Mysteries of Motion (7 page)

“Tom. After all that training—you’re still plumb scared?” She can’t help the smile; people can’t. Lack of the physical prowess you have yourself is funny.

“Maybe I am. Right now I’m too busy for it. Look.”

The shooting stick, plunged at an angle deep into the wet sand, is moving, almost imperceptibly. One has to know it well to catch the glint on its steel boss. It has known many soils and pavements. There’s a technique to placing it well. Often it accompanied him to the office, where he had no regular desk.
Fidus Achates,
Rhoda had snarled at the stick when he retired her,
why doesn’t he retire you?

Now the stick appears to be walking, or inching. Not horizontally. No wind. A downward pressure he can feel on his own head. But he isn’t moving. Or is he? He kneels. The circle of sand around the stick, flat as a Humpty Dumpty face, tells him nothing at first. Then he sees by a slight winkling that the sand surface is moving centripetally, as if the stick is being sucked from below, with scarcely a grain displaced. He lays his ear to the ground. Nothing. The birds are saying nothing. Then it’s not a land wind. Or not that near.

“Maybe it wants us to kiss the ground,” he says. In return for all the clay and river bottom which humans have walked on, and for all the
lutum
—the first mud—before. Plus all the pavements since. Kiss it, Tom, for all the places you’ve been, or won’t get to now. He’s never seen the crocodile loam of the Okefenokee, so near to here. He notes that the shooting stick is really in gyroscopic sway—or would be, if of the right shape. It’s being pressed
in.
His ears feel the pressure now.

He stands up, peering east. In the new light he can see the horizon. Air from the sea crowds in toward them, thick and white, water-heavy. The sea is being brought to them. “Hey—”

The way animals—men and dogs—foresense a great act of weather is in a sudden confusion of terms, an eerie loss of measurement. On-island he used to see his dog circle and circle, nose down, eyes sleeked, as if she must run the great rat to cover. Far out there, high above the seam between sea and sky, the clouds open on a cauldron of lurid light, its edges boiling westward in furious gray. Storm? Or break of day? For a minute he can’t tell; then the funnel rises like a bulging sinew connecting earth and heaven, streaming toward them, in no wind. Centered in the lost elements, the storm is walking the waters, neatly compacted as a tower and higher than Canaveral’s hangars in the distance. There’s a smell of sulfur, hugely rotting, electrical. Not bilge. This is fresh water, a column of it, riding the salt. Slowly. There’s no wind. But they had better run. “Get going.” He grabbed her. The last thing he saw was his stick, keeling gracefully, lost in a slur of waves.

“What is it, a tornado?” she said in his ear as, arm-linked at the waist, they ran on sand, laboring, hiking up their feet against the draw of the planet. Ah, it’s your last pull at us, is it?

“Dunno. A tornado’s twenty to forty—” he gasped back. Miles per hour, or knots? He was confused. Tornadoes were choosy. They could blast a street to lumber, zigzagging around houses left quiet as stars, suck dead a farm’s whole herd and featherbed the farmer meadows away from his tractor seat, safe in a tree. People ran anyway, even into motels that had no basements, and shut the wooden doors.

They ran inland from the promontory, pounding dirt for a quarter mile, then pavement along the road coastward again, to where the motel sprawled, accommodating hundreds, every room with a beach view. White water, such views were called here. They neared the motel’s breastworks, high, fretted panels of pierced stucco, fronded Hawaiian. The torches were shut off now but the palms were rustling with a steady marimba swish. Above the guard wall, lights were popping on along the indented cornices and swooping balconies which allowed each guest his outlook. The castle had been warned. He turned around, to the sea.

The funnel has advanced, is still advancing, grand as a pasha in its turbaned top. “Get inside,” he snarls. “Aren’t you?” she replies, and stays. There’s no rain, no hail; he wishes there would be. “Not a twister, is it,” she says. Now there’s absolute calm, even from the papery false palms. This is the moment before the bad one. They could be sucked seaward in a subtle undertow of currents, when that thing hits—but he doubts it. This is that storm which walks the waters for mariners only. “I never saw one of these,” he says. “But I’ve heard of them.” No time for more. That mushroom at the top, hanging pendant from the storm cloud above, whirls downward, tapering. Wooing the water like a tongue.

