She stood by the door, hand on the light-switch, again thinking of flight. When the overhead light came on, it made the images of the three marine creatures on the screen appear faint and spectral, more suited to move through air than water.
“Father, my headache has come back. May I go upstairs and lie down in my room to think about what you have told me?”
He moved a little nearer to her.
“Do you believe what I have told you? Do you understand? Are you capable of understanding?”
“How is it that modern medicine has not tracked down these reptile-men if they still exist, by blood-analysis or something?”
“It has. But it has misinterpreted the evidence. I won’t go into the whole complex question of blood-grouping. Another problem is that reptilemen and human stock now inter-breed. The lines are confused. There is reason to think that venereal disease is the product of interbreeding—another intravenous way in which the two species seek to destroy each other. Do you want some aspirins?”
“I have some eau-de-cologne in my case in the car. May I go and get it?”
“You go upstairs. I’ll get your case for you.”
Hesitating, she looked at him. Not liking what she saw, she moved reluctantly and walked along the hall corridor, turned right, and went up the stairs under the eye of Camera Three, holding to the bannister as she went. She paused again on the landing. Reptile-men! Then she went ahead into the bedroom, glanced hopelessly up at “Faithful Unto Death,” sullen in the twilight, and lay down. She could have locked herself in but what was the point? In his madness, her father would break the door down whenever he felt like it. Perhaps he would come up and kill her; perhaps he imagined she was of reptilian stock.
She played with that idea, imagining the strange and aberrant allegiances it might give her with gloomy green unflowering plants, with damp stones, with immense shapes that moved only when prompted by the sun, and with languid spans of time which could find no true lodgement within the consciousness of man. The idea of being cold-blooded alone made her tremble where she lay, and clutch at the blankets for warmth.
There was a dull light in the room, gloomy, green, and unflowering. Another plane blundered over, shaking the house.
Downstairs, he heard and felt the plane go over. He raised his heavy eyes up towards its path, imagining it furry and coleopterous while the room vibrated, saying to it, “One day, you too will lie broken and stoney in a shattered layer of sandstone.”
He stood before the big screen, Camera One trained on him, throwing his image over his body. Eyes, mouth, head, limbs, vibrated, became double and detached, then settled back as the noise died.
A memory came back to him from far away that he had said he would go and get Anna’s case from her car.
Moving with lethargy, he crossed to the console and set Camera One moving until it was trained through the living room door to the dining room door. This was the nearest he could get to covering the back door; some day, he must install a tenth camera in the passage, so that the back door was surveyed. All he could see on the screen now was the ugly concatenation of angles formed by the two doors between them. He walked out into the passage and headed down it, to the door with two glass panels in its frame which he always kept locked. He unlocked it, opened it, went out.
To his right stretched the length of the back of the house. At right angles to it, another wall stood along the left, punctuated by scullery and pantry windows. An uneven path flanked this walk. He moved slowly along it. There had been flagstones of good York stone underfoot, but weeds and grass had covered them. Blank eyes of scullery and pantry surveyed him.
The light was leaden now. Time and twilight were congealed and fixed like a murdered eye. Like something viewed in a long mirror, he was embedded far in the past, together with gymnosperms, woodlice, the first ungainly amphibians and things still unidentified by the peeping gaze of man.
When he turned left around by the corner of the woodshed, Macguire was only a few feet away from the sterile green wire fence. He knew a lot of things about the color green; it, more than any color, was involved in the guilty story of downfall.
He turned left again, pushing aside overgrown branches of elder. They still flowered, individual florets looming up before his eyes like galaxies in some dim-lit and cluttered universe. Now he was stalking the south-west side of the house. The weeds of high summer crushed and sprang under his footfall.
There was her car, low under the overhanging branches of trees. Every year, the beeches grew nearer and nearer to the house. Some of them already nuzzled their first tender branches against the brick.
He stood glaring through the windows at the seats within, awaiting people. It was shabby and vacant in there, another unwelcoming human environment, depopulated. On the back seat lay a small case. Macguire pulled open the rear door, grasped the handle of the case, and dragged it out. He stood with it where he was, his other hand touching the car, staring at his daughter. Anna had come round the front of the house; she held his carbine in an efficient way, and was pointing it at his stomach. He looked at her face and saw it too belonged with the lost gymnosperms, woodlice, and amphibians hidden long ago behind the pantry, engendering only extinction.
“You can go if you don’t shoot me, Anna. I’m the only one with the theory complete, although there are people everywhere piecing it together. It’s a matter of time . . . It’s not a race. I mean, there’s no excitement—it’s too late now for man to beat the reptile-man; they’ve had too long and they are virtually in control. Look at the light under these trees—if you understand such things, the light alone will tell you we’re defeated. So there’s no point in shooting.”
