Women and Men (84 page)

In fact, girls
are
interested in westward transition, though don’t worry it’s not your responsibility, we’ll get on it, checking all hitch-hikers between here and the roadblocks. Flick Mayn and her boyfriend united by his small car were seen to cross the April Mississippi and had been passing westward for miles and miles previous to this. Once the community’s infra-red satellite momentarily distracted by the unforeseen detour of its principal responsibility the Pan-Continental Wide Load, for which our road network was built only to become its baneful pressure to widen and expand, lost Flick and her boyfriend at Niagara Falls.
They
had to help
us
pick them up again, when, on our scope, they veered violently north to attend a tragedy at the Shakespeare complex at Stratford, Ontario, entering the bustling town as the sun fell.

Later, on their way (resumed under the infra-genic velvet dew of an Ontario dawn) to Midland, Michigan, we didn’t need the satellite to learn that Flick so asked the information office at the Dow Chemical plant there near the confluence of the Chippewa and other rivers with river namesakes elsewhere what it thought about dioxin’s suppression of immunity in guinea pigs, and what this thing was that dioxin did to mice exposed between the sixth and fifteenth days of gestation, that the voice of the information officer when it extended itself with suppressed anger informed Mayn’s daughter that agitators went no further than here and could apply by mail for information.

Yet Flick and her tall, dark, wired-up boyfriend, a former sometime actor on soaps, heard in the voice of its own answer that cleft palates aren’t caused only by dioxin, whether or not subcutaneously (or was it—torture-wise-san —sub-cuticley?) administered. And we hear the interrogator’s mind working overtime in multiples of Larry (who knows about Mayn what others without knowing might think useful). But the interrogator has said, not, Is it administered under the skin or under the cuticle and/or fingernail?—but has said,
Sue
(while others nearby are overcome by old lyric ceremonies of Navajo voices:

Far as man can see,

Comes the rain,

Comes the rain with me
—)

"Sue
. . .
sue"
the interrogator voices name exact but weighs which over which we can’t tell except in knowing we are the available relations— "you have admitted there was a room, there were traditional daiquiris in it, and it is quite long ago as the hailstones fly if we divide the labor of remembering a lime-green surgical blouse and matching trousers by reported dramatic weight loss, yet" (Wait, a budding community breaks in half-truthfully, that was the next room, the next
room
was where the green was surgical), "and a
woman"
continues the inquiry, "who had given birth yet wasn’t
so
sure what had happened, which is what you get when you go for this really
un-
natural, anti-traditional childbirth that irregardless promises the people hopefully increased consciousness of their personal histories"—and in that daiquiried room there was a Martin or Marvin—or both, in this age of plural priorities, if we make up our collected mind to go for both—but both, though it feels right to us, does not feel right to the interrogator in charge, who turns its potential he has no time for into the heated grin of a headset earphone fusing our ears with the molded plastic remelting them like they are same plastic family to be remolded, until through what we painfully hear, as our ear becomes the headset substance and is hard to tell apart from the sound of our own, well, torture, we hear the unmistakable pangs of a digital hand coming to birth from an analogous ear, why don’t we freak out? is it the revelation of it, the breakthrough transplant? why can’t we decide if this persuasion torture inflicted on us for having spoken out of both sides of our mout’ is real or not? was there some experimental anesthetic clocked into our re-system? we just dunno—and particularly about hand reborn from ear: it’s a new thing but our own, and the hand in question isn’t any garden-variety hand, or throw in a tree if you are all that confident, or human baby that like the coyote pup puts in its first year dependent on
its
parents: but is a hand that’s ready to go (to
ir,
in Spanish,
fortgehen,
which we already remember from our transplant meant Us, or
go away,
in
aller-Mayn)
which is why the interrogator with a generous, headsman’s execution basket suitable for dirty
or
clean laundry but just now full of exam questions for the hand (not afraid of being shot
or
chopped down) to take one cryptic potluck pick of, suspends the grabbag rule and with the utmost condescension as if we were black and white to be opened and shut asks what question
wed
like to be interro-gated on, for Martin (or whoever asked the newborn mother if she would have another daiquiri) may have been the name of a diver who cooperated with the police and a freelance documentary team trying to TV-produce out of New York’s East River the body of a girl-researcher and former Olympic swimmer reported with terrible inaccuracy to know too much about an impending prison break with hemispheric repercussions, but the diver and his man-hours came up only with a report of an unknown sound, he had been hearing in fact things down there (the Brooklyn Bridge groaning in its crypts via ghosts of the bends) and if girl-researcher lost in her strangely attractive low-gravity sleep down there manages like some women to "get herself found," she will still be an unknown saved (if saved)—while
Marvin
looks like being Larry’s father, the sometime husband not yet finally divorced of—

Sue
be it, the interrogator jokes, reading the mere slip of a question which by ear-hand we fished from the bloody basket: to which our answer is that Sue, formerly of Marv, Sue, and Larry, would not have been at a party so pair-bound as all that: therefore, the woman who was heard to say "Sue" names another of that name
or
is urging action upon her hearer.

But the Dow information officer complete with company cleft palate has been relieved by another who would hum these westward kids Flick and boyfriend a lullaby if he didn’t have all this information on tap: e.g., that some nine years ago the British producer of the chemical that dioxin inadvertently derives from thought of closing the plant since, like, they had an explosion and some of the help developed diversified complications—got things—erupting as chloracne (Flick doesn’t need to take notes)—acne (no joke) pustules, inflammation of the hair follicles, heart trouble, bronchitis, spleen rift, liver lesion, what had you, excess gravity in lower limbs, we just want to get back to breathing and more—but here at Dow-Midland we have what we call your "Fool-Safe" (Flick does take a note, her phrase): say, a disk ruptures in a reaction vessel, the reservoir discharges into a holding tank larger than your original reaction vessel so your reaction would be quenched with water in 105 percent of cases. So there’s hardly anything actionable in our—

—but dioxin’s a pesky beast or herb, it will take a rain check for a few man-days only to return in the form of—

—rain itself, for will not the wings we flush away with prove the thing we fly?

