“He was checking his watch by the clock on the tower.”
A huge digital one, well lighted, which gave calendar and weather information as well. So the man she’d seen wouldn’t have been the blind passenger. Merely an anonymous one, who somehow carried the mark printed on each of them four days ago.
He isn’t happy about that wrist mark. This one isn’t a tattoo, but more like those purplish proofs of payment rubber-stamped on the back of one’s hand at the ticket doors of conventions or benefit parties. Early on, NASA had proposed an invisibly permanent heraldry. “Some census mark will be necessary to distinguish between Earth and habitat residents, as between any borders.”
The whole fourth estate had reacted magnificently, especially television, whose voracious news maw, needing to be fed every hour on the hour, had found itself to be, like all “open” news, the unwitting ally of a sort of liberalism. “Invisible!” had come its roar. “Invisible?” So all passengers have these highly photogenic, two-year-durable, allegedly non-counterfeitable rosettes.
“So he had the mark,” he says, and sees her shiver. But not for the mark, he thinks. For the man.
He feels the removal he always does, from all those still down there in the hot sexual morass, swinging by their genitalia to the ancient reproductive current however they mind-alter it, and therefore, in spite of all other marvels of brain, ever slightly blunted in their face-up to the rest of the cosmos. Yet who would think of this world traveler in terms of that old melée? Or with her narrow rib cage against a child’s cheek.
“What were you doing, Tom, when I came along the beach?”
“Baying.”
“At the moon?” She stretches her long neck at it.
“At everything.”
She opens her mouth, a small orifice but more expansible than most. A curdling sound pours from it—more than a scream, not a shriek—long and idling. Not a bird flies up. Too late for it. Saluting the moon, she shrugs at him. “That my old friend you’re leaning on?”
It’s the old piece of hardware said to belong to the ill-fated Apollo which had blown up and burned on pad, immolating the three astronauts, Virgil Grissom and—who were the other two?—its fused horror now no more than an iron grimace on the air. She’d once written an article about it. Some said this wasn’t the real relic; there was none. Who’d been the others of the trio? For the life of him he can’t remember. In the space museums now, there isn’t too much space devoted to failure.
“After your story came out, they came to get this. But they must have got the wrong one.” And no wonder. Far as the eye can see, the ever-accumulating old shapes litter the shore.
She strips off her sweater, draping it there. “Bye. Bye-bye.” Underneath, her bikini is wet; she swims and swims here, with that other restlessness which must keep her young. Athletes have the same—a constant need to make muscle patterns in space.
“Where’s your white fur?”
“I was going to leave it. Finally I packed it. So—it’s being documented.”
Everything on the ship has its own document as to its chemical composition and reactivity in any spatial situation. There are to be no accidents this time, though the rocket plane will contain some paraphernalia left over from equipment specifications well back in space history, which if one thinks a minute are far funnier than that fur. Shark chasers, for instance, and pocketknives, and seawater desalting gear, all for use in the event of what was marked on each: JETTISON. Odd stuff, for those who could not possibly ever again land by themselves on that fleck, the sea. Had someone forgotten to eliminate old checklists? Someone always forgets something. Why does that warm him suddenly, instead of chill? Out there, where a bit of the wrong friction could send them all to blazes, there’ll be no margin for endearing human clumsiness.
“I had a girl with a fur once.” He smiles at the puppy thought of her, of the real girl. Except as Madge the symbol, he hasn’t thought of her nor heard from her since the day she left.
“In the days when you had girls?—Or boys. According to the office.”
“Ah, the office.”
She stretches, preparing to swim, then hangs back.
“No, don’t go in that. I don’t like the look of it.”
They both accept what the other knows. Sliding to the sand, she puts her head on her knees. Often they share these pleasantly collapsed silences. They free us, he’s thinking—though not to the same things. In our separate ways we suffer from the same dualism. Or enjoy it. Neither of us cares to confuse mind with body. Or body with mind.
And he likes to guard people, from a distance. Though those high-jutting knees of hers, meeting the shoulders in one limber furl, seem not to need it. On the other hand, those silver boots always scuff.
