Mysteries of Motion Page 6

  But maybe they’ll ask us to breed selectively up there. It would be natural. He’s had urges toward parenthood. Which any clear-eyed single person can tell you has nothing to do with sex. Perhaps in time the old master-race theory can seep in without ever being enunciated—what is this selection of machined, closed worlds, if not for that? While down here will be the ragged red-eyes, lupus in the dark, waiting on the property left behind? He thinks of the girl who wants Veronica’s fur. Or those hedonists who flee to the hills to braid flowers and stories, whenever there comes a plague year.

  Or the solitary, who writes his journal of it.

  She’s back.

  “You solve the maze, or step over?”

  She won’t say.

  He reaches out to press a button on a nearby tree. Nothing happens. Down at the swimming pools the trees burst into song at a touch. Or are left on, murmuring. These must be time-clocked. “Maybe I won’t go.” Would they allow it? “Maybe it’s more honorable to stay.”

  She sticks out a long leg, cocking the boot. “Maybe. But not for you.”

  Of the two civilizations kept always in mind, one was the world where we actually lived among our own offals, with occasional opal sky-peeks and sudden choirings of architecture. The other was that ideal place which the early church fathers of anywhere, East or West, had formed in our heads—a heavenplace of orthodox avenues cleansed hourly with youth serum, in a white nimbus of air. Meanwhile the middle-class Utopias, white with plastic, whirring with Ali Baba effects, sprayed with fake ozone and greened with refreshants of chemical sweat, were what we were getting, and would get some version of in Outer. Yet the impulse is still lovable, like a child’s dream of birthdays. He has to see it; she’s right.

  Just as he wants to see this morning, now warming up over the beach with fumbling touches of light as if searching for what to illuminate—a crab’s shell with the creature gone, a stone to make glow like a palladium. And all sleepers, jaws agape.

  Last night in the motel bedroom he began to yearn for the art he owned at home. Reproduced or real, it studs his consciousness. His apartment’s monotonously long corridors had been chosen for it. Passing down these of a morning, each work chimed, to him, steppingstones into the daily cave. Selecting for that ditty bag of personal possessions each passenger was to be allowed, he had put in one art catalogue, its choice an elegy, and the worst wrench so far.

  Up ahead, the motel’s Spanish-stucco writhings and ice-cream peaks have dawn on them. Behind each window is some life version from that catalogue: Henry Moore’s Shelter drawings as official artist for the second world war. Behind that window there, or that one maybe, the Pink and Green Sleepers with the monumental curved blanket—four inches by two and a half, the four-fingered hand, huge with slumber, the two heads under their curving shroud, and on the right—inch and a half by two, the great scratched pink shoulder. From now on, only human art would be set before him—real figures he will have to trace and compose, without guide. The idea awes him, yet sets him up foolishly, like a Sunday school warning.

  He might as well begin with her, gawping up at the façade, arms akimbo on the minimal hips, at first sight fashion’s very gargoyle, her aviatrix bones drawn with the whirlwind diagnosis with which artists like Reginald Marsh or de Kooning drew women—but with the subtler shadow of the girl he knew. A small head, Senegalese in origin. One man has maybe followed it here, perhaps two. And a friend. Yet in that ebony oval, which contains a brain of worth, he sometimes sees the black mummy face of the relic nun at Assisi, that hard licorice which priests of the moment had surely always anointed, perhaps with local wax. Beneath which it still has its own purpose, undefined.

  “Solitude will be the sin, you know,” she says. “They’re already trying so desperately to get us to love one another.”

  “I know.” The briefings have talked out all the group techniques of the waning century, from Rolfing to champagne, to fun with trigonometry and baroque music, to Albert Schweitzer and anti-perspirant. “Like St. Paul again. And with about the same results.”

  “You’re getting very religious.”

  “Tendencies—tend to emerge. In any closed environment. As at a house party. Or a death camp. I see the next three weeks as somewhere between. So do they.”

  “What a bunch. Our—managers.”

  “Sure are.” Texas professors, born in Russia some of them, but already with barbecue manners and Hollywood haircuts, both sexes of them. East coast think-tankers, fragile as prep-school geniuses, whose hound-dog heads one wanted to scratch between the ears for encouragement, until one saw the wild, monkish eyes. “My apartment co-op, the tenants never really believed they were their own landlord. We’re our managers. And—though that bunch may not know it yet—they’re us.” Even Perdue. He’s us too. And doesn’t know it yet.

  She hums mockingly, one of the tunes which had purled at them yesterday all through lunch. “Tom. You’re taking all this so—” She touches his wrist. “I know you always do—who better than me? But this trip—can’t you understand that for a lot of us, it’s only flying. Don’t overload it with—” She sighs.

  “Significance. Sorry to be a bore, but I never talk like this with anyone else.”

  She smiles. He sees that he does. “Okay, then. Let’s go eat.”

  They both burst out laughing. They’ve had their last meal. Until embarkation it’ll be all liquids, rarefied but adequate.

  “What’s in those pep drops, Tom? I can feel the vitamins dance. Bee jelly and ox blood?”

  “And powdered unicorn horn? Doubt it. Merck’s best formula for aerospace.”

  “Anyway, I’m not hungry. Feel as if I never will be. You?”

  “No. On a slight jag, though.” He’s just realized it. “The potassium crazies.”

  “And I don’t pee much. You?”

  “No.”

  Their voices die between them.

  “Last words,” he says. How strange it’s all going to be, citizens. No account may ever give all of it.

  Her eyes dart from side to side. Does she think of Peenemünde, the old site of the German military park, placed there because rocketeer Wernher von Braun’s father had once gone duck hunting in a remote town, and the son had remembered—from which, doing her last article for The Sheet, she’d flown on here? Or of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology—JP of GALCIT for short, where she’d been before? Or of what she’s going to wear for the flight? Which is the same as for him. He checks his watch—his old Waltham from the island, which he’s sending home. Past midnight. Once they get inside, they won’t again be allowed out. Strange, that not more of us are wandering.

  “May I offer you my arm?”

  She takes it, in style.

  “And my love.” Just in case. It’s wise to say.

  “And mine. Remember.”

  “I shall.”

  They swing their joined arms and start up the path, between the double rows of palms. From these, a man emerges on their right, pacing head down, one arm behind him across the small of his back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Is he the one?”

  “Now I’m not sure.”

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

  “You remember?”

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

  “More than you do.”

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

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

  “Or perhaps he’s crew: Operational.”

  “Wolf? Hah.”

  “What’s his field?”

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

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

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

  “And what was that?”

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

  He’d certainly done that to her.

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

  “Was Lievering himself a displaced person?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Time to go up. I felt great.

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

  “Sold out. Days ago.”

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

  “Offer me something,” I said.

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

  “You a passenger?”

  “I am.”

  “Sorry. No credit cards.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Which would win out, the voyage or the life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  MULENBERG’S INTERVAL

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