Women and Men (230 page)

(1) himself as the turnpike cars en route to Windrow
et al.
running on automatic leaving fauna, flora, other machines to breathe what he gave off;

(2) himself as the glassed-in phone booth both target for relatively faster-moving eyes and slot relatively removed from a person who knew him and loved him and was not always charmed with his charm but would stand in his way like a guard fully exploiting the rules and with her lovely arms outstretched toward him;

(3) himself as her, as B.J., Jean: too strong to be split between resting here with him, marrying, living for this long moment, and winging off to an endless nutrition project in East Africa—as Jean? he felt her legs warm and conscious and knew that she was not telling him to go away along a warp of age differential as if he ever would die and come back either younger or in her body that he knew pretty well;

(4) himself as also his own (actually leased)
car,
accelerating like gravity from a city tunnel toward a past home (decelerating to then use the speed of sound to phone to check on a daughter’s safety and with marginal disloyalty to call an extended son, Larry, whose life and thinking had changed dramatically)—but this was not the mere car—it was him, it was Jim Mayn . . . part of a multiple scene but not any one answer to it: until he rather casually and humorously spoke: "If I put myself into each of the components here, the cars, the pike, the phone booth, you, it comes out pretty dreamlike." She laughed with a tincture in her throat of contempt, and shook her head and said, "Make your call, and let’s get going. I was talking about actual dreams. You’re bullshitting me for some reason. I mean,
you
don’t believe this is a dream, this is a pretty odd day, I grant, when we have to go to a thing in New York tonight and you think you have to visit your father and the cemetery which is O.K. with me even if I don’t know what’s going on and you’re bullshitting me; but I know you’re more serious about the not-dreaming than even you are telling me." "If I don’t tell you, does that mean—" "Oh shit, man, ‘holding
out
on me’? Yes! When it’s this important."

She was bitching him as if he hadn’t been through twice her life. Larry had given over his systems hunt and relative reincarnation hypotheses, but they lived on. Say this Obstacle Geometry made a middle term by association with life on one hand and on another with how paths of astral bodies—light itself!—got deformed by massive bodies they neared: how did you—how did Larry, who said he wan’t talkin’ like this n’more—get from that middle-term stuff to being in more than one place-time at once? Mayn wheeled into the booth and told the operator to bill it to his Manhattan number, glad he had never installed one of those singles-people answering machines, but Flick/ Sarah was not at Lincoln’s or Amy’s or a club her mother’s fiance kept up his membership in, and Larry was out also, and Mayn seemed never to have stopped facing Barbara-Jean
(Jean!)
as close as a shower, close as some trip he left in a mind bag of unsorted non-news, though facing her to say he did not really think he had been through twice her life, not even twice his own —hers was
her
own—"I dreamt my own death, I think, once," she quickly said, glad they were friends again—"No," he said, "I know we get along." And he conveyed to her without more than a touch that he could explain something maybe in the car, which she then said
she
would drive—asking suddenly and lightly what the pistol was doing half-concealed in the lower sidepocket by the driver’s seat. Oh he had forgotten it the other night, in fact got into a discussion with a police detective and forgot even that the pistol could just as well be returned to the man from whom it had been easily taken except he’s dead now.

"You sound thorny," she added—to what had gone unsaid. This thing down here beside her wasn’t the Mayn family pistol she had heard about, was it?
That?
he said. But she really didn’t care. The driver sees more along the road than the freer passenger and might talk and question more. She said that a bicyclist in her rear-view mirror back a half mile had been sideswiped by a car and had disappeared smoothly into a ditch. Jim suggested that turnpikes shouldn’t have ditches. She said that as long as they existed you might as well use them. She said she didn’t see anything moving along the ditch’s horizon. She put her hand on his.

Jim explained that he had given up trying to see recent developments as unimportant or as necessarily unconnected to mysteries and oddities he himself was marginally confounded with. She laughed and asked if this would interfere with his work on anti-missile particle-beam weapons. Work
on?
he said, and laughed. Oh
sure,
she said, why
wouldn’t
he dream up a missile or two on his own? Or an
anti
-missile, he said like a proposition to her knowing she would not confuse it with some old
anti-missile
missile. Made of
anti-matter?
she suggested. Too easy, he said.
Anti-light,
she said. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been downright fond of the modest short-range Sprint in its day, one of the only mildly threatening curiosities of Mr. N.’s regime, and it had been trotted out again after the ABM ban in ‘72 as a short-range tactical. You sound like a salesman, she said restoring her right hand to the wheel. For "enhanced radiation," he went on, finding her thigh with his left hand . . . low thermal yield, cut down on damage, leave motels and churches and the Congressional Office Building standing, kill the T62 drivers but leave their vehicles intact right there in the main streets of Dusseldorf and Paris— Livermore Labs were playing around with it for God’s sake in the fifties when she was having Babar and Little Miss Muffet read to her.

Men know so much junk, said Barbara-Jean
(Jean!).
Hey, he said, she could explain the fusion doughnut to him better than Lawrence Livermore himself, and she hadn’t even been there. Simple, she said, you get this ring of magnetic material, keep changin’ its field real fast so you induce an electric field that’ll give a bunch of particles a push and then another push and then another and oompa-pa oompa-pa, but there isn’t any Lawrence Livermore. Well, that’s a linear accelerator, he said, I can tell, and thanks—anyway that particular one was trying for
fusion
energy, which is more sanitary and peacekeeping. Oh, she sighed half-intelligently half-contemptuously, we all end up the same either way, right? But she was there with him, turning turning to him constantly though she never took her eyes off the "ribbon of highway" he briefly hummed. That bullshit about fusion makes me mad, she said, it’s so fucking expensive you know. Actually, he countered, he’d prefer to wind up
ashes
more than
dust.
She laughed and took one affectionate hand off the wheel: Angel dust, she added, to whatever he was thinking, if anything. He said he imagined she didn’t know what angel dust was. What are T62S? she asked. Russian tanks by the hundred was the answer.

