Mysteries of Motion
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Authors: Hortense Calisher
A Novel
Hortense Calisher
1
GILPIN’S RIDE
R
EADER, I’M GILPIN.
This is our ride.
Strictly speaking there’s no evening here in orbit but we keep to schedule. Lately, always at this hour, we feel a soft lensing-in gain on us—one more of the body’s circadian rhythms for which there is no medicine. Our bodies seem to hope that some of you may now be watching us on satellite. The day salon, which has intermediate gravity, comes to seem to us more limbo than real. Passengers who were not in our cabin return to it. We six are in the non-gravity cabin closest to the tail.
You find us then exactly as we left you—how long ago? The positions for entering this life or leaving it resemble one another, just as with life anywhere. Once again each of us lies strapped to the Foget couch, which will allow maximum acceptance of G-force. We’re ready. One of us has helped in the other five, taking his or her turn at being left to do this alone. Not recommended, but unavoidable. Each of us now lies suited up from visor bubble to box toe. A space suit is in effect a small spacecraft in the shape of a human being. Or so they insist. Inside, a life-support system pressurizes, humidifies and sucks wastes, to small limits. Smallness has great meaning here. The identity badges on our breast pockets, turned on in more active hours, are once again unlit. At the moment you catch us a lack of friction is all-important. Or perhaps a moment ago was. If we are not dead—we are forestalled.
I identify us:
On the first couch, left to right of your screens, is Mulenberg, longest of bone. At times he sings, but not now. Second comes Oliphant, a woman, and almost as long as he. Next should come the man Lievering, also known as Jacques Cohen, but his couch may be empty; this has happened before. He has the lightest foot in space—or spirit—of any of us. After me comes Wert, shortest of the men, who even when rigid has an air of looking behind him. The suit on the sixth couch keeps its gauntlets crossed where its belly must be; it is some months with child.
There’s an extra person in our cabin, who should not have been here. Off center, in the shadow behind us, can you see a suit that hangs from the cabin wall, anchored only at its nape? Its arms float. We called him Mole. That suit can’t look younger than the rest; I only imagine it.
I am the man in the fourth couch. A book is in front of me, clamped at eye level. Drop an object in non-gravity and it’s lost to you. The book is the
Decameron
of Boccaccio. I have been reading aloud from it. One hundred tales to while away the time, as first told to each other by some nice young people in flight to the countryside from the Black Death. Boccaccio himself died well over six hundred years ago in 1375. Gentle Reader is what you and I would have been called then. In tribute to our noble birth, since we could read at all, and to our hopefully amiable temperament.
One hundred lives are believed to be aboard this vehicle. I offer you the private logbook of six, along with sketches of whoever else may wander in. Sometimes I may be Gilpin there; sometimes I can even bear to be “I.” You understand that; this is a dilemma you and we share. It’s in the spirit of the times, this twisting to avoid being a publicly machined shadow. The others here feel the same. Take us as we are, in the broken cinema of our souls.
In return we ask a favor. Be gentle no longer. Let your birth be what it may, but for whatever you hold dear give up the temperament. Listen to us with claws open as well as hearts. Cross steel in front of your own vitals, for whatever grace period this has given ours. Get up ever earlier in your mind to study the voyage we make.
Reader—ride with us. Not for our sake alone, not for yours, though soon you may be making your own decamerons into our blue. For the sake of that once gentle brown humus from which we all come.
Where the journey begins.
O
N CAPE CANAVERAL,
on Gantry Row, sea birds wheel above old space machines abandoned on that shoreline to rust in the sticky salt air, sometimes coming to perch on forked cornices and broken parallelograms no odder than those they might find on a forest floor. Vines creep over pitted metals once forged to absolute specification. On Gantry Row the birds and the jungle fernery are the space-age’s sole archivists.
Here engineers from the great inland installations come to loot these old rocket shapes for a spare part or idea still usable, or to sit on the beached sawhorse of some module once smartly vertical and stare at that quiet line where sea meets sky—the obsolete old horizon which any child these days taken aloft on school trips to witness the first truths can tell you is merely the old shoulder curve of a planet he or she may someday leave. Or a couple of men who’ve already been in space as non-operating personnel, lodged by day shift in the roomier white gantry of the lab but maybe sleeping by “night” in those constraint bags in which a body hangs in non-gravity as on a butcher’s hook, will be playing at toss with one of the small rubber balls which out in weightlessness help keep the muscle tone in the hands. They may play until the sun goes down, none of the spots of its eon-slow death here visible. Or they might simply jog the water’s edge, shouting to each other at the lovely downpull of gravity in the legs—according to the aeromedics not the best deal for the veins of bodies evolved from the non-erect, but still what they were born to. This day a pair have brought a bottle, congratulating the whisky as they pour it for not flying out. Clearly they are veterans of the way matter behaves when it is not “at home.”
Farther down the beach, a man seated on a triangular shooting stick and balancing a briefcase on one knee watches them with a freshman’s envy. Weightless travel could be tolerated, and like jet travel soon would be by all but the few made markedly sick by it, but it took learning and could be curiously tiring. In plain language, it was still a strain for humans to be in an environment where they couldn’t fall.
