Women and Men

WOMEN AND MEN

like nation that the anti-Castro (if he really is anti-Castro) Cuban in question recently spoke in my hearing about (in peril of his life inside, yet anxious for his wife and son he thinks of moving from a doubled-up apartment two blocks from the American Indian Museum in Manhattan to a new Hispanic quarter of Poughkeepsie) — and, in the same breath, spoke of you, Jim, as if you worried him (that nation concealing mountains and estuaries within its single-minded length, dense mines below rivers running with the cold blood of glaciers, a south pole of anti-land and a northern border hot in temper as in mercury) — oh all our Chilean gentleman knows more about than you and I of surplus value, skewed capacity, which brought him and I together by eavesdrop, mail, interview, colloid way, for I had felt he would need me, just as I am with you, Jim, in this, whatever it is.

Which leaves me often where I was, opening in the void, and if a mere vessel (like my mother said, meaning her Lord’s), my kind’s a vessel moving through a solid so long as in mid-trip you don’t come to and find yourself a chunk of fruit in the Jello Museum, and the light of my life if Miriam can’t get back to me might be having her own experience elsewhere that loving is more than being loved or "George, tell me a story, tell me anything."

So we have tabled for now the Foley Plan for this correctional facility, Jim; and so on into a new vein where a messenger came but didn’t know he was one.

And so on through all blocks of this multiple dwelling, this seventeen-hundred-toilet redoubt (for where there’s children you need plenty of toilets), walled by hills and woods (the trees in a book I have, and in the trees birds I think), walled by barns, brains, and moving figures I have heard — their limited-use autos, their working animals, all injecting tax dollars into the bird-pie to keep us and our ungodly potential at rest between the lines and from escaping this (strainer-with-built-in) jug where fourteen grand (you said, Jim, updating to ‘76 or so, my figures) pumped into each man’s annum inflates day and night as the Inside gets more inescapable (where the sale money’s spent—from the Inside), gets more cloudy, and so on. But in an adjacent vein—

(you with me? for believe that more than one of us are in touch with you, if only through your unused power—

(to get me outa here! (smile))

after our trip into the nuts, bolts, and budget lines of a scheme to make this jail more than a bird preserve so we who’re inside (not just I) grow into Insiders living to keep the Outside in its place — let’s say a messenger arrived not knowing he was one.

New vein after all Foley’s Wide Load to you of unused capacity (almost all we got here), trade-off bartering one-to-one hand-sewn shirts for another man’s talent to entertain a thousand people all by himself, one man’s instinct for engines for another man’s legal mind, a born chef coming out of the closet to inspire that tired genius with the green thumb; surplus value ploughing the collective heart back into the labor value of the use value, which is true value in the Foley prison economy still merely ho-hum to scanners of outgoing transmissions — hence all this has covered the coming of the messenger like all our talkers inside who never heard the rest is silence, who’ll tell you why they’re here if they ever find out. And, Jim, a different vein now — and we’ll trust that the correctional scanners of mail who never knew ol’ sex-box Premier K’s adage "A long wind that is too long forgets the mountain it has come down from," got gross-dipped with foregone lode of Foleynomics (constructive as jailhouse lawyers’ nit-picking here where cleanliness long since killed all nits but not the body oils) so that the above-mentioned correctional scanners didn’t comprehend Foleynomics (with its self-contained prison cooperatives of craft-skill, revenue management, marketing, and retreat) as part of the long-term continuum I’m really sending you, the shadow thrown by the words— and by now the scanner powers in this Multiple Dwelling that is Nowhere but walled inside Somewhere may have passed this particle transmission by, as it them; whereas my Dago friend Dante’s Life Inside got intercepted by our scanners on its way to a humor contest and Dante took them to federal court where you also have to talk fast only to have the judge tell him insanity was no defense of such writing and he should be ashamed to submit such a critique of authority when guys like him drove authority crazy not the other way around, and better go back and try again — which is why I contact you not mainly by word-unit or real-page but as I do, including voice-over and memory-merge and the twin-scopes to come. So in the case of this communique which can be as long as you want to be equal to, Jim, let’s hope them frogs have let us bugs limp past their slimy, froggy nose holes on one wing looking for air; so let’s assume the coast is clear. Look there, and there — if possible both at once. Stay with me; this was all you needed. Prison is not just full of murder or of bodies.

So what’s the issue, Jim, you visitor, me captive host? Me making sure you shtick around to the end, and no judge is going to send you off to jail because you took your eyes off the road, looked in the mirror, checked the nervous alternator or the fuel, looked at the passenger on your right to see she was still there, fellow-pro you said got you into this once-a-week experiment but how come you didn’t bring her, Jim? I can see her so clear I know you love her.

So in a different vein, say the messenger arrived but didn’t know himself to be, and didn’t know the room. Yet this room was it, all right. Hadn’t he aimed for it, driving his rented car through the hills up tree-lined parkways we remember and down rock-bound hairpins so fine they are timeless, across trout pool, by a stream’s sheer rock with writing on it along tree-guarded parkways above New York taking our poisons and breathing back green oxygen — so giving back better than you get is the sign of a vegetable!

While because of the mail scanners I had to get here my way, by our full account of the Foley Plan for 5-to-20-year development of this retirement compound, prison, or, some bad days, all I know.

This here then is not just what you the pro with life experience asked us for, as once a statuesque woman asked of you when you didn’t, you said, pick up on what was really on her mind until you had blundered ahead and put yourself to test. But you know I couldn’t fit it all onto one screen. And I didn’t come yet to my girlfriend Miriam’s father’s four-star garbage cans, or the space under the float at the Y camp one July, or a substitute teacher at my gorilla-training school; nor have I come yet to the guy with your name Jim but less hair, who slept through his own eleven-o’clock execution ‘cause nobody bothered to tell him his attorney got a routine stay from the afternoon judge! So maybe my communication to you here and now, this penetration of your head, Jim, by chain (clunk) reflection, given as well as written you from way back before I knew who you were, and half-unwritten now like primal scripts among many unsnarled (smile) thoughts, is what’s transmitted here by need, to put it in a nut’s hell (smile again), not some expose of prison life, its secret suicides posed as murders, its historic farts and mutterings in the night.

So maybe it’s not what I should have sent you, what you asked us for, you driving alone arriving from many times I felt; but the messenger I said has meanwhile passed his road signs and such signs of the Outside as the low guard-rail dividers we remember so close to the road that your fender bypasses the air between, unless you go faster, yes there’s a thing I miss. The guardrail divider that moves because you and the road move, always in the left lane ready to pass, and so close your left fender’s tracked on a point of the divider rail that’s always a few feet ahead though the fender looks like it’s touching, am I right? — and the optical flicker stream is enough to make you epileptic. Hear the pain of your steel-belted rubber (as on TV, which we get on Honor Block) rubbing out the road, turning gas into gas, eating it up. Messenger driving the highway to get to prison on time, through hills, valleys, forests, sheer rock, you name it, get there on time before his time is up, am I right? And I know that some of you out there dream of getting us out of here at last and us killing you for your time, but a guy in here can’t know for sure if silence means friends haven’t written because my mail’s been held up and that is why I’m connecting between the lines.

No Andes here, Jim, no lone Indian shepherds along the parkways and no work here for wild llamas watering head up head down, along the Chilean shore drinking straight brine (turning salt water to blood — now there’s economy for you). You’ve flown to far-flung climes, to seas, cities, mountains, seen only by astral projection which reached unprecedented range in New York State prison system if this bunk tourist hadn’t learned a better; doubtless you’ve woken up, Jim, in Southern Hemisphere with a girl on your arm, the two of you flying high, am I right? rented car, the works — while I have been to Peru with Karl Marx in a footnote, the fine print’s how Foley snuck in.

No Andes here above New York, but make no mistake, our supposed messenger driving an old Indian trail had to pay attention to his driving at that sly twilight the Motor Vehicle authorities threaten us with, between night and day, each margin your last along the tree-lined roads and into the steep, rock-bound curves Slippery When Wet (you see I remember). I remember the road signs, Jim, the shapes alone, as the authorities like you to know them. Signs of the Outside. Signs that, when they’re put to you, are just shapes you could enter right into, never hear from you again ‘less you’re a messenger getting to prison on time.

Your time, Jim. So taken for granted that it’s unknown to you who have it. Think of the problem it is spending yours, whereas our solution is to spend by doing. Good time, they call it. Time done. But take time to come, Jim.

Time well known by seventeen hundred wall calendars here and known so to the day and hour of future rain and shine that it decays into what I call a suspension where anything could fall out, looking for an opening, even past time, well how you gon’ teach Chemistry without a lab?

So let’s say the messenger’s got a purpose if he didn’t always see it. He had something his host wanted. But some of the criminal types waiting for him wanted not a message but to be him.

They waited up against the walls at first in the long, one-hundred-odd-yard-long green concrete corridor with your white-line two-layer corridor long as the city block between the jugular training school I attended in my extreme youth and the brown-brick fire-escape tenement where I practically lived because my girl Miriam lived there with her family and she was my girl and practically my sister from seventh grade until I left school, and later so did she, if I’m going to tell about her.

You came into Room Four of what we call the South Forty in this our temporary home-retirement institute where you won’t need your rented, purchased, stolen on time, or second car, looked from face to face, you formerly of (let me introduce you) the Associated Press (was all I knew) and now on a once-a-week basis voluntarily deputized to a posse of criminal types unless you’re CIA — you walking into the room and the guys getting off jokes and kidding (like the kids that this place condemns them to stay) while they acted like they’re not paying attention to you — this pro in a suit, red tie, cordovan shoes, who’d come once before — how I got wind, who might best profit from the experience, the only new man at this second meeting of the group in this pocket of human waste imploded into a toxic mountain — and while the guys are kidding around and not (you might think) paying too much attention or when you stopped by the desk and took out your cigarettes and put them down on the desk I know I heard you say, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here," so quiet you maybe hadn’t decided to be heard. Right?

Which we did hear. Even the guys laughing it up heard you through their own shit. And what you said pulled us together, Jim. It’s not the thing you hear from the lifers’ legal liaison, who’s dedicated in a way you’re not; and it’s not what the death padre (temporarily out of work!) says in the cadre therapy sessions religiously attended in order to put off lock-up for a couple of hours, when he tells us though he means well how we must not abuse ourselves; and not what you hear from the two Bible-class oldtimers who come in in boots and Stetsons sporting Bible Belt accents and huge guts — well, only the one with the white Stetson — but they mean well, but all these others are at least a little different from you; but you, you’re saying, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here." So Efrain (of whom much more later; right, Jim?) said, "Then you come to the right place because we don’t know either. You going to fit right in." Which got a laugh, but Smitty with the eyes closed said to Efrain, "You’re here because you’re a bunch of murderers and rapists, right?" which got another laugh, and from you, too, Jim, you wouldn’t keep it in.

"So you got something in common with us," says Efrain, who then was getting out very soon, and you answered so quick ("Oh yes") you can’t hear you almost, so nobody picks up on it.

The news comes in about the Outside, and we are not there.

So then I said, if you recall (and maybe only if) that some of the guys were really into journalism, which quieted things down, and I said once upon a time (though I don’t mean the clippings on my case) I was into it too— until they locked me up, and then I diversified inward. Newspaper work, you opined, has many facets.

But Jim while I have sweated out the politics of why I’m here, I know what you meant when you said (be brief, you said, be brief) that you wondered what you were doing here (though you were kind enough not to wonder if there was any future in it — for what is there to journalize about inside?). So the circumstances under which I was implicated in the decease of a person known to me would have come to mind even if you had not pinpointed said circumstances by telling us that as of fiscal ‘76 fourteen thousand dollars (and counting) was what each of us more or less cost the state per year, subject to inflationary update, when we all know the inmate doesn’t get that fourteen grand unless he is very special. It goes into a waste flume except that those whose overweight ill health and expanding families this fund floats cannot get off on the insanity of this fund or, come to think of it, the beauty of (in many domestic establishments) a wife who does work worth $250 a week by 1970 par, roughly $13 grand per annum, my mother for example a crimeless victim, or Miriam, such a girl, Jim, that around her I could never say enough. Meanwhile you do not ask, What’s your story?

Now you said you were used to getting a substitute instead of what you were looking for, and that that was the story of your life as a newsman. Carlos takes the New York Times and asked if you had information you refused to reveal and if you knew any journalists who blackmailed their sources to get more info and if you often knew the answers before you went after the facts. But I am communicating now to ask you this: a government contractor, say, gave you what they wanted you to get, like their own press release, ‘stead of you always finding out what was truly going on, so for instance you said they say countermeasures equipment that keeps the peace protecting B-52 bombers by denying threat radars information as to our bombers’ range and azimuth position, but I am asking you this because it was hard to get your attention with a dozen criminal types monopolizing you. . now when you go down to, say, Venezuela or the Argentine (you said) — or, cell-bunk itinerant I, let’s say Vermont (you said), doing an in-depth on the ‘‘insurance cover" corporation you did not name, well what else are you going to go looking for except the truth? I mean, did you surprise yourself and get into insurance and forget what it’s covering?

You answered as I asked and so I understood: but wave-length, forget it, though alternating current comes closer: what it is, Jim, which I put together that I never could have Outside is the Colloidal Unconscious where contact works through the Schism. And I am not guilty of discovering this unconscious, much less that it found me through a lab-less chemistry unseen as deepest bonds. Not that we’re of one mind in here with seventeen hundred guys longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic and black, Irish and black Irish, but only one slot-machine massage Chair in the chapel confronting four rows of pews for player-piano historians with clout and the need to study a captive example, if not to throw up the menu in reverse, but you said you were acquainted with at least one man in your business who was capable of the blackmail Carlos brought up — and you sometimes thought the truth about the Mysterycorp in the points of its operation you had checked into might have been all the time in you. Or did I only guess that?

If the guys didn’t know what you were talking about, I did. Arizona where sacred mesas are not above shedding refuse; northwest New Mexico, where a rocky ship shrugs off a moving desert; oh Jim, hit Houston racing-dog farms, El Paso boot supermart where every pair fits someone who will die, Vermont cemetery-sculpture quarries, New York music; you went into the history of that ghost state Uruguay as sanctuary in the McCarthy period which is like before my time. You traveled some in South America, which half these guys are mapping runs to in their waking dreams. And you sent word back or flew back to your desk with the information you had developed — how does that work? — and had the stuff in the old attache case bringing it back thousands of miles to your office, well maybe (you said) dry run or wet, going and coming you carried the real facts on you at all times, do you recall saying that?

Why do I ask? Conspicuous leisure and lifetime bent.

Remember when you asked, Got any animals here? — which got a laugh because you meant real cats, real dogs, tiger in this think tank, camel with loose hump in the yard walking between the basketball game and the iron pumpers.

But on the heels of that laugh you asked what I read. Someone said, George never learned; someone else, He got his own rules.

Right then, Jim, I hear Miriam on the phone and see the clear, large color of her eyes. What’s your act, Foley? you asked with wordless eyes. And once gently asked on the way out, Don’t you want to kill or get killed in here? but I had felt the shadow of such words cast long since, and the answer was colloid not pacif-ass. And we’re onto something new but then it seems not much good to have you aboard.

Yet some of us who share interface reach other in a mind compounded chemically but far truer than the sums of its particles — call it Colloidal Unconscious for lack of more up-to-date name: and some whose interfaces lie a billion millimeters off do reach each other and know they are amid particles suspended and dispersed but — I said "colloid" — so much smaller than fat droplets in homogenized and pasteurized (carcinoma-emulsified) juice not from concentrate and so much smaller than the clay in what you call at a glance muddy waters that you (because as I came to see when I had to make up my own lab, we are colloid solutions) experience and maybe use them (only you don’t see them) and if the Colloidal Unconscious is unconscious of itself this is the same as ants in their towers in Africa, they’re all working together, Jim, cooperation life, competition death — and already I can’t help hearing Miriam on the phone at the tax-return office — and you talking to me, the noise, you’re blunt and brief, you leave stuff out. And when you asked me what I was interested in, well you can write back and tell me what you think of that Norwegian immigrant non-farmer who grew ideas you know his name — wore a fur cap that hid his long-headed predictions — didn’t do much more farming than I would give my labor away for twenty-five cents an hour the going rate here, the staying rate! — to be your own peasant outside the walls on the correctional farm correcting potatoes to be someday mashed in milk. And I have read all the philosophers — read them in the programs, Jim — and have found many as blind and slippery as the economists on my way to test myself at Toxic Mountain (rumored by a lone foul or fair-weather genius correspondent of mine) via the Colloidal Unconscious which goes down through monetary theory like laxative or in your planet like dry ice through cloud potential.

You said, Don’t call collect (like the hip social worker whose phone got cut off), but Write, and you’d write too but you didn’t save letters. I don’t want you should get a substitute for the real thing you wanted, you’re a man who met the great Goulart in Brazil on his way out so there’s a chance for me, and you’re after something more than helping a clutch of cons be journalists (my mother went to school twice a week on the sly at age fifty-one) (my substitute teacher aforementioned Ruth M. Heard always made me feel I was in for something special in my life and must watch patiently) — by the way please fill out the correspondence form, Jim — you see as I told my mother who comes up here all alone sometimes real independent with a pack of cards and who is brave but has her own way of understanding what I mean, what I’m in for has proved to be something else, Jim, a purpose: thus I found myself, and here not there, like you in New Mexico, if I got your meaning.

What I’m in for — the appeal hangs fire. So when you said you don’t save letters, were you letting us down gently? A package deal of friendly help but when you get it open — well… the letters you said all get boiled down in your mind, you probably had them all, so that, never fear, while you would remember us — our stupid fish faces boiled down to veined pulp — you had to save on head space (there being not the unused capacity some claimed, and I was grinning because you knew I knew what you were talking about and not to think our letters were lost when they got thrown away, but you don’t have to be so honest all the time, did you know that, Jim?).

You saw I knew you meant who had written the letter didn’t matter, the name could detach from the words though the person was still there and the letter’s message turned into you and you had it in a new vein so I was glad to grin and also at the two former missionaries I get mixed up, you never see them together, they wear sweaters. I was sweeping, and one quick-steps by and with a shake of his head he says to my uncomprehending automatic pushbroom, Such a waste, such a waste; and I to my broom which suddenly goes off Automatic and weighs like a live thing on my hands, In my keeper’s multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.

This I thought, thinking of you, Jim: He’s been all over. I been here. Years going on lots more. But what’s he know? Said he skimmed stuff more than before; needed the information, distrusted eyewitness.

Then I thought, He wouldn’t be here for the hell of it.

Neither would I.

The guys wanted to ask you about yourself. I can speak for them, because I know they did. Your family, if any; your history: brother in haberdashery in Jersey, the brown-and-orange tie (the next time you came) came from his place. Much of it better forgotten, you said, if you recall.

You were shown the prison newspaper. Front-page shots, Puerto Ri-quenos, Indian hair and headbands, don’t know what you thought. You don’t see our whole picture. What is intrinsic here?

What the messenger’s hosts wanted, waiting for him in a mile-long corridor, then a weather-proof room (look, no windows!), was not a message at all (unless an emergency greeting from the state parole board); what they wanted was to be not the messenger himself but the message. Or so they think. But while some did, not I.

What could they know of you?

The lines you gave them straight — the news article simple and clear at the outset, separate from everything else under the sun except its subject. Subject in hand, get in get out, that’s your rule, and "How is the Rican mafia taking over the prison newspaper?" "They like to get their boys into all the photos looking like Indians," Charley said; and Efrain, "Hey man, I got to get out of here," like an inmate here who escaped a month before his release date.

But between the lines a message the guys would not find: I saw Juan write it down and put a box around it. "Don’t get too curious around here," Efrain said, didn’t he? He knows because he had a long elevator ride one morning, and the building he’s in only got two floors.

Curious about the law — you got a laugh; we got a law library here where some guys go to dream. You said dreams passed you by.

Curious about people: what questions do you ask an interview? You got a laugh, some questions you don’t ask, man! What makes people tick, what sets them off, look at a man, an ordinary man at a run-of-the-mill international conference, and you report what he said, not what’s going round in his mind, but I think you know that also, Jim, and pile it up as you encounter this prominent character again months later: "it’s like chemistry," you said — you looked my way — you never knew much chem ("Makes two of us," Juan said)—’ ‘Like between a man and a woman," said Efrain, and the guys laughed ("Oh darling," called Jackie, and I hear Miriam saying on the phone, "To whom am I speaking?") — but molecules, you said, if they are in the body, who says they are not in the mind? The guys sensed we were loose in inner space and they were ready for some personal history all around, but I knew where we had gotten to, and was glad I had broached the molecule problem.

Miriam I heard between us.

And most of them did not wait first in the room that our strange messenger had aimed at as he drove billowing parkways into twilight headlights coming on and oncoming. They waited in the mile-like corridor.

They waited in order to see the evening’s arrivals lest these be in part female. To whom am I speaking? For whom am I waiting. They’re good guys; there is some beautiful understanding going down here, don’t doubt it. Here comes the lifers’ legal liaison (young mother of three), keeps them up on the law (popular in her own right).

And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?

Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend — a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it — and any other females, the more the merrier, why not? the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour — the program people — and you among them but not of them, Jim.

Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs — no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper) — start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read — and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you want to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk — but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise — about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son — taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?

I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up old city bus, which he can do but I don’t want to talk about it — and about the crazed Hispanic off-islanders now attending big-league baseball games in our shared city (the Jews are better at picking up Spanish, he says, and he’s right, than the Irish — all of which explains how well I know the distance between that school and my second home, my girl’s).

And she was my beautiful, wise girl who took individualized driver training from me and was my girl from junior high until I left and later so did she, my future, though didn’t leave the tenement itself with a row of galvanized cans her intensely white-haired father the super — Jewish — get all info into lead! — kept always in their place so random Venusian descending via sun-fueled greenhouse-ship saw, through the deteriorating cement of the building’s brick, a sometime vacant "railroad" we might make better use of for an hour and a half, he saw his cans there on the sidewalk as field batteries, standing reserve, ammo. Accessories in my head long after the fact. I can feel for him, Jim, right down to the red nick on his jaw twice a week, and I am thirty and counting, and — as my esteemed substitute teacher once pointed out it would be painfully different for a childless female long-term con — wonder if I will have a daughter to protect, or just have one. You knew something because you said after me She is your future, getting it straight (your only child?).

So you can see where I am coming from. Neither of us dark to the other as I guess you’ve thought, driving up here or then with that one hard kernel of corn between your fingers looking at it and then Juan and back to that tooth of corn — do you have it, still, do you know where you can lay your hand on it?

And where is this here intrinsic continuum of message being (smile) devoured, by the way? In your hand? Your head? growing in your ear? Does it raise a blister in your fingerprint? Does it make you mad? Or, more like, make real the billions of millimeters between mind particles each with one interface exactly met by the other, and if you cheat the world’s jailed jailer of its substitutes, maybe you see further than you’ve a right to. If you go in for rights, I don’t, I go beyond.

But if the future is bent on some path, the latest in communications out of an electronic suitcase you mentioned that might go off or speak in words of two syllables, linking Vermont, New Mexico, Chile, and this prison-redoubt where I send out myself honeycombed with light, where I have transcended the passerby who carelessly strikes off the head of the sunflower, this sev-enteen-hundred-toilet redoubt ringed by hills full of white farmhouse roofs and fenceposts topped by talking crows and the glint of earless mobile homes like truck-stop diners in the trees — Oh I know they’re there — hills groaning full of firearms and tax deductions and howling with loose-skinned hounds— no, a hookup you don’t hang up on, a new path communicating between here and there, man and man — O.K., then, so what’s the economics if with all this new communication system there is nothing to communicate?

