Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  In that country farthest behind him, his childhood, those who were confronting death, or often only life, were often persuaded to partake of a little liquid refreshment beforehand. Women awaiting their time were especially urged to it. He is bringing his wife a beer.

  Veronica studies her breasts. They’re small cone shapes with large nipples, puffed now, which purse at her like the sly lips of neighbors. So that’s it, huh—she’s tired of the ethical life. As led alongside of friend Tom. While saving their lives for their memoirs.

  But who’ll she choose? All—and/or none?

  She reaches over to pat Hossein Bakhtiary Wert to be, child of many mothers, still in his seed-pouch turn. Soraya herself seems asleep, her mouth wide though not gullible. According to her, they are brought up to begin anointing their bellies and sides the minute they’ve slept with a man—pardon, the man. The nipples can wait until conception.

  All right, then. She gives each of her own nipples a tap for its trouble and begins buttering her belly. By rights she should have begun at fourteen. Her child will have many fathers.

  Soraya’s not asleep. Her eyelids are quivering.

  “Go on, look,” Veronica says. “The past makes all of us whores.”

  4

  THE VIEWING

  PASSENGERS KNOW A LOT already, but never trust their own expertise. Even any old mother who’s never flown has had a pursuit in heart from the beginning, or a flight. Even Wert’s son has already begun his brilliantly designed impulsion toward the light. Wert, a tense sleeper, inches vainly in his restraint bag, worn during the shift that is night. One can’t toss in it. But if he lies yoga-still he can woo to him the arch of the Foget couch. Semi-awake, he rides the balance line between the expertise floating him on, and his own. Ahead of him, Seats One to Four—Mulenberg, Oliphant, Cohen-Lievering, Gilpin and, behind him, Soraya, do the same. He wakes.

  In the other civilian cabins of the Courier, what are they doing? How little they’ve merged with this cabin’s consciousness. No wonder Soraya doubts the existence of those other small, six-sided worlds. If that they are. He sits up, yearning for tea.

  ON COURSE

  Each hour of that colophon, once so reassuring, is more impatiently unacceptable. The end of a journey as it nears always downgrades the journey itself. But that won’t account for why their long-promised intramural viewing of the spacecraft has been shunted into the scant prayer time before breakfast, or why their whole schedule has been telescoped. Two civilian administrators-to-be here, and neither of them told what-all—a divide and conquer habit of government which his old boss Nosworthy, a one-time Rhodes scholar, used to call bye-fellowing—a bye-fellow being one belonging to the college but not a member of its foundation. Wert’s been arguing in his head with Nosworthy for several days, asleep and awake. After a lifetime of reports to that silent interlocutor he still hopes that the actual Nosworthy, long vanished into retirement, is alive somewhere. Arguing with the dead is unprofitable.

  Wert pulls a nozzle from his armrest and drinks. In his and Soraya’s documents box is the brigadier general’s collapsible traveling cup he’d sent to Madame in Switzerland, found in her effects after her decease. Soraya, intent on her son’s American heritage, had insisted on bringing it. He stares at the nozzle, as it retracts. Unlike most objects he’s been used to, it doesn’t stare back. It has no historical past, to help make it real. An air of exaggeration always attaches to the real—only look close enough at people with noses, gas stations and foreshortened dogs. The norm is seldom very natural.

  On the Courier the case is the opposite. Such an exaggeration lies at the core of the life possible here that every execution of it has had to be routine. Surfaces repeat themselves so steadily that it becomes useless to observe them as distinct. Even people are lessened. The pull of space is the main feature of every face. On his arrival at the living-station, his first trip out, he’d been disturbed to see that same muzzle on all faces waiting at the dock. He’d assumed that the larger rotor movement inside of which they lived would have relaxed them. Instead, each face is prognathous with intent, as with those aborigines for whom each moment is a gamble with the gods.

  Indeed, Nosworthy, you’d have recognized us—as well as an old process. As Wert toured a wheel station twice as far from the sun as the Earth, yet made of ferronickel or asteroid, and currented by thermal prime movers, with refrigeration rooms for ice and oxygen cannily deep in the shadows of the rear walls, while other competences beyond his ken swarmed toward him in the Aztec light, he still thought: colonial?

