Women and Men (222 page)

Meanwhile, if such a new friend as Donald Dooley (cum, or not-cum girlfriend) might intellectualize at length upon genetic engineering, weather modification, seismic surveillance of nuclear tests, and taking the measure of Earth and its chains (food chain, profit-tradeoffs chain, crisis-intuiting chain, et al.), Lar’ nonetheless felt from these new folk who mattered in his life their physical nearness, their waiting energy of concern in terms of concentrically expanding small-scale self-help vis a vis total-global—their moment-by-moment, particle-by-particle evolution in Spontaneous Creative Faith—an experience coined by a woman writer apparently so important he had heard her quoted without ever being named.

But back in Lar’s room D.D. proved to be reading a poem or poems aloud and talking to it, or them, or the poet; yet talking to Larry too, it might seem, who, on reentry, said that that was his mother, his "ma," and it had been heavy. D.D. shook his head smiling and said, "Cut the tie if you can’t loosen it," and asked if she ever played music to him when he was a child because Mira played the piano in the evenings, like Schumann stuff and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Chopin, nothing heavy or loud, music to unwind to. Larry said sure he knew what Donald was talking about, and he hoped to hear Mira play, and Donald threw out his brown-bearded chin, "Say ‘when,’ Larry, just say the word." Larry said if we got it together globally we might not need dreams in the future and when asleep we might just hear music. But not cut-rate prescription, courtesy of Big Brother, put in D.D.— No, Lar’ went on, hearing the door buzzer go, more like a fantastic waterfall flowing out of the mountains of the right brain into the— Was Lar’ going to answer that?—Lar’ said he didn’t want to—but D.D. said it might be Mira and stood up and left the room, Lar’ saying, Sorry—"It’s O.K., it’s O.K., I know where you’re coming from," he heard his new friend quietly say. Lar’ went to look at the book of his that D.D. had picked up and put down, and on that page was a poem of D. H. Lawrence Lar’ had never seen and didn’t know Lawrence wrote poetry, "Piano" it was called and was about a woman softly singing to you, but at a glance it wasn’t just about that and probably when you got past that, you found it was about—but Lar’ got just as far as "betrays" when D.D. came back, looking puzzled. "Must have had the wrong door, got a glimpse of his back and his hair, then he went out of sight from your peephole, should I have opened the door and—" but Larry said No, it was O.K., though if it was someone off the street the doorman should have buzzed but maybe they did buzz the
right
apartment. Donald was telling how he and Mira had the whole floor, where they were, and it was good space but too much, and this older guy he had run into at the college told him he had moved back into a pad he had lived in years ago (Hey maybe it’s a friend of mine, he did that, said Larry) and someone had stacked it full of junk (—Same thing, said Lar’), couple three statues of women, y’know, and a rusted-out drill press and some other useless machines and he discovered while he was clearing all this shit out and thinking, Is it worth it? and is this junk telling me the place doesn’t want me?, that it was his own body he was . . . (Getting in touch with? said Larry—No, said D.D.—Looking for? said Larry—Well, . . . —Looking to find, said Larry; unearthing, he added; it almost sounds weird enough to be my friend; there was a weird bust of some woman he didn’t know where it came from, and a busted machine with a lot of small functions he didn’t have a clue about and gave it to the super or the doorman but they threw it out, but this was different because he had kept control of the apartment during the time he had been living in other places after his marriage broke up and his wife and kids moved away) . . . "Right," said D.D., staring at Larry’s photo of Sequoya: this guy was pretty interesting, he had been around the country a dozen times and had slept in many rooms and once was sure he himself was the person in the next room yelling in his sleep (You know it does sound like my friend but he doesn’t dream and never did)—"O.K., O.K.," said D.D. trying to reach the point, "because then he woke up, y’see, and the person next door was a woman (he’d only dreamt she was a man yelling) and she wasn’t asleep at all but being given the third degree by a man you could hardly hear until it got very quiet and then the
man
started yelling" and this guy D.D. had run into right outside Eco class and . . . and . . .
(What?
said Larry) . . . "and I hardly ever saw him again," said D.D., puzzled and staring preoccupied at Sequoya. "But you had quite a rap for just first meeting him, you know." "Well, he said that he felt incredibly empty like he was surrounded by nothing and he went back to sleep in that room and dreamt he was burnt to an ash, a perfect ash facsimile of himself and woke up and was afraid to move for fear he would crumble and had a shipyard foreman he had to go interview about his work when he was really looking into some smuggling racket he had heard was using dry dock work as a cover for unloading, and he was lying in bed ("Strange, it could almost be this friend of mine," said Larry)—and he knew then and there that it would be good for him to live
with
somebody, like maybe a family, and as soon as he said that to himself he felt really together and jumped out of bed and knew it was impossible, he could never find anyone nor could
bring
himself to do it, but ("Did he ever find his body in all the junk in that other apartment?" said Larry, unsure of his own empathy for whatever’s happening right now with D.D., who said:) He really dreamt that, but he knew it had happened in the past and it made him go buy a horse and stable it in New Jersey, he didn’t have a clue why although he had ridden in the West now and then."

