A LITTLE BACK ROOM IS not hard to find. At least not in a place where the public buildings held themselves so whitely in the moonlight, on each the name of its God. And perhaps not anywhere on your planet, to a being whose whole existence had been passed in what here would be thought of as public enclosures of no smallness or backward inclination whatsoever. As I passed over New York City first, I thought of this, and of how clearly, no matter that you did have the two kinds of room, the instinct to keep them separate prevailed. I thought of much more of course, but from now on would practice to be selective, if not so rigidly as we did it chez Nous. The great virtue of our civilization, at least to the calm-minded, is that it has known what to leave out—and whatever remnant of this intelligence was left me, I must preserve. Describing something, we feel, is one way of keeping it, even if you don’t want it—vide your war annals; yet I already sensed, passing over this city of terror-sparkles and tower-comforts, that you people wouldn’t go for our seamlessness in toto, or never for long. Other intelligences further hinted (now that I had coped with your primary sensations and physical properties, and had recorded how these barriers might be broached) that the more I gave signs of becoming a person, the less I might interest you personally. This couldn’t be helped. I was already so interesting to me.
And now that the first shocks and arrow flights were indeed over, I couldn’t conceal from myself, though I might well need to hide it from you, that a good part of our native excellence—as we had heard you so very kindly call it—had crossed over with me after all. It was nothing to me, for instance, to pause, at an elevation well above the George Washington Bridge, early of a clear winter’s night, and to know, looking down over the city—to know pretty well without being told—what some of its parts were meant for. Or to guess. The big buildings—in particular those which either were blank dark at this hour or lit with a certain regularity—I at once recognized as the ones where you kept your civilization. This was no superb deduction, since we ourselves are a civilization totally on display. But what of those other swarms and huddles, masses of rooms to all shapes and scales, and all of them cryptic—other than that many of them would seem to be back ones?
By now, I was following the river northward, at an altitude sometimes low enough for me to discern the highway on the cliffside, along which lay my destination, as well as the traffic, sparse on such a cold evening, that was wending its way there also. My ability to elevate, though it showed more and more signs of waning, must surely last me until I got there; meanwhile the cars below, though so unevenly spaced in their groove, sent up a faint humminess of home. As far as the occupants of these were concerned, had any of them looked out and up, I was but a leftover cloud, or a bit of the afterglow. Or even if—as might at any time happen, in a moment of what emotion, here?—I became rosy enough to be fully visible, why, what would I be to the denizens of this marvelous, fatal city that floated the waters behind us, except a wandering Neon, whose name I had learned from a piece of it which had announced itself in snake-pink above the shop that sold it—a wandering Neon which had got off by itself alone? This sentiment pleased me so much that I decided to stop somewhere to muse on it, meanwhile taking a prudent rest—a journey in miles being so much more tiring than one in light-speeds—and seeing a right-hand fork, marked by a sign, in the highway, I did so. You may wish to note—though I no longer intend to dwell on these minor acquisitions which come either thick and fast here, or cold and gradual—that I now knew my right lack-of-hand from my left.
Choosing a moment when no cars were passing—for in spite of my sentiment, I felt shy—I alighted, quickly read the sign, then fled behind an escarpment of trees that marked a promontory which stretched out into tonight’s moon-blinded river. The radiance was of the kind that blinds one with the facts one so clearly sees down to the last shiver, the kind which made one think of the river as “tonight’s.” As may be seen, I am sensitive to water and the travels it can offer to a traveler who is only resting by its side, but I did not want to make a poem of this or any other sentiment, not on this evening of the river’s existence. I wished to sit there and think of my mission.
Behind me, the sign near the road said HUDSON RIVER. This was odd of them, since they must already know this, and any foreigner who came this far also, even I—or did they assume that we rovers went from world to world without any briefing? No matter. Wilderness would be tricky here, being so much of it inside them; it was probable they would label it wherever they could.
For it stood to reason that the people here would differ not only from me—which was all I’d been able to think of up to now—but also and in more ways than gender, from each other. Difference, we’d been taught, led to a purposelessness which in the end could only destroy; together with birth, this is the second of the three great subjects of our seasonal laughter. But, serious though you were—for, looking about the city, I had an idea you had not our style of humor—tonight your world, or all the parts I had seen of it, was blooming, and meanwhile making my own native intelligences stream back at me, like transfusions of that divinity we were not allowed to see in ourselves at home. No matter that the facts never stood still here; this was real meditation on my part, wasn’t it—in which my energies flooded so strong, and I saw them as so far-reaching that surely all the facts would be subdued in the end? How delicious it could be, to be alone here, thinking the great thoughts that could be got here just from sitting!
I must have sat for some while before my own super-thoughts returned to me, helped by the example of the river, whose current repeated on itself in a faint version of our grooving. How wary the traveler must be here of first impressions, indeed clever enough to guess that this is what an impression is. We at home are born into maturity, at once and as one; no traveler will ever see us other than as we are. Our aging is merely a general going-down into the crater we came from, and so careful is the supervision, that we come only a very little better than we go. And going takes care of that! Evenness is all. But you, as we well knew without having bothered with the details of it, grow successively by stages, over the comparable value of which we had all too often heard you quarreling, to what end we had however heard not a word. This is what I had come for of course—that mystery, yes, that terror. I stared south, to the city which I had dubbed marvelous but fatal too, not knowing quite why, except that it bore itself upward like the proud spire of a planet which had lately been reported as almost all fatality. Now that I had come, I hid the conviction, constantly put by or below in another one of the space-boxes one seemed to grow here when needed, that this planet would be fatal to—me. Southward I stared, at all that fairy-tale wrack which hung on the harbor in a swarm of only slightly counterfeit stars. Shivering, I stood up to it, in self-knowledge. I had come for—the fatality, too.
Then, I looked down at myself hopefully, as I was to do, as I am to do so many times over, on here. No change that I could see, none of the appendages that you took so for granted. Nevertheless, I had been born again here in a way, and I had my images. I had the thought of arms, which, if I had them, I would stretch heavenward now. And use to set the facts right, later.
And then, remembering your chatter, I surmised what had befallen me. It must be that I was—young.
Well, that was something to know—even if it is the third topic of our laughter. And there was still time for gender.
Across the river from me, the opposite hills held lights also, some of them moving like those behind me on the highway, the others, though less cramply clustered than in the city, of that same nature yet to be guessed at, but somehow, I was sure of it, not public. If your public buildings were where you displayed your civilization, then what were all these others for—and so many of them? What went on in these little back rooms?
There on that cold, night-blue shore, I pondered. Cold is good for pondering, night also. This skinny silence repaired mine. Oh, how mind functioned, that evening! “Public” had an opposite; this I knew, if barely. The only private place on Ours was the crater, to which reentry is forbidden, except on that one occasion when we are also allowed our scream. And in all my traverse here, though from above I had watched passing beneath me your volcanoes, fiery or sleeping, your funnels, snow peaks, chimney stacks, grain elevators, lakes and gravel pits, bogs and salt seas, and entries to all kinds of underground mines and other muck—in all my traverse, I had seen nothing like. The volcanoes being by far the most promising, on the way I had alighted near one of the quieter ones, in the vicinity of Mexico, and confess even to have peered within, while forbiddenness sang on wires within me, but saw nothing, nothing but the pernicious vegetation beginning again, always beginning again on the good, calm brimstone. Your landed world, once so toy a ball, from my seeking something on it, became majestic. I was looking for something plural, by now I knew that. But where were they then, your craters?
Luckily, just before speeding up and away again, I had seen the vast yards of graves at the mountain’s base, and now that my faculties were so sharp again, could guess their meaning—and a good thing too, else, at my next insight, what nasty suspicions of lettres de cachet might not have assailed me. Thank goodness, I wasn’t being sent there, or not right away; where I was going there was to be a good deal of talking, if I knew anything about your dialogues. Where were your craters? Why, like everything else here their function would be divided two-ly. I had seen where you more than likely ended up, whether or not it was permitted to do so with a scream. But where, then, did you begin?
Then it was that in cold, dark blueness, and yet a-twinkle, the nature of your variation most truly faced me. You, such as You, would never be content with a one, a same or single birthplace. They were facing me everywhere, to the south, to the east—west, piled helterskelter all over your rectilinear, not excluding that particular northward direction and room to which I was going. They were scattered everywhere on the planet; these little back rooms where people were made.
I saw how primitive I had been—though in our command of the inorganic we had so single-trackly excelled you; how stolid had I been in the face of your thousand-petaled imaginations, how naif-naive! Why, I couldn’t yet even use a gendered language with comfort—and gender was only the half of it! Every time I entered one room here, or met a one of you, I would nevertheless have to be thinking in thousands. It was even possible that before I could really say I knew a one of you to the full, I would have to know all of you—I was willing. But (and I thought I glimpsed your style of humor) it was probable that I would have to start out with one anyway—I was eager. To differ like that, I saw what it meant now. To—differ. Different people!—how else would these be made except in different rooms?
It was very cold among the trees here; an hour ago the river had been breaking softly now and then under its thin shingles of ice, but now all was silent, except for the random whistle of a twig. There must be warmth in those rooms; I saw how each, a modest crater, glowed on the dark. Our crater ceremonies, like all command performances, are set up to show that there is nothing to hide. Friction, or the ghost of it, almost lurks here, between the guards and the populace that waits to greet the newcomers; there are no coarse jokes but the stifled gas of them blends with the smoke of creation; up farther, at the very font of the lava streams, stand the soul-hunters, those tremulous voyeurs. How charming it must be instead, to breed as you did, in private, small parties of you around the … cauldron, cozy dice games in every … ah, that’s what a corner could be for!—and a general humminess of jolly but temperate prenatal conversation. This was privacy then, and who wouldn’t desert the sublime for it? I looked up at the brilliant sky, its star-packed lanes ready for more and more like me, and beyond these caravans, the continuum of what has never had even an ear to listen to itself, oozing on, lone. How cozy was the small distance! I must go. In fact, I could hardly wait.
Before I went, I had the strange notion—to thank the river. For what, I didn’t quite know, unless for its silence, and did I dare? By your arithmetic, patiently doing its simple sum for me over and over, the inorganic would be only half-enemy here. But inexperienced as I was, how could I tell when a landscape, everywhere so full of seams and terra firma, would not subvert? What was being said, if not nihil, by the whistling twig?
But I am brave, at least on half-occasion, here. So from the riverbank, I bowed and gave thanks anyway, and as so often happens here only found out then what I was giving them for—is this prayer? After days here up to now, I had still been a squaller, a whimperer for whom being left alone was both insult and madness. Every time it had happened here, the fudging paranoias of I-ness overcame me, the bitter winds of by-yourself blew. In short, I was used to my group.
And now, for what I estimated to have been the good part of an hour, the very good part of one, I had been, thoughtfully but quite bearably—alone. There was nobody else around to thank for this, so I thanked what was most in sight. Perhaps aware of this, the river remained silent. It was frozen in a white smile.
When I got to the crest of the highway again, I looked back on it. The more aesthetically it smiled, the less I trusted it, and yearned to see it again. It was trying to win me over to a situation which, deep in the side of me that waited for a heart, I goddamnwell knew about already. Part of a One’s mission here was—to be alone. Or to learn how to be.
So? So I did what you do whenever such ghoulish thoughts afflict you. I ran like hell, toward a bit of company. After all, that was a part of the mission, too.
As I took to the road at a height well above the trees, there was more traffic, reminding me that in the moderate zone at this latitude-longitude, the day darkens earlier in the twenty-four-hour cycle, in winter; this was what was called the “suppertime.” Each car had its dark occupant sitting sternly upright, like a … buttonhook.
Ah. I barely got what the word meant, but I recognized the style, determinedly out of style. Better company was ahead, but I had an idea my computer, unheard from since Bucks, was taking pity on me, or feeling the journey too. On Ours, we, often debate the topic: “Is a One’s comput-put con-conscious of One’s Other Thoughts?”—this being one of those mildly sacerdotal subjects which would return us safely where we were. I did not know what the dogma was here. But from what We had heard, on Here—machines were sometimes let go free. I was now leaving the river, which paid this no mind but continued northward, while I took the fork of the road that curved far to the left, toward the Ramapos, a range of foothills which I would reach in some twenty miles. Hobbs was near. I bid for time, plus a little chat to while away the speeding dark.
“What’s a buttonhook?” I said it nonchalantly, as if nothing had lately come between us—which not much had of course.
A hesitation—they are sometimes so real in their reactions. Then a like reply. “Instrument for fastening highbutton shoes. Both out of use vers 1925.”
In our whole history together it had never offered me a fact less useful to me. To be fair, in the first week of my arrival it had been briefed for hours with all sorts of data; impurities might well have entered such a vast source of supply. Had it been unwise of me to let them brief it? … a grim thought struck me. Suppose they had supplied me with information slanted only toward the gender they planned for me.
We know ourselves to be so much more a frank and Open people than you, that we have had to be constantly on guard to Overcompensate for it. Shortly you may find that lately we have done rather well. And receptive as I was, your devious atmosphere was already affecting me, perhaps even disproportionately to what it did your own inhabitants, who have their immunities. Body mutation, after the first push, might go slowly for me, but I have always been precocious in sensibility.
“Old friend,” I said, “you have served me well.” Not too much sentiment now; like many people they are suspicious of what they don’t have. Why not treat them as people, really!
“Dangerous adventure may befall me,” I said. The books We have preserved tend toward this cadence. “Which you may not wish to share.” Or if all goes well, I thought, there may not be room for you, dear friend.
No answer.
“And I have been wondering—” It has to be spoken to in italic, a habit hard to break elsewhere, as you may have noted. “And I have been wondering whether—” Just then we were passing over a GAS station which also spoke up for itself as agency for tractors and other farm machinery. I hovered discreetly over a number of attractively red and yellow constructions, lit up like prima donnas, “—whether you would like a scholarship—in order to pursue your scholarship?”
No answer. We were only ten miles from Hobbs, now.
“In other words,” I said, “would you like to go free?”
This was desperate of me, having no idea whether operations for this sort of thing were known here.
“Underground!” it said sharply, and suddenly. “I want to go underground.”
Yes, I had better get rid of it—when things came to the point where even its answers needed interpretation.
“Underground—of what?” I said carefully.
“Not of what,” it replied. “Of who.” It allowed this to echo, like a birdcall, and then said, softer than I had ever heard it, “Underground of you.”
I looked beneath us, at the skimming world below.
“Stupid,” it said. “Look within.” Of course, it had read the same books we did.
I could see very well now why you had kept them separate, resisting their incorporation in yourselves. “What will you study down there?” I cried.
“Not to study,” it said, blurry. “To dream.”
“Is this … was this part of the program?” I mustn’t allow it to confuddle me. I shouldn’t treat it as an “it.” On home ground, I would never have thought of doing so. “Shall—shall we be talking?” I said.
There was the longest silence yet. Then, a whisper. “Well—keep in touch.”
The Ramapos came in sight then, shouldering themselves in the moonlight, more than hills, less than mountains, and just the dear range for domestic adventure.
“Good-bye!” it said, as of yore. “Old friend!”
It was the last direct communication I ever had from it. And a jolly good thing too, from the tone of the indirect ones. But I had to admire it. When they go, they certainly go—go.
And now I was free, alone, still airborne, and faring toward the most important company of my life.
Suppertime, teatime, dusktime over a town, any town if it but have white houses with a gleam in them. And if it have mountain hills behind it, air as if water had after all followed it—
God keep you from my poems, now.
And a little back room isn’t hard to find.
HOBBS. FOR REASONS WHICH may be becoming clear to you—or shortly will do—I wasn’t to go there at first, But I couldn’t resist having at least a look at it, it having been chatted about so constantly among those of my colleagues at home who were taking care of the practical side of things. I am a visionary, but a one with friends. Those are the ones to be reckoned with.
I recognized Hobbs at once, it being the shape of one of your own planetaria, and thus resembling many of our own more ordinary outbuildings. There is always something comforting about a building which curves from apex into ground, and no nonsense. Until coming here, however, I had never seen buildings which were not wholly translucent, and perhaps those can be comforting too. Like our best architecture though, Hobbs had no windows either. Latterly, we have had a few small, oval clerestories and the like, mere frippery which has nevertheless caused wide uneasiness, this kind of complication being so unwise for us. The more windows, the more seam.
Against the marble of the greater buildings, all grouped round a brilliantly floodlit agora across which only a few dark figures scuttled, the moonlight on their rears was as sharp as must be those barbed-wire emplacements I had been warned were beneath them. Everywhere were shadows almost as black as those at home. Fill the agora with grooves of any good manufacture, institute certain other subtle adjustments—such as washing the facades clean of their variable inscripts, replace the wires and any other so-called “securities” with a more delicate protection, and, of course, remove the moon—and homesick visitors from Ours might settle there almost as if in one of our own public ovals. The strength of our nation resides in its willingness to accept reasonable facsimiles. This, too, takes imagination.
My instructions were to ignore those buildings with the most abracadabra on their frontals, and fix upon the one with the shortest, from the steps beneath whose portal I had only to follow the lane. But it was a touch-and-go business, to go round those inscriptions—many of them fouled up with the two-or three-dimensional heraldic shapes proper to their deities—and to do it at the right reading height. Sounds rose well here also, and at each I flattened myself behind some trumpeted cornice, or horn of plenty, or gargoyle. Crouched behind the bronze shield of Muckelfrae, I had about decided that those below were merely greeting one another as they passed. But while engaged in peering at the flat-steel facade of what from its chaste glyph appeared to be Gryzmyshm, I thought I heard someone call, “Aurora borealis?” and then an unmistakable, “Northern lights!” Quickly I hopped behind the carved grapes of Rapaprat, whenceforth the sounds died away. And from my perch there, across an agora momentarily deserted by footsteps and voices, I saw what I hunted. Bastard lettering edited by birdlime indicated a rather rundown hall and deity, but there was no mistaking it: SMITH.
A daring moment. I allowed myself to alight and stand under its portico, on the very steps. On them. For, by hops, I so descended the fourteen of them. With each, I felt myself lose a minim of my power to levitate, until it rested at a skim-graze from the ground, at which level—and waiting only for the dear fault of feet—it has since remained. So I lost in a trice, and even with joy, what, as I progress toward you and yours, it is sometimes said I may have cause to regret. There are compensations.
The lane pointed. A lane is a meander with trees, ending in one house which already will have been described. At least it is so in my experience. I took the meander. On the way, the trees did not burn. And when I reached the house—dark in front, but in the rear, just as described, a nimbus of light, pale but steadfast on the poplars—I found I had gathered enough weight to push gently inward the unlocked door.
Behind me, the white countryside shone in also; it was snowing. I was covered with the little roseflakes, snow-windows, and of course knew well enough that cliché of interstellar geophysics—how much they vary—which nevertheless seemed to me to carry difference too far. There is an element of the lapidary, a tendency toward the precious-precious, in your nature world’s insistence on non-sameness, and it is when I encounter it at such times that I yearn again for a world simple almost as a wave in swath and spirit, freed forever from the crystallography of detail.
Otherwise, there is nothing so human as opening in a door.
I remembered then that I was to ring a bell before entering, so located it, and pressed my newfound weight against that also. There was no answer, many times. This made me feel as if, in three minutes, I had become master of a virtuoso instrument which owned this one sad song for my ear only. Perhaps it is only after many non-answers of this sort, that one develops an ear. I leaned against the door. How strange that leaning should be how I am doomed to make my way here. The door opened slowly, halfway. Over the lintel, just the other inside of it, lay the blue letter.