This was the point that our sometime substitute in the old days, Ruth Heard, have I described her? fresh from England, would make; and if she wasn’t looking at you with the blue eyes and the brown curls sticking way out all around, you knew she would be in a second. So much for economics, Jim, the vein of my opening cover for scanners of outgoing transmissions but secretly in its very openness for you too, Jim, and for others outside, if, and I give you leave, you have shown this mish-mash of news. Isn’t there more important things than being brief, Jim? if you’re still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.

You’ve been in South America, but didn’t see anything, you claim: like, I have been here! But remember the grasshopper? I bet you do. Alighted upon the biologist’s ship three hundred seventy miles from land, what had that grasshopper in mind? Through what air did it make that jump? what vein? I am without a lab here except the darkroom. Photography’s the program here, since C.U. can’t be taught or learned but only known, and there are some guys here who take unique pictures, Jim. No sunsets maybe, for orange dust smidgens don’t glow on the man-made horizon of our walls. But these men will photograph a shadow; a halo, in my opinion; a face; perspective looking down a cell block; or bars from inside or out on the gallery half over-, half under-exposed so the series locks into your head remember those flickering parkway guard-rail posts controlling thought? And my old sciencer sees weather control one day altering times of twilight, angles of seasons, rains albeit through radiation-parametering focus spoutwise down to flush up lung-blood from the avenues, leftover power toxins to be rethought. I knew my mother would not see the future in the photo I developed and arrested the development of soon after I was transferred here from Auburn; she shook her head — the future? she said, but look at the valid driver’s license she now carries due to me, hidden in her plastic cigarette case, good for years while Jackie who got me in the photography program will never agree with me what he can do: these men can photograph our finest particles, Jim, if they only knew what is there to be seen in the enlargements of faces, and yet is this a point? — that the taker always sees? Your face last night showed in the seams under the eyes the search and what-not of a life — like the noted substitute teacher Ruth Heard, even to the stories told. But while you are a man whose eyelids have doubted many a dawn, don’t be so sure you’ve lived all the way between your time out there and ours in here. Oh I could have been a doctor; I knew too late. I know another lab, though; and it’s here. You’re getting away from me, Foley, you said.

Well, that kernel was handed to you between thumb and forefinger by a (says-him) Marxist name of strong-man Juan, who was the other person present before the guys trooped into the room ahead of you; and then there you were.

On the threshold, you looked at Juan, the muscle-man with eyestrain pink across the furious, friendly eyes, who studies the abridged Kapital half the night as if his all-night light is the always switched-on bulb of Death Row, and you seemed to see nothing else but the old corn kernel he had picked up in the yard that only I and he and you — the three of us — were aware of, though more than three now occupied the room, and you asked what it was, and Juan held it up — a tooth? you asked — and give it to you and you had it in your right hand for a long time and forgot about it.

And I see that what I have been trying to say, Jim, if I can call you Jim once more, is that at 6:20 p.m. you came into Room Number Four of what we call the South Forty in this Stressed Concrete Castle our contemporary home (smile), you formerly of the Associated Press (was almost all I knew of the messenger), now associated with a gallery of criminal types.

You said you didn’t know why you were here. How come your act’s together, then?

But Jim, you did know.

Don’t know why he’s here; going to fit right in, Efrain said. Which brought a laugh and it was yours; but Smitty, who shuts his eyes tight, talks till he’s ready to open them, then shuts up, said that you were here with a bunch of. . you heard me before. And I as a friend of Smitty’s had heard of you and knew what you brought for me.

I the new man in this pocket of potential waste (new-type potential energy) here long enough to be relocated again, where they might tell you the night before or an hour before, and suddenly you’re not here, you’re up on the Canadian border (polluted beef, don’t you worry they won’t let you in), but you’re thinking up a new life, new territory, redcoat horsemen at outposts, great fish full of history diving out of rivers into lakes, wriggling airborne clear from the great long-head Norseman’s Wisconsin and Minnesota, land to be had, Sino-Russian reconnaissance reflector-planes slipping between dew point and early-warning layer, lunatic wing orbiting the top of the country: point, though, is you got through, Jim; and I spoke and said some of the guys were really into journalism, and you asked if there was some good copy around, and they wanted to know about yours. Oh, you said, it made you think of newsprint like wrapping paper and you said you could wrap the state of Vermont or New Hampshire in a year’s newsprint.

Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you about: I told him what you said."

Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal? — I’m thinking and will come up with it.

Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too — (I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who gets them? First come first serve?

Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what you were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories — and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record this. (You still there, Jim?)

Now you said — and I’m reporting, if not briefly — that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for — oh this hit me so hard — and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs — this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.

Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.

Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to — did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.

Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where he was coming from, he was right.

I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.

Fill out — thank you in advance for filling out — the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one — smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.

Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam — I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college — listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go! — you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.

Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.

I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here — plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas you got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes — because there’s no reason you should open with us.

Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook — and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.

And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length — you laughed— closer still.

I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.

(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60 mph on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)

Well the night I met you, I was in the room ready for the messenger. The room he aimed for, though he was not entirely into his message. It was not just a room your course was set for.

Because Charlie, rounding us all up — because here you don’t sit down and put in a call to some guy in his cell that you want to meet with him later in the week, but you find the guy maybe in the mess hall, if he is not doing his own food trip or fasting; or you pass a message to somebody in his block — Charlie didn’t know I had heard Smitty’s tape of the prior meeting, and Charlie told me you said you sometimes felt you’d been unconscious a lot of your life, between bedrooms, pressrooms, twenty-some years of assignments, many small-scale units but no one overall shtik. Charlie said he could relate to it, because he says he is also very aware of his unconscious.

But Charlie did not say what I found on Smitty’s tape — that you were obviously into the unconscious and it was chemical.

So then I knew, you see; but, the first three, four sessions, I held off broaching this with you. You see I knew maybe more than you.

The South American in question; yes?

I had known he might contact me. I knew he might need me. Even me. But I could not say this in short when the workshop broke up at eight-twenty and the guys crowded round the desk.

Now why did I think that you were unaware of the message you were being used to convey from the South American to me? Your interest in the kernel of corn Juan had picked up in the yard seemed more than your interest in me, a bearer of other things.

But no, you were no go-between, Jim. And would not use someone, though I feel that first letter is getting scrambled with my longer second— and shortened, especially after your hoped-for visits.

But I know when I’m being treated like a person!

The guys felt this in you. Efrain came out with things I didn’t know he knew. Like the guys thought of you as a friend. Hang loose; no sweat; the guy’s in the business, he wants to share some of his shit, give something back. I could have told you they’d be saying before you knew it, Hey Jim you ever need someone taken care of on the outside, you let me know — hey did you ever cover a contract? how about armed robbery? Ever cover a war? (But you knew the Cuban contact of our Chilean gentleman had asked where you in particular were coming from.) One guy who never said a word before tells of sticking up a drugstore with a piece of wood and a Volkswagen waiting outside. I had never seen you before. I said, "Were you ever in Brazil?"

You turned at me and said hard factual stuff, but I felt that the messenger might be hearing double signals; and I know the message was meant for me while the response here must, in kind, include the cover: so do you recall you said quick-like, "I met Goulart before the coup. Some revolutionary he was!" All dollars and cents was what you said it was, the middle class losing their wages advantage over the working class, Goulart refusing to stabilize at the expense of the workers, so U.S. development money went to provincial anti-Goulart groups, the CIA went ahead via AFL–CIO to infiltrate Brazilian labor (listen, we ought to have a union, let the Teamsters take us on) — but it was all dollars and cents, you said, and liberals in Washington you said thought it was beautiful, undermining Goulart. ("A liberal," said Ahmed Williams who came one time in four, "is someone who wants for others what he doesn’t want for himself" — the talk gets abstract in here but penetrating.) All bucks, forget the change, you said.

Something’s wrong with that view, Jim. I sound like my mother, who always had high hopes for Miriam, whose own young mother had shared at least the Catholic faith.

Tell the South American he can get in touch with me direct.

(Thanks for filling out the correspondence form.)

He will understand, and I’ll get back to you whether or not you make it up here for that afternoon visit, be assured. Readers of outgoing mail say now and then they read these letters but when they get past first few lines like mine so little smut or legally inflammatory — and you ask does that teacher Ruth M. Heard ever write?

Well, she could run, I’ll say that; small, not too thin, thick around the shoulders, lithe arms, prominent head of curls and when she faced you, her azure eyes came at you and at you, which there’s more of to come, though you understand that my account of the Norseman economist’s view of woman and my fascination with the Scot financier of kings, projector of Mississippi schemes, demand-and-supply monetarist who was first a man and far beyond the moneys he dreamed in, all this, Jim, is no mere opening screen played upon those outgoing-mail scanners who when they’re at the end of their rope have been seen actually holding a page upside down like they’re looking for something. Perhaps, like us, to do.

And so let us say they never got to the mythical messenger. No more than they the spendthrifts of this state’s at last account fourteen grand per inmate-annum (who can’t imagine the lights of that messenger’s car seen intermittently round curves, through trees, like a series of signals, signal fires, smoke signals) will find each the key to his own nature, that "invisible government," Jim, but not to be confused with your liberal nightmare, that CIA they call the "invisible government" right down to the "evenings" they sponsor. Which isn’t — if you can stand one prison inmate’s non-violent reality — the invisible government I mean (though you as a stranger even to yourself whose motion’s a way of waiting, know what I mean?) the skeleton key to what Jim Mayn can do: and this home wherever you go or are, the two the same. You would not go to a siege zone and expect immunity from snipers (or Cubans!) because you’re Press. Alcatraz is where it was, but now nobody home, not the Spaniards or the British, and the Indians who "landed" there were not the first ones there, and during their protest wrote their high slogans on its walls so to the passing ferry the walls might speak. The Feds, in essence they gave it back to the Indians, but the Indians didn’t want it, I said to you; you laughed at me seeing me anew and deja vu and I would be willing to be your reincarnation, if you let me. If I was to plan — thanks for sending back the correspondence form — to be elsewhere, like Outside, I would get my wish one day but arriving there victorious I might find nothing to occupy, it’s like that communication system world round we discussed, Jim, when maybe you got nothing to communicate, that’s what Ruth Heard once said.

And so I am here. Consumer of unseen leisure. A pat on the back for you that you don’t save letters much (you said — and I report — I the maker of carbons near-sighted reader of fine print practically on the end of my nose, in a book-lined study with grid-exposure on the west whence comes the mountain of my inspiration rumored in the stacks of force that one correspondent thinks is widely if slowly approaching, an old man sciencing radioactive weather, yes wrote me—and you boil all letters down in your mind, saving on head space since you doubted there could be as much unused brain capacity as the authorities are trying to make us believe. You saw me grin, man, I knew what you were saying. I who have diversified and know letters need to get lost if thrown away, just as I know what is small is better, idle need not be unused. But you don’t have to be so honest all the time with your new pen pals — Efrain, who’s writing a lot to his Iroquois girl sending her dreams; Smitty, who I wonder if he can smile with his eyes closed — please fill out the correspondence form — and if you write them you will find them very idealistic, Jim, souls, so with an exception here and there I wouldn’t expect these men to tell you their lives, if that is what you came for. Do we want your life? — there’s Shin, a Cambodian social worker (not assigned to prison), who seldom comes and come to think of it seldom writes except to apologize for not writing and to hint at problems in his personal life; so his marriage is on the rocks, maybe he’s got something going.

Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract! in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together — soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all — which is their secret from themselves.

My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said — I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality. .? What are we going to do about it?" — yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!

So that sometimes in this quest for things-to-get-in-the-way, I have felt the rock-bottom unit was Woman, so here, so there, so ever hard to pin down.

You evinced experience of this unit, this constant; I did not ask your marital history; thought Efrain followed up on you saying you had something in common with us but all you said was "Crisis."

And in the middle of the midnight of my pursuit which the South American economist about your age but bald traveling I feel sure you know under an alias seemed to understand in the brief time we spoke across the Visiting Room table so many months ago it’s years by calendar and even not by calendar (though the warp of this communication yields sometimes Efrain and sometimes only his absence, paroled) — followed by a second (but only by my count) stranger visit in the Visiting Room after our economist got back from a space launch — that visit the last time I heard from him till recently — I sometimes have felt that after all I have not found that unit and it’s as close as air and wherever I go it is with me, so I will not get shook when some former missionary in a sweater murmurs What a waste, as I’m standing by mop and pail, and I say that in my father’s house there are many mansions, but then see this missionary isn’t the same as the other, his brother, his twin, ever have a brother, Jim? but then am reminded that, no, I indeed did find the fundamental unit microscopic as beings we’re made of, grand as thought, abstract as the age.

And where is this letter by the way? In your hand? someone else younger? Here? Gone? Boiled down? To what?

To be made like my earlier letter and our subsequent afternoon visit? You said you would check out colloids (like to see if there’s any left!). You didn’t read much "to speak of." Thank you for bringing the correspondence form with you. To answer your question, No, Ruth Heard doesn’t write. Of Cubans and our Chilean I cannot say, though one of former was visited by a tall, scarred man sent by a fortuneteller’s friend and it’s general knowledge he’s on the way out of here sooner than legal.

I hear the black chant, the Muslim feet jogging down the concrete tunnel, study session’s over; I hear, I see, the men, two by two, the knitted caps, among them Willie Calhoun Jackson soon to be out on work release. And seeing this limited yet group consciousness bind these men, I think we are all. . but you know what is coming, I felt it a century ago in the frequency emanating from natural sources, cloud, hail, mountain, human plasm making me, as I then was, a hole in somebody else’s head no doubt (smile) — but what is coming you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious passed like a watchword so brief as to be unspoken from the South American through you was it by chance but really by itself. And so I know that he needs my help, though you might not know this, though you may know the gravity of his plight which I have not helped.

All this goes too far too fast, and whatever is true in your racket, Jim, brevity’s wit may turn out gravity’s vacant nutshell (read "-house," as in "nut-" or read "multiple dwelling")

Yet I slow down to be complete — holding no brief for speed, what do you really like doing fast? in and of itself you get plenty of time to fix all that — then if you follow not for the purpose of honoring a super’s garbage cans which he would speak of and as often keep watch over in case a neighbor, a kid, even own daughter’s boyfriend at school should leave a lid unsecured having stashed an old out-of-state plate where any animal or other might get into the building’s garbage, which is neither here nor there I’ve learned later in three places which are all prison which in turn I may not have said, but it’s a very good experience being transferred, as I have been twice, no middle-of-the-night police-state nonsense, right after breakfast, and you can get well-known for being well-known.

And when you get there you are as ageless as before though for once time done is space crossed, but might as well be the river in Australia longer than our Mississippi, endless as the abundant dairy products Miriam and I are farming in New Zealand calling to mind dairy-product cancer but also life as it was at first, where land is for the having.

To own land, Jim: not theft, as Juan thinks, practicing on my typewriter till the last minute — eleven o’clock when the juice surges elsewhere leaving us in technical darkness. For even if such property comes down to your claim through heirs upon the future, it is a transient holding minor as an accident, kernel of corn falling from a bird, a wind; one corn falling like theory, evenly from heaven, not to mention the paper manufacturer’s daughter who in her race for the State Senate and in preparation for that long-winded body added to her pilot skills learned at our airfield just outside these walls with a course in bailing out, but overshot the acreage her father owns, and someday, always in skirts, she will own for miles all around airport and prison, and on the Sunday of a Puerto Rican festival she drifted down too low, and, clearing one rampart but not two, she found her fantasy skewed, she yanked her lines expecting an answer that wouldn’t come, accepted with total-body wit the double-chute bare bloom, nearly twisted her leg descending onto the volleyball net with its angry holes stretched in lost memory — practically landed in the caldron of beans and sausage which would not have ruined underwear she was anyhow bare of but dispersed a long line of PR inmates and families and could have corned the ice cream but missed the rice, the coffee urn, the bandstand wired for poetry at that point, and missed a man and a small boy playing catch in the sun — catching up on lost life with a third, a known visitor in a western fringe outfit and hit a picnic table by the far wall where Efrain was getting it on with his full-blood Iroquois girlfriend fingerprint masseuse though while kissing turning both their heads so he could watch the Unidentified Woman’s flight approach out of the corner of his eye.

To touch down and be besieged by admiring strangers who, all but the Chilean’s associate the journalist Spence who had been talking to the Cuban’s little boy, could not be blamed for not knowing the industrialist’s daughter was the new owner of this land, if you see; for, sometime during my fourth or fifth year inside, the truth came to me (which I could never discuss with Shin the Cambodian would-be correspondent who when he used to come wanted to discuss the extra lift a guard gives you on your way up to the Box or how many assault problems per new inmate, plus profile which guys lose their wives in here within six months, ‘stead of basic problems like what I’m telling you came to me): that property is theft only of yourself: where are you if you have land? Why, you are there. It’s got you like the tax man leans on next year, which you have let’s say borrowed from him, but where is he if you want to blow him away or drive him nuts? You learn there’s a new man.

They go away, and approaching what I hoped would not go away, I’ve known the great obstacle, which is to be not remembered, to be almost on the tip of someone’s tongue, no more, though that’s a beginning for you.

The evening’s visitors, the program people, came up the long corridor, and there’s my Mayn in the rear chatting with the Austrian wife of the car dealer who turns and waits a beat as if to say to her, You O.K., dear? and in the forefront comes a former missionary in a sweater, he knows me and I say, "Putting in your time?" and he, "Aren’t we all?" eyes rolling upward, but when I say, "But mine’s being paid for by taxpayers," he steps on, as if he’s thinking for the first time today, turns back toward me and I don’t know which of the sweatered former missionaries he is and so don’t know what of me he remembers, and say before he can say anything which is doubtful anyway, "In my father’s retirement compound no rooms are rent-free," and he turns to greet you, and you stop to shake a hand, grip an arm, say a name.

And that obstacle, that being forgotten, I got to go down after it till you pass through the last nothing between you and the ground and find a footing. Everything you find here, Jim, I have seen with both eyes for myself. So I remember the Y camp that let me in for two weeks one summer because I knew a lifeguard at a beach in the Bronx I’d never swum at; they let me into the Y camp even after I had trouble in school thanks to Ruth Heard, I mean really thanks, and it was the first time she was fired; and when I left camp to go home I wondered where she was and remembered the pine needles on the ground beyond the screen of the cabin where dew and early sun whispered to me, Jim — yet, more, I had in my head a watery place way under a float out in the lake supported on all sides by fuel drums so you had to dive down through the anchorage lines and come up into the cool tomb of air, empty drums smelling of mineral echo and containing inside them someone’s private motor faraway outboard, bike, chainsaw; and while the drums and slimy ropes were good obstacles to your being discovered, you heard the guys shouting far away. One day a black kid with reddish hair came up in there gasping like whispering his mistake, and we just breathed at each other and I didn’t tell him the air pocket was getting smaller and smaller and the drums was timed to go off at seventeen hundred hours, but then I did, and he said, "Shee-it, man." But then he got to believing the way I believed it, and we would swim in there from different directions under water like as much as twenty-five yards thinking seriously for the first time of saving energy even creating your own, and two kids who went to parochial school and I would dive off the float and get up on it again, one of them must have had an idea because one afternoon just before seventeen hundred hours he came back up under there in the center in our air space and couldn’t believe it when he saw us and looked from one to the other, back and forth, but I whispered that the air pocket was getting less and less and we had to get out of there, and he got scared of us, I saw his teeth, his white eyelashes, the water and shadow gave us speckled skin — I never thought of that — he was treading water like he had a cop running after him and he was grinning at me and over his shoulder at the red-headed black kid and I said there was only air for two minutes for two guys and what would that be for three guys and the kid said so quick it was like breathing in, Forty seconds for three, thirty for four, and the red-headed black kid and I reached for him and he started screaming and we pushed him down, down under and toward the ropes — why did we? — but we didn’t hear anything after that and on the train home when the two weeks were up I kept thinking the place would forget me. Just some crazy place? Because I knew I wasn’t coming back and anyway the float would be gone.

What happened to that kid? Tried to get the two of us in his sights. He got homesick that very night, because when he got pretty well drowned he passed through a vacancy of the lake and saw only the connection of it with home and never slept again.

The float, though, gone for good? The place able to forget? I met my red-headed black associate once long afterward — my clock says almost eleven and I can’t lay my hand on a fresh carbon — met him at a city pool more full of kids than water, a pool with a good and unexpected shape and high and low diving boards and a Chinese kid (said to be thirty faking his age) who was thrown out for pounding the high board while the rest of us yelled at him to go off, then leaning sideways suddenly at board’s bend to pitch himself a good ten feet over to land on the low board which was free for that moment and landing in such a way that, though he practically snapped the low, he vectored all the curves of this force into a floating straight-out swan that held but did not let go all the joined curves of his act: until then he hit the water, and as he entered with a slice the growth he had been compounding of force for a million split-seconds that held us fascinated and sent the sound of the elevated train passing into an ear of sound so we were deafened by the sight of the diver, took hold of him: and, while he went in straight, once in he was swerved so hard left forward right left, that his body was swung under the surface by that unspent tangle of poles — it was another mind’s hook that sent him then with energy you would have sworn he did not have smashing silently suddenly six feet to his left with a gravity of force into the pool wall — cong! I could hear it. Ruth Heard who I met on the street the one and only time and she was not alone said I would have if I’d been under water.

When he was pulled out, looking like an old man who had been far away while time had stood still here — and ejected — I met my former camp associate who said, "Hey man, what about that kid we—" but he looked over his shoulder and our thoughts collided. He looked me in the face, and just as three kids yelled in my ear so not even my girlfriend’s father could have thought he heard what I said, I said, "It was a good spot and they’ll never find it," and he said, "What?" then nodded once slowly, up and down; "Right, I got it." For we had that place right with us, between us, we knew the camp wasn’t there no more.

You get out of me more, you see. You said again that you would check out colloids. My dad sees only one thing when he looks at me now — the cage in front. He will never get to see my cell, but. . and he doesn’t see what I was sent up for but if he maybe accepts it he never liked me writing the Fire Department to remove my name from consideration. I had been put forward without my consent by friends of the family and I could not go that route, a letter to which there was no answer. My sister I will say sees more than one thing looking at me — now married to a ticket taker on the New Haven in a black hat who I think of as a cop, basically, who has put her in a pre-dyed pink ranch unit by the Thruway where she can see his place of work pass twice a day and he hers even to knowing if the garage door is down or up, though if down, not whether she has made her every-other-monthly secret trip beyond the Connecticut line (no doubt mined) to see a once-loved relation in his storied seventeen-hundred-bathroomed redoubt, first arranging for the kids to go home with friends after school, mum’s the word, shopping for Dad’s birthday — oh, in New Haven, Hartford, Boston. . Montreal! Newfoundland! — while in this way she hides her true trip some miles westward and hides that once-favored relation of hers more than his exile hides him.

Now give her credit, though she can’t slip past the metal-detector threshold an old license plate of hers specially requested by the brother sentenced among other things to drive no more, she when she sees him unlike their father (who is also, granted, embarrassed, which is maybe good for my father to feel, you know) sees two things — not one, like the old man in his bleached T-shirt and his mouth. But she can’t see her two at once, and I can only forgive her; and the two are: me her brother the foregone once-loved relation; and second (but not in order) her man in black she sees — in my eyes sees him reflected, Jim, behind her on his suburban local moving past power poles like picket fences flickering disapproval but much worse than disapproval at her through me, my eyes — or try this for size, he’s standing just behind her mad brother (me) just before Brother seats himself on his side of the Visitors Room table, and seeing through me as thank my stars she alone has always done with the light of love, she instead, like the Visitors Room is a museum, finds her husband there, he in real black not my correctional green, in a silver-buttoned uniform coat over my prison-issue green short sleeves, and in his silver-number-plated conductor’s hat above my long-lobed brainy ears and short, fair hair, and his clean lip under my utility infielder’s mustache, but is he in black or in blue? it’s been so long I wouldn’t know, and you got to ask yourself as you said, Jim, speaking of trusting your memory, Did I ever know this thing I claim to have forgotten, rest my soul?

