You’re getting silly again, Foley, says strong-man friend Juan, What are you putting off? go away and leave me alone (and well it isn’t as if I don’t have letters to spirit out of here!). And Jim, I remember how Ruth Heard said how her father believed in speaking out and would pack a Thermos of Indian tea (how she learned to drink it without sugar) for the two of them on London Sunday morning and a cheese sandwich each, and her sister going up and downstairs every minute while her mother sat by the radio; So Ruth and her dad went off on a double-decker for hours with two changes to get to Hyde Park where royalty’s galloping around—you have been there, Jim, I am sure. And here her father would get on a box at Hyde Park Speakers Corner and talk, and talked even when they turned away because he believed in a new all-purpose tax, and in changing the time standard for England, and in experimenting with having every area in the world on the same time. He wore a dark brown suit, red tie, gray felt hat like a labor leader, and he could interrupt his address to catch the attention of someone, tourist or resident— speaker-shopping—but he kept talking even against ultimate noise interference, like if the machine you’re driving is working O.K. you forget what a jerk you are, but if you bust a fan belt in the boondocks (and the car is "borrowed" at that) it all comes down on you, what you are.

Juan says he wants to get to the bottom of why things happen. I say you can’t blame it all on Monopoly or Race. He’s thinking I know about his little baby brother, no baby now. There’s a lot of water under the wall between him and me and I’m going to leave him now and go around the corner, it’s time to eat, he bides his time, his food and roof, his heat and light are free but he must work overtime for that one corn as the Good Father says that’s only Juan’s subsistence before he begins to even think of his family’s, which he does not.

And Jim, take Charlie with his animal eyebrows, who’ll always listen and bring you together with someone you don’t know and even he is coming to think the Education Programs maybe sedate you, and knows the Colloidal Unconscious is neither powerful nor a drug. And Smitty will never tell you but he knows he’ll never be a journalist but comes to the workshop to stay out of his cell till eight-thirty and to add to his tape collection while trying to go on closing his eyes to his little woman (with the highest heels that make her taller than he is broad); and you, Jim, see Efrain, soon to be released, going up and down in that elevator because he put up a curtain across his cell bars and wouldn’t take it down, only the beating he took on the way to the Box is in his head now and his dreams shared with his Iroquois lady who can massage even his fingertips-fingerprints and nobody laid a finger on him for a long time I think (though sometimes I think every guy in here knows news I don’t); and nobody kids around with Smitty lately, but he’s got his tapes with guys sharing their thoughts and feelings (you don’t get that on the Outside so much), so you know that these guys are not just (as the foreign gentleman was heard to say to his contact here) vacuum-packed for burial in space, that even if in the cemetery here where you don’t want to wind up alone, on the headstone they got a number (that’s all) so let’s face it, they’re not dealing with death’s sting even at the end when, whether felt or not, it comes, these guys rapping on tape are just as alive, Jim, as you saying (also on tape, where I first heard you), that it was maybe just due to your chemistry that you were unconscious all these years which I don’t quite believe you, these guys they are not vacuum-packed for burial in space, that’s what our mutual acquaintance the South American said who we both know though how well is like why you’re here—he said the astronauts look alike, and a man he met there in Florida called them all sealed up in their suits unknown soldiers which made an impression on the South American and on me because the astronauts aren’t typical at all. Yet in your head it’s mainly me I hear talking (smile) and the time we had a Visitors Hours visit as private as such can be with the waste product at the high desk on the platform catapulting butts every twenty minutes depth-charging over the desk to be swept up (no waste/make work) by some half-visible con, not to mention in the corners above the junk dispensers the two closed-circuit videos scanning the room as if you would steal me and my annual value of fourteen thousand five hundred dollars when at best you rent my heart, friend, and all you can get at except to reach across the steel counter to press the flesh is the dispenser’s white-flour sandwiches (crisped by time) in their lighted windows and the no-cal leukemi-aid and the potato curls which they hold down inflation by filling the bag less up but then they rethink the price two months later, which I owe you thirty cents for: we spoke so little of the Chilean economist that I wondered was he our connection after all, though I figured you had come to your own discovery of the Colloidal Unconscious as well as through our economist-exile who had mentioned it to you.

I wondered how much he was our connection because—let’s be frank at least in heart-to-heart—when I asked if you had an address for him better than mine which is a "Care-of " that just isn’t where a man with a dignified manner and a head like that hangs his hat (not even an apartment over the deli in question), you paused to let, I know, those sub-microscopic half-knowing mirror-particles face me a message: which was, Can’t you give me an address?

Hey, when you going to bring Larry, I faced back an answer. College and from Outside.

Someone inside me knows more than I, and that’s the one you needed to ask. Unless it’s yourself, these later weeks, Efrain getting out, Smitty missing workshop one week, then not taping us the next, and saying little but keeping his eyes open now, telling me he did not believe in suicide.

Yourself, I said, for you said that sometimes going out on assignment you’d have this dumb idea you already had the facts. Was this to warn me of what I knew already from the tape, oh and from the capability of those colloid surface faces we share more than you may know, Jim—that you brought a message in units only I might put together from that fated man—his name you know; and he, as I told you on your last visit (not the most recent when you were not admitted) I have been in correspondence with—and he hinted Danger he is in from a journalist.

But these letters of his had begun again only after our workshop had gotten off the ground so there was something there between the two, a connection though not through the Colloidal unConscious with him—only with you, if you are not yet much of a chemist, so that in the evenings in this multiple dwelling while Charlie and others on Honor Block are watching the seven-o’clock news, I am catching the two of you—I’ll explain—there’s three Honor Blocks here—it’s not so easy to concentrate on Honor Block—but what I am explaining (since you and I accept no substitutes) is that you and the South American aren’t all I see, but it’s on not one but two screens, sounds like the latest thing, Jim, two separate screens you don’t tell the guard about, but he wouldn’t hear anyway up at the head of the tier reading the paper.

Two screens—separate but overlapping. It’s always that way—neither one complete, and I’m about to catch on one screen you and him both.

There’s his face listening at me like a window, but I know it is you he is facing even if you don’t know, and on the other screen there you are but not face-on (like a window) or back-to, instead in profile and you just finished talking, say to our mutual acquaintance who’s on Screen One, and there’s other stuff on each screen, women and children (I didn’t say "innocent" but you heard the after-image), an orchestra (I’m looking back and forth) and a stage with singers and some people I feel I know in the audience near me offscreen, a barmaid grinning straight up (with her kids yelling in the apartment upstairs, off-screen), an apartment furnished only with one unbaited mousetrap vacant for one and a half socially necessary love-hours, an arm in a sleeve I’ve seen on two men before and a hand swinging close-up back and forth, on-screen off-screen like it’s making the background of walls and stairs move, and then on the other screen as if I’m the owner two forearms and hands fitting a galvanized aluminum lid snug down over a garbage can so I know who it was in the other screen going downstairs, but whipping back I see the sleeve that’s going downstairs pull up above the wrist and there is undoubtedly the blue toe of my old man’s tattoo; then here’s a window full of shirts and jackets and when a bus passes I see me and Miriam in the glass and an out-of-state Dodge parked in a towaway zone and want to look some more—she takes my picture at the beach with her mother’s old box camera—but I’m seeing the other screen and a table with a million winged particles of steam above three bowls of real chicken soup I wish I could smell and we’re sitting watering at the mouth until her father’s hand comes up and grabs his spoon but before I can do likewise I’m back to the other screen but I’m in prison, not my head, and what else needs to be proved, you jerk you—and I don’t get to see me and Miriam but a familiar hand half in the dark reaching for a switch which is dark enough so it could be my father turning on the light on a Friday afternoon in spring when he’s home from the garage—but I know it isn’t, it’s someone else and the switch is for the garbage cans.

