— Theresa (Show Boat) Piccone
7.
They had moved twice up the coast, several hundred miles at a jump. The Military and Thalassocratic Adventure is no part of this account, but the little iron insects of beach and sea had been eating up the great craggy bird that is the Island of New Guinea. And then they were clear off the head of the bird (the Vogelkop) and to a little Dutch Island four hundred miles beyond. Now they were settled again, and everything nearly as before. Casey and Hans no longer lived in the sergeants’ tent. Casey had a little trouble with officialdom and had spent four weeks in stockade. Now he was back in the battery, though no longer a sergeant. He had to attend a rehabilitation course three times a week, and for the rest of the time he labored as a basic.
And Hans was no longer a sergeant. He had been reduced in rank for marrying without permission. Hans minded his loss of rank not at all.
Casey minded his though. For now there was a cloud on his record, a stockade term, a suspicion of disloyalty, unamericanism, and mental incompetence against him. He had to attend a class called ‘Reaffirmation of American Values’ taught by Stein the Red. He also had to endure the rumor, possibly started by that twisted humorist himself, that he and Stein were too close. But, most of all, he had to endure Stein.
Stein was not Machiavellian, but Casey thought he was. And Casey was infected, just when he believed himself cured, with the sickness to come later. Stein was not good for Casey, but he believed that he was just what that boy needed. And what Stein himself needed had just begun to stir.
But, after a while, something happened; then things became more livable.
8.
The new Islands weren't greener, but they were brighter, with the jungle less dense and with occasional meadows. These were happier islands with happier people, lighter and more lithe. And then there was the Event which contributed to the new feeling. “Casey,” Stein said suddenly one day, “I'm in love.”
“My God, with what?”
“A woman. That is normal to others. Does it seem abnormal in me?”
“Yes. A warthog I could understand, but not a woman. What tribe is she?”
“Casey, you are a kidder, but the needle tickles a little. She is a white woman. I met her today and fell in love.”
Now Casey knew that there was no white woman on the island. He also knew that Stein had very poor eyesight. But stone the crows! What object or being could have seemed a white woman to the myopic Stein. And what token could it (or she, if it were alive and sexed) have given of reciprocity?
Casey went in search of the answer.
At the Coconut Grove they were going to put on a show. Stein was commonly in charge of such. The Aussies would be in it too and share the talent. The Aussies haven't any talent, but they did have Tania. Tania was to be in the show: Tania was Tommy Trouncer, a tow-headed Aussie lance corporal. He had a double voice and could do impersonations.
“Lord, Casey, we took your double-eyed hoot owl,” one of the Aussies told him. “We just wanted to get Tommy into the show, and Stein has the say on those things. We made him a gown and dressed him like a sheila and took him for an audition. You'd think a man like Stein would be the last to be fooled. I guess we've all been in the jungle too long.”
“It really couldn't be that. Such things aren't possible,” Casey said, “but Stein hasn't any sense of humor.” Casey was partly mistaken in that statement.
“He doesn't have an angle, Case,” one of the Aussies said. “He's cooked, carved, and eaten. We finally told him that one of the brigadiers had her, that he had slipped her onto the island for vile purposes. We told him that the brigadier was temporarily gone, and that Tania wanted to be in the show to give the boys a treat. ‘The only way to do it,’ said Stein, ‘is to bill her as a female impersonator.’ ‘My God, that's brilliant,” we told him, ‘there isn't another brain like that in the world.’ ‘I doubt it,’ he said, and he swore us to secrecy. We must never reveal to anyone that she is really a woman. Lord, Casey, can't he see the hair on his legs?”
“Stein can't see in much detail. And then there is something that can happen to a man that defies explanation. We are none of us immune. By the way, what do you Aussies wash in, sheep-dip?”
“That's the perfume. That's what gets him. He talks about vernal ecstasy and things like that. He wants to make a good woman of Tommy. He wants to bring charges against the old brigadier. And he wants Tania, Tommy, to wait for him, and after this is over they will live together somewhere in a better, cleaner world.”
“This opens up a whole new game,” Casey cried out. “Help me cook this goose, oh help me cook this goose. Tommy, how good are you?”
“Casey, I'm the best in the world. You can't get better than that.”
Casey left the Australian contingent, taking with him Tommy and one liaison man, and went to seek advice from the four wisest men, besides himself, on the island. The Dirty Five and the two Aussies sat up late and concocted their dirtiest plan, the disenthronement of Stein and his masters.
It would make international complications; there would be hell to pay. But if it worked, and it could work, it would pull down Stein and maybe even the furious colonel and the three livid majors. They did the staff work that night, and then Casey followed up on the details during the several days that were available.
He gave it everything he had. It was a crime that the lecherous old brigadier should corrupt the girl, and her no ordinary girl, as the dullest could see. And if Stein were really in love, then who more than he was entitled to real love when it came? Certainly he could hope for the ecstatic life in the cleaner world to come. There are the specially favored, and one may enter this class by noteworthy boldness. The main thing was to get her away from the brigadier while she was still pure of soul. The goal was worth the challenge.
