But what I had really wanted to know was what the tall, fine, bald man had been doing with that Spence in the Press Center telephone room back on Cocoa Beach; that is, what Spence wanted with him. No: that’s not true: I wanted to hear him talk about astronauts evolving. No, that’s not it either.
What is next? I think he asked—he asked, yes, absolutely, asked instead of walking away from me. The Voice man was sitting at the card table talking into a pretty good facsimile of an old Western Electric saltshaker mike. He had a humorous face—don’t ask me why. The night air open to South America. The big boys behind glass smoking minutes away.
Next? I said; you mean Skylab in May? I said.
This is not your field, no? he asked frankly.
I am adaptable, I said, but I wondered what he’d been told, and if so, had it been by Spence?
So I have recently heard, the South American gentleman said.
It’s pretty far from my humdrum dispatches about missile economics and strip-mining sulfurous coal off the face of the Earth.
Oh I hardly believe you, said the man standing beside me, but between the two edges of his words I found a thought of my own: Far from barroom chat, from information capable of being phoned in, information on space spinoffs, on the highest clouds of all that condense out of dust from outer space and shine from the sun’s silent light practically all night long; congress on drought in the Sahel desert, on global weather network; proliferation of seismic monitoring devices; the minor beauty of the obsolete missile such as the Sprint; the "hardness" of the "hard target" offering endless economic scenarios where, regardless of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), three Minuteman III warheads "delivered" upon three Russian silos having a roughly U.S.-style "hardness" have an eighty percent chance of taking out one silo, whereas seven M-III w.-h.’s would have the same percent chance of knocking out one silo three times as hard; the good-story myths of offshore cloud-seeding interception to dry up Castro’s 1970 sugar crop, the Venus hothouse scenario turning New York into Venice, the two-billion-dollar Russo-Canadian "black film" scenario to fly in ten million tons of city soot to cover the Arctic ice cap and melt the north-polar glacier; far from this yet in the presence of the after-all-pretty-ordinary South American elite bald mustached intelligentsio, I got the aftertaste of what I was prepared to say but did not: a burn of bad breath vacuumized into a stress-factor of empty words: Mylar-insulated sleeping bags the coming thing already here, would they take your stain? (I sipped a bourbon in Oregon); clearer X-rays (I felt the Chicago cold beer follow my system all the way down); laser gear spots continental drift (soda water on some coast at either end of the American landbridge bubbling up into the tube of your body driven by convection currents somewhere among the all too believable, faith-informed deep plates they make up below our crust); and the micro-electronic revolution that had been spurred, spawned, sparked, and sped by Russian superiority light months ago in blast-off thrust to where and when, and by NASA’s consequent need to reduce weight in order to get off the ground, hence miniaturize, reduce space—hence brainstorms that sent computer exports up fourteen hundred percent the first ten years of NASA, Inc. Take Chrysler cars’ new clean-air ignitions, their new distributors computer-checked by the same system used in Saturn rockets, same system that will check your windshield-wiper motor. Potential barroom information at rest, and I have learned (but when?) to hate and fear potential, is that it? But I said to the gentlemanly, somewhat hard though melancholy and subtly exiled Chilean here in the final month of 1972, No sir, it was not my field, and maybe this was why I saw through it, and as for me I thought all this show tonight —Alabama Wallace in a wheelchair, former Truman on ye deathbed—and throw in that operator Spence long known long unknown half-life magnet—
What do you see through it? asked the man.
Fire, I said; games, I said (and answering this finely displaced guy was like being traced or calling up the trace in me, you know some old inch of wire with congealed words in it coiled in your gut where you swallowed it a century ago, some mineral that belonged to somebody else and after all this time it’s sort of cushioned and cocooned by your congealed juices and greases but it’s starting to do something, move or give off impatience, I didn’t know and was not accustomed to talk or think in this vague way), fire, games, speed, a touch of war, sky’s the limit, I said. Great American vehicle floating a loan!
Very good, said the Chilean; I see something else.
What is it? I said, and realizing I wanted to find something else to say to this guy—but what?—I said, The unconscious? You sure it’s out there?
Yes; it will be there even after it is gone, said the Chilean (though he may not have meant the unconscious). It is taking us there. It is like a nation, an institution. It is not people, though it is like greed. I say us. I am of the Americas.
