Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  I still see her, an ombré, curved figure, in retreat from the oval, yet here and there tuned to it, and lit like a cameo in the reflection of mine.

  It approaches. It stands with the crown of its light-dark musky head just a foot beneath my apex, and addresses me with an enthusiasm—and how reconcile ever the two moods of it?—both demure and wild. “So you did it!” she says. “You did it!” And then she reaches out a finger. “They said it would be beautiful and oh it is. Is that really you? Oh—I can’t wait.” And then she says—“May I?”

  The spot where she touches me doesn’t change to the eye, though I half expected a molten drop of it to glisten on her fingertip. She holds the hand which owns the finger in her other hand, the tip that touched me, now just under of touching her chin. “Oh, oh,” she says. “Can you beat it, honey! Can you beat us. Oh, Rachel!”

  3. Plain People

  I WASN’T RACHEL OF course, but in the end it was my new friend who had to convince me of it. You who come into the world so well ticketed, always with a name to hint to you who you are and don’t want to be, cast a look at the identity troubles of a One as nameless and sex-hidden as I. As she told me later, if a one of you comes down with an attack of omnesia, he can assume it’s a dead cert he’s somebody worth forgetting—and that there isn’t a camera crew that wouldn’t be happy to follow him round the orphan asylums, palaix de danse and baby farms, on the chance he’ll turn up the little bit of business he’s forgotten himself for. As for sexual identity, she said, there was almost no one of you who didn’t know the sex he was born with, or who couldn’t find a host of Samaritans to help him, should his preferences change. I myself, having only the preference, needed both the data to sustain it, and a competent guide. But to be greeted as I had been was unnervingly early. I could only hope I had been taken for somebody else. But, under the circumstances, who on earth could I have been taken for?

  “Who—?” I said. “Who … am I?” A throat is for swallowing—and for breath. I had no hunger, but if ever I developed that gorge, that celebrated column of cartilage and air, it would be seen to have begun here, with my terrible choking on such a question. How infinitely easier it is or must be, on the other hand, how indolently savory—like the longest afternoon in the world, prior to dinner on an excellent train passing Taj Mahals every ten minutes—to know who you are just as exactly as any chimneysweep or archangel—just merely not where. But WHO!

  “Who—is Rachelle?” I said, imitating her accent.

  Her hand crept to her own throat, that slimmest of round pillars with a bird, a flute or a box in it—and no self-doubt. “You mean—you don’t know?” It was the only ordinary response I ever had from her. “Oh—you poor,” she said. “Oh my poor, poor—”

  Girl. I knew the ending to that one. And somehow I couldn’t let her say it aloud, endow it with life—not that kind. Or endow me.

  “Oh, good God!” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to be another Marie!”

  If I could have maintained that rude, contemptuously virile tone from the beginning—? But of course, which tone to take was what I had been sent here to learn.

  Send the newborn to the women—wasn’t I after all being treated conventionally, and a great scientific opportunity therefore lost? One must remember of course that it was they who sent me. But sending the little one to the monks or the military, the wiseacres or the whores—a word that came from underground only yesterday—is still no assurance that somewhere in this democracy of disorder there isn’t being sent elsewhere a wee alternate who in time will counteract him. I make poems like mad when I think of it.

  In any case, no sooner does your innocent enter its house of correction here than it finds that questions are less expected of it than answers.

  “Marie?” said my teacher, interlocutor, doyenne, with a curl of the lip I learned right then was reserved for women she didn’t know—and some she did. One Up was shorter than the other; quick as one observed this, the problem was still—which? I was never with her a minute but I learned something. “Who’s Marie?”

  When, by bumps I’ll spare you, I got out that story, I found that in the course of it I had told her almost my complete one, including a description of my mentor which I remain proud of, plus a workable account of my own presence on Here, all of which took far less time than it has taken me now. She already had some knowledge of our adventure of course, to which desires of her own made her sympathetic. But it struck me mightily that she listened almost as we do in Ours, not out of courtesy or sympathy—but because events must be attended, else they are dream. Perhaps her anthropological training was part of it; in how many voodoo corners of God might she have watched what squeezed blood to its deity on the altar stone, or have seen snakes swallowed like long dreams, or have had to carry in her ear the three equivalences of a word!

