Women and Men

Her Place Is There

It’s a shower and it’s morning you can report and it’s not just any shower you’d write home about. It’s a shower slow as weight, deep as you both are tall; fast vanishing, steady as the fastest light. A warm-hearted thing, this shower! Shower-power — who cares how it happens dreamt up out of our future into the present? She just reached in behind the shower curtain and turned it on like going to bed, your two hands as near to her as if they were giving a supportive touch to the small of her strong back, this lovable Independent you choose lightly with an unsaid word "Angel" and, taking a shower with her, size her up and she is missing nothing or is anyhow like a question you put off as you take on this glassy fiber, two-for-one insulation against cold, against dryness, this. A show of New York’s famed drinking water on Election Day being economically purified by flowing down over two lovers before draining into all the stone-based drinking fountains of our coastal city’s parks and all the ceramic ones indoors in our hospitals and schools, bless ‘em. Plus through the shower head is coming hot-poured something, you don’t get a handle on it, does she? does Jean (or Barbara-Jean as she doesn’t prefer to be called). She knows her Hot, her Cold; adjusts her valves with the whole day in mind, voting or not; and no more could you get into words (at least before brunch) what in old New Jersey your once-upon-a-time quirks-and-music but then bottom-line/suicide-magic mother said (according to your grandmother, who survived her): that angels on the margins turn into us and out of us along their spiritual curve while voicing what they seem to need us for—and voicing also what you hardly know is in you at rest.

You left your name out there beyond the bathroom let alone the shower. Brought your light in here. Oh well, here comes the old water down onto the both of you. Your lighted skins grin. Water’s a new element always that does us all a bit of good and she seems less of an age under it, this youngster Jean (or Barbara-Jean). A woman, maybe she know what you not know, she like the water ultra-hot and maybe your bones need marrowing. She’s a near scientist, a science journalist unquestionably contractually, a cook of record, and with some less used ("-car") savvy of remembrance you get in your adopted New Yorker.

Hinterlandsperson come to sound the coast, she felt you were shadowed at the movie house last night by the nameless ponytailed Spence: hanging around there? or a one-night-stand Manhattan moviegoer? Maybe on the job armed, like some hobbyist, to the teeth, though you don’t tell that to Jean— and still haunting the Chilean exile-economist with (you understand) a deal for material on Middle Atlantic banking involvement in Dr. Allende’s brave downfall through level after level of intrigue like burning warehouse or as through stairwell down past deck after deck of ignorant oceanliner — yet Spence knows always about you some trace of you you don’t guess you bear, though you go on pondering the Chilean.

You’ll have to go back to bed, with her or not, because of what the water doing to you, it’s got the shower-power formula let’s protect it if we can. Maybe it is she that’s talking to you, not you (or "Mayn" as you prefer to be called). "Hi, Jim," she does say, for a second not touching. Oh you see she was touched by your saying "Angel" wordlessly; yet more than one female lurks loud in brain-speaker hot to reincarnate, bless ‘em, it’s a strange fashion in the air nowadays, so someone’s got to be there to receive. But which reincarnation? One that makes sense: like at the last instant of approach being in the shoes of what approaches you.

Now you do say a word. "You’re quite an old angel," you croak way down below crust of earth, which just now has levitated to this porcelain-lined above-the-ground floor of a city apartment, bring it up from under your bare toes. What’s in the women-and-men air along gravity-balanced libration points out along Earth-Moon curve? Canny Independent that she is, does she think anyone’s leaning on anyone? taking advantage?

Next question: What does she want of you? — the question you put off. If it hit her that you — He — try to take over a position that she has taken up in advance so it can’t be occupied without aggression (and our only referee has been internalized, which keeps the payroll from getting out of hand), could she kick you — Him — out? But if you are the one being occupied, could you kick her? But if you’re the one being occupied where are you?

The last time you looked, it was her place — the round, dining-room butcher-block table (‘case you need to chop up your dinner by candlelight), and right beside magnum gun-metal bookcase packed tight with the largely paper spines of anthro-historico-botanico-technologico-linguistico tomes is a low, square Mission-style easy chair luxurious ancient relaxer — if it was yourn, you’d plug it in and let it vibe like the motel bed in Buffalo does for a Buffalo quarter; no, it wasn’t your place the last time you looked, not to mention those four-dimensional pictures in the windows of the outside world, across the street fire escapes being farmed and a sight of the sky ploughed by helicopter.

What’s she want from you?

And if you knew, would that mean you had it to give? If your two grown children are truly grown, then you got more spending (-type) money but Jean (Barbara-Jean)’s a young star that gives this original-model but not light-years-seared old space-ship position. One tine of spray now flips out from shower head, walleyeing its route to drill your eye, and you’re not all here, though you woke half an hour ago in bed smelling oil and onions elsewhere in the building, which is the City, which is Election Day ‘76, which is today, onions, oil, a crisping side of unidentified fowl, Jersey chicken, prairie hen, and give yourself to the grandeur of a bulge of cliff, under which a thousand people so much part of the Rock it’s a vein of the cosmos have invented an apartment house: and they live together — nice! — and you’re getting there, they’re almost Indians in territory now belonging to the Federation of Arizone or Holy New Mexico, but you didn’t quite make it out of the shower westward yet.

Italians one floor below her have got a cousin running for office, and it’s not prairie hen cooking; in reality, it was her almond-shaded skin, her shoulder bone bed-shared to your mouth and eyes like sound that opens all the other sounds and sheds them to music; and now, looking again into the water that’s a degree too hot, you guess it’s her shower however much rented because it is her place; she got the keys — two pair.

Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, it’s a shower for sure, the water’s free so long’s you’ve got the good coffee to purify it. It’s a shower but, over her low voice saying, "I like having you here," the flow’s thick like whirring wheels in sun, so when you step back the water you thought was falling turns into legendary Rising Geyser tapped from the automated thoughtfulness of the community: she soaps herself fast like light you hardly follow, let it be, and low down out of sight and upward shining a-grin, her grin as large as last night in the dark you ran your fingers along to find out Is she smilin’? when you’d made a joke — under the canopy of bedroom ceiling where one by one she’s stuck the heavens embedded in all exact constellations each with a future and a message that she knows like she knows better than a man sometimes twice her age happens to know why the orbit of Skylab that you two shared months and more than months ago at Cape Kennedy, decays — or at any rate (speed-factor-curve-plot) both saw fired—and she knows how fast, while at dinner she told of a bone-marrow disease they’re trying to lick, that knobs the bones and swells ‘em closed upon the nerves — of hearing, of sight; and the grin of well-sexed soap now joins her divided flesh there out of sight (if hands and fingers couldn’t see) to your own comfort and surprise, while she so complete next to you soaps you as if she’s found cleanliness aped in her science by the godliness of sport telling you a dream, asking you, imagining you joked about not dreaming: looking with interest, then eye to eye where, in her streaming eyebrows and happy teeth and the blithe little (is it) sinew (?) of play that stares naughty in the round brown (God! violet-flecked!) eyes, you find a message like "Lookee here" — until you hold her shoulders and see right down at what she’s doing (two hands) so that she can happily seem to be self-conscious, for what we buy when we buy soap is tenderness, for she has discovered how to make it rain inside, keep dry and bright outside— but warm and bright inside, too.

It’s a shower, that’s all, but over her low voice saying through the flow that if you did dream what would you dream about, and that she likes having you here (whom she called Recycled Man at dinner last night) the water when you step back almost out of it could be rising, and this geyser and her voice’s backdropped distance reincarnate your belief that you’re in not just a shower in New York but two places, wait and see. Is that why you’re here? Give or take a few inches between your head and the shower’s, for to tell the truth you and she aren’t quite so tall as the shower is deep yet are deepening all the time and helped by the shower. She’s right under the heart-gush of the water while she’s soaping you with her eyes half closed.

She’s reached the coast and is imagining it, but behind you there’s another place and one of the two voices there behind you, the voice of portly, sport-jacketed Navajo Raymond Vigil is saying down through some bending drone of your still arguably if evolvingly human bladder, "It’s gonna happen." Voice of the Navajo.

You pick up graying lights of water turned yellow and blue through the shower curtain by a misty light bulb — this coastal weather, what’re you going to do? The shower bombarding her lags her busy motions a hair but one of two things are known for sure: not whether she has a boyfriend (inconceivable, considering), or is between boyfriends; only that this wonderful leak in the roof is O.K. and you’re taking a shower with a body on Election Day in New York, which must mean it’s a particular year, you saw a sign in Spanish, No Electioneering, and now hear a boxed shout through the bathroom wall from the next apartment, which God knows may be where those cooking smells originate; and while you’re still waking up to this Election Day in touch with this young woman as you have been for hours, you’re letting go unstable particles of energy such as ye meson here, you muon there, and grinning in your minor stand-up dream as your old chosen journalist colleague Red (of face, that is) Harley, possessed of a speaking voice so lowdown deep it sounded acoustic and should be slowed down by outmoded electrical wiring, sounded the ancient warning of his college swimming coach — sounded like old, tobacco-proofed crust but the vocal cords under the crust had turned to bone, for haven’t seen Harley since running into him and your tall-as-a-rusty-iron-post friend-in-another-and-now-immortal-category (dead) Ted walking the aisles of a train, Ted’s stark profile permanently fixed by its association with plane seats, though here at the moment on the Washington train — Harley’s coach in Indiana who was also called Ted calling down the gaping years words like your own New Jersey coach’s on a November field of stone-cold earth mashed and imprinted by teenage men in cleats, "Don’t stay in the shower, boys, sap ya strath," hollered into the shower room through Red Harley’s memory from the brink of a wintry pool on the Indiana border tiled with bricks of age-old blue-green ice long before Harley learned that he was to spend his life as a bass-voiced newspaperman saving time by spending hours on the phone, following history or preceding it, as he told Jim after a professorial dinner in Washington they’d both got asked to. Keeping one jump behind, added Jim, and they got into some nuthouse laughing — in relief after an evening of Gross National Product yielding never to plenty of tasteless roast beef but, curve upon curve, to Net Economic Welfare floated still on statistics denying the wisdom of an incomes policy — and when the nuthouse laughing ran its course they decided, getting into the elevator at the hotel, to go to church in the morning in Georgetown; agreed on this plan two or three times until in the carpeted elevator a bland or was it blond actor with long saffron sideburns and a silent girlfriend a hair taller than he asked himself along with them. But he was nowhere to be seen next morn, as almost neither were Jim Mayn and Red Harley, though heard deeply croak-voiced wading across the hotel lobby.

