Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  But I could discern that one of the figures was standing relatively still, and one—though with a movement visible only to those trained to receive the perpetual molecular shimmer, was very slightly dancing. Difficult as it is to stand rock-still—there is no better word on this planet—the black figure was doing it. It is even possible that to a human I the figure of Marie may have been invisible. These dialogues are not unknown here.

  “Listen—” said the dark figure again, who of course might not know that the listening attention of a One, cocked forever at the angle of the gyroscope, spins eternal. “Listen, Marie, what you see when you look the night sky?” And it spoke in two voices now, both the piping and the soft, the dark and the cool, like some oracle intent on ringing all the changes possible between One and Two, but unaware, of course—a sudden gust of my own laughter shook me—that above it, there peered the outsider, who was—I felt a slight flesh change. Could mutation come even while laughing? The outsider who was … I was. I was Three.

  “I tell you what ’Arry see,” She said.

  Three-ness is nothing compared to the passage from Oneness to Two-ness—a mere sophistication. I listened to her description of what a Harry saw—ah, the dears that these beings were, at least in their spare time! I watched him stumble out among the higher-speed environments to potter with his basic fizzical alphabets every evening: “No,” he said to himself, “matter could not be totally annihilated into energy; yes, the universe exploded bang into being thirteen billion years ago and is continuously expanding; no, it had no beginning, and, steady there!, will endure forever”—and I saw him fall like an apple, every generation of him, on the heads of those beneath.

  Meanwhile, the black veils did not tremble, but from within the demand was repeated, not waiting for a reply. “I tell you what I see,” it said.

  She did not see the horses of Apollo up there, not any more than the Harrys did; the romantic was no longer her line. But so bright was her description, charged with the scorn of non-seeing, I fancied I saw that classic heaven. What strength she had garnered, from not being merely other but always the opposite! Beneath me, she unrolled such a vast panorama of all the prospects she had never had, that I altogether forgot the staid picture to be seen through the crack below. This is your general power, to extend yourselves in a way we can never, by the airiest hazard and opine. And by that reverse grace which acts in all universes in some way, it is a power which comes to you by very virtue of not having a fixed Now.

  So she described—with what she said was bitterness—the long range of circumstances she had never been fully allowed, had meanwhile greatly despised, and now hoped to leave behind her, forevermore. What experiences, what illimitable Urals of them, their peaks bloodstained or rain-bowed, she cast behind her—and ahead of me! (And what a strange “forever” they had here, which lacking even a moment’s tranquility must attach itself at once, greedy-greedy, to a “more.”)

  I saw holocausts, hurricanes, tornadoes, some of which she had seen; despite her gender she had not been wholly underprivileged. I heard the plaint of children, not all of whom were hers, but all of whose cries were on her conscience—and dimly osmosed toward me, I thought I began to compute what was a child. The notion of “kill,” even within the species, I have never had trouble with (it being what we are in absolute reversal of, as we are from that other more melting opposite which we are forbidden to name). For, like you, we know from the crater what is forbidden us—in the way that all beings perhaps know the forces that have produced their particular shape.

  As for birth, barely mentioning it other than as the circumstance for which her kind was both anointed and chained, she passed it by as no mystery to her—just as the eye of a needle might neatly engulf a camel, meanwhile convincing itself that the camel had swallowed it. Birth by any biological means—viviparous, oviparous, animalcular, virginal—is of course what we laugh at, in the season.

  I understood of course what was happening; She in turn was having her vision. She too had a certain fidelity toward her origins. As for death, that question-answer she had so touted, I couldn’t make out whether she willingly left it behind—until I reminded myself that, just as my vision had had some of You in it, so would Ours have a place in hers.

  Matter of fact, being rather personally on Here myself, I wondered, a little hoped, whether among the great grab bag of things she saw to enumerate, there mightn’t be a Me in it—but she merely finished with a sigh as great, and as if politely, once more said, “What do you see … Marie?”

