East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Do you have a cup that is a cup, Gioia di Sotto La Montagna?” Perpetua Parisi, that tall and pleasant person, asked the old lady.

  “Yes, I will go get it. When the Atrocious Giant is angry you may not feel it in your big house, but his anger cracks the walls and ceilings of my little house under the mountain. We must all keep the Atrocious Giant happy.” What Gioia called him Il atroce gigante could be either Atrox the Giant or The Atrocious Giant.

  An old man of the neighborhood came to them. “The good-natured giant will no longer be satisfied with a little eating plate like that,” he said. “He has already come to consider you as pinchfist and flintstone people, and he says that he can unmake you as easily as he made you. He likes to eat out of a plate that is a plate.”

  “Do you have a plate that is a plate, Timore?” Leo Parisi, that short and pleasant person, asked him.

  “Yes. I’ll go get it. And also an imbuto to eat the eels with. And also a rail-splitter to split the bear’s bones. The good-natured giant is old and has only one tooth left, and he can no longer split bear bones as he once could.”

  “Can you do a giant voice, John Barkley Towntower?” Denis Lollardy asked mischievously. “I believe there will be need of a great giant voice in our masquerade. If you can’t do one, I suppose that I can forge one.”

  “I can’t do the giant voice well,” the John Barkley Towntower part of the person said, “but Solomon Izzersted is wonderful at it.”

  “Yes, I am wonderful at it,” said that ugly growth Solomon Izzersted, sticking his head out of the shirt-front of John Barkley Towntower. “I love to do a giant voice.”

  “I wonder if you people know,” said Denis Lollardy the forger, “that Atrox Fabulinus, the scribbling giant, who is reputed to have one of his scribbletoriums in this neighborhood, is called by those of his group The Least of the Seven Giants? He is not called the smallest. In fact it is believed that he is the largest and most brutish of them. But he is called the least of them in some other meaning.”

  “But Atrox is the eldest of the Scribbling Giants,” Mary Brandy stated as if she knew what she was talking about, “and he is the titular head of the seven. The others only call him the least behind his broad back.”

  “Do we have any good illusionist here, besides myself?” Denis Lollardy asked. “It would be a good show to project at least the outline of The Atrocious Giant.”

  “Yes, I am a good illusionist,” said another member of the Group of Twelve.

  Leo Parisi, wonder boy and nuclear scientist, had put his head together with the new person Hieronymous Talking-Crow, the barely-esteemed author of the exploratory essay A Complete Rewriting of Human Biology, and had also put his head together with Solomon Izzersted and John Barkley Towntower. These were the ones who were most worried about the Unreal and Disgracefully Undetailed Modern World, though the whole group was worried about their own and the group’s unreality.

  Meanwhile, Gioia di Sotto La Montagna, the old lady of the neighborhood, had returned with the cup that was a cup. “Oh, that’ll hold nine gallons at least,” Perpetua Parisi cried. “Thirty-six liters. Leo, go get cheese and hazel-nuts and wine, lots of wine. Oh, Leo is talking, and can’t be disturbed. Papa, will you get the things, and be sure there is enough wine to fill the giant’s cup several times.”

  “I go, Seventh Daughter, I go,” said Gorgonius Pantera.

  The outline of the giant began to form at the biggest of the tables. And it was at the same time that the outline of the discourse began to form at the same table between Leo Parisi and Hieronymous Talking-Crow and Solomon Izzersted/John Barkley Towntower.

  The giant’s outline sat ponderously, and the old lady Gioia di Sotto La Montagna set the nine-gallon cup which was quickly filled with wine by the wine-waiters. The giant outline raised the huge cup and drank from it, which proved that there was substance and strength to it.

  The old man Timore brought a plate that was a plate, and also an imbuto (that was a sort of funnel to eat the eels through) and a rail-splitter to split the bear’s bones. An eel-waiter placed a dozen of the big eels in the big funnel, and the fuzzy giant outline began to slurp and eat them from the bottom of the funnel.

  “When the last eel is gone, then the last giant must go too,” the giant outline spoke in an amazingly giant-like voice. “Eels, and the blood of Englishmen, they are breath and life to us giants.”

