Women and Men (146 page)

Meanwhile, hey Mir’, so what happened at school? She says Miss Heard substituted. It’s high school, Jim. I’m mad. I ask what happened. Miriam shrugs, smiles, throws me a curve, and screen becomes Heard’s first day substituting in
junior
high:

My name is Ruth M. Heard. / What’s the M for? / Mean Mother. / That’s two Ms, someone else adds. /
M
squared, would you be up to squares and square roots, love? / And in the snickering silence she gave a ten-minute account of square roots and squaring and cubing and no one gave her shit, then she reminded herself what class this was, but she shut us all up warning us this was a two-class-in-a-row substitution and she’s going to take us on an unscheduled trip soon. For tomorrow we had to walk one city block and write on two sheets of paper (one side only) everything "amazing" we saw. Plus, bring in, ready to tell class, the most plausible lie we could find—and when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?—that’s a burglar with self-respect, luv—What’s that? the same kid said who now had his particles glowing and would try to make it his show. / Oh, you set fire to your neighborhood munitions factory, you blow up the government printing office. / Oh yeah, that’s me, a lot of us said. What does it pay? I asked. / Liars, she said; you don’t want to be anarchists.

But the screen cuts me back, Jim, to its counterpart. So off in Honor Block Charlie and the others catching the seven-o’clock news are receiving the first commercial, the price your eyes pay for the disasters shown so far and to come; while I, if not otherwise engaged, find on one screen (—am I the real prison guard?—) a glass telephone booth all by itself under a night street light with the receiver off the hook lying on the ledge, shredded directory dangling by a chain like a higher power not yet recognized, and on the other I’ve got a woman’s arm and hand absolutely still, that’s all except for the address of the free dental clinic uptown, but on the first screen you see the woman all of her
except
that hand—and it’s my mother shaking her head slow, her eyes not coming to mine: and all I want is to get her on one screen, and is she watching the road? Look, let alone the once-a-week screamer that the Chiefs ignore (and it’s the Indians who’re always having a talk with him who screams once a week on Saturday morning, "The White Dog must go! The White Dog must go!") the real wilderness Jim is what’s not said by mouth which if they could hear it they would be making out transfers for one-eighth of the population conservatively and shuffling them off to Box A to have their rotten cells pulled at Clinton on the Canadian border where you say a Russian bomber has the capability of finding an unscreened layer to slip through over the prairies to detach us from our installations, and is that where the unscheduled mountain I hear about here at Ground Zero is coming from when it comes? a super-compact nugget that when you let the pressure out, swells to an overnight mountain?, that’s right, what do you do if you don’t pick up on either screen? I’m beyond those speeches at the playground fence, discussions they were, while the German lady Mrs. Erhard (who says Yes under her breath after every fourth of your words) kept a watch down the block across the street; and sometimes I stopped in to buy a magazine, and I asked her when she would be ripped off again, Mrs. Erhard, for she had a little pistol, but I wonder if she’s alive in Florida.

And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his
Times
with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.

Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious
except
the Chilean.

Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside—and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor—there isn’t one—and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old—I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too—and the lidless lid—because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining?—and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise—but no countdown—beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that
we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming,
I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the promise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

—of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—

—for what?
translates the dream out of some distant lingo, and
pir quanha quoia-san
comes to me as far from
por que
as
why
is from
because
—

—route for strange cloud-contents drawn coastward by what (?) that waited there?

But at the time of this dream—dreams settle nothing, you guessed—I did not know these people. And Spence, who, come to think of it, did later mention to Efrain, when Efrain got out, a meteorologist who had meditated ocean coasts in South America and inland coasts in North, was sure new winds were schemed with contingency underplan to quick-pollute selected areas of the U.S. possibly by Wide Load in motion eastward, and Spence, prob’ly
un
lunatic himself, told a touring foreign agent that a Known Daughter knew more about this because she and her father had made separate trips southwest recently especially in area from which Wide Load or Toxic Mountain (code name bearing built-in correctional facility) was thought to be commencing, and Spence wondered if our South American friend had written me—and I in my dream interpreted by Juan economically called to the knuckles that were white from the drag of the cargo namely cell plus me, and they didn’t have any hair on them so they were Miriam’s or my father’s, and the swings got less until the weight of fallen rain held my container from swinging much, so the open end was up to the heavens but the plane went away and then the weight got so much the cell was set down on the beach with a terrible bump I’m sure but, being partly weightless and in my sleep, I didn’t feel it, and I called to Miriam and she didn’t hear.