His attention goes from her to the sky and its portents. That’s dawn over there, not to break for hours yet, only a hectic itch in the sky, like an irritation in old skin. He’d found himself watching nature signs more too these last days in the motel, as if at the last moment these might still tether him.
Under his feet is the scruffy, barrier-island loam which privately he can never admit to the same company as the kneaded brown humus of his New England island, chastely containing itself as if for conscience’ sake, behind the harsh salt rock. We’re going to detach ourselves from the Earth pull, whatever else happens. We’re really going to do it. The draw of the Earth, all the way down to its fiery, quaking bowels, will no longer be the strongest part of our ken. Oh, only a slight detachment of the feet, lovey, they’ll say—they’re saying. You won’t miss it that much, ducky, that heavy deadness in the soles of your feet, in your limbs. Think, now, of lifting a steel T-bar with your fingertips in the nice dustless factory—where dust, they don’t say, can be a bombardment. Or of pedaling out into the late afternoon like a Nijinsky—with a paramour chosen for the same metatarsal tolerances? Oh there’ll be gravity, dear, false of course, and maybe not quite so forceful in the psychology; ethically we may even in the future wish to float rather than to weigh. But there'll be enough candy-gravitation to keep us all sane.
But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn’t. We’re going to float out of Earth’s ken—and out of our bodies, as we now live and breathe. That’s the real import beneath all the glory-talk.
“I’ve been a fool,” he said to her. “No matter how many times they say they’ll ferry us back, in our heads we’re going for good, aren’t we?” Forevermore. “No matter how long it takes.”
“Never takes as long as they first think. After the first time. The shuttles didn’t.” Leaning back against the scabbed metal of the old module, she stretched her long arms in joy he could see well enough. “Yes of course, in the long run. Haven’t you been saying it?”
“It’s just getting to me. Look out there.” The heavens are all fleece now, and stirring. The rising wind would be whipping her garments and hair if these hadn’t been pared down in the style that even at seventeen had made her seem a world traveler, all silhouette bone. “Must be blowing fifteen, twenty knots. There’s going to be a storm—and it won’t matter in the least.”
Smiling, she moves her head from side to side against the module. Except for its rust, she fits it, and into it or its newer versions, as well as any flesh could—a Jeanne d’Arc with the fire well behind her, ready to assumpt to heaven in her silver hip boots. “And you don’t mind it in the least. Do you.”
The wind’s bristling at his T-shirt like an animal held back. A reverse wind—that means a vacuum deadness somewhere. This, though, is no hurricane blow—that hollow roar as if the longest freight car in the world were pounding along sixteen feet up in the air. He wets a finger to test the wind, sees it in front of his nose—and bursts out laughing at the sight. Freight cars!
“Tom.” She pats not him but the shooting stick.
“Oh—I know. I don’t expect Allahabads up there. Out there. Or Chicago either.”
“You saw the drawings. The models.”
“Whose greatest concern—if I get it right—is whether our habitat’s to be wheel-shaped or cylindrical? Oh, I saw.”
“You won’t be looking at the outside shape. We’ll be living inside.”
“All the time. Yop—it’s getting to me.” There was an acid taste in his mouth. His father had always claimed one could taste lightning, in the yallery-greenery charged air before an electrical storm. This wasn’t going to be merely one of those. Shrubs were flattening. The blunted waves could have come from a child’s drawing.
“Poor Tom. You just belong to the old gravity generation.”
“You old—hang-glider.” He’d watched her at it more than once with his head back, teetering sickly. Though he’d often flown in the plane owned by the office, which she sometimes piloted.
“You talk free-fall, Tom. You’ve got the head for it. But not the feet.”
“Nonsense. I just have a hypersensitive middle ear.” But he knows he must seem like those thirty-year-olds who kid themselves they’re doing all right at the teenagers’ disco—and he’s not thirty anymore. In the space museums the crowds of young people saunter without surprise, chewing computer gab like gum, swapping old mission names—Saturn, Vanguard—like batting averages, and forever emitting their weakly hiccuped “you know, y’know?” between the snappiest logistics. Coming up to him shyly, in a museum or on a street, to say, You Tom?
