Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “I say ‘poor chap’ because of Veronica. Who’s known where she is since she was born, and wants only to go farther. Who maybe is the only true traveler here.”

  The pencil drops. Gilpin watches it sway on its chain. The claustrophobia of any space journey adheres not only to the vehicle but to the motion. One’s walled up—in motion. A coffin of it, after a while static as a train at standstill in a station. Past which all eternity wheels.

  The pencil crept toward him slightly. Not a delusion. Whatever degree of gravity is here, whatever air mix, Mulenberg will know, or know the place for it in his file. But the idea of the “delusions” Mulenberg alleges he’s beginning to collect on his own is unnerving. “Baby idées fixes,” he said yesterday, “can run through an office like wild rabbits.” And journeys with a sense of mission breed abstractions of no more value than imaginary music; people think windily on Everest. What Gilpin wouldn’t give for an old jet-liner crowd of ordinary travelers weaving their to-and-from-the-toilet rhythms. Florida-bound couples in identical vanilla checks and with the irritable lardiness of pensioners. Or one of those men who always sat over the wing, with profiles sharp as their portfolios.

  If he and Mulenberg and the others come to share some idée-fixe which can pass for real, what then?

  “The hazard here is eerieness,” Gilpin says aloud. “It attracts. Like an emotion.” Or it does me. But there’ll be no opera in another town to fly me to. Maybe we can learn to wrap and unwrap one another in hot sheets. I like the design of the sick bay. Our cabin seems a tough community. Except for its persistent young guest—who thinks himself the toughest of all. Wonder how the other cabins have done? Hard to keep in mind that there are four such sick bays and four Free Rooms like this one, for a total of twelve passenger cabins, plus that cabin of whistlers, the relief crew. Plus all those on the flight deck—how many? We shall see. In little more than a week.

  He sits up straighter. Even in the Free Room there’s always a leaning. Mulenberg, who now has an array of newspaper clips spread before him, hasn’t responded. The so-called silence here is cellular, capable of growth, composed of many small auricular coils of approach. The core of one’s hearing is always being scratched. It’s not unpleasant. But if Gilpin had a piano keyboard he would skitter it from bass to treble with the back of his hand. Or if he had a tuba—give one hippo snort. In his time he’s played both, badly. He sees by the built-in ship’s clock that the free hour, actually an hour and a half, will soon be half up.

  “Stars don’t twinkle here.” Gilpin stares out through the thermal pane. “Rude of them.” Far up ahead the wing rides steady as a coastline. Made of honeycomb aluminum.

  Mulenberg pushes his half-lens reading-glasses up onto his Triton head of hair. He seems never to remember he can look over them. On his face is the blank smile of scholarship. “No atmosphere to.” He sees that Gilpin knows this already. “Sorry.”

  His clips are disposed on the flip-out desk in front of him like a wreath of witnesses to what is still called “the space effort”—as if outer space is a still recalcitrant part of creation which refuses to recognize its own potential. It was in collecting this batch that Mulenberg, on one of the impulse errands by which he now and then removed himself from routine, had gone himself to the newly non-corporate floor in the Gulf & Western Building on which the clipping agency lodged, and there in that obscure cul-de-sac had caught sight of Veronica emerging from another elevator, so intent on a brace of shoulder bags marked Peene-münde-New York-Fragile This End Up that she hadn’t seen him. A person had opened an adjacent door marked in dusty brown, THE SHEET, and had helped her in with them.

  Inside the clipping agency, standing at the counter at which Anything in the World could be potentially furnished him, he hadn’t been able to demand it, shattered by a glimpse at how his own life was mass-connected beyond what it supposed. A minute later he said, “Give me anything you have on The Sheet.” His own Tessa subscribed to it. Later a secretary went back to get the file on the Courier. “Here—they’ve mixed the Courier clips with more stuff on that rag, The Sheet—aren’t they something? I wouldn’t use them again.” To him that load in her arms seemed to issue out of some proper voodoo in which two lives were being wooed to their space-slot in destiny.