It is the small things that shock, here. To a denizen of a civilization which generates four hundred million billion billion watts of power as compared with your four thousand billion, how could it be otherwise? How could the letter have arrived before I had, and once more be fresh, untattered? Slowly, I said to myself, take it slowly. Remember the snow-flake. This was a motto I was to say to myself often. For then of course, I looked down again and saw that this indeed was not the same. This letter, however blue-ly arrived, was not a letter to Bucks but from it, and not from the Janice but to her—I thought I knew from who. The other letter had given directions to my mentor as to how a One might come here. This message must announce my arrival here, the arrival of a One. But She, its author, was perhaps already out on There, far past any distances conceivable to the short minds here, far far past the spiral nebula in Andromeda, the Magellanic clouds. This time I was able to control the ragged breathing which visited me again but slower; how strange if grief, or what you more precisely call “regret,” should be the beginnings of a respiratory organ! Combined perhaps, with curiosity—for I was quite able to close the door behind me, and step inside. But it is the small things that shock.
And now, I was in. Previously, a One had fallen asleep on this planet, as once you used to do entirely, stretched slack on the green, numb in the bramble—outside. A One had seen from above your cities, churches, shops, highways and riverbanks—the green, and all the dark that overlay the green. And now a One saw his first private residence.
I do not know where to place this shock, for it has never much lessened. I could have wished that my pores would close again, but whether these had hardened now—or humaned—that anemone defense has never again been mine. (Up the ladder, I suppose.) Since I didn’t know where to look, or scarcely how, I had to look everywhere. I continued to shiver, for perhaps half an hour. Since I did so uncontrollably, I suppose this was up the evolutionary ladder too.
We don’t have aesthetic; that wasn’t my trouble. Neither would any kingly abodes, nor tapestried halls I saw later, had these come first, have reacted on me otherwise. As you yourselves say, beauty is relative. We live on that pinnacle where all appearances are relative together; as I have said in another connection, We Have What We Are. It would never occur to us to feel stuck with it. No, my trouble was—honesty. Ours.
Oh my non-opposites, I have a teaspoon of your perspective now! We have what must appear to you a far too candid civilization, gliding forever in one groove: Fear substance, suppress it, and never forget to do so in the knowledge of all. In curved life, there is this one lie which everybody honorably accepts. The rest is luster. At least, I suppose this to be the historical argument, long since buried with what it buried—we are all luminosity now. And for a one of us, however expectant, however half trained, to stand in any of your rooms is to suffer such shudders of substance, such gouts and corporeal bites of it as must in the end surely develop a venous system in me, or perhaps a nervous one—whichever carries double messages, and doubles back on itself to carry them.
For your rooms are chock-full of what you are half afraid of, and all half fawning, half at heel. Everywhere there is the threat to the body, in bulk of chair, in step from step, in sword-hung light. From one lurking apocalypse to the other, you move grooveless, on your own. And everywhere, only half suppressed, half acknowledged, you live with the threat to the mind. A window doesn’t annihilate distance—but frames it. In your antiquities, even in your meaner objects, the least of which may survive you, you live with your own death—and bear it. We are an almost dreamless people, but if ever we should start in large-scale, here would be our nightmare. For even the plainest of your rooms is stuffed to bursting with it, with threats held back by the nearest of margin, the thinnest of seal. In short, throughout all my almost life I had never seen such a prevalence of: seams.
In spite of which, everywhere I saw the brave shape of you, in the chair’s crushed pillow the implicit lean of you, in the doorknob a hint of your hand. Standing there, still shaking, I saw how you lived, not as we, by almost certainty, but by entente cordiale—the second word of that phrase being in itself already a little tipsy, not to be betted on as a sure thing even with your kind of boomerang money. Outside each of these rooms there was another room, a ghostly replica of lurks and shadows, as if refracted to one side. No doubt you differed among you as to which was the realer. I saw where to differ might be helpful. Fact was, you lived in both.
I stopped trembling at once. Nothing cures the panic of the moment quicker than a twinge from the ague that one knows will last for life. The room wasn’t such a threatening one really, indeed one so small and low that a wandering runt from abroad might even begin to be proud of his bearing—what great Lumpen my more imperial brethren would have found themselves here! The windows were flossed with white, and against these, and walls of the same, I would be just visible, a great fleshly vase of famille rose. As I calmed, I could better take in that the seams, though many, were tensely controlled; nowhere were there any leering cracks. On one wall, a gilt bird clutched in its claws a mirror I saw was convex—a tribute to the new guest? I glided over to see myself in it, then looked quickly away. Curved beings should perhaps not look in curved mirrors. But I turned away with a new respect for leaving. It was one method of moving, here, by which means you moved from room to room and perhaps from person to person also. We are a more blithesome people, since, traveling always on ovaloid, we need never speak of leaving. We always arrive.
Another method was to have an aim, and damn the directions. World to world, this had got me here, and now, somewhat abashed in scope, it moved me forward through a succession of small cottage rooms which passed over me or rather propelled me, like the smallest chip in a kaleidoscope, and then left me to stand, hung with all my half-mortal weight, before a door described. The little back room. Within, I heard a noise.
I am without shame. I confess it. I mean that I admit without shame that for what seemed many minutes but may have been few I stood there, hearkening to the murmurs, the sobs and cries of a creation which had drawn me toward it through spiral upon spiral of this small and scarcely steadfast universe, from room to room of a small house. But now that I was here, Prometheus bared and palpitant for his experience … now I did not enter. The glass transom through which I heard it was several feet above me, but I think I would not have looked through it even had I still possessed my power to rise. I was on the brink of the greatest moment of divination of the journey between us, and now I wanted it to move forward, to see its mysterious lamp shine ahead of me still, just around the corner, only just down the line. A poet must never plumb his otherwordliness to the full. Every night, in a mummy of a book I had read before starting out, the eagle comes to eat the heart of Prometheus. A One of us had flown far. But who could be sure which of us—You or We—was not still Prometheus, demigod chained to his ledge? You were my eagle surely, my mystery—you must not disappoint. Like the bird on the wall of one of the rooms behind me, clutched in your claw you held your mirror, in it the blankness from which I must—become.
I waited. The light in which I was listening was a queer one. From some shrouded source inside that room, light must be falling in domino on trees outside that sent it wavering inward again through the window of this one, perhaps augmented by moon. This light, whose source I could not see—it was like a link. In it, I saw that I had grown a shadow, not quite as black as one of ours, but long. My shadow stretched ahead of me, pointing toward the door. Even I could fancy that, thin as a wish, it slipped inside there, unbroken. And from inside, surely something stole forward to join it, to warn. What fled from me, toward me? I waited. The noise of creation was over. All was silence within and without, unbroken. And in it, I heard the beating of my non-heart.
It was never to become a permanent acquisition; even as yet I hear it seldom, always strangely, betimes. And indeed, later study revealed that I had misread the legend; the eagle in the story was a vulture, who plucked at a liver, not a heart. But the anatomy of evolution is not for me to say, or how false gods, false images might yet breed me true. In any case, I was at that moment heartened enough, emboldened enough to step across my own image, along the track of my own shadow, and stand up to that door. Prometheus made clay images—true. But he modeled them after … I had never dared say it before. Men.
Inside that room, I said to myself, was privacy, an institution we took care not to have. Yet here it was managed, and on the matter of affairs which were really the most public on the planet. This was honesty as it should be—one truth for all, but dramatically hidden away, so that everybody was kept running after it. Including heroes from other planets, whose more classic intelligence, once mated—ah, that word—with your hot self-drama, already made for such an internal frisking and a lolloping of my carbonation, and a singing too, as might very well be a reasonable facsimile of blood. A circulation dizzied me, around one thought censor-centered. Inside there, there was: inside!
I must have melted through the closed door with the first and last exercise here of my old power to, for there I was on the reverse side of it, without even a suddenly to help squeak me through. My shadow, that gentle but still genderless companion, was there also—and from that day forward—like a faithful if rather boring friend who would never do anything one wouldn’t be seen doing oneself. But I had scant time for me and mine now, the room was so exciting; that state of affairs is what creation is. At the risk of your already knowing what was in it, and all about it, I cannot forbear to describe.
Its dimensions were some twenty by forty miles—pardon, feet—that is to say, almost imperceptible by our standards, but quite practicable, even luxurious, for you. And I saw at once, with that exalting recognition-of-the-divine which is inborn in life everywhere, that the room was not respectable. History was all over its walls.
We of course had long ago had to annihilate history, both for its bad examples and its equally sinister good ones—else how could we have achieved that constant we were all so rightly proud of: One Now indivisible, for all? To accomplish this, a world must agree to learn nothing from its past and expect no advancement from the future. For these we had substituted a simpler Out from the crater, and the final In. Museums for contraband history sprang up now and then among us but died quickly, because of being so many millennia afar from fact. It was safer to use present imagination, as we did with the poem-cans, and in the end more pleasurable. As a race, we of course know that we have been one and are going to be, but we waste no time adorning either of these cloudy boundaries, preferring to sink both our credentials and our potentials for the sake of a tranquility which is unique in the cosmos. It is by this means that we have eliminated government in the political sense, sociology, philanthropy and all the other bloody dynamisms which drag in the train of history and masquerade as hope. But history to us is the real villain, and we have therefore cut it off at both ends.
And how do we live and govern ourselves? Just as you do, but with less misconception as to how. We live under the ukases of our biology. We live by the law of the crater. Just as you do. In fact this is the whole attraction-repulsion between our two worlds. For, where your biology of two-ness predicts all the violent modulations which give you no rest, a luckier physiogonomy has produced that great, frictionless civilization of ours, all its slippery artifacts being made, spent and returned to Us without the taint of possession, all conquest of distance and mass made possible by such a vast diffusion of electrical sameness—and in the realm of sensation, that sweetly curving round which we call Now. And you, by the substitution of one critical and unfair letter of your alphabet: Non. I, in my fealty to both civilizations—ah, what an eminence, and a responsibility of course—would phrase it with more justice, and after one of your own philos-phers, called, I believe, Pluto. We Are. You—live.
And this room was crammed with it, hung and littered with all the subversions of history, and not even hidden or coyly suggestive, but in arrogant, radical display. Sullen caitiffs that the walls were, and the tables and even the ceilings, they somehow stood it. Stages of it were even labeled with cards, brashly cataloged in cabinets. Examples of all your qualitativeness appeared to be here. Color?—there was onyx or amber, carved or smoothed to commemorate; there was the puce and brown of dried combat, and tusks. Touchness?—there was Coptic silk and desert leather, straw and wood and shell from nowhere, and from here and there, fur. And bone. Also fossil sheaves and ears of grain for the taste, and bowls for the serving, and strung teeth for the chewing, along with those some paleolithic beans which now were beads. And everywhere, carved into little carnelians and scarabs that threaded you through the ages, or merely beached up on time like spermaceti, whether cast up from you or your animal cohorts I could not know—bone. All the potsherds of your personality were here. How you valued them, how you valued yourselves ever more in the piece than in the whole, I now saw—and shivered for it. And yet the tintinnabulation here—made without a sound, without a sound, and what other history could do this?—made me wish for the wherewithall to weep.
On one of the tables near me, a War Club of the Plains Indians lay crossed with a Gold Armband, Sutton Hoo. I had fancied a little fur, had I? It was here, pelted and done for, snarling but done for, on the floor. On another table, there was a clay replica of a fist whose broken fingers clasped air, whose palm had a hole in it, for what use I couldn’t guess. And on yet another, a Grave Ornament—Chilean or Peruvian made a vase of four arms, four legs, but only two heads, in a combination I had no time to get to the bottom of, but presumed was intended to hold flowers and grief. It didn’t matter. Above this, a mask hung, labeled New Guinea, on it such a howling laugh of anguish as who should classify? Could I ever learn to feel like that? If your classifiers couldn’t say all of you, or quite of you, or true of you, this I had already discovered—nor could I, it didn’t matter. You lived, and more. The room was fisted with your violence, clubbed with it—and masked. Even in my half-time heart I felt the thrum of it. I felt a violence for that violence. All that I wanted of your world was here. And more.
Even a perfume, for the fifth sense I had forgotten—and how well I could number now—drifted, fresh heavy light salt dark, indescribable. Anything worth investigating here seems so. But this was the place you were made. I’d try.
At the far end of this storehouse, the telltale lamp which had helped draw me here shone toward the patterned window and cast a light behind itself as well. A garment had been thrown over it, filtering its softness down to the exquisite, so that the rosy air fought with the dark to pay tribute to what I saw before me—an extraordinary tableau. Was that what one should call it? Without my mechanic companion to do the sorting, words of all languages floated toward me like feathers. What a representimo!—if that was a word. Or was it a charade? Or a charivari—no, that was noise.
All was quiet in this scene; in a nimbus of quiet, the long couch, barque, dais, bed, platform, trireme without oars or rowers, sailed without leaving the light of shore. However it might be called, it was mysterium surely, from the Greek root that meant to close the eyes. Whatever it was called here, I knew what was before me. I had always known. How quiet was your cauldron. In it, you-you, the extraordinary beast, lay sleeping.
I crept closer, aided by the light which so harlequined my fainting visibility that any observer looking into the room would have thought merely that, athwart the stern of that long couch, rosiness had won. The beast, the double human, lay there, a medallion sleeping, in a nest of garments which at any other time I would have studied, these now flung every which way upon a coverlet in turn tossed wide enough to reveal this being down to the jointure of its tangled waists. Or rather, the cover humped over these, so that it wasn’t quite possible to see where, how, or whether the two stalks of this being were joined. Four appendages protruded at odd angles below; from some leftover study session, or prompting from underground dream, I knew these to be legs. As, by the same token, I recognized those that stretched above the coverlet line, two palm upward, two palm over—and no holes in any of them—to be arms of flesh, not clay, with hands. You had appendages in four, then, like those rodents I had watched from my first window, or happier thought, like the cows? Or were you tigers?—but if so, not spotted, at least on your outer sides. A somewhat hairy appendage lay here … but a milky, bald one there … and here a one … and there—good God, what a sport you were, now really. Tally-ho, and all that of course. But you didn’t match.
Rapidly I counted over again, the result dampening my pride in my numbering, and in my diagnostic as well. Indeed you were not like squirrels, rats, cows, tigers, dinosaurs, birds or anything else I had either seen or imagined aboveground, though you might somewhat resemble the tentacles of the sea. You didn’t have four appendages; you had—I counted them again—eight. And in so doing, I arrived at the part or parts of you which lay above your wingspread arms.
I don’t know why, despite all my preparations and studies, from stargazing to the most intensive low thinking, your world infallibly still takes me unaware. Thus I never feel that I have quite caught onto the nature of variability, and despite a suspicion that this is just what it is, it doesn’t seem fair. You choose such odd corners in which to be consistent. I should have known, I thought now, looking down upon what lay upwards of the coverlet. In this world, which had already given me token upon token of its duplicity, how else would such a being as you be constructed? Strictly speaking, you were as you should be of course, but somehow, in the matter of heads, I hadn’t expected it. You had two.
One had a hairy side turned to me, the other—a pale. In the latter, the twin orbs were half open, their slits white. Were they regarding me? I hadn’t enough education to know. By the glow of my own diffusing, I stared back at the head I was to know so well. The eyes were now closed again, and therefore tip-tilted, though still subordinate, like all the rest of that uneven face, to the whole. There is a beauty in the flawed which marks the separate state of consciousness mere perfection cannot know. This is the interplanetary argument between us and you—which we would not call war, but the force that draws. We shall come like the snow, though all of us the same, flying toward your imperfections, your grass. And in the end, will you conquer us? What else does the conqueror come for?
We, at least, had had the wit to think of it as the mutual project it was, though you mightn’t see it as such for some time, our lust for imperfection being, de return natura, so perfectly organized.
These were my thoughts, all of them swift to think and slow to tell, as I looked down on the heads of this creature—and all of them buried in the one thought. May whatever presides over godded or damned, or both together, give it me. I want a face.
Then, eyes still closed, lips only half open as if drugged with music of late afternoon, the face spoke. “Strange light. What a strange light.”
I was prepared for this of course, the strangeness to you of my sempiternal glow, and even for—somewhere in the forbidden history that had produced me—this dulcet, people-making voice. But I was not prepared for the next terror, which now struck.
The other head answered it.
“Some car,” it said, “passing down the lane.”
“No, I didn’t hear any. And it’s still here.”
The other head did not move, but spoke as if from its hair; had it a face on its nether side? “Heard a couple of rings at the bell,” it said, blurred.
“One was the four o’clock post,” said the first head. “Was there really another, Jack?” Then it laughed.
I knew good and well whose laugh this one’s reminded me of—but only half, some, not quite, not as a One reminds a One of a One. Nevertheless, terrorized though I was, that very imbalance held me rooted, bewitched by its inexact charm-chime.
“No, not really,” said number two, in a voice as hairy as its head. “We can’t admit that.” Then it too laughed.
Then it was that the first head opened its eyes fully. I could have sworn that, transfixed on the pillow, it saw me, even knew me, for what I was. “But it’s here,” it said, startled.
“Hmmm?” The second head did not stir, but one arm of the four came and lay across the neck of number one.
“Nothing,” the first answered. “It’s gone.” And looking straight at me, it whispered, “Begone!”
I already was of course—crouched down behind the big gondola—furniture or illusion?—so that I would not have to see them either. Behind there, the floor was solid enough, but surely there was a large crack in my wits. What dimorphic visions coursed through this gap!—you would have known these shapes for cockatrices, or perhaps gryphons, borrowing from that minute ago which you call medieval—but the untutored fancy can do much better, or worse. Nothing in the photoplates devoted to mammals had given me any idea of this, not even in my one veiled sight of you had there been even a chink of suggestion—that I should have to venture this far down or out upon the evolutionary scale.
Two heads I could take in my stride perhaps, and four arms and four legs, making eight appendages in all, also, no matter if a dim squeak from somewhere in my own anatomy protested that I had not bargained for this all-in-one. But if so, if I could bring myself to accept it as the form I was bent upon for my own, then it should at least be a uniform beast in action. I could concede a certain amount of asymmetric to the appendages; all the peripheral motion of such a beast might well not be in concert. But that its sensible brain should be divided in its responses, and perhaps even what must be its Siamese-joined heart! That these two heads should not only not speak in unison, but talk back! And my God, this was not all of it. That one or the other—could deceive.
For, then, what of the parts that I hadn’t yet seen, those still under the coverlet’s dark hill? What anarchy of gender (whose left might ever deceive its right, and counterclockwise, for so ran my vision) might there not be below! I tried to calm myself—at best, you weren’t Hydra-headed. But it was no go. I had myself to think of; indeed, to give you credit, since coming into an atmosphere blended of so many solo arias, I had thought of little else. But now I remembered, and with such haunting smoothness, the gentle people I had ellapsed from, the gentle almost round of their daily existence. I had not your hardihood. I doubted I could summon the degrees of friction you lived by. I was too weak. I did not think I could manage it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of my shelter, the wrestling noise began again, interspersed with the little ambiguous moans I was now not so sure were spurts of woe. Should I come round the corner, to join perhaps in a happy social occasion at which my company would be appreciated? Just as I was about to, silence, poco a poco, fell.
No, I cautioned myself, what if this were the war you lived by, spoke so greedily much of, and piously too of course, and all I would see would be the face of the winner, perhaps staring covetously at me? So this was my Janice, my janissary, who was to induct me into—No. So, at last my imagination gave up the ghost, and decided. I would return to Bucks, where there must be means to dehumanize me so far as I had acquired it. This was the nadir of my life and bitterness, but I would soon be out of all this. For if allowed the grace of return, I resolved nevermore to be pervert. Until my crater-day, I would be a perfect citizen of home.
And just then of course, you-you resumed your conversation.
And there I was, against all my resolve, with my non-feet—by which I mean the image of them—once more stuck fast in the sludge of our mutual sympathy. Nothing in your world or mine but can do with a bit of talking over, and always gets it. In this you are almost as elliptical as we; what a boring crowd, what an engaging one, we all are. For here was such a jejune dissertation as had rarely—and yet … It had just occurred to me, with the sharp-sad between which comes perhaps best to the eavesdropper, that you and we both might have no other auditor except ourselves.
