Mysteries of Motion (32 page)

“Or like they do in the entr’acte, the Vienna State Opera,” Lievering calls out to the circle. He’s joining in. Above their frieze of figures, the neon sign glows like a votive lamp. In outer space every object will be seen as intensely intimate, in a perfection of nearsightedness. “Round and round they go. Glass cases in the center of the grand salon. They never look at them.”

Lievering stands stock-still. He sees he has drawn ahead of the others. He’d spoken slurred. Was his upper lip deadening slightly, in the familiar sensation? With his canvased hand, he can’t feel for sure.

Suddenly a tall sentry is at his side. Is there already something noticeable about him, his movements? Safer not to look up. By the uniform, it’s not an aide. Another passenger. He keeps his head bent. Straining to instruct his body—to what?

“Or like the
passeggiata,
nuh?” the interrupter says, “in small Italian towns?”

Who would not recognize that lilting, roughish voice? He doesn’t need to check its name. Looking up against his will, he has to lift his chin. She was always taller than he. There it is—that snub black pearl, her face. But exactly as was. They promised real people here. Not dream visitants.

Who have real names on their breast pockets.
V. Oliphant.

So she’s followed him here. Where people flee a man, there are women who will follow him because of that.

“So…
Ronchen…
we were…married after all.”

“Nuh.”

That Bejan grunt which can mean anything. How he remembers it. She pokes a finger at his own breast. “Jacques Cohen? Who’s he?” Dream people poke you like that.

“A child in those sonnets. Who was crushed by an elephant.”

“Ah. Him.” Her glove goes to where her neck hollow would be, just below his eyes. “I threw him away. Just yesterday.”

That laugh of hers, sharp and akimbo as her knees, comes from her bone structure. Hooting at her passion to be more than beautiful. People who want to be artists beyond their means for it—one ought not to be tender with them. He would have told her in the end, that her poem wasn’t much. Life must have done it for him. “I…saw a poster of you once. In a Paris bookshop. On the Rue de l’Art.”

“I saw a shot of you. On a doorway off Pigalle.”

“Mistaken identity,” he said. “Was yours?”

Nuh. Isn’t she going to say that this time? In any of its variants? He remembers how sex could stretch that monosyllable of hers, when she was stricken on those heights. “You look just the same,” he says, stern for both of them. Though he at least has grizzled. “What…hasn’t happened to you?”

She isn’t going to answer. Yes she is, in a whisper. “Why are you here?”

When he spreads his formalized sleeves they seem to him to be addressing a multitude. Or making ready to deal with an instrument panel too big for him. “To find that out.”

“The town innocent. Here to tell us the truths. All of them.”

He sees that she is real.

“You do address me…like a wife. A Xantippe.” Pronouncing his father’s term for household shrew the German way—Ksantippeh—he smiles.

What a glow of anger women can keep for life!

All that has faded for him. What he sees are her haunches, narrow as a borzoi’s, high over her supple back in the Cuban sunlight, the small udders of her breasts almost touching the bed’s pagan-streaked coverlet. In whatever anagram her body used to place itself her legs were the most of her, her chin more often student-deferential, against her neck or cupped in her hands. While the belly, flat as a primitive spoon, disappeared into its own shadow, over the pink slit that his mouth or his hands or his sex were always grasping for.

“I know the anger was there,” he says humbly. “Like a navel between us. But it’s gone.”

Not mine.
Is that what she’s said under her breath?

A figure tall as hers looms up to Lievering. “Ah, partner, saw you debark behind me. Glad to get off that thing. Don’t like tunnels.” It half extends a hand, then remembers its glove, laughing in its hearty baritone. “On my way to those television screens. They’re taking messages. From the dear departed—that’s us. To those left behind. What a shivaree, eh. Two-way though. We’ll still be able to see them.”

The tall man pulls up short, puzzled by Lievering’s impassive face. “Excuse. Could have sworn you were the guy riding in the seat behind me.” He bends, peering. “Cohen, is it? Howdadoo. All get to know each other in time, eh?”

“He moves on, is all. Nuh, Lievering?”

The big man exclaims, turning. Slowed by his equipment, he raises his arms to the speaker, dropping them at the sight of her, his massive fair-skinned face on a level with hers. His creased eyes, blue under flat Baltic lids, hooknose and Roman-modeled lips are in their own way as symmetrical as hers. Everything about him is huge, except his whisper.

