Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Mole sat up, spreading his long thighs and waggling his bent head between them. It’s like a boxer’s corner here.

  “You ever hear of the Messiah, Mole?”

  This calls for a lift of the chin. “My mother was Jewish.” You don’t say-eee is what they usually come up with, and with a second look.

  Lievering only smiles, “Was?” He bends to the water nozzle and drinks, like an orator. Wipes his mouth with the back of the hand, not at all his style. “My father wasn’t very Jewish either. But he was a refugee. They had a weekly cabal, in a Bloomsbury pub. I could go along, if I could keep mum and not shame him. Since a stuttering Bar Mitzvah boy was not possible to him, this was the manhood offered me.” He’s being a Jew now, old Europe suddenly tailoring him. He takes another drink, swallowing hard. “That Messiah, how they needed him. All of them escaped the Holocaust early, and without trials. Either their relatives were already with them, or there were now none to rescue. So we never talked of the six million. We were its fat-cats, which could not be said. But we needed a future, like any refugee. Maybe even more than most. And being what we were to the London world around us, it had to be a Jewish one. So—the Messiah.” He’s still smiling. “They weren’t all educated men like my father. But needy. So one day it would be Spinoza and another day questions like, ‘Where is the Messiah right now? Is he waiting around from the beginning? Or would he be born a real boy-child and then chosen, like the Dalai Lama?’”

  “Or like Christ.”

  The laugh explodes unexpected. Has anyone ever heard Wolf laugh before? “Or merely chosen,” he says. “Like all of—us. Like you.”

  They’re still laughing when the medical aide enters and goes to the fridge for the soft fizz he drinks by the gallon. “Jokes? I could use one.” His voice is loud. Switching gravities often brings on a slight deafening. His name is Francis Tuohy. According to Gilpin, he’s a paramedical whose trade has involved him in compassions he’s had no training for. According to himself, he’s signed up because at thirty-odd he already has five kids and the base pay here makes him hit the side of his head in wonder. He is the youngest and smartest of the second crew, and can whistle Schubert’s “Ave Maria” with either double stops or a hot-lips riff—even though, as he says, he both hates priests and is white. “Sure—a nice joke. Not too close to the bone.”

  “Wolf’s just telling about a club he belongs to.” At once Mole’s sorry. Three’s never good. Never fair.

  But Lievering’s solemnity can’t be betrayed. “We sometimes did talk about the Christ. We Jews are very sensitive to Jesus, even though we don’t believe in Him.”

  “My mother—” Mole gulps. “She used to say—if we don’t believe He’s the son of God, it’s only because each of us already thinks he is it. Jewish men.”

  “We—?” Francis stares. “I mean—excuse me. Mothers can be anything.” He dives into the fridge, where he can be heard chirring.

  “As didn’t your God make clear?” Lievering calls out to his back.

  The medic emerges, laughing. “Thank God for jokes, and soda pop. Go on, Professor.”

  Lievering’s not been a teacher for nothing, Mole thinks. But is laughs all the medic is shaking with?

  “I must go. But yes, Mole—our club. We often discussed whether Jesus was dead the three days before He arose, or only in a certain state of being, for which my father tells them the word.”

  Mole groans.

  “Never mind then, about the word. But we study over and over about the tomb. You know that part in the Bible where—”

  “Tomb?” the medic says. “Which tomb you talking?”

  “Both,” Mole says. “Go on, Wolf.”

  “So in our—club—we have a famous folklorist. He is from Romania, where even forty years after Hitler you could see the broken synagogues, village after village, still closed. Maybe even now. He tells us that after the war, certain villages want their own tombs for the unknown soldier. Who is not to be so unknown that he could turn out a gypsy, or something worse. So in his hometown they build one. But when they come to put in their own man, there is already a body there. So it happens in village after village, until all Romania is afraid of these monuments. Then of course appears a rabbi, out of one of the ruined synagogues. He will tell them how to prepare their tombs. ‘Take down that sign that says in your language The Unknown. Put up a sign that says The Eternal Occupant. In Hebrew.’ This of course they won’t do. ‘So don’t,’ says the reb. ‘Saves us from building our own.’”

