Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (44 page)

So Linhouse veered round again to the object behind him.
Send Jack,
he thought, but almost proudly now, and thought too of his father, that foolish, proud and feckless, stupidly-bright man whose zest for division had been such that even after his death one thought of him as looking across to where life was still a winy fruit somewhere, a man who would have enjoyed this occasion even from the grave—if such bionauts had been possible—and would have written it up afterwards, too. As for Linhouse’s mother, for the moment he agreed with his father: she was best off where the latter had left her. If, as a woman of some enlightenment, she was still there. In the case of either parent, he could still take a pride—mixed, it was true—in the generation behind him, for the humanities they had shared with him, and had imparted to their lares and penates too.

He could even share a pride with this … this …
being
… he was now facing. And in good time perhaps, the lares and penates of the world too of course, from the horse on a sunny field with its hindparts cocked perky, to the farmhouse clock on his ma’s mantel in Chelsea, even someday to the. teacups in a cupboard not of his childhood, not in Wiltshire, but in a cupboard somewhere—and always and everlasting, a chair. Yes, a being—he could say that now, An adumbration that it was one must have been there in his mind, his tingling fingertips, from the beginning, ever since it had helped him silently, fraternally and a wee bit giddily, to carry it out of the cottage, and along the intervening streets and fields. It hadn’t been weightless entirely. But all along, perhaps even now, it had given him, and the others too, only such weight as they could bear. He stared at it. When it had been subjected to moving, it had passed for mechanism very nicely. But now, inanimate as it was for the moment, he had the strongest impression that it was giving him back his stare. If it had been a machine, he’d have had to summon all his strength not to give up, not to kneel to it with the insidiously growing humility of his kind. As it was, he could square his shoulders, raise his chin, and stand straight, sharing what he was with the consciousness opposite him, and inwardly give thanks. Thank God, he muttered to himself—and then shouted it. “It’s
not
a machine.
Thank God.
” And then stood back.

The book rose upon itself, began to spin, or was it really melting in upon itself, all its leaves combining—from those of shaggy integument, to a linenskin nearest to human, down the thinnest, porcelain blood-veil. To some in the room the vision was similar to those swimming giants they were accustomed to observe perpetrating themselves under the microscope; to others—as the long, central shape hardened to focus in the dimming ribands of its own shadow planes, of which it meanwhile remained the long core—it seemed only one of those astral television images one saw while tuning one’s way to a better one—and easily slain by the flick of a hand. Then as it rose finally on its tip, anybody could see that it was not many-leaved at all, perhaps had never been but was now One—a long presence of perfect curves subtiliating in continuous, restful outline, of modest less than seven-foot size, and in tint like the most limpid China tea or the clearest Havana leaf—yet nothing like. For even in its stillness, of a poise and quiet beyond that induced by any man-made tranquilizer or freezer, a stillness beyond any of earth’s inanimate objects, indeed of another dimension altogether—even then, any dolt, of which there were none here, could recognize that nameless quality, neither a palpitation nor a glow, perhaps only a dance of the molecules which we see without realizing it—which signified that they were in the presence of a being. It began to lean then, toward the stenographer. The voice of it rose to the most reasonable facsimile yet, all but human, and the words it breathed gathered strength, even echo. The echo, in that almost circular hall, bounced back first: “Mouth.” And then the cry that had been its source, “I want a mouth.” Then slowly, in the utmost delicacy, moving without moving across the gap between it and the young stenographer in her wimpled collar, it leaned.

Her answering cry went unnoticed. Like hares, deer, any animal transfixed in a new breeze, the entire audience looked upward. As they did so, there appeared on the rim of the room, first at what would have been its four corners if the circular room could have had these, then closing in on that circle, a series of long cores sublunary within their own ribands, shadows. As each clarified itself in the manner of the being on the dais, it could be seen that these in comparison were giants, but all of even size according to their obvious norm, and all less sensitively tinted than their small kinsman, to a pallid spongecake that made them seem for a moment like monstrous ladyfingers and the room itself a giant charlotte russe. From the ring of these, when completed, such a stillness radiated, a monster seriousness, that thoughts like these were frivolous. In this other-dimensional stillness it was not possible to see that each of these beings was moving on its tip, only the conclusion of it—that each had aligned itself with one of the audience. Each went to him or her, as it might be, without hesitation. Yet there was no difference to be seen between those who had chosen to align themselves with the men, and those who loomed at the sides of the women. Yet … was there?