“Oh well—” the first head was saying, with one of its semi-dulcet sighs. “It’s the nearest, isn’t it, the nearest we can come in this world, to nothing.”
No answer from the second head; was it after all slain, and this no longer dialogue, but soliloquy?
“Oh I mean—” said head number one, “to talk your language—”
And this was what I meant—that variability should sink even to this indecency. That the two heads of a body should not even share the same speech!
“—the Something that is Nothingness.”
But, oh sad on sad, that one should slay, and one should stay. Though the which of the whom might well … de return again … vary. And that … Light went up inside me, where only I could see it. I had remembered where I was. And that … was this gender?
“And like I said,” it continued softly. “There’re things you’ve taught me.”
Was it mourning for its other half now, keening? There are those of Us who gather at the crater, but for fear of naming a particular One, never speak. But we have the image.
“Me imperturbe,” it said, in its accent no imperfection whatsoever. “Of course, you’d only got to ask me if I knew it already. But you didn’t, did you? None of you do. And now I shan’t have to ask you what I didn’t know. I’ll whisper the answer in your ear.”
And softly hissing, I heard it, the unexpected, as if whispered in mine. “Elsewhere.”
Oh creature, creature, did it think this an answer? Yet I felt such a tenderness toward it, for its very lack. Yes, this is the force that draws us here.
And now, careless of the danger, I had the strongest desire to see for myself again this nest of imperfections so mixed, this slayer of its own opposing head. This head that nevertheless made me feel—I stood up straight, and hard too, in wonder, and thanksgiving. This head, that made me feel.
Though I couldn’t say precisely where such a sensation was located and even thought that it might be multiple, I found myself flushing deeply enough to be very visible, and even seemed to myself tall. So standing, and on the very floor also with not an inch between us, I peered over the long-couch rim.
But, on the other side of it, that surviving head must have been rising too; imperfect beings can sometimes do the perfect thing. So it was that we met, the number one head and I, face to—how I yearned to be able to say it! I would have given everything I did not yet have, for the sake of a face with which to meet that face. Her face—I was somehow sure of it. Another She.
At first, eyes aglint, it said nothing, then only breathed it—though I had no trouble hearing. “How beautiful you are.” Then she made a gesture toward behind her. Then she put a hand to her face, two of its five or six fingers—I hadn’t time to count for sure—crossed at her mouth. When I did nothing, she said, “Shhh,” and when I still did nothing, “Down!” I understood this of course, but I was slow. An expression crossed her face that I have not forgotten, it having been reinforced since by frequent repetition. Then she said: “Fade!”
I did both rather quickly, ending up in the customary confused heap. This is nothing new to you of course, but I was unaccustomed to multiple sensation, and still am not entirely in the tune of it. I seemed to me then all pulse, several dozen of these all at odds with one another—and none of them at seventy-six. On reflection, immature though it might be, it did seem to me that what she’d said first—Shhhh!—would have been quite enough.
I was wrong. I was now, in my all of a heap, in just the right mental state to receive a revelation—the latter being any visionary experience which everybody else has already had.
It comes by stages, but is all apprehended at once.
I heard her speak again, this time on the other side of my shelter, down there below. “Wake up,” she said. “Time to go.” I felt a loud vibration; why, she must be beating him. Yes—him. That’s the way revelation is. “Wake up, Jamie!” she said. “I mean—Jack.”
Almost in the same minute, one of the arms came up and slid the garment, which I now perceived to be long and bifurcated, off the lamp; in the amended light, a vigorous jounce was heard; then number two head appeared upright, and with a face, and smiling, though not at me but at number one, also upright, and smiling back.
Does the face produce the feeling, or does it go the other way round, and across the road? Though I know the accepted answer, I continue to wonder. But at that moment, I saw everything at once. I saw their garments, each torso with its complement of arms and legs, for which I must needs use a vocabulary of course learned later: shirt and trousers for the him head, a kind of serape for her—what duplicities, still to discover, must lie between! But, smiling at each other as if all this were ordinary, they moved off—yes … they. Her eyes glinted sideways as she passed, and I saw that she had something of the same aspect as my mentor, or the same power—to make her two eyes merge and gaze as one. I like to think of this as a gesture to Ours, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Then, they-they, you-you, or rather you and you, moved off.
At a discreet distance, I followed, to observe in such detail as I could these creatures who to my mind managed their separateness a little clumsily, even half-heartedly, but as compared to the enormity I had thought in store for me, were a considerable visual relief. Since then, the ugliest monster among you can never look as bad to me as he may to himself. You were separate, then, in head, trunk and appendage—and were you duplicate too? When I thought of this, in terms of the gaps between lips, hearts and brains (as well as all the other parts I must yet hold in fancy), I thought I understood all wars, all genders and Janices at once, and Tom, Dick, and Harrys too—and Jack, and how all the relationships sprouted between them and the carbuncular enormosity of their world. Such clarity eluded me later, but that too, is it not, is the nature of revelation?
And so, in our peculiar crowd of three—or three hundred million, whatever you were at the last census, and certainly not excluding the Chinese—we all moved toward the door. I saw her bend to pick up the letter, which lay just as when it shocked me; I heard her own exclamation. Jeepers.
I hear their exchange yet, through the veil you love to draw both across events and away from them, though to me it adds not a jot to their lopsided dignity.
Jeepers she said, plus, “It’s about time she answered.” I heard her explain to him who E=MC2 was the nickname for, and I heard her tell over the three wives of her Jamie (whatever “wife” meant): the beaky intellectual, then the Maori girl who died, “and then, me.” But though all this was recorded and put by for later, for the time being it was only the way the words went. I was entirely taken up in my natural enthrallment with the actions, physiognomy and socio-erotic tone of this Harry—I mean Jack. How I dwelt upon the outline of his trousers, on where his hands went to inside his pockets, on the whole line of his—line. When he said, “Nonsense, that man never exactly built you up, did he?” how I listened, though his argot seemed nonsense itself. When his lips touched her ear, it seemed to me that I had lips also. And when he made as if to rush her back to the room we had just come from, all my true vitality rushed there with him, as well as to a spot in me hitherto undeclared. (If this was vicarious living, what else is mutation?—at least at first.) The legend of our hidden gender was true, then! For somewhere within me I felt a quickening of that forbidden history, plus a conviction, also, that I was on the side of it I hankered for.
Curiously enough, when she refused him, I was not displeased. (And this, I suppose, is the role of variation.) So I waited, watched her close the door behind him lightly and forever, saw her muse over the letter, mutter at its lateness, then suddenly crumple it with an “Oh my God, I forgot She’s—what in the name of am I bothering with this for!” And letting the crumpled sheet fall, she turned, surely to go in search of me. For what could the letter have been but to tell her what she already knew—of my arrival. And I was here ahead of it. This is the way we usually arrive.
I was waiting for her on the sitting room side in front of her gold bird, and indeed that small room, later so cherished, was filled with my radiance, loosed upon the heavy earth atmosphere as never before. And never but once since—due to the circumstances which will be set forth shortly.
She approached, her figure shining in the glow of mine. My height of six-feet-six hid the mirror I stood in front of, also—though the beak of the bird on it pricked me a little napewise—an adverse comment it might be making from behind. She advanced, on her face an effulgence which must be its own. Extremely median in everything as she was, both to me and as confirmed later, she could be said to be about five-feet-six, but the rest was harder to describe. And has remained so, except for the two tiny whips of the eyebrows, set as if clenched at their center in an invisibily miniature fist.
I still see her, an ombré, curved figure, in retreat from the oval, yet here and there tuned to it, and lit like a cameo in the reflection of mine.
It approaches. It stands with the crown of its light-dark musky head just a foot beneath my apex, and addresses me with an enthusiasm—and how reconcile ever the two moods of it?—both demure and wild. “So you did it!” she says. “You did it!” And then she reaches out a finger. “They said it would be beautiful and oh it is. Is that really you? Oh—I can’t wait.” And then she says—“May I?”
The spot where she touches me doesn’t change to the eye, though I half expected a molten drop of it to glisten on her fingertip. She holds the hand which owns the finger in her other hand, the tip that touched me, now just under of touching her chin. “Oh, oh,” she says. “Can you beat it, honey! Can you beat us. Oh, Rachel!”
I WASN’T RACHEL OF course, but in the end it was my new friend who had to convince me of it. You who come into the world so well ticketed, always with a name to hint to you who you are and don’t want to be, cast a look at the identity troubles of a One as nameless and sex-hidden as I. As she told me later, if a one of you comes down with an attack of omnesia, he can assume it’s a dead cert he’s somebody worth forgetting—and that there isn’t a camera crew that wouldn’t be happy to follow him round the orphan asylums, palaix de danse and baby farms, on the chance he’ll turn up the little bit of business he’s forgotten himself for. As for sexual identity, she said, there was almost no one of you who didn’t know the sex he was born with, or who couldn’t find a host of Samaritans to help him, should his preferences change. I myself, having only the preference, needed both the data to sustain it, and a competent guide. But to be greeted as I had been was unnervingly early. I could only hope I had been taken for somebody else. But, under the circumstances, who on earth could I have been taken for?
“Who—?” I said. “Who … am I?” A throat is for swallowing—and for breath. I had no hunger, but if ever I developed that gorge, that celebrated column of cartilage and air, it would be seen to have begun here, with my terrible choking on such a question. How infinitely easier it is or must be, on the other hand, how indolently savory—like the longest afternoon in the world, prior to dinner on an excellent train passing Taj Mahals every ten minutes—to know who you are just as exactly as any chimneysweep or archangel—just merely not where. But WHO!
“Who—is Rachelle?” I said, imitating her accent.
Her hand crept to her own throat, that slimmest of round pillars with a bird, a flute or a box in it—and no self-doubt. “You mean—you don’t know?” It was the only ordinary response I ever had from her. “Oh—you poor,” she said. “Oh my poor, poor—”
Girl. I knew the ending to that one. And somehow I couldn’t let her say it aloud, endow it with life—not that kind. Or endow me.
“Oh, good God!” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to be another Marie!”
If I could have maintained that rude, contemptuously virile tone from the beginning—? But of course, which tone to take was what I had been sent here to learn.
Send the newborn to the women—wasn’t I after all being treated conventionally, and a great scientific opportunity therefore lost? One must remember of course that it was they who sent me. But sending the little one to the monks or the military, the wiseacres or the whores—a word that came from underground only yesterday—is still no assurance that somewhere in this democracy of disorder there isn’t being sent elsewhere a wee alternate who in time will counteract him. I make poems like mad when I think of it.
In any case, no sooner does your innocent enter its house of correction here than it finds that questions are less expected of it than answers.
“Marie?” said my teacher, interlocutor, doyenne, with a curl of the lip I learned right then was reserved for women she didn’t know—and some she did. One Up was shorter than the other; quick as one observed this, the problem was still—which? I was never with her a minute but I learned something. “Who’s Marie?”
When, by bumps I’ll spare you, I got out that story, I found that in the course of it I had told her almost my complete one, including a description of my mentor which I remain proud of, plus a workable account of my own presence on Here, all of which took far less time than it has taken me now. She already had some knowledge of our adventure of course, to which desires of her own made her sympathetic. But it struck me mightily that she listened almost as we do in Ours, not out of courtesy or sympathy—but because events must be attended, else they are dream. Perhaps her anthropological training was part of it; in how many voodoo corners of God might she have watched what squeezed blood to its deity on the altar stone, or have seen snakes swallowed like long dreams, or have had to carry in her ear the three equivalences of a word!
For, all this time she had not once winced at the timbre of my voice, but neither was she especially quiet even while I talked, walking round me with the most easy manner, no doubt to see whether I was the same from all views, and doing so as if her own actions were a rhythm in my recital—at one pause in it, even sitting down. Under my circumstances, of course, it was unlikely that I would ever have trouble getting auditors here. But she attended me as if listening were a part of life. Or had much been so, in hers. It can be said too, of course, that she was never with me a moment but she learned something.
“Ah, yes, legends,” she said vaguely, when I spoke of these and my ambitions, as if her ear had nursed many of both. After my long weeks here I found that confession was a relief, and this was the odder since neither of these two words was a part of our concept, much less our ritual. Most curious of all, I felt no danger, or rather, excused myself on the most dual (sic!) of pretexts. For it was as if one of her eyes was so intelligent that I needs must speak out, on the very grounds of being so extraordinarily understood, and the other eye meanwhile so prettily opaque that I might be reassured that everything passed over its clear glass like a flight of waterfowl. This effect, I believe, is called sympathy. For when looked at merely as composition, both eyes matched. They were median, mild eyes too, hazel, entirely free of cabalism or other spells. In them, one merely saw oneself—hot, vital and pink—and thought of her.
When I spoke tenderly again of my mentor, she smiled with the lip that was short (Too short for what? I wondered in passing; after all, what was the standard?) and made as if to hand me the letter, then, with most pliant of gestures, scanned the room for where to put it, rejected a table near the mirror as too low, and all in the spin of a heel put it on the mantel, as if she were flatteringly aware that my vision was concentrating upward—and incidentally, in a spot to which I was obliged to walk. I hadn’t moved, you see, in her presence. I did so—well, rather grandly a-sail, I think anyone would say. Without a jolt.
The letter read as follows:
Chére Janice:
I have the honor to inform you, ma luronne, that we advance in the adventure. A One of us has already done the trick. I myself expect this to be the last letter I can personally write you. But for you too we have plans. An individual will shortly arrive as promise, to be your guest until One day. Your house is so conveniently near the plant! Guard yourself meanwhile; your turn will come. I yearn that we shall soon meet. We shall!
Ábientot!
Yours, in Ours—et vogue la galére!
and then the bold, black signature
(E=MC2)
And then a postscript: What he would say to this, notre Jamie!
“What is—a Jamie?” I asked.
“Someone—we both knew.”
“And a Harry?”
She hesitated. “Someone—she knew.”
“And a Jack?”
She gave me a sort of look. “You shouldn’t say what,” she observed. “You should say who.”
So quickly were we teacher and pupil.
“Not who.” I retreated a little. “I don’t yet fancy that word.”
She came up close to me then. Ah, pity! Almost I was tempted to have her call me it again—“poor.” I was no longer a constant, then; I too could differ. From myself! How narrow, how wide are these stages of being.
“Now,” she said, “don’t worry. Did I scare you? For a minute I did think, but only because of the letter, all I knew was a One was coming. But how could I possibly—you’re nothing like her, surely.”
“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “Likeness, with us, is the thing. Anyway,” I said with a flourish, “I’m leaving it. All that.” I gave a little spin, rather like hers. “I never really assumed—not for one minute. One mustn’t, you know. Thought can—” I broke off, throwing out a little mysterium of my own. “But for a minute I did think I might be haunted, you know. Possessed. I have had a little ragged breathing.”
“You mean, like a—like a succubus.”
“Well, yes rather.” Or like a comput-put.
“How very medieval of you.” And then all at once she burst out laughing, threw up her hands, clapped them to her head, looked wildly about her, fell flat on the floor, howling, and ended up sitting there, her knees clutched in a sort of arm-wreath, her face tilted toward me, while water in a liquid state, the daintiest of pearls of it, ran down of it. “Medieval. Of you. You being who you are, excuse the word. You being you, and in my own sitting room, on this positively excruciating day. I’m becoming juvenile. But what else is there to be. How should I greet you. If you were a Sunda Islander, I should know how. Or in Molucca, or Celebes. Or even the Kalahari, though that wasn’t our field. Or even if you were a Kwakiutl. I know twenty rituals, extinct and not, that might be more suitable. And I say to you, ‘How very medieval’!” And she was off again.
“I know very little history, of course,” I said—boasting.
“Nor I,” she said. “At least—of civilized peoples.”
She leaned back, arms still clasped round her knees, but her feet off the floor—and spun that way. I had never … their postures were—I was lost in admiration.
“From what I have heard,” she said, “yours must be very ancient indeed.”
How was I to tell her that even to mention that We had an historical age—that she had just committed a radical offense? What a bore it would be in any case, to spend valuable mutation time talking of our two societies as they once had been, or momentarily were. History has nearly ruined their mind—or sociology. “No,” I said wearily, “we are constant.” I hastily amended this. “Oh, do ask anything you like, of course. Any information you—it’s the least I can do. But these cross-cosmos assumptions have a way of—”
How was I to tell her that generalizations to the scale of Ours could not possibly fit in this sitting room, possibly not even on this star? Moreover, I myself, evermore charged or clogged with its atmosphere, was beginning even to feel an ennui for the interstellar aspects of our adventure, and a great favoritism toward focusing on my own. I spoke it aloud. “Let’s—talk about us.” I inched forward, an achievement in itself.
Her eyes certainly changed. Any passing waterfowl, deciding to descend, would have struck ice, on either side. Yet I had a secret feeling (a secret, and a feeling—Me!) that they were about to do what they had done before. Cry.
“Oh, I’m sure.” But now her voice didn’t match the eyes. Strange. “I’m sure we’ll just be two little innocents talking. While we wait.”
“Wait,” I repeated, indeed as mechanically as I could. In fact my voice, ambiguous too, made it seem an interrogation, when actually, having until now been able to talk in the purest of speech, I felt myself seized by that distressful ambivalvulence which always preceded a bad attack of my usual speech trouble.
“For One day,” she said.
I took refuge in formality, one of our set speeches. “One like you doesn’t have to wait. You’re One of the arrived.” It is merely a cordiality, not unlike those exchanged by old-fashioned Chinese.
At this she got up in one cavalier sweep, leaving the floor to warm itself as it could, and stood next at the window, looking bravely out. How they move here, in great draperies of what must be invisible emotion. It had never struck me before, but of course, here you were cousin to us also. You had your invisibilities, too.
But I saw it—and that she was suffering from some affront. For she had taken all of her with her, leaving me to contemplate only the behind. Certainly whatever scene was framed in the wondow, I mean window, didn’t frighten her but rather steadied her; perhaps this was why they kept a little distance always at hand. She spoke without turning. “I have to ask you a question, a rather rude one. Perhaps an impossible one, which is what I hope, and what I was led to believe. You look just like what I was led to believe, by the way. But …” And here she turned, her arms flung back like wings against the floss-white of the windows. “… what are you like … inside?”
Think back, all of you, to the moment when you first discovered that your own most private inmost parts, or your own perverse dreams thereof, or even the short words these dreams always go for—were shared.
Who … answers?
“Oh, I am sorry.” When I still made no reply, she even came forward. “Perhaps … it’s never even occurred to you.”
And she thought me innocent.
“Has it?” She came nearer.
I prayed for mutation to come to my aid, as it had sometimes done before. But the best it could do for me was nothing new. I did turn bright red. The room was quite fulled with it.
“Well, well,” she said. “And what does this mean … cross-cosmosly.”
Nearer, nearer she came, until in some tremor I remembered the compound word I had coined for them, for the she’s. “Oh, I do hope,” she said. “And I was led to believe—” When they hope, they are indeed beautiful.
She touched me again, again with a finger once more quickly withdrawn, and again she said the same. “How beautiful you are.”
We too. When we—hope.
Then she said, head now averted, and in the crisp voice I came to know as her anthropological one, the accent on these occasions rather donnish and Anglophile, “But we might as well get it straight at once, don’t you think. After all, you’re to live here. Do you have sex? I mean of course, are you a particular one?”
“Six,” I said, mechanically as before. It wasn’t merely that I never happened to have heard the word before, either as used to distinguish between organic beings—for which we say “gender”—or in its more colloquial usage, since we are never—colloquial. It was also that I could sense the onset of my attack.
“I beg pardon!” she said. “Did you say, six?”
“Om having—” I said. At times like this I am like a singer who hears perfectly well that he is singing flat. “I’m hovving a little—” I began again. “I’m hewing a lottle trouble—” And again. “Um having a little tribble with my—” I gave up, and shouted it. “Wuth me vowels.”
