Women and Men (17 page)

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

No, this is December when I was down for Apollo. We’re near launch, near the big sneeze, I recall my grandmother telling me the Earth sneezed once to launch a giant bird westward, we’re on the infield watching the great electronic scoreboard record the countdown and there is the rocket and a flat gleam of bay that’s part of the Banana River at the edge of the grass, and here’s the son of a bitch I’ve already seen him with once back in Cocoa Beach in the correspondents’ telephone room, but now they’ve got their backs to me and I remember my man wears no press badge, and they’re side to side facing the sea. My man in his dark suit has his hands clenched behind him; the other man, Spence, seems smiling when he turns to him—I’ve seen that smile when he listened to me—and I keep hearing him say to my man, "No," but also in combinations like "You know"—plus whatever; and when the countdown hits ten minutes I’m closer, but a woman with a tripod asks them to move and they step apart, glance behind without seeing, then walk away mingling singly, and after the launch they’re nowhere.

The launch?

But the second time—the second time that night mattered most.

Ah, says the girl, you had a lot of reasons to look this man up, I really believe that.

My back to the bay I stood halfway up the infield grass toward the grandstand.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm. Contact.
Here is a holy man in a baseball cap.

Mmhmm. I ‘member.

No, this wasn’t this trip. This was December. This was on my left while next to it on the right were commentators in the three network trailers—trailers, were they?—and I was looking away from the rocket, the bright launch complex.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm—
look away, look away, CBS, ABC. And NBC. Trailers had their picture windows at the right angle. People inside had their legs crossed. But outside in front were some small tables—card tables, weren’t they?

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

Glad to have you aboard—corroboration and so forth.

Mmhmm.

Moral support, and standing by one of them was my man, and the man sitting down at a mike was a Voice of America man I once met in Washington at a Softball game—turned out he was the South American voice, and later he seemed not to know who I meant by the tall, bald man, but here now he assumed I and the man knew each other. He and the man—he was Chilean I learned later—were talking as I walked up. The Voice man started to introduce us, but the Chilean bowed to me and said we’d met.

I don’t know any Chilean, the girl murmurs.

It is very beautiful, the Chilean said—a squint of gaiety pinched the points of his eyes. He would look out toward the rocket, then at me; I only at him, with my back to the rocket though I saw behind him the picture windows of the networks: men on camera recrossing their legs and lighting up, while they thought of something to say while the hold went on.

It’s money, I said.

Money? He had a slight stammer but you didn’t pick it up, he used it to hold back what he was going to say. They risk their necks for a few rocks, he said; and I said, It’s not money they’re being paid off with, staring at him. He dropped his eyes to my shirt pocket where I’d neglected to unpin my press badge.

Why . . . why . . . The girl’s whole body stirs vaguely.

They have no necks, he said; look how the helmet sits on the shoulder: a new skin will develop in which one can live without the pressure of our atmosphere.

And the blood pulsing from inside? I said.

A new cool blood. All one type. Type R. Reptilian skin with fine patterns, and these creatures will come to understand each other without speaking, one will be like another, they will all be married to the future, they will live in zero gravity, no gravity will be wasted, and if they find the wherewithal and the
tranquil
control, they will be interchangeable, I think I have heard this said—I don’t think it is original with me—their hair will not need to be cut, they will die if they wish and the wish will be beyond burial or incineration —that’s as I’ve taken it, and I don’t know a booster from an Apollo.

Greek to you?

Greek I can read a few words for myself, though if they say liquid oxygen is being used I am prepared to believe even if I do not know. It is their wings, yet it is wings they fly from, to become what?

News, I said, but what
he
said felt like life or death.

It’s a very good show, he said with that slight intensity of stammer.

The girl rolls over and bends her back and brings up her knees and snuggles back against Mayn. How long have you been divorced? You said your daughter’s working on the environment?

I went for something to say, I didn’t know what I said: chemistry, I remember saying, you know your chemistry, people can be made interchangeable.

Nothing to speak of, he said. The chemistry of trade.

