Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Lievering rocks with his hammock. “Yes, they were.”

  “What you mean—were? They in the past or something?”

  Lievering elbows up. For some reason this is harder today than it has been, as if there’s resistance somewhere. “You looked at our private documents?”

  “Gun’s a breechloader. Never seen one. First I thought they got it assembled wrong. Uh-uh. Not those boys.” Under Lievering’s stare he says loftily, “That hope chest in the cabin? Somebody has to. Study it.” That pose won’t hold. “Gilpin peeks. Saw him.” He shakes his head, though tenderly. “Wouldn’t you know. Couple of peewee books.”

  “Those are his own.”

  “’kay. Sorry.”

  “Seen anything else of mine?”

  “You mean that gre’ beeg hankie with the gre’ beeg Elise a Jacques on it?” He bats his eyes vigorously. “No.”

  “Oh—Mole.”

  Mole subsides happily, that being an inflection he’s used to. His bad character is maintained—in his own eyes, where it’s most needed. As to his identity, he knows that this man of two names and episodic life has never questioned it. A Wolf-Jacques looks beyond such matters, into the meta behind a person. Though when Mole thinks of Tom Gilpin and Lievering together—the two men he likes best in the world or even loves, their innocence frightens him. Of course, to Fred and himself, older people had always seemed innocent to a degree, or else they couldn’t have accepted life as they had. But back there, on a known planet, the collective incompetence hadn’t been so frightening. There’d been a kind of trust that the veteran planet itself, heavy with the secrets of the millennia, would somehow advise.

  He knows only one older person he’d rate as not innocent.

  “How do you know so much about guns, Mole?”

  “My father hunted once.” Fanatic for specimens, when he was still a poorly paid biologist. Yet not ignoring the social aspects of being the first black member of a Virginia hunt. Later dropping the hunt and biology both, for wider armaments.

  “Wolf, why’d’ya suppose they’ve stowed all our documents in the cabin with us?” In that silly-marked wooden hold. He snorted. “LOOSE EQUIPMENT. PASSENGERS.” It’s the only amateurish object he’s seen here. As an amateur, that outrages him. Handkerchiefs, white fur, books; even if germ-proofed, the silly medley keeps reminding him. That he will be on a kind of planet. But one bald and new. “Looks like my old toy box. Or my sisters’ hope chests. Why’n’t they stow that stuff in the Payload Bay?”

  Lievering’s making a cat’s cradle with a piece of string, an exercise for finger sensitivity. His nails are grown long for that purpose. “You’ve answered yourself. Loose equipment—hope! In the Payload Bay? No room for it.” Chuckling, he completes the cradle and with one pulled whirl destroys it, his middle nail rearing up, triumphant. “I tell you, Mole. Words. You have to watch them. Like string.”

  But you’re watching your nail. No point in saying.

  “First comes the meaning,” Lievering says dreamily. “Then the use. So often different. Like—we are in the sick bay. But we are not si—Mole!”

  Next minute he’s cramming a vomit bag to Mole’s mouth, holding his head. It’s a dry retch. “Here. The hammock’s no good for you. Sit on the cot.” He hauls Mole onto one of the alcoved beds, each built over its own bin. Shelves of affixed supplies are at the foot of each. He whips a menthol impregnated wipe from one of these and laves Mole’s face. How indented the snub face is, a child’s face, not merry for the moment, tucked, in a man’s long head. How oddly most move here though, even this man-child. All except that lightfooted Mulenberg. Who never knows where on the ship he is, or near what supplies. But direct him to execute a movement and he responds accurately, even rhythmically, like an overgrown danseur. Or like the men in that brothel in Paris, where, when Lievering came to protest the display of his picture, he’d been invited to stay a night for free. Hard as it was to refuse anything offered him, he had.

  “Balance is compromise,” Lievering says. “Of the muscles.” Actually he’s surprised. Mole had been getting good at it. “But also it is the muscles’ brand of faith. To the center of things. Which is always change.” Under the shaved-wool head whose rounded bone declines to the neck like a skinny pair of haunches, Mole’s face is bent to the bag he still clutches. The young object to compromise and to faith both, as Lievering knows well. That’s their trouble, their prime paradox. “You get sick because you are in the place for it, yes?”

