Free Mysteries of Motion by Hortense Calisher Page B

undercarriage below any large vehicle is that other continuous movement—small, rotor, and fatal—between the people themselves.
    I hear my own cadence—the part of me that comes from fisherfolk, who are in motion all their lives. We at home were always at once in the trough of the wave and on the anxious shore. We were always listening to the voyaging.
    Time to go up. I felt great.
    On the way, I stopped at the bookstall and inquired for any publications of the L-5 Society of Tucson.
    “Sold out. Days ago.”
    How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. Shortly, I’d be where I would be refused nothing—of what there was to be had.
    “Offer me something,” I said.
    He stared. Silently he reached into his stock and held out a heavy, lustrous art book, a copy of which I had once owned. Years back NASA had commissioned certain modern artists to paint the space effort, which from craft to environs they had done. I thumbed the preface, supplied by a curator of the National Gallery. “Artists should be key witnesses to history in the making. The truth seen by an artist is more meaningful than any other kind of record.” Depending upon who picked what witnesses. First Edition—marked down to twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t the visitant I’d have chosen from my lost library, but it was one. I held out a credit card I still had on me.
    “You a passenger?”
    “I am.”
    “Sorry. No credit cards.”
    I had a hundred dollars in scrip. We all had been issued the same amount, to cross the border with. The clerk’s face lit up. He took the small orange and green slips and put them in a special drawer of the cash register. He was collecting them. He didn’t bother to wrap the book.
    So burdened, I climbed the stairs, the soles of my shoes sticking to the risers, partly from reluctance and partly from damp. Halfway up there was a botched crow’s nest where carpenter and material must have come to the end of a contract, though a table and chair were provided, in case one wanted to watch the crowd below. I no longer did. They had been my collection. I took out my remaining scrip instead. Beautifully engraved peacock-feather style, with a leaf-crowned, plump-cheeked Hebe or hermaphrodite on either side, the stuff still had the look of IOU’s. The slips measured about four and a half inches by two, much smaller than our civilian dollars. Each was marked MILITARY PAYMENT CERTIFICATE on its shorter ends. I hadn’t noticed that before. The legend on the two long sides was harder to read. On top: FOR USE ONLY IN THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ESTABLISHMENTS—BY UNITED STATES and on bottom: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE RULES AND REGULATIONS. This lettering was very small, but in caps.
    I knew where they’d got the whole idea. This was army of occupation currency.
    I left the book on the table. Those were not my witnesses.
    Upstairs the motel was all luminous white and gray-blue, as if they were already progressing us toward the germ-free corridor. They had given us each a two-room suite. We were to fraternize, like members of an expensive tour, on the eve. So far, in this wing, nobody had. So here we were in our usual ragged enclosure. Each mind enclosing itself, while making frantic land-ahoy signals to its proposed destination.
    In the day of the wagon wheel, or the freighter coaling into a sunset, or the ocean liner with its cups of tea, or the trains probing the Rockies and carrying a honeymoon couple or a corpse, a life and its journey were synonymous. The two voyages were one. An air trip is a pocket out of life, an anti-life means to an end, with a tray and a toilet between. But in outer space, with the means so huge and the journey so far, what then? Time—what would it become? All that gear—would it become household, or at least a caravan? Put real people there, with real lives behind them, and could the old continuity come again?
    Which would win out, the voyage or the life?
    My