Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  They tame the spirit with sleeping, here, while of course alleging the demands of the body; this keeps holy that division in their being which to allies of either, it would be treason to change. Nor can everybody here ever go about in perfect communion, but each must have a special name, chosen for euphony, royalty or larceny—and quickly awarded before natural bents become too clear.

  So, at last, I found out the likeness and difference between a Harry, a Jamie and a Jack—though even now I have a hard time with category versus individual, often finding, no matter how I scrutinize a person, that he or she seems to belong entirely to only one or the other of these ranks. Then I have to remember that this is impossible, at least here.

  But I did not accept everything here without protest. “I am a person,” I said. What dignity. After the long coolth of unanimity, enough.

  “Won’t do. So am I.” She had infinite patience really; the fire was almost out. “Matter of fact I belong to a category which calls itself the plain people.”

  My own glow remained stubborn.

  “That’s what I’ll be.” How much I had to learn; how much of one-ness still clung to me!

  Even to be a plain one, she said, required certain formalities. Even in the jungle, such a lackluster ambition would be criticized, with punishment only a little less bloody than civilized ones.

  “Even my people have another name,” she said. “The Amish. That’s my tribe. I’ll take you down there sometime. I’m going to have to take you lots of places.” She looked thoughtful. “I’ll have to turn in the car. For a bigger one.”

  A name made one larger, then. But still I was cautious. Proud, too.

  “I am already—I.” What equity. And—with all these little excursions into “me” and “you”—variety, too.

  “Nope,” she said, grinning. “Too many of us. Listen, you mean to say … of course I ought to be glad of it, for my ideals, and I am of course, but it is hard to get used to. You mean to say, you all have no images of what we—of our customs, institutions, and so forth. You mean you all go round in a sort of mental nude?”

  Of course we have them. If not precisely direct images, then the images of images. Only thing, they’re locked up.

  “Our life on the Oval is quite full,” I said. For the sake of my own plans, I had better keep recommending it.

  “But hadn’t you yourself even a category, to know yourself by?” she asked. “How do you all think!”

  “To explain life-on-the-curve is difficult,” I answered, thinking rather hard and fast, actually. Of course I had had one, else how could I be here; occasionally one gets out. But I had a reluctance to telling her I was a hero, straight off.

  “I’m a … at home, I was always considered a bit of a revelationary,” I said.

  She laughed, in that helpless-hopeful way of her, then got up and walked in that restless way of hers; she really didn’t need a groove for curving.

  I fancied I was getting onto many of her ways rather quickly.

  “Good night, you … you I, you … good night, and have it your way until morning. Make yourself comfortable any way you choose. Anyway, maybe life-on-the-curve is just sort of—the inside dope on life-on-the-angle, eh?”

  “Outside,” I said carefully.

  “Oh, yes of course,” she said, with a little bow, and then halted. “I mean—and it is outer of course—life on your planet. Elsewhere.” I saw that the idea of it could make her tremble too. This was both our ways.

  “Oh no,” I answered, in as low a voice as my poor reed was able. We don’t often name the name. “Ours is: Ellipsia.”

  “Ah, yes? Lovely, truly. And so are you, really.” She stared at me in a way I hadn’t got onto yet, called, I believe, a onceover. Or a twice. I moved closer, to cushion the shock that was coming to her. In fact, I leaned.

  “Yes, lovely,” I said. “For One thing, its shape—!” The One remains. O my teardrop, my Other home. “But this planet—” Though she couldn’t see me at it, I was looking around me, at this strange cottage with all its seams, hung on a dented globe at the other end of nowhere, just safely short of the beyond. “But this—is Elsewhere.”

  She got it at once, I think. Maybe, as with us, this is one of the boundaries they too know, but some ignore. They are stupid only in action. Not in mind. This time it was only her lip that trembled. Then she rallied. “But you said you were Here and There. Or neither maybe. Or both!”

  I took a deep swig of air, the most I had managed here, and the heaviest yet. “I know. That’s what Elsewhere is.”

