Women and Men (8 page)

The two who disappeared, frankly we question them, this reported disfunction called disappearing, though this suddenly seeming-to-be-one where there were two isn’t unheard of as if one had spun behind the other. So we’ll get right on it, there’s got to be an angle, for we now can’t see the one supposedly in front for some reason yet the state of our knowledge is such that this in front may be a thing bleeped out to the naked eye (think of it) yet blocking with its invisibility that certain someone behind it that, if we could only see it,
is
visible to the naked eye. But we’re looking good wait one
sounding
good whoosh going out on all power vac bands, good old sound waves, they’ll stretch a point if you need one, they’re a lot longer than light waves, don’t you know, so they work
round
an obstacle, whung, they stretch, they bend right round it, lose nothing; nevertheless, elastic as it is, the sound front has been altered by that obstacle, what we call a sound shadow, really don’t think about it, we’ll take care of it, why of
course
people matter, your very child agrees "people matter" and signals this agreement to the terms by introducing an R between them—but we’ll take care of it, we are some power to be here, we have a history of this, though we are not the first angels to conceive of the obligation to adapt, we understand the structures involved, if for our new coastline development we need a tree without a trunk then let’s go get it because we don’t need to ask, we know we’re it, now some of us get into worrying ‘bout what we don’t just understand, and that is bad, and maybe you know him, he is a citizen, a
noise-mac her,
a singer. He lives . . . with himself. Not always a good idea because he lacks . . . patience, let us say. Yet patience shared is just the rent reputed angels lately express in us for using us in their own life-changing, potential-seeking experiments, you feel them in your speech, forms of dreamt advice if we can only listen to these apparent visitors, these learners, using our language as they can.

He lives, to go on, in a multiple dwelling covered by rent stabilization not to be confused among apartment hunters with rent
control
or statutory tenets; an old endangered apartment house, old building, but well built originally with walls sound-proof, we’ll be repointing the bricks in a couple of years from now but in the apartments the walls of the rooms are sound, in fact soundproof from unit to unit, that is apartment to apartment, if not within a given unit: still this well-known singer, a
basso rotondo,
would get out of here and buy himself a townhouse had he not recently become afflicted with a secret he cannot bring himself to tell his doctor or his friends: like the recently divorced tennis pro who one day in the middle of a match he’s met starts thinking about his wrist which at that instant becomes suspect, he finds it tilting to hit the ball up over the fence or down into the net; or the long-time diver, his tanks like rockets on his back, who suddenly questions his lung capacity and can’t stop breathing faster and faster—well, our resident basso one day finds himself thinking about, ye gods, his larynx, his head register, his wind, his glottis (narrowing its void-like passage almost to non-existence to increase the frictional vibrations in the famous membranes either side); also, above the true,
the false
vocal cords that close, then cough-like quick-release to attack a note—ye gods, these are all parts he learned long ago to forget except as love of self but now can’t help remembering, part by part, lest it all fall apart, eh?, his acoustical equipment, to the point where now he’s gone on to thinking about his difficulty swallowing and now here he is, not in his own living room between a baby grand and a giant divan that belonged to his mother that, what with the declining state of the elevators in the elegant, turn-of-the-century building you could never get furniture movers to move out of here so we’d just have to get a rigger’s license at an astronomical hourly rate—no he is not at home between piano and divan but he’s onstage across town, you know, having all evening puffed his way around problem after problem, ye gods, doubt upon doubt, as if this Strauss opera
Rosenkavalier
equals an attempt upon his life by dramatizing this secret that’s wrecking his confidence, and now at curtain call he’s breathless, swelling his sternum like a victim of slow vacuum torture.

Yet at that instant he sees in the gaps between his parts a dark-haired bald man out there in the windowed world beyond the stagy brink frowning but applauding and beside him a light-haired lady smiling but not clapping; and seeing them turn to each other, the basso rotondo, for whom tonight performing was never so like work, turns to the woman in kavalier costume beside him and because he’s inspired by the look of that couple in the orchestra why he is suddenly released, loose, afloat, pure angelic promise turning in space, empty as if hearing his own delicious requiem; so he’s put in mind of the story going round about this slender lady beside his own wide load, she’s looking out into the full house she whose father far away in South America is said to talk louder and louder the older he grows so that his daughter the diva thousands of miles north is alarmed for his safety, so to the basso rotondo she seems newly frail; so he, betrothed for a moment by her innocent thigh, takes her hand, forgetting himself oh forgetting himself as two more singers come from the wings, and he and this lady who is dressed as the Kavalier move left with the Princess on their left toward the center of the great stage, and the basso, busy bison (it comes to him from nowhere), angelic bull at large within the delicatest discipline of total ballet, knows in his heart that he had always known that there must be infinite room for People, here and over the brink of the stage, for the magical individual, the limitless person, in this—what?—loose-strung grand opus the ongoing gods he feels in all his oh suddenly relaxed registers are giving us to live gorgeously and gratefully in, bravo bravo bravo, he can smell already the
lasagne verde,
the forbidden mussel-shrimp-and-oyster-stuffed striped bass, the artichoke stuffed with mor-tadella, and before the liquid freckled pear or fleshly orange persimmon, the ripe blue gorgon foiled in the oven then mashed with sweet butter (and give us a soft nugget of ash-enveloped
chevre!)
and through all this across the restaurant table his friend with a
roslein
in the button hole and such fingers on the keys to one’s self as even the great cogent Verdi could not compose!

