Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (39 page)

She nodded, head down. In fact, her head moved so neatly in its socket, as if following the memory of the skating on a small, neat oval of its own—had it ever moved like that before? I was filled with terror of her, for one startled moment—of her for whom until now I had had only terrors.

Then she raised her eyes and stared at me, as if only now she dared her fill of it. Then it was she who drew back.

“Let’s go home,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

I turned as if to walk at her side again.

“Go on ahead,” she said. “Walk ahead of me.”

I did so, at my glide. From puddle to puddle, their winks even more haunted now, I pondered. She had said “home,” which I knew quite well as the places here you went back to, as Jamison went back to his sons. There were places here one did go back to, or ways of trying. Although the homes moved also; I had heard her say how many she had had and how often, and I had also seen, as she said it to the cottage, the quirk of her mouth. And she and I too—were moving. Even I—who seemed so still, to
them.
We above all things here were moving onward, and did each wish the other to wait, to stay the same? No, not both of us. I told this to the last puddle. Just I.

Then I heard my name, and turned to it, thinking as always, and perhaps as you do when named:
No, there is more to me than that.

“Eli,” she said, and how hoarse that voice. “I’m always looking at you.” I saw her swallow. “You never see.”

The watching is different here. A one watches the other from afar, another who is watching not. The one who was not watching—now watches the other, from afar. What rises, the nameless third who is company, across that distance? Who stands there, shy observer, in the gap between?

S
O, THAT NEXT AFTERNOON
, you might think that when I heard the turn of the key which released me to join her, I would bound forward from the most exuberant dreams ever—not so. You yourselves have a saying, “Give him a finger, and he wants a whole hand.” And though during my whole sojourn here I had never been given much more than hope—who is?—even the slightest encouragement always at once made my hopes more precise. When we had crept into the house without another word between us, each going off to our rooms, she up the stairs, and I down the hall to my museum, it had been my hope—that for once she would not turn the key. And what advantage would I have taken of so beautiful an action?—none but to bask the whole day in the soft mallow-gleam of it, while perhaps her door lay open too, in exquisite trust. Or so I imagined, the minute the key turned, as usual, to lock me in.

Upshot of it was, I found myself utterly unable to dream at all, and after a space of distraught gliding to and fro, actually set about practicing the exercises I had so far neglected. What a strange thing is resentment—I shall never understand it, particularly in myself! In any case, I found what I had suspected; her exercises, poor dear, whether verbal, calisthenic or ideational, were not likely to set any being of my class in mutation, based as they were on a commercial humanism, the product of your social scientists. I mulled over the graphs and polygraphs with some amusement; if I was going to be as normal as this, I would be your first. We should have to help you with your conceptions of us, more than we had thought. And afterwards, we might have to help you with your humanity too.

Once you saw us, perhaps that was all that would be needed. As I paced the floor of this museum of mine—which I had begun to cherish for the way its silent masks, clay hands, weapons and other debris of your duration seemed almost a practice audience for me, your prize specimen—I brooded again on all those like-differences which you and we, cat’s cradle style maybe, nevertheless share. And which have allowed us to get together at last. But if I were going to say it all in a nutshell, as you say, how would I do it? I could say that just as you, to your eternal praise, sometimes let your poetic imagination rip wide as your yawns, we do the same with our physical ones, that where you must still machine space, we by image-making transcend it; in those realms where you cast only poems, astrologies and a little teleportation music, we have already quite matter-of-factly arrived. I could say it like that, but I could do better.
I could be the nutshell.

In the course of my meditations, whose path I strove always to keep off-oval and slightly irregular, I found myself in front of the mantelpiece, from whose marble there hung two grossly curved cherubs, the sight of whom, since I was courting prenatal influence rather than discounting it, I tended usually to avoid. I had no fear of catching their wings; they and I were on entirely different evolutionary lines. Even their fatty cheeks—and these in all directions, I could have learned, like some of you, to tolerate. But in a well-setup male, pudenda of that size would be ridiculous.

