The word “fodder” had been hers also, so, while reading some of the admonitory notes to herself which were scattered all over the desk and dresser, and here and there tucked in the many mirrors, I wasn’t surprised to see in a rather neater file of them marked Transportation—Eli, one large memo: “Get a horse van?” Beneath was the advertisement of a nearby stable and stock farm, dated only two days ago. The desk was further covered with lists and compilations of all the places and institutions she thought she ought to show me—a touring of which, under her tutelage, I half still trembled toward and shuddered over, as opportunity safely lost. Still, all hints being useful, I studied them, from Funerals and Hospitals to Picnics and Galleries, noting with some tenderness a memo to stop by the Chinese collection at the Philadelphia museum, where there were some famille rose vases which reminded her of me.
As for the planned picnics, the ice-picnic wasn’t among them. These spontaneities do occur, I thought, on both sides. And both sides, I was sure, would forget to watch for them. I wish I was not so smart, I thought, but quickly pointed out to myself that since I had never thought this before, it too must be human. I was getting to like the word more every day, and to use it, accurately I hoped, more and more often. It was very human of her, for instance, to leave notes to herself all over, in capital letters, WHAT TO DO ABOUT WAR? And bending closer, I saw a small item of another kind, that touched me most. It was a Shell map of environs which included Sunbury, Pennsylvania. To it was clipped the estimated driving time from Philadelphia, also a faded recipe employing the black walnuts she had said were indigenous to the region, and sundry other indications, the clearest of which was the picture of a farmhouse. At the last, I thought, she was like them all. She had meant to go back. And forward as well, of course, for everywhere on the walls I saw, with what I hoped was a smile—large placards bearing the motto from Ours which I had given her in response to a plea that I choose the one which seemed to me most significant. “Happiness is a total ellipse.” She had pasted it everywhere. And I had not been untruthful; she would see it in every public place, and hear it from every groove. It was the one community lie we are permitted ourselves, the one which in the public interest every citizen, until his last scream, honorably accepts. She, though no diarist like me, might yet have her own record of our adventure, in notes to herself inscribed, not on paper or cardboard, but on the forward flesh itself, and—helterskelter, wild or neat—much like these. And in her last scream she might voice that addendum which in life might not be said even sotto voce: Or, not quite.
Meanwhile, hearing her come up the stairs, I could reflect that during these twenty minutes I myself had accumulated some very profitable feelings.
Housecleaning, she said on return, always gave her ideas. I myself had noticed this, but concluding that it tended to supply her with a host of minor ideas which took the place of the major ones. This might well be debated between us, I thought, under the topic, “What is a major idea, and must one go out of the house for it?” Her assuredly minor one was that she was worried over my carbonation supplies for the months to come, and could we consider her leaving on the air conditioner in the museum, it to be set at the slot for fresh air?
Apart from the fact that I had no mind to be at the mercy of a machine, I deemed this a proper time to tell her that I too had been practicing a deception. I brought this out, as I said, in response to her having told me hers. Indeed, if our relationship hadn’t quite been an affair, in its expiring moments it rather resembled a marriage. I told her in detail of our talent for seeming to become objects. My ability to sit, as both a vow and a more valuable accomplishment, I kept to myself. At first she mourned loudly that I hadn’t told her of this in time for travel purposes, until I assured her that the process took some months of hibernation—in fact, and oddly enough, just so many months as I had to wait here. And it was as I had hoped; all Our hatchment, so painstakingly plotted, came out just as wanted, only now the hatching was hers. Housecleaning did give her ideas—she even volunteered an old aquarium from the basement, in place of a bell-glass, but I was able to refuse, assuring her that a colleague might check on me from time to time. This was not quite true, but I saw no reason to reveal how far our plots went or our talents; we can be rather lapidary too. In short, I was able to convey the idea from my brain to her mouth with a splendid economy of both energy and time. For, once having conceived it, she ran round like crazy, doing everything from checking temperatures to phoning banks. And of course, writing her last letters. In watching her at these, I found her still dear enough, in fact so much so that I could not afterwards recall whose idea it was: to send Jack. But each of us, wherever we were, would await his arrival with pleasure.
So at last, we found ourselves in a house stripped of all evidence that anyone but a lady had lived here, the placards and other correspondence a heap of ashes in the fireplace, and even those cooled. The cottage itself, blinds up now, since I would be in the museum in the rear, lay sealed against all except the sunrise. She herself would be going to “the facilities” well before. It was appropriate that we make our adieux, brief as these might be, in the room which had meant so much to us—this was one idea we had truly together—and there we repaired.
Going down the hall, I reflected, not on all that had ensued but as much as I had time for, being ever more conscious of time’s passing. We had been right, I thought, to wait for this particular set of applicants. I would be confirmed in my judgment, and my advice to my colleagues: Use the brightly-stupid ones to get us here; they have more reason to. And trained as they have been to seem humble and amenable, they have more energy for the final arrogance—which is to make an exchange of peoples, rather than of vehicles. And time enough, when we get there, to make use of the stupidly-bright.
