Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  CANAVERAL

  How good of such a place to be so musically named.

  Now he sees that the tram he’s on is actually the last segment in a long chain of them extending die-straight across the green all the way to the huge hangar itself—a structure said to be higher than any of the pyramids, and certainly glassier, its walls constantly exchanging polyhedral light. One of the many mirages here which have to be taken for real.

  The tram stops short. Figures clad like his own begin to dismount jerkily, like the old movie continuity for which he used to haunt picture houses from the Tottenham Court Road to Ealing, as soon as he was old enough. Railroad cars, circa 1914, with French soldiers descending pell-mell from all doors, in leg wrappings thin as lingerie. Or would it be 1939, and the Hitler troops entering the Sudetenland? At which very time his father, watching the foreign press sluice past his leather corner in the library at Bonn, had taken warning. He’d been proudest of the fact that his profession, “Words alone!” had saved his family. “When there began to be all those early articles in the American press about what fine, smart chaps the poilus were—then one knew there would be a second world war.” He’d however hated the Pathé newsreels first exported from there, and all the other reeled-back history his son became addicted to. All that filming only made it harder to believe in life.

  Lievering’s tram car is longer than it seemed underground. So is the one ahead and the one ahead of that, in diminishing perspective up to that door in the hangar which must be the entrance to the corridor. Figure after figure is getting down from the cars, slow as robots—or civilians—in the outmoded heavier-model space suits demanded by Congress, which NASA had vainly insisted they wouldn’t need.

  How could I think there were only ten of us, in a last tram? That steward hypnotized us with his fake warmth. They intended it. All the figures have dismounted now. So has he himself. There are dozens of us. But ours was the last cart. Suited-up figures surround him, tentative, even chatting, not sure what’s up yet. Not too organized. That’s good though—isn’t it? That aide’s merely wan from working inside, down in those basements where he can’t get the local tan—nothing sinister. We’re in the open air now. If Lievering moves slightly left to see around the side of that enormous hangar, he’ll see the vehicle itself. Instead, he looks behind him, at the carts. Yes, that’s what they are; why didn’t I see that before? Carts. But we’ve not been packed into them. We’ve been allowed to get down from them. In the open air.

  He’d rather stare to his right, a mile and a half across the nibbled green flats to where the reviewing stands are, low, white and rambling, with an indolent air of gentleman sport. They remind him of the sheds on a Virginia polo field the boys once took him to. Or the judge’s stand on the country-club grounds where the dog show was, where a dachshund, placing its paddle feet as if it were as tall as any dog, had won best-of-show over a doberman. A dog show was by nature a setting, a Sunday afternoon movie still. Yet shift to the handlers and the pens and another professional reality took over: the animals themselves. No animals here, of course. Even the vegetation’s been quieted. Lievering shifts himself slightly left.

  He can never quite believe in any airborne vehicle. So small when not in motion—even the largest of those with intentions of flight. So able—even the smallest of them—to carry destiny for the likes of us. He’s long known what the shape of this one will be—not one of those penis-style rocket probes. A double vehicle-on-vehicle with a third disposable belly, each parting from the other on signal. The hangar above is higher than the UN Building piled twice. That thing, its progeny, aims farther than the idea of nations. Yet when the thing lofts, in stages that he, deep in its middle belly, will jolt to but not see, when its groaning metal and plastic is finally data-processed out upon a magical evening which is now pinkly descending without the aid of any artificial intelligence whatsoever—

  THE CITIZEN COURIER

  —will look like nothing so much as a fly copulating with a fly.

  Up ahead, the citizens are lining up docilely enough in front of the hangar’s back door—or is it the front one? Lievering can’t get over how informal it all looks, how casual they’re being allowed to be. Yet could they flee? Soaring as the hangar is, its door is barely man-high. All man-scale grandiosity, from cathedral ceilings to floor lamps big as cannon, has stopped at the motel. From now on there’ll be no more earth-style architecture, good or bad. He already knows that from the training trip. No more grand porte-cochères or arching buttresses, designed to elevate man’s sense of himself, but always to human scale. The kingship is now in the amount of distance subdued. Aboard, all equipment focused on his body needs will be on as small a scale as humanly possible. Though he minds this less than some, over a time it can be subtly demeaning. He wonders whether others have noticed this. Perhaps. At the door, two florist’s baskets, of the same height as the door and filled with red flowers, flank it gracefully.