Meanwhile, hey Mir’, so what happened at school? She says Miss Heard substituted. It’s high school, Jim. I’m mad. I ask what happened. Miriam shrugs, smiles, throws me a curve, and screen becomes Heard’s first day substituting in junior high:

My name is Ruth M. Heard. / What’s the M for? / Mean Mother. / That’s two Ms, someone else adds. / M squared, would you be up to squares and square roots, love? / And in the snickering silence she gave a ten-minute account of square roots and squaring and cubing and no one gave her shit, then she reminded herself what class this was, but she shut us all up warning us this was a two-class-in-a-row substitution and she’s going to take us on an unscheduled trip soon. For tomorrow we had to walk one city block and write on two sheets of paper (one side only) everything "amazing" we saw. Plus, bring in, ready to tell class, the most plausible lie we could find—and when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?—that’s a burglar with self-respect, luv—What’s that? the same kid said who now had his particles glowing and would try to make it his show. / Oh, you set fire to your neighborhood munitions factory, you blow up the government printing office. / Oh yeah, that’s me, a lot of us said. What does it pay? I asked. / Liars, she said; you don’t want to be anarchists.

But the screen cuts me back, Jim, to its counterpart. So off in Honor Block Charlie and the others catching the seven-o’clock news are receiving the first commercial, the price your eyes pay for the disasters shown so far and to come; while I, if not otherwise engaged, find on one screen (—am I the real prison guard?—) a glass telephone booth all by itself under a night street light with the receiver off the hook lying on the ledge, shredded directory dangling by a chain like a higher power not yet recognized, and on the other I’ve got a woman’s arm and hand absolutely still, that’s all except for the address of the free dental clinic uptown, but on the first screen you see the woman all of her except that hand—and it’s my mother shaking her head slow, her eyes not coming to mine: and all I want is to get her on one screen, and is she watching the road? Look, let alone the once-a-week screamer that the Chiefs ignore (and it’s the Indians who’re always having a talk with him who screams once a week on Saturday morning, "The White Dog must go! The White Dog must go!") the real wilderness Jim is what’s not said by mouth which if they could hear it they would be making out transfers for one-eighth of the population conservatively and shuffling them off to Box A to have their rotten cells pulled at Clinton on the Canadian border where you say a Russian bomber has the capability of finding an unscreened layer to slip through over the prairies to detach us from our installations, and is that where the unscheduled mountain I hear about here at Ground Zero is coming from when it comes? a super-compact nugget that when you let the pressure out, swells to an overnight mountain?, that’s right, what do you do if you don’t pick up on either screen? I’m beyond those speeches at the playground fence, discussions they were, while the German lady Mrs. Erhard (who says Yes under her breath after every fourth of your words) kept a watch down the block across the street; and sometimes I stopped in to buy a magazine, and I asked her when she would be ripped off again, Mrs. Erhard, for she had a little pistol, but I wonder if she’s alive in Florida.

And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his Times with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.

Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious except the Chilean.

Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside—and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor—there isn’t one—and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old—I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too—and the lidless lid—because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining?—and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise—but no countdown—beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming, I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the promise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

—of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—

—for what? translates the dream out of some distant lingo, andpir quanha quoia-san comes to me as far from por que as why is from because—

—route for strange cloud-contents drawn coastward by what (?) that waited there?

But at the time of this dream—dreams settle nothing, you guessed—I did not know these people. And Spence, who, come to think of it, did later mention to Efrain, when Efrain got out, a meteorologist who had meditated ocean coasts in South America and inland coasts in North, was sure new winds were schemed with contingency underplan to quick-pollute selected areas of the U.S. possibly by Wide Load in motion eastward, and Spence, prob’ly un lunatic himself, told a touring foreign agent that a Known Daughter knew more about this because she and her father had made separate trips southwest recently especially in area from which Wide Load or Toxic Mountain (code name bearing built-in correctional facility) was thought to be commencing, and Spence wondered if our South American friend had written me—and I in my dream interpreted by Juan economically called to the knuckles that were white from the drag of the cargo namely cell plus me, and they didn’t have any hair on them so they were Miriam’s or my father’s, and the swings got less until the weight of fallen rain held my container from swinging much, so the open end was up to the heavens but the plane went away and then the weight got so much the cell was set down on the beach with a terrible bump I’m sure but, being partly weightless and in my sleep, I didn’t feel it, and I called to Miriam and she didn’t hear.

So there I was, afloat in my own rainwater higher toward the bars at the top of my traveling cage that wasn’t traveling now, and I thought, Miriam don’t know how to drive, they’ll pick her up. But at least she would be inside out of the rain but I couldn’t see her, and I wasn’t getting into a shouting match, I thought, all I could see was those fingers on the bars and below me underwater the toilet, sink, and bed were fixtures but table and chair, papers and books floated loose down there and the bed was changing but I had to look upward to breathe, and then bars with no fingers so I was alone and the water got higher until I had just my nose and half a nostril up above the surface and to do that, I had to position both eyes against bars so I couldn’t see to breathe, and so after a breath I looked down into the depths of my cell again and saw a shadow and a glint of silver or blond about the eyes, if it was a person, and the bed was sprouting not another bed but branches at the front corners, it was made of wood like my bed at home, I saw it growing but had to breathe again, but I heard everything from dolphins’ opera inside musical garbage cans to lobsters crawling my way over the land that lay all about the square bucket I was drowning in. I took mouthfuls of water, squirted it but it came back in, until I heard a pounding like thunder and then, Jim, I couldn’t hold on no longer, and I knew this was no dream, the thunder got like a weight in my drums and my chest, it was awful, I was ready for the chaplain and the whole cell received a jolt which was like a decision and tipped slowly and it went over and almost halfway but not quite, just so the bars instead of being turned down against the sand were facing onto the beach so anyway all the water ran out and kids were yelling and I wondered if they would kick it again but by then I was conscious in old way again.

It’s good of you to care, I guess—’bout Miriam, my mother, the garbage cans, more than when you first came—and will Larry come sometime? I think I’m on the same curve as him, from what you said about the obstacles he faces; but at that instant awake in my new cell, having come the day before from Auburn’s melancholy vale, I felt I saw Miriam. I tell you I saw her, whereas in the pir-quasi-quoiq dream it was only the knuckles (where was the hand?).

Me seeing Miriam meant I would see her more by being away from her.

But see what?

The white shell of scar since you ask along one fold of nostril. Raven bangs with the slight part like the narrow gap between two front teeth, the hair fell that way. The warm shoulders turned perhaps toward me—toward her father; anyone. The high cheekbones—you’ve heard that before—were they from eastern Europe?, it was where her father’s mother had hailed from, cheeks that looked like they had soft cream makeup on but, to touch, they didn’t. The eyes, one gentle, open degree wall-eyed, so you believed what was true also, that she saw you with both but saw beyond you, to for instance the broad-shouldered old father who acted like me being in the kitchen when she wiped and her little Aunt Iris washed meant I did not give him respect, but she’s afraid of him, Miriam, she don’t want him to even know I asked her to the movies, and she tells me privately she got a cramp while Iris is telling him the stove is still leaking gas and the smell isn’t that mentholated oven cleaner.

Yet waking from that prison dream with no one to take it to except myself, I saw that being away from Miriam was my going, not hers, my weight downward and she couldn’t hold me, O.K.

But all the good that ensued—this was Lady Luck in the grip of that dream hand. In tune with the opening leader-group response of the Death Row (therefore currently unemployed) chaplain’s cadre meetings that they soon threw me out of. Leader: "Out of the struggle of the now we will create the human world of the future." Group: "Our life is in the human struggle. The past is approved. The present is received, the future is open." But not luck, Jim, not luck at that bereft point of waking but, near known sounds, in a different cell and prison, guys passing my bars going to breakfast, desolation like an anvil I’m forged inside, with no hammer to hit it—having not known how to run my dream into the ground by tilting that box one more side over, and suffocate in the dark.

That is, after the water ran out through my new floor of steel bars into the sand.

