Mysteries of Motion (31 page)

Lievering smiled. “Heaven.”

Carlucci sat back. “Any trouble with women, out there? Or men? No? You mustn’t-a smiled much. You’ve got quite a—physiognomy.” He poked Lievering’s chest. “Big word.”

“I don’t mind it anymore,” Lievering said. Meaning all of it, including the jokes. As for his face, he knew it was now mostly like anybody’s. It could look better or worse.

“And was space like that to you? Like you said? Heaven?”

These men were such idealists, with such pale, well-bred ideas of how to reconstruct the mind. Like Dr. Larry, who had prided himself on having reconstituted his own. They never dared see that other world, of mind spitted on a pain-stick like a brochetted live bird, its sinewy nostrils filled with blood, its twisted neck a fowl’s at the moment of death, its eyes glazed with
the
knowledge. They think you can wipe that away.

“Not heaven—no. But for me…as I said.” Being in non-gravity does resemble, more protractedly and mildly, what he feels at the beginning of attack. Except that he’s fully conscious.

“You want to go back out there then? Start a new life?”

“Start it?” What an absurdity. “A life…can only…be continued. Or…my life.” He hesitates—long. “But if you said—finish it…”

“You ever suicidal?”

They seldom asked so abruptly. Though death was now mentionable in the States. Formerly it had been a social sin, better concealed. Now, at his college and others, they took classes in it. As if by studying it they could beat it. “Not—so I don’t notice it,” Lievering said. Careful to smile.

Carlucci burst out laughing. “You sure know how to talk to us.”

“Not I. The century…knows now…how to talk to itself. Too late.”

He never sees why what he says should be uncomfortable. Only catching on when they physically begin to move away from him.

“Never been in non-gravity myself,” Carlucci said. “How’s it feel?”

“I only know…how I feel.”

“Yes?”

The psychiatric “Ye-es?” He recognizes it. I feel marvelously afraid—dared he say that, if he wanted to go? It’s like an exercise that sweats me into a relationship with people. But the clearer he said things, the farther people retreated. And they were right.

As usual, truth came out of him. “It makes me feel firsthand.”

Carlucci had lowered those eyes. But he raised them again. “They said you were a real Nijinsky out there. What do you say to that?”

Lievering leaned forward. Don’t frown so, his mother said adoringly at his side, in the window of their London house. Keep the mouth smooth, she would say, in creamy German. His lips now felt numb. “You have monkey’s eyes,” he said. “Too…full of good.”

Yet Carlucci okayed him anyway.

“People are always…taking chances on me,” Lievering-Cohen said.

And your luck runs against them, or you do—is that what this monkey-man would say, with a last grind of his box? When Carlucci leaned forward, his pouty little arms curved to the table like a pair of tongs. “I like—freaks.”

The trolley’s moving briskly now. Lying in the notched seat, feet supported, Lievering feels a carriage-child’s passivity creep over him; he’d been wheeled until he was four. Ahead of him a helmet projects above the seat back; the person wearing it is very tall. He himself is already getting used again to the peculiar majesty of being suited up, which makes all one’s gestures minimal yet enlarged, within the limits of an environment which will make most gestures nothing. One may scream murder in such a suit, or mourn the world like Samson Agonistes—and be taken merely to be wanting air. Soon his limbs won’t weigh at all. He’s waiting for that, craving it like a drug which wouldn’t end consciousness but give it a rest from being itself. Like his attacks.

“No germ-free corridor on the training trip, was there?” the person in front suddenly calls back. “Wonder what it’s like.” A baritone voice, very American. “Seen the pictures, of course.”

What’s it want then? Something.

“There’ll be”—since Lievering can’t lean forward, he projects his voice—“windows.” As in a coffin, a needless expense. A modern coffin though, designed to keep him very much alive. Delight floods his muscles.

“Ri-ight.” The voice has relaxed. “Er—Mulenberg here.”

After a minute Lievering answers. “How do you do…” Not because of his two names. He’s simply never learned to do the quick name swap over here. That conception, too, will soon be a farce. Let them have their windows, their labels, while they can.