  “Lievering, know why I love you?” Mole gasps, reverting to school sarcasm. “Because you’re so honking, rat-trap silly.” He grabs a Wipe and blows his nose. “I barfed because I thought of my father.” He chucks the Wipe into the bin for it, pauses over the mark on the next bin: WASTATS, and leans back, lordly. “So now you know. And know what? I feel fine.”

  “You have a problem with your father?”

  Mole makes use of a second wipe and disposes of it. “My father—has a problem with me.”

  “Aha. So that’s what Gilpin knows about you?”

  Mole sits up. “He say?”

  “Anybody can see. Gilpin worries like a priest. Who has no God to help him out with it.”

  “Yeah. Yeah! Like—he’s such a great guy. But like—yet he gets things so wrong.”

  Each has turned red, Mole for the betrayal, Lievering shaken by that slangy I love you. Slang upsets him, as too intimate. He has no list for it.

  “Funny you should say priest, Wolf. I been kicking an idea around. That what that Free Room needs is a confession box. Oh, not the kind you talk into. To complain to. Like—for complaints in a bank. Only more serious. Or for a joke.”

  “A serious joke.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  They are both smiling.

  “You know what, Wolf? You remind me of The Chape. Mr. Chape.”

  “He is who?”

  “Our headmaster. He put up a confession box. Boy. Did he take it down quick. I miss Chape…What’s so funny?”

  “You young, you are all italics. But no wonder you miss—many things. Real food, at your age. Girls. I see how you squint at Veronica.” Mole’s experienced leer had shocked him almost as much as Veronica’s response to it—one rover appreciating another.

  “I miss missing them. It’s all so calm here. Fake calm.” Picking idly at the hasp of the chest under the bed he’s sitting on, Mole gives a smart shiver. Anti-calm, as Freddie would say. Who made use of that prefix for everything. All the hasps and drawer pulls are recessed here, but there’s more purchase on this one than on most. When you drop it it should give a clunk, but it doesn’t. Mole looks down at it. “Nothing clunks here…So okay. So I did put up a—Not a box—where would I get a—?” He looks round him at the stacks of conforming providables. “Everything meshes here. So wadd’ya know—that gave me where. On that grillwork in the Free Room—I hung it. Not a box, a pouch. That little waterproof pouch from the shark kit; you can write on it. I used that.” Marking it in indelible ink PUT YOUR BEEFS HERE. Just like the one at school. “No one’s used it yet, up to yesterday. I checked.” No one but him.

  “On that grillwork next to the instrument panel? Mole! That’s the exhaust.” Lievering hesitates. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Maybe it got sucked in. Or maybe—I didn’t do it.”

  “Mole—” Lievering’s recalling all the colleges he’s taught in—Mexico City, Barbados, Valparaiso. Stupid or smart, all the student eyes are the same. Hangdog, yet judging. “Mole—maybe I was never in the camp.” He waits. The boy waits too. Some won’t. Some will. “Maybe I need the camp. Like you need the box.”

  “Sure, man,” Mole says absently. “Like we all need the camp.” But this is only an acquired wisdom. He’s far away. He turns back, stubbornly. “The box is different. Like we have the life we’re standing in, huh? And we have the loopholes. Like when I think of riding through Japan where I was this summer—Japan is now a loophole. Or sometimes a girl from before. Or one that’s coming. L
ike anyplace or anything you aren’t now or maybe never was yet—that’s a loophole. That’s the loophole life.”

  The boy means more than memories, or dreams—or he would say. He’s said exactly what he means—the loophole life. The blend of past and future which is at every person’s core.

  “And the box?”

  “Oh the box’s only to let off steam. Like a go-between, the Chape said.”

  Under that glance Lievering isn’t sure he isn’t one. “I would like to meet that Chape.”

  “You almost could of. I went back to see him before I—right after graduation.” To suggest he come along. To dare him to. “But he’d been axed. Oh, they all still stand behind him even so, the school said. But he’d been axed.”

  “But he sounded like an institution there. The institution.”

