Women and Men

Choor Monster of the Long White Mountain

That sounds good, somewhere. Close as the next room (if you happened to be downstairs). Soft, loud, high, low; not without end, but still continuing. Song, yet then again like argument talked — not to you, or anyway not you alone. Space between it and you. Soft, loud, like music you would overhear when you were growing up.

But that’s it. It is that music. Or was it the person playing you "heard"? Was that the feeling? Heard but not seen! A sound of Experience itself. Weigh it, store it; luckily in your "life" you can be dumb about it. Her privacy inseparable from the noise of the instrument: piano or violin; some days both. The musician’s secure devotion. Practice, yet not to make perfect. Scale-like up-and-down workouts on violin that were more like real music when the in-between notes got crazily played. Early experience of somebody else’s, yes, thought earned. Or could it have been some teenage, fairly early experience for you of pausing: pausing to Look Back! But why back, when what you were hearing was your mother’s concentration right now? But where was it going?

This was you going too. Does that just mean "growing"? Or that you doubled her going? Who could you report such claptrap to? Is it monstrous that to this day you have not thought much about her going? Fact was, she went, dead or alive.

Decades late, an event now in the apparently near future may get away from you. Two persons stand upon a metal plate: alloy to the best of your knowledge unique among late-century alloys in being natural; occurring in a natural state, and mined, not made in the lab. But upon this plate two persons stand waiting to be elsewhere. And behind them, more twos wait.

Wait: what was this Choor? she asked, a passing affection in her and even in her word was that let you feel you might plead ignorance (here when you were headed out the door) or chance the intimacy of denying her the answer. I never heard about any Choor, she said, humorously but it bothered you but didn’t surprise you because the stories your grandmother Margaret had been telling up until not so long ago were for you, not for this daughter of hers who was your mother ("independent as hell," your father said as if admiring, but you didn’t quite understand). Choor what, did you say? she said. What Choor? she persisted, it has a funny sound, are you sure it’s right?

She meant to bother you, but you were the one who had dropped the mention: so on your way out of the house you stopped and you told her what maybe she wanted to know — your large, soft-oiled first baseman’s mitt enfolding a slightly reddened and browned American League hardball there beyond where your thumb and fingers reached that would always let the long mitt do its own finding of a ball coming at you high overhead or vacuum a low throw out of the dirt — a mitt with powers of trustworthiness beyond even the warlike leverage of your friend Sam’s black rubber fins at the lake, which were fun, but cheating — but magical.

You told her only what you knew.

Margaret made up Choor, you thought. This Princess got sent away on a mission or something by her father, who was King of Choor. Margaret didn’t tell them like stories much any more except once in a while referring to some Indian or mountain or agriculture or cure as if she was one of the listeners nowadays. Choor had a long white mountain, white in the summer too and just as white after some of the white broke off up into the sky and became one of the giant birds that grew there though they grew a good deal darker when they flew away. The Princess flew away on a giant bird on this mission and where she went to was really out West where Indians lived, but they weren’t all Navajos. (What mission? his mother asked. To explore the New World, he seemed to remember, see if they had any monsters. What did the bird look like? his mother asked, chicken-in-the-car-and-the-car-won’t-go, she added, sort of between the two of them. Hey that’s "Chicago," he said; no, her bird looked more like a big duck but the size of a house.) Margaret’s stories eventually got to be more like what you would have seen if you’d been there, you know what I mean? They had cures for everything.

Such as?

Well, tobacco ash makes your teeth white.

How ‘bout tobacco smoke, Jimmy? (But his father was the one who got mad when Sam’s father told him the boys rubbed lemon juice on their first two fingers to clean off the stain.) But this Choor, she said, it was just some place to be from? was that it?

Well, soon as the Princess left, things changed, he said.

Oh, shrugged his questioner (his mother, the daughter of Margaret) sounding like now she didn’t need to know anything more, and to Go on, Jimmy, scat.

And he did, sailing like a broad jumper off the porch, not hearing the screen door (is this true?) clap shut until he hit the sidewalk at the end of their walk — but today without that calm shout from his mother from inside to not let the door slam.

Meanwhile, decades later in the near future two persons stand upon a metal plate waiting to be elsewhere. And sure enough, behind them more twos wait their turn to step onto the plate and be transferred from sight. What becomes of these people? The plate is a type of transformer plate and the occasion is not a twenty-fifth-century movie in a theater in the 1940s where you know a dozen guys and girls plus your friend Sam, and your younger brother Brad is there in the dark somewhere with a real girlfriend. No, the people on the plate are bound for a frontier colony out in Earth-Moon space; and while it feels like home it is uniquely economy-oriented in that, unknown as yet to these pioneers, they wind up on arrival one person, not the original two. But what does that feel like? Is this Experience again? What happens to their clothes?

This is a future where you have been, and not by dream, Jim Mayn, because you don’t do dreams; and not by vehicle or through the aether to the best of your knowledge. Which you heard of long after it had been found to be not there. (Is that a trend?) And how did you get to the colony? In your same body? Maybe you didn’t stand on the plate. Were you simultaneously reincarnate?

But not dreaming, not dreaming.

A curve felt through your nature cuts distance brain-like and seeks in you to have been there first and retroactive to have guarded you through absence or secreted your viral memory from itself for a generation during which the future went ahead, homogened, homosomed, heading these willing pioneers for the hills of, after all, near-space, but getting there each pair as one person.

Which would make for richly human letters frequency’d back home, you can imagine, reluctant journeyman. But it didn’t make hard news you might readily share, cast as you could feel from that future like a shadow, whatever half-known way you got there to begin with; and while you’re not listening for more, maybe it is listening for you, for it seems to be there, and who was There First is like what Came First (the Indians or their Great Spirit that sets in motion our own stake in it).

But if two pioneers into one comprises one beginning ongoing, here is already another: a room, a city room, a mid-room of a railroad flat: and on the chipped walls big blood-red, blood-black working drawings on brown supermarket bags opened out, cut up, masking-taped together. And you are listening to an elder meteorologist with a broken yet rebroken and lengthened face expound too fast (then too slow, ignoring you, Mayn) that these represent another weather that may arise from convergence of atmosphere with some coastlines that of late actually have seemed disturbed, have varied suddenly like subtle fronts.

And while the world doesn’t interfere now with this elder maverick’s work, he does have a few correspondents left. One is a native American adolescent, New Mexico Pueblo Indian, y’know, who calls the Hermit-Meteorologist "great-uncle" and mails him bright chalk pictures (they’re in the other room) of sunsets and faces and mesa-based Apollo rockets like individual ears of corn; the second correspondent is an established inmate of a penitentiary, and he sends — God! — tips of some telepathic iceberg, y’know, reflecting what he found in his mail: write a lot of letters, you get a lot, the Hermit observes: oh this fellow’s much exercised about the high cost of opera tickets (that popular art!) and the current claims of women yet their "will"(!) to give themselves up for their men; but more to the point, letters re: precipitation of New Weather in new self-supporting communities. In return for all these letters, the Hermit’s afraid he’s sent back only a postcard now and then (like the one you got, you bet, brief-scrawled so it looked like a sketch: come ahead — naming this afternoon).

The Hermit like a discoverer in this bare room chock-a-block with his concepts and his weather: it was there to be found. (That epithet "Hermit-Inventor" adhering like a given name he has lived up to — did you actually hear it given this man? There’s some hum he makes you resist around him of catastrophe. With it comes calm as sharp as a second voice, female far away in some next room of this dilapidated "railroad," babbling soft and old and dearly.) He has pivoted one coastline so it runs cross-country, you’d swear. He has replicated another so it comes on like crabbed waves across the continent. Mountain range, you suggested (to say something). What about a mountain? the man demands.

Is some time-defying coincidence afoot here? Hermit-weathermen-inventors-of-New-York talked their way into and out of histories your spirited grandmother told you portions of; your mother did not tell stories. Were those hermit-inventors all one hermit, as you were one boy? "Great-uncle" to an Indian? It hardly rings a bell; coincidence anyway is against your religion. Jim Mayn will settle for just this oldtimer, tall and irritable, who can’t afford an unlisted number to cope with these screwballs and probably foreign powers who call up (he guesses you’re O.K.), and so is phoneless, hence more concentrated on what’s here: snowflake-fringe coasts and diagraphs of pressureless voids that look like meteorite showers of infinitesimal equation on the wall of this Greenwich Village railroad flat — these could make their clouds of fingerprints considerably more than New Weather (as you clock these curious clouds — their curves of whorls blowing down to smaller and smaller whorls) — no, not just coasts of a weather but, up there on the walls across vertical piece after piece of brown paper, mountains seemingly as well (for your money) or just any old graph contour of some expert’s risk-benefit analysis yet coming right at you or your brain anyhow (friendly dried-out polyp of a still two-gun arsenal, leftrightleftright) receiving obstacles of turbulence that your guy’s differential equations for the evolution of the atmosphere and doubtless half a dozen other things at same time and/or unseen aren’t going to help you with (and if you’re this recycled man some woman called you warmly you have to admit the other day look around at the accelerated evolution of practically everything including these. . what? you feel the word move your throat and mouth, the word "angels," where’d it come from?) and hell anyway this elder maverick New York Hermit-Meteorologist says forget it if you’re not up to them, the equations, he as for him never got family relation straight, left it to the women — second something twice removed—"Great-uncle to an Indian?" you ask—"Oh my gosh who knows what the boy meant by that? Second cousin I would have guessed, if my uncle or was it great-uncle was his grandfather. Leave that to all our kinship hunters in the field," your host mutters. . " — where’d you say you’re from? Jersey?" People underrate the grandeur of New Jersey, he laughs the very laugh you heard in his postcard replying to your humble inquiry. Pretty much over your head, you had inquired if radioactive mists might breed atmospheric "sports" — freak fronts, stacked weather — say, like a tree with no trunk, you half-see, half-hear (but did not say in your letter), or a mountain you can’t see.

Word of this man’s bulletins launched from a local radio station near Cape May had come to you — the Coast Guard had complained — then elsewhere he was fired by an offshore pirate television station because, according to (he laughs) his prison correspondent, the hermit has powers of warning communicable in a beeline to others — so no need for wire service, radio, or TV. (Wait — the powers communicable? or the warning?) But "the grandeur of New Jersey"? For a second the old tales wander back — all of them and for just one second.

The old geezer’s not after publicity. Unless it could get him the funds to hire the plane and the infra-scan gear and a human or two on the ground to prove his guess. Oh you’re willing to believe weather and coastline connect: this is no hare-lipped hype for the news-margin traders — you could name one who will send and, yes, buy photo-illustrated rumor linking a mountain of mineral matter with an intelligence strategy undermining what might have been one of the more interesting socialisms in South America: whereas the hermit’s meteorology finds only a relation between unprecedented atmospherics and the behavior of little stretches of coast that may alter infinitesimally overnight: work he’s done that’s solid and odd: but hardly your staple all-points conspiracy theory like what the South American (Connecticut-resident) owner of newspaper chain you James Mayn currently work for asked you to look into: that has a Chicago industrialist’s estranged son thousands of miles south arranging President Kennedy’s Texassassination to impress a Chilean woman he is pursuing while he’s studying magic music-stories with which Araucanian Indian brujas in the South demoralized their Spanish conquerors, but at same time north of there near the port of Valdivia helping rebuild after an earthquake: and the woman? she’s a member of far left MIR (M for Movement) but soon to flip her coign to equally anti-liberal rightist revolutionary hive; nor is this New York maverick weather-discoverer’s coastline-atmospheric-pressure correlation any suspense-loaded Doom ding-a-ling in all probability, certainly not mystery’d like family closet within closet complete with (remember the Edison light bulb that goes on and off with the) door, so let’s make it last and leave the madness, folly, deaths, and their relevant skeletons back in there — for this isobar-tailed atmosphere freak in a railroad flat in New York’s legendary Greenwich Village is coming up with science that resonates. And while you don’t grasp all he’s saying, if he has found a New Weather of enclosed voids that like "strangers" do not draw outside pressures inward, the old guy’s right to call it "weather-possibly-without-a-cause" and at the same time relate it to "outlandish parallel phenomena" he describes as infinitesimal breaks in fanatic coastline indentations directly beneath the weather in question — breaks that are not supposed to be there—"where" both weather and coastline turn out to be expressible in these (he calls ‘em) "erratic shape equashuns" — "regular monsters, ‘fya look close, like each surprised by the other, sky, land, sky."

Oh, some middle room of a Greenwich Village "railroad" and someplace along the hall you passed the room with that babbling lady voice — a mother as old as she sounds far from children, who her hermit-companion says tells him to "go tell it — tell your message." The weather diagrams polygonally strengthened here and there by the appearance of the supermarket bag’s bottom look like coastlines, but also vertical layeroids rising one upon another: the rock of history, not the history you don’t believe in but some history of rocks you do.

O.K., this meteorological speculation plus this broken and rebroken face hosting you is another beginning less necessary than equal, more equal than prior — work of an out-of-work savant, unfrocked more than unemployed, who beams his suspicion through you as if you, James Mayn, have sensationalized him, made him a household word. He didn’t know your name when you announced it, did he? He of course knows all these other things you don’t, the fact and math — even the grandeur of New Jersey — O.K., but not who you are, except your job.

His face is changing on you again, fabulous geezer — O.K. Cut. .cut, please.

For in still another beginning, a man and a woman — had once been married — but they didn’t know each other necessarily — because it had not been to each other they’d been married. Which is an O.K. opening for a friendship. Or Open Marriage (OM), as we once said in sanction of some liberty to fuck our freedom. But they’ve not really met yet, and on this new beginning we now leave them, you see, it takes so long for people to meet. Others have to meet first.

No order, that; but you’re in Florida, not all these other places: like Choor, the homeland of Margaret’s Princess; a railroad flat in New York; a metal plate to turn pioneers to a transmissible frequency; marriage OMing into friendship; these other other situations. (There are no situations, there’s only people. You missed your chance to tell the Hermit-Meteorologist about the visits you would swear you paid to a future where pairs of people get transmitted from Earth elsewhere only to arrive as one person. A technological economy, literally breathtaking.) You have just come in out of Florida where the night will smell of unused daylight and, come to think of it, of used daylight, too. Which might just be the Fountain of Youth Vaca de Leon. You have happened into a roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center, and here is where you are. Give the order. Is that an order? It’s only for drinks. They’re waiting. That’s all you do, you’re the one that says the words, let others carry them out.

A home passes overhead in orbit, ‘least you saw it launched this a.m., an empty household fully equipped, built-in cabinets, now it’s over the Andes, downtown Won Ton, Tunis, you wouldn’t know, and sure to come by again in ninety minutes, no need to duck.

You know what you have to do. Think of those waiting. Nothing to it: it isn’t as if this is even a mock killing-at-a-distance — nor that you have to be one whole person to give this order at a protracted time when you are letting a divorced whim bring you down here to Florida looking for a once-encountered Chilean only to find one of the best women you can remember.

"Shoot, kid," came the father-type voice (meaning, "Speak") far away in time but close inside the void.

But you, you don’t have to do the shooting. You just give the order.

Just? (For somebody hammering away at somebody else in a self-help workshop has just shown us that the word "just" often is minimizing our own self’s felt needs, as in "I just called up to tell you.")

