Women and Men

Larry

The word one heard was "homework," heard sitting at one’s somewhat small but new and not-cheap old-fashioned roll-top desk, the only word one heard aware that one’s mother was leaving was "homework," not "housework." Her last sentence (oration in espahol, a language for New York and for today, one’s father has assured one, for today’s complex horizons while the bilingual subway skips the horizon and goes under it) was heard only in that last word "homework." Like she’s been speaking in some next room.

Well, she had been. And with one’s erstwhile father. But like soundproofed with the door closed, and she seemed to throw it open for that last word homework which now therefore (though no echo) felt chock-a-block with housework, the code-word key-word clearing the voice-print of one’s mother’s ongoing discussion if that was the right word with one’s father who was in the habit of settling pre-contract differences with her out of court until it was too late for any kind of contract. Except, well, you know, a contract. Marriage contract. For a kind of new marriage.

Upon which both together seemed to laugh and she said low in this direction not the phone’s, "Oh Marv you know what I’d really" — succeeded by a murmur, and if not any more a liquor snicker or a courting snort at least a fickle chuckje and a pretty heavy sigh—"You look radiant!" — that came together into Jne untranstonguable impact in the next room the sincerity of which one did not wish to witness, having failed oneself to receive the incoming phone call (failed to make it one’s own, failed to will that it be from Amy), while forced to witness one’s parents in the next room in any case or along any curve clothed or unclothed, because one had acknowledged one’s existence by answering the "homework"-ending sentence "Yeah" (the cornerstone of one’s active vocabulary yet not one’s private).

Well then, ‘‘ Yeah," one answered, letting it slide off into the other things to be said to one’s mother or for that matter to one’s father if one had found the thoughts to go with those things. Not "Yeah, Ma" or "Yeah, Mom," which she, naked or dressed, nude or unnuded or denuded, objected to, but not "Yeah, Susan" (which she wants) either, because one does not feel right saying "Susan," which one’s Dad quite understands, and which one undertook to explain to him one Sunday morning amid much nodding of heads, first his, then one’s, then his and his again and yet again, then out of pity one’s own — out of pity or in time to Dad’s rhythm, one’s own head together or not quite, yet not with his then or now because often these days of raised consciousness he is too busy nodding, naked with one’s mother nodding, nodding, naked together spooning yogurt together, spooning, dripping a blob of white-filmed apricot like it had a cottony mold on it off the end of his yogurt spoon, nodding so as to transcend one’s own "Yeah" in answer to one’s mother’s mysterious oration depicting the life of her leader like that explained fathers and husbands, climaxed by the word homework, not assignment.

But one says assignment—one is in the big league if not big time, no longer in high school where assignment was also said, but college, for one is on the production-possibility frontier fully employed trading off guns and butter or highways and housing along all the points between no butter and all guns (dry) and no guns and all butter (sticky), the frontier (also called product-transformation curve) along whose arc are targeted all the points of well-oiled trade-off whereby one may surrender so many guns to get so much added butter or produce ten less butters to get two more guns, and on this menu of choices, this curve of output pairs — two million tons of food to fourteen million tractors, four million to twelve, six to ten — on this range of combinations, a week or more may be spent in the big time, the big league, firing one’s rounds of animal fat (leading one’s moving target) while spreading one’s arms as wide as there’s bread to spread them on, staying busy on the production-possibility frontier, not falling away inside it where point U marks the warning flash for Unemployed Resources, big lag, let’s say.

For one is in college, one is in the flow now, one can split one’s mind and, for a second, step outside the Gross National Product of which one is fast becoming a part and see that GNP equals Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure and see that if Net National Product is GNP less Depreciation, that’s what one may also be joining, for, big time or not, one feels the onset of time’s warp, and if one’s tennis forehand is improving one yet feels a depreciation in, as one’s father will say over his cocktail-hour joint, the quality of life, one sees this concretely and without bullshit in the cracked handball wall against which one lashes one’s forehand or in the new distance from any such wall when one is at the Manhattan apartment of the revised junta and not in Port Adams though this has to do with the changed equation between one’s married parents, and apparently not to do with what is no less true, that one is in college not high school any more with its occasional substitute teachers yet only in truth a potential continuum of substitute teachers, for one enjoyed modular classes in Port Adams, yes the school was often better not worse than what one’s got now in the big league so that one is inclined, like one of those lines the man calls a curve, to shoot up one’s arm saluting the schlock of collective education and when recognized by the amazing short man in the black shirt up at the blackboard ask a very general question about the point of it all.

But one is only inclined.

The short man at the washed blackboard — one has described him to Amy when she phoned from work and got one out of one bed or another — Manhattan or Port Adams. The phone’s voice so warm that Amy’s employee cheek seemed pillowed on one’s own — even on one’s own breast, or chest, patiently listening to one’s unemployed description of the amazing Professor Roger Rail until this employed twenty-three-year-old older woman radiant Amy warming one’s whole body from cheek to pyjama pants must say, "Got work to do, Larry — oh by the way, babe" — asking for information de pronto (suddenly)—de repente! (suddenly)—impulsivamente, Latin passion oh beautiful Amy Hispanic heat sin la reflexion debida—"oh by the way, babe" (she says), "what’s the name of that nice newspaper guy who’s taking you to the game?" — but not before one has made her outgoing laugh come in along the phone wire bathing the whole side of one’s somewhat unshaven face, for one has been describing Professor Roger Rail. Assuredly an amazing customer the man in the black shirt at the washed blackboard who starts to write upon that tabula rasa only to abort his oracion, stop his chalk, lean on it and push pensively off into the vertical space just off its surface, and give the assignment for next time, which means the next day that one and one’s fellow classmates with him in Economics meet, but not always the next day from this, he not in a suit but in black shirt and long black sleeves so his white hand fingering his chalk looked there like the pale bald tonsure his scalp makes against the bristling black or dark of his remaining hair. The bald area is time, a time in his life, yet one that has now passed and is surrounded by the hair remaining. He is the medium of exchange here, he is the potential speed with which one’s class leap through the many used but virgin copies of the sacred text, he moves before one a bound variable furnishing the classroom with his unavoidable circulation, he is the velocity of circulation multiplied by M, which stands for one thing suddenly with one oneself and another (Money) with Rail — who thinks in other velocities but not this that one has oneself begun to dream.

