Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

not rooster, nevertheless linked him elusively in the mind to genus bird or fowl, and if the observer-eye concentrated, became clearer. Looking at the back of Anders’s head, recalling what discoveries had already cracked from within that membraned oval, had circled and belted this universe and were now brooding toward others, any member of the warmer-blooded species found himself filled with awe, as once the ancients perhaps, before the mystic properties of Egg. Frontface, he had the turned-up features of a merry-andrew gone solemn, and again that high oval, the apostolic forehead. One ended up equally uneasy. This could hatch.
    As Linhouse watched, the three of them walked down to the front row of what in a theater might have been called the loges, and seated themselves centrally. Though they couldn’t see him, Lila had already turned on the worried stare she allotted those who, under suspicion of breakdown or home troubles or racial ones, might possibly be candidates for care. At her right, Meyer’s face, less at-the-ready, kept the benign gloom of a person whose sympathies lie with the mass. On her left, Anders’s face wore—though less noticeably than the back of it—its resemblance. All three, directly in line with the object on the platform, seemed not to notice it or perhaps had already classified it according to their lights, as an artifact known or unknown, a machine with or without a name. What these three and the rest of the audience had said of Linhouse beforehand and now were thinking—a lover about to open his liaison’s legacy thus publicly—was best not imagined, and already had been. But at his wildest he should never have imagined either of the men out there as his successor. Last year at this time, however, he’d done precisely that.
    When, after a month, her vagueness could no longer be so classified and yet couldn’t be pushed to anything more definite—either way, pure curiosity had moved him to look about him. Women didn’t stop, without reason. Someone else was the likeliest. Pure curiosity, he told himself then, had almost entirely motivated his side of the whole affair. What had motivated hers seemed to him, a man of normal vanity and conquests, so entirely natural he hadn’t questioned it—in spite of her “mistake.” Still, no one could blame him for wanting a look at her next. For one thing, the scope here was so peculiarly limited. For a second, in this all but closed community, it was almost impossible, honor aside, not to find out.
    Fifty miles from New York, rimmed by the Ramapo Mountains on the one side and the Hudson River on the other, the enormous gift mansions of the Center’s rambling estate, where not enfiefed by geography—or perhaps intellect—were so by regulation. Some of the most valuable scientific facilities in the world were here, plus the kind of government research which, though the Center wasn’t state-owned, inevitably went with such. Visitors of note came often, guests of the staff also. Some were heralded; others came quietly; all were met with aplomb. Nobody felt himself followed. Yet in such a few square miles, no matter how irregularly and munificently landscaped, there were only so many private houses to go to, each cot rather clear in its vale—and so many faces to see at them. Against the marble of the greater buildings, moonlight was sharp, shadows black, and even in rain or snow, nothing clandestine. And the bushes were so often barbwired.
    It would be one of the new men, since he knew so intimately her opinion of the present staff—the one uxoriousness of their affair had been the sharing, suddenly open to two single strangers in a community largely paired, of those infinitely cozy malices of the newly married. Not long before, he himself had been new. At the Center, aside from the women and a few men in outmoded corners of the humanities like his own, the procurement of its very special scholars was exaltedly international and the turnover