Women and Men

BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHING

BEGINNING TO BE HEARD

Yet we didn’t need to go outside the home to change, we had a set here and one in the next room where a child is doing homework and some of it on the screen, so we have dual screens if we can go back and forth between the rooms fast enough.

To stretch a point. On dual screens wall-eyed twain. ("Bleeps," adds the interrogator in some South American brogue, meaning blips, meaning points, we know by new intuition having internalized the interrogator. Points of light on a vintage radar-substitute we picked up at God prices everybody and her uncle can charge.) Not content with one set. Some inner leap between two separated screens being essential before we end the century in question seated upon the shoulders of Einstein-over-Euclid-man, if not over the shoulder (read soldiers).

But we meant more than weather-air-and-traffic-controller receiver-monitors-you-can-live-with, two screens in every relative home itself tilting always tilting round as we approach. We meant renewable duals between newer screen substitutes that for a day trip or night might accommodate Grace Kimball (who is more or less the multiplier of her workshops) and James Mayn (with his by our calculations parallel and intersecting populations) hear the noise, duple music from two really wonderful people as human as any angel-san could role-model, though two who may yet not meet in person to make (and brand name) exploratory history Recipro-Cal.

But happy with any proven home, we don’t argue with that femoral limb they share: thigh in the beginning angles cohering among the legs holding assembly under that conference table where agreement was general that a power vacuum was a real possibility: power vacuum a daughter found in and (para) for her Dad, but gap of such inner route it sings beneath your skin as if it thinks it’s that quaint spawn the worm we have been out of contact with: not our fault, it’s its turn to phone us we sort of remember on principle. For the one who calls, needs; but the one who is called, is that the strong or the weak?

The mother who left those sons or double-son is still somewhere and so is the promise she left behind that not she but they were the ones to leave. And if receding, she could still be reconstituted at a later libration point ‘tween pulls, because one looks after one’s mother, too, though rebirth’s what we were into, winging it or waiting on it, and if you are going to start taking responsibility, you might let your relations know.

Whatever. It was an intrahemispheric tapeworm yet slower than a gas-sped bullet spun out the rifling of a Colt revolver’s barrel belonging to the Mayn family: a tapeworm slower than the ready-to-eat horses loping down a western valley of red, brown, gray, and darker stone, past a thousand natural sundials, cantering so gently it’s in a slow scale, side by side mindful unmindful of their riders — the East Far Eastern Princess upon her gift from the Navajo Prince, as she called him, a compact black-and-white pony the Princess’s pale bird refrained from consuming; the Prince beside her upon the midnight-blue Mexican mare, his own thick-withered, tempered mesa-bird, whose land of monumental stone and desert-sea, of spring firmament starred red, petaled white, spread blue-violet, among the green of owl-eyed cactus and sinewy pihon scrub, and of winter space, finds its own four corners infinitely outward-bounded god-given; while still further, but, in the gridthink of territorial plot, less than a generation away from a state called statehood, the Four Corners are also, for administrative (read white Anglo, which is — just in case — redundant) clarity, ordained interior (the better to clear you with, my dear, my Laughing Antler, my own Doe Water escaping me yet lingering) and that administrative intersection neat as four joined squares of document paper or an idea in someone’s basic-four-color brain, where the mapped lands of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, abstracts in an infinitely vanishing cross divisions within, willed from a distance remote as that departmental will must always stand from the far corners of the Prince’s cosmos that’s held like his people in his heart where one day this cosmos of his is in part told to the visiting East Far Eastern Princess, who knew only then what she had come to understand, and thought the Indians had something — it all worked together quite sensibly, the forces were visible, by and large — but she thought, too, that there was something more the Prince himself was after.

And to go on (against the returning undertow of an interrogator’s interruption—had come? he demands, had come so as to understand? he complains as if he had not the wherewithal to implement his feeling by juicing our embedded electrodes: you spoke out of both sides of your face): to go on, to bypass these continental sentimentalities Mayn was clandestinely formed by until they questioned themselves one day, our noted tapeworm, intrahemispheric spawn though slower than trajected bullet or breathing horse, has, in case temporarily forgotten, other speeds, other inferred breathing like sound we picked up with our ear to the thigh of the divine that could make us, who now breathless need somebody to recapitulate by, forget that it was just any old fish tapeworm to be flushed out by gently acting bacteria prescribed by him who’s been your G.P. since not even your dying great-grandma can remember; a tapeworm taken out of Minnesota’s thousand lakes by air accompanied by the Ojibway medicine man’s diamond squint (now increasingly embedded in, if not pegged to, the soft swells of the dollar sign), this tapeworm arrived via the Manhattan physician’s fond attention to his diva, tapeworm extraordinary, which was perhaps not hers alone to do with as she pleased, for even after it got flushed away down the diva’s silver toilet, its track clung like experience to the insides of the slowly self-understanding society we’re in that’s capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale world views, even after it had been flushed by the afternoon diva, the swinging, well-sung songbird (read mezzo, read mezzo persona) from her soft system during the two hours between the exit of the brunched, rueful physician and the intercom announcing the elegantly lapeled, mustached, infamously gifted mufti officer whose hands upon neat-cuffed wrists delegated in his other, political sphere to marginal interrogators themselves trained in the best amputation may have crashed clapping through the earshot of friends of her father’s and perhaps her old father’s own amplified earshot head (faraway under house arrest) tortured but not by doubts. But this mufti officer’s elsewhere delegated hands have also here in New York (these very hands alive with knowing knuckles) clapped for her at two performances: Rosenkavalier we remember and (with a significantly different audience) Norma, the Druid priestess — slimmest she’s been during this several-weeks diet campaign, rather dangerously slim as danger approaches across the footlights of opportunity in the officer’s passion and across the intrahemispheric league-upon-league in awesome fear for her outspoken father back (down) home in South America where she the diva no longer hangs her passport, she of the divinely resonant (formerly-until-last-week tapeworm-echoing) thigh (daughter, priestess, officer’s lover, and, in today’s last act, beyond biweekly physic brunches and the hard-core soft-wear spawned much later over every half-lighted inch of her shared bed, now, in her brisk but high cuisine, sacrificing her stomach to her ringed pyre’s flame and a ghastly multiple spawn — (Norma’s little children-san to eat—) she offered in her Manhattan apartment to the military but naked appetite beside her at the stove, his breath upon her shoulder, trading for the omens of her duplex kitchen the real love she’s had of him in her own hemispheric-feeling bed) — where his hands that were out of sight she felt but hands right here, not delegated, also clapped for private performances where each of his "strong-arms" moved each hand to clap on its own in a silence not Zen-proof though contemplative because heard in the warm light of the diva’s bedchamber by the twain. And self-helped by feedback, awareness nowadays gets refined in some adepts such that the soul picks up within the common thigh a noted tendon’s oath that the next rash stride around this jogging track around New York’s Central Park reservoir will cost this lonely jogger a pulled hamstring, but through this oath that the soul picks up it can send back its fine tune to monitor the blood pressure risen expressly to this occasion of two independent observers watching the jogger if not his blood pressure which has risen to turn the neck muscles bound to the shoulder slope to stone (to lead, to consolidated scrap metal he an economist has thought) which in turn made him throw forth his middle-aged knee with a kick so his hamstring foresaw itself about to be yanked and thereupon flashed its elastic oath into that soul-center that’s everywhere but nowhere, and a painfully hobbling hamstring pull was spared the tall, bald, distinguished foreign jogger-economist who’s being watched, he knew, through the sunny trees and rocks of Central Park by the mufti naval officer and elsewhere by the journalist James Mayn, who, unknown to the jogging exile-economist and his enemy and fellow-national the mufti officer, came there to watch the officer as well, whose subtly callused palms even at this moment of political action (read surveillance, read commitment) hold the memory of those dual clappings joint and one-handed in the diva’s bed as, elsewhere in this city which is also an articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, that dimpled, divided, but stereo-attuned buttock-life he clapped also remembers: as when, in turn, bent into a spinal twist in a basement yoga class, the diva’s body complained, except then she could not be sure where the complaint was you know coming from, her upper thigh apparently all kinked but a pulse banging along her other instep thence brinked spaceward — across the room, the roof-like carpet, the floor under the carpet shared by the others of her yoga class — space anyway outside herself like someone’s coat hung in the hall while her soul’s complaining she’s not together.

For, figure it out, you’ve had more than enough time to take responsibility for what you see, even if you now think all you’ve been doing is waiting to remember. For see the diva’s (the lovely songstress’s, the recently officially Swiss-passportable transplant’s) painful if prolific, faintly lyrical, divisions of heart and head: think of it, there was the infamously gifted general officer of a South American navy whose regime’s unspeakable intelligence arm — to its own music — endangers her loved, outspoken father; and here was (in mufti) the graceful man who touched her even with a Japanese ballpoint which left its impress with code-like interruptions upon her satin thigh backstage the night of Rosenkavalier; yes and, to go on, by the same dual but separate-scoped oscillation, there thousands of miles south was her broad-faced, silver-mustached widower father guarded by that navy like an electrified coast to the point of apartment-house-arrest; whereas here, in New York, which is an articulate structure accommodating for her a multiplicity of grand commutes to Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Covent Garden, Adelaide or Sydney-Melbourne (anyway Australia) where Lohengrin and Otello are housed by two turtles copulating if you’ve ever looked at that opera house above the water and if they even bred above water — here in New York, she grants that her operatic life and body fill to bursting with small-scale honesties accommodating her career, her flow of breath — of blood — the breathing of her thought, the honest ungated thinking of. . of — but, to enlist the lyric of that American wartime hit, is it all of her? — of all the range of lusts even to the faintest infidelity of plot-twisting thrill in sauteing for her naked Chilean visitor in her seldom-used kitchen, which is duplex and balconied, the pink, dense shad roe her old friend the Boston-born Manhattan physician had brought her earlier hoping to tempt her for brunch, her own family G.P. if she had a family.

And what is the yes or no answer in question? Do we take all of her or don’t you? It sounds like rape, we mean a little light rape, rape in hopes of romance — but wait a minute, we said nothing about a yes or no answer to that song?

For we move if not exactly from war to peace to war, still from question to question, through long or brief the light makes equal, we move well together, you are magnetic. Yet if meaning something is (really) like goin’ up to someone, as the philosopher saith (to unquote the lisp of some grownup who, hearing the wind the far side of an obstacle drawing us toward the obstacle, hears not the noise of the wind but a song because leave it to a grownup to hear a song in the wind), we now know how to lighten that wide load of going up to someone: what you do is answer a question with a question, a trick used by endangered peoples under interrogation (older far than the manipulative modern Can I ask you a personal question?) but you talk to the question, point to it, and you promise it all the feedback it can hold of questions that readily come to mind, like would any Us worth its self settle for being relations?

Which turns her stomach — though she doesn’t catch on at first why — toward her lover where — this third visit to her well-loved apartment — he stares softly at her bedchamber’s birthday-cake ornate whipped-cream ceiling considering her much more than she thinks amid her post-coital wonder (that the tryst goes on) and a premenstrual void that feels like a dressing room that keeps out a dozen people she’s got to see in short order, which is not now but tomorrow when her week begins, not now in the cushioned interstices of this fantastic love meeting, her stomach against his arm, her mind upon his which she can’t quite hear until he speaks: and then what she hears in his idling question upon question may be not some hunt for information but a funny comfort with her, in her, for her.

