Women and Men (11 page)

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.