  “Watch those italics,” Mole said. “Oh, he was.”

  “So?”

  “He shot his girl friend. Chape. Oh, he’s out on bail. Nobody at the school helped raise it. But he’s out.” Mole shrugged.

  In the end they all shrug at us. All of them. “Mole—if there was a box. What would you put there?”

  The boy reaches for the vomit bag, tosses it into the MISC. TRASH and stands, stretching. “I did put.” He drops his arms hard, almost to the ground, head wagging. “I put—‘I miss Freddie.’” He pulls up slowly, his chest out. The name on the breast pocket, Fred Kim, is fully visible.

  “Now, Mole.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “A real person?”

  “A real other person.”

  “Aha. Freddie. A girl friend.”

  “No. And not a boyfriend either.” Mole drops his hands to the floor, bearwalks the four steps across its width and pulls up with an abortive flying motion of his arms, flopping back heavily on the thinly padded chest-bed. “Ouch.” He rubs his narrow buttocks. “I’m beginning to hate gravity.” He rests his chin on his hands. “You could say Freddie is my anti-friend.”

  “You are not being fey?” Lievering asks softly.

  “No more than usual,” Mole said.

  After a while Lievering says, “To add anything to this ship is to be against it. You have not yet learned the ways of this ship. That worries me. You have not yet learned how we are going to have to live out there.”

  “On the habitat. Nobody ever mentions it. It’s cuckoo, how nobody does.”

  “Because we are all thinking of it. Maybe not so much of how it’ll be, yet. Of why we came.” He reaches over to nobble Mole’s head. “But not you, eh?”

  “Do you all—just worry?” Mole said.

  Lievering flips up the Hydrostat and pees, keeping the arc within, then drinks from a nozzle, arching to it. When he turns it’s no longer definitive, the way most people still turn here, but as if he peels one turn from a store of them. “I wouldn’t teach again for a thousand pounds. You’ve been taught—we taught you—only what’s wrong. Not what’s dangerous. But that’s how we’re going to live, understand? Not what’s wrong. What’s dangerous.” He waits, expecting nothing. “So now excuse me. I have to go.”

  “Yeah, I know. Training you for EVA, aren’t they.”

  “Unplanned EVA only.”

  “Which means what? Emergency?”

  “Contingency.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Shortage of crew.”

  “Yah. Whyn’t they say what they mean? Whyn’t you?” He got up and peed, inaccurately. Reaching for a Galley Wipe he mopped and then tossed the wipe in the trash-all, pausing again at the lid of the bin next to it. “WASTATS. Of course, I remember learning them. Waste stabilizer tablets. They can’t bury in this sea.” About to sit on the bed again, he jumped up as if burned, raised the mattress and flipped up the long board below, and peered in. Lowering it slowly, he let go of the hasp and sat down again. “Nothing in it. Can you imagine that? And in the sick bay, too. Wasteful.” He looked up. Lievering was still standing there. “Sorry, Vulfie. Just learning to worry.”

  “No you’re not. At your age you despise death. That does not work here. That won’t keep you safe.”

  “What will?” Search as Mole has among the antique heads which were reproduced in his old Latin books, he’s never hit on one analogous to Lievering’s.

  “You must covet it.”

  No, Wolf’s face is not what’s familiar to Mole, nor its features, but a quality of its skin, of its voice, even of what it has just said. He remembers it, looming over the nightmare bedclothes until his mother came.

  “Don’t—don’t look so German at me.”

  White—the face goes. And those black lines from the nostrils, framing the mouth. No one must ever have said that to it.

  “Explain yourself.”

  He can’t, though he could draw that look. His mother’s au pair girls—always German rather than French because “they stay under your thumb better”—had all had it at times. Gleeful toward some inner authority that tortured yet exalted them, as if some goddess had lent them shoes which were killing them yet raised them up. The one girl had had it when he caught her praying, the other whenever she caught and punished him. He can see it on the face before him, limned by the day’s beard. The German look. His own mother’s phrase for it. Sweat, on stone.

  “You’re right—” it whispers. “I need the camp.”