Oh ancient showerer, you are wet by the flesh-inch, stubble to stern, but, in the timeless shower (which nonetheless you know she will someday turn off), not all here. What did she mean by Recycled Man? You are a couple of hairy shoulders, a still evolving chest solidifying its sternum; you are a bladder like a balloon brain; and you recall being a monster along some grand mountain shelf where there were no angels and no dreams in those days. You are still one who does not at least remember one solitary dream. But you are being soaped by someone else’s dream and soaped intently while the good New York water hung tine by tine to the shower head’s silver disk is talking to you as if she asks no more of you than you being here:

What Does She Want Of You?

You’re also in another leg of yourself and you’re so awake the young woman here doesn’t know that whatever time you’re in, Standard, Pacific, Mountain, or Water Time, or new east-west time vein fibered through you on a tropic curve off to a stage across the north lid of New Mexico lagged three, four degrees south of New York City — hearing information, stories (one you retold yourself) — were they the runaround? — you’re in two places at once, you see neither one works without the other — an acceptance like divorce from someone you really love — but the truth is that you’ve been in not the present sort of stuck in past but in the future looking back like crazy to the present which you’ve brought into existence again through undreamt-of particles in you that make you a window you fall out now and again.

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo Raymond Vigil’s purpose tracked in his Spanish-rounded easy-West-American body of voice just behind you on the floor of the desert goes on like there is no today and you’ll always be standing here (now again in a New York shower) hearing a fission of our Indian past and future; for Ray’s detailing hopes for breakthrough of resource revenue as if the brown stalagmite that’s risen hundreds of feet sheer up into a cave of sky isn’t there to absorb you and your eyes and as if the other person, this healthy-’n-well-off-looking woman Dina West from Albuquerque who was so nice but wants something, wasn’t standing there on the dry road also; "it’s gonna happen," says Vigil: what he means is ("up-ahead") more sensible control of Indian uranium and oil currently rented out. Wind brings a smell of rock into your throat; you saw the wells back on the Gallup road, the oil pumps right here a mile from Rattlesnake Wash and two miles from the Rock, and your organism slows down sensing it might not get a drink for hours, and if plants thought, what would a cactus for all those weeks between desert deluges—" — but listen, Jim, you wait—because this leasing the rights when we should control the whole operation — I thought I knew who was behind it in the Tribal Council at Window Rock but now I don’t know — maybe you know" (Anglo news-hunter visitor from everywhere else but here), the flat spaces of continent beginning to get ripped by this senseless wind, "not to mention the geothermal—"

"— geothermal! the country here’s not right for it, Ray, you don’t have any deep steam around here—"

"— wouldn’t be so sure, fella, but we deserve our cut — show me an Indian on the payroll at Los Alamos."

"That’s only a pilot project, hot rock drill you know Spacelab stuff."

Feel him pointing off to the right thirty miles where you know the colossal stacks of the power plant govern space as you go on staring here at the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock in front of you and at it only but those stacks don’t go away any more than Consolidated Edison chimneys horizoning the blue New York sky so finely rust-rinsed it’s a movie of itself what do you need to spend time going out West to see some Four Corners New Mexico gasification project with vast, near, dark, strip-mined hills of slag that at this distance in a New York shower two thousand downtown miles under the brow of the continent, where they take the deep surface of coal and turn her into "natural" gas to pipe to California, there to keep body and soul together, and would generate new gas-powered TV sets by next year or at least by 1978 on which to look eastward at their fuel source, were not the new upper-air electricity soon to be tapped by the cloud-needle project exploiting the grand and ancient cumulonimbus formations traditional to the American Indian airspace.

"— more jobs over there at the plant for Navajos than they’ll admit; more than before — and the irrigation project is coming along slow, but right here the uranium and oil still belong to us, well the coal does too but we won’t revoke the lease — say who told you there’s no geothermal here, some Anglo geologist?" It’s a good-hearted joke in the middle of nowhere, where the Nowhere is that he doesn’t know what he wants from you.

Who said there’s no geothermal right here? Well, it’s sort of a fact, like that some Indians aren’t talkers to speak of (you told your daughter in a letter, who passed it on to your son), but that’s Navajos — out in the desert in shacks or isolated hogans or navigating a pickup truck with a fifty-gallon drum of water in back, and talking little even at one of their own rug auctions — but other Indians talk much — the Co-op People, for instance, in a nine-hundred-year-old rent-controlled multiple dwelling under a cliff though granted they phased out that cliff site, and the multiple dwellings you had in mind are Pueblo and the co-op family-owned, but we let them keep the nine hundred years.

"Geothermal’s California, Raymond; geothermal’s Hawaii; geothermal’s up North."

But Los Alamos that day only a week previous: work on geothermal’s begun and wouldn’t you know we’re back at Los Alamos, where once upon a time they got toward the heart of things, but now they’re shooting for clean magma power, keep the deep steam from getting away; not even a press briefing, thank God, nothing going on but daily work, yet you’ll get your breakthrough assignment one day soon like in the as yet uninflated farming of wind some year soon — press handout cum voice-over tells all you need to know except who’s turned the profit into some other mystery of Nature before you can say, Hey that’s joint property acquired during the marriage (i.e., between us Indians and them Entres, short for Entrepreneurs, that just didn’t work out but there’s marital property and extramarital and the marriage was naturally here first) — your old pal and croaking colleague Red (of face-nose) Harley sounded like a Marxist with his Phillips head turning the wrong way when you ran into him on the train until you don’t hear his words n’more and others shower inside the general brain: corporate psychosis — spending into a black hole where competition sucks back inside its own abstract the screaming scam that at a slower rate sounded for centuries like grown man’s insured drawl — cannot last another decade, he said, the corporate psychosis: the only hope is cooperation: Veblen (Mayn had heard of him) didn’t predict hunger and atomic power (or did he? Red asks himself) (Mayn didn’t know) but Veblen said technology’s neutral: that’s the place to begin if you’re going to really own it; it’s no monster in itself (though was not sure: all that menial repetition coupling with the surety that you’re powering some Important Thing. .) and what color tax will a corporate structure pay to a revenue service that we’ve (Harley merges with Mayn to adopt the word of this pair-showering girl) "internalized" to hear inside us the corporate voice incarnal spinning off its true power at all the centers far be they from us, that, hell, so much of their take goes down the ruling sink might’s well be socialism:

Gossip and theory on a train commuting New York into Washington down the fine-toothed density of the coast, but now in the love and steam of a shower recalling Ship Rock and a week before it Los Alamos, the name or two you knew of people who were here ahead of you and maybe hacks no less than you that an information officer mentions in passing under the Los Alamos sun toward the high library, for instance, the buckskin photo-info agent Spence, whose high husky words are in your daydreaming ear a week later at Ship Rock along the breath of the Navajo Ray Vigil who mentioned Spence, and a year or more later in the truest showerbath of the decade— Spence lapses out of sight, then, until you hear your own name, and on his mouth or teeth talking still earlier in Florida when you first met this girl: and who was he ever to adopt that ponytail tone so fucking quiet and friendly its alertness is saying some hustling thing to you, but what? (Acts like there’s something on anybody you want to name, and if on you, what’s he want?) His name is Ray Spence, you wouldn’t want to know him though would say not even that to information officer signing you up for a p.m. tour of the hot-rock drilling, who tells you Spence actually asked after you — had you been to Los Alamos recently? — following you maybe like you knew something no one else knew when, ‘far’s you could tell, the opposite was the case — thus following you by preceding you as he did months-into-years-now ago to absorb the attention of the Chilean economist at Cape Kennedy who turned up in New York soon after his scholarly friend Allende went down in history: but maybe this Spence expected you to have gone to Los Alamos, or had been thinking of you — you never gave it the thought it no doubt in any event did not merit. Spence was out for a buck. But at Los Alamos? Nothing happening on the Indian geothermal employment front lately you told this young woman who is in the shower with you who knows twice what you know about it anyway, and hasn’t been there. Spence’s name mentioned at Ship Rock too, preceding you there, if not in Ray Vigil’s affections.

All of which means nothing but that you are boneless on this Election Day and not even in the happiness of the shower that window through which somebody else might trace an information or curve of face, your job — except now you recall your grandmother reporting (as if it was her job) that a young woman who was your mother said she knew nothing about Indians except they were the last Americans with a native sense of design. People been at Los Alamos thirty years; design a bomb like that one, the only way after it is in. Some of the same folk enclosed by their Los Alamos classical-music station are working on geotherm, fast forward, the radio didn’t hold the band — car slips over the white line, what a radio will do to you. Why Gods your future (a voice homes on the billowing straight road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe) — which train you on, brother, the radio voice rises, you’re with the others, ain’t ya, in the rear car looking back at the speeding landscape while the engineer ain’t up front in the locomotive no more and you feel this but you don’t want to ask, right? just a train (they’ll probably take it off service presently) just another train loose down the track with you and all the rest looking out the rear window of the rear car with enough supplies of fast grub and cardboard-soft cans of beer so we’ll never run out, that is before we hit bottom ‘cause God could be your future, you let him aboard, but this morning he ain’t.

Not here beneath a reverse geyser on Election Day massaging two slippery Manhattan selves nor there in her dry bedroom with a regular rug of a towel, a soft bedroom and two sets of keys on the bureau this morning where hadn’t she set down one last night when they came in from late dinner? geothermal feels clean but hot and in the miles of downward piping maybe the jobs aren’t so many for Anglos or Skins.

"Maybe you’re thinking I mean the old volcano that was here at the Rock, these dikes out here for miles, lava once, heat underneath — but," Vigil had gone on, "forget that and think of the magma chambers simmered down centuries ago but maybe below all that is an ocean, an ocean of power on the bottom line."

Who, then, has first rights to Lower Space? The wind across the bright plateau, listen to it come. And against the sudden grid of agreements in fine print shadowed by gasification lobbyists lurking within grainier shadows of strip-mine futures, shadow grids of revenue-sharing partnership statistics floated/buffered/spaced-out with the figured factor of good will, you say, "O.K., O.K., just a second — let me have a look at this," where you stand two miles away from Ship Rock, which rises solitary fourteen hundred feet up off the floor of the mesa, where desert is a memory of wind and quiets the two voices, male and female sounds behind you, so you feel them scarcely more than the three points of your shoulder blades which with the small of your back hold in place the late-model car parked behind the three of you, so you wonder not where you are but why you listen to the two different things that the two people behind you are asking, and of you, as if you could give what they want — the talking Navajo, the Albuquerque businesswoman Dina and her passion-like commitment.

