Women and Men (115 page)

So Jim, turning to nod to the major physical presence of Pearl W. Myles, who said, "I am
so
sorry, Jim; is there anything I can do?", did not ask her what she thought she was doing here—nor who was "we" which he’d half-heard instead of "I"—he wanted to ask her some good question since she was there. But Margaret reappeared and for a second looked like she would give the unknown Pearl Myles a social kiss.

So it happened (and he knew his grandmother knew) that the Hermit-Inventor of New York (who as we now say "lost a day or at any rate a sunset in there somewhere"), when he was still a mile horizontally away and, of course, sixty to seventy feet vertically down from the cliff apartment, heard the breath of the old Anasazi healer from further away than was logistically credible, and he knew he had heard before the thought expressed in words he hesitated to believe he was now hearing, particularly in the Irish accent—or Eiro-German—that he was in fact never able to prove came from him or from the late Anasazi healer.

Toward me the darkness comes rattling,

In the great night my heart will go out.

For the old man, on this afternoon that was a day later than the Hermit-Inventor reckoned it should have been, seemed dead on the Hermit’s arrival; and upon examination of all that was left by the Hermit-Inventor’s improvised standard of the state of tissues softly in the windless air waving where the old healer’s fine-worn neck had been, he had been dead a while, no question: the point was not what had happened to the body from the neck down (it had powdered at last and risen to a low cloud which Mena, the javelina authority, insisted took the form of the lowest noctilucent cloud ever seen, when those bright-banded phenomena had been observed at heights well above the stratosphere for centuries, indeed above the stratopause, mesophere, and mesopause—fifty miles—all of these officially undiscovered in Indian summer J893)—but the real question was how the last words of the Anasazi, born the year before one of the earliest described occurrences of his own pet cosmic window, had reached the Hermit-Inventor come to meet him in the
absence
of their
utterer;
indeed after the soft, successful exhalation of death.

But in their friendly way those last words
had
come bearing a memory the Hermit didn’t know was in him: the actual moment when a later incarnation of the Hermit suspected a magnetic break in the thin, precious, dangerous ozonosphere, the effects of which doubtless normally mutational yet the results not (for Margaret) death or sudden aging but an absorption of future: and at the margins of this swift vein of gold, blue, purple, violet, gray, and green seeming to incinerate the profile of ridge and crevasse, each peak and hollow reflected sometimes by a sunny sea of levitation, came a brainstorm—yes, providing with light financially unprofitable farms or whole hamlets at night by injecting some chemical, that in 1893 he could not name nitrogen oxide, into the appropriate layer (if you can find it in our junked atmo) round Earth’s sphere, a colossal halo to be sure, but a help to poor and insomniac peasants who might keep busy when they couldn’t sleep.

Yet Margaret, as she told Jim who never forgot but also seldom quite remembered how he reenacted her habit, stayed busy when asleep: witness the long afternoon, for the Princess dreamed a second simultaneous dream to go with the dream of the council led by her lover’s brother, and in this companion dream she saw into a grave but had no words, no mouth! for the valuable thing that waited for her and in the dream she went on to wake up and go through green trees and wooded water to find that same grave on a richly tilled hill and there was the grave which opened itself to her thought and
she
reached down to find a gun and an egg but not a bone or hair of that grave’s undoubted tenant and she was surrounded by the dustiest of desert Indians in this rich place who edged her closer to the grave telling her in unison (but she was the dusty one, not the Indians) what was no threat at all—that clearly she had lived the life of this dead person and now
was
this person reincarnate; but all she could feel, apart from relief that they meant no harm to her, was that these people from the southwestern desert were speaking beliefs other than their own, for
they
had no more belief in reincarnation than they had acquaintance with the cool, damp air of this hill with its eastern leaf forest, and when she gained courage to tell them this, they answered that she was the one who had told them about reincarnation; and when she felt awful and said, "You’re right, of course; what was I thinking of?" they swayed as one and, before she could reach for the egg or the gun, these people had resolved themselves into a fluid as thick as the blood of a worm and as sweet as the bean of a new world and had coursed into the grave which was then no more than the hillside—

—Revegetated? asks an environmentalist, setting up obstacles where none exist to a reasonable settlement.