Had bicyclist been resurrected? No, she murmured, without looking, but—can’t even see his ditch. Mayn reported a multiple-car wreck between Lausanne and Geneva along the lake road, in fact extravehicular and intramural (—what?—hit a wall), an acquaintance named Karl, this was a year ago, expert on arms-limitation protocols and on potential Russian cheating on the overall strategic-launcher ceiling, anyway he was declared by doctors on his arrival at hospital to be a miracle, and with that he died.

A miracle? Yes, that he had arrived in two pieces.

Why are you telling me this?

Because this is an arms negotiator who sat at the tables of our international power vacuum always armed with a small pistol.

What’s that got to do with your daughter and your grandmother’s trip west and your grandfather’s diaries that your daughter is returning to your father today and your grandfather’s briefer trip west, and dreams, and us?

Because if you don’t dream, you get something else.

What?

A fairly advanced design, your doughnut, Jim.

Oh sure, I had all that energy left over from not dreaming.

You read the old
Galaxys.

Never heard of it. I don’t even know
now
exactly why a torus is better than a dumbbell-shape or a sphere or cylinder, I know it’s the inside usable surface and the strength of the shell, but—

And it had spokes?

They were just like a bike, but not all the same length; but the wheel—

Doughnut—

Torus . . . was circular just the same, except, yes, there was a break, there was a break.

It broke in two? she asked.

It separated at one point and they added to it, but it stayed in one piece. God I’m tired. Why are we pursuing this total fantasy?

I’m pursuing you. You discussed all this with Mayga. Also, now that I’ve postponed my food trip to Africa I feel I want to justify my existence, so I’d like to know if they grew potatoes in Styrofoam with the roots hanging free and if they developed whole-wheat rabbits and sun juice from specially treated squeeze-paper—all the fruit juices direct so you bypass the fruit.

Oh I knew, as surely as I made that trip down to the shore playing the detective at the suicide site, that when they made that air-lock cut in the torus so that for a few days while they added a segment the torus was like a pair of nearly closed calipers, it let some of us or maybe it was only me make an unofficial escape.

Maybe
you
were a dream the system in the torus had.

You know me. I wouldn’t count myself among the distinguished or the mad.

You went around convinced you were in the future and needed to warn others what had happened.

Why didn’t I, though? I went on with my job.

You always say that. But what are these things happening around you? Old meteorologists, your daughter involved with a journalist named Lincoln who stagehands for an opera starring a friend of the woman who runs Lincoln’s women’s workshop.

Waste.

The mountain that compacted to next to nothing. What about that mountain?

I don’t remember. Was it made of moon matter flown in to the L5 station?

When did this future all begin?

I don’t know. But I always got transferred Earthside out of the break in the torus, let me draw it for you, no, touch my heart; and when I arrived, I was in both places, the future and the present, and some weeks the present was my past and I had just about made it up, but this was all in my head, and years later it still happened, sometimes when I had a couple too many or woke up in a new room, a motel in the desert, where I had been sent, I felt, not just by assignment, and I would think the problem was tequila or the worm in the mescal but it was like the things that happened when I was fourteen, fifteen: I had been returned unofficially to earth, which was both past and present and insofar as it was past, I had to make it up, but it was real enough, the M/E transfer zones where colonists went two by two and stood on this plate to be launched, to be really off’d into the Earth-Moon-space settlements and would tell them what was happening to them but they wouldn’t believe me, and at some point in time but not always time I might see that the settlements weren’t dazzling or original but heartrendingly functional, and God I’m boring you too.

You’re interesting, Jim, don’t you know that? Or did you mean you had bored Mayga? I keep wondering about Mayga. She died.

And I would find myself back in that settlement and later on in my life I would have stuff to add to that picture, although it’s not my bag, I’m a humdrum type, professional—

But how did
you
get back?

Well, that’s what’s odd. I would wind up back there, swimming in a very low-gravity pool where the water waves stacked up slowly and then subsided like sandy gravel; but while I was the same, I knew that I had gone through the same thing the colonists had gone through, I mean again.

But you would have had to go through it
with
someone. Probably some woman.

But I couldn’t remember.

Neither could the other twosomes who got scrambled into frequencies and wound up in the space colony one person rather than two. Maybe it was happening over and over again.

Maybe I had some memory of it. Search me. All because I didn’t dream.

You need to think so.

It was important to me to let the world know what was going on, though you know I was never a muckraker investigative type like what my daughter might have wanted. And so I would arrive suddenly on Earth and go to one of the departure centers where these metal plates with electromagnetic-plate domelets received and processed pioneers two by two (so there were always at least six on the way because the units wouldn’t work singly but only three at a time), and I would stop these people and sometimes they were descending from government buses and I would say, Hey, when you get there you won’t be two people, you will have been turned into one. Do you see how this isn’t me? how it doesn’t get us anywhere? not even to Mayga, who was a nice woman and I have never understood her death, it cast a long shadow—

Onto you?

Yes; onto me. I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—

A particular one, you mean?

I think so, yes; I was reading a dream, the author had put in a dream which switched on and off as if it was ... I don’t know . . .

Each dream was displayed on the side of a box kite? How about that?

And I had just picked up the book but I didn’t need to go back to the beginning to find out what the dream was referring to or what the dreamer felt about it all, and it was obviously the author’s way of taking care of some tricks he couldn’t pull off in the regular story, but mainly you felt the story got stuck in there in place of something else or to communicate between parts maybe, in place of some work, y’know, I mean some real work of storytelling.