Not luck that I made a single thing of day and night then and there through seeing not just her fingers if they were hers but Miriam. For I’d found how to receive what had always been mine to, in the Visitors Room from people I hadn’t even met, or in the photography lab which I was now destined to use only so far (no further), or in my manifold cell where I was keep-locked most of that first day in this particular multiple dwelling (call it orientation) though I did not need my colloidal swarms to light me down through this particular multiple dwelling—trade shops, dining salon, law library where there was a spontaneous fight, the Muslim study group (which has changed so many guys not just their names so they have two names with the authorities now); the programs and the plumbing and then deep inside our multiple dwelling the camel in the yard slouching back and forth between the five-on-five basketball game and the barbell clonkers and the very old lifers who, when you tell them a little about the Economic Plan to corral all skills for a better home and envision a society with no more prisons, shake their clean-shaven heads—oh man, f all the criminals was let out, this con for one would rather be inside—though every one of these joints is different, Jim, hence an idea for the future, of correctional confederacy.

You still with me?

Don’t ask, you say.

But as sure as from Smitty’s tape I knew you move and relate by the Colloidal Unconscious, not in so many words—even without words. And whether through the South American gentleman who is in the jeopardy you knew in advance predicted on Smitty’s tape, or through your inborn chemistry that received your future and brought you through it to this jailhouse where your resident economist (smile) seeks as he can the intrinsic unit of value, you now find yourself where you may need to know your own power or what it is, even if you don’t tell others such as the beautiful young social scientist Amy who came with you to the last Puerto Rican festival and you will let me know if she is coming I predict to the workshop soon so I can be there, I hope she did not think I was prying when we were at the table on the grass having ice cream with Charlie’s kid and I asked and she replied in the affirmative that she had been associated with a foundation, only that, no more. She looked around at the other picnic tables and said the guys looked in great shape—very clean, she said, as if she wasn’t sure what to say.

How you going to get dirty here?

Well, it came to me—the message—three days beyond the dream. The message of myself. But the dolphins still sang and the lobsters swayed below the billows and swam a little and in another vein crawled past the old bare tuning-fork fir tree high behind the lake at camp, and in the corners of my eyes swung the father’s garbage cans a loose unit glowing and sparking and clanking like competing anchors with nothing to hold but themselves, one lurching upward to haul the rest, another dropping to drag down those around it, the lids loose and floating off then back on but always loosely so I saw the father, also in each outside corner of my eyes coming but slowly, knowing it would wait, while his physician who I smelled but didn’t see waited to look him over and the Y camp physician was talking like a parent to the kid with white eyelashes who couldn’t go to sleep any more and the prison doctor waiting somewhere in this multiple dwelling to jam me while I coughed, or maybe more a traveling vet who inspected once a month, once a year, everyone will have info re: who when where, but you’ve got only yourself to trust these physicians I knew were there on one point to one side of my nose where I was blind but could smell them round the corner and Miriam she must come walking toward you very clear in what I tell you very tall she was (in junior high, I mean, taller than Ruth Heard), because you have not gotten into asking for all this information about her, like does she drive up here?

So was Miriam why you came? (smile)—father Jewish but mother P.R. (is Miriam Catholic then?), did the father go to Israel? what did Miriam think of your speeches, Foley, through the playground fence? what does she want out of life? (that question you asked didn’t ring true, Jim, yes? but you’ll never master the deeply dumb question Shin the Cambodian asks, like (one on one) Write down the three (or four) heaviest influences that made you what you were at eighteen—) such overly specific "things" prove obstacles to real sharing but for a person in your line of work, you don’t interrogate, you wait—is that what you do?

Miriam, Miriam, you can call her my other half if I had an extra one— Miriam came toward me as if she didn’t see me, she’s walking across my view, her arms swinging at her sides so slowly I would have watched the century out except she was also coming toward me and I had to watch out for her in that quarter also in the other screen where she was walking across and on bended knee I aimed a kiss at her she was going to walk out of sight if I didn’t switch my eyes to another view just as she was disappearing.

Because there was my own voice answering the substitute teacher (What do you want to be?) I still want to be a rich burglar, and somewhere, not on either screen but in between clearer because of my speed back and forth between the screen where I didn’t find her telling how I should come to England where they had the best burglaries like treasure hunts like a team broke into the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Association only to find in the safe not only all the jewels and watches but the keys to another G&S branch practically around the corner only to find, when they got there and broke in, the keys to a third branch, same shit, keys to an associate firm, number four. The class was laughing and the sound was like very great speed, I lost track and the calendar said it was the next day and the substitute teacher wasn’t there n’more and I was thinking I needed help getting over to England and back before they found I was gone.

The obstacles had not been in me, Jim, I had put them out there in front and this continuum that seeing Miriam had left me had nowhere to lead until three days were past and Jackie who smiles a lot and makes you feel you were the guy he was waiting to meet had made my acquaintance observing that a lot of the guys were totally materialistic and I was admitted to the photography program. Admitted so unusually soon that I thought they were out to trip me up but I reached out to claim if not yet unseal the message of myself that had been waiting for me, knowing also that what Jackie would teach I already knew. And they did trip me up. And it might have turned a bad corner for me at that opening of my stay in this multiple dwelling which is far more than the state correctional system.

Jackie—with Juan—in a tunnel new to me—said You want to take the last two on this roll, we’ll run it through now, learn by doing, O.K., George? And we did more than Jackie bargained for. And Juan especially. We passed a guy sweeping and we passed a plumber they knew who was going in the opposite direction, who raised his eyebrows, that was all, it was a long walk, like the prison is really the bigness of this space and you never get to see it. I let them tell me how to turn the shutter speed and roll the barrel. Then I did it my way.

I focused and took the long corridor plus half of Juan’s head up close while Jackie said, You can’t get both, you got to find the optimum, I saw what he meant, and a guard called out down the tunnel behind me, "Where ya going?" and "Better get there," and without taking my eye from the viewer (an expensive camera) I drew back the lever advancing the roll, turned blindly and took a picture of the guard who didn’t like it any better than Jackie who said, "You belong to the shotgun school," but the point of my instruction was to come, Jim.

In the darkroom, an eye on the second hand, an eye on the long strip in the tray-bath filled with what came from a bottle in a box called "Darkroom Graduate." For Juan the one-and-a-half-dozen frames time if not trouble obtained from taxpayers’ surplus income on which we here subsist though monks in their establishment have got it over us they can make a little wine downstairs and move it on the open market, yet if we grew the grapes our correctional wine might command as good a price as the inmate-therapists I have projected in Foleynomics who would work with outside patients by mail like the chess instructors also projected. One-and-a-half-dozen frames taken to be displayed to loved ones and all who care to look and those who read the paper where two or three shots will appear as a record of work made possible by conspicuous leisure, though not equal to the red-rimmed eyes that have viewed those tables of minimum subsistence wage equaling rate of exploitative surplus at one in the morning yet understood more than these, that in the last century a government could decree in the interests of employers that childhood ends at age ten or at the outside eleven—red-rimmed studies which prepare Juan he says for the struggle (though What about the parole board? I don’t say)—studies possessing a fair visibility here Inside while Outside the fourteen, fifteen grand earned and laid away to keep each profile here low if not void is funny money, Jim, I was able years later to explain it to Juan and in return—because effort is returned in this place, guys give and share, you’d be surprised, don’t underestimate us, guys who don’t belong here and guys who maybe do—Juan in return pictured for me his son, and his son’s cousin, Juan’s nephew, helping Juan’s little brother-in-law Manny get a new TV in a shopping cart up a hill from Broadway to Amsterdam at seven o’clock of a cold Saturday evening, I could see how Juan felt, he didn’t explain it, Juan’s kid holding the TV and pushing from behind, windbreaker, wool-lined leather gloves, baseball cap, sneakers with the laces tied).

