WOMEN AND MEN

like nation that the anti-Castro (if he really is anti-Castro) Cuban in question recently spoke in my hearing about (in peril of his life inside, yet anxious for his wife and son he thinks of moving from a doubled-up apartment two blocks from the American Indian Museum in Manhattan to a new Hispanic quarter of Poughkeepsie)—and, in the same breath, spoke of you, Jim, as if you worried him (that nation concealing mountains and estuaries within its single-minded length, dense mines below rivers running with the cold blood of glaciers, a south pole of anti-land and a northern border hot in temper as in mercury)—oh all our Chilean gentleman knows more about than you and I of surplus value, skewed capacity, which brought him and I together by eavesdrop, mail, interview, colloid way, for I had felt he would need me, just as I am with you, Jim, in this, whatever it is.

Which leaves me often where I was, opening in the void, and if a mere vessel (like my mother said, meaning her Lord’s), my kind’s a vessel moving through a solid so long as in mid-trip you don’t come to and find yourself a chunk of fruit in the Jello Museum, and the light of my life if Miriam can’t get back to me might be having her own experience elsewhere that loving is more than being loved or "George, tell me a story, tell me anything."

So we have tabled for now the Foley Plan for this correctional facility, Jim; and so on into a new vein where a messenger came but didn’t know he was one.

And so on through all blocks of this multiple dwelling, this seventeen-hundred-toilet redoubt (for where there’s children you need plenty of toilets), walled by hills and woods (the trees in a book I have, and in the trees birds I think), walled by barns, brains, and moving figures I have heard—their limited-use autos, their working animals, all injecting tax dollars into the bird-pie to keep us and our ungodly potential at rest between the lines and from escaping this (strainer-with-built-in) jug where fourteen grand (you said, Jim, updating to ‘76 or so, my figures) pumped into each man’s annum inflates day and night as the Inside gets more inescapable (where the sale money’s spent—from the Inside), gets more cloudy, and so on. But in an adjacent vein—

(you with me? for believe that more than one of us are in touch with you, if only through your unused power—

(to get me outa here! (smile))

after our trip into the nuts, bolts, and budget lines of a scheme to make this jail more than a bird preserve so we who’re inside (not just I) grow into Insiders living to keep the Outside in its place—let’s say a messenger arrived not knowing he was one.

New vein after all Foley’s Wide Load to you of unused capacity (almost all we got here), trade-off bartering one-to-one hand-sewn shirts for another man’s talent to entertain a thousand people all by himself, one man’s instinct for engines for another man’s legal mind, a born chef coming out of the closet to inspire that tired genius with the green thumb; surplus value ploughing the collective heart back into the labor value of the use value, which is true value in the Foley prison economy still merely ho-hum to scanners of outgoing transmissions—hence all this has covered the coming of the messenger like all our talkers inside who never heard the rest is silence, who’ll tell you why they’re here if they ever find out. And, Jim, a different vein now—and we’ll trust that the correctional scanners of mail who never knew ol’ sex-box Premier K’s adage "A long wind that is too long forgets the mountain it has come down from," got gross-dipped with foregone lode of Foleynomics (constructive as jailhouse lawyers’ nit-picking here where cleanliness long since killed all nits but not the body oils) so that the above-mentioned correctional scanners didn’t comprehend Foleynomics (with its self-contained prison cooperatives of craft-skill, revenue management, marketing, and retreat) as part of the long-term continuum I’m really sending you, the shadow thrown by the words— and by now the scanner powers in this Multiple Dwelling that is Nowhere but walled inside Somewhere may have passed this particle transmission by, as it them; whereas my Dago friend Dante’s Life Inside got intercepted by our scanners on its way to a humor contest and Dante took them to federal court where you also have to talk fast only to have the judge tell him insanity was no defense of such writing and he should be ashamed to submit such a critique of authority when guys like him drove authority crazy not the other way around, and better go back and try again—which is why I contact you not mainly by word-unit or real-page but as I do, including voice-over and memory-merge and the twin-scopes to come. So in the case of this communique which can be as long as you want to be equal to, Jim, let’s hope them frogs have let us bugs limp past their slimy, froggy nose holes on one wing looking for air; so let’s assume the coast is clear. Look there, and there—if possible both at once. Stay with me; this was all you needed. Prison is not just full of murder or of bodies.

So what’s the issue, Jim, you visitor, me captive host? Me making sure you shtick around to the end, and no judge is going to send you off to jail because you took your eyes off the road, looked in the mirror, checked the nervous alternator or the fuel, looked at the passenger on your right to see she was still there, fellow-pro you said got you into this once-a-week experiment but how come you didn’t bring her, Jim?, I can see her so clear I know you love her.

So in a different vein, say the messenger arrived but didn’t know himself to be, and didn’t know the room. Yet this room was it, all right. Hadn’t he aimed for it, driving his rented car through the hills up tree-lined parkways we remember and down rock-bound hairpins so fine they are timeless, across trout pool, by a stream’s sheer rock with writing on it along tree-guarded parkways above New York taking our poisons and breathing back green oxygen—so giving back better than you get is the sign of a vegetable!

While because of the mail scanners I had to get here my way, by our full account of the Foley Plan for 5-to-20-year development of this retirement compound, prison, or, some bad days, all I know.

This here then is not just what you the pro with life experience asked us for, as once a statuesque woman asked of you when you didn’t, you said, pick up on what was really on her mind until you had blundered ahead and put yourself to test. But you know I couldn’t fit it all onto one screen. And I didn’t come yet to my girlfriend Miriam’s father’s four-star garbage cans, or the space under the float at the Y camp one July, or a substitute teacher at my gorilla-training school; nor have I come yet to the guy with your name Jim but less hair, who slept through his own eleven-o’clock execution ‘cause nobody bothered to tell him his attorney got a routine stay from the afternoon judge! So maybe my communication to you here and now, this penetration of your head, Jim, by chain (clunk) reflection, given as well as written you from way back before I knew who you were, and half-unwritten now like primal scripts among many unsnarled (smile) thoughts, is what’s transmitted here by need, to put it in a nut’s hell (smile again), not some expose of prison life, its secret suicides posed as murders, its historic farts and mutterings in the night.

So maybe it’s not what I should have sent you, what you asked us for, you driving alone arriving from many times I felt; but the messenger I said has meanwhile passed his road signs and such signs of the Outside as the low guard-rail dividers we remember so close to the road that your fender bypasses the air between, unless you go faster, yes there’s a thing I miss. The guardrail divider that moves because you and the road move, always in the left lane ready to pass, and so close your left fender’s tracked on a point of the divider rail that’s always a few feet ahead though the fender looks like it’s touching, am I right?—and the optical flicker stream is enough to make you epileptic. Hear the pain of your steel-belted rubber (as on TV, which we get on Honor Block) rubbing out the road, turning gas into gas, eating it up. Messenger driving the highway to get to prison on time, through hills, valleys, forests, sheer rock, you name it, get there on time before his time is up, am I right? And I know that some of you out there dream of getting us out of here at last and us killing you for your time, but a guy in here can’t know for sure if silence means friends haven’t written because my mail’s been held up and that is why I’m connecting between the lines.

No Andes here, Jim, no lone Indian shepherds along the parkways and no work here for wild llamas watering head up head down, along the Chilean shore drinking straight brine (turning salt water to blood—now there’s economy for you). You’ve flown to far-flung climes, to seas, cities, mountains, seen only by astral projection which reached unprecedented range in New York State prison system if this bunk tourist hadn’t learned a better; doubtless you’ve woken up, Jim, in Southern Hemisphere with a girl on your arm, the two of you flying high, am I right?, rented car, the works—while I have been to Peru with Karl Marx in a footnote, the fine print’s how Foley snuck in.