“Not too far to go naow, you two, Jacques. Jawn. Yo’ group’s the layst in the tail.” The aide, trotting alongside with his final tender namings, disappears backward to a trail of other names: Tawm, Bee-yal and others too faint to catch, floated up in his soft—is it Floridian? He reappears like a marathon runner, his slug-white unarmored face oozing alongside their visored ones. Been years since Lievering has seen gardens with those huge slugs in them; they, too, are England. His imagination’s already rising, leaving behind it a planet of ever paler faces, slug-dotting a wasted Earth.

CANAVERAL

The tram emerges, megaphoned from the tunnel onto a wide clipped field, richly cared for. Cricket could be played here, or any of those antique games men play with quoits or bats. The sky is cruder here though, a heavy moist white.

The large voice breaks forth again, amplified for the benefit of the millions invisibly here.

CANAVERAL

How good of such a place to be so musically named.

Now he sees that the tram he’s on is actually the last segment in a long chain of them extending die-straight across the green all the way to the huge hangar itself—a structure said to be higher than any of the pyramids, and certainly glassier, its walls constantly exchanging polyhedral light. One of the many mirages here which have to be taken for real.

The tram stops short. Figures clad like his own begin to dismount jerkily, like the old movie continuity for which he used to haunt picture houses from the Tottenham Court Road to Ealing, as soon as he was old enough. Railroad cars, circa 1914, with French soldiers descending pell-mell from all doors, in leg wrappings thin as lingerie. Or would it be 1939, and the Hitler troops entering the Sudetenland? At which very time his father, watching the foreign press sluice past his leather corner in the library at Bonn, had taken warning. He’d been proudest of the fact that his profession, “Words alone!” had saved his family. “When there began to be all those early articles in the American press about what fine, smart chaps the poilus were—then one knew there would be a second world war.” He’d however hated the Pathé newsreels first exported from there, and all the other reeled-back history his son became addicted to. All that filming only made it harder to believe in life.

Lievering’s tram car is longer than it seemed underground. So is the one ahead and the one ahead of that, in diminishing perspective up to that door in the hangar which must be the entrance to the corridor. Figure after figure is getting down from the cars, slow as robots—or civilians—in the outmoded heavier-model space suits demanded by Congress, which NASA had vainly insisted they wouldn’t need.

How could I think there were only ten of us, in a last tram? That steward hypnotized us with his fake warmth. They intended it. All the figures have dismounted now. So has he himself. There are dozens of us. But ours was the last cart. Suited-up figures surround him, tentative, even chatting, not sure what’s up yet. Not too organized. That’s good though—isn’t it? That aide’s merely wan from working inside, down in those basements where he can’t get the local tan—nothing sinister. We’re in the open air now. If Lievering moves slightly left to see around the side of that enormous hangar, he’ll see the vehicle itself. Instead, he looks behind him, at the carts. Yes, that’s what they are; why didn’t I see that before? Carts. But we’ve not been packed into them. We’ve been allowed to get down from them. In the open air.

He’d rather stare to his right, a mile and a half across the nibbled green flats to where the reviewing stands are, low, white and rambling, with an indolent air of gentleman sport. They remind him of the sheds on a Virginia polo field the boys once took him to. Or the judge’s stand on the country-club grounds where the dog show was, where a dachshund, placing its paddle feet as if it were as tall as any dog, had won best-of-show over a doberman. A dog show was by nature a setting, a Sunday afternoon movie still. Yet shift to the handlers and the pens and another professional reality took over: the animals themselves. No animals here, of course. Even the vegetation’s been quieted. Lievering shifts himself slightly left.

He can never quite believe in any airborne vehicle. So small when not in motion—even the largest of those with intentions of flight. So able—even the smallest of them—to carry destiny for the likes of us. He’s long known what the shape of this one will be—not one of those penis-style rocket probes. A double vehicle-on-vehicle with a third disposable belly, each parting from the other on signal. The hangar above is higher than the UN Building piled twice. That thing, its progeny, aims farther than the idea of nations. Yet when the thing lofts, in stages that he, deep in its middle belly, will jolt to but not see, when its groaning metal and plastic is finally data-processed out upon a magical evening which is now pinkly descending without the aid of any artificial intelligence whatsoever—

THE CITIZEN COURIER

—will look like nothing so much as a fly copulating with a fly.