And he it is who says, "One may wish to substitute one good for another if. . well… if what has happened?" and who says at some later point in the morning’s curve, "One may frame, yes? a law of substitution which will embrace equality of price, yes? between commodities, yes? as well as the phenomenon of increasing scarcity," and who says, "given an extra dollar of income — a raise in New York, a rise in London, yes? — why one may choose to spend the whole dollar or spend some part of it — and since this dollar is in addition to one’s normal income heretofore, one may call it marginal, yes? and since what happens to it in one’s hand or purse or under the mattress, eh? or in the tight back pocket of your preshrunk bluejeans or a slot in the old money belt (he tapped his paunch above the silver horseshoe of his western belt) depends on one’s own personal inclination to hold on to it or blow it, and since to be inclined or favorable is propendere in Latin which one may safely bet that less than one percent in this room would read even if they could, why one calls the amount of extra consumption generated by an extra dollar of income the (yes?) marginal (yes?). . pro . . pens . . i . . ty … to consume—or MPC — which one may picture. . like so" — the chalk consuming itself like a comet, the graph squaring and lining and dashing itself off before one and one’s male and female classmates on the heretofore washed blackboard as if what moves the chalk were that Invisible Hand Rail speaks of, which a great thinker named Smith said guides each individual through his own mere wish for "security and gain" to use his capital "to promote an end which was no part of his intention" — namely, the interest of society as a whole. So let him alone, let him be — and a roomful of hands write down the words (but did he say them? and is this, then, telepathy?) laissez-faire, which is the same in Spanish. Yet if embedded in everyone else’s property one’s property is one’s own, the shtik is more co-op than condominium— face—"One may plot," "One may represent," "One may argue" — and then like magic his back was turned, and he said, "One" to the board chalked erased chalked erased, washed with the manual action of his mind into soft, gray-white nebulae of layers — his thing, one thought, his world! one thought. And one said it to Amy, whose soft, pale hair surrounds one by surrounding her ear and her receiver at her end, which is a desk at a foundation—foundation, the word attracts, envelopes, envelopes and erases all the curves one can think to draw between the vertical and horizontal with their reminders of the hypotenuse of junior year in Port Adams, that shortcut to Diane’s through used-car lot, church playground, shopping center’s parking lot where Mother Susan’s trunk was rifled while she was in buying a last-minute buttondown for one’s birthday with, under the rear collar button, a fag-tag loop Diane with Visine clearing up her eyes crept up behind one one day and snipped off — a beeline, no curve like these curves a professor sweeps away with a black-sleeved thrust of himself and all his Ones enveloped by Amy’s foundation, which is her job, from which at twenty-three years old in the morning from eight miles away her invisible hand touches one’s unemployed pyjama cloth, augments one’s marginal suspense, propounds yea extends one’s capacity to hunt down the curve of one’s desire, down from up where hovering hung-up above the landing pad, strutted, outstretched, and hang-gliding, flapped and blown by winds from the window of the sky, one seems to reach one’s base for the first time, to make love, juntarse (for love is reflexive, one has found out for oneself not in the book), consuming the reflexes as Amy’s real job consumed (when she called at nine-fifteen in the morning) consumed and erased the picture of the ecognome skating his thing, his thought, across the slate walls of a carpeted cave, the bell you see but don’t hear of the mountainous bell curve showing the normal symmetry of error, and the tilted long-tailed

skew capturing the odds on oddity, yeah, those far-out deviations that may upset the science of one’s laws, her real job nine to five consumed one’s own ragged schoolkid schedule and one’s late bed and one’s eighteen-year-old unemployed pyjama cloth and until she then asked for information and one felt a flickering substitution of the older man in question for oneself, and one said, "James Mayn," etcetera, consumed even almost the black synthetic cloth of the amazing Rail’s shirt susceptible to butter more than bullets until now just nightfall at one’s roll-top desk angry that the phone was not Amy, hungry for peanut butter in the kitchen on the far side of one’s parents’ secret junta of sounds and lingering here to feel, if one can, one hand through all one’s assignments, one modulus through Music, Spanish, English, Physics, Eco, a curve (say) that’s coming from far off and that when it gets here doesn’t meet either of the two half-lines half-framing it notched vertical and horizontal which Dr. Roger Rail likes almost as much as his curve, a line with dots on it, scheduled stops on a crooked airline’s great arc of route, spots of double quantity where vertical and horizontal by thought’s invisible lines intersect on their way elsewhere.

"Ships in the night," one’s mother is heard to say to one’s father, who says, "Well, not quite," and then without warning, "Oh Suze!" Then, "Let go of dependence, Marv." "Oh Suze." "It’s hard, Marv, I can’t do it myself sometimes, it has to be hard." "Suze." "Friends." "Friends."

