Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  And how was Wolf living? Dysart was horrified. Translations—slim pickings at best, and weren’t the French all now wanting the American style? Lievering saw his suit being inspected for signs of starvation, and all but confirming it. True, his publisher kept him only on sufferance; these days the office sighs that greeted him were large. Though the Aarons, who must be paying much more for honey and washing powder than when he first came to them, had never increased his rent. Dysart, staring at him over the bock they’d stopped for, wasn’t yet aware of his own irritation. They always thought Lievering never saw it. Lievering had paid for the beer. The time had come once again to relieve them all of the burden he is to them.

  So, once more, he’ll go where he’s pushed. Leaving is the only tact he knows.

  “Oh yes, you’ll remember us,” old Elise Aaron says, her eyes as bitterly red as her hands. “Like the cat.”

  “You can sit up, suh—Jacques,” the aide says. “No need to lie back.” The tram, which must hold at least eight suited-up forms, each one in its high-backed niche unable to see the one ahead or behind, has stopped. This underground runway, leading from the motel to the degerming corridor itself, which in turn gives directly onto the launching pad, had been built by a contractor already under indictment for its deficiencies—a risk which exhilarates Lievering. More may be ahead. He sits up in his clown suit with its big, reassuring box toe, eyeing a ceiling slightly chipped. M. Aaron is still following him, a pneumatique just for him. His cataracted eye looks even wiser than his good one. “I know only one way to live,” he’d said in adieu. “Collect people, Wolf. Not hope.”

  Arriving at the college in Richmond, Virginia, to which Dysart had sent him, he finds that the drawlers there, calling him Doctuh because of his Ph.D., remind him of a voice tickling out of a past scarcely thought of since—of Odgers, the false preacher who had performed a marriage on him. These gentle Virginians whom Lievering coaches at night—women mostly, pursuing what is here called “continuing education,” under the assumption that life itself hadn’t done that—soon teach him the difference between their state and Tennessee, and try to take him in socially. The richer ones are romantically certain that their Palladian houses will foster in him a renewed dreaming of England—which happens, though not in the kind of dream he could have told. In practice though, Richmond, like Paris, is too cheery for him. Yet Paris’s cultivated satanisms and haughty intellectualizings of fashionable religious pain had been no anodyne. The haunted picture frames of those martyrs he and his family should have been part of still attend him—empty now even of the shadowy glass.

  Is it because of them that the actual people who have passed through his life have less than the usual force in his memory? Though those who have can be summoned if need be in scenes quite accurate, even his parents have fallen into this void. He must possess less of the wavelike returns that characterize the brain life of others. Though he’s no blank, memory is not where he partially lives—except in the case of those martyred ones whom he lives with eternally. “Because of them you have no minor guilts,” the doctor for whom he’d bought the picture had written, incidental to thanking him for it. “Your memory’s non-Freudian. It bears no ordinary grudge. People won’t love you for it. We can neither stay away from the sight of it nor watch you for too long. You can’t conceal. That we’re all of us in the same grim present. Stammering on. Heard from my wife?”

  Lievering has never answered. Bills are the sole mail he replies to, twitching on the dot to the few he receives. Letters offering tentative life intimacy, or those follow-ups on how he’s getting on, from people themselves mired in the art of getting through—how can one answer them? They are like dreams.

  One person who had never so applied was Veronica Oliphant. She’d been all his present for a time. When other women offer themselves for that, which still happens, he remembers her. Not because she left, but because he had been the guilty one, in trying to make her part of his present for always. Once in a Paris bookshop he’d been confronted by a poster of her. Writer for the Damaged Age, its flyer said. So that’s what she had become. He’d stood there in the sadness of all follow-ups. So she had joined that journalism-by-the-decade which could make any running sore of mankind into a local case of the megrims. An age was never either damaged or pure, but a temporal flash which blinded its inhabitants, some of whom would hear its magnificat, others only its black Mass, the greater body of them never seeing the flash at all. An age was always everything. No style could contain it. He had merely made his choice of one. Veronica had had reason to be afraid he’d make her doubt words. She had seen him plain. That was what had enraged her most—that he might regard that kind of seeing as the immemorial function of women. Some of the best men and women acquired those more manageable angers early, in place of the impossibly durable, purer angers of dedicated life. But when he left the bookshop, he’d again forgotten her. Now and then his organ autonomously recalls her bed.

