East of Laughter

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Yes, but why don’t you write your own geography, Janie?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to innovate on such a big scale, not in my first day on the job as New Giantess. I experiment a little bit yet. I write that the men working in the field over there should be happy, and they laugh and giggle as if they’d rupture themselves. Then I write ‘not that damned happy’, and they are as they were to begin with.”

  “I don’t understand how you came by your special competence for writing the world.”

  “I’ve been dead, and now I live again. That hasn’t happened to most people. And then I’m an artist in all the arts, and hardly anyone else is, except possibly you.”

  “What are you working on now, Janie?”

  “I’m going to fix those false, pipe-smoking neo-giants back in Drusilla’s Manor house in Sussex, England. I’m giving them boils now, and turning their drinking water into blood. I’m going to give them all the ten plagues of Egypt if they don’t get out of the world-writing business. They aren’t very effective at it, but their ideas are so dark that they’d ruin the world if they were effective. And I can feel lots of points of contact between their trashiness and my valid work. I read somewhere about an eleventh plague of Egypt. If I can remember what it was, I’ll write that they’ll get it too. They’ll have to give up pretty soon. I tell them ‘My writing will eclipse your writing, and my snakes will eat up your snakes’.”

  “Where did you get this wonderful slab table, Janie. It must be twelve feet in diameter.”

  “Yes, twelve feet in diameter. That’s what I wrote that it should be. I wrote that there should grow a mahogany tree twelve feet in diameter and a thousand years old on that hillock there.”

  “Mahogany trees don’t grow in this part of Italy.”

  “This one did. Go and look at the rest of it on the ground up on that hillock. Then I wrote that they should saw a slab from the middle of the tree and give it a high polish and set it here.”

  “Isn’t that pen a little bit long to write with, Janie?”

  “Not for me. I like a long pen.”

  No, of course Jane Chantal High-Queen wasn’t writing with one of those nine-foot-long giant goose feathers. She was writing with a four-foot-long tail feather from a King-of-Bavaria Bird-of-Paradise. And now she had written that ten thousand song birds should add their warbles to Saturday at Lecco for Seven Flutes, and they went over the sound threshold to a new thing in music.

  Jane painted at intervals in her writing. She painted the world and wrote the world at the same time.

  “I bet I could forge some of your forgeries just as good as your original forgeries were, Denis,” she said.

  “Of course you could, Jane. Any Master-Forger could.”

  Denis Lollardy was quite proud of his art treasures. Only Leo and Perpetua Parisi and her parents the Panteras had seen any of them before, and even they hadn’t seen all of them. Denis called all the reduced Group of Twelve together to look at them now, for they were somehow important in their Quest for Reality.

  The Major Paintings were so good and so numerous that they almost destroyed their own effect. There were the Durer Pinakothek-Munich Self-Portrait; the Goya Third of May 1808; the Copley Watson and the Shark; the Gainsborough Robert Andrews and His Wife; the Boucher Shepherd and Shepherdess; the Ruisdael The Jewish Graveyard; Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps; Brueghel’s The Land of Cockayne; Bosch’s The Ship of Fools; Honore’s David and Goliath; Beckman’s The Dream; Chagall’s I And The Village; Klee’s Twittering Machine; Miro’s The Harlequin’s Carnival; Bouguereau’s Youth; Courbet’s The Stone Breakers; so many of the better-than-the-originals forgeries of the top world’s masterpieces that they really reached critical mass and established a world of their own!

  Oh, the exquisite fakeries of Count Finnegan’s Orange Period Oranges of Mockman’s splintering Cigar Store Indian; of Randall’s mysterious It Isn’t What You Think; of Mary Morehouse’s Nine Ducks, and also of her Seven Ducks; of Ewigman’s murky The Sun At Midnight; of Esterhazy’s Ikes Chilli Parlor; of Jonquil’s The Face At The Bottom of The Well. And there was Denis’s own Pine Tree, a forgery from life.

