Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Ollie had wanted the rocker. She’d have settled for the bed—Vivie’s old couch bed, bought in the Maritimes on her marriage holiday with Hervé Oliphant. Vivie, during her last weeks in it, had worn a white cap belonging to her own grandmother. By every atavism she could pry from the past, she’d meant to control her own death. On the appointed day, not revealed to Veronica beforehand—“But I keep hinting to God, baby, and I think He’s clinching it”—she would, as she said, “take up my bed and walk.”

  The sofa bed here was comfortable on a daily basis but it was essentially an office sofa and never really slept on, unless the secretary to all the staff writers, a lean man, pork-white with former priesthood, used it for bouts with the pickup boys Rhoda alleged but no one ever saw him with. “Truth is,” Tom had said, “I’ve stocked the office with idealists, lapsed or practicing. And in exact ratio to their kin outside, no one of them agrees with any other.”

  Which am I?—she’d thought, but wouldn’t ask. “Neither,” Tom said, as if she had. “Or both.” So was he, then. That was their link.

  She took up her bag again, slinging it on the worn harness made for her by a leather shop, once she’d caught on that there were parts of the civilized earth—Orly in August, Grand Central Station forever—where she must be her own baggageman, and left the building, signing out for the guard, who this time said, “Early bird leaving early, huh?”—a man whose sedentary profession obliged him to have the last say.

  Outside, she could have waited for a cab to pass, but chose instead to cross the Circle and walk along the southern rim of the park. There was always a line of cabs waiting in front of the Athletic Club. Sometimes they took you on, often they wouldn’t, citing their “regulars.” Once, late for a plane, she’d doubted the existence of such a customer at such an off hour and received the driver’s haughty reply, “He prefers to remain anonymous.” It was a need for independence that took the drivers suddenly. They all had it; those who could afford to indulged it. She understood it well.

  The park, running along beside her, smelled of its city-peculiar summer—those low green melodies which were never quite snuffed. Approaching the cabs, she saw from across Fifty-ninth Street that they were all Checkers, empty, or maybe the drivers asleep. Some people were afraid to take cabs at these hours, but to her cabbies had always been the city’s nurses, its twenty-four-hours-a-day attendants through whose changing licenses one could clock the city’s migrants—the world’s. Since the Vietnam war, a lot of Thais. Ever since the Papa Doc era, a lot of Haitians. Recently some Turks, whose significance she didn’t yet know. And now and then one of the earlier progenitors in his privately owned medallion cab, a Brooklyn Jew or Queens Italian family man who’d put his sons through college by means of this equipage bearing you, waxy as a mausoleum and tartly clean. People brought their own murders with them, most of the time.

  She peered in the window of the last cab on the line. Empty. In the next one, the driver was asleep. Now that the street was deserted she could see what an ugly strip of false Paris this sector of it was, gaining breadth only far toward Fifth. Here no late lovers stood entwined. Above the A.C.’s marquee, its oblong windows, so nineteen-twentyish narrow for the view they commanded, squinted like the small eyes one sometimes saw in the handsomest Irishmen, some of whom had founded the place. Was that man now sleeping in a room up there, or had he phoned her from his suite in the building she’d just left? Where would the two of them have eaten? Now that he was safely by-passed, she could allow a certain interest. All things could be of interest to those who were resolved that people were not permanent.

  Should she tap on the glass? The cab driver was slumped over his wheel, poor man, which kept on turning maybe even in his rest. But it was his profession to drive her to hers. Battista, Juan, his license said. Maybe from that Puerto Rican barrio, two blocks from her own block, whose whole motto was a shrug. Sure, why not wake him to a good airport fare. She was about to rap when the blast came. Like nothing she had ever heard before. Sucking the air in. At once she remembered the beauty-supply store, stocked with inflammables, at the bottom of her house.

