Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  All was quiet in this scene; in a nimbus of quiet, the long couch, barque, dais, bed, platform, trireme without oars or rowers, sailed without leaving the light of shore. However it might be called, it was mysterium surely, from the Greek root that meant to close the eyes. Whatever it was called here, I knew what was before me. I had always known. How quiet was your cauldron. In it, you-you, the extraordinary beast, lay sleeping.

  I crept closer, aided by the light which so harlequined my fainting visibility that any observer looking into the room would have thought merely that, athwart the stern of that long couch, rosiness had won. The beast, the double human, lay there, a medallion sleeping, in a nest of garments which at any other time I would have studied, these now flung every which way upon a coverlet in turn tossed wide enough to reveal this being down to the jointure of its tangled waists. Or rather, the cover humped over these, so that it wasn’t quite possible to see where, how, or whether the two stalks of this being were joined. Four appendages protruded at odd angles below; from some leftover study session, or prompting from underground dream, I knew these to be legs. As, by the same token, I recognized those that stretched above the coverlet line, two palm upward, two palm over—and no holes in any of them—to be arms of flesh, not clay, with hands. You had appendages in four, then, like those rodents I had watched from my first window, or happier thought, like the cows? Or were you tigers?—but if so, not spotted, at least on your outer sides. A somewhat hairy appendage lay here … but a milky, bald one there … and here a one … and there—good God, what a sport you were, now really. Tally-ho, and all that of course. But you didn’t match.

  Rapidly I counted over again, the result dampening my pride in my numbering, and in my diagnostic as well. Indeed you were not like squirrels, rats, cows, tigers, dinosaurs, birds or anything else I had either seen or imagined aboveground, though you might somewhat resemble the tentacles of the sea. You didn’t have four appendages; you had—I counted them again—eight. And in so doing, I arrived at the part or parts of you which lay above your wingspread arms.

  I don’t know why, despite all my preparations and studies, from stargazing to the most intensive low thinking, your world infallibly still takes me unaware. Thus I never feel that I have quite caught onto the nature of variability, and despite a suspicion that this is just what it is, it doesn’t seem fair. You choose such odd corners in which to be consistent. I should have known, I thought now, looking down upon what lay upwards of the coverlet. In this world, which had already given me token upon token of its duplicity, how else would such a being as you be constructed? Strictly speaking, you were as you should be of course, but somehow, in the matter of heads, I hadn’t expected it. You had two.

  One had a hairy side turned to me, the other—a pale. In the latter, the twin orbs were half open, their slits white. Were they regarding me? I hadn’t enough education to know. By the glow of my own diffusing, I stared back at the head I was to know so well. The eyes were now closed again, and therefore tip-tilted, though still subordinate, like all the rest of that uneven face, to the whole. There is a beauty in the flawed which marks the separate state of consciousness mere perfection cannot know. This is the interplanetary argument between us and you—which we would not call war, but the force that draws. We shall come like the snow, though all of us the same, flying toward your imperfections, your grass. And in the end, will you conquer us? What else does the conqueror come for?

  We, at least, had had the wit to think of it as the mutual project it was, though you mightn’t see it as such for some time, our lust for imperfection being, de return natura, so perfectly organized.

  These were my thoughts, all of them swift to think and slow to tell, as I looked down on the heads of this creature—and all of them buried in the one thought. May whatever presides over godded or damned, or both together, give it me. I want a face.

  Then, eyes still closed, lips only half open as if drugged with music of late afternoon, the face spoke. “Strange light. What a strange light.”

  I was prepared for this of course, the strangeness to you of my sempiternal glow, and even for—somewhere in the forbidden history that had produced me—this dulcet, people-making voice. But I was not prepared for the next terror, which now struck.

  The other head answered it.

  “Some car,” it said, “passing down the lane.”

  “No, I didn’t hear any. And it’s still here.”