Ruth Heard thought like that. And that’s how I almost got thrown out of Junior High: attacked the principal and other teachers for pushing her out, this beautiful subversive person. This is about i960 and she took us on unauthorized trips and we would disappear for the afternoon, and a skinny Irish kid who was funny so we all thought we liked him didn’t like her assignments and got his folks after her and she had no teaching certificate and told his parents she was glad to teach only when she was worked up and wanted to make trouble for herself; and in the different ways parents have, no one fought her dismissal and the principal fought me by letting me graduate. First things first, my mother would say, the sweat on her brow; and make dinner that my father would look at the meatloaf and ask very quietly, Where’s the ketchup, and she said, Already in — yet he brought home an electric frying pan for her once not threateningly and you could tell if you looked close he was pleased with himself.

My mother did not imagine she would go to a driving school on the sly and get her license at age fifty-one, but she did. Meanwhile made what trips she could to see me by bus, but has never to this day told me the explosion when the old man found out she had gone out and got her license.

First things second. It’s not a pat on the back I want now much less that brown-and-gray-striped shirt — did you get that in your brother’s store? It was hot in our workshop room that first night. Thank you for filling out the correspondence form. I took your word Friday that you do not know the activities of the South American economist (while we do not discuss him or the American photo-journalist who has pursued that distinguished gentleman’s life for profit that has led him from Florida to this very institution. Which the Foleynomic Plan was to cover, too).

You were part of the life of that good and heroic gentleman South American with an Irish or was it Scottish name but with the foreign and the English accent: hence our constant messenger tooling up through hills which was only one thing I meant when, before I said, "So much for economics," I found an opening in the void.

It was a face I could have pushed in, or inward. You know the type, Jim. One with oddly the same eyes as my girl, sharp behind the mist — a little not there. Reflecting not you exactly. Just secrets seducing you to know them when shit who cares.

But those eyes not my girl’s drew you in by likeness and then you were betrayed and where her eyes were all readiness which you expect of a good person, a fine girl, these similar orbs of her father the super were motion I swear like he’s not all here, and he did marry a Puerto Rican even if she died. Which left him free to go to Israel, which Miriam said her mother never would.

He never missed a thing; looked after the building like it’s owned by someone he looked up to. And he would forsake his bed in the middle of the night to monitor his garbage cans.

Once, the garbage started rising. So he needed a fifth can, and he got it out of the owner, but then found that under the beef gristle and chicken joints, the toothless cobs, lolling eggshells, glistening slicks of tuna cans and here’s a gefilte fish jar and spent tapeworms of spaghetti and tomato sauce and grounds and cucumber curls everything breaded in cat litter, light bulbs like new and angles of toast, was stacks of his old newsmagazines and papers he almost didn’t know he had because he reads them only years late for perspective, but now he wanted them and freaked out that the ones not already mashed by the sanitation-truck paddle-chopper were stinking wet, and what he could sometimes be saying in shock to his cronies who’d stop by the cans to smoke a cigarette, "I don’t get into shouting matches," and Miriam was up in the apartment right there when he came so close to smashing her little Aunt Iris who’d thrown the magazines out you might have thought those old pages and supplements were life savings — papers prematurely leaking cancer cures and showing old infants half-cooked half-eaten in the furnace of your local place of worship. He paid for them with his labor, and he had spent his time preparing to read them, it carried him through the very twilight hours of "local dusk" at which you said the Russians are fond of recovering payload weapons test-fired by retro from orbit in case there should be a future to ply with, which will mean more of the old educated guesses as to actual cash flow in global arms trade because credit arrangements not to mention the grant basis make, as you admitted, major weapons transactions as hard to put money value on as the give-and-take of modern wedlock (laugh). Twin mysteries. But why did you then say we shouldn’t take you seriously? I, at least, saw the connection. And I know the papers make up whatever they find they are missing so the future can be told; but if statistics like last year’s jump in military spending in a certain South American nation will likely be followed in ‘77 by a corresponding drop because the lid is on there now — and even because statistics don’t find it easy to lie, so action after action must be made up — did you sleep in berths in the old Pullman trains? — the father of a kid I know worked there until one day they put him behind a bar selling pressed units of turkey-gobbler in bread wrap — actions as live as that dioxin spread over four misty years of Asian woods and farms maintained its integrity so well that it proved itself as a future area-denial weapon — which you know already, Jim, so well that my being in your head is the important thing, not the information I rehearse there — as interesting, all this, as people, Jim, and as, sometimes, the boredom they make you live with — more events to read about, to carry Miriam’s father, his gray-white wiry hair standing up on end, through local dusk from work to supper even in my thinking and I feel yours concurring, beyond the sanitation tumbril chopper-scrambler (his head borne under it, and disappearing, or segregated and rejected for transplant tumbling back into the street where it is exasperated) while Miriam’s Aunt Iris watches with her soulmate Eddie the printer with friendly ink-eyes and an anvil forehead still unmarried driving a late-model compact.

And Miriam’s father keeps himself going with other consumables besides these magazines and papers which he kept because he wanted the chance to devour them all over again someday, while leaning against his building talking to friends who had retired and didn’t work part-time but are included, free, in his leisure watch over a six-story tenement not far from the East River Drive, from the subway, from my own former home, and from a drop Miriam and I some days detoured to so as to go not right home from school to her house which was a way I couldn’t begin to measure near-sighted though I don’t forget a bit of it, down to the point of a pizza wedge Miriam once fed me across the booth table to shut me up when all I was going to say was, Let’s get outa this dump, let’s go to Jersey, the beach, maybe further out, no one’s there this time of year — whatever time of year it was.

And I am not forgotten by her father, which is the story of my one-time life before I learned to think. But a man who his beloved daughter Miriam said spoke often of settling in Tel Aviv with a friend he had once sat on an East River pier bench with and disputed for hours. But if I am in your mind now and by design, you are in mine and no getting around it and you see I do not hide my light under a bushel.

You said, as if in question, There are no animals here. Got a guilty laugh, running up out of the convicted gut on a string that was then leashed in. I see you moving and me here. Ever-moving. But sometimes moving in one place without ever leaving, yet knowing you could leave. You asked who visits. Well, I have always been pretty selective. My mother borrows Eddie’s car— you don’t know Eddie — and always leaves a little present in it — a bear to hang on the sun visor; a pack of mints. My mother comes. The Visitors Room — what more than an expansion of the seminar horseshoe table where we rap with Death Row chaplain ‘bout everything except that inevitable penalty itself, and the Muslims come and listen and burst out now and then I mean really very intelligently. The meeting’s called "cadre," it’s called "therapy," it’s a rap supposedly though padre does all the talking, urges us not to jerk off — but the cadre’s a way not to get locked up after supper which is earlier than the army but later than the hospital. Not this dentist-equipped hospital, which I don’t go near.

Though Miriam sent me once to the dental clinic uptown, and I recall contemplating borrowing a car off the street to save time and now I see that as an early experiment in a public transportation system with open cars anyone may use within a given borough. The car theft I mentioned awhile ago was an old VW that petered out slowly block to block while the cops gave chase until at last vehicle came to a halt, and perpetrator left piece of wood used as pistol on seat, and the cops never identified it as the weapon.

Things go on somewhere here and are heard of. Guys for example might get burned upstairs. I don’t mean they been doing it, but it looks like they are going to activate the refrigerator and other major appliances (smile), stove, blender. But we would never see it. Not even the dimming of the light because they got a separate generator. What do you expect in a maximum multiple dwelling? Let’s say the head pop off and the exhaust smoke just squeeze out from armpit one, armpit two, and the curled hands darken with the body’s irritation at this half-ass cremation, this summary drying out of the teeming colloids. On those midnights when you are waiting for a dream in which there’ll be an unexpected dimming of the seventeen-hundred-toilet candle-power, you think then of an H-bomb settling whole and bright upon this place and reaching down instantly along so many fuse radii the incandescent inmates here are at the center of the flower if not attention; bodies with auras for a moment and auras inside too, where the skeleton flares orange under the analysis of the moment and the brightness that is in truth the ultimate shadow gives you gall remembering what you’re in for to say as you die (instead of "I think we’re in for a shower," because as our Chilean contact said, When people talk about the weather they often mean it). At least Outside the others are getting the same, and you see one of them jacking up a fast car to change a tire which ain’t reboring a cylinder because what’s he know? but doing something anyway, and on the parkway rolling nowhere; another person jumping at the kitchen timer and plunging to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer; another window-shopping, finding a trace of a faraway idea in an article of clothing; another in a backyard digging not realizing a person that knows him well is watching him from the back-porch steps, you could go on, Jim, but when you’ve had this final thought at the moment of the capital H — that your own human kinsmen outside are also being totaled by the bomb — your brain’s too full to let this be the last thought so while you think, ‘ There it was, they’re getting this, too," and ‘That was my last word and thought, that was it," your brain as it shimmies adds a whisper to the shuffle of your coil (smile): Anh-anh; nope; quite the reverse, everything on the Outside, unchanged, unbombed, is O.K. and as it was — like this new generation of clean devices come off the drawing board not just to eliminate undesirable elements but to model a holocaust at minimum expense and with maximum media exposure to show each man in the family of man.

Or so I used to let my mind go — a sloppy body (you said you’d check out colloids, no need to get too technical, Jim) — until my life changed when I woke up to the Colloidal Unconscious. It had always been with us. You touched on it when you first arrived on tape. You are different, Jim, from our old born-again prospectors with the fine-tooled boots pointing out under their cuffs, who pull their big-buckled belt off at the metal-detector checkpoint, yessuh, small change, pen knife, and some credit cards show up too, glad to be asked, suh, well you know they have got it all down to Jesus; or that good bearded father who cornered history by just splitting the Earth between those thirty-two hundred mines full to the brim with miners and on the other hand and always elsewhere the twelve inspectors who by some arithmetic fronting as geometry could ensure each mine one visit every ten years.

Or that bad father — for there’s always a good father and a bad father, Jim, and the bad father didn’t want to get into a shouting match and found the world in a necklace of garbage cans that magnetized his mind, and were his work and perpetuation and care like overflow from father function until his beautiful daughter the one I always love grew older and then those cans got mysteriously linked by a medium-voltage line especially dangerous in a drizzle to jolt and stagger Dobermans, frowning shepherds, bassets minding own business, cold-cock your Afghan, explode your spaniel, straighten out a white chow’s tail, recharge your Saint Bernard, when these had until then lifted, oftentimes propped, a leg to leave a sign of themselves upon galvanized common surface that could now be turned on or off; or another who’s got it all down to one thing, Willie Calhoun Jackson, fellow inmate, soon to get out on work release, soon to be wed, soon to join the army of the employed, who does not say what he does not know and does what he says he will do and is one member of the population here who does not walk the tier or walk the yard but — like him or not — got it down to one thing, and he sees it all as black and white, until you better just not talk to him any more, he is so clear:

as you, Jim, can see when he comes into a workshop when he comes, and in that ledger of his he has place for that famous President’s black Jupiter behind him on horseback or muleback (secret overseer-without-whip) — comes up in that famous American’s account books who knows when? when the master was meditating the source of petrified shells in the great layers of schist in North Mountain — not the ray-root mountain of the West-coming-East alluded to in the new weather of my old science-man when he writes, that will change our chromosomes and coastal precipitation not necessarily for the worse — and Jefferson recalled if not the Universal Flood those shells fifteen thousand feet high in the Andes that were said to testify to it — and this Jupiter was in unconscious connection with his famous master in ways not imagined by Willie Calhoun Jackson’s universe of black chance

: whereas you Jim boiling down my letters in your head now and the visits in between, keep us all in our places: you’ve got Juan, I bet, out in the yard pumping iron to build up strength to study chapter and verse long after lockup, after the last steel door clangs to, made by a Cleveland ironworks but not by unskilled cons but Juan isn’t hearing the clanging any more if I may speak for him, he’s memorizing contradictions between the freedom to sell that one basic valuable your labor, and the freedom not to buy it of those who made the steaks and winter coats you need, for these are nothing but materialized labor: but I say (wishing Ruth M. Heard was here), Listen, man, the cheap-labor market for Puerto Ricans in the early fifties, that’s past, it’s education that’s the difference (but I don’t like what my words tell me like a head I have contacted into existence outside of me)— So what happened to you, Foley (Juan demands), blond, white Irish-Polack (asks the red-eyed leader): Juan bides his time, regrets he was not at Attica getting strafed by a Rockefeller for what a difference a transfer makes: while hearing his own voices only sometimes because he’s studying every paragraph three times of a sacred book that found its proofs from across the ocean in England, but: Attica (I tell my friend Juan) was inevitable, then so was his not being there to get winged and anyway the day is over when Puerto Ricans were neither Americans to Americans nor Latin-Americans to Latin-Americans:

No, they’re not over, he looks up now from his book and I feel old twilights I used to enjoy outside — but (I add) Puerto Rican is internal immigrant. Migrant, you mean, he answers and don’t look up from his book: So what are you, man? Con, I answer — and he goes up in a laugh or not a laugh, and snaps the Bible shut:

You see, I come back at him, quantity of opposition between us has increased to a qualitative change.

But he reaches for the good book that’s dropped to the floor by his file crate: "Con" is right, he says: (Not "Pro," I quick-quip) Convert, I say.

He says, Look here (but I can’t see the long footnote he’s holding up): I should have kept up with my fuckin’ chemistry, he’s saying in somebody else’s voice. What I know about paraffins and fatty acids?

Baby, you don’t need to know that shit (I reply); Marx didn’t know much more chemistry than Lenin knew about rocks; it’s what you make of it (I act like I’m kidding, lift the open book out of his hands and see the chem footnote adapted from Hegel’s breakthrough vision and I recall you don’t need Marx to tell you a quantitative change builds up and bursts into qualitative (water heated to steam, I’ll take water any day and so would Mir’s dad’s tenants though steam is welcome in season) and mine came the morning I woke and knew my billion colloid cells were truly under suspension not solution

but I’m thinking of Ruth M. Heard, Jim — why? — I tell Juan, Look it’s all in Hegel, the evolution and obstacle quest of the spirit, that’s what you’re doing in here.

He grabs the book away, I’m still talking: Your brothers and sisters have got all they need except luxuries and freedom from worry.

But (he replies, because Jim whatever you hear ‘bout prison violence, we have a lot of time to rap in the abstract), they got (he says) freedom not to think why the boss knows more of what I need to know than I do, but I need to only because he knows, when neither of us really needs this business.

The light falls, Jim, through thick and thin, I hear it, actually sloshing around my vocal cords, and each sees the other in pieces. We both know who said that, Jim; I feel we both know. Though he, the gentleman from Chile, told his contact here, who passed it on to Efrain, who got to me, that he thought he had heard it said at Cape Kennedy near the coffee machine by a passing journalist or, sensitive as it was (though who knows what it means— except me and you, that is), by an otherwise menacingly ambitious photo-journalist with whom the Chilean has found himself involved.

Do we all live alike in here? I ask Juan; and Ruth M. Heard, who I saw maybe ten, twelve times during my formative years, is with me and against me (I’m excited)— Man, did you ever have raps like this Outside?

You’re getting silly again, Foley, says strong-man friend Juan, What are you putting off? go away and leave me alone (and well it isn’t as if I don’t have letters to spirit out of here!). And Jim, I remember how Ruth Heard said how her father believed in speaking out and would pack a Thermos of Indian tea (how she learned to drink it without sugar) for the two of them on London Sunday morning and a cheese sandwich each, and her sister going up and downstairs every minute while her mother sat by the radio; So Ruth and her dad went off on a double-decker for hours with two changes to get to Hyde Park where royalty’s galloping around — you have been there, Jim, I am sure. And here her father would get on a box at Hyde Park Speakers Corner and talk, and talked even when they turned away because he believed in a new all-purpose tax, and in changing the time standard for England, and in experimenting with having every area in the world on the same time. He wore a dark brown suit, red tie, gray felt hat like a labor leader, and he could interrupt his address to catch the attention of someone, tourist or resident— speaker-shopping — but he kept talking even against ultimate noise interference, like if the machine you’re driving is working O.K. you forget what a jerk you are, but if you bust a fan belt in the boondocks (and the car is "borrowed" at that) it all comes down on you, what you are.

Juan says he wants to get to the bottom of why things happen. I say you can’t blame it all on Monopoly or Race. He’s thinking I know about his little baby brother, no baby now. There’s a lot of water under the wall between him and me and I’m going to leave him now and go around the corner, it’s time to eat, he bides his time, his food and roof, his heat and light are free but he must work overtime for that one corn as the Good Father says that’s only Juan’s subsistence before he begins to even think of his family’s, which he does not.

And Jim, take Charlie with his animal eyebrows, who’ll always listen and bring you together with someone you don’t know and even he is coming to think the Education Programs maybe sedate you, and knows the Colloidal Unconscious is neither powerful nor a drug. And Smitty will never tell you but he knows he’ll never be a journalist but comes to the workshop to stay out of his cell till eight-thirty and to add to his tape collection while trying to go on closing his eyes to his little woman (with the highest heels that make her taller than he is broad); and you, Jim, see Efrain, soon to be released, going up and down in that elevator because he put up a curtain across his cell bars and wouldn’t take it down, only the beating he took on the way to the Box is in his head now and his dreams shared with his Iroquois lady who can massage even his fingertips-fingerprints and nobody laid a finger on him for a long time I think (though sometimes I think every guy in here knows news I don’t); and nobody kids around with Smitty lately, but he’s got his tapes with guys sharing their thoughts and feelings (you don’t get that on the Outside so much), so you know that these guys are not just (as the foreign gentleman was heard to say to his contact here) vacuum-packed for burial in space, that even if in the cemetery here where you don’t want to wind up alone, on the headstone they got a number (that’s all) so let’s face it, they’re not dealing with death’s sting even at the end when, whether felt or not, it comes, these guys rapping on tape are just as alive, Jim, as you saying (also on tape, where I first heard you), that it was maybe just due to your chemistry that you were unconscious all these years which I don’t quite believe you, these guys they are not vacuum-packed for burial in space, that’s what our mutual acquaintance the South American said who we both know though how well is like why you’re here — he said the astronauts look alike, and a man he met there in Florida called them all sealed up in their suits unknown soldiers which made an impression on the South American and on me because the astronauts aren’t typical at all. Yet in your head it’s mainly me I hear talking (smile) and the time we had a Visitors Hours visit as private as such can be with the waste product at the high desk on the platform catapulting butts every twenty minutes depth-charging over the desk to be swept up (no waste/make work) by some half-visible con, not to mention in the corners above the junk dispensers the two closed-circuit videos scanning the room as if you would steal me and my annual value of fourteen thousand five hundred dollars when at best you rent my heart, friend, and all you can get at except to reach across the steel counter to press the flesh is the dispenser’s white-flour sandwiches (crisped by time) in their lighted windows and the no-cal leukemi-aid and the potato curls which they hold down inflation by filling the bag less up but then they rethink the price two months later, which I owe you thirty cents for: we spoke so little of the Chilean economist that I wondered was he our connection after all, though I figured you had come to your own discovery of the Colloidal Unconscious as well as through our economist-exile who had mentioned it to you.

I wondered how much he was our connection because — let’s be frank at least in heart-to-heart — when I asked if you had an address for him better than mine which is a "Care-of " that just isn’t where a man with a dignified manner and a head like that hangs his hat (not even an apartment over the deli in question), you paused to let, I know, those sub-microscopic half-knowing mirror-particles face me a message: which was, Can’t you give me an address?

Hey, when you going to bring Larry, I faced back an answer. College and from Outside.

Someone inside me knows more than I, and that’s the one you needed to ask. Unless it’s yourself, these later weeks, Efrain getting out, Smitty missing workshop one week, then not taping us the next, and saying little but keeping his eyes open now, telling me he did not believe in suicide.

Yourself, I said, for you said that sometimes going out on assignment you’d have this dumb idea you already had the facts. Was this to warn me of what I knew already from the tape, oh and from the capability of those colloid surface faces we share more than you may know, Jim — that you brought a message in units only I might put together from that fated man — his name you know; and he, as I told you on your last visit (not the most recent when you were not admitted) I have been in correspondence with — and he hinted Danger he is in from a journalist.

But these letters of his had begun again only after our workshop had gotten off the ground so there was something there between the two, a connection though not through the Colloidal unConscious with him — only with you, if you are not yet much of a chemist, so that in the evenings in this multiple dwelling while Charlie and others on Honor Block are watching the seven-o’clock news, I am catching the two of you — I’ll explain — there’s three Honor Blocks here — it’s not so easy to concentrate on Honor Block — but what I am explaining (since you and I accept no substitutes) is that you and the South American aren’t all I see, but it’s on not one but two screens, sounds like the latest thing, Jim, two separate screens you don’t tell the guard about, but he wouldn’t hear anyway up at the head of the tier reading the paper.

Two screens — separate but overlapping. It’s always that way — neither one complete, and I’m about to catch on one screen you and him both.

There’s his face listening at me like a window, but I know it is you he is facing even if you don’t know, and on the other screen there you are but not face-on (like a window) or back-to, instead in profile and you just finished talking, say to our mutual acquaintance who’s on Screen One, and there’s other stuff on each screen, women and children (I didn’t say "innocent" but you heard the after-image), an orchestra (I’m looking back and forth) and a stage with singers and some people I feel I know in the audience near me offscreen, a barmaid grinning straight up (with her kids yelling in the apartment upstairs, off-screen), an apartment furnished only with one unbaited mousetrap vacant for one and a half socially necessary love-hours, an arm in a sleeve I’ve seen on two men before and a hand swinging close-up back and forth, on-screen off-screen like it’s making the background of walls and stairs move, and then on the other screen as if I’m the owner two forearms and hands fitting a galvanized aluminum lid snug down over a garbage can so I know who it was in the other screen going downstairs, but whipping back I see the sleeve that’s going downstairs pull up above the wrist and there is undoubtedly the blue toe of my old man’s tattoo; then here’s a window full of shirts and jackets and when a bus passes I see me and Miriam in the glass and an out-of-state Dodge parked in a towaway zone and want to look some more — she takes my picture at the beach with her mother’s old box camera — but I’m seeing the other screen and a table with a million winged particles of steam above three bowls of real chicken soup I wish I could smell and we’re sitting watering at the mouth until her father’s hand comes up and grabs his spoon but before I can do likewise I’m back to the other screen but I’m in prison, not my head, and what else needs to be proved, you jerk you — and I don’t get to see me and Miriam but a familiar hand half in the dark reaching for a switch which is dark enough so it could be my father turning on the light on a Friday afternoon in spring when he’s home from the garage — but I know it isn’t, it’s someone else and the switch is for the garbage cans.

Meanwhile, hey Mir’, so what happened at school? She says Miss Heard substituted. It’s high school, Jim. I’m mad. I ask what happened. Miriam shrugs, smiles, throws me a curve, and screen becomes Heard’s first day substituting in junior high:

My name is Ruth M. Heard. / What’s the M for? / Mean Mother. / That’s two Ms, someone else adds. / M squared, would you be up to squares and square roots, love? / And in the snickering silence she gave a ten-minute account of square roots and squaring and cubing and no one gave her shit, then she reminded herself what class this was, but she shut us all up warning us this was a two-class-in-a-row substitution and she’s going to take us on an unscheduled trip soon. For tomorrow we had to walk one city block and write on two sheets of paper (one side only) everything "amazing" we saw. Plus, bring in, ready to tell class, the most plausible lie we could find — and when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist? — that’s a burglar with self-respect, luv — What’s that? the same kid said who now had his particles glowing and would try to make it his show. / Oh, you set fire to your neighborhood munitions factory, you blow up the government printing office. / Oh yeah, that’s me, a lot of us said. What does it pay? I asked. / Liars, she said; you don’t want to be anarchists.