Go on. Demonstrate. To see it miles away and clear makes him want to weep, though he knows it’s no spectacle for him alone. One presence, anyone’s, makes it the spectacle. Down the ages, that’s been enough. “Here it comes—” he yells. “Fujiyama.” Tumbling back in silent boulders, the sea flowers upward. Atmosphere spins to meet it, charging down. On impact, the horizon crinkles. Parachutes of water pouring upward bring a cool sluicing air to his flesh; then there are sea mountains, moving whalebacks of gray, between jeweled eruptions lambent at the core, which mean sun behind. And now the breakers come, tons of water swelling in sequences of glass, wallowing on the shore. At last in a sound one can hear.

Halloo-oo, it’s over, fishermen say. And here we fine creatures still are.

“It was a waterspout,” he says, still exultant. No, I don’t have your unknowns, but you see the knowns I have. “Deadly. But they don’t come on land. Let’s go in.”

She bends suddenly, bobbing her head between her legs, crock-kneed, the way dancers did. “Not yet,” came muffled. Peering between her legs at the motel, she straightens slowly, keeping her eye on it, then hitches her behind at it and begins threading the clipped green maze which intercedes between them and the motel steps. The maze is one of modern landscape architecture’s hostilities, dealt the paying customer. If you can’t solve it, you step over a bush or walk the perimeter. She takes it head on, now and then grinning at him. Collapsed on a garden chaise, he now and then waves back. She and he alternate their childhoods with each other. Or their silences. That’s why people tend to couple the two of them. They rescue each other from the general coupling game.

Though the motel itself was only yards away, the path between maze and steps was intricate, another cheap manipulation, done at great cost. Inside there were more, in the public-complex style of grandeur—phony with real marble, for all this was government-owned. He frankly savors its quadruplicate comforts—four pillows for every bed, swimming pools lying like mirages every few yards across the false lawns, free snacks at the cocktail hour in the five bars. There’s a sense of citizen swag flowing in every corner, and although brought up on the hard virtues of a Doré Bible, he’s a citizen. On rainy afternoons on his island, after an hour or two with those steel engravings, he used to feel as if those Old Testament dramas—the Red Sea rolling back, Samson’s thick neck under the temple columns, all the illustrations so thronged with people—were literally taking place in his own inflamed insides. Tonight, exhausted, he feels the same, hoping he isn’t going to go on feeling Earth-responsible.

But maybe they’ll ask us to breed selectively up there. It would be natural. He’s had urges toward parenthood. Which any clear-eyed single person can tell you has nothing to do with sex. Perhaps in time the old master-race theory can seep in without ever being enunciated—what is this selection of machined, closed worlds, if not for that? While down here will be the ragged red-eyes, lupus in the dark, waiting on the property left behind? He thinks of the girl who wants Veronica’s fur. Or those hedonists who flee to the hills to braid flowers and stories, whenever there comes a plague year.

Or the solitary, who writes his journal of it.

She’s back.

“You solve the maze, or step over?”

She won’t say.

He reaches out to press a button on a nearby tree. Nothing happens. Down at the swimming pools the trees burst into song at a touch. Or are left on, murmuring. These must be time-clocked. “Maybe I won’t go.” Would they allow it? “Maybe it’s more honorable to stay.”

She sticks out a long leg, cocking the boot. “Maybe. But not for you.”

Of the two civilizations kept always in mind, one was the world where we actually lived among our own offals, with occasional opal sky-peeks and sudden choirings of architecture. The other was that ideal place which the early church fathers of anywhere, East or West, had formed in our heads—a heavenplace of orthodox avenues cleansed hourly with youth serum, in a white nimbus of air. Meanwhile the middle-class Utopias, white with plastic, whirring with Ali Baba effects, sprayed with fake ozone and greened with refreshants of chemical sweat, were what we were getting, and would get some version of in Outer. Yet the impulse is still lovable, like a child’s dream of birthdays. He has to see it; she’s right.

Just as he wants to see this morning, now warming up over the beach with fumbling touches of light as if searching for what to illuminate—a crab’s shell with the creature gone, a stone to make glow like a palladium. And all sleepers, jaws agape.

