Mysteries of Motion (70 page)

“Why Latin? No, he is studying the
Gulshan-i-Raz.
So he can be trusted with his father’s precious copy.”

The one Bakh gave Wert so many years ago, yes. This time the name doesn’t come, only the wise look over the kind of pawky detail even a devoted wife will share, or a devout—rememberer. Seems that Wert’s copy, though authentic, isn’t as precious as he thinks. Bakh, like many collectors, could be overweeningly generous with objects whose flaws only he knew. There was even a secret pleasure in that. But Bakh always denied suffering from the worst grossnesses of ownership. For his best objects he was only trustee, only waiting for a recipient as worthy as he. How did Soraya know all this? When her father went to prison Bakh bought her family’s collection, one by one. She herself used to bring each object to Bakh’s house, at which time the great appreciator would instruct her on it. In fairness, he often bought things of little value—though he would always point this out. Wert’s copy, which was one of them, is presently on loan to a university which luckily thinks quite well of it. In exchange, Bakh had given her the cheap English translation which went to prison with her later, where being in English it was suspect. She was tortured extra for refusing to say where she got it.

“All these objects, always having to be rerouted, or left behind,” Veronica said, the day Tom moved from his flat, having disposed of everything to where everything should properly go. He can be a good donor because he’s not a collector; none of that stickiness adheres to him. He goes straight to an object’s interest; only now and then an interest clutches at him. Earth’s moving day, she said. Going to be that way from now on. Nothing new, he said. Always has been. It’s just that you and I—we’re not Pharaohs. Though you have maybe the look of one.

Nothing new?—she said back to him. Tom, you always say that. That’ll be the day—when you find something new.

Soraya’s waiting. “Or no—you know what he is reading inside there?” She pats her belly. “Yo-yo. He is reading yo-yo.”

“Whatever’s that?”

“Little magazines. Thick paper, big print. Thin paper, little print. Fancy language always. Bakh’s desk was always covered with them. His second desk.” The first desk, as Veronica knows, was swept clean of all but the roses, the onionskin paper and the pen. “Bulletins from the University of Double Meaning, he called them—when I myself was at university he was always showing me. Over a hundred prescriptions to them he had—quarterly, they would arrive, or sixterly. Come, have a little laugh, he would say—Summer or Winter Issue?”

“Sub
scriptions.” Veronica is under strict promise to correct. “And sixterly,” she laughs. “A good word. But we don’t have it.”

“And always he hummed the same over them.” Soraya bends over her belly. The cicatrice on her back bends with her, an embracing purple spider. She vibrates softly, a nighttime woman with carved eyelids and loosening mouth-curves.
“Yo-yo. Yo-yo.”

She
was sent. To Wert by Bakh. Who’d first had her sent to prison for her views, because she wouldn’t marry him. Who before sending her to Wert dispatched Fereydoun to inquire of the prison matrons the color of her pubic hair. The color of my
place,
she’d said, soaping it. When I watched him die, she said, it was like watching an Alp die, that you have always lived under. That I had to be against.

Does she know that she was always in love with him? Of course. So must Wert. And so they are joined, all three of them. To all the lost ones, as well.

She wants not to dream. But she won’t get her wish.

“Look—” Veronica says, “Lievering’s disappeared.” The screen is blank. “Sometimes do you wish they all would? Mens?”

“They are not here by accident,” Soraya says sharply, but smirking. “And we are not.”

Bakh hasn’t taught her double meanings for nothing. Nor Wert, who has explained to her how the recruitment of Cabin Six has centered around Mulenberg—“and around you, Veronica.” How Wert had been recommended merely because Mulenberg vaguely recalled meeting him in important company. “Businessmen of his class like to keep a handle on their world. Or what they assume to be theirs.” For Wert the possibility of easing what Soraya would undergo has clinched it.

You learn too much from your men, Veronica told her, though she knows this to be an idea Soraya has no room for. To find that Gilpin himself had had his path smoothed because Mulenberg wanted to assure himself of her own presence—which Soraya had guessed at, was a blow, but believed at once.

Shivering, she flips the tube from hand to hand. The gravity stipulated here is almost normal. Today it’s not quite that.