"It’s gonna happen," Raymond Vigil insists, less certainly; "you can help us."

"I’m not a lobbyist, Ray, but what’s going on over there at the plant’s worth reporting."

Stand on a lava flow gazing at a fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot-high throat, a volcanic neck that gagged once upon a time and you stare until the material it was made of stirs as if to rise like wind in the alleged ship’s soul looking for a sea, the stuff once molten inside the pipe of the volcano that hardened before it could get out and now is all that’s left because the conduit / pipe / cone / actual volcano / outside slope has been worked away / blown away by continents of wind. It isn’t hard to explain, is it? What’s left is Ship Rock, hugely visible from the Four Corners Power Plant thirty miles away as the plant is from the Rock.

"Look, I’ve been up to my ears in gasification this past week," you hear drawling out of you—"let me just look. . look at this thing. Can one get up there?" Your fingertips feel the rock turn to sand.

Albuquerque woman Dina swaps a story about the Rock with the Indian Raymond yet then they’re arguing — and stories about stories, free location for TV westerns, or do you pay rent by the hour for using landscape? or by the mile? Your eyes, meanwhile, want to reverse the flow and give back the blast of fiery froth that bombed down to become so viscous it didn’t get out.

But stepping back under the shower’s waterfall, Jean’s now saying — not the blonde, middle-thirties, clean-tanned Albuquerque businesslady Dina West but the Jean whose New York place this is is saying—"I just saw you all over again."

Dance-like she cocks one leg out to the side, soaps herself, and you find the other cake which is thin and bends, but around what? And you reach through the steamy water and soap her moving arms, which stop moving.

"We’ve hardly met," you say.

"Because you’re condescending. You’re a funny kind of condescender and if I were you I still wouldn’t be able to know just how you condescend to me, and it doesn’t matter much now."

"I said," you threaten, "we’ve hardly met."

"You do a job but don’t know why," she says as if water weren’t cascading screening you both from the times and from dryness. Lecturing: "You’re O.K. at your job. But why were you at Skylab? You were mumbling in my head and I was half asleep and I know it had to do with why you were at Skylab but it wasn’t your job and I woke up the next morning feeling like you’d let me sit in your home but I didn’t take advantage of it — and Skylab wasn’t your job but it might have been. You know? And why you were at Skylab is like the other part of why you’re here with me. Is there something going on? I’ve seen you four times in three years, Jim."

"We’ve hardly met," you say in some other body which she would refer to as He.

"You’re not married, isn’t that so?"

"Not right now."

She turns her shoulder away and seems to be thinking of all that lies between you/him and the prospect of turning off her shower; it is hers.

She scrubs her face under the water without the soap running off: how does she do that? If you can talk to her you can stop being in two places at once (which is O.K. to be if you’re one of a growing number of gurus with multiple commitments and not enough time). She’s walking a beach in Florida with you; then last night on concrete here in New York months and months later and on that heavenly ceiling.

"After dinner you gave me hell not too sweetly."

"You thought I did."

She was coming to you closer and closer without moving in the shower, so you did not have to make her up looking back from the future, which was your combat status and is a capability lunatic to mention. Being in the future and being able to live back here in the present only by making it up. Jim Mayn and Jean stepped off a curb, the back of last night’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel gently crowding them down into the alley of old Lexington Avenue, a men’s shoe store all lighted up behind them, this little range of the city no harder to make up than grandmother Margaret moving up Park Avenue in a carriage at the turn of the century, for you — he — look past the corner up the crosstown street to the hedges of Park Avenue.

"I know we hardly know each other but do you mind if we go to a movie?" she had said.

"Sitting in the movie will be like lying in bed."

"Thanks, Jim."

"We’ll get us a paper."

"No wait—" as if he was about to leave her to go locate a newspaper —"I want you to know why I want to go to the movies."

"I want to know."

"There was Cape Kennedy and that pool table and the motel and the canceled launch; and there was once in Washington; and we had some phone calls which I really liked; but I feel like the Other Woman — weird, I almost don’t give a damn about you, and I don’t talk like this, you know? — and I feel as devoted as the Other Woman is: as if we had been seeing each otheron the sly all these years a couple times a week and there’s just time to have a drink, dinner, and go to bed."

"Tomorrow’s Election Day and you’re not going in to the office till late."

They walked realistically hand in hand to get a newspaper. They made to cross the street again; Mayn let go her hand, he stepped off the curb looking at a hurtling, disintegrating cab coming at him carrying ancient authority, knowledge of this New York City, so that the driver thought here’s a guy, he doesn’t have to raise his hand. But, the brakes crying out prophetically, the high-slung real yellow chassis skiing in toward the curb, Mayn raised his palm (Peace or Stop), felt good, shook his head, but the driver, abandoning his brakes, now found the light changing to red and, against his normal practice of running the red, had to stop since he’s confused, or felt he had to.

"Wait," she said; "I want you to know why I want to go to the movies even if you already want to know."

"You’ll tell me even if I don’t."

"Wrong!" she claimed, laughing anxiously. "I’m not necessarily going to."

"Please tell me," he said, stepping back onto the curb and looking down into her angry eyes — were her eyes so young as she? the colors had been put through much thought.

They opened to the movie timetables. "I feel like I’m already there," he said, and, as if they had made a movie decision, he closed the paper and kissed her, their two soft, closed mouths moving a little upon each other and she opened her eyes so she knew — was that it? — that he wasn’t looking over her shoulder. She said she would like to take a shower, and he murmured that there was a movie near here where you could do that, and she murmured that he had been out of his marriage for too long. No sweat, he added. He felt, through her hands, his clothes on him by the material yard, yards of thickness.

"Oh," she mildly disagrees — and reaches out again under the hot water from her own shower head in her own bathtub in an intimacy created by her own chosen shower curtain.

Oh you believe in the two of you, here in an O.K. shower, you don’t have to pinch yourself, only her, and she pretty well thinks you are here, and you don’t believe in people who indulge themselves thinking they could be in two places, particularly since today, Election Day, you don’t have to be anyplace.

"You voting?" she asks.

"Nope." But all she knows is that you’re reclaiming a place in the City that friends are letting you reclaim because they don’t want it any more, they’ve sublet it from you while you waited to buy it, a family of friends, friends of the family, living there but now they’re leaving the city. Not out for a week yet. She knows this stuff and that you’re coming from Washington, from the West, from really not too many places, newsmen don’t travel incessantly, but you don’t speak of South America, it’s not too vivid.

She doesn’t know your daughter’s phone, nor that it’s a new number and in Washington, or how old your daughter is; but there’s a thumping on the front door, isn’t it? but this young lady hasn’t heard.

You’ve made your living off information often from those too willing to give it, and reporting it like income, and for too long your aim has had to shift. You’re awake enough to feel the water altering you; it’s what it does so much better than cleaning you off; like the soap making us slippery.

"Pair-shower time," she said; well, it’s the age she lives in like a place that keeps getting away from you, into you. It might be the age she is.

"Lower."

"There?"

"Hold it — I mean, right there."

"I know my place. Have we reached it?" she asks.

"Did you hear someone at the door?" he might seem to change the subject.

"Did I?"

He would turn on the cold if with his eyes closed he knew which faucet. "I think we’ve…"

"Hey, oldtimer, you with me?"

"I think we have broken through…"

A kiss from you seals two mouths from the shower’s bombardment, ties them with a soapy hand below, until you give that hand of hers a remote-control bump and she smiles you off. You’ve got a mile of rope in your lower back and a coat hanger in your shoulders and you must stretch.

But you don’t get clear of the two places, the two at once, and you’re the window, and she’s looking at you from one side like she thinks you’re getting off somewhere else by soaping her own dear breast; but she says, "Are you in the thick of something? Why do I feel it’s so close?" and beyond New York or the dead lava of New Mexico’s earth you feel the shower head is spacewise transpondering you two, and when you audibly recall her words, "I just saw you all over again," and you thought this angel wasn’t particularly romantic you step away from the steaming shower that’s talking to you out of its silver disk-head, and, looking behind the shower curtain to the damp yellow tiles and a huge black towel cloaked on the door like a bathrobe and the toilet and the mirror now steamed that in another bathroom you briefly shared with her in Florida, once said, "Look me up" but here doesn’t know you — you hear now in the shower the woman’s voice as long ago as Joy your lost wife saying, "What’s the matter, did you hear something?" and you think you may not be here after all but through a bend of light seeing it awfully clearly.

She rounds her palm on your hip to slide on around and soap-finger you at the point of your tail — for you are some earlier thing’s future.

You cough and cough. She frowns and rubs your slippery back; she knows a good cheap hypnotist who’ll get you to stop smoking, she’s almost unhappy (she’s frowning so).

The film she wanted to see had gone on already, fifteen minutes’ walk away: take a cab (you said), and it took fifteen minutes of sitting to get there, next to each other arm in arm — while you listened to her and told her she could be apologetic about bringing you into a movie half an hour late if she liked — so she, after thinking, said you meant you liked it and why didn’t you think why? But the point was, you were going into a film half an hour late and it was the film she wanted to see even if you didn’t mind, and this was the point — and not that she was apologetic.

You had said her being apologetic was very sexy; your daughter said very like that. The cab had arrived and Jean wouldn’t let you pay, she was forward on the edge of the leather seat, the woman in the box office was talking on the phone, an old garden-variety clock your father would have on the bedside table beside the glass of water and the yellow-labeled bottle of aspirin and Wood’s Thoroughbred Racing Illustrated, and a clock here with green hands and a yellow face stood beside the opening at the base of the cubicle’s window, and after Jean said she had been in this situation before about paying, you won a compromise you didn’t care about: her movie, his cab fare: but, you explained, because in her paying all or part (well, dinner would have been going too far, and at the Pressbox at that, where she’d gritted her teeth and enjoyed her prime ribs hadn’t she? dinner would have been letting women into the lockerroom, you said, though you understood there were coed saunas hither and yon nowadays, or at least a Tasmanian economist and his myopic lacrosse-star son reported same at the gym-pool complex of a prominent Middle Atlantic university), you found some sweetness of knowledge in her knowledge of you, and found this right through the paying at the box office where (like a nervous host figuring the tip while the waiter stands near) she wanted to take you up on Apologetic being Sexy but there was a static-fresh ten-dollar bill peeling away from the packet with the bank’s fifty-dollar paper band around it and four ones wrinkled and curling and skating with reverse wind back toward the hand that she said made her feel like this had happened before and pounced on them and slid them outward again as if not wanting them, and this girl you’re with (whose apartment you were already visualizing from under one of her bed pillows which was how you in an occasional crisis slept) was suddenly excited because the time given in the paper was in fact for a prize-winning Eastern European cartoon so they had missed less than twenty minutes of the feature, and as a boy tore the tickets right-handing the stubs to Mayn and the bright, dark photograph which was their screen was straight on regardless of the slope that took them down the narrow house like a movie theater in an Italian movie he thought, quite crowded; and, putting her hand on his shoulder in the darkness of other people’s hands and laps and legs as they tried to see two seats, she whispered that she had always wanted to see this — forever — and he loved her then because she hadn’t remembered to ask him if he had seen the film.