Yes, that’s what you do. You do just. They take it from there. Standing up. Against a wall. In a revolutionary courtyard or an appropriated playground. But you don’t know what shooting: because maybe we have here a trial run, with blanks. Trial run to gain experience. Or give the squad waiting to take their best shot the real thing of hearing the blankety-blank gust of the weapons’ waiting life. And as for the terminal others waiting opposite, assembled in one timeless scheme all together or coming up in another time one by one to face the squad, the trial run gives them the complementary experience of, say, passing out at the explosion the shock of which we’ll hazard they’d have been condemned to run the risk of not quite hearing (whether they went-to-the-bathroom then and there or not) if the blasts had not been blanks — which "Victim then fills in" as blanks are to be filled in, with indifference, hope, rage, self, the blindfold smell of self’s waste, or say some tortured failure of heart (for who would go through that fake execution again? don’t ask), or (to reverse the words and economize) heart failure (for risk’s a factor and there’s such a thing as torture that goes too far) while on the other hand (human nature being what it is) failure of heart threatens to widdle and resolve itself into mere you know temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette or arhythm; or, after all, temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette may be but terminal arhythm.

Dry run or wet, give the order. It’s waiting to come into existence in order to be executed. A mound of sanitary landfill waits to be a layer, a quantity of vegetable, animal, mineral-kindred (not controlled-toxic, though literally mind-boggling) landfill, and some of those waiting are to be under the layer, and some not. So give the order. You have to anyway. Don’t distract yourself with memories of the future and a metal plate with persons standing on it, two at a time, two to the zero power it comes to you. Save your breath. Think instead of those waiting here; be considerate, you have to bring the order to the point of execution. So give the order. Give it your best shot. Yet hold it.

Oh sure, talk about the weather while we don’t know enough about it any more unless we wire Venus for un analogue much less consult weather’s novel rethinker in his disintegrating apartment furnished faintly with a sound of a cheerful old female talking aimlessly: or unless we hold to those ancient cumulus towers given us by the very Great Spirit who’d never incarnate vast self even in sign, even in spiral idea, much less stiff hat and short braids. But before getting into the weather, first give the order. That’s what you do. Take the power that’s fucking yours. The mayor’s spiel has gone on long enough. Don’t look back down the short circus of the century to a bomb or some such which once upon a biggish bang was set off in a territory named New ‘merica by desert marksmen, who knew better or worse after the blast to confirm that their preliminary risk-yield analysis had shown that the blast just might kindle the atmosphere (its enthusiasm?), evacuate our oxygen, take our breath away right down even to what we’d saved. But like the vacant furnished household swung round overhead tonight every ninety minutes, that one-time risk will stay where it is and take care of itself while you give the order.

Yet hold it, you know — hold the mayo; no, hold the mayor, no, hold the mushroom, hold the landfill, hold the lettuce (but don’t get caught holding the lettuce), hold the bacon it’s on the way home come to think of it for Mom had her first day on the job having broken the firing squad sex barrier — hold it, we said: but tell where we are, say we’re in a roadhouse late on a Florida evening and have approached the bar.

A young woman’s at our elbow while the micro-seconds that won’t settle into each other fall out of you into a noise umbrella like the we that you are and that you join.

But hold it, weren’t we a team, a squad? weren’t we about to do the necessary with the weapons at our disposal in the real field of a revolutionary system? Go on, don’t screw around, say it, say we’re one place or another. Go on, they’re waiting.

But somewhere else you see folk standing on a metal plate in fact of an alloy unique among late-century alloys in origin. Somewhere else — forget the chain of fire sphering the planet (call it Earth), forget that orbiting household (it’ll be there), forget that stand-up firing-squad routine did you think you were some young Chilean lieutenant? — no, forget all that, for people are standing on a metal plate you recall at a site called Locus T.

And they’re waiting for what better than what could happen.

Which they would embrace but it embraces them and raises them to its power to rid them of their twoness — elsewhere, not here in Fla — where the night smells of sugar percentage in the ketchup field.

And the couples waiting at Locus T — married? lovers? comrades? — seem cool and content, made of titanium, say, and about to be alloyed with a corrosion-resistant future. And only you know something, and you’re carrying it on you. It must be communicable, herd-wise; what is it? A number of those here seem not to find you dangerous. Hell, we all show traces of this ‘n that.

You were in future: that’s why you’re slow to execute. A shadow of the future? Hell no! You’ve no less than come back from the future. You have a power. Naturally don’t want to overuse or underuse it.

But here you are to give the order. Your teeth press your lower lip, or is that the floor, it’s so rough.

Give the order, give it through the gap. The gap? This vacant space between the arms. Left arm, right arm. The order can’t be executed if it isn’t heard (it says here). So execute, man, execute. You’ve been well coached, you have desire. Where’s the inspirational coach who said, "My guys like to hit and be hit"? The football coach in New Jersey, which if it had a decent mountain could have been a great state (had the coastline, the weather, the soil, the horses, had the good position north and south), New Jersey where you were a boy and where some story-book truth about (was it?) a hermitage invented of New York — we don’t ever get that right — not to be confused with the defrocked meteorologist whose wall diagrams you interview — not to be confused much less alloyed with some geezer arising in your monster-and-Choor-Princess-and-Navajo-Prince discussions in the late thirties and early forties with your grandmother Margaret down the street, but that was not on the football field where the coach should by now be laid to rest in the end zone staring up with all his heart at one stump of a goal-post timber impaled above him in the sod of state soil where the confined but still-functioning beep-bleep of his athlete soul picks up year-round the cleat-beats of his own executed plays thundering downfield, the football coach who wears a baseball cap to practice, to skull sessions, who hardly feels his tongue say execute when he takes his field general to task during drill for an intersectional clash (for we’ve graduated into America now, and the coach has been turned by sheer frequency of voice into many coaches). And where’s the general in the field or behind the scenes — a rebel of the junta (so goes the report), a revolutionary, but against what? — where’s the general who’ll say, "Execute them," much less, "Have them shot" or "Off them" (like your economical syndicate voice), when just plain "Take them away" will do the trick? Or (in fewer words compounding the economy of removing-without-replacing) "Remove them." Or, to effect this liquidation, he may confine himself to a look, a look intent and/or blank, the look his lieutenant sensed well and truly like the light clamp on the butt the first-base coach gave the rookie after a clothesline single who stood on the bag and now takes a healthy lead off first, his arms hanging from his shoulders.

But can the future know all that was meant by such orders and communications? That is, if you, this Jim Mayn, have really come from there. Or are still partly there or will be there. There is no future, it’s sentiment about what might have been. What say we make a package and see the future gets it? Why, then the future does exist. Yet wait: it has gotten it, and inside is the history meant for the future, but the package is so flat it can’t be opened, it can only be "read" or reconstituted. History is cover, but the cover story is increasingly worthwhile. But the package is being opened after all by its unknown receivers.

Are they the two by two waiting for what is to happen to them at Locus T? standing to begin with on a four-cornered metal plate of an alloy mined not lab-concocted, found in its pure impurity in a mountain of America, discovered and extracted and used As Is? No: call them a bad dream, though you don’t do dreams; and forget this business about your having shuttled back from that future where the people are waiting on that transformer plate.

They don’t know what they’re getting into.

It’s as well a legendary package about an Inventor of New York giving a secret sendoff to a regal young woman, only to receive her on her return almost a year later, all told by a steady grandmother who seemed to make up so much it threatened to be true; maybe it’s throwaway advice from a mother to go away where you belong (now you saw her, then you didn’t) — some fleshly difference between advice and prediction which is the filling between them, block that kick the crowd goes on and on except for a recognizable father who doesn’t say anything but watches him chase around the cold football field. Maybe it’s a fifth of sour mash; maybe it’s one compressed person for the agony of two — some loot for the future so they know.

But*he don’t know. A guy somewhere near the gap we were speaking about just said loudly that he don’t know.

But that’s not you, you’re a guy who knows, who knows an onus from a behoof. Yet wait: give the order. See yourself along some curve of inkling that in this Florida roadhouse, or void Between, you can know a thing or two right here worth knowing, send it or not to that future where people by twos are waiting to be transformed into one. No, that’s jumping the gun. Transfed to frequency then to be transmitted from Locus T elsewhere. And when the frequency reaches that other place, the two transmissible as one have become one and we shall have no right to miss one or the other. An economy the future holds like word that is carried but not known in so many words. Is there divorce there, after this two-into-one technology?

Forget there: you’re here, facing a gap between arms, this gap awaiting your order. Your stomach warps and you hang fire, you don’t need to be accounted for by some group you’re being interrogated by that sounds outside you.

Where you coming from? Is this just another life crisis in face of which you know you do your work? But you’re not down here on assignment, you said. And not on vacation, so what is it? though here is this subtle young person whose heart swims toward your body.

What’s going down? It isn’t new love, this powerful drift. And it’s not mid-life consciousness infection sluicing you in/out of the Untapped Reservoir of voices you figure all belong to (those that honestly don’t dream, those that honestly do). And it’s no more Chile than violence: because your job is nuts and bolts — fundamentals — not slow-blowing a bloody cover so that in five years the truth of who gave who the business can come out covered by the healing objectivity of time’s clarity wherein is the only safety upshot column by column into a morning news of riveting investigative reporting to be read in order not to think about what happened last night. And if the Argentine owner of a string of papers you work for has a brother who fakes his death by plane on a foreign continent, where it leads is probably not worth even dreaming about; nor are you any more into tracing several underlings named, say, Contreras, several with same first name too, some in receipt of political asylum in Texas but some spirited to a reputedly apolitical mountain and put into it like value one day to become minable veins; nor if you can help it are you into fielding blind volts of hardball played by proprietors of a stadium where you don’t tell the spectators from the game.

Where you coming from? A metal plate ahead where people stood Indian file, butt to gut (or are they being held up?) waiting to be reformed into frequency and at once transited elsewhere — where when you wake up there’s one of you. Two become one: did the Hermit-Meteorologist have an equation for this little monster? Two times almost collide! Is that a new one? And again, unreportable! The miss slides one between the other. New front-like shapes in the coast-cum-upper-void weather diagrams of an elder maverick fired for speculating about new weather as well as reading his mail on camera on an off-the-Jersey-coast non-commercial pirate TV station. Meanwhile, you saw Locus T like never before. Why’s it recede, then? In this void, to call up the future is to recall it. (Like division of automobiles ordered to have their mildly poisonous air-conditioners reconditioned?)

But no. Say what is so true that it recedes. Grasp it; it recedes. Grasp what? That that scene at Locus T was not future; it was a now, only one, mind you: the gathered point with one person in position right behind another person. They two are about to go. Isn’t it sad? But didn’t we toy with this for decades? Here it is, and not an experiment where hazard yield waits unknown.

The place is a station not a lab, though an all-white operator runs the trans-frequency send-off as if the controlled element were research, and after the send-off of each two the inspection of the transparent elevator-car-like bubble where they stood and its Locus alloy-plate might seem like tracing the still unknown. But unknown traces you, you can be either a jerk or a monster, your last choice, you have a moment to decide. The weight of your very own body is falling all the time. It’s your neck, look about you.

Bubble indeed! A million templates of electro-magnetism jointed continuously to make an ovaline so clear that with the help of a base plate made of a unique mountain alloy mined in its natural state, it throngs two waiting bodies with non-visible radiance, it brings out the cells in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin.

Till the instant when the million templates at what used to be the touch of a button collapse into one idea.

No experiment here, for this was no imaginary future; it was present. At least for you, who have not much in the way of imagination (you tell the girl beside you). But its vividness got so overdrawn on its own bearable present that you couldn’t stand what was happening to others, two by two and you were about to speak when you were cast out of that future (you won’t tell her any of this—yet, anyway) like a shadow though were you ever sufficiently dangerous and wasn’t your exit then also because you made up again an earlier time, well 1973? Where now you are for a while. While now those future scenes at Locus T are vivid — they live — because they’ve been seen before — for it’s, from Florida 1973, a future you’ve lived in, but as well because the scene at Locus T aligns itself with the arms and legs of that memory of two becoming one elsewhere in time — at a time when two becoming one did not mean this that is before one now in what can already be remembered as having once been foreseen as future. Seen, though, now with awful life because that memory helps the rememberer see that the T of Locus T isn’t just transfer — the dissolving of a person or persons here in order to be reconstituted elsewhere in order not to have to slog from here to there through spaces as a running displacement of volume — but T means another change. It is a clean economy so clean who would notice it? So awful, yes, that if one can find the right past to call up, why then this clear economy transpiring at Locus T makes one’s notice recede (T for transfer, T for transform, t for future). You’re not a dreamer; you’re at best a trace.

When you told her you lacked imagination, she said she thought you were instead a recycled man. But then she said to forget she’d said it.

Two became one. This gets unbearable. You’re hard-headed, plodding; real as need be, but you’re invaded lately. Two become one. It might be three, it might be more. Four become one if you make a good enough plate to stand on. Two-become-one seems, here in the future-become-present, to mean people made congruent to fit an aim that’s beyond them yet with which they are in tune and which if viewed wrongly and with alarm recedes, as this flawed witness unable to bear what he has seen would be bent simply (as if he’d had an attack of superfluous gravitation like a head cold) off toward Locus S, Locus G, or N, or P; Locus L.

The spoken L lets off L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, from marked memory; and you who kept subjects and faces target-distinct from one another, so as to never seem to know what you figured you did not, can’t tell how you know (but you do) that those Ls with the numerals aren’t lunar and aren’t locus, yet how you knew locus with all these letters escapes you (but into the friendly void). No. L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 are points in Earth-Moon space, quite comfortable space, yes, that’s it — libration points. What is libration? Libration points— that’s all you know and plenty more than a man like you needs to know, which is in turn a reassuring conclusion that, as soon as you divest yourself of it, feeds back in its recession some new stuff coming at you obstacle-like, the fact that at these libration points you can stay put because the pull of Earth and Moon balance out with another force you were not maybe to know. And around these libration points are gravity valleys; for every school kid knows that gravitation makes valleys in space as well as mountains, vales as well as hills — and wells, too, which is not to say Earth’s the bottom of the bucket, just the bottom of a bucket, or of the well of somewhat made-up gravitation like the Moon’s, but far greater: you forgot, you forget, for you’ve really been there — whereas this girl at your elbow (your bicep) in this infra-redneck roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center is sure to know, though she has not come from the future (though in turn will have been told by someone at school and/or college that she is the future): but as for you you don’t feel like the future, you feel like your future’s angling past, but this isn’t what you know to be the truth, that some future to come is what you’ve come from, and you’re not persuading yourself of this, you know it’s true and you don’t want to know.

Can’t speak of it. You have to give a simple order.

Through this present gap which is an opportunity. (Team’s fidgeting, squad’s waiting, squad’s right.)

If worse goes to worse you can make a package without knowing all that’s inside it.

Which represents a further economy. Hey, while we’ve got us here, say we make two or more places one, so we know where we are, even if in theory we sacrifice a few powers of people, there’s a limit to S.R. (standing room) when you feel you owe it to them to bring them out of frequency back into body. You saw what was happening, that the twosomes out of earshot on the metal plate waiting to be emigrated to libration-point space settlements necessitating unusual economies had not been told just how light they would travel, and you knew the (so to speak) theoretical "joke" was on them though in the interest of survival, and they really did know, somewhere in those beings of themselves that had invited mountains to come to them bearing natural alloys that made them invisible to people living in their vicinity.