  There was a sort of giggle in the air, almost in the same giant tone.

  “And do you also drink the blood of English women?” Drusilla Evenrood asked.

  “We do,” the giant’s outline said. “We do. We love it.”

  “Oh be quiet, Solomon Izzersted,” the giant’s outline now spoke in an entirely different voice. It was a wheezing voice, and yet entirely giantlike. “I never drank the blood of an English man nor woman. Properly speaking, the English came after my proper time. Solomon Izzersted, I almost repent of having made you, and I surely repent of having made you so voicey. Speak no more this night and day.”

  “But I am in a serious scientific discussion, and the world would be poorer for it if I didn’t speak,” Solomon spoke in his own, nasty voice.

  “Then speak in your own voice, and not in a burlesque of mine,” Atrox wheezed. “And number your words carefully. If you speak even one word in excess, your life will be required of you. Denis Lollardy, you stole my Laughing Christ out of the holy ground where I had buried him. Bring him back today.”

  Atrox Fabulinus (if indeed the giant outline were he) seemed now to be more substantial than previously, now that the declining moon shone full upon him. He ate steadily and fillingly of the eels from the funnel.

  “You are mistaken, good-natured giant,” Denis protested. “I myself forged the Laughing Christ and buried him in the ground for fifteen months to give him the patina of age. I have never seen the original and I have always considered it to be a fable. This was one of my cases of creative forgery when the forgery was an original. Then I dug it up quite recently and displayed the grand discovery.”

  “Not fifteen months but fifteen hundred years it was in the holy ground where I hid it,” the good-natured atrocious giant wheezed. “Tell us how you did this creative forgery, Denis Lollardy. Tell us how you did all your creative forgeries.”

  It had been a mistake a moment ago, or trick of the moonlight. Atrox had not become more substantial by the light of the declining moon. He was still transparent and of poor definition. And he was still of testy temper. “Who is intruding on my invisibility?” he demanded. “Who is mocking me? You are mocking me with this outline to your death. Go on, Denis, tell us.”

  “It is not really myself but the Demiourgikos Pneuma Apatelos, the Spirit of Creative Fraud, who does my creative forging,” Denis tried to explain as though he had never analyzed his techniques before. “I am always seized by this rapture, and then I create. But sometimes I am entirely surprised by the fraudulent (but better than the original – sometimes having no original) creatures that come from my mind. I apparently do them in seconds when they would have rationally required days and weeks. I do not understand my Spirit of Creative Fraud.”

  “No, nor shall you,” the giant Atrox wheezed. “I myself am the Spirit of Creative Fraud, as well as the Spirit of Creative Truth. Sometimes I am the one and sometimes the other. If you understood me, then you would be as spacious as I am. For I am your animating spirit entirely.”

  “Stop right there, both of you, or all three or four or five of you!” Mary Brandy Manx cried out with all the joy and zest of a bloodhound on the trail of the blood of a felon. “One of our extended Group of Twelve admitted tonight to being able to cast illusions, and this person has been causing the Atrox illusion now. I smell fraud all over the place. And Solomon and possibly another one of us can create voices. Solomon, could you do that giant wheezing voice? Solomon, are you doing it?”

  “I could do it. I am not doing it,” the ugly belly-growth that was Solomon Izzersted said in his own or
dinary and nasty voice. “I am afraid of the Giant Atrox. I am afraid either to mime or mock him.”

  “Mary Brandy Manx,” Giant Atrox wheezed, “you would not smell fraud if I hadn’t given you the nose to smell it with. You would not do or have anything if I had not given them to you.”

  And the Giant Atrox Fabulinus, if it were he, now spoke in a third giant voice, one of tired and ragged strength and patience. “Woman,” he said, and he was not now talking to Mary Brandy, “you mock me and you burlesque me at your peril. Persist in this and you will have seen your last midnight.”

  “I, Atrox, I?” Mary Brandy asked in incomprehension.

  “No, not you, island woman. Another of your Group. She knows who she is. Her string comes to its end if she persists.”

