Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  —ed to.

  I.

  I had been an I for some days now, and had thought myself used to it. But to date, I had never before said that I was—I had never quite felt it. That I was a person.

  I was a person. I was a person. I was a person.

  Somewhere I knelt then, though I had no knees to do it with—what is a person, but that? I had no appendages but even if I was never to get them except inwardly I could learn them; once a One is a person, it cannot be taken away. I felt such a sense in me of my possibilities as is said to come back to you with coffee in the morning. With us, the cosmic emotion—that constant awe-awe—is like a great corm from whose oval our hands, if we had them, would slip eternally away. But with you, the little hangs onto the big, so that when the cosmic becomes a bore here, as it sometimes must, all sorts of rubs and scrapes, kisses and ridicules are here to hold it down for you, until your hands may once again clutch. Couldn’t it be the same for my personality, though I didn’t mean to equate it with the cosmos—or did I? (This is what comes of kneeling.)

  The letter still stared at me with sweet complicity, as if it would shortly open for me if I stared long enough, though we both knew this to be unlikely. Objects are always being forced here to act symbolically; I hoped it would not be the same here for persons. On Ours and by the steadiest evaporation, we had become our own symbols, and needed none extra. But you were such a touching race, such a touch and go people. Death is.

  I thought of Her up there somewhere, my companion in uniquity, both of us in a way privileged witnesses to our own birth. The sunset had gone from the window, and for all its blood-and-ketchup—I know my reds rather well—I had begun to see its uses. Dark, dark was the world here, a winter garden. But I was the flower in the ground.

  My first poem as a person, and I had no time to admire it. For I thought of her, up there in the far vault of the heavens, pegging away at her lessons, unaware of all she was not getting into. Nevermore to be opposite anything—and in a nevermore of which there was so much that no One had any greed for more of it. Unaware, still unaware; for despite all she knew of us, we are in the end as unimaginable as you. And up there, while she picked at her destiny, she would be thinking of all that was in store for me—and of me down here, picking at mine.

  And hard upon this, I felt within me such a breathing. We have our diaphanous intake-outgo of atmospheres harmoniously rare, but this coarse ratchet which bent me near to splitting, which choked me near to gagging, or at least all the images of, as if I myself were the crater—good God, was I giving birth to myself, and prematurely? By the utmost strain of otherworldliness, I was able to exert every pore to breathe out again, without damage. I saw the letter respond with a sigh—and a slight crumple. It even half turned over. So finally, I understood what was wanted of me, and when the next fierce intake came, I hoarded it. I let it build, build, build, until it nearly rent me in two—but only nearly; until I could bear it—but scarcely. One gets born here every ten minutes, apparently—whatever one is. According to my needs, further needs would be thrust upon me. What would be useful here was a lack of control. And at last, at last; I let go.

  The letter sheet shot up, danced, spun, then rolled, permitting me to see that it must already have been opened from the outset, the typed message on its other side glimmering over and over. Describing a final parabola—I blame the night breeze from the window—it made one more thwarting reversal—then with a shudder, flipped over and lay flat and blue—on its back.

  It was only yards from me, but for a moment I could not go toward it, held by yet a new sensation in this person who was now I. Oh, I was back to pore-breathing, almost of the lightest; in comparison with the way you are organ-ized I was still a nobody, not yet a true lunger or anything else. Yet there was something inside me that had not been there before. It had got there in the moment I had seen that the letter had been opened for me. I saw the space her absence would make, and knew at once where to keep it. I had grown the little memorial space-box. I might not yet have feeling, but could know myself to be a person of sentiment. Also one with enough practical sense to observe that someday if ever I cared to grieve for myself, such a space might come in handy. For I knew enough about this world to suspect that there would be room enough there for two.

