Man of the World by Robert Gibson

25:  ellipsiteen

So that’s that, thought Midax as he watched the removal van rumbling away, while he, plus one rucksack, were left on the steps of his former house which was now empty and sold.
    He slung on his rucksack and walked in the direction of the bus stop. A bus was actually pulling up and he would get it if he hurried. But he could not be bothered to rush and catch it. Instead, he would walk the couple of miles into town, welcoming the tread of shoe on pavement, each plodding step hammering down the coffin-lid on his old dream picture of “Bringing Her Home” – the Great Reception – a dream henceforth quite impossible because the big posh home was his no more.
    He felt, in a way, liberated.
    It had always been an illogical dream, anyway. Illogical to suppose that, having rejected it as a youth (for he clearly had: he had shied away from Pjerl, not she from him, he saw that now) – that having so rejected it as a youth, out of a cowardly inability to cope with the intensity of his own feelings, he could now wait for it to come back when he wanted it. Rubbish. There’d be no second chance. All right, it was possible to make excuses for his miserable performance. He had been a mere schoolboy when the emotional lightning had struck him. But now, as he looked back upon his life so far, on the mistakes he had made, on the manner in which he had followed the promptings of fear and yielded to the threats of emotion, he must face the consequences. The everlasting, rust-proof, stainless-steel consequences.
    That did not mean they need ruin his life, though.
    It was time to adjust to realities.
    He was glad, in fact, that this day had come at last.
    It was a pleasant, warm, sunny morning hour for a walk along suburban leafy avenues, to tread old thoughts into the ground. Decompose them into fertilizer for a new life. The idealism in wrong-headed romance was a healthy enough substance in itself, it just needed its atoms re-arranging, into dry biscuit rather than over-sweet cake – more satisfying in the long run, surely. Who knew what might be salvaged by a middle-aged idiot who had at last seen the error of his ways and shaken off the spell, the pernicious spell of mythical romance? For one thing, he had more ready money, and therefore more freedom of action, now that he no longer had the upkeep of a big house. Yes, one mustn’t despise the practicalities. A lot of that money, admittedly, would have to be spent on keeping the former contents of that house in store. Stuff that he couldn’t or wouldn’t sell. Stuff which could never fit into his newly-assigned flat. Still, the change must leave him better off. He could make social progress, now that the troublous inmost part of him had died - died to bequeath new peace of mind to the rest of him.
    He approached the centre of Old Dranl, a district whose ancient towers, interspersed with yet taller, bulkier, steel-and-glass-and-concrete buildings, overlooked the coast.
    One of these new structures, which had gone up in the past decade, was his destination, the Port Authority staff block. In the past he might have turned up his nose at its soulless concrete slabs, but now he liked it simply for being within sound-range of the sea’s low roar and the cries of birds. Life was bursting with stuff to appreciate. At reception he was told his room was ready. He was given the keys. He took the lift to the third floor, found the room and went first to the window, to enjoy the view over the Zard Ocean.
    He took deep breaths, braced by the splendour. This, indeed, was the time, the high time to kick away the false dream which had wasted his life for so long. Who needs stupid romance? His un-romantic friends had all found love; he was the one who was alone. So much for that. Reality is good enough.
    He had arranged for a day’s leave. He spent it unpacking, settling in, and getting to know his way around. By evening he had familiarised himself with the layout of the staff block and the facilities and services available: the common rooms, the canteen, the library, the gymnasium and sports hall, the list for milk and bread and meat deliveries. Naturally, since it was a vast building serving a vast organization, it would take a while longer to get to know all there was and who was who.
