Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel (20 page)

“—but what’s that noise?” Mentor said sharply.

“Squirrels on the skylight. They always.”

It was I, of course, somewhat to my embarrassment. I could say that the darkly overcast wind blown up suddenly within me had blasted me up there. Or I could say that I had jumped. There was much more to alternatives than I had thought. Both were true.

I peered down. Through the heavily corrugated glass, I could perceive only areas of light and dark; as for myself, as yet I scarcely cast a shadow. In this climate, it was probable the natives themselves did little more. Again a sharp sense of home curved me. Likely nowhere on this planet were shadows cast with the perfect black lacquering of Ours, that teardrop planet whose shape is so devotedly matched by its inhabitants, and whose climate, standing ever at the semi-tropic, is of the texture of a melted-down smile. An undulating row of Us, our black alter egos peacocked out all at the same stance behind us, some with the shine of patent, others with the patina of velvet, is something to see. To watch this interplay is a spectator art with us, some preferring the brilliant contrasts of the siesta, others like myself inclining toward the curvetting nuances of dusk—both of these hours of course being artificial. And always even the whitest a One can at once be consoled for his pallor by looking behind him.

“No, don’t go yet,” said Marie, so close under me that for a moment I thought she addressed me, yet I could barely distinguish, below, the lump of stillness that must be she. Or the other: She. Which—was which? I said it to myself over and over like a pain. And this was strange, since, by logic and listening—the latter being a lot better than the former—I thought I knew. Hunger pains for the absolute are the natural consequence of a world having so many alternations, but it is the nature of the absolute itself here which
is
the more interesting. It is what one absolutely knows, but can never get confirmed.

But, if I could manage to break the skylight—

“Time for me to go and practice.” She sounded so depressed that I was reminded of certain times at home when, having already dared to think of the possibility that One might get here, it still seemed beyond power or destiny. Yet, once a Here is penetrated by thoughts of elsewhere, it is never the same.

“Practice makes perfect,” said Marie.

She cooed it, or was trying to, yet I seemed to know—the way those of you who have absolute pitch can summon an “A”—the pure tonelessness that such a voice must have.

“But perhaps you need a rest, eh?” she added. “Maybe you ought to table the whole idea of changing. Now, now, don’t get excited. Just for a little two-time.”

“What is that!”

“A small paraphrase of one’s own. When you do get to Us, as One is sure you eventually will, you’ll find us rather good on paraphrases. It makes for fresh reverberation without autointoxication. And we really have no non-mathematical name for the time factor—a concept that can’t exist anyway except in the presence of correlatives.”

“You never were very good at math,” observed Mentor.

“Where One and One is One,” said Marie, “a One has no trouble.”

She was either ignorant or giving herself airs. We do have a name for the time factor, indeed as single a name as it is possible to imagine. What would a world such as Ours call such a factor? We would and do call it: Once.

I repeated it to myself, and even giggled; as I bumbled between worlds, it was language which would help to keep me samely—I mean, sane. And Marie is a phony, with a telephony voice. Out on There,
Once
is certainly what We—what They—say. We. They.

And then, right here-there on my corrugated glass perch in the bright morning air of Bucks, I began to shiver and shake. I began to shiver as if this pleasant valleydom before me, on whose bright demesne I could even see, mute in the distance, a scattered few of that most comforting of creatures, the cow—were some hellhole at the outermost bounds of the universe perhaps, or even that worst of them, the one presumed to be outside those. I even fancied that my tremors were accompanied by a chattering sound which could never quite be caught of itself and stopped the minute I did, like the footsteps of those who had feet. Yet, so far I had nothing about my personage which should make even a whisper.

And then—suddenly I understood. Nothing much was ever understood on Here except suddenly, and I was even doing that, with a feeling like the rising of hair upon the integument—if one had hair. Consider how it all fitted together. Consider, for instance, how umbilingual I was about language, how ambivalvulent—how at one moment I despised it and at another it was my savior. I was
betwixt.
Regard how very little, or certainly less and less, I seemed to be living in the present; as I thought of it, it seemed to me that they scarcely had a present here at all. I was
between.
Consider a host of other things that an eavesdropper on a glass roof had ought not to do, being arsy-versy enough as it was. I was
betwixt and between.
We—They. And I saw quite clearly that, unless I could become more of a You, or less of a One, this circumstance might be the walking-floating hellhole which would follow me everywhere.

