each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier—Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and we are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.
(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)
And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?
It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.
What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.
Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.
Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.
"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.
For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?
The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he
(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)
And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?
It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.
What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.
Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.
Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.
"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.
For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?
The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he
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