Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  Björnson ignored him utterly, smiling only at Linhouse. “Food for thought, eh, Provost? For maybe, some day, the real-and-total job will be done—by one of us.” Under the friendly musculature of his arm, he must at last have felt a certain limpness in his protégé. He removed it, leaving Linhouse with his head still pushed forward from that fraternal arch, hands hanging loosely. Posture was indeed—

  Then Björnson poked him. “Second part, eh,” he said under his breath, “juicy, eh; sure like to see it sometime.” Louder he said: “Come now, Mr. Linhouse, release us—we’ve got you cornered, er hmmm. Fess up. Who else hired the hall, made use of the lady’s name, all the rest of it. Who else could it be? Perhaps you’ll explain it otherwise. Can you? And if so, how?” He raised his chin, walking to one side just a flick later; once he must have been in amateur theater.

  Oh sloth, thought Linhouse. Oh the three-toed sloth, does it never let go one toe, two, and then—For he felt himself to be such a sloth as only meant to fall—or rise? Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. He stared at the machine, where. resided somewhere, though automated, his own passion for Milton. He might ask it. What may I plump for, in my field, in my profession? Reel back movie-style, O great tumble of literature, as these fresh boys speak of doing with the universe? Not that easy. The mixture—so … mixed. Once, one would have spoken up, and automatically—for the human. Couldn’t be done, could it be done, any more. No, he wouldn’t be the one to do it; but he wouldn’t apologize, either.

  He stared at the machine, runt to runt. That’s my guess, who wrote it, he could say to them. I was right in the beginning. He nodded to it. A person from out of town. At last he opened his mouth—such a squeak!—and spoke to it. “I think, what we heard—” But he must speak to—them. Turning up his palms, he did so. “I think—That it’s true.”

  And now fall upon me, he thought—on me, Molly Martyr. But first, you bloody fools—count the women.

  There was a clatter then, and a roar, but not from the multitude. What was jostling over its neighbors in the loge, pushing past them over stepped-on ankles, banged knees, and coming down the aisle, past the hidden Charles, past Herr Winckler’s resolute eyeglass and the visiting Indian—into the pit? A strange ally, the last one Linhouse would have thought to find in his corner—who’d have thought it of the egg, and was it cause for elation?

  For as Tippy Anders came on, abang and agawk, perhaps yelling was a better word than roar. His young-old voice strained with its first-or-last attempt at vehemence. The head however, that huge infant, cradled itself like a crown jewel, balanced serene above the bumble beneath it, in a separate cottonwool of air. He reached the pit without Linhouse having been able to make out his message, and stood there touching his chest—gathering his forces down, as—it were?—until he could speak plain.

  “True?” he said then. “True?” and the word as he said it scared Linhouse as it never quite had, before. It went up as wandering as anybody might say it—as a child or a granddad, or a mute painting it to send up on a balloon. “Of course it may be, in true’s way,” said Anders. “I haven’t got time for—that kind of thinking. It isn’t that I don’t honor it of course; I just haven’t got time.” He shrugged. The head balanced above it. One could see why, when still over its milk and cereal, but already setting out on implosions which might someday limit the time of others, a confused family circle might have nicked it with the name Tippy. “Martians?” he said, and shrugged again. “Some kind of life there, I suppose. Not my part of the—not what I—” Hand in pocket, he considered. “Not my beckyar-r-d,” he said, in his crimped upstate New Yorkese, and one saw it, dark and not his, on a field of stars scattered wide. “But if Mr. Björnson is disputing that there’s life of a kind—maybe even this kind—somewhere, I’d like to ask him one question.” He turned bodily, head following. “What makes Björnson think—he’s one of us?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. One slender, Humpty-Dumpty arm and hand extended toward the apparatus. From where he was in the pit, he of course couldn’t touch it. And the Object, or whatever one must call it, remained—inanimate. But an exploratory—field? or feeling?—hung for a moment in the air between them; perhaps it was only one’s own idea, very elementary, of antennae retracting, of a gap—between anode and cathode—not jumped. “I wonder,” he murmured, so low that only pit and stage could be frightened by the wonder of his wonder. “Sure like to take that thing upstairs and have a look at it—when I’ve time.” Then he too addressed the audience, the head tilting meanwhile quite comfortably; if it never counted persons, why should it count women? “From the evidence. If Mr. Linhouse did write that business, he’s had some very sophisticated coaching. And I—” His face, set in the head as if just emerging from it, struggled. Yes, it could do; it had an expression, a small and beleaguered one, too. Something was missing from that face—the glasses! Yet it seemed able to see, quite well. Were those great goggles only that very special defense crystal—clear glass? If true—only in true’s way of course—one could see why; the whole world knew that Anders was only twenty-three. “And I’m kind of—sure, from what quarter he got it.” He was staring down into the pit. “I’m not interested in what kind of life,” he said sullenly, like a boy not taking a dare. “Who? What? … That’s for later … and it’s not my—” If he was going to say backyard again, then perhaps the world should scream at him and hurry, the one scream it would likely be allowed. “My job is where, send them and get them! My job is the signals themselves.” For a moment, the head, with its face, rode on the current of this, comforted. Then Anders put his glasses back on.