The husky voice is made naked of its huskiness — its husk, one adds, reading, "As population doubles and redoubles, it is exactly as if the globe were being halved in size," but wondering if the globe is not also a template constant and unbroken and even like the temple of one’s home limitless if understood — hearing, "Can I make you a cup of tea while you’re getting dressed?" and "But Marv, we’re surviving, and risk is always, you know, painful — no thanks, I’ve been on a juice trip all day — and Marv I don’t feel I’m being, you know, had any more — you know? — hey I am dressed, I’m going like this." So one thinks of the clothes of her date, wondering who phoned.

Fading down a warp into dark dimension not like humor, no, not like humor, a curve by the amazing aroused unsuited professor, but the curve itself maybe not amazing with dots on it, etcetera, then suddenly a new curve crossing the northwest-southeast curve southwest up to northeast, but, unlike Rail, his curves obvious, oh Amy the whole thing obvious to the point at which it might fade out on you — on one — into such a rolling tilt (trick of the eye or not) that the first curve’s point escaped up the black sleeve of the bald man’s shirt just as he said, "Concave," and was saying, "One may plot. ." and bringing the chalk toward his mouth so that concave became an elbow’s right angle at the instant that the unknown but not nameless girl (just a hair more voluptuous than likewise blonde twenty-three-year-old Amy who is worth a hundred of her who though unknown is also known elsewhere in the space-time of the classroom’s fall as Mary Minsky) outlining and again and again outlining her name, decorating her name in soft pencil in her notebook near one’s elbow so that one moved one’s desk closer to see, suddenly crossed her orange legs — snug orange tights for November — as if she were getting ready to start filling up an exam booklet: upon which instant of rising value the attention of the hunched vertical maestro (teacher) at the board and that of one’s sedentary own horizon met from two distances at what would have been an equilibrium (even given the difference between one’s own side perspective and Rail’s frontal) had not some doubt come into play as to the behavior of the variable in question, for had one here an instance of suddenly increased demand causing the price of equilibrium to travel right up the supply curve, or, since the quantity of what was available had perhaps (though one couldn’t tell for sure) not increased, had one here (had we here) a supply shift where the commodity or good becomes harder to get (whether really lessened or artificially lessened) so that equilibrium price now traveled leftward up the demand curve?

Was she, in short, more in demand or was there less of her available, as the eye ran neutrally landing here upon all her points curving always through the locus of all her possible points into the void of one’s own surplus shortage opening around one a space of fifty-minute hours bound into an autumn of weeks during which the class’s course deepened and was the same, was nothing next to all that came between each gradually numberless class meeting, was also one room one went on in from one point to another, straight or around, until against the trips between two parents in one home, between two homes instead of one, two domiciles with one empty ceiling on what to expect, between two parents become one-at-a-time-in-their-lives, the points thrown out by the amazing Rail could sometimes seem one conscious curve of all history — resources, costs, alternatives, the menu of choices along the production-possibility frontier — at the same time that as one smiled at his salt and gusto and the pomp of his sheer brain, his One everlasting and his fraction fractured by fractions, the incestuous blackboard deepening from rasure to rasa (while cielo raso, ceiling, is now not above but adelante, before), and his secret yen (he said) to open up the Rockefellers, dissolve the mysteries of distribution and oligopoly pricing to see strange profits rise during recession like energy made of nothing, new pride out of depression, one might fall inertly or grow into the inner or under concavity described by Rail’s waterfall contoured down the big blackboard with such alegria, such potencia, such Latin heat and so repente that the snap of the chalk split in mid-course released from the class en conjunto a laugh of relief that, across the cosmic vacancy of the board he had been moved to saltar de gozo, leap with joy—exalta-cionarse if one’s dictionary can hold such a word — pouring, precipitating, sending that curve down that slate sky to transcend, beat, swamp, wipe out points and show concavity itself, that the maestro may muestre how a bowed-out, concave curvature of the production-possibility frontier depicts the "law of increasing relative costs." But the waterfall was due to retract its short life, for the red-faced bearded student Donald — Donald Dooley — who came with knapsack crammed to the seams and topped by a tight-rolled down sleeping bag as if to pillow him against tripper’s whiplash was always challenging Rail.

Let there be curves for all events! cried Rail — the tool, though, has no more use than its user gives it.

I have a vision, however, Donald the knapsack man breaks in, I see a geographer in his tower formulating countries by their shape.

Meanwhile the economist, says Rail, cannot conduct controlled experiments.

But what, says Donald Dooley, will this neutral policy-science of yours do for those unknown statistics that don’t get their fair share of the gross national theory?

The question all in all joins one and one’s fellow students for a moment uneasily against the man in the black shirt and on behalf of the guy who with his knapsack has come in out of the urban wilderness to ask what he has to ask. But Rail has a southwest-northeast curve up his sleeve and out it comes. But not a curve at first sight — a straight line he calls a curve which then vibrates and loosens into local hammocks stretching and bowing while that straight line from corner to corner holds firm. For one has here (yes?) — the words are withheld for a moment of awful possibility during which someone at the controls on the other, the far, dark side of the blackboard seems to have thrown onto it the lines of this possibility that, having overlooked what will now be shown one, will reveal to one that one is a prisoner concentrated in one’s own home, though which home one hasn’t time to see — the one within striking distance of golf port and air course or the one near the long, narrow women’s restaurant with the big plate-glass window on a street in the City.

