Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (9 page)

And so at last he bent down to it, his hams up in that unfortunate position which says to the world, Dromio to master, “I invite your foot.” Was that a snicker? Arms encircling the bell-glass, he lifted. Its weight this time surprised him newly, as much as he could handle, no more than that—no less. As he placed it well back in the wings, relief flooded him.
I know how you feel about machines—that intense way you drive,
she’d written.
No need to be afraid here.
As usual, she’d misunderstood him. Like many a bumbler with mechanism, it wasn’t the machine he feared, but his own veneration of them.

He reseated himself, dragging his own chair very modestly nearer. Last night, this morning, all nerves he supposed—but he’d managed. Or
it
had. For as he sat back, another twinge came from the half of the letter in his hip pocket.
Relax. It will cooperate.

Shed of its covering, the object itself looked less formidable; perhaps refraction had enlarged it. Had it ever been quite as tall as it had seemed? Though still svelte, it had lost some of its shagginess, even of its beingness, enough for him to conceive of it as after all merely some new model, either still in the design stage or elegantly foreign, of any one of the sound-squeezers, life-compressors, which a modern yawner must keep in his living room. He was surprised to find again how extraordinarily this circumstance always depressed him: that, of all the objects the necromancers kept offering him for the tickle, the cure, or the kill, none had ever really transcended his own senses—that first strict magic of himself as he was; none had been able to be that different.

He waited, watching this object so much the locus of itself—yes, it still had that quality. Was it moving, had it already an imperceptible quickening? Across from him, that audient face of knowns and unknowns waited also—always, no doubt even in the anchorite’s questing cell, that sunflower of brothers. He saw how the tableau must look to them—like a nineteenth-century soiree-seance on animal magnetism perhaps—allowing for the maestro’s stubble and little Trilby’s pert knees? Or a demonstration of what everybody had come here to laugh at—the new talking machine, the new wireless, the new …—in which nobody sensible quite believed.

Above Linhouse, the Muzak plainted and fell away altogether, a drawer shutting on cheap knives. In the quiet, he heard from that antechoir implanted in him at the beginning, the thin oboe and countertenor of his own hope. Oh believe, believe in the polar of the unknown; it will ennoble us. Well, he would listen, he was always listening really, either in that achingly sexual undertow in which one listened to one’s own undercurrents half one’s life, or with that intellectual cupping-of-the-ear which had been the persistent other half of his. It was impossible of course that the two currents be facets of the same.

There was a stir in the loge. Sir Harry entered, drawing the attention of all, and walked slowly through, down to the vacant front row where he seated himself, dead center, with the same stiff articulation. Apparently, he’d had no trouble getting in; he was undisheveled. But he was unmistakably in that high state which is hard to decipher—joy at journey’s end, or the elevation of sorrow? He had lost one thing perhaps, and come within sight of another.

Less than a few feet apart, Linhouse, staring at him, dared not look away. If the object was opening, it was expanding as slowly as a flower; if it spun, the Tibetan whirl of its atoms was so wild that it seemed still. He didn’t need to look; he was seeing it, refracted through the eyes of a man who believed.

The world is still forest, he thought. What is coming? I smell difference. I am afraid.

Sir Harry’s eyes answered him, as if the old man’s hand were again on the younger man’s shoulder, pressing it as once Linhouse’s own had held that old wrist. They gave him back his own message. Space is personal. Let us be afraid together. We must fly this air.

Out of the corner of his own eye. Yes. It had moved.

T
HE TOP “PAGE” OR
“cross section”—that lily-pad circlet, was now at a rakish angle to the rest of the great cylinder, sitting atop it like a fatigue cap or a sailor’s beret. Yes, it had opened, and already was speaking or trying to, and the familiar sound which was emerging, though not yet coherent, was utterly consoling. It was the cyclic whirr of static, that mewl and screech which, from the days of the first stylus on wax, has reassured the anxious that somewhere at the helm are not spiritual hands but practical ones, under whose reasonable dialing only an encompassable nonsense will shortly emerge. God himself would be easier believed, thought Linhouse, if he would only learn to clear his throat perhaps, in some such preliminary voice.

