I could feel how it would be to be waiting there, the snow coming down like a blessing, or if you looked into it, like an akimbo whirling of worlds. In the clear marvel of the air, the planets swung in their perihelions. I could feel how it would be to shuffle the foot and stamp it, to breathe planets through the nose.
“Stand back!” she whispered. “If you aren’t going to hide. Look alive!” As I did so, drawing the light well away from her, she peered through the seam between blind and window. I saw by her face that the seam had let something in.
Then we heard it again, the bell, and again, as if it were teaching someone that sad, virtuoso song.
“Will you not go in?” she said. “So I can answer. Are you alive?”
Most curious, how I could not yet myself make insults aloud, yet could take them into me, making my own non-answer, which seemed joined with the non-answered bell outside. And it seemed to me that I felt my blood. Does the running of the blood answer only to the barb?
“Maybe I should ask him in,” she said. “To tell me for sure that you are. Should I?” She came a little closer toward me. “Eli?” She whispered it. She put out a hand, minimally. “No, don’t,” she said. “Hush. No, I know you are. Hush.”
“Hush,” she had said, and “No, don’t”—and I had not said a word. I looked down at myself. It was my light which was speaking. Was this how it had been in the beginning, here? Out of the primordial, the blind mouths rising, of beings not found yet by their own blood. Over the watery acres of the young world, a phosphorescence of being, which is light? So that, world to world, being to being, mouth to mouth, in the end it is all the same?
I watched her slip the lock so that she might enter again. She opened the door, glided outside, and shut it behind her.
And now it was I who crept to the seam and applied my vision to it. I couldn’t see her at all, where she must be pressed against the door, but by the light of the hanging-down lantern I could see the whole of the paving stone—often too had I glided there!—and … him. Now I recognized him. He was the second head. He was different in face from the milkman, but my shrewdness told me he would have his own prototypes somewhere. I looked him over from top to toe, but he did not see me, seeing only her. Did I want to be him? As with the milkman, I had a struggle—always this empathy!—but again I came out on top, or at least—alone. Then he spoke.
“It’s I,” he said. “I saw the light.”
Oh glory. He had said it; she had heard it. I was alive. To see and be seen was the double glory here too. And I had crossed over. I was visible here, fully and forevermore. Whatever wounds came of it, I was alive.
Her reply chilled me. I knew that dry rustle. “Philosophical?” she muttered. “Or electrical.”
Wounds come quickly here, but this was intended not for me but for him. What had she against him; what had they all? At the edge of the blind—good seam, kind seam!—I scrutinized him, thinking that if she invited him in, even if to stay and live with us, I should not mind. He would be a third, but the kind that is company.
But I heard her murmur that she expected to be leaving; she would write.
And then for a moment I saw her taken in his grasp. Mouth to mouth, all beings are light. I saw it.
Then I heard the car slam, then the gunning sound of it, the dying away. A road is a meander.
And then, followed in by a little dark wind, a little white of snow, she came back.
After she closed the door behind her, she stayed pressed against it just as she had done that first evening, the same, yet not the same. Much of the life here is like that; in this concentric it approaches our own groove. Swollen ghost of herself, I was sure she too watched my vision of how she had once moved. Hand pushed to mouth, as if in the bellyache, she looked at me. Once she had told me that in certain circles of Polynesia, a sign of esteem that wife may pay husband is to groom him in the village square by plucking the nits from his hair. Here women, in the exercise of a terrible vanity, do a service of esteem for themselves. One by one—when that profound honesty comes over them—they will pluck from their own heads the qualities that endear them to self or to others, and cast these aside like lice, like stones. How did I know this? Was she also doing a service for me?
“I wonder,” she said. “If he was worried for fear I was—The way he looked me over. Could be he was—” Her mouth opened. “Could be—I am … I never thought of it—that change.” She turned her other hand from the wrist, doll-like. “And what if I am. I’m still go where intended. Nothing new for a woman. Like that Russian astronaut-in-waiting the papers quoted. ‘The moon is my intended,’ she said.” She attempted a pirouette, ah yes pretty bad and she knew it, but aimed at me nevertheless. She clenched her fist and looked at it. “There must be someplace that’s all-of-a-piece, mustn’t there?” She came toward me and shook the fist at me, paying me the compliment of doing so where my face might one day be. “Mustn’t there—Eli?”
