Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (43 page)

I let her enter the room ahead of me, as I had learned to do, that I might be a gentleman. Courtesy cost nothing, I had read here, along with hundreds of other proverbs, some of which mixed in my mind now, of how Rome hadn’t been built in a day, nor Troy so tumbled. Some of my reading no doubt was more to be trusted than the rest. It didn’t much matter. She and hers had their horse, now; I had my van. Altogether we had done well, if only what nature had all along intended. I wished I wasn’t so smart.

In the museum room, chancing to stand near the cherubim, I revealed my hopes that human babies were better, to which she replied that of course they were; they were each of them like a great seed. And looking at me in that one-eyed way the she’s have, the nearer one gets to them, so that if one didn’t know better one might drown in it as in a desert mirage, she said, “So are you! Like a great seed!”

I was so occupied with this, and the eye, that I barely heard her say that if she ever had a child she would regard me as the putative father—or one of them. “Putative” was a word I didn’t know, though I knew the root of
putrid
and
putana,
an Italian word, I believed, for the female of
whore.
Sometimes these words didn’t have masculine forms. But I had no relish for linguistics at the moment, nor for sentiment either, being eager to get on with my hibernation and nervous enough as it was, so replied in an absent but gentlemanly enough fashion that I would be glad to do what I could.

“Thanks,” she said, giving me an odd look. “If it’s to be done—then, ’twere well ’twere done quickly, as they say in the, er—telephone book. I mean—
if
it’s done, it already has been.”

“Excellent!” I said, looking vaguely about me for a mirror, though I knew very well the room didn’t have one. “Great seed, eh. Hmmm. Fancy!”

“It would be the first ever to have
two
fathers,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to deny your Onfluence; that wouldn’t be fair of me.”

“Neither would I,” I said, musing. There were smallish seeds here, plenty of them, strung up with shells and so forth, but I had in mind a rather, well—a great one.

“Think of it!” she said enthusiastically. She was wearing clothes now, under a large cape, and galoshes. Beneath the cape, her hands tried to clasp, and with some effort, were able. “It would be the first child to be really
born
on Ours, wouldn’t it. What a legend that’ll be!”

I finally turned to stare at her. “You must be out of your—We don’t have them.”

“Legends?” she said. “Or babies.”

“Say-y, listen,” I said. American mightn’t be so gentlemanly, but it was jaunty. “I know what’s wrong with you. It happened to me at first, and it was awful. Like the bends. But you’ll get over it. I’m just coming out of it myself. You’re in a state of
between.
”

“Don’t patronize
me,”
she said. “You don’t look so good yourself.”

Then.
Then.
Oh, to have hands. Was
this
murder? Luckily mutation gave me no help. But I lost control, right enough. “If you had more brains—”

“Oh no,
no,
” she said, dropping her lashes. “Empty heads are much better, they say. For making people. At least that’s what we’ve always been told. And I must say, in our time we’ve made quite a lot of them.”

“The crater takes care of that,” I said, still a little stiff with insult—would I never learn how? “Besides, I thought you and your friends wanted to be relieved of it.”

“Oh, we do,” she said. “For here. And even there, maybe one mightn’t want more than one, you know.” She gave me a stare which might be cuckoo, or ve-ery cool. “One and One being One.”

If this was the curve of the cosmos, then I was now out of line with it, though if nature did have this in mind, there was—ultimately—nothing to be done. But if it was
her
little joke, then I thought I could handle it. “The atmosphere, physical
or
mental, simply doesn’t provide for it. You’d probably die in the attempt.”

“Oh, to be a martyr,” she said. Actually, she sang it. “Or a
mater.
” Then she giggled. “I
am
getting to talk like you. Do you suppose
it
would?” She drew closer. She could still inch. “I’ve faced the fact that nine chances out of ten that’s what I’d get, you know. A freak. What with the comic—I mean cosmic—rays and all. An
it.
”

“You’d better face the fact the whole fool idea’s impossible,” I said, meanwhile envying her the cape, but only generally. The kind of remark I had just made went better with a vest, and I had a fancy to make more of them. “If you got around a bit more, you’d know that nobody has that kind of ordnance. Too damn complicated—who’d undertake it?”

“Perhaps we would,” she said. “Being more used to complication.”