He’s that, yes. Their hero. Whose muscles creak doing their dance. “So you really want to go more than anything. Down deep in your cells even, you buy the glory of it. You really want to go.”
She hesitated, looking out to sea, “Not more than—anything. There’s something else I—” She shrugs that off. “But yeah. Down deep. It’s my kind of unknown, you see. You and I, we don’t have the same unknowns. I almost don’t have the same as the young ones. But somehow, I make it. I slip along in.”
And he’ll be tagging along because some joker wants to see the reformer swallow his own medicine? He can think about that on the way out.
“We met on a plane,” he said. “Seems appropriate we should be ending up on one.”
“Even if it isn’t a plane but a two-stage rocket.” She shakes her head at him fondly. “And not an end—Ah, Tom! Look at you.”
His fear of heights is anticipatory, as much for others as for himself. Worst when those he loves lean over the high railing. He never gets sick at sea. But these days no credit’s given for that.
Once in a while there’s mother in her, though not especially for him, perhaps not for any man. She mothers dramatic old women, or sick ones, in lieu of the stepmother she adored. As once in a while there’s still sex in him, though for no one in particular. He tends to let the impulse pass. As Rhoda, the office manager, has said with the bitterness of the unrequited: Being, like Jesus, too busy for it.
“Tom. After all that training—you’re still plumb scared?” She can’t help the smile; people can’t. Lack of the physical prowess you have yourself is funny.
“Maybe I am. Right now I’m too busy for it. Look.”
The shooting stick, plunged at an angle deep into the wet sand, is moving, almost imperceptibly. One has to know it well to catch the glint on its steel boss. It has known many soils and pavements. There’s a technique to placing it well. Often it accompanied him to the office, where he had no regular desk. Fidus Achates, Rhoda had snarled at the stick when he retired her, why doesn’t he retire you?
Now the stick appears to be walking, or inching. Not horizontally. No wind. A downward pressure he can feel on his own head. But he isn’t moving. Or is he? He kneels. The circle of sand around the stick, flat as a Humpty Dumpty face, tells him nothing at first. Then he sees by a slight winkling that the sand surface is moving centripetally, as if the stick is being sucked from below, with scarcely a grain displaced. He lays his ear to the ground. Nothing. The birds are saying nothing. Then it’s not a land wind. Or not that near.
“Maybe it wants us to kiss the ground,” he says. In return for all the clay and river bottom which humans have walked on, and for all the lutum—the first mud—before. Plus all the pavements since. Kiss it, Tom, for all the places you’ve been, or won’t get to now. He’s never seen the crocodile loam of the Okefenokee, so near to here. He notes that the shooting stick is really in gyroscopic sway—or would be, if of the right shape. It’s being pressed in. His ears feel the pressure now.
He stands up, peering east. In the new light he can see the horizon. Air from the sea crowds in toward them, thick and white, water-heavy. The sea is being brought to them. “Hey—”
The way animals—men and dogs—foresense a great act of weather is in a sudden confusion of terms, an eerie loss of measurement. On-island he used to see his dog circle and circle, nose down, eyes sleeked, as if she must run the great rat to cover. Far out there, high above the seam between sea and sky, the clouds open on a cauldron of lurid light, its edges boiling westward in furious gray. Storm? Or break of day? For a minute he can’t tell; then the funnel rises like a bulging sinew connecting earth and heaven, streaming toward them, in no wind. Centered in the lost elements, the storm is walking the waters, neatly compacted as a tower and higher than Canaveral’s hangars in the distance. There’s a smell of sulfur, hugely rotting, electrical. Not bilge. This is fresh water, a column of it, riding the salt. Slowly. There’s no wind. But they had better run. “Get going.” He grabbed her. The last thing he saw was his stick, keeling gracefully, lost in a slur of waves.