Her eyes went back to normal; that is—in that exquisitely gemütlich, simpatico, silly-unsafe way of theirs, they no longer matched. And again, they almost brimmed over. “Coo, Oy soy,” she said. Then she turned somewhat red, herself. “I mean, I say—I’m rather good at accents.” She grinned. “It’s me only clime to fime. I’ve done some recordings. Counting to Ten in Twenty-five Amerindian Dialects is one. Can you count?”
“If curse I can,” I said. “Win, toe, thray, fair, fauve—ohh damn. I mean—dumb. And also—dim.” My trouble was, I had more languages than would ever appear in her variorum, and all translatable into each other at once. To select a word was like trying to separate from a downpour one silver drop. But to burst of such things was against my nurture.
“It comes of being so oblong,” I said. “An isthmatic affluc-tion. And of not having the proper organs. At least, not yet.”
“Why, we could work on it,” she said. “I used to be rather good at remedial. In fact, it was my first job.”
I didn’t know what a job was, but no doubt it would come out later in the usual way of this world, the most eerie secrets here being hoarded for the very fun of unprising them.
“Oh, lively,” I said. “Perhips we could make a recording together.” I inched forward again, finding it so remarkable that I could, and I had never felt so colloquial before. “Let’s!”
She half-inched backward, perhaps to show me that they moved to minute tolerances I never could achieve. But she was puzzled, clearly. “Just what did you mean by that,” she said slowly. “By—not yet?”
I was astounded, disappointed, and probably a number of other things I failed to notice, though good God knows I was trying to fulfill my mission here and notice everything at once. By a little enamel clock on a bookshelf, I now estimated that my confession of a few minutes ago had taken at least fourteen of these, during which I had poured forth not only all the mystic legend of our gender, but also, though perhaps on the tremolo, my more practical hopes. She wasn’t deaf. She had indeed listened—to perfection. But she hadn’t heard.
The big things come so quietly here, at least to me. Nothing of what I felt as yet showed, or until I got a physiognomy of some sort, ever would. I had assumed that in a world where everybody knew about everybody else’s insides already, surely this would make for an extraordinary harmony in the personal presence of each of you. Not—(Come quietly, revelation.) Not that you were as badly off as I was—no, worse. For, candid and open as I was in heritage otherwise, it was only reasonable to suppose that when I came to full bloom as a person here, I would be all harmony. But you—(Ve-ery quietly, now.) How was I ever going to make my way here, under this situation! What price now, all the evidence I had amassed of you—why it was probable that you had no more real history or social science data than we did, once it got past either side of your epidermis. (Quietly.) From your out-sides, one simply hadn’t a clue of your ins.
It came to me that if I were going to get what I wanted, it would be only by the exercise, the secret exercise of my own supraterrestrial intelligence. The meaning of this now struck me full on. I’d bargained for a world with a different schema of living from ours, but had still taken for granted that it was a united one, somehow. But you must differ here even over the assumptions you took for granted—and if I had learned anything about you it was that you would do so in the weirdest parabolas, one from the other, others from others, others from one. And all this going on below the cuticle, which if it had a thousand hues couldn’t hope to reflect what went on below. But I could still count my blessings. By a parabola of intelligence impossible to you, I could imagine a place which would have all the assumptions, schemata and so forth, that you did—but didn’t live by a one of them. I was lucky I hadn’t hit there.
My interlocutor was watching me, almost subserviently now. How like lightning my mind moved in her presence! Even when she was silent, I was kept a-caper—and we had scarcely begun our dialogue. Her head rested now on her hand, against a pillow of bright curd-yellow, but the hair itself of a color I hadn’t been taught and should certainly enjoy asking the name of. Then there was the jointure of her sitting—a pleasure to study that also. So complicated it must be, to sit so, and so easy it looked when she did it, knee upon knee. Garments hinted a solution of how it was done, but kept one from seeing absolutely. But nevertheless, this sort of teaching had it all over the intercom. Mentor had done her best, but this person—
I stared at her. Was she a person? Or merely a super-intercom-with-images, an automaton placed here for my education—and probably a number of -ations I hadn’t yet heard of—as my guide to the full temporality and materialism of your world.
It was the first time I thought of her that conventionally. Though not the last.
And our longest silence yet. Silence, I thought, seems to tame her. I stared on. She returned my gaze, or so I fancied. And then, as in most of the silences to come, she spoke up first. Not to have done, is my only small eminence—gladly ceded to the one time in which we spoke up together.
“Are you a person?” she said. “Or some sort of telespeak or shadowgraph?”
This is the way it often went. Should I have spoken first—always?
“I didn’t used to be,” I said modestly. The truth doesn’t make me free, or even comfortable, here. It just reminds me of home. “But I am now.”
“Well, how am I to tell? Especially when you don’t answer. And even then!”
It was only then that I realized my full advantage here. Your kind of being, with its anterior-posterior exterior—and above all that interior about which both everything and nothing were claimed to be known—thought itself equivocal enough. But I—! Ha. For though knowing myself already in possession of most of your qualities and cravings—and to be haring down the road as slowly as I could after the rest of them—yet to all appearances here I was a total ellipse.
“Oh, I was listening,” I said, with satisfaction. “I just hadn’t heard.” What’s more, I thought, they simply have no standards here, for Us. If ever I needed to lie—though my standards limited me to one big one—chances were I’d get away with it. And luckily there was only one I might be interested in.
The opportunity came sooner than I thought.
“It’s easy to see that you are,” I said. “A person indeed.” Was this truth or flattery? I must be thrifty. “At least, after a bit.” There, that for the record. “But why shouldn’t it be?” I added. “After all, this is your world.” I made so bold as to circle her, much as she had done me, which inspection she permitted, though turning her head to follow it as far as she was able. “You might have more trouble in mine.”
“Oh, I know that,” she said, “but that’s your job, isn’t it?”
I stopped short.
Meanwhile she, continuing to turn slowly, as if she were used to this process, stopped short also, in front of her mirror, and shook her head at it. “It’s going to be some job, isn’t it. Getting me in shape.”
I came up behind her, but she didn’t flinch, though for all she knew I might have dragons in me, waiting their turn at evolution—and for all I knew, I might. Were not both of us brave? To face the unknown is bravery. The mirror showed her returning to me a gaze she couldn’t know for sure I gave. Though even in a curved mirror we were as unalike as any two creatures in the system, somewhere in that system we were of similar worlds.
Though not in every detail.
I scanned the walls. There appeared to be no computers there as yet, only the books, interspersed with some water-colors of woods—why they should have these here, when there were woods outside the very window!—but art, or the need to burn oneself twice with life, is still closed to me.
“Tell me,” I said into the mirror, while another part of my vision, this luckily still to a degree dispersed, looked down over her—was this a haunch, and this a shoulder, and this a—nape? “Tell me—what is a job?”
Laughing as if it were nothing, she told me. And told me what mine here was to be, taking it for granted that I already knew. I listened with what amazement—and oh, I also heard. As far as she had been told, I was here to train her up somewhat as you trained your astronauts, though more irretrievably. I was to help get her in shape to get Out for good. Then I might go home, or join the Others here One day. Nothing whatsoever was said about getting me into shape for Now.
She turned and looked up at me, smiling. “Are you—really here?”
She caught me off base—that is, here, but being honest about it. “Technically, I’m both Here and There. For the diary’s sake—and the species of course—I mean to go on that way as long as I can.”
“Good God,” she said, almost as absently as I. “I needed a philosopher.”
Always so interested in the non-aspect of things, they are. I didn’t care a rap, if she would interest herself in the non-aspect of mine. She cast a look at the door; I didn’t know why.
“Dear Ja-nice,” I said. I seemed to know the vowels for her by instinct; later I said it better, but she never once had to correct the phonetic. “Dear Ja-nice, did it ever occur to you—” Here I choked a bit, but looking carefully around, saw no evidence that we were monitored. “Did you ever dare conceive, that—” I never had, not even in that one niche of intelligence which one keeps unbugged even to oneself. “Did you ever think …” I had had to get out of my world, in order to admit it, “… that the authorities … are not to be trusted.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Why else do you think I’m leaving!”
Oh brave.
“But the new authorities,” I said, “they’re your friends. And your gender.”
She raised those brows. “And what do you know of gender?” she said.
“Dear Janice,” I said again, “listen to a story.” And this time, she did.
To the legend—of our former, or buried, or somehow other selves—she listened with the fixed smile of the folklorist.
My own conviction—that far within, down or beyond the soma, I was meant to be a man—she took under advisement.
And the one large lie—that her friends had sent me to her as to an expert for this purpose—she believed at once.
She spoke sharply, in dialect utterly unknown to me. But I was now relaxed enough to admit ignorance. “What’s that?”
“Queensland aboriginal,” she said. “For bitch.”
I had a feeling she would explain that later; this is the way dialogues begin. I also had a feeling I should make immediate amends for my lie, at least to myself. This is called conscience here, and accelerates with lying, but as far as I know does not outstrip it. “Don’t blame Mère,” I said, “if there’s been a mix-up; blame Marie.”
She shrugged. “I suppose they thought I wasn’t good enough. Rachel is a first-class astronomer. I don’t know about Marie. But the roster in general is tops. And I’ve no real distinction as an anthropologist, except for the speech. That’s a hobby of Rachel’s too, and I thought maybe she—But I suppose they have a preferred list.”
“Marie is a distinguished bore,” I said. “It’s no wonder she made it to Ours so quickly. And dear Janice—” It was a great strain for me to talk in personalities. Among individuals so quick to take injury, whose attitudes indeed seemed to me almost all umbrage, I should never make my way until I too could insult. “I’m sure Mère would have approved of you,” I said. “Either way.”
That sank into her somewhere, I wasn’t sure where until she laughed. “You’re just too good to be true.”
“I know,” I said humbly. “But you could fix that, couldn’t you.”
She got up, strode around a bit, and then came over to me. “You really are rather—fluffy. Not just in looks, either. You talk like some bloody sort of bedtime story. Uncle Wiggily, or Aunt Mouse. And I’ll wake up in the morning.”
“Uncle,” I said. “Please!” I found myself moving around after her; though her groove was more circular than ours, it resembled. “I’m quite aware of that,” I said, “and it’s quite worrisome. But if one takes into account how curvaciously I was reared, and in what constant tergiversation—”
“In constant what—?” She stopped in her round, leaned on a passing chair, and rocked back and forth with it, closing her eyes. “Oh Janice lovey, did you dream that?”
“No,” I said. I almost shouted it. “Stop this self-indulgence! I’m brighter than you could possibly dream of. Why I had to decandesce for months before I dared come here! It’s just that an outer ontilligence has every fringe of persitionality O-pressed.”
“My!” she said. “I mean-Oy.”
I decided I had no recourse but to dazzle her. “What you here mean by science, philosophy, et cetera, is exceedingly simplistic, Ours having congealed together eons ago, and taken mathematica with them.” I paused, wishing she would open her eyes. My corner was literally shining with me. I went on. “Everything, first came together, and then marvelously … stretched out. Biologically speaking, this is how it has become possible for a One and a One to remain—One. So if imperturbability is what you’re after, I’m your—” I gave a little cough, and then came round the side of her chair. She had her knees in the seat of it, and was clasping its back. “I know I’m terribly diffused. But you have what it takes to—pull me together. I’m sure of it. And as for your dear self, I could get it in the groove in no time. Do you know the catechism?”
She nodded, eyes sealed.
“Do you know your ad hoc hypotheses, and practice them daily?”
She shook her head, for a no.
“Dear Janice,” I said, “does it not seem that I have all the lacks you need. Could we not propose—I do propose it—a mutual derangement—what would you call it—”
She opened her eyes. I saw myself in them—a One and a One, which remained One and yet was two. In me, I suppose she saw what she wanted to see also—herself, non-reflected. For, sighing, she answered. “An affair.”
Then she jumped up, patted the chair, and began to stride about again, but with an indolent sort of weary-wariness which indeed more or less became her posture from then on. I found it attractive, though it didn’t make her any more real to me. She had her mysterium, too. If I continue to speak of her in this beforehand, behindward way—which can make a speaker as tiresome as destiny, and his account as teasing—I make no apology. I am making my elegy, too.
“But I’m being such a bad hostess,” she said. “Won’t you sit—oh dear, I mean—do you? And I’d gladly offer you a cup of tea, or a dri—” She shrugged again, turning up her palms. “All very well to say, but what the hell is the blueprint—for this!”
“I do feel rather faint,” I said, “it’s been days since I carbonated. But it’s a rather carminative process. I wonder if there’s any place I could—”
She led me down the hall. Later, since ozone was all I needed, but more space than the house afforded, I used to take my privacy in the little grove of trees outside.
“See,” I said, when I returned. “We have only to do what comes naturally to each of us. And let mutation take its course.”
She grinned. “Or prox … amity. To speak your language.”
And so, as teatime waned into evening, it came about that a one of you and a One of Us found themselves in front of the fireplace, watching the flames—which a one of you had built while prettily claiming this task for herself according to the female fuel-builders of I forget what tribe—and chatting of native customs all over the cosmos. We were indeed lucky in her background. Any temporary lacks on my part caused me no embarrassment, her performance of more than ordinary domestic function being immediately accounted for by data grubbed up from desert or jungle; one might have thought she had lived all her days with beings who had no appendages of any kind. Or that she now preferred to. Meanwhile, little by little, her knowledge of kitchen middens, barrows and sinks, drew me forth, until I felt myself tethering toward domesticity, drawn by all the sub-archeological details, in situ, of your intimate lives. This was the way to go about it, I was sure. As for her side of the adventure, surely she had only to watch me.
“If this were one of the upper klongs,” she was saying, “and we were in a canoe. Or many places in Asia, where the boatmen are women. In other words, I would be rowing, and you would be taking your ease. In other words, sitting.”
In other words was often to be her soft substitute for why don’t you, this being the style in which she herself had been taught to educate. But although the auditor already knows that I could sit on occasion, I had not let on (being still afraid of cracks), and had taken up a posture near the mantel, thus early establishing two principia which have since served me well.
A: The seamy side of life, though still to be gotten used to, would serve to keep me moving.
B: In the matter of talent, always hold back.
And now for a while, we fell silent. Both of us were breathing time quite naturally, though whether she sometimes also heard space, as I still did, I could not tell. In the days when I had traveled instantly, I had had urgent need to hear how far ahead of me space was pure of object. Now this power was blunting. Only once in a while did I hear the wild, colorless call of those pure leagues. But meanwhile I was building up all those consolatory storage-boxes inside me, only the first of which had been for grief. Color, too, was setting up intenser rays all around me, its quarry and target; in place of the way I formerly saw the world, in a mild, pastel envelope one step above the assumptive gray of the animals, now everywhere, color’s three-pronged nerve, hot and primary—saw me. And if up to now I had given no evidence of that power to smell thought, which you call extrasensory but we assign to olfaction, it was because the minute I hit the planet the ability had all but deserted me—surely a lucky move on something’s part, since who possessing such a power too early on here, would stay?
In front of us, the fire played at tongues and tails, oranges and lemons; does watching a fireside make all beings, or only poets, think of age? Would I grow old here? Would she? Time is but a breath anywhere, but even the yardstick of duration is so small here; they even think that matter is permanent. According to their own specifications, I thought, in the oldest rock known here—perhaps a thousand million years existent—a molecule taken to be vibrating with the frequency of yellow sodium light, will in that period have given off pulsations only to the number of about 16.3 X 1022 = 163,000 X (106)3. And outside the window, in the Ramapo hills that ringed us, the rocks were nowhere near that old. What endures here? What really endures, what? Unless they smelled what I knew nothing of.
I looked across at her, thinking mightily of all I knew that she didn’t and couldn’t; her eyelids were down. How extraordinary it was for us to be here, within the planes of night this dual silence, within a cottage itself falling at a rate they think steady, and my thoughts—careful as I keep them—already tinctured with your substance, hers perhaps with mine. By the small yardstick then, and by the small breath, what would be said of us here, of this pair keeping watch together—one hundred years of your nights from this night? This is the way it all was, would they say: the world spinning on from its thousand million, and an ordinary night of it, half the globe at sequin, half at dark. This was the way—would they say?—it was before. Would that be the legend? Or did it all always end here—in the peculiar way their little nows sucked them ever downward from eternity, and in spite of all spirals flung outward—in an evening at home?
We had already settled on a routine. Routine was the thing, she said, and as much of it as possible in strictly educational exercise, this being one way to keep from an anxiety about nexts. For the nonce, also, I was to become no more visible, indeed to learn how to turn this down, if I could manage it; here, reluctantly bringing out a talent I had hoped to bury here, I assured her we had means. Tomorrow, she would start me on intensive reading research at the library, if she could get me unobserved to her own fortuitously secluded carrel. During the hours I was there, she would be at her own studies; no, she replied to my inquiry, she had no icehouse, but doubted that this was literally necessary. And later, under my direction, and thanks to some woodcarving tools she had once had of a Maori, she thought she could build herself a groove. One of the bedrooms would do. The little back room, being in fact the largest, and already so filled with helpful material, would be mine. I listened to all this with some inner laughter, noting the various materialistic means by which she proposed to get into the “spirit” of things; by so doing, they not only keep alive this primitive division they are so afraid to leave, but their whole brief history is the story of which of these ends is up.
But above all, she repeated, the first step for me was to learn how to turn off the terrible radiance of my own awareness. Not only would a sight of me explode our secret prematurely; even later on, when all was known, it would involve me in all sorts of company which might be bad for mutation; it might bring me out a freak. “You simply can’t go round looking like a pillar of fire,” she said, “or an overgrown halo. You want to be normal, don’t you!” Since it was late, and we had just been discussing Malinowski (Sex-life of the Savages, a book to be on my agenda), we reserved consideration of that. But there was no denying that to be merely human, I must learn how to get a good night’s sleep.
They tame the spirit with sleeping, here, while of course alleging the demands of the body; this keeps holy that division in their being which to allies of either, it would be treason to change. Nor can everybody here ever go about in perfect communion, but each must have a special name, chosen for euphony, royalty or larceny—and quickly awarded before natural bents become too clear.
So, at last, I found out the likeness and difference between a Harry, a Jamie and a Jack—though even now I have a hard time with category versus individual, often finding, no matter how I scrutinize a person, that he or she seems to belong entirely to only one or the other of these ranks. Then I have to remember that this is impossible, at least here.
But I did not accept everything here without protest. “I am a person,” I said. What dignity. After the long coolth of unanimity, enough.
“Won’t do. So am I.” She had infinite patience really; the fire was almost out. “Matter of fact I belong to a category which calls itself the plain people.”
My own glow remained stubborn.
“That’s what I’ll be.” How much I had to learn; how much of one-ness still clung to me!
Even to be a plain one, she said, required certain formalities. Even in the jungle, such a lackluster ambition would be criticized, with punishment only a little less bloody than civilized ones.
“Even my people have another name,” she said. “The Amish. That’s my tribe. I’ll take you down there sometime. I’m going to have to take you lots of places.” She looked thoughtful. “I’ll have to turn in the car. For a bigger one.”
A name made one larger, then. But still I was cautious. Proud, too.
“I am already—I.” What equity. And—with all these little excursions into “me” and “you”—variety, too.
“Nope,” she said, grinning. “Too many of us. Listen, you mean to say … of course I ought to be glad of it, for my ideals, and I am of course, but it is hard to get used to. You mean to say, you all have no images of what we—of our customs, institutions, and so forth. You mean you all go round in a sort of mental nude?”
Of course we have them. If not precisely direct images, then the images of images. Only thing, they’re locked up.
“Our life on the Oval is quite full,” I said. For the sake of my own plans, I had better keep recommending it.
“But hadn’t you yourself even a category, to know yourself by?” she asked. “How do you all think!”
