Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Songs. No, I write songs.” The face Veronica turns, first to Mulenberg then to him—black-glass eyes and cheekbone dazzle—refracts only. Have they upped the candlepower here? Or has she her visor down? “The pretty little gun, Mulenberg? My brother took it. It’s not been heard from. The house went, later that night. A bomb. Just like at Gulf & Western. Only our insurance company didn’t pay for it.” She’s spinning like a ballerina now, showing first that face which had peeped soft behind the explosions of orchids in a Barbadian garden they went to once, then this visored bulb of glass. “The poem, Wolf? Sure, I finished it. I always do.”

  The face stops revolving; he can’t see at which half of it. But the voice is directly in front of him, nude, sprawled. The coverlet they used floats in front of him, bright as chicken’s blood and blue shell, then levitates away. That’s the way I am, her hand says, caught in his old Aer Lingus bag. Her breasts shudder gleefully to one another; we smell—of ourselves. “But this time I left it stuck in the mirror, at the motel.”

  She turns to the big man. “Who’s he, Mulenberg? He’s—a man who doesn’t follow anyone.”

  Cruelty of such quality is bracing; and means that Lievering is right. Its ugly armature, present in each beginning innocent, grows to be the hidden sculpture interlacing the world. Look at those two, Mulenberg and Veronica, walking away—look how the man is trailing her. She only had to whisper to him. I’ll eat with you now, she said.

  “On the motel mirror,” Lievering murmurs. “Like a calling card.”

  The astronomer is still watching those two. “Maybe it couldn’t be documented.”

  He laughs. It purls from his mouth like from anyone’s.

  PLEASE AMBULATE

  “What a conversation we’re having,” the astronomer says, keeping pace.

  He looks at her more closely. She’s the passer-by, and knows it. At university he used to feel sorry for this kind—always at the edge, with nobody bothering. Until he saw that those who could persist at it developed the hardest integument.

  She’s still searching out that pair. “He misses his beard, he can grow it again out there. My first uniformed job, I was project manager of the first satellite to study X rays in galactic and extra-galactic space—and know what I missed? My ear hoops. Still do. My analyst says it’s very human of me. But then he says that about everything I do—almost.” She touches her spectacles.

  He must be staring at them. Inside his mitts his fingers splay out as if light radiates from them. Energy is coursing through him.

  “I wear contacts usually,” she says, flushing. “They corrupt the telescope some. You allow for it. But no light plastic’s allowed in here.” She gazes up. “On account of the proofing.”

  “Gas, you mean? Or rays. I should have thought of it. We should have asked, yes? But people don’t, anymore; there’s too much gear.”

  “Oh, nothing like that. Just antibiotic spray, I imagine.”

  “Mustn’t let the stars corrupt your judgment,” Lievering says loudly. “We ought to be scrutinizing everything.”

  A space suit cocks at them to show a bare, sunny hawk-face and passes on.

  “Who was that?”

  “Gilpin,” she says. “That’s him.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You can’t not know. How could you get here? Without knowing.”

  “By way of a disease they’re not sure I have.” His head is filling with its golden confidence. This is the brief period when he knows it. Shortly he may not.

  “That what you’re leaving behind? Half the people here are leaving something.”

  “I always leave.”

  She nods eagerly, in the manner of people with analysts. An aide, passing through the rows head bent to his basket, hands them each a vial of the familiar yellow stuff. She hands hers back. The aide takes a second look at her. “Sorry.”

  “Observe,” Lievering says, “looks like mucus, but tastes like papaya. That tells us something.” He’s lost his stammer entirely; his voice is that warm authority which once taught, serene on other explorers’ heights. “Reality’s so patchy these days. Patchy newspapers, television.” He nods toward those windows. “Patchy pain, even with all the analgesics. Weather, too. History. Patchy war.” Hurry, before his mouth fills with his tongue. “Only a few basics to trust. Like dying. Or starving. Or being tortured. Or giving birth, I suppose—if the woman sticks with it.”