"No tools are neutral," Rail was saying — and the point would go on into the next week if week is the word — and de repente one saw form on the board a second southwest-northeast hypotenuse hammocked below with saggier bows likewise labeled with national initials—"Put these in your provisions for the long trip, Donald" — for here were graphs of injustice, graphed inequalities, on one side income distribution, on the other concentrations of wealth compared to yearly earned income. Rail’s points were two (but do they fade as one makes them, Amy?): first, that pre-industrial economies showed more inequality of income than advanced economies while holdings of wealth were spread less equally in advanced economies than are annual earned incomes; second, that these inequality curves implied in advance a wish to guard against extreme inequality, yes?

But while all eyes turned to Donald Dooley’s quite electrifying "No!" and to his combed barba and his blue-eyed iron and the lumps and pricks and metal-looking edges packing the khaki knapsack occupying the desk seat beside his, one’s own eyes found in the silver horseshoe bell curve lying on its side buckling Rail’s belt and half hidden in the stress of his paunch the making of new equals, like equations so weird that like digits on the same Invisible Hand their kinship was the void with which they threatened sight. Hey!

And while one heard the campus camper Donald the survivor al campo raso, the viajero y autostopista, retort in another medium but like a standard metal template laid down for pattern, "You’re telling us those curves defend the workingman under capitalism but you know as well as I do except it doesn’t freak you out that they secretly annihilate socialism, and those curves whatever you call them are next-door neighbor to that Italian Pareto whom you yourself would never call a Fascist maniac" (laughter set loose in the room, rising like hope, falling like breath, like eyes before staring power) "yes that Fascist statistician who made those charts you know that show that income is distributed the same in all countries no matter what political institution and tax system you have, and as for no controlled experiment, Doctor Rail, what about the man in the big bank across the river — what’s his name? you know — who says O.K., guys, we raise the interest rate tomorrow morning, and Doctor Rail none of your equations is telling us that the workers spend what they get and the capitalists get what they spend and telling us that we own seventy-five percent of the world through multinationals and if you want the GNP of Iran your same old equation C plus I plus G ought to be divided by CIA — because the CIA rents Iran, mon," one found Rail looking at one and saying what he then seemed to see that one knew (though perhaps not able to imagine one looking back to the night when one had leafed beyond, leaped ahead of, next day’s assignment through the skewed and sacred text like a diviner celebrating chance), "Lorenz curve, Donald, Lorenz curve," but Dooley cried, "What is economics, Rail?" and Rail, looking all around the room while simultaneously up the warp of the girl’s lap next to one, said quietly for a laugh, "It means ‘housekeeping’—Greek for managing a household," and when Dooley groaned and reached over and slapped his knapsack, Rail turned his attention to one and said, "Larry, I haven’t seen your hand up this term, what do you think of these curves?"

Well!

One might have answered,’ ‘They are a convenient method of representing the difference between income property and income from work." But one found oneself thinking that though of course Rail could not know that according to one’s mother Susan one is "too fucking smart," somehow Rail knew one’s name — wow! — and thinking that by some new math to divide C plus I plus G by C plus I plus A might yield G over A, one actually said, "I think these curves are a way to get from one point to another point and back again," to mild titters male and female, while then one shot from life to Eco and back as between Adam Smith the father of the Invisible Hand and Adam Smith who retired to take care of his mother knowing as well as the capitalists he left to their own devices that to fleece the future of its true unknowns the employers clipped the present to make it come true. But, following the normal bell-shaped curve of error, one’s concentration turned so repente through the horseshoe buckle edged by plump puffs of stress that one reached Lorenz through an unprecedented equals sign between the elastic modulus for Volume-Receiving-Stress and the form of Rail’s Velocity of Circulation. But Lorenz! — the name — it rang a silent bell in oneself. And whatever Rail said now of pure economics in this class this time or next time or several-times-this-class, or whatever he said of the apparently neutral theory that reducing income inequality won’t increase saving among poor people — one could not help contracting (if not shrinking) toward one’s home or homes where, being their product, one then felt the talk of one’s parents touch one so that like a snail’s raw lip one sucked back out of sight, or like a turtle, spider, or person of one’s acquaintance retracted liable limbs and contracted in or out of the harsh light that was invisible to parents debating the marriage contract that one sensed must be so late—"God, Sue, next thing we’ll be on a regular budget" — that when one’s female parent said a year or more ago, "Every other week, condoms," one must question what they would be for — the condoms. For even if, as Mom said, "we spend the same whether we budget or not," Susan and Marv who once were supposed to have been one seemed now two, as if a template had got warped between the first and second print — do you see, Amy? Yet these two people, Susan and Marv, one’s parents, were so contracted into one oneself they seemed to be oneself until, by a heretofore unheard-of trick of substitution without trade-off, one economized on action, put Amy in a class by herself where no longer employed by a foundation on research into right-brain projection for the handicapped she spent her days finely, subtly, warmly outlining one’s name in the palm of her hand like a model of something in the invisible and intimate void separating one from her only for the duration of the entertainment, which turned heartfelt stress into such storyteller’s speed, sweep, and volume that all one spent one saved, and a beautiful hand, a girl’s strong hand, a father’s empty hand to grip at a distance, a mother’s rule of thumb were one that put together such amazing tales by wielding a modulus, an elastic modulus of common ground between the change that stress gives a body’s volume and the velocity of circulating money which Rail could make circulate — blood money — circulate through all the curving continents of a globe that is believed but not seen except by the unseeing totals of that blood which one has paid and might again to unclench one’s parents from what’s bigger than the both of them, the ruling junta of their Open Marriage.