Yet the basic economy was borne by those who left as two and arrived as one. So what were you to do? Warn others it could happen to them?

Give the order, give it through the vacant, noisy space between two arms.

A left arm and a right arm, of course. ("Shoot, kid," an old voice says in you.)

But the left arm is to the right of the noisy vacancy between two arms, and the right arm is on the left side of the space. Solution is that left arm and right arm belong to two men, not one. The arms pieces of muscle and bone turned by you in a flash into one flesh. You don’t go in for that type of thing, yet you are so much a part of other voices that you can’t hear them telling you you’re one type or another, you almost don’t hear voices. You are spoken. Like voices that hear you. It’s new — did something in you go to pieces light years ago?

Directly across the vacant space on its far side the thick (for lately mortal women hate the word chunky), pale woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. {Chunky I hate chunky, comes the abstracted voice (through aether or whatever other is the latest thing in filters of our life together) of a loved, onetime wife; and I hate pudgy, too. But you’re not pudgy. And plump, I hate that, too, and you may say they’re words but they’re used instead of — No, my own dear, they are just instinctively cruel, you mean.) Well, however you describe her, the woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. Grins at what someone says but looking straight across this vacant space.

The order’s been given, but are the words wrong? Doesn’t the squad know the word? — ’cause nothing happened. Nothing except the two arms slid an inch, narrowing the space — collapsing in. The woman on the far side of the bar flicks her chin up as if to say, "What did you want?"

Well, it might not be worth saying again.

So change it, forgo the firewater, the part that can be changed, your part, the second part of the order. You know in advance what you’ll say.

"If they have it," adds the other woman, your near woman, the younger woman, whose fingers are on your arm as if she depended on you, the younger woman for whom the glass of wine has been ordered in this redneck tavern along the Florida highway.

A house passes overhead far out, bearing its appliances lightly. You have only practical words for this vision: a shower, three sleeping stalls, magnets to hold food utensils on the heater-tray, telescopes to gear the eyes, and insulated urine freezers, experimental sunflowers. How many working journalists have already called it a "house" tonight? The house passes overhead but so far is empty of occupants. No need to reach for it, it loops the earth each hour and a half, so at some point it will come by again. And when it does, no need to duck, point it out to a friend, if the light is right. People will credit anything; it’s such a relief from their endless skepticism. You hear inside you a mountain that dreams.

The house awaits its housekeepers, and they it; they dream of it. They’ve rehearsed inside one just like it. But it will pass overhead many times before they take up occupancy.

"If they do," says Mayn.

The young woman beside him may think he means, "Yes, if they have white wine." What’s happening with these arms? they’ve moved again, they’ve inched back, opening vacant space before the one vacant bar stool.

"Glass of white wine and a club soda."

Mayn said it through the massed vibes of the juke box, the claims and the clamor of talk. The pale, heavy woman tending bar didn’t hear the first time. And they don’t have any white but they got red. Through the lowish light Mayn makes corrections for color, he’s had experience with barroom light, ships pausing in the night while it passes them; but speaking through this under-light comes hard tonight against sound all around him like fire. It’s doing what other stuff has been doing. Speeding up and slowing down. Trace shells flash gold before the big gun’s quake hits you like the future observer of a blast-off thirty years later at Kape Kennedy, and out of the gold flash comes the tracer’s red dot already one quarter of the way to its target as if the dot in an instant of another time stayed still for the Sicilian darkness to rush past it but then (reversing the rocket of a generation later which lifts so slow it’s afloat on some stalled phase of its burners yet then suddenly is off and far off) the red tracer braked on another track to a speed at which it covers the remaining three quarters. Speeding up, slowing down.

Try and step outside this sense. Maybe Mayn brought it down here with him. Not on assignment. And this simulated vacation — well, the void drifting through him confirms he should be used to it after twenty and more years in motion.

He felt like an ocean voyage. (Don’t look like one! — his father’s one joke, on a rare occasion, these days, when he saw his father.) O.K. then, Mayn, wake up and die right (another expression of Mel’s), wake up and freeze yourself into the Arctic ice pack, take three years to drift from Siberia (near the "real" Choor?) to the Atlantic with his instruments if in return he file a slow-ocean story slowly fleshed-out reports unheard-of up to now, the southern rain falling upwards from the Pole. Time to feel the wind and tell the drift of ages of ice, study the bottom where some have faith it’s being pulled apart, drop your piston-corer through sediments of Arctic Ocean history, a year of leisurely hours to get the full story, the only deadline completion itself — you come out in Choor, for all you know, where things changed as soon as the Princess left in search of New World and monsters you recall reporting to your late mother when she who was not told these stories, except for one where one pistol became two, asked you what about this Choor, but never to the best of your knowledge asked what had changed in Choor (on Choor?) after the Eastern Princess left. But here he has not often been in Florida and he never understood Florida because it’s way down below the deep South as he thinks by the map, yet whereas they say "the South" (as in "will rise again") but they say "Florida" (like "Texas") and Florida definitely is closer (Fly me) than the deep or shallow South, so put that in your simulated vacation and feel it like you sometimes feel real tweed or real wood under the seat of tweed pants or smell shaving lather drying in the little wooden bowl or coffee once upon a time in Norway where modern meteorology began with fronts but where the coffee is not the least bit diluted but is as good as the prospect of coffee as you slowly get out of bed onto the floor so it takes you an hour of joint contemplation if in company, coffee getting out of bed so slowly it’s the sixties now — in beautiful, rebuilt Warsaw and twenty minutes later passing (not in his sleep) neatly dressed coffee drinkers less comfortable but more entrenched than cafe sitters in Paris (who seem to have more to do outside the cafe in their leisure or business, a teapot or a ruby kir), the Warsaw cafe missing also that fuller grain of (accept it, it’s likable) noise in Paris that slides density through the smells. He was followed and, bearing in mind the trip he was going to try and sandwich in to Cracow south of where his ass was at the moment, courteously led his shadow, a woman with dyed auburn hair, the short way to the Embassy where that morning all they had for him was a story on how China, which had not then begun to open up, had acquired the best collection of Ping-Pong players and railroad trains in the world. A story filed. But recollected. Like a vintage or a fine hobby.

Nor is this simulated Florida vacation of breakfast yesterday and today among the postcards of spacecraft and armadillos, the souvenirs and sunglasses and short sleeves and elusive mind of the media people, like having a drink of pisco with a Chilean-naturalized German beekeeper who wants not to be identified, watching the brandied December sun come up out of some Andean peak two days after fifty thousand middle-class Chilean ladies have banged their empty cookware marching against the Doctor President’s two hundred percent inflation and his alleged hundred pairs of shoes; and Mayn, upon finding some far window all but sinisterly traced inside him from valve to unseen valve of his inner organs by that rich burn lifting the sun out of catastrophe-knew-what mine of mineral information, Mayn, yes, caught himself trying to inject, lend, lard, connect into the loving picture of the simplicity of this rural beekeeping business (presented by his Chil-Kraut host who declined to discuss money he—paper-montyl—lost to some Santiago salesman for Investors Overseas Services) inquiries he had made into Du Pont’s preservation of the Delaware coastline from industrial development and his inquiries into an inquiry as to a Delaware canal’s potential water supply for two firms other than Du Pont, because the beekeeper has made a lot of money in nitrates and has a bank account in Wilmington like "American Switzerland" and corresponds about bees with a CIA bee-freak scholar in Washington, though such connections have never been Mayn’s yen: his business is get in get out. Of the subject, that is. Which isn’t the same as getting out of your mind, for you don’t want to wind up in that elusive media mind, though doesn’t he find when he gets out of his own there’s the next he’s right in? Where daydreams can’t be all his — some ancient trivia, yes — like what happened in Choor after the East Far Eastern Princess left on her mission to find New World and/or monsters — why some started up right in Choor — and did that fact come from Margaret or from her grandson listening?

The Apollo souvenirs — them you can smash. No sweat. Shrapnel facsimiles of themselves mined up a shaft of the future’s shape. Mayn would like to use them while he doesn’t know his multi-spectral scanners, isn’t up this time (nor any time) on peaceful uses of space to be tried out in that house kept orbiting the Earth. What souvenirs? Hard enamel keyrings; hard-baked enamel tie tacks commemorating the three of Apollo 1 which — who — burned together on the ground; Apollo 11 money clip; Lunar Module cufflinks; Apollo trivet, Apollo lighter keyring, Apollo bumper stickers, sterling rocket charms, Sky lab tankards, a Skylab spoon.

Is this simulated-vacation feeling what you get for a free ticket to one of the final spectator sports? He came — he will tell the young woman — here on the dumbest of hunches to find a Chilean gentleman he no doubt could have located if he had used his contacts to put out a trace on the man, whose chance words were a lead into nowhere. Mayn’s stuck in some future stadium lately where lions and gila monsters are being fed to high-strung, professionally itinerant tennis players bronzed into being near-Indianized. Would he cover sports? he was asked by a free-lance diver who did a lot of police department work and was looking for a couple of hard-to-get tickets to a rock concert, ignorant doting father. Mayn gets tickets—"ducats" — when he wants — for sports — sometimes. Never sports assignments; wouldn’t want them. The diver said that that was just what he would love to do — cover a great pitcher thinking his way through the late innings, a great outfielder diving to steal a Texas Leaguer, a great third baseman snuffing out a suicide squeeze. Had he ever visited one of those five-thousand-capacity Texas League fields and seen a young centerfielder pass the helmet after knocking the ball over the fence? Yet Mayn would rather do it: it’s the trick elbow in his brain that swings free to take him back to a tumble in a gym echoing like a pool under lights on the late afternoon of a dark winter weekday, or to a wild, hard squash-court wall. Or play at wrestling — being covered by two children who jump on him and get a lock on his neck. He could play less easily at being what is wanted of him elsewhere: at being Bureau Chief. He’s been pressured in his time even by a wife who loved him to amount to more, but can’t say this to this young woman he has met here. Let Bureau Chief vanish into a high building where Bureau Chief can wait for Mayn’s utilities pieces from New Mexico, for the follow-up from Iowa on drought prediction, short crops, to cut, (go ahead) edit, totally compress, compound it, turn it into space/money. Pressured once steadily to be Bureau Chief in the inevitable place, did its old-time inventor feel this in him like inspiration? — the Inventor of New York, the phrase finds him, he doesn’t much recall those old things — like, though, it’s now, and Jim still married, with a couple of domiciles to contemplate supporting (and a fine and subtle wife with six thousand a year from a charitable great-aunt), and a pair of dependent kids (the words come), kids (all but grown-up) whose games got more grown-up and less visible like relations at close range year by year. So what does he support now with the money he sends? A sounding down his gullet here in Florida regales the sweet fume of oyster flesh. Oysters that winked between him and his companion — Jean — Barbara-Jean, she prefers not to be called but doesn’t make an issue of it — at a table this night, hearing (the two of them) nearby a Spanish sentence about Castro’s Golden Falcon Skydiving Club in the Everglades (not Fidel because the club is for Cuban Liberation people), oysters reflecting what’s going to happen next, and the dinner companion looks away out the window, Jean, her hand around her glass, watching for a sign that tomorrow’s rocket for the crew of that already launched Skylab is being readied. The light of a jet swings red over the Cape, one-way trapeze. You wait into tomorrow, you have done it so many times you’re looking back at yourself now from irresistible future, a vacuum you fell for; you wait to watch. To watch the shot, the hit, tee-off, coin flip, puff from the starter’s gun, national anthem. And who of those curious folk with press badges got a clue what hands guide the rocket or swing the spent, absent Saturn’s payload at an orbit’s bargain rates around the sky? A plane, a bus, ship, windmill, paid-up home, basic expense: these routine orbits might have been devised by the same men who have measured out to the function of sleep a 12.3 percent wedge of the daily man-hour pie up there in orbit as American as ampule pie, we’ve got a monster-type in our head just saying things like a guardian angel. Dead vacation? His whereabouts are poised to come at him again while elsewhere so is his idea that this dead vacation is a second chance. Here before him at the bar, here it is again in the vacancy in front. Slow down, put on some speed. Is the mind dying? He’s got no business dismissing technical whattage he’s not up on and he wouldn’t hesitate to tell this young woman with him — she’s on assignment, she’s eager, she interviewed the high-school prize winners at the Press Site yesterday, she knows a third stage from a second, she is in her kind but oh so damned intelligent he’s half-stumped. O.K., he’s not on assignment this trip, nor was when down here in December for Apollo.

"The final Moon launch," the girl said, nodding fast.

"The first night Moon launch," he said, not owlishly but maybe as if there was more where that came from than this love he’s feeling.

This girl with a hand on his arm, this girl he sat down next to today in the grandstand at the Press Site three miles from the launch pad — Mayn has told her only that he was twice with the Associated Press but got into something better. Spaced his words for some funny effect of more point than his thought claimed, not that AP was ever bad; the old UP was worse before UPI, but that was before even his time and they had such skinflints at UP that their newsmen were said to belong to the Downhold Expenses Club (she smiled). He didn’t know why he told her that, it was like someone else’s divorce story. He did have credentials in pocket and he was a fair listener when it came to Skylab housekeeping, but this trip was a hunch-gamble on the Chilean economist, no more to do with space green stamps than with — he heard it speak in him — a much-chewed place name — say Choor—some incomplete place out of those accounts of Margaret’s that proved his as well — for instance, when she allowed as how monsters had been there all the time (Where? in the mountains? At least) she was appropriating his idea, he reminded her. Why, so it was, she said and laughed a little hoot of hers (brief as a thought more than a piece of a laugh; but, in a family way, the counterpart of the grandfather’s Haw). But then Jim heard her say a thing he learned from, though he stored the learning away (and resolutely could not use it when a time soon came for it when he had a falling out with his grandmother), and what she said was that maybe the monsters couldn’t appear until the Princess of those stories had left Choor. Well, that killed him! It was some surprise freedom of mind.

What will he tell the person here in the tavern whose fingers he feels on his arm? It’s a question. Why? What has she come in on? She spoke first today, she noted four youngsters, three boys and a very flaxen girl who was doing all the talking down in front of the grandstand: high-school award winners, designers of experiments to be carried out in Skylab’s orbiting blender, and one of these smart kids who didn’t win came down anyway. Here at night in the tavern he feels the fingers let go of him there above his trick elbow. The two owners of the arms before him that narrowed the space but now widen it are turning. Today Mayn and the girl sat in the Press Site grandstand watching the white rocket three miles away at the edge of the sea as if it would go at last when they were ready, its sides steaming and the red gantry holding it at arm’s length; and the flat sea was as flat as the land. A blonde girl down in front of the grandstand suddenly looked away from the three in glasses and short-sleeved shirts with their laminated cards pinned to the pocket and searched the grandstand so intently that Mayn felt he missed a point; the blonde girl opened a giant sketch pad and showed the boys, looking at each of them, and made marks on her pad like writing, not drawing; and Mayn kept looking around for the man who was in his mind all the time from December — the South American gentleman — man from Chile whose words telescoped with some unformulable acceleration less to connect Mayn with Chile than, later, to mean he had to catch up irrationally with the Chilean (that’s not right) before his own life changed unrecognizably: so the Chilean was why Mayn came down for another launch, having already tried in vain to get in touch with a Hispanic Voice of America reporter to find out who, what, and where the Chilean was.

