Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The name on his breast pocket says FRED KIM. In that grisly corridor he’d seen nicknames, tribal aliases for some of the blacks, and even flashy acronyms. The project encourages the personal touch—but keeps an encoded master list. The important thing is to be easily identifiable in space. But the name on his pocket is different. It isn’t him. His roommate Freddie Kim, two years older because of travels as a State Department brat and other early sorrows, was the one who had taken the training. Yet down below on the sidelines afterward, between studying the mockups in the museums and working out on the non-gravity training gear which a young Perdue could cadge access to, they thought they’d done pretty well with Mole. “When you get out there, though, the motto is learn, learn—” Freddie’d said worriedly. Yearn, he’d said, actually. He was tall for any part of his mixed ancestry, making his and Mole’s measurements fairly swappable, and though their racial mixes were nothing like, these made for a sort of resemblance even the school had recognized. Temperament was a horse of another color. “Now lemembah, Mo’. In space no moh joke. This one’s big enough.”

  Mole tries to laugh. The angle between upside-down diaphragm and esophagus must be wrong for it. His temples are splitting—if they don’t watch out up there on the flight deck, that point of toleration of theirs is going to get beyond him. There’s no second wind out there, Freddie says in his stopped-up ear. No second thoughts either. You have to be with it all the time.

  How long will this vehicle continue to rise? He tries to recall the manual—those infantile arrows crossing the white page he’s now on. At two seconds: The vessel will have cleared the launching pad. At six seconds: Fuel rockets burn out and drop. Into the Atlantic Ocean—or was it the Indian? No, that’s where they dump.—Six minutes: Main engines shut down. Smaller orbital engines take over. He sees them, two doll-baby turbo-maneuverers at the edge of space, nidgy nudge. Oops. Over. Into orbit. Your weight will drop to zero. 00000000.

  It hasn’t, yet. His outline still fills his couch. His straps still bind. Sequence, though, has been lost—gone with a seven-million-pound thrust. Time is in his own limbs now. He has no other vehicle. He is rising alone. The air will remain at sea level throughout. Do not hyperventilate.

  Out there, the mind grows very thin, Freddie said. Too fond of abstraction. Keep to the concrete. Okay then. His heart’s pounding like…a power mower. The grass on his family’s place in Kentucky—where the first known Perdue had been a groom, to put it gracefully—is blue. As in a Van Gogh. Whose madness seems to him worn out. Once it had been so coveted that it had been put in children’s bedrooms. His. Utrillo, at the other end of matters and in the front hall, stank of the false peace made out of one persistent village street. Every century makes its own madness and then makes peace with it, his father says. Making his own. Of course they’re all busy now totting up their century. Keep away from fathers this century said, early on. Well, he’s doing that. He begins to laugh. He chokes.

  “Don’t swarrow—” Freddie said, watching him work out on the space simulator. “Roll your tongue.” Loll it, he meant. How can you, from upside-down-sideways? He’s going to choke to death. In the holds of old schooners, old storybooks, cargoes shift, bilges drown. Breakers smash over the poop deck and onto the unused lifeboat. And stowaways die. No matter how rich in privilege. Die in dark green pools of second thoughts.

  He’s not died. He’s merely going to be sick. All over his nice new suit. Speed may induce peristalsis the book says, with a complete failure of style. Means your guts veer ahead of you and have to be convulsively repossessed, about every three sees. Count—the briefers said at the jolly motel; when in danger of losing your bearings, count. Okay, Mole. Count motels. Can’t be too many like that one. Better still, imagine yourself with a girl. Last summer’s French one. Who made love at high decibel but would never thou him. Alleging that her aunt, who wouldn’t approve, was in the next room. Which the aunt turned out to be, concrete enough to make tea for them.

  Soyez le bienvenu, M. Mole.

  For surely his body ship is leveling. The cabin, which he seemed to have left so far behind, is catching up with him, enclosing him again with its warm accordion. Slowly the horizontal reenters his veins, like bliss. Like the warm brim of milk held out to delirium. You’re no longer a reversed clot of consciousness, rushing the dark. Loll your tongue now, Moleson Perdue, Jr. Breathe.