Soraya’s watching her. “Wert says you can have any one of them. The big man. Or your friend. Or even—them, there.”

The screen is still empty. “Lievering? He shows no sign of it.” She shudders. “I hope not.”

“Or all, of course; you could have all,” Soraya says calmly. What other people might do doesn’t shock her, only what she might; she’s admitted it. In the old days yes, that was how the harem was made to work. “I say—you’ll have none.”

“Or all and none.” As she’s always done. Though she hasn’t felt like it since coming aboard, owing to the same medication provided women astronauts, which has stopped her menses as well. What the men have been administered she doesn’t know, though Tom has complained the coffee tastes like his old boarding-school slosh, in those days rumored to be doctored with saltpeter obtained at the nearby naval base. She can imagine him as a partner, though she has never let her mind run that way—toward what might turn out to be incestuous heat. But could she give up, even if he would, his company as it always has been, the quirky, cocky, asexual life-monitor ever at her elbow? Who knows everything about the world and himself—except that he’s not a reformer but an adventurer?

As for Mulenberg, he’s diagnosed his position with her correctly. He counts just little enough so that she might begin to be tender with him. Lievering moves her most. Of him she is sincerely afraid. He has the Indian sign on her, of her own youth. While over his own once crippled attraction there hangs now the shadowy
in hoc signo
of some spiritual chase whose stigmata might suddenly boil in his palm.

This leaves Mole, whom Soraya hasn’t mentioned. Plainly no victim of saltpeter, his open, bee-stung admiration makes her bridle—and smile. He already has a solemnity which the journalist in her recognizes, encountered in both the civilized and uncivilized corners of the world, and as often in broken men and women as in great ones. His virtue is not going to be separable from his intelligence.

All and none, that’s my trouble. Once, in Paraguay, she’d been taken by a French ornithologist to see a rare and celebrated bird-courting. The great males, naively lifting and lowering their seven-league wings for permission, picking up feet red-hot from inner burning, danced closer until rebuffed. The females, tall, angular specimens with faces as black as her own—even she saw the resemblance surmising that the laughing Frenchman had brought her for this purpose—stood averted, each in the hereditary sullenness. Then each had pounced. There had been more than enough males. There was no doubt which of the genders was the more prurient. She hadn’t spent the night with the ornithologist. Grinning mightily to herself the next morning, she’d sent him a bouquet.

She got up now and walked the Jacuzzi tub’s rim, her bare feet cuddling metal lukewarm as a rug. To her, one of the pleasures of this vehicle is its varied surfaces, and above all the gradations of motion provided her animal restlessness, those shiftings, in her since puberty, which Vivie had counseled were her “natural sex-nerves.” She is savoring her diet of gravities and atmospheres the way a recruit to radicalism might relish the new dogmas. The very suit-changes they must make seem to her bracing, like what one might do for sport. What she had known of flying now seems to her naïve and all ego—the monocycle thrill of piloting her small plane, or the soaring of the glider which hung over the earth like a soliloquy. The ordinary travel she did so much of down below now seems to her indiscriminate. Movement here is in phalanx, and within the thrill of fixed boundaries. She won’t describe this to Tom, who would see fascism in it. For what the vehicle offers them all is that wholeness of sensation which is geared not only to motion but to containment. So will the habitat.

Soraya’s still watching the screen. “It can’t be over yet.”

“What?”

“That repair. It shouldn’t be.”

EVA—you’ve flown, why don’t you train for it, Tom said, needling her, and like most of his sort equating any “air” activity with another. As well as mistaking this for why she had come.

For glory, Mulenberg, entering the
Courier
at her side, had said, flushed with the humility which made her cruel to him. You’re going for glory. At once she had stripped off one of the artificial roses flickering in the wind at the hangar’s doorside and had thrust it from her gloved hand to his.

Lievering has followed no one. He’s here as usual via the pure accident of himself. Seated next to him in the galley their first week out, she trembled, though the palm of the hand he ate with was unmarked. The curl of his lip, no longer so godly, still has no scorn in it. But now that he no longer stammers one sees that the defect had rendered pitiable a man who is really to be feared. He is one of those in whose presence people remember their own inner scourges. Women have to stop somewhere, he’d said—and here she is. I don’t ever want to stop, she’d cried, and had run from him straight toward the great arched categories she hoped to evade. We make nets of language but the blood always comes through, he’d warned. But he never really needed language. Wherever he is, the blood of the world comes through to him. For sure, one will never know which is character in him, and which experience. He is one of those rare ones in whom these are the same. When he rose from the table, Mole got up and followed him.