  For, all this time she had not once winced at the timbre of my voice, but neither was she especially quiet even while I talked, walking round me with the most easy manner, no doubt to see whether I was the same from all views, and doing so as if her own actions were a rhythm in my recital—at one pause in it, even sitting down. Under my circumstances, of course, it was unlikely that I would ever have trouble getting auditors here. But she attended me as if listening were a part of life. Or had much been so, in hers. It can be said too, of course, that she was never with me a moment but she learned something.

  “Ah, yes, legends,” she said vaguely, when I spoke of these and my ambitions, as if her ear had nursed many of both. After my long weeks here I found that confession was a relief, and this was the odder since neither of these two words was a part of our concept, much less our ritual. Most curious of all, I felt no danger, or rather, excused myself on the most dual (sic!) of pretexts. For it was as if one of her eyes was so intelligent that I needs must speak out, on the very grounds of being so extraordinarily understood, and the other eye meanwhile so prettily opaque that I might be reassured that everything passed over its clear glass like a flight of waterfowl. This effect, I believe, is called sympathy. For when looked at merely as composition, both eyes matched. They were median, mild eyes too, hazel, entirely free of cabalism or other spells. In them, one merely saw oneself—hot, vital and pink—and thought of her.

  When I spoke tenderly again of my mentor, she smiled with the lip that was short (Too short for what? I wondered in passing; after all, what was the standard?) and made as if to hand me the letter, then, with most pliant of gestures, scanned the room for where to put it, rejected a table near the mirror as too low, and all in the spin of a heel put it on the mantel, as if she were flatteringly aware that my vision was concentrating upward—and incidentally, in a spot to which I was obliged to walk. I hadn’t moved, you see, in her presence. I did so—well, rather grandly a-sail, I think anyone would say. Without a jolt.

  The letter read as follows:

  Chére Janice:

  I have the honor to inform you, ma luronne, that we advance in the adventure. A One of us has already done the trick. I myself expect this to be the last letter I can personally write you. But for you too we have plans. An individual will shortly arrive as promise, to be your guest until One day. Your house is so conveniently near the plant! Guard yourself meanwhile; your turn will come. I yearn that we shall soon meet. We shall!

  Ábientot!

  Yours, in Ours—et vogue la galére!

  and then the bold, black signature

  (E=MC2)

  And then a postscript: What he would say to this, notre Jamie!

  “What is—a Jamie?” I asked.

  “Someone—we both knew.”

  “And a Harry?”

  She hesitated. “Someone—she knew.”

  “And a Jack?”

  She gave me a sort of look. “You shouldn’t say what,” she observed. “You should say who.”

  So quickly were we teacher and pupil.

  “Not who.” I retreated a little. “I don’t yet fancy that word.”


  She came up close to me then. Ah, pity! Almost I was tempted to have her call me it again—“poor.” I was no longer a constant, then; I too could differ. From myself! How narrow, how wide are these stages of being.

  “Now,” she said, “don’t worry. Did I scare you? For a minute I did think, but only because of the letter, all I knew was a One was coming. But how could I possibly—you’re nothing like her, surely.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” I said. “Likeness, with us, is the thing. Anyway,” I said with a flourish, “I’m leaving it. All that.” I gave a little spin, rather like hers. “I never really assumed—not for one minute. One mustn’t, you know. Thought can—” I broke off, throwing out a little mysterium of my own. “But for a minute I did think I might be haunted, you know. Possessed. I have had a little ragged breathing.”

  “You mean, like a—like a succubus.”

  “Well, yes rather.” Or like a comput-put.

  “How very medieval of you.” And then all at once she burst out laughing, threw up her hands, clapped them to her head, looked wildly about her, fell flat on the floor, howling, and ended up sitting there, her knees clutched in a sort of arm-wreath, her face tilted toward me, while water in a liquid state, the daintiest of pearls of it, ran down of it. “Medieval. Of you. You being who you are, excuse the word. You being you, and in my own sitting room, on this positively excruciating day. I’m becoming juvenile. But what else is there to be. How should I greet you. If you were a Sunda Islander, I should know how. Or in Molucca, or Celebes. Or even the Kalahari, though that wasn’t our field. Or even if you were a Kwakiutl. I know twenty rituals, extinct and not, that might be more suitable. And I say to you, ‘How very medieval’!” And she was off again.