"Larry ought to get laid" — the word issues from the junta like a bulletin, like the ring of a bell telephone, like a parent, like a digital stat. A breach of their own open laissez-faire, for justice sake! But who said it? The junta en conjunto? Or one’s own congruence waiting elsewhere like an Unknown Soldier? Or a Buenos Aires cab’s exhaust pipe? an exhaust pipe which James Mayn was once invited to screw, having asked a man on the street where he could coger (catch) a cab when Argentine coger means something else also. Or did those words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the right or creative side of Amy’s beautiful mind dropped out of college and learning her living in the air force of the employed? Or did the words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the grin and nod on the far side of the eighteenth green of an IBM golf course — not exactly one’s favorite game — after one has said, "No, you go ahead, Dad," who might smile at home after the aforementioned words "Larry ought to get laid" and almost but not quite bring himself to say, "Leave him alone — he’s not indifferent to sex." Or (yes?) did the words "Larry ought to get laid" originate somewhere in the anger (yes?) jumping from an unexpected level of what proves to be the next room in spring twilight in what used to be one’s only home when one (one then tends to forget what it was that one) said, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" — a question, a query, a fair question (yes?), a fairly clear question, not a queer query, not a demand, but oh an error, a dumb error that multiplies the more one thinks, for she wants us to let her be, for at the moment that one asks, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" she is standing on her head doing the sunset naked and looking just as young as some of her seems more upside down than the rest of her, for "Look, Larry" she has had (O.K., O.K.) and out of a ("Larry, you’re living in a—") vacuum she has been addressed by her son as not-Susan, an address she has changed in her head and will soon change in fact so the future can come true, though for these uneconomical months she’s living at the old address, and Dad’s the one in Manhattan though as he has said (when a third party asks), "I come and go and so does Sue" — which is what in this future night at a Manhattan roll-top desk open to laissez-faire one hears her doing, coming and going, speaking on the phone to the Unknown Date whom Dad has answered the phone call from though one oneself, twisting or rising or shaking free of this domestic freakdom (yet not free), still hears with mixed feeling above the fractions and equalities of Rail’s extra-credit problem, in which hunting for the investment multiplier that makes a drop in the nation’s bucket expand like liquid oxygen in the vacuum of space one kept backsliding down the more than forty-five-degree slope of the Marginal Propensity to Consume because one could not get hold of why Rail called MPC and Marginal Propensity to Save "mirror twins" when they were so unlike each other, the female voice of Amy now doubtless home from the foundation asking whatever she likes to ask — anything, Amy, anything, my constant heart, mi corazon, my hot Hispanic hand — the name and address of the man (Mayn) you saw me with who — genius that Mayn is beyond that inkling one has that he has been here before and has seen it all happen that’s now happening to one— has two extra tickets for the game, not just one extra, and so Mayn will be going with one and Amy.

Or ask what a modulus is, Amy — a constant, expressing like a steady fraction of itself how much a certain property is possessed of something, or a constant factor — a multiplier! for the conversion of units from one system to another (yes?). Or Amy ask to be made to laugh because the last time Amy came — the last time you came, Amy — one felt in the hand a mixed feeling, a tender chill and in the gray-green eyes something put in place of something else, and she wished to know how well one knew Jim Mayn, politely anxious, not just trouble-at-work but, in the line between what showed and what didn’t, a void or nerve (of fear?) which one could not figure, just as, to be frank with oneself, one hesitated to broach the question of sex.

And so between the propensity to save what has happened to one yet to spend it, one found oneself so close to one’s blonde twenty-three-year-old potential girlfriend far from the harsh junta’s bulletin of progress toward independence, found oneself telling her a tale of the long day—como le va el dia? how goes it? — dreaming for Amy’s entertainment that one memorable long day — when the new network of the mixed market mechanism seemed to go haywire or beyond itself joining what, among random appointed curves, had not been seen to be connected. For the Chief himself on some royal and ancient green with just the shadow of satisfaction in his frown that somewhere his advisers are handling the economy as a strict father balances his family budget — purses his lips and bends over his makable putt. He has, he thinks, stepped secretly inside his own production-possibility frontier to let the world slide on without him while he takes a bit of recreation. But he does not know what lies baleful between the putter’s ridged-steel face, the dimpled ball, and the cup no Secret Service could have thought to check out beforehand.

And so the Chief starts the ball rolling along a curve he has foreseen for the ball should break left; yet some presence is missing, he must ask his advisers, some gravity — for long before he can send the ball on its way, a "big board" (they nostalgically call it — a big board down Wall Street way) has so previewed this event through sequences that can yield it that the Chief and this event have been pre-established as actual. Now, this "big board" (which actually has almost nothing in common with the old Stock Exchange) is neither one board nor a board. Instead it is a new global network constantly creating itself in numbers, template curves, possible consequences, and desirable equilibriums, as the locus of all Congruences filling the mixed-market mechanism. That one-time mystery which Smith had said to leave alone and Keynes had said to intervene in now by its mutual Mind constantly projects its own destined Congruence which at each "big board" center is all plugged in but actually more conceptual to the touch; do you see, Amy? Each misnamed "big board," then, is not at all two-dimensional except in samples momentarily abstracted for experiment — say, the effect of womanpower relocation-and-job-training plans on the stubborn Phillips curve that ties decreasing unemployment to wage hikes — not two-d but a system that predicts and that is known by those who know it best as a field of all possible curves whose constant changes occupy like a position that roughly resembles a headless, torso-less human form, armed and legged, a four-d field of intersections always but secretly mindful both of the crossings of such old slopes as the Demand and Supply, and the absolute refusal to cross one or another of the curves (or schedules) that compose an Indifference Map—