“I’m going to shoot.” The words came from her mouth. He watched the diagram of it, thinking how easy it was to understand human speech once you had the basic knowledge of the working anatomy of jaw and thorax and the formation of phonemes in the larynx by careful control of air, and how those sounds were carried into the listening labyrinths of those present. His daughter had the science of the whole thing off perfectly.
“I could show you yards of tapex—proof. Proof of all I say. I’m the only one who has studied a human being long enough. I’ve seen myself, caught myself off guard. I have to regard myself as heteromorphic. The reptile moves in my veins, too.”
“Move away from the car.”
He said, feeling the stiff discomfort of fear contort his lips and teeth and tongue, “Anna, this isn’t the time of day . . . Just when I’m getting control of reality . . . Look, you’re alien too. It’s strong in you. Believe me. That’s why you’re so hostile. You’re more lizard than I. Let me go! I won’t hurt you! Let me show you!”
The gun-point lowered slightly. A moth blundered through the space between their two ghastly faces and fell under the trees.
“What do you mean?”
“I got it on tapex. You can come in and see for yourself. Camera Number Eight. It’s betrayed in certain movements. Unhuman movements. The gesture of the hand, the way a knee hinges, spinal tension, hip flexibility, a dozen details of facial expression. Oh, I’ve observed them all in myself. One hundred and thirty-one conferences docketed. Throughout life, human beings are motivated to watch others and not themselves, right from early years when they begin to learn by imitation. I realized years ago I was not fully human. With age, you become less human, the antique lizard shows through more and more—after all, it’s the basic stock. That’s why old people turn against human pleasures. Now, in your case, you’ve never had much time for human pleasures—”
“Father—”
Afterwards, she wondered if he had begun to fall before she fired. The first shot curved the top half of his body forward. She fired again. This time he jerked backwards, still standing, so that she saw how long and dark and lined his throat was. His mouth opened a little. She had a thought that he was looking down his nose and laughing at her, totally unarmed. She fired a third bullet, but was already trembling so violently that it mi
ssed.
An airbus came sliding over the property so low that she fired again in sheer panic. The bullet whistled into the leaves of the trees, and still her father stood there, rocking a little, hands like claws digging into his belly. Then he fell over backwards, legs straight. When he hit the ground, the force of the fall caused his arms to spring out sideways. He lay there among the mid-summer weeds in that attitude of unknowing, and never moved again. The beeches dripped on him, the erosions of his last July.
His hair was quite wet before Anna managed to move again.
She dropped the gun, then had the presence of mind to fumble it up again and toss it into the car. She picked up the little case and tossed that into the car. She stood over the body.
“Father?” she asked it.
It continued to make its gesture of unknowing.
Fighting her palsy, she climbed into the driving seat of the car. After several attempts, she got the motor going and managed to back away to the front of the house. She gave a last look into that deep grey-green past under the beeches where time had ceased, and drove toward the front gates.
As she passed through them, bumping on to the cul-de-sac road, she experienced a flash of memory. She thought of the electricity still burning, the camera still processing the spirit of the empty house, the big screen still registering daylight dying between an ugly angle of doors, the inhuman sequence of mounting time slithering into tapex.
But she did not pause, certainly did not turn back. Instead, she pressed her foot more firmly to the accelerator, flicked on the side-lights, hunched herself over the wheel to control her shaking, forged ahead towards the tangle of tiny roads between her and Ashmansford.
She stared ahead. The shaggy elms outside the car, blue with advancing night, were reflected momentarily in her eyeballs. Overhead, another plane roared, its landing lights blazing, coming in to roost.
All at One Point
ITALO CALVINO
Through the calculations begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies’ velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe’s matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space.
Naturally, we were all there—old Qfwfq said—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?
I say “packed like sardines,” using a literary image: in reality there wasn’t even space to pack us into. Every point of each of us coincided with every point of each of the others in a single point, which was where we all were. In fact, we didn’t even bother one another, except for personality differences, because when space doesn’t exist, having somebody unpleasant like Mr. Pbert Pberd underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing.
How many of us were there? Oh, I was never able to figure that out, not even approximately. To make a count, we would have had to move apart, at least a little, and instead we all occupied that same point. Contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t the sort of situation that encourages sociability; I know, for example, that in other periods neighbors called on one another; but there, because of the fact that we were all neighbors, nobody even said good morning or good evening to anybody else.