  “I know very little history, of course,” I said—boasting.

  “Nor I,” she said. “At least—of civilized peoples.”

  She leaned back, arms still clasped round her knees, but her feet off the floor—and spun that way. I had never … their postures were—I was lost in admiration.

  “From what I have heard,” she said, “yours must be very ancient indeed.”

  How was I to tell her that even to mention that We had an historical age—that she had just committed a radical offense? What a bore it would be in any case, to spend valuable mutation time talking of our two societies as they once had been, or momentarily were. History has nearly ruined their mind—or sociology. “No,” I said wearily, “we are constant.” I hastily amended this. “Oh, do ask anything you like, of course. Any information you—it’s the least I can do. But these cross-cosmos assumptions have a way of—”

  How was I to tell her that generalizations to the scale of Ours could not possibly fit in this sitting room, possibly not even on this star? Moreover, I myself, evermore charged or clogged with its atmosphere, was beginning even to feel an ennui for the interstellar aspects of our adventure, and a great favoritism toward focusing on my own. I spoke it aloud. “Let’s—talk about us.” I inched forward, an achievement in itself.

  Her eyes certainly changed. Any passing waterfowl, deciding to descend, would have struck ice, on either side. Yet I had a secret feeling (a secret, and a feeling—Me!) that they were about to do what they had done before. Cry.

  “Oh, I’m sure.” But now her voice didn’t match the eyes. Strange. “I’m sure we’ll just be two little innocents talking. While we wait.”

  “Wait,” I repeated, indeed as mechanically as I could. In fact my voice, ambiguous too, made it seem an interrogation, when actually, having until now been able to talk in the purest of speech, I felt myself seized by that distressful ambivalvulence which always preceded a bad attack of my usual speech trouble.

  “For One day,” she said.

  I took refuge in formality, one of our set speeches. “One like you doesn’t have to wait. You’re One of the arrived.” It is merely a cordiality, not unlike those exchanged by old-fashioned Chinese.

  At this she got up in one cavalier sweep, leaving the floor to warm itself as it could, and stood next at the window, looking bravely out. How they move here, in great draperies of what must be invisible emotion. It had never struck me before, but of course, here you were cousin to us also. You had your invisibilities, too.

  But I saw it—and that she was suffering from some affront. For she had taken all of her with her, leaving me to contemplate only the behind. Certainly whatever scene was framed in the wondow, I mean window, didn’t frighten her but rather steadied her; perhaps this was why they kept a little distance always at hand. She spoke without turning. “I have to ask you a question, a rather rude one. Perhaps an impossible one, which is what I hope, and what I was led to believe. You look just like what I was led to believe, by the way. But …” And here she turned, her arms flung back like wings against the floss-white of the windows. “… what are you like … inside?”

  Think back, all of you, to the moment when you first discovered that your own most private inmost parts, or your own perverse dreams thereof, or even the short words these dreams always go for—were shared.

  Who … answers?

  “Oh, I am sorry.” When I still made no reply, she even came forward. “Perhaps … it’s never even occurred to you.”

  And she thought me innocent.

  “Has it?” She came nearer.

  I prayed for mutation to come to my aid, as it had sometimes done before. But the best it could do for me was nothing new. I did turn bright red. The room was quite fulled with it.

  “Well, well,” she said. “And what does this mean … cross-cosmosly.”

  Nearer, nearer she came, until in some tremor I remembered the compound word I had coined for them, for the she’s. “Oh, I do hope,” she said. “And I was led to believe—” When they hope, they are indeed beautiful.

  She touched me again, again with a finger once more quickly withdrawn, and again she said the same. “How beautiful you are.”

  We too. When we—hope.