Up ahead, the citizens are lining up docilely enough in front of the hangar’s back door—or is it the front one? Lievering can’t get over how informal it all looks, how casual they’re being allowed to be. Yet could they flee? Soaring as the hangar is, its door is barely man-high. All man-scale grandiosity, from cathedral ceilings to floor lamps big as cannon, has stopped at the motel. From now on there’ll be no more earth-style architecture, good or bad. He already knows that from the training trip. No more grand porte-cochères or arching buttresses, designed to elevate man’s sense of himself, but always to human scale. The kingship is now in the amount of distance subdued. Aboard, all equipment focused on his body needs will be on as small a scale as humanly possible. Though he minds this less than some, over a time it can be subtly demeaning. He wonders whether others have noticed this. Perhaps. At the door, two florist’s baskets, of the same height as the door and filled with red flowers, flank it gracefully.

As the passenger line keeps forming and filing in, the aides monitor it, one to every four or five passengers. A hand flicks his visor. His aide, his own
personal
aide, is smirking. “Jacques. Visor up!” He’s the only one around him who’s kept it closed. The air on his face is fresh. Yesterday’s storm has helped. “The last storm,” they said at morning prayer at the motel, “that you folks’ll have to see.”

At the door proper there is no step. Each space suit, short or tall, lifts its heavy feet apologetically. Each passenger’s elbow joint is carefully assisted. They’re being loaded in now, not let out. He sees that clearly. The carts were only interim.

In exchange, he’ll have what he always wanted. The setting will be real.

As he nears the corridor door, the flowers redden peculiarly. They’re not flower-flesh but nylon, or vinyl. That makes no difference now. All the settings of his life have been unreal to him, secondhand because he was—and only he upheld them. A setting, to be real to its inhabitants no matter how strange it is, needs only enough of them to sustain it mutually. He has colleagues now.

He turns from the passengers ahead of him to look behind him at the crowd of lay advisers clustering in for a last stare at him and his kind, brushing their hands together in send-off relief—and pride. Across the flats, in the sporting pavilion, the reporters stand ready to caw and cheer to a popeyed world. All the watching world is in the same state of lagothalmia: the state of being hare-eyed, unable to close the eyes. Against these marvels.

His elbow is cradled. He sees the nonexistent step.

“Look at all those lovely roses,” the aide said.

He passes through an airlock, the first of the many to be. Inside, he’s not surprised to find that the “corridor” resembles that official waiting room through which one passed or did not pass into East Germany. Though no passport numbers are issuing in amplified hullabaloo from the row of bank-teller booths along the left wall—
sieben hundert-neun-und-dreissig, sieben hundert-ein-und-vierzig
—and there is no tic of unease from the room at what may have happened to seven hundred and forty, the spasm of waiting in all these figures is similar. The chairs are semireclining, and properly notched for the suited-up. Nobody is ambulating—the training lingo for stretching the legs. He sits.

Those promised windows have television sets in them. How wise. The coastline, hallucinated with giant cake-plates and tongs like a kitchen for ogres, is already in the past, not to be seen again except as part of the rough crumple of a distant earth-ball. He’d expected some soft, degerming hiss here; there’s not even a disinfectant smell. All done with rays? So is all of life, the briefers said. Avoid sinister thoughts.

There are only twenty people here. Four rows of five. He will never see all the passengers at once. The delicate balance of the craft will not tolerate all that much breath or flesh together at one time. Or all that personality? Gantries would number four. “Gantry” seems to be the word for common rooms of varying function. He intends to look up the etymology. Library hours are to be rotated. Maybe, as on the training trip, mixers will be arranged. He anticipates being a good sailor again, freer than most. For the sinister thoughts which seem to him natural.

PLEASE WALK ABOUT NOW

He smiles. The sign talks like him. But here unspelling everybody around him to chatter, to inspect the breast-pocket name of his or her neighbor and to stroll, slowly extending the appendages. Gravity is still normal here, though everybody’s already unsure of it. There is laughter. “Home room!” somebody calls out. He doesn’t understand the phrase. A woman falls in step with him—an astronomer who briefed them at the motel. Luckily he remembers her, as he does all teachers. By her manner, she is one of those women who remember his face. It seems they are patrolling in a circle, as was done at recess in old-fashioned schools here, where you changed teacher and room for each subject, arriving end-of-day at your “home” one.