Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Always remembering also to rid yourself of other impedimenta. Such as the couple of Personal Wipes, so inscribed and luckily unsoiled, which had once come back to cabin with Gilpin, floating and sticking everywhere. The cabin being empty at the time, he’d never owned up to it.

  “So I sit on that ledge. And because of the baby, in my head it bubbles like a fairy story, along with the Jacuzzi. I think—who is the person on the other side of the wall? A person from another cabin? I tell me maybe they do come into our Hygiene Unit, when we are not there. I tell me—maybe—I will stretch a hair across that door. Like in the old palaces, for the wife’s lover. But really I do not feel that anyone will ever come.” She breaks off, taking in the other two men, then homing back—to Mulenberg. “In prison one has eyes in the back of the head. Even on the skin. One can always tell if there is no one. Or someone. On the other side of the wall. What you call that?”

  There’s a hair stretched between her eyes and Mulenberg’s.

  “Subliminal,” Gilpin says, breaking it.

  She turns at once to Wert. Like in the traces, a matched pair? “So—tell them, Beel.”

  He hesitates. “Why—burden them?”

  The buzzer rings. Time’s up.

  “Come on, Mulenberg—” Gilpin says uneasily. “I’ll race you on the ergometer. Let’s go.”

  “Allow us to.” Wert’s extended his hold on his wife to her arm. “Enclosures are difficult for her at best—but she would come along with me. She’s easiest in the bath, because in prison they didn’t have them. Or in the cabin, because we’re all there.” When he comes to speak plainly, he does it well. “Now of course, we could go home. On the turn-around flight.”

  She flashes him a long look, but is silent.

  “So you’ve been in prison,” Mulenberg bends to her. “I’m sure for good reason. Like with this one, eh, Gilpin?…Gilpin thinks this is a prison, and the living-station will be, but he’s going anyway. Wouldn’t miss it.” Mulenberg smiles hard at him. I’ve read you, Tom. You didn’t think me capable of it. “So tell us, little Seat Six. Your delusion. And I’ll tell them mine.”

  “Seat Six?” Slipped from Wert’s arm and leaning forward, she looks sturdier, stronger. Though not quite as young.

  “What we call you. Because he keeps you to himself.”

  “Not him. I.” She won’t sparkle for Mulenberg. “Because I am not to myself.” She means her belly. “So. You, too, have an impression. Tell me.”

  Under the video screen which is now jerkily rating their progress for them in coarse print, the intercom squawks. Mmmrrrher-rher-guh. Fwah—deck. They’re all learning to interpret it.

  “For Mulenberg, I fancy. They’ll be wanting you on flight deck. They told me so.”

  “Why me, Wert?”

  He already knows but it annoys him that Wert knew it first. He wants to make Wert say it. A hard man. When on business.

  “I fancy they’ll want you to take my place.”

  Always the gentleman. Misfortunately? Gilpin’s not so sure. Wert seems to get what Wert wants. What he may want is to get that willful girl home.

  “Will they now.” Mulenberg is toneless. “Well, bully for them. But let them first explain this.” The shelf he goes to has six of the black folders segregated. Some are as thick as books. “Here we all are. All with our names on the back, just like at the motel: J. Cohen-Lievering, T. Gilpin, V. Oliphant, J. Mulenberg, W. Wert. And S. Wert.” All lettered in gold-leaf. “All in order. I looked. And now—these others.” With a backhand sweep he riffled the two long shelves of folders below, bringing most of their contents to the floor again. “Look at them.”

  Books tumbled every which way are like women with their legs in the air. Gilpin peers. That one. That there. Over there. All of them.

  “Blank—” Gilpin says, kneeling, scholar-horror in his voice. “They’re all blank.”

  “All sixty-five of them. I counted. And yes—empty. All but ours. So I think—well, budget reasons. Four Free Rooms—they didn’t Xerox for all. But then why have the folders? Or they didn’t want us to spend the time here that way. Or even—they want us to work for it. The info. There’s no crap like a psychologist’s. Somebody’s sold them a bill of it.”

  I say: blank, Gilpin thinks. He says: empty. He passed a hand over the folders, almost gently. “These don’t have any names on them at all.”

  A cry from Soraya—a long Farsi moan.