Mayn looked behind the young artist along the grandstand and she was leaning forward, her arms across her knees, and where at the small of her back the beltless top of her jeans stuck stiffly out he saw down to the parting and there a sheen of downy shadow, not a stitch.

A dark swim is what’s called for, the water close, the grand night missing on both burners thus far, so that with his monstrous immunity to dreaming he will bring in the night himself; as in great hollow daylight Mayn had tried to bring on that night with that maverick’s new meteorology that he didn’t understand because he needed to check out coastline-atmosphere-chance theory professionally catastrophic for the old maverick meteorologist who did not care (nor gave written handouts because it’s only human interest to a newsman if that; and the chain of papers Mayn’s with has him do really important dull stuff, and yet the novel weather back there in that railroad apartment in the city holds his mind at bay and he will say it’s unique, no more) — so he could leave his San Antonio trousers and his Boston sport jacket on the wide beach and mysteriously ease his way out a hundred, two hundred yards and lie on his back looking up through the two or three constellations he will identify if given the chance, looking through them at imponderable speed.

For a long time he has been marked to die quite soon unless the event in whatever space it came to got shifted to one other person. How do you know a thing like that? But how do you feel? Little, apparently.

Alone, sunny side down in your motel Breakfast World, he got the speeding up and slowing down like a compact future-pill in the snowy grain of hominy slid in an inertial mass before him by maple-sugar high-school arms and legs.

A slow slow drawl either male or female is heard saying, "If I knew for sure, I’d take every penny out of the bank and bet it on the nose." The speeding and slowing, the rubber soul falling, he’s tried to step outside it. But this evening all he did, after a first course that turned out to be his dinner of a glutton’s dozen (= 2 dozen) slick, cloudy-cupped oysters, was do what he didn’t much want to do — leave a good fish place on a quiet, breezy pier when he needed another orbit of oysters — open and swimming at him. Yet, after a meal leisurely as a swim, though bothered by a skydiving FLNC Cuban bragging in Spanish at a nearby table, Mayn was racing in a rented car to get himself and the young woman to the ominous briefing at Canaveral, laughing with her at the grandmotherly waitress’s words (in a little apron), "Have a nice day tonight" — and now, after the smoke, the surprising letdown of a briefing where he looked again for the Chilean, he walks into a tavern over in Cocoa to feel, in those separated arms and the broad back on the right, that a position has been taken up in advance of his coming. Here first. The light is infra-reddish and the neck here first could be Native American.

He and the young woman have still only just come into the roadhouse. In less than a second a lot can happen, not his fault. Why does he know that she wants to ask for more about his son and daughter? He has already said he doesn’t know much about his son right now. Newspaper people who act as if they have seen it all. Is whatever you say a cover for something else? He could ask this girl. Why is she more a young girl tonight for having stepped out of her jeans and slipped down over her a sleeveless black dress? So light or smooth she seems to have nothing under. Which is halfway to the truth. He looks for anyone he knows. The stodgy gypsies of the press are not here, he thinks.

In this light only the girl. She’s taken off the badge that told him who she was with when they picked each other up this afternoon, going easy on each other, letting the National Geographic guy with the cardboard tub of fried chicken behind them explore women-in-space, a month is a long time, she’s a token woman but she doesn’t get just a token orbit. "Token of what?" the girl turned around and said, and while she had a mole under her ear like a magically hung trinket, she was her hair, as she turned: "There’s a lot of interesting non-sex feasible if you know about it," she said awkwardly — and in the short dark curls he found a quick silk of rusty orange that was only light maybe. So Mayn saw all the different hair around in the grandstand and saw that he appreciated his own gray hair, never wear anything on your head, give the follicles a chance to see — see what? what’s left out — of a chunk of information reported like a taxable sum in the submitted copy, dispatch from Geneva (New York?), Delaware Water Gap development, history’s parts of a mechanical being conceived but not yet invented by us all, so given a chance at the light, the hair follicles see both ways, curling outways yet double-ended to tickle used brain cells so the brain can dream they’re growing friendly through skull and dura mater to touch the void. So the National Geographic photographer didn’t handle the girl’s challenge, and he said, "I don’t want to know what they do up there." Mayn was touched by the girl and heard her words before they were spoken: "Soon, in a few years, people won’t be into sex so much, it’s getting toward the end of this kind of dopy thing." When the National Geo man said low and fast, "Let’s have a little eye contact when you say that," Mayn declined to deal with the guy.

Tonight all changed. At the press conference tonight the new problem called forth the old challenge. An official who at another point through the smoke introduced a voice from Texas said on the contrary the damage sustained by Skylab during launch into orbit today is exactly the kind of thing an unmanned operation is insufficiently adaptable to counteract. Heat shield torn off. One wing of solar cells undeployed, maybe torn off. Have to guess what’s gone. Tomorrow’s launch scrubbed. Before they launch the crew, they need to work out how to erect an improvised heat shield to replace the one ripped off today, time to think up a parasol.

Ballpoints through the smoke adapt to a director’s language picking up that it is a canned answer. Like an exec’s at a chemical-waste-disposal conference Mayn covered. Or sporting goods, all-weather, good-down-to-sixteen-degrees sleeping bags — gauge the impact on sleeping bags of NASA’s Mylar insulation (light, cheap) — don’t flirt with business, either get into it, make your million and get out — or stay out to begin with. Which isn’t the same thing as spending on insulation now so you’ll have it even if you theoretically haven’t got the money, it’s worth spending to install, say, that "cap" of insulation in the attic. The girl casts her eyes restlessly so that she radiates some subtle trouble. He’s not bright; he’s just looking. He couldn’t place her until their eyes crossed going opposite ways and she was the one with the sketch pad who had been taken by Mayn’s companion for one of the students, and there’s still a point about her he missed.

Hours later now he is touched by the rented car outside the tavern like a familiar object from elsewhere. All because of talking to this smart young woman he likes — who objected to the word girl even when he said that he would be glad to be called a boy, hell; and she added, You’re white.

In the car they discussed the heat shield and the parasol; the lack of resistance in space — no air — the solar cells that, like color TV, neither of them would claim to be able to explain.

And now, he listens to the girl and she to herself, "Do you think they’ll get a new heat shield up?" and when he smiles at her they both know that apart from her knowing more than he, the peaceful awkwardness of her saying again what she’s just — they’ve just — been saying in the car is, well, shy and warm. He is waiting for her to give point to the evening and the day. O.K., it’s about time for the rednecks to have completed turning. Say redneck: the light speeds into orange and hangs. A short man standing close up behind a woman in white pants with his hands on her stomach raises and lowers his thumbs and she gives him the elbow and he steps out from behind her, both of them laughing. Mayn turns back to the gap in front.

See the neck on the right, above the T-shirt, below the crewcut hair. Hair light like straw (waiting for a match); light in weight; not thick: thinning, they used to say: balding, isn’t that what they say? You don’t have to do anything here, but the angle’s arms are multiplying and you aren’t all here, it’s only the extreme vividness of what’s here that makes you here. Rather than where? Somewhere — not a word for a news story — charted to the fourth-warped, foot-minute future-past, two hundred miles out in an orbit Mayn’s not up to saying he understands, a home awaits entry, a house waits to be held, an experiment in living, the eye of a compartmented lab will scan scars in Earth. Yes, this life of his coming up on the meg that he’s telling himself his own story of wouldn’t be shapely like that household overhead underfoot. Aren’t you talking to this girl all this time the words might seem to an outsider only inside you? He loves her maybe. The he that is you. That home could house an orbital bomb but is not itself a re-entry vehicle. Go back to the motel and get your brown Skylab press manual on the unmade bed under a sky-blue buttondown shirt you wish they would just take away and wash, though you never said that to your one-time loved now lost wife whose messages or auroral emissions you go on picking up though the bang-up in a vacuum of near silence is now years and years away so the distance hits you and waits the way the future stands ready. The one here called you recycled. You get the manual, get it into your hands and speak with authority. Say it slow this time; you’ve no story to file, no pressure to fire it off. You’d do it fast — like brushing up on the stuff. But you needn’t. It’s being written, phoned in, taped, computed on the AP computers — stories assembled by others all around you, though you trust not here in this highway tavern where you’re looking at the back of a neck in low light. Why have you slowed down and separated every word? To breathe? To laugh yourself out of getting a one-night crush?

Slowly it comes out. Red neck. The red back of a neck. Creased more hard than deep. Creased with a wildness and object-deep finality like scars that some writer maybe of fiction’lized journalism dive-bombs like he knows the entire infra-fraction of your American infra-redneck. Scars of what America was? Yeah, scars; that is, just scars. Say redneck. It means a blue-collar male American likely rural often southern maybe farm, who works pretty hard if he’s got work and ready for any outsider who happens to come along carrying his light instead of his bushel. Wait: say redneck: order yourself one: but here are two rednecks, turning on their two stools between which is the vacant stool, the one in the T-shirt very broad, the other in a red-and-white bandanna and attached to it in front a big red-and-white-and-blue leather medallion that looks like an eye with a hole in it.

Does it slip as he gets up? His hand rises to it like a woman’s. But he’s just going through the motions, next to the other man in the T-shirt who’s jerked half around already talking.

"You go on and tell her, go on tell about the heat shield."

"But," says Mayn to the void of the man’s unexpected face, "it’s not what I want to tell her about; she can tell me about it; why I can do without the micrometeoroid shield" (but where do these words come from?) "and I can dispense with the multiple docking adaptor and I’m already trading in my molecular sieve beds that purify the two-gas atmosphere of smells, heat, humidity, carbon dioxide — all but the smell of no-smell."

He took his mouth for granted. Some press release refracting like real life off a slice of brain? Future commonplaces from which he was leaning back into a 1973 past that was more vivid than present? His whereabouts comes at him along a long curve winging through him just as he is about to grasp it — the speech of some other hustler’s information, as for Mayn he just does his job. Is he picking up ripples of the girl’s learning?

"Think they’re going to get right away from the Earth," says the man, "but they be lucky if they find some old germs on Venus to live off of; that’s what I’ve seen and it’s not such a long ways."

The girl’s voice gets automatic: "Venus is too hot for viruses." She is changed by the other man who has bowed her toward the vacant stool while coughing and stepping away from his own and fingering his cowhide medallion and smiling and backing away along the bar until a friend in a yellow wind-breaker reaches an arm around his waist and speaks to him, and the man in the bandanna replies in an odd voice, a voice Mayn can’t place partly because the broad man with the thin crewcut — hair white-thin — is saying, What’s Skylab after the Moon? He’s saying, If they can bend a man round to the dark side of the Moon they better get on with the real business, send a man out to colonize Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, time’s short, split their time between this solar system and the next—"split your time, split timer" — what redneck is this infra-talking? — "But no, they got to shoot three fellows into a Skylab tomorrow so close it’s like spitting out the window (if the window’s open)"

"Tomorrow’s off," says Mayn, about to sit.

"They not going? Well, hot poop," says the man, ready to stare Mayn hard in the eyes.

The girl, who was going to sit on the outside stool vacated by the bandanna man, slips in front of Mayn into the originally vacant one in the middle next to the man in the T-shirt.

"We are not alone," says Mayn.

"Well, hot scoop." The face is definitely void but pressurized. "Put that thing on automatic’s what they’d ought to do; save the men for the real trip. Save the loot, spend it right. All the money they poured into space, I ain’t smelled a cent of it."

But as soon as the girl is sitting, she’s leaning back to look behind Mayn at the man with the leather eye on his throat, and says out of the side of her mouth, "You’re spending it right now," and Mayn across her arched chest wants to ask her if she was the one who mentioned these libration points because how would he know? But Mayn explains to the man in the T-shirt (who after all acts like he already knows, too) the multiplier effect. Look what happens to capital created by a U.S. firm when it sets up an operation in a South American country.

If they didn’t take it over first, adds the man and Mayn finds an effort converging in him and going on, the noise inside Mayn and outside is incommensurable except as levels, yes they talk about noise levels of course, but they multiply, not rise, if that’s feasible, and he’s lifted with them, an object of science (as close as he’ll get) immersed, afloat, so his own noise directed at the redneck with curvature of the brain comes from other levels of him, from his vibrating wishbone shoulder to the redneck’s vibrating wishbone shoulder, or from knee to knee voiced like old phlebitis spasm of burn or between each other’s half-inflamed veins of humor heart to heart, don’t think this drivel unless you really think it, for profit — is Mayn drunk on a curve of light, sight, drink, indifference? A superpower sneaks from each individual nostril and sniffs this angel as he is about to touch the girl’s wrist, his libration between a past Now and a later Then — it’s never been so bad — got to fight this compositeness or be pushed into waking up and erasing it all — plus this guy — say only what you’re sure you know, oh well Skylab is a modern custom kitchen.

Well, it’s the same thing (Mayn has floor now) or similar, with the President, with Congress, NASA, the contractors, you name them: Chrysler makes one stage of the Saturn in New Orleans, North American Rockwell makes the Command Module in California which gets the astronauts up to Skylab, Martin Marietta makes the multiple docking adaptor in Denver, and Whirlpool designs and launders your Skylab food system in Michigan, rotate your kitchen, it’s a lab — and the space suits come from Delaware, where there’s a lot of business being piloted through the water gap. This isn’t just money paid to contractors; they get it but they pay it out too — so your local sporting goods dealer sells three more two-man inflatable rubber dinghies, and your supermarket manager moves more six-packs, more soap, more cryogenic pizzas, he hires another boy, who gives twenty bucks a week to his mother, but people move like money and the bus company puts on another vehicle on weekends and one driver blows his overtime pay taking the wife and two kids for a pizza Saturday night — wait — no, he finds himself balancing thirty Saturday nights plus a piece of a third kid against the alternative, let’s say, of on the other hand a long-held dream of a pool — and wow this balance works out for twenty-eight Saturday nights, not thirty, and he finds himself buying a complete pool package circular four-foot-deep collapsible rust-proof aluminum so big it only seems to take up the whole back lawn turn your backyard blue—

— (how much acreage, asks Mayn’s companion of the Void, have the DuPont family pushed for for public parkland in Delaware?)—

— which is good for the pool company his bus route goes past because it’s business for them — and so on — as if that first million of appropriations will never end.

Somebody shouts at the instant the man in the T-shirt, so quietly that it seems to come from his face in general, says, It ended.

Of course it did, says Mayn. It’s leakage, ever heard of leakage?

The space program is a luxury in the end, why not enjoy it, says the young woman, who should know.

Leakage—he has to get this across to the man in the lowish light, but the words, which are work, are a prefab substitute for work thus rank, too— for someone was once overheard to say a sign of high rank is exemption from industrial toil.

Sheer mysterious luxury, the young woman adds.

Leakage, yes the principle of leakage. That’s what they call it, the money that escapes the multiplier. Where does it go, this mysterious money leaking away? Some gets saved, right? — and some never existed in the first place.