The war between the women and the men, was his New York tourist question out of the corner of his supine eye while against her the rest of his arm comes into being — yes, this much-advertised war, was his question, does it really go on here in 1977 in this advanced city? And she softly, huskily answered in the twilit room where colors like the force of his eyes hold some reserve of precision, "Well I suppose that by temperament and by professional independence I am hors de combat."

"Because," he went on, "I sat near an older man and a young girl who I’m sure were not related last night, there is much of this in this city, I think, or is it like arranged marriage," he quips, "without the arrangement?" (Is the demufti’d officer making talk? His murmur passes on relaxed to whatever the smell and gentleness of her yields in his happy spirit at six in the afternoon) "… do you see people in the audience or just see the mass?"

She hardly answered, "I see friends sometimes if I know where to look." Is he probing her relation with Clara and her husband?

But the next question leans over against her. His far arm runs along her shoulder and for the moment triggers nothing. She recalls well his question ten days ago (hours after Rosenkavalier, two in the morning, three in the morning), How is your father? — which was the question she wanted to ask him, about her father, for he’s the one who’s just come from the padreland, the madre-earth, the nation that’s in the news, the long place she’s never really toured, never seen the ice, the desert, though as a child she visited the primitive Indians, the mapuche prehistory, the villages with the one abandoned house vacated for the use of las dnimas, "souls" you say — and she sensed that her lover’s question How is your father? meant she could get no answer to her question How is my father? and she answered, He is in a smaller place; he is himself. Perhaps you know him? No? I guess he is O.K. (She would not ask this man; why’s she lying here with him? to inquire for her father?)

And now ten days later when she’s let herself be interested in this young Fascist admiral if the navy isn’t only a cover for whatever he’s doing here in New York, his next question, "Were you looking at me the first night? it seemed to me you were, and yet we had met only at the consulate I think," brought out of her with languid clarity just a hair too soon — so she regretted saying—"No, there were two friends of mine near you, I didn’t know you were there" ("my dear," she adds) remembering already that at the next performance {Norma) those two friends of hers Clara and her exile-economist husband had changed their seats (which they had insisted on paying for at Rosenkavalier but were the diva’s gift at Norma) because the wife Clara, her particular friend, had asked for the change; and they were better seats; but then they had not come.

And why, she murmurs — moving one thigh off the other so he on his back staring at the symmetrically swollen raised plaster design on the ceiling — a free clock of space, she wonderingly heard him call it with some casual touch of intelligence she warmly adores — floats his fingertips over to her nearer thigh — why, she murmurs, or how, did a man of good family find himself posted to the naval base at Navarino, the end of the world?

The southernmost inhabited place if you don’t count weather stations, he informs her softly. Oh, it was seven years ago, he now whispers, everything’s changed; whispers so very privately: the South Pole is indeed hollow, the stories were right, but the lingo of the Fiery Landers down there is not hollow: They have a verb for kneeling in a bark canoe with a hunting spear poised to launch at a sea otter who is especially elusive so they stay poised ready for minutes at a time to make their move — one verb for all of that.

He sits up and bends his head to her thigh like listening. There’s still room, he says, for grand opera. All the music — it spaces it out.

She will not get depressed. Is she a traitor to her father? Why did she seduce herself with this military man her father would despise, would kill?

Have the Fiery Landers a word, she asks, for wanting and not wanting, one word for loving and despising and fearing and at the same time being delighted and wiped out and soothed by?

The man’s ear warms to her thigh. I didn’t get that far, he dimly answers, listening still upon her thigh, speaking so slowly. They don’t think that way, he goes on. Therefore Darwin dismissed their language. He found it simple-minded; in fact, it has a matchless grip on things; but then he was fooled into accepting answers that those he interrogated thought in the generosity of their imaginations he wanted; thus though they did not eat dogs which were useful in hunting otter they did eat old women who were of no use and were smoked to death, their meat a very delicate texture.

When you are here with me, she asks, are you outside this apartment also? Are you in the other places where you do whatever it is you’re doing, on the phone, in the park, at a consulate, for all I know your work may take you to the opera.

No, he says, resting his whole head upon her thigh, the edge of his dark mustache on her skin, I’m only here.

He keeps his thoughts a secret, she translates aloud from what he may or may not know he heard in Italian last night, and the man alertly drowsing his blue eyes up into the folds of her body lifts his eyebrows, and upon the skin of her thigh a corner of his faint smile moves and she’s certain he doesn’t hear Norma’s Ei face I II suo pensiero from last night right after she’s answered Clotilda that she does not know what strange fear moves her to send her children away, for diver si affetti I Strazian quest’alma, and she loves her kids, she hates her kids, it hurts her not to, or so she sings. And knows she could be no angel, let alone what some sexist flatterer suggests, because angels already are in her, welcomed by her as they come and go bearing no brevity for brevity but only for becoming, like interior clothes.

They have a word for "depressed," he whispers, undermining what she feels she’s undertaking; they use the word for the crab when it is soft-shelled. Have you hunted crabs with a long-handled net off a dock and just when—

Yes, she mildly interrupts, I did that with—

— and just when you spot a big, hard-shelled grandfather sashaying away (her lover speaks this thrilling, menacing English, always, a love code in lieu of their native Spanish), you find in the corner of your eye down through the dark, clear water the motionless thing you really wanted, the fat, skeletonless, defenseless one, its body gone to sleep, female, slightly swaying with the living water (you know what I’m talking about?)—

— if poets have to be in some way criminals, she thinks, nowadays criminals could try being poets—

— its shell sloughed off until it can grow a new one, its body all succulent meat, and you could catch it with an espatula, just lift it up like an egg out of a pan, it wouldn’t slip off. Mmm.

— with my father, she finishes, I did that with my father.

She absolutely will not be depressed; and along a route as unclear to her as what she can find to do with her fellow countryman’s head picking up nothing but the luxury her leg likes to give his cheek (his ear), she will persist with her interrogation looking for the right question that will tell her what she probably knows already about this intelligence from a land where her father lives, a planet in essence long, that a tall (too tall) young American woman poet told her is a shadow cast by the overlapping sea which is the silence of the world breaking upon the southern continent, a ghost coast this Chile like a mapmaker’s lost lore, words at a gathering in New York, standees boycotting the Queen-Anne-imitation chairs, but whether the young poet had been to Chile or not, it remained the remote, 125-mile-wide 2,500-mile-long world where the diva was raised, where once she stood breathing (picking up a tincture of the preceding night’s tobacco smell) beside a grand piano that made her singing into music; for she was singing, although in those days it was more a very big business of your coached attack-plan of breathing of which she was often more aware than of a bar of Bellini or of Iago’s love scene with Otello drugging that dark ear to know Desdemona is untrue; and there was another scene she can’t at this moment find, an opera that didn’t get put on, a very old one, a scene for which she produced a breath control like ambition itself, singing beside a piano near a painting of Chile’s first woman lawyer, 1890s, friend of the family, and while she sang hardly seeing out a tall window (with curly molding) a park, a wide boulevard, and the Pacific raising light back into the air it came from, as high as eagles she never saw, and a mountain of thorn she and her father and brother once found paths through, a mountain with year-round snow she knelt in.

But she never really explored her long coastline of a country so narrow they had to find its richness by mining downward and could not answer the young poet’s question What became of Neruda’s library? But she will find the question she needs, interrogating this man her lover whose head is suddenly in her hand for his head began to stir from its listening rest and to decide; but she holds it where it is and its momentary frown pulls at the temple which tickles her skin, and the living blue of his eyes might be saying not a thing blinking open and drifting closed again while he goes on listening. And what was the scene she can’t recall? But he has called her an angel.

A system big for her, though her own, and for a second she can’t hear all of us inhering in her and ongoing; and so she has a clue that we were. That is, going on. Which, realizing suddenly her unsupported nature, she hadn’t known, though has felt more, no question, than this community of us in her, though relations including her — whatever these acoustical divisions in her were; we find that to breathe is to feel, perchance to think, and in this resumption we almost have not heard her breathing till now, and while we had thought that in our angel quest we had minimal designs on her, bony and abstracted as we feel, this diva with all her paraphernalia has gotten she feels quite real — we hadn’t been looking for it, she was our transit, and now it has just happened, as she recalls the forgotten scene from that Hamlet opera by the Chilean woman who could not get it put on.

Who says? And is this increasing community heard in so many of us what was meant? And was it only a thought of this community that angels sought to evolve toward human, toward potential, and used our bodies? For that late Chilean woman composer seems to reach out — northward — toward the diva and her attached cast, even to the Ojibway with all his moving, American-related background, our Ojibway-Sioux medicine man, now matriculating thanks to his sporting acquaintance the diva’s Manhattan physician in that aeronautics program at a Minnesota college within shooting distance of Lake Superior together with several youngish fellow nationals of the Chilean diva’s (forget if we can her Swiss passport) and of her officer, who by a convergence often wrongfully identified as accident or as the Indivisible Hand was considering the culture potential now opening at home in the huge import of TV sets duty-free by order of the junta’s ruling general, just at the instant when in the diva’s mind an unknown man’s face would not go away, who, with a girl, had sat somewhere in front of her adoring officer yet behind the two vacant seats Clara and her husband were to have occupied; and after the first-act intermission after Norma has arrived in the sacred forest with her fellow Druid priestesses and, upon praying to the Moon for peace and cutting the mistletoe, has harangued fellow nationals of hers here in Gaul who instead of waiting for her prophecies to come true of corrupt Rome’s inevitable fall want to revolt now against the Romans occupying Gaul, and has at act’s end guessed that a "tall brass-helmed" Roman soldier her novice Adalgisa has confessed inspired in her a blasphemous love is none other than Norma’s own faithless Pollione who deserted her and their two children whom she now both loves and hates — oh how can you hate a child unless you have first stabbed it? — the diva’s unvirginal priestess Norma recalled Flagstad ready to sail from New York when the Germans invaded Norway, and returned at the opening of Act Two to her house intending to kill her sleeping children only to find the orchestra seats that in Act One were vacant of her friend Clara and Clara’s exile husband, the distinguished economist in the wonderful Dr. Allende’s regime, now occupied but by strangers who’ve no doubt assumed that the ticket holders absent for Act One would not show at all.

