Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  My interlocutor was watching me, almost subserviently now. How like lightning my mind moved in her presence! Even when she was silent, I was kept a-caper—and we had scarcely begun our dialogue. Her head rested now on her hand, against a pillow of bright curd-yellow, but the hair itself of a color I hadn’t been taught and should certainly enjoy asking the name of. Then there was the jointure of her sitting—a pleasure to study that also. So complicated it must be, to sit so, and so easy it looked when she did it, knee upon knee. Garments hinted a solution of how it was done, but kept one from seeing absolutely. But nevertheless, this sort of teaching had it all over the intercom. Mentor had done her best, but this person—

  I stared at her. Was she a person? Or merely a super-intercom-with-images, an automaton placed here for my education—and probably a number of -ations I hadn’t yet heard of—as my guide to the full temporality and materialism of your world.

  It was the first time I thought of her that conventionally. Though not the last.

  And our longest silence yet. Silence, I thought, seems to tame her. I stared on. She returned my gaze, or so I fancied. And then, as in most of the silences to come, she spoke up first. Not to have done, is my only small eminence—gladly ceded to the one time in which we spoke up together.

  “Are you a person?” she said. “Or some sort of telespeak or shadowgraph?”

  This is the way it often went. Should I have spoken first—always?

  “I didn’t used to be,” I said modestly. The truth doesn’t make me free, or even comfortable, here. It just reminds me of home. “But I am now.”

  “Well, how am I to tell? Especially when you don’t answer. And even then!”

  It was only then that I realized my full advantage here. Your kind of being, with its anterior-posterior exterior—and above all that interior about which both everything and nothing were claimed to be known—thought itself equivocal enough. But I—! Ha. For though knowing myself already in possession of most of your qualities and cravings—and to be haring down the road as slowly as I could after the rest of them—yet to all appearances here I was a total ellipse.

  “Oh, I was listening,” I said, with satisfaction. “I just hadn’t heard.” What’s more, I thought, they simply have no standards here, for Us. If ever I needed to lie—though my standards limited me to one big one—chances were I’d get away with it. And luckily there was only one I might be interested in.

  The opportunity came sooner than I thought.

  “It’s easy to see that you are,” I said. “A person indeed.” Was this truth or flattery? I must be thrifty. “At least, after a bit.” There, that for the record. “But why shouldn’t it be?” I added. “After all, this is your world.” I made so bold as to circle her, much as she had done me, which inspection she permitted, though turning her head to follow it as far as she was able. “You might have more trouble in mine.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she said, “but that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  I stopped short.

  Meanwhile she, continuing to turn slowly, as if she were used to this process, stopped short also, in front of her mirror, and shook her head at it. “It’s going to be some job, isn’t it. Getting me in shape.”

  I came up behind her, but she didn’t flinch, though for all she knew I might have dragons in me, waiting their turn at evolution—and for all I knew, I might. Were not both of us brave? To face the unknown is bravery. The mirror showed her returning to me a gaze she couldn’t know for sure I gave. Though even in a curved mirror we were as unalike as any two creatures in the system, somewhere in that system we were of similar worlds.

  Though not in every detail.

  I scanned the walls. There appeared to be no computers there as yet, only the books, interspersed with some water-colors of woods—why they should have these here, when there were woods outside the very window!—but art, or the need to burn oneself twice with life, is still closed to me.

  “Tell me,” I said into the mirror, while another part of my vision, this luckily still to a degree dispersed, looked down over her—was this a haunch, and this a shoulder, and this a—nape? “Tell me—what is a job?”

  Laughing as if it were nothing, she told me. And told me what mine here was to be, taking it for granted that I already knew. I listened with what amazement—and oh, I also heard. As far as she had been told, I was here to train her up somewhat as you trained your astronauts, though more irretrievably. I was to help get her in shape to get Out for good. Then I might go home, or join the Others here One day. Nothing whatsoever was said about getting me into shape for Now.

  She turned and looked up at me, smiling. “Are you—really here?”

  She caught me off base—that is, here, but being honest about it. “Technically, I’m both Here and There. For the diary’s sake—and the species of course—I mean to go on that way as long as I can.”

  “Good God,” she said, almost as absently as I. “I needed a philosopher.”

  Always so interested in the non-aspect of things, they are. I didn’t care a rap, if she would interest herself in the non-aspect of mine. She cast a look at the door; I didn’t know why.

  “Dear Ja-nice,” I said. I seemed to know the vowels for her by instinct; later I said it better, but she never once had to correct the phonetic. “Dear Ja-nice, did it ever occur to you—” Here I choked a bit, but looking carefully around, saw no evidence that we were monitored. “Did you ever dare conceive, that—” I never had, not even in that one niche of intelligence which one keeps unbugged even to oneself. “Did you ever think …” I had had to get out of my world, in order to admit it, “… that the authorities … are not to be trusted.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Why else do you think I’m leaving!”

  Oh brave.

  “But the new authorities,” I said, “they’re your friends. And your gender.”

  She raised those brows. “And what do you know of gender?” she said.