Meanwhile, breath bated, his blind hope waited for quite another voice. Algiers, Dar es Salaam. She’d once spoken of going there. Tbilisi, the Kara-Kum Desert, El-Gumruk. Gheit el Inab, to Zoo, Nouzha and Antoniadis Gardens. The cackle and glurr of the static began to seem to him a language, not cognate, barely Middle Eastern. And over and above it, through it, didn’t he hear, or hallucinate, a small Christian voice in that Islam, fresh and willful as the new teacher in some one-room schoolhouse of space? “Not
oy.
Not
ay. I!
” His tongue sought that arched palate. But then, in that Kubla Khan of calling voices, did or didn’t he hear another, a second pilot-one, harshly
lycée,
but speaking as if immeasurably farther than lunar and droning on to no one but the Om, the Omphalos.
“Une
et
une. Une
moins
une …”
and even more fading, barely streaked across the ear, an algebraic babble, ending:
“Axiome. Hypothese.”
To that first voice, he thought he heard an answer. To that second, indomitable one—none. Fantasies, both of them. Then, opening his eyes, he saw, first row dead center, a pair of old eyes opposite, dreaming closed.

At that moment, the bedlam of catcalls on the recording rose to that decibel which sometimes preceded a breakthrough into sense—or silence—to headshakes and the snap of a dial, no use trying, must be a storm somewhere round. Then came a silence. Into which a voice suddenly said: “—I.” Then, more strongly, followed by a pause: “I am—”

An accepting rustle of confidence went over the members of the audience—they knew their voices. Machines had special, overserious ones, drier and clearer than their own, and of a certain invigorating silliness—this was a good machine.

“Yes,
I!
” it suddenly said, very much louder. “Imagine.” It was the firm, story-telling voice of the kiddie programs. There was another pause. A cuckoo-clock strangulation. Then it said with triumph, in that same ingenuous super-tone, pseudo-tone: “This is a book!”

The audience gave one dreadful blat-blurt of laughter, immediately stilled. Into that perfect acoustic of its own shock, one of them said, just too late for privacy, “Oh, God’s balls.” It was the laugh that was the more shocking, to hear any such genus of men as were here utter, like a society of rooks, their savage distaste for themselves. One sometimes heard that same cawing at the theater—at bitterly intelligent plays which never had good enough endings. It was the sound clowns made, or naturals, when the deformity they had been carrying about with them was at last properly recognized. No Jesus himself, Linhouse had a glimmer nevertheless of the martyr’s wish to depower that ridicule by taking it upon himself. For, once a group of men could mock past a certain humor any of the better intentions by which they lived, then every man in it was cast adrift. From their hung-down faces, all here had already recalled who and where they were. If he got up—to what other point of order could
he
rise?

But, oh relief! The machine, with the most charming composure—as if it had heard but not minded—was going on, taking over the task of composing
them,
like the prize guest after a gaffe at a dinner party. What it did was simple. Once again it became clearly and grossly a machine. All its attributes were simple, insofar as he knew them, including an air of spontaneity which would have been unnerving if he hadn’t surmised this to be subjectively in him. For, it began giving out that high-grade echolalia, once the property of mystics and vaudevillians, which now could be piped anywhere from bank to parish house—the noise that sounded like language or like music according to the needs of the listener, but so comfortingly never really was.

Under its smoothing cover, Linhouse could reflect that any machine was awesome until you knew the limits of its authority—a mechanical milker, until you recalled that it could get it but not give it; an airplane, until you saw it floundered in the sea. Even those computers about whose ability to run amuck the world was now so anxious must be the less impressive according to your own ability to conceive the limits of their variables, and if you could remember that they could run amuck only in terms of what they were. Just plunk down beside one any bit of what Linhouse still liked to think of as “instant protoplasm”—a hoptoad, say, or a baby—and unless the bloody contrivance had been devised to do everything these could (which of course was always possible), let it rattle all its Valhallas, chances were it still couldn’t like them wet its pants, or hop away. He understood quite well that this was a philistine notion to harbor in the company of all these savants, but he suspected that it was by just such notions that, in their company, he might after all survive.

Glancing up, he saw by the secretary’s artificially stretched dimple that all hands were calmed to boredom again. He himself would feel safer once he knew the limits of this thing’s spontaneity, which to him gave it almost the aura of personality, a mild one, rather like that of a gentle, scholarly visitor, or tourist with ethnological interests perhaps, ready to bumble out among the conventions of a place that was new.