I did not answer, but not because of nothing to say. I thought she knew.
She sighed. “Ah well, you’re as all-of-a-piece as one would ever expect—and even you—” She laughed on the note of cool I dreaded to hear. “Even if it isn’t, how could I not go? And what do you know, Eli—maybe I’ll see the real place, from there.”
I couldn’t say. I had.
“What a sell!” she said then. “If I should be—as he thinks. Why, I’d be a legend, wouldn’t I? Sooner or later there always is one, even a bum anthropologist knows that.”
My blood-image froze. The people move on. The legend moves on. But the mutation is for life.
She came closer, close enough. “Heigh-ho, long speeches make long silences—but maybe you’re right not to talk.” She looked up at the tip of me. “Remember when—” She broke off. “Ah, that’s parting, isn’t it, when we say that.”
I didn’t know; I had always arrived. All this I was to mull over in my long hibernation. We were the non-blind leading the non-blind, two seeing people leading each other into the dark.
“Remember when I asked you if you had a sex, and you answered six.” She smiled. They only, can do this. And the animals. “Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” she said, though she wasn’t looking straight at me. “But you do have it now, you do. A look.” Then she rapped the clenched fist softly on my integument, as if to summon further out the imago, the person within. “What’s this, what’s this?” she said then. “Another bruise? How you’ll ever get along without someone to—” Her brow clenched, her mouth opened. “Eli, my dear, dear Eli, if I should—you know, be ahead of you—how will you get along all by your—in a house? Her scrutiny hardened. “That’s no bruise.”
Then she circled me indeed, as if she were measuring me for a garment, while I yearned to cry, “What is it; what have I?” but my voice struck some impediment and stuck there.
“No wonder you’ve been so canny quiet,” she said. “And bloody quick, my boy, no need to worry about you.” The brows clenched me as if I were half enemy. “If that isn’t an Adam’s apple as I live and breathe.” She scanned me. “No, wait a minute.” Again came that angled laugh. A small or satiric drain for feeling may be helpful, but the angle of the gyroscope is fixed. Yet when she conned me again she was serious—“Every ellipse has a center,” she muttered. “Which is a point such that it bisects every chord passing through it. The longest diameter is called the transverse axis, it passes through the foci. The shortest is called the conjugate”—and I realized she was doing her exercise tables. “Elliptic spindle,” she said, eyes closed. “Gearings, chucks, integrals, epicycloids. Elliptic point. A syneclastic point; a point where the principal tangents are imaginary.” She reopened them. “Oh shucks and chucks, what a physiognomy. I’m no good at it.” She squinted. “By ordinary rule of thumb, I’d say, if it isn’t the thyroid cartilage, commonly known as the apple, it’s—yes, blimey if it isn’t.” Hands folded, she made me a little bow. “Congratulations are in order. Mad rush of science and all that. Ha
rd to believe. Weren’t for—myself—I wouldn’t.” Her hands unclasped, palms up, a little pudgy now, but still hers. “Much good may it do you, Eli. It’s a navel.”
I stood there humble and quivering. It wasn’t my first choice, but it was a beginning, in fact the one in this mystery. And perhaps personal choices weren’t the wisest thing in this business.
When I came to myself, she was shining at me in her own way, even tall again; what slender, lissom joke of the first days was she going to share with me? “All these weeks,” she said. “How could I be sure I wasn’t off my rocker? Scusi, rocket. I had to give myself talks. ‘You’re in the twelfth century, say,’ I’d say to myself, ‘and somebody says to you, People will fly in the air.’ Or, ‘You’re in eighteenth-century Ireland, with a hoe in your hand or an ale mug, and good-fellow says at your elbow, They’ll cut you up in pieces and parcel you, but you’ll be a-sleeping and not feel it. And you won’t die! And so I worked myself up to it gradually. With roentgens and rockets, and I don’t know what all from the ragbag. It isn’t hard to imagine, if you’ve even seen an Ainu at his first telephone. And so, finally, ‘You’re in the twentieth century,’ I said to myself, ‘and somebody says to you, There’s going to be such an evolutionary adventure—There’s going to be—” She looked at me long. “Us.”