  I knew what I saw at that moment, in our joint sky. I saw that home planet astride the reaches which a One might yet return to, that long teardrop of grace from which, once wholly a You, I should be barred.

  “What do you see in the night sky?”

  And Marie finally answered her, with that single word which even on Here has its dignity. “We.”

  But, in the brusque way events kick up their heels at eternity here, I was given no time to reflect on it. A happening was indeed interrupting me. For, to my horrow, I observed that the crack in the roof was widening, although, clever criminal that it was, it was managing this all but imperceptibly.

  And now I must confess to a naivete so utter that a You may laugh at it seasonably all the year round. I had no idea that the raise en scene was so complex here. When a One of Us has a happening, everyone nearby turns to face him, affording just the mild degree of simultaneity which will be comfortable; we are an attentive race for whom it would be unthinkable that a member of it need step over any of the lintels of life quite alone. All the really important steps of life are in full quadrille. This being so, advice, since never needed, is never given, affording us a sweetly open laissez-faire in place of the fierce huddle of privacy for which you must be forever on guard. But the shocking simultaneity with which events public or private were permitted to engulf people here would never occur to us. The possibility that, within the same quarter-mile moment of duration—or frequently much less, what with the cram and stretch of your allotments here—people might drown at sea, strut the sidewalks, dice away their patrimony, feast, strangulate in hospital, or simply be gazing sun-focused at a tablecloth, had never before crossed my mind—much less that all over your planet, perhaps your universe, people went on stewing in the same sort of broth.

  My mind! My cleanly conceptual mind, across whose pure plain there had never stalked more than one neat aberration—must I not mourn forever that calm savannah, that zoological silence! Into which slid Two-ness, the snake. What dazed me most was that even the ways of comprehending the variable world branched off as one approached. No sooner had I resigned myself to the dangers which ran alongside the admissable joys of a world where objects were let be unbridled, than I was confounded with the appalling disorder of its events. Up from that melee, a couple of numb thoughts in counterweight promptly immobilized me: We—have no accidents. They—take no responsibility.

  So, meanwhile I sat on my crack. And below it, though this couldn’t go on forever, those two—tow, two, two—went right on talking. Would it be the same for two a Harrys? I looked down at the ground. No, as yet I wasn’t afraid of heights. But it seemed probable that to stay where I was might be a part of my gravitational training—especially where the listening was so instructive. So, lying as flat as a being so curved could, and careful not to make any movement which might further inflame the treacherous substance I was lying on—I remained.

  And what I now saw was—my first appendage. Ah, it is a one thing to sneer at your mechanical ways of extending yourselves—but this—! Conceive of the occasion! After such passage of time immemorial as could not be mathematically figured even by a Schlovsky-Schmidt, a Wheeler-Oppenheimer, not even if one added to these the services of a Heisenberg-Hoyle plus even this year’s most brilliant qualifier for the Cambridge tripos—after all that time, a One, of the most illustrious, unprofaned incestry, saw his first violation of the sacred outline. And it was no longer a perversion. It
wasn’t even a dream.

  I knew what the appendage was of course, or thought I did, via that ever-resourceful book of animal plates, plus—though no squirrel was around for me to check on—certain fugitive memories of the small fauna which had patrolled before my glass. And though I was a bit middled about the number of such proper to creatures here—yes, it was what I thought; of course it was!

  Slowly it exposed itself, white against its black draperies, while I reddened—really now, must it! Coyly, it seemed to linger a moment, weaving slightly against the figure of the being to whom it belonged. Yes, it was graceful. It was also in a way repellent. The sight of what one has always been forbidden is always a little sinister—and its performance, alas, inordinately clever. Finally—it extended itself; oh what a length, after all!

  Finally, its owner spoke. “Au ’voir, Marie. Shake!”