  Then she said, head now averted, and in the crisp voice I came to know as her anthropological one, the accent on these occasions rather donnish and Anglophile, “But we might as well get it straight at once, don’t you think. After all, you’re to live here. Do you have sex? I mean of course, are you a particular one?”

  “Six,” I said, mechanically as before. It wasn’t merely that I never happened to have heard the word before, either as used to distinguish between organic beings—for which we say “gender”—or in its more colloquial usage, since we are never—colloquial. It was also that I could sense the onset of my attack.

  “I beg pardon!” she said. “Did you say, six?”

  “Om having—” I said. At times like this I am like a singer who hears perfectly well that he is singing flat. “I’m hovving a little—” I began again. “I’m hewing a lottle trouble—” And again. “Um having a little tribble with my—” I gave up, and shouted it. “Wuth me vowels.”

  Her eyes went back to normal; that is—in that exquisitely gemütlich, simpatico, silly-unsafe way of theirs, they no longer matched. And again, they almost brimmed over. “Coo, Oy soy,” she said. Then she turned somewhat red, herself. “I mean, I say—I’m rather good at accents.” She grinned. “It’s me only clime to fime. I’ve done some recordings. Counting to Ten in Twenty-five Amerindian Dialects is one. Can you count?”

  “If curse I can,” I said. “Win, toe, thray, fair, fauve—ohh damn. I mean—dumb. And also—dim.” My trouble was, I had more languages than would ever appear in her variorum, and all translatable into each other at once. To select a word was like trying to separate from a downpour one silver drop. But to burst of such things was against my nurture.

  “It comes of being so oblong,” I said. “An isthmatic affluc-tion. And of not having the proper organs. At least, not yet.”

  “Why, we could work on it,” she said. “I used to be rather good at remedial. In fact, it was my first job.”

  I didn’t know what a job was, but no doubt it would come
out later in the usual way of this world, the most eerie secrets here being hoarded for the very fun of unprising them.

  “Oh, lively,” I said. “Perhips we could make a recording together.” I inched forward again, finding it so remarkable that I could, and I had never felt so colloquial before. “Let’s!”

  She half-inched backward, perhaps to show me that they moved to minute tolerances I never could achieve. But she was puzzled, clearly. “Just what did you mean by that,” she said slowly. “By—not yet?”

  I was astounded, disappointed, and probably a number of other things I failed to notice, though good God knows I was trying to fulfill my mission here and notice everything at once. By a little enamel clock on a bookshelf, I now estimated that my confession of a few minutes ago had taken at least fourteen of these, during which I had poured forth not only all the mystic legend of our gender, but also, though perhaps on the tremolo, my more practical hopes. She wasn’t deaf. She had indeed listened—to perfection. But she hadn’t heard.

  The big things come so quietly here, at least to me. Nothing of what I felt as yet showed, or until I got a physiognomy of some sort, ever would. I had assumed that in a world where everybody knew about everybody else’s insides already, surely this would make for an extraordinary harmony in the personal presence of each of you. Not—(Come quietly, revelation.) Not that you were as badly off as I was—no, worse. For, candid and open as I was in heritage otherwise, it was only reasonable to suppose that when I came to full bloom as a person here, I would be all harmony. But you—(Ve-ery quietly, now.) How was I ever going to make my way here, under this situation! What price now, all the evidence I had amassed of you—why it was probable that you had no more real history or social science data than we did, once it got past either side of your epidermis. (Quietly.) From your out-sides, one simply hadn’t a clue of your ins.

  It came to me that if I were going to get what I wanted, it would be only by the exercise, the secret exercise of my own supraterrestrial intelligence. The meaning of this now struck me full on. I’d bargained for a world with a different schema of living from ours, but had still taken for granted that it was a united one, somehow. But you must differ here even over the assumptions you took for granted—and if I had learned anything about you it was that you would do so in the weirdest parabolas, one from the other, others from others, others from one. And all this going on below the cuticle, which if it had a thousand hues couldn’t hope to reflect what went on below. But I could still count my blessings. By a parabola of intelligence impossible to you, I could imagine a place which would have all the assumptions, schemata and so forth, that you did—but didn’t live by a one of them. I was lucky I hadn’t hit there.