“Keep looking, dear, and no doubt it will occur.”
Had We really ever been so—like this a One? The vanity of an elliptic being is delicately elongated; it seemed to me that Marie’s bordered on the fatly circular.
I am.
Ah, Mentor. Look at me.
And in after-moments, I have sometimes wondered whether that might have been the one in which her own flashly education began.
“That’s no squirrel up there,” she said.
Beneath me, I could see the vague bundle which was Marie move closer to the other darker one. “Could it—” That voice couldn’t whisper. “—could it be—Harry!”
“Harry?” Her voice could make arcs. “Harry would come straight in.”
Then I was not after all as straight as I should be.
“Besides, he’s afraid of heights.”
Even in Harrys, then, there was room for flaw. If I could be a—! I would take on all the tribulations I deeply foresaw here: all the corporeal trials of the spirit, the dangers and bloods of a being which in its privacy retreats, a small, classic anima brooding upon its own waters, but when abroad even a landscape of the quietest, non-ravening trees—is still animal. If I could but choose to be that half here which—
“You’re so concrete, dear, even in misery. Not very womanly of you, I must say.”
“Au contraire.”
“Oneself is neuter, of course; I mean neutral.”
“Of course. I always ’ad in mind that you were.”
“Whereas One used to fancy, in fact, that you were just a teeny bit—”
“You don’t need to come any closer to tell me.”
I fancied I could see the gray blob stealing nearer the dark. It was maddening. Then I remembered that sight had been concentrating in the upper half of me. To aid it, I first leaned forward, then lay down—yes, horizontal!—then applied that part of me to the wavy corrugations on which I stood, but these remained adamant, stubbornly loyal—except for one crack of irritation. Fending off a squirrel, I remained as I was. As far as I could make out, the dark blob was standing its ground.
“—just an eeny-we-eeny—”
“Bug off!”
“Language!” shrieked Marie, but from what I could see the sun at high now aiding me—she came no nearer.
At that instant the sun must have come altogether out of the clouds here, ennobling the substance on which I lay to defend its owners royally against me, with flashes that went through me as if I were a scabbard. At some later date, I might brood on the curious interaction here between climate and inanimates—almost an alliance against blood-creatures, rather like that of servants who in reality are masters—but now I was held by what was going on below. Intervals for brooding versus happening are never purely regulated here, our peacefully successive periods of the same being unheard of; the line of demarcation is not even kept.
And now again, I saw a suddenly. The dark figure began moving. It was speaking as it was moving, and it was moving toward the gray. “Pax, Marie, eh?” it said. “I beg of you. Je vous en prie. Pax.”
Was this qualitative? Was this feeling? Or, the mixtures here being so mixed—? Oh, the new world! The dark was after all moving toward the gray.
“Language helps to keep me sane, Marie.”
So that was where I had picked up this sentiment.
“Or did do. While we ’ad our pupil.”
I trembled so that on the roof the very pattern of the sun itself—of a star—was dispersed, altered by my small but stubborn body. At home, all our aim is to order it otherwise—that the force of the universe may pass through us without change. She and I—and all the little band of us and you—are meteors whose paths intersect at equilibrium: once-now—then must soar onward into opposing nights. As she had forewarned me, the generations on Here do this also, in an equilibrium that never rests. While, on Ours, as I had cautioned her, all generations are created equal in dower, and throughout their tenure remain so—rising from the crater and returning there in perfect quadrille.
A sadness interfuses each world. Choose.
I trembled that I was even thinking such thoughts. On Here, even the very facts are never still. How then, when nothing waits, can meditation be revered?
Meanwhile, below me those voices went on a-murmuring; talk might sanify, but the converse of these two was circular enough to push even a nonconformist out of his Opinion—never had I seen so many questions permitted to exist without answers.
I arranged them before me as best I was able.
What was the new mission?
What was hidden there behind her black veils, whose somber shadow even the faithful roof above her could not take upon itself to hide?
And, to me the subtlest, what did Marie fancy was there? For, just as Marie still had much more of the old planet about her than she would admit to, I too still had a good deal of instantaneity about me. And one a thing I had learned quicker than light—though like the light here, it kept leaving me and returning. The shape of the questions here tells much more than the answers.
But a minute later, as that low, passionate monologue resolved itself on my hearing like drops of fire that burst each into its own picture, I almost wished myself if not elsewhere at least away, out of eavesdropping, perhaps on that green pleasance where, only a mile away but as if on another orbit, cows were to be seen munching in their own mirage. Sooner or later on this planet, everyone wishes himself a cow.
For, as She spoke I had never heard such a voicing of the single before, of what it meant to be, among many, a one. Yes, once, in my first dizzying gulp of print here: O dark dark dark. But that had been a blind dark brought to general majesty. What I was hearing now was the shriek of the particular, going toward darkness. Or toward the pale, non-particular of There.