Which is just filling you in with a little future because Juan and me and Jackie didn’t seem to have a great deal of future on that afternoon three days after the rain vision and here we are in a place they promise you if you fuck up and Jackie is giving an hour of socially necessary labor to the collective phenomenon as the poem says whose author you know, a phenomenon which is, as he says, the human spirit, and but a few minutes of darkroom time had elapsed under the red bulb when—too warm in there—to the amazement of Juan, whose pictures all but two they were, and of Jackie with that broad, pale, about-to-smile face whose pupil I was and who with Juan’s permission let me agitate the film in its bath, agitating the film along the many-tracked continuum of day-night raised the dripping strip, skipped the rinse, and slid it into a waiting pan of hypo and before Jackie and Juan could stop the act which stopped the developing process—or express their surprise at what the haunted fingers had done—the growth of Juan’s negatives had been suspended and that was that.

Dumb, you say? Not the coolest?

You didn’t say (but you communicated these words in our way though you’re just beginning to be in touch with your own C.U. and told me in the friendliest tone that "Dreams don’t settle anything"). And—dumb? uncool?—I’d have felt your point like misery in the lower back or an itching far inside the ear or wanting to go on a long sleep-walk in the middle of the night or our old question What do I do with my life?—had not the Way come to me where it and I always were waiting for each other, the Way of using what I had always had, using those grownups scattering on the rainy beach, using the knuckles that had dropped me in the dream, using the rainwater that was to spread and leave the photo on my table dry and the metal bed in which I came to, using the basis of the electricity more than it itself that Miriam’s father accused the good witch her diminutive aunt one foul spring day of switching on when he could be seen approaching his string of garbage cans with an offering of trash—using the blood that ran upward into my eye and congealed on my mustache though none touched Juan’s darkroom fist as the reminder from a dream those two guys had no way of knowing about, that it wasn’t the knuckles’ fault no more than mine and while I thought what was in my eye was the red light of the darkroom when really it was blood that flowed upwards from my crooked nose I knew in a flash—clear as by instinct I knew the heels and soles approaching our lab door to be a guard who’d heard angry sounds—that I would tell Jackie and Juan what they would comprehend and I would turn their measure of me (which at that moment would have been no truer than the guard’s measure of all three of us) to a finer bond intrinsic to what I’d just seen on those two negatives at the end and rescued.

"I’m sorry I had to do that," I said to Juan, his back to me, shaking his head.

They listened to me. I was way behind them in the mechanics of the camera, the tricks of film, not even a beginner, not started; yet I was way ahead, too.

They could not see at first.

"Wait, man, don’t let the light in!" Jackie called to the hand that gripped the door knob and that (far outside us as if beyond the very walls) said, O.K., what’s going on in there?

But the hypo did its stuff, while the record was in my mind; and when the guard opened the door, I could use that light to show what I meant.

They looked at what I meant. The guard, as I talked, I kept my face away from him; he’s in the doorway.

"‘you say so, George," said Jackie, not smiling, after I had pointed out to their more normal eyes what had been seen by the camera.

Was it a bright half-head (say, of a Puerto Rican iron-pumping Marxist) against a lighter corridor sharply sleep-patrolled darker in the three spots where there were lights? Not at all—only for those whose future is past.

No, Jim, what was it? I almost don’t have the words.

What was it? A moment of Juan’s true power a blur only to negative eyes that have to look ahead to that computerized correct flesh and bone and liquid—you know, Jim?—of our species’ face.

But not blurred if we’ll only see.

Juan’s power, then, caught at that moment that’s always waiting: between scattering we come from and dispersion we flow toward. Rain-dream material. But vision. No dream. So you don’t have to say, Dreams don’t settle nothing.

So the blur, the beginning, of half Juan’s head was no blur, no beginning; it carried on what was there, the core of his force if he find it to live with it to use it (and even if he could not). I said to them that it was Juan’s power mingling with his total environment which was rough if you were not into it because with photography you were going to get your nice perspective and some old corridor. Here you had more.

("You see the stairs," said Juan, low. "Yeah, the hypo got developer on it," said Jackie. "Oh shit," said Juan, the guard was in the doorway at our backs.)

I started to go on about him without designating him, that guard; but all but one of Juan’s immediate family had been on the film, and I had said enough, told what I had seen for all our sakes, leaving out just private stuff (they would think was just me not them). Here, I mean the shadow in my rain cage far below me wafting, budging, whatever it was doing with a blond silver shine about its eyes down there around the bed whose wood was growing from several points, I was fascinated to find that kid suspended in the particles of Juan’s power opened in the mass of light-sensitive stuff I had arrested the development of (smile) (you smile, you think I darken counsel by words without knowledge? true enough, Jim, as we will see a few days past this turning point)—the kid? you’ve guessed—the kid who swam out of the sun in under our raft. And now with the guard behind me and Juan’s power before me under the red bulb, I recalled ducking my head to keep an eye on that kid only to see him wriggling in the wrong direction back under the raft among the loose extra rope fat and slimy suspended here and there doubled and half-tangled near one of the anchor ropes that was taut through the murk.

Then I knew what Juan was going to say, Jim, don’t ask how I remembered—it comes later. I had seen a mind, Jim, a suspension within that film paper, the very small pieces it was in at that time of my life— swamped but too dry: I knew Juan would say, "Where do you get this stuff, Foley? Was you up at Clinton?"

Jackie laughed. He had not been smiling. I knew that through doing whatever it was with the great surface area of all the faceted particles increasing their area with each division that split the work and spread it far and wide, I had given those words to Juan who to this day doesn’t quite know the power of the Colloidal Unconscious to find him where he is, but is used by it, and not badly, Jim, for for all our waste of this power, it is always there, and always more.

So much of this was the work of a moment.

4’Auburn," I answered Juan.

But the guard had spoken, he was the one I had taken a picture of, I didn’t see how he’d gotten all the way down here to where we were. "You on D Block," he said, question but no question.

I turned halfway round and agreed; he asked me my number and I knew it.

"You look at me," the guard said, and the murk of power when I turned to see it, knew I saw it in all its tangled shorts and sparkings.

"You are not ready for this program yet," he said, "you don’t get into this program till you been around awhile."

"Around?" I said—it hit me, but funny; was it the prison system or this particular facility where I was now hanging out?

"It was cleared," said Juan quickly.

Jackie had done the clearing, with the help of Charlie, who asked me my second day how he could help me settle in.

"I said," the guard repeated, "you’re not ready for this program. What you got on your nose?"

"O.K.," I said, "I’m not ready."

"I said," the guard repeated, "what you got on your nose?"

"Blood," I said, wondering where the blood in my eye had gone.

"You hit him?" the guard said to Juan. "I heard you."

"You see that developer," I said, nodding at a thing that looked like a giant microscope. "You’ll find a piece of my nose on it, I ran into it."

"You keep your nose out of here till you get clearance," said the guard, who wanted to know how long we would be.

Jackie said the film was still in the hypo. The guard said he wasn’t having us hanging around there and didn’t I have anything to wipe my nose with. He left.

Juan told me the big thing was an enlarger.

The guard opening the darkroom door had let Juan and Jackie see what I showed them. So after all you don’t know who you’re working for. The guard, who I get along with now because to the ear I am quiet and I read and sit looking at my pictures, was working for me that day and didn’t know it, or the part of that day that had such consequences for me. And I was working for Juan and Jackie though Jackie thought he was working for me and for Juan separately. And six months later the guard asked me if I got cleared for photography because that’s a good program to be in—they all know it is— but I said I decided against it. And that first and only day in the darkroom my work for Juan went almost to waste because he wasn’t ready; but there was the enlarger I hit my face on (smile), plus a with-the-grain something in what I tried to show Juan and Jackie, so that soon afterward Juan worked for me.

‘Cause you build up credit with guys in here, nobody tells you that you were loyal, you didn’t give a guard more data than he could handle (smile), you didn’t pay a little bit too much attention to a guy who knew you knew what was going on with him, nobody tells you your credit rating is good, but you know. Yet Juan did not know he was working for me, in what happened soon afterward; look, he was working for himself too but not as if he knew the work he had done for me, and was destined to help still more, months later, the night before a test he never took but would in my opinion not have failed.