No Andes here above New York, but make no mistake, our supposed messenger driving an old Indian trail had to pay attention to his driving at that sly twilight the Motor Vehicle authorities threaten us with, between night and day, each margin your last along the tree-lined roads and into the steep, rock-bound curves Slippery When Wet (you see I remember). I remember the road signs, Jim, the shapes alone, as the authorities like you to know them. Signs of the Outside. Signs that, when they’re put to you, are just shapes you could enter right into, never hear from you again ‘less you’re a messenger getting to prison on time.

Your time, Jim. So taken for granted that it’s unknown to you who have it. Think of the problem it is spending yours, whereas our solution is to spend by doing. Good time, they call it. Time done. But take time to come, Jim.

Time well known by seventeen hundred wall calendars here and known so to the day and hour of future rain and shine that it decays into what I call a suspension where anything could fall out, looking for an opening, even past time, well how you gon’ teach Chemistry without a lab?

So let’s say the messenger’s got a purpose if he didn’t always see it. He had something his host wanted. But some of the criminal types waiting for him wanted not a message but to be him.

They waited up against the walls at first in the long, one-hundred-odd-yard-long green concrete corridor with your white-line two-layer corridor long as the city block between the jugular training school I attended in my extreme youth and the brown-brick fire-escape tenement where I practically lived because my girl Miriam lived there with her family and she was my girl and practically my sister from seventh grade until I left school, and later so did she, if I’m going to tell about her.

You came into Room Four of what we call the South Forty in this our temporary home-retirement institute where you won’t need your rented, purchased, stolen on time, or second car, looked from face to face, you formerly of (let me introduce you) the Associated Press (was all I knew) and now on a once-a-week basis voluntarily deputized to a posse of criminal types unless you’re CIA—you walking into the room and the guys getting off jokes and kidding (like the kids that this place condemns them to stay) while they acted like they’re not paying attention to you—this pro in a suit, red tie, cordovan shoes, who’d come once before—how I got wind, who might best profit from the experience, the only new man at this second meeting of the group in this pocket of human waste imploded into a toxic mountain—and while the guys are kidding around and not (you might think) paying too much attention or when you stopped by the desk and took out your cigarettes and put them down on the desk I know I heard you say, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here," so quiet you maybe hadn’t decided to be heard. Right?

Which we did hear. Even the guys laughing it up heard you through their own shit. And what you said pulled us together, Jim. It’s not the thing you hear from the lifers’ legal liaison, who’s dedicated in a way you’re not; and it’s not what the death padre (temporarily out of work!) says in the cadre therapy sessions religiously attended in order to put off lock-up for a couple of hours, when he tells us though he means well how we must not abuse ourselves; and not what you hear from the two Bible-class oldtimers who come in in boots and Stetsons sporting Bible Belt accents and huge guts—well, only the one with the white Stetson—but they mean well, but all these others are at least a little different from you; but you, you’re saying, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here." So Efrain (of whom much more later; right, Jim?) said, "Then you come to the right place because we don’t know either. You going to fit right in." Which got a laugh, but Smitty with the eyes closed said to Efrain, "You’re here because you’re a bunch of murderers and rapists, right?" which got another laugh, and from you, too, Jim, you wouldn’t keep it in.

"So you got something in common with us," says Efrain, who then was getting out very soon, and you answered so quick ("Oh yes") you can’t hear you almost, so nobody picks up on it.

The news comes in about the Outside, and we are not there.

So then I said, if you recall (and maybe only if) that some of the guys were really into journalism, which quieted things down, and I said once upon a time (though I don’t mean the clippings on my case) I was into it too— until they locked me up, and then I diversified inward. Newspaper work, you opined, has many facets.

But Jim while I have sweated out the politics of why I’m here, I know what you meant when you said (be brief, you said, be brief) that you wondered what you were doing here (though you were kind enough not to wonder if there was any future in it—for what is there to journalize about inside?). So the circumstances under which I was implicated in the decease of a person known to me would have come to mind even if you had not pinpointed said circumstances by telling us that as of fiscal ‘76 fourteen thousand dollars (and counting) was what each of us more or less cost the state per year, subject to inflationary update, when we all know the inmate doesn’t get that fourteen grand unless he is very special. It goes into a waste flume except that those whose overweight ill health and expanding families this fund floats cannot get off on the insanity of this fund or, come to think of it, the beauty of (in many domestic establishments) a wife who does work worth $250 a week by 1970 par, roughly $13 grand per annum, my mother for example a crimeless victim, or Miriam, such a girl, Jim, that around her I could never say enough. Meanwhile you do not ask, What’s your story?

Now you said you were used to getting a substitute instead of what you were looking for, and that that was the story of your life as a newsman. Carlos takes the New York Times and asked if you had information you refused to reveal and if you knew any journalists who blackmailed their sources to get more info and if you often knew the answers before you went after the facts. But I am communicating now to ask you this: a government contractor, say, gave you what they wanted you to get, like their own press release, ‘stead of you always finding out what was truly going on, so for instance you said they say countermeasures equipment that keeps the peace protecting B-52 bombers by denying threat radars information as to our bombers’ range and azimuth position, but I am asking you this because it was hard to get your attention with a dozen criminal types monopolizing you . . . now when you go down to, say, Venezuela or the Argentine (you said)—or, cell-bunk itinerant I, let’s say Vermont (you said), doing an in-depth on the ‘‘insurance cover" corporation you did not name, well what else are you going to go looking for except the truth? I mean, did you surprise yourself and get into insurance and forget what it’s covering?

You answered as I asked and so I understood: but wave-length, forget it, though alternating current comes closer: what it is, Jim, which I put together that I never could have Outside is the Colloidal Unconscious where contact works through the Schism. And I am not guilty of discovering this unconscious, much less that it found me through a lab-less chemistry unseen as deepest bonds. Not that we’re of one mind in here with seventeen hundred guys longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic and black, Irish and black Irish, but only one slot-machine massage Chair in the chapel confronting four rows of pews for player-piano historians with clout and the need to study a captive example, if not to throw up the menu in reverse, but you said you were acquainted with at least one man in your business who was capable of the blackmail Carlos brought up—and you sometimes thought the truth about the Mysterycorp in the points of its operation you had checked into might have been all the time in you. Or did I only guess that?

If the guys didn’t know what you were talking about, I did. Arizona where sacred mesas are not above shedding refuse; northwest New Mexico, where a rocky ship shrugs off a moving desert; oh Jim, hit Houston racing-dog farms, El Paso boot supermart where every pair fits someone who will die, Vermont cemetery-sculpture quarries, New York music; you went into the history of that ghost state Uruguay as sanctuary in the McCarthy period which is like before my time. You traveled some in South America, which half these guys are mapping runs to in their waking dreams. And you sent word back or flew back to your desk with the information you had developed—how does that work?—and had the stuff in the old attache case bringing it back thousands of miles to your office, well maybe (you said) dry run or wet, going and coming you carried the real facts on you at all times, do you recall saying that?

Why do I ask? Conspicuous leisure and lifetime bent.

Remember when you asked, Got any animals here?—which got a laugh because you meant real cats, real dogs, tiger in this think tank, camel with loose hump in the yard walking between the basketball game and the iron pumpers.

But on the heels of that laugh you asked what I read. Someone said, George never learned; someone else, He got his own rules.

Right then, Jim, I hear Miriam on the phone and see the clear, large color of her eyes. What’s your act, Foley? you asked with wordless eyes. And once gently asked on the way out, Don’t you want to kill or get killed in here? but I had felt the shadow of such words cast long since, and the answer was colloid not pacif-ass. And we’re onto something new but then it seems not much good to have you aboard.