“To explain life-on-the-curve is difficult,” I answered, thinking rather hard and fast, actually. Of course I had had one, else how could I be here; occasionally one gets out. But I had a reluctance to telling her I was a hero, straight off.
“I’m a … at home, I was always considered a bit of a revelationary,” I said.
She laughed, in that helpless-hopeful way of her, then got up and walked in that restless way of hers; she really didn’t need a groove for curving.
I fancied I was getting onto many of her ways rather quickly.
“Good night, you … you I, you … good night, and have it your way until morning. Make yourself comfortable any way you choose. Anyway, maybe life-on-the-curve is just sort of—the inside dope on life-on-the-angle, eh?”
“Outside,” I said carefully.
“Oh, yes of course,” she said, with a little bow, and then halted. “I mean—and it is outer of course—life on your planet. Elsewhere.” I saw that the idea of it could make her tremble too. This was both our ways.
“Oh no,” I answered, in as low a voice as my poor reed was able. We don’t often name the name. “Ours is: Ellipsia.”
“Ah, yes? Lovely, truly. And so are you, really.” She stared at me in a way I hadn’t got onto yet, called, I believe, a onceover. Or a twice. I moved closer, to cushion the shock that was coming to her. In fact, I leaned.
“Yes, lovely,” I said. “For One thing, its shape—!” The One remains. O my teardrop, my Other home. “But this planet—” Though she couldn’t see me at it, I was looking around me, at this strange cottage with all its seams, hung on a dented globe at the other end of nowhere, just safely short of the beyond. “But this—is Elsewhere.”
She got it at once, I think. Maybe, as with us, this is one of the boundaries they too know, but some ignore. They are stupid only in action. Not in mind. This time it was only her lip that trembled. Then she rallied. “But you said you were Here and There. Or neither maybe. Or both!”
I took a deep swig of air, the most I had managed here, and the heaviest yet. “I know. That’s what Elsewhere is.”
So, there it was, and I had said it for both of us, while outside of the outside of us, the interplanetary missiles swung. The legend moves on. The people move on. But the mutation is for life.
She could nod. She could clasp her hands, wring them a little and hang her head over them. She did it, for us both.
“I hate to tell you,” she whispered, “but this place has its name too. It’s called: Earth.”
I had expected something of the sort, long since. But shocks are shocks, especially at end of day. “Very suitable,” I said. “And pretty, too.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I know just how you feel.”
End of day. Or beginning—of the beginning. Surely that cock-crow which comes in poems derived from earthly ones, comes at dawn. “Girl, girl,” I said—and where had I learned that word?—“what did. you say? Did you say—I had a look—!”
She leaned toward me, understanding at once. For if I had a human expression, then surely this was the beginning of our mutual influence, at least for I-me.
“I’m not sure,” she breathed, almost as heavily as I had. Her hand brushed the place on me where my eyes might one day be. Then she stood back, well back. “Maybe I just imagined. Maybe it was just in the eye of the Observo, I mean of the beholden … I mean—.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “Look at me!” she cried. “Whether I can see you do it, or not. Is—is there any change in—” Before I could answer, or take opportunity to lean further, she ran to the mirror. Both of us answered her. No. Not yet.
Slowly, she returned to my side, and once more scanned me carefully. “Turn around,” I heard her mutter, “I have difficulty keeping my place.” Then she giggled.
I turned round and round and round; in fact I spun a-dazzle, even daring, at the very end, my old gyroscopic angle. “Wow!” she said. “Wow.”
When I righted myself, stopping on pinnacle as neatly as any ballerina, she applauded. I stood motionless. “How very still you are,” she said, “When you are still. No, if it was one, it must have been a very fleeting expression. I can’t honestly say you have a look, yet.” Then she smiled. “But I’ll tell you what you do have.”
“What?”
“A name.”
The name she’d thought of was Eli—short for my place of origin. But also—if I wanted lineage from here—short for Elijah. When asked what it meant, she thought it stood for “chosen,” but checked on it to be sure. It didn’t. It meant Yah is God, whatever that meant. She assured me that most names had little to do with the people who had them. And so a One was named, under the sponsorship of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 9, EDW to EVA, pp. 273—274, of the eleventh edition, which she informed me was the most noted. She was charmed that I could read Elijah’s story over her shoulder. She particularly pointed out these words of the summary: “A career into every stage of which the supernatural enters.”
“Hyper—” I said in disgust. “Hypemataral is what we are. If you’re making comparisons. We may be a little out of your ken, but we’re real, you know.” As for Elijah, it was all a fearfully gory story I thought, but I gave her my consent, telling her it was because of the ravens who fed him, birds being a little in my line—but actually it was because of the widow, who received the prophet with all her hospitality.
Afterwards, knowing your weakness for interpretation, for a while the whole business made me uneasy; we on Ours had no intention of our advent being mistaken for anything but what it was. Nor had I any desire to see this narrative later scanned by the symbologists in any department of a civilization already far, far too devoted to the deja vu. Later, however, I reminded myself that its denouement will make that impossible.
In any case, as you may have surmised, I was henceforth mostly called “you” anyway, and the little ceremony made a nice ending to a domestic evening.
“Good night,” she said. “Eh. I hope you’re real. Sleep well, anyway.”
The hardest part, I thought, would be to get her to believe I was “real.” But in trying, I would become so. I had an image of my image now. I made her a little speech, saying as much.
Ask the great eel-rays if they are real, I thought meanwhile, my head-image reeling; ask the strange Selachii of your underwater deep. Or any number of genera back in your own phylogeny—none of them specimens to be met too lightheartedly, even on a Sunday, after church. Ask them, I thought. But not yet geared to insult, this I kept to myself.
“Pinch me,” she said. “If you are real. Or perhaps—when.”
But she was serious too. Somewhere to-down of her, she did care. “You’ll see,” she said. “We’ll do it. They’ll see, one day, oh they’ll see, also.” She meant, her friends.
“Will Jack see?” I asked. I hadn’t forgotten him.
She looked at me. “Oh, you were there, weren’t you,” she murmured. “I won’t ask—for how long.” And I didn’t tell her. But as I found out very soon after, for educational purposes, not long enough.
Chin in hand, elbows on the back of a chair, she continued, in spite of our good nights, to brood at me. “One day, you’ll sit here, right in this chair. You’ll have a cup of tea with—with whoever’s for company. And you’ll have—an expression, all right.” She smoothed the chair pillow, plumping it. “Maybe they meant no harm, my girl friends at the top. Maybe the experiment has to have one reverse job—for a control. Or maybe at the last, after years of work, they all went wacko.” She shrugged. “Quien sabe? Maybe I’m a better anthropologist than even I know.” She said something in another language I didn’t know.
“Queensland aborigine?” I asked.
Clasping her hands together, she shook her head at me. “No. Jamie had a hairy Ainu in tow once. Wrote a book with him. What wouldn’t he have given—for you.” She smiled. “Don’t take it personal, Eli. Or rather—do. Eh, Eli?”
Me, I remained imperturbable. The chair was smooth, where she had brushed away her own imprint. It looked like a comfortable chair.
She walked to the sitting room door which led to all the other rooms but one. “Maybe some of Jamie’s gentlemen friends at the Center will see, too.” Then, still musing, she retraced her steps to the outer door, through which I had come, and locked it. “But you’re right. Maybe we’ll have to make a special effort for—gentleman Jack.”
Hand still on the lock, she made me another little bow. “And now Eli—good night.”
I had a fancy she had made that little, dismissing bow to others before me, though perhaps not to any of like shape. How had they answered her?
But, aside from my shape, perhaps my situation was different from theirs in other ways, at least from some. I was from out of town. I was a houseguest. I was inside.
How should I answer her, to suit all that, to suit her own personal share of the adventure, which she had perhaps a little forgot? And to suit me.
I claim no originality for my answer, but perhaps a little heredity. “Good night,” I said. “Good night—She.”
After I was left to myself, alone but in this peculiarly half-shared manner, I stayed for a long while awake with what you call insomnia but we consider to be that awareness of spirit, product of the ages, which sees no reason why, even for a mere moment of them, it should go back down again to the shadow from which it came. At last, having made my peace with it, dearly bought as that must be, I glided to the little back room, and after considering its facilities, made my bed—upon the long bed.
Ours, hers and mine, was not the usual situation. But then, every human situation was a little elliptic also, a little in reverse. And we were both people. Each in each, each to each, we would find our own characters, and though perhaps not together, our bodies too. We were ships that pass in the night—but then, people are.
SO, INTO THE MAZE we went. The world was all before us—as once was said of those either facing Eden or leaving it; now this must be forever amended: Worlds. And it will be for you, the audience, to say how much this means or how little; the threads will all be coming together soon.
It was in February, that afternoon when I and a few snow-flakes first brushed through her door. It is—as you all know—December now. This was the period of time, she said that we—and of course the others—had. Until One day? I asked. She nodded. And aside from the others en masse, I inquired, were there other couples, like us? She professed not to know, not being a member of the inner council, but thought it likely; in a world grown to the scope and complication of this one it was scarcely believable that the authorities would start with just one couple—not again. Meanwhile and whatever, she said, her face warm with it, we should have to take our solo-duo isolation and our destinations both de facto, and work very hard in order to come into our kingdoms. Since this still accorded more with your legend than ours, I was willing—being eager for anything of yours I could get.
“So much is available.” I sighed.
“Yes,” she said, glancing past me and acurve, an irritating habit which began the first day. “We’re like rich people, who prefer to work.”
“What is ‘rich’?” I asked, and she sighed. Not for the hour’s disquisition ahead of her, but because of the hairsplittings. Inching along physically was nothing, compared with what I was learning to do with the mind.
Her main duty—and this she held with passion—was to induct me, at least through hearsay, into the collective misery of the world. Misery, she said, was by far the better organized here, if not by nature, then certainly by men; pleasure, much more at random, had to be picked like bluebells along the road. But for one of my sanguine temperament—and once I got my appendages of course—the latter could be learned without training. For training, misery was the thing. I refrained from observing that by that time my temperament might have sadly straightened itself out. (Like many who early desert the orthodox for the worldly, she was still more innocent than she knew.) No matter. As she sternly declaimed for me all her catechisms of births and deaths, wars, starvations and other killings, it was the passion she did it with that I held it my duty to be interested in. She found this amoral.
“You mean to say, babies could be boiled, and you wouldn’t—”
“What is a baby?” I said. “Is it a child?” I was more comfortable with my own innocence now, having long since increased my own expectations of it.
“—could be gassed, one could be stewing right here—and all that you’d care about, or be fascinated with, is my attitude!”
How they hate their own humanism! It was my job to teach her the real nature of the almost sublime, but I sometimes despaired of it.
“Where there’s no difference, there is no morality,” I said. “I’ve come a long way even to know what amoral is.” And if I got my appendages soon, I thought privately, maybe far enough. Meanwhile I had my first image of a yawn, delightful the first time or so; after that, a la your-style, I just let ’em rip—and without having to hide them either, in this case having the best of both worlds—nothing showed. But that never lasts long here, does it.
“Let’s have one of my Voco-Phono lessons, why don’t we?” I asked. “Or better still, when are we going to start lessons for you? It’s begun to worry me, which is scarcely useful. I can learn to worry elsewh—otherwise.”
But she would have none of it, asserting that one didn’t learn a vacuum—and that whereas my course was to learn, learn, learn all the accessories of a variable existence, hers was merely to divest herself of them. Until, as she said, she should be as serenely passive as a round bubble in a rill of them, in a pond.
The trouble with converts is that they always regard the new world as the opposite of the old. Young as I was here, halfway through my journey I had learned otherwise. But it was not up to me to hint that the opposite of a world which regards itself as positive, does not necessarily regard itself as negative. Or that, though the whole sound and Omphalos of our creation is O, it is just that veriest subtle flattening at its ends, and of its beings too, which makes Us all what we are. I hoped she hadn’t the idea that it was circular. Or that we were zero. Willy-nilly, though I should like to have been consulted on the grooving track she constructed, and perhaps to show her a few practice turns on it, I was never allowed in the bedroom.
Meanwhile, as for me—in my past life, neither events nor any other accessories of yours had been so plentiful that I could afford to ignore them; indeed I had a tendency to greet one and all with equal ardor and no prejudgment, so that the question of whether I would turn out warm or cold of nature, fool or genius, was as open as it might be with any—excessively intelligent, of course—child. In truth, limited though my mise en scene might temporarily be in terms of what can really be done here with a trifle more brio, I was living a life of simple enchantment.
I can best get at the tone of it if I say that the first man I ever had an opportunity to study up close was the milkman. Through the chute. A most clever contrivance, it had as strange an optic as many of your more complex devices for viewing nature near and far. And, since I had to get down to it by extending myself along the floor, the situation had as much geometrical and philosophical amplitude as anyone could wish—and since it was me. But I had by now discovered that this is the way such situations were always experienced here, so therefore gave up describing them to myself, in favor of merely having them. As for the milkman, socially or aesthetically he did me no harm. Indeed he did as well as any. He had a long slide of a nose, a chin which the eons had meditated upon well, and had at last lengthened. Some days he had only a roundish eye—set more toward eternity, I always thought, than milk. Later I found him, feature by feature and all of a piece, on one of her shelves, in a most expensive volume of plates marked: Breughel. So I discovered art and the milkman together, and as a lucky child might, quite without shock or pain. Art is a finding.
But when I took my discovery to her, or rather directed her to shelf and volume, my surprise was that she was not at all surprised that in all your variation there was some repetition too. “What a child you are!” she said merely. (No, there was more to it—excuse me, this is an elegy, and I am still learning how to remember—or is that what elegy is?) She added thoughtfully, but with one of her grins also—“Or maybe you’re adolescent by now.”
By then I had learned all I could of your morphology, both historical and current; indeed it was her contention that my ontogeny had gone so self-consciously mad for my phylogeny that only her discipline might keep it from addling. Then too, I was forever coming to her with bruises or bumps I thought might be significant, until she said it was touch-and-go whether, via accident, excitement and ineptitude, I might not dispose of myself altogether, before having a chance to become a man, or anything else. Under this barrage, I began to keep my counsel, and from this began to do so generally, led by her chaffing from introspection to introspection. Life is a finding too, I thought, but other people didn’t want to hear about, preferring to find out for themselves, or pose as if they already knew. This was the sophisticate—and perhaps the contemplative—line. I might end up a contemplative, I thought, but not without a struggle first, for action. So, despite that I was not yet born to manhood, and she and I were only living together, I sometimes—according as how what I was reading swelled the heart-image or numbed the brain one—thought of this period of schooling as a courtship, even a honeymoon. I was mixed up, of course, but for me, that was progress. Emotively I was still more tentative than tangible, but at certain times I felt my potential as if it were biceps. Agreed—gestation, before too much happens to one, can be an introverted time.
So, when I stood before the fire of an evening, I tried to say little or nothing of the daily wonders, just as I try to do this now. Take for granted then, the green juice or cold swan-swoon of your seasons, or the bloom of your faces, swaying like history in the magic of your dust-coarsened air. Or there was the horse I’d seen, its hindparts cocked perky in a windy field, and like a horse I’d seen in a windy field in Bucks, and now both of them were the horse-in-a-field forever, its hind-parts cocked perky and permanent. No, no listings, else the poem would be endless and get nowhere, as perhaps it did. I contented myself with a brooding line of—not thanks; it can’t always be thanks—recognition. Between morning and evening fires, or breezes, what a ductile wonder is a day!
Dusktime of all moments of my day was the ritual one, the beautiful—the difficult. It was the hour when, until then locked in my study, for the safety of all, she said, though it was she who turned the key—I heard her at last give over those loud devotions which all the afternoon had echoed, though her bedroom was upstairs along a hallway and two doors down. So adept had she become in her grooving that after a few false starts I never heard her at it, which was alas as it should be. But when she practiced the stillness she so envied me, she was much too tense and frictional, so this, to my comfort, I yet heard.
Meanwhile, I lived in terror of her discovering that I wasn’t practicing the various exercises she had devised for me, all to small-scale radii and all designed to humanize—but instead day after day neglected them to lie indolently on the long bed, in daydreams inflamed by the vision which still clung to its cushions, and by the reading of the night before. Day after day, I set what I called the two-two, the two-headed automaton, to working there, but got no more than a Punch and Judy run-through of those few moments I had seen, or an impossibly Grand Guignol rendering of what I had not. No matter how devotedly I simmered over my zoology at the library or alternated this with the warmest romances, I could never get myself sufficiently aboil to complete the image of what I yearned to, and most needed for my development. That simplest, most singular episode, and of all your pornography the most prevalent—I could never imagine it straight on through. And when for a few exhausted moments I fell asleep, then my old former friend came up from underground indeed to take vengeance, providing allsorts of Barmecide illusion, but all of it oddities only—buttonhooks were nothing!—and thereby seeing to it that there were dangled before me all the sauces, but never the goose, all the cadenzas but never the main theme.
I decided I would either have to make it my business to see one of those movies of a sort not procurable at the library, or else—and here the circle I was in came round again—somehow get myself out of myself—and live. I was in despair of a sort. But to tell the truth, it was of the sort that could barely wait for the next afternoon.
After that came the dusk, when ambiguity flows best, and in the soft obscurity before the lamps brought us back to our own appearances, to the vast abyss still between them, measured with sidelong distant glances of evaluation, we had our most private conversations. To these we came as any couple might, each from his and her own afternoon and the ideas or emotions so stimulated—one from the slimming salon and one from the steambath. And like many a couple, I should guess, from our amiably tepid company, one might never have known. Topics we discussed were suited, she said, to any drawing room, yet would do for the humblest dwelling as well. We talked much for instance—rather like two distant blood-relatives met by severe chance, and one the much younger in the world—of what I would become. It was true of course that in not every drawing room, or hovel either, could a young newcomer discuss eagerly whether he would turn out to be white, red, yellow or black. A topic almost always avoided by the senior member, no matter how many times suggested by the other, was whether he was a he. Her own future shape was not discussable, there being only One. But she would talk endlessly of native customs, hers or mine, and in this connotation, if I wished, I could sun myself in her particularly high regard. Of all her past acquaintance, and certainly presently, I was the native she was most interested in.
And after that, perhaps, we would have a little music. The first morning, I had come out from my “museum” to hear the radio playing—a chorale of what I now know to be music. I had stood motionless, then dropping little by little, as if spelled, in a half-fainting return to my former angle—was not this my own, our own classical laughter, or faraway and cold, that poignance of the almost undesperate sublime? After that, she never turned on WQXR or any of the stations too devoted to the kind of music which might too much affect me with these intimations of my O-mortality—and her own taste was not classical. I learned even to like one song, the “Vilia” from The Merry Widow, that she spoke of lightly as hers.
And after that we had dinner, or she did, on a tray, while she turned on the telly for my delectation, though I would have been satisfied to watch the movements, never greasy, of her mouth; perhaps she knew this too. In some circumstances, a person of my transparent background and still fragile cellular construction might well have formed a prejudice against eating or ended up at best a dyspeptic; as it was, watching those small muscles move, pout, that face grow oh so delicately bland and perhaps a litle rounder, the little sips, dainty but never arch, and all of it with an economy as strong and neat as a cat’s, I yearned first to shrink to a cutlet, that I might lie on a plate, then, ashamedly remembering my I-ness, to eat her.
Saturdays—a kind of feastday, with, she said, the longest history of orgy, saturnalia to satyrs and all the rest—she had a large meal in the kitchen which she would not let me watch, and was, I thought, probably some training lapse of which she too was ashamed. It was at such times that I tactfully repaired for my own weekly carbonation to my little privy place among the rear grove of trees. Sometimes while there, I heard a footfall pause on the path that led past the front door, as if to note my faint glimmer, then pass on. But this was in the early weeks; then it ceased altogether. And since she was so keen on our secrecy, having already drawn the blinds, sold the car, stopped the milk, the paper and all but one weekly delivery, and now went out herself only for the mail and to the library—“We are not at home,” she would say to me, smiling, “the way Paris is not at home in August”—I told her nothing of this. From tweaks of the kitchenmaid sensibility which comes from uncurbed reading, I thought I knew who. And romantically, Chanteclerically proud, and Moorishly jealous—would I have fallen in the snow or strutted?—I fancied how we might meet. We never did—or not out there. I never told. But those footfalls were a marked help to the growth of my feelings.