But now she found nearby a new vacancy of two seats roughly equidistant from her exhilarated officer and those house seats she’d reserved for her absent friend and spouse. And this new vacancy she now, in bed with the officer, filled, but with a face she didn’t know, a large squarish face, rather strong, not old but with a thick shock of gray hair and broad shoulders. For, unmindful of mysterious convergence, she let the picture unthinking come at her — broad shoulders touching on one side whoever he was with — oh, a girl — who like him was absent before the curtain rose on Act Two’s awful business of the silver moon goddess turned green with jealousy and rage. Luna verde, she breathed in Chilean next to her love from the terrible planet of her birth, and found herself weeping, with those words of her revered, long-traveled poet, who meant not jealousy but the shadow cast by the silver of that earth rich with wonders not to say workable minerals: yet she’s not sure, and she needs to see the poem again and can’t lay her hands on it maybe for the very reason she’s thought of it; she lent the book to Clara for Clara’s husband, who gave up his personal library when he left Chile and travels light, and taught the entire poem in question by rote to Clara, who recited it to the diva who already knew it but not by heart, and who now in her companionable bedroom breathing luna verde wept, wept, but not wholly without joy. Meanwhile we have the ear of the officer’s thigh-connected head, and seem to speak through that well-turned ear though he thinks that it’s from her, her thigh, that he hears "James Mayn," whose future he knows quite a while ago found cause to shadow Clara’s husband—

— that’s the name, that’s it! exclaims the interrogator in torture country looking up from the bare ankles next to the floor-anchored chair legs, to the bloodshot eyes and ringing ears swaying above the bound arms and wrists they have grown out of, that’s the name! exclaims the interrogator, forgetting that his job is that of questioner tapped by those above who have the real responsibility for, say, adjusting import duties and exporting good old-fashioned surveillance, while this anonymous interrogator who represents a system the mufti admiral is higher up in has the job of taxing the bloodshot subject’s trick of ambiguous speech: for example, that the East Far Eastern Princess, when the Navajo Prince one day told her his cosmos, knew then (we quote) that that was what she had come to understand—

— Wham! comes the sneak hand on the subject’s soul which is everywhere and nowhere, and the bruises don’t show unless we peel off a layer of soul fat or fat-oriented Fleisch, or, to the music (if you call that music real noise) dimly heard in the next room where a child does its Rotation homework (so it stays done!), the torturer’s bruise-cruise leaves so little evidence that all we have to go on—

— Wham! Kthunk but we have to go on because—

— all we have to go on is the subject’s tic-like tendency to stammer forth nought but D.T.’s whose ambiguity now seems to welcome more and more of punishment’s teaching—

— Wham! we did it that time to ourself, we stick indiscriminately to the same rules as we do others, here to have our delirium tremens and in same breath render from Romance language "double tenders." But if we’re doing it to ourself does that mean we have within us that delegated interrogator who takes responsibility for taxing our after all human not angel trick of saying two things at once but only in order to get out of the subject information he the interrogator and his system are, well, already in possession of?—

— as Jim Mayn (journalist known to have met the exile economist) knew was one odd evolution, that is the future capacity to communicate things outward through the ear as, in the century in question and other surrounding centuries, we spoke through our eyes even more than down our noses. Evolution? Or mutilation?

Yet to the demufti’d officer, his eyes so nearly touching the length of the thigh his ear’s against that he’s apt to be not seeing what he’s hearing, which on these strong currents is pretty much the music of the hemispheres he has often applauded without really telling his left hand what his right was up to. That is, it isn’t the tapeworm’s track he is able to hear or, if he could, to guess that its track in all its now two-way flow is all that’s left of the tapeworm, as the diva last week flushed it out, to the nostalgic dismay of her fond physician, at the risk of putting on some more poundage at a Hispanic restaurant the same evening where she and her mufti lover sat near a small, once-dusty correspondent-woman who by some near rule of highly metabolized convergence was half-oblivious of them.

This woman Lincoln was chewing the mussels, shrimps, squid, and other fruits of the sea in a rich, peppery and suspiciously inexpensive mariscada that upstaged the sweet salt of her cactus appetizer, while she pictured deserts of New Mexico.

Is this true — what’s just been said? We promise so. For she had gone a long way in her own right, right into now a veritable granary of shared information that she was finding in a women’s Body-Self Workshop she had attended out of (for her) the strangest despairs. These she had woken up to one morning long ago. Or might we mean "recently"? — and save the "long ago" for her sense of time passed since her Asian assignments and her sense of South Vietnam lost ploughshared into what (unlike a native American desert) you couldn’t at last even give away — a war lost. Still, the records of her dusty work remained, even to voice tapes of children unwrapping candy bars and speaking English, and of a monk burning while she herself spoke into a tiny, bad-tasting mike as softly as a golf broadcaster talking through the tube to her father. She now found that the women of the workshop sitting naked on a great expanse of brown carpet told their despairs in the language of hers, her despairs. As if she had never been away across the world, so had she been performing actions in her sleep, the way she had heard a monk say? (If you want to cross over the world, whatever that meant, perform actions as if you were asleep.) Yet now it had happened without her willing it: never been away across the world but on a parallel track—very parallel, if she could round it off like that, because the other track was her job which she had always been good at. Still, sitting among those women on a New York carpet, no problem: she had always liked this imperfect female body, quite apart from quite good orgasm that she seldom let herself miss wherever she was, though didn’t bring it exactly with her, it had to be white men, some were co-workers, correspondents like her. She always lived in this painless cramp of knowing she of course would have a child but aware that her ability not to have one was fairly great; and now she was talking about it amid such shared facts of women who needed a second car and didn’t always have one, and women who even if the kids left the silver in the sink felt that added time spent evened out the lonely difference between how long dinner and how long eating it — which got multiplied and at once weirdly divided by difference between time spent by husband earning money not withheld and his eager indifference to how fast the expensive food they ate at night disappeared — and so Lincoln could see also how lucky she had been to have her work. But also, so what.

Which, like her contemplation of those New Mexico deserts that she’d never checked out in person, went a long way and beyond the truth that that was what she was thinking about while sopping her sharp-crusted bread in the juice of the garlic and peppery red-sauce of her sea stew in this small, cheap place a pass-along recommendation by the woman Clara in her workshop who had ultimately though pleasantly shown little interest in seeing her socially after the workshop ended.

The correspondent-woman could take rejection (T.R.) she thought. In fact it seemed to yield a historical clarity as, among necks and shoulders that seemed to belong to foreign bodies that had nothing in common with the cellulite-dimpled inner thighs of the same person (as if a given woman’s body gazed two ways at the same time), she recalled the very woman who’d told her about this Hispanic eatery who in the naked rap sessions said little about her own life, speaking later while they were getting dressed of the Vietnamese philosopher from another century who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers, and she spoke with such rehearsed calm that the very wind in the grasses of the country’s narrow midland spine and the once future wastelands in the upper-west sector of the Mekong-Bassac Delta that that woman had never seen but her listener had came out as visibly as her account of the Hoa Hao sect the correspondent-woman herself knew all about but couldn’t talk like that about: except that if she had it right the Hoa Hao’s Buddhism with its practical, no-frills privacy and its sort of you know eclectic turning toward educating the little people that high rents were not the inevitable condition of what she nonetheless understood to be an unavoidably conditional existence, and its eclectic (she threw the word around like others did "additive") turning toward some old village solidarity connecting the large sky of timeless time and the constant soil — all this, without the other movement’s, the Cao Dai’s, Masonic eye of God enlisting as amnesties or saints everyone from Moses to Joan of Arc and for all she knew if they had looked far enough west (or was it east from there?) Sequoya himself, all this now (though she didn’t mind eating alone, consuming her food alone) strangely kept if not her eyes which were on the vivid couple at the nearby table (the man never smiling yet ever adoringly humorous — how did he do that? — the woman with her auburn hair piled all over the place in marvelous, hurried flair, ringing that bell again in the normally infallible memory of the correspondent-woman), certainly her mind’s eye upon the deserts of New Mexico, but more than those places (because she’s never quite, in all her jaunts, been there, though she’s told Clara, last name unknown, who recommended this restaurant, to visit those same high deserts), her mind is in the word Navahu (hear the music but she’s no poet she prefers the noise of its original meaning) great planted fields, dreamt by the all but deserted dryness "reserved," as the man who’s in her mind more than Navahu, said, for the Indians alone converging upon this of all reservations so vast we in advance of the correspondent-woman, who’s just been stared at by the diva, can’t suddenly tell if maybe it’s the reservation that’s converged upon the nomad Navajo (read Navahu, "great planted fields" ye gods of baby cacti grown for shipment to eastern restaurants — but wait, not in New Mexico), so she, spooning up her juice mariscada because she’s almost out of bread and inadvertently blindly watching the dark very glam woman who’s just been asked by her escort (along whose forearm as if to erase its dark gray flannel sleeve she’s just run her hand) who it was that recommended this place so the woman catching her eye stares back as if the correspondent-woman is waiting for her answer, when really her thoughts have converged upon the letter a nice man — he must be — named Mayn sent from the West to — and read from to the correspondent-woman by — his daughter Flick on a cold eve in Washington, only read from, as if the daughter Flick was herself an obstacle to his current of meaning, which was perhaps that he missed her while he was writing to tell her he’d been to the Rock that Flick, from her own travels with her boyfriend had forgotten to tell him of, his work had taken him to a plant nearby and anyway you couldn’t miss that Rock (unless you wanted to), that Rock the Indians called a ship, though he was not really to his daughter in his words but — aloud to the other woman, in the daughter’s ironic voice—awfully hard-boiled, Daddy is, you know, but if you know him he’s a big faker: he was not a landscape man.

He was not really a landscape man.

The correspondent-woman heard the daughter read it: he was not a landscape man, never set out to be, he went on, but he’d stopped before this fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot old Tooth waiting for the sky and had felt just how long he’d been going — like the highly metabolized correspondent-woman herself, who reached the thing in that letter she (excuse the crass practicality) could use but in some other track went on beyond it which was as bad as being on really a separate track, so much slower that she also had not reached the thing in question; and, moving more and more slowly toward what anyway she was also beyond, she heard the daughter Flick’s three or four passages piling obstacles sought out of all our life and obstacles also necessary to the thing she thought she had heard Flick read at the very outset so that the subsequent stuff (which told you more than a little about this divorced Jim Mayn, the father) tried to shed a load of daylight like a cover covering up and half-forgetting that first dream thing, whatever it was—

— I know what’s going on, a child supposed to be negotiating its homework in an adjacent room says distinctly—

— he would, he’d said, like nothing to witness any more, that’s what he felt standing a couple three miles off taking in the mountain-like Rock but m^m-made ship, Ship Rock, whose history he’d heard bits of from an economist (Anglo), a filling-station attendant (Indian), a nice ash blonde (environmentalist), Flick’s dad gave its specifications, on balance he’d about decided to give it back to the Indians but was it too late? and probably some common ground could be reached.

The daughter, the young woman, the girl Flick, read from the letter very well but tilting her head like at any moment she’ll put it aside, sail it onto her desk, float it floorward, but read on as if amused: "Well, Daddy’s awfully hard-boiled, you know, not at all religious, my God, ‘geologists call it,’ " she read, ‘"a plug, a neck — a plug neck — of"’ (the letter sort of rambled on) hardened lava without benefit of volcano any more while some Indians talk about monsters from inside Mother Earth and see those four-five-mile tentacles of connected rocks as the congealed blood of Hero-Twins who put the monsters in their place; and from strip mines and the Four Corners Power Plant the Rock is a touring hallucination especially after the clowns I had a few with last night, and oh yes the Rock’s a ship and I tripped-out on it for a few minutes figuring how the geologists are right and the Indians are too, and I’m right, it’s not a ship at all if you look at it but it got me here, and there’s a secret here that your great-grandmother Margaret whom you never knew got hold of when she was out here in the nineties and a secret I think I had but I left it somewhere, dear Flick, and, all kidding aside (smile), it’s that the gods are or were here and that they are a little helpless too, the more the merrier, but it’s about time (see how I write through the ring of the cold beer can on the motel stationery) about time I went back and caught up with them, I have further to go because of where I’m coming from. (Words to that effect.)

"Well, Daddy’s gentle enough, but really—I mean he’s not at all religious."

"It’s getting to him," the correspondent-woman Lincoln had said; "sometimes it does at that age."

"I don’t know," said the daughter, "I think he doesn’t know why he got divorced from my mother."

"No, that’s you," said Lincoln.