  Then, in the usual two-ly, which I ought to have been used to by now, I saw another oddity. Marie’s color did not change a whit, unlike mine. She was after all going the other way; ships that pass! But in that rather stout gray outline of hers, whose texture, tell the truth, was still far short of transubstantiation, what did I see—just above the median horizontal and parallel with that waiting appendage—but a dent, a puckering as of a swift intake, a failure of arc that strove at once to repair its own extension, but for a quivering moment was unable. I watched in fascination—and of course, a vestigial sense of duty-watch. Then it was gone, leaving her form as perfectly inflated as before—and me gazing down on my own. Except for color, I was—as was. But the crack was now smiling to the width of an inch. I quickly looked away.

  “Think yerself pretty clever, eh, yer nasty bit of—? Wotch-er trying to do, give Us a setback!”

  Uh-oh. At this from Marie, my computer section, which has always had a weakness for dialect, positively chattered away at me—seems it had suddenly had revealed to it that Marie’s origins were not all she had pretended them to be. It went on to point out to me that neither were my mentor’s—or at least rather obscure, certainly not native to this region. And reaching a grand point of insolence, it asked itself, and covertly me, whether the fact mightn’t be that, by and large, most dissidents anywhere were either foreigners—or runts. In a final burst of ambition, it rattled off a request that I pose this question to it directly, promising me in return an answer which would not be by and large.

  Somewhat shaken, I turned off the connect. Since we do these things in our Own person, the relation between a One and his computer section is not separate, but neither is it equal. If this went on, I should have to get rid of it, maybe even let it go off on its own. Ever since coming here it had been getting above itself, and this despite a rapid downgrade in performance—witness its slapshod job of work on my vowels. Machines tend to do this on Here. Something in the atmosphere.

  “I apologize, Marie.”

  No matter what rude hints from mechanical snobs, here was a lady—a discrimination perhaps outside their realm now, and new to me myself. Her appendage, by the way, was still extended, indeed the only part of her to be seen, she being almost directly beneath me. And by now, this appendage seemed to me—what with that geometric progression of appetites which is here called “getting used to”—it even looked to me now rather sinuously beautiful. I found myself almost shy of learning its name. But since I couldn’t go on calling it an appendage forever, and it was certainly not an umbrella, I turned on the comput-put again, which thereupon snorted, “HAND!” omitting the usual accessory data, and—with what untold effects on my progress, not all of them bad, I daresay—went out of order for the whole afternoon. I know better of course. Only fools are onthropomorphic about machines. But, since I have been here, I find that though I like many of them very much, I can’t tell one from the other. Something in the atmosphere.

  Hand. A hand. A hand. I watched it closely, in order to detect its function, whereupon it withdrew, perhaps to spare my sensibilities. With my usual stingy ideas about the differentiation here, I was of course assuming that its function was limited to—one.

  “Sorry, ma vieille, I couldn’t ’elp—but is that material you’re in—really protoplasm. May I touch?”

  Separatism already. Their egos are enviably powerful.

  “You saw the prospectus; we all did.” Marie meanwhile retreated past my angle of vision. “And kindly stop gendering me. These Outlooks have their Onfluences. Wiser if you gave up French altogether.”

  Really, what a pill. I scarcely dared look down now—the split in the roof had stretched to a smirk.

  “Okay, bebbee.”

  “Take that word … away. And no, you can’t touch, thanks to One-ness. One’s got a sort of all-over electrical vest takes care of that. Very comfy, too.”

  “You could turn it off.”

  “Ha-ha to you, ducky. It’s forbidden. Besides, One can’t.”

  Which is the great contrast between our forbiddens, and yours.

  “There’s always a loophole,” said She, walking toward Marie.

  And a one—and a One—to see through it.

  Maybe she was looking for it now, for I could no longer see either of them. What they were in must be a corner. O philosophy. If I fell, would it be round a corner I came?

  “Marie …” came from below. “Marie … look up … do you see what I see? Straight up!”

  That lovely adverbative. I was enchanted.

  “Hah. No yer don’t. You’ll not get One to take one’s Observo off you till you’re safely away.”

  “Hélas. That may take quite a time.”