What a tongue. I hoped I would never get one like it. “Speeding up mutation is one thing—or reversing it. Or however you—one may look at it.” I coughed. “But the
breeding
of two species so far apart is impossible. It’s against the interglobular evolutionary convention.”

“Oh,
is
it?” she said. “I hadn’t heard.”

Neither had I. But I was finding the improvisation here utterly exhilarating.

“Oh, I suppose you’re right,” she said dolefully. “It was just a thought. I was just looking ahead.”

“Well, you do that,” I said cannily. “You do that—no harm done. When you get there, you—may think differently. Meanwhile, just remember this is only the twentieth century. And between you and me, we’ve got about as far as we can go. Mustn’t let our imaginations go absolutely
hogwire.
”

She smiled at me suddenly. How they do that. “No.”

“Just remember your catechism, and you’ll be all right. And the contract. Exchange of persons, and very liberally interpreted, too. Not a complete across-the-board change of them. That’s what it stipulates.”

“Oh does it?” she said. “I never read the fine print.”

Then she toddled to the door and put her hand on the knob. I had a pang, having to let her go like this, but a job is a job.

She stared back at me. “You
do
have a look, you know,” she said, “but it’s not the same one. Or maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder.” She stifled a sound. If it was a sob, no tears came. “You don’t look like you any more. You look more like—
them.
”

Always the double gift. And then, without even a “see you, one day” she was gone.

I confess I hurried straight into the little salon where there was a mirror. I was astounded at what I thought I saw there. Maybe it was in the eye of the beholder, though. And the beholder was now me. Whatever, the role I had just played was an inevitable one; why must they always be a little stupider
and
a little brighter than we thought?

During the long process of objectification, I planned to go over all that had happened to me and assess it, also all that alphabet of human attitudes which would come to me—I was resigned to it—only in the experience, only in the flesh. But, mutation or no, it would be generations before I and my progeny would forget the sacredness of our spiritual home. The sort of thing she had in mind—it must
not
happen there. We had it in mind for Here.

As for the words we had just had, I was stupid enough now to know that it could not happen for eons yet if ever—and bright enough to know that ours was just that quarrel of imaginations by which the difference, and the daring—is preserved.

In a few minutes then, I must go into the museum, carefully face away from those cherubs, mentally commend myself to the cosmos—since I couldn’t yet scrape a cross on my chest hairs or throw salt over a shoulder—and begin. A good objectification usually takes from three to six months. Until One day, I had six. The prospect of so long a meditation didn’t faze me, the likelihood being that I would never again here have the chance for so much of it. The object I had chosen to be will not surprise you. Until then I might rest, under a little sign she had prepared for me, with her own hands.
TO REMAIN UNTIL CALLED FOR.

But first, I had an appointment with someone—and a vow. I walked over to where, sitting there herself that evening, she had made a brave, a defiant, a kindly prediction. Some of it had come true, and some of my wants also. I could trust the authority in this house now, for it was I. If none could say whether she and I had had an affair or a marriage, who’s to say you can’t lose what you have never had. You lose it doubly.

And now I knew what betrayal was, but not yet whether the man I would become in this world would ever forgive me for it. To forgive is divine, and that was not to be my story. For though there was no company to see, and if there had been, teacups were still beyond me, I thought I had an expression which others might someday confirm. No matter how doubly a thing is done here, the misery which follows it is still single.

The chair still held her print on it. So, bending as if I too were already a little lamed by the world to come—I sat. And it was there that, loath to go just yet, I had kept my vigil, and there I had slept until waking. And there, till we meet again, we may leave me. To sit is very human. To sit on the imprint of another is the most human of all.

T
HE VOICE OF BELIEF
is a low growl, and the word it says is
No.
This was an insight which felt as if it belonged to drowning, but surely nature wouldn’t waste it on then? Linhouse knew better. He’d been brought up to know that nature’s waste was prodigal, so much so that it was almost the other side of perfection, serving almost as well as the notion of a clockwork universe to make us think that she must have
something
in mind. What he had really meant was: “Surely she doesn’t mean to waste me.”

But his
no
was drowned in the congregation of no’s that rolled toward the stage—for in the large object toward which this swell had been directed, the last, smallest lily-pad disc on the bottom had spoken its speech, and with a huge sigh, as if a wind teasing a volume had at last contented it by closing it, the discs riffled backward upon themselves so rapidly that the eye saw only blur, and there it was again, tall, shaggy-thick, conic and almost familiar, like the daily almanac of some queer neighbor, not necessarily a giant, which one had got used to listening to, its story over for the day, its work done.