In the end each of us associated only with a limited number of acquaintances. The ones I remember most are Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, her friend De XuaeauX, a family of immigrants by the name of Z’zu, and Mr. Pbert Pberd, whom I just mentioned. There was also a cleaning woman—“maintenance staff” she was called—only one, for the whole universe, since there was so little room. To tell the truth, she had nothing to do all day long, not even dusting—inside one point not even a grain of dust can enter—so she spent all her time gossiping and complaining.
Just with the people I’ve already named we would have been overcrowded; but you have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there, all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe, now dismantled and concentrated in such a way that you weren’t able to tell what was later to become part of astronomy (like the nebula of Andromeda) from what was assigned to geography (the Vosges, for example) or to chemistry (like certain beryllium isotopes). And on top of that, we were always bumping against the Z’zu family’s household goods; camp beds, mattresses, baskets; these Z’zus, if you weren’t careful, with the excuse that they were a large family, would begin to act if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing.
But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them “immigrants,” on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of “immigrant” could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.
It was what you might call a narrow-minded attitude, our outlook at that time, very pretty. The fault of the environment in which we had been reared. An attitude that, basically, has remained in all of us, mind you: it keeps cropping up even today, if two of us happen to meet—at the bus stop, in a movie house, at an international dentists’ convention—and start reminiscing about the old days. We say hello—at times somebody recognizes me, at other times I recognize somebody—and we promptly start asking about this one and that one (even if each remembers only a few of those remembered by the others), and so we start in again on the old disputes, the slanders, the denigrations. Until somebody mentions Mrs. Ph(i)Nko—every conversation finally gets around to her—and then, all of a sudden, the pettiness is put aside, and we feel uplifted, filled with a blissful, generous emotion. Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, the only one that none of us has forgotten and that we all regret. Where has she ended up? I have long since stopped looking for her: Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, her bosom, her thighs, her orange dressing gown—we’ll never meet her again, in this system of galaxies or in any other.
Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again. Last month, I went into the bar here to the corner and whom did I see? Mr. Pbert Pberd. “What’s new with you? How do you happen to be in this neighborhood?” I learned that he’s the agent for a plastics firm, in Pavia. He’s the same as ever, with his silver tooth, his loud suspenders. “When we go back there,” he said to me, in a whisper, “the thing we have to make sure of is, this time, certain people remain out . . . You know what I mean: those Z’zus
I would have liked to answer him by saying that I’ve heara a number of people make the same remark concluding: “You know who I mean . . . Mr. Pbert Pberd . . .”
To avoid the subject, I hastened to say: “What about Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0? Do you think we’ll find her back there again?”
“Ah, yes . . . She, by all means . . .” he said, turning purple.
For all of us the hope of returning to that point means, above all, the hope of being once more with Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0. (This applies even to me, though I don’t believe in it.) And in that bar, as always happens, we fell to talking about her, and were moved; even Mr. Pbert Pberd ‘sunpleasantness faded, in the face of that memory
Mrs. Ph(i)Nko’s great secret is that she never aroused any jealousy among us. Or any gossip, either. The fact that she went to bed with her friend, Mr. De XuaeauX, was well known. But in a point, if there’s a bed, it takes up the whole point, so it isn’t a question of going to bed, but of being there, because anybody in the point is also in the bed. Consequently, it was inevitable that she should be in bed also with each of us. If she had been another person, there’s no telling all the things that would have been said about her. It was the cleaning woman who always started the slander, and the others didn’t have to be coaxed to imitate her. On the subject of the Z’zu family—for a change!—
the horrible things we had to hear: father, daughters, sisters, mother, aunts: nobody showed any hesitation even before the most sinister insinuation. But with her it was different: the happiness I derived from her was the joy of being concealed, punctiform, in her, and of protecting her, punctiform, in me; it was at the same time vicious contemplation (thanks to the promiscuity of the punctiform convergence of us all in her) and also chastity (given her punctiform impenetrability). In short: what more could I ask?
And all of this, which was true of me, was true also for each of the others. And for her: she contained and was contained with equal happiness, and she welcomed us and loved and inhabited all equally.
We got along so well all together, so well that something extraordinary was bound to happen. It was enough for her to say, at a certain moment: “Oh, if I only had some room, how I’d like to make some noodles for you boys!” And in that moment we all thought to the space that her round arms would occupy, moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs which cluttered the wide board while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows; we thought of the space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce; of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: “. . . ah, what noodles, boys!” the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe (Mr. Pbert Pberd all the way to Pavia), and she, dissolved into I don’t know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, “Boys, the noodles I would make for you!,” a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible balloons and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.
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