an Indifference Curve showing one’s inability to choose between, say, dinner with one’s mother at a feminist restaurant and six holes of golf with one’s father, or two such meals and eighteen holes, and so on; or, along another Indifference Curve, one’s inability to choose between one pro basketball game at the Garden and the promise of one phone call from Amy, or two games and an actual call, or four games and a call in which one consistently interests Amy even in the name and address of someone else, an older man, a journalist whose relative substitution value may be greater because since he may travel to any point on the globe at an hour’s notice he tends to be scarcer than oneself. On this future day, then, the "big board" constantly reconstituting itself all over the globe, simultaneously reaching every direction with mutations potentially infinite yet hugging the Earth’s globe of flat horizons, outdoes itself, transactivates its parts to plot a collaborative global act by which both Gravity and Government are divided by both Agency and Anarchy.

One’s father peers through the wall of the next room and through the back or crack of one’s head trying to shine the hint that one take a two-hour break — an economic pause — from all this homeboundwork to "take in" (one predicts he will say) "a flick." He cannot envision much less see the dark-eyed blonde who hears only one, not him.

Now normally these electronic models plugged in to one another across the nuclear family of nations rule the mixed markets by foreseeing the multiple effects upon, say, Velocity of Money or upon the Global Consumption curves, of any event such as a drop if not a plunge in steel or water production or a local change of Mind. Amy, where is your heart, your hand? — this system devised by forethought beside itself, which controls, say, the arms while seeming to leave free the hands and digits, has so impressed the multinational oligopolists with themselves that they think to transcend those wise Quakers who are said to have gone to the New World to do good and ended up doing well, and they have ceded to the new system a strange measure of what would otherwise have been the Business-as-Usual Profit, fifty-five percent on a new transcontinental Third-World Sewer, one hundred percent on turning surplus soy into air, five hundred on a compact laundropod for nuclear waste. All such foregone! foregone! Forget the Phillips curve — the period’s competitive but transcapitalist. This global grapevine and decision system forestalls the old demand-pull inflation in which a certain curve goes too far and spending exceeds what the economy can come up with; and at the same time the parallel concept is available in the economatriculating templates of the system’s constant Future — namely, it forestalls any ghastly increase of Money, hence of MV in the exchange equation Money times Velocity of Circulation equals Average Price Level times real GNP — for as Rail says to a class suddenly still but for the mixed whisper of pencils and ballpoints chasing him along blue notebook lines, in this type of old-fashioned inflation too much money chases too few goods.

But wait — in a future where buyers’ inflation would be only an all-too-easily-contained beginning, this simul-system, Amy, this world manifold of instant models filled with instant information, can be trusted to expose and defense against cost-push (sellers’) inflation too. Here wages get forced up by unions despite widespread unemployment, so employers raise consumer prices before the worker’s spouse with five extra bucks in her purse consumed with what is to be next grabs someone else’s pushcart and starts down the aisle to the strains of free music. But this inflation, like other mishaps including unemployment itself, can’t happen under the new mutual controls; and while some argue that all the foreseeable futures created by the conceptual templates in conjunction with the vast input of productivity data, infra-red photos of rivers and mountains, and weather-satellite prediction have turned not only a mixed economy into a steady state but life itself into economics, still the system contains not so many future threats as it itself might have been expected to foresee and may be prey mainly to a normal human desire (in some people) not to see what’s coming.

And this globe-net of centers engrosses from Capetown to Kansas City, Brussels to Kyoto to Santiago, all data which the econometric projections and new random models embrace while registering results of events so fast that within certain templates of right-to-know publicity-pattern — and so in the minds of many — the events-to-come have come already, do you see, Amy? (You, for whom one’s fantasies may never be translated out of one’s right brain onto whatever handicapped digital screen; you, whose research in your real daily salaried job yields research that will help, say, cerebral-palsy victims speak and learn with a richness and rapidity heretofore impeded if not just bleeped off and schlonked out by the honchos of the industry who have been more interested in the first two days of birth-defect kids than in the void of boredom and solitary confinement that yawns out like an expanding universe for disabled unknown veterans of the theater of debut, Amy.) So, then, a given new model of consumer behavior, or model of models, may embrace, say, first, such events as, say, these three: may embrace, Amy, first, the impending takeoff of a plane containing pre-flattened, mildly yellowed, but cute orphans from a point in Asia; second, may embrace the plane of plate glass fronting a long, narrow, moderately multinational feminist health-food restaurant where a lean and hungry, hard-to-read young man whose pale, jutting chin contains two subtle scar points of what the mujer with him abruptly calls acne, and whose thoughts (he is aware) undergo breathtaking transformations, sits eating his companion’s sesame roll and butter and facing over his menu a depth of field which embraces both the glimmering plate glass twenty feet away like a lid upon the longish, noisy, aromatic restaurant room, the older woman opposite him who is asking him what he’s having for dessert and is herself torn between two desserts, and on the other side of the glass as if in a next room furnished with an orange compact car, a parking meter, and a hydrant, three persons, two women and a man, who appear bent on destruction; and may embrace, third, meanwhile, hours away, the Chief, who, having lined up his putt, grins, shakes his head, estimates the slope and the break, and with a rhythm that is all sensitivity, putts.

