Women and Men (143 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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