That’s a promise, politicks the trained interrogator "brought in from Outside" who likes it so much he thinks he gon’ come back ever’ year with his growing family so long as there are at least the traditional mirages of water to support the summer swimming rites so common to his people.

A promise? That’s what you say to all your people prior to torturing them with doubts.

—re vegetated for sure over the long haul, avers the interrogator speaking English with a vengeance: but first we need to know what the journalist Mayn thought he was doing that February day in northern New Mexico, first trying to get a helicopter to fly him o’er Ship Rock and the Four Corners Power Plant, later rendezvou’ing at the Roc’ with one Raymond Vigil, an Indian known to regard Mayn as a useful publicist, even powerful, and a radical environmentalist-woman Dina with whom Mayn abruptly departed leaving his rented car to be returned to the agency in Farmington by the portly young energy-conscious Vigil while Mayn himself vanished south in the direction of Albuquerque, the voice of Vigil pursuing him like a back-seat driver.

The question is hard to believe; it asks so much and gives so little . . .

... but it is not done with: for the daughter of Mayn not many months later arrived at Utah International’s doorstep asking similar questions about strip mining the Indians, re vegetating the injured sky, and ascending the treacherously softish rock of the thirty-mile-adjacent ship to find out if, from there, one could see the ground-level lovers’ plate marking the intersection of four states, or so the unexpected postcard to the dusty correspondent-woman Lincoln, enrolled in one of Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops, revealed —though to someone who herself was of more interest to the multiple interrogator than Mayn’s daughter’s friendly acquaintance with the poignant woman Lincoln could ever be.

Like Mayn, whom he resembles at some angles though possessed of a killer talent which Mayn never acquired perhaps because he has had a will to
no
power during the formative years, unlike Grace Kimball, who had the will to power ("originally from," and envisioning Manhattan from, much further away than New Jersey), but never any interest in killing her fellow man, the interrogator has lately had to rely on the dreams of others, which if he can’t get them to vouchsafe to the next room’s acoustics, he has obtained a scan of, through surprisingly old surplus equipment captured from authentic media geniuses of earlier basal-research ilk whose mind-and-heart sensors got shunted off into projects for handicapped (which viewers of the century in question became anyway), shelved just like those secretly launched odd-lot orbital platforms, for the duration.

And it doesn’t check out.

Yet while we, the interrogator’s momentarily stoned trusties, have checked it out, the whole Wide Load kept moving, accompanied by its monster night; it won’t pull over just while we take time to reflect upon the obstacle it is until too soon it’s gone, damn damn damn. Yet we already remember, in whatever order, the things animate and admineral and postvegetal in that Wide Load passing in-and-with its own privately operated night, that is there’s a real unit being hauled and at least someone in it going through the motions.

The interrogator has his uses. He notes lies extracted by, well, pain. Like that the Princess had two dreams consequent upon the afternoon of the sunset-on-hold (the dream in which the council said she was to cause the Prince’s death yet migration soul-wise and the dream about the grave) when a third also was betrayed, the one she told the Anasazi healer and he ascribed to his radically younger colleague Owl Woman just before his death with its aural aftermath, in which she’s hastening to get to the place where she is to see something at dawn but dawn comes too soon, and her wad is shot. The interrogator also comes up with insights in the field of the comparatively social: such that we have found in countries with coasts an extreme reluctance on the part of the populace to accept the death of family members, much less their disappearance.

Yet Jim did
not
cry and carry on. And Brad had his "Day." Yet that is not what we mean. Brad did cry and carry on, and inconsolably, but, as the interrogator missed, Brad and Mel Mayn both accepted the death of Sarah: she wasn’t coming back; she had followed the strains of her violin conceivably, if you call that music waves.

Whereas the Anasazi medicine man left his thing behind him (if you call those words ‘bout "darkness rattling"
thing)
when he went on in largely powder form, or, more precisely, honest particle form, having, as the interrogator quickly and emptily notes, been for the longest time beyond life
or
death.