“Veronica.” His glove goes up, smoothing his own cheek. “Gave up my beard back there; we all had to.” He knocks back his helmet to show thick gray-streaked blond hair. “Mulenberg here.” His shoulders twitch off a yoke. “Ah God.” He hides his face in the glove, smoothing. Whatever painful is going on in him, he doesn’t want the suit to hold it back. Straining at electronic latchings that took an hour to gear, his head comes all the way forward of its plastic bubble, on neck muscles that must have an ogre’s strength—how does he manage it? On joy, whimpering with relief. “Ah God.” He takes a step forward, slowed as they all are. Maybe it’s the urine-pouch, slung along one thigh, which makes him smile. He’s recovered himself. “Still got your gun, Veronica?”

Two passengers largo between her and Mulenberg, turning in unison. They are ambulating. “Oh—” the bright-eyed astronomer says, still paused wallflower-near. “Didn’t I have you two at the briefing?” They blink politely and pass on in slow motion, to some music which has already begun in them. It’s very like a ballroom here, Lievering thinks. Both the amenities and the small, ignoring cruelties preserve themselves wherever people are—even here. For underneath all of it is the waiting room.

“Did the police ever come?” From that muffled voice Mulenberg might be on his knees, only the space suit saving him.

She isn’t going to speak to him.

Strange clarities rise in Lievering, flowing from the base of his spine. People are becoming nearer and dearer. He sees their motives, in aura above their heads. Her anger glows like a spotlight drawn by that able draftsman, fear. Of such a nearness happening to her? With any man? Yet this man and she had been naked together when they last met. The man has that falling sickness in the limbs which comes of it.

“I followed you—” the big man says. “I took out insurance at every port.”

Such scenes have no place here. Those two can’t feel that yet. Out there—it will all be in the present. His own limbs are already lighter. All the falling sicknesses of love which straddle everyone over the abyss of human obligation—while the bellies wobble in the thick spermal rhythms and the women spew out in water and caul the soft skull of some new candidate—all are to be lifted off, in the purer current to come. That thin-aired sea of exploration where everyone will float impersonally. Can’t those two feel the hangar’s growing iciness? Gravitation is departing, lifting off the human onus. In our asbestos-colored new skin, we ambulate. Soon to rebound from one another if we accidentally collide. Yet because of that, plainer to one another than in the sweaty bumble we’re leaving. Colleagues! He must speak to them.

“Domestic scenes—” Lievering says. Because his lips are numb he sounds satirical. Can’t be helped. “Have no place here. You’ll see.”

Veronica raises an arm. Will she hit him? She did that once. In the hut, one morning. When he woke. A blow to the face.

She drops the mitted hand, on which, as on his and the other man’s, are tiny flashbulbs, minute but powerful. “I’ll save it for the sharks.” Her croaky, gawky laugh—why should it change? Salt on her own wounds. He’d cherished her for those, a young girl’s wounds. He can yet, for wounds still to come. To all of them.

He’s standing on illuminations that drift below his feet, arched now like Nijinsky’s, whose foot bones were said to have had a special, space-conquering conformation. She and he are together again on the one perch which united them, from which she must have thought she could scramble—into the Paris bookshops.

“Ronchen!”
How strong his voice is, unimpeded. “Did you ever finish the poem?”

PLEASE STAND BY FOR INTERVIEW

Amplifiers don’t interrupt; they impose. Unlike those at airports, this one can be understood. They are each to take their turn at the television interviewing stand.

“Have to say good-bye to my daughters,” the big man says. He grimaces. “Daughter.” He makes no move to go. “So, you write poetry, Veronica. Not songs. And who’s he?”

They all have two faces. First Mulenberg’s suavely canny, corporate face—and now this one. Even the lady astronomer, eager beneath her sharp, teachery visage—a pince-nez face modernized with big, college-girl glasses. Lievering can see better, now that the air in his nostrils is slowing with his heartbeat. Mica sprinkles the air here, linking vortices when he blinks. The underlying face is always innocent.

