Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (33 page)

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
a
re.”
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=MC
²
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.