I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up old city bus, which he can do but I don’t want to talk about it—and about the crazed Hispanic off-islanders now attending big-league baseball games in our shared city (the Jews are better at picking up Spanish, he says, and he’s right, than the Irish—all of which explains how well I know the distance between that school and my second home, my girl’s).
And she was my beautiful, wise girl who took individualized driver training from me and was my girl from junior high until I left and later so did she, my future, though didn’t leave the tenement itself with a row of galvanized cans her intensely white-haired father the super—Jewish—get all info into lead!—kept always in their place so random Venusian descending via sun-fueled greenhouse-ship saw, through the deteriorating cement of the building’s brick, a sometime vacant "railroad" we might make better use of for an hour and a half, he saw his cans there on the sidewalk as field batteries, standing reserve, ammo. Accessories in my head long after the fact. I can feel for him, Jim, right down to the red nick on his jaw twice a week, and I am thirty and counting, and—as my esteemed substitute teacher once pointed out it would be painfully different for a childless female long-term con—wonder if I will have a daughter to protect, or just have one. You knew something because you said after me She is your future, getting it straight (your only child?).
So you can see where I am coming from. Neither of us dark to the other as I guess you’ve thought, driving up here or then with that one hard kernel of corn between your fingers looking at it and then Juan and back to that tooth of corn—do you have it, still, do you know where you can lay your hand on it?
And where is this here intrinsic continuum of message being (smile) devoured, by the way? In your hand? Your head? growing in your ear? Does it raise a blister in your fingerprint? Does it make you mad? Or, more like, make real the billions of millimeters between mind particles each with one interface exactly met by the other, and if you cheat the world’s jailed jailer of its substitutes, maybe you see further than you’ve a right to. If you go in for rights, I don’t, I go beyond.
But if the future is bent on some path, the latest in communications out of an electronic suitcase you mentioned that might go off or speak in words of two syllables, linking Vermont, New Mexico, Chile, and this prison-redoubt where I send out myself honeycombed with light, where I have transcended the passerby who carelessly strikes off the head of the sunflower, this sev-enteen-hundred-toilet redoubt ringed by hills full of white farmhouse roofs and fenceposts topped by talking crows and the glint of earless mobile homes like truck-stop diners in the trees—Oh I know they’re there—hills groaning full of firearms and tax deductions and howling with loose-skinned hounds— no, a hookup you don’t hang up on, a new path communicating between here and there, man and man—O.K., then, so what’s the economics if with all this new communication system there is nothing to communicate?
This was the point that our sometime substitute in the old days, Ruth Heard, have I described her?, fresh from England, would make; and if she wasn’t looking at you with the blue eyes and the brown curls sticking way out all around, you knew she would be in a second. So much for economics, Jim, the vein of my opening cover for scanners of outgoing transmissions but secretly in its very openness for you too, Jim, and for others outside, if, and I give you leave, you have shown this mish-mash of news. Isn’t there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you’re still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.
You’ve been in South America, but didn’t see anything, you claim: like, I have been here! But remember the grasshopper? I bet you do. Alighted upon the biologist’s ship three hundred seventy miles from land, what had that grasshopper in mind? Through what air did it make that jump? what vein? I am without a lab here except the darkroom. Photography’s the program here, since C.U. can’t be taught or learned but only known, and there are some guys here who take unique pictures, Jim. No sunsets maybe, for orange dust smidgens don’t glow on the man-made horizon of our walls. But these men will photograph a shadow; a halo, in my opinion; a face; perspective looking down a cell block; or bars from inside or out on the gallery half over-, half under-exposed so the series locks into your head remember those flickering parkway guard-rail posts controlling thought? And my old sciencer sees weather control one day altering times of twilight, angles of seasons, rains albeit through radiation-parametering focus spoutwise down to flush up lung-blood from the avenues, leftover power toxins to be rethought. I knew my mother would not see the future in the photo I developed and arrested the development of soon after I was transferred here from Auburn; she shook her head—the future? she said, but look at the valid driver’s license she now carries due to me, hidden in her plastic cigarette case, good for years while Jackie who got me in the photography program will never agree with me what he can do: these men can photograph our finest particles, Jim, if they only knew what is there to be seen in the enlargements of faces, and yet is this a point?—that the taker always sees? Your face last night showed in the seams under the eyes the search and what-not of a life—like the noted substitute teacher Ruth Heard, even to the stories told. But while you are a man whose eyelids have doubted many a dawn, don’t be so sure you’ve lived all the way between your time out there and ours in here. Oh I could have been a doctor; I knew too late. I know another lab, though; and it’s here. You’re getting away from me, Foley, you said.