It was all so quick, so quick, so almost instantaneous, yet he had time to observe the round mouths of all those he had been watching intermittently: Lila, Meyer, Anders, there the three were, plus all the others who had spoken, Björnson the mathematician, and his friend Charles the biologist, and Herr Doktor Winckler, and the Indian too. He even had time to see the cruder meanings of their lives as they unwittingly every minute spoke them, at least to him—and these as if encircled above their heads in the vapid balloons of the comic strips, or at their feet in one or two astringent lines of print. There was Lila the anxious, the almost certainly adulterous, whom nobody could take seriously in either of these qualities, but it was all right because Meyer, heir of rabbis, would take all the rest of her seriously, and the children, heirs of them both, would too. There was Björnson who had known a zoologist in his childhood, and the admiring Charles who had known
him,
and Anders who had had such an odd childhood, and was having it still. And even Herr Winckler, always at somebody’s elbow, but probably never much farther, and Miss Apple Pie who wanted to know everything—he even had a twinge that she would never know the name he had awarded her. Always this empathy. Perhaps because the place was now dimming like a church, he felt as he always did nowadays when in one, that his heart was full of noble truths it wished to spit out immediately—and that all these good people were cardboard personages; only he was human, bad and real. Oh believe in the unknown, it will ennoble—he looked for Sir Harry, and at first couldn’t find him. Yes, there he was, yes, there, and his mouth was open too. Sir Harry looked to him like the only man there who knew he was saying
Yea.

He, Linhouse, even had time to look down upon himself and know he was a man. In the course of his life he had done this before of course in many ways, some that had seemed to him singular and some traditional, but never had he felt less embarrassed by it—gizzard, balls, tongue, cuticle and all. All of his earlier anticipated humiliation had come to pass, but he couldn’t care less if the whole audience here or of man, turned to look at Jack. Possibly he didn’t care because they weren’t even looking at him, and they weren’t because, with the growl which had only started a half-minute ago, they were too busy believing, and they were believing because they couldn’t help it—along with him.
The universe,
he said, looking down at himself. It has water in a liquid state; life is there. It has the blood, the sweat and the tears that old men have a habit of mentioning in old wars, and the piss they don’t bother to, and that other ichor which must be somewhere but nobody mentions much, or so shyly—the stuff that the brain makes in moving—no, that’s light. He looked down at himself, at his universe. I won’t apologize for you, he said, but for the first time he wasn’t embarrassed either. I can stand you, he said, but you have to
do
something. And suddenly he leaped from his chair, and shouted, “No!” though he meant Yea.

He crept forward, then straightened. It was only a yard from him; why should he creep? The secretary, rapt, paid him no mind. In front of
it
… dare he think more than
it …
he paused. What he wanted most to say to it was one of those ejaculations from his own core, one of those eeows or ahs it had honored him for. If he could, he would wish somehow, in its own sub-eighteenth-century language—if to speak of centuries was not an absurdity altogether—to honor it. He stood before it, it unquivering, not so he. O celebratizzical, he said to it silently. O amazingular. Finally he opened his mouth and spoke. Whose language had he spoken in? He had said, “O.”

Behind him, he heard his O echoed, not in a cadenza, but in continual asseveration, O, O, O, a trill somewhere far in the treble, that neither sank nor rose. He turned. The audience were all on their feet now faces aloft toward those encircling doors behind which, as from a phalanx of pipes, this super-octave was sounding. From there being so many women, and their posture, the effect was of the women rising in a body, or having so arisen. And from their number also, the effect was now as in any prospectus for the good life, that every man in the audience had a good woman at his side—in fact two. The sole man on his own was Sir Harry. His face still said Yea, but as he caught Linhouse’s eye, it stretched to a prompter’s smile.
Say it, Jack
it said, or seemed to.
You say it,
Linhouse signaled back, but Sir Harry, with a headshake, passed the ball back to him, and it was as if, in so doing, he had managed all sorts of comments on the generations. He did it by the simplest of gestures, his wedding ring gleaming for a trice on his long, competent fingers. Smiling, he turned up, down again, the palms of his hands.