Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “And the men in there? On the flight deck. What size are they?”

  “And the men are there—” the medic says in a dramatic whisper. “In their shirt-sleeves. They have perfect G-force there, perfect environment. Royalty. And don’t begrudge them it. You barge in like we had to; there they are. Like those cookie-cutter men in toy cars or like in a drag race. All profile. No full face. Because all five are glued to the panel. The three who’re on inside break can ease more, or take turns leaving deck. Or help put out a fire. They did that.”

  “Dove was on outside break?”

  “Yeah. He hauled me in. And my kit.”

  Throughout this narration the medic’s excitement has grown on him as if it comes from an outside agent, pounding his fist in his palm for him, rolling his eyes. Now he walks on tiptoe, his arms stretched graphically, watching the story issue from between his own fingertips.

  “Frank. Five and three makes eight.”

  The medic stops in his tracks.

  “And one makes nine.”

  “So it does.”

  “But the manual calls for—” A flight-deck crew of ten.

  Foolish Mole. Never interrogate in a straight line. Frank’s strong fingers are at his elbow, the coronaed eyes too close. “Kid. Go eat.”

  In his grasp Mole goes cunningly limp. “Frank—you like being scared?”

  He’s released. “Told you I’m a buff. Maybe I do. When there’s—good reason for it.” He can’t resist a slight smile. “Sends my wife up the wall.”

  “When there’s Quaker duty, huh?”

  “Somebody told you about that. Yeah.”

  “And I’m part of that duty, huh? You were never tapped. To watch over me. Frank? Thanks.”

  Now wait. Say nothing. Let him come down on it.

  “To let you come aboard like that,” Frank says slowly. “Cold. Men with boys of their own. For a joke. And when—”

  “When what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Repeat their name, his father said once, in a rare briefing on how Mole should deal with a touchy housemaster. Names never tire. “Frank—”

  “Space is curved, they say,” the medic says angrily. “That mean we people using it have to be crooked to match?” He bangs a fist against his head. “Ouch. Look, leave me be, will you? I have to write a letter home. Every week, I promised them. Hey. Hey, Mole. Don’t go all dreamy on me.” The medic’s voice softens, but like they all do when they’ve had enough of you, and hard tit to you: Like they have your interests at heart, but now scram. He can’t know of the three syllables which have entered Mole like a silver corkscrew. Using space.

  When Mole draws to his full height he’s almost six-five. Girls saw. Men noted only the shamble, and bone sockets wrong for basketball. Or if they knew his father—the flecked eyes. He’ll say “Frank” one more time, he thinks. You, Frank—answer, hear? Or else I’ll—I’ll swallow your dice. Though there’s no porthole, the sick bay has a reflector to the corridor. Out there he can see the medic’s life-support suit hanging on its hook. When Lievering goes for simulation practice on how to maneuver on the surface of the Courier, he wears a heavier version called an EVA Mobility Unit. It’s all the same thing. Maybe if I had my life-support on, this would be easier. Because I have this problem. I’m a joke, yes. But I’m also the Joker. “Frank—”

  The medic raises his head.

  “Does my father—does Canaveral know it yet. That I’m here?” Using space?

  “Come here, kid. I won’t bite. But if you weren’t such a lummox I’d take you on my lap. And your sidekick.” He snorts. “Some of us are psycho, yeah. Some of us are only panicky.”

  The dice lie on the floor. Mole kicks at them. “You’re going to tell me—I know what you’re going to say.” At what passes for night here he’s awakened and gone into the Hygiene Unit to squat and think of it. Or gone to the document box for Fred’s gift book, which dealt with all space as if it was only an architecture meant to soothe, whereby inconvenient people could be prayed away. He’s not sure what his prayer is. “Maybe—that my father’s aboard?”

  The medic gets up, goes to the fridge. Instead of opening it, he leans his face to cool there. “Your age, I worked Amnesty International awhile. We talk to a guy in jail, or a woman, we always do like this, for good-bye.” He turns up his hands at the wrists, “See? Put your hands against mine. They always do like this, for good-bye. They always did it, no matter what language. Paddy-cake. Through the bars.”

  Mole puts his palms against the medic’s, which are horny and greasy both.

