Mysteries of Motion (83 page)

I have. So must the others—and we are great hopers, all of us. Though already practiced at other solutions, or overpracticed at that one. From the beginning we were also on expedition, which fact inflected everything. We were also an enormous experiment in physical adjustment, which we are yet. My guess is that whatever would or would not have happened earlier in our journey does now, wilder in purpose then, less submerged now, but in the same pattern. As for the Werts, with a married pair one is never sure what goes on. We try to leave them opportunity but have never smelled it exercised. As the hour for possible rendezvous looms for the ship, we are busily chaste to all but that. As doubt creeps in, the other interest creeps with it; a hand may fumble for a breast, a crotch—and nowadays of any gender, duration having less of it. My guess is that the hand usually subsides. We move polymorphously here but toward the supremer emotion, whose kindness kills. Though that’s as I observe us, and by now you know my character. I copulate best with Paradise.

However Wolf’s yearnings for us don’t quite yet apply. We’re not always in chariotry here, which we should hate. Nor in the all-night sleep of the soul awaiting judgment, from which we most certainly wake. To work. To eat. Not too differently from some of you—and like you, in orbit. The movement toward each other’s mystery is the only life we know. How is it with you these days?

In one way, we are no longer representative of our planet. Down below, once you get safely past youth’s morbid death-interest, which is for most of them a quackery, your invidiously lively rivalries are often what keep you from brooding on your most certain end. But we here have only this everlasting kindness, almost a vice. In which there grows on us the conscious privilege—don’t flinch; we no longer do—of having been preselected for a companion death. Changes can come even in eternity, when it goes on so long. We have not discussed this, but I think of it. I think of how we will observe endless courtesies to each others’ wanings, to the child in us, to the skeleton.

Time for the last drill. Mine.

I am the man in the fourth seat. I have a book clamped in the reading vise. It is not the
Decameron
of Boccaccio. Time may not move on here, but we do. We are our own decameron now, having fewer people than in Boccaccio, but more days. Due to atmospheric decline beyond our control the book buckles slightly, making me fear for it, since it is also quite old. It is the one I brought with me for that unimaginable hour when I would tire of the dictionary. Dated 1827, it is entitled
A Voyage to the Moon (People of Morosofia)
—by Joseph Atterley, pseud., George Tucker. A familiar by now, we call him either, one day reading from Joseph, one day from George. I would not wish to say which day this is. I read from him:

The machine in which we propose to embark was a copper vessel that would have been an exact cube of 6 ft. if the corners and edges had not been rounded off. It had an opening large enough to receive our bodies, which was closed by double sliding panels with quilted cloth between them. When these were properly adjusted, the machine was perfectly airtight and strong, enclosed by means of iron bars running inside and out to resist the pressure of the atmosphere when the machine should be exhausted of its air by means of its air pump. On top of the copper chest and on the outside we had as much of the metal (which I shall call lunarium) as we find by calculation and experiment would overcome the weight of the machine and take us to the moon on the seventh Day.

At times I have to close the book and clear my eyes. Optically. We six are people who have been swung head over heels and drained of our simple objects. Though we have done well, those objects which have been left to us do confuse—the real ones, the memory ones—into a state resembling old age, or a senility not quite divine, but not without divinity either. Or perhaps it is the food. We have it, but we are harder put to get to it, now.

I read on, to how they “condensed” air, for every six hours of respiration, and of how on each of the six sides they had a small circular window made of thick, clear glass. So many sympathetic sixes they had—though I can never remember from day to day how many passengers. (Our own sun, standard at the portholes, no longer disturbs.) As to their “lunarium”: they fastened pieces of it to screws which passed directly through the top of the machine, so that by turning them in one direction those metallic pieces would fly into the air “with the velocity of a rocket.”

Robert—I say. Robert Hutchings—who? On a good day, I can recall in toto. Goddard. This is a good day.