  The medic with a wild laugh dives again into the fridge. His voice comes muffled. “Always something in the tomb.” The open door shows so many medical bottles that Mole wonders whether the bottle brought out is pop. Tuohy closes the door with his hip. “Yea bo.”

  “So.” Lievering is hoarse. His voice gives out fast. “S-so the folklorist says to my f-father. Who is always the last to laugh. If ever.” His voice fades, his eyes bulge, his mouth opens and shuts like a bird’s. “So the folklorist says, ‘Why, Lievering, the Messiah’s like us, he’s a refugee. He’s always looking for a new boardinghouse. But since he is the Messiah he always gets there first.’”

  In the silence the medic’s half-deaf grumble to himself can be heard: Somebuddy always does. He catches Mole’s eye.

  “You’re like my father, Mole. You don’t laugh.”

  “No,” Mole says. “Like mine.”

  Lievering is suddenly shy. “I bore you, I beg your pardons. When the daze comes over me, I have to watch out.”

  “Daze of what, Mr. Lievering?” The medic leans forward, alert.

  Lievering hesitates: “Of—brotherhood.”

  He’s halfway out the bay in his graceful way when Mole calls out, “Hey—what’s that word? Of your father’s.” He cocks an ear. “Oh boy. Spell it.”

  “P-s-y-c-h-o-p-a-n-n-y-c-h-y.”

  Mole fakes a retch. “What’s it mean?”

  Pedagogy is Lievering’s only malice. “The state the Messiah would be in. If he’s—already up ahead.” He smiles. He’s gone.

  The medic and Mole look at one another.

  “We have to watch him, you know. He has a history. Well, come on.” Frank squats on the floor. They’re about to play crap, which they often do.

  Mole follows, pulling his legs into lotus position. “His features are sure—classical.”

  “Heh. Jews were all lady-killers once, weren’t they? In the Bible. Except one.” Frank’s slow bringing out the dice. “What Jesus felt in the tomb. Sounds like my wife. She’s very devout, you know.”

  Mole does. Frank reminds him of his brothers-in-law, once normal post-collegiates, now like stuck to the armpits in bowls of breakfast cereal, from which all their talk issues glutenized by family life. Though Frank has other backlogs of thought—at least when he shoots crap.

  “Frank—On the station out there…that monument. Is it empty?”

  The medic reaches out and slaps Mole’s thigh. “Wish I could sit like that. Too much of this.” He wedges the pop bottle in a wall slot.

  “Frank—is that pop?”

  “You go too far, kid. But yeah—it is. Surprised?”

  “No. You’re a good family man.”

  “Don’t get too smart.” But he hasn’t brought out the dice. He’s in one of those nostalgia pockets nobody’s exempt from here. He’s in a loophole.

  “Frank. I know. Even my age, I get, you know. Like I spoke of my own mother like she’s in the past.”

  “So you did.” He’s awarded a grin.

  “So? Then bring out the dice.”

  They’re pretty ones, gift of his oldest daughter, who’s thirteen. They stay in Frank’s palm. “Thanks. But you’ve got me all wrong.”

  Mole unfolds his legs, a dramatic effort. “So what singed your eyebrows off, Frank?”

  He has good control. “So you noticed.”

  “Who wouldn’t. All that grease.”

  “Your friend didn’t.”

  “He’s not geared t
o faces. Or not to ours. What happened to you?”

  Frank shakes the dice gently, but doesn’t roll. “Not supposed to say. Maybe I better. Since they tapped me to watch over you. You mischievous, interfering”—he stands up and bears down on Mole’s shoulder—“absolutely first-class offspring.” He reaches down, tugging at Mole’s name tag. The dice scatter on the floor, blessedly staying there. In the sick bay, G-force is therapy. In silence Mole gathers them up.

  “There was a fire in there. Still hot when they called me in with my stuff.”

  “In the Free Room?”

  “The day salon? No. Why, anybody smoking?”

  “Gee, no,” Mole says righteously. “Would anybody?”

  “Now and then—some of the guys think they smell—maybe the Iranian lady?”

  “You been sniffing around our Hygiene Section, hah? No, that’s for the baby, Veronica says. Some cream she’s got.”

  “Veronica, huh.”

  “Look, Frank.” Mole’s hoarding the dice. “Tell me or not.”