The jets of Operation Adoption somewhere in Asia whine down the curve foreshadowed by the rich click shared between presidential ball and club face, while for the multinational eater, about to be pressure-cooked by means of not sealing but of breaching the gasket-bedded lid, what matters is the parallel, staggered trajectories of bomb and fire and bullet to be launched from the three outside, not that these curves actually come from the projections loomed template upon template by the housework of a system as if its thinking has rewired the world. But to take second things for a second first, where are these events coming from? The system has surveyed Asiatic futures to see what best return can be had from the long-term but now terminated overseas investment there of machines, material, men, bombs, and, more vital, demolition knowhow: what return will be suitable on such an investment? Friendship with those who have been ploughed had been run through the conceptual templates, likewise an agribusiness feedback and cultural exchange such as music and dance groups and eastern theories of peace cum Buddhist child care; but the only future seeming both to approach the desired congruence with the original input and simultaneously counteract certain domestic trends like guilt and the decline of marriage is a transfer of orphans which will fill a near-unquantifiable lag or gap or absence. Yet the system’s economy is to multiply consequences both in scatter-parallel and sequence (like alternatives in sentencing the convict to concurrent or consecutive death penalties or other terms) and the system foresees an East-West secret junta so dead set against the orphan solution, so certain this substitute is not the destined congruence of prior investments, that it must liquidate the moderately yellowed, pre-flattened contents of the plane as a counter act.

Elsewhere the steel industries will have agreed that with the decreasing leverage of unions a few union leaders still powerful because early in the game they were foresighted enough to diversify themselves will succeed in urging a certain bloc of workers that the compounding of steel-substitute and rubber-substitute production, whereby (though only a few know which) either rubber-sub will be made from steel-sub or steel-sub from rubbber-sub, is destined to make the industries so much more invulnerable that unions’ traditional interest in getting a bigger wedge of the pie within the newly stabilized economy where durable-goods sectors no longer show cyclical swings has no more chance now than a chronic slump or for that matter one Indifference Curve to cross another.

Therefore, since the Chief Executive (drawing triangle deltas on a pad to represent the finite increments within his variable putt and his invariable program) will be inclined — can be foreseen — to certify with a very slight hike in steel prices an experimental temporary downturn-to-come in the economy; and since increased prices will not affect demand, so the coefficient of demand elasticity for the products in question is virtually unity, as seen in the influential equation (good for elasticity of supply or demand); and since armament futures are sticky if not in a state of international instability over the effect of these events on mutual exports; and since new domestic disturbances, some even within union families where wives tend to be non-union and work harder for less money, put unions (even marriage) in an all-time popularity trough — the system conceives an explosive resolution to the moderate pressures bearing against the new stability: a dramatic assassination traceable to those in the hire of union honchos and international forces, dependent both upon a substance which (active for no more than five minutes after exposure to the air) explodes when touched by a golf ball that has been in contact with, in this order, a steel-faced putter and a stretch of Bermuda grass, and upon the Chief Executive’s habit of sinking putts only of such short distance that the consequent explosion in the eighteenth hole can comfortably reach him.

Elsewhere, a model restaurant contains, among twelve tablefuls of women plus (and including) a complement of men, two former golf widows, two known underground journalists — man and woman — getting an underground interview with a distinguished but generally unknown South American economist-in-exile who, consenting to be approached, had picked this spot because of his absent wife who knows of it in turn because of two new women friends who know and admire the proprietors who, through many turns, are a couple no longer divorced from each other having reopened a marriage if not a barricade supplied in part by the man’s lucrative lobby against toxic fertilizers including some from South America, and in part by the woman’s organic farm in Dutchess County snatched with a windfall from stock in a body-scan company bought and unloaded during the ten months of her divorce — my divorce, she says; my divorce, he says. Now, sets of sequence set in motion by the global system can break down, and the bombing of the restaurant now so vividly envisioned as to be actual seems in its train of causes — a new Invisible Hand — to be as much too fast to follow as it now seems deliberate, while diners reach gently for a second half-piece of crumbly stone-ground bread or, on a consumer’s whim, some broccoli tart or an earthenware vessel of spring water — or nod and nod and go on slowly munching while on the other side of the plane of glass the three plotters having been so actually plotted along the template curves of the global prediction sequences sidle by the still furniture of the street outside.

Yet if the system has outdone itself by projecting these three events congruent less with the "handiness" of Adam Smith’s old-fashioned limb the Invisible Hand than with its twin trait of being as out of sight as the old and ancient system behind big-board stock exchanges, it yields still in its own until-now unforeseen precreation a mind-blowing safeguard. For having projected instantly a consequence so real as to be actual, the system hence provides itself, to its own actual surprise, with both base and time for countervailing action backward from the projected future which has become as good as present, while these unprecedented redaction sequences (now conceived by the system) seem a prudential future. For the disasters now beginning to satisfy the functions of their prior and apparently independent sequences now are held back as their concepts bend back into this unforeseen dimension, so that with the new future-system working the world is ready for the new laissez-faire. And the waitress makes her way toward one’s table where one and one’s mother (who once forgivably said one ought to get laid but now seems nervous and looking about as if about to see someone) will order carob ice cream. And some amazing stuff goes down. Yet also, as you’ll see, does not.

(Oh Amy, why did you ask one if Mayn knew any Chileans? You could ask him yourself.)

For the giant orphan plane, having lifted off from its Asian field and lost altitude with dramatic suddenness, finds near the water a huge, dry cushion of air current that should not be there and is due to weather activity at a distance, both satellite-observed and program-stimulated — and along this cushion the plane slides horizontally round to limp back and land for repairs.

