The word processor is no serious help. I should be sunk if it was. The Courier’s laboring mathematics of the wilderness, ever creakier, is enough to contend with. A machine doesn’t have failings one can love—or not eternally. While as I watch our ring-around-rosy of bent heads, inclined over their grand mals and other epilepsies or rising to the constant rhythm of their delusions, I observe that we are more tolerable for being somewhat fallible. Look at Soraya there, whose maternal fatuity we accept like a widow’s, who would stretch backward to any orbit if the boy in her could be Bakhtiary’s; look at Wert tending her, while the beads in his hand twirl toward the other wife. They are not his amethysts but a string of lucky-beans given Mole by some girl and found in his documents box, which we rifled almost at once; we are untrustworthy, too. Like you. Mole’s beans, light as aspic, float.
The military has written us off. That’s what “for security reasons” means. Wert, our interpreter there, is sure of it. Civilians are now our hope. That as you may suspect is my contribution—with the addendum that we always come in late. If food does get to siege scarcity then will we be like any hamlet with all the tribal growlings of home? For doubting our own nobility, forgive us. We prefer it perhaps to trusting you.
But that’s my last bitterness. I now come to the drills we have perfected on our own.
You must all along have been expecting me to speak of despair. We do not all experience eternity in the same way. For those of us most used to the mobility and interests of the world, there would be the silent, claustrophobic terror, the strain of hearing the unremitting tuning fork of the status quo. We all know that the note being sounded is death. But with us there is a complication. Death is an eternity of being shut away from one’s kin, and one descends to it alone. That is not our case. When we see the dark imprint on another’s cheekbone, or in the eye above our bony image, one or the other of us will talk to it.
Veronica’s game is to travel us. How many places we have been with her, all the time on our cots! She will not tour a country. She doesn’t want the cities. She is like a travel agent who will deal only in the specific place but understands our needs with singular empathy. There her art expands. We shall not forget Minot, North Dakota at dawn from a train, how after the Wisconsin flats the sour green swells which will become the badlands begin. How until then one doesn’t know that the Wisconsin dells, those quirky castellations of limestone, were a warning. At Minot, the train crawls over a viaduct. We left it there, for a plane hovering low in the bauxite stench of clouds furled around a condominium straddling the traffic of a major bridge—was it Brasilia?—where behind ranks of windows sealed like the Courier’s, the tenants strangle slowly among the cocktails, on divans laid out for the only intercourse left. And once she took us back to the motel, that grotesque Eden—though all Edens may be grotesque. We left quickly. But she doesn’t deal in warnings only; none of us does, not even I. Winding up, she always brings us to the same villages, hot and baking on a Saturday night, the beery wind from the Bejan pothouses reeking the streets, the windows broad with maternal light.
And that is the Cabin Drill.
But there’s an end to pretending places where you are. We are the outside people to you now, less than that unknown passing on the pavement beside you, hard-smelling in the armpits even though his other life is an aquarium apart. We’re like the finger-giraffes projected on the walls of childhood, for your kids when you get home to them.
When that wans our faces, Wert rises to explain. He likes us to be in the Free Room for it. It’s here, freed of our visor-bubbles and in the light gloss which part-gravity lends the flesh, that we can see, fortunately or not, how we’ve changed. Corn-rows, no matter how neat, or how beautiful the head, grow fuzzy in duration, and mouth lines hold fast (once you know what you know) like the riffle that detains the current in the riverbed and produces the gold. Jack, between shavings or between beards, has the indecisive air this gives, but his thinned frame casting its long lantern-shadow, is making its racked decision clear. Soraya no longer blooms pink as her dreams; the late-month mask of pregnancy monkeys her. Below, the new life juts. One sees that Lievering’s head, a marble bust almost freed of its putti angelhood, is a Jew’s. I am at the word processor, where Wert likes me to be. I perambulated least during our mission; duration has compensated by crippling me most. That’s fair, but I can’t much hand-notate now.