With Stein's connections, could he not get the colonel and the majors to intervene? Have staged a sudden raid? Have the brigadier charged with moral turpitude and get Tania sent back home?
“It can be done, Absalom, it must be done,” Casey swore.
“It is worth the effort,” said Stein. “As I am a man I will bring it off.”
The show was a success, and Tania was the star of the show. It was so real that the boys almost tore up the place. Not that they couldn't see the hair on the legs; but, as they said, they had all been in the jungle too long.
And sometime after the show Tania had a tryst with Stein. The Dirty Fivers and the Aussie co-conspirators were jubilant. Tommy swore that he could pull a double-stall, a triple-stall, that he could keep old four-eyes on a loose hook. He said that he was a cousener from way back and had a talent for this. After all, he was the best in the world.
So they left it to him with high hopes.
Many hours later, before it was quite daylight, an odd creature crawled out of the woods. It had lost its glasses and could not see where it was going. It was covered with mud and terribly torn. There was blood on its noggin, and its eyes were blackened and nearly closed.
Casey put it to bed in sorrow, for this was Stein, and it meant that the conspiracy had crashed on the rocks of Tommy's temper. Casey went to get the details.
“There wasn't any way I could handle it, Case,” Tommy said. “That bloke is mad. He wanted the world of the future last night. He's stronger than he looks, and he got me spooked. I blew clean up. He's uncanny. He had an off-key laugh that turned me to ice. I had to beat him against the trees and stomp him into a slough.
“But he never did catch on.”
Casey flashed with sudden hope. “He never knew, Tommy? He still doesn't know?”
“No. He doesn't know anything. When you're that crazy you don't get over it.”
Casey returned to the wounded Stein and restored him to life with minor surgery and a certain roughness.
“Tell me, Absalom, if you can talk, what happened?”
“Oh Casey, she was magnificent. She is pure as the snow and I was contemptible. She is
full of divine fire when she is angry. Her strength is more than human. I am ten times as much in love now.”
“Well dammit man, don't lie there and bleed. This calls for sudden and drastic action. The brigadier is back this morning and is no doubt forcing her to submit at this instant. Get to the colonel and the majors and tell them that he is a fascist fink and had you beaten for your views. Tell them that a sudden raid will find him guilty of moral turpitude and give a chance to retaliate. The old brigadier is one man who was never fooled by — I mean, who is entirely unsympathetic to their views. Had you talked to them before?”
“Yes, they were almost ready to agree. They were a little doubtful of the legality, but they are sure that they can pull it off if the evidence is really there. As you have guessed, they are very highly connected.”
“Then go at once, Stein. Speed is of the essence.”
And, incredibly, a sortie was made, and with climaxing results. The amity of two nations was in the balance, and a seismic tremor went through the island.
The Aussie Brigadier was puzzled at first. “If there's a sheila here, then someone should be punished,” he said. “That isn't authorized at all.”
But when he realized that he was supposed to be the guilty one, then he became very angry and sent for the whole damned island to find out what was wrong. A raiding party doesn't just burst in on an allied brigadier like that.
His American counterpart, caught in utter ignorance, sought an explanation. When none was found, he went howling through the jungle for blood.
The pale star of Stein fell for a while. The little red stars of the three livid majors sank with a rumble. And that of Colonel Laycheck fell like lightning.
There is a footnote to this. It came out years later, and from Hans. Stein, he said, was not as myopic as all that; he had, in fact, begun to acquire quite a long vision. He was in no way fooled by that tow-headed Aussie lance corporal. Stein could see a gag coming a long ways off; and here he was actually the one who invented the gag and intruded it into those cobber heads. Then he went along with it, as he loved to play the buffoon.
He hadn't been gulled by Casey; he had gulled Casey and all the rest. And he had spooked Tommy Trouncer plenty at their strange meeting. The humor of the situation is several layers deep and it grows in retrospect. It is true that he didn't know that Tommy Trouncer could hit that hard.
Stein was a little tired of the majors and the colonel by that time and he had seen how they could be brought into the gag. It is nearly certain that he tossed that quoit to Casey who thought that it was his own. Hans was the only one of the Dirty Five who understood this, however. The other four never did suspect it.
They didn't? They didn't? Are you sure they didn't?
9.
‘We are strangers at home,
We are exiles in Erin.’
— O’Gnive
“When I was a little boy,” said Finnegan, “I had an Italian reader. This was when I was still an Italian, before I turned into an Irishman. There was a story called, I believe, Specchietto, the Little Looking Glass. A boy felt sorry for the little boy in the looking glass who has no face unless he gave him one. He said that he would lend him his own face, and this he did by means of a charm. “The boy in the looking glass climbed out and borrowed, not only the face, but also the shadow and the name of the original little boy. And these (though only loaned to him) he dishonestly kept, for he never returned them. The first little boy now sits in a dark corner of the world and nobody even knows that he's a little boy, for he doesn't look like one; he doesn't look like anything at all.”
“Well, you couldn't have been that little boy,” said Vincent. “If you lost your face, at least you have kept your nose.”
