Women and Men (7 page)

By at least one of our number. A grandmother who told stories upon stories to a grandson James or Jim long before his mother took her life if not her drawn, apparitional face away from him, and sometimes afterward also. Stories that often did not finish and were easy to understand, he thought; stories that passed the time. Stories that he retold himself to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not.

He kept an eye on both. This left him by our count one eye free for what was in between but put his moving feet in two places often at once like East-West magi even of that time, wise persons who they say could be in two places simultaneously, Grace Kimball on second thought among them though not for that feat (for she was always only here) but for having a total view, including healing change, finding as she must on what we will call her wheel a place and time and power for just everything:

Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier—Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and
we
are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.

(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance
yet.)

And where did that one
free
eye leave James Mayn?

It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.

What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back
so to the life
that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.

Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.

Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.

"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying,
What?
as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.

For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because
we
know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?

The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he belonged to be human? the inquisitor wants to know, our hands are connected to the arms of the chair, the man conducting the interrogation can’t wait, his time is worth its while, O.K., he’s said, which
is
it? The earphones with hard-to-beat frequencies are almost upon us while the wire for the earphones uncoils by itself, the man says he’s going to offer us some encouragement, some inducement to decide which of two things we mean. (Wide Load!)

Did we lie, then, speaking doubly?

There in our inquisitor’s eyes are shades of our danger which maybe he shares by knowing what is going to happen to us here no matter what we say maybe, or in the other room which now that we’re
here
becomes what
this
room
once
was, namely the next room, hear the silence, you could cut it with an electric prod, and you should; hear within the silence a high-frequency tuner rising in pitch or volume you can’t tell maybe both.

Just talk straight, honey, said Grace Kimball again and again, late in her century, tell it like Mama
didn’t
teach you; go public, come out (you know?—spelled TV
O)
be up front, like the money, everything else is guilt and manipulation.

James Mayn on another track thirty seconds away by phone, two three four five hours by air, said, Include me out of this Discussion of the Void
and
what is supposed to fill it; look if they get me under the lightbulb how do I know what I might say, I’m not one of your great talkers but under that kind of interrogation I might become human, I mean I might elect to survive, I’ll do what I have to do if I’m lucky, I might even make up what I’m supposed to know, I might get inspired, I’m human I don’t know how I’m going to react, I’ll say this, maybe I don’t even
know
my sources to divulge, maybe I can’t say what I saw or what someone said, but I would go easy on the jokes, I think, because those guys who do the interrogating have a sense of humor to begin with but on another wavelength which when it hits my skin-ends could just get into my wavelength or is it width, overloaded width? ouch, I’ll keep myself going maybe by thinking, What if I had this guy interrogating me alone man to man in a shopping-center parking lot, no secret weapons, nothing fancy, equals you know, just a couple of temporarily missing persons settling a difference.

Yeah, yeah, that’s how
men
settle their differences, a female voice on two firm thighs is piped in.

You mean how
man,
growls a male voice on two suspect knees.

A child is heard observing to a fellow child, See I had this block that was chipped, my dad threw it against the wall, there’s where it hit, he got a long-distance call from my mom, and he came back and we were working on this launch pad and suddenly he picked up this block and threw it, you see where it got chipped?

Breathe, said several people softly in unison and it was a comforting command.

In those days there were breathing problems they were called. We’ve cleared all that up by now, looking back, and that’s a promise. But in those days, from the city citizen in one’s high-rise apartment caught between the sounds of the sky and the sounds of the street, to the grand diva singing her guts out for the cheaper seats up in the troposphere interface as much as for those in the dress circle and closer in in seats so inflated they were out of sight, there were popular misconstruings as to the future evolution of our equipment, for instance what song we would be singing fifty years later. We’ve said "future" to be clear, for according to our historians picking up after our anthropologists, the past is also evolving, as the old song ("My Dreams Are Getting Better") had it, "all the time."

Looking back we found that we too had gone in for human sacrifices. To get where we were, we’d made them, and included others among us.

We have been busy. We have worked on it and some have become in fact busy bisons. But dispersed along our respiration’s warp that gets us together and expels us, flows us and stammers us, We have worked on our collective awareness of, as the poet says, similarity between us, which is liking, and difference between us, which is loving, in order as a long-range project to become single.