But you, Jim, who were you working for?

I think yourself. Do we all? No, we do not, said Ruth Heard, who told us to figure what we were getting out of every hour we worked, which was confusing to kids, but I found it’s confusing to others, too.

But doubts remain. Why don’t I know even now if the contact we made through the South American gentleman was by chance, or you meant it? He wrote to me, then he didn’t, then he did, then after Efrain got out the letters stopped again. I have told you how the South American gentleman, the Chilean economist, and I met diagonally across the counter in the Visiting Room one day late in ‘72 when my mother went over to the sandwich machine and my father didn’t know what to say to me—can’t blame him—and was looking over at Smitty who had his eyes closed talking and his wife was leaning on her elbows and nodding her head, but on my other side this guy who was getting out the next month was talking to this well-dressed bald gentleman with a mustache who spoke with an accent and he had come with this guy who looked like some street dealer but outdoors-looking not in the city way in a brown leather coat, heavy slick hair, more like long black high Hawaiian, but it wasn’t black, it was like blondish brown toxic-tinted with your "dirty" look, and this guy, our mutual contact the South American economist, listened by looking off into space but at that moment toward me. Then he said, "We are of one mind there, but this company agent you know so much about was my friend whatever his political aim may be," and the slick guy in leather and with hands that might have belonged to someone else, they fitted him, they seemed discolored or speckled—when he interrupted, the bald, well-dressed man seemed to not hear and he nodded in a friendly way at me because I was looking his way, and he said that whatever it was was more than a matter of scrambling funds, it was how the parent company filtered rewards among subsidiaries and the way this changed local taxes, and he mentioned the word "Marxian" but suddenly he and I were talking and I, to say something, asked if he was a Marxian and he smiled; but before he and the other guy with the hands and the high, sort-of-throaty voice got up to go, the South American gentleman asked what Marx I had read, and we exchanged names and addresses, it was great, the guard standing below the dais where the desk is came over and told me not to mix up my visitors, though my dad was still there so I had an excuse to be there, and my mother came back with two sandwiches and asked what it was about and my dad told her, or thought he did, they all love rules, you know.

I have told you this, and you have told me you ran into this guy at Cape K.—coincidence, his zig your zag!—and later learned he was an economist in the Allende government which I knew. But since then he didn’t ever refer to you when I mentioned you in my letters, and once I detected a colloidal settling to the effect that you wanted the address for him that I was in possession of.

But it was always me who brought him up and I don’t know which of us was getting the information, Jim.

Except you’re still here. I mean coming. Like a once in a while letter from the old weather sciencer who takes care of an old lady friend who thinks she’s in New Jersey half the time.

And the information you’re getting—think of it! About inconspicuous photography, hidden work, Foley Plan for 5-20-yr development of this retirement compound, garbage bail-out into a Puerto Rican festival inside these walls leaving the Cessna to level an abandoned barn that had been recklessly commandeered by two lovers; the blue of the sky witnessed above the Yard, if I could only put it down, the stars and comet tracks that are always there, seen or not; the slow, sandy rasp of a super’s shoes (of Life Experience for college credit), Miriam’s father’s soles heard making the swollen-footed ascent to the For Rent apartment he prided himself on not permitting her to clean out after the last tenants in case of rats; and you’ve been getting multinational jokes, and the unknown soldiers cited at Cape Kennedy that impressed our mutual acquaintance from the Southern Hemisphere so he said "vacuum-packed for burial in space" as if he quoted from some store of learning; and speeches through the fence; and why the color of Miriam’s eyes looked like it did when she turned away from everyone else on Earth to me, the late winter sun in her teeth, our feet in the salt soft sand beside a driveway back of a beach house, for we’d kept going all the way out to Westhampton and we were going to enter this beach house and it’s a week before St. Patrick’s Day and counting, and we were too far out from the City to rely on public transit to get us home, but what to do with this visiting Volkswagen, green but at the edges muddy whose New Hampshire plates I had turned to a single New Mexico plate, and I desired to return this VW to a legal spot near where I’d just managed to ease it out of an illegal space from where it could have been towed at owner’s expense plus fine, and I even took good care of the finish out there swept by the Atlantic salt of Long Island’s South Shore, for when we got up the side stairs to the door and Miriam kept saying, Are you sure it’s all right and I said the friend who usually had the use of the place had told me just how to get in, I went down through the house to the garage, slid up the door from the inside, and pushed the VW in as easy as starting it, but all the time suspended in all my mind’s eyes was the color of Miriam’s itself due to the more narrowly physical side of this colloid mystery we have spoken of).

This a cover? you asked.

But speeches through the fence? You didn’t understand about them? On-the-job training for leadership. The little store with the newsstand outside is within earshot, and Mrs. Erhard moves from behind her counter to come outside and watch.

Hear the basketball smack. The one-on-ones have occupied the playground playing half a court going six-on-six making all the moves; and me, I’ve got a crowd on the sidewalk side of the high fence maybe five, six, seven kids taken up position (got there first) watching the game and listening to me, so then the speaker himself, me, talking as always Issues, turns to the fence and addresses those deaf geniuses making all the moves—did I say jungle training school?—charging, double-dribbling, traveling, hooking up toward the hoop but hitting the hard rim like a stoop so the ball kicks twenty feet out beyond them, it’s as if without the cord of the net the rim has that extra power and they’re all chasing the ball but each other, so the elbow’s connected to the neckbone, kneebone to pelvic area, and our famous High Kool with his great semi-albino hands, six-five at age fifteen, stops short transfixed, Jim, for he hears me say, "What is the southernmost state of the Union?" Big man is in a trance, he’s outside the game now transfixed, while two lesser talents colliding with him where he stands (occupying position having gotten there first) fall away from him stunned, bruised, maimed; for in the middle of my critiquing of the Los Angeles police not letting the Russian strongman Premier Khrushchev visit Disneyland and of K. himself who said to us and our system, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," I had asked out of the blue which was the southernmost state in the Union.

This had to be more message than I knew, for often words as clear as this current-event trick question to keep them on their toes and supplement their jungle education came out of me, out of me mind into me throat, out of the struggle of my life, to reach another with a charge from me that settled some particles over there in him or her like there’s nothing to choose between there and me. You said that all this was just my feelers, Jim, which I souped up—it’s more, you ought to see. A power no less, Jim. A swing-arm anti-weapon you’d not detect by most known scopes. Unique capability, I call it, waiting there all dispersed to be willing to work for you. Work? Oh feel what’s given in the particles and deposit it wordwise coded to the message in you all the time.

I mean me. You. The others, and Juan.

He has achieved all this inside. To me, Juan has at least lived the rock-bottom unit of value in here if he has not in so many words known it. For so many words keep him from it: the Decade of the People; the time of the Real Great Society; la lucha (the struggle) for a better life (a better way of doing things, the Chilean said).

Juan had further muscles to flex, he went to prison ninety days before the great Garbage Barricade of ‘69 in East Harlem when the famed Sanitation Department declined to release city brooms to the people of El Barrio’s 110th Street to clean it up themselves and the people achieved overnight a consolidation of area garbage like one long, quiet upper that was a statement but still, as garbage, had to have alerted if it did not blow the mind of Miriam’s container-oriented father downtown, while as rampart and beachhead it was its own defense/offense without benefit of ventilating tradewinds that recycle out into the Caribbean Sea from that other, southern island, the isla verde of Puerto Rico proper, the smell of garbage strewn on a city beach for a population of free-range pigs raised there to harvest. But Juan inside got firsthand reports of the 110th Street Barricade from his visitors, so you see, Jim, this multiple dwelling sixty miles up the parkways past the guard-rail’s low barrier posts whose flicker-frequency could lock your normal speeder’s eyeball into gagged epilepsy, proved a contact between that neighborhood in upper Manhattan and my own to the south. I mean like you and your on-site inspection of the insurance corp. that quietly works into the earth and up into the troposphere, so you look at a quiet executive I can see him standing on his inner-office carpet in Vermont fantasizing a whole home quarried out of local granite, appliances too, an extension ladder, granite notepads for the wife, even granite you-know-whats. But I mean also, Jim, you take a trip up the river to find out what’s happening back where you come from. And you here with Foley looking for some hard info re: Chilean, and you find me waiting along the wall with a new method of communicating, don’t you know.