It’s people giving their destiny away so it’s all clear and set, I said (not myself). I still hadn’t said "it," I might have said more—even me—but the Chilean who I didn’t yet know was Chilean, much less involved in the government and here in the States on some kind of business apparently for Allende—and I wonder if he got called back or got back or got stuck here, caught here—he stopped me with his eyes that included me in the vista he swept from side to side, the fixed image of the rocket some three miles behind me, the mob on the grass—
—Mmhmm, mob, she murmurs, mob.
What enables the three men to get away, he said, is the same that gets them back, and it goes with them but it stays too.
(Well, this sounded as bad as the trace wire in my gut giving off rays perhaps.)
It has no ordinary body, it can be felt when the blast comes, though I have never seen a blast-off except on television, the red gantry like an oil rig is silhouetted but close up the real thing that stands out in the void of the fire and darkness is the anatomy, you see, the building of the rocket, the bones of the idea. Last night before it was rolled away we saw the mobile service structure against the rocket with a vertical column of slanting parallels that are stairs for the men servicing the rocket but are an idea too: the anatomy—
Whew, I felt—
—the anatomy of some power without a body except mental and a power that also goes with the men, do you see.
I turned, following his eye, the rocket in the side of mine, figuring this man was running a Rudolf Steiner school in Yucatan or was a foreign writer discovering America, and my turning, our turning, reminded me of ancient days, of God knows what, that if the Earth was wasting me, maybe I had some small power, hack that I am, that was a threat to it—and I saw, among the two or three faces looking our way, Spence the journalist, and wondered who he was "with" this time, and I answered this foreign visitor of mine who carried some thread of pain or brave dread lightly so I said only, I think, that through his words I saw God, some emptiness between the upright rocket and the mobile launcher holding it in place, and then the horizontal flat land of scrubby beach coast, O.K.? (you’ve seen it), and that it led me step by step to feel that one Mylar sleeping bag and one astronaut equaled two Mylar sleeping bags and no astronauts, or three and no—talking over my head occasionally. Wasn’t what I’d expected to say, which should have been, What’s your business with that Spence? and I did at last say, What’s with Spence?
Whereupon the Chilean gentleman looked at me and me alone with nothing in his eye, which I realized is a lot more than "very little" in his eye. And he said he was an economist, sort of a statistician (I think that’s how he said it). I said, The nitty gritty. Yes, he said, the "nitty gritty." Esoteric equations, I said, but then he said he didn’t believe anything was equal to anything else, only people were equals. Hell, he meant it in a specialized way; that’s O.K. He was obviously South or Central American; he didn’t have that heaviness Spaniards of that class tend to have, and he was obviously involved with Spence. I don’t know if he meant by my "field" the pieces I had mentioned doing on the relation of certain big mineral partnerships to the growth o
f multinationals, the Southern Peru Copper Company and the greater freedom the aluminum partnerships have, to shop around for bauxite extraction, and the freedom or lack of it of some U.S. subsidiaries in Australia to export. You know, popular business economics—material you can get from other news services—oh, about risks like Ford rubbering in the Amazon, parent companies parenting. And I stupidly but it was irresistible said, getting the name out in the open, I’m about as knowledgeable as your friend Spence. The man nodded politely—and he half-turned to the Voice of America man and said, Science fiction?
And I remembered Dr. Allende’s amazing speech to the UN just seventy-two hours before.
And I said, No all I meant was that what’s happening in the next room usually matters more to me, you see.
It is through each other that we see, said the Chilean and as he moved away like a cocktail party I felt, So what?—but free—a free agent—but then felt annihilated—
—You said "no reason at all," the girl says; there’s always a reason.
"Annihilated" is a bit strong, but Allende’s words came to me then about "forces which operate in the shadows"—which meant the NIK—we all knew—and I thought, The guy’s from Chile—and then the Voice of America guy with this humorous round face told me the man was an economist who had been spending a few days here; he did not name him; he had met him in Washington where he had had a brother and in New York and when I pressed the V. of A. man he added that a hippy free-lance he had talked to had pointed me out as—
—Wait, I broke in: who was this "he"?
Oh the Chilean gentleman, Dr. Mackenna.
Pointed me out as . . .
Oh as a person with connections down there. Railroads, airline, newspapers?
Who on earth told Mackenna this?
(Mackenna was his name? the girl murmurs . . . what’s "NIK"?)
