Authors: Joseph McElroy
In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or
we
had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared—twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.
Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The
radiance
given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had
done
the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.
Scientists eventually knew pretty well how the "persons" of survivors had worked. Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower. How this turned the whole or entire person into a multiconvergent window radiating communication and genuine feeling outward was not yet known. But meanwhile there was work to do every morning—"chores," as a prize-winning physicist put it.
One evening a freak storm put us in mind of what Mara had told Jim the day he posed as valley hermit. When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightning by an imbalance between earth and heaven. As Jim once said, this wonderful person may have meant by "heaven" nothing more than the lower, positively charged edges of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but then again she may have meant what she said. In the middle of the night we all got up to listen to our freak storm and check the terminals and endless tapes of our information bank. Just before dawn we looked at each other and knew that the storm had covered a silence we had not heard and that the bank was gone and with it the storm, and that we had contemplated all this before it had happened. Someone had saved one last P.O.B. device, or the government had; and if it had, it would announce that that was absolutely it, the People-Oriented Bomb had been unilaterally liquidated.
We found we could let go of all that data we had been doing. It had impacted and condensed into such a hard load that perhaps only the government could have resolved it, albeit through local control.
The weather was changing back to its old self. Sixty thousand new homes were built to be electrified by the great single-blade wind rotors of Wyoming. The World War Two one-and-a-quarter megawatt device atop Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont was repaired. Tales of the P.O.B. survivors persisted. Thinkers posited that if the People-Oriented Bomb had in fact generated a thought about itself in the mind of someone about to receive the naked, concrete effect of that logical possibility, the bomb’s new attention to the sexton’s polyester and to a derelict’s hoary, living tweed argued not only that the bomb might always have been under the control of the communal mind but, as the government suggested, might have been a figment of that mind.
Scientists had a harder time getting up in the morning, much less addressing their spectroscopes and proton skimmers. It was not that they were still dreaming of the unified field. It was the feeling that we all had missed something.
Which in turn kept us going. Which in turn kept alive—if memory is alive—the memory of our sometime bomb’s discrimination profile and what might ideally have happened if its aim had not been dispersed by so much adjacent non-living material. And so it was that we overheard, by chance or our own nature, that somewhere a People-Oriented Bomb would be set off in a chamber surrounded and sealed by life alone: a chamber planted with soil and ceilinged by soft, breathing skin, a chamber walled by leaf and hill, by live animal flesh and blood, containing at its target center an unborn child.
Spiraled back then into the waking night, we saw we should have believed ourselves when by the light of our own broken breath we had guessed ourselves to be relations. As among pockets of weather bagging here and there out of a rubber sheet of atmosphere; or like stories of the unknown that our light bends into in order to come out as some further end that we make near; or like these witnesses, some known to each other, watching a man wake in the middle of the night hearing his name called across grass and gravel and stones of a burial ground, each with its own name.
But it’s going to be O.K.
For whatever else we said, our relations are ourselves and there’s still time, though for what? It kept us going. For we had succeeded during that moment of the people bomb in forgetting all that had preceded it.
The past, though, is beautiful and, according to recent healers, "done with" (what you will) up to but including a singer’s physician with a countryhouse interest in plumbing, so secretly arrived at a New Jersey cemetery that he had a long walk from his car with his anguished companion, and he remembers as if it had happened this same dear magic one beside him somewhere in a dentist’s chair and leaning over to the porcelain bowl and vomiting such worms that his imagination apologizes with silent passion adding then the vacuum system he knows of designed in all its lines (and, not least, into the straw-mode-tube mouth-sucker) to handle a sea of saliva under city regulations "hopefully" ensuring that in the event of cloggage in the basement, the backup won’t upflush the plumbed waste of the building’s other users into your very mouth happily tickled or alternately press-sucked by your dentist’s gurgling tube. A definite mouthful! but why—in the medic’s darkling mind at the instant when a woman’s voice called a man’s name in the night cemetery who stretched and stood up as if we had been asked if on the horizon we lacked anything by chance or our own nature’s guesswork and suddenly a figure proved it such as an event that collapses two years into one, or folk, or two lost instants.
And when the man’s voice, its hand upon a New Jersey headstone under a moon multiplied only by all who saw by it, called back hoarsely, "You were right," our heart had burst had it been not already divided through all of us and more.
Though he had not sounded a word during his whole sleep.
The wind had come and turned about him.
He had been returned from one surface of the universe to another.
He was thinking, The unborn child was Margaret’s; was Sarah’s; was what you do as the result of the dream, wherever it slipped into you.
We stood on not the head of the pin but
pin-pointed.
So we’re upside down-loded only to find in that state of liberation that gravity is what you make it. Long as you keep talking round or under the tables of power. We could talk not so much in our sleep as in others’. Light pursuing other light. Which is what light is the pursuit of. As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.
"The Hermit-Inventor!" called the man across the Windrow night cemetery suddenly aware of others here besides the young woman walking toward him.
"He
said that!" And in the silence he turns a degree or two staring toward what might be in back of him, the direction of the wind? no the presence of or scent of someone else here in this stage of his life where he came he recalls in order to test his windowhood tracewise like a do-it-yourself EKG (for don’t go near a hospital, his plant-waterer neighbor Norma, now happier in her marriage, reported the woman Kimball virtually
ordering
her when Norma had a serious, even painful dragging in her uterus and her husband lately engrossed in non-invasive medical technology, malpractice precedent, and newly opening areas of environmental law had told her it was fibroids while himself contemplating a new Kimball workshop in part because Grace Kimball had intrigued him with strange talk of new weather generated by new air in part told her by a manic old lady who remembered only that she was from New Jersey, which is not why Mayn is here in Windrow cemetery in the middle of the night having dreamed what he can only now know was not his first dream): while we, who will take his part even if he will not, recapture the events of three hours or so ago that
now
remember
us,
having happened in the ancient city fifty miles from here; and, remembering us, these events find local habit
in
us; and, in twin next rooms, two screens we’ve found out how to join in us need no Dreaded Modulus to trans-hither and trans-yon.
But we don’t now know
how
we found out how—except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could
only
digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.
As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding
Hamletin, Hamlet,
and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous
Hamlet
operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly
heard
trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some
heart
in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s
Otello
though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie—surely
Verdi
here in this warehouse
Hamletin!
—and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom .../... is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery . . . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.
Many more agreements which we will get to as they to us, and no surprising number of things to these two who held hands in the theater, disengaged them when moist-warm, looked at each other’s profiles, sat sometimes one or other forward in the seat so the other gave the spine a firm, wonderful rub as much the breeze of passion as any light bending down at them from the stage, this immigrant couple who argued and played and talked and argued always in some suddenly and glimmeringly unpredictable agreement of near-touch like lovers who ring each other up three times per day and, at that, can aria and game through their pair-bonded circulatory systems to heart’s content like aliens (with green cards) who are three hundred percent married and flying always into loss of home and into the sea between that still takes them out of themselves and to themselves, let Grace Kimball (whom he has never met) reincarnate herself as she will as priestess of le Swing, doctor of Open Marriage, promoter of posture, poet-lariat of addiction that explains everything except Clara and her husband, isn’t that true . . . ?