So Spence in turn must conclude that whatever of the "traced" burial ground he might locate or unearth within him, this being furthermore the day of the night when he must be present at the Hamletin dress rehearsal, he must post-haste visit Windrow itself as if it were in reality outside him. Meanwhile, he was feeling deep inside some need to arrive at a semi-permanent home where he could hang T.W.’s fur tail with the female figurine or stub his bare toes in the middle of the night. And while having for these final days to pursue what in some way he was pursued by (including the wonderful Pearl Myles, whose marital breakup Spence knew had come after an argument over an event indirectly caused by Spence), and follow out to some provisional ending his relations with the two Chileans and several other persons with the annoying outside chance that he might already be targeted for death, given the awesome excess of data de Talca with reckless menace had poured down into the compound pulses of the phone’s ability to hit the body system’s addictive brains within brains within brains . . . Spence felt—he felt, and felt he felt —in possession of enough knowledge to live out the rest of his life if only he would decipher that knowledge in him though with help he knew was near in that common consciousness (was he speaking?) that was more than community spirit yet less organized and tense than the seeming collaborations spun, for instance, from the original words he was told of the opera in question if not leading to an anti-Nazi symphony about the very mountains that went way back into the American Southwest as if the same discovery had been made six thousand miles apart, certainly involving much traveling and explosive links with the Mayn family about which Jim Mayn’s personal unconcern must have been due to some numbing process caused by the very mass of these networks that clung to the world. Spence’s hair was growing out dark again, the jojoba oil might keep his natural black hair from looking, as it always had, dyed and false, he could see it grow so terribly slowly it had a mind as much its own as many. And if Spence began to make out conversations in a bagful of voices, he could secretly think of himself as We and begin to stop caring what Mayn’s relationship was with the young hunger technologist Jean in her Village apartment apparently festooned with Native American paraphernalia, or for that matter how it had come about that Jim’s former wife Joy had never made the acquaintance of the terrific and funny Grace Kimball and her army in the days when Joy lived in that odd, large old brick apartment house built the year Marcus Jones was in Montana, we believed, or for that matter how it had {if it had) escaped the attention of de Talca and his people that one of the two men who had been with the airline executive’s journalist wife Mayga Rojas Rodriguez was named Morgen, with an e, himself related to— . . . examples by the gross with a continent of earth t’bury them . . . mouths all by themselves talking ... or an invisible event . . . yet, beyond Spence’s mere head trips, circular possibly because of the slight torque given his emerging hair by the follicle root, work to do, the old woman yakking friendly in the street near the Wing lady’s racket, and the old guy with her, who was unquestionably into meteorology and had unquestionably been visited by Mayn as if that was all there was to it.
We had learned we were a language; or was it we’d been asked to be? For questions came our way at such speed they were only implicit, such as Wie gehts?, full of such problems as the uses that that language had been put to during the War, so for our part we would right out up front respond, "Say la question." We had been told or had learned we were perhaps words; or we were of all things the collision course along which larger matters tracked; or we were the "all" that proved Part to be oft greater than Whole; or if not "all," then we were the "us" {in we) so buried that we could but bear with it, for then at least if it came to light, so would we, though if not broken now and again toward parcels of life seen by bent parts of light that from another system seemed straight we when we are most turning seem, multiple by multiple, most dark as if by an anti-light.
Sometimes we imagined we didn’t know who we were, and this was sometimes in turn because when told we were angels (or, as "file ‘em"-type category, "angel" as in "vegetable" or "mineral") it came as an accusatory interrogation painfully circular could be so don’t take her serially. Yet from different direction came dual charge (1) that Light, which had theretofore been not understood, was totally devoid of rest and the energy that goes with rest (thus all up front and restless), and (2) that all the time that we didn’t know it, Light was Us (or, speech-patterned the way the late century in question sometimes couched information, What if "Light is Us?).
That there ran threads in us of Light who could question? not even an interrogator in a sequondam language-quoia whose pay don’ go as far this month because of inflation in your tight-money Chicago-school pocket-pool export reinvestment system. But when both women and men took to seeing their own trademarked thread of illumination outside themselves in Others and at the instant when they themselves (qua selves and, more deeply, quoia) felt the loss of these light threads, and, feeling this, then felt, lo! the threads of light return! (return like parents we had no less than off sprung!), . . . why then a faith spread among us and evoked its supporting arguments like those ancient preliterate metal clays from which life after the fact claims to have arisen (like a smell)—and this faith threatened to prove that these threads were our collected and collectible brain. Needless to add, faith’s threatening argument relied on such jumps as dreams are laid on and such acts as belong to, say, terminal segments of their own tail that certain earth-red once-purely-Chilean lizards will jettison when stalked by the sky-blue hypnosnake of the Andes whose attention (eye and tongue in terms of snake-minutes of attention) is so drawn to these independently twitching links of lost tail that the lizard for its part makes its getaway so long as it never looks back, in our opinion. And by acts of jump such as the above, or, better said, without such acts, why should we have supposed it would be in the end a literal bomb, when it came right out of our own restless Light: a burst responding to a passing intimacy of our own contrary matter, which is almost like love except with no time to admit there’s hardly time. Only the gates that light turns to and into, dark gates the obstacles Light finds and leaves in memory which is also obstacle and gate.
