Women and Men by Joseph McElroy Read Free Book Online Page A

had the same idea—cities in future like periodic fairs, you know?, a party of tribes for a few energy-transferring weeks. Show us that scene again, can you? Sure thing: the only cities left exist for a month or two from time to time. Festivals. Markets in the human sense. (A little business, too? Sure I don’t see why not. O.K., great—the market is unprecedented, we feel almost guilty.) Can you run it backwards, that future city, so we can check it out? Why sure why sure, we’ll get right on it. See, you’ve got your weak force that you get when things break down and run away on you and your strong force that brings things together and binds ‘em like the blessed tie (what things?); and you have the two together if you know what you’re doing, O.K.?, two in one if you can jump between, kin you jump between?, ‘cause jump, babe, there’s no power without the vac, jump the vac.
    What’s vac? / Where were you? I What’s vac? / Oh we forget, give us the replay give us—oh now we remember—
    Don’t want to know any more.
    But you are electric? / Is that all? / You are magnetic. / And?
    You shift before my eyes. Can it be our secret, our thing we do? Before my ears, you mean? I feel we have known each other all our life. Have I been in you like you have been in me? Oh like, but different. We can really talk to each other. You’re inside, you’re outside, then some days you are past all this mere physical jumping and have found peace past motion. If past jumping, then on both sides now: did we market that? Old angels they get a lot of them to the square inch of pinhead but they don’t get to be two places at once unless ... but if they exist in thought, angels have done so for a long time, so if they now, some of them, are discovering within their matchless power to be real an inner potentiality not granted them before, they would be within human being not for the first time but in a new way—in the bodies of us who, speaking now, are dazzled by this chance that just as we think them so they now speak out of us yet are we dazzled only insofar as we are not they? When do they speak in all this and when not? Oh ask our twenty-four-hour-a-day power vac—right, we’ve heard of it—well, it’s not used any more—oh but it’s been internalized back to where it all began.
    But if so, what happened to what we punched in? We punched in what we had and we didn’t write it down. Write it down, you run the risk of error, and that’s not the only risk you run, but I like the replays I like the replays.
    But what are we going to do about the kids?
    Their homework, you mean. We’ve tried to get a handle on it, we’ve looked up topology and rotation, and we’re just about read out. Displays and diagrams appear on the walls of the children’s space, interesting and decorative—damned decorative—till our heads spin with R and equals signs, and we with pride in our kids but authentic resentment too, think now that R is = , and all the = glance back at us for all the world like light off the wall.
    Yet we need that child or children. (There’s one or two of them right in the next room.) We said to our child in the next room, to our babe, our love, our hope for ourself, our sweet honest force, "How much light is there, then?" for the all-purpose child is doing its four terms of science dwarfed into one-and-a-half class-weeks (pill-assisted memory-wise, but we didn’t dare ask) and it should (our child) come up with a few of the answers and should know a thing or two about light; and it answers, "Plenty to go around," it was us, not the kid, the kid knows a dumb question when it hears it (How much light is there?); yet then, inspired by pity, the child with angelic directness is heard to say, "Light is inside people so long as . . ." and we add (because maybe that’s as far as our child is up to in class and because the light inside us feels deflected or busted, that sort of thing, though rebounding), "... so long as