Yet some of us who share interface reach other in a mind compounded chemically but far truer than the sums of its particles—call it Colloidal Unconscious for lack of more up-to-date name: and some whose interfaces lie a billion millimeters off do reach each other and know they are amid particles suspended and dispersed but—I said "colloid"—so much smaller than fat droplets in homogenized and pasteurized (carcinoma-emulsified) juice not from concentrate and so much smaller than the clay in what you call at a glance muddy waters that you (because as I came to see when I had to make up my own lab, we are colloid solutions) experience and maybe use them (only you don’t see them) and if the Colloidal Unconscious is unconscious of itself this is the same as ants in their towers in Africa, they’re all working together, Jim, cooperation life, competition death—and already I can’t help hearing Miriam on the phone at the tax-return office—and you talking to me, the noise, you’re blunt and brief, you leave stuff out. And when you asked me what I was interested in, well you can write back and tell me what you think of that Norwegian immigrant non-farmer who grew ideas you know his name—wore a fur cap that hid his long-headed predictions—didn’t do much more farming than I would give my labor away for twenty-five cents an hour the going rate here, the staying rate!—to be your own peasant outside the walls on the correctional farm correcting potatoes to be someday mashed in milk. And I have read all the philosophers—read them in the programs, Jim—and have found many as blind and slippery as the economists on my way to test myself at Toxic Mountain (rumored by a lone foul or fair-weather genius correspondent of mine) via the Colloidal Unconscious which goes down through monetary theory like laxative or in your planet like dry ice through cloud potential.

You said, Don’t call collect (like the hip social worker whose phone got cut off), but Write, and you’d write too but you didn’t save letters. I don’t want you should get a substitute for the real thing you wanted, you’re a man who met the great Goulart in Brazil on his way out so there’s a chance for me, and you’re after something more than helping a clutch of cons be journalists (my mother went to school twice a week on the sly at age fifty-one) (my substitute teacher aforementioned Ruth M. Heard always made me feel I was in for something special in my life and must watch patiently)—by the way please fill out the correspondence form, Jim—you see as I told my mother who comes up here all alone sometimes real independent with a pack of cards and who is brave but has her own way of understanding what I mean, what I’m in for has proved to be something else, Jim, a purpose: thus I found myself, and here not there, like you in New Mexico, if I got your meaning.

What I’m in for—the appeal hangs fire. So when you said you don’t save letters, were you letting us down gently? A package deal of friendly help but when you get it open—well ... the letters you said all get boiled down in your mind, you probably had them all, so that, never fear, while you would remember us—our stupid fish faces boiled down to veined pulp—you had to save on head space (there being not the unused capacity some claimed, and I was grinning because you knew I knew what you were talking about and not to think our letters were lost when they got thrown away, but you don’t have to be so honest all the time, did you know that, Jim?).

You saw I knew you meant who had written the letter didn’t matter, the name could detach from the words though the person was still there and the letter’s message turned into you and you had it in a new vein so I was glad to grin and also at the two former missionaries I get mixed up, you never see them together, they wear sweaters. I was sweeping, and one quick-steps by and with a shake of his head he says to my uncomprehending automatic pushbroom, Such a waste, such a waste; and I to my broom which suddenly goes off Automatic and weighs like a live thing on my hands, In my keeper’s multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.

This I thought, thinking of you, Jim: He’s been all over. I been here. Years going on lots more. But what’s he know? Said he skimmed stuff more than before; needed the information, distrusted eyewitness.

Then I thought, He wouldn’t be here for the hell of it.

Neither would I.

The guys wanted to ask you about yourself. I can speak for them, because I know they did. Your family, if any; your history: brother in haberdashery in Jersey, the brown-and-orange tie (the next time you came) came from his place. Much of it better forgotten, you said, if you recall.

You were shown the prison newspaper. Front-page shots, Puerto Ri-quenos, Indian hair and headbands, don’t know what you thought. You don’t see our whole picture. What is intrinsic here?

What the messenger’s hosts wanted, waiting for him in a mile-long corridor, then a weather-proof room (look, no windows!), was not a message at all (unless an emergency greeting from the state parole board); what they wanted was to be not the messenger himself but the message. Or so they think. But while some did, not I.

What could they know of you?

The lines you gave them straight—the news article simple and clear at the outset, separate from everything else under the sun except its subject. Subject in hand, get in get out, that’s your rule, and "How is the Rican mafia taking over the prison newspaper?" "They like to get their boys into all the photos looking like Indians," Charley said; and Efrain, "Hey man, I got to get out of here," like an inmate here who escaped a month before his release date.

But between the lines a message the guys would not find: I saw Juan write it down and put a box around it. "Don’t get too curious around here," Efrain said, didn’t he? He knows because he had a long elevator ride one morning, and the building he’s in only got two floors.

Curious about the law—you got a laugh; we got a law library here where some guys go to dream. You said dreams passed you by.

Curious about people: what questions do you ask an interview? You got a laugh, some questions you don’t ask, man! What makes people tick, what sets them off, look at a man, an ordinary man at a run-of-the-mill international conference, and you report what he said, not what’s going round in his mind, but I think you know that also, Jim, and pile it up as you encounter this prominent character again months later: "it’s like chemistry," you said—you looked my way—you never knew much chem ("Makes two of us," Juan said)—’ ‘Like between a man and a woman," said Efrain, and the guys laughed ("Oh darling," called Jackie, and I hear Miriam saying on the phone, "To whom am I speaking?")—but molecules, you said, if they are in the body, who says they are not in the mind? The guys sensed we were loose in inner space and they were ready for some personal history all around, but I knew where we had gotten to, and was glad I had broached the molecule problem.

Miriam I heard between us.

And most of them did not wait first in the room that our strange messenger had aimed at as he drove billowing parkways into twilight headlights coming on and oncoming. They waited in the mile-like corridor.

They waited in order to see the evening’s arrivals lest these be in part female. To whom am I speaking? For whom am I waiting. They’re good guys; there is some beautiful understanding going down here, don’t doubt it. Here comes the lifers’ legal liaison (young mother of three), keeps them up on the law (popular in her own right).

And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?

Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend—a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it—and any other females, the more the merrier, why not?, the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour—the program people—and you among them but not of them, Jim.

Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs—no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper)—start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read—and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you want to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk—but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise—about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son—taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?

I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up old city bus, which he can do but I don’t want to talk about it—and about the crazed Hispanic off-islanders now attending big-league baseball games in our shared city (the Jews are better at picking up Spanish, he says, and he’s right, than the Irish—all of which explains how well I know the distance between that school and my second home, my girl’s).

And she was my beautiful, wise girl who took individualized driver training from me and was my girl from junior high until I left and later so did she, my future, though didn’t leave the tenement itself with a row of galvanized cans her intensely white-haired father the super—Jewish—get all info into lead!—kept always in their place so random Venusian descending via sun-fueled greenhouse-ship saw, through the deteriorating cement of the building’s brick, a sometime vacant "railroad" we might make better use of for an hour and a half, he saw his cans there on the sidewalk as field batteries, standing reserve, ammo. Accessories in my head long after the fact. I can feel for him, Jim, right down to the red nick on his jaw twice a week, and I am thirty and counting, and—as my esteemed substitute teacher once pointed out it would be painfully different for a childless female long-term con—wonder if I will have a daughter to protect, or just have one. You knew something because you said after me She is your future, getting it straight (your only child?).

So you can see where I am coming from. Neither of us dark to the other as I guess you’ve thought, driving up here or then with that one hard kernel of corn between your fingers looking at it and then Juan and back to that tooth of corn—do you have it, still, do you know where you can lay your hand on it?

And where is this here intrinsic continuum of message being (smile) devoured, by the way? In your hand? Your head? growing in your ear? Does it raise a blister in your fingerprint? Does it make you mad? Or, more like, make real the billions of millimeters between mind particles each with one interface exactly met by the other, and if you cheat the world’s jailed jailer of its substitutes, maybe you see further than you’ve a right to. If you go in for rights, I don’t, I go beyond.