  “We don’t fly like the canaries here, kid. Everybody knows they work us from outside. Like the wardens did. That’s what shook me up. That one gray screen that’s responsible—to them. Then one little hot spot and it goes blank. Like my old Murray switch-box at home, when a fuse blows. But they’re the ones at home.”

  Mole can see their own box in a closet under the cellar stairs.

  “For a minute you’re in the dark, that’s all,” the medic is saying.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you repair. Or they do. And that’s the glory of it.” Tuohy removes his hands from Mole’s. At the mirror again he pats his face all over delicately, with a Kleenex, like a man using aftershave before a date. “Us—against the universe.” He drums his feet on the floor as if the universe stops there. “Glory, hear? All those wars’ve made us ashamed to say it. Teaching kids like you only bad men have it. Or want it.” He reaches behind him. “Here. Have some of my fizz.”

  Mole drinks. It tastes like—fizz. “Thanks, Frank. Now I am a man.”

  The medic chuckles. “Everybody needs a little…paddy-cake. You all right now?”

  You’re the one needed it. “Thanks. You must be a very good father.”

  “Right.” The medic brings out a pencil, free of its string. Here and there the rules break down. Here and there. “So—”

  “I’ll scram.”

  “Enjoy your meal. Hah—porpoise. I’ll write the kids that.”

  “We had it in the Bahamas, on a rented schooner. The captain insisted.” Mole lingers.

  “Honest? What’s it taste like?”

  “Like the inside of a girl.”

  Frank’s head comes up, slowly.

  That’s right, Frank, revise me. Still think I need a lap? “Silly idea aren’t they, Frank. Captains.” Mole ha-ha’s giddily. “On a bridge, with a spyglass. Passenger idea.”

  The red coronas are hard and shiny now. They still can wrinkle.

  “Tuohy?”

  The medic sits up.

  “Which side you on?”

  “Side?”

  “The men or the kids?”

  “Heh. Close to the bone. Very close to the bone.” He doesn’t smile.

  “Maybe I should ask Dove a few things.’”

  “That stooge? You ask Dove anything, Dove is what you get. Kid—” He shakes his head, flicking Mole’s breast pocket. “Okay, Mr. Kim. Whyn’t you just hold tight and wait till you’re called?” He mutters under his breath.

  “I heard that. And pray you won’t be, you said. Then why won’t you level with me?”

  “You walked into it.” He’s moving his letter page in a circle under the pencil, as if he can’t figure out how to intersect with it. “And so did I.”

  “Walk—” Mole says. “When we can fly. Who wants to walk anymore?”

  “You mean that?”

  “Almost.” He’s dizzy with it. High—on fizz.

  “I keep wondering what my kids will think about that when they’re old enough. So now I know.” He flaps his arms like wings. “Like father, like kids. So you’re a buff, too? Like the rest of us? Then settle down to it.”

  “What is this fizz?” Mole said.

  “Potassium juice. For the athaletic muscles. People win Olympics on it. I just take my cut. Expect to do a lot of running, out there. Be in a factory, they said. In a medical capacity. What the factory makes, I dunno.”


  “Well, you have the run of the ship here. You’re crew.”

  “Second crew. The others on it understudy the deck. Which means they don’t get away from it. My bailiwick’s here. I run the super-nourishment supply.” He shook the bottle. “With other supplements.”

  “We don’t get this in the cabin. Cabin Six, I mean.”

  “No-o. You’re administrative bigwigs. You’re not going to be athaletes.”

  “Frank—who are—the rest of us?”

  But the medic, taking up his pencil, is lettering a large HOW ARE THE HOW IS In the first space he draws two rabbits with their ears intertwined, in the second a plump cat holding up its name. He’s quite good at it. The finished letter will be processed to wait for the return voyage and then at last go local to the Canadian border where his family lives as Americanly close as possible to his wife’s Quebec. Months may pass, more.

  “You’re a talented guy. Drawing, whistling.”

  “The wife takes care of their mortal souls.” Tuohy now limns in a houseboat marked WE, with a brace of giraffes nodding from behind its smokestack toward two horses, one bonneted, the other dropping a turd. Then come a number of auditing birds and finally a far shore with a crowd of minute button-faces, labeled YOU. Presiding over the deck is his own face recognizably hung in the air and rayed like a sun. Below it is a woolly-haired figure with its hind end in a tub. YOUR DAD AND A CUSTOMER.