“Besides, dear colleague, we have such a lovely mission for you. It will fit right in with your circumstances.”

I gave a start, having forgotten that everybody has them. Circumstances.

“That’s no squirrel out there, Marie.”

“You’re just nervous. Do let me explain.”

“I am rather full up on mission already.”

“But this one is
instead
of. Just for a—Just for now.”

Hmm. This is the way their present always goes.

“Who believes in
now,
these days?” Mentor’s voice was bitter. “What peasant?”

“Good-oh! That’s the spirit. Nobody. Not since the Christian era, really, the better to think of the world to come. And what with you scientists helping—what one can’t understand is how such a doctrinaire as you should be having such trouble at getting there.”

How wrong she was, she would soon see. The answer was that a One does not believe in a now; a One has it. Our Now is
not
doctrinaire. One merely cannot assume it unless the whole race does, since it comes from a sameness in every circular pore and bath of living. And I could show her a race of Ones, in such a sempiternal Now—! Almost I yearned to be back there, sweet-sucking that circumambience.

“No wonder you succeed, Marie. You ’ave faith.”

“One always has had.”

“
Oui.
To be sure, not always in the same thing. But, chapel to cosmos—you ’ave it.”

“From now on, it all
will
be the same. That’s Our comfort.”

So One thinks.

“I wish—” Mentor sighed.

“I know what, dear—that you were like me already.”

Mentor gave a laugh. “No, it is more complicated. I wish … that I wished it.”

And I wished that I could jump down through the skylight to tell her that such a mingy, gray pod of a convert—for surely this was the which and which of the pair I had seen—was no true model of Us. Oh to be sure, mutation the
other
way, toward You, was my mission and my yearning, but the truly large spirit can honor its beginnings, as you yourselves honor the gills and auricles which fathered your breathing, the unicellular yolks which only latterly became your hearts. And I wished she might see a line of Us, serene as barques born all of the same sailmaker, acurve on the evening at the gilded hour when the refractions of dust so bend the energies of light that for a moment we are visible—we are even leviathan.

“Keep looking, dear, and no doubt it will occur.”

Had We really ever been so—like this a One? The vanity of an elliptic being is delicately elongated; it seemed to me that Marie’s bordered on the fatly circular.

I am.

Ah, Mentor. Look at
me.

And in after-moments, I have sometimes wondered whether that might have been the one in which her own flashly education began.

“That’s no squirrel up there,” she said.

Beneath me, I could see the vague bundle which was Marie move closer to the other darker one. “Could it—” That voice couldn’t whisper. “—could it be—Harry!”

“Harry?” Her voice could make arcs. “Harry would come straight in.”

Then I was not after all as straight as I should be.

“Besides, he’s afraid of heights.”

Even in Harrys, then, there was room for flaw. If I could be a—! I would take on all the tribulations I deeply foresaw here: all the corporeal trials of the spirit, the dangers and bloods of a being which in its privacy retreats, a small, classic
anima
brooding upon its own waters, but when abroad even a landscape of the quietest, non-ravening trees—is still animal. If I could but choose to be that half here which—

“You’re so concrete, dear, even in misery. Not very womanly of you, I must say.”

“Au contraire.”

“Oneself is neuter, of course; I mean neutral.”

“Of course. I always ’ad in mind that you were.”

“Whereas One used to fancy, in fact, that you were just a teeny bit—”

“You don’t need to come any closer to tell me.”

I fancied I could see the gray blob stealing nearer the dark. It was maddening. Then I remembered that sight had been concentrating in the upper half of me. To aid it, I first leaned forward, then lay down—yes, horizontal!—then applied that part of me to the wavy corrugations on which I stood, but these remained adamant, stubbornly loyal—except for one crack of irritation. Fending off a squirrel, I remained as I was. As far as I could make out, the dark blob was standing its ground.