He made me think of his prisoner. Your prisoner, I said, and heard "Your witness," "your witness," "your murderer."

My prisoner, he said. My economical prisoner.

Your profession? I said, but he replied, An unusual inmate, but he had to spend his time somehow; he was attempting to take some thoughts he had and, I believe, collapse them into one.

The unconscious.

Oh yes, the
Colloidal
Unconscious was how he put it. But we were interrupted and I see I have to visit him again when I am back in his part of the world.

Colloidal, I said.

I checked, said the gentleman: it is between a solution and a suspension—fine particles in a liquid, you know. Homogenized milk but not a dust storm. Particles too small to see under a microscope. But for the unconscious I do not know what it is. But I carry it onward, you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious? I asked.

Sounds like news, he said.

Something else is what it sounds like, something else I have never heard out loud before, or a crackbrained American business.

But the Colloidal Unconscious, said the South American gentleman, I would not speak of it. I don’t know any Colloidal Unconscious. It is, as you say, something else.

Maybe it’s news, I said.

It’s news, he said, looking away toward Apollo 17 and the sea, both of which had stopped existing for the while, but he wanted to say something more.

They take the elevator, I said, up to the top floor, make a few phone calls to influential people, loved ones, then they’re off. If I did some homework I’d care more.

The other way round, he said, and I felt him to be a brother.

Mmhmm.

What prison were you in? I asked, and Spence grinned in my mind, never forget it, like he
knew
me—which of course he did.

I was not inside, the Chilean said. I was paying a visit. I left the city in the morning, I was back in time for a late dinner. A Vietnam restaurant cheers one up, an authentic one as opposed to half the Vietnam restaurants in Paris.

The prison was a pleasant ride through the hills. You are almost as persistent as another man against whom I once stammered; but I stammer slightly in several languages.

Santiago? I thought, the approach is through wide, flat fields of shining green. Caracas—Caracas has hills. Are there hills outside Athens, and a Vietnam restaurant? The ones in Paris, but a prison in Paris and a highly conceptual prisoner? Possible.

(Are you kidding, the girl murmurs; of course there are hills; it’s a regular amphitheater.)

But Spence materialized at the corner of the press grandstand. My man had seen him at once, and changed absolutely and asked me what it was that I wanted, as if I had been after information.

I said, Your prisoner was not in prison for his beliefs, I gather.

He had found a way around waste, or a way to stem the anguish of it. The passerby—what was it he said?—who carelessly strikes off the head of a sunflower. The thoughts we may or may not call our own that go nowhere until we immerse ourselves in the larger colloid. The need to go away but the discovery that we can go away by staying and being left. I see I must visit him again. When I return from California one day I may. One day soon, was the offhand remark the South American gentleman I think made against the Voice of America man transmitting.

But what I had really wanted to know was what the tall, fine, bald man had been doing with that Spence in the Press Center telephone room back on Cocoa Beach; that is, what Spence wanted with him. No: that’s not true: I wanted to hear him talk about astronauts evolving. No, that’s not it either.

What is next? I think he asked—he asked, yes, absolutely, asked instead of walking away from me. The Voice man was sitting at the card table talking into a pretty good facsimile of an old Western Electric saltshaker mike. He had a humorous face—don’t ask me why. The night air open to South America. The big boys behind glass smoking minutes away.

Next? I said; you mean Skylab in May? I said.

This is not your field, no? he asked frankly.

I am adaptable, I said, but I wondered what he’d been told, and if so, had it been by Spence?

So I have recently heard, the South American gentleman said.

It’s pretty far from my humdrum dispatches about missile economics and strip-mining sulfurous coal off the face of the Earth.

