Mysteries of Motion (8 page)

It’s a European posture, Gilpin thinks in that first impression which takes precedence over all. Actors walk so, playing unworldly persons or famous ones, Stanislavsky method. Or it’s in the striped suit, out of place for the tropics. Or that iron-gray, maestro hair.

The man steps to the center of the path, silently presenting himself. That is his posture.

His face. What must it have been, if it’s ordinary now? Elongated by youth, would it have been an El Greco? Squared by middle age, it’s no longer a face from those high winds, but one can see that it’s been there—and hasn’t yet settled for handsomeness. Perhaps the extraordinary has since gone into the whole man, who now bows as if they have merely met on the path, and goes on past. Yet he had intercepted them.

They watch him enter the motel. He walks determinedly, the one arm still folded behind his back.

She doesn’t speak. My life’s never been weighted like that, Gilpin thinks. By another person. I love by accretion, finding that no disgrace. But I’ve no background for joining in the dramas which fall upon those who’ve loved otherwise; I lack the proper conventions. I speak from the off-side. People don’t seem to mind. “Thought maybe your locket had washed back in and he’d picked it up.” Finding it empty? “Was there ever a picture in it?”

“Never. I wore it for the continuity of it. For what had been me. Or I thought I did.”

“Is he the one?”

“Now I’m not sure.”

“Neither was he.” Then it must have been that man. “Lievering,” he said. “Wolf Lievering.”

“You remember?”

“Everything you tell me. Which isn’t much.”

“More than you do.”

“There isn’t more.” He’d long ago made it all public. He knows that people find this hard to believe.

“We’ll both soon know.” She grimaces. “About everybody.”

“Or perhaps he’s crew: Operational.”

“Wolf? Hah.”

“What’s his field?”

They’re all booked under one, she to be the official photographer, he the historian, their particular cabin to be shared with, among others, an industrial consultant and the head administrator and wife; whether the wife has another function as well, he doesn’t know.

We’re booked as for any archaeological expedition, he thinks. Our quarry being the future.

“His field? Language. But it was in what he was, more than what he did.”

“And what was that?”

“He—displaced people. From what they were. Everywhere he went.”

He’d certainly done that to her.

“Ah—one of those.” A charismatic. Evangelical or not, they’re always trouble.

“Was Lievering himself a displaced person?”

“I never knew.” She shivered her arms up, stretching. “Let’s go in now.”

Both turn the other way, toward the promontory they have just come from. Strewn with omens, it can no longer be seen.

He stretches an arm. “Which’ll weigh more out there, d’ya suppose? The future—or the past?…Yes, let’s go in.”

As they do so, the palm trees on either side of them burst into a musical signature. Reveille.

Inside the motel for once and all until liftoff, every window that I, Gilpin, looked through became a haunting, by an Earth already half departed from. The motel was an excellent limbo. Downstairs, once past the porte-cochère, there were no windows. The grass-green sward of the rugs, interspersed with blood-red sofas and chairs in suites of three against walls of plastic stone and plywood forestry, projected a present world one would do well to find repellent. Either the authorities knew what they were doing to the psyches under their care, or hadn’t a clue as to how cleverly they were managing—about par for government. I note how I have already begun to think of them as the authorities. I go into the bar.

There’s no piña colada in front of me today. Much as it had done for me once, I hadn’t cared to try its properties since. My glass holds whisky, Irish ordered but bourbon received, which could mean that on Canaveral even the bartenders no longer bother with terrestrial geography. The whisky in any case is forbidden—and that always helps. During these last hours we are on our honor not to have alcohol. Last hours help too, toward a rushing sense of what’s to be done—for I never can believe in them.

As Gilpin, I do perform publicly rather well. But the
I
of me will not move except to an inner call which Gilpin has no power to provoke. Tapped once before, I recognize the sensation, never having expected it again. Not that the mission I’ve spent most of my span on is fulfilled. The missions that adopt me are not that sort. But once again, I’m on call.

In the movements we make toward one another’s mystery, surely there is where life most is. Those ever-shadowy movements—who does not make them, and who is exempt from studying them? But on the
Courier
I would be closest to the nature of motion itself. This is why I and the others, and a great nation, are being drawn there, and why history is. For when people are in thrall to a certain physical motion, then life appears to them to be at its height. Meanwhile, swung like an undercarriage below any large vehicle is that other continuous movement—small, rotor, and fatal—between the people themselves.