  In silence, Mole passes him a Wipe, then another and another, carefully placing each in the proper bin, until the flinty gray space between Lievering’s lip and nose relaxes into flesh again, the sweat now sprouting merely acrid and tan on the fairness.

  No, you’re sick, Mole wants to say—and not because you’re in the place for it. But Lievering is plainly dealing with a process known to him.

  When it was over Mole ventured: “Don’t you have to go?” and Lievering mimed, “Not yet.”

  After a while Lievering mimes, “I’m okay,” but lies back in his hammock. Mole remains on the bed. The air smells clean but pharmaceutical, like in a good hospital. But who is visiting whom?

  After a while Lievering says, “I do think of it.”

  “Of what?”

  “The new station. For the EVA practice they show NASA slides of it. A cylinder, but to such a scale that to anyone walking its outer surface it will seem like a globe.”

  Both their voices are hushed. Like convalescents, Mole thinks. “What’ll you do that for?”

  “To inspect. You think they put those things up there and just leave them?”

  “They have.” From the dinner table gab at home, the sky, or at least the nearer sky, was full of smaller installations, not all of them merely satellites. Durations unknown, on some of them. Locations lost.

  “Not like this. Not to live in. Or monkeys maybe, dogs. But not when it’s us. There will be constant maintenance. The outer skin of these constructions is always the most delicate to manage. Like on the Courier.” Lievering braces his arms against the ceiling, which was lower on one side of the bay. His hammock stops. “You know about that?”

  “The house was full of it.” Even his sisters when they visited: Dad, how’s with the tile?

  “The—house?”

  “My father’s with NASA.”

  “Aha. So that’s how you—So young. You have—what do you call it here?” Lievering’s face is ordinary again, for him. But he always grimaces for slang. “Pull.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Mole says. “The whole force of gravitation. But go on.”

  “No, you. So you saw special pictures? Of the L-5. Of the interior, too?”

  They’ve reached a new stage in their companionship. He’s ahead. Not sure he wants to be. “Dunno, how special. Only, I maybe saw more.” Great green-studded maps spread out under the cigarette smoke and the pointing, always well-cared-for hands, some with the weighty signet rings of colleges, an American style his mother always made fun of as juvenile.

  “So what did you think of it?”

  What had he? “The stations are always going to be bigger next time.
They always have to cut down. From what they want. NASA’s always the underdog.” He can hear the self-pitying voices. All but his father’s, who never pities himself, even professionally. “But they’re always very proud of the greenery. There are always the factories and yeah—a playing field. Even a made river. All very tiny. And then the rest—you know. Where they live and all.”

  “They. You don’t see yourself there?”

  “Oh—me? I’ll board at the ‘Y’ or something.” Mole grinned. “The Jewish one. If they have one. Oh yeah—they have a church.” No graveyard. But there’s a church. “A chapel, that is—with a triple-denominational sanctuary. Revolving.” He’d been saving that to tell Chape, who’d had high-church leanings. He’s surprised at how much he does know. “Of course, it was always just what they called ‘artists’ renderings.’ I never saw the finish line.”

  And of course they never put in any people, not even dots. It was all architectural drawings and luscious photographic glossies. Strictly rear-rangeable. Gilpin’s lonesome tale of the lost civilians, which had so touched Mole and his friends—that had been a lovely cautionary tale—for children. The dinner table had never thought of people at all.

  “Then there’s the Tomb,” Mole said. “That’s always there.”

  “The—?”

  “For the Unknown. Not a soldier necessarily. Just ready.” Mole nods. “Kind of nice, huh?”

  “Nice?”

  “I mean, there’s nobody in it yet. That’s what's nice.”

  Aside from girls’ breasts and men’s peckers, Lievering has the most overt body-changes Mole has ever seen. He can’t decide whether Lievering’s cakewalks around space, each day more lucidly sinuous, are rarefying him or animalizing him. When he’s excited as now, his eyes actually darken.

  “Nobody?”

  “Gives all of us a chance, eh, Vulfie?”

  Swung down from the hammock and standing, Lievering’s height, too short for the head, is still a pedestal. He’ll never be as short as Napoleon, but there’s lodestone in him. People will follow him. If not with love.