Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And on this day under the enormous breathing of the bird, he told the Princess in the Anasazi’s language rather than his own more technoloon that she must act upon the future that afternoon:

  Meanwhile, Jim felt on Brad’s Day that it was only like yesterday that his grandmother had told him how the Navajo Prince’s mother had died brimming with demons who had become more numerous and flowed together like crowds in future until those knowing elders staring down into the hole in her head saw less hole and more surface of teeming flume and a surface they would incredulously check by darting their heads around to see her face, for the fluid surface where had been the reverse fountain of her head top and where Owl Woman’s namesake the woman Manuel had applied oil of the jojoba bean to encourage reseeding of hair came to resemble the kindly storms that were her eyes’ insight and the large, nicely shameless cheeks like muscles to welcome you and reflect all you knew you could do. Which encompassed even marriage to a girl as alien to the Navajo mother as Harflex, that young noble of faraway eastern Choor, seemed far and familiar to the still not homesick Princess; until, while the demons talked louder and louder and the lady herself said nothing but wept, the impending union of the foreign, much-traveled girl and the Navajo son seemed to herald her thoroughly convincing death at the hands of demons who carried out their impulses suing for her energy more than her. Which they grasped no more than the medicine women who would not touch her or share out the clothes she wasn’t wearing during her curious period of death. And then her dying ended like a season when the noisy winds go away and the birds, if any, wing back reincarnating these same winds:

  But the night the Princess left, thinking herself the cause of the Prince’s mother’s death, and the Prince left in pursuit, the demons returned to the wonderfully preserved head of the lady, and once more she suffered, lived, and, upon ceremonial occasions, including one remembering her son, whose much-sung trek around the core of Earth never came full circle, she made long noises unmistakably music to Indians and authentic to a Mexican spy openly out of work and a dark-spectacled German gun-and-honey importer from Chile who smiled as if it were his show and who, though tone-deaf, knew by heart her country’s eminence in music and by sight a Chilean lady whose daughter had become a zoologist and run away.

  Why did Margaret’s account of this feel like it had been given only yesterday, when this was months ago in a dark night’s backyard? Doubtless because Jim put it in its place with the long afternoon when the sun did not go down because the rough lip of the Earth didn’t let it, as because, too, rifts in all these once speculative layers lined up by convergent pang of all or most of the gods flexing, for a second, one universe, to remind themselves of time.

  —Did you have a mother-in-law like that?

  —The Princess almost did.

  —What about you?

  —Not quite.

  —What about your mother? (whose uncle in earlier New Jersey made. her a table every other year and her friend the banker designed a slick racing sulky double-size well a sort of little open carriage to show her off in).

  —I was my own mother then, Jimmy.

  Out West? The favored grandson, remembering on Brad’s Day, the day when the sun did not go down on time, and thinking what he’s missing today at school because this is only the second week and he hates to ask for even some beautiful girl’s history notes, finds in himself a thought as deep as two parallel thoughts—one, that he never did more than hear and appreciate Margaret’s "fish stories" yet knew they demanded questions, and from him, that he never asked; and two, that Brad, without knowing, has taught him they are brothers—no matter that here they all come, Alexander Granddad (eyes alive and taking aim on what needs to be done) and Margaret rubbing her damp hands on her apron, and Pearl W. Myles of all people, the high school teacher, a stranger, who, when she phoned the Democrat for advice and support, heard from Mrs. Many that the younger boy was having a fit on the rug and who had come at once, though a stranger.

  What were the parallel thoughts? The interrogator, who has more than enough to do with his button, is thinking no less cheerfully, "Enough of this, it is of course deeply affecting."

  He meant (for everyone has perhaps had a brother), do you mean "breather" asks the interrogator—Jim feeling brother to Brad for once: he could look right at him, anyway, without vomiting or wanting to liven up his pallid bony puss (mayhap seen snoring, of a night, when Jim, scorning the stairwell where no one was likely to be found to catch him, took to the roof, toeing the balsa-light slant of each personally known shingle as slow as but fast as one jump from window to grass).