But if the future is bent on some path, the latest in communications out of an electronic suitcase you mentioned that might go off or speak in words of two syllables, linking Vermont, New Mexico, Chile, and this prison-redoubt where I send out myself honeycombed with light, where I have transcended the passerby who carelessly strikes off the head of the sunflower, this sev-enteen-hundred-toilet redoubt ringed by hills full of white farmhouse roofs and fenceposts topped by talking crows and the glint of earless mobile homes like truck-stop diners in the trees—Oh I know they’re there—hills groaning full of firearms and tax deductions and howling with loose-skinned hounds— no, a hookup you don’t hang up on, a new path communicating between here and there, man and man—O.K., then, so what’s the economics if with all this new communication system there is nothing to communicate?

This was the point that our sometime substitute in the old days, Ruth Heard, have I described her?, fresh from England, would make; and if she wasn’t looking at you with the blue eyes and the brown curls sticking way out all around, you knew she would be in a second. So much for economics, Jim, the vein of my opening cover for scanners of outgoing transmissions but secretly in its very openness for you too, Jim, and for others outside, if, and I give you leave, you have shown this mish-mash of news. Isn’t there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you’re still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.

You’ve been in South America, but didn’t see anything, you claim: like, I have been here! But remember the grasshopper? I bet you do. Alighted upon the biologist’s ship three hundred seventy miles from land, what had that grasshopper in mind? Through what air did it make that jump? what vein? I am without a lab here except the darkroom. Photography’s the program here, since C.U. can’t be taught or learned but only known, and there are some guys here who take unique pictures, Jim. No sunsets maybe, for orange dust smidgens don’t glow on the man-made horizon of our walls. But these men will photograph a shadow; a halo, in my opinion; a face; perspective looking down a cell block; or bars from inside or out on the gallery half over-, half under-exposed so the series locks into your head remember those flickering parkway guard-rail posts controlling thought? And my old sciencer sees weather control one day altering times of twilight, angles of seasons, rains albeit through radiation-parametering focus spoutwise down to flush up lung-blood from the avenues, leftover power toxins to be rethought. I knew my mother would not see the future in the photo I developed and arrested the development of soon after I was transferred here from Auburn; she shook her head—the future? she said, but look at the valid driver’s license she now carries due to me, hidden in her plastic cigarette case, good for years while Jackie who got me in the photography program will never agree with me what he can do: these men can photograph our finest particles, Jim, if they only knew what is there to be seen in the enlargements of faces, and yet is this a point?—that the taker always sees? Your face last night showed in the seams under the eyes the search and what-not of a life—like the noted substitute teacher Ruth Heard, even to the stories told. But while you are a man whose eyelids have doubted many a dawn, don’t be so sure you’ve lived all the way between your time out there and ours in here. Oh I could have been a doctor; I knew too late. I know another lab, though; and it’s here. You’re getting away from me, Foley, you said.

Well, that kernel was handed to you between thumb and forefinger by a (says-him) Marxist name of strong-man Juan, who was the other person present before the guys trooped into the room ahead of you; and then there you were.

On the threshold, you looked at Juan, the muscle-man with eyestrain pink across the furious, friendly eyes, who studies the abridged Kapital half the night as if his all-night light is the always switched-on bulb of Death Row, and you seemed to see nothing else but the old corn kernel he had picked up in the yard that only I and he and you—the three of us—were aware of, though more than three now occupied the room, and you asked what it was, and Juan held it up—a tooth? you asked—and give it to you and you had it in your right hand for a long time and forgot about it.

And I see that what I have been trying to say, Jim, if I can call you Jim once more, is that at 6:20 p.m. you came into Room Number Four of what we call the South Forty in this Stressed Concrete Castle our contemporary home (smile), you formerly of the Associated Press (was almost all I knew of the messenger), now associated with a gallery of criminal types.

You said you didn’t know why you were here. How come your act’s together, then?

But Jim, you did know.

Don’t know why he’s here; going to fit right in, Efrain said. Which brought a laugh and it was yours; but Smitty, who shuts his eyes tight, talks till he’s ready to open them, then shuts up, said that you were here with a bunch of . . . you heard me before. And I as a friend of Smitty’s had heard of you and knew what you brought for me.

I the new man in this pocket of potential waste (new-type potential energy) here long enough to be relocated again, where they might tell you the night before or an hour before, and suddenly you’re not here, you’re up on the Canadian border (polluted beef, don’t you worry they won’t let you in), but you’re thinking up a new life, new territory, redcoat horsemen at outposts, great fish full of history diving out of rivers into lakes, wriggling airborne clear from the great long-head Norseman’s Wisconsin and Minnesota, land to be had, Sino-Russian reconnaissance reflector-planes slipping between dew point and early-warning layer, lunatic wing orbiting the top of the country: point, though, is you got through, Jim; and I spoke and said some of the guys were really into journalism, and you asked if there was some good copy around, and they wanted to know about yours. Oh, you said, it made you think of newsprint like wrapping paper and you said you could wrap the state of Vermont or New Hampshire in a year’s newsprint.

Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you about: I told him what you said."

Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal?—I’m thinking and will come up with it.

Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too—(I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who gets them? First come first serve?

Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what you were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories—and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record this. (You still there, Jim?)

Now you said—and I’m reporting, if not briefly—that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for—oh this hit me so hard—and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs—this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.

Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.

Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to—did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.

Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where he was coming from, he was right.

I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.

Fill out—thank you in advance for filling out—the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one—smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.

Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam—I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college—listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go!—you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.

Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.

I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here—plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas you got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes—because there’s no reason you should open with us.

Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook—and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.

And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length—you laughed— closer still.

I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.

(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60 mph on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)

Well the night I met you, I was in the room ready for the messenger. The room he aimed for, though he was not entirely into his message. It was not just a room your course was set for.

Because Charlie, rounding us all up—because here you don’t sit down and put in a call to some guy in his cell that you want to meet with him later in the week, but you find the guy maybe in the mess hall, if he is not doing his own food trip or fasting; or you pass a message to somebody in his block—Charlie didn’t know I had heard Smitty’s tape of the prior meeting, and Charlie told me you said you sometimes felt you’d been unconscious a lot of your life, between bedrooms, pressrooms, twenty-some years of assignments, many small-scale units but no one overall shtik. Charlie said he could relate to it, because he says he is also very aware of his unconscious.

But Charlie did not say what I found on Smitty’s tape—that you were obviously into the unconscious and it was chemical.

So then I knew, you see; but, the first three, four sessions, I held off broaching this with you. You see I knew maybe more than you.

The South American in question; yes?

I had known he might contact me. I knew he might need me. Even me. But I could not say this in short when the workshop broke up at eight-twenty and the guys crowded round the desk.

Now why did I think that you were unaware of the message you were being used to convey from the South American to me? Your interest in the kernel of corn Juan had picked up in the yard seemed more than your interest in me, a bearer of other things.

But no, you were no go-between, Jim. And would not use someone, though I feel that first letter is getting scrambled with my longer second— and shortened, especially after your hoped-for visits.

But I know when I’m being treated like a person!

The guys felt this in you. Efrain came out with things I didn’t know he knew. Like the guys thought of you as a friend. Hang loose; no sweat; the guy’s in the business, he wants to share some of his shit, give something back. I could have told you they’d be saying before you knew it, Hey Jim you ever need someone taken care of on the outside, you let me know—hey did you ever cover a contract? how about armed robbery? Ever cover a war? (But you knew the Cuban contact of our Chilean gentleman had asked where you in particular were coming from.) One guy who never said a word before tells of sticking up a drugstore with a piece of wood and a Volkswagen waiting outside. I had never seen you before. I said, "Were you ever in Brazil?"