As she turned to the stairs, she flung me the gift, always a double one, over her shoulder. “Oh, I believe in you all right, these days. Else I couldn’t—in me. But one keeps one’s … imbalance … better, doesn’t one, when one sees one’s own kind now and then.” She turned full face again. “You were right to stay. Not to hide. You don’t have to worry. You’re—you. But I was never so sure of it as when I saw Jack.”
Then she turned alimp, like the little lame grandmother of herself, and went up the stairs.
It was black night now, that time when any room with a person in it wondering steady on his life is like a hearth with a good live coal on it. I was as rosy and pulsing now as any young person here could be—and what a dowry I had at my back! Every guide, protection, power and elasticity that our biophysical research could devise had been provided me, from an ordnance which we had heard one of your own experts remark must make theirs look like a nickel tip at a table d’hôte. I had properties which you, except for your poets, had never dreamed could inhabit protoplasm at all. And now, so armed, I confronted those low qualities of yours which, excepting in the merest shadow, had never inhabited ours. Whatever of our ancient books I had crammed on had at least given me some command of your powers of expression, antiquarian though these might be. But since then, in the hot-and-cold of books by night, and the long-simmering dream-watches of the day, I had learned that only what is already inborn can a book inspirit, only this can a dream inflame. For I now knew by rote the entire alphabet of your world’s emotions—and that until I myself should inhabit them personally, they would remain mute. What a Voco-Phono lesson I had before me now!
I studied the very stairs she had gone up, as she did daily, in tripping health or at her new lamed glide, and always oblivious, or almost, that every step of my existence here, and the risers too, must have a name as large as a territory, taken from your infinitely stretchable alphabet of them, from avarice to Angst, to Zartheit, to zest. I saw the range of them, a Jacob’s ladder only as high and difficult as the thirteen actual and countable steps before me might be for me, but with what stiles and fences, steeplechases and Père Lachaises on the way—and John-a-Baptist pits, and common stubbing stones. In all the languages of your world there was the same little list from aleph to zed—and none of it was to be had by hearsay.
Then the spasm gripped me for true, for deep, for aye. Nor was I myself to be had so. Nor was I.
And now indeed I knew the true nature of that most hurtful nothing-to-say which, through all this fateful night of speeches and shadows and scenes at windows, had grown and grown in me until in this black dark, lit only by me, it bid fair to burst my boundaries also, scattering my rosy diffusion far and wide. For such a state of nothing-to-say is actually the vacuum which at one prick is sucked out, as if by a single gasp-breath, into action. Often this is the way you yourselves are moved to it or make yourselves to move.
And now too there had come upon me that eventuality which early on I had once teased myself with—laughed over, never really dreaded, and at last put by—that I might one day find myself with rather enormous feelings and no mechanism as yet to vent them with; I had jokingly defined this as “a sneeze with no place to go.” Then I had forgotten it. Who after all so dreads the accession of riches that he will not put by his terror of them until the time comes? And now it, this eventuality which even your best ahs and aies and eeows wouldn’t suffice to express. Remember it, those of you who have been young? I had everything to say, but not yet the furnishment to do it with.
So I did what the young do, of course: I went up the stairs anyway. And though I was now only as visible as any an excited one of you, I seemed to myself a veritable pillar of fire as I ascended them and went, timorous as a newborn lion—if these had navels—down the hall.
The door to that haven of hers which I had never seen was darkly ajar. Should I push it in? Before I could do so it was opened from within, as if she had expected me. Still, darkness. My own brilliance blinded me.
Then I heard her voice, almost at where would be my ear. “Wann dich ime busch ferlore hoscht, guk ame bam nuf.”
Was this only one of her many patois, or out of some final language of experience, saved up for this one, for me?
Then I heard her construe it, in sad-perfect compound, as if she had heard me think that, or had said this many times before. “When lost in the woods, look up a tree.”