Elsewhere in a broad-based effort to recycle, they’ve started without us, and we need to get over there, as if not there already bringing our prestressed flange units in postponement of perhaps pain, whatever news pain is. What, though, have they started? A woman looks forward and backward to have a baby naturally with her husband; elsewhere, another does the same if she only knew it, and meanwhile lies incarnate in a motel bed near Cape Kennedy hearing from her
new
lover, who does not dream, dream-like memories murmured till she can’t stay awake no more no more; elsewhere, a man tries to hear what
his
new lover instructs him to hear, like a third party between them—news to him. Oh, these people, many more, are sharply felt yet minimally known, of an articulate community that is our representative blood but, like inmost organs and habits, unknown to us or word we bring sealed by the sender, whose parting words were that there is no neutral messenger.

For in this brief-turned age or interlocking place we were thrust back to the drawing board. To find that our understanding could prove to be just plain light—for there’s no reason to think angels can’t learn too—while light in our case had recently proved sometimes sound. And, given off from us, this sound had more to it or less depending on the viewer’s place—that is, how much you were, and where you were coming from, and how. What mattered, though, was that among all points of view the
more
Much averaged a shade greater than the
less.
So we had not just differences in point of view: we had a net more Much given
off,
and this might mean so much in the long run that the shade greater More felt downright massive. And so we chose for Much the new term Mass.

Yet how came this net More? From the sound at source in us. Even us in the sound. Trying to know when our tenant angels spoke in us.

But given a net More given
off,
the source must suffer net
loss.
Net loss of mass material which could be weighed. Which meant (we had to think) that sound had weight. So weight in some state might have sound. Yet if our
light
was only sound, sound could well be light. If so, light too had weight (which became it never so much as in the losing of it).

This was hard. But actually not on us. Beset by abstraction we many of us thought to hang in a little longer. If light had weight to its mass and on good days proved relatively endless, must not we its sometime source be endless, too?

Whether or not
we
needed
it
in this seeming endless supply,
it
seemed to need us
less.
We hated to lose light like that. Yet coming
to
us, leaving us constantly, it seemed still to know its place. Which we kept it in. That is, its place of use to us. For reading. For gardening at sunset. For cave weekends. For open-ended incandescence. For seasonal definition, if at times light’s swift generalizing power transcended such particulars as that Chile was not South America, New York not the Capital, the Statue of Liberty not art. Lately, we used light for Obstacle Manipulation, where Eye-light means Contact, and we had learned by chance that at a distance and without touching we might move a plum away from a lemon if not toward ripeness; move a person—say, one half turn; or move a mountain with its half-known contents, yet do so only so long as we saw the movable thing as in a beautiful relation to us (thus Optical Kinaesthesia). And first and last, we used light for interrogation and inquiry.

Inquiry was not new to us. We had long since isolated through shifting densities light’s lightning turns, refractory quirks, and strangely confident bends impromptu and for all the world like thought—light’s fantasies or dreams no less! These we had plans to guide through staggered densities prism’d to sooner or later get back to us so that
refract
might come round to mean
reflect.
Until one day, angling and bending in hope of mastery, we grandly thought light’s refracting mediums no other than ourselves. Yet now the sound of voicing such insight shed light
in
us. Right down inside us. So light, losing mass to us inward, must find itself as if anew. Thus received in us, it must be in us conserved.

"Kept
in its place," did we already remember saying? Its speed stayed constant even now, and if we now first surmised that, like its speed constant to all passing points of view, we could have our light and be it too, we still could not for sure maintain in bulk the illumination now shedding itself inwardly. We looked out on others of us and at our stars and at light’s bent through our waters and slow motions, and entertaining the possibility that we might through adaptation experience the first angelic senility. We looked inward and felt curious. We thought not just that if light never slows nor speeds up how can it be us?, but since its sacred speed seems an unalterable inertia, why not an inertia of
no
motion? For we already remembered we had been told that we might make it
stop.

Stop? But be itself. Let light, say, stop with us and be a pause.

And we half-listen, breathing, and with half ourselves wonder if it is by some awful standard exactly half. We can go in the front or back, the top, the bottom, one curve or another, or segment or seam or width of century, city, apartment house, gossip network, weather-station system doubling as arms-control monitoring grid, newly designed head, articulate structure that can accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale units, one gets the idea—though what about the long hills of soil turned over by hands? now this is small-scale agricultural homework inefficient and wasteful to one vision, body and soul by another,
these
hills are ours too and content to be not a model of the whole but a piece of Earth that’s one of many places we might be reflected, while some of us may be found elsewhere trouble-shooting to see where sunspots cross depression, high belts of auras fuel deep quests for the power source we were always meant to have, the gods told us through holes quietly drilled in our heads, if we could only look at it and see it, that power source which may be mere talent for prophecy. We’ve got a multiple child that’s equal to anything, exploring it, researching it, playing around with it—the harvest cycle, and Maunder Minimum rotation, deep steam from Earth’s magnetic engine, pure clean power from nuclear (say after us) Fusion, the race to find the tack to harness the void, for that’s where the power is.

Which Jim Mayn in later life listens to. At least there’s the machine and there he is, the tape recorder on the table and he’s sitting by it, used to being two or so places at once, staring along the desk at a picture of a global weather network.

Why has this life happened to him? Questions threaten to be unearned questions. He’s a guy—oh that explains everything!—a little more independent, more up on things by virtue of his work which he works hard at but at a leisurely slope. But why has
what
happened?

Nothing much. But a turn that your head takes and you aren’t all there for a while. I mean you can work out, go to a movie, have dinner with a lady, take your plane, or like now hear the flown-in tape, make a note or two, stare at the sphereful of weather stations doubling as other centers: But he’s looking down at it, the globe with little towers like a satellite’s antennae, a Christmas orange that grandma’s just getting started sticking with twig-hard little cloves the ends blunt so she has to bear down against her own flesh; but wait: that pomander’s a secretly familiar obstacle to this uncanny other.