  “I bet God is jealous of that one, Denis,” Caesar Oceano said.

  “Of course he’s jealous of it,” Denis rejoined, “and yet it’s unfair. Pine trees are among the few things, among the very few things, that God does badly.”

  There were nine pair of matched originals-and-forgeries of totem poles. The originals were from British Columbia of Canada of North America. The forgeries were from the talented buck-bladed knife of Denis Lollardy.

  “Your forgeries can always be recognized by their being slightly better than the originals, Denis,” Gorgonius Pantera said. “It’s a failing of yours. But in the case of these, though your technical ingenuity which you can never disguise is here more manifest than in most of your forgeries, yet the original wooden grotesqueries have something that yours lack. What is it, what is it?”

  “The spirits, the jailed spirits,” Denis said. “There are spirits imprisoned in the originals, suffering spirits. Why is it that I am the only non-Pacific-Coast Indian who noticed just what totem poles are. They’re jails, you know.”

  “Jails? How would they be jails, Denis?” Laughter-Lynn asked.

  “They are wooden jails in which humans, spirits, genie, friends as well as enemies were imprisoned. I don’t know how they were imprisoned into the wood, but they are in there, alive, and usually angry at being imprisoned. They have one advantage: they outlived their jailors who locked them up in the wood, for all these totem poles are more than one hundred years old. And they have one disadvantage: they are not comfortable in there, piled atop one another and unable to move. See this White Woman in the first original of the series! She was the wife of an English sea captain who explored that western Canadian coast and traded with the Indians. She left her husband and ran away into the woods with one of the Indians under the impression that Indians are passionate lovers. But he tired of her quickly, so he locked her into the wooden jail of that totem pole along with half a dozen other friends and enemies. She is alive and awake in there. She is ugly with hate and pop-eyed with fury, and she hears every word we say and becomes more and more furious about it all. I captured her rather well in my forgery, and yet the original has her as a living and hating person and my forgery has her only as a piece of angry art.”

  Denis Lollardy had one table a hundred-and-twenty feet long, and on it were ten thousand artifacts, some in both originals and forgeries, some in forgeries only.

  “I want that pair of dingy lamps,” Monika Pantera told Denis. “Nobody else would ever want them, but I want them unaccountably. They have a yearning, wishing quality. You have tried to hide them, haven’t you? – making them into the two least interesting artifacts on the long table, by having one of them at one end of the table and the other one at the other end. And ten thousand other glittering artifacts are in between them. One of the lamps would hardly catch a person’s eye. But the two of them, even when so widely separated, do catch it, barely. Don’t tell me what they are. Their story is probably as dingy as their appearance. Just give them to me.”

  “You don’t know what you ask, Monika-of-the-Pianocastle. Can you drink the cup I drink from and quell the spirits that I quell? Can you play tag with the elementals and pull the beards of the roughest giants in deep earth?”

  “Of course I can, all that and more. Please have the two lamps sent to our castle this very day. You haven’t given me any gift since the last one.”

  “The microscope on the table by itself, is it a forgery or is it not?” Solomon Izzersted interrupted.

  “Of course it’s a forgery, Solomon, and much better than the original, though I have not been able to steal the original. But this one is full of miracles and revelations without end.”

  “In the context of the empty-box-atoms-revisited, does it contribute anything new?” Solomon asked. “Can one, by using it, see anything
in the hearts of the atoms besides those silly little scraps of meaningless trash?”

  “One can’t see anything else, Solomon. But one can pick intimations of something else, of whole invisible empires. Try the microscope for a few hours today.”

  Denis had two non-distinguished tables there. Each of them had twelve places and twelve chairs. The original was an unimaginative factory-made table, probably from Milano. And the forgery was somewhat better.

  “Why, Denis, why?” Caesar Oceano asked. “Is there –?”