  Then Atrox Fabulinus (or the transparent appearance of a sloppy giant), having finished his wine and eels and trout and flesh and bones of bear, faded out completely and was seen no more that night. His transparent outline was gone. His wheezy voice and his other voices were gone. He was gone, and all of them laughed in relief.

  “I still smell fraud, whoever it was who gave me my nose,” Mary Brandy still insisted. “And the smell of fraud comes strongest from the group of Solomon Izzersted/John Barkley Towntower, and Denis Lollardy and Hieronymous Talking-Crow and Leo Parisi. How many hoaxers are there in our group?”

  “Can there be a fraud and I not a part of it, Mary Brandy?” Laughter-Lynn Casement asked archly. “Suspect me too! Oh, please suspect me too, Mary Brandy.”

  “Yes, I suspect you too,” Mary Brandy said in her sunny brandy voice. “There are two and maybe three prime hoaxers in our group. Why are you so quiet, Jane Chantal Ardri?”

  “I don’t want this to be my last midnight, so I will not persist.”

  Did you know that bear meat and trout meat and eel meat are three of the best brain-foods ever? Oh, they start the brains to working, but sometimes they work a little bit roughly on this diet as if they were over-fueled.

  “What we are smelling is cosmic fraud,” Leo Parisi said. “Everything is composed of ninety percent of nothingness, and when we come down to the smallest units of it it is composed of more than ninety-nine percent of nothingness. I seem to remember old physics texts in which more than fifty sorts of subatomic particles were mentioned. But nobody remembers such texts or particles now. There is something wrong. The whole world should not have forgotten things so pertinent and so fulfilling.”

  “I don’t remember them, Leo, and I’m much older than you are,” Hieronymous Talking-Crow said. “I believe that you only intuit the need for such particles, and the intuition comes to you as a memory of them in old physics textbooks. I myself intuit the need of thirty, at least, of them.”

  “And we intuit the need for fifty, at least, of them,” Solomon Izzersted said with real wonder in his ugly little voice. “Why aren’t the particles there? – for they aren’t.”

  “It’s the same with musical notes,” Perpetua Parisi said sadly.

  Monday at Sora still played its blended immediacy on the thirteen player pianos. “Open up a musical note and you’ll find that it’s ninety-nine percent empty,” Perpetua said. “I still don’t understand how they’re so pretty when they’re so empty.”

  “There is something else,” said Solomon Izzersted. “Both myself and my alter ego John Barkley Towntower, as well as Jane Chantal and Hilary Ardri and Hieronymous Talking-Crow have noticed it and been spooked by it. We feel that we do not really live in the United States, we the only supposed Americans in this group. We feel that instead of really living in the United States, we are living in somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea of what the United States is like.”

  “And there’s another thing again,” said Hilary Ardri, “and it concerns you, Leonardo the Great. You are not satisfactory as panther, leopard, puma, tiger, lion, nor as any of the big cats at all. You simply have no reality as one of the big cats. You are only somebody’s very sketchy and imperfect idea of what one of the big cats, the panther (itself an uncertain description) should look like. You have been done by somebody who never saw any of the big cats, nor any good description of them. So it would almost have to be somebody who had not seen the last thousand or fifteen-hundred years either. You yourself, Leonardo, told Caesar Oceano that you came to him from the ‘Exterior Darkness’, did you not, Leonardo? And you were delivered to him by the Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers Company which you two now own and operate (without, apparently, understanding very much about it) and now reap rich profits from. Can you tell us anything more about your origin? About what you are?”

  “No, I cannot,” the Golden Panther said. “I never examined my mind on the subject of myself till just this minute, but there doesn’t seem to be any valid information at all about me in my own head. I seem to have only a very sketchy and imperfect idea of the big cats myself. I believe that I have a man’s mind in a cat’s body, I am in terror of that black panther who shadows me, and yet I am at least as well-muscled and toothed and clawed as he is. Not he, you say, Caesar? No, I never noticed that he was a female. As a cat there’s surely something lacking in me. Myself am one of the most bewildering questions here.”

  They had assembled to seek answers to certain absolutely crucial questions, and yet they could not even formulate those questions except in most absurd phrases. And they were enticed away from the seriousness of their questions by their magical surroundings.