"Oh is that all," Flick had said, but the correspondent-woman, who had wondered if Flick’s father was available, had read the mind of the letter and held it to her mind’s eye as, now, days and nights later, the glamorous couple got up from the table across from Lincoln, arose grandly, and from one look into each other’s eyes turned as one to look at the irrelevant correspondent-woman, whose lips puckered with the remembered words "The Future," which was how the letter from Jim Mayn, transient in Farmington, New Mexico, to his daughter Flick in Washington, D.C., was headed, which meant maybe the strip mining and the process of turning coal into natural gas to be piped to California and which meant the Four Corners plant, O.K.

It had meant also, Lincoln was sure, some profoundly previous other thing. Oh she lost it, as two stories slid together, complementary scopes, the Rock that absorbs, versus the Ship that transits you plus all those immigrant Indians on the escape — the Rock, if you’re some stolid, lunatic being, knew this like a new country propelled into being by the force of meditation, thus the Rock’s an obstacle to going on versus (because she was thinking this way) an obstacle in turn to the Rock, the two people who drove miles out to the Rock in order to, in the middle of extreme northwest New Mexican nowhere, lobby against the mine’s peeling of the landscape and the Four Corners plant’s alternative ozone if we may so call it because we’re hastening to say, through the person of the correspondent-woman who has of late a new reason for cooperating, that for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us, that is to breathe it. But obstacle supplanting obstacle, it’s more than the dark view and the bright view of things held in one eye, O.K., it’s more than that old dust of existence itself measured with and against the advanced production of sulfur dioxide shared by volcanoes and coal-burning operations which is, as sulfur dioxide alone, curious enough when it hooks up with the particles in all our smokes of unburned fuel to go on a killing spree in 1930 in Belgium’s famed Meuse River valley to name but one — but with ye old water vapor and sunny-sun-sun it becomes distinctly gamy sulfuric acid which can (we bleep thee not) give you a new set of (not to mention inflamed) lungs, even in signal instances make ‘em burst with or into flame, while yet more lasting damage—Que lastima, murmurs a tourist catching up with the marbles of Florence, Paris, Prague, Toledo, Ohio, Argentina — slowly wears thin the fabrics of great cities submerged in solution. It’s — she sensed — more than this alternation between apparently exclusive views, it’s also — forgive vagueness — one thing after another: so that while we seem to lose what we had a moment ago, we already remember what’s so soon not here any more. The correspondent-woman, recalling her godawful tape of the monk burning himself up, has fallen in love with the man who wrote the letter to the daughter Flick like thinking out loud. The correspondent-woman was a mere means to a greater end (which was what she suddenly saw her years in Vietnam to have been, incidentally informing her about Buddhism, about fathers, family, children, and taking notes, some mental) when she sat with legs crossed naked at Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop among her New York if not sisters surely kin who kindly exclaimed at her God-given first name Lincoln. President’s name! But like the diminutive correspondent-woman, we see only the immediate means by which she (we still can’t help predicting by old habit actually less angelic than human) will recall at last what’s been here with us so long we had more than a chance to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember, whereas we don’t hate birth, do we?

Not birth of relations, comes the answer but from where? from us or others conceivably not angel but likewise evolving toward human, though if an angel is trying to change, it must have a long way to go — light years, some informed soul says.

Yet as the auburn-haired woman and the wonderful Latin man moved around their table and rejoined on the far side and touched arms, he speaking into her ear, she raising her shoulder and snuggling her head to it like he’s tickling her, the correspondent-woman on the point of salvaging the thing she needed in the selection read her from Jim Mayn’s letter found one more intervention in the person of two or more scope-size stories sliding slow toward each other and toward her, unless one was the waiter coming to rescue her oval mariscada dish before this highly metabolized and busy customer bread-polished it "licking-clean" enough to fool the waiter into lightly laying down upon its white mirror a jiggly dessert, but not before she knew more than she was able to know: that the father Jim’s letter had drawled its way into taking the Ship Rock literally, so it’s sliding through the Earth, masts breaking the horizon; so the Earth — this man reasoned like telling a story to his little girl now grown to irony — was softer, kind of fluid in those days — make sense? — so that when he told of lovers going up the Rock together and coming down separately at accelerated velocity, and reported the volume of American new-lyweds visiting the actual Four Corners twenty miles or so from Ship Rock to stand on an ugly metal plate that she did not like one bit where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico met, he seemed to have an easy grip holding that earlier, fluid Earth together for such newlyweds as held on to each other standing on the plate to be in four states at once but were by some design of theirs in collusion with their future and with the literalness of this man who seemed not the type to think himself "between histories." Was the joke some new mixed-blood religion? For was he preaching layer by geofirm layer down to each seashell in its thousand-mile-deep coast where the current of the sea of the gods listens to itself in the dry fires of the plateau? This man will take legend and geologic report, and, as she understands it, it’s history as common in the invisibly slow violence of the land’s change as in the cities of the sky invented upon high mesas by the four-dimensional grid of mind with which the People lived their respect for the forces that made the Encircled Mountain a four-petaled flower or told a singer when he was strong enough to sing a healing and when he’d better not. Well, she had put aside what she hardly knew, to find there were many paths all in her from one uninterrupted breath to the next and many even the face of the Earth was consuming. This all came to her, as the woman with the abundant auburn hair leaning into the embracing form of the Latin man she was with, cast back upon the correspondent-woman such a look of tension it darkened the prospect of dessert, but the waiter came between them. And as she ordered her dessert and saw her shiny mariscada dish pass away, the correspondent-woman heard her own frank voice questioning her profession. Didn’t newspeople just multiply wants? The preceding week, looking across the semicircle of naked women at the woman Clara who had not really rebuffed her but seemed to prefer not to carry "it" beyond the (naked) workshop, her voice was saying right out as if her whole body-self made her understand, that she had stayed single because she did not want that trip, it was stubborn of her, she knew, it was uncooperative and over-metabolized, it was unwilling: but two people boring into each other? slipping closer into unmentioned disaster she couldn’t put her finger on, her fault no doubt—

No, said one woman; and, not at all, said the woman named Clara; and stick to your own body feelings, Line, said Grace.

— but the point was that now as a new contingent of five diners rather silent came into the restaurant, her unwillingness brought on a fellow feeling, but who was it with, who was it with? and she knew it was with the father who wrote to his beloved daughter (hoping incidentally that she wasn’t going to find herself high and dry when the funding for her job ran out, and could he do anything? he knew any number of people in Washington), wrote of the rock ship barreling through the once permeable (fluid) Earth and also of the numerically real couples, newly wed two by two but maybe really experiencing four states hand in hand become one for the future.

Until she half-loathed her life alone while sliding forth to meet not the waiter who approached and whom she momentarily slid through, but what lay well beyond, and it was as if the unwilling landscape man Mayn had actually told her this was what would happen: that two persons perhaps without even a vein of bias as to religious or sexual origin might one day disappear literally into one: but the point was not that this need happen each to each in their frequent troth but that under some latest utility dome two persons stood Indian file content because awaiting transport to another section of their future: there, having here been reduced to frequency and thus transmitted hence, they would reconstitute and see each other at once in their new home which would be an Earth-Moon-space colony with native-silica drapes, a lawn on top of the living room, altogether a new consumable life, running, say, a waterless fish-farm where beyond gravity gills won’t collapse, she understands (space spouse).

When in reality through the matter-scrambler utility dome the union of these forward-looking couples was to be sealed literally in a one-for-two eco-switch dreamed up by population-consolidation programmers who cover with the old romance of loved union a new unknown singlehood: that is, the Earthling couples demattered domeside turn out, when reconstituted thousands of miles forth in space in one of the colonies, to be one person now, no longer two.

O where was this coming from? Mariscada chemicals? Glamorous couple? (just exited — awesome; dangerous; partial, she had to feel). But more coming from herself, like wind within, drawing her out in all directions, she thinks grandly. To where? Away from that place in her that fired off messages home to friends beginning "I’m sitting on Al and Ginny Kaulilua’s balcony on Statehood Day overlooking the Pacific and somehow at peace listening to a Society Island canary sing in its swaying cage." Or toward the gist of two persons transpondered to an elsewhere of one, like shadow cast back from future. She didn’t carry it further; but she almost did (recalling her reply to a man she momentarily didn’t, because she couldn’t, name, when they were lying in bed in a hotel contemplating shadow shapes on the ceiling made by a sunset among nearby trees — which was "Bliss" — which he then called the highest compliment any gal had ever paid him but she didn’t tell him it wasn’t just that — and she didn’t because she was still touched by his question, which was, "What are you feeling right now?"). And as she did almost carry it further now, she heard the line in the letter Flick had read where the man, Flick’s dad, whom the correspondent-woman Lincoln decided she loved, had said, Look I’m no landscape man (she heard his voice coming down in his knowing who he was) and she asked how could she ever have taped the self-burning Buddhist monk whose peeling colors — dervish flames drying out the personal pockets of life in the still being of that after all non-renewable person who had had no fat on him, much less cellulite — who was news: and so she scraped onto her spoon’s oval blade all but a trace of smoky caramel dark from the flan whose mold stood once trembling upon her dessert plate; and, wanting that last trace, she might through that girl Flick have felt, through near-relations leaning toward her or toward becoming as human as she or toward becoming her, or her and Flick, have figured out that her play-by-play taped Statesward many months ago in Vietnam for a pool of reporters had included in its stored radius the very man Mayn, of whom had been said (by his grandmother) what had been said of the correspondent-woman Lincoln (by her late mother) from field-hockey days when the grass kept growing under her furious feet, to her last visits home from further and further away — that she must have a tapeworm inside her. But thinking her new mystery-beloved’s disclaimer when really he was a landscape man meant that he might want to become the landscape — spread, disperse himself into it, which was kind of threatening, especially to someone wanting to locate him and meet him; and contemplating the last dark molasses swipe from her creme caramel; and reminding herself that a good Buddhist stays put and plants a tree like her father who planted on the other hand thirty postwar Jap red pines all at once the year after he had given her her Christian name over her ma’s dead body — she had to see that after a given two people were reduced to frequency, matter-scrambled, and sent on like a message to a better way of doing things in that hibiscus-flavored diaphragmatically breathing space colony with timeless sunbaths that might make her impatient ("No one can make you impatient," came a voice seductive if you love being taught things) — and there was only just the one of you when you materialized again in the Earth-Moon-space colony, and you found your head half pillowed by inner gravity or aware of some god in you or an angel or the memory of one with a permanent reservation in some of your newly compounded gray matter if it was really gray — well, which one of you was it that wound up on your feet? (as your parents predicted, in spite of their anxiety, which was for themselves?) — and which sex (to get down to shared thighs)? and would you be meeting a new, well, lover soon who had been done likewise?

Fair questions. Did he want to be done that to? Did it mean our feelings would wind up even more mixed, our memories fuller, our sex still less plain (and what about the women-women pairs, and the men-men)? What happened to chromosomes when turned into frequency? Just another male idea, she heard a female group-consciousness verbalize. Yet Lincoln had some lightness or light in her — was it non-serious? So she imagined again these couples compacted and transmitted as a frequency and recreated in the promised land as one person not two, and thought, Did it mean each new person would be even more the song of its parts, but where would Jim Mayn be? would he be internalized in her and she would have to live with that fo’ th’ rest of her days in space? But what if…? But, seeing the waiter approach and seeing just why this hypothetical man Jim Mayn could be right here — look out! — is also anywhere but here, for she is thinking him — oh God she didn’t know the man and never would, unless Flick his dear daughter mentioned Lincoln by name, which could stick in Jim’s mind, a woman with such a name: she took hold of her dessert plate, it had a thin dark blue circle painted round its rim, and brought it up to her face like a comfortable mirror, and, protecting her handsome nose by the length of her tongue, she saved the last curve of caramel from a final meaninglessness of trace, from the dishwasher or the swift fingertip of the waiter, whom for a second of bliss she blotted out with this mirror too close for anything but taste.