  “She’s right to wonder. But Allah won’t help.” An almost libidinous satisfaction plays on Mulenberg’s lips. “All right, then, girl. Tell me.”

  “No,” her husband says. “Do not. It’s destructive. We’re all on a thin edge here. Until we arrive. But this is not prison. We’re connected.”

  Gilpin stands up, tilting toward Wert. Does the vehicle help him there, though gravity’s near normal? Maybe the Courier itself gets confused. “With, say—the military?”

  Wert’s long upper lip twitches—amusement at a child’s plaint. “Let’s say—” He bites the lip. “Let’s say—I am not connected with it.”

  So was that the screw? But who’s applied it to who? Who protested what? What would Wert not do? “You agree then—some factions might be very glad to see this mission disorganize?”

  Wert shrugs, maybe back in his old world of honorably negotiated checks and balances. Let’s say—that Wert would be a fine man to have at your side in a crisis, but can he ever be brought to it? “Gilpin, you and I might have our vanities of principle. I admire yours. But we’ll never be the real enemy.”

  “Whose? Whose enemy aren’t we—you and I—important enough to be? You’ve been out there. Tell us.”

  The warning light over the door is pulsing red. A person is about to enter. Gilpin hopes for Mole—his happy-nihilism-to-you grin. He sees Soraya arch her neck like a cat’s, lift her nose, hunch her shoulders. She does know. She knows who it will be.

  Veronica breezes in, the airlock seeming to deposit her astride a wind. But by now the movement is characteristic of all of them when moving in and out of gravity, a kind of brimming. In Mulenberg’s heart a valve opens. The essence of to and fro—we’ll have it always with us. We’ll have her. He sees she’s counting heads. “No, stay,” he says. “Tom and I are just leaving.”

  “Yes, Jack and I.”

  Her eyebrows go up at both of them. In the fatigue suit, with her long bones boxed away, she’s lost her model’s leanness. Though she never wore makeup except at the eyes, she now looks as women do when washed pure of it—caught by age and youth at the same time. “Hey—what’s that pile on the floor?”

  “That’s my delusion. Tom, want to tell her it?”

  “Nobody here seems to want to tell his own.”

  “He thinks all those folders are blank,” Mulenberg said.

  “Yes, I think they’re all blank.”

  “What are you two—?” She kneels, passing her hands over the white pages. She looks to Wert, away from the two men staring at her in concert, as if whatever she says might bind her to one of them. “They are blank, aren’t they?”

  Wert nods. Holding his woman tighter.

  “Mulenberg’s collecting delusions. How about you, Wert? Don’t you have any?”

  “Sure. Mine is—that I left mine all at home. And yours, Gilpin?”

  “That he never had any,” Mulenberg says, almost with affection.

  “He’s read me.” And who says you don’t have humor, Jack?

  Soraya, tracking all this back and forth says softly to Wert: “Yes—they talk like the prison.”

  In truth, a jailhouse gaiety is rising here.

  Or is it lack of air?

  All four of them are standing closer, as in a street corner shell game. Veronica joins the circle. But in its center nobody’s playing. The game’s not here. Yet she seems to feel there is one.

  “A penny for your thoughts.” The porthole light aureoles Mulenberg’s head. It’s not clear which woman he’s speaking to.

  “No,
Soraya. Come away.” Wert edges her toward the hatch.

  Mulenberg bars them. “Soraya. Say there’s a hair across this door. Is there anyone outside it?…No?…Not Lievering? Not Mole?”

  “N-not at the moment.” Her accent turns Englishy, stiff, a schoolgirl’s.

  “Who might there be? Besides us?”

  “No one.” Her eyes are sleepwalker wide.

  Veronica interrupts. “So she’s told you that story, Mulenberg?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “She won’t. Bad for the baby.”

  Wert coughs. “That’s my wife’s delusion. That the womb protects the child.” His restless hand seeks hers again. She’s his worry-bead.

  Veronica lays a tender hand on her. “Shall I tell them?”

  Between the two women Mulenberg senses that sudden waxy flow which can join the most ill-assorted of them. Just so, Veronica stood over the blood-spattered black-gartered, foolish haunch of pimp’s meat, the night of his and Ventura’s exploit—only with a gilt dress on her arm, offering it.

