Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  If Marie was the kind who was a first, I was not sure I wanted to be.

  “I was recruit before the war. At Göttingen. The day after the first ’Itler putsch, I was recruit.”

  “Precisely. One of the longest in the business. Tops. Member of the very first group to make the decisions against—them. And afterwards, the pride of France. One gives you all your medals, dear girl. But then all the more, this—inconvenience. This strange delay. We never dreamed—”

  “Nor I.”

  She was still saying “I.” I liked that.

  “Nor that Harry would be so—so persistent.”

  “’E is ’ere? ’E is ’ere?”

  This was a cry. It went through me. I could have wished that it had at least gone all the way—but it lodged. And during the very long silence which now ensued, I felt as if I were leaning on the sharp point of it. This was what came of dropping One’s field. Then, as it ebbed—was that … pain?—I thought perhaps the two of them had gone. Why did I always—? Such things never mattered before.

  But no. “Spare me,” said Marie. “If you please. That pronoun.”

  “Merde.” It was only a mutter. “Quelle vraie salope.”

  “And the French also. Now that One can compute it quite easily. In any case, the answer is no—not here. Gone up to London. To look for you, still after any trace of you. Then, we hope, to Harwell. One of our brightest recruits is working there. Just a beginning candidate. But she’ll have several tricky little theses to show him which should help delay him awhile. But after that, unless we can think of something in time—we’re for it. One good guess, and Harry could blow up the whole show. For, where do you suppose, my dear, that Harry plans going? A great tribute to you, of course. After that, Harry expects to chase across the water again—back to Hobbs.”

  But that was where I’d been told I was going! And surely I wasn’t Harry. Or was I.

  “’Arry won’t ’ave to guess,” said my mentor.

  “You can’t mean—” Marie’s voice was all vibration. “You couldn’t have. Told him. Or is that why you’re having such—Aha. And all those widow’s veils of yours are just a—”

  “You think I need to tell ’Arry? ’E guessed. An’ ’e never say a word. No matter ’ow long I work in the tower, evenings. No matter what changes ’e find now and then in the observatory. ’E never. Long, long ago, ’e guess.”

  I began to suspect who—or what—Harry was. In general.

  “But then it’s all up with us,” said Marie. “I knew we shouldn’t have used women of—your stamp.”

  Mentor gave a little laugh. “One should never. But no, it’s not all up with us. ’Arry won’t speak.”

  “With everything that’s at stake, Harry wouldn’t speak? You’ve lost your mind, poor sweetie. Any of them would speak up—they would have to. Just as in the same boat, so would any of us.”

  “Not Harry.”

  She even pronounced the “h” I used to twit her about—her difficulty.

  “But that’s too extraordinary!” said Marie. “Or would be.”

  “’E ’ad two wives very unusual, Mm? So why shouldn’t ’e be such a man?”

  So I was right. One of the straight ones. A he. A—

  “Language!”

  When Marie’s voice went even higher, whose did it resemble?

  “If you persist in breaking every safeguard,” she went on, “how can One believe anything you say? Or be surprised that One-ness is still beyond you. Even if what you say could possibly be true, then—then why should Harry keep on looking for you?”

  Ah, I thought I knew the answer to that, dear Marie. I waited for my mentor to give it: “Because I am She.” As one so often does here, I had learned just a little more than they had taught me. But, however—and hence my tame Obedience to the next program, the dialogue to come—not quite enough. As so often before, I imagined her there, just through the wall, a being longitudinally oval like myself, and pinkish too, not all of the dinosaur size which I had hoped for the straight ones. More to my scale, and with a spot of difference, or, as things went here—two.

  Then She gave a chuckle. First it was only a little purling from those strings of hers, the kind with which she had sometimes honored an error of mine. But then it was a ripple, and another ripple, and finally it buffeted the room—how did the wall withstand it? Answer: like many clever inanimates, it took the shock, but passed it on. To me, in this case.

  “Ohé, ohé. Mors. C’est ce que je—So that’s it! Eh bien, eh bien, at least I still have what it take to laugh!” And She was off again.

