Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "Mmhmm" is the way the other creature speaks, then surprisingly, "Sure": for China’s opening up now, we’ll have to think again about Chile, have to get a visa to China, China’s opening up. Choor, then, only a matter of time till Choor has a nuclear capability?—no, nothing so obvious—rather, till Choor can be mapped so that when there’s an underground event in Tibet shock-waved off the scale-scope Choorward, we don’t always have to jump to another map to check the event’s warp through Choor or Choor’s registering of event while in doing so we no longer sure if quake-plode-quoia originated in Tibet or the indestructible Great Salt Dome of Kamchatka whose peninsula moves toward Choor or on another map America bearing its whole weather system with it, together with selected coastline whose breaks correlate with zero-pressure pockets above but do not show up to naked eye.

  "But Jim—hey you asleep?—what’s ‘choor’? ‘something-choor’?" He explains it is probably a made-up place with precise alternative locations for contingency movement. "You mean like bombing?" He laughs in his half-sleep. She’s too young for him, he thinks he is too old to fall in love with a future mother, he chuckles still or rumbles, and nearly gets to dreamland but he has never dreamed—only hallucinated, he laughs—and she pinches his nose so he feels it behind his trick knee, What’re you doing? she says when she is the one doing. Her name again is Barbara-Jean, and she overlaps the times he is in, answering his "Is the Earth possibly undergoing long-term separation trauma?" before he answered it himself: Yes, she thinks so. The symptom of this urge, he says, waking up a bit, is the urge to figure out what it all means.

  But she: You mean when Earth doesn’t suffer separation trauma any more, the urge will pass?

  But, he goes on, you got to ask, How was the Earth made?

  Well?

  Oh, it got itself together, he concludes. But she has not concluded, and digresses to his account of Apollo 17, four, five months ago. "But Jim, I don’t know when you told me, it must have been this afternoon but I don’t remember but those meetings are very clear to me, in the correspondents’ phone room, then five hours later outside the suiting-up building when the Apollo 17 astronauts came out and got into their van to drive to the pad, then under the grandstand when he was waiting for someone, then on the infield during the hold, at the Voice of America table, then Mackenna’s off talking to the creep you don’t like, and you think they got something going, so I see the meetings clearly, but why did this guy make such an impression on you?"

  "It’s possible," he murmurs.

  So if the event-quake in Tibet-Choor territory (wait it out, it feels like a monster’s monstrously silent sneeze) remains only intermittently monitor-prone, and while we are seeing about a visa to China, somewhere along the long white mountain in Manchuria, the path marked by great sprinkles of green pods of unripe peppercorns—or along some above-the-surface Tibet (nonetheless safe from the nose-to-the-ground Beagle of Darwin discovering an American corporation full incarnate in Chile), a mammal can be seen, thing all hairy muscle-fat gaping out of a hole in the top of a root he inhabits like top of many-limbed trunkless tree that dreams its way growth wise up, up, from way deep in the ground until it just reaches the surface where this creature—

  —What kind of choor did you—? hey! did you say choor?—

  —"make the economy scream," Nixon ordered for sick Chile, as CIA Helmsman took notes.

  Mayn’s not quite with her, or it, and she’s asking, "Jim. You awake?" reaching for the light and thinking better of it—"Who was second cousin to the weatherman? and who married Tall Salt?—is that the name? did the weatherman have an uncle who married an Indian woman named Tall Salt? did he stay with her if he was a New York hermit? is that an Indian name?" "Oh, Choor was a place my grandmother knew about. A place a Princess went adventuring from."

  Forget; "create"; take the "choor"—let the credit—no, the continents are adrift this year, next year they will have never budged—such reliable fact as the drift station now being set up itself which is to be a source of fact, freeze an aging Coast Guard icebreaker of the Wind class into a floe and let drift be our guide, plus the Norwegian Nansen who set out like a Viking in 1893 (a big year in our family) convinced that like an old wreck that he knew about, trapped northwest of Alaska that wound up in Greenland not to mention trees from Siberian forests, he might "sail" up the Arctic Ocean to within spitting distance of the North Pole: but if you can (fact) keep the bears off your equipment and believe that your receivers are really telling you how and when (and which) high-energy particles are bombarding the sky at the top of the world and thank God for our weather satellite what did we do without them for so long?—but we need the oil, we may annex Alaska leastways any land arguably moving—but there remains the long white mountain that has now gotten moving, compacted for the moment to next to nothing, and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we find that Choor now positions itself by what events occur naturally around it, and since we can’t find that mountain suddenly except in self-styled angel voices living us and tracking some Wide Load traveling a highway by night (no big problem, just get the route straight, the mileage figures and approximate bearings), and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we figure that Choor, or feel that this mountain, may have gone underground or (off-loaded by day) may get to where we see it is not any place except what’s happening around it.