  He’s forgotten the information panel. Up there in the sight of all. What he wants is that lighted part in the middle. Two words on it; he sees that much. ON COURSE. But the meaning won’t register. Temporary dyslexia due to deoxygenation. In some individuals. He’s grateful for that last. As an individual. A chimp must feel like this, confronted with the alphabet. Is he aphasic, too? “Abbadabba—” he croaks. “All Gaul is divided.” No, he can understand what he says, and hear himself faintly. His ears are open, hearing the hiss of the pressurization system. Soon his brain will reopen too, and read. He doesn’t have to wait for it. He knows where he is. He looks down at himself. He is floating against the straps.

  Superfly, the vehicle, is still keeling, but less and less. Soon he’ll be sitting at almost the same angle as in his scull on the Chesapeake. Turtle haven’t been in the bay since his waiter great-grandfather served soup made of them in the dining car from Philadelphia to Wilmington, at thirty-five cents a plate. Oysters are coming back to it. Keep things concrete. A sob-bubble escapes him. The window on his left is such a stately Magna Carta of the skies he can’t look at it. A giant hand, placed at the small of his back like a generation of physical education instructors, is pushing his shoulders square. Not courage, just the effect of non-G.—the muscles in his back reacting to weightlessness. Feels like that long, gondola glide when you’re coming down from sex; Fred was right. Except that you never land, kid. You’ll grow used to it.

  Oh land, Superfly—on land! Reel the film backward, so that he can walk out of this theater, rubbing his eyes. But that window’s stubborn. Traced with God’s own holograph. Give it the stare anyhow—a young man who’s met Gilpin. He wants to smile, but his face has disconnected. Do not disorient. You are in float. The kinesthetic connect between body and will is different. He has the illusion now that the vehicle is static. This mean they’re out of orbit and on their real way? He knows they’d’ve had to get free of circling Earth in order to beam their way to the living-station. But then, what about space being curved? A curve so vast it seems straight—still, no one’s ever mentioned it. He does know for sure that when they lifted off the acceleration doubled his weight, and that now he must have almost none. And that’s about it.

  At least he no longer has the illusion he is the vehicle.

  Truth is, he can’t seem to retain that sort of fact verbally. Okay, he’d rather experience them, and maybe in time they will stick. “The facts fly from me—” he’d loftily told the exasperated Freddie. “Must mean I’m a real citizen of space.” Nothing doing, Fred said, that day he got back from training. “You just refuse any flight fact. Any scientific fact, almost. Like it came from idiots.” Then they burst out laughing, enormous gasps which flattened them to the ground, where they lay erupting chuckles until the museum guard came over to them. Gad ap the floor. “My friend has an exhibit here,” Mole said proudly. “A space environment. He won a contest on it.” Which was so, but didn’t prevent them from having these bouts of laughter wherever they went. When together, their blood ran pure amusement. At what the world was, which in spite of all delighted them, and at what it would be if they could just get it out of the hands of their parents in time. “The fact is—” Mole observed when they were out of there, “that you pronounced the r in “flight” perfectly. Just like an l.” And they burst out again.

  There was no hard reason for Freddie’s accent, which wasn’t always stable, though never assumed. His parents, both born in the U.S., spoke English perfectly, as had he until taken back to Seoul at the age of eight by his feminist-dramatist mother—who then abandoned him to her mother,
the repatriated widow of a Korean émigré to New York who’d made a fortune in vegetables. At the age of eleven he’d been bought back by his own father, by then an illustrious architect passing through on a tour of acclaim from his semiancestral Tokyo. “Acquired at gleat cost,” Freddie’d said, twinkling, “to go lound the woh-hld with him. My accent’s a somatic defence, my father says. That means—from the body cells.” He smiles. “My father’s a little, bowing man who moves huge buildings about like pebbles, to keep people from noticing.” “What difference does that make?” Mole said. “Your father’s good.” Since Fred’s mother—who Fred said had an ego as snaky as her neck—certainly wasn’t, but Mole’s mother was okay, he and Mole were more or less even on the parental scale. They’d never needed to discuss what they meant by “good.”