  Then and then only, having solved my conscience, I could read the letter. As you must all know by now, I was instructed to betake myself across the ocean to a point in America, therefrom to make my way by charts of road and river and anything else curved I could find, to your Center. It was further suggested that I cross well above your airlane traffic, by reentering from slightly under outer space, and so I have done. I might have traveled by train, having now enough of your properties, it seemed to me, to do so quite comfortably, but this was not suggested. Besides—“time pressed,” said this gay, this pawky letter addressed to my mentor, whose name, whose ever dear birthname, to be preserved always in the box, I found out to be E=MC2. Time pressed, the letter repeated, and when I saw at the bottom its signature—that lovely bisyllabic word, whose large, generously rounded letters might be read from seventy-eight inches up—so did my own eagerness to be away. I was to go, not to Hobbs direct, but to a place where the person to whom that beautiful bifurcation belonged would be awaiting me, in safe quarters, smaller than I had been used to in Bucks, but by no means unsympathetic to mutation. Explicit directions were included, on how to reach this—little back room.

  And so began my journey—“On, on, on and on, on”—an account of the biological events leading up to which was embarked upon in this hall exactly one hour, forty-five minutes and nine seconds ago, at a Fahrenheit temperature of exactly 74.6°.

  As I shot up the skylight, the backdraft caught up the letter, which followed after me. I was delighted, and for some miles up was able by a gentle rhythm of my new respiratory gift to keep it with me, finding that alternate puffs of God! and Damn! kept the thing easily afloat, the God! being better on the intake than the outgo, but both words marvelously supportive in triplicate. Finally, the letter gave tattered signs of wanting to merge its blue with the eternal. Before it vanished, I caused it to waver close, close enough to touch an arc of my outline to that signature. Mère had been a dignified one-syllable, but one cannot deny the added flutter of a name that has two of them. I dared not say this name aloud yet, but did read it to myself, if with private phonetics too sacred to disclose.

  Janice.

  And then—I was off.

  Entr’acte—Or: Get a Horse!

  WHEN LINHOUSE WAS Avery small Sunday school boy, he had brought home a phrase, dropped from the gravely pale young lips of the girl who taught them, which he had long kept as a peculiarly satisfying one for the declamatory occasions which went on only in his own head. Pandemonium rained. In a distant way he had been aware of its true context, which his private vision of it seemed not to contradict. Pandemonium sank quietly from the heavens, his grandmother’s brown silk umbrella, enlarged to cover all mankind. Rained fell in long, glass chopsticks slanted permanently midair, as in a favorite drawing from the London Illustrated Magazine. The phrase had always seemed to him one of the quietest ones in the language, yet more sinisterly suited to the end of the world than many later ones with more rockets in them. As the auditorium lights swelled on without any help from him, and revealed rows of faces in various stages of that holy quiet of aghastness—it still did. He would not have been surprised, looking up, to see a brown-ribbed tent, sized to this house, this crowd, this—occasion, on its way down.

  Pandemonium here, he observed at once—why it must be his duty to observe, no doubt went back to that Sunday school also—would first of all be a contest in silence, not only here, perhaps anywhere. The first to speak would choose a reality; after that, the rest would only be taking sides. So it might have been along the dark, fifteenth-century prados when rumors of a new continent had divided the wine cellars, or at date-palmed oases receiving that tale-bearer—and burying him l
ater?—who said that the Red Sea had rolled. Or, to bring matters forward to a period which better matched this present tender pink light and the surprise it shone on, perhaps that silk-shaded dusk in American clubland—maybe the Union League in Chicago—when it first came over the ticker that a man in machine had flown. For, number eight lights, opera intermission rose-velvet, had once again been chosen.

  Meanwhile, he at least was looking out on an audience so selectively of the same impulses, credos, that—barring a bird-squabble or two—it could act admirably in concert. He scanned them. Naturally, those he knew best or had seen before, such as Meyer and Lila, the publicity woman, Anders, various departmental heads and secretaries, nodding acquaintances, stood out as if they were the main cast—no doubt an illusion. Illusion also the platform one—that they were all looking back at him. Elsewhere and through him was where they must be looking; they were all thoughtful persons, and lens-or-television trained. Everybody out there wore the same face—and it was divided. And nobody was bothering to look at the machine.