  “So One observes. Or could do, if you hadn’t got yourself up in—the way you have.”

  “Arabique. A chador. Très chic, non? And a good way to hide.”

  Another time, since hiding was of interest to me also, I should have pondered this further, but I was in the grip of more important questions. Questions here are terrible. No wonder we do not have them.

  “Highly unnecessary, isn’t it? Since Harry is gone.” Marie’s voice was rather elegant, or at least, slender. Like whose?

  “To return, you say.”

  “Possibly. Meanwhile, what is it you find so funny?”

  “A private joke, Marie.”

  “Still back here in personality, are you. I insist.” Between a flute and a bumble. Very aristocratic, of course.

  “I don’t like to ’urt your feeling.”

  “One hasn’t them, dear. Not any more.”

  “Pardon. Then you will not mind my asking … when you disappear, Marie—”

  “Ye-es. One has forgotten all that now.”

  “Oui. Pardon. Then you will not remember … that when ’Arry come back from Egypt—”

  “All that has faded, my dear girl. As you will find, if you are lucky enough to—to Ovolve.”

  Marie was putting on airs, as converts so often do.

  “Ah, oui. But since I ’aven’t been so lucky—you forgive I amuse myself—that ’Arry did never take the trouble to go looking, hein, for you.”

  And Mentor gave a final low laugh which did her no credit. Natter, natter, how silly-silly these two could be together! But I shouldn’t at all mind having a straight talk with this Harry. Who couldn’t be the one I was being sent to next, since the very pronoun was distasteful. Who must be one of the other kind. Who must be one of those whom the two inside called them. A “he” was a Harry. And it was jolly likely that, if it were left to those two, I’d never get to meet any. I saw the likelihood that very definite limits were indeed to be put on my education here. Good God. Was it possible that enmity between the genders here was such that the two never met at all?

  A host of questions assailed me. I managed to put down all but a few, meanwhile rather nervously watching a squirrel who regarded me with his bright wink but came no nearer. I shifted a bit so he should not mistake me for a boulder, and listened again for sounds from within, but heard nothing but that silence which is always so equivocal here. At home there is always a supportive hum, not to the point of music but very filling nevertheless.

  I preoccupied myself meanwhile by imagining a sort of being to whom one might pose all sorts of questions it would be a waste to put to that pair behind the wall. Serious questions, to be propounded in some solemn but comfortable environ from which the brightly-stupid, the silly-unsafe, would be barred. Nothing personal. Serious questions being of course those to which both sides already knew the answers.

  At the moment, I bent to consider those more foolish ones in which vitality so often secretes itself here. Why was it Marie’s reedy voice annoyed me, for instance, with a resemblance I couldn’t or wouldn’t identify? And why it should so matter to me that, of the two in there, a One of Us and a one of You, and both my mentors, which …?

  An appendage voice suddenly interrupted what were perhaps all our meditations.

  “Security reports a One returned to station Bucks and safely landed.”

  “There!” said my mentor’s vo
ice. “I’d better go see.”

  “Not until you’ve revealed just what’s behind those veils, mind. Do be … just a weeny look now …”

  “Touch me at your peril, Marie!”

  “Disgusting thought. We don’t, you know. But you’re the one who’s in danger. Psychologically. Taking the veil is just what they used to do in the old days. Women who’d led a full life.”

  “All the better you don’t come any nearer.”

  “Temper, temper! As for the rest of your ensemble—All those pockets. How do you ever expect to lose weightfulness?”

  So they did have them.

  “You’re not supposed to be eating, reading or yearning. You’re supposed to be in a quiet non-corner, talking hypotheses to your—” Here Marie gave a short cough.

  “Nombril.”

  I computed rapidly. Navel. Whatever that was.

  “Yes, excuse One. You know our reticences. Well then. Whatever can you be keeping in those pockets?”

  “Old enthusiasms.”

  I thought as much.

  “Ah! … Mind letting me … have just a weeny—”

  “Loin d’icil Non!”

  Another cough. “Just testing. Quite a good reaction, really. Touching departs first, one is told. But you still seem to be suffering from quite a lot of—poetry.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For persons, places, that sort of thing. Any sort of irregular—surface attachment.”