I let her enter the room ahead of me, as I had learned to do, that I might be a gentleman. Courtesy cost nothing, I had read here, along with hundreds of other proverbs, some of which mixed in my mind now, of how Rome hadn’t been built in a day, nor Troy so tumbled. Some of my reading no doubt was more to be trusted than the rest. It didn’t much matter. She and hers had their horse, now; I had my van. Altogether we had done well, if only what nature had all along intended. I wished I wasn’t so smart.
In the museum room, chancing to stand near the cherubim, I revealed my hopes that human babies were better, to which she replied that of course they were; they were each of them like a great seed. And looking at me in that one-eyed way the she’s have, the nearer one gets to them, so that if one didn’t know better one might drown in it as in a desert mirage, she said, “So are you! Like a great seed!”
I was so occupied with this, and the eye, that I barely heard her say that if she ever had a child she would regard me as the putative father—or one of them. “Putative” was a word I didn’t know, though I knew the root of putrid and putana, an Italian word, I believed, for the female of whore. Sometimes these words didn’t have masculine forms. But I had no relish for linguistics at the moment, nor for sentiment either, being eager to get on with my hibernation and nervous enough as it was, so replied in an absent but gentlemanly enough fashion that I would be glad to do what I could.
“Thanks,” she said, giving me an odd look. “If it’s to be done—then, ’twere well ’twere done quickly, as they say in the, er—telephone book. I mean—if it’s done, it already has been.”
“Excellent!” I said, looking vaguely about me for a mirror, though I knew very well the room didn’t have one. “Great seed, eh. Hmmm. Fancy!”
“It would be the first ever to have two fathers,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to deny your Onfluence; that wouldn’t be fair of me.”
“Neither would I,” I said, musing. There were smallish seeds here, plenty of them, strung up with shells and so forth, but I had in mind a rather, well—a great one.
“Think of it!” she said enthusiastically. She was wearing clothes now, under a large cape, and galoshes. Beneath the cape, her hands tried to c
lasp, and with some effort, were able. “It would be the first child to be really born on Ours, wouldn’t it. What a legend that’ll be!”
I finally turned to stare at her. “You must be out of your—We don’t have them.”
“Legends?” she said. “Or babies.”
“Say-y, listen,” I said. American mightn’t be so gentlemanly, but it was jaunty. “I know what’s wrong with you. It happened to me at first, and it was awful. Like the bends. But you’ll get over it. I’m just coming out of it myself. You’re in a state of between.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said. “You don’t look so good yourself.”
Then. Then. Oh, to have hands. Was this murder? Luckily mutation gave me no help. But I lost control, right enough. “If you had more brains—”
“Oh no, no,” she said, dropping her lashes. “Empty heads are much better, they say. For making people. At least that’s what we’ve always been told. And I must say, in our time we’ve made quite a lot of them.”
“The crater takes care of that,” I said, still a little stiff with insult—would I never learn how? “Besides, I thought you and your friends wanted to be relieved of it.”
“Oh, we do,” she said. “For here. And even there, maybe one mightn’t want more than one, you know.” She gave me a stare which might be cuckoo, or ve-ery cool. “One and One being One.”
If this was the curve of the cosmos, then I was now out of line with it, though if nature did have this in mind, there was—ultimately—nothing to be done. But if it was her little joke, then I thought I could handle it. “The atmosphere, physical or mental, simply doesn’t provide for it. You’d probably die in the attempt.”
“Oh, to be a martyr,” she said. Actually, she sang it. “Or a mater.” Then she giggled. “I am getting to talk like you. Do you suppose it would?” She drew closer. She could still inch. “I’ve faced the fact that nine chances out of ten that’s what I’d get, you know. A freak. What with the comic—I mean cosmic—rays and all. An it.”
“You’d better face the fact the whole fool idea’s impossible,” I said, meanwhile envying her the cape, but only generally. The kind of remark I had just made went better with a vest, and I had a fancy to make more of them. “If you got around a bit more, you’d know that nobody has that kind of ordnance. Too damn complicated—who’d undertake it?”
“Perhaps we would,” she said. “Being more used to complication.”
What a tongue. I hoped I would never get one like it. “Speeding up mutation is one thing—or reversing it. Or however you—one may look at it.” I coughed. “But the breeding of two species so far apart is impossible. It’s against the interglobular evolutionary convention.”
“Oh, is it?” she said. “I hadn’t heard.”
Neither had I. But I was finding the improvisation here utterly exhilarating.
“Oh, I suppose you’re right,” she said dolefully. “It was just a thought. I was just looking ahead.”
“Well, you do that,” I said cannily. “You do that—no harm done. When you get there, you—may think differently. Meanwhile, just remember this is only the twentieth century. And between you and me, we’ve got about as far as we can go. Mustn’t let our imaginations go absolutely hogwire.”
She smiled at me suddenly. How they do that. “No.”
“Just remember your catechism, and you’ll be all right. And the contract. Exchange of persons, and very liberally interpreted, too. Not a complete across-the-board change of them. That’s what it stipulates.”