You turned at me and said hard factual stuff, but I felt that the messenger might be hearing double signals; and I know the message was meant for me while the response here must, in kind, include the cover: so do you recall you said quick-like, "I met Goulart before the coup. Some revolutionary he was!" All dollars and cents was what you said it was, the middle class losing their wages advantage over the working class, Goulart refusing to stabilize at the expense of the workers, so U.S. development money went to provincial anti-Goulart groups, the CIA went ahead via AFL-CIO to infiltrate Brazilian labor (listen, we ought to have a union, let the Teamsters take us on)—but it was all dollars and cents, you said, and liberals in Washington you said thought it was beautiful, undermining Goulart. ("A liberal," said Ahmed Williams who came one time in four, "is someone who wants for others what he doesn’t want for himself"—the talk gets abstract in here but penetrating.) All bucks, forget the change, you said.

Something’s wrong with that view, Jim. I sound like my mother, who always had high hopes for Miriam, whose own young mother had shared at least the Catholic faith.

Tell the South American he can get in touch with me direct.

(Thanks for filling out the correspondence form.)

He will understand, and I’ll get back to you whether or not you make it up here for that afternoon visit, be assured. Readers of outgoing mail say now and then they read these letters but when they get past first few lines like mine so little smut or legally inflammatory—and you ask does that teacher Ruth M. Heard ever write?

Well, she could run, I’ll say that; small, not too thin, thick around the shoulders, lithe arms, prominent head of curls and when she faced you, her azure eyes came at you and at you, which there’s more of to come, though you understand that my account of the Norseman economist’s view of woman and my fascination with the Scot financier of kings, projector of Mississippi schemes, demand-and-supply monetarist who was first a man and far beyond the moneys he dreamed in, all this, Jim, is no mere opening screen played upon those outgoing-mail scanners who when they’re at the end of their rope have been seen actually holding a page upside down like they’re looking for something. Perhaps, like us, to do.

And so let us say they never got to the mythical messenger. No more than they the spendthrifts of this state’s at last account fourteen grand per inmate-annum (who can’t imagine the lights of that messenger’s car seen intermittently round curves, through trees, like a series of signals, signal fires, smoke signals) will find each the key to his own nature, that "invisible government," Jim, but not to be confused with your liberal nightmare, that CIA they call the "invisible government" right down to the "evenings" they sponsor. Which isn’t—if you can stand one prison inmate’s non-violent reality—the invisible government I mean (though you as a stranger even to yourself whose motion’s a way of waiting, know what I mean?) the skeleton key to what Jim Mayn can do: and this home wherever you go or are, the two the same. You would not go to a siege zone and expect immunity from snipers (or Cubans!) because you’re Press. Alcatraz is where it was, but now nobody home, not the Spaniards or the British, and the Indians who "landed" there were not the first ones there, and during their protest wrote their high slogans on its walls so to the passing ferry the walls might speak. The Feds, in essence they gave it back to the Indians, but the Indians didn’t want it, I said to you; you laughed at me seeing me anew and deja vu and I would be willing to be your reincarnation, if you let me. If I was to plan—thanks for sending back the correspondence form—to be elsewhere, like Outside, I would get my wish one day but arriving there victorious I might find nothing to occupy, it’s like that communication system world round we discussed, Jim, when maybe you got nothing to communicate, that’s what Ruth Heard once said.

And so I am here. Consumer of unseen leisure. A pat on the back for you that you don’t save letters much (you said—and I report—I the maker of carbons near-sighted reader of fine print practically on the end of my nose, in a book-lined study with grid-exposure on the west whence comes the mountain of my inspiration rumored in the stacks of force that one correspondent thinks is widely if slowly approaching, an old man sciencing radioactive weather, yes wrote me—and you boil all letters down in your mind, saving on head space since you doubted there could be as much unused brain capacity as the authorities are trying to make us believe. You saw me grin, man, I knew what you were saying. I who have diversified and know letters need to get lost if thrown away, just as I know what is small is better, idle need not be unused. But you don’t have to be so honest all the time with your new pen pals—Efrain, who’s writing a lot to his Iroquois girl sending her dreams; Smitty, who I wonder if he can smile with his eyes closed—please fill out the correspondence form—and if you write them you will find them very idealistic, Jim, souls, so with an exception here and there I wouldn’t expect these men to tell you their lives, if that is what you came for. Do we want your life?—there’s Shin, a Cambodian social worker (not assigned to prison), who seldom comes and come to think of it seldom writes except to apologize for not writing and to hint at problems in his personal life; so his marriage is on the rocks, maybe he’s got something going.

Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract!, in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together—soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all—which is their secret from themselves.

My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said—I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality . . . ? What are we going to do about it?"—yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!

So that sometimes in this quest for things-to-get-in-the-way, I have felt the rock-bottom unit was Woman, so here, so there, so ever hard to pin down.

You evinced experience of this unit, this constant; I did not ask your marital history; thought Efrain followed up on you saying you had something in common with us but all you said was "Crisis."

And in the middle of the midnight of my pursuit which the South American economist about your age but bald traveling I feel sure you know under an alias seemed to understand in the brief time we spoke across the Visiting Room table so many months ago it’s years by calendar and even not by calendar (though the warp of this communication yields sometimes Efrain and sometimes only his absence, paroled)—followed by a second (but only by my count) stranger visit in the Visiting Room after our economist got back from a space launch—that visit the last time I heard from him till recently—I sometimes have felt that after all I have not found that unit and it’s as close as air and wherever I go it is with me, so I will not get shook when some former missionary in a sweater murmurs What a waste, as I’m standing by mop and pail, and I say that in my father’s house there are many mansions, but then see this missionary isn’t the same as the other, his brother, his twin, ever have a brother, Jim?, but then am reminded that, no, I indeed did find the fundamental unit microscopic as beings we’re made of, grand as thought, abstract as the age.

And where is this letter by the way? In your hand? someone else younger? Here? Gone? Boiled down? To what?

To be made like my earlier letter and our subsequent afternoon visit? You said you would check out colloids (like to see if there’s any left!). You didn’t read much "to speak of." Thank you for bringing the correspondence form with you. To answer your question, No, Ruth Heard doesn’t write. Of Cubans and our Chilean I cannot say, though one of former was visited by a tall, scarred man sent by a fortuneteller’s friend and it’s general knowledge he’s on the way out of here sooner than legal.

I hear the black chant, the Muslim feet jogging down the concrete tunnel, study session’s over; I hear, I see, the men, two by two, the knitted caps, among them Willie Calhoun Jackson soon to be out on work release. And seeing this limited yet group consciousness bind these men, I think we are all . . . but you know what is coming, I felt it a century ago in the frequency emanating from natural sources, cloud, hail, mountain, human plasm making me, as I then was, a hole in somebody else’s head no doubt (smile)—but what is coming you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious passed like a watchword so brief as to be unspoken from the South American through you was it by chance but really by itself. And so I know that he needs my help, though you might not know this, though you may know the gravity of his plight which I have not helped.

All this goes too far too fast, and whatever is true in your racket, Jim, brevity’s wit may turn out gravity’s vacant nutshell (read "-house," as in "nut-" or read "multiple dwelling")

Yet I slow down to be complete—holding no brief for speed, what do you really like doing fast?, in and of itself you get plenty of time to fix all that—then if you follow not for the purpose of honoring a super’s garbage cans which he would speak of and as often keep watch over in case a neighbor, a kid, even own daughter’s boyfriend at school should leave a lid unsecured having stashed an old out-of-state plate where any animal or other might get into the building’s garbage, which is neither here nor there I’ve learned later in three places which are all prison which in turn I may not have said, but it’s a very good experience being transferred, as I have been twice, no middle-of-the-night police-state nonsense, right after breakfast, and you can get well-known for being well-known.