So coming from heterogeneous points in the city, Juan uptown, I down, we met at a point in the continuum intrinsic for both of us. For Juan it became soon afterward a time of new dedication to work for a socialist-humanist state, yet of near-madness since his studies had led him to see that the time he was doing had been provided by taxpayers whose sweat’s already being fleeced of its fruits and now Juan and the rest of us yardbirds are forced to go on exploiting these workers because of our tenancy in this place.

I showed him that we were getting the rent of our cells dirt-cheap if we ignore the value put on day labor in this retirement compound. But I couldn’t cheer him up—"Cheer up," Ma said when my father shook his head and scrunched deep into the easy chair and said he couldn’t have done better than stay where he was in the transit system all these years—or better still, help Juan right over the edge toward roaring derangement, because at the Death Row chaplain’s cadre session he had just come from, so absorbed had my friend been in cramming for his Chem final that the single thing he had heard, having heard it before but not from this source, was the remark by a part-time missionary I had had words with once who on this evening was sitting in and might have wanted to get a laugh, to the effect that there were folks on the Outside laboring to make time available for us guys Inside to do. And so, coming back to the block from cadre, Juan was murderous and seething, for what would he ever have to do with discovering lattice structures to substitute for rubber (outdated textbook of course) or to experiment with sewage-disposal solvents for the benefit people? His work, I learned, through my abstract evening bars where he paused to bid me goodnight was in Revolutionary Theory.

But we had a going joke about that page of Chem.

The kid on the north side of my cell was listening to his own latest message to his wife on the Jap tape player he’d recently been allowed to import but which I didn’t envy him.

Now I swiftly saw the relevant page of this book belonging to the man Juan about to retire for the night to his cell on the south side of mine and in the mere moment before the officer called Let’s go (which is a funny thing to say when one man has just come on his shift after a thirty-mile commute and the other man has just arrived back at his cell for the night), I was able to see Juan’s work and place run simultaneously with my own grain.

He had not asked for help exactly when he’d exclaimed with that angry grin like some movie star, "Christ is it a suspension or is it a solution?"— what did he know, he said, except what some once-a-week visiting authority said by the book they had been required to read. Well, to this he and I in unison like we were telling the teacher chirped, "It’s a colloid system," and for the last time I gave my friend his book back through the bars like I’m putting it on the shelf, and we crossed brothers’ thumbs and palms.

In he went for the night with the mountainous clank-bang I no longer hear except in my understanding, but for a second, only a second; but of crucial import I smelled, like pollen that no longer afflicts me seasonally, the collective flumes of all Johns on the tier. Oh sweet privacy—a high percent of these guys can experience it only here, not home with their family sharing a bath, not in the armed forces I’m told, not in a mountain monastery, definitely not at Y camp. But wait, Jim, understand it was only for a minute, that smell (however timelessly recorded in that girl sports writer’s "treatment" of this facility). For—will you wait one instant more?—with an end to that minute that I suddenly saw I always made by myself (and an end that your mere outsider engineer’s got his book explanation of, such as shooting centrifugal force at all particles of said dispersed odor so that through their sedimentation potential they concentrate at the outer rim and you get rid of them like particles of smoke in a poisoned city made to coagulate, precipitating out in one dark, industrially flushable lump all the dispersed specks and films of smodge we lumpens go on breathing of our fuel and work)—I as I say grasped suddenly without trying the power I saw I’d grown to be grasped by.

Grown partly I swear through the motion of my double screens.

And if it was not help Juan wanted at that eleventh hour such as my advice to fuck memorizing and get to the heart of the Contradiction as he will say—the Matter, as I—yet what do you know—it was help Juan gave me. My thoughts gelled and then by some return were swimming limitlessly, imprisoned in the locus of their own freedom, forget the Chem.

It was nothing I needed; but it was a gift no less. More a material to see through than a pay-off formula to say the word; for what is colloid but a name for the unnamable, a name to say, a word and little more. But holy mother wasn’t I then in the next few minutes not only chatting to the unseen Juan round the corner from my cell but signaling unknown to him through his wall because if I could not I also did not want to keep myself from using what I’d all the time been being. No accident that without a word spoken out loud from his friend he got to the heart of the matter right then and there remembering who he was and that the time to begin is no more the next day after than the place is the next room. Which is a way of saying it that, now it’s out, might come from Outside me—from you—from the Mind that’s not mere Body-Brain. You hear me now without words said or penned. Jim I had seen between suspension and true solution. On that historic page this was what I had seen. And I saw what I had done. Oh, Jim, what relief! To see and prove what I had done. That is, besides my work in economics and in dual screens. For I had been going round and round what I had done, these particles of all life, Jim, so fine: a string of garbage cans; a watery space under a float; two medium-size apartment tenements separated depending how close you see them; a private announcement, to one who smiled but cared, of Sunday’s— tomorrow’s—current-events message; particles, particles multiplying surfaces by the light they themselves multiplied so fast it began to stand still and give back all the time I had given up to understanding what I only now saw went part and parcel with how a state of body-brain turns to mind and mine to ours. A Miriam was here so many-sided that love for her got more and more: so many particles of all life and so fine no lens in or out of the lab we do not have at this bomb of a correctional facility could make them out: unseen, they’re what Juan’s old book here on my shelf calls "homogeneous"—all one stuff—but knowing them, they are you and all so different: Miriam walking away under a blue winter sky, her left arm close in holding her books, so her shoulders curved forward slightly; a forkful of mashed potatoes catapulted at my father’s T-shirt when he told Mom for the last time that they were lumpy; the blue of the ocean in a blind kiss, and all dynamite colors in a windy sunset so we didn’t hear the beach patrol until I jumped; and I had been scattering and settling these particles for a long youth, let me tell you—particles so fine as the voice of one guy telling either side of a playground fence by a fair-to-average city school the difference between the real smog which I was to read later is the mark of business mismanagement (as our womanizing Norse economist once saw) not of technology, and on the other hand the Russian ambassador, smiling Mike Menshikov’s small betrayal of the revolution in misrepresenting to Premier K. one sunny California day two small, innocent, fleece-lined clouds in a clear, but colloidally blue, Los Angeles sky as Smog, Smog, tut(ski) tut(ski)—but I hear the voice, me, the one guy at the playground fence, but more, going round and round even then before prison came into the picture, going round like what later was by chance at Juan’s moment of individualized evening lockup to acquire as if it needed it a scientific name and description—and did Larry get his visiting rites (smile) form?—and going round and then round one night a small tenement apartment building superintended by the father of his beloved, round and round so that the island of Manhattan all around that square block dissolved; as round and round the current of this one young guy’s voice itself (with contributions from the audience) might go and the playground fence disintegrate while that voice sought what power over current events only his buried spirit knew and did not yet tell, for to him it was as unconscious then at first as what swarmed deep behind his pride the day he concluded his sometime (by Eric, by Joey, by Hector Ramirez, and by others) interrupted remarks upon the need for blacks in city government and a new Israel in New Zealand and Australia where there’d be more space which might encourage Russia to unload more of its Jews—and halting in mid-word to find, hands in pockets diagonally down the block, Miriam’s father glaring from the newspaper store which had always been within earshot as, standing right behind him, Mrs. Erhard even when she would not muscle her bulk out from behind the sugar-and-nicotine counter and step outside to see with her protruding eyes what she had heard, would testify—if you are receiving all that, Jim.

Miriam had foretold that he would appear one Sunday I was there. He had had scarcely a word for me ever, but here and now was willing I should have words that happened to apply to him.