“Oh does it?” she said. “I never read the fine print.”
Then she toddled to the door and put her hand on the knob. I had a pang, having to let her go like this, but a job is a job.
She stared back at me. “You do have a look, you know,” she said, “but it’s not the same one. Or maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder.” She stifled a sound. If it was a sob, no tears came. “You don’t look like you any more. You look more like—them.”
Always the double gift. And then, without even a “see you, one day” she was gone.
I confess I hurried straight into the little salon where there was a mirror. I was astounded at what I thought I saw there. Maybe it was in the eye of the beholder, though. And the beholder was now me. Whatever, the role I had just played was an inevitable one; why must they always be a little stupider and a little brighter than we thought?
During the long process of objectification, I planned to go over all that had happened to me and assess it, also all that alphabet of human attitudes which would come to me—I was resigned to it—only in the experience, only in the flesh. But, mutation or no, it would be generations before I and my progeny would forget the sacredness of our spiritual home. The sort of thing she had in mind—it must not happen there. We had it in mind for Here.
As for the words we had just had, I was stupid enough now to know that it could not happen for eons yet if ever—and bright enough to know that ours was just that quarrel of imaginations by which the difference, and the daring—is preserved.
In a few minutes then, I must go into the museum, carefully face away from those cherubs, mentally commend myself to the cosmos—since I couldn’t yet scrape a cross on my chest hairs or throw salt over a shoulder—and begin. A good objectification usually takes from three to six months. Until One day, I had six. The prospect of so long a meditation didn’t faze me, the likelihood being that I would never again here have the chance for so much of it. The object I had chosen to be will not surprise you. Until then I might rest, under a little sign she had prepared for me, with her own hands.TO REMAIN UNTIL CALLED FOR.
But first, I had an appointment with someone—and a vow. I walked over to where, sitting there herself that evening, she had made a brave, a defiant, a kindly prediction. Some of it had come true, and some of my wants also. I could trust the authority in this house now, for it was I. If none could say whether she and I had had an affair or a marriage, who’s to say you can’t lose what you have never had. You lose it doubly.
And now I knew what betrayal was, but not yet whether the man I would become in this world would ever forgive me for it. To forgive is divine, and that was not to be my story. For though there was no company to see, and if there had been, teacups were still beyond me, I thought I had an expression which others might someday confirm. No matter how doubly a thing is done here, the misery which follows it is still single.
The chair still held her print on it. So, bending as if I too were already a little lamed by the world to come—I sat. And it was there that, loath to go just yet, I had kept my vigil, and there I had slept until waking. And there, till we meet again, we may leave me. To sit is very human. To sit on the imprint of another is the most human of all.
One Day
THE VOICE OF BELIEF is a low growl, and the word it says is No. This was an insight which felt as if it belonged to drowning, but surely nature wouldn’t waste it on then? Linhouse knew better. He’d been brought up to know that nature’s waste was prodigal, so much so that it was almost the other side of perfection, serving almost as well as the notion of a clockwork universe to make us think that she must have something in mind. What he had really meant was: “Surely she doesn’t mean to waste me.”
But his no was drowned in the congregation of no’s that rolled toward the stage—for in the large object toward which this swell had been directed, the last, smallest lily-pad disc on the bottom had spoken its speech, and with a huge sigh, as if a wind teasing a volume had at last contented it by closing it, the discs riffled backward upon themselves so rapidly that the eye saw only blur, and there it was again, tall, shaggy-thick, conic and almost familiar, like the daily almanac of some queer neighbor, not necessarily a giant, which one had got used to listening to, its story over for the day, its work done.
It was all so quick, so quick, so almost instantaneous, yet he had time to observe the round mouths of all those he had been watching intermittently: Lila, Meyer, Anders, there the three
were, plus all the others who had spoken, Björnson the mathematician, and his friend Charles the biologist, and Herr Doktor Winckler, and the Indian too. He even had time to see the cruder meanings of their lives as they unwittingly every minute spoke them, at least to him—and these as if encircled above their heads in the vapid balloons of the comic strips, or at their feet in one or two astringent lines of print. There was Lila the anxious, the almost certainly adulterous, whom nobody could take seriously in either of these qualities, but it was all right because Meyer, heir of rabbis, would take all the rest of her seriously, and the children, heirs of them both, would too. There was Björnson who had known a zoologist in his childhood, and the admiring Charles who had known him, and Anders who had had such an odd childhood, and was having it still. And even Herr Winckler, always at somebody’s elbow, but probably never much farther, and Miss Apple Pie who wanted to know everything—he even had a twinge that she would never know the name he had awarded her. Always this empathy. Perhaps because the place was now dimming like a church, he felt as he always did nowadays when in one, that his heart was full of noble truths it wished to spit out immediately—and that all these good people were cardboard personages; only he was human, bad and real. Oh believe in the unknown, it will ennoble—he looked for Sir Harry, and at first couldn’t find him. Yes, there he was, yes, there, and his mouth was open too. Sir Harry looked to him like the only man there who knew he was saying Yea.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 33