  Maybe this is the real, the best candidate, thought Linhouse. For mutation. This nihil, floating blind but intelligent behind its clear non-glasses, its fontanelle winking and ready for: anything.

  Anders was still staring down in the pit. He spoke to it. “Water in a liquid state,” he said, in deep disgust. “Universal biochem—and so forth. We know all that. We know what you others—and more power to you. But why one of us should take a position that might be contrary to you, to every—” He leaned over, until it was seen that he was really addressing another head, sunk on its neck and so low in the shadows that everyone here had forgotten it. “Collaborate if you want to, on that kind of—of fancywork! Maybe you’ve got time for it.” He sounded like an angry merchant-father, whose son wanted to go into art. “That’s your business. What you’ve been doing with my facilities I don’t know, but you might have asked for the loan of them. But there’s one thing we don’t have to listen to here, not from you, nor Harwell nor the Sternberg, not from anywhere.” He pointed at the machine. “—and not from there.” He drew himself up. “Not here at Hobbs we don’t, not in America. We have not been excelled. Not on evidence as yet, and I say not likely to be. And you ought not to—” He faltered, gulped. “And you ought to remember it.”

  Then the ass grew ears indeed, the great head became no more than a Thanksgiving pumpkin giving thanks for itself. Not just “one of Us,” thought Linhouse. Also, just—and very lowercase, too, billy-boy. Just one of us.

  Below, in the pit, that other head didn’t move.

  Then poor Anders leaned over the edge of the stage. “Sir Harry? Sir Harry! Good God, hope I haven’t done anything to—Sir Harry, sir!”

  Three things happened then, according to Linhouse—he having much taken to this style of separating events from each other.

  The machine ruffled itself, with a premonitory trembling of all its discs.

  The head in the pit raised itself also. It was an elderly gentleman, who had been asleep. It was a former staff member, emeritus and retired to the neighborhood, who attended anything and everything public. It was not Sir Harry.

  From above the crowd, beyond the seats, from apparently that corridor of gently encircling doors—a voice answered.

  Linhouse closed his eyes again. High in the back wall of the auditorium, there was the usual projection window—or so it looked to be. Would it op
en now to display Sir Harry’s naked, well-set old bones as Father Time, or on a cushion, lotus-crossed? But there was really no time for brooding. When he opened his eyes, Sir Harry was merely at the top of the center aisle, still dressed in nothing more unconventional than the costume he must have considered suited to California—yachting jacket, and those white flannel bags.

  All faces turned back and up, of course. No. All the male ones. And now surely, one must believe. For the other faces remained forward, like dolls in a shop at night perhaps, who could move but wouldn’t bother, knowing their morning destiny—or else awaited the tink-a-tink of a magic churn. Yes, there was one of them peeping, but perhaps she was doing it professionally—Miss Publicity Pie. What clever fascisti could have trained up the women this way? Answer: us.

  “Yes, Anders,” said Harry, “what is it I mustn’t say?” He came a step or so forward. “Fear I had nothing to do with this, except—perhaps as we all have—to have stood aside. And whoever tampered with your facilities, Mr. Anders—you’ve only my word of course—it wasn’t me. As for Mr. Linhouse’s role in all this; I shouldn’t be surprised, Jack, if—you’ve been had. Or—what’s it your gangsters always say—in your newspapers?”