  So, there it was, and I had said it for both of us, while outside of the outside of us, the interplanetary missiles swung. The legend moves on. The people move on. But the mutation is for life.

  She could nod. She could clasp her hands, wring them a little and hang her head over them. She did it, for us both.

  “I hate to tell you,” she whispered, “but this place has its name too. It’s called: Earth.”

  I had expected something of the sort, long since. But shocks are shocks, especially at end of day. “Very suitable,” I said. “And pretty, too.”

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I know just how you feel.”

  End of day. Or beginning—of the beginning. Surely that cock-crow which comes in poems derived from earthly ones, comes at dawn. “Girl, girl,” I said—and where had I learned that word?—“what did. you say? Did you say—I had a look—!”

  She leaned toward me, understanding at once. For if I had a human expression, then surely this was the beginning of our mutual influence, at least for I-me.

  “I’m not sure,” she breathed, almost as heavily as I had. Her hand brushed the place on me where my eyes might one day be. Then she stood back, well back. “Maybe I just imagined. Maybe it was just in the eye of the Observo, I mean of the beholden … I mean—.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “Look at me!” she cried. “Whether I can see you do it, or not. Is—is there any change in—” Before I could answer, or take opportunity to lean further, she ran to the mirror. Both of us answered her. No. Not yet.

  Slowly, she returned to my side, and once more scanned me carefully. “Turn around,” I heard her mutter, “I have difficulty keeping my place.” Then she giggled.

  I turned round and round and round; in fact I spun a-dazzle, even daring, at the very end, my old gyroscopic angle. “Wow!” she said. “Wow.”

  When I righted myself, stopping on pinnacle as neatly as any ballerina, she applauded. I stood motionless. “How very still you are,” she said, “When you are still. No, if it was one, it must have been a very fleeting expression. I can’t honestly say you have a look, yet.” Then she smiled. “But I’ll tell you what you do have.”

  “What?”

  “A name.”

  The name she’d thought of was Eli—short for my place of origin. But also—if I wanted lineage from here—short for Elijah. When asked what it meant, she thought it stood for “chosen,” but checked on it to be sure. It didn’t. It meant Yah is God, whatever that meant. She assured me that most names had little to do with the people who had them. And so a One was named, under the sponsorship of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 9, EDW to EVA, pp. 273—274, of the eleventh edition, which she informed me was the most noted. She was charmed that I could read Elijah’s story over her shoulder. She particularly pointed out these words of the summary: “A career into every stage of which the supernatural enters.”

  “Hyper—” I said in disgust. “Hypemataral is what we are. If you’re making comparisons. We may be a little out of your ken, but we’re real, you know.” As for Elijah, it was all a fearfully gory story I thought, but I gave her my consent, telling her it was because of the ravens who fed him, birds being a little in my line—but actually it was because of the widow, who received the prophet with all her hospitality.

  Afterwards, knowing your weakness for interpretation, for a while the whole business made me uneasy; we on Ours had no intention of our adv
ent being mistaken for anything but what it was. Nor had I any desire to see this narrative later scanned by the symbologists in any department of a civilization already far, far too devoted to the deja vu. Later, however, I reminded myself that its denouement will make that impossible.

  In any case, as you may have surmised, I was henceforth mostly called “you” anyway, and the little ceremony made a nice ending to a domestic evening.

  “Good night,” she said. “Eh. I hope you’re real. Sleep well, anyway.”

  The hardest part, I thought, would be to get her to believe I was “real.” But in trying, I would become so. I had an image of my image now. I made her a little speech, saying as much.

  Ask the great eel-rays if they are real, I thought meanwhile, my head-image reeling; ask the strange Selachii of your underwater deep. Or any number of genera back in your own phylogeny—none of them specimens to be met too lightheartedly, even on a Sunday, after church. Ask them, I thought. But not yet geared to insult, this I kept to myself.

  “Pinch me,” she said. “If you are real. Or perhaps—when.”

