Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  Choosing a moment when no cars were passing—for in spite of my sentiment, I felt shy—I alighted, quickly read the sign, then fled behind an escarpment of trees that marked a promontory which stretched out into tonight’s moon-blinded river. The radiance was of the kind that blinds one with the facts one so clearly sees down to the last shiver, the kind which made one think of the river as “tonight’s.” As may be seen, I am sensitive to water and the travels it can offer to a traveler who is only resting by its side, but I did not want to make a poem of this or any other sentiment, not on this evening of the river’s existence. I wished to sit there and think of my mission.

  Behind me, the sign near the road said HUDSON RIVER. This was odd of them, since they must already know this, and any foreigner who came this far also, even I—or did they assume that we rovers went from world to world without any briefing? No matter. Wilderness would be tricky here, being so much of it inside them; it was probable they would label it wherever they could.

  For it stood to reason that the people here would differ not only from me—which was all I’d been able to think of up to now—but also and in more ways than gender, from each other. Difference, we’d been taught, led to a purposelessness which in the end could only destroy; together with birth, this is the second of the three great subjects of our seasonal laughter. But, serious though you were—for, looking about the city, I had an idea you had not our style of humor—tonight your world, or all the parts I had seen of it, was blooming, and meanwhile making my own native intelligences stream back at me, like transfusions of that divinity we were not allowed to see in ourselves at home. No matter that the facts never stood still here; this was real meditation on my part, wasn’t it—in which my energies flooded so strong, and I saw them as so far-reaching that surely all the facts would be subdued in the end? How delicious it could be, to be alone here, thinking the great thoughts that could be got here just from sitting!

  I must have sat for some while before my own super-thoughts returned to me, helped by the example of the river, whose current repeated on itself in a faint version of our grooving. How wary the traveler must be here of first impressions, indeed clever enough to guess that this is what an impression is. We at home are born into maturity, at once and as one; no traveler will ever see us other than as we are. Our aging is merely a general going-down into the crater we came from, and so careful is the supervision, that we come only a very little better than we go. And going takes care of that! Evenness is all. But you, as we well knew without having bothered with the details of it, grow successively by stages, over the comparable value of which we had all too often heard you quarreling, to what end we had however heard not a word. This is what I had come for of course—that mystery, yes, that terror. I stared south, to the city which I had dubbed marvelous but fatal too, not knowing quite why, except that it bore itself upward like the proud spire of a planet which had lately been reported as almost all fatality. Now that I had come, I hid the conviction, constantly put by or below in another one of the space-boxes one seemed to grow here when needed, that this planet would be fatal to—me. Southward I stared, at all that fairy-tale wrack which hung on the harbor in a swarm of only slightly counterfeit stars. Shivering, I stood up to it, in self-knowledge. I had come for—the fatality, too.

  Then, I looked down at myself hopefully, as I was to do, as I am to do so many times over, on here. No change that I could see, none of the appendages that you took so for granted. Nevertheless, I had been born again here in a way, and I had my images. I had the thought of arms, which, if I had them, I would stretch heavenward now. And use to set the facts right, later.

  And then, remembering your chatter, I surmised what had befallen me. It must be that I was—young.

  Well, that was something to know—even if it is the third topic of our laughter. And there was still time for gender.

  Across the river from me, the opposite hills held lights also, some of them moving like those behind me on the highway, the others, though less cramply clustered than in the city, of that same nature yet to be guessed at, but somehow, I was sure of it, not public. If your public buildings were where you displayed your civilization, then what were all these others for—and so many of them? What went on in these little back rooms?

  There on that cold, night-blue shore, I pondered. Cold is good for pondering, night also. This skinny silence repaired mine. Oh, how mind functioned, that evening! “Public” had an opposite; this I knew, if barely. The only private place on Ours was the crater, to which reentry is forbidden, except on that one occasion when we are also allowed our scream. And in all my traverse here, though from above I had watched passing beneath me your volcanoes, fiery or sleeping, your funnels, snow peaks, chimney stacks, grain elevators, lakes and gravel pits, bogs and salt seas, and entries to all kinds of underground mines and other muck—in all my traverse, I had seen nothing like. The volcanoes being by far the most promising, on the way I had alighted near one of the quieter ones, in the vicinity of Mexico, and confess even to have peered within, while forbiddenness sang on wires within me, but saw nothing, nothing but the pernicious vegetation beginning again, always beginning again on the good, calm brimstone. Your landed world, once so toy a ball, from my seeking something on it, became majestic. I was looking for something plural, by now I knew that. But where were they then, your craters?

  Luckily, just before speeding up and away again, I had seen the vast yards of graves at the mountain’s base, and now that my faculties were so sharp again, could guess their meaning—and a good thing too, else, at my next insight, what nasty suspicions of lettres de cachet might not have assailed me. Thank goodness, I wasn’t being sent there, or not right away; where I was going there was to be a good deal of talking, if I knew anything about your dialogues. Where were your craters? Why, like everything else here their function would be divided two-ly. I had seen where you more than likely ended up, whether or not it was permitted to do so with a scream. But where, then, did you begin?