At some point the medic will come in and then we have to find a place for him. There are always corners. He likes to hear the part about the ladies of that region, how they wear fireflies in silver tissue cages on their heads, or live butterflies in stiff open gauze. So does Veronica, who one day opened the documents box for him to see her white fur. When I come to the section—“At first as we partook of the diurnal motion of the earth our course was consequently oblique”—laughter always spurts. But the people of Morosofia were classified by their shadows, which we consider exceptionally intelligent. And no matter what section I read of this piece of curiosa, I always end with the one of its author’s sentiments which always brings a silence. “Human pity is always the same.”

Then, drill being over, we suit up for our daily performance. The medic leaves. Up in the nose of our vessel, all the instruments are still chattering and screening; the dial hands swing like a coquette’s eyelashes. Someone else is taking the responsibility. The feeble circuits of our cabin strain to glow. We are freed—each to his or her own kaleidoscope. In mine, a woman walking the street of her own exploit is suddenly treading the streets of Iran, along with a harem intimate. The cab which held a dead man in front of the plaza, is found in London, brass-polished to a fare-thee-well and in front of the Garrick Club. Yards away from a dog lying on the runway at Canaveral there is a glint in the bushes like a turned soup spoon: the birds are back. In many places. In the mountains of Tehachapi the geography is now clear. My father Giovanni the Portygee, lost from his dory, is riding the waterspout, over what was once the sea. Soraya swings in her net.

My pockets are full of crumpled paper. Ideas come on here like the silk of motion, with no air between them and the carriage of meaning. There’s a thinness here, a purging. A convalescence from worldliness. We watch the indolent sidle of light into shade. Maybe we no longer expect to see our heirs. Maybe even Hossein no longer expects it. Our eyes glaze, exuding time, that mere by-product. We are time; we make it by enduring space until we are done for. How is it with you?

It occurs to me that you may get to us, but never quite reach us, where we are now. Though I hear—I hear the sweetest click. Or on this, perhaps the thousandth-and-one night—hear you hearing it. We are not as we were. On our foreheads may be the sweated drop of dew which contains all biologies. It comes of our location. Where we are now we can just glimpse—the balance between the voyage and the voyager. It seems to us we are brimming over with the mysteries of motion; our hands are cupped with them. We wear the great mask of transportation and know it for a mask. Are we the country behind you, or the one before?

We are the dark behind the migration. Bend over us as the Romans bent over the guts of cocks to see their own lunes. In our sunken entrails you may see the difference between the way things work and the way things are. I hear your cry—They felt gravity! Cover us, with your glory and rage.

Then I will rise up, from the all-night sleep. I know what I have been compiling here—a civilization. The
Courier
was only one of its missions. We were what the military calls a civilizade. A nonce word, i.e., created for a special occasion. Blessed are the dictionaries, for they shall see God.

We never knew for sure the drill for rendezvous. We were only non-footprints in space. But there have to be passengers. There have to be. What can we offer you—broken time, broken language, broken lives always fusing again—breaking the mold? It will happen. The broken best represents you. But the tragedy must be enough. Islands will happen. If we can bring our suffering with us, I’m thinking; if they can—

Foolish. It comes.

What a wind your entry makes. My papers are blown up. Handwritten, they swarm the cabin, soiled but afloat. They circle lazily, like snowflakes. The miracle is that they will never fall.

From my Foget couch, I watch them. I feel the extra-territorial imperative. Dangling from its hook, Mole’s empty restraint bag, veering right when we veer left, left when we veer right, says to me what it has from the beginning: Comprehendo.

Reader, I was Gilpin. Who are you? Bend over and I will tell you. An infinite number of people could have been brought into this account; in fact it was my guilt not to have you all here. Then I looked up, and saw that you were.

Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled
In the Absence of Angels
, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for
The Bobby Soxer
, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1983 Hortense Calisher

Cover design by Kelly Parr

978-1-4804-3899-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com