And the Chief Executive, having reached the lip of the cup, receives a message from his mujer, his esposa, who’s been playing tennis she says, and he thinks for a moment and walks abstractedly away to the edge of the green, before smiling then to his now distant caddy, who holds the flag. Then the Chief Executive waves the back of his hand, upon which the black man who was substituted only at the last moment before the round began picks up the unholed ball and hands the flag stick to the second caddy and follows the Chief Executive, who now remembers, and turns and approaches the black man to shake hands.

One’s audience does not exactly answer — though radiant, she does not answer — she only outlines one’s name again and again until it is barely visible. She is not one’s mujer. Is she indifferent? One senses the curve of her attention, and one finds one has forgotten why indifference curves can’t intersect because this would contradict preferring more of a commodity to less. But she smiles — she is amused! divertida! The hair so different from one’s mother’s. The starts she’s had, too. At least from what one knows of Amy, who, already older than one’s mother when she fell into marriage, has a chance to live from month to month now without that half-visible arc of outside control one heard of like an Invisible future-Hand when one was young, writing on the wall Little Wife, Little Mother, Little Woman, be faithful, be fruitful — and which Susan, one’s mother, speaks of — and which angered her for years and years.

The front door is heard. Open and shut. One is at times like one who has been deconstituted to a scatter of frequencies to be flash-transferred to another place — which once seemed to be one of all those places the older man the journalist James Mayn had been to so that when one spoke of that deconstitution into a scatter of frequencies he shook his head until one said, "Wait, Jim, I think I got the idea from you, didn’t I?" and then he stopped shaking his head and stared through one, as if he knew what came next — for, the scatter of frequencies having been flash-transferred to another place, lo there is no receiver there, or it’s there but, like some Third World depot waiting very lazy for sophisticated lezie and fairey technicians to come to operate it, they haven’t installed it, they haven’t even ordered it — or wait, its concept is there waiting, which is all that’s needed to take delivery.

One hears one’s father sigh. At this point one’s father no doubt thinks Larry is less valuable than Susan, but by a corollary of the law of substitution Larry is cheaper and more plentiful. One contemplates what the Eco class isn’t up to or probably even going to cover — the Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity! The phone might ring. White parents still wait at the airport of an advanced economy. (Did you mean, one’s audience in a class by herself has asked, that some of those adopting parents were having trouble with their marriages?) One moves between two homes that are becoming one—this one in Manhattan, where one’s father is.

Disaster forestalled. Headed off, yeah. But where did these events come from? Far back. One becomes the system for a long second, one finds the Chief Executive’s uncertain wife, his mujer, sitting in a New York health-food restaurant incognita, thinking of broccoli and the smell of a certain face, only to be handed a note as she reads her menu that the young meteorologist she would love to help has been pre-empted by an unforeseen future-emergency. Rising angrily, she leaves the table; she elbows someone in order to flag a cab; she takes the cab two blocks to a phone booth where she dials a distant golf course collect wondering if carob is an adequate chocolate substitute, while the driver knows he’s seen her somewhere. But one steps now outside of the system and into the beautiful face of one’s potential girlfriend, Amy, who is asking a question which one cannot hear through all the outlinings she has made over one’s name and through the sound of that now silent telephone containing the voice of one’s mother’s date. And so one is thrust between some echoing openness of fucking minds and, on another hand, a taxing institution with a capital M one cannot get away from — while through the traffic and smoke of one’s name is asked, "Are you saying that these three events are linked by something like marriage or the breakdown of marriage?" while one substitutes an Amy for oneself asking — but one can’t make the words — asking — one can’t say them — while, ah, for that weird equation between Volume-Receiving-Stress in physics and Velocity-Conceived-Under-Stress in economics, substituting another equation between Lorenz curves that correlate income distributions in economics and the (note the Lorentz, with a t for) transformation by which space and time in physics may be coordinated between two frames of reference at relative velocities.

So that — the bell will ring — so that — the bell will ring and the audience disperse, the class disperse — so Eco can be transformed into Physics in another space or in another space translated into English where another maniac wielding a borrowed ax by Walden Pond can huff and puff, "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools" — so one’s father can enter one’s room and one can ask, "Who was that on the phone?" to which he answers, "You don’t know the half of it," but he has entered one’s relatively new room to ask if one would like to go out to eat at the Middle Eastern restaurant — so one’s family curve adds to the National Net — so the bell can ring in one’s absent mind, the vacuum between Openness and Marriage, two possibilities locused at the phone bell which may ring from Amy in one’s absence if one goes out to dinner now with one’s father who is not happy but is being reasonable, cool, yea scientific — about being open and married. So one makes an effort when he says, "What may I ask is this Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity?" And one answers that it’s the arithmetical relation, see, between a percentage change in the sales of a substitute like tea, yes? — while at the bell which in the silence of one’s vacuum has saved one for the higher cross of Rail’s science and his curves, one knows one must not be saved, even from the crazy tale one admits to an Amy who has not phoned except this morning to ask for James Mayn’s name-and-address (when she must already know — though maybe not enough about mineral cartels, Mayn’s interest in) — to an Amy who is not present in one’s room at one’s roll-top escritorio bought by one’s mother — not present, not here, as one’s father looks down at one’s textbook graphs and says, "Well maybe the bookkeeping stuff will help, but if you get a job in business you’ll have to forget all this and learn some real economics" — to an Amy to whom one says almost but no longer with the scientific fiction of the impersonal "one" which one can’t maintain any more than one is Rail or would wish one’s first name to be Lawrence, "I think I am the reason my folks stuck together."

I am.

But if they have not stuck together, what am I?

I am.

If they have not stuck together I am not the reason.

I am Larry.

I am.