Besides which, I found your
putti
of whatever sex, with their high aims and low execution, always a little obscene, hoped your babies would do better, and indeed was never quite persuaded that these two cheese-white creatures were only marble, stone. As you may have noticed, I had a mistrust of objects, reassure myself as I might that on this planet it was not nearly so well founded as on mine. That is, it appeared that though you could control objects to a degree, or sometimes gave evidence of being controlled by them, you could not—by that image-stretch of the cells which was our newest scientific practice—
be
them.

This latest expertise, a delicate one even for us, was like all on Ours, most severely regulated; it was permissible to invade only certain classes of objects, and only certain of the elite were allowed any such performance. The rush had been enormous; one would have thought people didn’t want to be people any more—at least, not Ours. Certain sociologists had been particularly adept in temporarily transforming themselves or other beings into objects, and I—yes, I, a former poet, now confess it—had for my own purposes joined that profession. Temporarily. But my wary scrutiny of objects here, now may be even clearer. At home, some of them might have been friends.

For, our new accomplishment, popularly called “objectivity,” and being of course merely a casting ahead of images, on wavelengths of a scope and penetration some steps advanced of your own electronics—had of course nothing to do with mutation. We could transfer ourselves to the inanimate with a certain precision now, but in effect only counterfeiting what nature did to us every day, if more indiscriminately. But for us to have gone from flesh-form to flesh-form by any like transformations was still beyond us—in fact, there we were far behind you, not yet having produced, by flash methods, some of your freaks. As for regularized mutation—if it hadn’t been for millennia forbidden us, there too we’d have been like you, still dependent on the old stewpots of nature. But it must by now be clear to you that we had long since done something very drastic about that. We’d reached a form—that suited our very stringent sense of form. And then, screw
up
progress, as you would say. We had stopped right there.

No wonder, then, that our small band of travel agents, though daily gaining members, had still to do it in underground style. We were not only fiddling with mutation; we were being antiquarian about it, or so our best minds would say. So then, was it kismet or was it cosmic, I thought, moving away from the cherubs, that no sooner had I begun developing some of the feelings forbidden to us, than I found them linking me to a being who didn’t want to go back, at least not on this planet—but neither did she want to stay. A being so—I couldn’t say untrustworthy—at least not yet. But one so mercurial, so devoted to conformity without, and what looked like anarchy within—that I had misgivings whether her kind should be allowed on Ours at all.

By now, I was moving up and down the long room so agitatedly that I almost made a noise. Well, that was progress. Much as I liked the room, however, almost everything in it, if stared at
too
fixedly, might well be a hazard for the kind of progress I was after—except, of course, the bed. On it lay the Dream, my personal and singular one, as distinguished from the more traditional perturbations and
doubles entendres
I got from your books. It was of course this, that one day, say around teatime, I would entice her to enter here and there lie down with me—but thereafter it departed from convention. Necessarily. For I could see us there all right, the longer being and the shorter one, both horizontal and side by side, and if I could persuade her to take her clothes off, both of a resembling pink. So far so good, but there the categorical sympathies ended. After that, on the long couch of history, what a strangely assorted—more so than Abelard or Heloise, what a surely immortal—as much as Cupid and Psyche—
pair!

And what I planned for us to do then wasn’t at all beyond imagining; it contrarily and sadly went beyond what I wanted of it. For in usual your-style, though in my dreams I was never quite able to conclude that episode of yours I so wanted to happen, my intelligence, that damned super-ergo, was all too bloody well able to visualize what I hoped against hope wouldn’t. For I could see the two of us … And what a box we were in, indeed! Star-crossed was nothing, in compare. For, suppose I reached the apotheosis I craved? Imagine it then, as I was now doing: in the warmth of her nearness, or (dared I say it)—embraces? Yes, I did dare. In those encircling arms, suppose then (though perhaps not without many teatime repetitions, many a long, quiet hibernation in that hot-humid New Guinea conservatory)—suppose then that I would then at long last find myself to be, though perhaps not in the
strictest
ontological sequence, nevertheless … nevertheless …
budding.
Alas I knew only too well how you mucked things up here—I could not only fill in all the dots. I could fill in the spaces between these too. And it was there, alas, I found the other word, for what she would meanwhile be doing, under the onfluence of my shape. What would she be doing but
melting?
Mutation is mutual. And once again—and in vain all our heaven-floating arrogance—we would be ships that pass.