  The other head did not move, but spoke as if from its hair; had it a face on its nether side? “Heard a couple of rings at the bell,” it said, blurred.

  “One was the four o’clock post,” said the first head. “Was there really another, Jack?” Then it laughed.

  I knew good and well whose laugh this one’s reminded me of—but only half, some, not quite, not as a One reminds a One of a One. Nevertheless, terrorized though I was, that very imbalance held me rooted, bewitched by its inexact charm-chime.

  “No, not really,” said number two, in a voice as hairy as its head. “We can’t admit that.” Then it too laughed.

  Then it was that the first head opened its eyes fully. I could have sworn that, transfixed on the pillow, it saw me, even knew me, for what I was. “But it’s here,” it said, startled.

  “Hmmm?” The second head did not stir, but one arm of the four came and lay across the neck of number one.

  “Nothing,” the first answered. “It’s gone.” And looking straight at me, it whispered, “Begone!”

  I already was of course—crouched down behind the big gondola—furniture or illusion?—so that I would not have to see them either. Behind there, the floor was solid enough, but surely there was a large crack in my wits. What dimorphic visions coursed through this gap!—you would have known these shapes for cockatrices, or perhaps gryphons, borrowing from that minute ago which you call medieval—but the untutored fancy can do much better, or worse. Nothing in the photoplates devoted to mammals had given me any idea of this, not even in my one veiled sight of you had there been even a chink of suggestion—that I should have to venture this far down or out upon the evolutionary scale.

  Two heads I could take in my stride perhaps, and four arms and four legs, making eight appendages in all, also, no matter if a dim squeak from somewhere in my own anatomy protested that I had not bargained for this all-in-one. But if so, if I could bring myself to accept it as the form I was bent upon for my own, then it should at least be a uniform beast in action. I could concede a certain amount of asymmetric to the appendages; all the peripheral motion of such a beast might well not be in concert. But that its sensible brain should be divided in its responses, and perhaps even what must be its Siamese-joined heart! That these two heads should not only not speak in unison, but talk back! And my God, this was not all of it. That one or the other—could deceive.

  For, then, what of the parts that I hadn’t yet seen, those still under the coverlet’s dark hill? What anarchy of gender (whose left might ever deceive its right, and counterclockwise, for so ran my vision) might there not be below! I tried to calm myself—at best, you weren’t Hydra-headed. But it was no go. I had myself to think of; indeed, to give you credit, since coming into an atmosphere blended of so many solo arias, I had thought of little else. But now I remembered, and with such haunting smoothness, the gentle people I had ellapsed from, the gentle almost round of their daily existence. I had not your hardihood. I doubted I could summon the degrees of friction you lived by. I was too weak. I did not think I could manage it.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of my shelter, the wrestling noise began again, interspersed with the little ambiguous moans I was now not so sure were spurts of woe. Should I come round the corner, to join perhaps in a happy social occasion at which my company would be appreciated? Just as I was about to, silence, poco a poco, fell.

  No, I cautioned myself, what if this were the war you lived by, spoke so greedily much of, and piously too of course, and all I would see would be the face of the winner, perhaps
staring covetously at me? So this was my Janice, my janissary, who was to induct me into—No. So, at last my imagination gave up the ghost, and decided. I would return to Bucks, where there must be means to dehumanize me so far as I had acquired it. This was the nadir of my life and bitterness, but I would soon be out of all this. For if allowed the grace of return, I resolved nevermore to be pervert. Until my crater-day, I would be a perfect citizen of home.

  And just then of course, you-you resumed your conversation.

  And there I was, against all my resolve, with my non-feet—by which I mean the image of them—once more stuck fast in the sludge of our mutual sympathy. Nothing in your world or mine but can do with a bit of talking over, and always gets it. In this you are almost as elliptical as we; what a boring crowd, what an engaging one, we all are. For here was such a jejune dissertation as had rarely—and yet … It had just occurred to me, with the sharp-sad between which comes perhaps best to the eavesdropper, that you and we both might have no other auditor except ourselves.