Where was she? Where had metabolism left her? Beamed to this instant of her life, lowering her plate she found herself neither with the waiter, who’d seemed to be bearing down on her, nor not with him, for he had detoured to the table of five in the far corner and, except for a darting glance out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to have seen her "getting it on" with her plate as Grace said to "get it on" with your fingers eating your salad greens, as in conversation, as in work (as in "-aholic") for Grace taught that work was addiction like past, like romance, like sugar, like love.

As down the wormhole’s wind-tunnel evolving we recede from correspondent-woman, too, as she has glimpsed relations looking at her the way life holds you if you let it care, though looking back at her at the last second we couldn’t help it between bodies, we just could not. And we see her looking right at us but she doesn’t know us from Mayn, whom she is really looking at but doesn’t know it’s him there in the restaurant with the party of five others, and we who can’t help being angels, strive though we do these days toward human, had best leave her for this tunnel opening not inward tubewise like being de-born or digested but opening out from an endless circumference of where we’ve been. We "can’t" say, because, looking back at her who helped us get where we are, we relations touch an independence there as if although we have seen her off going hopefully on terms of Mayn, why what group of angels striving to evolve toward human can surely know what that "gal" (as her mother in St. Louis called her own oldest woman friend) is thinking while waiting for the waiter to bring the check? newly wondering where she’s coming from; yet breathes, breathes, and calmly like the diva who saw Jim Mayn in the flesh in an orchestra seat at Norma but knew him no more than she knew his name or than she knew here the softly sinister, fluffy-haired tiny woman wearing, we already remember, one simple unsewn length of saffron (acetate), her sleeveless arms free to beckon the waiter, who in the course of appetizer and entree has looked at the cloth often to dema-terialize it but could not know that her name she has lately come to accept and even (instead of the mere initial L) use in a by-line is her first, or Christian, name provided her by her father who scarcely knew what he wanted for a daughter of his loins but in the void of this he had her christened Lincoln, hoping, we’re now in a position to say, that she would never wed, but intrigued by the prospect of her unfettered and professional independence so much that Dad’s void or concept became that of his daughter. She, though, went so far beyond him as to aid a Hindu lover in graduate school, her first on all scores, grow quickly out of what she didn’t know till later was called "prematurity." And now, to get beyond the three stars on the framed, enlarged restaurant review out front in the window beside the menu, in a joint where the refried beans are good at gluing the expansible corridors of our r’evolutionary intestine, she has got her own void in hand. And not a hell of a lot to do for the next few minutes, the no-man’s gap where she ensures herself, and the dear link she has divined between her and the man on whom she meditates even to the extent of asking the waiter not for the check which he’s about to give her anyhow but for a third Mexican coffee: thinking upon this man Jim Mayn she imagines she has never seen except in essence and now so close to her (can’t explain) so close she liplessly mouths syllables like digestive grace so they can seem kinda beautiful: special, desert, creativity, reincarnation, relativity. And the coffee comes — a new cup which before it lands is but a cup whose liquid weight a waiter mimes, bearing it ever toward us, an obstacle that contains openly our belief, and she knows in the back of her mouth and in a chill down one thigh that she doesn’t want it after all, it’s the obstacle she couldn’t help asking for but at least now she knows she don’t want it: and she opens her mouth, her whole face, to ask for the check, but the waiter makes it out then-and-there with a wrinkled forehead (though that’s all she can see), we don’t know any more than he and should not have looked back but she made us.

But no one can make you do anything, not even relate. But these words we thought had come from us came from the interrogator, a real learner, whom we in any event ignore in order to concentrate on the spurt of juice he has given the funny bone in our groin with his ‘lectric button ostensibly for having either answered a non-question or having said two things at once which make no sense over the short run but across the long curve of our possibilities prove absolutely exact.

This we already remember. As if we hadn’t been told. Listen, what we remember is important, it’s all there is.

Her presence has drawn things to converge upon her, as witness the threesome (for two of the starting five, two women, just got up and left) at the corner table (and now a young fellow leaves the table to make a phone call by the service bar), so we’ll return to her along some track less smooth than the levity of a tapeworm’s nostalgic footholds in the diva’s aborted weight-loss project. And through spiraled circumference spinning our wind-tunnel ‘tween histories, we’ll see the correspondent-woman now without looking back and share with her the state of being between Mayn, no sweat.

A sage said all troubles arise from trying to broadjump inside a telephone booth. Oh well, the multiple youth Larry, like the economist his godly madness turned him into, forgot that a great leap upwards within the booth, even of joy (that is, after hanging up after a call during which he received kind words from the older, four-or-five-year-older woman Amy) might shortly hit a ceiling. Which returned Larry to the floor of the booth or to his feet (whichever came first) and made him wonder again if old Mayn was his rival or his adopted friend, not to say back-up father function/media connection. He’s had this trouble before, the two-on-one he calls it for safekeeping cum portability, it’s where the Dreaded Modulus comes in and expresses one system in terms of another like he knows chez Brain that Mom/Sue didn’t literally mean "Larry should get laid," because mothers don’t talk like that even in the future and Sue’s expressing one shitload in terms of another, and yet even his oF Brain will tell him you got to sometimes give Modulus oon rest and feel that both given shitloads are your given life and it’s all the same ballgame. (Right on, Larry, right on, sweetie, he hears Grace once say to him in another context.) But should he pack a backpack and go to Europe for a few years? but where would Amy be when he came back? living with oF Jim? of course not, probably in Europe herself! but where will Jim be? Is this the two-on-one trouble again? It’s a shitload faster coming at him than an unresigned end-game with a bishop and a knight against just a knight (which Larry’s given up with chess itself at eighteen); is it more the lone guard against a forward and a sudden substitute you don’t recognize tearing-ass downcourt? Got to make your move because if he doesn’t the one with the ball will go all the way and up for the shot which for greed’s sake he may do anyway: but it’s all also inside Larry and he would talk to his father if his father didn’t have enough on his plate already and to his mother if she had not once recently reduced his life, telling a friend that Larry has to get laid: and while in the corners of his eyes the two enemy players divide their distances to the basket so he would prefer switching to instant-replay mode to put it mildly, he figures he’s divided his talk option between Father and Mother, next between yes-Mother and no-Mother (opting for the no-don 7-discuss-the-two-on-one-with-her), then between no-Mother-One (which is no discussion but no hard feelings) and no-Mother-Two (which is You’re so one-track-minded nowadays you’re a jammed terminal, Ma, it isn’t funny, we can’t get a decent discussion going about this two-on-one thing of mine until we get past the sex gate which can be jumped only with the correct Yes or No response, that is we have all first got to be sexed like little kittens and then our eyes can be looked into). Yet as the no-Mother-Two option gets branched, Larry can see his mother Susan gain perspective through distance but is it hers or his he’s pinning down? all he knows is she gets smaller with these divisions yet doesn’t bug him less.

That is, without the two-on-one being submitted feedback loop.

Larry says to Mayn, If I could be another person, she could be.

Mayn says, It doesn’t matter, pal. You’ll be another person someday; she might stay the same. You mean, asks Larry, she’ll go on as she is?

Probably go on, is Mayn’s reply.

Stay married, Jim? Larry laughed. Oh, said Mayn, you need more than one sometimes.

"I know what’s going on," an all-purpose child contemplating another nap who was apparently absorbed in educational television is heard by some resident adults adjacent to it to say. Adults getting equal with kids; seeking girlfriends and boyfriends. But not in response to Larry’s fine Either/And, which he would talk to Mayn about if Mayn weren’t already a motion within the reference frame of Larry’s life so how do you get an external fix?

Larry’s dad one night, turning away from his personal TV when Larry came into his room silently wanting to talk, gingerly identified changes in lifestyle they were being buffeted by, ‘cause Lar’s old enough to hear. But Open Marriage (which is more like the U.S. Open than open house, though it’s that, too) gives you permission to stick it out. But Larry doesn’t say this to his father. Even if it is ‘76-’77—you’re never in a single year, it feels like, and he dunno if he wants his mom to come back — I mean, who the fuck cares?

But Larry’s life feels like escape. And someone else’s escape that Larry figures in and has been drawn if not sucked into.

Well, as for him, he works with the Modulus, Dreaded or not, that constant factor, it converts units from one system into another, which might be its own, so all potential partners in an extended marital system may observe laws of all divisions and games going on inside Me, making Me sometimes Us. Bumper stickers used to say Carlsbad Caverns, Howe Caverns, Pioneer Village. God, these married older people, they don’t have any standards any more, negotiating clean breaks and all that load of crap, and codifying power games like Who Called Who? — well Larry could pile right through a naked workshop recycling women and leave them scatter-cornered, multiply der limbs lying in his wake watching his stern lights fall back into the night with just enough glamor of wake to yield a bumper sticker that says, Have You Hugged Another Woman Today? and so also that, some nights, oddly when he’s on the phone with this older guy he really likes, he wants to be the one to say a whole lot of unrelated words, shit, fuck, cunt, asshole (asshole doesn’t mean anything any more although you wouldn’t want to be one), cocksucker, mother-fucking turd-master, chew-sampler, pimp-spread police-dog-screwer, you run out of those words.

Were they funny once? he asks Mayn.

Funny? oh yeah, sure, we used to call each other cunt lappers — what else? scumbags.

Hey you still hear that.

Muff diver. Scum bucket.

That’s pretty sweet.

And during the War, when we saw all those movies, what was it? I’m afraid it was the syphilitic afterbirth of a Japanese gangfuck.

That’s not even sick: it’s not possible.

We probably didn’t know what an afterbirth was.

Well, it probably could be syphilitic.

It’s history.

Yeah.

Larry still wasn’t telling Mayn the two-on-one problem. Yet how could Mayn be a rival? Obviously between Mayn and the unique Amy who is old enough to be Jim’s daughter there can be nothing save professional researches and contact-expediting assistance — people she knows (?) through the place where she works, but Lar’s not asking. He doesn’t sense that Mayn’s into Amy’s interests, right-brain video-projection hardware used by handicapped to make themselves understood, plus reading-playing-manipulating a console-operated screen — and though anything might happen in the weeks since Amy phoned Larry to ask if he had Mayn’s number which she either could have discovered for herself or already had, in which latter case, she was letting Larry know, Mayn might be using her.

Oh Larry’s eyes hurt; they know how to turn into marbles; and his head hurts on one side — purely conceptually: he’s resisting a crowd inside him (well at least he knows and acknowledges—even welcomes!) that’s relations and all he can do is look back and forth between two eyes. And often now makes his phone calls from a pay booth, but rarely jumps as, booth-high, after the Amy call.

And he would not get into hating Grace Kimball, she’s friendly y’know — y’know? — y’know the multiple child’s next-room door is closed and among other emblems on the door is "Love Ya," and not so loud— whose sway has swung his mom Susan who wished she’d been named Sara, no h—into quite a new life which she thinks she’s asking him along on, which sets her apart from Jesus freaks and other groupies of the Ideal who want no part of their parents but he feels, he feels. . (and, like using the Modulus, suddenly conceals his life) "this friend of mine he’s freaked out, Jim, his mother thinks she’s a Lesbian, what do you tell a guy like that? he doesn’t even want to think about it." ("Nothing, I guess. I would just say, Hang in there, you know?") ("Hang in there, Jim?") ("I mean I couldn’t handle it. There’s nothing you can say, if you like her — if your friend likes her — so hang in there — it’s like what your negotiators mean when they say, At least keep talking").