There was no tree, but in the dimness I could see papers, placards, letters, newsprint, a whole clearing house of them strewn about everywhere, and near several office machines, off to one side, what must now be in disuse or disrepair—for it was half buried under paper also—her wooden track. All this I saw as one sees things in one’s own light—only half regarding them. She was standing almost in front of me, behind a screen back of which she had been disrobing. All her garments lay in a Mexican-European-American jumble on the floor, between us. In the rear of the room behind her, there was a full-length mirror, in it a whiteness which might have blinded me had I fairly looked at it. Above the screen, her head regarded me. After a moment, her hands, one on either side of her head and opened like false wings, came to join it.
So we stared at one another, each in our own light. What hers was I could not yet descry, except that, not as powerful as mine, it did not need to be—it was still different, and that was enough.
But between us, as with the pile of clothes, stood another—the shy observer. I fumbled for its name, not knowing whether I was honest or ignorant. When it did not give ground, and I could find no better, I spoke to her, across it.
“Teach me pleasure,” I said.
And if, with all my non-heart and voice I put, as in a book of your books, a line here of asterisks, it is not in order that you might be free to think for yourselves on what happened then, but for its sadder opposite, that from our lacks, it could not.
First I saw her in the mirror, just as you often see your lovers. I saw her, melted from neck to knee in such a curve of beauty as I had not forgotten, it being also—except for my slight, new indentation—mine. But she would not have this be the end of things, and kicked aside the screen. Then, turning up her palms with the slightest of sighs, she regarded me. You are You her eyes said to me, and all my being said the same to hers. But, in the nature of things both of us added: Not quite.
We were ships that pass in the night.
We were an old couple, one of us old in experience, one of us—by your account—in age. We were a young couple, each of us in the flesh of a new world. Like any two of you, we were the same, but different. And like any two, there was only a partial cure for it. So, until morning, curve to curve—we leaned.
Despite which, she left everything in exquisite order. When I woke next day in one of the downstairs salons, past noon of a high, sunny day that beamed into every cranny of the house through windows with their blinds now set at precisely halfway, I thought of it. Like any good housekeeper, she had said, she had to clean house before she left for a journey; that it might be for forever made no difference, or in fact more. So, some hours before dawn, we began it, I only watching of course, but following her everywhere. These obligatory scenes of watching do occur here after all, and are not unpleasant, so long as—yes, I must say it—a termination is in sight.
The kitchen was a disgrace, she said; besides, she said, with a smile she meant to be glorious, it was no place for a man. So it was then I took a last carbonation which must carry me for some time. Away from the not quite wasted spell of her presence, I felt a growing cuteness in her which I deplored. I was apprehensive too that her face—dear dimming face I said to myself harshly—wouldn’t last through our encounter, but it did. It was a face which had launched quite a bit in its time, and with minor alteration, it survived until the need for it was gone. Meanwhile, I could tell for myself how very private I was getting, and how there was on the increase in me too that sense-of-the-past-in-the-very-present which so bollixes up the lives of all the thoughtful, here.
It was in the welter of her bedroom, again while she had left me alone for some moments, that I was most afflicted with it. She, while breathing with an effort which caused me dismay—“No, it was all right,” she said; it was just that she already felt herself to be breathing at high altitude—had dismantled the wooden practice-track she was supposed to have been using, and was at this moment storing its pieces in the basement, where if someday discovered it might be taken for parts of one of those old toys on which all basements dream. She wasn’t sure why she had to do this, or—to my inquiry—whether it was an instance of femininity or merely human, the “merely” being hers also. She supposed that she perhaps did it to commemorate a deception she had practiced—and now told me of—on me. For, after a few token sessions she had never used the track at all, but had employed those hours in secret drilling sessions with colleagues in the area—the sounds I had heard her make, and had so dwelled on, being those of a tape recorder she drew from the corner and now showed me. Did I wish to hear it? I looked sadly or so I hoped—on that fair skin of hers now so callousing and said no. It was for this reason that I had been locked in. Even during our nights at the library—she added in a sudden rush of confidence—while I was safe in my carrel she had not always been there, but in proportion as my slackening rate of speed enabled her to provide me with fodder for some hours ahead, she had slipped out to those facilities in Hobbs which she and her band used nightly, on only one occasion carelessly leaving evidence that they had. Deceptions, alas, were necessary, she said; it was hoped we would not mind. She said it very prettily. I said no.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 32