But on a day when Jim was just standing at the edge of the goddamn music room watching Brad cry and groan and swim and wound the air having saved up all this shit for a month during which Jim would wake early in his own room and stand up still asleep and look out the window then go at once to Brad’s room (which had the dormer let into it and, by the bed, a part of the ceiling came slanted down low) and wake him by touching his shoulder at the same moment as he spoke his name (he wore red-and-white pyjamas, Jim a T-shirt and jockeys), Jim was as able as the interrogator to pick up inconsistencies. But he had reached a time in his friendship with his grandmother when he wasn’t sure any more; and what happened to the Navajo mother when the Prince and Princess separately left, he after her, looked like some weird balancing-out that was like See what the future brings.

But his mother had been the one to say Go away where you belong, etcetera—hadn’t she said that? (yes, in the extreme quiet of her bedroom he had heard it)—yet she was the one who wasn’t here. He was falling, he knew, but he could not hit the floor like Brad. He fell forward, and maybe as much for both of them as Brad did this tragic bit for both of them when Jim couldn’t cry—why
would
he?—but this wasn’t all he couldn’t do.

He couldn’t ask Margaret any more stuff like what about that other egg, the shell splashed with the rainbow albumen of the first egg the lion ate before turning into the wolf whose entrails flared upon the sky. Anyway, Margaret was mad, because when Alexander said Lake Rompanemus was probably still warm and she said the wind was not, and Alexander agreed with her to keep her happy, she replied, And it’ll be hailing by sunset.

One thing: the Princess had felt the future that day: takes a while to digest, like Ira Lee the Indian halfback said in the huddle, she swallowed a pin when she was only nine but didn’t feel the prick till she was nineteen—

the day the Sun wouldn’t set and she knew she would leave: that was fact, to be believed; and so was the Prince’s mother coming back to life three days later and scaring the other, more administrative son half to death, on top of his brother having left pursuant of the foreign Princess who was traveling on her gift horse, not the at times unreal giant bird that ate horses and had left for Choor in the middle of the night.

But there’s an egg unaccounted for, except in that dream’s grave where the People, against the everlasting cannon, in the trench, in the trees, in the sky that is itself orbiting, express their sympathetic solidarity by resolving into a fluid neither cold nor warm pouring in, pouring in—sing it—which they wouldn’t do for Andrew Jackson in their Seminole forms in the Florida caper, getting shot, getting shot like the "red sticks" Andrew Jackson called them (and they were) and as ignorant of civilized football as were the skulls which Jim and Brad’s cereal box during summer, ‘45, said Indians kicked around inventing soccer. Until Jim, one day long after he had gone into facts with a vengeance delicate enough to be kept by him from himself though it’s just a job as the fact-oriented interrogator once slyly, ruefully said, dividing his chaired, nay tabled interrogatee-like data extracted from it into dead ends or rock bottom and further possibility, found the egg one day, did Jim, and didn’t know who’d made it up, him or Margaret. Except he did know that, before the afternoon of Brad’s Day ended upon the continuing cadence of Brad’s grieving breath, Bob Yard sounded off at last, after being subdued for an hour and a half, his shifty eyes moving soberly under the dark-chalked blazons of his eyebrows (but Hold it, offers the interrogator: Sarah, the mother in absentia, was possibly about to be found out,
nicht wahr?,
and so—)

No! No!
howls a voice in the next room, there were those who knew about Brad and where he came from, and didn’t talk, and most others didn’t know including the brothers themselves, though Jim guessed. Not, however, that day at the beach when he wanted to throttle his brother but didn’t know why (read
how).

Yes, cool and subdued for a long time as if the presence of death they were in was Brad’s, who nonetheless moved—Bob Yard at last angrily entered a dispute. Alexander had returned to report that the hurricane was not developing after all, although the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms rattled as if the whole house were being moved; and Pearl W. Myles, who had sat long-legged on a straight chair looking from person to person until Margaret, having cleared away and washed up, returned to inquire what was happening to Pearl’s classes at the high school today, said factually that she had felt the low pressure in this vicinity since early morning when she was having orange juice. Alexander said there were whole belts of pressure and Margaret, who was still peeved with him, said she didn’t believe a word of it, and Bob Yard in that abruptly deep, grating voice said, "That’s why air travels horizontal."