But the screen cuts me back, Jim, to its counterpart. So off in Honor Block Charlie and the others catching the seven-o’clock news are receiving the first commercial, the price your eyes pay for the disasters shown so far and to come; while I, if not otherwise engaged, find on one screen (—am I the real prison guard? — ) a glass telephone booth all by itself under a night street light with the receiver off the hook lying on the ledge, shredded directory dangling by a chain like a higher power not yet recognized, and on the other I’ve got a woman’s arm and hand absolutely still, that’s all except for the address of the free dental clinic uptown, but on the first screen you see the woman all of her except that hand — and it’s my mother shaking her head slow, her eyes not coming to mine: and all I want is to get her on one screen, and is she watching the road? Look, let alone the once-a-week screamer that the Chiefs ignore (and it’s the Indians who’re always having a talk with him who screams once a week on Saturday morning, "The White Dog must go! The White Dog must go!") the real wilderness Jim is what’s not said by mouth which if they could hear it they would be making out transfers for one-eighth of the population conservatively and shuffling them off to Box A to have their rotten cells pulled at Clinton on the Canadian border where you say a Russian bomber has the capability of finding an unscreened layer to slip through over the prairies to detach us from our installations, and is that where the unscheduled mountain I hear about here at Ground Zero is coming from when it comes? a super-compact nugget that when you let the pressure out, swells to an overnight mountain? that’s right, what do you do if you don’t pick up on either screen? I’m beyond those speeches at the playground fence, discussions they were, while the German lady Mrs. Erhard (who says Yes under her breath after every fourth of your words) kept a watch down the block across the street; and sometimes I stopped in to buy a magazine, and I asked her when she would be ripped off again, Mrs. Erhard, for she had a little pistol, but I wonder if she’s alive in Florida.

And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his Times with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.

Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious except the Chilean.

Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside — and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor — there isn’t one — and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old — I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too — and the lidless lid — because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining? — and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise — but no countdown — beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming, I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the promise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

— of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—

— for what? translates the dream out of some distant lingo, andpir quanha quoia-san comes to me as far from por que as why is from because—

— route for strange cloud-contents drawn coastward by what (?) that waited there?

But at the time of this dream — dreams settle nothing, you guessed — I did not know these people. And Spence, who, come to think of it, did later mention to Efrain, when Efrain got out, a meteorologist who had meditated ocean coasts in South America and inland coasts in North, was sure new winds were schemed with contingency underplan to quick-pollute selected areas of the U.S. possibly by Wide Load in motion eastward, and Spence, prob’ly un lunatic himself, told a touring foreign agent that a Known Daughter knew more about this because she and her father had made separate trips southwest recently especially in area from which Wide Load or Toxic Mountain (code name bearing built-in correctional facility) was thought to be commencing, and Spence wondered if our South American friend had written me — and I in my dream interpreted by Juan economically called to the knuckles that were white from the drag of the cargo namely cell plus me, and they didn’t have any hair on them so they were Miriam’s or my father’s, and the swings got less until the weight of fallen rain held my container from swinging much, so the open end was up to the heavens but the plane went away and then the weight got so much the cell was set down on the beach with a terrible bump I’m sure but, being partly weightless and in my sleep, I didn’t feel it, and I called to Miriam and she didn’t hear.

So there I was, afloat in my own rainwater higher toward the bars at the top of my traveling cage that wasn’t traveling now, and I thought, Miriam don’t know how to drive, they’ll pick her up. But at least she would be inside out of the rain but I couldn’t see her, and I wasn’t getting into a shouting match, I thought, all I could see was those fingers on the bars and below me underwater the toilet, sink, and bed were fixtures but table and chair, papers and books floated loose down there and the bed was changing but I had to look upward to breathe, and then bars with no fingers so I was alone and the water got higher until I had just my nose and half a nostril up above the surface and to do that, I had to position both eyes against bars so I couldn’t see to breathe, and so after a breath I looked down into the depths of my cell again and saw a shadow and a glint of silver or blond about the eyes, if it was a person, and the bed was sprouting not another bed but branches at the front corners, it was made of wood like my bed at home, I saw it growing but had to breathe again, but I heard everything from dolphins’ opera inside musical garbage cans to lobsters crawling my way over the land that lay all about the square bucket I was drowning in. I took mouthfuls of water, squirted it but it came back in, until I heard a pounding like thunder and then, Jim, I couldn’t hold on no longer, and I knew this was no dream, the thunder got like a weight in my drums and my chest, it was awful, I was ready for the chaplain and the whole cell received a jolt which was like a decision and tipped slowly and it went over and almost halfway but not quite, just so the bars instead of being turned down against the sand were facing onto the beach so anyway all the water ran out and kids were yelling and I wondered if they would kick it again but by then I was conscious in old way again.

It’s good of you to care, I guess—’bout Miriam, my mother, the garbage cans, more than when you first came — and will Larry come sometime? I think I’m on the same curve as him, from what you said about the obstacles he faces; but at that instant awake in my new cell, having come the day before from Auburn’s melancholy vale, I felt I saw Miriam. I tell you I saw her, whereas in the pir-quasi-quoiq dream it was only the knuckles (where was the hand?).

Me seeing Miriam meant I would see her more by being away from her.

But see what?

The white shell of scar since you ask along one fold of nostril. Raven bangs with the slight part like the narrow gap between two front teeth, the hair fell that way. The warm shoulders turned perhaps toward me — toward her father; anyone. The high cheekbones — you’ve heard that before — were they from eastern Europe? it was where her father’s mother had hailed from, cheeks that looked like they had soft cream makeup on but, to touch, they didn’t. The eyes, one gentle, open degree wall-eyed, so you believed what was true also, that she saw you with both but saw beyond you, to for instance the broad-shouldered old father who acted like me being in the kitchen when she wiped and her little Aunt Iris washed meant I did not give him respect, but she’s afraid of him, Miriam, she don’t want him to even know I asked her to the movies, and she tells me privately she got a cramp while Iris is telling him the stove is still leaking gas and the smell isn’t that mentholated oven cleaner.

Yet waking from that prison dream with no one to take it to except myself, I saw that being away from Miriam was my going, not hers, my weight downward and she couldn’t hold me, O.K.

But all the good that ensued — this was Lady Luck in the grip of that dream hand. In tune with the opening leader-group response of the Death Row (therefore currently unemployed) chaplain’s cadre meetings that they soon threw me out of. Leader: "Out of the struggle of the now we will create the human world of the future." Group: "Our life is in the human struggle. The past is approved. The present is received, the future is open." But not luck, Jim, not luck at that bereft point of waking but, near known sounds, in a different cell and prison, guys passing my bars going to breakfast, desolation like an anvil I’m forged inside, with no hammer to hit it — having not known how to run my dream into the ground by tilting that box one more side over, and suffocate in the dark.

That is, after the water ran out through my new floor of steel bars into the sand.

Not luck that I made a single thing of day and night then and there through seeing not just her fingers if they were hers but Miriam. For I’d found how to receive what had always been mine to, in the Visitors Room from people I hadn’t even met, or in the photography lab which I was now destined to use only so far (no further), or in my manifold cell where I was keep-locked most of that first day in this particular multiple dwelling (call it orientation) though I did not need my colloidal swarms to light me down through this particular multiple dwelling — trade shops, dining salon, law library where there was a spontaneous fight, the Muslim study group (which has changed so many guys not just their names so they have two names with the authorities now); the programs and the plumbing and then deep inside our multiple dwelling the camel in the yard slouching back and forth between the five-on-five basketball game and the barbell clonkers and the very old lifers who, when you tell them a little about the Economic Plan to corral all skills for a better home and envision a society with no more prisons, shake their clean-shaven heads — oh man, f all the criminals was let out, this con for one would rather be inside — though every one of these joints is different, Jim, hence an idea for the future, of correctional confederacy.

You still with me?

Don’t ask, you say.

But as sure as from Smitty’s tape I knew you move and relate by the Colloidal Unconscious, not in so many words — even without words. And whether through the South American gentleman who is in the jeopardy you knew in advance predicted on Smitty’s tape, or through your inborn chemistry that received your future and brought you through it to this jailhouse where your resident economist (smile) seeks as he can the intrinsic unit of value, you now find yourself where you may need to know your own power or what it is, even if you don’t tell others such as the beautiful young social scientist Amy who came with you to the last Puerto Rican festival and you will let me know if she is coming I predict to the workshop soon so I can be there, I hope she did not think I was prying when we were at the table on the grass having ice cream with Charlie’s kid and I asked and she replied in the affirmative that she had been associated with a foundation, only that, no more. She looked around at the other picnic tables and said the guys looked in great shape — very clean, she said, as if she wasn’t sure what to say.

How you going to get dirty here?

Well, it came to me — the message — three days beyond the dream. The message of myself. But the dolphins still sang and the lobsters swayed below the billows and swam a little and in another vein crawled past the old bare tuning-fork fir tree high behind the lake at camp, and in the corners of my eyes swung the father’s garbage cans a loose unit glowing and sparking and clanking like competing anchors with nothing to hold but themselves, one lurching upward to haul the rest, another dropping to drag down those around it, the lids loose and floating off then back on but always loosely so I saw the father, also in each outside corner of my eyes coming but slowly, knowing it would wait, while his physician who I smelled but didn’t see waited to look him over and the Y camp physician was talking like a parent to the kid with white eyelashes who couldn’t go to sleep any more and the prison doctor waiting somewhere in this multiple dwelling to jam me while I coughed, or maybe more a traveling vet who inspected once a month, once a year, everyone will have info re: who when where, but you’ve got only yourself to trust these physicians I knew were there on one point to one side of my nose where I was blind but could smell them round the corner and Miriam she must come walking toward you very clear in what I tell you very tall she was (in junior high, I mean, taller than Ruth Heard), because you have not gotten into asking for all this information about her, like does she drive up here?

So was Miriam why you came? (smile) — father Jewish but mother P.R. (is Miriam Catholic then?), did the father go to Israel? what did Miriam think of your speeches, Foley, through the playground fence? what does she want out of life? (that question you asked didn’t ring true, Jim, yes? but you’ll never master the deeply dumb question Shin the Cambodian asks, like (one on one) Write down the three (or four) heaviest influences that made you what you were at eighteen—) such overly specific "things" prove obstacles to real sharing but for a person in your line of work, you don’t interrogate, you wait — is that what you do?

Miriam, Miriam, you can call her my other half if I had an extra one— Miriam came toward me as if she didn’t see me, she’s walking across my view, her arms swinging at her sides so slowly I would have watched the century out except she was also coming toward me and I had to watch out for her in that quarter also in the other screen where she was walking across and on bended knee I aimed a kiss at her she was going to walk out of sight if I didn’t switch my eyes to another view just as she was disappearing.

Because there was my own voice answering the substitute teacher (What do you want to be?) I still want to be a rich burglar, and somewhere, not on either screen but in between clearer because of my speed back and forth between the screen where I didn’t find her telling how I should come to England where they had the best burglaries like treasure hunts like a team broke into the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Association only to find in the safe not only all the jewels and watches but the keys to another G&S branch practically around the corner only to find, when they got there and broke in, the keys to a third branch, same shit, keys to an associate firm, number four. The class was laughing and the sound was like very great speed, I lost track and the calendar said it was the next day and the substitute teacher wasn’t there n’more and I was thinking I needed help getting over to England and back before they found I was gone.

The obstacles had not been in me, Jim, I had put them out there in front and this continuum that seeing Miriam had left me had nowhere to lead until three days were past and Jackie who smiles a lot and makes you feel you were the guy he was waiting to meet had made my acquaintance observing that a lot of the guys were totally materialistic and I was admitted to the photography program. Admitted so unusually soon that I thought they were out to trip me up but I reached out to claim if not yet unseal the message of myself that had been waiting for me, knowing also that what Jackie would teach I already knew. And they did trip me up. And it might have turned a bad corner for me at that opening of my stay in this multiple dwelling which is far more than the state correctional system.

Jackie — with Juan — in a tunnel new to me — said You want to take the last two on this roll, we’ll run it through now, learn by doing, O.K., George? And we did more than Jackie bargained for. And Juan especially. We passed a guy sweeping and we passed a plumber they knew who was going in the opposite direction, who raised his eyebrows, that was all, it was a long walk, like the prison is really the bigness of this space and you never get to see it. I let them tell me how to turn the shutter speed and roll the barrel. Then I did it my way.

I focused and took the long corridor plus half of Juan’s head up close while Jackie said, You can’t get both, you got to find the optimum, I saw what he meant, and a guard called out down the tunnel behind me, "Where ya going?" and "Better get there," and without taking my eye from the viewer (an expensive camera) I drew back the lever advancing the roll, turned blindly and took a picture of the guard who didn’t like it any better than Jackie who said, "You belong to the shotgun school," but the point of my instruction was to come, Jim.

In the darkroom, an eye on the second hand, an eye on the long strip in the tray-bath filled with what came from a bottle in a box called "Darkroom Graduate." For Juan the one-and-a-half-dozen frames time if not trouble obtained from taxpayers’ surplus income on which we here subsist though monks in their establishment have got it over us they can make a little wine downstairs and move it on the open market, yet if we grew the grapes our correctional wine might command as good a price as the inmate-therapists I have projected in Foleynomics who would work with outside patients by mail like the chess instructors also projected. One-and-a-half-dozen frames taken to be displayed to loved ones and all who care to look and those who read the paper where two or three shots will appear as a record of work made possible by conspicuous leisure, though not equal to the red-rimmed eyes that have viewed those tables of minimum subsistence wage equaling rate of exploitative surplus at one in the morning yet understood more than these, that in the last century a government could decree in the interests of employers that childhood ends at age ten or at the outside eleven — red-rimmed studies which prepare Juan he says for the struggle (though What about the parole board? I don’t say) — studies possessing a fair visibility here Inside while Outside the fourteen, fifteen grand earned and laid away to keep each profile here low if not void is funny money, Jim, I was able years later to explain it to Juan and in return — because effort is returned in this place, guys give and share, you’d be surprised, don’t underestimate us, guys who don’t belong here and guys who maybe do — Juan in return pictured for me his son, and his son’s cousin, Juan’s nephew, helping Juan’s little brother-in-law Manny get a new TV in a shopping cart up a hill from Broadway to Amsterdam at seven o’clock of a cold Saturday evening, I could see how Juan felt, he didn’t explain it, Juan’s kid holding the TV and pushing from behind, windbreaker, wool-lined leather gloves, baseball cap, sneakers with the laces tied).

Which is just filling you in with a little future because Juan and me and Jackie didn’t seem to have a great deal of future on that afternoon three days after the rain vision and here we are in a place they promise you if you fuck up and Jackie is giving an hour of socially necessary labor to the collective phenomenon as the poem says whose author you know, a phenomenon which is, as he says, the human spirit, and but a few minutes of darkroom time had elapsed under the red bulb when — too warm in there — to the amazement of Juan, whose pictures all but two they were, and of Jackie with that broad, pale, about-to-smile face whose pupil I was and who with Juan’s permission let me agitate the film in its bath, agitating the film along the many-tracked continuum of day-night raised the dripping strip, skipped the rinse, and slid it into a waiting pan of hypo and before Jackie and Juan could stop the act which stopped the developing process — or express their surprise at what the haunted fingers had done — the growth of Juan’s negatives had been suspended and that was that.

Dumb, you say? Not the coolest?

You didn’t say (but you communicated these words in our way though you’re just beginning to be in touch with your own C.U. and told me in the friendliest tone that "Dreams don’t settle anything"). And — dumb? uncool? — I’d have felt your point like misery in the lower back or an itching far inside the ear or wanting to go on a long sleep-walk in the middle of the night or our old question What do I do with my life? — had not the Way come to me where it and I always were waiting for each other, the Way of using what I had always had, using those grownups scattering on the rainy beach, using the knuckles that had dropped me in the dream, using the rainwater that was to spread and leave the photo on my table dry and the metal bed in which I came to, using the basis of the electricity more than it itself that Miriam’s father accused the good witch her diminutive aunt one foul spring day of switching on when he could be seen approaching his string of garbage cans with an offering of trash — using the blood that ran upward into my eye and congealed on my mustache though none touched Juan’s darkroom fist as the reminder from a dream those two guys had no way of knowing about, that it wasn’t the knuckles’ fault no more than mine and while I thought what was in my eye was the red light of the darkroom when really it was blood that flowed upwards from my crooked nose I knew in a flash — clear as by instinct I knew the heels and soles approaching our lab door to be a guard who’d heard angry sounds — that I would tell Jackie and Juan what they would comprehend and I would turn their measure of me (which at that moment would have been no truer than the guard’s measure of all three of us) to a finer bond intrinsic to what I’d just seen on those two negatives at the end and rescued.

"I’m sorry I had to do that," I said to Juan, his back to me, shaking his head.

They listened to me. I was way behind them in the mechanics of the camera, the tricks of film, not even a beginner, not started; yet I was way ahead, too.

They could not see at first.

"Wait, man, don’t let the light in!" Jackie called to the hand that gripped the door knob and that (far outside us as if beyond the very walls) said, O.K., what’s going on in there?

But the hypo did its stuff, while the record was in my mind; and when the guard opened the door, I could use that light to show what I meant.

They looked at what I meant. The guard, as I talked, I kept my face away from him; he’s in the doorway.

"‘you say so, George," said Jackie, not smiling, after I had pointed out to their more normal eyes what had been seen by the camera.

Was it a bright half-head (say, of a Puerto Rican iron-pumping Marxist) against a lighter corridor sharply sleep-patrolled darker in the three spots where there were lights? Not at all — only for those whose future is past.

No, Jim, what was it? I almost don’t have the words.

What was it? A moment of Juan’s true power a blur only to negative eyes that have to look ahead to that computerized correct flesh and bone and liquid — you know, Jim? — of our species’ face.

But not blurred if we’ll only see.

Juan’s power, then, caught at that moment that’s always waiting: between scattering we come from and dispersion we flow toward. Rain-dream material. But vision. No dream. So you don’t have to say, Dreams don’t settle nothing.

So the blur, the beginning, of half Juan’s head was no blur, no beginning; it carried on what was there, the core of his force if he find it to live with it to use it (and even if he could not). I said to them that it was Juan’s power mingling with his total environment which was rough if you were not into it because with photography you were going to get your nice perspective and some old corridor. Here you had more.

("You see the stairs," said Juan, low. "Yeah, the hypo got developer on it," said Jackie. "Oh shit," said Juan, the guard was in the doorway at our backs.)

I started to go on about him without designating him, that guard; but all but one of Juan’s immediate family had been on the film, and I had said enough, told what I had seen for all our sakes, leaving out just private stuff (they would think was just me not them). Here, I mean the shadow in my rain cage far below me wafting, budging, whatever it was doing with a blond silver shine about its eyes down there around the bed whose wood was growing from several points, I was fascinated to find that kid suspended in the particles of Juan’s power opened in the mass of light-sensitive stuff I had arrested the development of (smile) (you smile, you think I darken counsel by words without knowledge? true enough, Jim, as we will see a few days past this turning point) — the kid? you’ve guessed — the kid who swam out of the sun in under our raft. And now with the guard behind me and Juan’s power before me under the red bulb, I recalled ducking my head to keep an eye on that kid only to see him wriggling in the wrong direction back under the raft among the loose extra rope fat and slimy suspended here and there doubled and half-tangled near one of the anchor ropes that was taut through the murk.

Then I knew what Juan was going to say, Jim, don’t ask how I remembered — it comes later. I had seen a mind, Jim, a suspension within that film paper, the very small pieces it was in at that time of my life— swamped but too dry: I knew Juan would say, "Where do you get this stuff, Foley? Was you up at Clinton?"

Jackie laughed. He had not been smiling. I knew that through doing whatever it was with the great surface area of all the faceted particles increasing their area with each division that split the work and spread it far and wide, I had given those words to Juan who to this day doesn’t quite know the power of the Colloidal Unconscious to find him where he is, but is used by it, and not badly, Jim, for for all our waste of this power, it is always there, and always more.

So much of this was the work of a moment.

4’Auburn," I answered Juan.

But the guard had spoken, he was the one I had taken a picture of, I didn’t see how he’d gotten all the way down here to where we were. "You on D Block," he said, question but no question.

I turned halfway round and agreed; he asked me my number and I knew it.

"You look at me," the guard said, and the murk of power when I turned to see it, knew I saw it in all its tangled shorts and sparkings.

"You are not ready for this program yet," he said, "you don’t get into this program till you been around awhile."

"Around?" I said — it hit me, but funny; was it the prison system or this particular facility where I was now hanging out?

"It was cleared," said Juan quickly.

Jackie had done the clearing, with the help of Charlie, who asked me my second day how he could help me settle in.

"I said," the guard repeated, "you’re not ready for this program. What you got on your nose?"

"O.K.," I said, "I’m not ready."

"I said," the guard repeated, "what you got on your nose?"

"Blood," I said, wondering where the blood in my eye had gone.

"You hit him?" the guard said to Juan. "I heard you."

"You see that developer," I said, nodding at a thing that looked like a giant microscope. "You’ll find a piece of my nose on it, I ran into it."

"You keep your nose out of here till you get clearance," said the guard, who wanted to know how long we would be.

Jackie said the film was still in the hypo. The guard said he wasn’t having us hanging around there and didn’t I have anything to wipe my nose with. He left.

Juan told me the big thing was an enlarger.

The guard opening the darkroom door had let Juan and Jackie see what I showed them. So after all you don’t know who you’re working for. The guard, who I get along with now because to the ear I am quiet and I read and sit looking at my pictures, was working for me that day and didn’t know it, or the part of that day that had such consequences for me. And I was working for Juan and Jackie though Jackie thought he was working for me and for Juan separately. And six months later the guard asked me if I got cleared for photography because that’s a good program to be in — they all know it is— but I said I decided against it. And that first and only day in the darkroom my work for Juan went almost to waste because he wasn’t ready; but there was the enlarger I hit my face on (smile), plus a with-the-grain something in what I tried to show Juan and Jackie, so that soon afterward Juan worked for me.

‘Cause you build up credit with guys in here, nobody tells you that you were loyal, you didn’t give a guard more data than he could handle (smile), you didn’t pay a little bit too much attention to a guy who knew you knew what was going on with him, nobody tells you your credit rating is good, but you know. Yet Juan did not know he was working for me, in what happened soon afterward; look, he was working for himself too but not as if he knew the work he had done for me, and was destined to help still more, months later, the night before a test he never took but would in my opinion not have failed.

But you, Jim, who were you working for?

I think yourself. Do we all? No, we do not, said Ruth Heard, who told us to figure what we were getting out of every hour we worked, which was confusing to kids, but I found it’s confusing to others, too.

But doubts remain. Why don’t I know even now if the contact we made through the South American gentleman was by chance, or you meant it? He wrote to me, then he didn’t, then he did, then after Efrain got out the letters stopped again. I have told you how the South American gentleman, the Chilean economist, and I met diagonally across the counter in the Visiting Room one day late in ‘72 when my mother went over to the sandwich machine and my father didn’t know what to say to me — can’t blame him — and was looking over at Smitty who had his eyes closed talking and his wife was leaning on her elbows and nodding her head, but on my other side this guy who was getting out the next month was talking to this well-dressed bald gentleman with a mustache who spoke with an accent and he had come with this guy who looked like some street dealer but outdoors-looking not in the city way in a brown leather coat, heavy slick hair, more like long black high Hawaiian, but it wasn’t black, it was like blondish brown toxic-tinted with your "dirty" look, and this guy, our mutual contact the South American economist, listened by looking off into space but at that moment toward me. Then he said, "We are of one mind there, but this company agent you know so much about was my friend whatever his political aim may be," and the slick guy in leather and with hands that might have belonged to someone else, they fitted him, they seemed discolored or speckled — when he interrupted, the bald, well-dressed man seemed to not hear and he nodded in a friendly way at me because I was looking his way, and he said that whatever it was was more than a matter of scrambling funds, it was how the parent company filtered rewards among subsidiaries and the way this changed local taxes, and he mentioned the word "Marxian" but suddenly he and I were talking and I, to say something, asked if he was a Marxian and he smiled; but before he and the other guy with the hands and the high, sort-of-throaty voice got up to go, the South American gentleman asked what Marx I had read, and we exchanged names and addresses, it was great, the guard standing below the dais where the desk is came over and told me not to mix up my visitors, though my dad was still there so I had an excuse to be there, and my mother came back with two sandwiches and asked what it was about and my dad told her, or thought he did, they all love rules, you know.