Unless—I thought of yesterday. Unless, there was a thing unknown to me, that you in turn had kept from me, that you and yours had smelled out. It might be sensible on both sides, not to reveal talents which would only confuse the situation without bettering it, in the time we had to spare—witness my power to-objectify, which was not to be done in a day. In fact, now that I knew our time scale, not in much less than a year—I should just manage it. In spite of which—I drooped at the thought—it seemed forever to teatime.

A pause in my agitations brought me to the room’s one chair, but although it was a plump lounge one, and masculinely leathered, I never sat on it. Not that I thought it
was
anybody. I had never yet sat again, either in her presence or mine, and this time not for caution but out of pure sentiment and superstition—and perhaps a little gamble. As a nation we love a long chance, and so did I, though since I had no one to bet with but myself, mine was more of a vow. I had a private bet on, not to sit until I could consider myself to be, if not a human in full panoply, at least out in the world of them, or on my way. To sit is so human. Other attributes of yours that I wanted seemed to me nearer the divine, or the animal. I was perfectly aware that besides these, you had many minor tricks of individuality as a species, plus more majestic ones, such as buying and selling—which the Ones who came after me might settle upon as your insignia, for them. A matter of taste, perhaps. To sit, at least in a chair, was mine.

And so, when I heard the key turn at last, I was still standing there. I hurried out, and at once took up my sentry post by the fireplace, even though I well knew that although in the spirit of fair play she ran to release me the minute her own practice period was over, she then returned to the bedroom for a time which might be any length, in order, as she said, to “change.” A feminine habit in the main, she said, though anyone could do it, and indeed so far it was applicable only to her costume. But how could I ever be sure, and therefore began the teatime always in a flutter. If ever I attained my full goals here, I told myself—this was the hour at which I should drink.

In default of that, it was often my custom quickly to set the tone of the evening as cozily as possible, usually with a phrase which would start us off on the topic of last night’s reading—perhaps quotations from the poets, or entire renderings of a Russian novel’s plot. The novels she criticized freely, giving me a running commentary on anything in them—from card playing to epilepsy—which might be of use to me out in the world. The poetry she listened to with her eyes rapt on the window—that is, she didn’t. Anthropology belonged to her own frequent reminiscence, and so I never read any; I was vicarious enough as I was. Chemistry, astrophysics and like, I needed to study only long enough to learn the steps you had reached, and to observe how the narrow shoe of your mind still hunted a foot to fit it. In recent weeks, I had spent most of my time—and much of it humble—in pursuit of those biologies where, whether you knew it or not, you could be master, always coming home so full of my studies that I never had to choose my gambit; it chose me.

“I have been studying the courtship of the three-spined stickleback!” might tumble from me, the minute she entered. Or, while she built up the fire or tested the blinds for blackout, I would brood for some minutes, lost on some Australasian shore where the platypus waddled, before I exclaimed, “I better have a look at Breughel again; I do wish you hadn’t stopped the milk!” Or, as on the day I first comprehended the full biology of you, I might spend the whole evening in thralled silence while she chattered, only to say to her in the tenderest tone, as we set out across the fields and she fell silent—“To think that I once envied the complex fertilization of the sponge!”

But tonight, when she entered, I said nothing, though not out of self-pride; these days I kept the sharpest, ever more self-conscious eye on my own conduct. And I knew myself to be ridiculous; this is the way you and I—
we—
are. But tonight I was quiet for another reason, and it wasn’t because, after our ice-picnic finding myself unable to read, I had no topic to draw upon. I was mute because—and this may surprise those of you more used to this curdle of events—because for once I had nothing to say. We at home were always required to have something. Until I understood the full significance of this new state, as I began gradually to do throughout that famous evening, the sensation was quite hurtful.