  He opened an eye. Saw her over the half-rolled-down window. Eye to eye. “That wasn’t no backfire,” he said, as if to a regular. He got slowly out of the cab. “Wonder where.” Looking up, they saw nothing. The great buildings, plane on plane, hid all perspective. Vibration lapped their ankles. Two more cabbies joined them, staring up. “Listen—” her cabbie said. They heard it, a slow brown web they couldn’t see, settling. Rubbling the smacked light.

  “Terrorists,” he said. “Wonder where.”

  The silence yawed her sideways. “Maybe—Fifty-fifth Street.”

  He caught her elbow. “My wife’s afraid to go to the bank, the department store. Where you going?”

  “Kennedy.”

  “Right. Let’s get outa here.”

  They were at the Queensboro Bridge before they heard sirens. Once out on the structure, she leaned out to stare back. The river wrinkled under the impossibly looped guy wires and spidery fenestrations which the years had flung over it. Faded red-brick warehouses with postscripts from the soaps and comforts and inventions of a century ago were riding cozily alongside the cab, to blot out, on the far shore, the high-pointed spires and glass forests of now.

  “See anything?” the driver asked. “Them bomb clouds, they last forever.”

  She shook her head. He was a good driver; he didn’t look behind. Her life surface was pocked with encounters like this, the small businessmen of the traveler’s experience, often more memorable in a penny-hard way than the persons one shared ideas with, or loins. “Vignette people—” Tom, to whom she’d confessed this, had said. “Everybody’s more comfortable with those. Nobody really wants the big story.”

  She hunted for the driver’s face, furtive with kindness in his back mirror. “I saw a bed. On a cloud.”

  His eyes found hers for a minute, shifted.

  Studying the cab, she saw that it was an owned one. Pictures of the children, a bobbing luck animal in the rear window, a Sacred Heart up front, where it counted most. The back seat and floor had been scrubbed with that disinfectant which smelled like violet gargle. He’d made his traveling nest. Even revolutionaries would, or anarchists, only moving their gun gardens and ticking toys from time to time, by error or trial. But moving on was essential.

  People who inhabit revolution—who are they, what are their types; do these eternally recirculate? Not all of them from a beggar’s opera. Some people who inhabit revolution—that may be all. Like the title of a print picked up in a bookstall off the Thames. Or always obtainable on the Rue de l’Art. Some people inhabited revolution who didn’t know they were there. Who felt they were part of a new world, yes, but hadn’t yet imagined it.

  Suddenly the driver laughed out loud. “The Klondike Mattress Factory sign. That’s what you seen, hah. From 1928. We have all kinds products here, this bridge. Used to have even the Victor Victrola dog.”

  They rolled down into the ordinary streets, short-cutting through the one she always looked for, where two tiny villas fought a war of large roses. He didn’t remark on it. Their encounter was already over, their little personal spurt. Like an orgasm forced out of life, between two strangers. Like a house. Like a bomb. She could still hear the rubble.

  I see a bed rising. On a cloud. Vivie’s dying on it in great gouts of bedcloth, rising up to shriek, “I don’t know—what I know”—then falling back, a spent sheet, a gone breath, cold wax in a frilled cap. She’d knelt beside the bed, receiving the shriek in her arms, stuttering out, “I’ll know it for you.” As it passed through her. Gone.

  She crouched in the cab, her pack still on her back. When Vivie had risen like that, it had been the last paroxysm of what she did know, gazing back at the tender expanse of all of which it was no longer her time to speak. This was what all the dying must feel: Make haste and speak; make everything speak, count—she, Veronica, would feel it too. All the
sentient living felt it: their solid, eminently sure and even practical death jogging beside them, who are still full of supernatural life.

  Up to a point, the old ones did your dying for you. She was no longer that young. Or houses did it for you, falling down, fading out. Now she must do it for herself. I don’t yet know what I know, or all I know. The energy of it poured through her. Her fingers trembled with knowledge. I am the terrorista. I am the revolution. I am the new life.

  Her own dying had begun. She hid a grimace of satisfaction. At the lifetime it could take.