I have told you this, and you have told me you ran into this guy at Cape K. — coincidence, his zig your zag! — and later learned he was an economist in the Allende government which I knew. But since then he didn’t ever refer to you when I mentioned you in my letters, and once I detected a colloidal settling to the effect that you wanted the address for him that I was in possession of.

But it was always me who brought him up and I don’t know which of us was getting the information, Jim.

Except you’re still here. I mean coming. Like a once in a while letter from the old weather sciencer who takes care of an old lady friend who thinks she’s in New Jersey half the time.

And the information you’re getting — think of it! About inconspicuous photography, hidden work, Foley Plan for 5-20-yr development of this retirement compound, garbage bail-out into a Puerto Rican festival inside these walls leaving the Cessna to level an abandoned barn that had been recklessly commandeered by two lovers; the blue of the sky witnessed above the Yard, if I could only put it down, the stars and comet tracks that are always there, seen or not; the slow, sandy rasp of a super’s shoes (of Life Experience for college credit), Miriam’s father’s soles heard making the swollen-footed ascent to the For Rent apartment he prided himself on not permitting her to clean out after the last tenants in case of rats; and you’ve been getting multinational jokes, and the unknown soldiers cited at Cape Kennedy that impressed our mutual acquaintance from the Southern Hemisphere so he said "vacuum-packed for burial in space" as if he quoted from some store of learning; and speeches through the fence; and why the color of Miriam’s eyes looked like it did when she turned away from everyone else on Earth to me, the late winter sun in her teeth, our feet in the salt soft sand beside a driveway back of a beach house, for we’d kept going all the way out to Westhampton and we were going to enter this beach house and it’s a week before St. Patrick’s Day and counting, and we were too far out from the City to rely on public transit to get us home, but what to do with this visiting Volkswagen, green but at the edges muddy whose New Hampshire plates I had turned to a single New Mexico plate, and I desired to return this VW to a legal spot near where I’d just managed to ease it out of an illegal space from where it could have been towed at owner’s expense plus fine, and I even took good care of the finish out there swept by the Atlantic salt of Long Island’s South Shore, for when we got up the side stairs to the door and Miriam kept saying, Are you sure it’s all right and I said the friend who usually had the use of the place had told me just how to get in, I went down through the house to the garage, slid up the door from the inside, and pushed the VW in as easy as starting it, but all the time suspended in all my mind’s eyes was the color of Miriam’s itself due to the more narrowly physical side of this colloid mystery we have spoken of).

This a cover? you asked.

But speeches through the fence? You didn’t understand about them? On-the-job training for leadership. The little store with the newsstand outside is within earshot, and Mrs. Erhard moves from behind her counter to come outside and watch.

Hear the basketball smack. The one-on-ones have occupied the playground playing half a court going six-on-six making all the moves; and me, I’ve got a crowd on the sidewalk side of the high fence maybe five, six, seven kids taken up position (got there first) watching the game and listening to me, so then the speaker himself, me, talking as always Issues, turns to the fence and addresses those deaf geniuses making all the moves — did I say jungle training school? — charging, double-dribbling, traveling, hooking up toward the hoop but hitting the hard rim like a stoop so the ball kicks twenty feet out beyond them, it’s as if without the cord of the net the rim has that extra power and they’re all chasing the ball but each other, so the elbow’s connected to the neckbone, kneebone to pelvic area, and our famous High Kool with his great semi-albino hands, six-five at age fifteen, stops short transfixed, Jim, for he hears me say, "What is the southernmost state of the Union?" Big man is in a trance, he’s outside the game now transfixed, while two lesser talents colliding with him where he stands (occupying position having gotten there first) fall away from him stunned, bruised, maimed; for in the middle of my critiquing of the Los Angeles police not letting the Russian strongman Premier Khrushchev visit Disneyland and of K. himself who said to us and our system, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," I had asked out of the blue which was the southernmost state in the Union.

This had to be more message than I knew, for often words as clear as this current-event trick question to keep them on their toes and supplement their jungle education came out of me, out of me mind into me throat, out of the struggle of my life, to reach another with a charge from me that settled some particles over there in him or her like there’s nothing to choose between there and me. You said that all this was just my feelers, Jim, which I souped up — it’s more, you ought to see. A power no less, Jim. A swing-arm anti-weapon you’d not detect by most known scopes. Unique capability, I call it, waiting there all dispersed to be willing to work for you. Work? Oh feel what’s given in the particles and deposit it wordwise coded to the message in you all the time.

I mean me. You. The others, and Juan.

He has achieved all this inside. To me, Juan has at least lived the rock-bottom unit of value in here if he has not in so many words known it. For so many words keep him from it: the Decade of the People; the time of the Real Great Society; la lucha (the struggle) for a better life (a better way of doing things, the Chilean said).

Juan had further muscles to flex, he went to prison ninety days before the great Garbage Barricade of ‘69 in East Harlem when the famed Sanitation Department declined to release city brooms to the people of El Barrio’s 110th Street to clean it up themselves and the people achieved overnight a consolidation of area garbage like one long, quiet upper that was a statement but still, as garbage, had to have alerted if it did not blow the mind of Miriam’s container-oriented father downtown, while as rampart and beachhead it was its own defense/offense without benefit of ventilating tradewinds that recycle out into the Caribbean Sea from that other, southern island, the isla verde of Puerto Rico proper, the smell of garbage strewn on a city beach for a population of free-range pigs raised there to harvest. But Juan inside got firsthand reports of the 110th Street Barricade from his visitors, so you see, Jim, this multiple dwelling sixty miles up the parkways past the guard-rail’s low barrier posts whose flicker-frequency could lock your normal speeder’s eyeball into gagged epilepsy, proved a contact between that neighborhood in upper Manhattan and my own to the south. I mean like you and your on-site inspection of the insurance corp. that quietly works into the earth and up into the troposphere, so you look at a quiet executive I can see him standing on his inner-office carpet in Vermont fantasizing a whole home quarried out of local granite, appliances too, an extension ladder, granite notepads for the wife, even granite you-know-whats. But I mean also, Jim, you take a trip up the river to find out what’s happening back where you come from. And you here with Foley looking for some hard info re: Chilean, and you find me waiting along the wall with a new method of communicating, don’t you know.

So coming from heterogeneous points in the city, Juan uptown, I down, we met at a point in the continuum intrinsic for both of us. For Juan it became soon afterward a time of new dedication to work for a socialist-humanist state, yet of near-madness since his studies had led him to see that the time he was doing had been provided by taxpayers whose sweat’s already being fleeced of its fruits and now Juan and the rest of us yardbirds are forced to go on exploiting these workers because of our tenancy in this place.

I showed him that we were getting the rent of our cells dirt-cheap if we ignore the value put on day labor in this retirement compound. But I couldn’t cheer him up—"Cheer up," Ma said when my father shook his head and scrunched deep into the easy chair and said he couldn’t have done better than stay where he was in the transit system all these years — or better still, help Juan right over the edge toward roaring derangement, because at the Death Row chaplain’s cadre session he had just come from, so absorbed had my friend been in cramming for his Chem final that the single thing he had heard, having heard it before but not from this source, was the remark by a part-time missionary I had had words with once who on this evening was sitting in and might have wanted to get a laugh, to the effect that there were folks on the Outside laboring to make time available for us guys Inside to do. And so, coming back to the block from cadre, Juan was murderous and seething, for what would he ever have to do with discovering lattice structures to substitute for rubber (outdated textbook of course) or to experiment with sewage-disposal solvents for the benefit people? His work, I learned, through my abstract evening bars where he paused to bid me goodnight was in Revolutionary Theory.

But we had a going joke about that page of Chem.

The kid on the north side of my cell was listening to his own latest message to his wife on the Jap tape player he’d recently been allowed to import but which I didn’t envy him.

Now I swiftly saw the relevant page of this book belonging to the man Juan about to retire for the night to his cell on the south side of mine and in the mere moment before the officer called Let’s go (which is a funny thing to say when one man has just come on his shift after a thirty-mile commute and the other man has just arrived back at his cell for the night), I was able to see Juan’s work and place run simultaneously with my own grain.

He had not asked for help exactly when he’d exclaimed with that angry grin like some movie star, "Christ is it a suspension or is it a solution?" — what did he know, he said, except what some once-a-week visiting authority said by the book they had been required to read. Well, to this he and I in unison like we were telling the teacher chirped, "It’s a colloid system," and for the last time I gave my friend his book back through the bars like I’m putting it on the shelf, and we crossed brothers’ thumbs and palms.

In he went for the night with the mountainous clank-bang I no longer hear except in my understanding, but for a second, only a second; but of crucial import I smelled, like pollen that no longer afflicts me seasonally, the collective flumes of all Johns on the tier. Oh sweet privacy — a high percent of these guys can experience it only here, not home with their family sharing a bath, not in the armed forces I’m told, not in a mountain monastery, definitely not at Y camp. But wait, Jim, understand it was only for a minute, that smell (however timelessly recorded in that girl sports writer’s "treatment" of this facility). For — will you wait one instant more? — with an end to that minute that I suddenly saw I always made by myself (and an end that your mere outsider engineer’s got his book explanation of, such as shooting centrifugal force at all particles of said dispersed odor so that through their sedimentation potential they concentrate at the outer rim and you get rid of them like particles of smoke in a poisoned city made to coagulate, precipitating out in one dark, industrially flushable lump all the dispersed specks and films of smodge we lumpens go on breathing of our fuel and work) — I as I say grasped suddenly without trying the power I saw I’d grown to be grasped by.

Grown partly I swear through the motion of my double screens.

And if it was not help Juan wanted at that eleventh hour such as my advice to fuck memorizing and get to the heart of the Contradiction as he will say — the Matter, as I — yet what do you know — it was help Juan gave me. My thoughts gelled and then by some return were swimming limitlessly, imprisoned in the locus of their own freedom, forget the Chem.

It was nothing I needed; but it was a gift no less. More a material to see through than a pay-off formula to say the word; for what is colloid but a name for the unnamable, a name to say, a word and little more. But holy mother wasn’t I then in the next few minutes not only chatting to the unseen Juan round the corner from my cell but signaling unknown to him through his wall because if I could not I also did not want to keep myself from using what I’d all the time been being. No accident that without a word spoken out loud from his friend he got to the heart of the matter right then and there remembering who he was and that the time to begin is no more the next day after than the place is the next room. Which is a way of saying it that, now it’s out, might come from Outside me — from you — from the Mind that’s not mere Body-Brain. You hear me now without words said or penned. Jim I had seen between suspension and true solution. On that historic page this was what I had seen. And I saw what I had done. Oh, Jim, what relief! To see and prove what I had done. That is, besides my work in economics and in dual screens. For I had been going round and round what I had done, these particles of all life, Jim, so fine: a string of garbage cans; a watery space under a float; two medium-size apartment tenements separated depending how close you see them; a private announcement, to one who smiled but cared, of Sunday’s— tomorrow’s — current-events message; particles, particles multiplying surfaces by the light they themselves multiplied so fast it began to stand still and give back all the time I had given up to understanding what I only now saw went part and parcel with how a state of body-brain turns to mind and mine to ours. A Miriam was here so many-sided that love for her got more and more: so many particles of all life and so fine no lens in or out of the lab we do not have at this bomb of a correctional facility could make them out: unseen, they’re what Juan’s old book here on my shelf calls "homogeneous" — all one stuff — but knowing them, they are you and all so different: Miriam walking away under a blue winter sky, her left arm close in holding her books, so her shoulders curved forward slightly; a forkful of mashed potatoes catapulted at my father’s T-shirt when he told Mom for the last time that they were lumpy; the blue of the ocean in a blind kiss, and all dynamite colors in a windy sunset so we didn’t hear the beach patrol until I jumped; and I had been scattering and settling these particles for a long youth, let me tell you — particles so fine as the voice of one guy telling either side of a playground fence by a fair-to-average city school the difference between the real smog which I was to read later is the mark of business mismanagement (as our womanizing Norse economist once saw) not of technology, and on the other hand the Russian ambassador, smiling Mike Menshikov’s small betrayal of the revolution in misrepresenting to Premier K. one sunny California day two small, innocent, fleece-lined clouds in a clear, but colloidally blue, Los Angeles sky as Smog, Smog, tut(ski) tut(ski) — but I hear the voice, me, the one guy at the playground fence, but more, going round and round even then before prison came into the picture, going round like what later was by chance at Juan’s moment of individualized evening lockup to acquire as if it needed it a scientific name and description — and did Larry get his visiting rites (smile) form? — and going round and then round one night a small tenement apartment building superintended by the father of his beloved, round and round so that the island of Manhattan all around that square block dissolved; as round and round the current of this one young guy’s voice itself (with contributions from the audience) might go and the playground fence disintegrate while that voice sought what power over current events only his buried spirit knew and did not yet tell, for to him it was as unconscious then at first as what swarmed deep behind his pride the day he concluded his sometime (by Eric, by Joey, by Hector Ramirez, and by others) interrupted remarks upon the need for blacks in city government and a new Israel in New Zealand and Australia where there’d be more space which might encourage Russia to unload more of its Jews — and halting in mid-word to find, hands in pockets diagonally down the block, Miriam’s father glaring from the newspaper store which had always been within earshot as, standing right behind him, Mrs. Erhard even when she would not muscle her bulk out from behind the sugar-and-nicotine counter and step outside to see with her protruding eyes what she had heard, would testify — if you are receiving all that, Jim.

Miriam had foretold that he would appear one Sunday I was there. He had had scarcely a word for me ever, but here and now was willing I should have words that happened to apply to him.

He never spoke afterward of my plan for resettling Jews in the Pacific, but he almost never spoke to me anyhow. Miriam slept late that Sunday, later even than this dreamer. Two little girls with little white hats led my eye down the block to two double-parked cars bumper to bumper and when I caught sight of Miriam’s father who never got his Sunday News at Erhard’s, I didn’t know where Mir’ was. I was seeing screens even then but when you’re ahead of your time (smile), how you going to know it’s O.K. what you’re doing, it’s natural?

Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there — Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez — whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend — was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim — like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly don’t know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right? — little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.

But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours — like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful? — you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.

And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what we want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what you want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language — but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?

Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.

And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself as one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News — conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment — oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).

Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it — no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?

Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.

In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but could not, if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds: you want to control miriam to grow up to stay home WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO come home (where we were, the only direction was Stay Put).

But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water." "You know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much? — oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.

Old Testament or New, Jim? — oh you wouldn’t know.

Runneth to that other screen, there is no over-screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce? — and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."

So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.

Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s — oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts? — got a landing field next door—

and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?

Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he? but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story — for history in the making though you said you take no view of history — ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.

Three, four years you seem to have gotten into your head, more years than that join Miriam’s pointed message to mine co-hosted with her dad. Long years in fact afterward her father I am told appeared at the new entrance wing of the prison without visiting permission form plus knowing too well that I could not receive him. His plan was stopped, whatever, and I never asked how he got up here, he never to my knowledge drove.

Through Efrain I have kept in touch. He’s out, as you know because I heard you met him the night he slipped through a pickpocket area suddenly into a warp within warp where your pocket gets a valuable put into it. In touch with the Chilean, that is. Or tried — to be honest.

And he has, the Chilean tried to keep up his pithy letters to me. On economic topics, though he has been encouraged to expand his coverage to those political margins associated with his earlier conversations overheard or not here in visitors’ "quarters" (smile) with friend of reported anti-Castro Cuban in danger of life here inside though reported to be being processed toward some unknown escape and is the Chilean mixed up in that? — it is immaterial, next to that bond between us. Better his letters on full employment, substitutions in the marketplace, the as my friend puts it undoubted motion of corporate inertia against the sinister resilience of this country’s technological inventiveness in the matter of alternative energy though never once at the national level consulting the Colloidal Unconscious as it emerged from body-brain fluid states finding the jump to mind. He names no names, not that of his old friend, the late Dr. Allende, whose fate he I believe sees as his own but I can’t find anything out, I didn’t know the inmate or anyone who did know well the inmate our Chilean gentleman visited that day we met diagonally across the Visitors Counter, there’s a pattern here, no doubt the ever-dividing particles dispersed non-visibly in the colloid total of my self — my whole body is my self, I see; you who may have come among us for political information re: an exile economist and a supposedly pro-Castro Cuban inmate rumored to be set to spring — you have helped me to see it — have plotted in my unconscious this pattern and some message which is to me or from me or both and which will be me is in the works. This is more than consolation, as everything worthwhile must be, Jim, and I felt myself, for a sub-micro-instant that’s as small as one of the colloid particles, say it in a Spanish language that I never have studied or learned — you speak it a little, you said, and regret your daughter does not — but the impulse went back into the cloud it came from. Better the instructive letters I now and then receive from the Chilean than those visits Carlos gets from an elder liberal lady with a secret pocket for mints and non-sugar chewing gums in her shiny bag, a lady with scarce a grain of dialectic in her who gives him his subscription to the Times and after smiling bravely at him for an hour shows strong, true feeling only when his sister or uncle comes and she plays second fiddle but lately has proven her devotion to truth by a special letter to the Governor reluctantly urging, we hear, that for Carlos’s own well-being he delay Carlos’s clemency despite the seventeen hundred or twenty-seven hundred letters supporting his clemency petition on file in the State House we like to imagine and in a crate of files (the carbons) which Carlos rereads and shares with me by hand since our cells are too far from each other on the gallery for him to read aloud around the corner.

If I do not leave here, I have no need to. The hunt for the unit of value goes on in person and is no respecter of place. Neither is the ever-increasing speed of dual-but-separate-screen grasp, a speed so constant it could be maddening to its host but for the Colloidal Unconscious, its many-faceted spread, calm, content, its endless particles of difference charging the host to make contact from time to time through this medium that adapts itself to centrifugal coagulation-sedimentation to clear things up and to the huge good power mirroring itself in endless division of particles it’s a gift that says we all have it and (let me confess) must misuse it so, Jim—

— so that we penetrate the D-fences, send or receive (i got a new boyfriend, Mir’s message came to me, only it’s been going a long time, he’s an accountant) yes, when instead we should be going round and round; and then when we should be sending, receiving, we instead go round and round precipitating a void where the center was. Am I right?

So you came here — well, once a week — started your own brand of social work, more entertaining therefore more valuable than most, at this retirement complex, and it’s how I now have all to myself that family window though you’re almost missing from it, where I see your grandfather with a pistol on the mantel unbending two or three times a year to sing, ‘Tut on your old gray bonnet / With the blue ribbons on it / And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," almost missing but not quite missing because here you were, singing briefly for a lively audience of cons, a song I’d never heard, and if I hadn’t they hadn’t, though blue ribbon even I a city guy (even now in a multiple dwelling in the country occupied by mainly city guys) know is first prize they pin on a horse at a horse show. Sixty, eighty thousand miles traveled, two or three times round the earth, and still a town boy with a family, though we have pianos in the City too, though none in Miriam’s or my home though I hear the conductor bought my sister a blond-wood upright which no one ever touches, she told me, and you don’t get a man like your grandpa to sing unless he’s accompanied, think who might pass by and look in the window: Foley a generation later, if I broke out — and more interested in how you fit into that window your old white Caddy you bought to give to your daughter in Wash-inton, a grand gesture to be sure at nine miles to the gallon but any guy here could dig it — blue-ribbon horsepower and I’m glad she took your gift in good humor (I sense you’d been unsure): you say the Chilean has a brother in Washington — now that I didn’t know but Efrain (who would never come back to visit) wrote asking if that dealer-duck’s-ass-into-a-ponytail type guy had been back to visit, he’d run into Efrain near Penn Station and asked what he knew about the murder of the wife of a South American newspaper publisher ten, fifteen years ago and had he been in Philadelphia the other day, the economist’s brother was there for some opera singer’s recital — and Efrain is scared — mainly by the guy, not his information, though he would not admit it — but what do they stick your daughter for insurance, she’s under twenty-five, maybe my information is old. But why be so damn ready for the future, it’s here, to recall a peculiar point about future you dropped which nobody but me picked up on, so that everybody but me nodded thoughtfully, you know? But a touch of old-fashioned class, give or take a tender valve or two, Jim-Daddy, might even get her an interesting friend or two in the nation’s capital. I wrote letters to the editor once upon a time on the subject of Australia, etcetera, but also of having some good old-fashioned taste in the design and beauty of the automobiles you choose to get into, and I dreamed of seeing an article in the paper with my name on it and of taking Miriam up and down the Hudson River in a hired helicopter, so I must have been looking forward to that corner of your aforementioned window where you can be seen rising off a Manhattan pier in the middle of the day in transit to JFK jet but for the moment watching out the window some cops on the pier, a TV crew, a tugboat, and a diver just coming up the ladder onto the pier in his black rubber suit, TV news possibly but no network sign in evidence and something else wrong with that, you looked back down there as long as you could but — and I, too, sense something in that scene familiar (to you, I mean). Or was it, Jim, that you said sometimes you leave people where they are. ("Very funny," said Efrain, the only one of us then soon to be paroled.) To which I’d add leave some of your stories where they are and don’t look back too close, like at the man and woman upside down in seat-belt harness the blood dry on their alert faces but the car wheels still spinning, I don’t pretend to know where you were, it must have been up in the high magnetic mountains where the air friction’s less (smile), although I grant it occurred to me more than once because Mir’ liked to drive fast, an accident, a fatal accident — well, close the window, if you like — a dual fatality they would have said, leaving us where we were. In time. Oh say her name, Jim, I say her. They can’t hang me for that. Not in the state I’m in (smile) for which the future for all I know may already have developed colloid-boosters to phase out imbalances such as what inclined us two. I mean you and me, since there was little hope for my Miriam to take control of her life. Her father had boxed her in, while only I called her "Mir’."

Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!" — because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him — freeze — cut — frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on — no, it’s not raining outside, I’m telling a true story — and both of us knowing at the same instant why of course the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

R. M. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that — get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission not to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory. . no, the water fountain — but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the p.m. after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise — so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime — Yeah, hit oil, man — Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong? — silence, and a passing patrolman called Wrong! same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?

Meanwhile dozens of barrels of flour were rolled into the street and the heads broken open and a kid named James was throwing barrels of flour out into the street from an upper story calling, "Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel," which was what it should have been selling at perhaps, and the constabulary could do nothing with the anger of the mob which was organized from its inception north of City Hall at the present site and it was the first riot in "your history," the lady told us, where the poor ripped off the property of the rich and a New York paper called it the beginning of the French Revolution, did anyone know what the French Revolution was — no one in this junior high class did, and one of the drivers asked who the George Washington Bridge had been named after and a black kid said, Martha’s man. Anyway here was the Flour Riot of 1837, never forgot it, Jim, so what if the building had changed, and it was inflation panic, Ruth said, did we know what inflation was? the voice held us, not the words which is often the case with colloid communication, prices going up, what do you do when the landlord hits you for twice what your pad is worth like me, said Ruth M. Heard, because you see, rent went right up with flour in 1836-37, right? (Right!) and why was that (why the bakers, a man’s voice called, owned all the real estate) and as Ruth called out these questions, three older ladies with small hats came out at the door of a restaurant to smile, and I said, We got rent control now. Ruth called, Well what about the poor landlord, you watch, the City ups his property taxes and you and your family go on paying peanuts for your apartment; I said You’re taking both sides — her voice came at you deepened, like harsh pellets whipping through the sunlight. I reached for Miriam’s hand, she was over by a vendor with Gonzales buying a hot dog, the cost of flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel. Ruth asked what was a monopoly, one of our drivers as stocky as a snatch-and-press fanatic here on the farm cut in and gave a teacher-type answer that sounded English to me until she told him compassion was death and he could shut up now and the point was the flour people had made flour and wheat scarce by hiding them in the warehouse till the price went up: see the flour in the streets, our substitute called, and our twofold divided group on the sidewalk had been joined by slow-moving late-lunchtime people and messengers one with an enlarged head, one not, and anybody you want to think of was looking up at James’s windows. And as the flour and sacks of wheat came down, rent went up, now how do you figure that, think of what the street looked like! Think of life outside.