    In fact the process turned out lengthier than might have been expected. For many weeks, Midax’s descent into slow-wittedness, as his mind underwent the final stage of dark-adaptation from the noon-day glory of ambition and ideals to the dimness of everyday life, caused him frequently to lose his way, say hello to people he didn’t know and fail to recognize those whom he did know. Not that it mattered. Even after years of working for the Port Authority he could hardly be expected to know more than a fraction of its employees by sight. That situation was not suddenly going to change merely because he was now living amongst them. So he must simply endure the mildly embarrassing fact that their memories seemed better than his. They knew him more than he knew them. On about three occasions a female neighbour of his – a tall woman of about his age – said “Hello” quite warmly when he was going to collect his mail. He said “Hello” back, putting (he hoped) reciprocal warmth into the reply, and felt like a lackwit for not knowing who in the world she was. Still, no harm done. All he had to do was carry on with his job, and with his safe small existence from day to day, while social skills would come to him now that he was sustained by firm earth rather than tugged by a dreams-balloon, and hence eligible for membership of the general public.
    One day he spilled some food-mix in the kitchen.
    He gazed dully at the mess made on the kitchen floor.
    Think now. Think. Where might the mops be kept? He went out into the passage to look for the mops…
    Somewhere, he knew, existed a store-cupboard on this level. Which door? By a process of logical elimination his choice fell upon one of the doors. Using an enormous proportion of his remaining intellectual power he checked that logic and could find no flaw in it, so he tried the door, found it wasn’t locked, pushed it open… and blinked stupidly. The room beyond was not a cupboard.
    It was a lounge with coffee-table, chairs, TV set… whoops.
    “Hello. You look a bit stunned,” said that woman who had greeted him thrice before. The friendly new neighbour, whose name he did not know. She reclined in an armchair, turning her long face and wide mouth towards him while she raised a mug of drink in greeting. “Come in.”
    “Er,” said Midax, “Er, I’ve just made a great discovery,” he managed to say.
    “Come in and tell me about it over a mug of elipsiteen,” suggested the woman. She rose from the chair to busy herself with the electric kettle. “Here,” she handed him a steaming mug while he stood dazed. “Well, what’s your story? Lost your way?”
    “Lost my brain, more like.”
    “Is that your ‘discovery’?”
    “It certainly is, but,” went on Midax creatively, “does this mean I am totally hopeless? No! Not at all.” He solemnly shook his head, then took a sip from the mug. Invited to a chair, he sat and continued, “For at least I have achieved something. I have pinpointed who you are. You’re Jerre, aren’t you?”
    “However did you guess,” she replied, following his glance at the mug she was holding, on which was the name JERRE in large capitals. “Yes, I suppose, so long as I hang on to this I’ll be instantly recognizable.”
    “Well, not just that,” said Midax hurriedly, concerned to cover up the impression that he might have forgotten those earlier hellos, when she and he had met on the way to the mail-box. “My memory isn’t that bad really,” he went on; “it’s just that…”
    “Forget the past?” she smiled, as if suggesting a maxim to quote.
    “That’s it. I’m aiming for a fresh start!”
    He liked this blowing of catch-phrases, a kind of bubbly platform from which the conversation could leap… either into the frivolous or the serious direction. “Absolutely new start. We’re different people every day, and I haven’t seen today’s You before.”
    “That’s a good line,” she smiled again. “Must remember that one. Solves the problem of embarrassing meetings with old school pals, when we’re slow to recognize them.”
    “Right. A case in point. No need to feel bad – because there’s nothing to recognize! Because they’ve changed into different people anyway! So you can start afresh.”
    “You’re wise,” she nodded, quietly.
    “That way,” he went on, “you avoid seeing double. No more need to overlay an old image with the present reality. Which is good because that’s hard to do. Too confusing, to carry on a conversation while seeing both the adult in front of you and the child you remember.”
    “Doing it your way,” she nodded, “one gets a second chance. I like it. Let’s go for that, Midax.” She turned him her most brimming smile yet. A knowing smile; and she’d used his name – but of course, it was marked on his door…  Nevertheless he felt a twinge of uncertainty –
    He said, “Talking about starting afresh… are you a recent recruit to the Firm?”
    “Yes, I’m an accountant, first hired by the Authority only a few months back.”
    She had worked for many other organizations, and had a fund of stories to tell. He had another mug of ellipsiteen with her and they talked some more about the characters they had known, but when he mentioned his school, she turned the subject… and talked some more about work and holidays. Then she looked at her watch and said, “Time has flown! I must get on; I bring work home, you see,” she explained; “it’s the only way to stop it becoming a hassle-job.”