  Linhouse said it softly to him. “We wuz framed.” Not loud enough. But at least he’d warned this crowd.

  “Either way,” said Sir Harry mildly, “I have to claim my right to say what I think again, Anders. For: we HAVE been. Excelled, don’t you know.” He paused. “Will no one quote Voltaire?”

  Meyer, in a mumble, obliged. “Hatewhatyousaydefendt’deathyourrightt’sayit.”

  “Thank you,” said Sir Harry. “Ordinarily, that breaks up most any meeting very satisfactorily. But I fear I have some even more unpleasant information for us, though I dislike alarming the ladies.” He stopped, reflective—“So many ladies!”—and went on. “Anders? … Anders—” and again he didn’t wait for reply. “I do rather fancy we may have been, don’t you know. Every one of those doors up there has been sealed.”

  There was a rush to them then of course—by whom and whom not, Linhouse had no need to look up and see. Alone on the stage again, or nearly so, Björnson and Anders having rushed up there also, he was thinking of the London Underground where he and his mother and older sister and her three girl friends had once been caught for many hours during the blitz. He was thinking of the one bathroom here, at the end of the passage which debouched on the door backstage in the wings, just behind him. And he was thinking of the long line of spike-heeled hysterics who after a while, training or no, would have to be led down that passage—unless more anatomical change had already gone on here than he imagined. Or unless—He didn’t really believe in the end of his world, or that it was happening here—but there was no doubt that in his world the big doings hung by the little ones. Unless—he then said to himself silently—unless, mammas to the end: they would lead him. He jumped up, tried to run backstage—and got no further. Where the wing sections had been, two curved heights of wall, solid from boards to the ceiling, had slid into place on either side of the stage.

  He was just in time to join his report of this to that of the group of men now returned to the pit. It seemed that the doors, whether electro-magnetically sealed or jammed, were immovable and made of the heaviest plastic, not of anything as frangible as old-fashioned stone. There were no phones here. To this he could contribute that, as far as a mind humbly unused to Gauss’s logarithm could calculate on its own, then they were now in a hermetically sealed dome. Within it, he looked around. Except perhaps for that phalanx out front, row after row of them—or even with them—things still looked remarkably friendly. Or at least in good taste.

  In the pit, all the men who had spoken were gathered, plus a few others—all except the Indian, who sat in his shawl as if it concealed other resources.

  “What’ll we do?” said the rest of them, rather similarly, although one looked at the ceiling, and one—Charles—was testing the floor with a fingernail.

  Sir Harry, coming down the aisle, arrived among them.

  “What’ll we do?” they said to him.

  Sir Harry looked at Anders, who blushed, though it only yellowed him more.

  “Do?” said Anders. “Hear it—that thing—through, of course. If it is … anything … If they’re like us—and they will be—they’ll expect us to.”

  Sir Harry nodded solemnly. He had never underestimated Anders.

  “Hear it out, what else?” Anders repeated. Chick or egg, he knew which part of him came first. “That’s obviously what’s been programmed.”

  And at that, as if his remark were part of same, the lights began to go down altogether.

  “Oh no, no, really not,” Sir Harry said mildly. “That’s not necessary.” Raising his arms in what was already twilight, he looked as if he were about to start a last late race in the regatta at Cowes. “Not in the dark,” said Sir Harry.

  Could he be afraid of that too? Linhouse stirred. O nursemaids—and O policemen, everywhere. Oh believe in the unknown; it will ennoble us. Not that it has any obligation to. Or need.

  But he had one. Really, it was his duty. “Look to the women!” he cried at last, then heard its ambiguity. “Damn you, will you look at all the—”

  Behind him, came a glow—angels? Great hoptoads fiery? Grand ellipses, pinkly visible? Kings, beleaguered archangels up from your gambreled towns—or down? “—strike!”

  God damn, thought Linhouse—We made a poem. He turned.

  The television screen, vast as any cinemascope, was lit softly. At first, nothing played there; then, some large letters were dragged across it wrong-end first, so that they saw—“ou!” only; then, as if filmed by a director ignorant of projection, or one who knew only Hebrew, the direction of these was quickly reversed. The letters themselves weren’t smartly cut, nor arty, nor even hop-skip-and-a-jump cartoon. The best that could be said of them was that they could be the work of a gifted aborigine. They were large enough to fill the screen, and raggedly simple. They said, “THANK YOU.”