  THE CORRIDOR

  AS JACQUES COHEN, who was once Wolf Lievering, is being inserted into the longish, flat tram which will transport their group from the motel to the pre-liftoff corridor, the aide, who has helped each heavily suited-up body to load in, bends over him to deliver the usual briefing. The rule is that no passenger, once suited up, is left too long uninformed or isolated. Identity, propinquity and a constant camaraderie of fact is always urged upon them. “This group,” he’s now reminded, “is not necessarily the group which will be in your cabin. This group may be more or less random.”

  More or less. An accident of the sequence of motel rooms from which the tram has rolled them, stopping in turn at each door? The room sequence can’t have been left to accident, since nothing has been. The aide isn’t lying, or even attempting to prevaricate—a word Lievering’s father had favored, sermonizing on its derivation from the Latin verb varicare, to straddle. Since his father’s birth, in the first quarter of a century now drawing to its close, the nature of lying had merely once again changed. He himself wouldn’t at all have minded being called Lievering again, a name he’d neglected rather than defected from.

  “Your own special medication is around your neck, Jacques.” The aide, reading from a list, has never seen him before but all of them affect intimacy. Especially now that no one can literally see the passenger. “Each pill is separately ejectable. The pouch records how many taken, and at what interval.”

  Lievering coughs. “And bears the prescription on its little tum.” He is still rather proud of yesterday’s attack outside the motel, if it was one, the first in so many years and mild, but proof that the hospital, sponsoring him as valuable because of it, hadn’t recommended him for nothing. In fact his mood is still warmly elated. This country prefers the elated, and rewards them for it.

  The aide pauses, but without comment. They are trained to be intimate toward, not with. “You’ll be in the corridor approximately forty minutes. You must ambulate only twice, on signal.” Though the suits are modified, it would be unwise to drag that load about. “The corridor is windowed. One window to each of you. No plane-time Coke or chips, or last book purchases.” The aide’s voice is grimy with joke. “But the window’s yours.” Have a look, a long, long look—the voice doesn’t say. But before it moves on to the next, Lievering’s shoulder, or the place where his shoulder would be, is given a last cozy pat. “There’ll be music,” the voice said.

  He is already enjoying the uniform. Actors were said to take confidence from costume. As a kid he’d had a clown suit once, and a band uniform and shako, which he’d enjoyed, though never performing in them. Saying to his disappointed mother, No, I’m not in them for that. He didn’t intend to stare through that corridor window, though, while some prophylactic ray removed the germs from him. He had no further need to look. The past is his real alias. He is unloading it.

  One becomes exultant through being a rejectant, though philosophy tended to deny this. He’d been born one of the Rejectimenta—a popular word in that household of German pomp and Jewish martyrdom combined; therefore his creed—or naked impulse—is a rejectant’s; it is natural to him. This is what they want here, don’t they: natural selection? But he would have come anyway. He’s the one who can admit that they are well rid of a planet hung in the heavens like the withered-prune testes of an ancient Jehovah, still spawning horrors that change only in versatility. Good will is its farce, recitable every Christmas in twenty-four languages, by popes and presidents kept swaddled away from the ordinary living which went on in any of them. As the world wanted. While outside its basilicas, the faithful poor kneel in the slime behind the faithful rich, Jews are burned in one style and Asians in another, and all over the earth the miserable child becomes the woman and the man.

  When he thinks like this, rhetoric fills his mouth like spit. He can forgive the actual soil of the earth its quakes and other Incan calamities; what he can never forgive are its countries of the mind, their terrible and persistent inequity. In which the occasional joys and goods are always lost, just as each personal body in its time is lost to disease. Gratuitous evil? There was none. We were all on evil’s salary. Gratuitous good is his scourge. For he can see that these occasions exist: balms that are offered, children who are not whipped—and groaning out of some blackish studio behind the Loire or the Thames or the Neva, or curling at the base root of some buddha tree, the true blood whisper which says, “I am Thee.” Under all the filth, those little white worms of good? He can’t wait for them to be butterflies, or whatever the optimists think they will be.