“Yes, I am that little boy,” said Finnegan. “I have a comic mask instead of a face, and a moniker instead of a name. The shadow I cast is not a shadow at all; it is only the shadow of a shadow. All the persons I know are so indeed, but I do not seem a person to myself. I am not Italian like my father, nor Irish like my mother; I am a changeling of no ancestry. I can look in the face of the city where I was born and find it blank. I walk the towns and roads of my own land in amazement and ask ‘Is this the world? Or is there another world, and I have stumbled into the wrong one?’ When I am alone I feel as though I were a defective ghost who has misplaced his soul and is doomed to its search.”
“Next week, same hour, listen for further adventures of Finnegan in search of a personality,” said Casey.
But Finnegan did not find it the next week either.
10.
“The thing is,” said Vincent, “that we can never be sure of anything since it might all have started only ten minutes ago.” “Let's try that again,” said Henry.
“The whole thing, creation, might have happened only ten minutes ago; the universe with the red shift already built into the distant light, with the momentum up and the life partly spent, the matter somewhat expanded and rate of expansion well under way; the earth complete with its fossils and vestiges, half-way down the slope from the fourth Pleistocene ice age, with its carbon balances and its partly run-down atomic clocks; its sediments made to show a picture of fifteen hundred million years; its insects and its tumbleweeds at their present development; the brains of its two and a half billion human beings etched with the wrinkles of memories of things that never happened, and dreams that were never dreamed.”
“The idea isn't new at all,” said Casey. “I could cite you — ”
“That a thing has been thought of before is not proof positive that it is wrong,” said Vincent. “Once there were two bums in a gutter. ‘We ought to straighten up,’ one of them said, ‘get on our feet, get cleaned up, to provide for ourselves even if it means working a little; it would possibly give us a new outlook.’ ‘No,’ said the other bum, ‘It's already been done. There's nothing new about it.’ So they didn't do it because it had been done. This is intimidation by primogeniture, and it is those who call themselves the boldest who are most intimidated by this fear. I am not. I never hesitated to stride in the elephant spoor, or to match paces with the — ”
“Oh get on with it, Vincent,” said Henry.
“Suppose that only ten minutes ago were made the marks that mean old nostalgias and new loves, debts and guilts, and rankling resentments of things that never were; books just made in full print and the corresponding influences in the marks of many minds. A morning paper made this afternoon and with all the pennant standings and results of yesterday's games that were never played; batters born in a slump though they have never seen a bat. No, I can't see a thing wrong with my theory. It could be true. That's all you can say for any theory.
“He is Finnegan just created with a built-in hangover from too much jungle juice drunk last night, and yet there was neither jungle juice nor a last night.”
“I thought that last night seemed a little unreal,” Casey said.
“Can anyone think of a better explanation? We will call it Stranahan's Theory of the Uncreated Creation. There's more to it, what I call the Shadow and Substance motif. But I'll not tell that, as you are not paying attention.”
“You are wrong, Vincent, and for this reason,” Finnegan said. “It hasn't happened yet. The world hasn't begun. It may begin in ten minutes or ten aeons or never. I was wrong the several times I believed it had begun.”
“It's begun for me,” Vincent insisted. “A world can only exist for an elite. The present world exists for an elite of one, me. It is in being for me and not for the rest of you. The point is that none of you is here at all, and I am here only by an act of will.”
But the only one of them who worried about his unreality was Finnegan.
11.
During those days Hans was at full strength. He had entered a period of ease and happiness that seemed to go on forever. That he had been disciplined for marrying without permission, that he was now a basic in a battery where he had been staff sergeant, that his wife was a di
stant foreigner and himself a soldier on an obscure island with at least a chance of their never seeing each other again, it didn't matter. Nothing could pull him down. Hans had the world under perfect control, and he played it like a fish. He could have landed it long ago but he enjoyed teasing it. So he climbed the cliffs that nobody else could climb and found the peoples who had never been found before.
Hans had better luck than most at meeting the cliff people. Hans could find all people, and he was accepted by all. Finnegan always said that the cliff people were like the Abominable Snowman, only seen by liars. Finnegan would have qualified there, but he seemed afraid of what he would encounter in the strange race. And Hans himself was quite a liar in those days; but he did meet the cliff people, and ate with them, and learned to talk with them. They ate taro and goop and meat. Sometimes the meat was cuscus or coconut possum, and sometimes it was bird meat. And again sometimes, Hans would hint (hey, are you listening to him?) that it was an unidentified meat with a very peculiar taste.
“Hans, you are a phoney,” said Finnegan. “Melville was the last one who could tell a cannibal story with a clean heart, and he was a little bit phoney too.”
“Cannibal is too common a term,” said Hans. “We initiates prefer to be called necrophagists.”
“That's better,” Finn said. “I thought you ate them alive.”
But in truth Hans had found why Finnegan (the only other one who could have climbed there) was afraid to meet the Cliff People. The Cliff People looked exactly like Finnegan, the same great noses and the same chinlessness, the same deceptive shambling gait, and the same sudden speed and strength. Whatever remnant they were, Finnegan was one too. Imagine a hundred brown men who looked just like Finnegan! Imagine a hundred sturdy Cliff Women who looked just like him, and yet didn't look bad at all!
Archipelago Page 6