  As the passenger line keeps forming and filing in, the aides monitor it, one to every four or five passengers. A hand flicks his visor. His aide, his own personal aide, is smirking. “Jacques. Visor up!” He’s the only one around him who’s kept it closed. The air on his face is fresh. Yesterday’s storm has helped. “The last storm,” they said at morning prayer at the motel, “that you folks’ll have to see.”

  At the door proper there is no step. Each space suit, short or tall, lifts its heavy feet apologetically. Each passenger’s elbow joint is carefully assisted. They’re being loaded in now, not let out. He sees that clearly. The carts were only interim.

  In exchange, he’ll have what he always wanted. The setting will be real.

  As he nears the corridor door, the flowers redden peculiarly. They’re not flower-flesh but nylon, or vinyl. That makes no difference now. All the settings of his life have been unreal to him, secondhand because he was—and only he upheld them. A setting, to be real to its inhabitants no matter how strange it is, needs only enough of them to sustain it mutually. He has colleagues now.

  He turns from the passengers ahead of him to look behind him at the crowd of lay advisers clustering in for a last stare at him and his kind, brushing their hands together in send-off relief—and pride. Across the flats, in the sporting pavilion, the reporters stand ready to caw and cheer to a popeyed world. All the watching world is in the same state of lagothalmia: the state of being hare-eyed, unable to close the eyes. Against these marvels.

  His elbow is cradled. He sees the nonexistent step.

  “Look at all those lovely roses,” the aide said.

  He passes through an airlock, the first of the many to be. Inside, he’s not surprised to find that the “corridor” resembles that official waiting room through which one passed or did not pass into East Germany. Though no passport numbers are issuing in amplified hullabaloo from the row of bank-teller booths along the left wall—sieben hundert-neun-und-dreissig, sieben hundert-ein-und-vierzig—and there is no tic of unease from the room at what may have happened to seven hundred and forty, the spasm of waiting in all these figures is similar. The chairs are semireclining, and properly notched for the suited-up. Nobody is ambulating—the training lingo for stretching the legs. He sits.

  Those promised windows have television sets in them. How wise. The coastline, hallucinated with giant cake-plates and tongs like a kitchen for ogres, is already in the past, not to be seen again except as part of the rough crumple of a distant earth-ball. He’d expected some soft, degerming hiss here; there’s not even a disinfectant smell. All done with rays? So is all of life, the briefers said. Avoid sinister thoughts.

  There are only twenty people here. Four rows of five. He will never see all the passengers at once. The delicate balance of the craft will not tolerate all that much breath or flesh together at one time. Or all that personality? Gantries would number four. “Gantry” seems to be the word for common rooms of varying function. He intends to look up the etymology. Library hours are to be rotated. Maybe, as
on the training trip, mixers will be arranged. He anticipates being a good sailor again, freer than most. For the sinister thoughts which seem to him natural.

  PLEASE WALK ABOUT NOW

  He smiles. The sign talks like him. But here unspelling everybody around him to chatter, to inspect the breast-pocket name of his or her neighbor and to stroll, slowly extending the appendages. Gravity is still normal here, though everybody’s already unsure of it. There is laughter. “Home room!” somebody calls out. He doesn’t understand the phrase. A woman falls in step with him—an astronomer who briefed them at the motel. Luckily he remembers her, as he does all teachers. By her manner, she is one of those women who remember his face. It seems they are patrolling in a circle, as was done at recess in old-fashioned schools here, where you changed teacher and room for each subject, arriving end-of-day at your “home” one.

  “Or like they do in the entr’acte, the Vienna State Opera,” Lievering calls out to the circle. He’s joining in. Above their frieze of figures, the neon sign glows like a votive lamp. In outer space every object will be seen as intensely intimate, in a perfection of nearsightedness. “Round and round they go. Glass cases in the center of the grand salon. They never look at them.”

