Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (41 page)

So, each to each, we had our dinner. The village faded, the truck also; we came to a wayside station. We had a mother, babe in arms and three children, like paper cutouts that faded where they stood, and still stared.

“This is Shartlesville Corn Pudding,” she said, looking down at what she was still eating. “From an old family recipe. And bacon drippings in the lettuce. I cook Dutch.”

We had a dead body with the salad. It was then she smashed down the tray.

If it were a simple mystery, a single one, I was thinking, perhaps I could understand it. Surely they could be taught to manage it that way, or perhaps I could teach them. Surely this they could manage here—only one by one.

Then I saw that the tray had fallen and I could do nothing. And she said, “Don’t … it’s nothing. Don’t bother.” As if I could. “I was just clumsy,” she said and half bent down to pick it all up—and then didn’t. And then tossed her head and walked over to me where I stood, silent at the mantel. And then put her hand a little way out to touch me—and then didn’t. But I felt it. Like the other times, it burned. But it burned like a thought, not a feeling. We stared across it, as if we had between us but one large eye.

I thought she said to me: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.

I thought I said to her: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.

Then she was at the tray, kicking the remains onto it with the point of her shoe, and there were no remains for me to bother with, except later when I read about madness I understood it. It is a budding in the mind and a melting. It is a mutation that hasn’t been asked for.

And then, outside on the road, a car door slammed.

And then the bell rang.

We had so few doorbells and telephone calls in our life these days that both of us looked at the television, but it had passed on now from war, and was quietly grieving out the stock market quotations. She crept toward it, and turned it off. “Who do you suppose that is?” she whispered. “Nobody comes round here, this hour of the day, who could it be?” We had had a peddler whom I had been too late to see. Today was Thursday. The week’s delivery, the post and the meter reader had all been. At these specified times I was required to go at once to the museum and stay there until the all-safe, but now I stayed where I was, the tumult of nothing-to-say meanwhile so loud in me that it was like a wind which took the place of speech.

“The lamps!” she said, crouching toward the nearest one, then stood abashed. While we had been at our dinner-share of all the things in the world that could be happening simultaneously, on our side of it we had been moving forward into the shadows; outside, the blue light had moved on to that deepest Prussian-colored moment before the dark plunge. Inside, I was the only lamp. And the blind of the small window was up.

I suppose there must always have been pulsings of mood, dimming of hesitation, which even in me told their story. She knew at once that I was not going to hide.

She stole to the window, and stretching her arm as if her wraps dragged on it, silently inched down the blind. We heard someone stamp and shuffle on the square of paving stone that served for a porch, overhung with a lantern, just outside.

I could feel how it would be to be waiting there, the snow coming down like a blessing, or if you looked into it, like an akimbo whirling of worlds. In the clear marvel of the air, the planets swung in their perihelions. I could feel how it would be to shuffle the foot and stamp it, to breathe planets through the nose.

“Stand back!” she whispered. “If you aren’t going to hide. Look alive!” As I did so, drawing the light well away from her, she peered through the seam between blind and window. I saw by her face that the seam had let something in.

Then we heard it again, the bell, and again, as if it were teaching someone that sad, virtuoso song.

“Will you not go in?” she said. “So I can answer.
Are
you alive?”

Most curious, how I could not yet myself make insults aloud, yet could take them into me, making my own non-answer, which seemed joined with the non-answered bell outside. And it seemed to me that I felt my blood. Does the running of the blood answer only to the barb?

“Maybe I should ask him in,” she said. “To tell me for sure that you are. Should I?” She came a little closer toward me. “Eli?” She whispered it. She put out a hand, minimally. “No, don’t,” she said. “Hush. No, I know you are. Hush.”

“Hush,” she had said, and “No, don’t”—and I had not said a word. I looked down at myself. It was my light which was speaking. Was this how it had been in the beginning, here? Out of the primordial, the blind mouths rising, of beings not found yet by their own blood. Over the watery acres of the young world, a phosphorescence of being, which is light? So that, world to world, being to being, mouth to mouth, in the end it is all the same?

I watched her slip the lock so that she might enter again. She opened the door, glided outside, and shut it behind her.

