But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours—like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful?—you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.
And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what we want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what you want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language—but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?
Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.
And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself as one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News—conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment—oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).
Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it—no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?
Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.
In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but could not, if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds: YOU WANT TO CONTROL MIRIAM TO GROW UP TO STAY HOME WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO COME HOME (where we were, the only direction was Stay Put).
But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water." "You know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much?—oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.
Old Testament or New, Jim?—oh you wouldn’t know.
Runneth to that other screen, there is no over-screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white
saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce?—and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."
So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.
Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s—oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts?—got a landing field next door—
and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?
Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he?, but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story—for history in the making though you said you take no view of history—ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.
Three, four years you seem to have gotten into your head, more years than that join Miriam’s pointed message to mine co-hosted with her dad. Long years in fact afterward her father I am told appeared at the new entrance wing of the prison without visiting permission form plus knowing too well that I could not receive him. His plan was stopped, whatever, and I never asked how he got up here, he never to my knowledge drove.
Through Efrain I have kept in touch. He’s out, as you know because I heard you met him the night he slipped through a pickpocket area suddenly into a warp within warp where your pocket gets a valuable put into it. In touch with the Chilean, that is. Or tried—to be honest.
And he has, the Chilean tried to keep up his pithy letters to me. On economic topics, though he has been encouraged to expand his coverage to those political margins associated with his earlier conversations overheard or not here in visitors’ "quarters" (smile) with friend of reported anti-Castro Cuban in danger of life here inside though reported to be being processed toward some unknown escape and is the Chilean mixed up in that?—it is immaterial, next to that bond between us. Better his letters on full employment, substitutions in the marketplace, the as my friend puts it undoubted motion of corporate inertia against the sinister resilience of this country’s technological inventiveness in the matter of alternative energy though never once at the national level consulting the Colloidal Unconscious as it emerged from body-brain fluid states finding the jump to mind. He names no names, not that of his old friend, the late Dr. Allende, whose fate he I believe sees as his own but I can’t find anything out, I didn’t know the inmate or anyone who did know well the inmate our Chilean gentleman visited that day we met diagonally across the Visitors Counter, there’s a pattern here, no doubt the ever-dividing particles dispersed non-visibly in the colloid total of my self—my whole body is my self, I see; you who may have come among us for political information re: an exile economist and a supposedly pro-Castro Cuban inmate rumored to be set to spring—you have helped me to see it—have plotted in my unconscious this pattern and some message which is to me or from me or both and which will be me is in the works. This is more than consolation, as everything worthwhile must be, Jim, and I felt myself, for a sub-micro-instant that’s as small as one of the colloid particles, say it in a Spanish language that I never have studied or learned—you speak it a little, you said, and regret your daughter does not—but the impulse went back into the cloud it came from. Better the instructive letters I now and then receive from the Chilean than those visits Carlos gets from an elder liberal lady with a secret pocket for mints and non-sugar chewing gums in her shiny bag, a lady with scarce a grain of dialectic in her who gives him his subscription to the Times and after smiling bravely at him for an hour shows strong, true feeling only when his sister or uncle comes and she plays second fiddle but lately has proven her devotion to truth by a special letter to the Governor reluctantly urging, we hear, that for Carlos’s own well-being he delay Carlos’s clemency despite the seventeen hundred or twenty-seven hundred letters supporting his clemency petition on file in the State House we like to imagine and in a crate of files (the carbons) which Carlos rereads and shares with me by hand since our cells are too far from each other on the gallery for him to read aloud around the corner.
If I do not leave here, I have no need to. The hunt for the unit of value goes on in person and is no respecter of place. Neither is the ever-increasing speed of dual-but-separate-screen grasp, a speed so constant it could be maddening to its host but for the Colloidal Unconscious, its many-faceted spread, calm, content, its endless particles of difference charging the host to make contact from time to time through this medium that adapts itself to centrifugal coagulation-sedimentation to clear things up and to the huge good power mirroring itself in endless division of particles it’s a gift that says we all have it and (let me confess) must misuse it so, Jim—
Women and Men Page 119