  In the silence—certainly he should be the last man to speak—certain convictions nevertheless came to him.

  He had heard of scapegoats, as who here had not, it being the political convention of—that funny little capsule—“our time.” Send Jack. He was not going to be one. They would try.

  He ought to look at the women especially, to see whether this soft candlepower was intended, what it was designed to—For (an old-fashioned certainty of one’s own sex might yet come in useful) he’d had a very straight thought indeed. No being whose flesh is trained to cosmetic … ever quite escapes it in the mind.

  As he began to scan the women row by row, another thought superseded this one, and pronto. He ought to count them.

  Then, in concert indeed, and as if Pandemonium were always succeeded by Babel—everybody began speaking at once.

  Out of this, the voice of the provost—when Naughton’s head was bent, as it must have been, that red-faced presence went out like a stoplight—rose responsibly above. “Food for thought—” he said. Alas for authority in high provosts, so often a habit, rather than a content. “Food for thought—” Yes, almost a question.

  “Nonsense!” The voice, of a man either slouched in his seat or hidden from sight by his neighbors, rang from the upper rows just below the grand circular aisle of doors. “Nonsense! Riemann!” Was it identifying itself? The voice of prejudice at last, in any case, and Linhouse saw he was not the only one glad to hear it. Why, though, must prejudice always sound so much braver than reason, and often be it? Answer: (and for whom?)—because it is ready to declare.

  He should be counting.

  Someone near the first speaker interposed, “What’s that again, Charles?” with the mild deafness of a colleague, and Linhouse recognized that the men in this row, plus a few women, sat together in a sort of unity. A department of course, as probably throughout the hall—though he didn’t know which were which.

  “We may be only geneticists,” said the hidden Charles, “but though we didn’t read for the tripos, some of us jolly well had to—”

  “Riemann, Bernhard,” a third voice drawled, from several rows below the others, off-center. “German, 1826–1866, died at his height, poor fellow.”

  The voice, that of a man who was certainly at his—yellow-haired, handsomely ruddy in the oddly hawk-soft way very north North Europeans could be, and of a girth jutting well out from his neighbors—continued, in mock recitation: “Geometry of elliptic or Riemannian space. The Riemannian measure of curvature. And for all you biologists who didn’t go in for the tripos: The inverse square of a certain constant, characterizing by its value—as positive, negative or infinite—the three space forms—that is, elliptic or Riemannian; hyperbolic or Lobachevskian; parabolic or Euclidean. And such that when the sides of a triangle are divided by this constant, there results a system of equations—” The voice returned to its drawl. “Very good, Charles, for thinking of it, go to the top of the class—as you were always doing, when we were at school. But as far as a serious connection with what we’ve been hearing—with this. Uh-uh. Go to the bottom. Afraid it won’t do honey; it just won’t do.”

  Well, maybe it wouldn’t. But this speaker had identified himself, at least to Linhouse-honey, as the man who had been in the coffee shop with Lila. The man was sitting so that he had an angled view of her if he wished, and his voice had a vanity in it which might be addressed to her. In the dim past—why did the last two hours make it seem such a dim one?—Linhouse would have been amused to share this, in the way even a non-gossipy man will, with the woman he—but he was counting.

  “I don’t know about that, Björnson,” said yet another voice. “I wouldn’t say that. In some ways, even there, we just don’t know.”