In brief—for I can scarcely bear to repeat all of it—She stated that the trouble had all begun with my own lessons. While she was so carefully arranging for me my affirmations of Here, she had begun to grow doubts about There. This is always a danger, I surmised, with alternatives; too big a bagful of either, and one pokes a hole to let in the other. For as she inventoried the characteristics of this world for me, she had begun to make a ring-around-a-rosary for them for herself.
“After forty years pointed toward elsewhere, what could it matter, Marie, this little exercise in farewell!”
Then had come the day when she and I had made our au revoir, the day when I had learned to say “I.” It was just then that she too had had a suddenly. It had come upon her that the words themselves, all those jewel cases which she had been airing for me, would no longer be needed by her, that not only they but all their contents—which now sparkled so green—would soon by her choice be over and gone for her forever.
“—and then, ah then I find myself in such a bramble.”
Bramble!
“Everything I look at, Marie; it touch me. And everything what I touch; it look at me.”
Yes, that’s the bramble, all right.
One after the other she described them, these blandishments. Little pictures flitted past me, small images struck as if with one molten drop of that organ which, as they tell it, beats like a brazen forge within them, magic unto itself in the center of their wilderness. What scenery they have within them, what landscape!
I could spare her those cherished sunsets, rather pale to me after such sun carillons as I had passed on my way Here, though I had begun to understand that delirium for the daily which can clang upon us once we know it is going—or it is gone. Her plaint about the plant-in-the-window left me cool also; I have already declared myself on plants; since they will outnumber us all there is no need to mourn. On the contrary, and though I might marvel politely here at grass which did not burn one, I would let it go at that, knowing what it still can do, left to its own.
But most of her apostrophes were to the smaller domestica, some so insignificant that they fell through the screen of my computation altogether unidentified.
In the span of one day, according to her account, she had wept equally and uncontrollably both over memorabilia of the past and objects testimonial to such a present as can be caught here—from an ancient pumice stone, a piece of volcanic lava which under the strange inequity here had scraped her heel in the bath since her girlhood, to the patch of trillium on the way through the woods to the tower where all her scientific efforts were conducted—to the stockpot on the stove. This last, on whose to-and-fro, from organ to organ as it were, she rather dwelled on, did rather ticklishly affect me. But taken altogether, what—
“Sentiment!” said Marie.
Fool, semi-demi convertedly quavering fool! No! What disorder!—from which comes all their danger. Their tolerance for the inanimate here—on whose sneakiness we keep forever vigilant—is past believing. Whatever of it they do not positively venerate, or worse yet, even help to proliferate, they let run incontinently free, eventually to rise, mountains of it and they knew not why, in their own dreams. Enmity—as we already knew from certain faint tintinnabulations of our instruments—they keep for among themselves.
“Yes, sentiment,” said my mentor in her deepest voice yet. “Softens the tissues. But hardens the memory.”
“How low your voice has got!” Marie tittered. “Whereas mine … that is, One’s—”
Good God. No wonder I knew that pitch pipe of hers, its tinny “A.” It was also mine.
“You never did weep, Marie?” she meanwhile was saying. “During all that time?”
“You know quite well how busy one was, collating all that inform—all very well for you scientists, but some one has to org—”
“—and someone ’ave to ’ave money.”
“—ye-es. That’s a thing One has rather missed, on There. We do gamble of course, but only with the oddest curved little counters, designed to slip away of themselves as fast as accumulated. One does wonder if it wouldn’t be possible somehow to immobilize—”
Up there on my perch, I began to laugh in the very special way we do, of which even the so sensitive roof beneath me would not be aware. No, We may not feel, per se, and we may have but one carefully constructed climate, status-quo’d to such fine tolerances of the same as your engineers would not conceive. But we have our outlets, arrived at after such implosions and gravitational collapses of which all but the most trusted members of our steadied universe remain unaware. Miles out to star you can hear us in the laughing season. And even off-season one is soothed by the characteristic hum-tune of a planet always at a cool, cerebral bubble—the smooth, general laughter of the only very slightly counterfeit sublime.
Such a planet can take care of itself.
Indeed, I shouldn’t be surprised if, ententes cordiales to the contrary, emigration should after all take place only One way.
“—and remember, Marie, you’d so much sympathetic company, right up to the time you took to your groove. I would have found it difficile to explain to ’Arry—why all these international ladies so interest to walk to the old icehouse by the lake. ‘An ’ardy lot,’ was all ’e ever say. ‘An ’ardy lot you physic-culturists.’”
Fuzz fizz. I must do better with my vowels.
“Grenadiers in skirts, most of your lot,” said Marie. “Spies, I shouldn’t wonder. One’s most telling evenings were spent alone, with what I seem to remember was a good book. Can’t quite recall its name. But it was a good one.”
“The good one, Marie. I try it last evening. There.”
From the thud, it must have been a book from a very large pocket.
“One hopes it helped, dear.”
“Very settling,” said Mentor. “To the settled.”
“Ah?”
“But not if one hopes for an Elsewhere less like here.”
“Fancy. What could One have been thinking!”
“And certainly not if one hopes for one truly—original.”