  Converts. They never get things right.

  “Ah, oui. Very—poetical. An’ I suppose, they ’ave no word for—”

  “No, no, no. No! Whatever you may be thinking of—no.”

  “Fi donc.” But this was merely a mutter, followed by a pause. “Alors, tell us Marie … touch goes first, you say … ’Ow does it go?”

  “That’s a good sign. You said ‘tell Us.’”

  “I mean the change. How does it start? The change.” Her voice was hoarse, but still hers.

  “Why, amnesia takes over at once, of course. We wouldn’t dare remember. Once leave for good and all, Here will disappear altogether.”

  For some, maybe.

  “You never look-èd the miroir? During that time?”

  “Doubt it. Never was one for mirrors, much.”

  “Ah. All that time—what you think of? What you were—for?”

  “Not for,” said Marie. “Wherever in the universe would that get you? Against!”

  Sunday was Marie.

  “Ah, I see,” said my mentor. “I even … remember. And I—I am still too much—So. So that’s it.”

  I stirred uneasily. At home, where talk was for dilettantes, the perfectly ovoid exchange of serenities made for conversation, yard after yard of it, reverberating, profound. Here, where talk was a necessity, there were only these papier-mâché detonations.

  “How you can see anything, with all those clothes on!” said Marie.

  “There’s no doubt you look better, chérie, without the clothes you were in the ’abit of wearing. And now, if you excuse me—”

  Cherie. She had called Marie by my name. Language on here could be gall to the taste, gender a confusion of the mind. Take the whole of their reversible world here; let it burn in its own nasty green glare. This was an emotion. I was almost sure of it.

  “—but what’s that noise?” Mentor said sharply.

  “Squirrels on the skylight. They always.”

  It was I, of course, somewhat to my embarrassment. I could say that the darkly overcast wind blown up suddenly within me had blasted me up there. Or I could say that I had jumped. There was much more to alternatives than I had thought. Both were true.

  I peered down. Through the heavily corrugated glass, I could perceive only areas of light and dark; as for myself, as yet I scarcely cast a shadow. In this climate, it was probable the natives themselves did little more. Again a sharp sense of home curved me. Likely nowhere on this planet were shadows cast with the perfect black lacquering of Ours, that teardrop planet whose shape is so devotedly matched by its inhabitants, and whose climate, standing ever at the semi-tropic, is of the texture of a melted-down smile. An undulating row of Us, our black alter egos peacocked out all at the same stance behind us, some with the shine of patent, others with the patina of velvet, is something to see. To watch this interplay is a spectator art with us, some preferring the brilliant contrasts of the siesta, others like myself inclining toward the curvetting nuances of dusk—both of these hours of course being artificial. And always even the whitest a One can at once be consoled for his pallor by looking behind him.

  “No, don’t go yet,” said Marie, so close under me that for a moment I thought she addressed me, yet I could barely distinguish, below, the lump of stillness that must be she. Or the other: She. Which—was which? I said it to myself over and over like a pain. And this was strange, since, by logic and listening—the latter being a lot better than the former—I thought I knew. Hunger pains for the absolute are the natural consequence of a world having so many alternations, but it is the nature of the absolute itself here which is the more interesting. It is what one absolutely knows, but can never get confirmed.

  But, if I could manage to break the skylight—

  “Time for me to go and practice.” She sounded so depressed that I was reminded of certain times at home when, having already dared to think of the possibility that One might get here, it still seemed beyond power or destiny. Yet, once a Here is penetrated by thoughts of elsewhere, it is never the same.

  “Practice makes perfect,” said Marie.

  She cooed it, or was trying to, yet I seemed to know—the way those of you who have absolute pitch can summon an “A”—the pure tonelessness that such a voice must have.

  “But perhaps you need a rest, eh?” she added. “Maybe you ought to table the whole idea of changing. Now, now, don’t get excited. Just for a little two-time.”

  “What is that!”