  At the Center—where was gathered so much more knowledge than the rest of mankind shared, that any dinner party on which the chandelier fell might be a world disaster—to say “one didn’t know” was the proper affectation, though Linhouse had noticed that visiting scientists were affecting this simplicity also—like rich men who never carried a penny in their pockets. But this speaker, a nut-brown Indian of quiet demeanor, who belonged to one of the astrophysical sciences, was remembered by Linhouse, though he’d forgotten his name, as the prime mover in the most interesting table conversation, or any, he’d ever been privileged to have here. In the faculty lunchroom, where tables marked “Single” were carefully kept for those who weren’t clique-minded or—O demokratia—didn’t have one, Linhouse had one day arrived fresh from his seminar in Greek translation, where a routine discussion of adherent meanings, hotly blooming to lively, had set off a knockdown, dragout fight over the ambiguity proper to a work of art. Not as good as the playing fields of Eton of course, but still that circumstance which exhilarates the modest teacher on the sidelines. He couldn’t help mentioning it. “Mathematical ambiguity can be fascinating also,” the Indian had said. “Happens to be something I’m working on. The semantics people have to learn they can’t have ambiguity all to themselves.” For the first time here or anywhere, Linhouse had felt himself to be part of a continuum of intelligence that didn’t divide itself into the familiar separation which so often made him feel below the salt, or apparently didn’t even consider this separation to exist. Indians, of course, when they got into the sciences, often carried something Eastern along with them—look at the discovery of reserpine.

  “I found this—little treatise, most fascinating,” said the brown man now. Was he listened to so respectfully only because, to Western eyes even here, his thin, tobacco-leaf face was of the kind that so easily went upward in mystical smoke, or by peculiar ropes. Name rhymed with … no, no wonder they listened; he was that astronomer. “It dovetails with something I’ve been working—I shall very much want to meet its author. I confess, I have no idea who—”

  “I have an idea,” said the big blond man, Björnson. Was he looking at Linhouse, or smiling at Lila?

  Thirteen. Linhouse lost count again, lulled by the deadly slow rhythm, opposite to Babel’s, in which events were now going, almost as if influenced by the legend just heard, its soothing reminiscences of a world whose longitudinal happenings came one by one. Where else could this happen so, except here among these stately mansions—he shivered. Why else would that apparatus be here? It hadn’t changed in aspect. But as with even the most outré machine, his docile eye had grown used to it. It no longer looked to him like a book but rather more like a record player on the shaggy side, its discs—on a new wavelength or something, but very durable—at halfway. He hated to admit to himself that nevertheless, if necessary, he would make a show of observing it, to deflect any too meaningful observation of him. Only other scapegoat he could think of, except one too afar. Unless: Part Two—to be revealed. Could he bear it? Then he sighed.

  “So indeed have—I.” Meyer Spilker’s opening phrase, impeccable Beethoven Fifth. His vox humana voice, such a rich marriage of sociology with a fine record
collection, made it hard to disentangle his ideas from his overtones; luckily he would always go on to do it for one. “So do I.” He was looking at Linhouse, surely. And had surely been looking, with a frown, at Lila his wife, so married to Spilkerdom that she might have been born one. Was it possible that while Linhouse, in that dim past of his, had been casting about for a sort of rival, Meyer, already with some notions of his own case, had been—

  Fourteen. Calmest face he’d seen yet—and most disturbing. Me imperturbe. Lila!

  He lost count again. Many of the women here were unknown even by sight to him; since there were so few on the faculty, these were secretaries and wives he supposed, brought out by the lure of scandal; down front there was a sort of staffer, Miss Apple Pie. Me imperturbe too, and on her, even in this light, it wasn’t becoming. What long, smooth cheeks she had, like a bad Raphael! How could he laugh at such a time—or had he better, Gad, had he better? For it had struck him, under spell of the fairy tales being told here, that if any such mass ascension were ever to be planned, Miss What’shername would certainly be his idea of a Marie.

  “What a moral message!” Meyer was standing up. “What a legacy.” He cleared his throat, while Linhouse blessed him. Meyer wasn’t looking at him, or if, for a fleet second, he had been, Linhouse’s image had swiftly gone the way that everything in Meyer’s life did, from his own possible cuckoldry, to a day’s family sailboating—during which, for his children’s sake, and pleasure of course, he would triangulate the horizon—to those Christmas cards on which the current clutch of the darker Spilker houseguests were shown around their fireside above the caption, “Why can’t the whole world be like this!”—and “Merrie Xmas from All Spilkers Seven.” Nothing happened to Meyer but went into his “views,” and then was generously shared out.