  He bows toward the astronomer’s well-masked belly. In a city on the brink of war, his mother, with no hope of hospital or drugs, had had to stick with it. Which left her with a disproportionate respect for women’s bellies, much urged on his father and him at mealtime, when theirs could merely feed. Only money could make her more emotional. “On that vehicle we’ll be able to believe everything. Because we’ll have to, eh? We’ll pool our knowledge, too. And call it faith—eh?” He tosses his emptied cup into the wire cage intended for it. “Last time we’ll throw anything. Huzza!” His voice is loud even to his own ears, a nasal evangelist occupying his mouth, his smile stretching to cover the vast replica of himself which is swelling from its own outline. Hurry hurry. Believe.

  A young male aide touches his shoulder pad. “Interview, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Right.” He’s never used that expression in his life. Far off in the beautiful double helix of consciousness this fact records itself. “But call me Wolf. We’re all ordinary martyrs.” Ah, but he’s being grand; he can only hope that a few ancestors are watching. “And this lady here?”

  “No, I stay,” she says to Lievering. Her teeth dazzle him. All light-reflecting objects now have penumbra to him. “I’m ground staff.”

  “Commander Townsend. Assistant on the project to Admiral Perdue,” the aide says gravely. “In charge of substitute personnel.”

  Squinting, Lievering sees that though otherwise suited up like the rest of them, she has insignia buttons on her female-softened epaulet, and she is wearing plain black leather brogues.

  Suddenly she thrusts up an arm. As if they hadn’t been talking. The arm comes out smartly, angled at the elbow but with the mitt facing inward instead of out—as necessitated by certain straps. At normal gravity, the official space salute became a caricature, a paramilitary Heil! Once off earth it took on an uneasy beauty, interposing between him and the floating universe. Thine own hand, solid before thine eyes. Antiposed to another from the same regiment. While both souls float.

  “Perdue—? Perdu, perdito. Verliert. Lost…Excuse me. I was translator.” His own words, backed up in their cells like worker bees, are about to swarm on him. Emerging again from his father’s lists, brought home to rehearse him with (nothing like new words for unlocking the larynx, mein Sohn) from books he has translated, or from the dictionary itself, they come zooming in, on the eve of attack. They may be that high noise which other epileptics hear. Bringing on the real altitude.

  “Mr. Cohen—Wolf. Is anything wrong?” This aide has a British twang to him. They come from all over.

  “I am—somewhat elevated. I do not usually fall. I get to non-gravity, it cures it. We better go. Auf Wiedersehen, Commander.” When there is penumbra around a face he can often see its past youth. She’d had a merrier, turned-up nose once, now eye-contradicted. The eyes are narrowed in salute. But she is a wallflower still. Brushing her insignia, his mitt rests for a second on her jacket, where the breast would be. “Stars on your shoulder. But you still need the earrings.”

  The aide takes Lievering’s elbow, his own face stiff. When they get well away, a goaty snuffle spurts from him. “You always that frank?”

  “I’m a man who has brain explosions. I can’t afford delusions, too. Even other people’s.”

  “Science boffin, she was. Very good, actually.”

  “I see.” He can’t bother to, really. The apperception he’s entering is too bright for detail.

  “Shall we press on?” the aide says.

  “You are British?” Lievering speaks idly. Heavy. The world is too
heavy.

  “Emigrated.”

  “Ah. Britons of character don’t, much. Not to here.”

  “I say. You all right?”

  The sound of Britain, or used to be. In the face of all insult. Are you all right?

  “No offense. I’m one of them. You may go now.”

  “My orders are to see you all the way into your jolly little niche.”

  “I will have company.”

  The screen he’s placed in front of is still blank, though he sees others are not. All down the line suited-up figures like his own are waiting or talking. There are no booths, no boundaries. Why should he feel alone as one does in a hospital—isolated with the true destiny of all, while others outside are still partying? An émigré into death, lacking the healthy character to stay on. For death is the treason each of us is doomed to commit. Was that from Pascal? Or another from that weed-swamp of ideas Wolf Cohen-Lievering is afraid to attribute to himself?

  But he is not alone.

  On his left, in front of another screen, is the big man, Mulenberg. Mulenberg is in a dream of himself. People always are, but this corridor, lifting off one veil of dross, allows that to be seen. Lievering’s head, moving on his neck like an idol’s, feels uncomfortably large. He shoves his helmet farther back. When his head bursts, it will have room to.