  “Fire was on the flight deck. Big screen that maps deep space, which stars we’re passing through. Behind there.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “Not bad. Flash burns. When we went in, a smaller spot blew.” Frank goes to a shaving mirror. The skin between his brows and his eyes is marked with a corona of red spokes, like when the oven exploded in Mole’s mother’s face. “Everything in this dreadnought comes out symmetrical,” Frank murmurs at himself. “That’s a World War I expression, dreadnought. But it didn’t get my whistle.” He trills a phrase that Freddie, an oboeist when he could find a gig, would have cottoned to. “No, nobody hurt bad. The guy that would have been if he was in his seat, wasn’t there.”

  Mole’s trying to recall the manual, with that long diagram of the three-level flight deck, which came up from between the center pages like a pop-up. They wouldn’t let you on the deck but they wanted to impress you with it. “Behind a screen. What could be there?”

  Frank’s daubing on more grease. “Ouch. Maybe I should use tannin…Who knows? Anyway, we’re now on Auxiliary Environment.”

  “Where was Dove?”

  “Dove? Oh yes, Dove. Understudy Captain Dove? He was on break with the rest of us. When we bust in. Dove’s beak is now a goodly pink.” He turns. He has a glob of yellow on each red spoke. “Looka me. Sloppy Louie the Sun King, huh?” When Mole doesn’t answer he drops to his haunches beside him. “Sorry. Five kids—you play games. But I see you’re a man.”

  “I saw the deep-space map in the Courier model at the Goddard. Weird cobalt blue they’d painted it. You’d think they’d know better about the color of space. But they never got to installing the whole flight-deck panel.”

  “There is only one. Finished just in time. This one. Never saw it myself before.” Hugging his knees, the medic inches across the floor on his haunches in one of the exercises mandated for the lower back.

  Though Mole’s buttocks are too scraggy for comfort, he sometimes joins in and they have a kind of butting cockfight, hands barred. Not today. “I saw a map once—for the habitat.” At home, one of those evenings. “The Tomb was drawn on it.” It was exactly the shape of those stone beehives still on some of the old thruways, usually near a thruway authority base. He’d always thought them kind of runic, a public shrine to the art of getting thru; the Japanese had such things. But asking a state trooper, he’d found they were only storage for road salt. “The map code was on it.” Like for everything: Factory A. Factory B. Recreation Hall. Hospital. Factory C. “The Tomb was right on the main drag.” With a big waste-space around it. Or so you would think, comparing other allotments. Marked Platform X, it was. Delivering or receiving? “‘What do you suppose that’s for?’ he’d said, pointing it out to his mother when they were clearing the table, no maids being allowed in at these sessions. ‘Not for the Space Angel,’ she’d said. She is still in the past tense.

  “Frank, you’re shivering.”

  “Burns do that. Body defense.”

  Even such a small burn? Mole eyes the labeled shelves here, where nothing rattles. No urns of ruby and blue, like the trick pharmacy in Georgetown. Everything here is space-serious. Add to it at your peril. Or subtract? “My mother’s big on body defense. She says you have to be. And big on the mind. Or else the medicines will take over. The pharmacopoeia, she calls it.” She has a wide range of such terms; she’s not a tenth cousin of Freud’s for nothing. Once, clearing up those maps and models to dump in his father’s study, she’d snorted “Prosthetics!” He’d followed her into the study, which was lined with more models his father himself dusted, to ask what that meant. “Artificial limbs.” She’d swept out a hand. Took him a minute to catch on she meant NASA—maybe all of it. It was she who taught her three to pit their bodies toward the world. Into it, she’d said—not against. And not always in a machine. Oh, come on, Elsa, you drive that Porsche breezy enough, his father said. Of course, Moleson. It’s my subordinate.

  It occurs to him that he gets his italics from her. And that he’s here as much on her account as on his father’s. Much in the same way, she’d sent his sisters, those Cathedral School types his father had insisted on, to the midwife instead of the hospital, where they did handily, almost too quick for their husbands to take flash-shots of the births. Whee, isn’t he lovely, Elsa said, handing round to his father’s colleagues the snapshot of her first grandchild pulping from between her elder daughter’s engorged thighs. ’Scuse it, boys, his father said, red under his brown: Elsa thinks she did it. No I don’t, Moleson. But I did wear out two fans.