She wants to teach him No Dependency: see, you don’t hang on to any particular person (so the theory goes — Grace’s theory yet in words identical to others uttered by a dark man with no shirt on as Larry switched TV channels and just before a commercial break to the effect that if the winds of attachment continue to blow, the light of true knowledge will never be kindled). Yet act, he had heard, so as to benefit others. Yet have, he had heard, no desire. Yet Larry was ready to believe the words; they were now his. Don’t anchor onto particular mother, spouse, or lover, you hang on to instead where they came from, not the person in question: keep the standing reserve from your miles-deep soft wear dream-lab, it’s your permanent credit cord to the ocean, keep that and let the actual persons come and go. Yet go for total sensate focus: what did that mean? Your toe massage might trip you up the common thigh: it’s the sources in thyself you want to glom onto, definitely not the particular persons who are thrown up like visitors to your real past and come and go, or so the rumor spreads, and Lar’ has this shitty feeling right in his (yes, actual shit in his) head that it all has assumed great weight and point, greater than in any rap: he hears oh what’s he hear? — workshop raps of Grace Kimball; fond talk and joking talk of Susan and her "friend" in a next room at mid-morning one weekend, really getting along; and so lest there appear ground for suspicion, he’ll go his ma one better and will not bust out to this guy Mayn who is now for a moment a total stranger but Lar’ would ask him what he thought it meant to say you withdraw hearing from sound, for God’s sake, was it to listen to other sound, or soundless things? well Larry would buy that, too, it sounds like at least an effort to shake things up a bit.

— (hear the song — song that’s just naturalized American noise, Lez-bee-in; once said, so what — the foreign plural of a visitor from an olive island. But all that funny material or its sources isn’t why he wouldn’t get into hating Grace Kimball. For she’s funny; O.K.? And she’s open (as opposed to — are you ready? — closed), but Larry thinks her book of changes, one a week minimum, had better not get too into ideas, even if where else is it at? — because as the energy level does in a roomful of people jerking off or in their heads, so the room leans its sides in on each other, driving the other equally parallel pair into slant formation, the room is energy-shimmying and maybe the building’s being squashed or at last looking like us to think as a whole building which even then may be but one of those parts of units within units capable of being accommodated in the articulate structure Mayn woke up in to hear a visiting economist preaching decentralization many months ago, but as the energy level of all those people in the happily collapsing room going public rises to some great explosion, you’ll smell the sandalwood but Larry thinks that in the very Near East (right round the corner, maybe) or Far East where some of this stuff comes from, the sandalwood and all the postures in our New York picture book may be easier to smell — and haven’t they relegated the shit to a book of pictures? although in a western vein among fellow discussants Grace’ll talk about bowel movements (squatting heel-and-sole on traditional horseshoe seat or traditional buttock-contact support) as if they’re a recent layer of awareness which is what Larry means, speaking to himself more than to this older guy Mayn, when he says G.K.’s O.K. if she no slide into Ideas: where she has, she says, done the Freud Trip, the Art Trip, the Marriage Trip, the Separation Trip, the Booze Trip, the Romantic Love Addiction Trip — the addiction number, how she makes the long trip equal the short trip: well, says Mayn, is it destructive addiction or not, would be what I would want to know — while, however, the best seedless grass is not addictive, Larry happens to have heard, for just you look, whatever she says about dudes, at the black truckers downstairs in the middle of any Monday through Thursday afternoon taking you know their break to breathe a king-sized Caribbean back-home-style baseball-bat(ty!) joint biggest Larry’s seen so fast their eyes can turn blue ‘f they didn’t wash the stuff back with Colt 45 you know and you can be sure they don’t rinse their eyes before repairing homewise, what would be the point? calm their wives and girlfriends? Wing it — and if Grace talks a lot it’s in a naturally fertilized voice — and to you— for she rides in on other people’s energy wings too, she flies them too, so it’s like she’s listening to your feedback as she herself says, while meaning only that she wants a supportive opinion for, say, her still-on-the-drawing-board nation(-cum)wide women-bathhouse chain: keep the sexes apart for the time being, just a working model, teach ‘em the wings they fly ain’t only yr joint wings twain bonded in the ground of birth, and Hey Lar’, she asked, where did the sexes first split? (I think it was the Paramecium, I go check the book or was it Jim who got it from the prison inmate appendicularia zooplankton that house themselves in their own mucus (read imprison self in own ideas), the more I think appendicularia the more I think Paramecium, ah go check mah book, want to get outa here — I know you do, baby, but come back soon, it’s just an elevator ride away — all this as noisy as your own mind).

But we see Larry, and he knows Grace’s mere wish for supportive reaction even better than Grace, but he doesn’t know how much he knows, and knows the feedback mechanism is sometimes a homunculus-soul of Grace sucked actually back into him to listen to herself; but also she listens in the customary sense and in a jiffy would be naked almost without your knowing it and execute a hatha yoga number resectioning her old abdomen to music (if you call that music real noise), resectioning it in ultra-deep ripples that’re waves and are erupting muscle pregnancies now-you-see-them, but Larry won’t let her listen to his two-on-one oscillations, he knows he is no crazy after all, and everyone else probably has this same ballgame going, where there are long like pauses, your weak forces when things break down, or are in low-low-energy configuration, then will come like the strong force but you’re not getting them together, there’s a jump going back and forth, but Larry won’t show himself this scramble-minded in talk with Mayn (though there’s another person quiet and clear beyond the scramble and it isn’t anyone else but Larry, he knows) but he’ll guard his gourd, which was what they called your head in Mayn’s day, a day that sounded, when spoken of by the visiting man himself, physically rough in that old New Jersey township where he grown up, up — not that the man bragged — quite the reverse, don’t you know, but a lot of semi-serious sparring and shoving went on in his memory of the edges where everyone lives day to day not in the midst of what once was thought of as history, according (casually) to Mayn: edges where (though his father in this scene was on what you call the sidelines) Mayn drop-kicked a football for a field goal on a cold day that smelled, as he stepped forward on his cleats, of apples and cowbarns and a horse’s hide right under your nose spun magically to him at the twenty-yard line on the breeze curving around the recent brick of the high school and perhaps around his father too, where, to give another example (and another and another, for Horace Greeley, founding the New York Tribune some fifty miles away and but a few short years after the weekly Mayn-family Democrat burst upon Jackson’s strong-handed but anti-central-izing scene, believed "news" to be plural!), Jim Mayn got an unexpected lip, an enraged foul swipe on the mouth which he had to return though he knew he would smash his kid brother Brad, who was justified in his anger at Jim the older (though now to Larry Jim went on to something else, and didn’t quite tell what had been so important about) observing (through a mother-load keyhole) less than he could hear and hearing less than he felt he understood and understanding less than he had words for when he accosted his little angel kid brother Brad about the overheard scene with their mother in the music room, an intimacy with the scrawny Brad when Jim regarded himself as the preferred, the admitted animal of the two sibling species but though the admired animal of the two siblings not the child she would sit with in the closed music room, and that was Brad.

No head for music, Mayn told Larry; an ear for noise, all kinds of sounds shilling about in the gourd, oh maybe back home in Grandma’s old brass-ring-handled highboy chest of drawers, and Larry felt something personal in the introduction of that piece of furniture and did not wish to be Mayn’s equal yet. No stamina for the opera, you know, Mayn said, speaking of noise. Mayn’s mother had played chamber music. It’s intense, said Larry. I’m told it’s like talk, Mayn said, and I believe that. And it’s nice, I won’t take anything away from chamber music.

Mayn is in on something beyond Larry, maybe the Us that Larry feels invading; and Larry is tired and ready to be put on hold, an eighteen-year-old who really hears those three, four, five lone singing boxes, high-strung cabinets of explanation playing and singing, in a music room of a shingled house in a corner of a county seat, a house where Jim Mayn grew up on a street where trees had been put there by your ancestors and their chamber music or anyway beautiful homemade tables and cabinets: Yes, chamber music, said Mayn into the phone to his new young friend. Mayn was partial to supperclub numbers such as "Lush Life" ("the axis of the wheel of life") or "It Never Entered My Mind." So that Larry, listening hard and talking silently, drawing words out of Mayn’s mind to work into thoughts of his own, could have said, If you don’t have any head for opera, why didn’t you let me take Amy Tuesday night (answer? the tickets were Amy’s!): the words are coming Larry’s way. We see how Lar’ feels, camped above a receding economics assignment, or, where lately when his father stays home to work he makes many of his phone calls, in one of the two booths around the mid-City corner from the apartment, face (then) to voice with this guy Mayn who’s in his late forties. Oh well, Larry would broach the Two-on-One "Quantum Regress" to Mayn, if Mayn didn’t instead talk and talk — this distinctly listening kind of guy — interesting to Larry because two so different impressions, and Larry is weirdly feeling long-established, whose long-time mother thinks that she is a Lesbian and follows Grace Kimball in supporting all those desiring to get out of relationships— though wan’t desire wrong according to some doctrine itself paired with one that there is no right and wrong, which Larry shrugs roughly in favor of— and he vows to consolidate his gains of self, if only voiced in mind but voiced no less so that we already remember his wordsI am, and he complains to himself that Mayn, who’s supposed to listen, isn’t he? is instead wiping Larry out just about, so Larry’s mere ear complementing one of the City’s earphones, a voice but we hope with eyes, for Mayn must at least see eye to eye, he couldn’t not picture the Lar’: a conductor of information indirectly to or from a voice third party possibly named Amy decorated in the old-fashioned way with a body — whatever his function, that’s what the Lar’s been reduced to, a presence included in Mayn s voice and a function brought into being with all these Mayn-generated bits that are interesting stuff just in their own right.