In the utter marvel of that stillness, there was at first no change. In its cosmic breath (to the auditors, of a new cosmos) all rested, beings both human and—what should one say?—extrahuman. All rested in it without change; one could not tell the exact minute when the breath became a sigh. Impossible to unweave its orchestrations, whether it came from the tiny, revolutionary glow of some small, vestigial furnace within those beings of utter curve, or whether it was the grave Vedantic murmur of those ready to lapse their hot heart-claps forever in the ellipse. Only, when it was over, the air in the room was changed; though none might see it yet or a hundred years not bring its mutation into being, the air was charged with the aspiration to difference. And when it was over, the postures of all were changed forever. All were still again in their new dimension. Couple by couple, they leaned.

How they were leaning went almost without saying; Lila was anxious but leaning forward, and ready to worry at the slightest encouragement; Meyer was eager to share his views and happy to do so with any one who would incline; Sir Harry’s majestic head, sculptured by age, passion and endowment, was bent as if still listening, and surrounded by a bevy of forms among which there was indeed one of—in profile—perhaps the faintest aquiline. They were all, if not classicists, humans of a classic evolutionary kind. And if they leaned separately, humanly, each on the note of himself, then there was yet another note unheard perhaps because higher, on which they leaned in unison as it dropped down to them through volumes of air: death is sure, but the longing for the unknown is the lyric reason that holds us in life. Anders was the only one who looked frightened.

And what of me?

He was partially answered, or so he at first thought, by a sudden diffusion of light behind him. On the large screen which a while before had extended them a ragged thank-you, a picture now subtly widened—this time as if from the hands of experts—until it filled the entire wall behind the dais. Large as a backdrop, it presented them with a magnified and almost adequate picture of themselves, so that all might see the larger canvas of the occasion, just as was so often done at banquets, political or sales conventions, and the best charity balls. This picture showed a rotunda crowded with couples matched like these here, also a dais, on it two figures, between them a chair. One of them, though his back was turned, was clearly a man; the other, as clearly, was not. The man was looking at a large screen behind him, on which … And so it must go on and on, in the infinite trickery of optics, electronics or eternity—or of the girl on the box of raisins, who holds ad infinitum a box of raisins on which there is a girl, who—Or did it? For on second glance, though the
mise en scène
of crowd, dais, and the two figures had changed not a whit, it seemed to him that the hall itself had—what did it remind him of? Those sub-Corinthian columns, plaster pilasters, here smudged with distance, but in the pics of new-old Moscow a friend in the foreign service had sent him, as if dirtied with a nineteenth-century snow—would such a building house the Sternberg Astronomical?

He looked round him, at the hall; no, no columns here anywhere—the picture on the screen—it was not of Hobbs. But when he glanced again at the screen, though its central details remained the same as previously, surely the hall had changed again, though he could not precisely say how—except that if he had been in it instead of viewing it, he had the idea it would have had the smell and ambience, unmistakable to him, of a British public building. Yet he had never been to Harwell, and had no idea whether its architecture was Lever House, Festival, or Dolphin Square. To say nothing of those other inner facilities which, though worldwide they might be the same as here at Hobbs, were all “no admittance” to the likes of him.