He looked at her and at the screen now darkened and there on the screen three people he knew were standing face to face alternately talking and silent, and she drew him in off the aisle, and as he came between the screen and three people whom they had to step on, one of the characters on screen broke silence and spoke and was speaking when Jim and Jean — Barbara-Jean her parents called her (long-distance) — sank into the audience and looking at each other’s perfect faces both began to whisper — He: "I love—" synchronized with but halted by her "I love black-and-white," but he heard himself substitute as silently as what she had halted, several adequate covers for the vinous, garlicky "you" — such as "coming in in the middle it’s like getting it twice"; "New York sometimes"; "these people" — onscreen, that is, for they were still there as they were one teenage afternoon at the Walter Reade Strand Theater in a town near the Jersey shore called, in the high-colored atlas of his secret pacts with his grandmother, Windrow, and he’d gone with a couple of his friends and had run into his kid brother and his brother’s shy little girlfriend — not that he hadn’t known they would be here, and his pale brother had looked past him as if he hadn’t been there, because Jim had not worked that morning for his father at the newspaper that was running itself toward liquidation run mainly by the father who had married into it — when despite his calm demeanor everyone especially Jim’s younger brother knew that Mayn Senior’s suffering over their mother’s being gone and dead was too great to bear alone. And on the screen that was finally revealed by two traveling curtains that parted for the cartoon and a newsreel and closed again in order to rattle open once again, these actors and a couple of actresses who had already appeared once talked frankly and dangerously to each other as if even when they were afraid of being caught — hurt — killed, they went ahead with their way of moving, looking away so that the screen losing their faces darkened, looking right at another person so you the onlooker might have been the trick mirror they looked through (though Jim didn’t know about such things at that age), these people who were getting ready to pull a job went ahead with their way of just sharp, abbreviated talking so the silences in between might have been all the admiration they were receiving from the unseen, unknown, silent while candy-crackling audience including Jim and his teenage friends — one of whom said out loud, Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor.

Admiration that Jim wouldn’t have to announce personally to these apparently normal-size actors with names and with ways of talking and characters he knew no matter what action-packed mystery they appeared in, with cigarettes in their fingers and tough distrust of the world including the audience if they had included it and Jim, which without knowing it they didn’t, so that arriving outside at 4 p.m. in the wild, heavy-as-air daylight of East Main Street, three dusty pickup trucks parked across the street, this Jim who was suddenly again a part of the town which in his absence from it in the theater he’d still been part of but more grandly eavesdropping on the real life of the movie and without having to do anything, could feel satisfied that their good criminal world which he wished to enter and had, unknown to them, entered like a relaxed, off-duty ghost, was all set and completely to be seen without him, and lasted for at least fifteen minutes walking up toward and past the small newspaper office front where his father who’d been glumly p’d off for years it seemed before and irrespective of the Tragedy of Jim’s mother could be seen typing some letter or leaning over a table staring at ad proof or quickly grinning on the phone so he looked through you if he saw you but he would look through Jim anyhow as if Jim were not his son except he was better to other people’s kids. (Hold it, Jean said at dinner, how in the middle of his life, I know you’re being funny but are you sure he was pissed off for years? — she’s had two drinks and feels her charm; and his might need a little molybdenum, that’s what they strengthen steel with for cars, doll.)

The young woman whose elbow you long ago conceded the glimmering armrest to, gently slipping your elbow off and raising your shoulder more against her, stretched at the end until her arm came up athwart that shoulder, the back of her hand finding your cheek, smiling as if, eyes half-open, she’d woken up happy, said, in the twilight between showings, "Well, I’m ready for this thing to start, how about you?" so you weren’t quite sure she had liked it.

Was liking it; for the ominous, all-purpose real-life music that came at them more personal and closely closeting of whoever they were than the perfected world of the black-and-white drama now theirs, then it quieted down, and the silver-gray, menu-like ground with the plain-printed titles and credits was readying you for what was probably real life coming and she found your hand for this half of the show as the story began and squeezed your fingers when two Manhattanites in the squeaky seats behind you started suppressing laughter of recognition, doubling up it sounded like, and you ran your right hand along your roughening cheek concluding that inevitably you knew someone here. She was at once absorbed you could feel it in the unchanging grip of the humid palm.

Then you didn’t want to be there but you did want to be with her, eyeing her in profile the way you used to catch your mother doing who didn’t go to movies but came with you and Brad and your grandmother when it was Errol Flynn or Fairbanks; so Jean tears herself away for a moment to gaze at you but she has work to do and presses your hand and lets go and is looking at the screen again, and so it goes — good film, soiled screen.

A film that as it turns out has a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of because when the time comes for you and the girl to walk safely up the aisle get out of here, you and she all by yourselves — as incognito as the angels way inside you and way outside you that you of course wouldn’t know gimbal an essential window domestically unbudging amid the shuffle of your usual being — long before the show’s over — while, granted, nobody was exactly standing occupying a position ahead of you the way your stocky sidekick Sammy who played quarterback until high school who’d thought the picture was to be in Technicolor stood suddenly in front of your brother Brad coming out of the movie in 1945 and, though none of Sam’s business, said, "What’s the matter, Brad, ain’t you speaking to me and Jim?" — so Brad parted from his girl and tried to get around Sam who moved his unbudgeably occupied and waiting position with Brad — you saw last night like a fact leaving just ahead of you an older hippie type with a ponytail and some kind of jacket that in the lobby light proves to be rough-side brown leather fringed and braided and designed with deliberately rough-looking dark-orange and acid-gold cloth strips, a man you know, it might be him that little crook talking to you in one side of your routine (the girl you’re with will know which side, right left right left right — you had a good home but you left) — a man instantly known to you whom you wouldn’t want to know and you don’t know and never will know whether he got up out of his seat because you and the girl did, following you visibly from in front rather than an unseen shadow behind, you didn’t see which row behind you he came out of but you weren’t going to run up behind him, and you liked him less when he turned out to be a contact of the Chilean’s that night of the final moon launch (that you told the girl about, the time she was about asleep), and there’ve been other coincidences but ("Cripes," as Sam used to say) it’s natural in this job after all like running into your old Associated Press pal Red Harley (such a profession for plain brevity, get in get out) intoning his character by deep voice-print on the Metroliner, who called when Mayn passed him, "You gotta execute, fellow, execute," and Mayn, turning, had said, "Don’t stay too long in that hot shower, boy, saps ya strenth," which wasn’t what he meant to say though then on the way to Washington did say to a man he liked — not this bastard in the complicated western jacket leaving the movie house by coincidence right ahead of him and Barbara-Jean, and alone, which wasn’t out of character really but ("Do you know him?") since he had always seemed to be turning a trick wherever you ran into him, and had no off-hours, what (again) was he doing here? — in that old backwards-half-and-half flick which you and Barbara-Jean ("Neat, eh?") (though you didn’t analyze it like the heavies behind you) had put together independently and side by side having come in in the middle, in which you found a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of, because on that Saturday afternoon soon after your mother was dead (which at dinner last night before the movie you found yourself interrupting a couple of other stories to mention to this young woman who’d said testily, "How do I know your father was pissed off for years before your mother died?" — then made a face to take the prickle out of what she’d said) — that Saturday afternoon of this movie of last night (plus a second feature in those days you can’t recall probably a third-string western with very very white ten-gallon hats and not much more), the gangster movie would not after all stand on its own apart from all the terrible time which Jim (aged sixteen) had cordoned off, that terrific movie of men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, also complete without him, which gave him that afternoon some escaped sense lasting at least fifteen minutes into (four-in-the-afternoon-daylight where you carried preciously the other light of the movie) re-entry, at which point, beyond his father’s newspaper-office storefront plate-glass, reflecting or transparent depending, and the Jersey Central tracks and the red-and-gold firehouse, he knew now under a friendly bathroom shower with a hand pounding his slippery-slapping back for he was coughing, that he would leave that town, and knew he would leave his family that, like what he’d been durably watching go on between his parents for so long (though nothing much to watch), was complete with him or without him who could not be complete himself except without it. She said he was quick in spite of himself and he said, looking at her, that he had to be; and there they were outside the theater stepping off the curb, and even an old stone with a hole in the middle of it yields a trace of mineral radiance irrespective of erosion factor in such company.

You could feel her rubbing your back already, and you were hours away from a morning shower. Why was the guy coming out of the movie ahead of you like you were following him? Well, he had gone in and must come out: but it is Spence, who would make you feel drearily important, the way he is a retrieve-all of data so personal it is as unimportant as everyday life itself. You look up now on Election Day at the shower head of the hostess throwing its ray of weight upon you two together; and knowing like a good witness the dates when you were in New Mexico and when you were heading south through Bogota (where Spanish is as svelte as Florentine Italian) and in Caracas once heading north from the unconscionably disproportionate length of Chee-lay, and knowing just when you ran into the girl at Cape Kennedy, and just when the last time was that you were here in this city whose name should be Manhattan — though not knowing exactly when you decided to move back into an apartment you sublet unobtrusively for years — you figure that that jerk Spence knows such things on instinct, not because he is using you, much less following you — and, well, you can roll up that time belt, for the zone stripes run north-south the way the atlas always says, and you know the difference between Eastern Standard and Mountain, so just turn your face into this shower of Greenwich Village time and check out this smart kid whose keys you’ll leave where they are on the table, after brunch or whatever, and you see yourself doing it.

"Do you have a sister, Jim?"

"Brother. Married high school sweetheart. Took over her widowed mother’s haberdashery."

