Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (29 page)

Linhouse said it softly to him. “We wuz framed.” Not loud enough. But at least he’d warned this crowd.

“Either way,” said Sir Harry mildly, “I have to claim my right to say what I think again, Anders. For:
we
HAVE
been.
Excelled, don’t you know.” He paused. “Will no one quote Voltaire?”

Meyer, in a mumble, obliged. “Hatewhatyousaydefendt’deathyourrightt’sayit.”

“Thank you,” said Sir Harry. “Ordinarily, that breaks up most any meeting very satisfactorily. But I fear I have some even more unpleasant information for us, though I dislike alarming the ladies.” He stopped, reflective—“So
many
ladies!”—and went on. “Anders? … Anders—” and again he didn’t wait for reply. “I do rather fancy we
may
have been, don’t you know. Every one of those doors up there has been sealed.”

There was a rush to them then of course—by whom and whom not, Linhouse had no need to look up and see. Alone on the stage again, or nearly so, Björnson and Anders having rushed up there also, he was thinking of the London Underground where he and his mother and older sister and her three girl friends had once been caught for many hours during the blitz. He was thinking of the one bathroom here, at the end of the passage which debouched on the door backstage in the wings, just behind him. And he was thinking of the long line of spike-heeled hysterics who after a while, training or no, would have to be led down that passage—unless more anatomical change had already gone on here than he imagined. Or unless—He didn’t really believe in the end of his world, or that it was happening here—but there was no doubt that in his world the big doings hung by the little ones. Unless—he then said to himself silently—unless, mammas to the end: they would lead
him.
He jumped up, tried to run backstage—and got no further. Where the wing sections had been, two curved heights of wall, solid from boards to the ceiling, had slid into place on either side of the stage.

He was just in time to join his report of this to that of the group of men now returned to the pit. It seemed that the doors, whether electro-magnetically sealed or jammed, were immovable and made of the heaviest plastic, not of anything as frangible as old-fashioned stone. There were no phones here. To this he could contribute that, as far as a mind humbly unused to Gauss’s logarithm could calculate on its own, then they were now in a hermetically sealed dome. Within it, he looked around. Except perhaps for that phalanx out front, row after row of them—or even with them—things still looked remarkably friendly. Or at least in good taste.

In the pit, all the men who had spoken were gathered, plus a few others—all except the Indian, who sat in his shawl as if it concealed other resources.

“What’ll we do?” said the rest of them, rather similarly, although one looked at the ceiling, and one—Charles—was testing the floor with a fingernail.

Sir Harry, coming down the aisle, arrived among them.

“What’ll we do?” they said to him.

Sir Harry looked at Anders, who blushed, though it only yellowed him more.

“Do?” said Anders. “Hear it—that thing—through, of course. If it is …
anything
… If they’re like us—and they
will
be—they’ll expect us to.”

Sir Harry nodded solemnly. He had never underestimated Anders.

“Hear it out, what else?” Anders repeated. Chick or egg, he knew which part of
him
came first. “That’s obviously what’s been programmed.”

And at that, as if his remark were part of same, the lights began to go down altogether.

“Oh no, no, really not,” Sir Harry said mildly. “That’s not necessary.” Raising his arms in what was already twilight, he looked as if he were about to start a last late race in the regatta at Cowes. “Not in the
dark,
” said Sir Harry.

Could he be afraid of that too? Linhouse stirred. O nursemaids—and O policemen, everywhere. Oh believe in the unknown; it will ennoble us. Not that it has any obligation to. Or need.

But he had one. Really, it was his duty. “Look to the women!” he cried at last, then heard its ambiguity. “Damn you, will you look at all the—”

Behind him, came a glow—angels? Great hoptoads fiery? Grand ellipses, pinkly visible? Kings, beleaguered archangels up from your gambreled towns—or
down?
“—strike!”

God damn, thought Linhouse—
We
made a poem. He turned.

The television screen, vast as any cinemascope, was lit softly. At first, nothing played there; then, some large letters were dragged across it wrong-end first, so that they saw—“ou!” only; then, as if filmed by a director ignorant of projection, or one who knew only Hebrew, the direction of these was quickly reversed. The letters themselves weren’t smartly cut, nor arty, nor even hop-skip-and-a-jump cartoon. The best that could be said of them was that they could be the work of a gifted aborigine. They were large enough to fill the screen, and raggedly simple. They said, “THANK YOU.”

And then they went out.

And now we’re all in the dark together, Linhouse thought. And nobody’s screamed yet—unless one could count mine.

A number of hollow words now became flesh to him. He saw the function of committees. He understood politics—which latterly, had seemed to him not a serious subject. He felt what murder might feel like in the vein, and the asphyxiations—in a small dark space—of a poet like Poe. A locked door made all the difference.

Beside him, a voice spoke up, so tweedly soft that at first he mistook it for the mechanical wind-up of the machine—on whose pile of unplayed disc pages he imagined the topmost one rising.

It was the secretary, who had all that time sat, numb as her sisters, on her chair beside it. Was
she
real? Her whisper reassured him. “I wonder if
he’s
coming back,” she whispered. “That li’l ole
e
-llipse. Sho’ hope so. He was real cute.”

Linhouse didn’t answer. Whether she was real, and from the tender land she talked like, or whether she would shortly fall from her chair in china bits or in pinch-me dream-stuff, no longer interested him. Of women, he was sure of it, he now thought nothing—or, nothing he had ever thought before.

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?