  A “TRAFFIC-JAM” IN OUTER SPACE

  OVERCROWDING: A PROBLEM FOR COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES

  An old clip from back in early 1980, with a diagram of the approximate location of the then existing satellites on the only geostationary orbit for these, 22,500 miles above the equator, and already showing that those orbital slots above the busiest markets, then U.S. and U.S.-Europe, were to be the most jammed.

  He began to draw a similar diagram for the girls. “I suggest you girls make your own world map—for habitats and rival shuttle lanes.”

  Tessa, tracking world politics from her mountain longhouse in front of which the goats were milked, would see to that. It was Tessa (who’d posted above her personal hole in the outhouse: All our Righteousnesses are as menstruous Rags—BUNYAN, and followed her affinity with the moon, as she herself said, like a member of a rape committee) who’d long since alerted him to lunar politics.

  TIME FOR EARTHLINGS TO SIGN A MOON TREATY

  No, that was ’79, and only from a letters column, though that loathsome word, Earthlings, had been the Times’s own.

  PACT ON MOON’S RICHES APPROVED

  Undated, which by now made no difference. Like the pact itself, finally emerged from an Outer Space Committee long-stalled by the Soviet’s refusal to accept the concept that the moon’s resources should be a common heritage—a touch he found hilariously like his maternal aunts’ and uncles’ refusal to share a belated U.S. Indian land-grant settlement with “any in-laws,” some of whom they were married to.

  He had wired Tessa a congratulatory message anyway. “Aren’t you glad that now neither the moon’s surface nor its subsurface can become the property of any country?” Refraining from unsportsmanlike crowing over the fact that her favorite “Third World” countries had wanted a moratorium on exploitation only until the establishment of a regulatory regime for getting down to it. How odd it was though, to have a child even now still back in the world of the “Third World.”

  Since then, she’d moved on. Returned once from Saudi, he’d sent her a pendant just presented him as deacquisitioned by an unidentified museum, a pure gold crescent with that faint, unreal finish the archaeological years bestowed. On his last visit to Mendocino she’d apologized for having had to hang his gift communally, above the kitchen sink—meanwhile shaking dun-clad breasts the plaque might have hung between, and hair of an ancient glow not unlike it. “Oh yeah, the moon,” all there had said, admiring. The big news being that they were now into banning nuke explosions in outer space.

  Tessa, shushing them, said: “I sent Maidie a pic of it.” She knew he yearned to hear. Yes, Maidie’d sent pics in return—and knew he would clutch at them. Tessa’s wide mouth, stained blue with the wine all in the commune drank ritually, a word they never explained, hung open, distressed. A lovely boy entering just in the nick squeezed her compassionately; they all knew each others’ sagas. “Daddy—she sent pics of their new hedge.”

  Magnolia grandiflora seven foot high. In his head, as at Guilford, she stands behind it. There are facts in his file which seem to belong most to her.

  —Did you know, Maidie, that the younger a woman is, the more sensitive to startle from sonic boom?—

  He reread the aeromedical report on it, remembering how as an adolescent she had screamed at his overloud stereo.

  —We find we’re not as hungry in space. Less caloric outgo—

  In the marvelously compensating balances of the body which he’s learning to trust here, and maybe to fear, would passengers long in transit, or space-citizens of long duration, have to guard against gradual anorexia? He has always thought his straight, chiseled girl has a touch of it. Maybe her reaction to Tessa’s curves, at f
ourteen self-confessedly open to “any man whose eyes take the you-darling position.”

  —We perambulate a little like your cakewalk—

  Done at age eight to a section of the Nutcracker Suite, in a hat like a mushroom, and with Chinese’d brows and lips which half a dozen other sets of parents had told them made Maidie look like Myrna Loy.

  —When one turns one’s head here, for instance—

  Here he has to refer to the notes, copying them painfully, though without quotes:

  Space passengers experience surprises because of counter-rotational movement, and move only by action and reaction, which are always equal and opposite. When a person in non-gravity makes a movement with his right hand, left to right, his body moves a trifle to the left. The lighter the arm is, and the more heavily loaded the body, the less the body will move. Under weak gravity high jumps of thirty-five feet can be made, they say—after which you would float lightly down.