  Soraya gives her the nod.

  “She thinks—that we in Cabin Six are the only passengers aboard the Courier.”

  Someone’s signaling to enter the hatch. No head turns.

  To Mulenberg, the other four in the center of the Free Room look like a war monument, each figure stricken in its own attitude—with him the one off-side.

  Wert’s fingers, so restless by themselves, are locked firm across his wife’s belly. No bulge there, but anyone would know what he guards. Veronica, the tallest, pivots slowly, half-left, half-right, a weather vane at the top.

  “Listen—” Gilpin says, “hear it?” The silence has changed. Where in a jet plane the noise assures a sense of flight, here until now it has seemed rather the stars that moved, the sun, while they themselves hung fixed, dead-center of the universal change, their vessel a great loosed shark, plundering the same space waves over and over, often as if ahead of its passengers. Who haven’t moved an inch since Canaveral.

  This is what it means to be in orbit. The universe pulls past you.

  But now—with that same slight dislocation which occurs between the moving train and the train at standstill in the station, they’re pulling past the universe.

  “We’re moving—” Gilpin says. “Aren’t we?” Because that’s what we’re here for. He’s the man who always has to do what he’s here for.

  The others nod, abstracted.

  “I felt it, didn’t I?” Wert says. “The child, turning?”

  “Too soon, too soon.” But her eyes are shining ahead.

  Veronica’s stopped pivoting. “Does it strike you—all day I’ve been thinking so. We’re shifting course.”

  They’re letting go. Of time.

  The video is blinking RETURN TO CABIN RETURN TO CABIN RETURN TO CABIN

  When Lievering enters—moving like the king of the tightrope walkers, for one can’t burst through an airlock—his first thought is that he has at last joined the gas chamber of his longings.

  They’re all so still and clumped, in a sharper ozone than he’s ever smelled here. The great hubcap of the sun is at the porthole. In its white vision they press together, their arms hung down and wavering. Death is not yet their dignity. They’re mayflies, the wings of their past lives folded glossy, ephemera collected around the glass cage of space. Inside which is the gold icon-shoe of traveling.

  In the minute it takes to count heads they’re Cabin Six again, already filing past him. They must have forgot to count—that precaution which should by now be routine. His entrance has reminded them. They’ve surely dared too many for the Free Room’s air, by the half-drugged way they pass by him, their eyes ark-dazed and liquid, like people just out of the theater.

  He’s counted. “Where’s Mole?” And to the next one in line—“Where’s Mole?” And to the next one, the echo following them. He trails after them.

  Mulenberg’s alone again with his two communicants, his daughters. The model of the Courier is warm against his hip. Over in that corner is the tumbled pile of folders—what the cook at the ranch, a believer in spiritualism, would call “the evidential.” He’d never believed the cook’s clairvoyant writings, brought to the kitchen table from a half-dozen assorted famous dead—and all in the same round penmanship. Or the tales of horses that spooked under a dead man’s saddle, or mossy fingers brushing your face in the dark like your dead sister used to tease you with, and when there was no live-oak within two thousand miles. Or a prediction that broke someone’s back last Saturday, within only three and a half weeks—and two rodeos—of the specified time. He hadn’t believed any of it but he remembers. He’s alone.

  His flesh creeps—and he knows it for spiritual delight. I know where I am, and will from now on. In a minute I’ll go forward to the flight deck and tell them anything they want to hear. That, yes, I’ll stay up there, for the two-year contract—or who knows, forever? Though there’s no more forever in space than there is anywhere and no competency they offer him can compare with his own. No evidential.

  Oh my honies, I’m still the passenger. But I know where I am. I’m on EVA, in extra-vehicular activity. Let me describe my machine.

  He’s on the vehicle of himself. Where all the delusions may prove real.

  THE SICK BAY

  “FEAR OF HEIGHTS can be a fear of rising.” Lievering stretches in his hammock in the Sick Bay, next to Mole’s. “A metaphysical fear—in a foolish way.”