Oh I hardly believe you, said the man standing beside me, but between the two edges of his words I found a thought of my own: Far from barroom chat, from information capable of being phoned in, information on space spinoffs, on the highest clouds of all that condense out of dust from outer space and shine from the sun’s silent light practically all night long; congress on drought in the Sahel desert, on global weather network; proliferation of seismic monitoring devices; the minor beauty of the obsolete missile such as the Sprint; the "hardness" of the "hard target" offering endless economic scenarios where, regardless of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), three Minuteman III warheads "delivered" upon three Russian silos having a roughly U.S.-style "hardness" have an eighty percent chance of taking out one silo, whereas seven M-III w.-h.’s would have the same percent chance of knocking out one silo three times as hard; the good-story myths of offshore cloud-seeding interception to dry up Castro’s 1970 sugar crop, the Venus hothouse scenario turning New York into Venice, the two-billion-dollar Russo-Canadian "black film" scenario to fly in ten million tons of city soot to cover the Arctic ice cap and melt the north-polar glacier; far from this yet in the presence of the after-all-pretty-ordinary South American elite bald mustached intelligentsio, I got the aftertaste of what I was prepared to say but did not: a burn of bad breath vacuumized into a stress-factor of empty words: Mylar-insulated sleeping bags the coming thing already here, would they take your stain? (I sipped a bourbon in Oregon); clearer X-rays (I felt the Chicago cold beer follow my system all the way down); laser gear spots continental drift (soda water on some coast at either end of the American landbridge bubbling up into the tube of your body driven by convection currents somewhere among the all too believable, faith-informed deep plates they make up below our crust); and the micro-electronic revolution that had been spurred, spawned, sparked, and sped by Russian superiority light months ago in blast-off thrust to where and when, and by NASA’s consequent need to reduce weight in order to get off the ground, hence miniaturize, reduce space—hence brainstorms that sent computer exports up fourteen hundred percent the first ten years of NASA, Inc. Take Chrysler cars’ new clean-air ignitions, their new distributors computer-checked by the same system used in Saturn rockets, same system that will check your windshield-wiper motor. Potential barroom information at rest, and I have learned (but when?) to hate and fear potential, is that it? But I said to the gentlemanly, somewhat hard though melancholy and subtly exiled Chilean here in the final month of 1972, No sir, it was not my field, and maybe this was why I saw through it, and as for me I thought all this show tonight —Alabama Wallace in a wheelchair, former Truman on ye deathbed—and throw in that operator Spence long known long unknown half-life magnet—

What
do you see through it? asked the man.

Fire, I said; games, I said (and answering this finely displaced guy was like being traced or calling up the trace in me, you know some old inch of wire with congealed words in it coiled in your gut where you swallowed it a century ago, some mineral that belonged to somebody else and after all this time it’s sort of cushioned and cocooned by your congealed juices and greases but it’s starting to do something, move or give off impatience, I didn’t know and was not accustomed to talk or think in this vague way), fire, games, speed, a touch of war, sky’s the limit, I said. Great American vehicle floating a loan!

Very good, said the Chilean; I see something else.

What is it? I said, and realizing I wanted to find something else to say to this guy—but what?—I said, The unconscious? You sure it’s out there?

Yes; it will be there even after it is gone, said the Chilean (though he may not have meant the unconscious). It is taking us there. It is like a nation, an institution. It is not people, though it is like greed. I say
us.
I am of the Americas.

It’s people giving their destiny away so it’s all clear and set, I said (not myself). I still hadn’t said "it," I might have said more—even me—but the Chilean who I didn’t yet know was Chilean, much less involved in the government and here in the States on some kind of business apparently for Allende—and I wonder if he got called back or got back or got stuck here, caught here—he stopped me with his eyes that included me in the vista he swept from side to side, the fixed image of the rocket some three miles behind me, the mob on the grass—

—Mmhmm, mob, she murmurs, mob.

What enables the three men to get away, he said, is the same that gets them back, and it goes with them but it stays too.

(Well, this sounded as bad as the trace wire in my gut giving off rays perhaps.)

It has no ordinary body, it can be felt when the blast comes, though I have never seen a blast-off except on television, the red gantry like an oil rig is silhouetted but close up the real thing that stands out in the void of the fire and darkness is the anatomy, you see, the building of the rocket, the bones of the idea. Last night before it was rolled away we saw the mobile service structure against the rocket with a vertical column of slanting parallels that are stairs for the men servicing the rocket but are an idea too: the anatomy—