Explain that, says the man in the T-shirt meaning whatever the angry opposite might be of that.

It wasn’t new capital because it was a substitution for other investment that got aborted; and some of the new capital (a woman is chalking her cue, and some of Mayn’s force leaks toward her dyed black hair), some of the fresh spending power lifts prices, so consumption-buying might actually decrease in some sector, you see. But what we’re saying is that after we subtract leakage, what we still get is the multiplier. We divide — you still with me? — divide the original new investment by one minus r (I think it is) where r is the marginal propensity (tendency) to consume—

You’re out of your mind, says the man. You’re no businessman. You must be — he ponders Mayn — some inventor.

— no, no (Mayn’s laughing) and your marginal propensity to consume is the percent of your raise you’d spend if you had a raise. So if two-thirds of the new income is spent, the multiplier comes out as three (because you’re dividing the investment by one-third) — so you keep tripling the nation’s money — which makes a hell of a lot of money running through the economy. They talk about its velocity.

You ain’t going to find it up there, the man says; for a home has passed again overhead and Mayn looked up to it, last chance for an hour or so, and he and the girl again hear "La Moneda," which he gets now: it’s the government palace in Santiago — the guys talking are the Cuban skydivers.

The furniture is all screwed down, he wants to tell the man, but then says, Do you understand gravity? I mean, do you understand it?

I got it inside me, I don’t have to understand it, the man retorts.

Gravity may not even exist, says Mayn. The girl has laughed, and the man wants to know how many launches Mayn’s got on his belt. Well, the man’s not an expert but he can rebuild an engine if he has to. Brother-in-law’s got a body shop, says the man, heavy oval face and thinning crew, maybe sometimes you got to go ahead and try to do the job when you don’t know how in hell it got that way, people are crazy what they do to good simple machines. Last week he’s down Route 12, it’s a back road, and right beside a palm tree’s a little red car upside down, foreign car, hell to install pollution devices into, upside down, that’s all there’s the matter except in the front buckets a man and a woman upside down in their seat belts — dead, you know, fairly dead — and the woman in the driver’s seat is grinning: but here’s the thing — front wheel’s spinning away like it’s on the blacktop still — might think it’s got a back-up ‘mergency motor in the bearings, and when I stand there looking, do you think it stops? — no sir, wheel keeps spinning — going to report it, it must have just happened if the wheel’s spinning, even if the wheel should have stopped spinning, little red Renault front-wheel drive but the engine’s not running, got a big cut of darker red across the door and rear fender but the woman here’s the thing—

— the thing you’re going to fix, says Mayn—

— even ‘f I don’t know how it got that way, right! — woman’s got blood all over her face but it’s dried almost black — but her wheel’s spinning.

Got hurt before she got in the car, Mayn and the girl say raggedly.

Well, only that she was grinning.

The wheel stopped? inquires Mayn.

Right about the time the police car came along.

On a back road? says Mayn, looking impolitely past their T-shirt man at a friendly argument between the woman with paint-black hair standing behind a man with a big nose who is sitting at the bar and talking over his shoulder.

Newspaper reporter on an expense account, right? says the man in the T-shirt. My point is that it don’t keep going. I’m no expert on nothing. Stop in here, have a few beers—"multiplier," you said; "velocity," right? — the companies made the helicopters for Vietnam, they spent their money and gone away on vacation but where’s the helicopters? — blown up, rusted out, stuck up in a palm tree. Like the newspaper now, what man ever lost his job because he missed today’s paper?

The man with the big nose is not looking back at the woman with black hair now, but he on the stool and she behind him are talking in profile as if an audience were out there in front of them in the array of bottles, but there’s no mirror and the woman is talking into his neck.

Mayn can’t say, Let’s get out of here; for the girl is angry; she’s saying, What about the men in the helicopters? and when the man in the T-shirt looks at Mayn and turns to look away where Mayn is looking, he shrugs, Hell the men is easy to replace, it’s the helicopters, ma’am.

He leans behind her to catch Mayn’s eye: What they paying you to come down here?

A price schedule looks up and passes overhead: one war equals ten launches, two multinationals (read bottom-line American) equal one potential earthquake or two (non-cancer) lab breakthroughs; but how many more launches will Congress find it fun enough to fund?

So the girl swings off the stool — goes and stands squarely in front of the juke.

Oh they’re paying me the same whether I come down here or I’m a thousand miles from here. (Comes out sounding mysterious to Mayn himself but not the man.) She’s the one covering Sky lab.

She frowns over there.

Didn’t think she was the wife coming along for the ride.

Your spinning wheel, you didn’t get to the point.

The man digs out a yellow alligator wallet and smooths a fiver on the bar, checking the other room, it’s on his mind. The point? Listen, the cop swings his door open, and quick I put out my hand, stopped that wheel myself. Them foreign cars they must know something we don’t about cutting friction.

The girl’s looking at Mayn, and the juke box isn’t playing. But as he nods to her he finds in some gap between himself and the man in the T-shirt words that he wanted to say before they were said by the man, as if the man were responsible for his having missed the Chilean as if in turn the Chilean had been here in Florida yesterday and today to be missed. So Mayn says the words as the girl takes a couple of steps toward him and his hand goes up to the bills in his shirt pocket and on the third of the three words "Shoot some pool" he knows that the man in the T-shirt has said only the first two, and has said them in unison with him. Mayn isn’t like this; he’s getting compacted, or is the man some window that’s picking up traces of Mayn, who isn’t drunk?

The man in the T-shirt has reached him. The man with the nose passed a bill to another man when the couples racked up their cues.

Does the girl want to play? (She wants to go; he didn’t have to ask; then the noise says, Ask, ask, ask). The music parties up, and Mayn holds her and slow-dances her down the bar, curving along people. He can listen to her thoughts later, irritated or all the rest she is capable of, and he sees in himself after this two-day junket two or maybe three years during which he hardly runs into her but then he does and is still fifteen to eighteen years older.

Winning’s not the issue on the green baize. Lousy break, the balls resist, did the table get concave? Mayn goes, but the table is still a mess after him, and when the man finally busts it up, a pink ball slam-drops at the far end while the cue ball having fought its spin bends onto a cushion and banks back home to drop at this end. The guy is angry but has gotten to Mayn but doesn’t know where: where is the girl? she’s not here but coming back, her hips slightly swaying, her glass held up like a toast, and as he looks sideways at her from the table, her eyes see past the glass and she says, "I’m here," and pauses and takes a sip.

Something will get settled by the game. Four or five clean shots shape up ahead, dangerously possible, you see a clean run composite, a spread of objects, the land, history, get it over with. The girl speaks suddenly of New York, while Mayn’s playing, a woman she met at a swimming pool who played billiards with her husband every other week at a tavern and one night looked down her stick and beyond the ball to that chalk thing on the rim of the table and her husband’s hand picking it up to do the end of his cue and she knew she would leave him. (Bet it was pool they was playing, said the man in the T-shirt. Secret of concentration, Mayn adds, taking a shot. What’s that? the girl asks. Doing two things at the same time, he comes back at her.) No words for his belief that he knows the New York woman already; or is it that he will know her, through this girl? (I feel like I know her, he mutters, and recklessly cocks to line up his following shot and she doesn’t name the woman but, You probably know people she knows, she adds with some soft meaninglessness that fully excludes Mayn’s opponent — though she’s getting to be a celebrity in feminist circles.) He’s pounced recklessly but takes his time lining up, the green baize swells in an uncanny middle unless he is half-drunk, and the balls are going to just follow the slope to the pocket and lucky for you you don’t claim you personally caused all these dead shots — you are sensing a downright flesh closeness to the girl but it’s talking to you like a happy plural toxin monstrously claiming strange stakes yet not yet the wonderful girl here but some payoff for being able not to dream, is it he’s in a couple of places at once, embodied in that woman the girl has mentioned? though not sexwise exactly, he doesn’t know but damn! some heart and ears and hands and loss lie between them, and this discovery sends a charge of used euphoria, no drunk dizzy spiel, up your brain later recollected as the right side which means love or work, you forget which.

The man with the void in his eye stands close behind him like the joker in a friend’s basement one year who would bump the base of your cue at the moment of execution. One day Mayn rammed him back, a heavy volt to the chest. Kid sat down and started crying, breathless, he was fifteen or sixteen, stopped crying and started gasping. The man in the T-shirt is pushing more than joking.

Now I look at the trash out by the garbage can and I think what am I missing if I don’t see the paper tomorrow, day after, don’t see one for a week? What am I missing? The dog charts? Not a suckin’ thing.

But you’d like to be quoted, Mayn goes for the man’s sharpening edge.

But forget the man’s solar plexus, make the shot. But what does the girl think of the man’s saying a word he wouldn’t use with some other women who are in the tavern? She’s in a chair with her legs crossed, having a really good time somewhere in her head. The man is pushing a little more, but where?

Mayn’s weight rides on the left side of his left hand, four fingers fanned like a tripod on the green baize, the cue slowly sliding forth again, again, probing or pushing, the distance between the chalk-blue sky-blue button and the white ball, then resting in the fork between forefinger and the tight-arched thumb.

Tell me what am I missing: news today, history tomorrow. You could spend your life reading the newspaper, said the man.

Mayn grins down target but for the benefit of his girl. Her speech, family more than college, and the way she carries herself unmarried and making good money (and to the man maybe smoother and older-looking than she is to Mayn) lets him with his void in eye say (with only the first letter changed), "fucking" where if she were a regular here he might not.

The cue strikes through the steady sounds; tip jabs the white ball low for a stop backspin; the blue jumps for the corner, smacks the back of the pocket, rolls up into the air and, rising, falls out of sight rattling back down the alley to clack the wood of the tray at shin level. Before making the next shot, speak. (The green baize has developed a slight hill in the middle.)

You have to know what not to read, man.

The man laughs. Mayn speeds up; he looks into a distance and is where he looks. Where was he? He can see only back. He’s falling but the bills in his shirt pocket are stuck to his cigarettes and his shirt.

Before they left he asked the man if they usually played for five bucks.

Mayn said they were going; the man wanted another game; Mayn asked if she wanted to drive. No.

They drove back over to Cocoa Beach past fewer lights now, and she was beside him asking if he’d seen the hole in the other man’s throat who had given up his seat. He’s so near to her, keeping his eye on the road.

Fewer lights. Most selling something. She agrees quietly. The woman upside down with dried blood all over her but the wheel spinning was impossible. Like different time schemes. But the girl didn’t hear, did she? Yes, with one ear. She got beaten up, said the girl. But she was driving him, said Mayn. Quite a while before the accident, she said.

Mayn parked between two motels. Or so he later thinks he recalls. In a public area where some giant local kids, four of them, powerful-looking if you cared (and more than four of them, the males, plus a couple of girls, blonde like the boys), stood around two big bikes watching Mayn and the young woman.

Put all six or seven of those kids along with their machines into a compressor, come out with not a new race but — Jean’s name, voiced on the beach as if he hadn’t been told: she thought she had said Barbara-Jean, which her mother still held out for. She doesn’t smoke, she points out. Forgot to leave her shoes in the car, which equals Mayn forgetting to take the ignition key. Beach so long that (sure, she agrees with him) they’re walking the coast of Florida.

Has he ever been down to the Everglades?

Only thought about it. (She made it sound like ‘‘Tomorrow.")

What is he doing here, she wants to know, if he’s not covering the launch? Nostalgia for the last one, he smiles. Worried or irritated, she is thinking and he feels it right up into her words: Well, what was his overall. . aim? (she doesn’t really finish). Not to make too much of what I find out, he tells her: maybe leave things as they are.

You have power, though, she replies, but the precision and forthrightness of her voice spread her meaning so all he knows is she feels something for him.

He told his kids a story about the Big Dipper but they couldn’t — (How old are they? she asks calmly, womanly) — they couldn’t see the Bear; and to tell the truth sometimes neither could he; or believe it. Let’s see: it’s 1973 tonight. He ages his son this side of twenty, his daughter never see twenty again. (You’re joking with me, she says unamused.) American Indian story updated so the Great Bear unknown to the Great Spirit learns how to use the Big Dipper in order to drink more, faster, and when the Bear invents a way to tip a jug of honey so it pours into the Dipper, the heavens instead of coming apart wait and wait for the space-cold syrup to flow so that as the parts of the sky reach rest, a cleft appears like an inverted spigot.

Pulling out his cigarettes he dropped some bills on the sand and she shifted one shoe so she had both on the fingers of her right hand on the far side of him. He put his hand on her shoulder, she was about twenty-five, and he guessed he was comfortable to her, journeyman that he was; and when she said, "Can we go back and make love," her name and him with it fell far back into the whirr of the air-conditioner clamped down into a distance of window sills and parked cars and an unknown Chilean man of middle age not so "active" as elegant. And in the whirr, which brings the sea so close, as if Florida is all shore, is heard the bellow of some creature out of Mayn, a wrinkled sea lion on the point of a drowned mountain Darwin never saw. The stage sets down the horizon, the maverick meteorologist defined horizon, raising in question form how retreating from an object or what’s called a perturbation may balance out the emergence of mountains behind the initially observed eminence with their disappearance down Earth’s angle, arguing that from the properties of the horizon you or some alternate right person might divine a round Earth, but did this help explain recent weather fronts whose shapes Mayn had just barely gathered during his allotted struggle for existence.

The vessel sets down the horizon, and if you are on it, you’re also James Mayn sitting up straight on a bench burning fermented chicha down your gullet here in Temuco numbing your historic gums, fermented quinoa grain once divinely amino-rich. A black Indian beside you who has little to say except his uncle went away to the nitrate mines years ago and they are still waiting for him to come home, you are waiting here in Temuco to talk to a German beekeeper who has made some other way a fortune in Chile (partly in brewing but partly in lumber apparently) and has a Boy Scout (emeritus) son happily in military school close friends with the son of someone who runs the national airline. Four days three nights was what Mayn could spare for the entire country, look through that skin and see aboriginal mapuches, dark people of the tierra who hold right in their eyes memories of such ancient mapuches as wiped out a few waves of conquistadores and got their own back before it was taken away from them, so Mayn donates a thin bottle of Peruvian brandy, feeling after all some digestion kin to this strange man’s next to him in lieu of any whit of history to be grasped between them, as, then, it is necessary to cut to the German materializing near the village-square bench Mayn and the Indian are leaning back in: cut to the German, surprisingly youngish for mid-forties at least and slender and brown and with the darkest yet faintest dried-blood-red crescents incising sills under his wary eyes, for he turns to you often walking down the road to his land — it’s called the Alliance for Progress, still winding down late in the decade, 1969 it was, and you ask him What will happen?

Son a former Boy Sprout (old New Jersey witticism) in military school, daughter desiring to study animal husbandry and buy a ranch and raise Chilean beef (Does it make sense? the father with some odd German indirectness, asks you, and answers, The haciendas have always tied up the land, not used it, but we will see what happens). Did Mr. Mayn know that forty-six percent of university students here are women?

The man and his wife? Bees, now, and a boat. (Does it make sense that the people in this country don’t eat fish? he asks.) And string duets almost every day, the children never played. (Strings? Two guitars in fact.)