  A man now appears on Mulenberg’s screen. “Your daughter’s in the studio, sir.”

  “My daughter from Mendocino, yes. Tessa. Good girl.”

  “Your daughters.”

  “Guilford? You called Guilford?” Mulenberg chokes out a phone number. “Guilford, Connecticut. You have her on the line?”

  “She’s here in the studio, Mr. Mulenberg.”

  “My—other daughter? I have—two.”

  “Both of them are here.”

  A pause. “Maidie. Maidie.” Mulenberg, peering so close to the screen that Lievering can’t see it, lays his head on it.

  On the screen to Lievering’s right a different interlocutor appears. A personality known even to Lievering, who’s never had a television set, he’s both conscious and unctuous, full of his own humility and fame. The man in front of that screen is Gilpin. Now and then one sees such profiles, in engravings of whose period one is always unsure.

  A delegation fills the screen in front of Gilpin. “Your home island is here, Mr. Gilpin.”

  “Nettie! How’s the P.O.?” Gilpin’s saying. “Rector. Cap’n. Jennie and Rose. You Wiswells. Grown so I wouldn’t know you. Lee Willipaw. Lee—you keeping the folks in gas, propane and natural both?” This is a joke. Apple cheeks, male and female, quiver over Sunday-best. How clear they are. They seem to have no penumbra at all. “Clarence”—Gilpin says—“Clarence Mock, what you doing off-island? You win the Old Boys’ Race, that old tub of yours?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “Mr. Mock is eighty-nine,” the interviewer says. “Mr. Mock—what do you think of this voyage of Mr. Gilpin’s?”

  “Twasn’t his idea.”

  Behind Lievering, laughter vibrates. Other passengers, waiting their turn, have gathered in close. He can smell the unique must of space-cloth, of the flesh behind the cloth. Before your attacks, Cohen, any delusions of smell?

  “Happens every year—” Clarence Mock says. “Somebody invents the wheel.”

  “Tell ’em, Cap’n. We don’t think ahead—we pioneer.” Gilpin’s boyish voice goes nasal—an orator’s.

  “Sure thing,” the old man says. “Puttin’ you some of my Old Boys’ stew in the deep-freeze. For when you get back.”

  More laughter.

  “Make it myself,” the old man says proudly, to the interviewer. “Save up the tongues and cheeks for a whole year.”

  “Tongues and cheeks?” the interviewer says. “Lordy. Of what?”

  “Cap-n,” Gilpin says, “you shouldn’t have come, maybe. Any of you. Not on my account. For the people here to make wrong use of you. You belong on-island.”

  “Don’t you worry, boy. You puttin’ us all on the map.”

  On Lievering’s blank screen an interviewer now fades in, and toward him—to his enlarging vision perhaps the same one. One screen, one vis-à-vis, one journey. Through the airlock, all in lockstep. If he’s in attack now, between him and the people pressing behind him there’ll be no room to fall. To be crowded is also to be of the crowd. This is what comes of not hating enough. They are holding him up.

  “Some young people here to see you, Mr. Cohen. What’s that you’ve got there, boys?”

  A Geiger counter? Sweat’s breaking out on him now in radiant pores but he can’t explode yet, he has to know.

  It’s a musket. Leaked part by part from that dried-blood earth of theirs, where nothing else grows so hardily. Over hours of tramping they’ve dreamed for years of putting a whole one together. Perhaps the fathers have helped. Or the great-grandfathers, sending up from the gun-pits of the eyes and the musket-slits of the pelvic bones a last black mucilage.

  “They wanted you to know, Mr. Cohen. Will you speak to them?”

  Their scrubbed faces shine in the pitted, mauve odeon light. Baby hawks, they have no auras yet. They are themselves. If the martyrs are always ordinary people, with ordinary lives, at what age does it manifest?

  “I—We—”

  His mouth’s too full of stammer again.

  Next to him on his left, Mulenberg is bellowing, his housed arms gripping the screen as if to tear it loose. “I promise. I promise you both. I won’t be just a passenger.” Lumbering aside to give place to the next figure, he lurches toward Lievering to give his shoulder a grotesque pat of partnership. His face is beatific and wet.