  Look at the window now, Mole. It’s only space. You’ve heard talk of it since you were born. Never questioning what was meant by it. Nor had the talkers, in their hip circle no longer even saying “outer,” once that had been taken over by the amateurs. Space was what they wanted certain things from. Not bothering to enumerate. When he’d wanted something from it, he’d gone straight to them.

  He spent his infancy at the knees of top NASA personnel, including even a couple of the aging first astronauts, and knows how they love jokes—indeed have to have them, if they’re wise. Tom Gilpin’s name is anathema to all that crowd; that’s how Mole first became interested in him. To a boy reared in the clockwork suburbs of Alexandria, Virginia, and the capital’s white miles of near-monument, Gilpin’s island youth, of which everyone Mole’s age knows the details, is real beyond hope—a father who was a fisherman! His own father he regards as one of the smart ones, yeah, but fatally clobbered by having thrown in his lot with the government, when he could have stayed an honest solo scientist.

  Mole understands well enough how his father’s mixed blood might have contributed to his ambitions, even if Mole’s mother—who is an eighty-eighth cousin of Freud and constantly improving upon the connection—hadn’t already explained this to him, her verdict on Mole himself being that he has no color feelings at all. She thinks that everyone, of whatever color or colors, should have the feelings which go with these—for guidance in life. He does have one such feeling, out of kindness concealed from her, which tells him she can say this only because she’s white. As well as being committed to explaining his life to him before he gets to it, which he’s neutralized by shunting her off onto his sisters, who needed that sort of thing until they married, which both now are, to young NASA men. Physically he’s a gangling version of his mother, who has the crimped-gold hair and fair skin of some Viennese Jews, though the long shape of his handsomely wooled skull and the way his snub profile is indented there are, like his father’s, faintly African.

  He knows his father idolizes him. He has done his best not to make conscious or unconscious use of it. Yet he knows he’s here because of it, as much as to follow Gilpin, his own idol. If the two idolatries interconnect, which his mother has now and then pointed out, then he thinks he’s made rather a neat response to all that—which, when his father learns of his presence here and burns up the wires to talk to him, it’ll be Mole’s turn to explain.

  If there’s time, which he sincerely hopes there will be. Because the real reason he’s here is, he has an inkling something might happen to this ship. Or to put it another way—if something unforeseen or accidental does occur, his father and other NASA conservatives, while never conniving at such an event, mightn’t be averse to seeing such a project, with such a passenger list, make an example of itself. Expensive, but they’re used to that. How many times has he heard them hold up their flagship answer to expense: For the sake of future times.

  So, Tom, I felt I had to come. So I did what you wrote you were doing, in The Sheet. Went down the white and walnut offices. So did I, all except Dad’s, which you described so well. In all the other ones, though, I did what I’d so often watched him do. Kept it simple and spoke the truth—only not necessarily all of it. “Dad can’t know about it,” I said, “because of that man, Gilpin.” The smart ones just nodded, screwing up their eyes. The dumb ones said, potato-in-the-mouth, what I’d only had to hint to the others: favoritism would be alleged. All the way, Gilpin, your name was almost enough. Plus maybe a little credit for me, Mole, as a regular guy who wanted to join up early. From these men he’d grown up with. “So you want to go. So, the admiral—Uh-huh. What’s your friend’s name?” A tough bunch, his father’s boys. When he got out of there, respect welled up in him, for his father, too.

  What he’s afraid of is that he may want to be a hero more than a good boy should.

  The view from where he emerged that day had been part of his childhood and had grown with it. He’d always left these offices from the back. He was in the office yard, one of the atriums which often serviced government architecture there, sparing the Parthenon fronts. Pipes coiled from some basement hernia and went in again, thickly wrapped. Hydrants rose to brass caps on which he had often sat. Where foundation granite met gray earth, iron oxide fringed it like brown fern. Cellar door housings had wooden lids that flapped back as if for dogs. There was the mournfulness of retreated functions, to which nobody paid mind. The undisturbed air had a prism lightness. On the open fourth side, an aerial view of whatever the observer was tall enough for. In the foreground, for years, only an early print of a rectangular park of trees, dotted separate and from there the size of burrs, beyond these, green dales shrubbing an observatory dome soft and rosy as a mushroom, in rain or shine. Now, greater Washington was his, in a glorious, marble-reflecting sky, where even he its son could not always tell cloud from monument.