  (. . . to Earthward, murmurs incorrectly the interrogator, moved, his hand dreaming of that putative U-boat conning postwar haven from the Jersey shore 252-foot-length by 252-foot-length clear around to the long nation-coast of Chile, dreaming the more because he’s convinced it was created not to wait for the woman who owned a black towel who vanished into the sea, its surface, its clefts, its cells, its temperature, so that the interrogator’s hand slides relaxed over a button (don’t you know) momentarily juicing the grime off a suspect in the next room . . .)

  (we infiltrate like angels trying to change and are broken in on by a young voice down the hall from a 1977 apartment in some articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and the voice is talking to the basso profundo but not about the //amto-opera warehouse gig thrust upon him, who gives off a delighted rumble now at the words "This weekend we’re going to play leapfrog in the asparagus bed, Popsy" accomplished by a clink which as Larry does not guess is a large jar of the basso’s down the hall in his apartment, his latest discovery, Clamato Juice!)—

  Until there is nowhere to go except understanding: however, the division of sadness which was Brad’s way of shouldering brotherhood—"and crawls on his belly like a reptile," sounds the barker’s cry in the voice of more than one fourteen-year-old including Jim—left a less-known job of grief or action to the superior brother Jim, the study of which he found one day in his still teenage grandma’s Democrat "piece" on Mars, done when interest was at a height (August 18, 1892—"apogee," darts in the interrogator), but Jim’s interest betrayed itself in a quite foreign detail, it improved Jim’s study of his side of the grief responsibility (awkward words, but) also of how the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the Anasazi healer’s theory of the cleft by which the layers enveloping our neat fragment of the brother Sun, brother to others yet not to us who are a mere breakage become anxiously clear (through convergence of semi-explosive clays) and bent on becoming more, came periodically into line; and on that day, the Sun would not go down until those drawn by convergence of the many gods’ periodic effort to think one thought in common had had the chance to be found by cosms of this tearing or breakage of the Sun which, like ceremony, recalled that signal tearing one of many tearings or great breathings of this brother Sun when at the peak of breath or inhaled explosions of possibility that drop of fire blood split off, in love with, or expelled by, its own hunger for the void or to find what rein of force waited like a relative string arcing some bond unknown even to the cactus with its nesting eye and the birds that the winter wind becomes when it leaves: and the person who is struck by such reminiscent cosms of the Sun’s inhaled breath would find such purpose, at last, that she would start her life over as if either she had aimed inward to the center where the hells and rock-skinned saurs and river-rhines and the rock-skinned rhinogog and also the rich kettles of change tipped gimbaling this way and that upon the magma of a magnet that was not there, or her starts had been launched as secretly outward as her inexplicit "hello" to other worldlings in her 1892 Democrat piece when Mars, in opposition to Earth every twenty-six months, reached its regular fifteen-year extreme of opposed closeness—"hello":

  amidst speculation engendering in the mind a wild longing to know whether people like ourselves live there and enjoy the hills and valleys and rocks and all the waterways of the universe, the rivers, waterfalls, e
ven yes canals, and the eternal sunsets—they surely have enough moonlight! we would want to know if they were anything like ourselves and slept, eat and drank to live; and whether they knew anything of electricity and gunpowder or would like to know; and if they were going to have a World’s Fair