“Songs. No, I write songs.” The face Veronica turns, first to Mulenberg then to him—black-glass eyes and cheekbone dazzle—refracts only. Have they upped the candlepower here? Or has she her visor down? “The pretty little gun, Mulenberg? My brother took it. It’s not been heard from. The house went, later that night. A bomb. Just like at Gulf & Western. Only our insurance company didn’t pay for it.” She’s spinning like a ballerina now, showing first that face which had peeped soft behind the explosions of orchids in a Barbadian garden they went to once, then this visored bulb of glass. “The poem, Wolf? Sure, I finished it. I always do.”

The face stops revolving; he can’t see at which half of it. But the voice is directly in front of him, nude, sprawled. The coverlet they used floats in front of him, bright as chicken’s blood and blue shell, then levitates away. That’s the way I am, her hand says, caught in his old Aer Lingus bag. Her breasts shudder gleefully to one another; we smell—of ourselves. “But this time I left it stuck in the mirror, at the motel.”

She turns to the big man. “Who’s he, Mulenberg? He’s—a man who doesn’t follow anyone.”

Cruelty of such quality is bracing; and means that Lievering is right. Its ugly armature, present in each beginning innocent, grows to be the hidden sculpture interlacing the world. Look at those two, Mulenberg and Veronica, walking away—look how the man is trailing her. She only had to whisper to him. I’ll eat with you now, she said.

“On the motel mirror,” Lievering murmurs. “Like a calling card.”

The astronomer is still watching those two. “Maybe it couldn’t be documented.”

He laughs. It purls from his mouth like from anyone’s.

PLEASE AMBULATE

“What a conversation we’re having,” the astronomer says, keeping pace.

He looks at her more closely. She’s the passer-by, and knows it. At university he used to feel sorry for this kind—always at the edge, with nobody bothering. Until he saw that those who could persist at it developed the hardest integument.

She’s still searching out that pair. “He misses his beard, he can grow it again out there. My first uniformed job, I was project manager of the first satellite to study X rays in galactic and extra-galactic space—and know what I missed? My ear hoops. Still do. My analyst says it’s very human of me. But then he says that about everything I do—almost.” She touches her spectacles.

He must be staring at them. Inside his mitts his fingers splay out as if light radiates from them. Energy is coursing through him.

“I wear contacts usually,” she says, flushing. “They corrupt the telescope some. You allow for it. But no light plastic’s allowed in here.” She gazes up. “On account of the proofing.”

“Gas, you mean? Or rays. I should have thought of it. We should have asked, yes? But people don’t, anymore; there’s too much gear.”

“Oh, nothing like that. Just antibiotic spray, I imagine.”

“Mustn’t let the stars corrupt your judgment,” Lievering says loudly. “We ought to be scrutinizing everything.”

A space suit cocks at them to show a bare, sunny hawk-face and passes on.

“Who was that?”

“Gilpin,” she says. “That’s him.”

“Who’s he?”

“You can’t not know. How could you get here? Without knowing.”

“By way of a disease they’re not sure I have.” His head is filling with its golden confidence. This is the brief period when he knows it. Shortly he may not.

“That what you’re leaving behind? Half the people here are leaving something.”

“I always leave.”

She nods eagerly, in the manner of people with analysts. An aide, passing through the rows head bent to his basket, hands them each a vial of the familiar yellow stuff. She hands hers back. The aide takes a second look at her. “Sorry.”

“Observe,” Lievering says, “looks like mucus, but tastes like papaya. That tells us something.” He’s lost his stammer entirely; his voice is that warm authority which once taught, serene on other explorers’ heights. “Reality’s so patchy these days. Patchy newspapers, television.” He nods toward those windows. “Patchy pain, even with all the analgesics. Weather, too. History. Patchy war.” Hurry, before his mouth fills with his tongue. “Only a few basics to trust. Like dying. Or starving. Or being tortured. Or giving birth, I suppose—if the woman sticks with it.”

He bows toward the astronomer’s well-masked belly. In a city on the brink of war, his mother, with no hope of hospital or drugs, had had to stick with it. Which left her with a disproportionate respect for women’s bellies, much urged on his father and him at mealtime, when theirs could merely feed. Only money could make her more emotional. “On that vehicle we’ll be able to believe everything. Because we’ll have to, eh? We’ll pool our knowledge, too. And call it faith—eh?” He tosses his emptied cup into the wire cage intended for it. “Last time we’ll throw anything. Huzza!” His voice is loud even to his own ears, a nasal evangelist occupying his mouth, his smile stretching to cover the vast replica of himself which is swelling from its own outline. Hurry hurry. Believe.