The Alliance, though? Well, everyone even the Indians know that Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon spent a billion to keep us from going Communist, but to protect the projects of the left which never got off the ground anyhow, they spent huge sums on counter-insurgency police.

Any predictions?

The man in his pressed khakis shakes his head slowly, subtly. Your father came here at the end of the War? you ask. He was Alsatian, the man says precisely; started an automobile repair shop, just the engines, not here, north of here; there were not engines enough and he fell into something else. Your mother? you ask, was she Chilean? No no, she was Bavarian: the man stared into Mayn’s face, they’ve reached a long wooden fence, detoured where Mayn had had no wish to wander, it’s so long ago: Your father is dead?

What is it you are looking into? the man goes on, not desiring to end the conversation. The Alliance for Progress or old German soldiers who were in the lumber business? That man, though, in December ‘68 knew the answer, as the girl four years and five months later in Florida does not yet quite. But tonight in Florida we are not even there, on the German’s land, a sixteen-minute walk from the village bench where Mayn left the mapuche and the Peruvian brandy. We are in Darwin country in reality, south Chile, the real baja that Mayn never got to, had to get back — it’s south of Puerto Montt (a name only, but what a name!), way down near the Cordillera, where he is a fashionable Patagonadal sea-male yellowish brown, and his nose in the sun sighting the Darwin range ashore sniffs sweet coastal coves where cows birthing young are now to be mounted again on that annual basis. Put that on the wire back to the boss but you’ll be home again soon enough with the industrial profiles pre-election/overall-hemispheric prognosis. Bellow it back, having grown a mane. Bellow back into the present what the German said when he put down his guitar that was unusually deep and fat and had another name. Do away with Nixon and with his right-hand man and prove it was a lunatic who did it and not a Cuban, and Chile might make it, next time around. But this was not news, not even that a German with money thought a Socialist government could feed the brains of children with milk and nationalize mines that represent four-fifths of Chile’s foreign credit and bring the absentee landowners home from Rome, London, Buenos Aires, Paris not to be shot but to help think it through from month to month, the future.

But Mayn doesn’t rid himself of that future whose shadow he carries, having been cast from it as if he could not stand what they were doing there. Where two become one. Twosomes reduced to frequency in order to be transmitted to Lj or L2 and so on, when they were expecting to be two also at the other end when they came out of frequency into their own reconstituted flesh arriving in the libration space settlement, though all of them had been told what was really going to happen even if in a message system announcing— that it bears in it — its own drug — and the effect on these emigrants when, on arrival, each one transformed from two discovers what has happened and turns and turns and turns looking for some other while seeing only the apparently straight expanse of vast libration-point torus, one’s new vast-doughnut home, cannot be estimated except in special instances by, strangely, geiger sifter; can’t be estimated because, because — he is an economist besides his credentials as sea lion or more generalized monster, or at a great distance a worm digesting Earth, his laughter leaks like madness and he alone can return to Earth to try to do something only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened — because, because there will not be two to contemplate one another, but one alone, which doesn’t preclude the new one meeting someone, which anyway must happen where the curve of destiny sloped out to Earth-Moon space steepens subtly with law unprecedentedly honed.

One alone? But with what characteristics? Did he get that far? He is not there, he is deluded, isn’t he? Is he a guy grown more familyless than less as two or three years became six or seven and his family apart from him grew? He missed being naked in that woman’s presence whom he loved. No, that is not the first story; he is in a Florida roadhouse on Skylab night but he can’t get loose from that future he has come from, how old must he have been? he can’t reconstruct it, and fails the more he tries until he recalls he isn’t in the roadhouse now but in bed with a friendly person. Mayn recalls his own name, Mayn smiles (or thinks he smiles) in his sleep. He smiles on her sleep. Her generation grew up on noise, turning that wild wire of juice whorling down the ear into a mountain of life to look into the map of poison or radiation and imagine taking nothing from it but what can be used, except that this is Mayn’s own generational lie, not theirs. Her name gets dismantled in the air-conditioner, but her elbow’s all there. He smells the girl in her sleep: soap fading somewhere on her still holds: it makes clearer the last breaths of his Gauloises as rich and cutting making a home in the throat, as noise down the worming gullet of an ear. Bed sentiments from here to Walt Disney’s piece of Florida’s own Orlando the coast Chileanizes his intestine but make no mistake, Chile’s as long as America is across, so thank God the strip is stabilized by the Andes. Yet narrow as a mere layer: file that, file it along some southern continent’s Pacific flank. She doesn’t smoke, he sees along the cold rocket flanks steams like leaks of day into night, the Saturn V night-white waiting to fire stands upright fixed by the weight of searchlight beams. So it’s not yet May, but December: the night launch. Five months gone, and he not a stupid person but he came looking for the tall, tailored, bald Chilean not knowing what he would say when he found him. Slow-motion interview: would you mind saying that again, sir? History is the cover story. Why tell the girl? Will Mayn love her? He’s talking to her, which is important.

"What is it?" she says rather softly when he gets her name right and she moves her elbow off him; but her face doesn’t turn toward him but a couple three angels have hung around near the modular chests of drawers long and low or are checking out the towels and the clickless light switch.

Well, "it" threatens to grow by blurring into insignificance: is it a story? "How I played winter ball and was approached by anti-Castro elements," or "How I declassified a CIA director’s secret play to have himself abducted by his own men," or "How I became a message from here to there implanted in me and recoverable but not by me" — or "How as a P.O.W. in Vietnam I had to whisper for five years and what this did to my hearing," or "How I kept to myself a conversation with the pilot who helped stage the plane crash that faked the death of a right-wing Chilean revolutionary in January."

"Yes," she says.

No, said the Chilean that night in December, have we?

But I looked the same; he was the different one: was I drunk? No. He was taller and a shade less thin: mustache dark and drooping but he’s less bald close up if possible than five hours earlier in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center—

I don’t think you usually talk like this, she says to Mayn, the most intimate thing so far.

Anyway I saw him meeting this moderately disreputable guy I know named Spence, and now I’m meeting him again and he looks different and seems to be saying he doesn’t think we have met (I mean, who really cares, but). . and he’s murmuring, half-politely, I dont. .

While I stared, and—

I don’t think so, he said. Unless, New York? he suddenly added like he would give something to get something, although there was fear. The accent on "York" Slavic, Italian, Spanish. But then hands were clapping hollowly in the early evening, hands that were not pressing pictures into cameras.

Jim, she’s saying close to his mouth, I can’t be bringing all this out of you.

No. You can’t.

But am I right? are you in the middle of something you can’t decide if it’s there or not? — so I feel, Is it trivial or dangerous or important or what? — because you aren’t whimsical.

Anyway the three brilliant white suits came out of the building, each man carrying his twin-hosed portable life-support pack, out of the suiting-up building (you understood that) and under the outside roof-overhang above where the white van was parked a grand hotel seeing off a team of — I don’t know what they were: not warriors though suspicious plunder was their aim; not priests, notwithstanding the slow uniforms and tight caps beneath the helmets; not condemned men in their divers’ fishbowls fixed forever onto neck rings; not statesmen in protective on-site inspection suits — but (words fail, again and again, words, words) surprise! — explorers: hunters. A fireman on one knee watches them stop to greet their families, the rangy American women dolled up, a cool, Sundayfied adolescent or two, one in a long skirt, was it Carlsbad Caverns, the Empire State Building? No kissing through the helmets, two wives not three — one wife, the Command Module pilot’s, did kiss her husband’s convex bubble and he the air inside, so their kiss met very firm, no tongues, poles invisible they are so familiar. And the blithe bachelor rock man Schmitt (also seen off by a lady) kicked up his huge Earth-heels — or was it Evans, the Command Module pilot — just before he climbed in the back of the Apollo van, his white bringing up into contrast a touch of rust-brown.

The boxes they are carrying said the South American gent next to me after all, maintaining the conversation he had seemed to decline. I pointed out the hoses and told him what I’d picked up — which did not (in reply to him) include who made the space suits and where. He said, They are taking overnight bags. .

Kidney-machine overnight bags, I said.

They are getting away from their women for a weekend—

— on the Moon, I said—

— it is every American’s dream, he said, it is what you and I were bused here from the Press Site to see, it is a brief, expensive shot from a movie—

— seen much closer up (I pointed out) by the crowd back at the Press Site on closed-circuit. But are you a journalist?

The astronauts are elated.

They’re like kids in those aviator skullcaps.

Who is the one who danced? Was it not our bachelor rock man?

The geology of space.

But now that they are in the van I am not so sure.

Hard to tell.

They look alike, suited up. Unknown soldiers.

Wasn’t the idea one unknown soldier? Mayn asked.

Yes, more than one spoils that.

Ah well, unknown soldiers vacuum-packed for burial in space, Mayn slowly quipped.

Is it the Service Module pilot who orbits the Moon while the other two are on the surface?

The reliable friend who is there for the heroes.

Still, a vacation in a vacuum, said the tall, bald man with the mustache; what was that you said? vacuum-packed for burial in space? I will remember that.

The van has a rusty tailpipe, I said.

It will drop off on the way; nothing spent, nothing gained.

You know about the Polish revolutionary who was told to blow up a bus.

I knew him; he was not Polish.

And burnt his lips on the tailpipe.

That’s not the one I knew. Your astronauts don’t make mistakes. Can they be heroes?

Those tight skullcaps, that’s the secret.

It is a performance.

Shot out of a cannon, I said: do they have that act in your circuses?

In America you can see anything and live to tell about it, said the man with the Spanish intonation in the first phrase and in "leave" for "live."

Or see nothing and not live to tell about it, Mayn had replied, he thought.

Nothing? A man in prison assured me, yes, prison is about nothing. But of course that is not just anywhere.

A journalist also? I asked.

Also?

A journalist?

In fact, he had once wanted to be one, since you ask. As well as a public speaker, perhaps, though now compelled to have a limited audience however practiced an audience.

Political prisoner? I asked.

He killed someone. He had a theory, said the tall, bald man.

Political? I said (I couldn’t just say, Oh?).

Possibly about imprisonment, said the tall, bald man, but it was about the unconscious: in effect he said — he was not so clear as my summary of him — he had found it unavoidable, the unconscious — we reconstituted ourselves in each other’s heads, I believe, our minds being congruent frequently, does that sound right? — always near to being one mind, was that it? Oh, he apologized, always, and it was not him I at first went to visit; he eavesdropped; he ignored a man and woman who had come to see him, actually, and listened to me and the man I was talking with. It’s chemistry, this mind-family affair, but I was unable to give him my full attention. His theory was of imprisonment, and in the fragments I heard while essentially speaking to the person I was with, I gathered it was consolatory rationalization, yet moving. He expressed contempt for exposes of prison life. He was quite intelligent: he called jail abstract. No, his theory was about all imprisonment, if there is such a thing; but I would not have called him a political prisoner. I learned later that he had killed a woman one night who had been his girlfriend more or less since grade school. He was doing a long stretch.

You were not.

A matter of hours, no more. He seemed to have taken up economics but later I wondered if/ had started something.

This lean, diplomatic man with a mustache turned away, clasping his hands behind his back and raising his chin like a royal consort on a visit. Or a king. Not a journalist.

But I did see you, I said, in the telephone room at the Press Center back in town.

The man seemed frank — and if contempt was here it was not for Mayn, to whom the man had attended quite warmly. But he was looking away now. He did not speak of the man Mayn knew with whom Mayn had seen him in conversation, an ageless little villain (well, not so little) named Spence. Ever meet him? he gives information a bad name. The Chilean answered me that he was not a journalist, he said he knew nothing of space but he had heard there were particular pathways in it finding which we might save time. He had humor to spare.

That’s quite a lot, the girl murmurs, and an elbow lands on Mayn’s breast, and charges into him so the skin and bones couldn’t stop it.

Mayn’s more awake and there is a strip of horror over his heart, he wouldn’t know why, he hasn’t been asleep, he knows that. Hey, did you tell me the gravitational hills and valleys of space give us libration points but not the transfer of persons two to one?

Two people one, yeah, the girl murmurs, half asleep and more than half, Libration, vuhbration, she says the v like another language.

But did you?

For just a moment she’s awake like a woman he once married who when she woke up cocked one eye at the light and kept the other shut (but which eye suddenly seems important, but it’s lost): Yeah, well libration points I know but… I don’t really recall. . saying anything about them, and. . transfer of persons from two to one, I know I didn’t say gravity… her voice closes. . didn’t. . and she’s out again. Or in.

Where did he get gravity valleys, gravity hills, geology of space, libration points, where’s he coming from? he’s no scientist, far from it. It’s like a mountain is coming to him.

We are not there any more, he continues. "No, we’re at Sky lab, May, ‘73," he imagines her sharply saying out of one wire-thin cleft of sleep; but he hears, "Mmhmm" and says, "Please" (meaning stay awake and hear me) and she says, "No" (meaning perhaps some opposite) and breathes; and then she breathes words he’s heard before—"resting my eyes" — heard from a wife — again between his lips feels the softness of her lower lip and her eyes looking out the back of his head. His fingers catch the ghost of the word Spence.

We’ve been bused back to the Press Site now, and it’s getting late. The place is packed, the grass infield stretching from the grandstand toward the Banana River. We don’t know for a few minutes yet that we have four hours to wait. The delay doesn’t dull me. Against the blinding giant disk of searchlight the contour of bald head and loose robe of an Indian holy man stood for a long moment. A delay is coming. A computer hold. And the computer is far away in Alabama, same Moon though. But my man, you see, appears twice more to me and then a third time. Under the grandstand at the hot-chocolate machine. Hands at his sides, calm, indifferent you’d say if you didn’t pick up this weird independence. But he’s not doing anything there, and you can’t see the launch pad, and he’s not there to study the structure of the grandstand or blow it up, although I might ask again about that one. He’s got to be waiting for someone, and I felt stupidly it was me. He looks away through me with a steady power I didn’t see before, so he’s above me and I’m only half there, and I have to make some conversation, the bastard; but then abruptly he acknowledges me: Where are they? he asks, and he answers, Elsewhere, elsewhere. The Governor of Alabama and the one-hundred-thirty-year-old slave must be seen, and he smiles and moves away.

I look at a girl’s name tag as she tips a paper cup to her mouth and eyes me and I look away to the body in general of a girl next to her who doesn’t have a name tag and this girl does not notice, and moves away from the other girl, they’re not together, why am I going into this? while someone behind me reports that Press Site buses will visit the VIP stands, and I can hear a student returning to her friends camped on the infield grass down near the dark glimmer of the water say, "I saw him — he looked dead," and a boy called out, "What about the slave, Suzie?" while somewhere a woman says, "Zsa Zsa Gabor," and the syllable hangs on and holds as if the whole statement opens toward verbless nothing, but we know what is meant even if the future should think it not worth the struggle. The third time that night I see my man the South American — I’m jumping from first to third—

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

No, this is December when I was down for Apollo. We’re near launch, near the big sneeze, I recall my grandmother telling me the Earth sneezed once to launch a giant bird westward, we’re on the infield watching the great electronic scoreboard record the countdown and there is the rocket and a flat gleam of bay that’s part of the Banana River at the edge of the grass, and here’s the son of a bitch I’ve already seen him with once back in Cocoa Beach in the correspondents’ telephone room, but now they’ve got their backs to me and I remember my man wears no press badge, and they’re side to side facing the sea. My man in his dark suit has his hands clenched behind him; the other man, Spence, seems smiling when he turns to him — I’ve seen that smile when he listened to me — and I keep hearing him say to my man, "No," but also in combinations like "You know" — plus whatever; and when the countdown hits ten minutes I’m closer, but a woman with a tripod asks them to move and they step apart, glance behind without seeing, then walk away mingling singly, and after the launch they’re nowhere.