But this stuff that clears up acne, the bean the nut the bush—whatever —said Spence years before at the far end of a Washington bar where Jim has met the South American woman (his son now having been born) and enlarged upon his prior answer to her question, namely, What sex? Far as
he
knew, the colonists two into one wound up with such deep memories of the other sex that such memories are built in!

—this stuff that’s going to revolutionize acne, quietly calls Spence from his position, I gather it thrives on
no
rain, right? (and no doubt he has gathered the name of the magic bush, plus a way to peddle news of the bean though Mayn won’t give him the time of day, he and Spence are so different) so why don’t we grow the bush—

—"Only God can create a cleft palate," the father wrote the daughter in reply to her account of the chemical plant written to him from a campsite on yet another Chippewa River, this one in Wisconsin, the lights of the motel over the water promising rest right here where they were, with their green Coleman stove open for business: and the trees and the stars and a hundred and fifty miles to go to a region of a thousand lakes but, for now, free of the wide highway where we cannot add to that loved campsite a Wide Load’s tracks free and full of cash on delivery.

Which same chemical-related "cleft palate" the little woman named Lincoln recalled as she sipped a new cup of Mexican coffee, the forgotten woman perhaps, contemplating the new "table," since the glamorous Latin couple, the woman of the marvelous piled auburn hair, the elegant, hard foreign man in gray flannel, have gone away leaving still the small bell of recognition in the correspondent-woman’s memory which is then only the dull disappointment when the woman Clara kind of snubbed her at the Body-Self Workshop saying that this restaurant was recommended by a singer she knew: until now the group of five impending diners before her became a group of three, a heavy set man, a tall young woman, and a dark-haired boy-man talking intensely to the man but
for
the girl; and Lincoln, watching them over her coffee cup, found the singer in Clara’s comment yielding to the thought that things were summoned in order to be cleared away (or us from their presence), like of the original fivesome the two somewhat older—the smaller, dark; the taller, flaxen-fair—they quietly detached themselves from the other three (who had been a group to themselves coming in like they’d been doing something together other than what the two women had), and when they three had come they had first signaled, more by a contented
not-
talking than by, then, a burst of intense comment from the dark-haired youth, that they (the broad-shouldered man with the gray hair and the girl and boy, both around twenty) brought into the place a fun that was like gossip: though now that the two women had gone (the dark one having given the boy a kiss he didn’t expect though didn’t not), the man and his young people weren’t talking much again, and the correspondent-woman watching them in her unused extra spoon felt that one of the young ones was "his," though who was it?, it shifted, and he was father to neither.

So that the correspondent-woman found the Chilean economist’s wife Clara blocking her—not with that snub but with her elect authority picturing for them all during workshop a magical area of "Cambodian" Vietnam where secret societies flourished like the crops which earlier colonists had striven to establish, all as if to enable her to cite the Cochin sage who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers. So that the correspondent-woman wished to be at the other table sharing with the man the company of those nice kids and not to part with her own senseless memories of Mister Guerrilla Prisoner-san, barefoot flying twice in twos neatly bound, down from the sky into the land-like dark cushion of tree-crowns and out of the blare of choppers noisy as creation’s opening day and out of the experience of their pilots.

But, the South American woman asks, two days after Mayn’s son’s first birthday, in 1961, it is
quiet
in these libration colonies fixed between Us and the moon? because
it feels
quiet—the great torus sealed up, the cows safely grazing down the spokes of the wheel, individuals fathoming their origins in couples that were dissolved on earth.

They chuckle with reciprocal memories.

Why hasn’t she ever questioned his sincerity in all this? begins Mayn with a seven
P.M.
grin, he’s been telling her he’s actually
in
that future
whatever
he’s doing
here,
and the colonists will be doing their future farming under ideal conditions getting eight hundred and fifty pounds of grain per acre per day and just like the desert greenhouses on the southeast shore of the Persian Gulf speed-picking tons of potatoes grown with unsupported roots—vegetables prospering on Styrofoam boards and spin-off colors spraying the roots that hang down below. We’re maximizing milk production using tomato-vine-fed goats that
weigh
a tenth what a cow weighs but give a quarter as much milk which will be all the sweeter if you keep the billies back on Earth and inseminate by space shuttle.

Why not scrambled messenger?

The matter-energy transit works better with two.

The
two
messengers.

Not to mention fish. In a weightless farm where gravity wouldn’t collapse their gills out of water, they could be raised
without
water. Yet since we’ve got artificial gravity, they’re raised in phosphate ponds that recreate the food chains we’ve snafu’d down here.

It all sounds possible, the woman said. And
your
place in it?

Mayn had to shake his head that she believed his basic report. Fantastic as his mother’s presence, that fantastically had never felt (whatever
else
it was) skeptical to her son.

And we in turn, like the diva, have to ask the interrogator (right back through our newly violated ear), Do you
question
the whereabouts of Mayn’s mother Sarah?

—and we get back not even pain through this torture device.

Do you question, we add, that she looked at him that day on the beach also to look over his shoulder at the horizon of the sea?

From a distance the interrogator does answer now, like he’s at home or at some other end of our body and he is murmuring with a lover’s assurance, a superior’s shrug: Was there ever any
doubt
that he turned and followed her look out to sea?, knowing that come hell or high water
that
was the nothing she was bound to, irritated, caustic, and anemic, deeply watchful of the boys they always felt, and there on the beach that day setting sail for where her sense of humor wouldn’t have a chance to—