  He’s in his fifties now—a time when a man begins to notice that his heroes have remained forever young. Lievering has no such real faces to go by. But even a hair shirt wears into positions of rest. Once more the monastery of himself is being broken into. These Southerners he’s among know how to tolerate worth without competing with it, tranquilly leaving it to its eccentricities. When his teaching begins to be bruited about and the college transfers him to day classes, his ladies give him as good-bye present an antique roll-down map of the Virginia Commonwealth. In their talky, secret way they must have discovered how life anywhere is only a setting to him. “As it is so much for you women here,” he exclaims, thanking them. “Though for you it will not change.” He’s said the wrong thing again, as he can see by their flushed faces. In spite of this, they invite him home. People are startled by what a man like him can live on emotionally. They don’t want to know about it, but against their own inner warnings they keep inviting him home.

  Along the farms on the James River which a few of these women have inherited or married into, their teenage sons are now hunting the land with Geiger counters for their own Civil War artifacts. “Hunting your martyrs?” Lievering asks.

  The boys take to him. Sometimes on weekends he goes out with them on their queer walks, which are neither exercise nor dreaming but somewhere in between, and may end up with some rusty proof that people other than themselves have lived. Tow-haired and snub, or brunette and oval-faced, these boys have the polite remoteness of their fathers, set forth in soft, murky voices still almost feminine—though their own mothers, chatting peahen high, are another version of female entirely. A code of manners sifted down from French dandies in Baltimore, British adventurers, black slave nurses and butlers, and maybe an infusion of North Carolina mountaineer, sits like armor on these boy knights who have no horse for it, though they sometimes speak of shaggy farm mounts, or the occasional birthday colt.

  The chain between each boy and his father is clear. In their grandfathers’ time, they tell him and believe, the riverbed had still been frog-pure. Under their grubby campfire hands the ground between the pushed-aside twigs is desperately old. Urgent dying still leaks from it. The scrub trees here nuzzle these boys like family furniture. Down on their knees in the leaves, they smile over their shoulders at him. War, that old status quo, is as usual again crumbling their horizon. Boys from this territory respond quicker than most.

  One day it strikes him that they’re using him as a kind of Geiger counter for themselves, for powers they think he has. They know their scraps of flintlock or cannonball better than he ever can, excitedly ignoring him when one is found. Though they sometimes sling words as neatly as tackle, they aren’t bookish. But now and then, when a boy says a thing or asks it, all of them will wait for the answer. “Roun’ heah”—one of them says now, holding up what he’s just identified as a musket strap, a piece of ossified leather at which all are staring—“roun’ heah, where it so comfortable, it ever hard on you?” The face of youth straining for knowledge must be m
ore weird than any in purgatory. Its destiny is more sure. “—Doctuh?” the boy said.

  Sometimes he almost can’t bear it—their destiny. But surely by now his company won’t add to it. Soon, though, they might not be able to bear him. Before that happens—at least he judges it so—they take him along with them to the Goddard Space Museum—and there, poking about in a file of the latest aeromedical news, he stumbles upon a series of brain-wave studies done by the space program, which indicate a possible niche for him in it. When he does qualify, he tells no one the basis for it. As he prepares to leave Richmond, the boys drop by his office singly or in pairs to tell him how “super-pleased” they are. In the documented personal pack already incubating for him on the shuttle, he’s taking a few of their exhumed knickknacks to the new world for them. If they had after all begun to tire of him, or of his halting answers, they hadn’t yet been aware of it. He’s escaping just in time.

