Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Eventually a survivor was kidnapped. It was the former National Guard major who had been an executive in the seaport outerwear factory. The kidnappers phoned Jim Ash to report that their captive had disappeared on them. Several known survivors phoned Jim Ash to say they were convinced there had been a raid on the rural lab where the bomb formula had been discovered. The ex-major was accused in absentia by the Committee for a Sane Bomb of stealing the formula to sell. The kidnappers reported that the major had had a peculiar incision in his chest before they had worked him over; the committee accused the government of altering the survivors. A hundred survivors selected at random were called in and found to be feeling fine. Ash was known to have visited the missing ex-major’s physician. Ash phoned to give us in strictest confidence a fuller account of what Mara had told him in the valley. Several foreign powers complained that the varying effects of the bomb made its formula difficult to infer. Unaccountably, Washington offered to share the bomb. The sharing would be phased. Demonstrations would be given abroad on targets mutually agreed upon though chosen by the United States. Then the formula would be passed to nations that could show a real need for it. Gradually, postblast findings would be shared. A mass protest of archaeologists in a green field near England’s famed ancient baths was given a surprise bombing, to demonstrate good faith by the targeting of an area where there were only people and no buildings; the archaeologists reported afterward that they, in the American phrase, had a good feeling and in terms of their profession were looking inward as never before.

  Unavailable for almost a month, Ash was reported to have said that the increasing sophistication of the bomb’s effects—its growth, if you will— might not be the result of tinkering with the formula. Jim was usually onto something when he was not in touch with us. Now he phoned to report that a top science adviser had told him that in fact, from one test to the next, no changes in the bomb’s formula or in the operational nuts and bolts had been contemplated. "They" were letting the device "have its head." They were going to clear away the Golden Gate Bridge in an upcoming test in order to prepare for the construction of a new bridge which the contractor had promoted by enlisting several survivors as advisers.

  A brain-scan technician at the original Stateside postblast debriefing had asked to be included in the upcoming test. His request had been denied, and he was in a dangerous state. On a day when saffron ceilings of pollution over New York, Denver, and Los Angeles mysteriously turned into three great gentle gray clouds suggesting the forms of future animals and then almost simultaneously condensed into a rain so rich that acid lawns turned blue and the very police stripped themselves naked in the avenues giving thanks to that tonic flood of new weather, the technician whose request had been denied expressed his rage by calling a press conference. He would tell all, or at least more than he knew.

  It was a violent scene. Jim Ash and others blocked the double doors as long as they could. The technician was letting it all out—anger and information. Survivor brain voltages, if anyone cared to know, had hit levels so far beyond parameter models as to be either freakish and lethal or an adaptive mutation that made this a whole new ball game. Moreover, these unthinkable sharp loads of electrical charge—if it was electricity—were coming from such a small fraction of the brain that large areas "looked" positively dead, and this was presently borne out by the trimensional pictures, though they came out spotty. But one thing was clear: there was endless variation from survivor to survivor as to which brain areas were nonfunctional, yet the actual amount was a pretty consistent fifty percent in most of the subjects, while from other brain sectors came these giant flows of more force than you would think a head could handle.

  The technician stopped—his mustache drooped—something in him had stopped, or his powerful rage at being rebuffed in his effort to be a bomb survivor was beginning to translate force into guilt. Newspersons scuffled with federal officers at the door. Facing a dozen questions at once, the technician ignored them and talked fast. These survivors had seemed to know each other. No matter who they were. Yes, and they laughed too damn much, many of them at the X-rays. They said the machine must be one of the early models. Big joke. What happened to the synthetic sieve my surgeon tucked into my liver last Christmas? one asked. A more potent X-ray "eye" was flown in from the Caucasus. One survivor had laughed so hard he clapped a hand over his chest and his eyes stood out; his hand covered an incision. He wasn’t the only one with an incision. Like some others with incisions, he looked at his X-ray and said, "There’s nothing there." Big joke.

  Jim Ash, struggling with federal officers who were trying to enter the long room, called out over his shoulder, "Was that man a part-time major in the National Guard?" but the technician, in whom for a moment resentment had seemed to slow down into nostalgia, pressed on: These people! Secretly communicative people! Happy, frighteningly happy! Well, when their follow-up scans came in, the voltages had risen again but now the huge charge had distributed itself, and amazingly the voltages were coming from all quadrants and yet the new trimensionals showed that the dead hunks of brain were now gone, obliterated, what have you, removed—

  "Vaporized?" a woman called, and Jim Ash picked her out.

  —but the measurable brain power now perfectly spread itself, the technician continued, and came alike from the cell matter that had gone on living as well as from these gaps, these vacancies, these voids with shapes that you had seen before . . . these voids . . . presumably left by the bomb.

  The fugitive technician had rediscovered sheer science. His ruminative pause made Jim Ash and the other defenders at the door turn to look, and this was just long enough for the feds to rush the room. This happened so suddenly that Ash had a moment to get away.

  The officers were not interested in him then. The former major’s physician phoned to ascertain Jim’s whereabouts. A medical hardware firm phoned, wanting Ash to see their lab in a remote wooded area of New England; they sounded too nice. One of the six biggest cathedrals in an unidentified eastern European country was reported to have been resolved and absorbed in a test employing American advisers and technicians. More and more survivors were being sequestered because their common problems of adaptation were thought to be best met among their own kind. A woman known to be checking out the links between the breath of survivors and recent changes in weather patterns was visited by Jim Ash, who tried to explain what an early survivor woman had revealed to him—how total-body auras dispersed pure vibration prior to the light of dawn.