  “It is wonderful, it is enchanting, it is magic here, it is haunted,” Laughter-Lynn Casement declared with passion. “There is so much here that it is almost enough.”

  “It’s haunted in a sinister way also,” Jane Chantal spoke in her beautifully fuzzy voice. “It worries me. The whole environ is a haunted house, a murder house out of a police romance or a mystery novel. Let us all stay together whatever happens, or the killer will pick us off one by one.” Jane Chantal was the hoaxer who had projected the outline of the Giant Atrox, and had voiced him also, and she had done it in a spirit of mockery. She very much feared she would have to die for that Lese Geant, and it made her nervous.

  “Oh, do you feel intimations of a killer on our estate?” Perpetua asked. “So do I, a little bit, since Leo found the big feather, the nine-foot-long feather. It was gory, you know. Oh, the safest and most central suite will be the libraries then. And there also (here also for we enter them now) are to be found the right answers if only we can phrase the right questions. Leo and I have assembled, and somehow inherited, the best reference library in the world here. We use it a lot, and so does a bigger someone.”

  “It seems to me that it is a little bit like the catacombs of Rome,” Solomon Izzersted, that distasteful belly-being, said with apprehension. “The shelves are so deep, you know, and some of them at least are plainly hewn out of the earth and rocks themselves. We are underground here, are we not? Some of those long, patina-weathered stone boxes that are interposed with the tomes on the shelves, I have the sudden feeling that they may contain dead bodies.”

  “Have you that feeling, Solomon?” Perpetua asked. “But Leo and I, somehow we never feel that they are dead, not completely dead. Only a few of them have disintegrated down to the bare and crumbling bones. Quite a few of them are completely incorrupt. We call the two sorts The Saints and The Sinners. Some of them give off the odor of sanctity, and some of them give off the odor of Hell. It is to counteract the latter that we always have aromatic and disguising candles burning in here, but they don’t disguise the hell-stenches well enough. Oh, the bodies, both the dead and the quick among them, are an intricate part of our great reference library here. A reference library is supposed to answer questions; and these spirits (we call them spirits though they are more overwhelmingly bodily in their deaths than they could have been in their lives) do answer questions. They answer them with great good will, or with great bad will. Oh, I never noticed before that our libraries might be considered weird. And now I wonder for the first time about their origins. Leo a
nd I had this house built here, half underground and half above, with great care and planning. All except the libraries. They seemed just to happen. They grew and expanded bit by bit, or they were discovered or manifested bit by bit. And the invaluable books and scrolls just happened to be manifested here in this place. And the bodies, it is historically improbable that the majority of them should have been buried here at Sora in middle Italy.” “You know, Perpetua, Atrox does a much better job on you Italians than on us Americans. He does have a good idea of what Italians should look like. He does you well, he does you well, and it’s unfair,” Hieronymous Talking-Crow cut in. “Oh, it’s not unfair at all, Hieronymous,” Perpetua smiled. “Oh my, we are a pretty people, aren’t we, and we do have a pretty country and pretty buildings.”

  “Yes you do, Perpetua, and it is unfair,” Hieronymous still insisted. “He has a centuries old love for Italy and all its little towns. But he had never even been in beautiful Down-Town Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and he represents us as sketchy and silly. Oh, that’s only a subjective feeling, of course. How would a fabulous giant really have anything to do with it?”

  “But your libraries here are very subjective.” Hieronymous had spread out thirteen of the tomes from the library shelves and seemed to be consulting all thirteen of them at one time. “Here is a book of my own, and it contains passages that I tried to add to the text, but the printing was too far advanced to allow the additions. But here the additions are allowed. And here is one which I have been intending to write but have not yet written. Ah, what genius, what genius I show, a subjective opinion, of course. But your libraries are entirely too subjective for reality.”

  “So is the wine here very subjective,” said Gorgonius Pantera, the only one of them who had lived in three different centuries – for all his youthful appearance. “The roundish stone kegs of wine make a nice pattern on the shelves with the squarish stone sarcophays that hold the old bodies, and they contain spirits at least as well-bodied. And whatever wine one thinks of, that is the wine that appears in one’s cup, whatever cask is tapped.”