  “We should all be such epileptics,” the team at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had agreed, examining him for the project. “If that’s what you are.” They doubt it, as other doctors have—two major attacks, only the one in the psychiatrist’s office in the British hospital corroborated as serious, though not positively identifiable. The second—the Cuban one—almost twenty years ago. “More like trauma reaction, both times.” He’s told them the circumstances of each. “Too exaggerated for trauma only, don’t you think?” one doctor argues. Has patient had no other instances? “In bed—” Lievering tells them, sometimes a stoniness he recognizes comes over him. When he’s at the nadir of aloneness, though this he doesn’t add. In this state he sees distant light ahead, and finally breaks through to it. “In dreams.” Laughter. “Wet?”

  Lievering looks patiently from one to the other of these mouths flipping his life from lip to lip. Swollen young medicos, grown fat and fork-tongued in the consulting room and the lazing air of the District of Columbia, what do they know of the need for tragedy? But he can see their medical greed.

  “Why d’ya want to go?” one asks.

  He’s already told them how after an attack or a threat of one his speech difficulty vanishes, returning only as an accompanying sense of electromagnetic confidence, charging all his muscles with good will, gradually wanes. He never uses his pauses consciously, but they guide him well. Always toward the truth. “When…I am…in attack,” he answers now, “it is like…what non-gravity…must be. I am sure of it. And…I have never been…as happy…as I am then.” He’s spoken the truth. Why should they look so stunned? And judgmental. He could have added, It takes the place of the poems. But holds his peace.

  “After all, do we want anybody out there in attack?” the same doctor who’d not thought his seizures negligible says thoughtfully. “We only need the temperament.” A tiny, bitten-off man with a navvy’s biceps bulging on the short arms sticking out of his surplice and the hands of a plump child, this doctor’s shiny brown eyes remind him of the organ-grinder who’d come once a week to their London street, though Lievering’s mother had never once tossed him money—whose eyes had been exactly like the monkey who had turned the man’s music box. Or the monkey’s eyes had been like the man’s. “We’ll let this man train,” this doctor said.

  When Lievering returned from space training, this doctor was there to talk to him. Dr. Carlucci—the head. In the interval, Carlucci had taken the trouble to hunt up a couple of the translations by which Jacques Cohen had once made his living. “Had to look up too many words,” he grunted—the standard complaint. Again his eyes reminded Lievering of the monkey’s. “But your training record aboard—my God. Suppose you’ve heard?”

  “No.” But he couldn’t help knowing how he’d soared and modulated to that state of being as if he’d been born to it, often helping out others like a good bath attendant or lifeguard. Never spilling a drop of food. Moving with the angle of vertigo, not against it. Never faulting space.

  “They say—” People hesitated with Lievering. It was catching. “They do say here, Mr. Cohen—you sometimes blurt painful things. Uncomfortable to others, that is.” The doctor scratched the report on his desk with a minute nail. He wasn’t a dwarf but only barely not. The Apennines still produced foreshortened men like him. Dwarfs were sometimes used to get into the tight corners of aeronautical assemblages under construction. Maybe they used a Carlucci to pry into the inaccessible corners of a person. “Jesus—people are still going to be themselves in space. What in heaven do those bozos expect?”

  Lievering smiled. “Heaven.”

  Carlucci sat back. “Any trouble with women, out there? Or men? No? You mustn’t-a smiled much. You’ve got quite a—physiognomy.” He poked Lievering’s chest. “Big word.”

  “I don’t mind it anymore,” Lievering said. Meaning all of it, including the jokes. As for his face, he knew it was now mostly like anybody’s. It could look better or worse.

  “And was space like that to you? Like you said? Heaven?”

  These men were such idealists, with such pale, well-bred ideas of how to reconstruct the mind. Like Dr. Larry, who had prided himself on having reconstituted his own. They never dared see that other world, of mind spitted on a pain-stick like a brochetted live bird, its sinewy nostrils filled with blood, its twisted neck a fowl’s at the moment of death, its eyes glazed with the knowledge. They think you can wipe that away.

  “Not heaven—no. But for me…as I said.” Being in non-gravity does resemble, more protractedly and mildly, what he feels at the beginning of attack. Except that he’s fully conscious.