Uh-oh. O-nathema. No wonder there’s trouble. But in the end She might do better than Marie, who will get only so far. She may be an obsessive of those higher orders which are often less obvious. She can laugh. And she has rather a strong sense of O.
“Is that a shadow up there?” said Marie nervously. “A rather large one?”
“Mebbee.”
It melted me. Maybe she knows I’m here, I thought. Maybe is such a melting word.
“They’re let run so free here,” Marie said crankily. “On There, the shadows are so beautifully organized.”
She’ll learn not to use that word.
“Marie …” She spoke now in the hoarsest whisper. “Marie, I lie to you. Last night, in the tower, I did empty out some of the pockets. And I weep; it is true. At the bottoms when I find ’ere a lorgnette, there a few ’airpins—I weep for what I am leaving, yes I weep. But in the end I go back to the telescope. For perspective, you need an atmosphere that warps; in the telescope, I tell myself, where there is only distance, maybe I shall be safe. ’Arry often say it, even on Palomar what is a telescope but a circle drawn around doubt?”
“Not on Ours,” Marie said eagerly. “Ours isn’t circular; Ours is ellip—”
Good God, let not these two get into philosophy.
“I know, I know. But let me demonstrate. The statement I just made, Marie—is that theory or heresy, in your part of the universe? Choose!”
I hoped Marie would give it to her proper. Here-sy is of course a statement with too much Here in it—to Us. For you, any statement is a the-ory which has too many holes of There. A statement is wherever a One or a You is standing.
“O,” said Marie. “On the One hand … On the One Other Hand … O.”
“You see! And you haven’t even got any hands.”
Despite which, the hammer and tongs atmosphere being what it seemed here, the odds were that I would soon develop them!
“Forty years in the movement,” said Marie. “And all gone to—While you were at your rosaries, what happened to your catechism?”
“I remember. I still remember!”
“Repeat it then.”
“Birth: bleed. Child: starve. Men: kill. Death:—”
“There!” cried Marie. “Could anything be more convincing? One sees that alternative. As against all the horrows of two-ness—”
“You interrupted me,” said Mentor quietly. In the silence, she cleared her throat. “Death: is.”
“Not on Ours,” said Marie eagerly. “We simply—”
“Let me interrupt you. Lacking the adhesives of personality, or the sharps and flats of suffering, you simply—”
“Elide!”
They both said it at once. Even the roof beneath me gave a small echo, and in its glass I saw a small vein develop, in sympathy perhaps with the sudden weight even I was feeling. Death?
“And I’m not sure—” said She very slowly. “I can’t make up my mind. Do I really want to avoid the one answer to which there is no question?”
Curved. Beyond all doubt—curved.
“Dear girl, what are you going to do?” This time Marie did manage a whisper. “All that black crepe! You’re not planning to commit …!”
“La, la, no, that package will keep. But thank you, Marie—did I ’ear per’aps ever so small … a tendresse, pas pour moi … but for ’ere, per’aps a small feeling?”
Under me, both bundles moved inward, to a sound that seemed no more than a lisp of the cells. “A little.”
“Alors, Marie … listen. Last night, I do my hypothesis, these, hypothése; it seem to me I am doing this all my life. Only now, does it seem odd that I am doing it in order to get to a place where I shall never be able to do it again. To concentrate, this time I look at ’Arry’s new star object, the brightest of nine, and my favorite—”
“Favorite! You are still—”
“Yes, I admit it. Personality to the end! Listen about this 3C-273, Marie. It is the nearest of the far ones. It is so far that what I was seeing last night ’appen before the birth of the solar system, yet it make so much brilliance that any
amateur can pick it up in his speculum—And listen, Marie, this vary rhythmically, in thirteen-year cycles. Maybe the proper star for a woman? Hmmm?”
“You’re not thinking of—still!”
She gave a laugh alarmingly like one of ours. “’Ow nice to see that you can still not think—whatever you’re not thinking of. No … but—” She broke off. “Honest to God, what the matter with me? When I think of what we ’ave gone and done, the secondary sex, the unprofessional one—I ’ave such ’ot flashes of adventure. And then suddenly … an icicle grow in my throat, and stick there. I feel such a laugh coming on, of such frivol as I ’ave never—” She stopped short. “I think to myself, change-of-life, eh? Who should be surprise we are the ones to think of it?” Her voice bubbled. Then there came from her such a laugh, higher than Marie’s, not as supersonic as that chorus one hears in the season, but still cast to the all but disappearing pitch of it—the cool, aleatoric music of all answers which have no death in them to disturb us.
How did I know this? Where was I going, or coming? I looked down at myself, no discoverable change. Then I noticed that, beneath me, the solicitous crack had widened. I had forgotten about that subtle traitor, the inanimate—that counterspy, that informer. But now, within a small circumference around what was going on below, I could see.
They were just down under—the gray figure and the black. Seeing often adds very little to the believing here—at least to a vision accustomed to rotating at the center of a cyclorama which in turn intersects Others of the same, all this united perspective—aerial, isometric and linear—of course operating as usual, as One.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 16