    “Sorry to have distracted you,” he said, rising.
    “Don’t be daft,” she said firmly. “You popped round at exactly the right time.”
    “I might try it again then,” he warned, marvelling at the sensation of trust, at his new lack of shyness. Wonderful, the absence of any fear of a snub!
     “Tomorrow if you like,” she said.
    It thus became a custom for Midax and Jerre to meet in her lounge for the “ellipsiteen hour”. Occasionally she saw other friends, but mostly she seemed to prefer his company, and as the days passed he wondered at his good fortune. He gathered, vaguely, that she had been married twice before, to men who had deserted her (crazy though this sounded), and apparently a third prospect existed, somewhere in the background, an on-off “relationship” (whatever that meant), something steady though apparently not intense. She had a son who had “flown the nest” and was now in college. So she, like Midax, had sold her house for economy’s sake and moved into the staff block.
    In a way he was glad that her accountancy duties made it necessary for her to be away at other sites one week in three. These periods of absence gave Midax the opportunity to take stock of his new-found happiness. Otherwise it might have afflicted him with too much bliss too soon. This might have resulted in nervous intoxication. As it was, he felt not only warmly excited but also serenely content.
    Well done, universe. Great job, reality. I compliment you. I admire the speed with which you proved my former beliefs to be utterly wrong. Almost as soon as I made the key decision to step out of the romantic mind-set, out of the one-love-per-life illusion, you gave me proof that I had made the right move. A proof so alive, it cannot be denied.
    You, Jerre, you are the disprover of the lie. You, the second love of my life, refute the Boalo doctrine that there can only be one.
    All it took was the fortunate accident of meeting you and of rooming near you –
    Propinquity is (after all) all.
    Whereas destiny is an arrogant idiot’s dream.
    She came back one evening when her week of absence was over, and flopped into her usual chair. She grinned, and said one word: “Zonked!”
    Midax had been waiting for her in her room. She always allowed him to wait for her, nowadays, trusting him with her key.
    “Was it that strenuous?” he asked. “Where did you go this time?” he added, operating the kettle.
    “Marine insurance company. Form-filling nightmare. Can’t seem to find a job like yours, where you can do as little work as possible and dream most of the time.”
    “Well, don’t give up,” encouraged Midax; “keep looking. Something’ll turn up. Then you’ll be able to take things as easy as I do.”
    “ ‘Something’. Ominous word, that. I hear it from the people I work with. Buy one of our policies in case something happens to you.”
    He smiled delightedly. “Odd, isn’t it – as though we’d want a life where nothing happens.”
    She laughed, “Small chance of that! People love to manufacture hassle.”
    Midax ventured, “Do you by any chance get those shop-assistants who slap the change down on the counter although one is holding out one’s hand?”
    “Yes!” she replied with a reciprocally wondering look; “they’re really exercised about something, goodness knows what!”
    “Champion emoters.”
    “Contenders for the Emoters’ Cup.” Jerre chuckled, stretching herself lithely in her chair. “Well, they’re welcome to their hobby. I’ll stick to nice relaxing boredom. Talking of which, my bosses are going to keep me in late tomorrow. Oh well – bit of extra money.”
    Midax said, “Oh!” disappointedly. He dared to add, “You should tell them you have a prior appointment to drink ellipsiteen with me.”
    “Quite right! I should tell them they’re disrupting our ellipsiteen relationship,” she quipped.
    Day after day their rapport deepened, though occasionally he caught her giving him a look of wild amusement which he did not quite understand. They chatted over a range of issues, history, geography, botany, even Midax’s old love of cloud-watching. It did not matter at all that Jerre knew a lot less than he did about most of these subjects; she was always adept at catching the conversational ball and throwing it intelligently back. She turned out to be by far the most stimulating companion he had ever had. Her liveliness of mind and wit, in fact, was such as to reconcile him to something he had always regretted until now – his failure to pursue an academic career. Who needed to talk with professors and such, when someone like Jerre was around? It made you wonder… perhaps old Boalo got it partly right, after all. The ancient philosopher, who was supposed to have insisted on “one love per life”, may even have been mistranslated… may merely have meant that in life there is one true love at a time… Or maybe … Midax thought about it hard and long… maybe there is only one of them per life but until it’s all over one doesn’t know which it was…
    He gave up on this baffling question; it was far too hard, and anyhow he was happy with what he had. The future was vague – and that was fine by him. All he wanted right now was a future that did not slam doors.