  “You want to go back out there then? Start a new life?”

  “Start it?” What an absurdity. “A life…can only…be continued. Or…my life.” He hesitates—long. “But if you said—finish it…”

  “You ever suicidal?”

  They seldom asked so abruptly. Though death was now mentionable in the States. Formerly it had been a social sin, better concealed. Now, at his college and others, they took classes in it. As if by studying it they could beat it. “Not—so I don’t notice it,” Lievering said. Careful to smile.

  Carlucci burst out laughing. “You sure know how to talk to us.”

  “Not I. The century…knows now…how to talk to itself. Too late.”

  He never sees why what he says should be uncomfortable. Only catching on when they physically begin to move away from him.

  “Never been in non-gravity myself,” Carlucci said. “How’s it feel?”

  “I only know…how I feel.”

  “Yes?”

  The psychiatric “Ye-es?” He recognizes it. I feel marvelously afraid—dared he say that, if he wanted to go? It’s like an exercise that sweats me into a relationship with people. But the clearer he said things, the farther people retreated. And they were right.

  As usual, truth came out of him. “It makes me feel firsthand.”

  Carlucci had lowered those eyes. But he raised them again. “They said you were a real Nijinsky out there. What do you say to that?”

  Lievering leaned forward. Don’t frown so, his mother said adoringly at his side, in the window of their London house. Keep the mouth smooth, she would say, in creamy German. His lips now felt numb. “You have monkey’s eyes,” he said. “Too…full of good.”

  Yet Carlucci okayed him anyway.

  “People are always…taking chances on me,” Lievering-Cohen said.

  And your luck runs against them, or you do—is that what this monkey-man would say, with a last grind of his box? When Carlucci leaned forward, his pouty little arms curved to the table like a pair of tongs. “I like—freaks.”

  The trolley’s moving briskly now. Lying in the notched seat, feet supported, Lievering feels a carriage-child’s passivity creep over him; he’d been wheeled until he was four. Ahead of him a helmet projects above the seat back; the person wearing it is very tall. He himself is already getting used again to the peculiar majesty of being suited up, which makes all one’s gestures minimal yet enlarged, within the limits of an enviro
nment which will make most gestures nothing. One may scream murder in such a suit, or mourn the world like Samson Agonistes—and be taken merely to be wanting air. Soon his limbs won’t weigh at all. He’s waiting for that, craving it like a drug which wouldn’t end consciousness but give it a rest from being itself. Like his attacks.

  “No germ-free corridor on the training trip, was there?” the person in front suddenly calls back. “Wonder what it’s like.” A baritone voice, very American. “Seen the pictures, of course.”

  What’s it want then? Something.

  “There’ll be”—since Lievering can’t lean forward, he projects his voice—“windows.” As in a coffin, a needless expense. A modern coffin though, designed to keep him very much alive. Delight floods his muscles.

  “Ri-ight.” The voice has relaxed. “Er—Mulenberg here.”

  After a minute Lievering answers. “How do you do…” Not because of his two names. He’s simply never learned to do the quick name swap over here. That conception, too, will soon be a farce. Let them have their windows, their labels, while they can.

  “Not too far to go naow, you two, Jacques. Jawn. Yo’ group’s the layst in the tail.” The aide, trotting alongside with his final tender namings, disappears backward to a trail of other names: Tawm, Bee-yal and others too faint to catch, floated up in his soft—is it Floridian? He reappears like a marathon runner, his slug-white unarmored face oozing alongside their visored ones. Been years since Lievering has seen gardens with those huge slugs in them; they, too, are England. His imagination’s already rising, leaving behind it a planet of ever paler faces, slug-dotting a wasted Earth.

  CANAVERAL

  The tram emerges, megaphoned from the tunnel onto a wide clipped field, richly cared for. Cricket could be played here, or any of those antique games men play with quoits or bats. The sky is cruder here though, a heavy moist white.

  The large voice breaks forth again, amplified for the benefit of the millions invisibly here.