  The one day he’d gone back to Berlin, a birthplace never seen since, the windows of the shops had been assaulted by drifts of may-flies, their wings folded back like dead Giselles, gauzy and sweet. A hand could lift hundreds, in one ball of carnival fluff. Schmutz, the shopkeepers said, brooming and hosing—and they had been right. On the sidewalks, the West Berliners allowed glassed-in display stalls, unattended, in each some bit of merchandise with a placard directing the passersby where to go for it—and why not? Why shouldn’t the pavement, too, have its profit, say these pragmatists, pup-pup-pup from their sputtering, consonant-plopping mouths—and they were right. Inside one stall, against whose panes were piles of the bug-gauze, there had been a single gold sandal, wonderfully embroidered. The sun had struck sandal and bugs to iridescence at the same time. Fabelhaft, a couple stopping to admire had said—and they were right.

  From there he’d taken a bus to Checkpoint Charlie to see the atrocity photos, then the subway train which passed directly over the Wall so that you could see its sentries and the barbs sticking out of its concrete, and after that had spent the rest of the day in whichever East Berlin museums were open, all of them being closed alternately, as announced from day to day, so that one could never be sure of one’s choice. He’d managed to see both the Pergamon Porch, an ochre Greek frieze of figures, the largest he’d ever seen torn from its home sun, and the Ishtar Gate, a great green-blue and gray tiling with seneschal lions, the longest ever scooped from its native sand—surely the two best museum rapes he had ever participated in. After that and a fruitless search for a meal, all the restaurants in the open museums being closed, he walked down Unter den Linden, wide and free now of armies, and lightly goose-stepping, brought himself to the door of the university library where Marx himself had worked—whose brass-dragon knocker he too had touched. And he had been right. Going back over the border he stood next to a young couple, East Germans, bidding farewell to their West German mother who clutched a small bouquet of dreadful cotton flowers and seeped rheumily at the eyes. Entering the Demokratik Republik, one had to be yelled in by number and passport; leaving was by gate and silence, but equally secure. On return to West Berlin, he’d eaten soup at the Copenhagen, from a menu choice of thirty—on the good side surely. In the cab to the airport the driver proclaimed that Berlin’s city services, including the refuse-disposal stacks which made a kind of skyline on the city’s interrupted leaden cloud, were the best in the world. And he had been right.

  They were all of them right; each had his or her small mite of it, on an earth irreparably wrong. So Lievering nursed no illusions about doing his best as a matter of principle during his own term on it, or even his worst, which would have been merely romantic, could he have brought himself to it.

  Instead, that protestant saliva of his constantly filled his mouth. Where had it oozed from, stuttering
him? From his schooling in England, which had had so much of it? Or from before? His parents, two young Germans fat as Blutwurst, hadn’t been cooked by the Third Reich’s ovens but had merely escaped, along with their year-old boy, plus both sets of grandparents, who in the course of time had merely died. On arrival his father had almost immediately qualified as a librarian in Bloomsbury, where he got words wholesale, of which supply the boy could never get enough. Even his mother’s cranky-looking amber and garnet jewelry had survived.

  They had been a small family from the first, graspingly close. All that was left of Berlin for them to mourn for were a few friends, along with certain brands of cocoa and Rindfleisch, which lacks London had soon repaired, even to the Kleine Konditorei where they could eat eclairs on Saturdays. Not being very Jewish—not for centuries, his mother said—they had left no God behind. His father had joined the Fabians, or what was left of them, their refugee services being far the best. Via their thriftshop Wolf had been clothed by Harrods up through grammar school. A German kitchen could be steamingly excellent anywhere; his mother’s glazed carrots could have been served sous cloche at the Savoy. So, everything they had had been secondhand but of the best quality—including their tragedy.

  Who could be apostate to that—to an inoffensive run of luck? Instead, he had been assimilated to it (a word the real Jews used disdainfully), except for that mouthful of words he could never speak. Words of all sorts cluttered his mouth, piled there like the world’s error, but he couldn’t speak them. His mother blamed his trouble on his looks; of course she was in love with him. “Too much of an introduction, your face.”