  Your Dad hasn’t done it—

  Perhaps on habitat, and for manufacturing purposes, we’ll make a practice of it. That wouldn’t interest her. But her sister will want to know, though little will either surprise or disappoint Tessa, inured as she is to communes which start up in the most spiritual landscapes and upon the most stubbornly fixed absolutes, but more commonly end up admittedly like hers—“a soul boardinghouse, for lease by the week.” Like Tessa.

  Ah, she was a darling though, and likely he was wrong about the humor in her case.

  He wrote on, busily.

  “Which do you prefer?”

  Mulenberg raises his head. How Gilpin could smile, asking that! But childless people—be gentle with their lack. One always smiles back. “Fathers can’t. But I’ll tell you a story.” In hotels he sometimes has. He draws out two snapshots illegally in his breast pocket. “Had a fellow in our New York office, known the girls since they were two and three.” Until they stopped coming there. And stopped taking my money. “He kind of uncled them. Asked me that question once. Gave him the answer I gave you. Fathers can’t—prefer. But uncles can, I said. Which one do you?” Because it helped to know.

  Mulenberg holds out the snapshots.

  There they are, just about as Gilpin has imagined them. Maidie the classy lady whom everybody done wrong. Tessa all hound-dog soft, her boundaries oozing beyond the lens. And these are not girls. They’re thirty now—thirty-five. “What did he say?”

  “Said—‘I prefer the bitch, of course.’” Mulenberg knocks his head, as narrators of an old story do. “And when I said, ‘Yes, but which one of ’em is that?’ you know what that damned old geezer said?” Mulenberg lets it out in his softest baritone. “‘Oh, Jack, I leave that to you.’”

  All parental stories are the same—they don’t hear their own overtones. What use to tell Mulenberg that Gilpin hadn’t wanted to know which daughter he preferred but which atmosphere, the steady starry one or the red earthly twinkling? Gilpin has more pressing matters to bring up. “Well, of all your women, perhaps Miss Oliphant—looks most like a Kwan-Yin.”

  Is Mulenberg going to put up his dukes, as men still say in the fish house on Gilpin’s island? No, Gilpin’s statement seems to dazzle him. “Thanks. I’m just finding myself,” he says hoarsely and sits down.

  Watching, Gilpin sees him turn off the processor and shakily try the pencil chained like Gilpin’s at his wrist. Twice he tries, straining red-faced, like a child at stool. Or a man in orgasm. No one should be watching this. Gilpin closes his eyes.

  “I’m just finding myself,” was said to the unmoving ring of faces in sales conference, or on the mat afterward—by those vice-presidents who weren’t going to be given any more time at it. Remove their secretaries. Close the coffee-break door; cancel the lunch date. When their air conditioners break down, fumble the order for repair. Let even the office machines seem to ostracize. Better that way. One day such a man will finally get to Mulenberg on his own. Resign, you say? Thought you might be thinking of it. We don’t want to stand in your way.

  The door he’s outside is his own. No lettering; everybody knows I’m the president. Here’s my key.

  He’d thought if he improved his “geographic” deficiencies, it would balance his other reason for being here. Not as a question of virtue. Not excusing himself but empowering himself, as well as occupying time as he always had. Space is travel, like any other. Just be more efficient at it. I vowed I would be. I promised the girls.

  Suppose I tell them how when I leave here I’ll spend the next thirty minutes on a bicycle ergometer? And that I’ve got the hang of it. Travel.

  Or show them this little item—on how the data on hearing-threshold sensitivity in airline pilots had been used to profit by one of our own outfits?

  Or here’s his own speech—a long clipping from an industrial magazine, on how American business had no sense of history, how technology was often forgotten in the rush of events and already existent studies were reproposed. As a scrabble through the file shows him, several had been for the Courier.

  His hand trembles over all the connections magnetizing toward this vehicle. I’m learning my place here, girls, that’s all; I see it. That tight knot in the head which loosens when a problem in geometry dissolves into solution?—it’s like that. The theorem was always there. And the proof for it. All of it counts. The girls are no pretext, only part of a search in which everything counts, and all his pile of notes. You have only to be in a closed world to see it. In a home even, like Maidie. How long since he’s had one?