I hear my own cadence—the part of me that comes from fisherfolk, who are in motion all their lives. We at home were always at once in the trough of the wave and on the anxious shore. We were always listening to the voyaging.

Time to go up. I felt great.

On the way, I stopped at the bookstall and inquired for any publications of the L-5 Society of Tucson.

“Sold out. Days ago.”

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. Shortly, I’d be where I would be refused nothing—of what there was to be had.

“Offer me something,” I said.

He stared. Silently he reached into his stock and held out a heavy, lustrous art book, a copy of which I had once owned. Years back NASA had commissioned certain modern artists to paint the space effort, which from craft to environs they had done. I thumbed the preface, supplied by a curator of the National Gallery. “Artists should be key witnesses to history in the making. The truth seen by an artist is more meaningful than any other kind of record.” Depending upon who picked what witnesses. First Edition—marked down to twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t the visitant I’d have chosen from my lost library, but it was one. I held out a credit card I still had on me.

“You a passenger?”

“I am.”

“Sorry. No credit cards.”

I had a hundred dollars in scrip. We all had been issued the same amount, to cross the border with. The clerk’s face lit up. He took the small orange and green slips and put them in a special drawer of the cash register. He was collecting them. He didn’t bother to wrap the book.

So burdened, I climbed the stairs, the soles of my shoes sticking to the risers, partly from reluctance and partly from damp. Halfway up there was a botched crow’s nest where carpenter and material must have come to the end of a contract, though a table and chair were provided, in case one wanted to watch the crowd below. I no longer did. They had been my collection. I took out my remaining scrip instead. Beautifully engraved peacock-feather style, with a leaf-crowned, plump-cheeked Hebe or hermaphrodite on either side, the stuff still had the look of IOU’s. The slips measured about four and a half inches by two, much smaller than our civilian dollars. Each was marked
MILITARY PAYMENT CERTIFICATE
on its shorter ends. I hadn’t noticed that before. The legend on the two long sides was harder to read. On top:
FOR USE ONLY IN THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ESTABLISHMENTS—BY UNITED STATES
and on bottom:
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE RULES AND REGULATIONS.
This lettering was very small, but in caps.

I knew where they’d got the whole idea. This was army of occupation currency.

I left the book on the table. Those were not my witnesses.

Upstairs the motel was all luminous white and gray-blue, as if they were already progressing us toward the germ-free corridor. They had given us each a two-room suite. We were to fraternize, like members of an expensive tour, on the eve. So far, in this wing, nobody had. So here we were in our usual ragged enclosure. Each mind enclosing itself, while making frantic land-ahoy signals to its proposed destination.

In the day of the wagon wheel, or the freighter coaling into a sunset, or the ocean liner with its cups of tea, or the trains probing the Rockies and carrying a honeymoon couple or a corpse, a life and its journey were synonymous. The two voyages were one. An air trip is a pocket out of life, an anti-life means to an end, with a tray and a toilet between. But in outer space, with the means so huge and the journey so far, what then? Time—what would it become? All that gear—would it become household, or at least a caravan? Put real people there, with real lives behind them, and could the old continuity come again?

Which would win out, the voyage or the life?

My bedroom has a vast window, from which I can see the dish antennae that dot the Cape, giving its outline an extra blur of puzzlement. There is a pair of binoculars on the windowsill. But I have no further urge to enumerate surfaces or distinguish them. My mind has taken on the mnemonic position. From that moon-flat perspective I can see how foolish my last remark to Veronica was. Which will weigh more, the future or the past? Nothing will weigh the same from now on, certainly not time. Down here a duration, out there would it be more of a distance? As the human faces around one flattened or curved with speed, how would one make contact with the minds behind them? Based in bodies constantly bombarded, would the minds sharpen or drift? Or cling to performance, as the best grip on the moment-at-hand?

This is exploration a priori. Of the first things. Into elements we are not adapted to. We are going backward, into anti-civilization. With everything of course mechanically provided for. Who can know what selves we will find?