We think now that we knew the why for all these things once upon a time at the beginning but then the things ensued and the reason got left. At the starting gate? asks the interrogator with his idiomatic pedantry from the next room knowing no more about the future than we except fingering his well-wired (solid-state import) Persuasion Button which inclines us to give not a double answer to one question yet neither one to two—but . . . one to one, that’s it! Yet we’ve got such a staff working on this we can forget responsibility almost, there’s such a wealth of history and we are making it, and by all continually processing ourselves into one we are transcending the old outmoded individual responsibility thus not passing buck but saving it. We wanted to tell our friends that we were pregnant.
O.K., I got the point: I am only the second person you’ve told these things to. So who was the first, if it wasn’t your wife? (It’s good you had some practice!)
A journalist named Mayga Rojas Rodriguez.
The one who died, the Chilean.
I don’t know that she was mainly a journalist. She lobbied for liberal politics back home and she had some big friends who weren’t friends, and she didn’t talk about all that.
You cared about her. But go on, what kind of settlements were they? They sound quite real, routine like they’re based on mature technology.
I wouldn’t know. Yes, I guess so.
Maybe not planned out with all these sophisticated alternatives we can think about now, but when you were fourteen or fifteen the agriculture and the torus-shell stress stuff wasn’t even in Galaxy I bet.
I wouldn’t know.
I know.
I simply saw a giant silver doughnut with spokes.
You keep saying you don’t know, Jimmy. But thirteen, fourteen? that was when these daydreams began.
&
nbsp; Who knows where they came from.
I couldn’t care less about that; but what kind of settlements were these Earth-Moon stations?
My father would say, Don’t say "kind of."
To you?
I recall him saying it to my mother, too. I mean, he was harmless, he had a weekly quota of discomfort he had to absorb from us, from my mother’s irony and so forth. But he would say, Don’t even say the noun kind by itself, because it’s always more than you honestly mean.
Now, torus shape you said.
I didn’t know the name then.
It’s been arrived-at as the best shape for the space stations. I mean mathematically. And it gives you horizons and it gives you the option of building up from small units which are more fun, instead of macro—
I don’t know if that’s true of toruses alone.
I’m sure you don’t. Your mind sneaks out, Jim.
In 1945 I didn’t know any math. I had a geometry teacher who stood up in front of the board and looked like he had lost his next-to-last friend. He used to go in to New York to the opera and would tell us about it when he walked into class in the morning with gray-green moons under his eyes.
So the doughnut came from your mother’s kitchen.
God no—it might as well have come from my wife’s.
Joy didn’t do much cooking?
No, she did it all. All except doughnuts, but that’s asking a lot. And I never asked her.
You wouldn’t dream of it.
Homemade doughnuts were out of fashion. Pop-up waffles were what validated Flick and Andrew’s Weltanschauung hold the italics. But you were making a point. I got it. But of course Joy and I talked about dreams. Like any other couple.
You are funny.
Apparently, with you.
But you can’t kid me: you didn’t dream.
Didn’t read books either, to speak of.
But you did.
You make me say funny things.
So the truth comes out: you and Joy swapped dreams, and you did dream, all those years.
Not in the least. These were dreams that all came via her.
You make her sound like they didn’t come all from her.
It’s where they get to that matters.
Aren’t you a smug old thinker, really.
Now, you’re sounding like a slinky vulnerable intellectual lady I met actually in Bloomsbury when I was writing a piece on English breakthroughs in waste-disposal.
I can see why your marriage didn’t last.
No, I don’t think you can.
Well, help me.
Oh, it lasted. It would have lasted longer if I had said these things to Joy instead of you.
I’d rather go back to L5 and check out the future from your daydreams and forget where they came from.
I’d just as soon retreat to us.
No, you can’t do that. You said "via," and you have to say what that means.
Some came through her from her occasional paramour, a man named Wagner, a dog I once almost cured of his habits.
Through her from him?
Some dreams she had and some he had. And they would tell them to each other, according to her. It was like her going back into her family history for the whole last year we were married, a glut of family lore, she read some old letters that had been stuck inside her father’s piano and she found she had some close relations she didn’t even know about and it was big drama for several months and took her mind off—
What about her and Wagner and their dreams?
I reckon some were made up.
Do you?
It was the use they were put to.
They were telling each other things through these dreams?
How did you know?
Maybe the gods were communicating with them.