  At the beginning of an attack, Lievering’s brain always fixes on one of his father’s old word lists, always the same one. Before and after, he can never remember which. It will come of itself. Fall now, Lievering, and be done with it.

  On his other side, on Gilpin’s screen, the old captain’s finishing up his recipe. “Cod’s tongues, yes. Taste like oysters if you make it right. And with the cheeks.”

  “They throw the rest of the fish back, no matter how big,” Gilpin’s saying. “Captain Mock will tell you why.”

  “Because the sea is our dominion,” the old man says, gleeful. “What’s that your dad used to call us, Tom? And because we don’t like cod.”

  “Mr. Cohen?”

  At what age is a life ordinary? When there are no guns? No border numbers? No waiting carts? In the moment before his head bursts, Cohen-Lievering searches for what his own number is among the hundred here. Sieben hundert neun-und-dreissig, sieben hundert ein-und-vierzig—or that lost one in between. He sees his own life-on-earth clearly—like everyone’s a numbering, heavy and secret to itself though to others lightly passing. Until the score comes in, the personal number from outer space.

  He stretches a gloved hand toward the boys. “We came here in carts. Near and dear. Remember that. Thanks for bringing the gun.”

  He can now smell the brain in his own cranium. Oh lens that only slightly corrupts the stars—now let me fall. But the suit, with its minute nailings, holds him strong. He tears off his left mitt, holding up to them the thin naked fingers with the clearly stamped purple blotch just below the thumb. “But I like having it. The wrist mark.”

  Now can he fall? Now that he knows?

  Next to him, Gilpin, hearing what Lievering said, recoils. “Pithecanthropus erectus, Dad called us, Cap’n,” he says, and spreads his arms to the fading screen, embracing all shadows on it and behind it. “Remember me to the sea.”

  As he turns away a figure approaches him, lifting its squared feet in the same slow motion as his own. Amazing, how human characteristic can seep through even a space suit. Or youth can. Mooching space as if it owns it. Ignoring those who are not immortal. Ain’t everybody seamless flesh? Not a country boy, this one. No musket. But what’s a boy of that age doing on this side of the screen at all?

  Passing the commander, who has already spotted him, the boy grima
ces a silent, chimp Boo! at her, and winks at the officer at her side. The chimpface sits puckishly on his own. The wink is too old for him. The commander’s face is racked with surprise. The other officer, holding her back, returns the wink.

  I know this boy, Gilpin thinks. Seen him somewhere—that almost white, woolly hair. Or I’ve known his like always.

  The kid comes on with majestic gawk, his helmet knocked back like a cyclist’s. He stops in front of Gilpin. His eyes are like all of theirs—glowing toward the existential raids to come. His mouth is sweet with awe.

  “You Tom?”

  LIFTOFF

  THE HARDEST THING to fake had been the wrist mark.

  Mo-o-le-son! Mo-oleson Perdue-ue!

  As the boy is lifted off and up, and hung by his heels, the flesh on even such firm cheeks as his enlarging downward while the blood drains from his fingertips, the Space Angel, a grotty character from a comic book often foisted on him and his sisters when they were kids because of their father’s profession, keeps calling his name with the silvery insistence of a receptionist.

  Swung by his neatly boxed feet in the alternating light-and-dark of a cabin which lags forever behind him, he zooms upward to the last point of toleration—and rides on from there, a clot of body from which its own mass is dripping, like in the Francis Bacon painting his mother is so proud of, in the dining room in Washington. He’s a haunch of gravity-dripping meat in space—where he’s never before been. That cheap little Angel is even a help to him.—Son-nee! Sonny Perdue!

  He hasn’t been called that since he was a home-boy of fourteen arriving at the prep school which promptly dubbed him Mole, and after four mutually guarded years had last June formally extruded him. “Into thy hands dare we pass the torch—?” the headmaster muttered, ceding him his diploma.

  “Torch for what, sir?” He’d known the proper answer: To light up the world. But why let on? They might think they had taught him it.

  By now the world—which isn’t quite synonymous with his father, though both senior and junior Perdues have it tough not to think so—may already know where Mole Perdue is. Snot drips from his stowaway nose.