  "My hair goes quite light in the sun," he hears (of another season, not Florida—a future as well, he feels: of going to the beach; living). Her hair is too dark to go light, yet she’s reliable: she finds it incredible but eerily so, believably incredible, that he has never dreamed but she has not yet said, You just don’t remember. "But, you know, you don’t show your moods so much, whereas you have a lot of them." "Sounds like New York talk," you grumble. "Now what was this Choor, these Choor monsters? I mean didn’t you say that your mother before she—well, obviously before she—or was it just Choor she asked about?"

  A curve of news passes so near it is surely Mayn’s, but, making it his own, he feels in his mouth a tongue of prediction: Mayn will fall in love again if, and only if, he finds the formula joining (i) his uncontrollable power to witness two persons transferred by frequency into one; (2) his faith that the Chilean economist matters more even than his connection with post-Allende politics and the Spence link; and (3) his lifelong inability to dream.

  Then a tender compliment feels you where you live but some countdown the end of whose unseen hand sure reminds him he’s forgotten a little lower-back dread born of today though of a future known in one’s system if not spelled out except in some longer, tough stranger-tongue in the old animal mouth: that you yourself are this vagrant stump-tail monkey-bird Choor Mon’, still not quite shaped despite all these generations, and of which the mountain really remains to be found, for the coastline breaks that won’t stay put when you go looking for them hours after your infra-red aerial scan has jointed and correlated them with unfamiliar uncaused weather pockets of non-pressure mount up, until the impossible shape asking more and more to be called ancient threatens to be understood by not the curves and equations of some loner Meteorologist of New York but actually him whom you never dreamt of identifying with earlier Hermit-Inventors of New York historied by a grandmother whose tales made up to fill a grandson’s mother-gap became extra-true at a bad time for you. You are the He who belongs to that Mountain of Choor, but what’s a monster nowadays, and if—God!—angels have had to get into evolution and haven’t the power they once had to be absent and/or give potentiality, why more and more monsters with or without new role models may also be deciding to join the human race. Let me get this straight, she’s saying, your aim was ... to succeed in not changing the world?

  Lost without other people, through whom he falls bending toward them, just missing them, sometimes lighting them before he gets to them.

  Misses his family, that’s no news. Kind of loves this woman—young, smart, nice, fine, yes. Love waves deflect his b
ullet into orbit, how about that!, whose was said bullet?, bitable, choorable, he will wait and it will come to him, for while he lives, haply he is lived. By relations processing him into perspective, maybe he’s theirs.

  Or by other people who know themselves so well they don’t feel clear, whereas he has dinner with them, plays squash, phones, hears their unre-portable doings in the same room and bent through others, which is a relief from his own light, which also weighs. Lived by others? Sentimental inkling, no more. Though it goes on at length somewhere, it’s just hearing yourself in others.

  Forget it was even thought. Never stand up in court.

  the unknown sound

  That sound, she said—and he felt her attention touch him—doesn’t it bother you?

  She lay in a corner of the long leather couch. She looked beautifully composed, relaxed. Her toes were lighted by the TV screen, the light crossed a knee, a shoulder, her nose. She was new to him and in a way he was thinking about her. He was on his knees across the room, and when he sat back on his cold heels his knees cracked like a painful joke. She didn’t seem to notice.

  That sound, she said—she smiled and shook her head quickly—it’s so strong.

  Well, let’s have it without sound, he said, and started crawling toward the TV. I often have the sound off.

  You can’t, she said, unless you turn off the TV.

  What do you mean I can’t? he said, and stopped where he was.

  It’s always on when the set’s on, she said.

  What is?

  That sound.

  I hear the guy talking, and I hear the crowd, right?

  That’s not the sound I mean.

  She smiled and he felt the warmth of the smile through the low light, but the smile had a clarity he did not grasp. He didn’t know her yet. He crawled back to where he’d been.

  Hear it? she said.

  What did she mean? Sound was something he knew about.

  Look, I’m not deaf, he said. He wanted to go over to her. He looked at her eyes, one at a time, both at once. Above the nipple of one breast was a brief, tender shade he knew to be bluish. On the screen the young pitcher in a gray cap with black letters with orange hair bulging out beneath was staring in at the camera, close-up. She didn’t follow baseball, she’d said, didn’t really know baseball; but she’d played—softball, that is. The pitcher was at the top of the screen now and smaller, and three figures were grouped at the bottom of the screen watching him. These were the batter, facing sideways, waving the end of his bat above his shoulder in a brighter, a white, uniform; a player squatting behind him in a gray uniform, his cap on backwards; and behind him an older, burly man in normal clothes leaning over the shoulder of the squatting one, who now tipped onto one knee.