  The crewman who subs as aeronurse and medical aide has gone off for his mid-shift meal. During the hour Lievering subs for him he’s dubbed Mole his assistant here—the sub’s sub’s sub, Mole said, accepting. He loves any category which will keep him a kind of student. Lievering, whom the flight deck has tabbed for several such fill-in tasks which might require his refined agility in case of emergency, has in his spare time been coaching Mole in the special pratfalls of non-gravity living. But here they rest, and exchange legends. It’s Lievering’s talent to be able to make a man of eighteen feel he has one.

  “What the f—is—what’s metaphysical?” With Lievering one doesn’t swear. Too time-consuming. Mole has long since been escorted through the etymology of “fuck.”

  “The science of being. Of all your being that is not physical. Or is behind it.”

  “Oh yeah, meta.” Mole has had Freshman Greek under The Chape, but is ashamed of it. He purses his nose in what he hopes is a high-powered sneer. Facial expressions go awry here. “What happened to plain old fear of falling?”

  “That’s for when you do fall. Most of the time you don’t—which is when the other takes over.” He believes that his attacks, which he feels no need of here, are a kind of falling and rising both.

  “Tell me again about the camp.” Mole has learned that his new friend half-wants to be drawn back.

  “You know I was only a year old when we left. Germany.” This is the nearest he comes to revealing that his parents had never been in a camp.

  “Uh-huh. Tell me anyway.” Mole habitually imagines himself as an ongoing cartoon. Any action of his that he doesn’t want to examine goes quick-quick into the daily strip—the cartoon of Mole. He has reels of it. It’s a way of getting through. Lievering’s word obsessions, which stop all action like a sentry’s “Halt!”, or his word pictures of what he couldn’t have seen are just Lievering’s cartoon. Mole smiles, gently swinging. Dormitory convention, summer-sailor dusks at gnat-time, sleepy-time in shuttle-land; it’s all the same. Men in adjacent hammocks swap.

  “Well, then. You remember what an energumen is? Sometimes spelled with an added e. Energumene.”

  “A devil-possessed, yes,” Mole quotes as taught. “‘If ever there was an energumene, the devil is speaking with that woman’s tongue’—Sir Walter Scott. Was it always just the women in the camp went like that?”

  “No. But it’s them, certain of them that I think of, that come to me.” Certain little Jewish women, often very pretty when young, who when they age—t
he short grapple-hook nose, the swarthy skin, the hooded eyes—look like small, winning owls. Competent, with the smell of many milk puddings behind them. Or those like retired elementary-school teachers, their breasts molded into one gray bird-bodice spread with a few gold chains, their feet leather orthopedic stubs. “Tenacious women, who don’t serve the devil easy, or go under with just a quack. So they become—” Lievering can still shudder at his old nightmares. “Black-tongued, from more than thirst. Harridans, but because of hunger.” He pronounces it with the g soft, to rhyme with “lunger,” then corrects himself. “Hunger. The eyes get a snot-glare. Like green glass.”

  Mole shivers pleasurably. “And the men?”

  “I don’t like to—remember.”

  “Yes you do. Come on.”

  “They become—mirrors. Torture-mirrors. Double ones. From the back they reflect the torturer. From the front—you. Or sometimes they are walking lopsided, with purple tongues. Or with the skin in tatters. They have been hanged, or boiled, but won’t die. For which they apologize.”

  “Br-r-r.”

  “Don’t make a game.”

  “Come on. You do.”

  “You—devil.” But Lievering is pleased. No one’s ever said that, even the doctors. Mole’s truths go as deep—or are as gauche—as his own.

  “Wolf, Vulf. Jay-queeze, Jacques—” Mole teases. When a man tutors your legs and arms, sending you on practice swoops down corridors, prying you off walls and showing you how to arch the small of the back to control the ballooning and haul in, even coaching you on how to drink in non-G without either dribbling or making yourself into a blooming fountain of Versailles—then, if you don’t want to become his baby you become his junior intimate. “Cohen-Lievering. The only guy outside the flight deck to carry a gun.”

  “I’ve told you. It’s just a—document. And I don’t carry it.”

  “Got a bore, hasn’t it. Got ammunition.”

  “Such ammunition. Like hundred-year-old bird droppings. I see when they dig it up.”

  Mole gets up on an elbow, steadying the hammock, which makes him motion-sick, a fact he conceals. “For your info—they polished it. Everything…to a sweet shine. Those boys are something.”