  And now, were we all back where we started?—which we would be, at home, of course. Those two were. But the crack grinned up at me, reminding me that I was a three.

  “We have Time,” said Marie. “For once and same. No more trickles.”

  “Marie … listen. Very beautiful of course, all that We-ing. But mebbee for me—you think possible I ’ave pick the wrong elsewhere? For you, fine, but for me, mebbee I would be better off in one where—”

  Where there were no pronouns at all? But that’s the beyond!

  Marie cut in quickly. “You’ll feel better, when you get to—America.”

  “America!”

  America!

  There was more to corners than I thought. More things than You came round them.

  “But that’s an ordinary elsewhere, Marie! It’s on the planet!”

  Everywhere is an elsewhere to somebody. When less precariously situated, one might point out to them that I, formerly of Ours, was here. As for America, since we were both going there, mightn’t it be a sort of way-stop for all those whose pronouns were in transit?

  “O … is it? One’s been away … Anyway, it’s Orders.”

  “Good God, Marie,” said my mentor. “I hope you girls ’aven’t fuck things up altogether.”

  I flipped the connect. Not a sound. Then an agitated one, “Turn me off!”

  “Everything is on Order,” said Marie. “Except your lack of progress. Luckily We can make use of it.”

  “But I am suppose to be going Out! Off!”

  “Later on,” said Marie. “That is … later on-on. Pres-presently, you’re to stay as you are-are.”

  Pedagogue.

  “And what I am suppose to do there?”

  “You’re to—help us with the migration. You’ll be right in the center of things, don’t worry. In fact it’s called the Center.”

  “And will you be there? The way you are.”

  “Jolly right, dear. But One couldn’t do what you—” Here Marie rather choked. “You’re to—head off Harry.”

  There walked before us then the greatest silence yet; in fact, it was a silence that was positively running, in which, both parties below, maneuvering away from it, came to a stop directly under party a three.

  “As I—am, Marie?”

  “Right you are.”

  “… Then, I ’ave to inform you—”

  Here a sound unclassifiable. Or no. If a p
erson could have a—If in a person there could suddenly be a crack—

  “—I am not … as I was.”

  The silence, which had finally run out of hearing, came back.

  “O,” said Marie. “One had an Omen. All along One had an—One does hope there hasn’t been a rather dreadful—”

  “Mistake? That I cawn’ say. But one look at me would certainly tip the tumble to ’Arry.”

  “O O O,” said Marie, and I caught myself just in time, at the cool, pushbottom signal which turns all on groove onstantly toward One-All. “One needs Others. OOOO.” A four-digit alarm was doing better than expected; in fact it was well on the way Out. But she relapsed, crying out, “One can’t do it alone.” Ul-loawoun is what she really said. They mix-multiply their vowels like equations here.

  “Per’aps it shoulden’ be done alone,” said my mentor. “Migration. Per’aps it should never.” Why then so invigorated her voice? “Affinities can be dangerous.”

  “Have no fears on that score,” said Marie. “The next lot is coming in perfect quadrille.”

  “Nevertheless!” What joy in her voice. Joy is a statement put like a question, but only for the sheer pleasure of it. I recognized this without computation, “—nevertheless, ’is-tory ’ave to ’ave its ’eroines, eh Marie?”

  “Not where One is concerned,” said Marie abjectly. “Not without drillection.”

  “Then, look UP!” my mentor cried without warning, as if on a countersignal. “Look at the sky, the skylight! Look at our pupil. Our Hero! Look at—HIM!”

  The crack yawned obediently. I saw her appendage waving.

  And then–––––––O. How does one ever render the mise en scène here? By what dots ……… or symbols … + — x ÷ = X — + X ÷ … by what loci, foci, axis transverse or conjugate can one describe and total it?

  O Appolonius of Perga, who first named Our curve, O Great Geometer! How shall I render a what-where-who-how which is always all happening all at the same different ONCE!

  O pi in the sky——————!