  The thought of what she might be seeing made the picture suddenly so familiar he didn’t see quite as he was used to seeing. But what could she hear that he didn’t? It was one of the older color TVs. He concentrated and he felt the four figures—umpire, catcher, batter, pitcher—blur back into the extreme and ticklish rear of his eyes to be surfaces or components. He heard the announcer, and then the thuck of a pitch hitting the catcher’s mitt, and the shout of the umpire, who did not raise his arm.

  Wait, she said. She pulled her feet up under her, she leaned forward and crawled off the couch so smoothly that the couch’s level and the floor’s were not separate.

  On her hands and knees she reached the TV, her bare back arched, her head childlike up close to the screen, finding a new thing. When she turned the right-hand knob her hair, as if in the sudden absence of sound, was surrounded by light.

  Now hear it?

  What’s it like—is it a hum, a whistle?

  It’s hard to describe.

  You’re right on top of it, you sure you’re not hearing the announcer very faintly?

  No, she said, it’s what’s left.

  On her hands and knees she swung her head around, and she observed him, her chin against her shoulder.

  You’re being mysterious, he said. He wanted to touch the blond down on the small of her back.

  She fell over and, opening her legs, sat with her legs crossed. Her force was clear, but it confused their ages a bit. Turn around, she said, and don’t look.

  Her pale stomach was straight up. He followed the line of each leg out along the calf to the angle of the knee then in along the thigh. He turned his back to her.

  He sat the way she was sitting. He straightened his back and then realized what he was expecting. Her touch. So far he recalled each time with her; and he wondered how long it would go on—it.

  Try again, she said.

  He heard the set turned off as the light in the room slid away toward the one other source, the white globe on the window sill.

  Ready, he said.

  Maybe you should close your eyes, she said. But he didn’t; he remembered the Lord’s Prayer in church when he was a child.

  Tock goes the switch again, and the sound brought up the armchair and rug and, in the window, an image of glowing bookshelves.

  Do you hear a very high sound?

  He didn’t. He said maybe he was inured, maybe he was flooded. He wondered how often she watched television.

  Maybe once a month, if that—she didn’t have a TV.

  They tried again.

  The light from the screen dropped away. Then it came up again so that he saw the top of the armchair reflected in the window where the lamp was.

  It’s so strong, she said, and he felt she was smiling.

  Too strong for me, he said.

  Come on, she said, don’t say that. It’s high, like a whistle. Very high.

  A dull crank of gears echoed down in the street. He wanted to see her.

  He turned himself around and she didn’t object. She was unusual in that she didn’t try to get him to talk about his work, except once she’d asked if he had to do much actual swimming. She pushed the knob, the screen became a gray mirror. She kept her hand on the knob and looked at him with something in store for him. He kept an eye on her hand.

  She pulled the knob and there was a between-innings commercial.

  He felt a vibration, he thought. Or a pressure.

  You really can’t hear it?

  A whistle, he thought, a whistle without the whistle. It’s like speed, he said.

  Speed? she said.

  No, I mean like the speed of light—but without the light.

  But then he didn’t know, and she agreed, and said she didn’t want to push him into saying what he didn’t mean.

  He didn’t know if she would spend the night this time or go home.

  She smiled when he told her about her neck, her collarbone, her hands, the tender bluish shade he had touched with his eyelash, even with his eye. She’d liked his hands, it was one of the first things she looked at in a man. He’d let her get away with that.

  Let’s listen to the sound, she said, and he thought she was saying also, Concentrate, here’s something I can bring you on your home ground.

  In the same serious way she had asked if he had some light penetrating oil; the record turntable sometimes failed to stop and the arm sometimes didn’t come back. She wanted to tilt the housing up, she knew where to look. He’d said he would buy some oil.

  Now she switched the TV set off and told him to shut his eyes and put his hands over his eyes.

  He asked if she’d heard this sound before.

  Only the few times she’d watched TV.

  She and her friends listened to music. She’d lent him a piano record. It sounded like a half-magical, musing mish-mash of Debussy, Schumann, pre-War nightclub songs and barroom rag heavy on the pedal and old American songs he could not identify, only respond to, a tune from Stephen Foster maybe, or a camp meeting by a river. He’d lent her Delius and the Bach partitas he liked. She’d said little about him himself except that she had always wondered what free-lance really meant. He had volunteered the information that most of his salvage work latel
y was for the police. She told him a little about her friends.

  Her friends thought of themselves as coming out of the sixties, but he saw they were suburban kids not old enough to have been actually in the events of the sixties. They lived together in musical apartments but they weren’t hippies. They would be fairly romantic, he supposed, though she, he felt, was not. And she didn’t preach or brag. She ate little—only live foods, she said, meaning raw. But a week ago she’d asked if he minded if she smoked a cigarette. She had enjoyed it, looking out the window, and he had smelled a sweet richness he had never tasted when he had smoked.