Well, that kernel was handed to you between thumb and forefinger by a (says-him) Marxist name of strong-man Juan, who was the other person present before the guys trooped into the room ahead of you; and then there you were.
On the threshold, you looked at Juan, the muscle-man with eyestrain pink across the furious, friendly eyes, who studies the abridged Kapital half the night as if his all-night light is the always switched-on bulb of Death Row, and you seemed to see nothing else but the old corn kernel he had picked up in the yard that only I and he and you—the three of us—were aware of, though more than three now occupied the room, and you asked what it was, and Juan held it up—a tooth? you asked—and give it to you and you had it in your right hand for a long time and forgot about it.
And I see that what I have been trying to say, Jim, if I can call you Jim once more, is that at 6:20 P.M. you came into Room Number Four of what we call the South Forty in this Stressed Concrete Castle our contemporary home (smile), you formerly of the Associated Press (was almost all I knew of the messenger), now associated with a gallery of criminal types.
You said you didn’t know why you were here. How come your act’s together, then?
But Jim, you did know.
Don’t know why he’s here; going to fit right in, Efrain said. Which brought a laugh and it was yours; but Smitty, who shuts his eyes tight, talks till he’s ready to open them, then shuts up, said that you were here with a bunch of . . . you heard me before. And I as a friend of Smitty’s had heard of you and knew what you brought for me.
I the new man in this pocket of potential waste (new-type potential energy) here long enough to be relocated again, where they might tell you the night before or an hour before, and suddenly you’re not here, you’re up on the Canadian border (polluted beef, don’t you worry they won’t let you in), but you’re thinking up a new life, new territory, redcoat horsemen at outposts, great fish full of history diving out of rivers into lakes, wriggling airborne clear from the great long-head Norseman’s Wisconsin and Minnesota, land to be had, Sino-Russian reconnaissance reflector-planes slipping between dew point and early-warning layer, lunatic wing orbiting the top of the country: point, though, is you got through, Jim; and I spoke and said some of the guys were really into journalism, and you asked if there was some good copy around, and they wanted to know about yours. Oh, you said, it made you think of newsprint like wrapping paper and you said you could wrap the state of Vermont or New Hampshire in a year’s newsprint.
Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you abo
ut: I told him what you said."
Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal?—I’m thinking and will come up with it.
Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too—(I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who gets them? First come first serve?
Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what you were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories—and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record this. (You still there, Jim?)
Now you said—and I’m reporting, if not briefly—that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for—oh this hit me so hard—and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs—this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.
Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.
Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to—did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.
Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where he was coming from, he was right.
I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.
Fill out—thank you in advance for filling out—the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one—smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.
Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam—I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college—listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go!—you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.
Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.
I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here—plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas you got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes—because there’s no reason you should open with us.
Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook—and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.
And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length—you laughed— closer still.
I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.
(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60 MPH on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)
Well the night I met you, I was in the room ready for the messenger. The room he aimed for, though he was not entirely into his message. It was not just a room your course was set for.
Because Charlie, rounding us all up—because here you don’t sit down and put in a call to some guy in his cell that you want to meet with him later in the week, but you find the guy maybe in the mess hall, if he is not doing his own food trip or fasting; or you pass a message to somebody in his block—Charlie didn’t know I had heard Smitty’s tape of the prior meeting, and Charlie told me you said you sometimes felt you’d been unconscious a lot of your life, between bedrooms, pressrooms, twenty-some years of assignments, many small-scale units but no one overall shtik. Charlie said he could relate to it, because he says he is also very aware of his unconscious.
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