How many times I have been in such a hall! Where the speaker will lambast us, then give us hope. While the audience, come to have its own say, bears with him—the speaker being beyond their informing him. Wert will inform us of what we already know. That is what we want to hear.
He looks the best of any of us, thin, but only fined-down. Nature often allows late parents a longer span. Though he has parenthood always in mind, he will talk to us about nations. From where we are in this regard, even yawns are ingenuous. But Wert’s oratory is not the usual.
Wert’s the bellwether a country doesn’t make much of. Where you see him in government, he won’t be on top. His type used to be much seen in the law, though not anymore. It still lingers in your classrooms, that untamable refuge. He’s the one whose ideas and heart one knows by the cut of his weskit, which may have more than one hole in it. My guess is that down the ages he has always been the man whose ideas are going out.
Wert’s are nothing new. He’d learned when a stripling, he says, that we’ll think we’re the authority wherever we are. When he says “we” he means “the nation.” By the time he came here he’d been acting for years on the principle that “we” meant any nation—yet his own remains like a sinkhole in his breast. Our minds are so good, the cabin once heard him groan—in his sleep, and when Jack later asked if that excluded the military, he said, with his gray shyness at the explicit: “Those are whom I meant.” Though Wert has been born an American for close to two hundred years, it’s sometimes hard for him to be sure he is one. When he brought me for process his letter to his unborn son, I saw that this might be why he had written it.
For though there was still the Thoreau in us, he wrote, and alas Emerson, by now there were all the other waves of inspired emigrants from the stale or cruel known—that ever-hopeful diaspora. He wrote to his son as to a member of it. I saw how he approved of the Asiatics washed to us from the late wars, for bringing to the slippery hodgepodge of the way our lives were lived the industriously slim, pearly ethic of Eastern existence. Thoreau he did love, for his particularity—a man who knew what a stringbean was. Emerson he saw as a third-rate transcendentalist on the world scale, and far too responsible for our self-satisfaction, though sterling of intent in his sage’s pallid style. Of his own prospects Wert spoke guardedly. They thought him outmoded, he said. But if he lived, he was certain that new dying statehoods would be provided him.
Soldier-scholars once wrote such letters, at predawn. Though it contained much else more intimate, these remarks seemed to me the most personal. I was sad to see what he thought of Emerson, that mentor of my own youth, especially as I now agreed with him. I saw that he felt guilty; he needn’t have. He speaks only to the best in us.
When we had settled the disposition of the letter—it’s to go with this log—I dared to say I thought any son would be glad of it. On the desk-shelf the fragile papers trembled with our movement, and our destiny. Neither of us is a praying man. “I believe in correspondence,” Wert said.
I had a mentor once who resembled him. Our teacher on my own island. Because of her job she had to speak routinely and did. When pressed for her own opinion she would give it. But only of the snow-flake.
What Wert has us do here in the Free Room—is to count. Whenever you lose your bearings, the briefers at the motel told us, count. Today we did so as usual. Silently. To do this in company can be very healing. One may be counting up anything, blessings included, and there is a sense that much more is being taken care of. When the interjections come, I record. For when you come. We already know most of them.
Today Wolf’s was the first. When we lose grandeur he returns us to it. Which some at home think an illness we should evade. Careful under its weight he speaks with head in his hands, voice muffled. “—The martyrs cannot be deserted,” the processor repeats after him. “But they can be joined.”
After that usually no one speaks.
Jack keeps waiting for these meetings to be “executive.” Deafening slightly, he doesn’t know we hear him mumble: “Space is moral. Space is life. Space is—” He never finishes. We do it for him. Space is Earth.
When our counting is over, at a quiet Quaker signal which may come from anyone, we will sometimes fancy we see—not our planet, but its surrogate. How can it possibly be there at the porthole, that cheese-face floating silvery in our own atmosphere of an evening, in summer huge and lavender, while a child is falling asleep? But one day Soraya said, “Look, Hossein. The moon.”
Apol-lo. A-aa-pollo.
And that is the Free Room Drill.