The launch?

But the second time — the second time that night mattered most.

Ah, says the girl, you had a lot of reasons to look this man up, I really believe that.

My back to the bay I stood halfway up the infield grass toward the grandstand.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm. Contact. Here is a holy man in a baseball cap.

Mmhmm. I ‘member.

No, this wasn’t this trip. This was December. This was on my left while next to it on the right were commentators in the three network trailers — trailers, were they? — and I was looking away from the rocket, the bright launch complex.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm—look away, look away, CBS, ABC. And NBC. Trailers had their picture windows at the right angle. People inside had their legs crossed. But outside in front were some small tables — card tables, weren’t they?

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

Glad to have you aboard — corroboration and so forth.

Mmhmm.

Moral support, and standing by one of them was my man, and the man sitting down at a mike was a Voice of America man I once met in Washington at a Softball game — turned out he was the South American voice, and later he seemed not to know who I meant by the tall, bald man, but here now he assumed I and the man knew each other. He and the man — he was Chilean I learned later — were talking as I walked up. The Voice man started to introduce us, but the Chilean bowed to me and said we’d met.

I don’t know any Chilean, the girl murmurs.

It is very beautiful, the Chilean said — a squint of gaiety pinched the points of his eyes. He would look out toward the rocket, then at me; I only at him, with my back to the rocket though I saw behind him the picture windows of the networks: men on camera recrossing their legs and lighting up, while they thought of something to say while the hold went on.

It’s money, I said.

Money? He had a slight stammer but you didn’t pick it up, he used it to hold back what he was going to say. They risk their necks for a few rocks, he said; and I said, It’s not money they’re being paid off with, staring at him. He dropped his eyes to my shirt pocket where I’d neglected to unpin my press badge.

Why. . why. . The girl’s whole body stirs vaguely.

They have no necks, he said; look how the helmet sits on the shoulder: a new skin will develop in which one can live without the pressure of our atmosphere.

And the blood pulsing from inside? I said.

A new cool blood. All one type. Type R. Reptilian skin with fine patterns, and these creatures will come to understand each other without speaking, one will be like another, they will all be married to the future, they will live in zero gravity, no gravity will be wasted, and if they find the wherewithal and the tranquil control, they will be interchangeable, I think I have heard this said — I don’t think it is original with me — their hair will not need to be cut, they will die if they wish and the wish will be beyond burial or incineration — that’s as I’ve taken it, and I don’t know a booster from an Apollo.

Greek to you?

Greek I can read a few words for myself, though if they say liquid oxygen is being used I am prepared to believe even if I do not know. It is their wings, yet it is wings they fly from, to become what?

News, I said, but what he said felt like life or death.

It’s a very good show, he said with that slight intensity of stammer.

The girl rolls over and bends her back and brings up her knees and snuggles back against Mayn. How long have you been divorced? You said your daughter’s working on the environment?

I went for something to say, I didn’t know what I said: chemistry, I remember saying, you know your chemistry, people can be made interchangeable.

Nothing to speak of, he said. The chemistry of trade.

He made me think of his prisoner. Your prisoner, I said, and heard "Your witness," "your witness," "your murderer."

My prisoner, he said. My economical prisoner.

Your profession? I said, but he replied, An unusual inmate, but he had to spend his time somehow; he was attempting to take some thoughts he had and, I believe, collapse them into one.

The unconscious.

Oh yes, the Colloidal Unconscious was how he put it. But we were interrupted and I see I have to visit him again when I am back in his part of the world.

Colloidal, I said.

I checked, said the gentleman: it is between a solution and a suspension — fine particles in a liquid, you know. Homogenized milk but not a dust storm. Particles too small to see under a microscope. But for the unconscious I do not know what it is. But I carry it onward, you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious? I asked.

Sounds like news, he said.

Something else is what it sounds like, something else I have never heard out loud before, or a crackbrained American business.

But the Colloidal Unconscious, said the South American gentleman, I would not speak of it. I don’t know any Colloidal Unconscious. It is, as you say, something else.

Maybe it’s news, I said.

It’s news, he said, looking away toward Apollo 17 and the sea, both of which had stopped existing for the while, but he wanted to say something more.

They take the elevator, I said, up to the top floor, make a few phone calls to influential people, loved ones, then they’re off. If I did some homework I’d care more.

The other way round, he said, and I felt him to be a brother.

Mmhmm.

What prison were you in? I asked, and Spence grinned in my mind, never forget it, like he knew me — which of course he did.

I was not inside, the Chilean said. I was paying a visit. I left the city in the morning, I was back in time for a late dinner. A Vietnam restaurant cheers one up, an authentic one as opposed to half the Vietnam restaurants in Paris.

The prison was a pleasant ride through the hills. You are almost as persistent as another man against whom I once stammered; but I stammer slightly in several languages.

Santiago? I thought, the approach is through wide, flat fields of shining green. Caracas — Caracas has hills. Are there hills outside Athens, and a Vietnam restaurant? The ones in Paris, but a prison in Paris and a highly conceptual prisoner? Possible.

(Are you kidding, the girl murmurs; of course there are hills; it’s a regular amphitheater.)

But Spence materialized at the corner of the press grandstand. My man had seen him at once, and changed absolutely and asked me what it was that I wanted, as if I had been after information.

I said, Your prisoner was not in prison for his beliefs, I gather.

He had found a way around waste, or a way to stem the anguish of it. The passerby — what was it he said? — who carelessly strikes off the head of a sunflower. The thoughts we may or may not call our own that go nowhere until we immerse ourselves in the larger colloid. The need to go away but the discovery that we can go away by staying and being left. I see I must visit him again. When I return from California one day I may. One day soon, was the offhand remark the South American gentleman I think made against the Voice of America man transmitting.

But what I had really wanted to know was what the tall, fine, bald man had been doing with that Spence in the Press Center telephone room back on Cocoa Beach; that is, what Spence wanted with him. No: that’s not true: I wanted to hear him talk about astronauts evolving. No, that’s not it either.

What is next? I think he asked — he asked, yes, absolutely, asked instead of walking away from me. The Voice man was sitting at the card table talking into a pretty good facsimile of an old Western Electric saltshaker mike. He had a humorous face — don’t ask me why. The night air open to South America. The big boys behind glass smoking minutes away.

Next? I said; you mean Skylab in May? I said.

This is not your field, no? he asked frankly.

I am adaptable, I said, but I wondered what he’d been told, and if so, had it been by Spence?

So I have recently heard, the South American gentleman said.

It’s pretty far from my humdrum dispatches about missile economics and strip-mining sulfurous coal off the face of the Earth.

Oh I hardly believe you, said the man standing beside me, but between the two edges of his words I found a thought of my own: Far from barroom chat, from information capable of being phoned in, information on space spinoffs, on the highest clouds of all that condense out of dust from outer space and shine from the sun’s silent light practically all night long; congress on drought in the Sahel desert, on global weather network; proliferation of seismic monitoring devices; the minor beauty of the obsolete missile such as the Sprint; the "hardness" of the "hard target" offering endless economic scenarios where, regardless of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), three Minuteman III warheads "delivered" upon three Russian silos having a roughly U.S.-style "hardness" have an eighty percent chance of taking out one silo, whereas seven M-III w.-h.’s would have the same percent chance of knocking out one silo three times as hard; the good-story myths of offshore cloud-seeding interception to dry up Castro’s 1970 sugar crop, the Venus hothouse scenario turning New York into Venice, the two-billion-dollar Russo-Canadian "black film" scenario to fly in ten million tons of city soot to cover the Arctic ice cap and melt the north-polar glacier; far from this yet in the presence of the after-all-pretty-ordinary South American elite bald mustached intelligentsio, I got the aftertaste of what I was prepared to say but did not: a burn of bad breath vacuumized into a stress-factor of empty words: Mylar-insulated sleeping bags the coming thing already here, would they take your stain? (I sipped a bourbon in Oregon); clearer X-rays (I felt the Chicago cold beer follow my system all the way down); laser gear spots continental drift (soda water on some coast at either end of the American landbridge bubbling up into the tube of your body driven by convection currents somewhere among the all too believable, faith-informed deep plates they make up below our crust); and the micro-electronic revolution that had been spurred, spawned, sparked, and sped by Russian superiority light months ago in blast-off thrust to where and when, and by NASA’s consequent need to reduce weight in order to get off the ground, hence miniaturize, reduce space — hence brainstorms that sent computer exports up fourteen hundred percent the first ten years of NASA, Inc. Take Chrysler cars’ new clean-air ignitions, their new distributors computer-checked by the same system used in Saturn rockets, same system that will check your windshield-wiper motor. Potential barroom information at rest, and I have learned (but when?) to hate and fear potential, is that it? But I said to the gentlemanly, somewhat hard though melancholy and subtly exiled Chilean here in the final month of 1972, No sir, it was not my field, and maybe this was why I saw through it, and as for me I thought all this show tonight — Alabama Wallace in a wheelchair, former Truman on ye deathbed — and throw in that operator Spence long known long unknown half-life magnet—

What do you see through it? asked the man.

Fire, I said; games, I said (and answering this finely displaced guy was like being traced or calling up the trace in me, you know some old inch of wire with congealed words in it coiled in your gut where you swallowed it a century ago, some mineral that belonged to somebody else and after all this time it’s sort of cushioned and cocooned by your congealed juices and greases but it’s starting to do something, move or give off impatience, I didn’t know and was not accustomed to talk or think in this vague way), fire, games, speed, a touch of war, sky’s the limit, I said. Great American vehicle floating a loan!

Very good, said the Chilean; I see something else.

What is it? I said, and realizing I wanted to find something else to say to this guy — but what? — I said, The unconscious? You sure it’s out there?

Yes; it will be there even after it is gone, said the Chilean (though he may not have meant the unconscious). It is taking us there. It is like a nation, an institution. It is not people, though it is like greed. I say us. I am of the Americas.

It’s people giving their destiny away so it’s all clear and set, I said (not myself). I still hadn’t said "it," I might have said more — even me — but the Chilean who I didn’t yet know was Chilean, much less involved in the government and here in the States on some kind of business apparently for Allende — and I wonder if he got called back or got back or got stuck here, caught here — he stopped me with his eyes that included me in the vista he swept from side to side, the fixed image of the rocket some three miles behind me, the mob on the grass—

— Mmhmm, mob, she murmurs, mob.

What enables the three men to get away, he said, is the same that gets them back, and it goes with them but it stays too.

(Well, this sounded as bad as the trace wire in my gut giving off rays perhaps.)

It has no ordinary body, it can be felt when the blast comes, though I have never seen a blast-off except on television, the red gantry like an oil rig is silhouetted but close up the real thing that stands out in the void of the fire and darkness is the anatomy, you see, the building of the rocket, the bones of the idea. Last night before it was rolled away we saw the mobile service structure against the rocket with a vertical column of slanting parallels that are stairs for the men servicing the rocket but are an idea too: the anatomy—

Whew, I felt—

— the anatomy of some power without a body except mental and a power that also goes with the men, do you see.

I turned, following his eye, the rocket in the side of mine, figuring this man was running a Rudolf Steiner school in Yucatan or was a foreign writer discovering America, and my turning, our turning, reminded me of ancient days, of God knows what, that if the Earth was wasting me, maybe I had some small power, hack that I am, that was a threat to it—and I saw, among the two or three faces looking our way, Spence the journalist, and wondered who he was "with" this time, and I answered this foreign visitor of mine who carried some thread of pain or brave dread lightly so I said only, I think, that through his words I saw God, some emptiness between the upright rocket and the mobile launcher holding it in place, and then the horizontal flat land of scrubby beach coast, O.K.? (you’ve seen it), and that it led me step by step to feel that one Mylar sleeping bag and one astronaut equaled two Mylar sleeping bags and no astronauts, or three and no — talking over my head occasionally. Wasn’t what I’d expected to say, which should have been, What’s your business with that Spence? and I did at last say, What’s with Spence?

Whereupon the Chilean gentleman looked at me and me alone with nothing in his eye, which I realized is a lot more than "very little" in his eye. And he said he was an economist, sort of a statistician (I think that’s how he said it). I said, The nitty gritty. Yes, he said, the "nitty gritty." Esoteric equations, I said, but then he said he didn’t believe anything was equal to anything else, only people were equals. Hell, he meant it in a specialized way; that’s O.K. He was obviously South or Central American; he didn’t have that heaviness Spaniards of that class tend to have, and he was obviously involved with Spence. I don’t know if he meant by my "field" the pieces I had mentioned doing on the relation of certain big mineral partnerships to the growth of multinationals, the Southern Peru Copper Company and the greater freedom the aluminum partnerships have, to shop around for bauxite extraction, and the freedom or lack of it of some U.S. subsidiaries in Australia to export. You know, popular business economics — material you can get from other news services — oh, about risks like Ford rubbering in the Amazon, parent companies parenting. And I stupidly but it was irresistible said, getting the name out in the open, I’m about as knowledgeable as your friend Spence. The man nodded politely — and he half-turned to the Voice of America man and said, Science fiction?

And I remembered Dr. Allende’s amazing speech to the UN just seventy-two hours before.

And I said, No all I meant was that what’s happening in the next room usually matters more to me, you see.

It is through each other that we see, said the Chilean and as he moved away like a cocktail party I felt, So what? — but free — a free agent — but then felt annihilated—

— You said "no reason at all," the girl says; there’s always a reason.

"Annihilated" is a bit strong, but Allende’s words came to me then about "forces which operate in the shadows" — which meant the NIK — we all knew — and I thought, The guy’s from Chile — and then the Voice of America guy with this humorous round face told me the man was an economist who had been spending a few days here; he did not name him; he had met him in Washington where he had had a brother and in New York and when I pressed the V. of A. man he added that a hippy free-lance he had talked to had pointed me out as—

— Wait, I broke in: who was this "he"?

Oh the Chilean gentleman, Dr. Mackenna.

Pointed me out as. .

Oh as a person with connections down there. Railroads, airline, newspapers?

Who on earth told Mackenna this?

(Mackenna was his name? the girl murmurs. . what’s "NIK"?)

The Voice of America man with earphones on raised his hand, listening, and bent to the microphone; looked up again at Mayn and smiled and shrugged.

"Who’s Spence?" the girl mutters, breathes, murmurs tenderly as if her interest in facts themselves is tender and in the dark she’s as young as a very young wife but fairly off somewhere in herself for having both responded so regularly and just about slept through this amalgam.

The guy he ran into in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center in Cocoa Beach — a crook named Ray Spence. NIK equals Nixon and Kissinger, and the I is for CIA.

Mmhmm.

Well, I mixed up the sequence.

Mmhmm. It doesn’t matter.

Communication unvoiced, but telepathy this late is not the issue, the issue is whether what we convey etherially to each other is worth it.