And a rueful energy comes across from Mayn to Larry (you take it, Larry) in word Mayn brings of an elder meteorologist now working "out of" a Greenwich Village railroad flat whom Mayn visited on impulse having heard the man had been blackballed as a maverick and Mayn could not fathom— only pass on, now — the coastline of that man’s theory: but Lar’ did not stop measuring it ‘gainst what he already knew: and so while Mayn and he went on, Lar’ yet reviewed that Maverick Mastermind Weatherwright’s theory— namely, that some new force roughly west-to-east is now altering the modified sine curve which said Maverick long since worked out for the relation between sea/air temp, differential along selected coasts, and consequent updraft deflections of air current; but as this sine curve of late alters erratically, so does the configuration equation for the coast itself which the elder meteorologist worked out by a math he would not trouble Mayn’s mind with except to say the equation for the possibly limitlessly wrinkling and, perhaps literally, broken coastline in question felt like a Canadian sine curve worked out for the coastlike pattern path taken by our own neurons retrieving memories yet sensing always that, traveler, there are no paths, paths are made by walking: in short, the Maverick Meteorologist is sure something else is arriving, apparently from the West, and collaborating with coastal configuration perhaps by some odd congruence as if a possibly metallurgic radiation affected temp, and pressure differentials along coastlines, affected in fact weather, through indirect congruence with coastline itself possibly complicated anew (or even broken) by this same radiation not to be confused with radiation as in radiation fog where radiational cooling over a land mass reduces temperature to around dew point: yet Lar’s mind swarms, now, with coasts, and now margin seems so central, there seems no boundary at all to this promontory or island as its successive discoverers invent words for it and Lar’ feels drawn toward maybe weirding-out an equation relating the (possibly due to radiation pollution) variable coastline and—

and while Larry’s feeling a shade less Real than, say, he had planned to, in this and other phone exchanges, the stuff that’s piling down the wire out of Mayn is (granted) told like conversation along a well-tended bar; like chat in transit through the Happy Hour, while conversely what’s this guy doing, where’s he coming from, ‘z’he just like Larry? and why why this absolute stream of talk taking for granted that Larry had no other reason for phoning than to be there: for example, to hear what one knew already, that standing on the subway platform in Lower Space doing some last-second drifting so as to end up in front of the subway-car doors, you never knew any more which half of the two doors was going to open since now only one did; and before long (the man Mayn spoke as if he’d been away from the City a long time and was coming home, well he was moving back into an apartment he had once lived in) the (said) subway doors wouldn’t open at all and hopeless passengers would turn into a new mode of expectations, stand hopeless on the platform in Lower Space, watch linked cars roll into the station, stop, and slide out without opening their doors, and, interjected Larry, if you looked hard into one of the windows you would see two workmen inside the car sitting legs crossed chatting as if there wasn’t a platform with its dim exhibit of stalled passengers outside, and a toolbox on the floor of the car near one workshoe, and a kit at the belt, and a length of rope. Mayn remarked that his grandmother had taught him to look at things and had traveled widely in the last century when the family newspaper in New Jersey had still been going strong. Larry said he was envious. But no news can be good news, said Mayn, for Andrew Jackson in whose behalf the Democrat was founded went right ahead, first week of January, decimated countless seasoned British troops because the news of peace signed Christmas Eve didn’t reach New Orleans for what is sometimes known as a fortnight, so that for Jackson no news was good news, otherwise known as first win the war, then win the battles — Larry, there’s a key there if I could only find it, for — (I mean history has its laws, said Larry) — If so, said Mayn, I haven’t spotted them, they’re like the laws of a humanly lazy if insane visiting despot, there’s just no telling, except they are barricaded behind Fort Nightmare which we can pass through and never feel, like books almost read in one’s youth such as the heavily grandfather-recommended Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens—while, thought Larry, was he kidding about his grandmother at some pre-twentieth-century age maybe still in her teens (he certainly seemed to like her) traipsing off to the crystal fountains of Chicago’s World’s Fair then changing her plans and traveling West further than the eye can see, fields of globe mallows and all manner of southeast Utah and Colorado May flowers, magenta, darkening violet, down to the very finest royal purple locoweed swaying not far above the ground— but Larry’s phone is lost to that We that’s bigger than the both of them — that drives a whole canyonful of color-blind Indian horses to the winds of princely addiction and was known once in the beat of its digested purple to penetrate through her soft Indian gift-saddle to the actual blood of its noble rider the East Far Eastern Princess who must have sat her horse at least as well as this Mayn’s grandmother Margaret tripping out there a decade and less after the botanist Marcus Jones negotiated the terrain on a bicycle who, when he ran out of names for all the specimens of locoweed he found there, named the next one desperatus, bicycling such rockland! — the cliff-dwelling circuit— (Wait a minute, breaks in Lar’ like an emergency operator, a nineteenth-century botanist bicycling hundreds of miles through southern Utah? — but Larry’s always got the little-known Modulus, it will be known as Larry’s Modulus, it came from math but made him its own, working turning and remixing.) Mayn’s talk into-onto the good old screen closer to home so if Mayn persists in not sensing that this phone call was because Lar’ had a thing or two on his mind, Lar’ will do the understanding for Mayn — cliff dwellings, Mayn went on, I’ve seen some of them; apartment houses call them, the sun shines up against them and makes shadows that seem to wander way way back into those apartments: one of them had eight hundred units but whether the Anasazi six hundred years ago had co-op ownership like your modern Pueblo Indians (and the pueblo at Taos is thought to be nine hundred years old) I don’t happen to know, and just about all I know about anything I just happen to know. What are you doing out there in a pay booth? did I say I had basketball tickets? I’ll call you back — and Lar’ thinks Mayn hangs up without having been told the pay number. Larry is absorbed by the thought that Mayn himself passes easily between one thing and another, the peculiar Princess he’s got one or two low-profile stories about — a guy whose interest in meteorology, perilous dusting of our atmosphere in, for example, the Junge-layer of aerosol particles above the tropopause, and the mother-of-pearl night-lucent clouds and the "twilight" effects first pondered when Krakatoa blew a shitload of volcanic dust into the stratosphere, takes him two thousand miles west to check out reports of sky scraping windmills, though it’s one of those somewhat technical though probably not boring assignments of his: a guy who has done, for his boss, as much homework on arms limitation as, if not more than, the government guys whose fringe personal habits he’s got anecdotes about as if he doesn’t want to deal with the "bolts" (for example, one missile delivery system he specializes in, he knows all about that one, yeah); a guy who flies from a Vienna conference to Stockholm, where the disarmament information center is, but then to New Mexico in order to examine strip-mined land at first hand to see if he believes the corporate claim that that landscape can be duly re vegetated within twenty-five years (for whom?), while he stands thirty miles away scratching his head afloat upon desert in front of a giant rock-thing through which he passes himself hardly thinking about the Four Corners coal-into-gas plant but of a red convertible automobile driving across the water of a New England lake once when he was in the vicinity of his daughter and his son, at any rate a man (whatever his unknown personal life) up on what’s being thought right now even though just a journeyman journalist, he claims, and inclined to keep lowest possible profile, anyway a journeyman, an "adult," really into the East Eleventh Street "sweat equity" windmill, called by local Puerto Rican kids "the helicopter" and by the East Eleventh Street older residents "the fan": yet so easily, with Larry, this guy Mayn seems to — What’s "sweat equity," Jim? — Oh, fancy talk for, well, more fancy talk. . "urban homesteading," Puerto Rican low-income tenants’ tenement renewal, do it yourself, in this case a five-story disaster area becomes the pioneer wind-energy installation if the thing doesn’t fall off the roof, don’t forget New York’s a harbor city — so easily seems to, yes, switch between his son in college who doesn’t talk to him, and his daughter in Washington whom he gave an old white "auto" (he calls it), and an environmentalist group in New Mexico urging him to come back and report in "depth" what strip-mine interests are doing to the land — (which Jim says means "their side of it" — though granted the right side) so where’s the chance Lar’s ever going to broach with James Mayn the Two-on-or-in-One Quantum-Regress shifts, when Mayn’s got not only QR shifts of his own but Larry as a mere function of it, so it’s more germane to ask where is Larry in this momentary empty breath along the phone connection, i.e., where (to wit) is Lar’ except in the husky space nearly guaranteeing Mayn is there still, and Lar’ names the numbers: so now Mayn rings back, which in the middle of the visible noise of the City gives Lar’ the illusion of inventing a way to beat the system and more of being able like a pedestrian who flags a vacant vehicle and is given a free ride which the materializing driver will be repaid for elsewhere in the system and not necessarily in kind, a sense of being able naturally to use the public furniture of the City, a comfort subtler than mere economy.)

Oh the ancient apartment houses, continued Mayn, a day later face to face, they spread south from Utah but in Jones’s time the Anasazi cliff houses, not to be confused with the Pueblo co-ops, had long fallen vacant but for a hermit occupying one unit six months of the year in northern New Mexico; it was a multi-year summer plan he had, I mean a hermit from the City of the East, remarkable man whether real or made-up. Unusual, no doubt, but your hermit needs a break once in a while too, though not necessarily in terms of seeing a whole lot of people (You mean, said Larry, not necessarily a vacation from himself? — Yeah, that’s it exactly).

But Larry’s not sure if Mayn said this line of hermits included this Hermit-Inventor of New York. But could Lar have made it up? lately he thinks of invaders in his bloodstream (maybe they’re good) but then they aren’t the We his mother Sue’s always speaking in — (We feel that only through money can we achieve power) but (God, maybe) his own We, but does that make him wacko or a vehicle for these bloodstream visitors to (what? "get real," as his own mother puts it, even when she tells him he lives in his head and ought to—) feel, not think. Yet this hermit is into quite threatening meteorological thinking and it has made Jim Mayn reflect upon a certain Hermit ®f New York who befriended Jim’s own grandmother not quite a century ago when she came down through canyonland a timeless Victorian girl-explorer with a box camera and on a horse brimful of locoweed at one point so it leaked (and beamed and radiated into her legs and eyes) full filtered through the bliss of her temporarily insane horse and, as a consequence, Jim told Larry one evening meeting at a newsstand beside the cafeteria where half a dozen cabs were pulled up, she could see just what she wanted though with the help of a fine young Indian who had given her her skin-and-dyed-wool saddle and her horse and some high-class guided companionship to boot (though Jim deep down felt this Navajo princeling had come to a bad end because of her eventually) — he was sort of a brother and perhaps husband-at-first-sight and Jim wished he had asked his grandmother more about him though he had gotten the impression that the Hermit of New York had kept an eye on her: so Lar’, who’s thinking Why’s this old guy (well, not that old) kidding like this in the middle of well what else? until Lar’ feels, yes feels, that this young woman of the last century, Jim’s grandmother or person beyond her, could see in the high-up and far-targeted reflection of the cliff-vacationing hermit (whom she couldn’t see except for his eyes like one eye, one platinum ingot) someone else entirely, astride this Indian pony (God, thought Larry, looking into the window of a furniture store all alone the following morning on the way to the subway to go to college, this stuff is driving me loco and all I get from Jim Mayn is this sense that he’s a down-to-earth not very intellectual regular guy, divorced, yes, he did speak of that as if we’re — what? — equals? like Grace said, speak to everyone as an equal) — till Larry’s telling this ancient story himself, Guess whose reflection the visiting Princess made out in the pin-glint of platinum light from the hundred-foot-high tier of cliff caves of that centuries-old multiple dwelling of the departed people who had once had a sterling culture of pots and cloth, and larders stapled with corn that some said had been transplanted hundreds and even thousands of miles from the original southeastern soils long gone of this continent the Princess was discovering, plus dry-country native seeds help save Africa from famine, a woman friend of Mayn’s is seriously thinking of giving up her career as a journalist to work on this — but guess whose reflection the Princess made out.

Oh, why it was your grandmother’s obviously, said Lar\

How did you know? called Mayn, laughing elevator door closed. It just came to me, said Larry, who saw Jim for an instant as a family man coming home, though Lar’ knew there’s nobody upstairs. (Or was there?)

Platinum don’t come in ingots, is that what you’re thinking?