  (the giveaway)—she would make a start "out of" no less than her future, or, in awesome fact, marriage to Harflex, the suitor, who awaited her presence,’ her go-ahead back along the shores of Choor: while the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the effect of these cosms of the Sun winging all instantly through this long window comprising in one long "point" all the single clefts in layers of breath embracing our own known world, the bodily senses of one’s given future: but Jim found later he had on Brad’s Day begun extending this material, having gotten mad at his grandmother—and maybe from the moment when Pearl W. Myles, his statuesque journalism teacher, appeared in the bereaved Throckmorton Street house, dark red paisley draped across the Chickering grand, a dust of English biscuits hovering round their sweet tin in a curtained dining room where a fortnight’s supply of Newark and Asbury Park and New York papers stared neatly stacked on a pulled-out chair, soap (Pear’s mild), upstairs flowers (fresh from Margaret’s garden which Sarah always accepted, while calling them "dead"), a nutmeg left to roll around the kitchen table (it might have been a brown Mexican jumping bean Bob Yard’s wife gave Jim after a trip to New York where she said it was the Italians who imported Mexican jumping beans) as cold as a dead turtle: the East Far Eastern Princess listened, and as she did so, the Sun began to tip into the horizon line of irregular mountains warped up toward the Sun as if (to allow the Hermit-Inventor his way of accounting for this strange afternoon) the axis had tilted so that this southwestern corner of the Earth became a pole. This explanation was no better than the Princess’s twin dreams the night of the long afternoon, nor the large turtle mouth painted upon the face of dancers in the snowy dawn of the year according to an outcast cousin from another people who carried water to the Anasazi twice a week though he was by now barely more than an occasional if intelligent fume given off by time’s inching root, which the Anasazi’s own thin mouth fresher than all the rest of him put together could be heard to tell, though with a softness audible only to those at a certain distance from him, not those as close as the Chilean javelina specialist Mena emerging before him upon the last in a series of ladders, her mouth painted white only by some love in her mind’s quest for the white-lipped javelina, not by ceremonial pigment, nor to the Navajo Prince when, long before Princess came along or giant bird, he knelt next to the Anasazi healer and took from him a Colt pistol, having at a distance of half a mile heard, moments before, the breath of the ancient healer telling how he had let his medicines take him for decades at a time away from his faithful and humorous wife and doting children only to find that one day they were gone across the space of one unending sunset which begot a double moon inside the Princess’s mind that night whereby she saw the Moon singly with each eye and dreamt that she was agreeing with a council led by the Prince’s brother that she would cost that young horseman "her" Prince his life.

  And the trails he left, when she departed three nights later toward Zuni country (with its afternoon-long ramparts and nests of red cliffs), were not of cornmeal nor of crusts from her wooded memories of Choor but were only in her lover’s mind grown there by the thought of her womb hair and the embrace of her pale breasts, all such parts lost along the cells of his hand’s brain, bold as decision, humble as seeming-fact that’s beyond what idiots call sacrifice; and so he followed her.

  We are such mingled growths, which the interrogator incorrectly remembers as Owl Woman’s words "I am running far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling," who has yielded his button (though to no one) for the moment and says "We" to us and sees our no doubt human matter here as a far cry from some center of information and political identification.

  Well he may, for the Anasazi medicine man claimed that not he but his many hundred years younger colleague Owl Woman had sent the Princess the dream she came to him with on the morning after the Hermit’s interview with her near the eyrie of the giant bird: to wit, that having run hard all night to get to where she was to see what was vital to her precisely at dawn, the Princess was stricken by the dawn rays too soon, as if life won’t wait for you to find it.

  When the Hermit, asked by her to prove the news about cosms bolting briefly through a vastly thin window in all our spheres, ran away to check again with the Anasazi, she knew she was being left alone. Above her, through the spruce and juniper pinon sat the giant Choor bird lessening in scale as if the great eggs, previously hidden, grew and the song or noise out of this still, animal peak atop what the Hermit named a volcanic neck came from the eggs as much as from the bird’s hunger.

  "It’s all right," come the words from our own next room personalized by the presence of a multiple child fuguing some rock-folk against the polyfunk of old reliable homework—"It’s all right—It’s all right—It’s awwlll right" becomes a bright-eyed, quick quiet "All right!" so the interrogator who had almost forgotten himself asks if our multiple child has any Negro blood in it. We have at once answered, "If you have to ask, you can’t afford one," but the interrogator won’t smile this one off as an adroit addition to his command of our idioms . . . not even interrogative smiles ... we have put off his return to business for a time that is coming to an end.

