Free Mysteries of Motion by Hortense Calisher Page A

People don’t seem to mind. “Thought maybe your locket had washed back in and he’d picked it up.” Finding it empty? “Was there ever a picture in it?”
    “Never. I wore it for the continuity of it. For what had been me. Or I thought I did.”
    “Is he the one?”
    “Now I’m not sure.”
    “Neither was he.” Then it must have been that man. “Lievering,” he said. “Wolf Lievering.”
    “You remember?”
    “Everything you tell me. Which isn’t much.”
    “More than you do.”
    “There isn’t more.” He’d long ago made it all public. He knows that people find this hard to believe.
    “We’ll both soon know.” She grimaces. “About everybody.”
    “Or perhaps he’s crew: Operational.”
    “Wolf? Hah.”
    “What’s his field?”
    They’re all booked under one, she to be the official photographer, he the historian, their particular cabin to be shared with, among others, an industrial consultant and the head administrator and wife; whether the wife has another function as well, he doesn’t know.
    We’re booked as for any archaeological expedition, he thinks. Our quarry being the future.
    “His field? Language. But it was in what he was, more than what he did.”
    “And what was that?”
    “He—displaced people. From what they were. Everywhere he went.”
    He’d certainly done that to her.
    “Ah—one of those.” A charismatic. Evangelical or not, they’re always trouble.
    “Was Lievering himself a displaced person?”
    “I never knew.” She shivered her arms up, stretching. “Let’s go in now.”
    Both turn the other way, toward the promontory they have just come from. Strewn with omens, it can no longer be seen.
    He stretches an arm. “Which’ll weigh more out there, d’ya suppose? The future—or the past?…Yes, let’s go in.”
    As they do so, the palm trees on either side of them burst into a musical signature. Reveille.
    Inside the motel for once and all until liftoff, every window that I, Gilpin, looked through became a haunting, by an Earth already half departed from. The motel was an excellent limbo. Downstairs, once past the porte-cochère, there were no windows. The grass-green sward of the rugs, interspersed with blood-red sofas and chairs in suites of three against walls of plastic stone and plywood forestry, projected a present world one would do well to find repellent. Either the authorities knew what they were doing to the psyches under their care, or hadn’t a clue as to how cleverly they were managing—about par for government. I note how I have already begun to think of them as the authorities. I go into the bar.
    There’s no piña colada in front of me today. Much as it had done for me once, I hadn’t cared to try its properties since. My glass holds whisky, Irish ordered but bourbon received, which could mean that on Canaveral even the bartenders no longer bother with terrestrial geography. The whisky in any case is forbidden—and that always helps. During these last hours we are on our honor not to have alcohol. Last hours help too, toward a rushing sense of what’s to be done—for I never can believe in them.
    As Gilpin, I do perform publicly rather well. But the I of me will not move except to an inner call which Gilpin has no power to provoke. Tapped once before, I recognize the sensation, never having expected it again. Not that the mission I’ve spent most of my span on is fulfilled. The missions that adopt me are not that sort. But once again, I’m on call.
    In the movements we make toward one another’s mystery, surely there is where life most is. Those ever-shadowy movements—who does not make them, and who is exempt from studying them? But on the Courier I would be closest to the nature of motion itself. This is why I and the others, and a great nation, are being drawn there, and why history is. For when people are in thrall to a certain physical motion, then life appears to them to be at its height. Meanwhile, swung like an