Nobody stayed on Gantry Row late enough to watch the moon come up. Or bothered to bring a man or a girl. The moon is business now. Like most heavenly bodies, it has suffered the decline in personality and charisma which comes, as in old love affairs, from accumulated familiarity and even the most special handling. Those beachcombers on furlough probably work on it, or on a materials-processing station “nearby.” For the five nights Gilpin has stayed on here after dark, playing hooky from the fancy government motel up the road where all passengers for his flight are quartered, he and those busted old rocket shapes have had Diana LaLuna to themselves in all her phases, and it’s been a quiet affair. The moon no longer has much of a sex. On Canaveral maybe even the dogs don’t bay at it.
On the long-ago night of the Apollo moon shot, Gilpin had been a student on work holiday, gorging himself on boar during end-of-summer festival week in a small mountain town in Tuscany. That night, as all there agreed, “she” had lost her virginity—though a clutch of roisterers, dirty old men clapping their hands to their wine-soaked crotches, had kept shouting that the old man up there had lost his balls, until the matrons serving the tables in the straw tents set up all along the town’s central
strada
had had them thrown out. After which the women, tightening their downy mustachios with a ripple that ran from one headshake to the next—
“Aie, la Luna poverina, aie!”
had handed all the rest of them in the tent a free extra plate of meat. Mouth full, gazing up through the starry, straw-rimmed tent hole as if he were watching a rape from a manger, Gilpin had quoted Sir Philip Sidney’s address to the moon. Only the first line of it, which was all a sophomore could recall, but aloud, for hell, this was Italy: “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies!” Telling himself he was participating in the death of a portion of the world’s poetry and was possibly the only person in the world to feel this. Next morning every columnist in the Italian newspapers had felt the same.
The following day he sat in a different stall with his real feelings. Here the wine drinkers were the younger men for whom babies were beginning to spill out—not onto the floors of their grandfathers’ farms, sold now to foreigners, but into the new apartment villas on the edge of town, which the government had had built out of the local tufa stone. Tonight they were drinking grappa, which cost more than their own wine, but maybe because they knew him as the boy who since spring had lived on an absentee
inglesi’s
farm, trucking in the olives to the press like any of them, they wouldn’t let him pay. He’d have to hang along until sundown when they’d all go off to the cafe where perhaps he could treat. The sky he saw through the straw hole was a bright, hard Tuscan blue, and empty. He had no quote for it. Now and then one of the men shook his clenched fist at it admiringly. Once a man let his thumb slide slowly through his other four fingers, two on a side, and everybody laughed. In the tent hole the sky dimmed to “mountain’s breath,” as the dusk was called here, then to a soft ripe-olive black.
Later, in the cafe that was the village’s grange and heart, he and they trooped past the grannies and mothers who sat with the children at tables near the entrance, past the confectionery counter where girls clustered to talk with the two young daughters-of-the-house from whom he bought his ration of one mouth-filling inch of custard pastry with his after-work cappuccino every midmorning—all the way to the bar at the far end, served by the
padrone
himself. Among the gathered men he recognized the butcher, his cheeks as yellow as the tallow he worked with, who could be glimpsed every Friday through the bead curtain of the barbershop, confronting the mirror with a hair net on his head. The barber himself, that pink-cuticled Aesop, saluted him. Well apart from these townsmen there stood or leaned the town’s portion of granite-wrinkled old men, in pants of stone also and boots cast by time, who every evening were maybe let out of the vaults of the Etruscan museum across the valley. There was one ancient who never got past the café entrance, standing inarticulate for whole evenings in front of the tinseled, glassed-in Motta chocolate display, staring in with dazed other-era eyes.
Gilpin had ducked through all of them, into the communal pisshole at the back. When he came out they were all on their feet, even the mothers guarding the pointy-lashed teen-gigglers whose baby-ready breasts poked at him from their blouses. The slim doe from the town’s gas pump, who bent her valentine-shaped jeaned hips under his nose to feed the
inglesi
’s car when he brought it in but wouldn’t let herself be spoken to, now smiled at him. Each and all had a glass in hand, holding these out to him.
Moona-shot
—
Moona-shot-Americani!
That long, classically segmented room, lantern-shadowed yet lit with candy-paper frolic, smelling of after-work wine and ice cream, coffee and field stink and talcum powder, murmuring with three-generational tales whose nuances of wit and death he would never get to the bottom of, and underfoot with children treated like everybody’s saints, had all summer seemed to him a bright parable of the world—and still does. He understood that they were making the ritual their rightfully developed sense of occasion demanded of them, and that they felt extra-lucky to have a real American on hand for it. A drink was thrust into his hand. And no, they still wouldn’t let him pay.
A-pol-lo-o!
a man shouted from the back—
Viv’il machina A-pol-lo!
The old man transfixed in front of the glassy display mouthed it—A-pol-lo.