Just then, the object riffled itself tall, again in a motion so quick that one scarcely saw it, except for its breeze received in the blond tendrils of the head of the nearby girl bent over her pencil and pad. Was the thing “tall” or “short,” “great” or “small”—until one knew its function, how could one tell? Again he wished he knew what it was “set” for. Had he the right to assume, for instance, that it was not a secretary-eating machine? Just then, this time in reassuringly single voice, it spoke.

“Every journal,” it said, “has a secret desire to be found.” A pause allowed each spine in the audience to squirm pleasedly under the warm suggestion that it alone was to be the finder. “This one is dedicated … to the Jamison who found it.” The voice, though nasally purer now, was not yet sexually identifiable, or rather, elegantly asexual, perhaps that of an Elizabethan actor who in his earlier days had played Rosalind, or, in these times, that of a cultivated Lesbian not quite recovered from a bad cough. “And—
in memoriam
”—the falter in it was indeed a winning one—“in memory of those sessions in the little back room … where it learned … yes, where it learned what it is, to be a man.” In the pause, the secretary’s pencil flew, then blond head and the pencil were raised again, competently waiting, so that the next words, also faltering, seemed apologetically addressed to her. “What it is, to be woman and man.”

Linhouse got up, overturning his chair. Hoax, hoax, a bitch and a hoax, his pulses said to him, their final wavelength arriving in a red clutter in his brain. The result was that he simply had to go. As he righted the chair and left the stage, the recorded journal was embarked on a list of what it termed “credits and acknowledgments.”

When he returned—a toilet bowl being sometimes better for self-lecture than the pool of Narcissus—the listing was still going on, and had even attained a comforting academic drone, easing reminder of how many eccentricities the mother church, Universitas, must forever pay host to, as well as of the fact that, among her many mansions, there were dozens of little back rooms which had nothing to do with him. He stood in the wings.

“—to Professor Schlovsky, of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow.

“—from the
Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources.

“—the two-hundred-and-ten-foot dish antenna at Parkes, Australia.

“—reconsiderations of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

“—studies on the C-field compatible with a steady-state universe.”

Again he felt like a man facing a firing squad, all a blankness there, behind the guns. Were there such institutes, catalogs, universes? Or was this eccentricity? Whatever, surely it was not
Janice
Jamison?

He crept forward, Audience normal. Rows of tipped, soup-plate faces, twelve-inch dish antennae, astigmatic white. Sitting down again, he surreptitiously munched at a bar of chocolate found in a pocket while in the washroom. If all this still seemed
kosher to that crowd, as long as it made sense to their sense, or to somebody’s, it was all right with him. This was a compromise he’d come to early on, for a fact in his senior year, when he had
bumped into the quantum theory in an old
book of Russell’s and had decided: Call a halt; this is as far in
these
matters as a word man can go: Take him all and all, on an average and for a that, for that ordinary creature of blood and vesicles this had still been
very far.
From that time on, he’d decided to accept the benefits of all this magic (the burdens had not yet bubbled up)—just let somebody else watch the pot.

And since then, he thought, he’d come even farther on, about as far as some old peasant woman from New York’s Italian quarter, who had never heard the word “biopsy,” but would let her breast be lopped off at a sign from some invisible in lab white, who said what he saw. In the same way, if somebody pushed a
button now, and the news was brought to Linhouse by certain magnetisms he had always trusted without understanding them, he would, like any Aztec to the sacrifice, in five minutes prepare to die. Meanwhile, classicist though he was, he wouldn’t even admit to fearing the gift-bearing Greeks. He’d use all the jack-in-the-boxes they brought him, trot down all their movable carpets, breathe their peculiarly tonic air as fast as they mixed his formula—like a little king who, by jumping in and out of all the diamonded crowns which were brought him, kept himself from knowing that he had been deposed. Okay, let them keep the magic going if they wanted—just let them
keep
it magic—to him. Only when the world
of mathematical science came and stood in his middle distance did he get nervous—and resentful that he could spit back at it words only. It wanted him to understand it. It wanted to cozy up to him and be ordinary together, did it?
He
was ordinary, dammit. By God, this was
his
equation. And it was all he had.