"He’s one of those missing persons," said Larry, wanting to go out and look through the peephole." "That’s right," said Donald Dooley, "can’t afford to have them turn up because they’re living your life and you didn’t know it." "Didn’t want to know it," said Larry, and left the room because D.D. was about to discover Simultaneous Reincarnation. "God, we can’t stay off reincarnation," called D.D. as Larry strode to the front door and, through the peephole, saw an ageless man in the outer hallway in a (best) western-style fringe jacket and bluejeans and a ponytail at his age, standing next to Ford North’s giant couch but not like waiting for the elevator: Larry imagined the Chinese woman jumping down off her phone books, removing one to look up a number, putting water on to boil, sitting down again on two phone books, saying hello as he entered her store to turn away from a street full of parallels trying to turn into people where this man in the hall by the elevator was, say, Mayn reincarnate but not because Mayn was dead and returned for we had here (5.R.) Simultaneous Reincarnation like the two screens of truth that, on his previous bike, Larry had reached by descrambling Mayn’s informations about some future existence in a very real torus-shaped libration-point space station and his conviction that his grandmother had done a number of peculiar and heroic things out West as someone else, a princess or something, plus much more information that when Lar’ had descrambled it yielded theory weeks ago, and Larry felt it wearing him down and bothering his very existence as the man out there moved from the couch to ring Ford North’s bell, and like a body of light went up close in case North’s peephole was open so Lar’ himself, riding some curve of (call it) relativity away from his new friend and the Chinese woman so he might be in danger of—and Mayn’s voice, on the topic of his romance, came into Lar’s body—of standing in someone else’s place. So keep away from being inhabited by that curve. Oh
how
(but Lar’ knew the answer) could we be simultaneously incarnate elsewhere (he tried to wipe from his head, returning now to D.D.).

"I thought he was coming on to me," said D.D., "he walked with me the first time—I don’t think you were in class, because Rail read your name off, and this guy asked what we were studying in class and whether there was good interaction and what type of fellow students we had, so he could have been looking for someone else."