  “A small paraphrase of one’s own. When you do get to Us, as One is sure you eventually will, you’ll find us rather good on paraphrases. It makes for fresh reverberation without autointoxication. And we really have no non-mathematical name for the time factor—a concept that can’t exist anyway except in the presence of correlatives.”

  “You never were very good at math,” observed Mentor.

  “Where One and One is One,” said Marie, “a One has no trouble.”

  She was either ignorant or giving herself airs. We do have a name for the time factor, indeed as single a name as it is possible to imagine. What would a world such as Ours call such a factor? We would and do call it: Once.

  I repeated it to myself, and even giggled; as I bumbled between worlds, it was language which would help to keep me samely—I mean, sane. And Marie is a phony, with a telephony voice. Out on There, Once is certainly what We—what They—say. We. They.

  And then, right here-there on my corrugated glass perch in the bright morning air of Bucks, I began to shiver and shake. I began to shiver as if this pleasant valleydom before me, on whose bright demesne I could even see, mute in the distance, a scattered few of that most comforting of creatures, the cow—were some hellhole at the outermost bounds of the universe perhaps, or even that worst of them, the one presumed to be outside those. I even fancied that my tremors were accompanied by a chattering sound which could never quite be caught of itself and stopped the minute I did, like the footsteps of those who had feet. Yet, so far I had nothing about my personage which should make even a whisper.

  And then—suddenly I understood. Nothing much was ever understood on Here except suddenly, and I was even doing that, with a feeling like the rising of hair upon the integument—if one had hair. Consider how it all fitted together. Consider, for instance, how umbilingual I was about language, how ambivalvulent—how at one moment I despised it and at another it was my savior. I was betwixt. Regard how very little, or certainly less and less, I seemed to be living in the present; as I thought of it, it seemed to me that they scarcel
y had a present here at all. I was between. Consider a host of other things that an eavesdropper on a glass roof had ought not to do, being arsy-versy enough as it was. I was betwixt and between. We—They. And I saw quite clearly that, unless I could become more of a You, or less of a One, this circumstance might be the walking-floating hellhole which would follow me everywhere.

  “Besides, dear colleague, we have such a lovely mission for you. It will fit right in with your circumstances.”

  I gave a start, having forgotten that everybody has them. Circumstances.

  “That’s no squirrel out there, Marie.”

  “You’re just nervous. Do let me explain.”

  “I am rather full up on mission already.”

  “But this one is instead of. Just for a—Just for now.”

  Hmm. This is the way their present always goes.

  “Who believes in now, these days?” Mentor’s voice was bitter. “What peasant?”

  “Good-oh! That’s the spirit. Nobody. Not since the Christian era, really, the better to think of the world to come. And what with you scientists helping—what one can’t understand is how such a doctrinaire as you should be having such trouble at getting there.”

  How wrong she was, she would soon see. The answer was that a One does not believe in a now; a One has it. Our Now is not doctrinaire. One merely cannot assume it unless the whole race does, since it comes from a sameness in every circular pore and bath of living. And I could show her a race of Ones, in such a sempiternal Now—! Almost I yearned to be back there, sweet-sucking that circumambience.

  “No wonder you succeed, Marie. You ’ave faith.”

  “One always has had.”

  “Oui. To be sure, not always in the same thing. But, chapel to cosmos—you ’ave it.”

  “From now on, it all will be the same. That’s Our comfort.”

  So One thinks.

  “I wish—” Mentor sighed.

  “I know what, dear—that you were like me already.”

  Mentor gave a laugh. “No, it is more complicated. I wish … that I wished it.”

  And I wished that I could jump down through the skylight to tell her that such a mingy, gray pod of a convert—for surely this was the which and which of the pair I had seen—was no true model of Us. Oh to be sure, mutation the other way, toward You, was my mission and my yearning, but the truly large spirit can honor its beginnings, as you yourselves honor the gills and auricles which fathered your breathing, the unicellular yolks which only latterly became your hearts. And I wished she might see a line of Us, serene as barques born all of the same sailmaker, acurve on the evening at the gilded hour when the refractions of dust so bend the energies of light that for a moment we are visible—we are even leviathan.