Just turn your face into the talking tines of the silver disk of the latest-model shower head that foretells the imminent absence of both of you from this curtained bathtub — you first, your will says to her, its eyes shut; and hearing a stiff rustle of plastic and the slide of rings along the rod, then back along the rod as if she is tucking you in, your bladder tight-hot inside the watertight skin of your wet body’s belly lets go blind, down the watery drain, upon which you hear an "Ah" behind you, which is not some spirit wind upon the New Mexico plateau but Woman who exits right then reappears left, where she has peeked back in at one she probably loves but can’t see what your blind eyes feel bombarding your eyelids and you will not pass it on though terrible there in the shower head. Because you would not be believed.

Would not believe yourself. Would you? Don’t answer. It’s not at this late date a mother’s suicidal disappearance, it’s more a future you’re in from which you’re obliged to make up the present, you got the technology to do it (and it’s got you).

If this is the Void talking, well how come it’s got so much to say, an Empty Void (ha ha). To say about you is the answer. Now the girl got you into this hot shower and you can’t get out; but you do and she’s gleeful and now:

you’ve dried her, she’s dried you — you’ll keep — he and she. But each puts the finishing touch to themselves, with corners of one big draping towel which he feels is now legally part-his.

Then launched by the bathroom light switch you’re getting just off the ground into a new hall and into a room which, with its bright shades all the way down and except for the bed, looks darkly neat. The bed, whose own tossed wrap seems flat and simple like other beds, speeds you in your flight while the girl’s dark, pale room (but now with the pad of paper, the book, and the spot lamp on the night table on the near side) is a deep window, yes, that’s right, the room’s a window.

Is it the Void that tells you you will forget? — forget being in two places at once while you were in the bath’s tent of steam raining down through slippery light? (Do you believe in One Void?)

Or is it the girl, who, having flown you from a damp bathmat into a hall and over the pine-green pile of her bedroom carpet by a bureau with a deluxe blank check pastel-imprinted with a manageable landscape of butte, flowering desert, rose-tinted rock ridges, gullies, arroyo — into a flat cloud bank of cool bed, is asking if you wear gloves even when it isn’t cold, saying, "Hey I could borrow a car today, what about it?" while your palm rubs moisture down her shin, in the slowness that may catch up with the stillness of the window in you, and you wait for her to do something about that thumping on the front door that comes and goes and you’re beginning to think is future syndrome you’re in for, now that you’ve let a decision to come back to New York come to you.

No, you have not fooled the Void, you’ve used its flow to let yourself forget for a time not any new and unheard-of time belt beaming its numerous at-onces through your wet navel here, say, to your dry ears off at Ship Rock, say, hearing a Navajo sheepherder’s son turned tribal-spirited hustler brief you while you stare off at the Rock where the ghostly sun stands on the sheer brown face of its lower lofty sharded cliffs with all around it the sky that the businesswoman behind you says is supposed to be turquoise, male if clear, female if mottled, it’s business information nonetheless, and you think of breakfast, three brown eggs scrambled with sweet red pepper and mushrooms and onions and nutmeg and salt. What the hell is this Void you don’t get out of your head? — run for office like Lincoln to forget the Void but who is going to capture thirty votes by spending an afternoon cradling wheat in an Illinois field as if the men he worked beside were candidates he ran against? no, you’ve used its flow, alloyed with hers soaping you and flying you, to annihilate the shower head, latest model, steam needles you gargle, tines fine enough to breathe like a scented ozone of coke dust ripe for gasification, a hot-and-cold bombarding massage combing your skin as each arc like a drawn line dissolves its color into mere water of rivulets and drips and eddies.

But what about the shower head?

That it talks? or talks to you?

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo said. "You could help." Tell the world, that’s what you newsmen’s supposed to do — that was what your father on his front porch said: ‘77/ tell the world": if someone asked if, say, he’d seen his cousin’s daughter’s new boyfriend, the sulky-driver from upstate New York — and now here come the Indians, stealing a march even on the archaeologist Indian watchers in their cubicles in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the engineers down at Socorro — yes here come Indians turning turning turning beyond a burst of arrowheads far out in the cloud-feathered cradle of the sky hooped and woven in smoky inertias by (hey!) the first Indian women astronauts hunting happiness the grounds for which may be achievement, and right behind you this Navajo promoter turning beyond to what’s down not up, what’s right there underfoot — well, not right there but far down — the geothermal tap, the well of energy-steam which, given a shared technology, a Navajo operation proposes to mine.

Meanwhile, the blonde, serious Albuquerque businesswoman you smell behind you waits to renew her quiet theme. Her pitch isn’t like that of Raymond Vigil the Indian. His is a shade hidden by the ail-too-well-aged tale he tells as if you hadn’t had it already long ago in a life where you were a reader, he’s selling it and now it’s another story, the Enchanted Mesa of his cousins (Incorporated for better flow — a hundred cars a day comes to twelve hundred dollars a week American to support the pueblo as an institution, literally, no joke, you’re adding it up not counting private enterprise — and now here comes electricity). However, the Albuquerque businesswoman’s story hides less: what? her? what else? not her kids who go to bilingual school and whom she took to lunch at the Western Skies Hotel yesterday, and not what she frowns about, shakes her slightly silver-sheened blond-ash (good) head at, and just about breathes (out as in): the environmental impact of an airport they’re talking about for smaller planes under twenty thousand pounds: but (no) hides what else? a tender, firm, speechless sight of what could still happen in the land if only the river flows clear, if only the horizon can be tilted another way so the strip-mine boom (read bomb) towns may slide elsewhere whose concept breathes its (can that be chlorine-rinsed) air-conditioning off the drawing board’s horizon or off the wall onto the very neck of Ship Rock — and if only the toxic output from future plants can be solved not by water of San Juan River but by decision, by foresight — yet in this so abstract nation (of men within men within men) her tender freedom of sight equals also that American speechlessness you knew in the car coming out here through a reservation so great it can be comprehended only on a map or in the cleft lines in the blooded faces of sun-banished Indians your ignorance mixes up with other burnished Indian faces, and she said, "These little farms — it’s a museum! But the blood’s still here if we leave them alone."

New Mexico is more outside-controlled than any other state, yet in itself more foreign, magically foreign, you’re pretty certain the economist in Farmington said to you at the moment your eye sockets began to feel anesthetized from the mescal and thawed-out orange juice, and you saw this gentle old leftwinger from the McCarthy and even Roosevelt days now day-to-day studier and teacher of Indian resource economics (to Indians out at that underfunded outpost community college in the town named for the Rock Ship Rock) as a great man — yes, quietly and factually forewarning that in two, three years they would need more two-thousand-megawatt generating stations and you figure twelve new strip mines roughly for two stations, but is "out-of-state" anti-Indian? yes, because the supplier and profiter is non-Indian — even if he was here first, your bad knee jokes paining you — while the economist mentions a rug auction tomorrow evening and you both get into family and he speaks factually, not wearily, not intensely, of a still undivorced wife a little too near, and a daughter and almost imaginary grandchildren too far. He thinks the economy is history, he has a steady view, but he isn’t where he was a generation ago and the western world might wind up devaluing via police-state order and rebuild on the Austrian model and maybe nobody important wind up dying of gold hoarding: but he doubts that scamario, he thinks the corporate cooperative will have to self-destruct rather than rebuild out of world poverty and he wonders if you could design a nuclear device that would confine itself to non- or m-human target-structures — but he isn’t interested in black-humor technology, he is for local economics, the irrigation project — it didn’t sound like overall history, which you have always declined to take a view of.

Farms — the environmentalist lady dreams of — encased in this transparent air you’re not used to taking in. You know that she, here two miles from the astoundingly near Rock, has a sense of you, that you wouldn’t get sentimental about legend/religion, yet that you have not yet refigured how to do your work so that it matters. A sense of you, she has, you (well) might skip the trip to Socorro, get the volcano man on the phone, maybe he can talk a more layman’s geotherm. You’re serious, she guesses (hits upon it, lo acierto). That is, serious about something else which may be volcanoes or idleness or privacy, but may be something to one side (both sides) of this assignment that’s your job, so much to either side of it that she’ll have to be framed by these margins of yours or she’ll just have to take off her public environmental concern and let the craziness the two of you are giving off speak to eclipse this infernal garrulous Navajo whom you do ask in self-defense to return your rental car to Farmington and you’ll go south with the woman, Dina, and why doesn’t he get going where instead he’s totaling you with the high place accorded the Navajo woman: she rules the hogan almost; yet where are the hogans? — show me a hogan — these pole-supported, earth-covered mound-houses, where are they? (are they the polygonal wooden cabins you see?) — north pole is Corn Woman, south is Mountain Woman, west is Water Woman, east pole is Earth Woman.

There’s a void fading out and you a reciprocal window fade nakedly in, into just a shifting weight of plasm, it’s what you are on this New York Election Day, plasm recalling in of the girl Barbara-Jean’s voice up there on the pillow that she said at Cape Kennedy she was there for a magazine that you now know more about but last night she hardly talked of because she started you in a western direction — you feel a slowness, greater and greater, turning you back into the rest gap inside you, groups of powers gimbaling the window far away in you, computerized adjustment with an equally far away outside—what groups? they are in communication — fades out, leaves one dark twinkle in the hair of her puff, primes this globulet of light there flowing through her legs, but it’s shower water, there comes a thumping on her front door again and you taste rose-flesh in the drop of her shower water on your tongue, determining to have what’s here — the margin is the center, forget Spence in the movie and the Chilean economist three, four years ago at Cape Kennedy — so long as the girl isn’t responding to the door. And so you won’t talk now for a long time of circling her as she circles you, turning the bed warm again, and the interruption once tight with the touch of chill for a moment between bathroom and bed crossing the palm of your old hand, now gets bigger and softer. Void fades out and the silver-disk shower head is no more the brain and no more that mutation beyond terror both future and past that could not be believed if voiced to this girl who’s of a scientific mind for a journalist, and would wonder what you thought you were laying on her, what being in future reinventing the present meant and as for public events threatening to be news, there’s private life and public life and always was.