And now it was I who crept to the seam and applied my vision to it. I couldn’t see her at all, where she must be pressed against the door, but by the light of the hanging-down lantern I could see the whole of the paving stone—often too had I glided there!—and … him. Now I recognized him. He was the second head. He was different in face from the milkman, but my shrewdness told me he would have his own prototypes somewhere. I looked him over from top to toe, but he did not see me, seeing only her. Did I want to be him? As with the milkman, I had a struggle—always this empathy!—but again I came out on top, or at least—alone. Then he spoke.

“It’s I,” he said. “I saw the light.”

Oh glory. He had said it; she had heard it. I was alive. To see and be seen was the double glory here too. And I had crossed over. I was visible here, fully and forevermore. Whatever wounds came of it, I was alive.

Her reply chilled me. I knew that dry rustle. “Philosophical?” she muttered. “Or electrical.”

Wounds come quickly here, but this was intended not for me but for him. What had she against him; what had they all? At the edge of the blind—good seam, kind seam!—I scrutinized him, thinking that if she invited him in, even if to stay and live with us, I should not mind. He would be a third, but the kind that is company.

But I heard her murmur that she expected to be leaving; she would write.

And then for a moment I saw her taken in his grasp. Mouth to mouth, all beings are light. I saw it.

Then I heard the car slam, then the gunning sound of it, the dying away. A road is a meander.

And then, followed in by a little dark wind, a little white of snow, she came back.

After she closed the door behind her, she stayed pressed against it just as she had done that first evening, the same, yet not the same. Much of the life here is like that; in this concentric it approaches our own groove. Swollen ghost of herself, I was sure she too watched my vision of how she had once moved. Hand pushed to mouth, as if in the bellyache, she looked at me. Once she had told me that in certain circles of Polynesia, a sign of esteem that wife may pay husband is to groom him in the village square by plucking the nits from his hair. Here women, in the exercise of a terrible vanity, do a service of esteem for themselves. One by one—when that profound honesty comes over them—they will pluck from their own heads the qualities that endear them to self or to others, and cast these aside like lice, like stones. How did I know this? Was she also doing a service for me?

“I wonder,” she said. “If he was worried for fear I was—The way he looked me over. Could be he was—” Her mouth opened. “Could be—I am … I never thought of it—
that
change.” She turned her other hand from the wrist, doll-like. “And what if I am. I’m still go where intended. Nothing new for a woman. Like that Russian astronaut-in-waiting the papers quoted. ‘The moon is my intended,’ she said.” She attempted a pirouette, ah yes pretty bad and she knew it, but aimed at me nevertheless. She clenched her fist and looked at it. “There must be someplace that’s all-of-a-piece, mustn’t there?” She came toward me and shook the fist at me, paying me the compliment of doing so where my face might one day be. “Mustn’t there—Eli?”

I did not answer, but not because of nothing to say. I thought she knew.

She sighed. “Ah well, you’re as all-of-a-piece as one would ever expect—and even you—” She laughed on the note of cool I dreaded to hear. “Even if
it
isn’t, how could I
not
go? And what do you know, Eli—maybe I’ll see the real place, from there.”

I couldn’t say. I had.

“What a sell!” she said then. “If I should be—as he thinks. Why, I’d be a legend, wouldn’t I? Sooner or later there always is one, even a bum anthropologist knows that.”

My blood-image froze. The people move on. The legend moves on. But the mutation is for life.

She came closer, close enough. “Heigh-ho, long speeches make long silences—but maybe you’re right not to talk.” She looked up at the tip of me. “Remember when—” She broke off. “Ah, that’s parting, isn’t it, when we say that.”

I didn’t know; I had always arrived. All this I was to mull over in my long hibernation. We were the non-blind leading the non-blind, two seeing people leading each other into the dark.

“Remember when I asked you if you had a sex, and you answered six.” She smiled. They only, can do this. And the animals. “Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” she said, though she wasn’t looking straight at me. “But you do have it now, you do. A look.” Then she rapped the clenched fist softly on my integument, as if to summon further out the imago, the person within. “What’s this, what’s this?” she said then. “Another bruise? How you’ll ever get along without someone to—” Her brow clenched, her mouth opened. “Eli, my dear, dear Eli, if I should—you know, be
ahead
of you—how will you get along all by your—in a
house?
Her scrutiny hardened. “
That’s
no bruise.”