  But she was serious too. Somewhere to-down of her, she did care. “You’ll see,” she said. “We’ll do it. They’ll see, one day, oh they’ll see, also.” She meant, her friends.

  “Will Jack see?” I asked. I hadn’t forgotten him.

  She looked at me. “Oh, you were there, weren’t you,” she murmured. “I won’t ask—for how long.” And I didn’t tell her. But as I found out very soon after, for educational purposes, not long enough.

  Chin in hand, elbows on the back of a chair, she continued, in spite of our good nights, to brood at me. “One day, you’ll sit here, right in this chair. You’ll have a cup of tea with—with whoever’s for company. And you’ll have—an expression, all right.” She smoothed the chair pillow, plumping it. “Maybe they meant no harm, my girl friends at the top. Maybe the experiment has to have one reverse job—for a control. Or maybe at the last, after years of work, they all went wacko.” She shrugged. “Quien sabe? Maybe I’m a better anthropologist than even I know.” She said something in another language I didn’t know.

  “Queensland aborigine?” I asked.

  Clasping her hands together, she shook her head at me. “No. Jamie had a hairy Ainu in tow once. Wrote a book with him. What wouldn’t he have given—for you.” She smiled. “Don’t take it personal, Eli. Or rather—do. Eh, Eli?”

  Me, I remained imperturbable. The chair was smooth, where she had brushed away her own imprint. It looked like a comfortable chair.

  She walked to the sitting room door which led to all the other rooms but one. “Maybe some of Jamie’s gentlemen friends at the Center will see, too.” Then, still musing, she retraced her steps to the outer door, through which I had come, and locked it. “But you’re right. Maybe we’ll have to make a special effort for—gentleman Jack.”

  Hand still on the lock, she made me another little bow. “And now Eli—good night.”

  I had a fancy she had made that little, dismissing bow to others before me, though perhaps not to any of like shape. How had they answered her?

  But, aside from my shape, perhaps my situation was different from theirs in other ways, at least from some. I was from out of town. I was a houseguest. I was inside.

  How should I answer her, to suit all that, to suit her own personal share of the adventure, which she had perhaps a little forgot? And to suit me.

  I claim no originality for my answer, but perhaps a little heredity. “Good night,” I said. “Good night—She.”

  After I was left to myself, alone but in this peculiarly half-shared manner, I stayed for a long while awake with what you call insomnia but we consider to be that awareness of spirit, product of the ages, which sees no reason why, even for a mere moment of them, it should go back down again to the shadow from which it came. At last, having made my peace with it, dearly bought as that must be, I glided to the little back room, and after considering its facilities, made my bed—upon the long bed.

  Ours, hers and mine, was not the usual situation. But then, every human situation was a little elliptic also, a little in reverse. And we were both people. Each in each, each to each, we would find our own characters, and though perhaps not together, our bodies too. We were ships that pass in the night—but then, people are.

  4. Into the Maze

  SO, INTO THE MAZE we went. The world was all before us—as once was said of those either facing Eden or leaving it; now this must be forever amended: Worlds. And it will be for you, the audience, to say how much this means or how little; the threads will all be coming together soon.

  It was in February, that afternoon when I and a few snow-flakes first brushed through her door. It is—as you all know—December now. This was the period of time, she said that we—and of course the others—had. Until One day? I asked. She nodded. And aside from the others en masse, I inquired, were there other couples, like us? She professed not to know, not being a member of the inner council, but thought it likely; in a world grown to the scope and complication of this one it was scarcely believable that the authorities would start with just one couple—not again. Meanwhile and whatever, she said, her face warm with it, we should have to take our solo-duo isolation and our destinations both de facto, and work very hard in order to come into our kingdoms. Since this still accorded more with your legend than ours, I was willing—being eager for anything of yours I could get.

  “So much is available.” I sighed.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing past me and acurve, an irritating habit which began the first day. “We’re like rich people, who prefer to work.”

  “What is ‘rich’?” I asked, and she sighed. Not for the hour’s disquisition ahead of her, but because of the hairsplittings. Inching along physically was nothing, compared with what I was learning to do with the mind.