  He swung his pencil toward him, using the left hand to snag it. The hand is abnormally hot—has he fever? The pencil doesn’t work, not even an impress. The paper tears. He writes on, invisibly, sprawling it large. SPACE IS MORAL. SPACE IS LIFE. SPACE IS—He can’t make that last perception come. But it will.

  He turns around, exultant. “The Free Room. You know—it is that. Even if you’re chained to it. Or because you are. Everything’s together here. Climbing. And us with it.”

  Gilpin’s eyes are shut. Mulenberg turns to the word processor. The girls are gone. They’re women now. He types anyway. Let the machine edit if it can. TELL YOU THE TRUTH I FOLLOWED SOMEBODY HERE Yes, they’re women. He doesn’t have to spell it out for them. Only for the machine. He punches it savagely. Might as well punch a photo-electric cell. An answer lights up: Wrong Direction.

  One tickle will erase his whole labors here. There, that lever. So cool to the touch. Response with no response. Businesslike. Rest a minute, Mulenberg. Then begin to learn your home. He feels as if he’s eaten. He wants to sing.

  Gilpin is in the fish house. Old Cap’n Treeve, the island’s unofficial chieftain, is blading a cusk, farting as he goes. All the men are doing something. The cusk means it’s not winter yet. Albert, who runs the dry goods store, is giving Cap’n a haircut. That he’ll do the one means he’ll do the other, neither of which any fisherman would. Treeve’s wife is on the mainland, helping her ninety-five-year-old father with his fall canning. The haircut is to appease her when she comes back and finds the captain winding up his binge. No women come into it, except her when she returns. Sun is just leveling, so the poker deck and the whisky aren’t out yet. No one there would eat the cusk, too close to an eel, but the Canuck hand on the Winnie Mae, which comes in tomorrow, will take it home to Rockland and leave Treeve a couple of pints. Winnie Mae comes in only twice a week now the tourists are gone. No lobstering for four months yet. The angle of the sun, gold on Albert’s scissors, tells everything. These harmonies of information go unremarked.

  But just at that time also, Gilpin’s father was applying neat’s-foot oil to a sharkskin, his boy watching. Gilpin has brought along the portfolio made from it. Deep in the hold with his other document, a bit of the shark, at first sophisticated to him, is once again mariner. The fish house would not be surprised.

  Gilpin opens his eyes. The sun in their space path is on the left. The buzzer attached to the time clock here—which doesn’t always work although Mulenberg s
ays the system comes from the highest bidder—now beeps. He notes his place in the book clamped again to his lap desk. Sure, we’re all climbing. He did hear what his cabinmate said. From a fish house where men hang out after catch, it hadn’t seemed worth answering.

  He sees that Mulenberg has set up a long accordion folder all across the panel in front of him and even over the screen of the word processor. A flattened dollhouse version of the Courier with three-dimensional fretworks which rise out of the pages, it must have been made for him. To help him find himself.

  “Nobody’s at home in the universe,” Gilpin says. “But we’re all busy at it.” On his island the housewives curtained their windows, putting ruffles around the North Star. All the way back to the Ptolemies building their pyramids—give us any strong idea of future enclosure and we’ll suffer up the stairs by the thousands.

  Mulenberg sits back. “There. Look at this model…I can take off the rocket boosters. We’ve used them. But here’re the external tanks. Look at how the slosh baffles are mounted in the oxidizer tank. Five interfaces, between the tank and the—the Courier. All of them insulated, except one…Wonder why—well…” He shrugs. “And here’re the main propulsion engines. Here’s a diagram of the structure systems—and there’s the thermal-protection one…And I still haven’t touched auxiliary power control, environmental control, communication. Tracking-data process, navigation, operational flight.” His words come trippingly, with too rational a gleam of eye. “You seen how they deploy and retrieve payloads? Not just lights on booms and sidewalls. Remote-control television for depth perception.” He closes the folder reverently, starts to put it back into its case and then into the storage bin but it won’t go. He’s refolded it wrong. Guiltily he slides it into the long stashpocket in his suit.