The third drill we have not named. One day, we were filing into the Sick Bay, for the medic to give us our potassium. It had helped him considerably to perform these small duties and we were always creating them for him; indeed, that is how the stumbling train of our mutual kindnesses began. It is always pleasant to crowd into the Sick Bay even if briefly, a little closer than our wont. And as we each have our swig, we might be at a soda fountain. Or as Jack reminds us, with a crosshatched grin caused by the loss of two of his excellent tooth-caps to what was not food after all, or not edible, we might be modern farm animals. Whereupon we are likely to reply that if we could, we would be fauna for him. Our understanding of each other is frighteningly deep.
Just then the medic, his head in the refrigerator, begins to howl. It leaps to all minds that the midges have arrived there, but no; inside all is sparkling. The medic, hauled out in our circling arms, is counting his family, his face yellow with grief. Over and over he does it until, anthem-high, the theme of it breaks for home. It seems they depend on him to count them. But he cannot get their number right.
In these padded walls the noise penetrates us. Shelves hold injections; we have no lore. We can’t let go of him. It’s I who remember a remedy. Those sheets we wrapped Mole in before putting him in the box there? Winding sheets. We wrapped the medic as tight as we could, passing the long, serviceable cloth from shoulder to shoulder, for first we had circled him with the warmth of ourselves. So quietly do we breathe, that so far in this drill, which we practice only in extremis, the atmosphere in the Sick Bay has never yet been exhausted.
Wrapped so, we can feel the Courier lumbering on. What a ship you have after all given us. What experience. Grateful, without other means of expressing it, we feel like apostles on a vaulted ceiling, unable to inform or bless the masses come to light a candle to see us from the cathedral below.
Perhaps it is in this attitude you will find us, when you come.
What an elite we are.
That entry was to have been my last. Graceful enough. My forefinger lay rigid on its key. Just so it had stopped me in the Forty-second Street Library when, tracing down the UN’s list of objects in space, it had come to the lost ones.
But Soraya, claiming to be now in her seventh month and restless, begged to be allowed to work at a computer which apparently interprets other computers, on the now no longer noxious flight deck. Or as she says—to play with it. So far, she has found no messages from you except superannuated ones, but she continues to try to beam out. If she goes on, I must. Since then we have all begun leaving notes for her to send when she can. There is no reason why I should be our sole representative. Or this log.
Sometimes, on my way aft for the dusk’s discipline, I contrive to be the last, and nip into the flight deck. Once it had the best atmosphere of all. Now it has a faint musk of—what shall I call it?—the after-life. One wouldn’t want to be here in one’s shirt sleeves. Though it has the widest view in all the craft. I stand here in the brilliant orbit—how many times have we traveled it by now, Henry Draper? Should we be beginning to know that large star which flashes by like a Stop—and those milky ones? Send Us A Kangaroo.
Will there come a time when all except your catalogues let go of us? When will we fall? No use asking where. I have intervals, even, of finding us luckier than you. Whom can you look forward to, on your vehicle, for rescue? Some dusks I see a resemblance in our plight.
For support I look over at our graffiti, which we scrawl on a computer panel now covered with them. Veronica has affixed a pad and one of her special pens, but we are not often so neat. Those remarks inscribed earliest begin to fade. I see one which looks familiar: Disperse like a field of stars, yet cohere. Is that from Alfred Whitehead, whose parties for favored students still echoed in the Cambridge of my own day? Or from that old crock, me?
Here’s one says merely, How do we ever get to you? A wide audience once cherished Veronica for her bewilderment. Now at least she knows who you are. Here’s another one, below: On the flotation rafts of return, we shall come to you—Alas, my own scratchings here are as fatally recognizable as bell-buoys. I come from an era when alliteration was respectable. The cows of my island spoke Beowulf.
I detach a few of the more embarrassing and crumple them in my breast pocket, though disposal here grows ever more difficult. The WASTAT bins are almost full. When young, I too was of the school which my own age has brought to apogee—according to which it is their garbage which most reminds people they are real. Now our problem grows as fast as your Malthusian one. Down at the bottom of the panel is a note to you in drawing pencil from our medic, whose madness grows dearer: Your prosthetics are N.G.