The Voice of America man with earphones on raised his hand, listening, and bent to the microphone; looked up again at Mayn and smiled and shrugged.
"Who’s Spence?" the girl mutters, breathes, murmurs tenderly as if her interest in facts themselves is tender and in the dark she’s as young as a very young wife but fairly off somewhere in herself for having both responded so regularly and just about slept through this amalgam.
The guy he ran into in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center in Cocoa Beach—a crook named Ray Spence. NIK equals Nixon and Kissinger, and the I is for CIA.
Mmhmm.
Well, I mixed up the sequence.
Mmhmm. It doesn’t matter.
Communication unvoiced, but telepathy this late is not the issue, the issue is whether what we convey etherially to each other is worth it.
A crook, did I say? First of all, a bit of a character, a subsidiary worm, probably a minor monster.
But this Chilean: tall, dark, bald, the Chilean whom he (Mayn) hadn’t yet known was Chilean had been waiting to use a phone it seemed, for they were all in use, but waiting so detached that he could contemplate Mayn.
The man returned my look which I held just longer than I’d meant to and he gave a bow and I saw two men I knew and I went and talked to them without finding out if they knew as little as I did about space. Then, with his dark glasses propped on his hair—ponytail behind—and torturing his mouth into the sinew of some smile, Spence came in, or was in the doorway, and was the one the Chilean apparently was waiting for, but you couldn’t be entirely sure. Spence waved a sideways wave like a saxophonist I know to me with eyes lowered as if we both knew something. Then a switch-off, and I didn’t exist.
I followed them into the information room. The orbital charts were being given out. Then we went upstairs—the contractors’ handouts—half promo, half straight dope, two halves slanting away in a curve not quite routine, information dividing itself, its future, its source’s future multiplying its trite labor.
The silence next to Mayn shifts emphasis but is silence still. She murmurs. He stammers in several languages he hasn’t heard himself speak, and the sounds are familiar. Can Mayn feel activity in the elbow that’s on him like a thing coming to life? There’s her lovable circulation, he would swear; it’s her blood flowing along his hairs—he’s with her all right—hell, that’s what you always hear but he’d had it for a moment, "one-with," they said—they’re one, he’s sure they’re one—is that good? They have a plate for newlyweds to stand on where four western states meet, corner to corner. He tastes nicotine saliva seeping down, rejected by now-dead brain cells as their last wish. He ought to go into the new but fragile motel bathroom all done in green and throw up, but he would have to try too hard and two-thirds of him feels good and what if he tilted some relatively fresh and unused void capacity out by mistake, but he’s got a cap of rock-wool insulation up in the attic he paid to have it blown in before that house was winterized for divorce, keeps the heat from escaping—his once friendly former wife’s, his no longer growing kids’—and he stared into the Florida motel mirror until he was sickeningly dissolved to be transferred to another bathroom of another color, he sees yellow but it’s no particular prophecy, he’s been in yellow Johns before, and he goes on seeing the wall beyond the foot of the bed, the wall through which he’s assumed he might be having a dream which he can’t walk out on like a shadow under a door.
He’s got this feeling he’s said too much as well although the girl’s not going to remember it. Take a shower in the morning, have a cup of coffee, wash down the scrambled eggs, grits before they take hold. His wife Joy would let him go on about how he believed in anarchy for children and then would throw it up at him later as if some prediction of his had come cruelly true, while neither child is close to being as dislegalized as the father, nor at this time close period. The elbow stirs and slides, leaving a hand, like a substitute or residue. And he might run his tongue into the forks of her fingers, to finish between her thumb and forefinger: old, deep southern-hemisphere’s wrinkled mind stirs on top of the submerged mount: wind rises from the right direction: mature sea male among shore smells he makes not much distinction between the young and old sea mares, he sneezes, he observes them all, he doesn’t have to do anything (isn’t that him?), he feels them unfolding all round him and he’s the center of a wind from all quarters, he hears the voice naming the hustler the Chilean was intermittently with then in December—December 7th—at Apollo 17—just three days after Allende’s UN protest—and can’t see why the Voice of America man when he phoned him two weeks later didn’t know which Chilean—well, the Chilean who (forget that snake Spence) spoke of future blood cooled under a new skin and of future communication without words but between whom? between survivors so grotesquely fitted into the new atmosphere that who then would want to survive? Except naturally the survivors, who in turn at a plateau of zero gravity would never think to take up the option of the wish to die and such thoughts as all these were— as if the Chilean had heard Mayn often think—whether with Joy or alone. And Mayn contemplates the wall but looks into it, not through. He hasn’t been dreaming: light from the parking area has found a Venetian slat stuck open, and on this wall opposite the foot of the bed a framed color shot reduced to black and white by the night is of a towering Saturn in the A-frame doorway of the scaleless exterior of what’s touted as the biggest pile on Earth, so big a pile Mayn obligingly fits Chartres and other cathedrals and their orbits into it while also transferring St. Peter’s perilously into orbit where it is at last safe unless it collides with astral debris, but since he’s tired now, could he be thrust back along the particles of his own shadow to that future he came from where on metal plates persons two by two are being transferred by frequency to space settlements where upon arrival they will find themselves participating in a population-control project which Mayn knew of in advance? One more eccentric proposition (like Allende’s "We are the victims of virtually imperceptible activities, usually disguised with words that extol the sovereignty of my country"—paranoid, right? fatal-sounding was more like it, Mayn knew—f
atal paranoia, then?—but the paranoid in this case was not the victim).