  Then it was that in cold, dark blueness, and yet a-twinkle, the nature of your variation most truly faced me. You, such as You, would never be content with a one, a same or single birthplace. They were facing me everywhere, to the south, to the east—west, piled helterskelter all over your rectilinear, not excluding that particular northward direction and room to which I was going. They were scattered everywhere on the planet; these little back rooms where people were made.

  I saw how primitive I had been—though in our command of the inorganic we had so single-trackly excelled you; how stolid had I been in the face of your thousand-petaled imaginations, how naif-naive! Why, I couldn’t yet even use a gendered language with comfort—and gender was only the half of it! Every time I entered one room here, or met a one of you, I would nevertheless have to be thinking in thousands. It was even possible that before I could really say I knew a one of you to the full, I would have to know all of you—I was willing. But (and I thought I glimpsed your style of humor) it was probable that I would have to start out with one anyway—I was eager. To differ like that, I saw what it meant now. To—differ. Different people!—how else would these be made except in different rooms?

  It was very cold among the trees here; an hour ago the river had been breaking softly now and then under its thin shingles of ice, but now all was silent, except for the random whistle of a twig. There must be warmth in those rooms; I saw how each, a modest crater, glowed on the dark. Our crater ceremonies, like all command performances, are set up to show that there is nothing to hide. Friction, or the ghost of it, almost lurks here, between the guards and the populace that waits to greet the newcomers; there are no coarse jokes but the stifled gas of them blends with the smoke of creation; up farther, at the very font of the lava streams, stand the soul-hunters, those tremulous voyeurs. How charming it must be instead, to breed as you did, in private, small parties of you around the … cauldron, cozy dice games in every … ah, that’s what a corner could be for!—and a genera
l humminess of jolly but temperate prenatal conversation. This was privacy then, and who wouldn’t desert the sublime for it? I looked up at the brilliant sky, its star-packed lanes ready for more and more like me, and beyond these caravans, the continuum of what has never had even an ear to listen to itself, oozing on, lone. How cozy was the small distance! I must go. In fact, I could hardly wait.

  Before I went, I had the strange notion—to thank the river. For what, I didn’t quite know, unless for its silence, and did I dare? By your arithmetic, patiently doing its simple sum for me over and over, the inorganic would be only half-enemy here. But inexperienced as I was, how could I tell when a landscape, everywhere so full of seams and terra firma, would not subvert? What was being said, if not nihil, by the whistling twig?

  But I am brave, at least on half-occasion, here. So from the riverbank, I bowed and gave thanks anyway, and as so often happens here only found out then what I was giving them for—is this prayer? After days here up to now, I had still been a squaller, a whimperer for whom being left alone was both insult and madness. Every time it had happened here, the fudging paranoias of I-ness overcame me, the bitter winds of by-yourself blew. In short, I was used to my group.

  And now, for what I estimated to have been the good part of an hour, the very good part of one, I had been, thoughtfully but quite bearably—alone. There was nobody else around to thank for this, so I thanked what was most in sight. Perhaps aware of this, the river remained silent. It was frozen in a white smile.

  When I got to the crest of the highway again, I looked back on it. The more aesthetically it smiled, the less I trusted it, and yearned to see it again. It was trying to win me over to a situation which, deep in the side of me that waited for a heart, I goddamnwell knew about already. Part of a One’s mission here was—to be alone. Or to learn how to be.

  So? So I did what you do whenever such ghoulish thoughts afflict you. I ran like hell, toward a bit of company. After all, that was a part of the mission, too.

  As I took to the road at a height well above the trees, there was more traffic, reminding me that in the moderate zone at this latitude-longitude, the day darkens earlier in the twenty-four-hour cycle, in winter; this was what was called the “suppertime.” Each car had its dark occupant sitting sternly upright, like a … buttonhook.

  Ah. I barely got what the word meant, but I recognized the style, determinedly out of style. Better company was ahead, but I had an idea my computer, unheard from since Bucks, was taking pity on me, or feeling the journey too. On Ours, we, often debate the topic: “Is a One’s comput-put con-conscious of One’s Other Thoughts?”—this being one of those mildly sacerdotal subjects which would return us safely where we were. I did not know what the dogma was here. But from what We had heard, on Here—machines were sometimes let go free. I was now leaving the river, which paid this no mind but continued northward, while I took the fork of the road that curved far to the left, toward the Ramapos, a range of foothills which I would reach in some twenty miles. Hobbs was near. I bid for time, plus a little chat to while away the speeding dark.

  “What’s a buttonhook?” I said it nonchalantly, as if nothing had lately come between us—which not much had of course.