  Her main duty—and this she held with passion—was to induct me, at least through hearsay, into the collective misery of the world. Misery, she said, was by far the better organized here, if not by nature, then certainly by men; pleasure, much more at random, had to be picked like bluebells along the road. But for one of my sanguine temperament—and once I got my appendages of course—the latter could be learned without training. For training, misery was the thing. I refrained from observing that by that time my temperament might have sadly straightened itself out. (Like many who early desert the orthodox for the worldly, she was still more innocent than she knew.) No matter. As she sternly declaimed for me all her catechisms of births and deaths, wars, starvations and other killings, it was the passion she did it with that I held it my duty to be interested in. She found this amoral.

  “You mean to say, babies could be boiled, and you wouldn’t—”

  “What is a baby?” I said. “Is it a child?” I was more comfortable with my own innocence now, having long since increased my own expectations of it.

  “—could be gassed, one could be stewing right here—and all that you’d care about, or be fascinated with, is my attitude!”

  How they hate their own humanism! It was my job to teach her the real nature of the almost sublime, but I sometimes despaired of it.

  “Where there’s no difference, there is no morality,” I said. “I’ve come a long way even to know what amoral is.” And if I got my appendages soon, I thought privately, maybe far enough. Meanwhile I had my first image of a yawn, delightful the first time or so; after that, a la your-style, I just let ’em rip—and without having to hide them either, in this case having the best of both worlds—nothing showed. But that never lasts long here, does it.

  “Let’s have one of my Voco-Phono lessons, why don’t we?” I asked. “Or better still, when are we going to start lessons for you? It’s begun to worry me, which is scarcely useful. I can learn to worry elsewh—otherwise.”

  But she would have none of it, asserting that one didn’t learn a vacuum—and that whereas my course was to learn, learn, learn all the accessories of a variable existe
nce, hers was merely to divest herself of them. Until, as she said, she should be as serenely passive as a round bubble in a rill of them, in a pond.

  The trouble with converts is that they always regard the new world as the opposite of the old. Young as I was here, halfway through my journey I had learned otherwise. But it was not up to me to hint that the opposite of a world which regards itself as positive, does not necessarily regard itself as negative. Or that, though the whole sound and Omphalos of our creation is O, it is just that veriest subtle flattening at its ends, and of its beings too, which makes Us all what we are. I hoped she hadn’t the idea that it was circular. Or that we were zero. Willy-nilly, though I should like to have been consulted on the grooving track she constructed, and perhaps to show her a few practice turns on it, I was never allowed in the bedroom.

  Meanwhile, as for me—in my past life, neither events nor any other accessories of yours had been so plentiful that I could afford to ignore them; indeed I had a tendency to greet one and all with equal ardor and no prejudgment, so that the question of whether I would turn out warm or cold of nature, fool or genius, was as open as it might be with any—excessively intelligent, of course—child. In truth, limited though my mise en scene might temporarily be in terms of what can really be done here with a trifle more brio, I was living a life of simple enchantment.

  I can best get at the tone of it if I say that the first man I ever had an opportunity to study up close was the milkman. Through the chute. A most clever contrivance, it had as strange an optic as many of your more complex devices for viewing nature near and far. And, since I had to get down to it by extending myself along the floor, the situation had as much geometrical and philosophical amplitude as anyone could wish—and since it was me. But I had by now discovered that this is the way such situations were always experienced here, so therefore gave up describing them to myself, in favor of merely having them. As for the milkman, socially or aesthetically he did me no harm. Indeed he did as well as any. He had a long slide of a nose, a chin which the eons had meditated upon well, and had at last lengthened. Some days he had only a roundish eye—set more toward eternity, I always thought, than milk. Later I found him, feature by feature and all of a piece, on one of her shelves, in a most expensive volume of plates marked: Breughel. So I discovered art and the milkman together, and as a lucky child might, quite without shock or pain. Art is a finding.