And when you get there you are as ageless as before though for once time done is space crossed, but might as well be the river in Australia longer than our Mississippi, endless as the abundant dairy products Miriam and I are farming in New Zealand calling to mind dairy-product cancer but also life as it was at first, where land is for the having.

To own land, Jim: not theft, as Juan thinks, practicing on my typewriter till the last minute—eleven o’clock when the juice surges elsewhere leaving us in technical darkness. For even if such property comes down to your claim through heirs upon the future, it is a transient holding minor as an accident, kernel of corn falling from a bird, a wind; one corn falling like theory, evenly from heaven, not to mention the paper manufacturer’s daughter who in her race for the State Senate and in preparation for that long-winded body added to her pilot skills learned at our airfield just outside these walls with a course in bailing out, but overshot the acreage her father owns, and someday, always in skirts, she will own for miles all around airport and prison, and on the Sunday of a Puerto Rican festival she drifted down too low, and, clearing one rampart but not two, she found her fantasy skewed, she yanked her lines expecting an answer that wouldn’t come, accepted with total-body wit the double-chute bare bloom, nearly twisted her leg descending onto the volleyball net with its angry holes stretched in lost memory—practically landed in the caldron of beans and sausage which would not have ruined underwear she was anyhow bare of but dispersed a long line of PR inmates and families and could have corned the ice cream but missed the rice, the coffee urn, the bandstand wired for poetry at that point, and missed a man and a small boy playing catch in the sun—catching up on lost life with a third, a known visitor in a western fringe outfit and hit a picnic table by the far wall where Efrain was getting it on with his full-blood Iroquois girlfriend fingerprint masseuse though while kissing turning both their heads so he could watch the Unidentified Woman’s flight approach out of the corner of his eye.

To touch down and be besieged by admiring strangers who, all but the Chilean’s associate the journalist Spence who had been talking to the Cuban’s little boy, could not be blamed for not knowing the industrialist’s daughter was the new owner of this land, if you see; for, sometime during my fourth or fifth year inside, the truth came to me (which I could never discuss with Shin the Cambodian would-be correspondent who when he used to come wanted to discuss the extra lift a guard gives you on your way up to the Box or how many assault problems per new inmate, plus profile which guys lose their wives in here within six months, ‘stead of basic problems like what I’m telling you came to me): that property is theft only of yourself: where are you if you have land? Why, you are there. It’s got you like the tax man leans on next year, which you have let’s say borrowed from him, but where is he if you want to blow him away or drive him nuts? You learn there’s a new man.

They go away, and approaching what I hoped would not go away, I’ve known the great obstacle, which is to be not remembered, to be almost on the tip of someone’s tongue, no more, though that’s a beginning for you.

The evening’s visitors, the program people, came up the long corridor, and there’s my Mayn in the rear chatting with the Austrian wife of the car dealer who turns and waits a beat as if to say to her, You O.K., dear?, and in the forefront comes a former missionary in a sweater, he knows me and I say, "Putting in your time?" and he, "Aren’t we all?," eyes rolling upward, but when I say, "But mine’s being paid for by taxpayers," he steps on, as if he’s thinking for the first time today, turns back toward me and I don’t know which of the sweatered former missionaries he is and so don’t know what of me he remembers, and say before he can say anything which is doubtful anyway, "In my father’s retirement compound no rooms are rent-free," and he turns to greet you, and you stop to shake a hand, grip an arm, say a name.

And that obstacle, that being forgotten, I got to go down after it till you pass through the last nothing between you and the ground and find a footing. Everything you find here, Jim, I have seen with both eyes for myself. So I remember the Y camp that let me in for two weeks one summer because I knew a lifeguard at a beach in the Bronx I’d never swum at; they let me into the Y camp even after I had trouble in school thanks to Ruth Heard, I mean really thanks, and it was the first time she was fired; and when I left camp to go home I wondered where she was and remembered the pine needles on the ground beyond the screen of the cabin where dew and early sun whispered to me, Jim—yet, more, I had in my head a watery place way under a float out in the lake supported on all sides by fuel drums so you had to dive down through the anchorage lines and come up into the cool tomb of air, empty drums smelling of mineral echo and containing inside them someone’s private motor faraway outboard, bike, chainsaw; and while the drums and slimy ropes were good obstacles to your being discovered, you heard the guys shouting far away. One day a black kid with reddish hair came up in there gasping like whispering his mistake, and we just breathed at each other and I didn’t tell him the air pocket was getting smaller and smaller and the drums was timed to go off at seventeen hundred hours, but then I did, and he said, "Shee-it, man." But then he got to believing the way I believed it, and we would swim in there from different directions under water like as much as twenty-five yards thinking seriously for the first time of saving energy even creating your own, and two kids who went to parochial school and I would dive off the float and get up on it again, one of them must have had an idea because one afternoon just before seventeen hundred hours he came back up under there in the center in our air space and couldn’t believe it when he saw us and looked from one to the other, back and forth, but I whispered that the air pocket was getting less and less and we had to get out of there, and he got scared of us, I saw his teeth, his white eyelashes, the water and shadow gave us speckled skin —I never thought of that—he was treading water like he had a cop running after him and he was grinning at me and over his shoulder at the red-headed black kid and I said there was only air for two minutes for two guys and what would that be for three guys and the kid said so quick it was like breathing in, Forty seconds for three, thirty for four, and the red-headed black kid and I reached for him and he started screaming and we pushed him down, down under and toward the ropes—why did we?—but we didn’t hear anything after that and on the train home when the two weeks were up I kept thinking the place would forget me. Just some crazy place? Because I knew I wasn’t coming back and anyway the float would be gone.

What happened to that kid? Tried to get the two of us in his sights. He got homesick that very night, because when he got pretty well drowned he passed through a vacancy of the lake and saw only the connection of it with home and never slept again.

The float, though, gone for good? The place able to forget? I met my red-headed black associate once long afterward—my clock says almost eleven and I can’t lay my hand on a fresh carbon—met him at a city pool more full of kids than water, a pool with a good and unexpected shape and high and low diving boards and a Chinese kid (said to be thirty faking his age) who was thrown out for pounding the high board while the rest of us yelled at him to go off, then leaning sideways suddenly at board’s bend to pitch himself a good ten feet over to land on the low board which was free for that moment and landing in such a way that, though he practically snapped the low, he vectored all the curves of this force into a floating straight-out swan that held but did not let go all the joined curves of his act: until then he hit the water, and as he entered with a slice the growth he had been compounding of force for a million split-seconds that held us fascinated and sent the sound of the elevated train passing into an ear of sound so we were deafened by the sight of the diver, took hold of him: and, while he went in straight, once in he was swerved so hard left forward right left, that his body was swung under the surface by that unspent tangle of poles—it was another mind’s hook that sent him then with energy you would have sworn he did not have smashing silently suddenly six feet to his left with a gravity of force into the pool wall—cong! I could hear it. Ruth Heard who I met on the street the one and only time and she was not alone said I would have if I’d been under water.

When he was pulled out, looking like an old man who had been far away while time had stood still here—and ejected—I met my former camp associate who said, "Hey man, what about that kid we—" but he looked over his shoulder and our thoughts collided. He looked me in the face, and just as three kids yelled in my ear so not even my girlfriend’s father could have thought he heard what I said, I said, "It was a good spot and they’ll never find it," and he said, "What?" then nodded once slowly, up and down; "Right, I got it." For we had that place right with us, between us, we knew the camp wasn’t there no more.