Didn’t she do that at dinner before the movie? Not his westward grandmother Margaret who passed muster but the negotiator Karl immune from search who packed a very small Japanese pistol into a room in London that was right next to the room where erstwhile presidential timber Stassen of whom she had but dimly heard went even further than the long way the mythic little bit of him was said to go in 1957. He’d gotten the Russians actually interested in a couple of aerial surveillance plans, but then on the day that Karl had the pistol, Stassen spilled one of these schemes to the Russian, forget his name, and the West Germans and the British found out and got mad— they hadn’t been told; and Eisenhower’s face was red with rage because here we were with the Russians again and he was trying to soothe the British after not backing them on Suez, and Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State as you know, had for his beloved West Germans all kinds of Presbyterian good manners in the breach of which created by poor Stassen’s jerkwater impulse Dulles aimed at Stassen a backfire that blew him right out of a job. (But "How could this Karl get into the talks with a pistol on him? I didn’t know the Japanese made pistols" — "Same thing in Stockholm I think it was and there he was assistant to one of the sub-principals entrusted with the most finely boring technical details, you know" — actually in those days less the unmaking of weapons than making them on a rational schedule of rationed balances.) Mayn’s westward grandmother Margaret on the other hand: she saw the Statue of Liberty in pieces on Bedloe’s Island in 1885, she must have been twelve? and her father, who took her on these short trips from the New Jersey town where the family paper had run weekly since at least 1834, sent her in ‘93 to Chicago to cover the World’s Fair. ("The World’s Fair? Fve got pictures of the ‘39 World’s Fair, my father met my mother there, they were standing outside the Finnish Pavilion and some kid’s green balloon with Minnie Mouse on it blew by and Dad captured it and returned it to the kid, who was French.") It was called the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Mayn’s nineteen-year-old future grandmother took issue with a famous reincarnationist named Carl Browne whom she heard hold forth and he introduced her to the famous Jacob Coxey ("Who?") who organized an army of unemployed to march on Washington the following year.

("But why didn’t you take over the paper — what was it called?") the Democrat, and up to when Margaret’s grandfather became publisher in 1854, it had weathered many attacks beginning with the scurrilous and unspeakable and dastardly charge in its first months that it would publish only until the fall election, that being its only aim, but the attacks came from the same landowners who thought Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States was a left-wing stampede to anarchy, the same who had been known to pay laborers with notes below par value on a bank seventy miles away, and the same who agreed with Justice Story, who was one of two pre-Jackson dissenters on the Taney court, in ‘37, that to build the toW-free bridge, the Warren Bridge, across the Charles River in Boston was tantamount to raping decent monopolist stockholders of the already existing bridge at a time when the political routine of exclusive charters granted (as they put it) to businesses meant that — well, the editor of the New York Post was saying, The City is trapped, we can’t get our potatoes, we can’t get our fuel, without paying some damn monopoly that’s finagled a corporation charter out of a clutch of crooked legislators in the statehouse. (Lawmen, newsmen. "What, Jim?") Newspapers don’t give away a million loaves of bread any more, like when Jacob Coxey’s Army of the unemployed moved on Washington in ‘94—the New York Herald, can you believe it? ("The promotions have just gotten bigger, Jim, I got news for you! But. . your grandmother went to Chicago at nineteen?")

Something like that. Of course by then it wasn’t just your advertisements that showed you what was going on in town, for in the 1830s and ‘40s it was Congress, the legislature, politics, foreign news — not much local news; and she used to show me the ads for the stagecoach even before her own time that took people, her grandfather’s subscribers, to Hightstown to meet the railroad train, or to Key port to meet the steamboat. ("What river was that?" — "Oh it must have been the Delaware.") That is, if the steamboat made it. ("What railroad?" — "The Camden and Amboy; big inverted-cone stack, two pair of high wheels back by the engineer’s cab, two pair of little wheels up front by the cow catcher, and the big wheels came right up inside the railing with its little brass posts, twenty that ran clear round the engine"), and even fifty years later it was Chicago those subscribers wanted to hear about in the Windrow Democrat ("Windrow. ." Jean says the word—), June 1893, headlines the Chicago fair — Two Windrow Girls Visit the Great Exposition — An Interesting Account of What They saw — A Labyrinth of Crystal Rocks— Fooled by the Mirrors — The Germans Everywhere Ahead — ("The World’s Fair" — "Yes, and she and Florence were almost afraid as they wended their way toward the New Jersey building. ."). Margaret wrote,

I had heard words of censure about this little place, and at last we were told that it was just ahead of us. To be sure it is just a handsome old Colonial residence and not prepossessing in comparison with the others. And it may be my entire loyalty, but I thought it was just too nice for anything. There is a drawback in that no one is around who appears to have to do with affairs except the colored servants. But we met Mr. Walter Lennox, the Secretary of the New Jersey Commission, who made us feel very much at home and showed us the rooms — banquet room and sleeping apartments — which are not open to all visitors. Of course the first thing we Jersey girls did was to devour the register.

("Crystal rocks?" — "I think that was over in the Horticultural Building. She described it for the Democrat: a pyramid of tropical vegetation in the center towering up to the glass dome, and grassy knolls with fountains and pools; and avenues; and orchids from Short Hills; and under the pyramid a pint-sized model of the Crystal Cave in South Dakota — that’s the labyrinth in the headline.")

It sounded proper, like her report of the light show one night over the Lagoon with one building after another illuminated with hundreds of electric lights, and the searchlight making the water throw gold sparks, and something called "The White City" there in the dispatch but she never talked about it or much about the Fair, Susan B. was there to visit the Women’s Building displaying handicrafts and Mary Cassatt’s mural of modern woman "plucking the fruits of knowledge and science," Margaret declined an invitation to attend the opera in Milwaukee because she had only just met the people who asked her, who were from Madison, Wisconsin and had an Irish name: a vivid correspondent but then in the next weeks an errant daughter. But the white city under the lights fulfilled "the most alluring dreams anyone ever had, with John Philip Sousa’s band playing dreamy Spanish airs, and, later, car after car passing with people hanging on like swarms of bees." ("I can see them." "Bless you, baby, so can I — one foot on, one foot off. T hear Mark Twain is here, but no one has seen him, which is hard to imagine,’ she wrote, I remember. Do you know, she gave a full account of Coxey’s friend’s reincarnation theory: chemistry came into it, and Christ, and Congress too. Newspapers aren’t what they were, thank God, but Easter 1894 the New York Herald gave a thousand dollars worth of clothing to the Coxey marchers though I happen to know one of the California hoboes named Jack London did not wish to change his clothes.") But she really went West, you know, and Florence got sick after they spent a day at the Cudahy Packing Company in Omaha, visiting one thousand hanging carcasses, and the man who gets five dollars a day for sticking ten hogs a minute (a job which in some states disqualified a man from serving on a murder jury), and the children packing smoked meats, and the process of making butterine mostly out of tallow to which is added some small amount of real butter and the small amount of white waxy waste left after the golden mass got pressed from it was used in chewing-gum factories and Margaret reported (!) the only thing not utilized in the whole plant was the squeal of the hog — and what happened then isn’t clear except two other New Jersey people persuaded Florence to go home with them and Margaret remained with a family in Omaha for two or three days more. And then, incredibly, she kept on west. ("She must have had something amazing in her to go away across the country like that — Victorian girl correspondent." "Or she was homing on something amazing she wanted to get. Long skirts, hat — you ought to see the photograph of her on a bicycle I have — she might have bicycled the Colorado trails!" "No.")

Oh she came back; but she went to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, well I told you we don’t know where all she went. It’s in the dispatches. ("You mean you haven’t read them all? I guess I can understand that, Jim— Jim, dear.")

Margaret had her own stories when Jim was eight, ten, eleven, twelve. ("You don’t pretend to know much, do you? with your Taney decision of ‘37 and your Amboy Railroad" — "and the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair if we can come back to it, where according to her report she saw the Cairo Street with donkeys being ridden by Americans, and a Dahomey Village with fifty mud huts and grinning natives with next to nothing on and a witch doctor who cured rheumatism by cutting a slit down your back and rubbing powder in it—" " — in her long skirt and her hat. .")

Stories she told were something else, and this girl Barbara-Jean hardly interrupted except in some mental way during two sudden fragments offered during dinner before the movie, before the night, before this morning shower of love geysering down from pipes that otherwise rose up from far below, except to say she was disturbed by a feeling of. . traces, the word just came out—traces—traces in him like a grain giving off vibes (sorry), some Thing that’s, some Power that — I sound like Total Woman — you’re not aware of it — it’s—

Was it animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Well, since he asked, it was more mineral, but speaking; and it was acting at long range.

A few voices ask inside Mayn, So what’s to be gotten out of this? — all this matter of Chicago tipping westward and the rest?

Answer: The reason why two places there in the shower (New York shower; New Mexico plateau) laid upon each other a congruence that wasn’t bad at all, unlike the reason behind that merely mental union — a late-model shower head that has taken James Mayn, and others in his recollection, from the future (whoever happens to be with him in the cube of the future) and has done what is done to the two of them by what the shower head at once reminds him of and foreshadows, both; and as the void fades, a porch-rooted father, his own, is saying, ‘77/ tell the world" and that nowadays you get one for the price of two. The son’s earth-odored flame of anger sprouts only in the rest of the body, not in mouth or eyes, and later he remembers this — this ore.

But they fade apart, the girl breathing, Mayn breathing, the girl asking, "Do you ever get high?" — he answering, "I get drunk sometimes, but intentionally." "Do you feel there are things you remember only when you’re. .?" "I do." "Because when I was drowsy this morning before we got in the shower, I started remembering the time I was half asleep, really a long time ago, Cape Kennedy." "Too long…" "Yes, but I didn’t mean that; I meant that you were talking in the dark and I saw your face; why was that?" "Guess it happens." "Very funny. I think it was about Chile, I know it was, but I think it was someone from Chile; and you talked on and on, and I saw you being tossed over your own shoulder: why was that?"

You talk back to her at the risk of an equal falling backward through the foreign arms of that Navajo windbag and that Albuquerque environmentalist woman into the cracked Earth whose storms tossed up Ship Rock into time, a wreck sailing its gray-blown iceberg through a landfall.

"I’ve got some jewelry from out there," she says naked and thoughtful in her bedroom; "the men make it mostly, the women are starting to do some, the poverty gets to look like landscape if your car is running smoothly; it was spring and I saw some dry-painting, the real stuff you’re not supposed to be able to see (perhaps that’s sad), and I wanted to pay the people and one man surprised me and took my money. You know how they mix charcoal and vegetable pigments, I mean isn’t that right? on a background of buckskin or sand, so it’s sometimes called sand painting. It’s ritual, it’s a cure for sickness; when were you there?"

