flash comes the tracer’s red dot already one quarter of the way to its target as if the dot in an instant of another time stayed still for the Sicilian darkness to rush past it but then (reversing the rocket of a generation later which lifts so slow it’s afloat on some stalled phase of its burners yet then suddenly is off and far off) the red tracer braked on another track to a speed at which it covers the remaining three quarters. Speeding up, slowing down.
Try and step outside this sense. Maybe Mayn brought it down here with him. Not on assignment. And this simulated vacation—well, the void drifting through him confirms he should be used to it after twenty and more years in motion.
He felt like an ocean voyage. (Don’t look like one!—his father’s one joke, on a rare occasion, these days, when he saw his father.) O.K. then, Mayn, wake up and die right (another expression of Mel’s), wake up and freeze yourself into the Arctic ice pack, take three years t
o drift from Siberia (near the "real" Choor?) to the Atlantic with his instruments if in return he file a slow-ocean story slowly fleshed-out reports unheard-of up to now, the southern rain falling upwards from the Pole. Time to feel the wind and tell the drift of ages of ice, study the bottom where some have faith it’s being pulled apart, drop your piston-corer through sediments of Arctic Ocean history, a year of leisurely hours to get the full story, the only deadline completion itself—you come out in Choor, for all you know, where things changed as soon as the Princess left in search of New World and monsters you recall reporting to your late mother when she who was not told these stories, except for one where one pistol became two, asked you what about this Choor, but never to the best of your knowledge asked what had changed in Choor (on Choor?) after the Eastern Princess left. But here he has not often been in Florida and he never understood Florida because it’s way down below the deep South as he thinks by the map, yet whereas they say "the South" (as in "will rise again") but they say "Florida" (like "Texas") and Florida definitely is closer (Fly me) than the deep or shallow South, so put that in your simulated vacation and feel it like you sometimes feel real tweed or real wood under the seat of tweed pants or smell shaving lather drying in the little wooden bowl or coffee once upon a time in Norway where modern meteorology began with fronts but where the coffee is not the least bit diluted but is as good as the prospect of coffee as you slowly get out of bed onto the floor so it takes you an hour of joint contemplation if in company, coffee getting out of bed so slowly it’s the sixties now—in beautiful, rebuilt Warsaw and twenty minutes later passing (not in his sleep) neatly dressed coffee drinkers less comfortable but more entrenched than cafe sitters in Paris (who seem to have more to do outside the cafe in their leisure or business, a teapot or a ruby kir), the Warsaw cafe missing also that fuller grain of (accept it, it’s likable) noise in Paris that slides density through the smells. He was followed and, bearing in mind the trip he was going to try and sandwich in to Cracow south of where his ass was at the moment, courteously led his shadow, a woman with dyed auburn hair, the short way to the Embassy where that morning all they had for him was a story on how China, which had not then begun to open up, had acquired the best collection of Ping-Pong players and railroad trains in the world. A story filed. But recollected. Like a vintage or a fine hobby.
Women and Men Page 9