A crook, did I say? First of all, a bit of a character, a subsidiary worm, probably a minor monster.

But this Chilean: tall, dark, bald, the Chilean whom he (Mayn) hadn’t yet known was Chilean had been waiting to use a phone it seemed, for they were all in use, but waiting so detached that he could contemplate Mayn.

The man returned my look which I held just longer than I’d meant to and he gave a bow and I saw two men I knew and I went and talked to them without finding out if they knew as little as I did about space. Then, with his dark glasses propped on his hair — ponytail behind — and torturing his mouth into the sinew of some smile, Spence came in, or was in the doorway, and was the one the Chilean apparently was waiting for, but you couldn’t be entirely sure. Spence waved a sideways wave like a saxophonist I know to me with eyes lowered as if we both knew something. Then a switch-off, and I didn’t exist.

I followed them into the information room. The orbital charts were being given out. Then we went upstairs — the contractors’ handouts — half promo, half straight dope, two halves slanting away in a curve not quite routine, information dividing itself, its future, its source’s future multiplying its trite labor.

The silence next to Mayn shifts emphasis but is silence still. She murmurs. He stammers in several languages he hasn’t heard himself speak, and the sounds are familiar. Can Mayn feel activity in the elbow that’s on him like a thing coming to life? There’s her lovable circulation, he would swear; it’s her blood flowing along his hairs — he’s with her all right — hell, that’s what you always hear but he’d had it for a moment, "one-with," they said — they’re one, he’s sure they’re one — is that good? They have a plate for newlyweds to stand on where four western states meet, corner to corner. He tastes nicotine saliva seeping down, rejected by now-dead brain cells as their last wish. He ought to go into the new but fragile motel bathroom all done in green and throw up, but he would have to try too hard and two-thirds of him feels good and what if he tilted some relatively fresh and unused void capacity out by mistake, but he’s got a cap of rock-wool insulation up in the attic he paid to have it blown in before that house was winterized for divorce, keeps the heat from escaping — his once friendly former wife’s, his no longer growing kids’—and he stared into the Florida motel mirror until he was sickeningly dissolved to be transferred to another bathroom of another color, he sees yellow but it’s no particular prophecy, he’s been in yellow Johns before, and he goes on seeing the wall beyond the foot of the bed, the wall through which he’s assumed he might be having a dream which he can’t walk out on like a shadow under a door.

He’s got this feeling he’s said too much as well although the girl’s not going to remember it. Take a shower in the morning, have a cup of coffee, wash down the scrambled eggs, grits before they take hold. His wife Joy would let him go on about how he believed in anarchy for children and then would throw it up at him later as if some prediction of his had come cruelly true, while neither child is close to being as dislegalized as the father, nor at this time close period. The elbow stirs and slides, leaving a hand, like a substitute or residue. And he might run his tongue into the forks of her fingers, to finish between her thumb and forefinger: old, deep southern-hemisphere’s wrinkled mind stirs on top of the submerged mount: wind rises from the right direction: mature sea male among shore smells he makes not much distinction between the young and old sea mares, he sneezes, he observes them all, he doesn’t have to do anything (isn’t that him?), he feels them unfolding all round him and he’s the center of a wind from all quarters, he hears the voice naming the hustler the Chilean was intermittently with then in December — December 7th — at Apollo 17—just three days after Allende’s UN protest — and can’t see why the Voice of America man when he phoned him two weeks later didn’t know which Chilean — well, the Chilean who (forget that snake Spence) spoke of future blood cooled under a new skin and of future communication without words but between whom? between survivors so grotesquely fitted into the new atmosphere that who then would want to survive? Except naturally the survivors, who in turn at a plateau of zero gravity would never think to take up the option of the wish to die and such thoughts as all these were— as if the Chilean had heard Mayn often think — whether with Joy or alone. And Mayn contemplates the wall but looks into it, not through. He hasn’t been dreaming: light from the parking area has found a Venetian slat stuck open, and on this wall opposite the foot of the bed a framed color shot reduced to black and white by the night is of a towering Saturn in the A-frame doorway of the scaleless exterior of what’s touted as the biggest pile on Earth, so big a pile Mayn obligingly fits Chartres and other cathedrals and their orbits into it while also transferring St. Peter’s perilously into orbit where it is at last safe unless it collides with astral debris, but since he’s tired now, could he be thrust back along the particles of his own shadow to that future he came from where on metal plates persons two by two are being transferred by frequency to space settlements where upon arrival they will find themselves participating in a population-control project which Mayn knew of in advance? One more eccentric proposition (like Allende’s "We are the victims of virtually imperceptible activities, usually disguised with words that extol the sovereignty of my country" — paranoid, right? fatal-sounding was more like it, Mayn knew — fatal paranoia, then? — but the paranoid in this case was not the victim).

The man with the bandanna, she’s saying, had a hole. Yes. You know that operation? People know all the operations nowadays. That’s right. .‘case they take out the wrong lung, et cetera. Yes. A thumping starts — and the chance that it’s their door breathes him more toward sleep. Is the Earth perhaps undergoing long-term separation trauma? Is that it? Yes, I think so. What did you say, Jim? What did you think?

She’s waking up, he feels inside his body. But Mayn isn’t happy with that mobile home that keeps passing like a Wide Load up the highway or some mind of his vacantly overhead is it every ninety minutes? no he is in orbit around it. He never got around to giving the firing-squad order. Turned out the squad was formed in a circle and those facing it were a larger circle and so on, and the squad leader had to discuss this before any order could be given. And all he can get out of the incoming messages is what he was once ready to have but now needs to see through, in honor of the Chilean: for the — laryngectomy, the girl says — for the motel’s words about itself are not worth using, too easy, not funny, not the thing: "Jettison all worldly cares, splashdown transcontinental load in Space Coast motel pools at strictly suborbital rates, your motel launch pad puts you in perfect orbit around the sun" — but the Chilean knew there was more to it than techno ahoy ha! and Mayn and the Chilean were messages to each other unknown to the bearers. But in addition Mayn still missed a point: two shapes slid together and looked congruent and he had trouble identifying them.

He reaches for the ceiling: his uncle or his father (he’s getting too old to have a father) said (heart to heart), "Shoot, kid" — so his shoulder tips the girl’s residual hand off him — he, Mayn, part Indian-country where he could kill Spence, erase him out of mind, and he Mayn is not a killer, believe Mayn, he isn’t a killer, or not yet, though his future nature is all here, the votes are in and he was elected hands down, yet to a new life he always had in him, no chameleon sweat of a Spence-hustler just old Mayn a non-toxic monster (patterned on earlier earthling-newsgatherers) doing the job as coach said, "but you know something? — that old meteorologist in the Village is second cousin to a Navajo." And Mayn hears himself slur, "There goes Skylab again, why’s it have to come over every ninety minutes?" "Skylab passes over the same spot on Earth only once every seventy-one orbits," is the answer and she says this while simultaneously asking if he is awake, God it’s only three-twenty and he goes Mmhmm, and she asks if he will be seeing her again up in New York sometime (the "sometime" hedging her), and he replies, Mmhmm, which is not the sound of the void (send out for sandwiches), and which is the sound of another creature to the north and not the brou-ha-ha bellow of a sea lion in the other Chile that’s way to the south — cordillera country, my man — a Darwin South that he never quite (he Mayn) got to except to hear the rains falling upward from the Pole (and he suspects that a whole lot of other people who say they’ve been there really haven’t) — but what the hell did Mayn’s "quite" mean? but no sequence to speak of for he’s tired of his insistent soul threatening to bore him and needs to migrate to another belt, says, "Mmhmm" again to the girl’s "Well if you’re here for Skylab because of this Chilean economist you met at Apollo 17 in December" (surely she’s only pretending to be awake) "who did you say he was? Mackenna you found out his name was? That’s South America for you. Then what were you doing at the launch in December?"

"Mmhmm" is the way the other creature speaks, then surprisingly, "Sure": for China’s opening up now, we’ll have to think again about Chile, have to get a visa to China, China’s opening up. Choor, then, only a matter of time till Choor has a nuclear capability? — no, nothing so obvious — rather, till Choor can be mapped so that when there’s an underground event in Tibet shock-waved off the scale-scope Choorward, we don’t always have to jump to another map to check the event’s warp through Choor or Choor’s registering of event while in doing so we no longer sure if quake-plode-quoia originated in Tibet or the indestructible Great Salt Dome of Kamchatka whose peninsula moves toward Choor or on another map America bearing its whole weather system with it, together with selected coastline whose breaks correlate with zero-pressure pockets above but do not show up to naked eye.

"But Jim — hey you asleep? — what’s ‘choor’? ‘something-choor’?" He explains it is probably a made-up place with precise alternative locations for contingency movement. "You mean like bombing?" He laughs in his half-sleep. She’s too young for him, he thinks he is too old to fall in love with a future mother, he chuckles still or rumbles, and nearly gets to dreamland but he has never dreamed — only hallucinated, he laughs — and she pinches his nose so he feels it behind his trick knee, What’re you doing? she says when she is the one doing. Her name again is Barbara-Jean, and she overlaps the times he is in, answering his "Is the Earth possibly undergoing long-term separation trauma?" before he answered it himself: Yes, she thinks so. The symptom of this urge, he says, waking up a bit, is the urge to figure out what it all means.

But she: You mean when Earth doesn’t suffer separation trauma any more, the urge will pass?

But, he goes on, you got to ask, How was the Earth made?

Well?

Oh, it got itself together, he concludes. But she has not concluded, and digresses to his account of Apollo 17, four, five months ago. "But Jim, I don’t know when you told me, it must have been this afternoon but I don’t remember but those meetings are very clear to me, in the correspondents’ phone room, then five hours later outside the suiting-up building when the Apollo 17 astronauts came out and got into their van to drive to the pad, then under the grandstand when he was waiting for someone, then on the infield during the hold, at the Voice of America table, then Mackenna’s off talking to the creep you don’t like, and you think they got something going, so I see the meetings clearly, but why did this guy make such an impression on you?"

"It’s possible," he murmurs.

So if the event-quake in Tibet-Choor territory (wait it out, it feels like a monster’s monstrously silent sneeze) remains only intermittently monitor-prone, and while we are seeing about a visa to China, somewhere along the long white mountain in Manchuria, the path marked by great sprinkles of green pods of unripe peppercorns — or along some above-the-surface Tibet (nonetheless safe from the nose-to-the-ground Beagle of Darwin discovering an American corporation full incarnate in Chile), a mammal can be seen, thing all hairy muscle-fat gaping out of a hole in the top of a root he inhabits like top of many-limbed trunkless tree that dreams its way growth wise up, up, from way deep in the ground until it just reaches the surface where this creature—

— What kind of choor did you—? hey! did you say choor?—

— "make the economy scream," Nixon ordered for sick Chile, as CIA Helmsman took notes.

Mayn’s not quite with her, or it, and she’s asking, "Jim. You awake?" reaching for the light and thinking better of it—"Who was second cousin to the weatherman? and who married Tall Salt? — is that the name? did the weatherman have an uncle who married an Indian woman named Tall Salt? did he stay with her if he was a New York hermit? is that an Indian name?" "Oh, Choor was a place my grandmother knew about. A place a Princess went adventuring from."

Forget; "create"; take the "choor" — let the credit — no, the continents are adrift this year, next year they will have never budged — such reliable fact as the drift station now being set up itself which is to be a source of fact, freeze an aging Coast Guard icebreaker of the Wind class into a floe and let drift be our guide, plus the Norwegian Nansen who set out like a Viking in 1893 (a big year in our family) convinced that like an old wreck that he knew about, trapped northwest of Alaska that wound up in Greenland not to mention trees from Siberian forests, he might "sail" up the Arctic Ocean to within spitting distance of the North Pole: but if you can (fact) keep the bears off your equipment and believe that your receivers are really telling you how and when (and which) high-energy particles are bombarding the sky at the top of the world and thank God for our weather satellite what did we do without them for so long? — but we need the oil, we may annex Alaska leastways any land arguably moving — but there remains the long white mountain that has now gotten moving, compacted for the moment to next to nothing, and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we find that Choor now positions itself by what events occur naturally around it, and since we can’t find that mountain suddenly except in self-styled angel voices living us and tracking some Wide Load traveling a highway by night (no big problem, just get the route straight, the mileage figures and approximate bearings), and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we figure that Choor, or feel that this mountain, may have gone underground or (off-loaded by day) may get to where we see it is not any place except what’s happening around it.

"My hair goes quite light in the sun," he hears (of another season, not Florida — a future as well, he feels: of going to the beach; living). Her hair is too dark to go light, yet she’s reliable: she finds it incredible but eerily so, believably incredible, that he has never dreamed but she has not yet said, You just don’t remember. "But, you know, you don’t show your moods so much, whereas you have a lot of them." "Sounds like New York talk," you grumble. "Now what was this Choor, these Choor monsters? I mean didn’t you say that your mother before she — well, obviously before she — or was it just Choor she asked about?"

A curve of news passes so near it is surely Mayn’s, but, making it his own, he feels in his mouth a tongue of prediction: Mayn will fall in love again if, and only if, he finds the formula joining (i) his uncontrollable power to witness two persons transferred by frequency into one; (2) his faith that the Chilean economist matters more even than his connection with post-Allende politics and the Spence link; and (3) his lifelong inability to dream.

Then a tender compliment feels you where you live but some countdown the end of whose unseen hand sure reminds him he’s forgotten a little lower-back dread born of today though of a future known in one’s system if not spelled out except in some longer, tough stranger-tongue in the old animal mouth: that you yourself are this vagrant stump-tail monkey-bird Choor Mon’, still not quite shaped despite all these generations, and of which the mountain really remains to be found, for the coastline breaks that won’t stay put when you go looking for them hours after your infra-red aerial scan has jointed and correlated them with unfamiliar uncaused weather pockets of non-pressure mount up, until the impossible shape asking more and more to be called ancient threatens to be understood by not the curves and equations of some loner Meteorologist of New York but actually him whom you never dreamt of identifying with earlier Hermit-Inventors of New York historied by a grandmother whose tales made up to fill a grandson’s mother-gap became extra-true at a bad time for you. You are the He who belongs to that Mountain of Choor, but what’s a monster nowadays, and if — God! — angels have had to get into evolution and haven’t the power they once had to be absent and/or give potentiality, why more and more monsters with or without new role models may also be deciding to join the human race. Let me get this straight, she’s saying, your aim was… to succeed in not changing the world?

Lost without other people, through whom he falls bending toward them, just missing them, sometimes lighting them before he gets to them.

Misses his family, that’s no news. Kind of loves this woman — young, smart, nice, fine, yes. Love waves deflect his bullet into orbit, how about that! whose was said bullet? bitable, choorable, he will wait and it will come to him, for while he lives, haply he is lived. By relations processing him into perspective, maybe he’s theirs.

Or by other people who know themselves so well they don’t feel clear, whereas he has dinner with them, plays squash, phones, hears their unre-portable doings in the same room and bent through others, which is a relief from his own light, which also weighs. Lived by others? Sentimental inkling, no more. Though it goes on at length somewhere, it’s just hearing yourself in others.

Forget it was even thought. Never stand up in court.