Our mottoes, unsigned as raindrops, will puzzle you. Should they ever fall.
On the way deck to aft we have to pass Cabins Three and Four. The more Christian of you will grade that as our scourge. But as an old if retired revolutionary I have to tell you that such guilt lived with over a period becomes reverence—half for the punishment, half for the crime.
In the corridor, I pause. Orbiting, like any routine, causes the mind’s voice to repeat itself, yet accumulate. Suddenly a bit that is new may arrive. Like those motes we saw here. Each time I dawdle here I expect to see them, perhaps multiplied. Soraya says she would like to cage a pair, for Hossein. The future is now our joke.
I bestir myself. Forward!—to the present. I make these divisions consciously, worried that the others do so less. Reformer that I am, I am critical even of eternity. Yet compelled to describe it.
The hatch to our own cabin opens easily now but I am reluctant to enter. Once, in an antique shop in Amsterdam, a group I was with for an afternoon came upon a body-box. The owner had placed it high on a shelf where it would directly meet the eye, yet when out of a common urge, and already suspecting, we asked him what it was, he told us slyly, as if he knew it wouldn’t sell. Made in one of those tropics which handle death comfortably it was no cheap wicker or rattan but woven of sisal and modestly oval at the ends, after a satisfactory length. We each had an urge to try it, it was so deliciously to human size, yet all of us shrank back, and of course we did not buy.
That is the way I feel about the hatch, yet I enter it.
Once in the cabin, I still delay, even hunting out my briefcase and neglected note pad. There is still so much to tell you, or that you may wonder at missing; I may not have selected what you most want to be told. Quick—what about our copulations here? Two women and four men—surely there’s been a corner for it? Soraya and the medic at their midwife consultations, he a family man at lickerish ease with a protruding navel and the safe hole beneath, she trusting him to be careful, wanting for once to try a man brutally young? Veronica and Lievering, Mulenberg and Veronica—what an aphrodisiac memory is, or what a triumph for each in turn to lay the other low? And what a rhomboid, if I myself joined in, not yet so leached or sophisticate, as I had thought—and more than affectionate. Be coarse enough to imagine as people do.
I have. So must the oth
ers—and we are great hopers, all of us. Though already practiced at other solutions, or overpracticed at that one. From the beginning we were also on expedition, which fact inflected everything. We were also an enormous experiment in physical adjustment, which we are yet. My guess is that whatever would or would not have happened earlier in our journey does now, wilder in purpose then, less submerged now, but in the same pattern. As for the Werts, with a married pair one is never sure what goes on. We try to leave them opportunity but have never smelled it exercised. As the hour for possible rendezvous looms for the ship, we are busily chaste to all but that. As doubt creeps in, the other interest creeps with it; a hand may fumble for a breast, a crotch—and nowadays of any gender, duration having less of it. My guess is that the hand usually subsides. We move polymorphously here but toward the supremer emotion, whose kindness kills. Though that’s as I observe us, and by now you know my character. I copulate best with Paradise.
However Wolf’s yearnings for us don’t quite yet apply. We’re not always in chariotry here, which we should hate. Nor in the all-night sleep of the soul awaiting judgment, from which we most certainly wake. To work. To eat. Not too differently from some of you—and like you, in orbit. The movement toward each other’s mystery is the only life we know. How is it with you these days?
In one way, we are no longer representative of our planet. Down below, once you get safely past youth’s morbid death-interest, which is for most of them a quackery, your invidiously lively rivalries are often what keep you from brooding on your most certain end. But we here have only this everlasting kindness, almost a vice. In which there grows on us the conscious privilege—don’t flinch; we no longer do—of having been preselected for a companion death. Changes can come even in eternity, when it goes on so long. We have not discussed this, but I think of it. I think of how we will observe endless courtesies to each others’ wanings, to the child in us, to the skeleton.
Mysteries of Motion Page 65