And the second time D.D. had run into this guy was just last week near D.D. and Mira’s space and he said he had never been to college but had dreamt of D.D. finding a new home and asked if he had any friends at college who would be interested in horseback riding in New Jersey in, actually, the vicinity of a good undisturbed cemetery, and though this drew a blank, it turned out friend D.D. and this guy shared an interest in the relation of Earth chemistry to sudden layer changes in weather and D.D. had mentioned Larry as a likely contact for this guy ("He sounds like my friend Mayn," said Lar’, "heavy-set with gray hair, wears the business suit"—"Not the same guy," said D.D.)—and he asked if we were into any secret societies at college such as the antique hand-gun sect in Texas or the—come to think of it—Masonic offshoot he had heard of that seeks a lost degree of radioactive effect that divides people into two without their knowing it and—("I think someone’s at the door," said Larry, "the buzzer doesn’t always work"—the Chinese woman was on her phone books, the weird guy in the hall was just stepping into the elevator and the light was still green, the man D.D. described was right out of Mayn, and Lar’ had to deafen himself to what was to come, a reversal economy by which two people then became one, although if Mayn never dreamt, how could he, this rational guy, find himself so sure of his presence in the workaday future of an Earth-Moon system?, the Chinese woman was a random particular, Lar’ loved her, she was remote even from our after-all-quite-real smelling-of-ginger-grass (in a green bottle) Amy, who worked at the foundation in the same block as the Chinese woman, and the threat of abstraction wasn’t just abstract, there’s a memory maybe Lar’ needs to
dream
up that puts him in danger from these tangled others—
otros
—and in need of new friends, he feels the encroachment again of some special relativity that corresponds to oW-fashioned reincarnation (time travel yet you come back out
there
not here and you’re one, not two) and feeling drawn to new people because people matter but, by turns,
are
matter drawing seemingly him toward them as if they were empty chance landscaped pathwise (fuck gravity), he knows what he after all did
not
(so well) know, that people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined
toward
these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry of missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives, of tricking our old computers into passing right
through,
the way a medicine man Mayn joked of made his death an event horizon of new obstacle, which brings Lar’ so close to a threat to his life that he is back in company with Donald Dooley before almost either
one
knows it, and Larry knows now that the man D.D. reports knowing is of or in or from Mayn.

"So he was going out to N.J. to a town where they tell direction by the
nature
of the wind rather than the wind by direction, and winds have natures not compass prongs, he had to do some digging he said, some final digging, he said, and I said, You a newspaperman? and he said, More a photographer, and he was looking for some old Indian who had turned into a new species of weather in order to avoid being—yes! by God there it is!, to avoid reincarnating as—"

"Please don’t," said Larry, "that was the Indian who made a prediction a hundred years ago that could fall on
my
head, I have to keep some stuff out of my head, Don, you got to help me but I can’t tell you what it is, though I will say that even if General Relativity does confirm Obstacle Geometry, I would rather pretend at least that General Relativity won’t help us understand local events, like life, for instance."

"Get your head out of here," said D.D., "especially if your mother’s freaking back when you’ve accepted her leaving. Anyway things aren’t always relative."

"What do you mean?" asked Larry, but the phone was ringing and he hated this need he had for privacy, and he rushed to the far phone yet it kept ringing (no doubt accented, no doubt demanding to know from him what
he
knew or had worked out, demanding surely some particular thing that then turned into events already going on in the hall by launch-elevator and opera-star couch) still ringing of course because in the curve or his small piece of it he had been abstracted once more to the front door which was not ringing, and in the peephole he saw only what he could not afford to believe was there, and D.D. was calling, Do you want I should answer it?, while Lar’ saw also that these outer people were extremely dangerous like the embodiment of that tensor geometry of, really, Time which made Obstacle Geometry law but law he must leave to Time to work out, for the Chinese woman he had so treasured was there in the peephole approaching Ford North’s door with a very small non-Oriental child, and she had a key, and Larry rushed back to his room as the phone stopped (but not, blessedly, picked up by D.D.): "What did that guy look like?" asked Larry, leaning against the door jamb. "What’s it matter?" said D.D. "The main thing is you could help yourself." "Yes, I could do that." "Me and Mira got more space than we need, we got enough for three, or even four, depending—and the place is designed with plenty of acoustical privacy—and we need a share to swing the rent. So how about moving in with us? We discussed it, and Mira thinks you’re great ... I mean ..."

Larry’s heart stopped for a moment. Life accelerated, but he had felt that for quite a while, y’know.
Life
seemed as dangerous as finding what tensor may plot the obstacle curve of the heart and other interweaving parallels; and he said, "I want to, I really want to; but my father might need me and . . .

I want to but I want to think about it." "Sure." "I might talk to a friend about it." "Sure." "This friend is upstairs, she runs these workshops." "Sure," said D.D.; "we like want to get somebody by next week, so there’s time." "I think I might not," said Larry, "but I really have to think about it."