  “Stand me up straight,” Mole said.

  “Me, too.” Gilpin enters. He and Mole smile shyly. Since Mole’s apprenticeship to Wolf they haven’t more than greeted during the routines, often taking their places silent throughout, well-drilled pupils with nothing more to exchange. Since that time in the Free Room, everybody’s doing it.

  “Bad knee again, Frank,” Gilpin says. “What I need’s a space walking-stick. I dream of what it could be. An electric grip, like a baseball glove for buttocks only, that follows after you like a nanny does a toddler. Or a crystal cane, really an elongated ray, that springs from your palm. Both palms. Or a floating walker, with ball-bearings that react weightfully.” He groans. “Dear, dear weight, remember how steady it was? I would like to eat some—like chocolate.”

  “I’m your nanny,” Frank said. “Strip.”

  In order to have his knee examined, Gilpin has to. “Jump suits. Rightly named. Always jumping from them to get in touch with yourself all at once.” He hangs his canvas fatigue suit on a hook where it slowly reshapes itself. Ditto his thermal underwear. His anatomy is solid and much younger than his face, whose skin, even in their short time aloft crinkled further by the dryness, has begun to distance itself from its own features, a much used atlas showing these valleys and peaks.

  “You have a Maine skeleton.”

  “So I do. How’d you know that, Mole?”

  “We used to classify ourselves, at school.”

  “What were you?”

  “Ibo aristocrat from the Niger. Mixed with Silesian cattle-dealer, from the mountains of Glatz.” His and Gilpin’s laugh chime together. It’s a relief to talk on his own level. He suddenly feels great.

  Frank removes a clear plastic bracket from Gilpin’s left knee. He holds it dangling. “NASA aeromedical brace.” Shrugging, he opened a drawer full of other lustrous shapes—my moonbeam drawer, he calls it—and tosses the brace in. He pokes a greenish area just below Gilpin’s kneecap. “Old synavitis, looks like.”

  “Had that since I was sixteen. Wave smashed me on the dory once, lobstering.”

  “Oh? Catholics love lobster,” Frank says glumly. “My wife.”

  “So do Silesians,” Mole grins. “But aren’t stinkpots used for lobster runs now?”

  “Outboards, sure. But there are still the waves.” Gilpin sighs. “The January sea.”

  “Golly, I could use a real swim.”

  Both older men look at him silently.

  Gilpin breaks it. “Where’d you get that sunburn, Frank?”

  Frank, poking in other drawers, ignores them.

  “Bartendering,” Mole says. “On the flight deck. Tom—you know a word—psychopannychy?”

  “You’ve been talking to Lievering,” Gilpin says sharply. “Mole—you’d better understand about him. Everybody’s head is—plagued with symbols. Look at me. Look at Frank here. Look at you. But Wolf lives by them. He’s like a man brought up on wine instead of water—or in his glass everything turns to it.”

  “He’s some man to put on EVA then.”

  “Maybe that extra coordination comes of it. Of being all of a piece.” Tom is bent to the striations left by the brace on his knee, smoothing them.

  “They have a little cart travels along the surface of the ship, to examine it.”

  “Oh?”

  “He doesn’t like carts.”

  “Why not?”

  “Hitler took away the Jews in them.”

  Tom’s hand stops. “There you are.”

  “So—it’s not just—brave of him?”

  “What’s brave? Sure, admire him. Pushing his little diagnostic hut along, like that old Geiger counter he brought with him. Testing what we’ve put into the universe. Meanwhile, the universe is streaming past him. The others, they’ll be intent on the job. But Lievering, he can’t admit that this trip’s in the end like any other—just travel. He’s looking ahead.”

  “To death?”

  “Farther than that. To legend. He’ll tell you it.”

  “He did.”

  “The unknown in the tomb? Waiting for us? No matter how far we go? And when we get there already there?”

  “You take any stock in it?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Frank has lifted his head out of the drawer.

  “The one who goes before?” Gilpin says it lightly but like Scripture. “Sure. But I’m a popularist. Look in any grave.”

  Frank’s ready to impart information. He always does it with pomp. “In the erect position, Mr. Gilpin, a vertical line from the center of gravity passes in front of the knee.”

  “Hear that. And me with my center now so—moot.” He looks down himself, shaking his head.

  Mole looks shyly away from the distinguished pubis.