  Come to think of it, none of the men propositioned had laughed.

  “I’m laughing—” Mole says low, then stronger. “I’m laughing.” He’s sitting up now like a baby righted by its nurse. The sun at the window is a huge porthole of glare. I’m a barnacle getting a free ride on the universe. Glee shakes him. Freddie, by now in Osaka getting ready to build two houses—one “for quietude,” near the National Park and in the style of the old catabolist school whose disciple he is, but also one house “for protective emulation,” out on the highway and in the style of the sewer-pipe architects—can no longer share the joke. Fred has settled for the ground, Mole for the air. They’d always known they would separate, but not in what style. From now on we have our own jokes is all, Fred said, saying good-bye to him at the airport and handing him the book on the catabolists which is in Mole’s documented luggage. Wonder what style is that motel you’re going to? Let me know. Then for once the laughs hadn’t burst out.

  It’s because of architecture that he’s here. Because Kim’s father—Eminent Kim, as Fred fondly calls him—had smelled a rat. A rocket buff from way back, at first he’d been all for Fred’s going on the Courier. “Our firm did some of the industrial design for the living station,” Fred said. He would never say “habitat.” “We ought to keep a Kim foot in the door. My father went to see your father about it.” Both boys know how Washington business is done. “But, Mole…” Fred’s always very sober when he speaks of the firm, but this is more. “Yes, Fred?” He doesn’t like to think of the two fathers together. “I’m to go for training, Mo’. Why not? It’s a plus. But whether I go on the Courier’s maiden voyage afterward—is watch and wait.” Why? Something wrong with Mole’s father’s baby? Oh no—Eminent Kim says Commander Perdue’s team has done a fine job there. “Admiral,” Mole says, “he got for it. So what’s wrong?” The project itself. Somewhere it’s a bummer. What Fred’s father had said more precisely was: “There’s bad architecture there somewhere. Not on the drawing board maybe. But in the head. Or the heart.” From a Kim, bad architecture was the worst that could be said. “I’ll find out,” Mole said. “Go to one of Mother’s teas, if I have to.”

  In the worst of the hot weather Mole’s mother handed out paper fans with the drinks. She said it made the gossip more informative. “Ah, Mole dear
.” For two months he’s had his own place, on the proceeds of a summer job. The crowd has changed; it always does. But the tiny, packed house makes for classic parties. Amazed, she watches him take a drink, a fan. “Want me to help serve, Ma?” As a knobby-knees he often had, though she’d never prettied him up. Sadly smiling, she shakes the gold head people think she dyes. She and his father still make love and have no other lovers, no matter what is said. But she likes to watch others finding them. “Ah, Mole, if I’d known you were coming—there’s not a soul here your age.”

  There isn’t, but over there was the Eminent Kim. Neither he nor the gray-blond civilian talking to him is fanning. If you are a five-foot Oriental among all these gung-ho ramrods, perhaps you don’t. But the other man, an Anglo type with a British suit and finish to him, but an American, who must be in State, maybe a Secretary, for few foreigners come here—what’s he doing with that string of beads crawling through his hand? The Kim has nice manners. “This is the son of the house, Bill. And my son’s friend. Mole, do you know Mr. William Wert?”

  “Worry beads,” Wert says, seeing Mole’s look.

  “Get them in that headshop, here in Georgetown?” Which sold all the casual machinery of meditation. When Mole was thirteen he’d bought a Turkish water pipe there.

  “Inherited them.” Under his linen jacket, Wert’s wearing one of those transparent embroidered shirts from the Philippines. But the type he is, he could wear a monocle, too, and get away with it. “Cool me off better than a fan.”

  “Beautiful.” Kim hands back the smoky purple beads. “See you’re wearing a barong. Wish I had the nerve. I’m the only man here in my native dress. A dark suit.” Kim smiles instead of laughs. But that’s where Fred gets his mirth from. “So, Bill. You liked the designs for the living station.”