  “Oh well—” the first head was saying, with one of its semi-dulcet sighs. “It’s the nearest, isn’t it, the nearest we can come in this world, to nothing.”

  No answer from the second head; was it after all slain, and this no longer dialogue, but soliloquy?

  “Oh I mean—” said head number one, “to talk your language—”

  And this was what I meant—that variability should sink even to this indecency. That the two heads of a body should not even share the same speech!

  “—the Something that is Nothingness.”

  But, oh sad on sad, that one should slay, and one should stay. Though the which of the whom might well … de return again … vary. And that … Light went up inside me, where only I could see it. I had remembered where I was. And that … was this gender?

  “And like I said,” it continued softly. “There’re things you’ve taught me.”

  Was it mourning for its other half now, keening? There are those of Us who gather at the crater, but for fear of naming a particular One, never speak. But we have the image.

  “Me imperturbe,” it said, in its accent no imperfection whatsoever. “Of course, you’d only got to ask me if I knew it already. But you didn’t, did you? None of you do. And now I shan’t have to ask you what I didn’t know. I’ll whisper the answer in your ear.”

  And softly hissing, I heard it, the unexpected, as if whispered in mine. “Elsewhere.”

  Oh creature, creature, did it think this an answer? Yet I felt such a tenderness toward it, for its very lack. Yes, this is the force that draws us here.

  And now, careless of the danger, I had the strongest desire to see for myself again this nest of imperfections so mixed, this slayer of its own opposing head. This head that nevertheless made me feel—I stood up straight, and hard too, in wonder, and thanksgiving. This head, that made me feel.

  Though I couldn’t say precisely where such a sensation was located and even thought that it might be multiple, I found myself flushing deeply enough to be very visible, and even seemed to myself tall. So standing, and on the very floor also with not an inch between us, I peered over the long-couch rim.

  But, on the other side of it, that surviving head must have been rising too; imperfect beings can sometimes do the perfect thing. So it was that we met, the number one head and I, face to—how I yearned to be able to say it! I would have given everything I did not yet have, for the sake of a face with which to meet that face. Her face—I was somehow sure of it. Another She.

  At first, eyes aglint, it said nothing, then only breathed it—though I had no trouble hearing. “How beautiful you are.” Then she made a gesture toward behind her. Then she put a hand to her face, two of its five or six fingers—I hadn’t time to count for sure—crossed at her mouth. When I did nothing, she said, “Shhh,” and when I still did nothing, “Down!” I understood this of course, but I was slow. An expression crossed her face that I have not forgotten, it having been reinforced since by frequent repetition. Then she said: “Fade!”

  I did both rather quickly, ending up in the customary confused heap. This is nothing new to you of course, but I was unaccustomed to multiple sensation, and still am not entirely in the tune of it. I seemed to me then all pulse, several dozen of these all at odds with one another—and none of them at seventy-six. On reflection, immature though it might be, it did seem to me that what she’d said first—Shhhh!—would have been quite enough.

  I was wrong. I was now, in my all of a heap, in just the right mental state to receive a revelation—the latter being any visionary experience which everybody else has already had.

  It comes by stages, but is all apprehended at once.

  I heard her speak again, this time on the other side of my shelter, down there below. “Wake up,” she said. “Time to go.” I felt a loud vibration; why, she must be beating him. Yes—him. That’s the way revelation is. “Wake up, Jamie!” she said. “I mean—Jack.”

  Almost in the same minute, one of the arms came up and slid the garment, which I now perceived to be long and bifurcated, off the lamp; in the amended light, a vigorous jounce was heard; then number two head appeared upright, and with a face, and smiling, though not at me but at number one, also upright, and smiling back.