You get out of me more, you see. You said again that you would check out colloids. My dad sees only one thing when he looks at me now—the cage in front. He will never get to see my cell, but . . . and he doesn’t see what I was sent up for but if he maybe accepts it he never liked me writing the Fire Department to remove my name from consideration. I had been put forward without my consent by friends of the family and I could not go that route, a letter to which there was no answer. My sister I will say sees more than one thing looking at me—now married to a ticket taker on the New Haven in a black hat who I think of as a cop, basically, who has put her in a pre-dyed pink ranch unit by the Thruway where she can see his place of work pass twice a day and he hers even to knowing if the garage door is down or up, though if down, not whether she has made her every-other-monthly secret trip beyond the Connecticut line (no doubt mined) to see a once-loved relation in his storied seventeen-hundred-bathroomed redoubt, first arranging for the kids to go home with friends after school, mum’s the word, shopping for Dad’s birthday—oh, in New Haven, Hartford, Boston . . . Montreal! Newfoundland!—while in this way she hides her true trip some miles westward and hides that once-favored relation of hers more than his exile hides him.

Now give her credit, though she can’t slip past the metal-detector threshold an old license plate of hers specially requested by the brother sentenced among other things to drive no more, she when she sees him unlike their father (who is also, granted, embarrassed, which is maybe good for my father to feel, you know) sees two things—not one, like the old man in his bleached T-shirt and his mouth. But she can’t see her two at once, and I can only forgive her; and the two are: me her brother the foregone once-loved relation; and second (but not in order) her man in black she sees—in my eyes sees him reflected, Jim, behind her on his suburban local moving past power poles like picket fences flickering disapproval but much worse than disapproval at her through me, my eyes—or try this for size, he’s standing just behind her mad brother (me) just before Brother seats himself on his side of the Visitors Room table, and seeing through me as thank my stars she alone has always done with the light of love, she instead, like the Visitors Room is a museum, finds her husband there, he in real black not my correctional green, in a silver-buttoned uniform coat over my prison-issue green short sleeves, and in his silver-number-plated conductor’s hat above my long-lobed brainy ears and short, fair hair, and his clean lip under my utility infielder’s mustache, but is he in black or in blue? it’s been so long I wouldn’t know, and you got to ask yourself as you said, Jim, speaking of trusting your memory, Did I ever know this thing I claim to have forgotten, rest my soul?

Ruth Heard thought like that. And that’s how I almost got thrown out of Junior High: attacked the principal and other teachers for pushing her out, this beautiful subversive person. This is about i960 and she took us on unauthorized trips and we would disappear for the afternoon, and a skinny Irish kid who was funny so we all thought we liked him didn’t like her assignments and got his folks after her and she had no teaching certificate and told his parents she was glad to teach only when she was worked up and wanted to make trouble for herself; and in the different ways parents have, no one fought her dismissal and the principal fought me by letting me graduate. First things first, my mother would say, the sweat on her brow; and make dinner that my father would look at the meatloaf and ask very quietly, Where’s the ketchup, and she said, Already in—yet he brought home an electric frying pan for her once not threateningly and you could tell if you looked close he was pleased with himself.

My mother did not imagine she would go to a driving school on the sly and get her license at age fifty-one, but she did. Meanwhile made what trips she could to see me by bus, but has never to this day told me the explosion when the old man found out she had gone out and got her license.

First things second. It’s not a pat on the back I want now much less that brown-and-gray-striped shirt—did you get that in your brother’s store? It was hot in our workshop room that first night. Thank you for filling out the correspondence form. I took your word Friday that you do not know the activities of the South American economist (while we do not discuss him or the American photo-journalist who has pursued that distinguished gentleman’s life for profit that has led him from Florida to this very institution. Which the Foleynomic Plan was to cover, too).

You were part of the life of that good and heroic gentleman South American with an Irish or was it Scottish name but with the foreign and the English accent: hence our constant messenger tooling up through hills which was only one thing I meant when, before I said, "So much for economics," I found an opening in the void.

It was a face I could have pushed in, or inward. You know the type, Jim. One with oddly the same eyes as my girl, sharp behind the mist—a little not there. Reflecting not you exactly. Just secrets seducing you to know them when shit who cares.

But those eyes not my girl’s drew you in by likeness and then you were betrayed and where her eyes were all readiness which you expect of a good person, a fine girl, these similar orbs of her father the super were motion I swear like he’s not all here, and he did marry a Puerto Rican even if she died. Which left him free to go to Israel, which Miriam said her mother never would.

He never missed a thing; looked after the building like it’s owned by someone he looked up to. And he would forsake his bed in the middle of the night to monitor his garbage cans.

Once, the garbage started rising. So he needed a fifth can, and he got it out of the owner, but then found that under the beef gristle and chicken joints, the toothless cobs, lolling eggshells, glistening slicks of tuna cans and here’s a gefilte fish jar and spent tapeworms of spaghetti and tomato sauce and grounds and cucumber curls everything breaded in cat litter, light bulbs like new and angles of toast, was stacks of his old newsmagazines and papers he almost didn’t know he had because he reads them only years late for perspective, but now he wanted them and freaked out that the ones not already mashed by the sanitation-truck paddle-chopper were stinking wet, and what he could sometimes be saying in shock to his cronies who’d stop by the cans to smoke a cigarette, "I don’t get into shouting matches," and Miriam was up in the apartment right there when he came so close to smashing her little Aunt Iris who’d thrown the magazines out you might have thought those old pages and supplements were life savings—papers prematurely leaking cancer cures and showing old infants half-cooked half-eaten in the furnace of your local place of worship. He paid for them with his labor, and he had spent his time preparing to read them, it carried him through the very twilight hours of "local dusk" at which you said the Russians are fond of recovering payload weapons test-fired by retro from orbit in case there should be a future to ply with, which will mean more of the old educated guesses as to actual cash flow in global arms trade because credit arrangements not to mention the grant basis make, as you admitted, major weapons transactions as hard to put money value on as the give-and-take of modern wedlock (laugh). Twin mysteries. But why did you then say we shouldn’t take you seriously? I, at least, saw the connection. And I know the papers make up whatever they find they are missing so the future can be told; but if statistics like last year’s jump in military spending in a certain South American nation will likely be followed in ‘77 by a corresponding drop because the lid is on there now—and even because statistics don’t find it easy to lie, so action after action must be made up—did you sleep in berths in the old Pullman trains?—the father of a kid I know worked there until one day they put him behind a bar selling pressed units of turkey-gobbler in bread wrap—actions as live as that dioxin spread over four misty years of Asian woods and farms maintained its integrity so well that it proved itself as a future area-denial weapon—which you know already, Jim, so well that my being in your head is the important thing, not the information I rehearse there—as interesting, all this, as people, Jim, and as, sometimes, the boredom they make you live with—more events to read about, to carry Miriam’s father, his gray-white wiry hair standing up on end, through local dusk from work to supper even in my thinking and I feel yours concurring, beyond the sanitation tumbril chopper-scrambler (his head borne under it, and disappearing, or segregated and rejected for transplant tumbling back into the street where it is exasperated) while Miriam’s Aunt Iris watches with her soulmate Eddie the printer with friendly ink-eyes and an anvil forehead still unmarried driving a late-model compact.

And Miriam’s father keeps himself going with other consumables besides these magazines and papers which he kept because he wanted the chance to devour them all over again someday, while leaning against his building talking to friends who had retired and didn’t work part-time but are included, free, in his leisure watch over a six-story tenement not far from the East River Drive, from the subway, from my own former home, and from a drop Miriam and I some days detoured to so as to go not right home from school to her house which was a way I couldn’t begin to measure near-sighted though I don’t forget a bit of it, down to the point of a pizza wedge Miriam once fed me across the booth table to shut me up when all I was going to say was, Let’s get outa this dump, let’s go to Jersey, the beach, maybe further out, no one’s there this time of year—whatever time of year it was.

And I am not forgotten by her father, which is the story of my one-time life before I learned to think. But a man who his beloved daughter Miriam said spoke often of settling in Tel Aviv with a friend he had once sat on an East River pier bench with and disputed for hours. But if I am in your mind now and by design, you are in mine and no getting around it and you see I do not hide my light under a bushel.