  Recalling certain specifications from his days with Ordoobadi’s company, he’d primed himself to watch for bombs hung on what had been called “Ross-Smith arms,” or rather to ask for them, since as defense ordnance they might be on the outer surface only. “Ross-Smith?” the commander leading him around said. “Not for years.” Remembering that bland face, Wert understands the quality Dove and his crew have been picked for. The best colonials were like the sturdiest equipment, not rare but satisfactorily routine. That’s why he, Wert, won’t do.

  Indeed, Uncle, they’ve done their best here to remove all drama from us, so that, as deliverably tailored packets of consciousness we may better enter and exit what NASA calls the “man-machine relationship in space.” Any irruption, if it comes, will be that much more exaggerated. When it comes. Life having no obligation to teach us anything useful about life. Not in time to use it, like say—an old cup.

  “Sleepers, awake!” Wert calls out. He’s taken to doing this each “morning.”

  Everybody is except Soraya, who lives in sleep these days as in an old surplice. Gently, having to get up and step behind his own couch, he lays a hand on her cheek.

  Up ahead, Gilpin bursts out laughing. The screen, which he’s always watching, now says THE VIEW. After a pause it corrects itself, adding the ING.

  Mulenberg yawns. “Wish to God I had some cologne.” His head looms over his seat-back. “Whatsit you have on, Oliphant?” Lately he calls her that. “Smell it all the way from here.”

  “Cocoa butter. Soraya lent me it.” Her voice is lazy, deep in her chair.

  Soraya laughs.

  Yes, there’s a new intimacy here. Office party at Christmas. End of summer, the yacht club. Leaving Soon. Is he mad to think this, considering where they are? Not at all. It’s our way.

  For Lievering is saying, “Unser Gott im Himmel. Kaffee.”

  They can smell it above their own odor, which isn’t a rank stench but a blanketed one of vinyl linings, bagged urine and sweat nullified.

  Tuohy the medic, a Galley Wipe adhered round his crown pirate-style, is bearing in one of his plastic unmentionables, on it a row of the covered cups they collect their own test-specimen in. Gravity’s waiter himself, he lays the other hand’s forefinger against his nose. What’s wafting from his tray is no school-smelling emulsion. There’s one of him at every Embassy, and at least one of these celebrations. Wert’s reminded of a picnic at the base of Mt. Ararat, trundled over the Azerbaijani border with a load of nun bread, Jamison whisky and Kraft cheese from their post, and met by their compatriots from the Turkish side with Coca-Cola, a box of French almond-dragées from Ankara and a roast kid. Plus a tent, borne all the way by the beaming newest young guy from home, who when complimented, for the sun was fearsome and their side had only hats, said modestly: It’s our way. “And sugar—” Tuohy says. “And—well—cream.” He indicates the packets.

  They all take it black. The old statement floats out like a caroling. The brew is strong, wineberry of their own earth.

  Lievering, standing, has drunk up. Is there more? He whispers it. There is, though not enough for all. The ladies are served again. Wert watches the long Oliphant arm reach out, hand its portion to Lievering. Blinking back tears, he accepts.

  Wert’s own cheek is damp. Whatever, they’re not going to down us. We’ll live in the little particulars, no matter from what source. So softened, or weakened, he awaits the viewing. A rum
or that home will see it at the same instant has circulated from somewhere forward. The medic has gone. “I wonder—”

  “What?” comes from Soraya behind him. But hers is only a murmur, marital.

  What the social tenderness is, where it stands among the emotions? Between charity, and what else?—that brush with another which the gruffest of us must have. Which behind all the avowed reasons, even to a reform bill for humanity and to giving birth without pain, he believes has brought all of them here. The emotion under all the rest, though he would never say that to this wife. Such reflections are for his other one. “I—was wondering whether there was a medic like Tuohy sent to every room.”

  “Room? No one’s ever called this cabin that before.” Veronica makes her laugh intentionally crude. Why does she do that, and as if she herself doesn’t know?