  “Is there more to it than is apparent, Caesar? No, I don’t think so. They are plain seance tables, and seance tables have never been known for their artistry or craftsmanship, being used in the dark most of the time anyhow. Oh yes, like about one in ten of all seance tables, they can be used to evoke spirits from the vasty deeps. I use them here sometimes because this place (in the midst of my treasures and masterworks) gives me ideas of the persons and spirits that I might take a fancy to evoke.”

  “Let’s evoke the shabbiest spirit we can think of,” Solomon said. “At every seance I’ve every attended (though this will be the first one without my erstwhile host John Barkley Towntower) the persons evoked have been the grandfathers of persons present, or the husbands of some of them, or historical personages, kings and Napoleons and drivel. Who is the most casual, the most non-noteworthy spirit we can think of, and the one who (in spite of being non-noteworthy) is likely to give us unusual information or pseudo-information? Who is so ridiculous that it won’t matter that he is ridiculous?”

  “I’m thinking of one of the three persons that Atrox mentioned as being secondary creators of his,” Laughter-Lynn said. “He mentioned Rabelais whom he had made because his contemporaries called him the Roman Rabelais and laughed when they said it, and he couldn’t discover the meaning of the word ‘rabelais’. He mentioned Balzac who would create a massive and intricate nineteenth century Paris that never really existed. Atrox, he confesses, had an old anger against Paris because of being abused there for stealing chickens, so he could not write the city rationally. And for a third of them, Atrox mentioned a grubby North American of only a few years ago, but I forget his name.”

  “Charles Fort,” said Caesar Oceano, “the driveler of sky drivel.”

  “Sure,” Denis agreed. “Let’s sit down in eleven of the chairs, and perhaps that Charles will come and sit down in the twelfth.”

  They sat down.

  “Abra dabra ookie ort,

  “Come and visit, Charley Fort,” Jane Chantal High-Queen intoned, and she also wrote it down on a piece of paper that the person Charles Fort should appear.

  There were several slight changes in the ambient. They were indoors in a high-vaulted room, but now the sky came indoors also, right through the high vaulting of the room, and came down so low that a tall man could have reached up and touched it. Oh, it was the sky all right. The sky is easily recognized. But it was the sky caught in the net of an odd circumstance. And Charles Fort was there. Non, no, he did not do anything so extraordinary as appear. He was just there, dully and comfortably, as though he had been going through Lollardy’s remarkable collection of old newspapers for countless years.

  Charles Fort, or his evocation or ghost, reached up and scratched a match on the sky. He lit a half-smoked cigar with the burning match, and then he sat down in the twelfth chair. He seemed the most materialistic of all of them there. “A sky that I can’t scratch matches on is no sky at all,” he said. “Do you have Ruppert beer?”

  “No, that beer has not been made for a long time. Colonel Ruppert has been dead for a long time,” said Caesar Oceano who knew beer.

  “Yes, I see the Colonel now and then,” Fort said, “and he always explains that he’s dead. And he doesn’t know whether his New York Yankees team is still in existence or not. He’s got one rule of existence to go by though. ‘If the Yankees are in the second division,’ he often says, ‘then they’ve dropped out of it. They aren’t.’ Oh, any sort of beer will do.”

  “Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?”

  “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. They just weren’t paying attention, I guess. A tall man could crack his head on it on an especially low-sky day. Yes, I discovered that the sky could be as high as twenty-seven miles and as low as seven feet, that the moon was about the size of an Iowa hay-barn, which is to say large, but not exceedingly large. I pointed out that not only do large and small rocks fall out of the sky, but also spiders (sometimes in clusters of more than a million of them), frogs, toads, worms, snakes, fish (including supposedly long-extinct fish), tar or tar-like substance by the ton, pieces of fresh meat weighing as much as three hundred pounds, pieces of ice weighing as much as eight hundred pounds, horse-saddles, pieces of sea-weed more than a hundred feet long, rusted chassis of automobiles of unknown manufacture, row-boats which fell to earth so slowly that they were not broken, sea-anchors weighing as much as nine tons.”

  “Where is all this leading, Charley?” Laughter-Lynn asked him.