But we were back in the vans now — Jim, I’ve been over every square foot of that trip in here, I have the map, I have the pictures of old New York — and we were headed to the fish market to see historic Coenties Slip with the little houses that looked like they might fall down, which was where the rioters wound up smashing windows and doors and ten more barrels emptied. But at this point, Jim, our substitute reintroduced one of her wealthy Americans, the strong one, as the man who was going to buy us hamburgers with the works at three o’clock and I don’t know how many hamburgers and sodas went down, this is 1958, 1959, but I was the only one who could tell without counting hamburgers and sodas that little Gonzales and Miriam had been missing since the last stop and I figured Gonzalez knew what he was doing if Miriam didn’t, for this was only junior high and Gonzalez went everywhere with his father and often alone to do with his father’s lamp business. It was irresponsible of me and of Ruth Heard not to, respectively, do something and know about the two absentees, but when we arrived back at the school in our vans there was High Kool making his moves and dunking a few, and the roughest girl in the class, Louise, laughed at something Ruth said and looked over her shoulder and caught me looking at her and I gave her the grin, and a thought came in one eye and out the other — and no Gonzalez though there was an explanation, little G. had had a business appointment several blocks uptown and Miriam accompanied him, an errand for his father. Ruth M. Heard kept me or I her talking by the playground fence and she was telling how she had heard about the brain drain from Britain and had decided to come over in case any rubbed off on her, and how she was Jewish and so was New York which I was ready to believe though not that this small blue-eyed rambunctious woman with her accent could be Jewish. She said, You’re ahead of the others, I suspect way ahead — but how old are you? What’s going to happen to you? Two teachers, two men, had come down the steps with a cop, it was late, they seemed to be approaching but this was the time of day and really they were waiting, and Ruth M. Heard said, Here comes trouble, I could walk her home another time, but I had said nothing about walking her home, Jim.

"You were thinking it," you reply, picking up what I would have said had I not known you would pick it up.

Yes, and there I stood at the playground fence, it had begun to rain and High Kool stopped short with the ball hanging from one hand and looked upward. I felt the city, this block and the few other blocks I knew well, south going down to Fourteenth and east to the river, you know the area I know, and while my parents’ building and others like it still stand, now being occupied by, as my father used to say, "off-islanders" (Hispanics) but I happen to know also by gypsies from New Jersey via Rumania, and rocked by bongo drops (suddenly a drum is ther^, two drums, and guys have cut out to play them) and opened here and there by dust-choking construction sites like everywhere else in the city where kids play and imagine shortcuts through to other Arab- and Australian-financed construction sites leading mayhap to a brand-new disaster area where their own building was this morning, which may be what happened to Juan’s little brother like Efrafn who passed into the very heart of pickpocket land where you get the opposite, ungraphable, unpredictable, and anti-pickpocket warp where instead of your pocket being picked, valuable stuff comes into your pocket.

And suddenly, retreating from me to face the music for the first of many times and she could care less, Ruth M. Heard left me at the fence dreaming of speaking, starting somewhere between ahead of myself and retarded— speaking of what then I did not know, thinking nonetheless of, well mostly bullshit, Jim, but also of Ruth M. Heard’s father, who I thought might have died, yes hit by a bullet while speaking his mind on some great current event, and there beside me was Miriam looking over her shoulder telling me our substitute was in a shouting match down there (her eyes slightly wall-eyed like some thought came back to me seeing me but. . you know).

But I had not noticed what she reported; no at that moment I was speaking my mind with an eye on the fence, the mesh steel the action viewed through the diamond holes which went away when you looked at the guys through them stopped, gathered around High Kool, all looking into the sky, and like taking up position in advance sq you’re the one who is fouled, not the guy who couldn’t check himself when you stopped and he ran into you, I can imagine basketball is the key to everything but these guys didn’t play with fouls, and I didn’t want to go home but looked at Miriam wondering when I’d get angry about her disappearing with little Gonzalez and saw that she hadn’t registered a word I’d said, because I was speaking in my mind, and I looked at Ruth tossing her head of thick heavy curls twice our age and shaking her finger at the men, and I thought I would like to speak on how the poor women gathered into their own bags the wastes of flour and wheat from the barrels and wheat sacks spewed by the rioters into the street and how maybe the rain — what month was it? I (didn’t know — came down and mixed in with the flour near the fishmarket until you had a block-long of dough and immigrant demonstrators heated in the oven of the City freely sprinkled with if not sugar as Mir’s Aunt Iris did, then by a free hydrant. But I knew that current events were of more use: a human newspaper I found myself, but talking mainly to Ruth Heard who believe me knew too much and was too much for the authorities to permit her to exist. And then I got angry at Mir’ and walked her home, and she said I was crazier than Miss Heard when I said, Here’s all this news coming in from Russia, from Algeria to see if General De Gaulle can end the war, from uptown and from Wall Street, and I’m not there, I’m here stuck in a neighborhood, know what I mean? "Vacuum-packed for burial in space" I wouldn’t have said then because it had not been said yet, though I don’t mind taking it from the journalist the Chilean met at the launch named Spence I think for he’ll take a thing or two from me like all the rest before we all get sick of ripping each other off.

Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.

Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather — what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm) — whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.

The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.

Two blocks down and around the corner our dingy brick church with long, wide, slightly curving steps and the white-and-colored altar you can see if you stand across the street down from the black-and-blue awning of the undertaker and his double-doors down two — no, one step, brownstone.

Couple of pizza joints a block apart, one with the booths down one side where we sat and a wise kid who works there with big horn-rimmed glasses bigger than his face who’s giving us a lot of shit across the counter and the girls are threatening him; the other, a take-out with Sicilian and regular Guinea pizza, the Sicilian like cake. What color are the cop cars?

And it comes like particles in the wind, snowing me, pouring in and I’m the funnel, but you know that already some bull on the corner of Third Avenue is yelling to some bull two blocks away, "Hey Johnny," "Hey Eddie," "Hey Marco," "Hey Eric" "Hey Sal," when a refrigerator truck stops for the light and blocks the view and the guy goes on yelling, under the truck, around the front, over the top, through the high cab where the driver with his arm on the rolled-down window ledge looks straight ahead, gunning the motor.

Six flights up, I’m old enough now, taking a can of beer out of the icebox, shaking it a few times, get a rise out of my mother—"it’s going to go all over the floor, Georgie"; my dad standing in the kitchen door, "At it again, fuckin’ freeloader."

Telling them when I’m in high school about Ruth Heard. Why do I? I know what they’ll say, do you understand, Jim? I know what they’re going to say but I still go ahead and tell them. Very smart lady, funny, went to college in London, England, fastest tongue in the East — dismissed, reappeared, dismissed, disappeared, rehired as substitute still talking, still doing it her way, calling New York schools so bad they might not be an instrument of the class system after all, commanding us to write down the best lies we could think up: "Eric can beat up Jeannette because boys are stronger than girls" (when the truth was that Eric had hypnotic powers and everyone knew it and in those days boys had more pockets than girls and Eric had some very bad things in his pockets, no mere switchblade knife but tricky electrical devices he said his father had taught him to miniaturize). (But, no no, said Ruth Heard, that lie’s just confusing, it’s not persuasive; get to what matters, what we live with.) "My father don’t go to church on Sundays because my mother takes care of that side." (But that’s no lie, that’s true, isn’t that true?) "Someone I know, her sister she’s getting married now not waiting till June because she wants to get out of the house she can’t stand it no more." (Getting out of the house? Ah yes, a substitute for the real reason, and a good substitute, and so a persuasive lie. Right.) "If you study hard you will get a good job." (Well look at me, I’m a product of the English school system, ruined my eyes, speak two languages, don’t read any more, only speak, intelligent, brave, and beautiful, and here I am, waiting to get started.) "America is the best country." (Of course it is, that’s why I came.) "This is where the money is — I wasn’t finished, Mrs. Heard." (Not "missus," thanks but no thanks, marriage is important, it’s one of the most interesting and dangerous ways of distinguishing between two people. Otherwise, religious cant.)

No one asked her what "cant" was; and so she asked us. Quite a person. I said there was no such word, and that got a laugh out of her.

"Sounds like a Communist," my sister says, getting ready to come out of her room. "She speaks the King’s English, I’ll give her that," says my mother in her rapid way that wasn’t only her relief at finding something sensible to say but also her secret protection against being found out to be a bright woman who didn’t want to be especially noticed — bearing a tall can of grated Parmesan cheese out of the kitchen. "What do you mean she speaks the King’s English," says my father, "you never met her. They all come over here. You can’t even be sure of the English immigrants any more. This is where the money is." He has enjoyed all four of his statements, each strong and taken together better than he could have even guessed from his chair, and they earn him the right to go on being clear of the rest of us as he hauls himself out of the easy chair and stumbles yawning and stretching to the head of the table. "Who knows why she’s here," I say; "but it ain’t the money and it isn’t the job." "Make up your mind, Georgie," says my father. "Yeah," says my sister, but I’m not looking back and forth between them. "She can speak Spanish," I reveal. "Well, that’ll help her in this fuckin’ city," says my father. I’m not looking back and forth between whatever and whatever, I can tell you; I’m seeing my mother’s plump knuckles mix up the shells and the meatball sauce in the big bowl she mixes her cake mixes in, and I say, before I know I knew it, "She talks about factory workers never being alone."

"Sounds like a Communist," retorts a voice yet why do I not recall whose? high or low, light or glum.

I know I go round and round, Jim, but not so fast. You see I could get through to her father, I decided. Miriam didn’t know what to say to me any more, for sure not a report of that colloidal message that came sliding out of her while she looked the other way even more beautiful at twenty, twenty-two, than at sixteen when we took over secret control of a temporarily vacant "flat" as Ruth Heard put it.

These garbage cans — I mean her father had a respect for them. They were vehicles he kept hosed down and he hammered out the dents more than once. He knew that if the ironing board lever sticks and you can’t fold the thing up, you don’t throw it like Miriam so it hits the TV and scares her aunt who blames it on Miriam’s old man for putting the screws to Miriam — when he himself saw mechanical devices as life we have brought into being to be treated kindly, kept in working trim, not mechanical brains to suck all the bones out of our heads like that mountain that’s making the rounds.

Who are we then, Jim, you to come here like you had something to tell or had something you wanted to get out of me — and who am I to be there with you now or be a man you’ve told your friends about who think they will never see me? But by colloidal action they may find, out of their minds, me on their doorstep a substitute for another trip, escaped from outside to inside, like my always waiting for Ruth Heard, escaped from England to America, to tell us what?

In our very early twenties — to answer your question that, admit it, Jim (though you’re a pro) was a substitute for further query re: the Chilean’s wife’s plans to get back at the journalist who sought information concerning the Chilean’s continuing activities on behalf of interests undermining the military state-capitalist regime in Chile that had killed his friend and leader Dr. Allende — Miriam left me over a considerable period of time for an older man (smile). I guess I mean her father, too, but the part-Jewish part-Hungarian guy who had a share of a foreign bicycle shop was three years older than she and she had gone out with him once in a while, long (a) before her message to me in the tax office but long (b) after the Sunday morning she slept late in order to keep from her conscious mind that she had told her father I was going to be saying some controversial stuff about Jewish homeland Sunday at the schoolyard fence and if a good discussion ensued it would not be surprising.

And when at the end I saw him down the block across the Sunday street at the German Mrs. Erhard’s newspaper store and we knew each other in the message he received from me but which we, the boyfriend and the widowed father, together created, I follpwed his sudden absence the seven and a half blocks to the well-tended tenement and the string of bright garbage cans because I had to be on the scene in case he burst in to tell his daughter her boyfriend was planning to concentrate all Jews in the limitless Australian desert at whose edges according to Ruth M. Heard Cockney long ago became audible because the settlers were cons shipped there out of sight out of mind and low class low speech. But what could I say to Iris who opened the door all dressed up, her beloved, the printer Eddie, her size, in his blue suit, a tattoo on one hand, ready to take her out after Sunday dinner (which I smelled through Iris’s perfume and her hesitation between asking me in and wishing I’d go away, it would be so much easier) and who when I tilted or cocked my head to say to Eddie, "How’s it goin’, Ed?" was replaced by Miriam’s father as if he was all face, vdice raised not to shouting proportions only to the violence of one who didn’t know, poor bastard, that he had communications to make to me only by colloid suspension express (smile) and was in no mood to be told especially by one who did not have a name then for this power to which our lives and spirit are to be raised, not an anger voicing what was false, namely that Miriam was sleeping late and she didn’t want to spend her time with no bum who ought to be out of school and working, whereupon I shushed him if Mir’ was sleeping, and he slammed the door, and I could hear steps coming out of an apartment two, three floors up, and as I heard the old man’s stupid sound going on—"At least she’s not with him" — and seeming to calm down, I found myself admitted — half admitted — again to Mir’s home, or facing the door magically ajar again and heard the old man’s voice go on and saw that he hadn’t calmed down at all but only faded into the next room as if there was something there, too, and Iris, I see her holding her apron bunched in her hand, saying to me softly, Miriam went to the movies already, her father thought she went with you.

I know I could have killed the old man except he was Miriam’s father — I admit it, Jim. You learn to go for what is inside you like no stigma at all. You go round and round it till you see it, then you don’t need to say it except in these particle facings between you and your self, or you and me, which the Whole Turning Factor turns thank God into the Two Screen never fully known till I came here to prove it in my body, my touch, the presence of others whatever their race or social class — and thanks be to the Giant Colloid Swirl we share whose galactic disk we can see, or flat Earth, or on end a gibbous bike-wheel, or the full mass to live within by letting it find itself an infinite neighborhood, such as this, and between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it — as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

Iris made Sunday dinner in that house mainly for her sister’s husband, my Miriam’s father; he burst out the front door muttering like a super whose building’s suddenly getting bigger over his head behind his back and passed me standing there in the first-floor hallway seeing cast of thousands featuring in the three or four movies I knew she wanted to go to, and on the other side instant and constant a void for whoever she was with, a void I couldn’t fill except with the feeling of myself and couldn’t see but as the dark reflection of her friendly face, Jim, turning after several seconds of my watching her enjoying the movie in the seat next to me, turning like a wife, I guess, Jim — you have had a wife because you have a daughter, so much I know like a wife I say, so beautiful, her glasses on because she wore them at the movies starting around age fifteen; garbage lids crashing outside, I in the hallway standing back to let a rent-paying tenant-couple pass and knowing that turning the hidden, living-room switch for the garbage-can circuit the day Mir’ and I had occupied all too briefly the vacant apartment, hadn’t been much of a joke and I had hated him for being the reason why Mir’ said up there that it was too risky, and minutes later when her old man came storming in and blamed Iris for flipping the juice hoping he’d go up to one of the upper floors so I could get out of the building—

— I thought she loved me enough to have followed me the day of the rain-check walk-home with Miss Heard to her apartment which was no longer the "flat" she had when I was in junior high, for she had been in and out of New York several times since then, though that earlier "flat" I one day heard described by another English voice.

That is, one of the three similar-looking van-driver friends of R. M. Heard but not the one who said so unforgettably in 1959 that you could see flour caking blood in the street, a monopolist was the sole seller of a commodity that has no substitutes, to which definition I could apply the Whole Turning Factor to connect the van driver’s definition with that Law of Substitution I learned from the Chilean gentleman between us when I proposed burial in space as a substitute for cemeteries or our precious oceans — a Utopia dissolving interface between outside and in

— instituting an elite brother- and sisterhood working together with the inmates to make the Inside a center of self-supporting craft and industry, not license plates but clothes and furniture, and exported therapeutic services, all maintaining a balance of payments with the Outside and always a center too of communal thought directly engaged in like democracy in your inter-lunar space settlements while enriched unpredictably by individual thought alone in contemplation, call it subsistence thought whose surplus can be saved by being shared by the men and women in communion here or stored like my own lone swirls of colloid light forever and a day — from, as I say, these Foleynomic projects for a great articulated structure where an infinity of whatever you called small-scale units may find their being — all the way to changing the concrete itself they wall this retired compound round with — so that someday each new vacancy here would be an opening for a new and different freedom, it would be a resource vied for with an elan that someday in future could dissolve guard and con not into one non-individuated mass, but—

that is, Jim, if you’re there still, Miriam would not receive all this because Miriam did not reach that swirl that Juan by fits and starts leans into, then loses, working deeper into Surplus Contradiction alternating by fits with his attempt to see where in the building site his very small brother has disappeared; and Mir’ paid off (if I had let her finish the job) with her once precious self, the shadow I’d hopefully thought she’d engaged to follow me the day Ruth Heard and I met at Mrs. Erharjl’s, each waiting for another, each waiting for the other I do believe, and while Miriam did not come to meet this temporarily but structurally unemployed old friend of hers George, her bike-shop Hungarian not at that point in time identified by me as who he was pedaled past upstream and downstream several times, along Third Avenue truck’d, bus’d, taxi’d, brimming, jammed, but with one sinister space for him, while Ruth, my elder by nine years, and I walked her home, seen by not only the bike-capitalist Hungarian on his wheel and by my mother so that she walked right by the gleaming meat market, but seen also by Gonzalez who must by then have been age fifteen or sixteen easing into his father’s business, profiting by each new day—

— that is, the Hungarian bike-peddler (smile), as you have guessed, recognized not me alone but Ruth M. Heard as well, her heavy head of wild hair atilt, her eyes everywhere, her voice risen richly, telling me she was afraid they would pull her Green Card, telling me she would return to the South one day soon, telling me how her father had taken her on the rollercoaster which has another name in England — but asking me what I was doing (she cared, you see), asking if I had graduated, asking so much that was unanswerable that to my stammering interest in what she said I could not add that I had for a time made a regular thing of current-events discussions at the schoolyard fence — until I envisioned a time when bands of bicylists would break traffic laws so commonly they would go to jail for five years—

— that is, her hair was not heavy but light, her head not heavy but aglow, her recent history so full how did I pause and wait for what would come to me to change my life? — having tendered my resignation to the management of a garage where my part-time job had left me more than part-time free, until at Mrs. Erhard’s, both Ruth and I watching diagonally up the block toward the schoolyard fence, we turned to know each other, and she: We never had that walk, and I (feeling ahead of myself but a retard working on being a retread): I said I’d take a raincheck, and she: A raincheck? (coughing through her laughter at the American word, coughing with bronchitis, TB, cancer, trying to get free of whatever it was as if it was what made her laugh); and before we knew it we were in a narrow elevator and getting out of it and finding ourselves in a one-room pad with no curtains with to my surprise not one-tenth the books I have in my cell today, a canvas chair beside the couch-bed, a photograph on the wall of a very intellectual-looking elderly man with a bushy beard and eyes staring at you half-impatiently, half as if you needed to be treated (you know?) so that, half-tongued as I was, I couldn’t tell if time crawled or ran wild and this was the first thing I thought when I phoned Miriam to say, "Hey what’s happening?" when I meant how come she stood me up yesterday at Erhard’s — and Mir’ said would I like to explain how come I spent so long inside Ruth Heard’s apartment house yesterday, what was going on, and as I say I thought about how slow and fast time went, up there, listening to her describe like a witness Medgar Evers’s children on the fatal night pleading with him to get up where he lay face down just beyond the doorway, arm outstretched — I couldn’t help thinking, "Like a drunk" — and beyond him a bunch of new sweatshirts and in his hand the key to the open door and on the sweatshirts "Jim Crow Must Go" and, I recall remembering irrelevantly my mother the year before crying for days over our wonderful young Catholic President Jack — so I know Kennedy came before Evers — while Ruth had no tears in her eyes telling me how Medgar’s wife packing his toothbrush for the hospital was distractedly asking nobody in particular how many pairs of pyjamas he would need, and I sat down where she told me on the couch-bed and she sat down in the canvas chair and put her feet up on a suitcase and asked me what I would like, she thought they hadn’t turned the gas off yet or the electricity so the beer in the icebox was cold or she could make a cup of instant — you’ve got to get out of here, she said, which I kept stupidly remembering as if I couldn’t remember anything else for years, two, three years, Jim, and that I’d said, "I know, I know," thinking at the time, "I need a dry climate for my asthma" but also New York is too big even to get through; but thinking of her wise advice, for three years up to and beyond when Miriam let slip the message in the tax office, binding those years together so they were gone, Jim, like the road of hairpin curves up the mountain and all that was ahead and is then behind—

— that is, her hair was nbt heavy to the eye, but thick with electricity to the touch of your particles, not soft and straight like Miriam’s, as gentle as Miriam’s mind, and then she too left school, I see her before and after (smile), smiling when I said I was going to get car for transport-delivery and drive across the country, I imagine you’ve done that, Jim, but in an expense-account car, am I right? smiling (that is, Miriam) when I said, "All we did was talk — how do I know how long I was in her apartment?" — "Gonzalez saw her put her hand on your shoulder" — "What do you get for that, two free throws?"—

— that is, Gonzalez was too busy to see more than that, but Kallman the Hungarian who raced on weekends had time to do a soft-pedaling parallel-tail on me and Ruth my former substitute teacher, and it wasn’t even his lunch hour but he’s the boss, or one of the two bosses so he can be in two places at once, and more, because on the day of the raincheck walk-home to where Ruth was preparing to leave, I knew nothing of Kallman’s interest in Miriam and wasn’t inspired to guess, for she, who had stood me up or at any rate made me wait, could not self-evidently be paired with him for, for — two places or not — he was present along my route with Ruth, but I did not know she was then beginning to see Kallman, hear his accent on the phone, watch him far from the innocent women and children on Third Avenue swiftly unstrap from his Volkswagen’s bike-rack beside a New Jersey lake, one for him, one for her; and so I could only blame her for not meeting me at Mrs. Erhard’s and believe Mir’s claim that she had phoned Mrs. Erhard’s and the line was

full, which like some other history to be taken on faith was a lie I believe

that is, Jim (and thanks for getting Larry’s correspondence form in)—

— that is, when I met one of the three rich-American van chauffeurs and recognized him all of seven yeirs after the 1837-Flour-Riot-and-Union-Square-Bombing-New-York-History Tour, he told me Ruth had been ready to leave that last apartment on a moment’s notice, he liked this neighborhood, he’d almost taken that apartment, he knew the place, the address, had crashed there, the canvas chair belonged to his friend who’d also driven us that day in junior high though not the one who gave the definition of monopoly on the sidewalk when Ruth said shut up (oh she got arrested, he said, when I asked about her, right there on the street in Boston picketing a school), she was a warm-hearted gal oh Christ she was, he said, she’d give you the shirt off her back (when they carried her away in Boston something about her visa they made her leave the country — I didn’t have tipie to track down the whole story — history is being bombed, you can quote me, it collapses in the mind to what really happened).

"Her father died when she got home," the "rich-American" van chauffeur said to me—"Charles heard that she got married to someone, Charles it was his canvas chair you sat in," he said to me, and I didn’t use the only comeback I had.

That is, I sat on the couch-bed until I went to the icebox and opened the one beer and Ruth and I shared it, it was all alone in that icebox with a white jar of marmalade and a couple of puckered mushrooms.