She’s here to leave her experience behind, to break through into ordinary life and maybe stay. By will a member of Mole’s aerospace generation, she sees no oddity in the extreme setting she’s chosen. As what her world sleazily calls a celebrity, she has no hope of being an ordinary person, or not until old age, when all have that possibility. Yet all ordinary lives need not be the same. She’s so muscularly happy here; mayn’t she be acting from instinct—though this, too, Tom would deny. Nowadays, as he often sighs, we act bodily for such intellectual reasons; it’s the late-century’s neo-primitive curse. Even the dopes are doing it. He’d like to have lived in one of those Restoration comedies where as a matter of course everyone had his or her shark-teeth out for satisfaction. If you and I can’t do that, Veronica, it’s because we share the classically poor judgment of those who look ahead.

So for years they’ve immobilized each other. As in their statutory marriage.

Yet she’s had two of those fake-legal affairs. Careful, Veronica. Don’t blame the mens.

She’s tired of her own secrets. As with the manuscript, she’s trying to dispose of them. For a long while after Mulenberg she’d found herself chaste, the fever stopped, along with the excitement which used to come from repetitive sexual action secretly pursued. Knocking about Paris she had often observed certain women, beauties or
jolies laides,
not all of them with many lovers but all with some, suddenly pull up short into a kind of false middle age. Since they were also types who could do nothing without style, they externalized their new state, clipping their skulls close in what was more than chic, strutting the effigy bone structure as less vulgar for them now than any further striving toward the proud-flesh of youth. Though not homosexual themselves, they often gravitated to the company of the gay, inviting gently appreciative male souls to tea at the blue hour formerly devoted to love, and later joining those mixed crowds of any sex who knew how to waste the white, sleepless hours by turning them into scarecrow night. Widows of the hormone, such women are. She’s still too young for it.

Before she embarked, her most notable public admirer came to wish her well and regret her leaving. He knows the secret which includes all of the others, that she suffers from a lack of recognition by herself, over the work done. She still does those articles in which she invades an environment, or a matter of principle, abused or eccentric ones preferable, with her hypertensive eye—and still has her claque for it, thanks to which she’s known in her nation and even beyond, if in the shallows of the name and the photograph.

What she’d wanted was to be a good enough artist so that when she chose she could afford to confuse the power of the adoration with the power of the work—a disease deadly when chronic, but if not, often supportive to the sufferer, and in the case of a supreme gift now and then producing, like a self-inoculation, further good work. “Ah, but you’re going off,” he says shrewdly. “People of that sort do not.” They do not adventure but imagine, and record from the star-strewn casement only. Yet he doesn’t want her to be ordinary—for he’s written about her; it would reflect on him. It was he who years ago said of her: “The language of nihilism—and full of hope.” He is sure she will admire herself again. Nuh, she answered. “That’s what they say to children.” He laid his gouty, puffed hand against her cheek. “Yes.” She took him to her door, now an anonymity in a tower always royal with sun and overlooking no small buildings, and said good-bye without further talk. He knows what’s happened to her; she’s not the first. The nihilism is what has gone, over the far hills, to wait for the next contender. She has been left with the hope.

“Allah
—” Soraya says, still watching the screen,
“bismillah.
There is Mole.”

Extraordinary that they can tell it is he. Thanks to living so close they have triumphed over uniforms; in spite of all, they can differentiate. Mulenberg is Size, Lievering Grace, Tom alas Clumsy, without reflexes he will trust. And here is Mole, floating diagonally across the screen, at the end of two thick, corrugated tubings which attach to his shoulder and must connect to the vehicle somewhere off-screen. He is no longer awkward, now daring, now tentative. Now he stops peering toward the vehicular surface and floats straight at them, goggles wide. Soraya draws in her breath.
“S-fffff.
They should not let him.” Mole is modern, insolent. He’s the tester, not yet nameable. He is judging space.