“—just an eeny-we-eeny—”

“Bug off!”

“Language!” shrieked Marie, but from what I could see the sun at high now aiding me—she came no nearer.

At that instant the sun must have come altogether out of the clouds here, ennobling the substance on which I lay to defend its owners royally against me, with flashes that went through me as if I were a scabbard. At some later date, I might brood on the curious interaction here between climate and inanimates—almost an alliance against blood-creatures, rather like that of servants who in reality are masters—but now I was held by what was going on below. Intervals for brooding versus happening are never purely regulated here, our peacefully successive periods of the same being unheard of; the line of demarcation is not even kept.

And now again, I saw a suddenly. The dark figure began moving. It was speaking as it was moving, and it was moving toward the gray. “
Pax,
Marie, eh?” it said. “I beg of you.
Je vous en prie. Pax.
”

Was this qualitative? Was
this
feeling? Or, the mixtures here being so mixed—? Oh, the new world! The dark was after all moving toward the gray.

“Language helps to keep me sane, Marie.”

So that was where I had picked up this sentiment.

“Or did do. While we ’ad our pupil.”

I trembled so that on the roof the very pattern of the sun itself—of a
star—
was dispersed, altered by my small but stubborn body. At home, all our aim is to order it otherwise—that the force of the universe may pass through us without change. She and I—and all the little band of us and you—are meteors whose paths intersect at equilibrium:
once-now—
then must soar onward into opposing nights. As she had forewarned me, the generations on Here do this also, in an equilibrium that never rests. While, on Ours, as I had cautioned her, all generations are created equal in dower, and throughout their tenure remain so—rising from the crater and returning there in perfect quadrille.

A sadness interfuses each world. Choose.

I trembled that I was even thinking such thoughts. On Here, even the very
facts
are never still. How then, when nothing waits, can meditation be revered?

Meanwhile, below me those voices went on a-murmuring; talk might sanify, but the converse of these two was circular enough to push even a nonconformist out of his Opinion—never had I seen so many questions permitted to exist without answers.

I arranged them before me as best I was able.

What was the new mission?

What was hidden there behind her black veils, whose somber shadow even the faithful roof above her could not take upon itself to hide?

And, to me the subtlest, what did Marie fancy was there? For, just as Marie still had much more of the old planet about her than she would admit to, I too still had a good deal of instantaneity about me. And one a thing I had learned quicker than light—though like the light here, it kept leaving me and returning. The shape of the questions here tells much more than the answers.

But a minute later, as that low, passionate monologue resolved itself on my hearing like drops of fire that burst each into its own picture, I almost wished myself if not elsewhere at least away, out of eavesdropping, perhaps on that green pleasance where, only a mile away but as if on another orbit, cows were to be seen munching in their own mirage. Sooner or later on this planet, everyone wishes himself a cow.

For, as She spoke I had never heard such a voicing of the single before, of what it meant to be, among many, a
one.
Yes, once, in my first dizzying gulp of print here: O dark dark dark. But that had been a blind dark brought to general majesty. What I was hearing now was the shriek of the particular, going toward darkness. Or toward the pale, non-particular of There.

In brief—for I can scarcely bear to repeat all of it—She stated that the trouble had all begun with my own lessons. While she was so carefully arranging for me my affirmations of Here, she had begun to grow doubts about There. This is always a danger, I surmised, with alternatives; too big a bagful of either, and one pokes a hole to let in the other. For as she inventoried the characteristics of this world for me, she had begun to make a ring-around-a-rosary for them for herself.

“After forty years pointed toward elsewhere, what could it matter, Marie, this little exercise in farewell!”

Then had come the day when she and I had made our
au revoir,
the day when I had learned to say “I.” It was just then that she too had had a suddenly. It had come upon her that the words themselves, all those jewel cases which she had been airing for me, would no longer be needed by her, that not only they but all their contents—which now sparkled so green—would soon by her choice be over and gone for her forever.