  “Dear Janice,” I said again, “listen to a story.” And this time, she did.

  To the legend—of our former, or buried, or somehow other selves—she listened with the fixed smile of the folklorist.

  My own conviction—that far within, down or beyond the soma, I was meant to be a man—she took under advisement.

  And the one large lie—that her friends had sent me to her as to an expert for this purpose—she believed at once.

  She spoke sharply, in dialect utterly unknown to me. But I was now relaxed enough to admit ignorance. “What’s that?”

  “Queensland aboriginal,” she said. “For bitch.”

  I had a feeling she would explain that later; this is the way dialogues begin. I also had a feeling I should make immediate amends for my lie, at least to myself. This is called conscience here, and accelerates with lying, but as far as I know does not outstrip it. “Don’t blame Mère,” I said, “if there’s been a mix-up; blame Marie.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose they thought I wasn’t good enough. Rachel is a first-class astronomer. I don’t know about Marie. But the roster in general is tops. And I’ve no real distinction as an anthropologist, except for the speech. That’s a hobby of Rachel’s too, and I thought maybe she—But I suppose they have a preferred list.”

  “Marie is a distinguished bore,” I said. “It’s no wonder she made it to Ours so quickly. And dear Janice—” It was a great strain for me to talk in personalities. Among individuals so quick to take injury, whose attitudes indeed seemed to me almost all umbrage, I should never make my way until I too could insult. “I’m sure Mère would have approved of you,” I said. “Either way.”

  That sank into her somewhere, I wasn’t sure where until she laughed. “You’re just too good to be true.”

  “I know,” I said humbly. “But you could fix that, couldn’t you.”

  She got up, strode around a bit, and then came over to me. “You really are rather—fluffy. Not just in looks, either. You talk like some bloody sor
t of bedtime story. Uncle Wiggily, or Aunt Mouse. And I’ll wake up in the morning.”

  “Uncle,” I said. “Please!” I found myself moving around after her; though her groove was more circular than ours, it resembled. “I’m quite aware of that,” I said, “and it’s quite worrisome. But if one takes into account how curvaciously I was reared, and in what constant tergiversation—”

  “In constant what—?” She stopped in her round, leaned on a passing chair, and rocked back and forth with it, closing her eyes. “Oh Janice lovey, did you dream that?”

  “No,” I said. I almost shouted it. “Stop this self-indulgence! I’m brighter than you could possibly dream of. Why I had to decandesce for months before I dared come here! It’s just that an outer ontilligence has every fringe of persitionality O-pressed.”

  “My!” she said. “I mean-Oy.”

  I decided I had no recourse but to dazzle her. “What you here mean by science, philosophy, et cetera, is exceedingly simplistic, Ours having congealed together eons ago, and taken mathematica with them.” I paused, wishing she would open her eyes. My corner was literally shining with me. I went on. “Everything, first came together, and then marvelously … stretched out. Biologically speaking, this is how it has become possible for a One and a One to remain—One. So if imperturbability is what you’re after, I’m your—” I gave a little cough, and then came round the side of her chair. She had her knees in the seat of it, and was clasping its back. “I know I’m terribly diffused. But you have what it takes to—pull me together. I’m sure of it. And as for your dear self, I could get it in the groove in no time. Do you know the catechism?”

  She nodded, eyes sealed.

  “Do you know your ad hoc hypotheses, and practice them daily?”

  She shook her head, for a no.

  “Dear Janice,” I said, “does it not seem that I have all the lacks you need. Could we not propose—I do propose it—a mutual derangement—what would you call it—”

  She opened her eyes. I saw myself in them—a One and a One, which remained One and yet was two. In me, I suppose she saw what she wanted to see also—herself, non-reflected. For, sighing, she answered. “An affair.”

  Then she jumped up, patted the chair, and began to stride about again, but with an indolent sort of weary-wariness which indeed more or less became her posture from then on. I found it attractive, though it didn’t make her any more real to me. She had her mysterium, too. If I continue to speak of her in this beforehand, behindward way—which can make a speaker as tiresome as destiny, and his account as teasing—I make no apology. I am making my elegy, too.

  “But I’m being such a bad hostess,” she said. “Won’t you sit—oh dear, I mean—do you? And I’d gladly offer you a cup of tea, or a dri—” She shrugged again, turning up her palms. “All very well to say, but what the hell is the blueprint—for this!”

  “I do feel rather faint,” I said, “it’s been days since I carbonated. But it’s a rather carminative process. I wonder if there’s any place I could—”

  She led me down the hall. Later, since ozone was all I needed, but more space than the house afforded, I used to take my privacy in the little grove of trees outside.

  “See,” I said, when I returned. “We have only to do what comes naturally to each of us. And let mutation take its course.”

  She grinned. “Or prox … amity. To speak your language.”