  “Not Mole’s. His runs straight down the middle, eh, Mole?” Frank’s brought out a small packet he’s tossing from hand to hand. “Why’ncha try the Jacuzzi, Mole, maybe it’ll run cold for you. Or maybe one of the girls’ll let you in. Watch out though for that feisty Iranian.”

  “Lay off him, Frank. Remember your youth.”

  “I prefer to remember my middle age. My early middle age. On a Sunday afternoon, a nap with the wife. With the kids at the rink. You know—I believe this is Sunday afternoon.”

  “Where?” Gilpin says.

  “Here,” Mole says passionately. It has welled in his throat. “Here, too. Anyplace, you can always feel the Sunday molecules gathering.” Around Washington, about 1 A.M. Saturday night. “According to a friend.” His live-in girl, that was.

  “So this is already a place to you, then,” Gilpin said.

  “I have a present for you, Mr. Gilpin. Rare, very rare. Only one within a million miles far’s I know. I brought two.”

  “Why, Frank, that’s very kind of you. What is it?”

  Frank unrolls it slowly. “An Ace bandage.”

  “An Ace bandage. My dear Frank.”

  Slowly, firmly, the homely stretch of pinkish cloth is bound in overlapping circles around the swollen joint. Mole, kneeling to watch, can smell the menthols of the locker room after track.

  The bandaging is done with art. Gilpin’s knee is scarcely thicker. “God it feels good.” He extends the leg. “Hermann Oberth couldn’t have designed it better.”

  “Those little metal Ace fasteners shaped like dog pads—what about them?” Mole says huskily. He’s been waiting for them.

  “Can’t risk those in heat; this cloth self-locks,” the medic says absently. He’s staring joyously at Gilpin. “Never knew you were a rocket-buff. Oberth—wasn’t he a
fast man though? And how about Wernher von Braun?”

  “Still have a spot of resistance to those other Teutons. Okay, Von Braun—even though he wanted metal space suits, like armor.” They all laugh. “But the ghouls like Krafft-Ehricke—ever hear his Extra-Terrestrial Imperative? No? Heard him give it in Alabama, once.” Gilpin half-closes his eyes. He is lecturing. “Confi-denz in a soaring future is the essenz uff our techno-scientific civilization. Und Vestern Mann’s greatest message to Mannkind.” He opens an eye to wink at Mole. “Erosion uff ziss confi-denz, threatens—zee Vahlue Sys-tem.” He opens both.

  Mole’s clocking their two faces, his and Tuohy’s, like a boy in a bar, waiting to be asked to drink.

  Gilpin’s arm is quickly around his shoulder. “Well, here we are. Three—buffs.” He unhooks his suit and eases in the game leg. “Good old ACE.”

  “Brought ’em along for my own varicose.” Frank gives him a hand with the suit. They all do it for each other without a thought, the women, too. “In non-G, liquid pools in the lower extremities. Then I go and spend most of my time in artificial G. Does the job, good enough.”

  Gilpin is dressed. “Cheap candy. Not the real stuff. But we’ll get used to it.”

  “R-r—right. Trouble is, too many people round here have too much imagination.” Frank has a prop cigarette he sticks in his lip now and then. He reaches for it. “Extra-Terrestrial Imperative. My God, I never heard it better said.”

  “Nor worse.”

  “Ah, come on, Mr. Gilpin. Your bark’s worse’n your bite.”

  “So it is, alas.” Gilpin prepares to leave.

  “Well, ta-ta. Any trouble, come by and I’ll rewind that for you. Or we’ll shoot a little crap.” The medic winks at Mole, or tries to, reaches for the grease, slaps some on, stows the tube in its drawer and takes up his pencil again, all in one go.

  “Your hands are your imagination, Frank, but they won’t let you know. What was it on the flight deck? What’s going on?”

  The pause now hasn’t the comfort of a bar’s or a Sunday’s. Mole steps in. “The other bandage, Frank, where’s that one?”

  “Why? Want me to save it for you? Ah, come on, both of you. Off me.” He twiddles his pencil. “I’ll tell you where. It’s on that gutsy Iranian gal’s back. The posture changes here are rotten for it. Some nights she can’t sleep, I bind it for her. I couldn’t see how they qualified her, till she told me. She really comes in here to talk to me. Midwife stuff.”