The picture faded and quivered again, with the built-in anonymity, no matter what the details or the angles, of a screen. Was that what they were showing us, he thought (I mean
are
showing, for on a screen the tenses cloud too), the end of our world as we know it, as it would be being seeded from observatory to observatory, by them? Or was it merely the end-of-the-world as to be seen now and then on a screen at the end of any living room. The possibilities were endless, yet, like perhaps everybody else here in this hall, he inclined toward one of them. For if
They
were inclined to satire, these connoisseurs of non-living, these experts in shadows—as it certainly seemed to him they were—how would they bring us, who have ourselves not so inexpertly made a hearsay of misery, to their gently styled day of judgment?
Answer:
The whole world as we know it is ending for us,
by hearsay.
What is happening here is doing so country to country all over the scattered “facilities” of the world, and we are joined to it, picture to picture, with substantially the same cast of characters, so that we may muse on it simultaneously and without the strain of feelings—from screen to screen to screen.

He crouched forward, in this peculiarly anesthetic agony, to look at himself—at that picture, fixed now for the moment again, which was surely Hobbs, at that man who was surely he. It was like looking at his own death; or like the way a movie star, nervous in his lounge chair in the viewing room, might watch his own false rendering of that as yet unknown lyric which all, before
THE END
, must learn. It was himself all right, and now he began to doubt his own diagnosis of what was going on here. He even began to wonder whether those other flashed changes had really existed—doing so with that canny, thrilling, schizoid doubt of oneself which is the viewer’s supreme of vicarious sensation. Then his throat froze. The picture had changed again. Again a hall and a dais, again a man and that other, and those. The man was not he; he was sure of it. It made no matter, because of the hall, that hall. So it was true then, if only by hearsay. For he had been on Palomar.

Or did he dare to—? His throat melted again, but thank God only as yet to what it had always been, though his own language seemed mangled to chicken feathers forevermore. But he did dare, to think that it might be not an end but a beginning, if not
the
one, and even if the beginning of
what
wasn’t his to say. He wasn’t thinking in terms of resurrection, however. But, in a vast diffusion of lighted welcome, deeper than any picture, he had just remembered all the streets of all the cities, all the fieldlands and waters beyond and outside all the observatories: still
outside.
Let them seal them up, all the halls of science, and inside each one a few of us specimens, random or select. Outside, on bourses and gallerias, with the odd punchinello noses and long chins of Breughel, in penny arcades and thronging from bathhouses, with Ethiop limb or waxy, a-Rowlandson with flannel lip or staring from the single broody-eye of Picasso, or on the desert tented or in the single sheepfold—there are still the people outside. Why did he always forget that people, with the animals, are the other half of physical creation; that they too are nature who always has the last word. And history—which we have tells us nothing if not that the people, humbly the same, humbly elusive, and never to be trusted except in this one quality—ever rest, ever
are.
Unless they were all to be atomized, and somehow he didn’t think so. That sort of invasion, he thought, is more our style.

How sweet, how delicate instead, would be mutation! Especially, he thought, as humble as any, if
they
like
us.
Or must
we—
? He realized that his newest picture—and history’s too perhaps—was on the side of yellow journalism or dream, for what he had in mind was a sort of New Year’s Eve on Times Square, with the crowds beneath the irradiated heavens jostling brow to brow, liquored-up to sober neo-Christian, pale to ape, and perhaps a few wan children of the poor to cry, “Daddy, what does it mean?” (the rich being presealed in their own tunnels), while above the milling heads, to the sound of cornets and kazoos, the electric message ringed round and round the flatiron-sides of the old Times Building:
IN YOUR END IS OUR BEGINNING
, and then, just as everybody grew thoughtful, a jolly reversal,
IN OURS IS YOURS
, and with top luck perhaps,
IN OURS IS OURS
—though one would never again be sure of the pronouns. If he could dream that, would he?

He looked out front, feeling a peculiar pain—at the scope of the world compounded with its very nearness—which he hadn’t had since adolescence. He looked at those new ones there, as a boy looked at the adults he both wanted and wanted not to be.

It’s a cold world, Linhouse thought. Poor Tom’s a-cold. He shivered with what he and perhaps others too had come to think of as the interstellar fear. A-cold. And was he to be the last Tom in it? He thought he was. He couldn’t lean as the others were—it was not his style of difference. At last—out of delicacy or prudery, before a blending of outlines which seemed ever more intimate, he cast down his eyes.