Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his Times with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.

  Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

  Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious except the Chilean.

  Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside—and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor—there isn’t one—and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old—I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

  San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too—and the lidless lid—because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining?—and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise—but no countdown—beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming, I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the pro
mise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

  —of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—

  —for what? translates the dream out of some distant lingo, andpir quanha quoia-san comes to me as far from por que as why is from because—

  —route for strange cloud-contents drawn coastward by what (?) that waited there?

  But at the time of this dream—dreams settle nothing, you guessed—I did not know these people. And Spence, who, come to think of it, did later mention to Efrain, when Efrain got out, a meteorologist who had meditated ocean coasts in South America and inland coasts in North, was sure new winds were schemed with contingency underplan to quick-pollute selected areas of the U.S. possibly by Wide Load in motion eastward, and Spence, prob’ly un lunatic himself, told a touring foreign agent that a Known Daughter knew more about this because she and her father had made separate trips southwest recently especially in area from which Wide Load or Toxic Mountain (code name bearing built-in correctional facility) was thought to be commencing, and Spence wondered if our South American friend had written me—and I in my dream interpreted by Juan economically called to the knuckles that were white from the drag of the cargo namely cell plus me, and they didn’t have any hair on them so they were Miriam’s or my father’s, and the swings got less until the weight of fallen rain held my container from swinging much, so the open end was up to the heavens but the plane went away and then the weight got so much the cell was set down on the beach with a terrible bump I’m sure but, being partly weightless and in my sleep, I didn’t feel it, and I called to Miriam and she didn’t hear.

  So there I was, afloat in my own rainwater higher toward the bars at the top of my traveling cage that wasn’t traveling now, and I thought, Miriam don’t know how to drive, they’ll pick her up. But at least she would be inside out of the rain but I couldn’t see her, and I wasn’t getting into a shouting match, I thought, all I could see was those fingers on the bars and below me underwater the toilet, sink, and bed were fixtures but table and chair, papers and books floated loose down there and the bed was changing but I had to look upward to breathe, and then bars with no fingers so I was alone and the water got higher until I had just my nose and half a nostril up above the surface and to do that, I had to position both eyes against bars so I couldn’t see to breathe, and so after a breath I looked down into the depths of my cell again and saw a shadow and a glint of silver or blond about the eyes, if it was a person, and the bed was sprouting not another bed but branches at the front corners, it was made of wood like my bed at home, I saw it growing but had to breathe again, but I heard everything from dolphins’ opera inside musical garbage cans to lobsters crawling my way over the land that lay all about the square bucket I was drowning in. I took mouthfuls of water, squirted it but it came back in, until I heard a pounding like thunder and then, Jim, I couldn’t hold on no longer, and I knew this was no dream, the thunder got like a weight in my drums and my chest, it was awful, I was ready for the chaplain and the whole cell received a jolt which was like a decision and tipped slowly and it went over and almost halfway but not quite, just so the bars instead of being turned down against the sand were facing onto the beach so anyway all the water ran out and kids were yelling and I wondered if they would kick it again but by then I was conscious in old way again.

  It’s good of you to care, I guess—’bout Miriam, my mother, the garbage cans, more than when you first came—and will Larry come sometime? I think I’m on the same curve as him, from what you said about the obstacles he faces; but at that instant awake in my new cell, having come the day before from Auburn’s melancholy vale, I felt I saw Miriam. I tell you I saw her, whereas in the pir-quasi-quoiq dream it was only the knuckles (where was the hand?).

  Me seeing Miriam meant I would see her more by being away from her.

  But see what?

  The white shell of scar since you ask along one fold of nostril. Raven bangs with the slight part like the narrow gap between two front teeth, the hair fell that way. The warm shoulders turned perhaps toward me—toward her father; anyone. The high cheekbones—you’ve heard that before—were they from eastern Europe?, it was where her father’s mother had hailed from, cheeks that looked like they had soft cream makeup on but, to touch, they didn’t. The eyes, one gentle, open degree wall-eyed, so you believed what was true also, that she saw you with both but saw beyond you, to for instance the broad-shouldered old father who acted like me being in the kitchen when she wiped and her little Aunt Iris washed meant I did not give him respect, but she’s afraid of him, Miriam, she don’t want him to even know I asked her to the movies, and she tells me privately she got a cramp while Iris is telling him the stove is still leaking gas and the smell isn’t that mentholated oven cleaner.