  So Jim, turning to nod to the major physical presence of Pearl W. Myles, who said, "I am so sorry, Jim; is there anything I can do?", did not ask her what she thought she was doing here—nor who was "we" which he’d half-heard instead of "I"—he wanted to ask her some good question since she was there. But Margaret reappeared and for a second looked like she would give the unknown Pearl Myles a social kiss.

  So it happened (and he knew his grandmother knew) that the Hermit-Inventor of New York (who as we now say "lost a day or at any rate a sunset in there somewhere"), when he was still a mile horizontally away and, of course, sixty to seventy feet vertically down from the cliff apartment, heard the breath of the old Anasazi healer from further away than was logistically credible, and he knew he had heard before the thought expressed in words he hesitated to believe he was now hearing, particularly in the Irish accent—or Eiro-German—that he was in fact never able to prove came from him or from the late Anasazi healer.

  Toward me the darkness comes rattling,

  In the great night my heart will go out.

  For the old man, on this afternoon that was a day later than the Hermit-Inventor reckoned it should have been, seemed dead on the Hermit’s arrival; and upon examination of all that was left by the Hermit-Inventor’s improvised standard of the state of tissues softly in the windless air waving where the old healer’s fine-worn neck had been, he had been dead a while, no question: the point was not what had happened to the body from the neck down (it had powdered at last and risen to a low cloud which Mena, the javelina authority, insisted took the form of the lowest noctilucent cloud ever seen, when those bright-banded phenomena had been observed at heights well above the stratosphere for centuries, indeed above the stratopause, mesophere, and mesopause—fifty miles—all of these officially undiscovered in Indian summer J893)—but the real question was how the last words of the Anasazi, born the year before one of the earliest described occurrences of his own pet cosmic window, had reached the Hermit-Inventor come to meet him in the absence of their utterer; indeed after the soft, successful exhalation of death.

  But in their friendly way those last words had come bearing a memory the Hermit didn’t know was in him: the actual moment when a later incarnation of the Hermit suspected a magnetic break in the thin, precious, dangerous ozonosphere, the effects of which doubtless normally mutational yet the results not (for Margaret) death or sudden aging but an absorption of future: and at the margins of this swift vein of gold, blue, purple, violet, gray, and green seeming to incinerate the profile of ridge and
crevasse, each peak and hollow reflected sometimes by a sunny sea of levitation, came a brainstorm—yes, providing with light financially unprofitable farms or whole hamlets at night by injecting some chemical, that in 1893 he could not name nitrogen oxide, into the appropriate layer (if you can find it in our junked atmo) round Earth’s sphere, a colossal halo to be sure, but a help to poor and insomniac peasants who might keep busy when they couldn’t sleep.

  Yet Margaret, as she told Jim who never forgot but also seldom quite remembered how he reenacted her habit, stayed busy when asleep: witness the long afternoon, for the Princess dreamed a second simultaneous dream to go with the dream of the council led by her lover’s brother, and in this companion dream she saw into a grave but had no words, no mouth! for the valuable thing that waited for her and in the dream she went on to wake up and go through green trees and wooded water to find that same grave on a richly tilled hill and there was the grave which opened itself to her thought and she reached down to find a gun and an egg but not a bone or hair of that grave’s undoubted tenant and she was surrounded by the dustiest of desert Indians in this rich place who edged her closer to the grave telling her in unison (but she was the dusty one, not the Indians) what was no threat at all—that clearly she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person reincarnate; but all she could feel, apart from relief that they meant no harm to her, was that these people from the southwestern desert were speaking beliefs other than their own, for they had no more belief in reincarnation than they had acquaintance with the cool, damp air of this hill with its eastern leaf forest, and when she gained courage to tell them this, they answered that she was the one who had told them about reincarnation; and when she felt awful and said, "You’re right, of course; what was I thinking of?" they swayed as one and, before she could reach for the egg or the gun, these people had resolved themselves into a fluid as thick as the blood of a worm and as sweet as the bean of a new world and had coursed into the grave which was then no more than the hillside—