  Does the face produce the feeling, or does it go the other way round, and across the road? Though I know the accepted answer, I continue to wonder. But at that moment, I saw everything at once. I saw their garments, each torso with its complement of arms and legs, for which I must needs use a vocabulary of course learned later: shirt and trousers for the him head, a kind of serape for her—what duplicities, still to discover, must lie between! But, smiling at each other as if all this were ordinary, they moved off—yes … they. Her eyes glinted sideways as she passed, and I saw that she had something of the same aspect as my mentor, or the same power—to make her two eyes merge and gaze as one. I like to think of this as a gesture to Ours, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Then, they-they, you-you, or rather you and you, moved off.

  At a discreet distance, I followed, to observe in such detail as I could these creatures who to my mind managed their separateness a little clumsily, even half-heartedly, but as compared to the enormity I had thought in store for me, were a considerable visual relief. Since then, the ugliest monster among you can never look as bad to me as he may to himself. You were separate, then, in head, trunk and appendage—and were you duplicate too? When I thought of this, in terms of the gaps between lips, hearts and brains (as well as all the other parts I must yet hold in fancy), I thought I understood all wars, all genders and Janices at once, and Tom, Dick, and Harrys too—and Jack, and how all the relationships sprouted between them and the carbuncular enormosity of their world. Such clarity eluded me later, but that too, is it not, is the nature of revelation?

  And so, in our peculiar crowd of three—or three hundred million, whatever you were at the last census, and certainly not excluding the Chinese—we all moved toward the door. I saw her bend to pick up the letter, which lay just as when it shocked me; I heard her own exclamation. Jeepers.

  I hear their exchange yet, through the veil you love to draw both across events and away from them, though to me it adds not a jot to their lopsided dignity.

  Jeepers she said, plus, “It’s about time she answered.” I heard her explain to him who E=MC2 was the nickname for, and I heard her tell over the three wives of her Jamie (whatever “wife” meant): the beaky intellectual, then the Maori girl who died, “and then, me.” But though all this was recorded and put by for later, for the time being it was only the way the words went. I was entirely taken up in my natural enthrallment with the actions, physiognomy and socio-erotic tone of this Harry—I mean Jack. How I dwelt upon the outline of his trousers, on where his hands went to inside his pockets, on the whole line of his—line. When he said, “Nonsense, that man never exactly built you up, did he?” how I listened, though his argot seemed nonsense itself. When his lips touched her ear, it see
med to me that I had lips also. And when he made as if to rush her back to the room we had just come from, all my true vitality rushed there with him, as well as to a spot in me hitherto undeclared. (If this was vicarious living, what else is mutation?—at least at first.) The legend of our hidden gender was true, then! For somewhere within me I felt a quickening of that forbidden history, plus a conviction, also, that I was on the side of it I hankered for.

  Curiously enough, when she refused him, I was not displeased. (And this, I suppose, is the role of variation.) So I waited, watched her close the door behind him lightly and forever, saw her muse over the letter, mutter at its lateness, then suddenly crumple it with an “Oh my God, I forgot She’s—what in the name of am I bothering with this for!” And letting the crumpled sheet fall, she turned, surely to go in search of me. For what could the letter have been but to tell her what she already knew—of my arrival. And I was here ahead of it. This is the way we usually arrive.

  I was waiting for her on the sitting room side in front of her gold bird, and indeed that small room, later so cherished, was filled with my radiance, loosed upon the heavy earth atmosphere as never before. And never but once since—due to the circumstances which will be set forth shortly.

  She approached, her figure shining in the glow of mine. My height of six-feet-six hid the mirror I stood in front of, also—though the beak of the bird on it pricked me a little napewise—an adverse comment it might be making from behind. She advanced, on her face an effulgence which must be its own. Extremely median in everything as she was, both to me and as confirmed later, she could be said to be about five-feet-six, but the rest was harder to describe. And has remained so, except for the two tiny whips of the eyebrows, set as if clenched at their center in an invisibily miniature fist.