The man with the bandanna, she’s saying, had a hole. Yes. You know that operation? People know all the operations nowadays. That’s right . . .‘case they take out the wrong lung, et cetera. Yes. A thumping starts—and the chance that it’s their door breathes him more toward sleep. Is the Earth perhaps undergoing long-term separation trauma? Is that it? Yes, I think so. What did you say, Jim? What did you think?
She’s waking up, he feels inside his body. But Mayn isn’t happy with that mobile home that keeps passing like a Wide Load up the highway or some mind of his vacantly overhead is it every ninety minutes?, no he is in orbit around it. He never got around to giving the firing-squad order. Turned out the squad was formed in a circle and those facing it were a larger circle and so on, and the squad leader had to discuss this before any order could be given. And all he can get out of the incoming messages is what he was once ready to have but now needs to see through, in honor of the Chilean: for the—laryngectomy, the girl says—for the motel’s words about itself are not worth using, too easy, not funny, not the thing: "Jettison all worldly cares, splashdown transcontinental load in Space Coast motel pools at strictly suborbital rates, your motel launch pad puts you in perfect orbit around the sun"—but the Chilean knew there was more to it than techno ahoy ha! and Mayn and the Chilean were messages to each other unknown to the bearers. But in addition Mayn still missed a point: two shapes slid together and looked congruent and he had trouble identifying them.
He reaches for the ceiling: his uncle or his father (he’s getting too old to have a father) said (heart to heart), "Shoot, kid"—so his shoulder tips the girl’s residual hand off him—he, Mayn, part Indian-country where he could kill Spence, erase him out of mind, and he Mayn is not a killer, believe Mayn, he isn’t a killer, or not yet, though his future nature is all here, the votes are in and he was elected hands down, yet to a new life he always had in him, no chameleon sweat of a Spence-hustler just old Mayn a non-toxic monster (patterned on earlier earthling-newsgatherers) doing the job as coach said, "but you know something?—that old meteorologist in the Village is second cousin to a Navajo." And Mayn hears himself slur, "There goes Skylab again, why’s it have to come over every ninety minutes?" "Skylab passes over the same spot on Earth only once every seventy-one orbits," is the answer and she says this while simultaneously asking if he is awake, God it’s only three-twenty and he goes Mmhmm, and she asks if he will be seeing her again up in New York sometime (the "sometime" hedging her), and he replies, Mmhmm, which is not the sound of the void (send out for sandwiches), and which is the sound of another creature to the north and not the brou-ha-ha bellow of a sea lion in the other Chile that’s way to the south—cordillera country, my man—a Darwin South that he never quite (he Mayn) got to except to hear the rains falling upward from the Pole (and he suspects that a whole lot of other people who say they’ve been there really haven’t)—but what the hell did Mayn’s "quite" mean? but no sequence to speak of for he’s tired of his insistent soul threatening to bore him and needs to migrate to another belt, says, "Mmhmm" again to the girl’s "Well if you’re here for Skylab because of this Chilean economist you met at Apollo 17 in December" (surely she’s only pretending to be awake) "who did you say he was? Mackenna you found out his name was? That’s South America for you. Then what were you doing at the launch in December?"
Women and Men Page 14