When I came in from the woods I had always to press the back bell or call out to her; this she said was for safety’s sake. But even within the routine of the house, we preserved a decorum of bathroom doors and bedroom ones, and if I never got into hers, she was equally observant of those courtesies which might yet help to make a man of me, and never came into the room she still called the “museum”—which was mine. Slowly, meanwhile, I built my picture of her. She was the most watchable of persons, who must never have known a time when she wasn’t being watched. In contrast, I suppose, my lack of definity was restful. And slowly, sent out artful-artless toward the quiet pink slope of my sympathy, her confidences came.
If she said “telly” and had other Anglicisms poking out like umbrellas from her storehouse of acquired patois and dialects, it was because Jamie her husband, a Scotsman who had required always and precisely to be termed Scottish—and who knew whether or not his profession-obsession mightn’t have started there?—had gone to Merton in his youth-time, and been a don there for part of hers.
“He’d had another wive?” I said—by this time, I knew about wives, up to a point, and never lost a chance to dwell on them.
She nodded, with an odd look at me that I never interpreted, but of this wive we spoke little more. I never saw Jamie either really, put his images together as I might, from grizzleskin to bush-moustache, as she told it. I never saw him except in the shadow of his small shadow—hers. They had met under a bush too. “Not a cabbage,” she said, laughing, having long since explained to me that context—but what was called a sparrowgrass bush, then a youthful evening haunt of hers, in a graveyard in Sunbury, Pa. I often made her repeat this story, I meanwhile standing proud and ever rosier, because of knowing all the contexts. How could she have known, she said, how many of his she had piqued and teazled, when she said to him afterwards—afterwards of what, I knew also—“Oh, ja, ’ch wis was du bis.” She had told him her tribe, and of her parents’ lapses—from wearing buttons to living in town and having the gas and electrisch, to her father’s drink and her mother’s earrings—for which they had been thrown off the grandfather’s farm. And how she herself had three languages. “’Ch hab Deitsch, und Deutsch”—how cleverly her dear little tongue must have made that turn—“und ’ch hab der good Englisch.” And she even knew what he was. “Ja, ’ch wis. Du bis Scotch!”
On the television, she never liked to look at the news, or listen—too much quack-quack. Jamie hadn’t been much of a talker, but had made talking dolls of his wives. One was still living—somewhere; it was the second one, the Maori girl, who had died. And it was her son by Jamie who had given Janice the woodcarving tools she had at long last found such a use for. Jamie had sons all over, though never a daughter by anybody at all. Just as well, and said so himself; could never keep his hands off a young girl. Give him credit though, he always went back along the trail, even years later, picked up the sons, as one by one they popped up out of huts, long-houses or island waters, and popped them back—into a good church school.
“Oh these half-breed Englishmen,” she said, “half-breed Irish, Scotch—I mean Scottish, or American—queerishest of the queer!” She gave me a sharp look. “Queerish queer, you understand, Eli, not queer-queer. Or at least, not all of them.”
I would have nodded if I could, but anyway, she seemed able now to tell so well what I was thinking—though we were wary of false alarms—that I often thought she could smell.
“Always on the move, too,” she added. “But keep in touch, is their motto. And they don’t in the least mind—going back.”
Jamie himself, whenever he had deceived her—this context like all moral ones, took a while, but finally, by rote, I got it—did so only with older women, or those along the trail already. She hadn’t deceived him ever, instead merely cultivating a taste, when she could indulge it, for never going back. “Queerish,” she said again, with a sigh. And that was the end of Jamie, though since then she had not pushed much forwarder in her own history.
Sometimes, her quick chatter—in which drama, character and gender were all of them mixed up together—put a strain even on my extended reading. I had a question or two, one of which I put forward with some awkwardness. “Shall I be, do you think—one of those half-breeds?”
She muffled what I feared was a laugh—though it could have been a sob—then said, with an expression that of all her many I liked the best, so straightforward, nothing roundish, “Whatever … you’ll be a dear.”
I swallowed the second one—I was swallowing more frequently these days. A half-breed. Was: Jack?
Or sometimes, as she sat down with the tray, and flicked the switch to a story or a dancing, she remarked that she didn’t really care for more news of a world she was leaving—and out of the complicated reasons she might have had for this, gave me one. “I’d like to move on forever. But not get any particular where.”
That was Ours, all right. I myself was all for progress, more and more. I felt I would do well here. But more and more it had to be at my demand that we had a Voco-Phono lesson; almost it seemed that she had lost interest, not in me, but in my getting on. Often I had to plead for it, with what I hoped was a little joke. “Well, let’s, eh—since we can’t play cards.” Was this piteous, tedious, or my worst bugaboo—coyful? Even from reading, I couldn’t quite get right all the attitudes. But, for a proper joke here, I did see that serious attitudes had to be taken seriously—and if my growthing went as predicted, I fancied I’d make good use of how to give and take a proper joke. I hadn’t yet puzzled out what was needed for the tragic sense of life, or even quite what it was, or whether people really wanted it. More to the point at present was that, evening by evening, I could see that my darling—she called me dear, but I had advanced ahead of her—was drifting. Was it tragic or comic, that nobody could know better than I—what and where she was drifting toward?
In the lessons themselves, now that my speech had advanced from the grammars, catechisms, recordings and verbalization tables she had first devised, I found it harder to keep her attention, and sometimes even had to resort to making old mistakes which had once amused her, saying “has-been” for instance for husband, or “woeman” for wooman, not expecting her to laugh, but hoping only that she would notice what I was doing, or perhaps even give me a beating for some reason—I was reading Dickens, de Sade, and Krafft-Ebing at the moment and could have given her any number of reasons—but all that occurred was my own recognition that I no longer amused even me. Which has not stopped me from trying; this is called a sense of humor. Meanwhile, more and more often, she went with me to my evening library stint at an hour she once would have thought dangerously early.
It was quite simple, the way we did it. There was a way across the fields, and she carried a woodsman’s lantern which when vigorously swung effectively reflected me out. We never had to cross the agora I had hit upon on arrival, but it could be seen in the distance, and remembering those cries of the aurora borealis, I hunted up manuals on camouflage, magic illusion, protective coloration, and like any young thing growing here, found many a little trompe l’oeil trick which helped me blend with my surroundings. One or two rainy evenings now and then kept us in, or she did, citing how the first Indians here on the continent had died of measles contracted from the Europeans, and how there was no need as yet to take chances with my unknown hardihood. Curious, how none of you ever think of yourselves as the aborigines—not even, I presume, the aborigines. How she could think we would not have primed ourselves with all the immunities was another of her innocences, but I kept my own counsel—and the weather marvelously held. Terrestrial nature sometimes does that, before it stretches toward another adventure. So we two traversed the fields in our own light, and a lantern’s. She was always and ever staring upward on the dark map she had set her sights for, but to the traveler of many crossings, the night sky is sufficient if it but be known to be above him. So, an affair of two worlds had narrowed down almost to that idyll of a man and a maid—and a field—whose authorship is generally ascribed to the ages. So, at least, I had read. And so I hoped.
Then, at the library, in the door we went, via her key, up the backstairs, and into the stacks. Once in her cubicle, while she raided the shelves for me, I was safe, even against any possible scholar as late as we. And there, reading everything from Anthropology to Zoology—and though my rate of speed slackened slowly, slower ever slower, until toward the end I couldn’t read faster than a volume of Blackstone a minute and a good novel in forty—I spent the sea-green incorruptible hours of my Here youth. So I set myself to read your universe through, haunted only by the fear that I should too soon finish. A young person’s fear! Nature has its own ways, in retrospect all nobly simple. What slowed me down, ever more irreparably—until near the end I could read no more than the day’s supply of the ten or fifteen books she could load into two book bags—was of course my own delight, that first touch of the bibliophile’s hunger. Everything I read, or almost, was still pornography to me!
Then, at four o’clock or so we betook ourselves home again quickly, I glowing hot as the dawn itself, stuffed as I was with all the splendors to come, and she pale as Diana disappearing—each to our own daydreams.
Daytime excursions she had decreed were impossible. Yet, once, we dared it, for what she called dreamily an ice-picnic—her choice. She wanted—as she said—out. The state park, she said, would be deserted even of keepers, on the farthest side of the winter lakes. While she took her air there, I could start my own test of endurance—it was time I started something, unless I planned to remain forever a monstrous bookworm—and if I was not soon to develop a figure, or some fas-simile of a bifurcation which would allow me to be clothed, I would have to learn to brave the elements as I was. She spoke somewhat harshly, and though I thought of such things as a manteau or a toga, offered me nothing. “If you could only learn to sit,” she finished, “I could hire a car!”
Scarcely knowing why, I still was hiding that talent, as well as—another. Only a day or two past, on the excuse of my weakness, she had kept me from the rain. Must I mistrust her, or did she want me somehow both weak and strong? And how varying she was herself; surely the authorities had done right in sending me to her to complete my variation. As we went together through the numb woods, aglide and atrudge on a dull day that hadn’t a spark of orange fire in it, I felt what even the rebel, the revolutionary must often feel, and perhaps he most inwardly—a secret restfulness, near resignation, in the thought that the authorities may after all be right. Was this why, on the very edge and crux of the adventure, he might turn about and betray his own kind? I stopped, in horror—what hateful insight was this?—then went on blithely, saved by the reminder that none of either world could now tell for sure what my kind was. Here and there along the path, an iced puddle was haunted with blue. Station by station, these suggested. And in my first sight of the lake, that gray rainbow even on this cloud-wrapped day, I accepted it, the nature of this universe. I was seeing better and better, the doubleness of things here. And how it was managed, that one admired it.
She had brought her skates. So, for an hour or so, while I trembled but bore it, I watched her twirling over and over, along the black and white geometry, so single, of her hope. So as not to gloat over me perhaps, she wasn’t too heavily clothed herself, in short skirt and jacket. Was she rounder in form, not so slender? I feared so, and that just as she must be inspiriting me—so that all my inside must be swelling, buzzing and sporing, and spoored all over with the black print of her enigmas—so all the while my dull One-ness of spirit must be having its effect on her also. How differently folk watched here, I thought, recalling the constant bowing and acknowledgment of the obligatory life scene at home. Or how differently—when beings were folk. I had posted myself against the frozen sedge before a long promenade of bathhouses, ending nearest me, in the bareswept ticket stall. On the surface of that lake—so wild a wondershape to me—she was describing over and over a pear-shaped oval. But what I saw upon the lake was its name, dragging its great swallowtail wings over the whole of it, Tiorati, in black-netted brown and plush-orange, and butterfly-white. That of course was because of my poetic nature, which gratefully insisted on spanning both worlds. But she had turned her back on the bathhouses. And though no human could have been sure of it, I knew I was facing them, and that in my longing second sight they were a-tumble with people, a-Dickens and a-Daumier and a-Rowlandson with these beings I had seen so little of except in their own illustration—and of course a-Malinowski and a-Lombroso, a-Krafft-Ebing, de Sade, Machiavelli and a-de Montherlant too. My tastes were perhaps still cartoon. But people could not be had by hearsay alone.
Yet I froze with the sedge as I stood there, and not from the elements, not with cold. The inflections of two-ness were more versatile than I thought. The one being with the two-heads—any of us would have thought that the final elaboration—and enough. But was there another?
She was taking off her skates now, her hands clumsy in her mittens, surely only from cold? I couldn’t help her, and had never before thought to. In all that was daily done here. I watched her, from this afar. There is a foreshortening that intimacy brings. I hoped it was nothing else but that, for my one-ness was now a disease I feared to bring her. Yet—oh these halves that never match here!—I wanted to engulf her with the I that was now me.
She came and stood by my side, the skates dangling. When she came that close, could I really see her?
“I was watching you,” I said. In the cold, her face blurred. Though it was still a face—as much of a one as ever I would hope to have, and more. “From afar,” I said. And from near too, though you cannot see it.
She nodded, head down. In fact, her head moved so neatly in its socket, as if following the memory of the skating on a small, neat oval of its own—had it ever moved like that before? I was filled with terror of her, for one startled moment—of her for whom until now I had had only terrors.
Then she raised her eyes and stared at me, as if only now she dared her fill of it. Then it was she who drew back.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “Let’s go back.”
I turned as if to walk at her side again.
“Go on ahead,” she said. “Walk ahead of me.”
I did so, at my glide. From puddle to puddle, their winks even more haunted now, I pondered. She had said “home,” which I knew quite well as the places here you went back to, as Jamison went back to his sons. There were places here one did go back to, or ways of trying. Although the homes moved also; I had heard her say how many she had had and how often, and I had also seen, as she said it to the cottage, the quirk of her mouth. And she and I too—were moving. Even I—who seemed so still, to them. We above all things here were moving onward, and did each wish the other to wait, to stay the same? No, not both of us. I told this to the last puddle. Just I.
Then I heard my name, and turned to it, thinking as always, and perhaps as you do when named: No, there is more to me than that.
“Eli,” she said, and how hoarse that voice. “I’m always looking at you.” I saw her swallow. “You never see.”
The watching is different here. A one watches the other from afar, another who is watching not. The one who was not watching—now watches the other, from afar. What rises, the nameless third who is company, across that distance? Who stands there, shy observer, in the gap between?
SO, THAT NEXT AFTERNOON, you might think that when I heard the turn of the key which released me to join her, I would bound forward from the most exuberant dreams ever—not so. You yourselves have a saying, “Give him a finger, and he wants a whole hand.” And though during my whole sojourn here I had never been given much more than hope—who is?—even the slightest encouragement always at once made my hopes more precise. When we had crept into the house without another word between us, each going off to our rooms, she up the stairs, and I down the hall to my museum, it had been my hope—that for once she would not turn the key. And what advantage would I have taken of so beautiful an action?—none but to bask the whole day in the soft mallow-gleam of it, while perhaps her door lay open too, in exquisite trust. Or so I imagined, the minute the key turned, as usual, to lock me in.
Upshot of it was, I found myself utterly unable to dream at all, and after a space of distraught gliding to and fro, actually set about practicing the exercises I had so far neglected. What a strange thing is resentment—I shall never understand it, particularly in myself! In any case, I found what I had suspected; her exercises, poor dear, whether verbal, calisthenic or ideational, were not likely to set any being of my class in mutation, based as they were on a commercial humanism, the product of your social scientists. I mulled over the graphs and polygraphs with some amusement; if I was going to be as normal as this, I would be your first. We should have to help you with your conceptions of us, more than we had thought. And afterwards, we might have to help you with your humanity too.
Once you saw us, perhaps that was all that would be needed. As I paced the floor of this museum of mine—which I had begun to cherish for the way its silent masks, clay hands, weapons and other debris of your duration seemed almost a practice audience for me, your prize specimen—I brooded again on all those like-differences which you and we, cat’s cradle style maybe, nevertheless share. And which have allowed us to get together at last. But if I were going to say it all in a nutshell, as you say, how would I do it? I could say that just as you, to your eternal praise, sometimes let your poetic imagination rip wide as your yawns, we do the same with our physical ones, that where you must still machine space, we by image-making transcend it; in those realms where you cast only poems, astrologies and a little teleportation music, we have already quite matter-of-factly arrived. I could say it like that, but I could do better. I could be the nutshell.
In the course of my meditations, whose path I strove always to keep off-oval and slightly irregular, I found myself in front of the mantelpiece, from whose marble there hung two grossly curved cherubs, the sight of whom, since I was courting prenatal influence rather than discounting it, I tended usually to avoid. I had no fear of catching their wings; they and I were on entirely different evolutionary lines. Even their fatty cheeks—and these in all directions, I could have learned, like some of you, to tolerate. But in a well-setup male, pudenda of that size would be ridiculous.
Besides which, I found your putti of whatever sex, with their high aims and low execution, always a little obscene, hoped your babies would do better, and indeed was never quite persuaded that these two cheese-white creatures were only marble, stone. As you may have noticed, I had a mistrust of objects, reassure myself as I might that on this planet it was not nearly so well founded as on mine. That is, it appeared that though you could control objects to a degree, or sometimes gave evidence of being controlled by them, you could not—by that image-stretch of the cells which was our newest scientific practice—be them.
This latest expertise, a delicate one even for us, was like all on Ours, most severely regulated; it was permissible to invade only certain classes of objects, and only certain of the elite were allowed any such performance. The rush had been enormous; one would have thought people didn’t want to be people any more—at least, not Ours. Certain sociologists had been particularly adept in temporarily transforming themselves or other beings into objects, and I—yes, I, a former poet, now confess it—had for my own purposes joined that profession. Temporarily. But my wary scrutiny of objects here, now may be even clearer. At home, some of them might have been friends.
For, our new accomplishment, popularly called “objectivity,” and being of course merely a casting ahead of images, on wavelengths of a scope and penetration some steps advanced of your own electronics—had of course nothing to do with mutation. We could transfer ourselves to the inanimate with a certain precision now, but in effect only counterfeiting what nature did to us every day, if more indiscriminately. But for us to have gone from flesh-form to flesh-form by any like transformations was still beyond us—in fact, there we were far behind you, not yet having produced, by flash methods, some of your freaks. As for regularized mutation—if it hadn’t been for millennia forbidden us, there too we’d have been like you, still dependent on the old stewpots of nature. But it must by now be clear to you that we had long since done something very drastic about that. We’d reached a form—that suited our very stringent sense of form. And then, screw up progress, as you would say. We had stopped right there.
No wonder, then, that our small band of travel agents, though daily gaining members, had still to do it in underground style. We were not only fiddling with mutation; we were being antiquarian about it, or so our best minds would say. So then, was it kismet or was it cosmic, I thought, moving away from the cherubs, that no sooner had I begun developing some of the feelings forbidden to us, than I found them linking me to a being who didn’t want to go back, at least not on this planet—but neither did she want to stay. A being so—I couldn’t say untrustworthy—at least not yet. But one so mercurial, so devoted to conformity without, and what looked like anarchy within—that I had misgivings whether her kind should be allowed on Ours at all.
By now, I was moving up and down the long room so agitatedly that I almost made a noise. Well, that was progress. Much as I liked the room, however, almost everything in it, if stared at too fixedly, might well be a hazard for the kind of progress I was after—except, of course, the bed. On it lay the Dream, my personal and singular one, as distinguished from the more traditional perturbations and doubles entendres I got from your books. It was of course this, that one day, say around teatime, I would entice her to enter here and there lie down with me—but thereafter it departed from convention. Necessarily. For I could see us there all right, the longer being and the shorter one, both horizontal and side by side, and if I could persuade her to take her clothes off, both of a resembling pink. So far so good, but there the categorical sympathies ended. After that, on the long couch of history, what a strangely assorted—more so than Abelard or Heloise, what a surely immortal—as much as Cupid and Psyche—pair!
And what I planned for us to do then wasn’t at all beyond imagining; it contrarily and sadly went beyond what I wanted of it. For in usual your-style, though in my dreams I was never quite able to conclude that episode of yours I so wanted to happen, my intelligence, that damned super-ergo, was all too bloody well able to visualize what I hoped against hope wouldn’t. For I could see the two of us … And what a box we were in, indeed! Star-crossed was nothing, in compare. For, suppose I reached the apotheosis I craved? Imagine it then, as I was now doing: in the warmth of her nearness, or (dared I say it)—embraces? Yes, I did dare. In those encircling arms, suppose then (though perhaps not without many teatime repetitions, many a long, quiet hibernation in that hot-humid New Guinea conservatory)—suppose then that I would then at long last find myself to be, though perhaps not in the strictest ontological sequence, nevertheless … nevertheless … budding. Alas I knew only too well how you mucked things up here—I could not only fill in all the dots. I could fill in the spaces between these too. And it was there, alas, I found the other word, for what she would meanwhile be doing, under the onfluence of my shape. What would she be doing but melting? Mutation is mutual. And once again—and in vain all our heaven-floating arrogance—we would be ships that pass.