  Yet waking from that prison dream with no one to take it to except myself, I saw that being away from Miriam was my going, not hers, my weight downward and she couldn’t hold me, O.K.

  But all the good that ensued—this was Lady Luck in the grip of that dream hand. In tune with the opening leader-group response of the Death Row (therefore currently unemployed) chaplain’s cadre meetings that they soon threw me out of. Leader: "Out of the struggle of the now we will create the human world of the future." Group: "Our life is in the human struggle. The past is approved. The present is received, the future is open." But not luck, Jim, not luck at that bereft point of waking but, near known sounds, in a different cell and prison, guys passing my bars going to breakfast, desolation like an anvil I’m forged inside, with no hammer to hit it—having not known how to run my dream into the ground by tilting that box one more side over, and suffocate in the dark.

  That is, after the water ran out through my new floor of steel bars into the sand.

  Not luck that I made a single thing of day and night then and there through seeing not just her fingers if they were hers but Miriam. For I’d found how to receive what had always been mine to, in the Visitors Room from people I hadn’t even met, or in the photography lab which I was now destined to use only so far (no further), or in my manifold cell where I was keep-locked most of that first day in this particular multiple dwelling (call it orientation) though I did not need my colloidal swarms to light me down through this particular multiple dwelling—trade shops, dining salon, law library where there was a spontaneous fight, the Muslim study group (which has changed so many guys not just their names so they have two names with the authorities now); the programs and the plumbing and then deep inside our multiple dwelling the camel in the yard slouching back and forth between the five-on-five basketball game and the barbell clonkers and the very old lifers who, when you tell them a little about the Economic Plan to corral all skills for a better home and envision a society with no more prisons, shake their clean-shaven heads—oh man, f all the criminals was let out, this con for one would rather be inside—though every one of these joints is different, Jim, hence an idea for the future, of correctional confederacy.

  You still with me?

  Don’t ask, you say.

  But as sure as from Smitty’s tape I knew you move and relate by the Colloidal Unconscious, not in so many words—even without words. And whether through the South American gentleman who is in the jeopardy you knew in advance predicted on Smitty’s tape, or through your inborn chemistry that received your future and brought you through it to this jailhouse where your resident economist (smile) seeks as he can the intrinsic unit of value, you now find yourself where you may need to know your own p
ower or what it is, even if you don’t tell others such as the beautiful young social scientist Amy who came with you to the last Puerto Rican festival and you will let me know if she is coming I predict to the workshop soon so I can be there, I hope she did not think I was prying when we were at the table on the grass having ice cream with Charlie’s kid and I asked and she replied in the affirmative that she had been associated with a foundation, only that, no more. She looked around at the other picnic tables and said the guys looked in great shape—very clean, she said, as if she wasn’t sure what to say.

  How you going to get dirty here?

  Well, it came to me—the message—three days beyond the dream. The message of myself. But the dolphins still sang and the lobsters swayed below the billows and swam a little and in another vein crawled past the old bare tuning-fork fir tree high behind the lake at camp, and in the corners of my eyes swung the father’s garbage cans a loose unit glowing and sparking and clanking like competing anchors with nothing to hold but themselves, one lurching upward to haul the rest, another dropping to drag down those around it, the lids loose and floating off then back on but always loosely so I saw the father, also in each outside corner of my eyes coming but slowly, knowing it would wait, while his physician who I smelled but didn’t see waited to look him over and the Y camp physician was talking like a parent to the kid with white eyelashes who couldn’t go to sleep any more and the prison doctor waiting somewhere in this multiple dwelling to jam me while I coughed, or maybe more a traveling vet who inspected once a month, once a year, everyone will have info re: who when where, but you’ve got only yourself to trust these physicians I knew were there on one point to one side of my nose where I was blind but could smell them round the corner and Miriam she must come walking toward you very clear in what I tell you very tall she was (in junior high, I mean, taller than Ruth Heard), because you have not gotten into asking for all this information about her, like does she drive up here?