    For he had a new hope and so long as it was not ruled out, he was content for the time being.
    He did know in a shadowy sort of way that there was Someone Else in her life. His knowledge of this other friend, or suitor or whatever, amounted to the facts that his name was Inellan and he was in the merchant navy. But these facts existed in a kind of suspension. Nothing appeared to be happening in that direction at all, whereas Jerre and Midax saw each other most evenings.
    In fact, if ever there was a case of having the best of both worlds, this was surely it. The vague background existence of this Inellan character made it possible for Midax to deny himself official hope (with all its need for desperate decision) while allowing him to handle the present bliss without strain.
    Perhaps Jerre felt the same advantage. She seemed to have some code of behaviour as far as their seating arrangements were concerned: he noticed that they always sat in separate armchairs. Or, if he sat on the divan, she never sat next to him there, but on an armchair instead. That, evidently, was her degree of distance. Physically, then, he knew where he was. Mentally, though, there seemed no limit to the growing closeness which they shared.
    One evening he dared to try to make a point he had never made to anybody before:
    “Have you noticed the silly way some philosophies have, of conceding with one hand what they’ve denied with the other? Like, saying something is illusion but then defining illusion in such a way as to make it indistinguishable from reality, so you wonder, why didn’t they just give over and admit the thing is real? So for instance you get people who imply that the qualitative aspect of reality is purely epiphenomenal, just a glow or emanation from the solid world of material reality; but they can only make this claim at the cost of admitting by another door what they’ve stopped from coming in at the front door – talking about ‘evolutionary imperatives’ and whatnot…” He would never have tried to say this to anyone else. And she understood it – she looked as though she got the drift, anyway. Just to make sure, he added, “Like in some tinpot navy where just about everyone is an Admiral…”
    “Or like if we were all awarded a thousand-per-cent pay-rise,” she nodded gravely. “Reality always catches up.”
    Phenomenal rapport, thought Midax. This had got to be the one.
    Stupidity, that night, came solidified in a dream. He stood on an eerie plain, in front of a carven cliff that barred his way. He spoke up at the cliff in a silent dream-voice. I must get on, I must get past, he pleaded. I must be allowed to continue my journey. I am reformed now. I am no longer rushing about madly, no longer going too fast to be trusted. He assured the cliff that he was wise enough now not to jump into another heartbreak. Conditions were different now, he was older, and Jerre was spoken for anyway; he was merely enjoying some valuable companionship while he kept his emotional eyes open –
    The cliff merely stood and stood, in massive and silent denial of everything he was saying. The sign carved on its face, in sarcastic curlicues, expressed infinite, unknown and inconceivable stupidity. Vast cracks appeared in the ground as the world’s crust began to sag under the weight of that cliff-sized bulk of stupidity.  During that sag the dream changed its character, to become less worrying as the weight sank from sight...  Now the cliff had disappeared in an ordinary cataclysm of magma, steam and smoke. Midax clung to a floe of rock, maybe a continent or two (sometimes he was tiny, sometimes he was thousands of miles long), happy to watch the sinking sign, the disappearing reproach. He was overjoyed to see it go under.
    Next morning without any forebodings he got up and got ready for work. He went to check the mailbox and found, to his surprise, a biggish brown envelope from (of all places) the Shapers’ College. Quaint! What could these worthy people want of him? He noticed that the envelope had been redirected from his former address. Then he remembered: that day, long ago it seemed, when he had washed up after his birthday party and peeled those potatoes and gone out to mail a despairing request for information about joining the College.
    The Shapers’ College, the guardian of the Boalonian Ideal, the ultimate romantic ideal.