Unless—I thought of yesterday. Unless, there was a thing unknown to me, that you in turn had kept from me, that you and yours had smelled out. It might be sensible on both sides, not to reveal talents which would only confuse the situation without bettering it, in the time we had to spare—witness my power to-objectify, which was not to be done in a day. In fact, now that I knew our time scale, not in much less than a year—I should just manage it. In spite of which—I drooped at the thought—it seemed forever to teatime.
A pause in my agitations brought me to the room’s one chair, but although it was a plump lounge one, and masculinely leathered, I never sat on it. Not that I thought it was anybody. I had never yet sat again, either in her presence or mine, and this time not for caution but out of pure sentiment and superstition—and perhaps a little gamble. As a nation we love a long chance, and so did I, though since I had no one to bet with but myself, mine was more of a vow. I had a private bet on, not to sit until I could consider myself to be, if not a human in full panoply, at least out in the world of them, or on my way. To sit is so human. Other attributes of yours that I wanted seemed to me nearer the divine, or the animal. I was perfectly aware that besides these, you had many minor tricks of individuality as a species, plus more majestic ones, such as buying and selling—which the Ones who came after me might settle upon as your insignia, for them. A matter of taste, perhaps. To sit, at least in a chair, was mine.
And so, when I heard the key turn at last, I was still standing there. I hurried out, and at once took up my sentry post by the fireplace, even though I well knew that although in the spirit of fair play she ran to release me the minute her own practice period was over, she then returned to the bedroom for a time which might be any length, in order, as she said, to “change.” A feminine habit in the main, she said, though anyone could do it, and indeed so far it was applicable only to her costume. But how could I ever be sure, and therefore began the teatime always in a flutter. If ever I attained my full goals here, I told myself—this was the hour at which I should drink.
In default of that, it was often my custom quickly to set the tone of the evening as cozily as possible, usually with a phrase which would start us off on the topic of last night’s reading—perhaps quotations from the poets, or entire renderings of a Russian novel’s plot. The novels she criticized freely, giving me a running commentary on anything in them—from card playing to epilepsy—which might be of use to me out in the world. The poetry she listened to with her eyes rapt on the window—that is, she didn’t. Anthropology belonged to her own frequent reminiscence, and so I never read any; I was vicarious enough as I was. Chemistry, astrophysics and like, I needed to study only long enough to learn the steps you had reached, and to observe how the narrow shoe of your mind still hunted a foot to fit it. In recent weeks, I had spent most of my time—and much of it humble—in pursuit of those biologies where, whether you knew it or not, you could be master, always coming home so full of my studies that I never had to choose my gambit; it chose me.
“I have been studying the courtship of the three-spined stickleback!” might tumble from me, the minute she entered. Or, while she built up the fire or tested the blinds for blackout, I would brood for some minutes, lost on some Australasian shore where the platypus waddled, before I exclaimed, “I better have a look at Breughel again; I do wish you hadn’t stopped the milk!” Or, as on the day I first comprehended the full biology of you, I might spend the whole evening in thralled silence while she chattered, only to say to her in the tenderest tone, as we set out across the fields and she fell silent—“To think that I once envied the complex fertilization of the sponge!”
But tonight, when she entered, I said nothing, though not out of self-pride; these days I kept the sharpest, ever more self-conscious eye on my own conduct. And I knew myself to be ridiculous; this is the way you and I—we—are. But tonight I was quiet for another reason, and it wasn’t because, after our ice-picnic finding myself unable to read, I had no topic to draw upon. I was mute because—and this may surprise those of you more used to this curdle of events—because for once I had nothing to say. We at home were always required to have something. Until I understood the full significance of this new state, as I began gradually to do throughout that famous evening, the sensation was quite hurtful.
She was wearing a conglomeration of garments—these days it seemed to me that in her abstraction she put one costume on top of another—which she had finished off with the Mexican serape she often referred to as her favorite, since it had been through so much with her. As she brushed past me, almost under the spot of me where I was intensifiedly cultivating nose imagery of the most Roman pretensions, I noted with some anxiety that this costume effectively blurred her figure at those very points it had been my luck to be able to dwell upon at my ease, though I sometimes thought that despite my lack of physiognomy she knew—she hadn’t been watched for years for nothing. On happier evenings, or more relaxed ones, she even rallied me, saying almost flirtingly, “Peeping Tom!” And it was these moments, I said to myself, which in the end would be more effective than any of their exercises, at least those that I knew. But one of the evenings was sure to be followed by one in which she made a great show of adhering to our intellectual program, and I already saw, from her brusque manner, that this was to be the case tonight. She bustled on past me—was she a little lame?
When she returned from the kitchen with her dinner tray, I noted with relief that she was carrying it in two hands just as always, and that when she sat down her legs, perhaps because of her garments, were crossed not at knee but at ankle. Her face, bent over her food, looked fuller, but then it had done that when she had wept with laughter, that first time. I had a terrible thought—having nothing-to-say breeds them. I should like to see her weep the other way—and over me. Could she have smelled this? She did not seem to be relishing her food. When she looked up at me, those eyebrows of hers, lovely whips, were clenched in that ever-invisible fist—they had not changed.
“Taking inventory?” she snapped.
Oh let her not change, I thought. Let her leave that to me. Oh heresy.
“No need to take stock of you!” she said. “One glance does it. Always redder than the last time. Like the Commissioner in South Wind—I suppose, having read everything, you’ve read that one.” She even got up, reached for the bookshelf, arm half bent, then thought better of it. “Never mind. Somebody remarks that he looks redder than when last seen, and somebody else answers, That is always characteristic of the Commissioner.’” She put the tray quietly to one side—she was never chattery, but how noiseless this evening!—and regarded me. “One would think I beat you.”
Beat me.
“Or tickled you. Incessantly.” She had the most peculiar expression, a snarl that at any moment might turn into a smile. How I envied her it. “Are you … ticklish … Eli?”
I am, terribly. That is, We were. Laughing so much makes one so, at least this is the way it works with us.
“My, my,” she said. “What a complexion. Why look at the great big—it looks like a gre-at big … Bavarian … Mädel!”
That was cruel of her. She knows I know German.
“But we mustn’t be coy, must we. At least not in that direction. Might disturb the—elements. Yes, I know—‘the elements so mixed’—Julius Caesar. You quoted it the other evening. Sometimes I wonder who’s being educated here. I could graduate from college, just on the books I’ve hauled since February.” She sat back. Her ways of sitting might not be as versatile as once—surely it was those Saturday orgies?—but even when she sat stiffly it was of interest to me. “Funny thing—” The snarl was almost a smile, now. “I always thought I didn’t like being made use of. This is the first time I—I suppose it’s because you’ve never looked down on me intellectually.” Her voice sank. “Or because I’m making use of you too.” To a whisper. “I suppose I always did that, to everyone really.”
I dared not move. But she might see it for herself—that the willing slope of what someday might be a shoulder, was near.
“Though why I’d want to make you see what bitches women can be, or I can—I ought to be spending all my time on the men.” She dropped again, her neck sadly shortened by that coarse garment, underneath which it must surely still stretch, as is said with truth of their necks, like a lily. “I can’t bear it. The good and bad in the world, in men, in me. I can’t go through it again, any more.” Did she glance at me for a minute, and quickly look down again? “I’ve had it. We all have. It’s too mixed.”
I trembled, who only wanted to qualify. And I thought, with horror for her side, that before she came over to Us, she ought to be trembling too.
Was she? If she were naked, I should know better. I had never before felt my lack of clothing, or seen the peculiarity of a domestic situation in which, according to your best art books, only one of us was A Nude. I wondered whether I might make her an artistic suggestion.
“What’s the matter,” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”
Oh cruel, when we hadn’t a cat, and I hadn’t a—But always with imagination.
And still I had nothing-to-say, though I could now have said it in the most impeccable accents.
She got up from her chair and strode the room as she always did when excited, though her paths were more oval than before. In spite of the hobbling garments, she could still fling around her those great sashes and skirtings of the emotion I so envied her. Never mind the clothing, it was these others I wanted, and perhaps there was a bifurcated version of them too.
She paused in front of me. “What, no let’s have a lesson, Janice’ today?” She drew breath, perhaps to show me how her thought had smelled mine. Or perhaps to show me how a one of you could draw breath. “I suppose our young hopeful—thinks itself educated?” That time, she saw me flinch. “Yes, it. One doesn’t deserve the personal pronoun just from craving it!”
She was wrong there, I thought. Want dignifies—almost anything. Especially in a world so full of possessions.
There in front of me, she took a few steps backward, chin tucked in but her eyes still on me, the way a short, excited person tries to lord it over a large, poised one. Tall beside the mantel, I felt her words almost before she spoke them.
“Sit!” she said. “Will you never! Why you haven’t even learned to sit down, and that’s not the half of it, barely a detail. Do you realize that nearly a third of our time here is gone, and you haven’t even seen the world yet, and all because—arrh-ah!”
Or was it hah—IT—ah, that final explosion? Many as my pedestrian languages were, and on their way to perfection, I can never get right those jagged exclamations of yours, those hahs and bahs and eeows torn as it were out of the crude heart of variation—in place of which I had only my perfect O-pear!.
“I sold the car,” she said, in the smallish, exhausted voice in which these small cries are apparently to be answered, particularly if they are one’s own. “But it’s not that easy, your transportation, young massa.” She tried to glare, making this last a satirical slap, but I knew better; never a slap did one of her hands give me, but there was a bit of sugar for me in the other.
“I thought of a truck, but they’re too obvious for around here, and even out on the main roads, if I drive one.” And now, wonder of wonders, and of ponds shining and puddles no longer haunted, she smiled again. “Jack used to say I had no vanity. If one happens to be obvious and knows it, one often isn’t, you know.”
You meant to say Jamie, didn’t you, I thought; or you always said Jamie before. But this time you said Jack.
Was that why she frowned again? “Bah!” she said. “You think you know the world because you’ve been in a cottage and a library. Wait till I show you. I know what you think of the world, don’t think I haven’t smelled that out. You’re like those Americans who want to see Stratford, but not Birmingham or Liverpool. Or like Jamie even, who never minded me seeing the truth for any part of the world but his—who wanted me to walk the ramparts in Edinbro’ with him prince-cock-a-feather, but kept me out of the slums of Glasga’. Or like those tourists inside the glass lounge of the hotel, looking over Corregidor Bay and drinking whisky sours, and all the old war might have been a flamingo flying over, and round the corner, not even in a slum mind you, just round the corner, the squatters living in the piled-up whisky cases. All the people who think the world’s all of a piece, or want to. Is, was, and ever shall be. I’ll not have you walk out on it like that, like them, hear?”
Corners, always corners.
She put her hands on her hips and looked up at me, her attempt to seem as tall as I forgotten. “And do you know why—no, don’t answer, how could you know. Because that’s the way I did.” She whispered it. “I thought the world was all of a piece, somewhere else. Or travel would make it so.” She folded her arms in front of her, settling down into her wraps and teetering on her ankles in a way that unnerved me. “And don’t say what you would say if you are what you think you are. ‘Oh, you were just a girl.’” She gave a short laugh, and trundled—yes, that was the word which came to me—to the window, pulled the blind up, and looked out. Her voice always softened when it came from there, and it did so now. Over her shoulder I could see, turning away from the mantel, that it was snowing again. The road, far as I could see it, was trackless, and filled with the half-blue, spectral winter light that oozed into the room like a power. “You’ve only known us in snow,” she said. It was a strange ending to such a speech but she repeated it. “You only know us in snow.”
This wasn’t quite true, unless I wasn’t to count what I’d seen in Bucks, or from the air—but it was her soliloquy. How one saw ought to count too, I thought, watching how the little salon, holding fast all its seams, said, “Still safe, still safe!” to the window, and how the winter light strode through the window replying, “You are a trinket upon the world.”
Her voice cut between the two. She was still looking out. “Women are the real travelers,” she said. “They’re afraid of nothing. Not even to stay at home. But if any being has too much of that, or even of the world—travel comes of it.” She turned away from the window, sat down by the telly, and picked up her tray. She looked down at the articles there, the fork, the knife and the glass, and on the plates, the food, a sight to me still faintly repellant, though they say here that food is the last pleasure to go. Then she leaned forward, flicking the switch on the telly. “I’ll find us some misery,” she said. “I’ll introduce you two yet.”
She twirled the switch from arc to arc, turning up a crooner, on of those animated cartoons whose toy properties, as they zoomed, always gave me space nostalgia, a close-up of two human figures in what I always thought of as the swimming-pool moo-vie, two comic goons in boot camp—the telly vocabulary, running much to the oo sounds which were my easiest, was a constant enjoyment—and three very excellent shots of a perfect set of false teeth, a clogged nostril and a bloodshot eye. Early in my stay she had restricted my viewing, on the grounds that I was already misconceiving you from it, and would end by never being able to tell your shadowy attitudes from your real ones, or your teeth or your people, but I was quite able; nobody knew more about shadows than we do.
She was studying the newspaper. “Here’s one! A documentary. On Hansen’s disease—I suppose your omniscience knows that’s leprosy.” Fork lifted, she watched the screen. “In Asia we saw it often.”
I watched with intense interest, having read much about disease but never seen one.
“Yaws, too,” she said in a teacherly voice of satisfaction. “In Ceylon called parangi, in Fiji coko, in the Malay peninsula purru, tonga in the Samoas or sometimes tono, in the Moluccas bouton d’Amboine.” She repeated this in soft carillon—lovely!—and added that the healthy children of sick mothers were the worst.
From what I had read, this seemed to me scarcely the show for a being who was trying to acquire appendages, not discard them, but I need not have worried—we saw many leucocytes, many doctors, but no mothers and indeed no patients; no scabs appeared on the fine, metallic wood of the television box as I had expected, but then we had just been informed that the incubation period was long. She watched me narrowly, while the hospital angled whitely elegant along a soothing voice which brought us at last to a clean patient sitting with his back to us, reading a newspaper like her own. All that time, I had been covertly watching my own skin, expecting that the disease must surely appear there, but all was so pleasant that my nothing-to-say was lulled almost to the point of speech. You were not that instantaneous here. The screen did not suffer. Or anybody close to it, no matter how near.
I was about to cry out, “Oh charming, see, he’s sitting,” but she reached forward to turn it off, with a scowl. “He’s right. One more try, then. The news.” Out of her own ennui, we seldom had the news, though I always listened with real listening, since she said it was real—though I never saw what she saw.
“Ah, we’ve struck luck,” she said. She took up her fork again. “The war in Vietnam,” she said. “We’ve struck it rich.” And compared to other times, I suppose we had. We had had bombs before and after, but never now, and this was a village set fire by its own hand, before it moved on. And now, as a village, it was leaving, all close together, in the truck. I saw that.
“Here’s your TV dinner, Eli,” she said. “Nummy-num. And meanwhile I’ll have mine—that’s how we do it here.” She watched me watch it and her, both of us imperturbable, and made sure I saw every morsel she ate. “They’re so thin,” she commented, “they’ve been starving. Ordinarily they’re a beautiful people.” I had not too many standards to judge them by. I had never seen so many together before. They had not a field of space measured out for them. I saw how close they could be to each other, in starvation. That is what I saw.
“Eat!” she said. “Fill ’er up. That’s misery there, isn’t it? Isn’t it!” And my nothing-to-say rose up again, so I couldn’t answer her to say, I don’t see what you do, I can’t eat as you do, it’s only a screen to me. I’m not as human as you are.
“I’m eating!” she said. “I’m hungry. That’s the way we do it here. And maybe that’s misery too.”
So, each to each, we had our dinner. The village faded, the truck also; we came to a wayside station. We had a mother, babe in arms and three children, like paper cutouts that faded where they stood, and still stared.
“This is Shartlesville Corn Pudding,” she said, looking down at what she was still eating. “From an old family recipe. And bacon drippings in the lettuce. I cook Dutch.”
We had a dead body with the salad. It was then she smashed down the tray.
If it were a simple mystery, a single one, I was thinking, perhaps I could understand it. Surely they could be taught to manage it that way, or perhaps I could teach them. Surely this they could manage here—only one by one.
Then I saw that the tray had fallen and I could do nothing. And she said, “Don’t … it’s nothing. Don’t bother.” As if I could. “I was just clumsy,” she said and half bent down to pick it all up—and then didn’t. And then tossed her head and walked over to me where I stood, silent at the mantel. And then put her hand a little way out to touch me—and then didn’t. But I felt it. Like the other times, it burned. But it burned like a thought, not a feeling. We stared across it, as if we had between us but one large eye.
I thought she said to me: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.
I thought I said to her: Stay as you are. I’ll come to meet you.
Then she was at the tray, kicking the remains onto it with the point of her shoe, and there were no remains for me to bother with, except later when I read about madness I understood it. It is a budding in the mind and a melting. It is a mutation that hasn’t been asked for.
And then, outside on the road, a car door slammed.
And then the bell rang.
We had so few doorbells and telephone calls in our life these days that both of us looked at the television, but it had passed on now from war, and was quietly grieving out the stock market quotations. She crept toward it, and turned it off. “Who do you suppose that is?” she whispered. “Nobody comes round here, this hour of the day, who could it be?” We had had a peddler whom I had been too late to see. Today was Thursday. The week’s delivery, the post and the meter reader had all been. At these specified times I was required to go at once to the museum and stay there until the all-safe, but now I stayed where I was, the tumult of nothing-to-say meanwhile so loud in me that it was like a wind which took the place of speech.
“The lamps!” she said, crouching toward the nearest one, then stood abashed. While we had been at our dinner-share of all the things in the world that could be happening simultaneously, on our side of it we had been moving forward into the shadows; outside, the blue light had moved on to that deepest Prussian-colored moment before the dark plunge. Inside, I was the only lamp. And the blind of the small window was up.
I suppose there must always have been pulsings of mood, dimming of hesitation, which even in me told their story. She knew at once that I was not going to hide.
She stole to the window, and stretching her arm as if her wraps dragged on it, silently inched down the blind. We heard someone stamp and shuffle on the square of paving stone that served for a porch, overhung with a lantern, just outside.
I could feel how it would be to be waiting there, the snow coming down like a blessing, or if you looked into it, like an akimbo whirling of worlds. In the clear marvel of the air, the planets swung in their perihelions. I could feel how it would be to shuffle the foot and stamp it, to breathe planets through the nose.
“Stand back!” she whispered. “If you aren’t going to hide. Look alive!” As I did so, drawing the light well away from her, she peered through the seam between blind and window. I saw by her face that the seam had let something in.
Then we heard it again, the bell, and again, as if it were teaching someone that sad, virtuoso song.
“Will you not go in?” she said. “So I can answer. Are you alive?”
Most curious, how I could not yet myself make insults aloud, yet could take them into me, making my own non-answer, which seemed joined with the non-answered bell outside. And it seemed to me that I felt my blood. Does the running of the blood answer only to the barb?
“Maybe I should ask him in,” she said. “To tell me for sure that you are. Should I?” She came a little closer toward me. “Eli?” She whispered it. She put out a hand, minimally. “No, don’t,” she said. “Hush. No, I know you are. Hush.”
“Hush,” she had said, and “No, don’t”—and I had not said a word. I looked down at myself. It was my light which was speaking. Was this how it had been in the beginning, here? Out of the primordial, the blind mouths rising, of beings not found yet by their own blood. Over the watery acres of the young world, a phosphorescence of being, which is light? So that, world to world, being to being, mouth to mouth, in the end it is all the same?