  “I have no idea. That’s a leading question, and I won’t be led.”

  “You once wrote: Traceries of ice, millions of years old, forming on the surface of a pond – later, with different materials, these same forms will express botanically. What did you mean by that?” Leo asked.

  “I meant by that to write what I did write, and I meant nothing else.”

  “You once wrote: There are giants who will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems, and things that are rags … Here and there will flit the little harlots. Many are clowns. How many giants, Charles? And don’t you think yours is a pretty odd universe?” That was Drusilla Evenrood questioning him.

  “Seven giants in general, and one in particular. Of course I never said that my Fortean Universe was the only universe. It coexisted with other universes in the same parts of space.”

  “Coexisted with other universes?” Mary Brandy asked. “How?”

  “In the same way the universes of the Jews, Irish, Italians, Blacks, and Germans coexisted with each other in that part of space named Bronx New York, my native town. The different universes seem to mingle with each other, but in reality they have hardly any parts in contact. Like the lemon juice and the coconut milk in the Trader Horn Hookers we used to get at the Seven Seas Bar and Grill in the Bronx, and the rum in the drink didn’t have any real point of contact with either the lemon juice nor the coconut milk. I use that as a metaphor, of course.”

  “You’ve been dead sixty-six years, Charles, and yet there’s a slight smelly solidity to you,” Leo Parisi said. “Do you know Atrox the Giant?”

  “He’s one of those markets you write for and never get paid. I do know him, but you won’t get me to admit it. With my reputation for nuttiness, I just couldn’t get away with knowing Atrox. What would people think if I told them that I was associated with a giant who was writing the world, and that he sub-let part of the job to me for many years? People would think I was some kind of loony.”

  “Charles, being dead for sixty-six years, do you still stay current with your particular universe? And with the other universes in general?” Gorgonius asked.

  “Oh sure. Dying was one of the least important things in my life anyhow. The only difference is that I know more people now. I know the living and the dead. I’ve been alive and I’ve been dead, but dead’s a little bit better. It’s more spacious.”

  “Do you fool with atoms and with the interiors of atoms in your Fortean Universe?” Solomon Izzersted asked.

  “Oh yes. But the difference of size isn’t nearly as great in the Fortean Universe. In the For
tean Universe, people are almost small enough and the atoms are almost big enough. It’s the only universe that comes anywhere near to accommodating both of them. In my universe, people are sometimes able to make personal visits to the interiors of atoms. The atoms sure are not empty-box wastelands as some modern scientists say. I’ve visited the interiors of atoms myself, but it sure has been close. I simply pick a place inside my own body or outside of it (it doesn’t make much difference, so long as it’s living, living animal or living plant). Then I think small till I’m wandering around in a cell there. Then I think still smaller till I’m wandering around inside a protean cluster. Then I think still smaller till I’m wandering around inside a single molecule, and then a single atom. It’s like a circus or carnival inside an atom, ferris wheels and giddy-go-rounds and slambangos and sky-rides all over the place. The reason you can’t see all that activity through our ultra-microscopes is that the spinning particles move so fast that they’re invisible. But if you get down to their size, then you get down to their speed and time also. The last time I was able to crack the size barrier and go all the way in, I was in there for thirty-one days. I kept a journal of it. Oh, the things moved fast enough to be dazzling, but not so fast that I couldn’t keep track of them. And it was a circus in every way. I never had so much fun in my life. And when I came out again, do you know how much time had elapsed? A little less than one thousandth of a second. And I really had spent thirty-one days in there, by subatomic time. I’d filled up a thousand pages in my journal, and I brought it out with me. I tried to sell it to Colliers Magazine, but they wouldn’t touch it. They said that my reputation was against me. Oh sure, since I’m dead I do it often. My size isn’t any impediment to me when I’m dead.”

  “Just how much of an impediment is it when you’re not dead?” Solomon Izzersted asked apprehensively. “And how small would a fellow have to be so it wouldn’t be any impediment at all?”