  And so, as teatime waned into evening, it came about that a one of you and a One of Us found themselves in front of the fireplace, watching the flames—which a one of you had built while prettily claiming this task for herself according to the female fuel-builders of I forget what tribe—and chatting of native customs all over the cosmos. We were indeed lucky in her background. Any temporary lacks on my part caused me no embarrassment, her performance of more than ordinary domestic function being immediately accounted for by data grubbed up from desert or jungle; one might have thought she had lived all her days with beings who had no appendages of any kind. Or that she now preferred to. Meanwhile, little by little, her knowledge of kitchen middens, barrows and sinks, drew me forth, until I felt myself tethering toward domesticity, drawn by all the sub-archeological details, in situ, of your intimate lives. This was the way to go about it, I was sure. As for her side of the adventure, surely she had only to watch me.

  “If this were one of the upper klongs,” she was saying, “and we were in a canoe. Or many places in Asia, where the boatmen are women. In other words, I would be rowing, and you would be taking your ease. In other words, sitting.”

  In other words was often to be her soft substitute for why don’t you, this being the style in which she herself had been taught to educate. But although the auditor already knows that I could sit on occasion, I had not let on (being still afraid of cracks), and had taken up a posture near the mantel, thus early establishing two principia which have since served me well.

  A: The seamy side of life, though still to be gotten used to, would serve to keep me moving.

  B: In the matter of talent, always hold back.

  And now for a while, we fell silent. Both of us were breathing time quite naturally, though whether she sometimes also heard space, as I still did, I could not tell. In the days when I had traveled instantly, I had had urgent need to hear how far ahead of me space was pure of object. Now this power was blunting. Only once in a while did I hear the wild, colorless call of those pure leagues. But meanwhile I was building up all those consolatory storage-boxes inside me, only the first of which had been for grief. Color, too, was setting up intenser rays all around me, its quarry and target; in place of the way I formerly saw the world, in a mild, pastel envelope one step above the assumptive gray of the animals, now everywhere, color’s three-pronged nerve, hot and primary—saw me. And if up to now I had given no evidence of that power to smell thought, which you call extrasensory but we assign to olfaction, it was because the minute I hit the planet the ability had all but deserted me—surely a lucky move on something’s part, since who possessing such a power too early on here, would stay?

  In front of us, the fire played at tongues and tails, oranges and lemons; does watching a fireside make all beings, or only poets, think of age? Would I grow old here? Would she? Time is but a breath anywhere, but even the yardstick of duration is so small here; they even think that matter is permanent. According to their own specifications, I thought, in the oldest rock known here—perhaps a thousand million years existent—a molecule taken to be vibrating with the frequency of yellow sodium light, will in that period have given off pulsations only to the number of about 16.3 X 1022 = 163,000 X (106)3. And outside the window, in the Ramapo hills that ringed us, the rocks were nowhere near that old. What endures here? What really endures, what? Unless they smelled what I knew nothing of.

  I looked across at her, thinking mightily of all I knew that she didn’t and couldn’t; her eyelids were down. How extraordinary it was for us to be here, within the planes of night this dual silence, within a cottage itself falling at a rate they think steady, and my thoughts—careful as I keep them—already tinctured with your substance, hers perhaps with mine. By the small yardstick then, and by the small breath, what would be said of us here, of this pair keeping watch together—one hundred years of your nights from this night? This is the way it all was, would they say: the world spinning on from its thousand million, and an ordinary night of it, half the globe at sequin, half at dark. This was the way—would they say?—it was before. Would that be the legend? Or did it all always end here—in the peculiar way their little nows sucked them ever downward from eternity, and in spite of all spirals flung outward—in an evening at home?

  We had already settled on a routine. Routine was the thing, she said, and as much of it as possible in strictly educational exercise, this being one way to keep from an anxiety about nexts. For the nonce, also, I was to become no more visible, indeed to learn how to turn this down, if I could manage it; here, reluctantly bringing out
a talent I had hoped to bury here, I assured her we had means. Tomorrow, she would start me on intensive reading research at the library, if she could get me unobserved to her own fortuitously secluded carrel. During the hours I was there, she would be at her own studies; no, she replied to my inquiry, she had no icehouse, but doubted that this was literally necessary. And later, under my direction, and thanks to some woodcarving tools she had once had of a Maori, she thought she could build herself a groove. One of the bedrooms would do. The little back room, being in fact the largest, and already so filled with helpful material, would be mine. I listened to all this with some inner laughter, noting the various materialistic means by which she proposed to get into the “spirit” of things; by so doing, they not only keep alive this primitive division they are so afraid to leave, but their whole brief history is the story of which of these ends is up.

  But above all, she repeated, the first step for me was to learn how to turn off the terrible radiance of my own awareness. Not only would a sight of me explode our secret prematurely; even later on, when all was known, it would involve me in all sorts of company which might be bad for mutation; it might bring me out a freak. “You simply can’t go round looking like a pillar of fire,” she said, “or an overgrown halo. You want to be normal, don’t you!” Since it was late, and we had just been discussing Malinowski (Sex-life of the Savages, a book to be on my agenda), we reserved consideration of that. But there was no denying that to be merely human, I must learn how to get a good night’s sleep.