You said, as if in question, There are no animals here. Got a guilty laugh, running up out of the convicted gut on a string that was then leashed in. I see you moving and me here. Ever-moving. But sometimes moving in one place without ever leaving, yet knowing you could leave. You asked who visits. Well, I have always been pretty selective. My mother borrows Eddie’s car— you don’t know Eddie—and always leaves a little present in it—a bear to hang on the sun visor; a pack of mints. My mother comes. The Visitors Room—what more than an expansion of the seminar horseshoe table where we rap with Death Row chaplain ‘bout everything except that inevitable penalty itself, and the Muslims come and listen and burst out now and then I mean really very intelligently. The meeting’s called "cadre," it’s called "therapy," it’s a rap supposedly though padre does all the talking, urges us not to jerk off—but the cadre’s a way not to get locked up after supper which is earlier than the army but later than the hospital. Not this dentist-equipped hospital, which I don’t go near.

Though Miriam sent me once to the dental clinic uptown, and I recall contemplating borrowing a car off the street to save time and now I see that as an early experiment in a public transportation system with open cars anyone may use within a given borough. The car theft I mentioned awhile ago was an old VW that petered out slowly block to block while the cops gave chase until at last vehicle came to a halt, and perpetrator left piece of wood used as pistol on seat, and the cops never identified it as the weapon.

Things go on somewhere here and are heard of. Guys for example might get burned upstairs. I don’t mean they been doing it, but it looks like they are going to activate the refrigerator and other major appliances (smile), stove, blender. But we would never see it. Not even the dimming of the light because they got a separate generator. What do you expect in a maximum multiple dwelling? Let’s say the head pop off and the exhaust smoke just squeeze out from armpit one, armpit two, and the curled hands darken with the body’s irritation at this half-ass cremation, this summary drying out of the teeming colloids. On those midnights when you are waiting for a dream in which there’ll be an unexpected dimming of the seventeen-hundred-toilet candle-power, you think then of an H-bomb settling whole and bright upon this place and reaching down instantly along so many fuse radii the incandescent inmates here are at the center of the flower if not attention; bodies with auras for a moment and auras inside too, where the skeleton flares orange under the analysis of the moment and the brightness that is in truth the ultimate shadow gives you gall remembering what you’re in for to say as you die (instead of "I think we’re in for a shower," because as our Chilean contact said, When people talk about the weather they often mean it). At least Outside the others are getting the same, and you see one of them jacking up a fast car to change a tire which ain’t reboring a cylinder because what’s he know?, but doing something anyway, and on the parkway rolling nowhere; another person jumping at the kitchen timer and plunging to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer; another window-shopping, finding a trace of a faraway idea in an article of clothing; another in a backyard digging not realizing a person that knows him well is watching him from the back-porch steps, you could go on, Jim, but when you’ve had this final thought at the moment of the capital H —that your own human kinsmen outside are also being totaled by the bomb —your brain’s too full to let this be the last thought so while you think, ‘ There it was, they’re getting this, too," and ‘That was my last word and thought, that was it," your brain as it shimmies adds a whisper to the shuffle of your coil (smile): Anh-anh; nope; quite the reverse, everything on the Outside, unchanged, unbombed, is O.K. and as it was—like this new generation of clean devices come off the drawing board not just to eliminate undesirable elements but to model a holocaust at minimum expense and with maximum media exposure to show each man in the family of man.

Or so I used to let my mind go—a sloppy body (you said you’d check out colloids, no need to get too technical, Jim)—until my life changed when I woke up to the Colloidal Unconscious. It had always been with us. You touched on it when you first arrived on tape. You are different, Jim, from our old born-again prospectors with the fine-tooled boots pointing out under their cuffs, who pull their big-buckled belt off at the metal-detector checkpoint, yessuh, small change, pen knife, and some credit cards show up too, glad to be asked, suh, well you know they have got it all down to Jesus; or that good bearded father who cornered history by just splitting the Earth between those thirty-two hundred mines full to the brim with miners and on the other hand and always elsewhere the twelve inspectors who by some arithmetic fronting as geometry could ensure each mine one visit every ten years.

Or that bad father—for there’s always a good father and a bad father, Jim, and the bad father didn’t want to get into a shouting match and found the world in a necklace of garbage cans that magnetized his mind, and were his work and perpetuation and care like overflow from father function until his beautiful daughter the one I always love grew older and then those cans got mysteriously linked by a medium-voltage line especially dangerous in a drizzle to jolt and stagger Dobermans, frowning shepherds, bassets minding own business, cold-cock your Afghan, explode your spaniel, straighten out a white chow’s tail, recharge your Saint Bernard, when these had until then lifted, oftentimes propped, a leg to leave a sign of themselves upon galvanized common surface that could now be turned on or off; or another who’s got it all down to one thing, Willie Calhoun Jackson, fellow inmate, soon to get out on work release, soon to be wed, soon to join the army of the employed, who does not say what he does not know and does what he says he will do and is one member of the population here who does not walk the tier or walk the yard but—like him or not—got it down to one thing, and he sees it all as black and white, until you better just not talk to him any more, he is so clear:

as you, Jim, can see when he comes into a workshop when he comes, and in that ledger of his he has place for that famous President’s black Jupiter behind him on horseback or muleback (secret overseer-without-whip)—comes up in that famous American’s account books who knows when?, when the master was meditating the source of petrified shells in the great layers of schist in North Mountain—not the ray-root mountain of the West-coming-East alluded to in the new weather of my old science-man when he writes, that will change our chromosomes and coastal precipitation not necessarily for the worse—and Jefferson recalled if not the Universal Flood those shells fifteen thousand feet high in the Andes that were said to testify to it—and this Jupiter was in unconscious connection with his famous master in ways not imagined by Willie Calhoun Jackson’s universe of black chance

: whereas you Jim boiling down my letters in your head now and the visits in between, keep us all in our places: you’ve got Juan, I bet, out in the yard pumping iron to build up strength to study chapter and verse long after lockup, after the last steel door clangs to, made by a Cleveland ironworks but not by unskilled cons but Juan isn’t hearing the clanging any more if I may speak for him, he’s memorizing contradictions between the freedom to sell that one basic valuable your labor, and the freedom not to buy it of those who made the steaks and winter coats you need, for these are nothing but materialized labor: but I say (wishing Ruth M. Heard was here), Listen, man, the cheap-labor market for Puerto Ricans in the early fifties, that’s past, it’s education that’s the difference (but I don’t like what my words tell me like a head I have contacted into existence outside of me)— So what happened to you, Foley (Juan demands), blond, white Irish-Polack (asks the red-eyed leader): Juan bides his time, regrets he was not at Attica getting strafed by a Rockefeller for what a difference a transfer makes: while hearing his own voices only sometimes because he’s studying every paragraph three times of a sacred book that found its proofs from across the ocean in England, but: Attica (I tell my friend Juan) was inevitable, then so was his not being there to get winged and anyway the day is over when Puerto Ricans were neither Americans to Americans nor Latin-Americans to Latin-Americans:

No, they’re not over, he looks up now from his book and I feel old twilights I used to enjoy outside—but (I add) Puerto Rican is internal immigrant. Migrant, you mean, he answers and don’t look up from his book: So what are you, man? Con, I answer—and he goes up in a laugh or not a laugh, and snaps the Bible shut:

You see, I come back at him, quantity of opposition between us has increased to a qualitative change.

But he reaches for the good book that’s dropped to the floor by his file crate: "Con" is right, he says: (Not "Pro," I quick-quip) Convert, I say.

He says, Look here (but I can’t see the long footnote he’s holding up): I should have kept up with my fuckin’ chemistry, he’s saying in somebody else’s voice. What I know about paraffins and fatty acids?