***

Yet inside this noise a silver needle is heard over its compass rose still in its package vibrating less Obstacle Race than Obstacle Hunt. It’s what I’m getting—O.K., what we are getting—as an imprint through glass, cardboard, paper, and skin from the wildly jiggering compass needle. Obstacle Quest it sounds like. For you can’t get around the ob. until you locate it through what gaps between.

Like what a father didn’t say or a mother didn’t do. Gaps where somebody wasn’t. So we took up position there, O.K.

But fell through.

That’s the horizon for you.

More to it than our mother and our father, who can’t take all the blame for the fix we’re in and who now turn out to have been obstacles inspired by our trying to get through to what we’ve chosen to forget may not be there.

Except as a wind that takes you where wants go. To the next obstacle. If it doesn’t pass you by. That you go past, then, to see it back there as if it was, my word, "the limit," that’s what a fantastic grandmother called a snoring grandfather in his and her sleep, "you are the limit!" whom she probably would sometimes dream of punishing for dropping cigar ash in his pleasant bed-dreams on such carpets as connected in later years their separated bedrooms, Persian carpets almost meeting in an L-shape, whose angle is both the gap between them and the threshold into which we turn to see the other.

Who has . . . what? disappeared?

Not quite.

Is it the Buddhist monk, who as he burns away even this last desire to burn so seems to spin, as a creed enjoins? As ye reap thus shall ye sow, the western observer of this event quick-quote-reports on tape, and she is a beautiful, dusty little woman in a Stetson hat, and her cam’raman and his gear have disappeared, and she reports on tape the crystallized advice of this dying Buddhist burning with purpose. No microwave oven he, no Sugar Crisp bargain fed to the air which knows he can’t be totally consumed, a piece of him will survive the fire’s fuel, there’s a fossil shortage. Also his economic teachings will survive him, if we remember. They’re on tape don’t forget; some anyway, if we recall.

Later the muddy-faced dramatic little woman’s voice is joined by her body Stateside. She’s draped now in one simple length of uncut, unsewn saffron matter illustrating a principle of economics that other women at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop who know this correspondent-woman’s reputation expect to be but a preface to history when this small, beautiful, now clean woman removes the garment that represents a maximum of well-being and a minimum of labor and consumption, but instead, there, then, she is, naked, "lovely" (somebody says) and not at all the confident person thousands of miles away graveling on magnetic tape the burning monk’s economic doctrines of full employment for its own sake and purification of character as opposed to multiplying goods and wants.

But an articulate structure, we’ve heard that one before if not been messenger for it when actually we had thought it up—was it a promise?—weren’t those the words—
articulated structure?
The tape ran out, the void keeps spinning, the leader flaps, James Mayn has appeared in several places in the audience, which in its haphazardly individual or single way has some claim to be itself the real show, and this is not quite the opera house (which was full in any case though Mayn with his press connections could have obtained a ticket but he doesn’t like opera, he arrived at this view with a minimum of sweat and independently of Grace Kimball, who also does not go, she hasn’t got the time for that puffed-up stuff, it’s ripe for a high colonic enema, all those overweight transverse colons up there and it’s not her show anyway, she honestly upfrontally unclosets. Mayn himself meanwhile an audience of one hearing a tape rotate (faulty), against its plausible
(read poignant)
crackle background of enthused (read
kindled)
flesh, three or four familiar tenets of ancient economics, and who is elsewhere in another audience either in an all-purpose conference hall near the Santa Fe opera house or at Cooper Union in New York hearing from another foreign thinker (an increasingly gaunt South American economist with red hair) that this "articulated structure . . . can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units," Mayn will just jot that down, and, as quoted by the thinning-red-haired Argentine, jot down also that "people matter."

A multiple child in the next room rotates a whining pencil sharpener and reduces something or other to R, which may then be positioned between any two other things to make them equal, hear the noise. But what am
I
equal to? I said I preferred not to think about that Wide Load approaching (with typical Danger signs) down the high road, our mind having been cross-multiplied into a various
we
with new powers but less room to operate in.

Yet if we are multiplying, who were those two who were together for a while and then there was one? That’s what it seemed—suddenly one instead of two, one citizen, one bonded messenger. And we for one can’t at present say it better but add that we deny, at least categorically, that anyone has disappeared from the country, for one thing we’ve got to feed them, they keep coming, out of the hills and the forest, later the woodwork and the closet space we didn’t know our property had in it squirreled away.