That is, when I said to Miriam that it wasn’t all that long spent in Ruth Heard’s apartment, and I said I think she was packing, she took down a framed photograph off the wall when I was going, the glass was cracked. Miriam smiled not like she knew there was anything to know, but like it didn’t matter—

— that is, I later recalled seeing this but it not registering, and (if you’ve got a minute, Jim) the moment when I recalled seeing but not registering that she didn’t care was the moment much later of her accidentally getting to me with the message in the clean-carpeted income-tax office, with a half-bald guy in a windbreaker beside a desk, his elbow not too calmly on the desk, waiting for some accountant to come back from the key-locked John (is the City still like that?), and Miriam meanwhile with me there, picking up the phone so cool, reaching for an office ballpoint like it was a handkerchief to wipe a kid’s nose (a ballpoint I asked for, with a smile, and got with a shrug but no smile from smiling Miriam), and I took it, I mean what she had to give me then and accepted what had happened to us, I would live (right?) but the Chilean economist now, Jim, let me be frank with limited data, let’s say it is the truth you want about him, but whether or not you are this other person Spence who I hear the Chilean’s wife is after for threats against her and her husband, shouldn’t you let him lay? — I mean in decent obscurity, I mean what’s the use as I said to young Larry who writes me such letters, Jim, that I almost forget to read between the lines and said he would give anything to go back to age fifteen with what he knows now at eighteen (smile) which is like me thinking I’ll write all this down someday, though perhaps that won’t be necessary since others, few though they be, share portions of my information, for I have found that Larry too has made the acquaintance of that loner the inventor who in the eighties and nineties changed the world by making feasible his much-beloved alternating current with its fantastically higher voltages plus their long-distance transmission against the hostile opposition of Edison and his DC faction who, our loner-genius knew by intuition, had pushed AC on the New York State prison people when electrocution came in as a means of discrediting AC. But you wanted to know if Miriam came to see me, and I believe I said I am selective. My cup runneth over with your interesting questions—

— like, the Chilean gentleman between us has enough trouble, am I right? and more trouble I couldn’t use for there’s a limit to the trouble you can use and if it comes to you in your warped life what are you going to do on the principle of Give Back More Than You Get?—

— like, I thought about Miriam but did not see her because power is in restraint; called her up on her birthday and on Sunday it’s no secret I was by then in a holding pattern and didn’t know what I’m waiting for, not the rich-American school-tour chauffeur who does one day run into me in the street and it might as well be Ruth M. Heard, until I hear what he tells me and I need to slug him, kill his face — you’ve had that feeling, tell me you have— on account of he’s pretty dartin casual about Miss Ruth, while I remember everything, the little I have to the wall, her father maybe (at remember, like her taking the framed photo off that point in the afternoon I could almost have asked), and leaning it up against the other suitcase not the one she’d put her foot on so many swirling, surprising, clear minutes ago—

— that is, I could have accepted what happened to us, and lived with what she had to give me—

— that is, in the tax accountant’s office I heard Miriam, a year before the rich Anglo-American van-chauffeur ran into me on Third Avenue—

— lived without her — and without her saying, George you ought to get married and settle down; and without you, Jim, saying, Now which one said that? — Ruth M. Heard or Miriam? — when you know damn well Ruth wouldn’t say a thing like that, she said to me the last time I saw her, Get on the road Foley get out of this spot you’re in—

— that is, since you insist on asking, the prospect of settling down with old girlfriend; laboring in a vineyard of worn-out brake pads and (irritable) valves and walking into sunsets that need to be changed every fifteen hundred miles — having some kids who at different rates walk up the widely slightly curving steps of the church on Sunday with their Aunt Iris and won’t be allowed to go near granddad’s electrified waste units, oh the whole bit—

— that is, she didn’t say so much that day but this was the kernel and it ain’t popcorn, Jim, just like the danger to your Chilean friend whoever you are, Jim, ain’t prime-time TV cops and bombers treasury agents and vice-smugglers, current events before you turn in for the night sponsored by automobile commercials and Sir Horny-Loin Plus-Burgers preserved by psycho-colloid solutions, prime-time kidnapped tycoons sending an arm and a leg back the long way to the main office of their bank attached in a revolutionary new way to prove they exist and confess to long-standing surplus, no Jim this is real as the absence of information about Juan’s little brother who disappeared into the open-ended construction site and as crass as the van chauffeur who met me the day my ramshackle history fell in and I stopped waiting—

— that is, for Ruth to add to what she’d told me, for I could add my own conclusions to what the van driver who after all had not been there told me about what happened during two hours I spent in Ruth M. Heard’s semi-vacated apartment which I would not believe

— that is, I said to him, You’ve been talking to the Hungarian at the bicycle shop — Kallman — Oh do you know Kallman? says the rich American light-mover van chauffeur, Kallman gets around for a bike grease-monkey, said the van driver, who still had his face, it was still alive, I had not killed it—

— that is, Kallman had told him about that afternoon raincheck walk-home, the van driver — and the last words of his I recall as I turned angrily, precipitately, away to get away from him, was his saying, No he knew Kallman, everyone who saw the future of bicycles from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth knew Kallman, but Kallman, don’t tell him I involved him in Ruthie, he never said a thing to me about you and her—

— that is, those two hours—

— that is, the van driver had had more to say, which he no doubt went on saying at length long after I’d split—

— that is, I did not wish to hear his personal reminiscences about my substitute teacher, her qualities, her frankness, her suspicion of brevity, her relations with the official tenant of that last apartment, and her supposed words about me—

— that is, although I had agreed to take the afternoon-evening shift of a car-rental agency (downtown branch) on trial, I cut it pretty fine by going to Kallman’s bike shop which had grown in size since I had last thought about it, to confront him with having told others about me and Ruth but he and his partner and three assistants with T-shirts with French and Italian sayings on them were spread out, confusingly dispersed, across the showroom and the repair department so that as if entering a room so full of furniture you’d spend all your time deciding where to sit, I saw that Kallman, swarthy, muscular, eyes flashing with the humor of a well-rested stud, had laid out for me an obstacle course of glistening wheel spokes and frames of all colors and nations that he might look like he owned when the fact was that the bank owned his bikes and his future of such colossal interest charges that a man like him must receive monthly rebates on his by comparison negligible automobile loan charges, because here was a man who Miriam had once told me always obtained on his personal savings commercial paper rates which is hard to believe, and I called to him across the cement floor of his showroom so sharply the wheels of a foreign racing bike near me (as near as the upside-down car in Florida you told about) would have begun to spin if it had been standing upside down on its seat and handlebars like one over in the repair area no doubt being tuned up or one up on a platform that Kallman with one eye on me not knowing my policy was never to attack first, was describing to a fantastically tall lady in loose overalls and an old-fashioned leather skull-tight aviator’s cap, with whom he suddenly then left the bike and made his way grinning, mouth partly open like he was about to speak, as if he knew from my loud, abrupt greeting across the storeful of merchandise that was more beautiful than Miriam, more finely tuned and whirringly out-of-reach (I remember then understanding for the first time) — that I didn’t have time to stop, I didn’t really have the time for him; and knowing me through all that interference, knowing what I had to say, Kallman stopped for me, maybe however not knowing of me what I knew of him, that his direction might have been mine; and his smile, his grin, was not Miriam’s smile of delicious amusement, and before he could get near enough to try and sell me something, I was telling him—

— that is, I had not killed his face, only I had had it up to here, the junior-high Revolutionary-New-York-History-Tour van chauffeur’s (who didn’t drive the light-moving van any more but had gone on to contracting, he had a team of musicians and painters who worked for him plastering and painting apartments, non-union, off the books); and so to stem violence I turned my back on that face but the wor4s of his message got to me and were admitted to the Colloidal Unconscious, which at large in its space has no front or back; yet that developing power in me needed the truth of his cruelty in order to come to know what doesn’t matter and what does, Jim — Ruth’s touch on my arm, my leg, my sleeve being helped on, and, come to think of it, my back, which recalls her father who was off the wall (smile) and who took her on the rollercoaster—

— that is, in some region of England rollercoaster goes by the name of switchback; while what doesn’t matter, Jim, is the van driver’s will to show such knowledge of Ruth as I would not match. I knew what was in his mind which meant that he could not; (at that stage of development) know what was in mine.

And so he was able to say to me that Ruth never made that bed of hers, that they had shared that apartment through some pretty bad times, that Mrs. Erhard got the air edition of the London paper for Ruth, that on the day of the raincheck walk-home (I lo^e track of seasons) and the shared beer and the advice re: my life interrupted and cut short by the arm and a leg I would have given her for that and more, and did give, I say on that day the van driver (as I divined through his words and with a new use of the centrifugal though unidentified coagulant clarification I now think I was coming then into) had himself been stood up by Rut)i Heard just as I had by Miriam whatever her busy signals said; and over his pursuant, early-afternoon words circling me as I went round and round Miriam’s and her father’s and her Aunt Iris’s block that night recalling louder and louder Mir’s father’s I-told-you-so relayed now months later by Kallman whose direction I could never have taken, never never have taken, were my words to a thirty-year-old former substitute teacher as I paused at last on her semi-vacated threshold for further words of advice and still barely tasting our one beer: we will meet again Ruth (the first time I called her that)—/ just know \ve will—and returned to me swimming in my dreams, dispersed through days and months, swung round by a cruelly other voice to leave a clear vacancy at the center which is me, my doing—

— that is, my meditations before and after divined what must happen for the high-risk development of powers I had no name for then, God curse me and curse your obsessed but (I Jiave to think) good questions, Jim Mayn, curse you, though—

— that is, when Larry’s sad, fucked-up letter (for you’ve brought people into my field who I then know have often already been there) reported hearing your ladyfriend namely Jean worried herself about you (lucky you!) because you "confessed" — not "claimed" — you’re in the future doubling back upon the past which is our present to see it and us so plausibly that it exists— claiming to her nonetheless that you’re not the type for this deranged stuff, not crazy, not off the wall (like me, or, come to think, the sleaze who hung out with our fine senor), nor did you honestly think the future yet exists—

why, it came to me, Brother Mayn — and who says you ain’t crazy as a container ship full of do-it-yourself corn kernels that pass like a shadow over a vein of heat gushing up beamed geyser-like single-minded as lasers bombarding a tornado and no one in designing the containers and the container-ship allowed for these billions of kernels growing like plant cells out of control in the next century or the next room into — call it — popcorn but is it growth or death? — it came to me and my freedom to receive the before and after so they dissolve — that whatever the giant differences in how you look but given the fact I have never seen the two of you together, you and the Chilean’s associate Spence may be one and the same and don’t say no, Jim, because in the great community where the colloid’s facets of human light do not escape us but do not settle either nor readily filter out, this identify of Spence and you might be true—

— that is, with another particle of me, not cruel like the van driver’s voice that gave me back Ruth’s words, I later learned what I knew already. I knew what I was going to do that night though above this meditation went the traffic of particles trucking helter-skelter up the river of the city until—

— that is, having had it up to here, I told Kallman — several bikes still between us — where did he get off blabbing about me and Ruth Heard when he hadn’t been up there in her apartment? What was he shooting off his face to the van driver (which van driver?) (what’s-his-name who shared the apartment with Ruth Heard, Miriam’s and my substitute teacher back in school) (—is there any other Ruth Heard? cracks the Hungarian and answers: Oh there’s only one Ruthie, we threw coffee mugs at each other over Hungary, I threw a wet cake of soap at her and it hit a picture of Karl Marx and busted the glass — you mean Fred Monk, who painted my apartment, oh Fred Monk I saw him last week, I sold him a three-speed for his little girl)—

— that is, the van-driver-turned-apartment-painting-contractor had known Ruth Heard did business with the German storekeeper Mrs. Erhard and later that afternoon, cutting it so fine you might say I had already given by default my new car-rental job a trial, finding her with her back to me on the phone, I slipped a few copies of the early Post onto the sidewalk before entering the store; I stood across the glass counter with its breath sweeteners (or is it suppressors?) and asked Mrs. Erhard, who seemed upset, if the English woman Ruth Heard who had once had a standing order here had had a friend called Fred Monk with one bad eye, a white streak right across the eye; and when she didn’t know what to say as if I had something on her, I kidded her: I said, Mrs. Erhard, that little pistol you got’s going to go off and hurt somebody someday you’re bound to get robbed as long as you got it on the premises, and her face with the big round cheeks was saying, Do you really think so, but she said, "Yes, she would come here and wait for him, and use the phone, and sometimes he didn’t come and she was very mad and talked to me like we were close friends—"

— that is, I didn’t go right to Mrs. Erhard from Kallman, I went and phoned Miriam at her office and made her talk to me. We hadn’t gone together in months. I said I’d like to take her father to court for bad-mouthing me. She kept saying, "It’s so long ago, it’s so long ago, it’s so long ago—" and had to hang up amid—

— that is, Kallman claimed that I had it wrong, as he slowly approached through his ranks of bicycles^ — no, man, it wasn’t him who spoke to Monk about me and Ruth, it was Mir’s father who had spoken about me and Ruth to him Kallman, but it was so long ago, you know—

— that is, Ruth on the day of the raincheck had been reading her air edition of the London Times and opening it out to continue the article she was reading, and when she noticed me and we spoke, she looked at her watch, she had on one of these heavy sweaters with buttons down the front and a collar, the Colloid Unconscious divides and divides its particles, faceting faster than light so light pauses relieved to be no longer champion—

— that is, Kallman, definitely not smiling as he reached me, heard the very tall woman in the baggy overalls with large smoked glasses and the aviator’s leather cap skull-tight with the earflaps snap-tight under her chin call from where she’d been left staring at the racing bike up on the platform, Hey is anybody selling bicycles around here? — and called again, while I traded words with Mr. K., who, looking all around the store, waved an assistant, a girl with Italian words all over her T-shirt, away from a young boy in a baseball cap and toward the aviator woman, then turned back to me: "Miriam’s father said you were sneaking up to the apartment of that Communist teacher, he said you were always a no-good, I’m just telling you what he said"—

— that is, there’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Erhard, she remembered me from way back, her life is simple, she opens up seven-thirty, has her coffee in a container with a grain of saccharin and a bagel that she breaks in two and nibbles the second half all morning and she closes up at seven p.m. sharp when she’s had time to sell most of her late edition; and if she knew I threatened to expose Kallman to Miriam and her father for playing around in the bathroom with Ruth Heard, whose father rode an old black bike to work every day of his life, she would have better things to do than worry about threats. Still, I wondered if she paid anybody off. She was a little upset, probably because I was. For these things communicated themselves in our last (which seemed final) visit, when I told you, Jim, after you said the London Times never used to have "continueds" but would end the article on the page it began on, that I was so finely cut into the faces of your particles, their dividing swirl, their timeless beamings, riverings, and wheelings, that I knew you were in big trouble over something, maybe the Chilean, but when the Cuban Brigade leader came on TV with a bag over his head I felt Colloidal Unconscious drawing you near me. I said to Mrs. Erhard someone must have pulled a Post from the bottom of the pile because there’s copies all over the sidewalk, could I pick them up for her, but she squeezed out from behind the counter without looking at me as if she’d had it up to here, and went outside and I slipped behind the counter but not to give her job a dry run (smile) and put my hand under the counter and there it was—

— that is, we’d both had it up to here, and Miriam knew it when I told her I had to talk to her father, tell him a thing or two about what she said oh God it was so fucking long ago, and find out why he still had to bad-mouth me after all this time I’m off the scene, I’m her past, I’m not the boyfriend anymore; and she said, Please don’t get into a confrontation with Dad, a shouting match, it’s not going to help matters, is it? But I, being in the more developed state, could tell she would not hang up on me this time, and I hung up on her—’That’s it, Miriam," I said — ("That’s it," one black guard at a side door of the Tombs in Lower Manhattan called to a second black guard standing beside the rear door of the correctional bus, stockpiled schoolbus, with its steel-mesh windows which from outside can seem like grime shading the interior, where some insane kid with a little beard calls sex to a couple of girls talking especially intently as they pass the bus and us in it, its rear door now closed upon the one-way all-inclusive tourists who are their own bag self-addressed to be consumed, wasted, or invested)—

— that is, with no place to turn from Miriam, from Kallman, from the van driver who meant me no harm and had inaugurated a profit-sharing plan that gave the artists he employed (to resculpture and cover with two coats of oil-base paint walls in which the customer would then drive hooks to hang other artists) marginal increments of time or other possibilities of experience into which increments of money might be translated, I needed to talk with Ruth M. Heard to ask her—

— that is, about the basic unit of value; but as I wrote Larry, I had not yet found the obstacles that would stand in its way to make me look for it—

— that is, I might have hunted the painting contractor down to finish what he had started when he’d given me Ruth’s story of what she and I had done during much of the two hours even my mother (who said I was all she had) had learned I had spent there because to tell the truth no one had told her—

— that is, beyond little Gonzalez identifying for her who the person was who had rested a hand on my shoulder in the street—

— that is, I went to see my mother, who was in the kitchen on the phone listening to my sister I could tell by her tone of the tired survivor now beyond the struggles of others, a bag of groceries on the table, another with a six-pack in it I could tell by the straight-up sides of the brown paper, and she looked at me and pointed to the clock and looked back at me but didn’t say what she meant because I know she didn’t want my sister to know that I was not at my new job at this hour of a jam-packed day, and she continued to listen with consternation in her eyes until smoothing the gray-brown hairs that had sprung late-afternoon frizzy out of the tight-pulled-hair combed back along her head flat and rolling her tensely blinking eyes around as if my sister’s long-winded stories had made my mother forget and forgive all there was to forget and forgive facing her in the freshly linoleumed kitchen I already recall (but why do I say "already," is it some prompting from a facet of you, Jim? only a facet when you are tuijned also outward toward perhaps our Chilean said to be involved by his associate Spence in some plot to be exported with an anti-Castro cover possibly from this very multiple dwelling while you shake your professional head allowing that there might be something in it but one hears these stories) my mother pointed at the clock again and meant, I knew, my father, and wanted no fight about whatever the meaning was of my appearing at this hour—so it’s about time you started paying rent, you drink my beer and eat my food, and I left—

me to be between my mother — that is, when her voice

— that is, I was down the stairs when I heard our phone above me and knew my father was always a half-hour later than my mother said because he sat at the last stool at the end of the bar at the corner, sat in the window looking out, talking to a couple of his friends whom he hardly looked at but would sometimes interrupt wtyle watching the world go by — well, he would not be as yet climbing the stairs of our building; and so there was no one for

and—

as close to a cry as my Christian name permits came solitary down the old stairwell and I knew the phone had been ours, and I let myself out as gently as I could in the knowledge that the two phone calls my mother had found herself between had kept me from sitting down with her and saying, Look, Mom, no excuses asked but I come this close to taking the advice I wish I could have got all of from my substitute teacher, this close today, but I run into this fellow Fred Monk and I can’t wait for the rest of Ruth M. Heard’s advice, Mom, I’ve had it up to here and you have with me I know—

— that is, she found me between first my sister’s phone call and my dad’s arrival home her habitual hour or half-hour early, and second my sister’s phone call and a call I caused, though I never thought later to ask which of the possibles it had come from, conveying the information that I, Foley, was thought to have on me a small pistol — borrowed lady’s piece — and had my mother seen her son George Foley?

— that is, I loved her and she me and she had never said a word to anyone but me a year before, to wit "What do you want with that woman she was fired three times and she’s old enough to"—

— that is, I found New York very big and very small at that moment, Jim, you’ve said the same observing that in your memory the city was neighborhood enough, walking your little girl to the school bus stop though at the time as you later told her the city seemed too big and too harsh to be a neighborhood that now in memory you may think it really was all the time because your family’s there wherever you were, Jim, in your sundry travels, you have a son, too, so where’s he? I know you wonder if you should have left—

— that is, I had been looking at electrical equipment in one window and then boats in another, rubber, wood, collapsible boats, I knew I was beginning, I was on Broadway across Union Square from the bench or tree where some historic bomb went off — no legs lost that time — and I walked north magnetized by my will — is there a guitar in that street window of the Flatiron Building still? — east on Twenty-third Street fingering a pistol I wasn’t friends with, by the high gray wall of life insurance with a giant clock up there someplace (is it there still?) — post office on the left, hardware on my right side, oyster bar at Third and Twenty-third (still there?), then the public library branch on my side, School for the Deaf across on the left (am I right, Jim?), doughnut counter, and I turned down First Avenue wanting to get where I was going my own way, passing the multiple-dwelling development across First on my left named after an early New York settler-crook no doubt, on my right the liquor store, newspaper stores, meat market (not my mother’s), a jumble of steady money-makers whatever they say, all the Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican settlers on this frontier of noise more or less happy in their daily work, many gone home, me just the opposite; past the street where the precinct waits barricaded by all its squad cars double-parked: and before I know it, I’m along Fourteenth Street thinking west and I’ve stopped for a cup of tea and a blueberry blintz and the sky is darkening but not the city, and curbing my westward aim I bend north into Park Avenue South understanding in my magnetic will that all I wanted was to confront Miriam’s father with his socially unnecessary remark at this late date about me and tell him I hardly ever saw Miriam and what was I to him or her, or Iris, or their well-kept tenement in whose reaches, well above the electrified interlinked waste-disposal system, I had so transiently visited a vacant "railroad" with the daughter who my own father never spoke of now — though I didn’t always follow him from (frankly) quite cheerful coffee and fresh light cream and glazed doughnut with my mother at the kitchen table through a repeat two hours later at the garage (no fresh cream) through all that friendly talk turning up and changing the oil of big New Jersey cars until their owners, their mat of meshed hair woven all colors across their scalp, reentered the open-ended, dark garage at four as if to get in and drive away with hardly a glance at the white worksheet clamped with a wiper to the windshield, through to his curved corner of late-afternoon saloon and the shared corner of (call it) Life with two guys talking and him almost never looking at them but when I spied him from across the street staring quite happy (frankly), to his speechless reentry into the apartment to go straight to the icebox, then the bathroom, then his chair, never mentioning Miriam any more so why should Miriam’s father pile insult onto exile talking of me when his cup was running over and he had a half-Jewish Hungarian son-in-law-to-be with a late-model foreign car and a surplus of new business every week Kallman claimed he couldn’t handle, and occasional Sundays to please his bedridden widower father he might go to church with Mir’ and Iris and Eddie when he and Miriam were not otherwise engaged driving up the Hudson, down rockbound hairpin curves, along tree-guarded parkways, their bike wheels in the bike rack turning faster and faster hanging in the clean air: all these little things expanded to take up the strange gaps between one year and another, what has Foley been doing? (I heard you ask as if you had said it out loud in my presence) — as stalled as our Chilean incognito at his foundation research sinecure who wrote me that he might as well be our Thomas Jefferson riding through imaginary Andes to see for himself proof of the Universal Flood by the testimony of shells at fifteen thousand feet — there was Ruth M. Heard, a fighter, a brilliant woman, on an immigrant visa questioning our system but whooping it up, here one year, gone the next, back, gone, living her future while talking about the present, providing some action for us slower settlers like me and Gonzalez who had been delivering some plumbing supplies to Ruth’s building around the time my postgraduate school was letting out (smile) that fateful day of the raincheck walk home—"well, at least you’re a dropout, Foley, you don’t have one of those diplomas to keep in working order, you’re free," I thought in her words, fatefully walking round and round, in a narrowing circle you could call it, cutting out Broadway, then Park, cutting out Twenty-third, Twenty-second, cutting out First Avenue, cutting out Fourteenth Street, Fifteenth Street, coming toward whatever was waiting in me, not at all the geographical center of the great oblong of city streets I was narrowing, the Puerto Rican who was still dividing the high cakes of Sicilian pizza waved to me as I passed, and was it my magnetic foresight that his raised hand through the window seemed to stay raised in a long, too-long "Hello, Georgie," and was it my imagination that, when I looked from the bright TV screen and the window of the bar where my father would long since have had his final going-home beer to the curb that had been as vacant as three in the morning a moment ago, I found a squad car in the streetlamp light and two young cops seated below me so I let go the small pistol, and, presently reaching the narrowest circle of my developmental approach, I turned into the school block, the playground where no matter how luminous High Kool’s stormcloud-albino hands, I don’t see them n’more — past the wooden stand outside Mrs. Erhard’s little store taken in for the night, to the corner where stood waiting for me Louise the roughest kid in the class. No one ever saw her pull a knife on a boy but what she said was meant for you and she swung her shoulders just that little bit when she walked so you knew she didn’t care what she did; she said, "Hey Georgie, you got a mustache." I hadn’t seen her in months, not consciously, maybe years, same old dry cleaner, supermarket, very unhip haberdasher, drugstore, dress shop, palm reading, in that neighborhood you didn’t count the months or years; it wasn’t a bad neighborhood, Jim, she had her hair drawn up in a kerchief with a couple of rollers bulging, she’s Italian as plum tomatoes, Italian as a life-long widow sitting on her folding chair in a doorway in the evening, Italian as a church festival banner stretched across the street, none of these things is Louise (sorry), and she was smoking a cigarette against the railing above the basement Chinese laundry, and she had a little girl with her though it’s late and I could almost have stopped to shoot the shit with her, she’s tall and fantastic-looking. "Where you working, Louise?" And I think not that she would pull off a job someday because we often thought that, and there were rumors besides; but what I thought was Louise had liked me, I mean at the moment she looked over her shoulder when we got out of the New-York-Revolutionary-History-Tour van and I was looking at her; and now, years later, Mrs. Erhard’s pistol’s in my jacket pocket and I could dump it in the corner sewer, I could go back half a block and put it under the door— Yeah, Jim, I know the joke but this is true, there’s no way I could leave the piece at Mrs. Erhard’s so it wouldn’t be seen, but drop it down the stinking, smoking sewer to music playing someplace — sure I could have, but I was in love at that instant with the roughest girl in the class, and I say, "Hey they didn’t have bombs like ours in those days," and she gives me the biggest smile and long-drawn-out "Hey r/ght, right" and I couldn’t look at her or the three-year-old kid holding her hand and eating a pink ice cream, and I say over my shoulder, "You’re beautiful, kid, you’re beautiful," and hear behind me, "I never knew you cared," kidding or true, and I’m very clear I can’t go round n’more, there’s no room, the AC working smooth at last, the magnetic field rotating free, I’ll have it out with Miriam’s father, that’ll be it — help I give myself.