Let’s get back to us.
Or communicating with each other.
You’re some scientist.
Was it raining upward at the pole?
I myself have no memory of that and cannot be made to confess to ever having believed it. Not even at the South Pole does it rain upward.
Amy told me—
Oh yes, you said you knew her.
—that in your grandmother’s day, when I gather she claimed to have been pursued all the way across the continent by an Indian you never told me about, they had winds that blew straight up from the ground; so why not rain?
I do recall an overhead mirror in an indoor pool someone took us to in New York once. I went off the high board and thought what if I spring high enough to reach the pool in the ceiling, there were these huge oblong panes of tarnished mirror-glass. Later I entertained some daydream of very-low-gravity swimming pools.
In your space doughnut?
What’s more it can’t be held against me.
You spoke to me of Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, one night at Cape Kennedy.
That was the motel that launched us, I remember that time. You weren’t so much of an interrogator then.
I have to know things if I’m going to pray for you.
Pray or pry?
Cry for you. You remember speaking to me of Nansen?
He locked his ship into an ice floe and tried to drift up the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Sure. Nansen.
It’s like nothing has happened since you told me that stuff.
Then there were the Norwegians who figured out weather fronts.
What is "93"? Is it the distance to the Sun in millions of miles?
No. It’s the year Nansen tried his stunt.
That isn’t quite what you said.
Well, I am subject to factual error. It’s the story of my life.
I’ll share the burden with you, Jimmy, but let’s include the mountain that compacted to next to nothing.
Let’s get back to us.
We are.
Feels more like me.
Your daughter, according to Amy—
—Amy doesn’t know my daughter—
—but works for a man who knows people your daughter does know—
Flick has traced toxic waste right into the conversation of mutual acquaintances.
Amy said Flick thinks the Indian pursuing your grandmother across the continent is a terrific putdown of native Americans and probably some old family legend.
I didn’t know she thought that. I did know that she had figured out two of the possible ways this mythical Navajo met his death.
Also, she wants to be called Sarah.
Maybe so.
You’re getting mad. Did you say Let’s get back to us?
We are.
O.K.
But we have had other curves to trace, trusting at times they would be parallel in their surprising ways like the pot calling the lid empty, or the lid we seek for our unconscious life mirroring with its dark storefront underside our incessant approach to it, uncertain if all this means People Matter or Are Matter, Are The Matter, or, by turn (potentially) of mind, first Equal (=), hence ARE (if not already Were), thus R (ARE’s real sound that hence turns back to us the (phenomenon, hence) law (of the letter) Rotation containing our now verb rotate) M—once the study of our child in the next room who went on beyond Rotation to other things, leaving us turning and turning in wonder and love at having been exposed to this multiple child, for, left alone now in a room that recalls departed tenants and so much major that by turns proves margin, we feel (or feel we feel) that, if less group-safe than Grace Kimball officially backed rape-proof group sex for being, our own group-shared discovery of a new reincarnation ensured that the Anasazi healer’s prophecy would not come true, for no one of us much less one "young person" (quote unquote) bears sole responsibility for discovering that wonderfully commonplace if mind-bent simultaneous One-into-Two, the S.R. that the Anasazi surely meant when, prior to the cloud he became, he predicted that the discovery of a new reincarnation would doom its discoverer (—though to what? for S.R. was always there) a l-screen-into-2 basis for that 2-into-l coup t
hat might lead like Matter’s largely Rest Energy to Bad News as well as Good News, from knowing your spouse so well you might so become his attaché case or her bag and/or its absolutely familiar and known contents or, say, your spouse’s body and with it his-or-her desire to jump out of it so that at a moment’s lack of notice you’re willing to risk said spouse or spouse-hood (all the same thing) in a game of chance—all the way to, say, knowing a loved parent so ill with one power of your soul that you redo that parent inside you without first asking and wind up possibly legal tender (to recall the name of a famous Pennsylvania reincarnationist’s child) for a future transaction in which you lend yourself to that miracle witnessed by a ruddy-tan daydreaming adolescent lying bemused on his slightly sagging bed in an upstairs room of a New Jersey house whereby two regular people (maybe accustomed to twin candles at the evening dinner table) are trans-mattered (perfectly safely!) outward into Earth-Moon space arriving as one person, not two, at the destined pioneer place so as to give new sense to our question Where you coming from?, and since two persons, two personalities, have become one, should not their parallel warps of past come to rest in some new time? For how do we compound a deadfall animal trap set upon a western mountain and a treehouse nailed and wedged into an eastern maple? how mingle memories of an elder voice haunting you from behind as you stare at a dismembered Statue, and an explorer’s sight-unseen fantasy of that Statue’s harbor and that harbor’s city while the identical voice warns you not to embark eastward toward that fantasy? We already remember, as if we always knew.
Women and Men Page 178