Somewhere through these days and mostly phone talks after the two had met when Lar’ had by chance heard Mayn discussing basketball in the lobby with the doorman in Spanish and had joined in, Larry became attached to Mayn, maybe because he had been places and was cool. Until Mayn was in Larry’s head often, like opinions, and Larry, who did not ask Mayn about himself, saw the fact, one night, hearing his father come in, and could not imagine why Mayn’s college-age son didn’t want to be in touch with Mayn, because while Jim did not think at all the same way as Grace Kimball, he was funny, like her, and heard what you said, though she maybe made up what she said (though out of what?), did she really think her kidneys spoke to her brain and generated dreams? but the man whom one of the women in her workshop reported had never dreamed must exist, though when Lar’ was going to raise the question of whether it was possible not to dream, Grace told how the woman was ready to be in love with that undreaming man sight unseen, which was a perfect example of love addiction. This relationship with Mayn was easier, though Larry woke up in the middle of one night, hearing his father come in, and remembering soft joking in the next room long ago between his father and his mother — and now recalled Jim Mayn just now saying in this dream Lar’ had been having, "Get out of there, Larry," Larry driving through a three-sided bowl of rocky mountains, desert deserted for days of a poor man’s travel, "Forget it all, Larry, forget the family and try thinking something new," whereupon Larry asked something, and Mayn said, "Never dream": until Larry at once grasps the light where some modulus of the dream has vanished but leastways it’s light and has come to rest and is what’s between the two men, and Larry knows he’s Mayn in the dream, so maybe dreaming for his friend — has become this other person while simultaneously being, well, almost-Larry, but he is certainly not the women who arrived as the dream was curving away around a tree trunk or down the Earth just barely held by gravity to the surface: they were his mother and a band of others like her: he was in his clothes on the bed, but his father wasn’t about to open the door, and dreams thank God were garbage, all these angels and his mother were pleading with him, "Let’s be real, let’s be human," as if it’s up to him, when it’s no more up to him in some dream than when his mother said those very words out loud in the next room to her friend Evelyn so Larry heard. At least not talking about him. Or telling him he thought too much, which was a hard one to answer, he was working on it.

Yet he was talking to Jim Mayn days afterward only to know that on the night of that garbage dream he had had a theory as clear as if he could say it: it was a reincarnation theory that was true this time but must find itself in Larry before it could be clear.

Larry wanted to ask Mayn a direct question about escorting Amy to the opera when Mayn said he don’ like opera.

All very poor out there, says Lar’ from a phone booth and digs for a nickel, comes up with a quarter, all he’s got, then remembers Mayn called him back from Mayn’s home, did Lar’ pick up a signal? — responding anyway to Mayn’s claim that certain Indians of the Southwest come all the way home hundreds of miles from boarding school for the weekend and nobody knows how they make the trip, they disappear into it and materialize hundreds of miles later.

Mayn had a relative who went out there before the turn of the century and stayed almost too long and when she came back an Indian she was mixed up with followed her clear across the continent.

There’s hardly anything to fill this break between the hard facts he speaks of (such as water, and the litigation over it against heavyweight Anglo lawyers talking water so that Indian irrigation plans, their own and those of others for them, go only partway, everlastingly partway, poverty and water) — this break between the hard facts and such allusions to that relative often a grandmother but then allusions to lore that feels true like dug-up-bits, including a Princess from elsewhere who had a protector in a hermit who sat up in high tiers of wind-hollowed niches (also believed to have been the result of the actual rock’s thought) and she would catch him far far away and high above her watching her and recognize in his platinum hermit-eye the grandmother Mayn recalled so fondly.

"I mean," Mayn went on, "you can make hunger dramatic, it’s got good bone definition, cheek, chin, ribs, for those who don’t share it you know, and so when the Princess turned into her reflection at a later time," but as Larry put it together still later, the grandmother must have been really someone, whoever the Princess was, because she criticized her Navajo "protector" and his people, who weren’t too well off themselves, for having driven the Anasazi people out six hundred years before (though it may have been that the river had cut so deep down into the earth that the irrigation ditches were amputated high and dry like reverse waterfalls that can’t draw water up any more).

Larry later felt Mayn had been entertaining him.

Apartment tiers as vacant as the sunlight: when she looked again, she thought she saw one hundred, two hundred scrawny physiognomies with blanketed shoulders, blanket-hooded heads, looking out of that cliff dwelling answering like tidal creatures coming out of the shadows that lined the fingers of sun bent and crooked because of the openings.

She looked again and saw but one hundred. But arriving at the ceremonial sing where the Prince’s people tried to find a way into the Prince’s mother’s trouble through a hole in her forehead plain as could be but full up with demons that left little extra space but didn’t leak, the East Far Eastern Princess asked how the two hundred had become one hundred — those impoverished, derelict Indians back in the "apartment house," did they have a way of making people and things fewer, like the one used in her father’s East Far Eastern land of Manchoor? There, far away, her father had taught her to ride on the worst giant hill-sheep of the Manchoor Mountains he owned, when he was not gathering information about other countries. She would never ride like a Navajo sheepherd no matter how long her fact-gathering visit. Contemplating the two hundred or the one hundred, she asked herself, What of excrement? But Rivertalk, who was the Navajo Prince’s second mother, was surprised, for didn’t this fluctuation of numbers just happen? It was either death, a natural result of living among the unseen presences; or it was that when you weren’t looking, half the people went back into their cliff apartments; or it was that two became one just as one became two in many ways, hadn’t the Princess seen one hundred before she saw two?

Larry was happier for having spoken to Mayn — and catching the eye of a tall blonde girl in a locoweed-purple outfit passing, so she leaned back and stopped, friendly, reminded by someone in the mid-City using the booth that it was there and she needed to put in a phone call. Larry, by now possessed not only by interest in the dual histories of this man who wrote news but didn’t believe in anything you’d be ready to call history, but also by the need to speak what he had called Mayn in the first place to say but had not been able to, along these last mutual minutes curving by swiftest increment away from Lar’s prepared question to nonetheless keep faith with the undeniably parallel tracks either side which happy parallels sloping off into the sunset over the Jersey cliffs he is moved in his abstracted heart to see behind these darker people going to the subway outside his booth, finds all turned now into the face of the blonde who’s waiting.

There’s someone waiting for this phone, and all I wanted to know, though thanks I would like to go to the game, is—

Listen, Larry, hang in there, you’re a good playground talker yourself, the formulas (was that economics or physics?) I probably couldn’t keep up with you, though that’s fun sometimes, but when you said you’re a good playground talker backpedaling one-on-two waiting to make your move—

I said that? asks Larry, as the blonde looks at her knuckles. He had thought he had only thought it.

Well, all I called about — oh gee I got to get off the line, there’s someone waiting — was, well obviously Amy is into work that connects with your work, right? and it isn’t the right-brain video research for the handicapped, I know that, and she phoned me once to ask for your number which didn’t make any sense; so is she in some kind of trouble?

In Mayn’s mind, Larry knows, come answers unspoken to Larry’s unspoken question Was there anything between him and Amy? Mayn is saying "We" about when they are going to meet for the game, and Larry is saying "We" about a couple of events scheduled between his father and him, like going out to dinner tonight and maybe going to swim at a pool they have a family membership at and they haven’t gone in a while. Mayn has said, Well, Amy’s a real pretty girl. But he has balked, Lar’ knows, at the bottom-line negative, adding, You say you got a lady waiting there? Jim’s saying, Between us, that Chilean exile I mentioned to you who’s. . modestly shrouded in the folds and folders of the foundation Amy works for as a research assistant, Larry understands, and that Jim prefers not to say more — so that, realizing that Mayn don’ wanna reassure him that there’s nothing of a sexual nature between him and Amy, nor ask him to keep under his hat these mentions of the Chilean exile-economist, Larry separates the perhaps nothing political implications of his present rush and concludes that, O.K., maybe he is being used by some higher power (as Grace Kimball said once, using the Alcoholics Anonymous formula) and if the higher power someway equals his new sharing with Jim (or anyone else maybe), then try to flow along the curve of this whatever it is, because it is more than relationship softly resounding words like "We" through Lar’—it’s another type of being using him toward — what?

Hanging up, Larry, tall within the booth whose roof he once hit his tender fontanel upon concluding oon call with Amy, understands that the blonde girl’s eyes are on him alone when she says, Well I almost gave up on you (though making no move for the booth) — when he doubly realized (having not till now guessed) that she is — but no, she is not a hooker, definitely not (she is wonderful, maybe) and much as (what with the gate swinging open, gate beep gate beep) he wants to get started at once exercising the dreaded Modulus upon matters shared through Mayn that are falling into place, still he toys with the idea that this girl and him met once, she’s a friend of a friend of his father’s, or of Grace Kimball’s, or she was seen doing water polo in an Olympic pool at Port Adams, Long Island, or she was profiled lovely against a sludgy oil on the second floor of New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art where the gross ornate gilt frames were once gifts to some potentate or are the sculpted coastlines of some old rich room’s ceiling Larry would like to lie down in at twilight. But no, the answer is easy: Larry and she Have Not Met; she is just plain here, plus it’s late afternoon of a day when Lar’s father’s been working at home at home at home, but will be going out presently to his group that he’s always on the verge of telling his son about (which suddenly now means to Larry that Marv has talked to the group about Larry—but that’s O.K., his father has lost love but not heart, but for cool feedback cum companionship you gotta go elsewhere).

So what’s Lar’ going to do? suspects he’s lucking out, for a second hallucinates Mayn kept him phonebound so long, exposed to your curbside traffic and to self-preoccupied yet happy homeward (but of course it’s quitting time, they have punched out) wage earners for as long as he did because Mayn was sending this girl.

But Lar’ has heard us, and (confirmed by the converging difference between the speech of a skimpily shorted jogger passing mid-Manhattan gridlock traffic-stall and behind and then ahead of him a high-stepping blackish sprinter in jeans who tears by and nearly runs down a bike that’s running a red light) Larry must cut out from the phone booth at once in defense of his own privacy, he’s got to make himself scarce from that booth, has heard us relations before we actually say in the voice of the Dreaded Modulus or we take the form of the resident child that reminds Lar’ of his youth, O.K., let R (for rotation) equal any number; having found that R may be positioned between two things in order to (through turning, looking, and merging through converging) make them equal, we suspect that R means "equals": hence we have the child’s R neatly inscribed between the two terms people and matter, which together the child has heard from his immediate ancestors and seen in the culture so often as to mate the two terms and identify them: which the child therefore calls R (Lar’ recalls from a dream he had of working in a moving house): hence People R Matter, which might muddle itself slightly if the R be merely heard and not seen, since then it might come out as wr, or some like speech d’effect (not to be confused with "Drive-Ur-Self"), whereas sounding just like the word "are," the letter "R" works O.K. to mean "equals." But what bugs Larry is some half-received words themselves or emotion afoot in Mayn’s friendly chat, that the way Mayn’s diverse informations have been given is telling Lar’ two things at once on separate but equal machines-like, you cain’t luck into both at once ‘cept by a mode he has only dreamed of, and the two things are: people matter; and people equal MATTER.

Larry feels one of these people disintegrate around him, it’s his too-young-acting mom, while around him in the terminal that he doesn’t travel through much nowadays living not on the Island but here in Manhattan, people hasten to get their train, and Lar’s humming of course at the premise that beyond this gone-to-pieces capability they will put themselves back together later. If Lar’s mom Sue one-on-one with or without possession took the court now, she might find the classic one-on-one upped by all the don’t know about her son Larry (though Secretly Can Come To Love) who like all the rest sees Life, does Larry, as backpedaling, backpedaling, and couldn’t Larry be seen by Susan as a divided and conquering Ewe-man Be-in not one but two sons to babysit (to diaper, to lift, to look into, to hear yelling clearing yare iddle lung, haroong harangue, to suckle mebbe two on two but maybe not) when by contrast she had been all but certain the unknown kid she looked forward down her front to seeing shoulder its way out of her, slow-diving ‘thout benefit of arms (don’t worry, it’s got arms, don’t you worry, they’ll come, they’re there below the tiny shoulders I thought; they’ll come, they’re there), was the one baby that she wanted and the only one, she said.