Women and Men (223 page)

And for an instant of nebulous future containing all the new people Larry would meet, with their strange but no doubt often familiar names, the eyes of Sequoya upon him as they had been upon that last-century relative of Mayn’ s who took the photo and recorded his travels told Larry he might economize and find the basic unit of value and that here at the edge, full circle but jogged up a notch, he might throw his light into the void and whether the void we had encircled with a kind of
pseudo
spiral went upward or downward, he need not worry about his light coming back to him.

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE END

We already recall what has just happened.

But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to
be
passed
through,
though this is due as well to the Obstacle
penetrator’ s
at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.

Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate
within
him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing)—but
chemical
contact—with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose
initials,
de Talca added, were his
real
name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news—personal and private news—that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired
him
were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the
Hamlet
story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you—I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.

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, "ange
l
" 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!)