Last night in the motel bedroom he began to yearn for the art he owned at home. Reproduced or real, it studs his consciousness. His apartment’s monotonously long corridors had been chosen for it. Passing down these of a morning, each work chimed, to him, steppingstones into the daily cave. Selecting for that ditty bag of personal possessions each passenger was to be allowed, he had put in one art catalogue, its choice an elegy, and the worst wrench so far.

Up ahead, the motel’s Spanish-stucco writhings and ice-cream peaks have dawn on them. Behind each window is some life version from that catalogue: Henry Moore’s Shelter drawings as official artist for the second world war. Behind that window there, or that one maybe, the Pink and Green Sleepers with the monumental curved blanket—four inches by two and a half, the four-fingered hand, huge with slumber, the two heads under their curving shroud, and on the right—inch and a half by two, the great scratched pink shoulder. From now on, only human art would be set before him—real figures he will have to trace and compose, without guide. The idea awes him, yet sets him up foolishly, like a Sunday school warning.

He might as well begin with her, gawping up at the façade, arms akimbo on the minimal hips, at first sight fashion’s very gargoyle, her aviatrix bones drawn with the whirlwind diagnosis with which artists like Reginald Marsh or de Kooning drew women—but with the subtler shadow of the girl he knew. A small head, Senegalese in origin. One man has maybe followed it here, perhaps two. And a friend. Yet in that ebony oval, which contains a brain of worth, he sometimes sees the black mummy face of the relic nun at Assisi, that hard licorice which priests of the moment had surely always anointed, perhaps with local wax. Beneath which it still has its own purpose, undefined.

“Solitude will be the sin, you know,” she says. “They’re already trying so desperately to get us to love one another.”

“I know.” The briefings have talked out all the group techniques of the waning century, from Rolfing to champagne, to fun with trigonometry and baroque music, to Albert Schweitzer and anti-perspirant. “Like St. Paul again. And with about the same results.”

“You’re getting very religious.”

“Tendencies—tend to emerge. In any closed environment. As at a house party. Or a death camp. I see the next three weeks as somewhere between. So do they.”

“What a bunch. Our—managers.”

“Sure are.” Texas professors, born in Russia some of them, but already with barbecue manners and Hollywood haircuts, both sexes of them. East coast think-tankers, fragile as prep-school geniuses, whose hound-dog heads one wanted to scratch between the ears for encouragement, until one saw the wild, monkish eyes. “My apartment co-op, the tenants never really believed they were their own landlord.
We’re
our managers. And—though that bunch may not know it yet—they’re us.” Even Perdue. He’s us too. And doesn’t know it yet.

She hums mockingly, one of the tunes which had purled at them yesterday all through lunch. “Tom. You’re taking all this so—” She touches his wrist. “I know you always do—who better than me? But this trip—can’t you understand that for a lot of us, it’s only
flying.
Don’t overload it with—” She sighs.

“Significance. Sorry to be a bore, but I never talk like this with anyone else.”

She smiles. He sees that he does. “Okay, then. Let’s go eat.”

They both burst out laughing. They’ve had their last meal. Until embarkation it’ll be all liquids, rarefied but adequate.

“What’s in those pep drops, Tom? I can feel the vitamins dance. Bee jelly and ox blood?”

“And powdered unicorn horn? Doubt it. Merck’s best formula for aerospace.”

“Anyway, I’m not hungry. Feel as if I never will be. You?”

“No. On a slight jag, though.” He’s just realized it. “The potassium crazies.”

“And I don’t pee much. You?”

“No.”

Their voices die between them.

“Last words,” he says. How strange it’s all going to be, citizens. No account may ever give all of it.

Her eyes dart from side to side. Does she think of Peenemünde, the old site of the German military park, placed there because rocketeer Wernher von Braun’s father had once gone duck hunting in a remote town, and the son had remembered—from which, doing her last article for
The Sheet,
she’d flown on here? Or of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology—JP of GALCIT for short, where she’d been before? Or of what she’s going to wear for the flight? Which is the same as for him. He checks his watch—his old Waltham from the island, which he’s sending home. Past midnight. Once they get inside, they won’t again be allowed out. Strange, that not more of us are wandering.

“May I offer you my arm?”

She takes it, in style.

“And my love.” Just in case. It’s wise to say.

“And mine. Remember.”

“I shall.”

They swing their joined arms and start up the path, between the double rows of palms. From these, a man emerges on their right, pacing head down, one arm behind him across the small of his back.