I watched her slip the lock so that she might enter again. She opened the door, glided outside, and shut it behind her.
And now it was I who crept to the seam and applied my vision to it. I couldn’t see her at all, where she must be pressed against the door, but by the light of the hanging-down lantern I could see the whole of the paving stone—often too had I glided there!—and … him. Now I recognized him. He was the second head. He was different in face from the milkman, but my shrewdness told me he would have his own prototypes somewhere. I looked him over from top to toe, but he did not see me, seeing only her. Did I want to be him? As with the milkman, I had a struggle—always this empathy!—but again I came out on top, or at least—alone. Then he spoke.
“It’s I,” he said. “I saw the light.”
Oh glory. He had said it; she had heard it. I was alive. To see and be seen was the double glory here too. And I had crossed over. I was visible here, fully and forevermore. Whatever wounds came of it, I was alive.
Her reply chilled me. I knew that dry rustle. “Philosophical?” she muttered. “Or electrical.”
Wounds come quickly here, but this was intended not for me but for him. What had she against him; what had they all? At the edge of the blind—good seam, kind seam!—I scrutinized him, thinking that if she invited him in, even if to stay and live with us, I should not mind. He would be a third, but the kind that is company.
But I heard her murmur that she expected to be leaving; she would write.
And then for a moment I saw her taken in his grasp. Mouth to mouth, all beings are light. I saw it.
Then I heard the car slam, then the gunning sound of it, the dying away. A road is a meander.
And then, followed in by a little dark wind, a little white of snow, she came back.
After she closed the door behind her, she stayed pressed against it just as she had done that first evening, the same, yet not the same. Much of the life here is like that; in this concentric it approaches our own groove. Swollen ghost of herself, I was sure she too watched my vision of how she had once moved. Hand pushed to mouth, as if in the bellyache, she looked at me. Once she had told me that in certain circles of Polynesia, a sign of esteem that wife may pay husband is to groom him in the village square by plucking the nits from his hair. Here women, in the exercise of a terrible vanity, do a service of esteem for themselves. One by one—when that profound honesty comes over them—they will pluck from their own heads the qualities that endear them to self or to others, and cast these aside like lice, like stones. How did I know this? Was she also doing a service for me?
“I wonder,” she said. “If he was worried for fear I was—The way he looked me over. Could be he was—” Her mouth opened. “Could be—I am … I never thought of it—that change.” She turned her other hand from the wrist, doll-like. “And what if I am. I’m still go where intended. Nothing new for a woman. Like that Russian astronaut-in-waiting the papers quoted. ‘The moon is my intended,’ she said.” She attempted a pirouette, ah yes pretty bad and she knew it, but aimed at me nevertheless. She clenched her fist and looked at it. “There must be someplace that’s all-of-a-piece, mustn’t there?” She came toward me and shook the fist at me, paying me the compliment of doing so where my face might one day be. “Mustn’t there—Eli?”
I did not answer, but not because of nothing to say. I thought she knew.
She sighed. “Ah well, you’re as all-of-a-piece as one would ever expect—and even you—” She laughed on the note of cool I dreaded to hear. “Even if it isn’t, how could I not go? And what do you know, Eli—maybe I’ll see the real place, from there.”
I couldn’t say. I had.
“What a sell!” she said then. “If I should be—as he thinks. Why, I’d be a legend, wouldn’t I? Sooner or later there always is one, even a bum anthropologist knows that.”
My blood-image froze. The people move on. The legend moves on. But the mutation is for life.
She came closer, close enough. “Heigh-ho, long speeches make long silences—but maybe you’re right not to talk.” She looked up at the tip of me. “Remember when—” She broke off. “Ah, that’s parting, isn’t it, when we say that.”
I didn’t know; I had always arrived. All this I was to mull over in my long hibernation. We were the non-blind leading the non-blind, two seeing people leading each other into the dark.
“Remember when I asked you if you had a sex, and you answered six.” She smiled. They only, can do this. And the animals. “Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” she said, though she wasn’t looking straight at me. “But you do have it now, you do. A look.” Then she rapped the clenched fist softly on my integument, as if to summon further out the imago, the person within. “What’s this, what’s this?” she said then. “Another bruise? How you’ll ever get along without someone to—” Her brow clenched, her mouth opened. “Eli, my dear, dear Eli, if I should—you know, be ahead of you—how will you get along all by your—in a house? Her scrutiny hardened. “That’s no bruise.”
Then she circled me indeed, as if she were measuring me for a garment, while I yearned to cry, “What is it; what have I?” but my voice struck some impediment and stuck there.
“No wonder you’ve been so canny quiet,” she said. “And bloody quick, my boy, no need to worry about you.” The brows clenched me as if I were half enemy. “If that isn’t an Adam’s apple as I live and breathe.” She scanned me. “No, wait a minute.” Again came that angled laugh. A small or satiric drain for feeling may be helpful, but the angle of the gyroscope is fixed. Yet when she conned me again she was serious—“Every ellipse has a center,” she muttered. “Which is a point such that it bisects every chord passing through it. The longest diameter is called the transverse axis, it passes through the foci. The shortest is called the conjugate”—and I realized she was doing her exercise tables. “Elliptic spindle,” she said, eyes closed. “Gearings, chucks, integrals, epicycloids. Elliptic point. A syneclastic point; a point where the principal tangents are imaginary.” She reopened them. “Oh shucks and chucks, what a physiognomy. I’m no good at it.” She squinted. “By ordinary rule of thumb, I’d say, if it isn’t the thyroid cartilage, commonly known as the apple, it’s—yes, blimey if it isn’t.” Hands folded, she made me a little bow. “Congratulations are in order. Mad rush of science and all that. Hard to believe. Weren’t for—myself—I wouldn’t.” Her hands unclasped, palms up, a little pudgy now, but still hers. “Much good may it do you, Eli. It’s a navel.”
I stood there humble and quivering. It wasn’t my first choice, but it was a beginning, in fact the one in this mystery. And perhaps personal choices weren’t the wisest thing in this business.
When I came to myself, she was shining at me in her own way, even tall again; what slender, lissom joke of the first days was she going to share with me? “All these weeks,” she said. “How could I be sure I wasn’t off my rocker? Scusi, rocket. I had to give myself talks. ‘You’re in the twelfth century, say,’ I’d say to myself, ‘and somebody says to you, People will fly in the air.’ Or, ‘You’re in eighteenth-century Ireland, with a hoe in your hand or an ale mug, and good-fellow says at your elbow, They’ll cut you up in pieces and parcel you, but you’ll be a-sleeping and not feel it. And you won’t die! And so I worked myself up to it gradually. With roentgens and rockets, and I don’t know what all from the ragbag. It isn’t hard to imagine, if you’ve even seen an Ainu at his first telephone. And so, finally, ‘You’re in the twentieth century,’ I said to myself, ‘and somebody says to you, There’s going to be such an evolutionary adventure—There’s going to be—” She looked at me long. “Us.”
As she turned to the stairs, she flung me the gift, always a double one, over her shoulder. “Oh, I believe in you all right, these days. Else I couldn’t—in me. But one keeps one’s … imbalance … better, doesn’t one, when one sees one’s own kind now and then.” She turned full face again. “You were right to stay. Not to hide. You don’t have to worry. You’re—you. But I was never so sure of it as when I saw Jack.”
Then she turned alimp, like the little lame grandmother of herself, and went up the stairs.
It was black night now, that time when any room with a person in it wondering steady on his life is like a hearth with a good live coal on it. I was as rosy and pulsing now as any young person here could be—and what a dowry I had at my back! Every guide, protection, power and elasticity that our biophysical research could devise had been provided me, from an ordnance which we had heard one of your own experts remark must make theirs look like a nickel tip at a table d’hôte. I had properties which you, except for your poets, had never dreamed could inhabit protoplasm at all. And now, so armed, I confronted those low qualities of yours which, excepting in the merest shadow, had never inhabited ours. Whatever of our ancient books I had crammed on had at least given me some command of your powers of expression, antiquarian though these might be. But since then, in the hot-and-cold of books by night, and the long-simmering dream-watches of the day, I had learned that only what is already inborn can a book inspirit, only this can a dream inflame. For I now knew by rote the entire alphabet of your world’s emotions—and that until I myself should inhabit them personally, they would remain mute. What a Voco-Phono lesson I had before me now!
I studied the very stairs she had gone up, as she did daily, in tripping health or at her new lamed glide, and always oblivious, or almost, that every step of my existence here, and the risers too, must have a name as large as a territory, taken from your infinitely stretchable alphabet of them, from avarice to Angst, to Zartheit, to zest. I saw the range of them, a Jacob’s ladder only as high and difficult as the thirteen actual and countable steps before me might be for me, but with what stiles and fences, steeplechases and Père Lachaises on the way—and John-a-Baptist pits, and common stubbing stones. In all the languages of your world there was the same little list from aleph to zed—and none of it was to be had by hearsay.
Then the spasm gripped me for true, for deep, for aye. Nor was I myself to be had so. Nor was I.
And now indeed I knew the true nature of that most hurtful nothing-to-say which, through all this fateful night of speeches and shadows and scenes at windows, had grown and grown in me until in this black dark, lit only by me, it bid fair to burst my boundaries also, scattering my rosy diffusion far and wide. For such a state of nothing-to-say is actually the vacuum which at one prick is sucked out, as if by a single gasp-breath, into action. Often this is the way you yourselves are moved to it or make yourselves to move.
And now too there had come upon me that eventuality which early on I had once teased myself with—laughed over, never really dreaded, and at last put by—that I might one day find myself with rather enormous feelings and no mechanism as yet to vent them with; I had jokingly defined this as “a sneeze with no place to go.” Then I had forgotten it. Who after all so dreads the accession of riches that he will not put by his terror of them until the time comes? And now it, this eventuality which even your best ahs and aies and eeows wouldn’t suffice to express. Remember it, those of you who have been young? I had everything to say, but not yet the furnishment to do it with.
So I did what the young do, of course: I went up the stairs anyway. And though I was now only as visible as any an excited one of you, I seemed to myself a veritable pillar of fire as I ascended them and went, timorous as a newborn lion—if these had navels—down the hall.
The door to that haven of hers which I had never seen was darkly ajar. Should I push it in? Before I could do so it was opened from within, as if she had expected me. Still, darkness. My own brilliance blinded me.
Then I heard her voice, almost at where would be my ear. “Wann dich ime busch ferlore hoscht, guk ame bam nuf.”
Was this only one of her many patois, or out of some final language of experience, saved up for this one, for me?
Then I heard her construe it, in sad-perfect compound, as if she had heard me think that, or had said this many times before. “When lost in the woods, look up a tree.”
There was no tree, but in the dimness I could see papers, placards, letters, newsprint, a whole clearing house of them strewn about everywhere, and near several office machines, off to one side, what must now be in disuse or disrepair—for it was half buried under paper also—her wooden track. All this I saw as one sees things in one’s own light—only half regarding them. She was standing almost in front of me, behind a screen back of which she had been disrobing. All her garments lay in a Mexican-European-American jumble on the floor, between us. In the rear of the room behind her, there was a full-length mirror, in it a whiteness which might have blinded me had I fairly looked at it. Above the screen, her head regarded me. After a moment, her hands, one on either side of her head and opened like false wings, came to join it.
So we stared at one another, each in our own light. What hers was I could not yet descry, except that, not as powerful as mine, it did not need to be—it was still different, and that was enough.
But between us, as with the pile of clothes, stood another—the shy observer. I fumbled for its name, not knowing whether I was honest or ignorant. When it did not give ground, and I could find no better, I spoke to her, across it.
“Teach me pleasure,” I said.
And if, with all my non-heart and voice I put, as in a book of your books, a line here of asterisks, it is not in order that you might be free to think for yourselves on what happened then, but for its sadder opposite, that from our lacks, it could not.
First I saw her in the mirror, just as you often see your lovers. I saw her, melted from neck to knee in such a curve of beauty as I had not forgotten, it being also—except for my slight, new indentation—mine. But she would not have this be the end of things, and kicked aside the screen. Then, turning up her palms with the slightest of sighs, she regarded me. You are You her eyes said to me, and all my being said the same to hers. But, in the nature of things both of us added: Not quite.
We were ships that pass in the night.
We were an old couple, one of us old in experience, one of us—by your account—in age. We were a young couple, each of us in the flesh of a new world. Like any two of you, we were the same, but different. And like any two, there was only a partial cure for it. So, until morning, curve to curve—we leaned.
Palm up, palm down, people are the wilderness.
Despite which, she left everything in exquisite order. When I woke next day in one of the downstairs salons, past noon of a high, sunny day that beamed into every cranny of the house through windows with their blinds now set at precisely halfway, I thought of it. Like any good housekeeper, she had said, she had to clean house before she left for a journey; that it might be for forever made no difference, or in fact more. So, some hours before dawn, we began it, I only watching of course, but following her everywhere. These obligatory scenes of watching do occur here after all, and are not unpleasant, so long as—yes, I must say it—a termination is in sight.
The kitchen was a disgrace, she said; besides, she said, with a smile she meant to be glorious, it was no place for a man. So it was then I took a last carbonation which must carry me for some time. Away from the not quite wasted spell of her presence, I felt a growing cuteness in her which I deplored. I was apprehensive too that her face—dear dimming face I said to myself harshly—wouldn’t last through our encounter, but it did. It was a face which had launched quite a bit in its time, and with minor alteration, it survived until the need for it was gone. Meanwhile, I could tell for myself how very private I was getting, and how there was on the increase in me too that sense-of-the-past-in-the-very-present which so bollixes up the lives of all the thoughtful, here.
It was in the welter of her bedroom, again while she had left me alone for some moments, that I was most afflicted with it. She, while breathing with an effort which caused me dismay—“No, it was all right,” she said; it was just that she already felt herself to be breathing at high altitude—had dismantled the wooden practice-track she was supposed to have been using, and was at this moment storing its pieces in the basement, where if someday discovered it might be taken for parts of one of those old toys on which all basements dream. She wasn’t sure why she had to do this, or—to my inquiry—whether it was an instance of femininity or merely human, the “merely” being hers also. She supposed that she perhaps did it to commemorate a deception she had practiced—and now told me of—on me. For, after a few token sessions she had never used the track at all, but had employed those hours in secret drilling sessions with colleagues in the area—the sounds I had heard her make, and had so dwelled on, being those of a tape recorder she drew from the corner and now showed me. Did I wish to hear it? I looked sadly or so I hoped—on that fair skin of hers now so callousing and said no. It was for this reason that I had been locked in. Even during our nights at the library—she added in a sudden rush of confidence—while I was safe in my carrel she had not always been there, but in proportion as my slackening rate of speed enabled her to provide me with fodder for some hours ahead, she had slipped out to those facilities in Hobbs which she and her band used nightly, on only one occasion carelessly leaving evidence that they had. Deceptions, alas, were necessary, she said; it was hoped we would not mind. She said it very prettily. I said no.
The word “fodder” had been hers also, so, while reading some of the admonitory notes to herself which were scattered all over the desk and dresser, and here and there tucked in the many mirrors, I wasn’t surprised to see in a rather neater file of them marked Transportation—Eli, one large memo: “Get a horse van?” Beneath was the advertisement of a nearby stable and stock farm, dated only two days ago. The desk was further covered with lists and compilations of all the places and institutions she thought she ought to show me—a touring of which, under her tutelage, I half still trembled toward and shuddered over, as opportunity safely lost. Still, all hints being useful, I studied them, from Funerals and Hospitals to Picnics and Galleries, noting with some tenderness a memo to stop by the Chinese collection at the Philadelphia museum, where there were some famille rose vases which reminded her of me.
As for the planned picnics, the ice-picnic wasn’t among them. These spontaneities do occur, I thought, on both sides. And both sides, I was sure, would forget to watch for them. I wish I was not so smart, I thought, but quickly pointed out to myself that since I had never thought this before, it too must be human. I was getting to like the word more every day, and to use it, accurately I hoped, more and more often. It was very human of her, for instance, to leave notes to herself all over, in capital letters, WHAT TO DO ABOUT WAR? And bending closer, I saw a small item of another kind, that touched me most. It was a Shell map of environs which included Sunbury, Pennsylvania. To it was clipped the estimated driving time from Philadelphia, also a faded recipe employing the black walnuts she had said were indigenous to the region, and sundry other indications, the clearest of which was the picture of a farmhouse. At the last, I thought, she was like them all. She had meant to go back. And forward as well, of course, for everywhere on the walls I saw, with what I hoped was a smile—large placards bearing the motto from Ours which I had given her in response to a plea that I choose the one which seemed to me most significant. “Happiness is a total ellipse.” She had pasted it everywhere. And I had not been untruthful; she would see it in every public place, and hear it from every groove. It was the one community lie we are permitted ourselves, the one which in the public interest every citizen, until his last scream, honorably accepts. She, though no diarist like me, might yet have her own record of our adventure, in notes to herself inscribed, not on paper or cardboard, but on the forward flesh itself, and—helterskelter, wild or neat—much like these. And in her last scream she might voice that addendum which in life might not be said even sotto voce: Or, not quite.
Meanwhile, hearing her come up the stairs, I could reflect that during these twenty minutes I myself had accumulated some very profitable feelings.
Housecleaning, she said on return, always gave her ideas. I myself had noticed this, but concluding that it tended to supply her with a host of minor ideas which took the place of the major ones. This might well be debated between us, I thought, under the topic, “What is a major idea, and must one go out of the house for it?” Her assuredly minor one was that she was worried over my carbonation supplies for the months to come, and could we consider her leaving on the air conditioner in the museum, it to be set at the slot for fresh air?
Apart from the fact that I had no mind to be at the mercy of a machine, I deemed this a proper time to tell her that I too had been practicing a deception. I brought this out, as I said, in response to her having told me hers. Indeed, if our relationship hadn’t quite been an affair, in its expiring moments it rather resembled a marriage. I told her in detail of our talent for seeming to become objects. My ability to sit, as both a vow and a more valuable accomplishment, I kept to myself. At first she mourned loudly that I hadn’t told her of this in time for travel purposes, until I assured her that the process took some months of hibernation—in fact, and oddly enough, just so many months as I had to wait here. And it was as I had hoped; all Our hatchment, so painstakingly plotted, came out just as wanted, only now the hatching was hers. Housecleaning did give her ideas—she even volunteered an old aquarium from the basement, in place of a bell-glass, but I was able to refuse, assuring her that a colleague might check on me from time to time. This was not quite true, but I saw no reason to reveal how far our plots went or our talents; we can be rather lapidary too. In short, I was able to convey the idea from my brain to her mouth with a splendid economy of both energy and time. For, once having conceived it, she ran round like crazy, doing everything from checking temperatures to phoning banks. And of course, writing her last letters. In watching her at these, I found her still dear enough, in fact so much so that I could not afterwards recall whose idea it was: to send Jack. But each of us, wherever we were, would await his arrival with pleasure.
So at last, we found ourselves in a house stripped of all evidence that anyone but a lady had lived here, the placards and other correspondence a heap of ashes in the fireplace, and even those cooled. The cottage itself, blinds up now, since I would be in the museum in the rear, lay sealed against all except the sunrise. She herself would be going to “the facilities” well before. It was appropriate that we make our adieux, brief as these might be, in the room which had meant so much to us—this was one idea we had truly together—and there we repaired.
Going down the hall, I reflected, not on all that had ensued but as much as I had time for, being ever more conscious of time’s passing. We had been right, I thought, to wait for this particular set of applicants. I would be confirmed in my judgment, and my advice to my colleagues: Use the brightly-stupid ones to get us here; they have more reason to. And trained as they have been to seem humble and amenable, they have more energy for the final arrogance—which is to make an exchange of peoples, rather than of vehicles. And time enough, when we get there, to make use of the stupidly-bright.
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.