He never spoke afterward of my plan for resettling Jews in the Pacific, but he almost never spoke to me anyhow. Miriam slept late that Sunday, later even than this dreamer. Two little girls with little white hats led my eye down the block to two double-parked cars bumper to bumper and when I caught sight of Miriam’s father who never got his Sunday News at Erhard’s, I didn’t know where Mir’ was. I was seeing screens even then but when you’re ahead of your time (smile), how you going to know it’s O.K. what you’re doing, it’s natural?

Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there—Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez—whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend—was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim—like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly don’t know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right?—little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.

But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours—like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful?—you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.

And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what we want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what you want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language—but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?

Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.

And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself as one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News—conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment—oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).

Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it—no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?

Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.

In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but could not, if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds: you want to control miriam to grow up to stay home WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO come home (where we were, the only direction was Stay Put).

But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water." "You know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much?—oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.

Old Testament or New, Jim?—oh you wouldn’t know.

Runneth to that other screen, there is no over-screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce?—and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."

So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.

Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s—oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts?—got a landing field next door—

and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?

Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he?, but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story—for history in the making though you said you take no view of history—ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.

Three, four years you seem to have gotten into your head, more years than that join Miriam’s pointed message to mine co-hosted with her dad. Long years in fact afterward her father I am told appeared at the new entrance wing of the prison without visiting permission form plus knowing too well that I could not receive him. His plan was stopped, whatever, and I never asked how he got up here, he never to my knowledge drove.

Through Efrain I have kept in touch. He’s out, as you know because I heard you met him the night he slipped through a pickpocket area suddenly into a warp within warp where your pocket gets a valuable put into it. In touch with the Chilean, that is. Or tried—to be honest.

And he has, the Chilean tried to keep up his pithy letters to me. On economic topics, though he has been encouraged to expand his coverage to those political margins associated with his earlier conversations overheard or not here in visitors’ "quarters" (smile) with friend of reported anti-Castro Cuban in danger of life here inside though reported to be being processed toward some unknown escape and is the Chilean mixed up in that?—it is immaterial, next to that bond between us. Better his letters on full employment, substitutions in the marketplace, the as my friend puts it undoubted motion of corporate inertia against the sinister resilience of this country’s technological inventiveness in the matter of alternative energy though never once at the national level consulting the Colloidal Unconscious as it emerged from body-brain fluid states finding the jump to mind. He names no names, not that of his old friend, the late Dr. Allende, whose fate he I believe sees as his own but I can’t find anything out, I didn’t know the inmate or anyone who did know well the inmate our Chilean gentleman visited that day we met diagonally across the Visitors Counter, there’s a pattern here, no doubt the ever-dividing particles dispersed non-visibly in the colloid total of my self—my whole body is my self, I see; you who may have come among us for political information re: an exile economist and a supposedly pro-Castro Cuban inmate rumored to be set to spring—you have helped me to see it—have plotted in my unconscious this pattern and some message which is to me or from me or both and which will be me is in the works. This is more than consolation, as everything worthwhile must be, Jim, and I felt myself, for a sub-micro-instant that’s as small as one of the colloid particles, say it in a Spanish language that I never have studied or learned—you speak it a little, you said, and regret your daughter does not—but the impulse went back into the cloud it came from. Better the instructive letters I now and then receive from the Chilean than those visits Carlos gets from an elder liberal lady with a secret pocket for mints and non-sugar chewing gums in her shiny bag, a lady with scarce a grain of dialectic in her who gives him his subscription to the Times and after smiling bravely at him for an hour shows strong, true feeling only when his sister or uncle comes and she plays second fiddle but lately has proven her devotion to truth by a special letter to the Governor reluctantly urging, we hear, that for Carlos’s own well-being he delay Carlos’s clemency despite the seventeen hundred or twenty-seven hundred letters supporting his clemency petition on file in the State House we like to imagine and in a crate of files (the carbons) which Carlos rereads and shares with me by hand since our cells are too far from each other on the gallery for him to read aloud around the corner.

If I do not leave here, I have no need to. The hunt for the unit of value goes on in person and is no respecter of place. Neither is the ever-increasing speed of dual-but-separate-screen grasp, a speed so constant it could be maddening to its host but for the Colloidal Unconscious, its many-faceted spread, calm, content, its endless particles of difference charging the host to make contact from time to time through this medium that adapts itself to centrifugal coagulation-sedimentation to clear things up and to the huge good power mirroring itself in endless division of particles it’s a gift that says we all have it and (let me confess) must misuse it so, Jim—

—so that we penetrate the D-fences, send or receive (i got a new boyfriend, Mir’s message came to me, only it’s been going a long time, he’s an accountant) yes, when instead we should be going round and round; and then when we should be sending, receiving, we instead go round and round precipitating a void where the center was. Am I right?

So you came here—well, once a week—started your own brand of social work, more entertaining therefore more valuable than most, at this retirement complex, and it’s how I now have all to myself that family window though you’re almost missing from it, where I see your grandfather with a pistol on the mantel unbending two or three times a year to sing, ‘Tut on your old gray bonnet / With the blue ribbons on it / And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," almost missing but not quite missing because here you were, singing briefly for a lively audience of cons, a song I’d never heard, and if I hadn’t they hadn’t, though blue ribbon even I a city guy (even now in a multiple dwelling in the country occupied by mainly city guys) know is first prize they pin on a horse at a horse show. Sixty, eighty thousand miles traveled, two or three times round the earth, and still a town boy with a family, though we have pianos in the City too, though none in Miriam’s or my home though I hear the conductor bought my sister a blond-wood upright which no one ever touches, she told me, and you don’t get a man like your grandpa to sing unless he’s accompanied, think who might pass by and look in the window: Foley a generation later, if I broke out—and more interested in how you fit into that window your old white Caddy you bought to give to your daughter in Wash-inton, a grand gesture to be sure at nine miles to the gallon but any guy here could dig it—blue-ribbon horsepower and I’m glad she took your gift in good humor (I sense you’d been unsure): you say the Chilean has a brother in Washington—now that I didn’t know but Efrain (who would never come back to visit) wrote asking if that dealer-duck’s-ass-into-a-ponytail type guy had been back to visit, he’d run into Efrain near Penn Station and asked what he knew about the murder of the wife of a South American newspaper publisher ten, fifteen years ago and had he been in Philadelphia the other day, the economist’s brother was there for some opera singer’s recital—and Efrain is scared—mainly by the guy, not his information, though he would not admit it—but what do they stick your daughter for insurance, she’s under twenty-five, maybe my information is old. But why be so damn ready for the future, it’s here, to recall a peculiar point about future you dropped which nobody but me picked up on, so that everybody but me nodded thoughtfully, you know? But a touch of old-fashioned class, give or take a tender valve or two, Jim-Daddy, might even get her an interesting friend or two in the nation’s capital. I wrote letters to the editor once upon a time on the subject of Australia, etcetera, but also of having some good old-fashioned taste in the design and beauty of the automobiles you choose to get into, and I dreamed of seeing an article in the paper with my name on it and of taking Miriam up and down the Hudson River in a hired helicopter, so I must have been looking forward to that corner of your aforementioned window where you can be seen rising off a Manhattan pier in the middle of the day in transit to JFK jet but for the moment watching out the window some cops on the pier, a TV crew, a tugboat, and a diver just coming up the ladder onto the pier in his black rubber suit, TV news possibly but no network sign in evidence and something else wrong with that, you looked back down there as long as you could but—and I, too, sense something in that scene familiar (to you, I mean). Or was it, Jim, that you said sometimes you leave people where they are. ("Very funny," said Efrain, the only one of us then soon to be paroled.) To which I’d add leave some of your stories where they are and don’t look back too close, like at the man and woman upside down in seat-belt harness the blood dry on their alert faces but the car wheels still spinning, I don’t pretend to know where you were, it must have been up in the high magnetic mountains where the air friction’s less (smile), although I grant it occurred to me more than once because Mir’ liked to drive fast, an accident, a fatal accident—well, close the window, if you like—a dual fatality they would have said, leaving us where we were. In time. Oh say her name, Jim, I say her. They can’t hang me for that. Not in the state I’m in (smile) for which the future for all I know may already have developed colloid-boosters to phase out imbalances such as what inclined us two. I mean you and me, since there was little hope for my Miriam to take control of her life. Her father had boxed her in, while only I called her "Mir’."

Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!"—because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him—freeze—cut—frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on—no, it’s not raining outside, I’m telling a true story—and both of us knowing at the same instant why of course the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

R. M. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that—get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission not to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory . . . no, the water fountain—but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the p.m. after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise—so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime—Yeah, hit oil, man—Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong?—silence, and a passing patrolman called Wrong!, same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?

Meanwhile dozens of barrels of flour were rolled into the street and the heads broken open and a kid named James was throwing barrels of flour out into the street from an upper story calling, "Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel," which was what it should have been selling at perhaps, and the constabulary could do nothing with the anger of the mob which was organized from its inception north of City Hall at the present site and it was the first riot in "your history," the lady told us, where the poor ripped off the property of the rich and a New York paper called it the beginning of the French Revolution, did anyone know what the French Revolution was—no one in this junior high class did, and one of the drivers asked who the George Washington Bridge had been named after and a black kid said, Martha’s man. Anyway here was the Flour Riot of 1837, never forgot it, Jim, so what if the building had changed, and it was inflation panic, Ruth said, did we know what inflation was? the voice held us, not the words which is often the case with colloid communication, prices going up, what do you do when the landlord hits you for twice what your pad is worth like me, said Ruth M. Heard, because you see, rent went right up with flour in 1836-37, right? (Right!) and why was that (why the bakers, a man’s voice called, owned all the real estate) and as Ruth called out these questions, three older ladies with small hats came out at the door of a restaurant to smile, and I said, We got rent control now. Ruth called, Well what about the poor landlord, you watch, the City ups his property taxes and you and your family go on paying peanuts for your apartment; I said You’re taking both sides—her voice came at you deepened, like harsh pellets whipping through the sunlight. I reached for Miriam’s hand, she was over by a vendor with Gonzales buying a hot dog, the cost of flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel. Ruth asked what was a monopoly, one of our drivers as stocky as a snatch-and-press fanatic here on the farm cut in and gave a teacher-type answer that sounded English to me until she told him compassion was death and he could shut up now and the point was the flour people had made flour and wheat scarce by hiding them in the warehouse till the price went up: see the flour in the streets, our substitute called, and our twofold divided group on the sidewalk had been joined by slow-moving late-lunchtime people and messengers one with an enlarged head, one not, and anybody you want to think of was looking up at James’s windows. And as the flour and sacks of wheat came down, rent went up, now how do you figure that, think of what the street looked like! Think of life outside.

But we were back in the vans now—Jim, I’ve been over every square foot of that trip in here, I have the map, I have the pictures of old New York—and we were headed to the fish market to see historic Coenties Slip with the little houses that looked like they might fall down, which was where the rioters wound up smashing windows and doors and ten more barrels emptied. But at this point, Jim, our substitute reintroduced one of her wealthy Americans, the strong one, as the man who was going to buy us hamburgers with the works at three o’clock and I don’t know how many hamburgers and sodas went down, this is 1958, 1959, but I was the only one who could tell without counting hamburgers and sodas that little Gonzales and Miriam had been missing since the last stop and I figured Gonzalez knew what he was doing if Miriam didn’t, for this was only junior high and Gonzalez went everywhere with his father and often alone to do with his father’s lamp business. It was irresponsible of me and of Ruth Heard not to, respectively, do something and know about the two absentees, but when we arrived back at the school in our vans there was High Kool making his moves and dunking a few, and the roughest girl in the class, Louise, laughed at something Ruth said and looked over her shoulder and caught me looking at her and I gave her the grin, and a thought came in one eye and out the other—and no Gonzalez though there was an explanation, little G. had had a business appointment several blocks uptown and Miriam accompanied him, an errand for his father. Ruth M. Heard kept me or I her talking by the playground fence and she was telling how she had heard about the brain drain from Britain and had decided to come over in case any rubbed off on her, and how she was Jewish and so was New York which I was ready to believe though not that this small blue-eyed rambunctious woman with her accent could be Jewish. She said, You’re ahead of the others, I suspect way ahead—but how old are you? What’s going to happen to you? Two teachers, two men, had come down the steps with a cop, it was late, they seemed to be approaching but this was the time of day and really they were waiting, and Ruth M. Heard said, Here comes trouble, I could walk her home another time, but I had said nothing about walking her home, Jim.

"You were thinking it," you reply, picking up what I would have said had I not known you would pick it up.

Yes, and there I stood at the playground fence, it had begun to rain and High Kool stopped short with the ball hanging from one hand and looked upward. I felt the city, this block and the few other blocks I knew well, south going down to Fourteenth and east to the river, you know the area I know, and while my parents’ building and others like it still stand, now being occupied by, as my father used to say, "off-islanders" (Hispanics) but I happen to know also by gypsies from New Jersey via Rumania, and rocked by bongo drops (suddenly a drum is ther^, two drums, and guys have cut out to play them) and opened here and there by dust-choking construction sites like everywhere else in the city where kids play and imagine shortcuts through to other Arab- and Australian-financed construction sites leading mayhap to a brand-new disaster area where their own building was this morning, which may be what happened to Juan’s little brother like Efrafn who passed into the very heart of pickpocket land where you get the opposite, ungraphable, unpredictable, and anti-pickpocket warp where instead of your pocket being picked, valuable stuff comes into your pocket.

And suddenly, retreating from me to face the music for the first of many times and she could care less, Ruth M. Heard left me at the fence dreaming of speaking, starting somewhere between ahead of myself and retarded— speaking of what then I did not know, thinking nonetheless of, well mostly bullshit, Jim, but also of Ruth M. Heard’s father, who I thought might have died, yes hit by a bullet while speaking his mind on some great current event, and there beside me was Miriam looking over her shoulder telling me our substitute was in a shouting match down there (her eyes slightly wall-eyed like some thought came back to me seeing me but . . . you know).

But I had not noticed what she reported; no at that moment I was speaking my mind with an eye on the fence, the mesh steel the action viewed through the diamond holes which went away when you looked at the guys through them stopped, gathered around High Kool, all looking into the sky, and like taking up position in advance sq you’re the one who is fouled, not the guy who couldn’t check himself when you stopped and he ran into you, I can imagine basketball is the key to everything but these guys didn’t play with fouls, and I didn’t want to go home but looked at Miriam wondering when I’d get angry about her disappearing with little Gonzalez and saw that she hadn’t registered a word I’d said, because I was speaking in my mind, and I looked at Ruth tossing her head of thick heavy curls twice our age and shaking her finger at the men, and I thought I would like to speak on how the poor women gathered into their own bags the wastes of flour and wheat from the barrels and wheat sacks spewed by the rioters into the street and how maybe the rain—what month was it? I (didn’t know—came down and mixed in with the flour near the fishmarket until you had a block-long of dough and immigrant demonstrators heated in the oven of the City freely sprinkled with if not sugar as Mir’s Aunt Iris did, then by a free hydrant. But I knew that current events were of more use: a human newspaper I found myself, but talking mainly to Ruth Heard who believe me knew too much and was too much for the authorities to permit her to exist. And then I got angry at Mir’ and walked her home, and she said I was crazier than Miss Heard when I said, Here’s all this news coming in from Russia, from Algeria to see if General De Gaulle can end the war, from uptown and from Wall Street, and I’m not there, I’m here stuck in a neighborhood, know what I mean? "Vacuum-packed for burial in space" I wouldn’t have said then because it had not been said yet, though I don’t mind taking it from the journalist the Chilean met at the launch named Spence I think for he’ll take a thing or two from me like all the rest before we all get sick of ripping each other off.

Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.

Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather—what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm)—whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.

The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.