    He gazed at the brochure with a whimsical, warm, tender disbelief. That ideal to which he no longer subscribed - that one-love-per-life thing which had met its living disproof in the lounge where he and Jerre drank mugs of ellipsiteen most evenings together – had one remaining power: it could call up long trains of memory.
    He felt such affection for that brochure, that for a while he could not open it, could not bring himself to look at evidence of what the trendies had no doubt done to the College by this time.  He wished the College well, though it was not for him, and thought it a great pity to see its tradition betrayed.  He remembered the articles he had read in the press, and could picture the dreary process of radical restructuring, with traditionalists in a vain battle against modernisers. That sort of thing was bound to grind on until all that was distinctive had been modernised out of existence.
    No wonder the mailing of the brochure had been delayed!  The organization must be in a desperate state by this time. Small chance of its having time to give prompt attention to requests for information.  Besides, the very wording of the brochure had no doubt been a bone of contention between the factions, delaying its publication.
    The trendies must by now have won. And his own behaviour was a symptom of the kind of culture that must bring them victory. For he, too, even he, Midax Rale, had abandoned hope in the Boalo doctrine of the one true love. Furthermore, immediately after he had relinquished the doctrine, he had been rewarded: he had found another! Which proved the trendies must be right…
    And yet how recently it was, that he had been considering that he might take the Vow himself!
    His admiration, though not his intellect, was still on the side of the Doctrine; he loved the vision in which he could no longer believe. And maybe, if he was honest, he ought to admit that he dared (confusedly) to hope that he had good particular reason now for not joining the College… A woman who had married twice might agree to marry a third time, might she not? The woman whom he had in mind had no restraining loyalty to Boalo’s doctrine; she had proved that beyond doubt… and then came memory like a dagger of lightning:
    “I suppose we haven’t the will-power,” Pjerl had said in that sixth-form Civics lesson twenty years ago. The day of his first visit to her house.
    “I suppose we haven’t the will-power,” had said Jerre likewise, a few evenings ago, over a cup of ellipsiteen.  On this latter occasion the phrase had come up during a chat about diet.
    (He’d just protested that she surely did not need to diet and she had replied, oh yes she did, in fact, she had “quite a bulge”, whereupon he had silently wondered how in the world she could say something like that and still retain such grace and dignity, and what it would be like to be someone like that, who could get away with anything…)
    The universe trembled around Midax. The scales fell from his eyes as he remembered, that “Jerre” is after all the diminutive of “Pjerl”.
    Again he saw in his recent memory the lankily abundant figure draped on her chair, with a shrugging short of smile, inviting and offering sympathy for so many things as if to say, “Isn’t this a crazy sort of world?” as she gave him one of her swinging sidelong glances. And most of all he took stock of the way, the precise way, in which this mannerism of hers had endeared her to him: the way it had established her status so fast, as the ultimate soul-mate for Midax Rale. Of course it had. In no time at all it had worked. It was shatteringly obvious why this was so.
    So I AM being true to “both of them” after all, and at the same time I am being true to only one, for there is only one, for they are one and the same person, and I am the record-breaking idiot of the cosmos.
    Daze in the brain; sickness in the pit of the stomach; the boggling of the mind. How could he have been so stupid; how in the world, how in the universe could anyone, no matter how slow-witted and dense, conceivably fail to recognize someone he had loved so much?
    The passage of time?  People did change, but not that much.  Another reason must apply here.
    The Dark-Adaptation. That was to blame. It must be so. The sheer strength of the turning-his-back-on-hope had stopped Midax during these weeks from seeing who “Jerre” was. And besides, he had never really got a good objective look at her. He had always been too overpowered by her field of force. That was true both in the old days at school and in the new days here.
    She, of course, had recognized him all along. He saw that now. It was obvious in retrospect, as he reconsidered their first “ellipsiteen” conversation.
    Actually, by great good luck, his own words in that conversation (now that he thought back to it) could be construed as a recognition of her. So, although he had made a planet-sized fool of himself in his own eyes, some chance remained that he had not done so in hers.