  And then they went out.

  And now we’re all in the dark together, Linhouse thought. And nobody’s screamed yet—unless one could count mine.

  A number of hollow words now became flesh to him. He saw the function of committees. He understood politics—which latterly, had seemed to him not a serious subject. He felt what murder might feel like in the vein, and the asphyxiations—in a small dark space—of a poet like Poe. A locked door made all the difference.

  Beside him, a voice spoke up, so tweedly soft that at first he mistook it for the mechanical wind-up of the machine—on whose pile of unplayed disc pages he imagined the topmost one rising.

  It was the secretary, who had all that time sat, numb as her sisters, on her chair beside it. Was she real? Her whisper reassured him. “I wonder if he’s coming back,” she whispered. “That li’l ole e-llipse. Sho’ hope so. He was real cute.”

  Linhouse didn’t answer. Whether she was real, and from the tender land she talked like, or whether she would shortly fall from her chair in china bits or in pinch-me dream-stuff, no longer interested him. Of women, he was sure of it, he now thought nothing—or, nothing he had ever thought before.

  Part III

  1. A Person from Out of Town

  A LITTLE BACK ROOM IS not hard to find. At least not in a place where the public buildings held themselves so whitely in the moonlight, on each the name of its God. And perhaps not anywhere on your planet, to a being whose whole existence had been passed in what here would be thought of as public enclosures of no smallness or backward inclination whatsoever. As I passed over New York City first, I thought of this, and of how clearly, no matter that you did have the two kinds of room, the instinct to keep them separate prevailed. I thought of much more of course, but from now on would practice to be selective, if not so rigidly as we did it chez Nous. The great virtue of our civilization, at least to the calm-minded, is that it has known what to leave out—and whatever
remnant of this intelligence was left me, I must preserve. Describing something, we feel, is one way of keeping it, even if you don’t want it—vide your war annals; yet I already sensed, passing over this city of terror-sparkles and tower-comforts, that you people wouldn’t go for our seamlessness in toto, or never for long. Other intelligences further hinted (now that I had coped with your primary sensations and physical properties, and had recorded how these barriers might be broached) that the more I gave signs of becoming a person, the less I might interest you personally. This couldn’t be helped. I was already so interesting to me.

  And now that the first shocks and arrow flights were indeed over, I couldn’t conceal from myself, though I might well need to hide it from you, that a good part of our native excellence—as we had heard you so very kindly call it—had crossed over with me after all. It was nothing to me, for instance, to pause, at an elevation well above the George Washington Bridge, early of a clear winter’s night, and to know, looking down over the city—to know pretty well without being told—what some of its parts were meant for. Or to guess. The big buildings—in particular those which either were blank dark at this hour or lit with a certain regularity—I at once recognized as the ones where you kept your civilization. This was no superb deduction, since we ourselves are a civilization totally on display. But what of those other swarms and huddles, masses of rooms to all shapes and scales, and all of them cryptic—other than that many of them would seem to be back ones?

  By now, I was following the river northward, at an altitude sometimes low enough for me to discern the highway on the cliffside, along which lay my destination, as well as the traffic, sparse on such a cold evening, that was wending its way there also. My ability to elevate, though it showed more and more signs of waning, must surely last me until I got there; meanwhile the cars below, though so unevenly spaced in their groove, sent up a faint humminess of home. As far as the occupants of these were concerned, had any of them looked out and up, I was but a leftover cloud, or a bit of the afterglow. Or even if—as might at any time happen, in a moment of what emotion, here?—I became rosy enough to be fully visible, why, what would I be to the denizens of this marvelous, fatal city that floated the waters behind us, except a wandering Neon, whose name I had learned from a piece of it which had announced itself in snake-pink above the shop that sold it—a wandering Neon which had got off by itself alone? This sentiment pleased me so much that I decided to stop somewhere to muse on it, meanwhile taking a prudent rest—a journey in miles being so much more tiring than one in light-speeds—and seeing a right-hand fork, marked by a sign, in the highway, I did so. You may wish to note—though I no longer intend to dwell on these minor acquisitions which come either thick and fast here, or cold and gradual—that I now knew my right lack-of-hand from my left.