  Lievering stands stock-still. He sees he has drawn ahead of the others. He’d spoken slurred. Was his upper lip deadening slightly, in the familiar sensation? With his canvased hand, he can’t feel for sure.

  Suddenly a tall sentry is at his side. Is there already something noticeable about him, his movements? Safer not to look up. By the uniform, it’s not an aide. Another passenger. He keeps his head bent. Straining to instruct his body—to what?

  “Or like the passeggiata, nuh?” the interrupter says, “in small Italian towns?”

  Who would not recognize that lilting, roughish voice? He doesn’t need to check its name. Looking up against his will, he has to lift his chin. She was always taller than he. There it is—that snub black pearl, her face. But exactly as was. They promised real people here. Not dream visitants.

  Who have real names on their breast pockets. V. Oliphant.

  So she’s followed him here. Where people flee a man, there are women who will follow him because of that.

  “So…Ronchen…we were…married after all.”

  “Nuh.”

  That Bejan grunt which can mean anything. How he remembers it. She pokes a finger at his own breast. “Jacques Cohen? Who’s he?” Dream people poke you like that.

  “A child in those sonnets. Who was crushed by an elephant.”

  “Ah. Him.” Her glove goes to where her neck hollow would be, just below his eyes. “I threw him away. Just yesterday.”

  That laugh of hers, sharp and akimbo as her knees, comes from her bone structure. Hooting at her passion to be more than beautiful. People who want to be artists beyond their means for it—one ought not to be tender with them. He would have told her in the end, that her poem wasn’t much. Life must have done it for him. “I…saw a poster of you once. In a Paris bookshop. On the Rue de l’Art.”

  “I saw a shot of you. On a doorway off Pigalle.”

  “Mistaken identity,” he said. “Was yours?”

  Nuh. Isn’t she going to say that this time? In any of its variants? He remembers how sex could stretch that monosyllable of hers, when she was stricken on those heights. “You look just the same,” he says, stern for both of them. Though he at least has grizzled. “What…hasn’t happened to you?”

  She isn’t going to answer. Yes she is, in a whisper. “Why are you here?”

  When he spreads his formalized sleeves they seem to him to be addressing a multitude. Or making ready to deal with an instrument panel too big for him. “To find that out.”

  “The town innocent. Here to tell us the truths. All of them.”

  He sees that she is real.

  “You do address me…like a wife. A Xantippe.” Pronouncing his father’s term for household shrew the German way—Ksantippeh—he smiles.

  What a glow of anger women can keep for life!

  All that has faded for him. What he sees are her haunches, narrow as a borzoi’s, high over her supple back in the Cuban sunlight, the small udders of her breasts almost touching the bed’s pagan-streaked coverlet. In whatever anagram her body used to place itself her legs were the most of her, her chin more often student-deferential, against her neck or cupped in her hands. While the belly, flat as a primitive spoon, disappeared into its own shadow, over the pink slit that his mouth or his hands or his sex were always grasping for.

  “I know the anger was there,” he says humbly. “Like a navel between us. But it’s gone.”

  Not mine. Is that what she’s said under her breath?

  A figure tall as hers looms up to Lievering. “Ah, partner, saw you debark behind me. Glad to get off that thing. Don’t like tunnels.” It half extends a hand, then remembers its glove, laughing in its hearty baritone. “On my way to those television screens. They’re taking messages. From the dear departed—that’s us. To those left behind. What a shivaree, eh. Two-way though. We’ll still be able to see them.”

  The tall man pulls up short, puzzled by Lievering’s impassive face. “Excuse. Could have sworn you were the guy riding in the seat behind me.” He bends, peering. “Cohen, is it? Howdadoo. All get to know each other in time, eh?”

  “He moves on, is all. Nuh, Lievering?”

  The big man exclaims, turning. Slowed by his equipment, he raises his arms to the speaker, dropping them at the sight of her, his massive fair-skinned face on a level with hers. His creased eyes, blue under flat Baltic lids, hooknose and Roman-modeled lips are in their own way as symmetrical as hers. Everything about him is huge, except his whisper.