Then she circled me indeed, as if she were measuring me for a garment, while I yearned to cry, “What is it; what
have
I?” but my voice struck some impediment and stuck there.

“No wonder you’ve been so canny quiet,” she said. “And bloody quick, my boy, no need to worry about you.” The brows clenched me as if I were half enemy. “If that isn’t an Adam’s apple as I live and breathe.” She scanned me. “No, wait a minute.” Again came that angled laugh. A small or satiric drain for feeling may be helpful, but the angle of the gyroscope is fixed. Yet when she conned me again she was serious—“Every ellipse has a center,” she muttered.
“Which is a point such that it bisects every chord passing through it. The longest diameter is called the transverse axis, it passes through the foci. The shortest is called the conjugate”—
and I realized she was doing her exercise tables.
“Elliptic spindle,”
she said, eyes closed.
“Gearings, chucks, integrals, epicycloids. Elliptic point. A syneclastic point; a point where the principal tangents are imaginary.”
She reopened them. “Oh shucks and chucks, what a physiognomy. I’m no good at it.” She squinted. “By ordinary rule of thumb, I’d say, if it isn’t the thyroid cartilage, commonly known as the apple, it’s—yes,
blimey
if it isn’t.” Hands folded, she made me a little bow. “Congratulations are in order. Mad rush of science and all that. Hard to believe. Weren’t for—myself—I wouldn’t.” Her hands unclasped, palms up, a little pudgy now, but still hers. “Much good may it do you, Eli. It’s a navel.”

I stood there humble and quivering. It wasn’t my first choice, but it was a beginning, in fact
the
one in this mystery. And perhaps personal choices weren’t the wisest thing in this business.

When I came to myself, she was shining at me in her own way, even tall again; what slender, lissom joke of the first days was she going to share with me? “All these weeks,” she said. “How could I be sure I wasn’t off my rocker?
Scusi,
rocket. I had to give myself talks. ‘You’re in the twelfth century, say,’ I’d say to myself, ‘and somebody says to you,
People will fly in the air.’
Or, ‘You’re in eighteenth-century Ireland, with a hoe in your hand or an ale mug, and good-fellow says at your elbow,
They’ll cut you up in pieces and parcel you, but you’ll be a-sleeping and not feel it. And you won’t die!
And so I worked myself up to it gradually. With roentgens and rockets, and I don’t know what all from the ragbag. It isn’t hard to imagine, if you’ve even seen an Ainu at his first telephone. And so, finally, ‘You’re in the twentieth century,’ I said to myself, ‘and somebody says to you,
There’s going to be such an evolutionary adventure—There’s going to be
—” She looked at me long. “Us.”

As she turned to the stairs, she flung me the gift, always a double one, over her shoulder. “Oh, I believe in you all right, these days. Else I couldn’t—in me. But one keeps one’s … imbalance … better, doesn’t one, when one sees one’s
own
kind now and then.” She turned full face again. “You were right to stay. Not to hide. You don’t have to worry. You’re—you. But I was never so sure of it as when I saw Jack.”

Then she turned alimp, like the little lame grandmother of herself, and went up the stairs.

It was black night now, that time when any room with a person in it wondering steady on his life is like a hearth with a good live coal on it. I was as rosy and pulsing now as any young person here could be—and what a dowry I had at my back! Every guide, protection, power and elasticity that our biophysical research could devise had been provided me, from an ordnance which we had heard one of your own experts remark must make theirs look like a nickel tip at a table d’hôte. I had properties which you, except for your poets, had never dreamed could inhabit protoplasm at all. And now, so armed, I confronted those low qualities of yours which, excepting in the merest shadow, had never inhabited ours. Whatever of our ancient books I had crammed on had at least given me some command of your powers of expression, antiquarian though these might be. But since then, in the hot-and-cold of books by night, and the long-simmering dream-watches of the day, I had learned that only what is already inborn can a book inspirit, only this can a dream inflame. For I now knew by rote the entire alphabet of your world’s emotions—and that until I myself should inhabit them personally, they would remain mute. What a Voco-Phono lesson I had before me now!