She wants to know about geothermal energy, what he knows about, just like a woman — tapping the Earth. Mayn remembers her all over again from Cape Kennedy, she has conviction. Oh she’s in a gap, she’s free, sharp, charitable, in place; will travel when she has to for her magazine and when she wants to, and she wants to know if the geothermal Navajo is in private business and has he dropped all the names he must have acquired — Spanish, European, Christian nicknames, and a secret war name (traditional) — she has a brilliant Bolivian cape, eats Japanese and vegetarian though is into brain parasites lately and may sometimes throw back (all these details of not-yet-knowing-her) the raw fish though they’re pretty when they’re served curled and nestled like white rose petals with beads of quince-colored roe in the middle like a bloom; shares the check but won’t make a fuss if she gets taken; plays squash; does the Plough but not the Headstand; studied physics and banking; broad forehead; plays Rolling Stones and the B-Minor Mass without being well-balanced. How is she so gentle, so accurate? She has avoided losing out. She’d know what to do in a Baptist church, hymnal in hand, or in a high church Whiskopalian. Or when a male neighbor’s thumping on her front door twice in an hour. She has nonetheless just let a second set of keys just appear on the pigskin knuckles of some gloves. How can she be so finely unconscious, naked here? His problem, not hers.

But if (she’s thinking) — look — fine if you’ve got a magma chamber a mile or two down full of molten rock swelling up through a break in the crust, even granting you could have when these sites are inactive volcanoes — and granted hot water under pressure way down there will stay liquid at much hotter than a hundred centigrade, maybe double that; and granted if you bring it up to the surface it’ll flash into steam which you can harness: still, what if there’s no water to work on? And where exactly were they planning (hoping, figuring, fixing) to drill?

He nears — no; hears—the Albuquerque environmentalist lady but in Mayn’s own words retelling to the Barbara-Jean girl in New York some sentimental passion for Zuni grandmas belied by efficiency and the long, taxing drive down through Gallup and its glittering pawnshops full of Indian silver and to Albuquerque. Oh I hear it in our wonderful air out here, Mr. Mayn, another airport poisons the air, wrecks the ears, and what of the Earth itself, Mr. Mayn? — "what of"? she is sounding Indian for God’s sake — I felt the Earth alive right there on my front seat this morning so I want to reach way down. My hands know. And I’m not especially religious, any more than selling time for TV-radio is my religion either, a woman has to have a job — I think we need gas — but the Earth is the Lord’s and the Earth is alive, so how can it listen to us if its drums are busted? Spider Man told the Earth Surface People a ringing in the ear signals death or disaster, and the Earth is one great ear that hears more than what you say; it hears what you mean. I don’t mean you yourself. Ray Vigil tells some of this: you’d be surprised. Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

There’s a second, indefatigable wind the plateau ignores that passes through Ship Rock and Window Rock and crumbled (two centuries’ worth in two minutes) the stone ladder so three Pueblo women got stranded up on Enchanted Mesa when the men were out hunting, close to but not quite the story Ray’s father told him and he told Dina who told it to Mayn — who finds that Jean knows it already, even in his version simplified and alloyed with a certain hydrostatic compulsion: story of the Holy People below the Earth who once upon a time down there were driven by flood and that’s how they came up onto the surface. Like Spider Man and Spider Woman who taught Earth Surface People to weave, but many other Holy People do not speak, and many are not always friendly to Earth Surface People and must be given songs and dances, the Wind People and the Thunder People and Fringed Mouth and Coyote (listen a witch once impersonated Coyote so my own father fell off his horse that everyone told him not to herd sheep on and he wound up in Ship Rock hospital with concussion and delirium); and we cannot forget in terms of our growth potential that the Hero Twins did not kill off all the monsters, so the blood of the dead ones that is dried up into the lava you stand on is not all the blood of the monsters; likewise while the Holy People up here travel on the echoes of the flood and on the Big Screen of the Rainbow, and on the Superwatts of the reldmpago which is lightning in the language of Coronado who came seeking the Seven Cities that were gone by his time but held under the Earth for the future, and the Holy People as they move about now among the Earth Surface People that they created are helpful or dangerous for life is dangerous for it bends into other life, though full of natural resources which matter to the future of Navajo people, these spirits — these Holy People — travel on also shafts of the sun like the wind, you better believe it, for this is not just their speed, it is how they keep in touch with the Holy People who stayed below, yes, oh the professors down in Albuquerque and Tempe think they believe this, anyway some Holy People stayed below through the terrible flood while most of the Holy People rose to Earth Surface through a reed that soon became clogged with viscous, sandy noise, Jean, for the fear of death — there goes the door again — seeped down from above, and Spider Man taught that noise in the windpipe is one of the four signs of disaster—

— You’re not the type to tell this, but there’s a reason you’re into it and it’s not culture and it’s not hobby and it’s probably not insanity and it’s not copy you’re turning out — wait, there’s the door.

Well, those that rose became spirits, and those below have heated that ancient flood with elements given by the Sun, elements like, hell, why not electro-magnetism? until the time when a Navajo will come with a business sense and with vision and with roots deep enough below the dried blood of the monsters and will tap that energy source and bring all those stranded but worth-watching Holy People up to the surface so we’ll have more Spirit and a new time of gratitude between Earth Surface People and the Holy People and the Sun and Moon that ask one death each per day, and above all we will have a Navajo geothermal power source.

Navajo-Ute — get facts straight; think you can lean on the man at the other end of your wire to pick you up? so it’s Navajo-Ute, you said yourself, didn’t you? Something for everyone. Male and female at the dividing line concentrating to keep the Earth from cracking, one knee, one thumb, one jawbone’s like another, even one tail if you don’t get down too close to the bone, but here she comes again like an intelligence orbiting you or you it, she with her knowledge, though knowing her only from our brief docking and recovery at Kennedy Space Center, I’m not inspired to pick an argument which is how the sexes got separated if not created according to Void’s Book of New Navajo — Is it that you’re Divorced Man who confused this with history like secretly getting religion? No, that’s not it. You were created after a geothermal super spat under the Earth so the sexes ceremonially separated. Then the females of the Holy People bore a series of monsters whom it thus became necessary to murder, lynch, subject to a "rolphing" — which the erstwhile editor of the Democrat tells his son meant lynching in 1934 when it was not Indians as a century before but Negroes — eliminate, waste, blow them away, or, as an interested party, ask for their death. So here came the Hero Twins to do the job with a minimum of words and a maximum of lava stamping so hard the plates down deep in Earth’s crust came apart and magma from Earth’s mantle gurgled, welled, bent upward. But where did those old twins come from?

From Changing Woman, Mr. Mayn, explained the Albuquerque environmentalist lady Dina, sure I’ll have another Manhattan, but we should eat and I have to call my husband—

So here came the Hero Twins to do the job, but go way back before the power of this Earth we saw today began to suffer erosion, before breaking sound barriers had to be noisy instead of just a slipping through between, if you see, and we find First Man and First Woman who I think must have created the universe together, but the Navajo don’t say so though what they think is anybody’s guess and might be something else.

No, lady, we think First Man did the job. But don’t sell First Woman short, Mr. Mayn, for she was right there behind him like a shadow that wheels off the south corner of Ship Rock even much later when Earth Surface People learn how to tap the oil, the vanadium, knock power out of a rock, and if I can’t give you this blue-green silk shirt off my back may I buy you a beer? — you know what they say about drunken Indians, and now it’s the anthropological chemists.

But Blessing Way, Mr. Mayn, you might be interested in coming here when they have the ceremonials. Blessing Way is the one that recalls the meeting organized by Changing Woman at which Earth Surface People most of them created by Changing Woman learned about horse and gila, yucca and the storms in the sky and how to use the wind without building magic carpets that carry their own vacuum cleaners you can’t switch off if your husband is a TV sports commentator, Mr. Mayn, with his own plane and I should call him.

But Jean here on Election Day in New York knows stories — the same ones — our Indian heritage inspiring internal decor plus thought about native American history when natural resources become unnatural by excluding Us — and there’s Changing Woman, they say in the ceremonial that Changing Woman is young and beautiful, Miss Universe, and she has this fantastic home on the Western Waters, which is a prophecy of the coming of the Geothermal Spirit—

— Now you’re being facetious, Jeanie.

And since, Mr. Mayn, we are stopping (Dina of New Mexico had said), you can learn the word for gas—chidi bi to (‘‘car’s water"), they speak the language more than write it.

But, Dina, where did First Woman and First Man come from? That is, just to get my facts straight, did they sail in on Ship Rock? this would have been when it was active. I can’t keep all this from getting practical.

First Woman and First Man were transformed from two ears of corn, it’s what the Navajo say and it’s easier for an Anglo to believe, a white ear, and a yellow ear, white for woman.

But if I am to cover this story I have to know for sure beyond a tincture of doubt who was the father of Changing Woman’s Hero Twins.

What’s the matter? (a nearer voice asks like a pillow) did you hear something? Do you want the answer before brunch, old man?

Raymond Vigil, portly, young, beamingly serious busybody, and Dina West, cool, kind, healthy, melancholy, Anglo environmentalist lady speak at the same time in the void of your head: I am no Mattie Grinnell who at a hundred and one went to Washington on the Poor People’s Crusade and was the last full-blood of her tribe but her Indian name also meant Many Roads, and what’s around now is a new type that sees the land not only as what the treaties took away with only promises to pay but what lies under the land and does not only lie but shifts its energy and is in turbulence.

God I’m sick of energy.

My grandfather got mixed up with that march of the unemployed in 1894 when he went out looking for my grandmother who was only twenty and wasn’t even his fiancée yet. There was at least one Indian on that march.

Well, there is something in that story you know that the great She lay upon the Earth in anger, scratched it with her nails until the minerals, the coal, the mica, silver, gold, and vanadium were heated up into her by a process whose secret has been lost but was fed by all the desire of the Holy People Left-Behind-Underground, who raised such an upward pressure of passion for her which came together by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost that new coordinate shafts of magma dikes formed so she grew hard with minerals radiating into her which came together yet by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost fell apart in her, giving off two fields of flesh which grew to be the Hero Twins.

Sure, Mr. Mayn, if I could speak I’d say we could drive all day all night in my late-model Dart into the sky, my husband has his Thunderbird—

Wait, Jim: no one interrupted you; go on, what are you waiting for, your breakfast? What about an organic Bloody Mary for Election Day?

My ex-wife’s dad drank dry Manhattans.

Wilhelm Reich drank Manhattans.

I think church organists drink Manhattans.

Maybe they like something special.