  Bitter and saucy behind him, she picks up the models of glory and mulls them. Because of her he is pitting his body into the universe. Without coveting death.

  “Hurray, he’s breathing,” Francis says. “Our living Buddha. I was beginning to wonder. Or are you just having a BM?”

  He’s straining to drag her forward and over the miles set between him and her since a week ago Saturday. Hup, Mother, and over the stile. In a minute she’ll be here, distant maybe but as alive as he—no loophole for me, sonny. No, Elsa. Wish I could hear her on Lievering. Probably she even knows his big word. Forward, Mother, out of the past.

  “Seven, come eleven,” Mole says, scooping the dice, throwing them and untangling his legs all in one graceful swoop which brings him back to the cot bed, where just as rhythmically he raises it, and holding it up, lowers himself into the box below.

  “What the hell you—?”

  The bed’s resisting him, like a lid. He pushes against it, panting. “Multiple Failure…Not Contemplated. Remember? On all those print-outs. Of the mission, they meant…Well, I’m—contemplating it.” He’s big for the box. But if he curves himself in, it fits.

  “Get the fuck out of there.” Tuohy, straining against the upraised cot, hauls him up and out. Red to their Adam’s apples, they waver at each other like two cocks.

  “I’m—gee, Frank, that lid was—weighs a ton.”

  “You fool, it’s on a spring.”

  Mole stands up, weaving, vibration like an undercarriage beneath his feet. He misses his old sneakers. He tries to grin. “Tuohy, you’re not shivering anymore.” His own teeth are chattering.

  “I should be. Suppose you’d done that while I wasn’t here.”

  “I didn’t…Hey, look.” He’s thrown a seven, and a four. Shakily, he throws again. A six. A five. “Hey—these dice loaded?”

  He only meant it in fun. But the medic says gently, “Sure, Mole. That’s the pair that are. Didn’t you know? Thought you were just humoring the old guy. My kids do a lot of it.” His voice is husky. “She just wanted me to have all the luck I could. Daddy’s little baby girl.” He whistles softly. Mammy’s li-tle ba-bee loves short-nin bread, the tune is. Mole stands at attention. Frank’s bringing his baby girl over the stile.

  Though when the elders are finished feeling, then better to make like you’re sloping off; it’s less embarrassing.

  “Where you go
ing, kid?”

  “Galley. Time for—ah—that cold porpoise and purée of bog.”

  “Come on. It’s not that bad.”

  Actually it isn’t. Better than the airlines. Only the presentation is odd. Booger-shaped solids and virtuous essences. What he craves is a little home-style disorganization. What saddens him is he’s getting used to the other. Not without a fight. “Sure. But I still have my standards.”

  “You sure do. That’s what we cherish you for.”

  “You what?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  They are both embarrassed.

  “Then level with me.”

  The corona framing Frank’s eyes goes up. “Ouch.” He claps a hand to it. “About what?”

  Once, playing tic-tac-toe in an office anteroom, he’d overheard his father interrogate. He reached out a finger, lightly spreading the grease on those red marks. “What else on the flight deck scared you shitless, Frank?”

  In a similar silence, had his father offered the guy a cig? No—asked for one. Mole stretched. “Think I’ll have some of your pop.”

  When Frank comes back with the bottle, he says: “The deck did. The deck itself. I can only tell you what I saw.”

  “Please.” His father had said—“Do.”

  “I never been in Outer before. But I been a rocket buff since I was in jeans. Seen every model they ever had at Canaveral. Never seen a panel like that one. Yards of it. The controls alone are like jewelery. Some of the screens longer than a man. Than a big man. And like three-dimensional. Like you could almost live in them. Who knows, maybe four dimensions, once you get the hang of it. They’ve even got that radio-communications setup broadcasts signals—you know—for pickup. In case of other peer groups hacking around the universe.”

  “Like at Goldstone. That desert one? But those discs are huge.”

  “They’ve brought it all down to size. Things when I was your age were spread out a whole hangar. Or like—remember the old computers? No, you wouldn’t. That’s the first rule, kid. Bring it all down to size.” He crouched forward. “That’s what we do best. And it’s marvelous. Want to know the truth? I’d pay to come.”