  Ash at last phoned in to report that two California survivors, who had been about to present to the bridge contractor their plan to replace the Golden Gate Bridge with a force field spread like an airy milk by the energy of people who had been resolved by survival, had suddenly been sequestered. A test on an Austrian concert hall was called off because Ash was reported to be racing there in order to become a survivor, but later a group of heart specialists convening only a stone’s throw from the concert reported that Ash had come and urged them to support the bomb as a cure, whatever it did to the pacemaker industry.

  Above the Hungarian pampas an unidentified hovering object was resolved without residue in a test that failed to determine if any aliens or Hungarians had been aboard. Here in the U.S. in areas where homes had been resolved/ subtracted, we arrived at a new clemency of weather. The government investigated a link between this meteorological change and a diminution of wind velocities at what had been the third windiest place in America. Jim Ash was caricatured in the newspapers as a man both hiding out when no one was looking for him and trying to discover the next test site in order at last to become a survivor himself. The Committee for a Sane Bomb advised the President that these unpredictable alterations in the weather were due to the wholesale elimination of building across the continent. A philosopher replied that Memory is the estranged spouse of Prediction. We could not put all these facts together but we knew again that the contemplation of a completed past might yield not just regret but
certainty.

  The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.

  When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them—and here the former major was saying Mara had wanted this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.

  In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or we had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared—twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.

  Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The radiance given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had done the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.

  Scientists eventually knew pretty well how the "persons" of survivors had worked. Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower. How this turned the whole or entire person into a multiconvergent window radiating communication and genuine feeling outward was not yet known. But meanwhile there was work to do every morning—"chores," as a prize-winning physicist put it.

  One evening a freak storm put us in mind of what Mara had told Jim the day he posed as valley hermit. When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightning by an imbalance between earth and heaven. As Jim once said, this wonderful person may have meant by "heaven" nothing more than the lower, positively charged edges of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but then again she may have meant what she said. In the middle of the night we all got up to listen to our freak storm and check the terminals and endless tapes of our information bank. Just before dawn we looked at each other and knew that the storm had covered a silence we had not heard and that the bank was gone and with it the storm, and that we had contemplated all this before it had happened. Someone had saved one last P.O.B. device, or the government had; and if it had, it would announce that that was absolutely it, the People-Oriented Bomb had been unilaterally liquidated.

  We found we could let go of all that data we had been doing. It had impacted and condensed into such a hard load that perhaps only the government could have resolved it, albeit through local control.

  The weather was changing back to its old self. Sixty thousand new homes were built to be electrified by the great single-blade wind rotors of Wyoming. The World War Two one-and-a-quarter megawatt device atop Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont was repaired. Tales of the P.O.B. survivors persisted. Thinkers posited that if the People-Oriented Bomb had in fact generated a thought about itself in the mind of someone about to receive the naked, concrete effect of that logical possibility, the bomb’s new attention to the sexton’s polyester and to a derelict’s hoary, living tweed argued not only that the bomb might always have been under the control of the communal mind but, as the government suggested, might have been a figment of that mind.

  Scientists had a harder time getting up in the morning, much less addressing their spectroscopes and proton skimmers. It was not that they were still dreaming of the unified field. It was the feeling that we all had missed something.

  Which in turn kept us going. Which in turn kept alive—if memory is alive—the memory of our sometime bomb’s discrimination profile and what might ideally have happened if its aim had not been dispersed by so much adjacent non-living material. And so it was that we overheard, by chance or our own nature, that somewhere a People-Oriented Bomb would be set off in a chamber surrounded and sealed by life alone: a chamber planted with soil and ceilinged by soft, breathing skin, a chamber walled by leaf and hill, by live animal flesh and blood, containing at its target center an unborn child.

  Spiraled back then into the waking night, we saw we should have believed ourselves when by the light of our own broken breath we had guessed ourselves to be relations. As among pockets of weather bagging here and there out of a rubber sheet of atmosphere; or like stories of the unknown that our light bends into in order to come out as some further end that we make near; or like these witnesses, some known to each other, watching a man wake in the middle
of the night hearing his name called across grass and gravel and stones of a burial ground, each with its own name.

  But it’s going to be O.K.

  For whatever else we said, our relations are ourselves and there’s still time, though for what? It kept us going. For we had succeeded during that moment of the people bomb in forgetting all that had preceded it.

  The past, though, is beautiful and, according to recent healers, "done with" (what you will) up to but including a singer’s physician with a countryhouse interest in plumbing, so secretly arrived at a New Jersey cemetery that he had a long walk from his car with his anguished companion, and he remembers as if it had happened this same dear magic one beside him somewhere in a dentist’s chair and leaning over to the porcelain bowl and vomiting such worms that his imagination apologizes with silent passion adding then the vacuum system he knows of designed in all its lines (and, not least, into the straw-mode-tube mouth-sucker) to handle a sea of saliva under city regulations "hopefully" ensuring that in the event of cloggage in the basement, the backup won’t upflush the plumbed waste of the building’s other users into your very mouth happily tickled or alternately press-sucked by your dentist’s gurgling tube. A definite mouthful! but why—in the medic’s darkling mind at the instant when a woman’s voice called a man’s name in the night cemetery who stretched and stood up as if we had been asked if on the horizon we lacked anything by chance or our own nature’s guesswork and suddenly a figure proved it such as an event that collapses two years into one, or folk, or two lost instants.