My wife’s father played the piano, I’m told.

Nonsense to all this mineral cookery. Changing Woman conceived those Twins by the mere advent of puberty. What traffic needed she with a male? What mere equality?

I hope you will do something with the airport question, Mr. Mayn, local though it is, yet readers in the East could put it together with their own priorities.

We hope you will do something with the joint geothermal technology-sharing project possibility, Mr. Mayn. Did the car rental take your credit card?

Nonsense, Jimmy — the true story — but what about your grandmother? She went out to the Chicago Fair and came back with Coxey’s Army marching on Washington?

Not "Jimmy," please… no, she knew Coxey and met the reincarnation man Carl Browne and some blood-medicine seller from Chicago, who was called the Great Unknown but so far as we know she wasn’t on the march, she was back home in New Jersey long since. I think she said the march was at least one-third correspondents.

O.K. If not "Jimmy," then not Jeanie. The true story is that Changing Woman was impregnated by the rays of the Sun and by a shower of water: I’ve been out there. I have a silver and turquoise buckle.

Well, I been down to Ecuador on my way.

"Scrambled eggs are up!"

On my way where?

Something special. An onion for sure, and the dark mushroom oiling a touch of sweet invisible as a spice’s membrane.

You couldn’t get out of your head the bones removed of sacred enemies, and what they did then. But you reported mainly business so you would not get into what they did then (with the bodies).

"I scrambled six big ones."

Well, two or three bodies anyway, dried to perfection in hot hot sand, then smoked. Get a new slant on yourself, one’s body. In the forests of Oriente in Ecuador. No other white man has seen it! Indian bodies softened up and then remolded. By hand.

Hand around the empty, red-filmed glass, while thumps speak against the front door.

"I juiced the tomatoes. You want another Bloody Mary?" She’s realistic.

"I want one just like the first."

"You shall have it."

"Now we’re getting somewhere."

"I thought so, Jim. But I’m trying to find that Bolivian beach we’re sunbathing on. I think of you letting fly in the shower grinning up into the water with your eyes closed."

"I thought I had my back to you."

"Maybe I imagined it. I was daydreaming like crazy. It’s the overflow the last few hours."

"Shower power to the middle class. You’ve got a good shower there. That means you got a good landlord."

"It works better on two bodies. It’s very reliable almost all the time except at eight in the morning Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday."

"Hey, you mean you were daydreaming in the shower?"

"Only because it was so great being there."

"Where did you get to, angel?"

"New Mexico, the usual places. Hey, you can stay here until the people are out of your apartment."

"It’s too comfortable here."

"Do you think Bolivia will get its coastline?"

"They been talking about it a long time, Bolivia, Peru, it’s a shame to have to earn a coastline. It will change the weather."

"Having a coastline?"

"Some crank theory. Coastal configuration-outline, instability of moisture front above coast. Maverick weatherman I tried to get a story out of. Lives like a hermit in the Village."

"A hermit?"

"Oh there’s someone with him, an old girl about his age but her mind is babbling to her from a long long distance away. It’s a railroad flat — a long hall each next room opens into. He’s not interested in being known, but I think he’s confused on that issue, and I’m picking up some terrible risk in what he’s figured out."

"How old are you? I would rather hear about your nineteen-year-old grandmother and the Great Unknown. Did your own mother travel around a lot?"

"One at a time. I guess my daughter would say I’m pushing fifty. She wants to keep me in my place."

"She sounds like she loves you."

"Did you stand on your head while the water was boiling?"

"No, I like to take my time whatever I’m doing, and then I find there is time. It’s like finding you know more than you think you know."

"I know less, always."

"You’re kind of stupidly modest, aren’t you?"

"Look, I’m not on assignment all the time."

"And nobody knows you’re here?"

"You saying someone does?"

"The landlord’s nephew came to the door while you were in the bathroom."

"So the landlord’s nephew knows I’m here."

"He wanted to remind me his father is a ward leader and hoped I would vote today. He mentioned your name."

"The nephew?"

"Yes. Someone came by this morning asking if I lived here. I mean, my name is on the mailbox. The landlord’s nephew said Yes. The man asked if you lived here with me."

"Sounds like a divorce detective."

"Are you one of the flippant ones? Are you only part here?" she gets serious, youthfully, pompously.

"That would be ungrateful."

"You mean I’m ungrateful?"

"No, only the top gurus get to be in two places or more at the same time."

"Why are you so flippant? It’s not funny."

"Who asked for me?"

"Some guy. A Puerto Rican in an army jacket."

‘‘But I have a perfectly good address. It has a street name and a number."

You reach out a hand toward her and she moves her arm. "I’m familiar with your address," she says. "There’s a rather well-known woman who runs a workshop there that I don’t happen to go to, I go to a workshop someplace else."

"They seem to. . work. I mean they do."

"Because they’re so easy to make fun of."

"The self-help?"

"The support system," she responds authoritatively, but then " — just ganging up on the guys sometimes. It’s O.K."

"As for me I would increase my competence in science if I joined a workshop."

"You in a workshop, Jim? Pardon me, but. ."

"Or I would increase my competence in those areas I now have some competence in — don’t laugh — such as the politically sluggish issue of ocean geothermal energy which is in a way the opposite of land because the surface is comparatively warm while the water deep down is cold where I gather they pipe the water from to the surface where they get the good passive solar energy though they have to run the pumps, don’t they? but now if we pollute ourselves a new ceiling to greenhouse the planet, we melt the glaciers and up the oceans, but how fast does new glacier water really sink because what if the surface gets cold in that case?"

"O.K., this is my opinion, Jim. You are locked into some obsessional reluctance, and it comes out sort of meant and sort of not meant. Do you know who came asking about you? Was it connected to the man you saw ahead of us at the movie? Are you involved in something?"

Mayn has seen the streets of Santiago grooving into slippery sluices to acquire momentum-wise the passive energy of people-bodies in the manpower sense sliding toward consolidation into a new power base as if a dictator without imagination could open national resources and reserves without being one himself, or are these "bodies" sports fans? for the tilted streets all sluice toward the Stadium (its inherent grandeur captured in the name of sport and even the social), while economy dictates that via compaction technology a percentage of those who gain entrance through their togetherness among all others are not seen to leave the Stadium.

"Where’d you buy your shower head because it’s a powerhouse."

"I’ll tell you. And if someone is following you, I don’t care. Because we’re here having brunch and if you’re here that’s O.K., and professional intrigue is anti-family — it’s an anti-family bomb out there way at the outskirts."

Sure, sure, he’s familiar with that one, his own family go way back into the mists of continental trek, and (agreed) if at this point in the century extreme left and extreme right be no different except in religion (whose entertainment is openly embraced on the right) and in the style of wealth-holding (which on the left requires more pomp), what is there for us except private life? Yet to agree with her and (who knows?) her hormones might confess that political power is more and more a South-American-style spectacle you witness from the orchestra or upperdeck practicing your job of fact discreetly: which has been for donkeys’ years the policy he reached precisely through giving up on family, not political, history. Yet she didn’t mean, Forget political integrity-action; that’s not what she meant. She meant intrigue of surviolence: what? wait. . violent surveillance, paranational pastimes like assassination, more the spirit of participation in these, boytime with no more Caring for History than a disciplined hit man’s automobile accelerator explosion whose anger is perhaps lost in the shoulds and distances of some father’s disapproval or some mother’s or just overarching miasma of absence. Yet—

"Don’t you have a buzzer?"

"There he is again — the buzzer’s broken. Weird: he was knocking before to tell me it was fixed."

"That was three things on his mind: the election, the Puerto Rican, and the buzzer."

"Your sweet stuff distracts me."

Tall girl in white terry cloth, hair dark and damp — she’s looking down at him — you — in his shorts. What is this? She’s getting younger before your eyes. Does she now have the technology? To colonize space, that is. She falls from a beautiful height upon your — his — neck, his shoulders, chuckling through her hair and into his throat. She wants to know his birthday. Same as his grandmother’s, etcetera. "That thumping," she looks at him cutely, "that thumping on the door won’t go away."

"It won’t?" he says. "Better find out what it is."

She rises away from him leaving him feeling naked, and turns to leave him but the thumping on the door reminds her: "You weren’t really serious about not dreaming. You sure you don’t?"

"Answer’s still No," he stubbornly leavens his reply.

But if he did dream, she ponders, moving away. .

He would dream, he answers, maybe all those books he tried reading one chapter of, you know.

She says it doesn’t sound right. She’s gone away to answer the door, leaving him with love and, well, technology beyond el toaster and her anxious suspicion of fiberglass adrift in the lining of her oven — call in two hundred thousand ovens. What history will he find if he truly enters Spence’s life. His own? Her apartment is like his head today, and there’s a danger at the door, potentially historic, hence with its tedium to work through. He would rather discount it and weigh her breath spilling him forward, for at his age he is in love-again now with a person other than his one-time wife, so a front of private life spills forward, though he knows he has been followed lately, though it’s perhaps par for the course, like some shadow of bomb-war or throw in disarmament with the shower water. He meditates in his shorts upon the shower head, for it has taken him — you — a ways into the future from here, and the weight of the water’s raying wash has turned to a force that can so re-matter what the rays hit that you wonder the water can be so real. Except that you don’t wish to ponder that future force that deconstitutes and works on two not only one, a shortcut toward colonizing space transferring two into one — the thought makes a relation that is so rough you’re thrust into where you are, like future forced you to step back into the most alive.

"Did you ever see that movie? — I mean, you know, not coming in in the middle?" She’s here and sits down hard on his lap, tall and subtle enough to carry his love into the Great American Question Who was here first? and beyond.

He doesn’t want to get around her. "But is weight slow?"

"It’s steady," she guarantees. "It’s steady?" she asks the void.

"That’s what I was thinking in the shower."

"We had a great one. Slow as weight itself," she says. "Do you ever feel," she wonders, "that we fit into a large life that doesn’t much know us but — holds us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?"

"Well, let’s not tell it about us," he seems to agree, and she puts an arm on his shoulder and frowns.

"It is beyond understanding us," she pontificates softly.

"It’s still fun being here," he is going to say but instead out comes, "I think I have to go and ask it a few questions. It’s fun being here, Jean."

"It is," she agrees; and feeling her legs across his all over again, he finds that she doesn’t yet know what she wants of him, so he brings the question inside himself, switches the sexes to protect the innocent, and now sees he’s had the question in him all along. To be sure, it’s shared, but at the moment he was here first.