And then I’m coming up on the silver garbage cans and I can see him, his hair dangerous in the streetlamp light, he’s in the door, three or four steps above the street level, and saw me and didn’t move for a moment till he saw something in my walk or thought something, and ducked out of sight. I put my hand down on the first can and nothing. And so on, no juice. The cops had spoken, and he’d cooled it, and maybe he’s on the phone now calling Kallman that I’ve got a gun. And Jim, I know I’m going to do a dumb thing that might throw me forward into what I won’t know I need until I see I know it all along: do you develop by knowing the greedy oppressor and reciting your history like Juan my friend? Why is he in here? He does not say. But oh you have these thoughts, Jim—

— that is, deceive—

— that is, knowing that the goods and the bads on the Outside are getting their share of the bomb also — the ones with bags over their heads or haloes, with pistols in their hands or fellow feeling — you know at the last sub-second particle of our unconscious that everything on the Outside is as it was and the bomb is cleanly modeling something awful next door or at a never-fear maximum security center overlooked by all except the media who have the infrared filters and the resolution and the extrapolation capability and the cool, high Horror Threshold to give you this truth in your homes, Jim, journeyman journalist that you are, to make you understand without having to go through it save for a documentary tour, I forget d’l say one day a month we’re fasting against executions? (for colloidal communion is but one way to work with others and a self-induced rotating magnetic field must be another if you think of all that alternating current our loner-genius of the eighties and nineties could generate who later in ‘93 disproved in his head at least the curved space that new-fangled gravity graphs so potently and disproved the claim that we are walking-around bombs in the mere matter of our bodies). No, it was our young friend Larry (who was bringing his girl but they broke up) whom I told of Jim Lee State, totally bald since adolescence and they said had a pretty odd amber shine to his skull that you thought you could see through into his long-structured Indian- (apparently) type brain, who fasted except for one cup of water and half an avocado per day for three weeks prior to his execution date, this is in the Middle West, and wanted no part of last meals (sharing quadruples on ice cream with fellow condemned—"con2" — (smile)) or chaplain supplying last words; and he slit his own trousers because he wanted it to be his trip subject to the normal balance of manual/automatic in the system; and he was writing a story in his cell trying to complete it for his lawyer to have in lieu of fee, but it was nine-thirty p.m. and only ninety minutes till Time to go. But Jim Lee State fell asleep at the new manual typewriter a recent parolee had left him and slept through his own execution — that’s right — because no one told him the judge had granted his lawyer a stay that afternoon. He was tired, he found out.

I had a letter from him before I came here and he said he would be thinking of me up there on the Canadian border — the dreams of all that night’s work he singled out were two, and he does not recall at all the dream he had had off and on for months that was as close as he came to a dream of the Chair, but the two he had the night he slept through his execution were adjoining like a two-room apartment you can’t live in all of at the same time. His wife was cooking very hot and dry Mexican food, the pinto beans, the chopped meat, the chili peppers, her own corn tortillas, and singing at the top of her lungs so he could hear in the next room when actually he was right there where he’d been all day but now behind her sitting so close he could have reached out to touch her hips and she could have sat down on him had she not been busy stirring a pot and turning the tortillas and folding them but holding them a little open.

Meanwhile in the next dream she was lying in bed half-covered and drops of bathwater on her body and face so he could feel the dampness against the sheets and she didn’t see he was standing right there speechless with love but she was talking to him like he was in the next room and he couldn’t tell her he was there. She worked at a supermarket checkout, I learned. The two dreams were one after the other, repeating, but then they were at the same time too, and she was about to discover he was behind her listening to her sing and she could sit down on his lap, and at the same time she was lying in bed with drops of water on her about to discover she was looking right through him talking to him like he was in the next room one hand near the bedside light and he was about to speak but couldn’t till she saw him, and these dreams went back and forth all night it seemed, but later he had the idea that they occurred at about eleven, but how could he check with the guards? they said he talked in his sleep all the time anyhow.

I had heard of his case, his composure, his writing, his claim that his murder had been the victim’s premeditation, not his; and I had written telling him of the fateful day when I’d had it up to here but had not known till afterward the degree to which unconscious premeditation, mine and others’, had turned a divided visitor into a perpetrator of the unknown. I got his answer as I left to come here; they might have forwarded it, but the post is uncertain. I wrote Jim Lee State to report the dream that awaited me upon arrival here, but he never got back to me and so I do not know what use-value he placed upon the dreams that determined him not to complete the story he had fallen asleep writing, which you have to figure was also the work that tired him toward those dreams which if I did not know better now I’d think were as lost to us as they are now to him and he to us. The story, you ask — because I feel that you are asking.

The cons revered him for doing his own thing until the end like a leader concentrating on personal thought and meditation right up to the moment when he must leave his billet and go out to the barricades. He wrote me that they didn’t know the truth of how he felt; true, he did these things like when they came into his cell in death row to forcibly shave his beard off ("Want to see what you got under there, stud"), a rule-breaker right to the end; maybe you could hang yourself with a Father Time-type beard (smile); anyway he fought tooth and nail when they unlocked the cell door and three of them came in and stood shoulder to shoulder before they reached for him, he fought the way he believed he would the night they really came for him, having as a dividend not had to shave his head. Yet, Jim, it — the resistance, the calm typewriter, the close attention given everything even the guards’ pension plan and pay-increase schedule — this activity was mainly, he said, to keep his mind off the fear of time passing behind his back and not thirty years of future life, say, lost but mainly his inevitable vague death held in the hands of moral morons who at the moment of its passage didn’t hold it, but were held by a job which was to prevent it not happening, where its happening would be a high point of their work shift, topped only by its not happening, that is through the seated man in question (for when is it ever a woman? we wonder — while we’re saying, When is it ever a white? though are not a few white "burns" to be the cover for the true policy?) — bringing to a center all the live organic electric charge which the Colloidal Unconscious can draw to itself and because of a unique defense system which I only later in Juan’s abandoned book saw was due to the charges around each colloid particle being not a single but a double layer of opposite charges making the colloid suspension behave like an uncharged body, which when controlled by him who (not holds but) knows how to be held by his Colloidal Unconscious may theoretically receive two thousand volts of inorganic commercially generated mere alternating current and put them to peaceful communications use, but, since this effort of concentration can never succeed in suspending the heartbeat to a minimum as hard to pick up by stethoscope as colloid double charge by electroscope, what are you going to do if they think you are dead and load you onto the stretcher and do an autopsy? The backup mode is to resist as the unified sense of Colloid Unconscious is uniquely fitted to do against the AC system and theoretically repel it right back to the generator where it came from, thereby blowing out their circuits and their new equipment with perfect safety however to the perhaps masked functionary at the non-conducting lever, with at most a Mayday ring to other C.U. members who hear a sound-barrier-bust-type blow accompanied by their favorite music.

Well, I wrote Jim Lee State but in my opinion he never got back to me, which was sad but not sad like saying so long to Efrain when he got out so recently which was not sad. Jim Lee State said that after the stay of execution and the dreams he came to see the stories as work for someone else: like the last was to pay his lawyer, though he also saw that this was just making the trip his own by paying a real debt not to some abstract Society but to counsel (smile), but if he thought of the story as not money but friendly communication which was the best he could do and his best work, its money-value would be real and then how many others would profit by it?

Until, with no prodding by me to investigate the True Unit of Value because he was answering only my first exploratory letter, he saw that he was into Immortality — for a "him" he could never get hold of or know, so here again he was working for someone else, though I pointed out in that letter I never got a personal answer to that wide-spun readers of his Death Row tales would be an endless surplus distributed according to desire and need long after he had no more use for whatever value they returned.

But on the night in question the dreams had drawn him away from this story he was working on — insofar as he recalled it, for he had destroyed it. He said it was based on a true incident, but in the story which begins on a big outdoor Visitors Day like our P.R. festivals here, a guy who’s got a clean lip under his mustache and is wearing under his correctional greens khaki chinos with a razor in the pocket and two freshen-up wet-wipes, and a but-tondown like he never had on his back before, he peels off here and there piece by piece and in the crowd gets into conversation with two girls who don’t (yet) know why they’re here — that is, they’re with an old lady who visits once a month to check on the rehabilitation of a con she’s been corresponding with for asshole years in the hope that he’ll never get out; and our hero, whom the old lady doesn’t know, just walks out the gate to the bus with the two girls and the old lady later that afternoon; he’s free and making his way to Florida before his greens have even gone to the dump for reprocessing with the paper plates and cups.

But here is the point: he arrives in Florida and seeks employment in a supermarket chain as a security guard (smile). Before he knows it, he thinks up a better system which involves all the employees and a pattern of checkpoints superior to the tilted overhead mirrors or the closed-circuit videowatch, and he calls it security-sharing and Personnel is about ready to give him a change of uniform, the system is security-sharing and depends on the employees looking like average shoppers and tracking a three-cornered (three-person) line-of-sight routine which each employee is on his or her honor to share in at least once every ten minutes. But the day before he’s to be promoted, because they’re afraid his system will get more and more participatory, he’s on the scene when a hold up occurs. He gives the alarm, is wounded in the spinal column; in firing back from the meat lockers, he wings a butcher scale and hits a patrolman just arriving on the scene, who later dies of his chest wound because the hospital does not check to find out the cop was allergic to penicillin.

But now our guard is identified as a vacationing con and when a hysterical out-of-work actor a member of the gang is asked point blank if the guard was their inside man and answers yes, yes, the other members of the gang aren’t listened to when they say, No, No, No, what’s this about a guard?

The ending was in doubt, as was the trick by which in the first place the escape artist got onto the back of his hand the invisible visitors stamp which shows up purple under the machine on the way out. But that problem he left to others, if any, because the alternating dreams of his dead wife had shown him where he was coming from and the gap he had to fill, which was working together with others, and he would never write one of those stories again. He said, "I aim to be the oldest living con" (smile), and this was before his sentence was permanently commuted; and now he works steadily against the death penalty ("against death as a penalty") and for more meaningful careers for prisoners.

But shortly after this initial exchange I wrote him a longer letter concerning the Colloidal Unconscious where center and margins are outmoded ideas, and while I did get an answer back, it was on the letterhead of the committee he’d founded and was from someone else who spoke for him, relaying his message that he was gratified I too was involved in my home state working toward a more meaningful prison experience; but I don’t believe those were his words.

Which young Larry when I told him about Jim Lee State agreed marked a development that was practically a scale model of what went on Outside, and he asked if there was much vomiting Inside, he said his mother’s women friends did it all the time, I said it can’t be just morning sickness, but he was puzzled and he had to go, and we agreed that personal communication is our only hope, and he said Jim’s not hearing of the judge’s stay was hard to believe.

Miriam’s father spotted me and ducked right back inside, not even pausing to defend his cans in the bright full moon of the streetlamp. And before I knew it, he was behind both of the old glass-plated doors of the vestibule that would protect him from the explosion of a small borrowed pistol that no doubt my mother, the police, he, and others had gotten a call about, when all I wanted was to tell him how I’d had it up to here so where’s he get off doing a job on me about the two hours I once spent with a woman not his daughter? So I could figure it only that he had failed to stop the Hungarian from marrying Miriam (I feel you shaking your head steadily at me) — and had taken it out on me—

— that is, if I cared, you say Jim?

Well, yes I cared: enough to face him in all of his faces, galvanized, switched-off, widower, Jew, father, boss of a tenement inhabited by renting tenants where he paid no rent except his twenty-four-hour attention to what he found himself responsible for.

That was it: we’d once been responsible together for Miriam. I heard voices where turning shapes struggled through the dimly lighted glass. And thinking he had regained sole responsibility from me, I saw he couldn’t handle it and had turned the surplus back to me.

That was it, a male figure not in color, agitated and vague, agitating the dim light through the milky glass, and another familiar figure, female but less small than Iris, turning me into a gunman when I would have been glad to make him a present of the gun, when all I wanted was a word with Miriam’s father, who was retreating to call the authorities and maybe turn his garbage cans on but he’s scared Miriam’s going to get shot in her effort to peacemake when she and I knew she’s scared I’d tell him what she and I had sometimes done, and where, and so I called him by name, his first name, to come out like a man. Windows started going up; tenants were getting their feet on the ringing metal grates of their fire escapes. I heard the old man’s voice calling but not to me, the figures merged and wrestled, rattled the glass, and a voice came from deeper inside that multiple dwelling.

But that was it. They didn’t matter, yet they insisted on mattering: but, to a man, they were able to place me only on their well-swept sidewalk and could not imagine any more than a jury of unknowns that I had come to their doorstep as if it was only one center of many rounds, for now I was also in another place round the corner having a long overdue talk with the roughest girl in school, Louise Agniello whatever her name was now, who’d vouch for me in some way more real than words — I heard her thinking at that moment.

That was it. I was just an ordinary guy she remembered liking; that is, part of life’s untouched potential, Jim.

But these people, one now breaking through into the dingy, dim vestibule, made me matter, when all I had wanted was a few words with one of them — or did I, now? And, expecting to see in the corner of my eye the light turning round and round like a lighthouse on the roof of a squad car closing fast to double-park hopefully at a scene of perpetration, I heard a whirring close to me and knew it by a foreknowledge of what I later knew there was no getting round, and I made my move toward the outer door calling to the loved figure opening it, "All I want—" as the loved figure replied as she was joined and half dragged inside by the father, not as if I was exactly covering them (right?), "Go ahead and tell him." And I heard my name and a clank behind me, and knew it was a bike leant against a car, and, at the same time as my name, the father saying, "I’ll talk to him, I’ll talk to him." But he’d already sent me the messages: sent them with my help between playground fence and newspaper store whose proprietress had phoned him the info he’d kept from his daughter until just now; sent me the messages with the help also of his future son-in-law. For Kallman was here, his hands came down upon me like the /^meditation that I claimed later to no avail, for they narrowed the scope of my arms and hands (his too), dropping my right hand into my jacket pocket; so as we fell together I could do nothing but, first, gripping Mrs. Erhard’s pistol, hold it away from me inside my pocket; and then, hearing Miriam shout, "You’re an asshole, George," as her father ripped her dress, I saved my leather pocket by lifting the pistol up out of it and touching it off like pricking a balloon, firing wildly at her father who was tugging at her from behind the glass-paned front door, with a City inspection sticker on the upper right corner and a cardboard cup sailing down half empty from someone’s window to hit me cheek and roll away with great commotion where I lay trying to recall where I was, and what was important, my right hand alone on the sidewalk hurting like a tooth with a terrible cavity, my arms not held now but without value, Jim, like I had always been close to marginal and now was for good. But I heard a voice saying "Miriam" more than once and a voice saying, "Blow in my ear"; and I knew that whoever those warm words had been said to, the voice was mine and I must become its breath, wherever you are, Jim. And I got to stop thinking there’s what was and what will be, and start thinking there’s a story in between.

Who are we, then, Jim? — you to come here with something to tell us or more like a thing you would get out of me, when we were in connection all the time by colloidal particles. They won’t tell you. Don’t ask. Don’t ask and then maybe they will tell you. The bad raps. The lawyers who didn’t show, the lovers who were too prompt, the lawyers who overdid it in court. The say-so of some mouth in a bar at two in the morning, circumstantial hearsay that helps get you eight to twenty if you can believe in it. The guy who came back to his old apartment because he had been in love there and they hadn’t changed the locks and a new tenant was there and he scared her to death and stole some money and some grass. The guy who could hear such fine and delicate sounds that nobody believed anything he said. The woman who was in a holdup in a supermarket and didn’t remember all that she had had in her pocketbook that had been taken off her until the perpetrator came to her home, and ate an avocado before exacting one long desperate kiss from her.

I have looked for the things that endure and recur, what rules hold firm, and in Foleynomics have urged landscape gardening within the walls where you can see it.

When I engaged the Chilean economist in conversation never guessing he had an Irish name, I was pushing a broom and had heard someone say behind me, "Nobody comes to see Foley," which was because I told them not to, being in a large enough communication to do without visitors as well as the vending machines that line the walls. I know distances. Down the gallery I hear a message; it’s six snores and four dream-curses off, and one astral projection from here to New York down hairpin parkways that throw you always back. And the message is no less margin than are visitors, but it has been passed to Efrain by the man the Chilean came first to visit who was never Efrain’s friend until a week before Efrain, who had lost good time he thought in the Box where he had nursed one and a half busted ribs for curtaining his cell and expected his parole to be held up a month at least, unexpectedly was released from here as if his recent Box time counted: which wasn’t the newsbreak you were after (smile) when first you joined us, for you named, bless you, space-time’s Colloidal Unconscious, having half-sensed its power in yourself and homed on another center of it, where you know at last what no one else knows — not Miriam’s father who looks for her at twilight in garbage can after garbage can of chicken limbs and leftover wordburgers of our nation’s half-read magazines, and is not sufficiently developed to get through to me; and not even the red-headed black kid who helped me ritually drown the kid from parochial school with white eyebrows: he, not Miriam, is the one I think of, with true guilt never spoken, never stood up for in court, for after what we did to him at camp that kid never slept again, so great was his fear confronted with the dividing and dividing particles of air he had such a quick concept of, there under the float, but no inner resources to find multiplied in connections among all our minds; and so some nights, when Miriam joins Larry, and, however good and friendly you’ve been, you merge with Spence, and the Chilean economist’s wife imperils her own husband-mate by enlisting his brother who while in Philadelphia sees not only an opera star’s recital but that lady’s dangerous paramour visit some old, ill printer who answers, "Very possible," to each query and returns wisely to firmer ground, which is that a female relative by marriage once put Andrew Jackson everlastingly in her debt by ordering for him in a tavern a radical if not quite borderline-toxic colloid to allay if not suspend his dyspepsia (if not his desire) but, too, his hunt for her beloved who sat back in the shadows of that tavern having let himself be disarmed by his beloved who later herself got rid of the darkly engraved pistol not by throwing it into the river they had both seen from end to end and on spring days when a woman and a man might spear the great bodies of the sturgeon running upriver above Albany, but by slipping it to a reporter-diarist in the shadows of another corner of that tavern, friend of Jackson and of his namesake Andrew J. Downing, protege of the Austrian consul general with whom he had collected mineral samples on walks in the Hudson Highlands but, more important, ideas of landscape and gentility whence to emerge as a great American builder and planter — on such nights, I say, even some twilight payload of a mountain moving our way to be deposited somewhere in this general region of the Northeast so that only those in active possession of Colloidal Unconscious will resist the bent of that mountain to make us think that it was always there and that we have found how to make our living together — on such nights I think less of Miriam, whose fate her father dare not take responsibility for, than of all those roadblocks the kid we scared must have had to draw near and bend himself around all his life. And so, Jim, for I am with you even if you have taken your message whatever it was away with you never in body to come back, we have reached a simple truth. If prison is irrelevant to the work of the heart, lasting time inside’s mere transiency, too. Therefore, it does not exist. So as for escape, who needs it?

Yet if it does not exist, then it presents no obstacle to escaping. I shared this with the old scientist-man whose lady companion came from Cincinnati thirty years ago but came to believe she was in New Jersey half the time and he replied to my letter that he thought her delusion was her way of being part of his early life. He whose work is clouds and winds, the newer rains and the particles of power in our atmosphere that may still have the wrong names, is all for my plan to exploit the potential of this place. But I sent you the F.E.P. as an opening cover to carry the real Moon rock of C.U. but I see it all about me, the Foley Economic Plan, and find that planning to build a home you may start by seeing you already got one built.

I am someone you have told your friends about, I hope. I see someone take up a letter of mine off your mahogany table, maybe your kitchen sink; your window sill, car seat, motel carpet, beach towel, or out of the wastebasket where you have saved (smile) other exposes of life’s stacked-up words including (remember?) your little brother’s who when you told him he didn’t have to thank you for helping him frame a scenery flat for a high school play said to you his admired elder bro what you said you never forgot, "The rest is silence"; or my letter comes out of your coat pocket while someone’s standing next to you; or I’m in your mind and you are in prison while snoring away first thing in the morning next to your wife, do you have a wife? a future one, a past? maybe seeing yourself on one or other screen of long historic time. So here is my news article, get in get out you said, the larger frame of history is nowhere, which is how there can be an opening in what is already open as hell I told the anti-Castro Cuban (who looked at me weirdly), but the opening I meant isn’t some escape he no doubt plans but the one snoring along a thruway through Old States, New States, to be totaled soundlessly when we all run together, for is not history’s frame everywhere? Charlie and Carlos I know say hello. They know we correspond. The guards in their slots send best, having heard from Juan that a Chilean prison cleared out all their beat-up inmates the day of an OAS human-rights team visit and put the guards in the cells, but in this joint there wouldn’t be enough guards to pull it off, but they have their daydreams like you who I had this sense in a dream last night do not ever recall your dreams, so you move ahead imagining there’s none to recall, or could the South American gentleman have told me this about you? — except how would he know? by the very fluid bond I have called "colloid"? — which, had I broached it to that girl-sensationalizer of life inside, I would never have shown was part and parcel of the Foley Economic Plan since it includes the fuller use of our esteemed visitors as well — and was that anti-Castro inmate right to wonder about you? but he could not know you as I do — I asked what he thought of the man who got bombed in Washington last September, he said Letelier wasn’t far enough left to matter — like, upper-middle-class semi-guilty husband with extra-love on his mind — but it did not sound true to me, for I have read about the man since the car bomb blew his legs off under the car, and I have asked our Chilean, who knew him and I could tell respected his energy but would not speak of him — also in the Eyes of my fellow inmate the Cuban supposedly anti-Castroite I have seen Escape, for he weighs time here against the blind light out there of mere explosion. Won’t stand up in court, Jim, what I put in writing, what said in person, what you’ve received through being tuned towards me and what you’ve added, for we make our contribution I mine here and you who might here and there say it all in your own way better — so much for Foley.