Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (32 page)

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.