“What is it, a tornado?” she said in his ear as, arm-linked at the waist, they ran on sand, laboring, hiking up their feet against the draw of the planet. Ah, it’s your last pull at us, is it?
“Dunno. A tornado’s twenty to forty—” he gasped back. Miles per hour, or knots? He was confused. Tornadoes were choosy. They could blast a street to lumber, zigzagging around houses left quiet as stars, suck dead a farm’s whole herd and featherbed the farmer meadows away from his tractor seat, safe in a tree. People ran anyway, even into motels that had no basements, and shut the wooden doors.
They ran inland from the promontory, pounding dirt for a quarter mile, then pavement along the road coastward again, to where the motel sprawled, accommodating hundreds, every room with a beach view. White water, such views were called here. They neared the motel’s breastworks, high, fretted panels of pierced stucco, fronded Hawaiian. The torches were shut off now but the palms were rustling with a steady marimba swish. Above the guard wall, lights were popping on along the indented cornices and swooping balconies which allowed each guest his outlook. The castle had been warned. He turned around, to the sea.
The funnel has advanced, is still advancing, grand as a pasha in its turbaned top. “Get inside,” he snarls. “Aren’t you?” she replies, and stays. There’s no rain, no hail; he wishes there would be. “Not a twister, is it,” she says. Now there’s absolute calm, even from the papery false palms. This is the moment before the bad one. They could be sucked seaward in a subtle undertow of currents, when that thing hits—but he doubts it. This is that storm which walks the waters for mariners only. “I never saw one of these,” he says. “But I’ve heard of them.” No time for more. That mushroom at the top, hanging pendant from the storm cloud above, whirls downward, tapering. Wooing the water like a tongue.
Go on. Demonstrate. To see it miles away and clear makes him want to weep, though he knows it’s no spectacle for him alone. One presence, anyone’s, makes it the spectacle. Down the ages, that’s been enough. “Here it comes—” he yells. “Fujiyama.” Tumbling back in silent boulders, the sea flowers upward. Atmosphere spins to meet it, charging down. On impact, the horizon crinkles. Parachutes of water pouring upward bring a cool sluicing air to his flesh; then there are sea mountains, moving whalebacks of gray, between jeweled eruptions lambent at the core, which mean sun behind. And now the breakers come, tons of water swelling in sequences of glass, wallowing on the shore. At last in a so
und one can hear.
Halloo-oo, it’s over, fishermen say. And here we fine creatures still are.
“It was a waterspout,” he says, still exultant. No, I don’t have your unknowns, but you see the knowns I have. “Deadly. But they don’t come on land. Let’s go in.”
She bends suddenly, bobbing her head between her legs, crock-kneed, the way dancers did. “Not yet,” came muffled. Peering between her legs at the motel, she straightens slowly, keeping her eye on it, then hitches her behind at it and begins threading the clipped green maze which intercedes between them and the motel steps. The maze is one of modern landscape architecture’s hostilities, dealt the paying customer. If you can’t solve it, you step over a bush or walk the perimeter. She takes it head on, now and then grinning at him. Collapsed on a garden chaise, he now and then waves back. She and he alternate their childhoods with each other. Or their silences. That’s why people tend to couple the two of them. They rescue each other from the general coupling game.
Though the motel itself was only yards away, the path between maze and steps was intricate, another cheap manipulation, done at great cost. Inside there were more, in the public-complex style of grandeur—phony with real marble, for all this was government-owned. He frankly savors its quadruplicate comforts—four pillows for every bed, swimming pools lying like mirages every few yards across the false lawns, free snacks at the cocktail hour in the five bars. There’s a sense of citizen swag flowing in every corner, and although brought up on the hard virtues of a Doré Bible, he’s a citizen. On rainy afternoons on his island, after an hour or two with those steel engravings, he used to feel as if those Old Testament dramas—the Red Sea rolling back, Samson’s thick neck under the temple columns, all the illustrations so thronged with people—were literally taking place in his own inflamed insides. Tonight, exhausted, he feels the same, hoping he isn’t going to go on feeling Earth-responsible.
Mysteries of Motion Page 5