Free Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel by Hortense Calisher

here to hope against hope that when the lamp glowed she would be standing between the cherubs, a median, white-budded plant just enough different, at the small fork of her, for him? Perhaps—a little. Or more than either, that man even in his psyche was only a part-time Narcissus? Was it that he loved—as men had learned to call it—because in one final way, and a number of frivolous ones, she was different from him?
    The answer he got was the worst: that he was still speaking of her to himself in the present. At the flip of a switch he would see straight ahead through a window, out where a light made a coastline of trees. If, by a similar projection, he could be his last winter’s self walking by, it could know who was inside here. In a way he could. For he understood what he cared for. And he knew who was here. The pain of being thus double was ugly. There, in the dark, his own memorial service was long.
    When he snapped on the light, it was no longer needed; dawn was growing, entering the room with its gray usurper’s stride. The room seemed unchanged, holding the same host of immoderate objects still covered by the same moderate dust—as if in this most miniature time lapse, each had been awarded its exact pinch of the dust of time. Nearest him, a poggamoggan— War Club of the Plains Indians, Authentic —lay crossed with a small archeological steal, Gold Armband, Sutton Hoo— fake. Carefully his glance edged toward the corner where lay all New Guinea. Alone there, the long couch still sailed. He turned his head slightly to the right, toward the mantel wall. The cherubs still flew. She wasn’t standing between them. Even if he hadn’t had the directions in her letter, or had been a newcomer to all the wild wrack that floated this room like a Sargasso, he couldn’t have missed what was.
    It stood there under the glassy shape which was so clearly only its covering, and it had only the one quality. Everything else here strained or pleaded under a confusion of so many, the smallest shard in some way beating upon the world, on with it. If the total medley here could have been heard, it would have been an irregular one of all kinds of human loops and eddies stretching to be heard above and outside the concentric itself of sound.
    This object stood imperturbable, above and outside them. The quality it seemed to have most was a self-containment, of a creation not necessarily—though he’d never seen anything like it—unique. If, for instance, all the snowflakes in the world, instead of being so crazily versatile, had been shaped to a compassionately single design, then any one of them would have what this had—the poise of the One. In the far corner of himself that loved one-ness—or perhaps machinery—he restrained an impulse to kneel.
    Instead, he got a move on—his normal response to that impulse. Else he might have been mooning there yet in his solitary longing, instead of being so healthfully exposed here to act it out before what now appeared to be an audience close to the hundred he’d invited. One might almost think that he indeed had been observed on the way here—what right had she to expect that he’d be some sort of Godiva for whom the town would draw its blinds? A thrill nevertheless went through him at all she’d expected of him, for which, in the range of conceivability, he might yet be rewarded. It was the thrill of which heroes were made, as he well knew. He couldn’t help it. Getting that thing here, as her letter had predicted, hadn’t been all that strenuous. She’d merely failed to warn him that it might be ludicrous. For, anyone chancing to see the complementary rhythms between him and his charge as they made their way here together, might well be excused for assuming that it had been getting the move on him.
    Suddenly the Muzak went off, leaving him on, to manage as best he could by himself the stealthy current of time. Had he been asleep? What in God’s name was he doing here? Out