Good-bye Amerigo, Eric the Red—who merely knew what they were looking for.

I passed an air-cooled hand over the pane, as if clearing a windshield that was clouding up. Good-bye my own, my native land, body, foot.

On the desk behind me a tape recorder was provided. I had been encouraged to use it. I pressed the button for tape. The slow hiss came on.

“I should have kissed the ground,” Gilpin said.

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL
a big man lies calmly face upward on the motel’s fine mohair bedspread, fully dressed even to his shoes. This indicates what he is in the main: a hotel traveler, first by trade, but in recent years from need—psychological, for he is very rich—and by now, from personality. Two of his residences, unlived in for years, are finally up for sale. We report on them from the real estate firm’s brochure—and on him.

Outstanding Private Retreat within Routt Nat’l Forest [which is in Colorado] some miles north of Steamboat Springs. Secluded in magnificent hidden mountain valley, 160-acre ranch in a setting of spruce, aspen, pines, lush grass and wildflowers crossed by trout-filled Reed Creek flowing through beaver ponds to lake. In this awe-inspiring forest setting comforts are twentieth-century. Beside picturesque pond, outstanding architect-built 10-room residence with huge glass areas, heated swimming pool, caretaker and guest houses, 2 original cabins and homestead, with professionally developed nurseries, plus stable and complement of maintenance buildings. Offered furnished and equipped at $1,750,000.

The price is intentionally low. He’d held onto the homestead for his great-grandfather’s sake, the nurseries for his father’s, until sure that his heirs were no longer any more interested than he in those fragile interviews one holds with the dead.

The second ad reads:

Chance of a Lifetime: 4920-cattle ranch in Oklahoma Panhandle. I-deal cow/calf operation for one man or family. Strong grasses, healthy climate. Cross-fenced into four pastures. Two good sets of working pens. Well watered with 10 windmills and 3 electric pumps. Good fall hunting with dove, quail, prairie chickens. The bonus on this ranch is a $500,000 Grecian mansion: fully carpeted, seven chandeliers, 4-car garage, central heating and cooling, large porch on three sides, enclosed atrium garden. Formerly used as retreat for corporate executives. Outbuildings for domestic and other help, offices or storage. This unique package ready to go at $2,000,000.

Ditto on the low price. Bought for him as a corporate necessity and in place of some holding-company stock, the house wasn’t Grecian, the acres no longer a real panhandle. A prairie chicken might be good to eat but was a laugh to hunt. Quail there were not. He wouldn’t shoot dove. Windmills anywhere were a pleasure, but Oklahoma was not Colorado. All of which he’d known at point of purchase. Far as he knows, they were right about the chandeliers. Sale money for both places would be disposed of for him in the usual style, by three balustraded banks. He is no longer corporate. But he expects to be back. He always does—come back.

He’s lying on the bed because, though the day’s been as medically arduous for him as for the rest, he can’t expect his five o’clock whisky, nor is he any longer surrounded by the array of leather goods—portfolios, attaché and dressing cases, framed pictures and walleted cards—which normally keep him company in such rooms, and he has made all his telephone calls. There remain early bath and bed, and the visit of the aeronurse with medication. He plans to make no ceremony of any of these, neither whooping and soaking in the bath, nor masturbating in his last private bed-to-be—which he hasn’t done since a boy—nor pulling the young nurse in with him, though in spite of sex being proscribed here on grounds of energy loss, she’s made signs. He knows pretty well what will or won’t be provided out there, industrially and domestically, since he’s already been functioning as ordnance coordinator between Earth and habitat under a command order which transcends this flight, and reports direct to Perdue. On whisky supply, the answer—a tie between the brass and the doctors—is wait and see, and meanwhile send beer makings. These, dispatched on the last shuttle but one, all chemically documented and stowed along with other oddments the habitat can’t yet fabricate or cannibalize meteors for, must even now be fermenting. The civil administrator-to-be, an excellent man heard of in the Middle East years ago, is his own nominee, which pleases him. It has pleased him, maybe childishly, to circumvent Perdue in several instances. Ordinarily Mulenberg doesn’t much play industrial politics. If you’d had the goods early enough in your own career, you didn’t need to. But it appears that many on the project consider it their civic duty to circumvent Perdue.