  “Veronica.” His glove goes up, smoothing his own cheek. “Gave up my beard back there; we all had to.” He knocks back his helmet to show thick gray-streaked blond hair. “Mulenberg here.” His shoulders twitch off a yoke. “Ah God.” He hides his face in the glove, smoothing. Whatever painful is going on in him, he doesn’t want the suit to hold it back. Straining at electronic latchings that took an hour to gear, his head comes all the way forward of its plastic bubble, on neck muscles that must have an ogre’s strength—how does he manage it? On joy, whimpering with relief. “Ah God.” He takes a step forward, slowed as they all are. Maybe it’s the urine-pouch, slung along one thigh, which makes him smile. He’s recovered himself. “Still got your gun, Veronica?”

  Two passengers largo between her and Mulenberg, turning in unison. They are ambulating. “Oh—” the bright-eyed astronomer says, still paused wallflower-near. “Didn’t I have you two at the briefing?” They blink politely and pass on in slow motion, to some music which has already begun in them. It’s very like a ballroom here, Lievering thinks. Both the amenities and the small, ignoring cruelties preserve themselves wherever people are—even here. For underneath all of it is the waiting room.

  “Did the police ever come?” From that muffled voice Mulenberg might be on his knees, only the space suit saving him.

  She isn’t going to speak to him.

  Strange clarities rise in Lievering, flowing from the base of his spine. People are becoming nearer and dearer. He sees their motives, in aura above their heads. Her anger glows like a spotlight drawn by that able draftsman, fear. Of such a nearness happening to her? With any man? Yet this man and she had been naked together when they last met. The man has that falling sickness in the limbs which comes of it.

  “I followed you—” the big man says. “I took out insurance at every port.”

  Such scenes have no place here. Those two can’t feel that yet. Out there—it will all be in the present. His own limbs are already lighter. All the falling sicknesses of love which straddle everyone over the abyss of human obligation—while the bellies wobble in the thick spermal rhythms and the women spew out in water and caul the soft skull of some new candidate—all are to be lifted off, in the purer current to come. That thin-aired sea of exploration where e
veryone will float impersonally. Can’t those two feel the hangar’s growing iciness? Gravitation is departing, lifting off the human onus. In our asbestos-colored new skin, we ambulate. Soon to rebound from one another if we accidentally collide. Yet because of that, plainer to one another than in the sweaty bumble we’re leaving. Colleagues! He must speak to them.

  “Domestic scenes—” Lievering says. Because his lips are numb he sounds satirical. Can’t be helped. “Have no place here. You’ll see.”

  Veronica raises an arm. Will she hit him? She did that once. In the hut, one morning. When he woke. A blow to the face.

  She drops the mitted hand, on which, as on his and the other man’s, are tiny flashbulbs, minute but powerful. “I’ll save it for the sharks.” Her croaky, gawky laugh—why should it change? Salt on her own wounds. He’d cherished her for those, a young girl’s wounds. He can yet, for wounds still to come. To all of them.

  He’s standing on illuminations that drift below his feet, arched now like Nijinsky’s, whose foot bones were said to have had a special, space-conquering conformation. She and he are together again on the one perch which united them, from which she must have thought she could scramble—into the Paris bookshops.

  “Ronchen!” How strong his voice is, unimpeded. “Did you ever finish the poem?”

  PLEASE STAND BY FOR INTERVIEW

  Amplifiers don’t interrupt; they impose. Unlike those at airports, this one can be understood. They are each to take their turn at the television interviewing stand.

  “Have to say good-bye to my daughters,” the big man says. He grimaces. “Daughter.” He makes no move to go. “So, you write poetry, Veronica. Not songs. And who’s he?”

  They all have two faces. First Mulenberg’s suavely canny, corporate face—and now this one. Even the lady astronomer, eager beneath her sharp, teachery visage—a pince-nez face modernized with big, college-girl glasses. Lievering can see better, now that the air in his nostrils is slowing with his heartbeat. Mica sprinkles the air here, linking vortices when he blinks. The underlying face is always innocent.