  It occurs to Wert that he now knows the people here like a member of a congregation. From which, like any found wanting in loyalty, he may be about to be dispossessed. For who knows better than he that in even the smallest of statehoods the wise neither criticize the facts nor predict them? Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon—as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.

  Why should he have shouldered so early the burden of statehood, and of his country’s virtue, as the true burden and virtue of his own life? Was it the Pledge of Allegiance, said solemn and breast-crossed in the sunlit classroom, with spring flickering outside on the Civil War monument? Or the stunted primer, with its echoes of Edmund Burke. Or the old canvas of a family member obscurely at the Treaty of Paris, whose vast white-weskited abdomen hung in the dining room at the level of young William’s eye? It had had a hole in it.

  “Hey, Mole—” Veronica says, “come on in.”

  Mole, swanning in his long neck, follows with the gosling rest of him. “I—just wanted to check. Seen anything yet?”

  “Have you?”

  “No, sir.” He still calls Wert sir. “Hear they’re going to show us the official film of our own liftoff. Before they show us the whole ship.”

  “So we’re in touch again.”

  “I believe so, sir.” Mole’s no longer debonair. “Cabin Two’s not talking.”

  “Or whistling?” Though Gilpin gets messages, he’s not been forward since the first day, nor invited.

  “Take my seat, Mole.” Lievering gets up. “I’m going forward.” There are no spare seats in Cabin Six.

  “Or—mine?” Gilpin says, hesitant. He knows he’s a liability. “You’ve both been on EVA.” He admires them for it. He’s not a man who despises the prowess he doesn’t have. “Must be tired.”

  “Not Lievering—” Mole says. “He thrives on it.”

  “Find anything?” Wert asked.

  Lievering turns. His eyes glitter like the eyes of racing drivers when lifted from their cars at Le Mans. They already have a view in them. “Nothing to repair.”

  “The tile—” Mole said. “I saw it. Nothing wrong with it.” Like most of the young, he loiters well. He’s come to be with them for the viewing. It’s touching, how at any crisis he prefers to be in Cabin Six. But Wert can’t offer. His place is with his wife. This wife, a distant blue-eyed voice reminds him.

  “You can have half my seat,” Veronica drawls.

  They all hoot, except Mole. A Foget couch can’t be divided.

  Soraya stands up. “I am going to the bath. No, Mole, my pleasure. Sit here.”

  “Go on, Mole. She doesn’t want to see.” Wert stands up, putting an arm around her. Up to now he’s been careful not to emphasize their coupledom. He stares down at his brown-eyed wife, admiring both his wives for the rhythmic instinct with which they use self-sacrifice.

  “You will tell me.” She starts forward. “And, Veronica, you change seats with Wert. Mole won’t mind the smell.” Her merry look has the iron mirth of ranks of matchmakers behind it.

  They both do as told, just in time. The video, unfolding to wide lens, no longer looks bumbling. Used to its single-line clichés, they are awed, ready to meet themselves.

  The camera begins like any travelogue, lyrically scudding coastlines, bridging alps. Its intention is at once plain—to dismiss the Earth. But on that they aren’t amateurs. Isn’t that Italy’s San Marco Platform?…That’s off east of Kenya, only for satellites Ah—Thumba Equatorial Rocket-Launching Station, India…Mar del Plata, Argentina, or used to be. Where the joint Apollo-Soyuz with the U.S.S.R. was launched, back then…The U.S.S.R. does not appear. Australia does. And now again they are at sea. No ships. Cloud.

  “Europe has disappeared,” Wert says, with wry intention. Not even Gilpin bothers to echo him—for here they are: NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. A President picked it. They circle it, long enough for Oliphant to whisper, They lost a piece of our action, Mole; they’re no longer set to bring us in.

  And now—why it’s Greenbelt, Maryland, where we first started sending hopeful signals to other worlds. One of the symbols they, send, Wert remembers, resembles an ankh. “Much bigger installations now in Arizona,” he hears Oliphant mutter. “But other worlds have not yet come forward.”

  Cabin Six falls still. Back and forth we go, along our own dear country’s edge, the rest of the world annulled, as in any love affair.

  “There it is, from the sea,” Gilpin breathes. “Gantry Row.”