    Nevertheless he was close to real panic. Stabs of shock – I didn’t see! I didn’t see! I really didn’t see! – ripped into him, tore him inside. The most explosively terrifying aspect of all this was the question, what colossal madness might he be capable of next.
    A quarter of an hour later he became aware that he was still holding the Shapers’ College brochure, while still sitting and shaking in his chair.
    He was going to be late for work. Work! Must go in and push some papers around, I suppose, he thought as he heaved himself up.
    With a wretched eagerness he lurched towards the door, as though office drudgery might offer a cure for the shakes.
    It did, but not much.
    During the course of that day the approach of evening tyrannised over his nerves. He found excuses to prolong his work. He wanted to come back late. And yet at the same time he wished the opposite, wished that he could get to Pjerl/Jerre’s room as soon as possible.
    But how would he be able to calm down enough, and soon enough, to make any worthwhile move, or say or do any worthwhile thing? All that hope and fear, fizzing in his blood! Oh for a leech to bleed it off, he thought desperately when at last he set off homewards.
    As it turned out, her room was empty. What a disappointment; what a relief.
    Either she was going to be late back, or she had been called to another branch and would not be back at all this evening. He would sit and wait awhile, anyhow. Time dragged unprofitably while Midax, sick and afraid, existed in a blankness of thought lit by sparks of emotion which shed no useful light on anything. He did not have a clue as to how he should act.
    Then with a jolt he heard words: her voice in conversation with a man’s, a man older than Midax, and the voices mingled with the bump of heavy cases.
    Midax went to the door and saw her and the man hauling a couple of travelling trunks along the corridor.
    “Should have got the new type, with wheels,” the fellow panted.
    “We could dump them out here,” she told him, “while I get the rest of the flat ready… Hello, Midax.” Midax saw in a flash that she must have told him all about him. “This is Inellan,” she added with a forthright smile.
    Midax shook hands with a large, well-built, leather-skinned individual with bleary eyes and a humorous twist to his mouth. Jerre/Pjerl spoke for him: “Inellan has just retired. He’s finished his last voyage.”
    “My last business-voyage,” he corrected her huskily, with upraised finger. “I plan,” he added to Midax, “to take Jerre with me on my next journey and sit on deckchairs showing her how hard the crew work.”
    “Typical,” said Jerre, “talking already of going off again when I’ve just got you back!” She added in a quieter aside to Midax, “I’ll invite you round for a meal once I’ve got him properly settled in… he’s going to get some time at home whether he likes it or not.”
    So. When life throws a punch, dodge if you can; but if there’s no escaping the blow, you snap into armour mode, tighten your gut-muscles and stay gagged as well as beaten: you cannot whine or complain, when your own conscience tells you that you haven’t a leg to stand on. Midax, drip though he was, had learned something finally from decades of life. He remembered, to good effect, that it was he, himself, who had joined in with Jerre in deriding the “Champion Emoters”, the dramaholics, people who are perpetually hurt or offended by something, making a cliff-hanger out of each and every one of life’s complications. He wasn’t going to do down that road now. So don’t gulp, ran the shock-absorbing argument. At any rate, refrain from gulping visibly. Just because you find it hard to take this turn at full speed, don’t expect others to know your problem. They’ll expect you to be as agile as needed in shifting gears. The name of the game is: smoothness. Quick reflexes. Poise. So his gut-armour turned out to be good enough to avoid disgrace: strong and flexible and well-cushioned inside. Springs and shock-absorbers, those arguments; they shielded him, prevented him from showing his feelings. Dim the switches, attenuate the links, while you secretly open the trap door of the disposal chute and let the mush drain away.
    Leaving the cases, Jerre and Inellan moved off through an inner door. They were disappearing from Midax’s sight into a room where he had never set foot. “Goodbye,” he responded belatedly, and stood there awhile, then let himself out. He went back to his own flat and stood in the middle of it, staring at nothing, listening blankly to nothing, until he thought of an action he might perform: go to the table, where he had left this morning’s mail.
    His hand reached for the packet from the Shapers’ College.

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