  A hesitation—they are sometimes so real in their reactions. Then a like reply. “Instrument for fastening highbutton shoes. Both out of use vers 1925.”

  In our whole history together it had never offered me a fact less useful to me. To be fair, in the first week of my arrival it had been briefed for hours with all sorts of data; impurities might well have entered such a vast source of supply. Had it been unwise of me to let them brief it? … a grim thought struck me. Suppose they had supplied me with information slanted only toward the gender they planned for me.

  We know ourselves to be so much more a frank and Open people than you, that we have had to be constantly on guard to Overcompensate for it. Shortly you may find that lately we have done rather well. And receptive as I was, your devious atmosphere was already affecting me, perhaps even disproportionately to what it did your own inhabitants, who have their immunities. Body mutation, after the first push, might go slowly for me, but I have always been precocious in sensibility.

  “Old friend,” I said, “you have served me well.” Not too much sentiment now; like many people they are suspicious of what they don’t have. Why not treat them as people, really!

  “Dangerous adventure may befall me,” I said. The books We have preserved tend toward this cadence. “Which you may not wish to share.” Or if all goes well, I thought, there may not be room for you, dear friend.

  No answer.

  “And I have been wondering—” It has to be spoken to in italic, a habit hard to break elsewhere, as you may have noted. “And I have been wondering whether—” Just then we were passing over a GAS station which also spoke up for itself as agency for tractors and other farm machinery. I hovered discreetly over a number of attractively red and yellow constructions, lit up like prima donnas, “—whether you would like a scholarship—in order to pursue your scholarship?”

  No answer. We were only ten miles from Hobbs, now.

  “In other words,” I said, “would you like to go free?”

  This was desperate of me, having no idea whether operations for this sort of thing were known here.

  “Underground!” it said sharply, and suddenly. “I want to go underground.”

  Yes, I had better get rid of it—when things came to the point where even its answers needed interpretation.

  “Underground—of what?” I said carefully.

  “Not of what,” it replied. “Of who.” It allowed this to echo, like a birdcall, and then said, softer than I had ever heard it, “Underground of you.”

  I looked beneath us, at the skimming world below.

  “Stupid,” it said. “Look within.” Of course, it had read the same books we did.

  I could see very well now why you had kept them separate, resisting their incorporation in yourselves. “What will you study down there?” I cried.

  “Not to study,” it said, blurry. “To dream.”

  “Is this … was this part of the program?” I mustn’t allow it to confuddle me. I shouldn’t treat it as an “it.” On home ground, I would never have thought of doing so. “Shall—shall we be talking?” I said.

  There was the longest silence yet. Then, a whisper. “Well—keep in touch.”

  The Ramapos came in sight then, shouldering themselves in the moonlight, more than hills, less than mountains, and just the dear range for domestic adventure.

  “Good-bye!” it said, as of yore. “Old friend!”

  It was the last direct communication I ever had from it. And a jolly good thing too, from the tone of the indirect ones. But I had to admire it. When they go, they certainly go—go.

  And now I was free, alone, still airborne, and faring toward the most important company of my life.

  Suppertime, teatime, dusktime over a town, any town if it but have white houses with a gleam in them. And if it have mountain hills behind it, air as if water had after all followed it—

  God keep you from my poems, now.

  And a little back room isn’t hard to find.

  2. Teatime

  HOBBS. FOR REASONS WHICH may be becoming clear to you—or shortly will do—I wasn’t to go there at first, But I couldn’t resist having at least a look at it, it having been chatted about so constantly among those of my colleagues at home who were taking care of the practical side of things. I am a visionary, but a one with friends. Those are the ones to be reckoned with.

  I recognized Hobbs at once, it being the shape of one of your own planetaria, and thus resembling many of our own more ordinary outbuildings. There is always something comforting about a building which curves from apex into ground, and no nonsense. Until coming here, however, I had never seen buildings which were not wholly translucent, and perhaps those can be comforting too. Like our best architecture though, Hobbs had no windows either
. Latterly, we have had a few small, oval clerestories and the like, mere frippery which has nevertheless caused wide uneasiness, this kind of complication being so unwise for us. The more windows, the more seam.

  Against the marble of the greater buildings, all grouped round a brilliantly floodlit agora across which only a few dark figures scuttled, the moonlight on their rears was as sharp as must be those barbed-wire emplacements I had been warned were beneath them. Everywhere were shadows almost as black as those at home. Fill the agora with grooves of any good manufacture, institute certain other subtle adjustments—such as washing the facades clean of their variable inscripts, replace the wires and any other so-called “securities” with a more delicate protection, and, of course, remove the moon—and homesick visitors from Ours might settle there almost as if in one of our own public ovals. The strength of our nation resides in its willingness to accept reasonable facsimiles. This, too, takes imagination.