  It is a beautiful coastline. Flocks of birds. They approach at dusk.

  “What are those shapes?” Lievering says. “I never saw anything like.”

  “Lost EVAS,” Gilpin answers. “Look.”

  The camera is slow and grand now, hovering in a magnificent sunset. Below they spot a kind of ladder, with ungainly squares at its sides. They near it. They pass it. “Crawler Transport to move the old Saturn V rocket,” Oliphant says. “Only about forty feet high. They called it ‘The Train Wreck.’ And there, that tiny job, the old Lunar Model Mission-Simulator, I think.”

  Mole says softly, “I been in it. You can move the moon’s landscape past you by the controls.”

  The thing is full of birds. So is another ancient sculpture, pretty with vines. Gilpin and Oliphant exclaim at it.

  “What the—” Mulenberg rouses himself. “Can’t they find anything better?”

  “Model of the old Vanguard dud,” Gilpin said. “Blew the men up on launch pad. Don’t think the camera realizes what it’s looking at.”

  Mole says softly: “They’re photoing the birds.”

  “Twenty miles of Teflon-coated wire were in it,” Oliphant whispers clear. “Water-glycol system to protect on reentry, from the intense heat. Glycol’s corrosive, and its dry residues are combustible. They also used non-certified paints, epoxy and tape.”

  “How do you know all this, Ronchen!”

  The two back couches are silent. It must be the endearment makes her hesitate. “I wrote an article on it.”

  The camera is now taking them into fog. “Maintenance crew of the Vanguard were overworked,” Oliphant continues in a drone. “And said to have been drinking cleaning alcohol, ninety proof. Afterwards, a leftover wrench was found in the spacecraft. According to the House Investigation Committee.”

  “They are very proud of still having the birds,” Mole said.

  “I find you two—uncalled for,” Mulenberg said. “Your attitude.”

  “The report was called NASA Oversight,” Veronica said.

  On camera, the lights of a great, sweeping peninsula are now below.

  Wert says: “Now, now, folks. Here we are. Canaveral.”

  Once again Gilpin notes the dish-antennae on their triangular turrets. “We go much deeper in space, they’ll have to radio-impulse symbol language to us.”

  Mulenberg snaps, “Now then. Merritt Island. Four miles from the sea. And there’s the new VAB.”

  “Pardon?” Lievering.

  “Vehicle Assembly Building. The Courier was put together in it.
You could fit a pyramid in it. Or a whole thunderstorm. Or that new piece of ordnance called ‘The Blind Boy.’”

  “Whatever for,” Mole says.

  “To blow up troubled rockets, for one thing.” Her voice comes low and rich.

  “Troubled?” Mole says.

  Can’t stop the two of them, Wert thinks. It’s a wooing. Do civil administrators do the marrying? Not that those two would bother, but on habitat there’ll be chapbooks for conduct. All the rulebooks of the world, to be done again. He should groan, yet it dazzles him. A clean slate. He should know better—he does. Yet it shimmers before him. That white hero-hall of the human mechanism, with all the old inscriptions coming on again, slow.

  “Here we are,” Mulenberg says. “That’s whatever for.”

  On the screen, the launch pad is still empty, the Courier not yet arrived. The pad is a concrete base which has been compared to a Mayan temple. Any craft on it will stand slightly above terrain. Underneath is the flame deflector, brilliant yellow. Nearby is the gangling service tower and its companion gantry, red and clumsy, though with a white room inside. Those huge tanks in the distance store fuel. Those asbestos ones are for viewers. And rescuers.

  Here it comes: The Roll-out. Theirs.

  Looking out from Mission Control, there would be no human scale by which to measure it. The way soldier ants look, huge, crawling a white asphalt day in summer Georgia, with the street cleared by the sun’s cannon. Inch by inch now, slow as lava, the towering mass. In its blind self-knowledge it is not unlike a waterspout. When did it stop? For it has stopped.

  How it and we loom. Universe, accept us into your quantity.

  The dawn is behind us. The view is from the east.

  WE HAVE LIFTOFF

  Someone in the Firing Room back there must have said that. It sounded like surf.

  They watch themselves soar.