Archipelago

by R. A. Lafferty

  Tagalog-Parakeet is a very compressed language, and three or four words of it will commonly translate out into many paragraphs.

  “Gusto ko ng isda,” said Amoy. Amoy was the parakeet.

  “He says that before he was a bird he was a fish,” Ti translated. “But before he was a fish he was a bird again, a crow or a blackbird. Isn't that right, Amoy?”

  “Pula,” said Amoy.

  “He says that he was a red-winged blackbird,” Ti translated freely. “He was a thief and he worked for thieves. When he was young he was very poor and the thieves he worked for were poor. He stole millet; just a few grains were all that he could carry at one time to his masters. It was hard work with countless trips, and if he stole less than a peck a day he was beaten. After that, he stole rice for rice thieves. Later yet he stole coriander seeds, and dates: still later, figs and olives. But this was all preparation.

  “The year that he reached his majority he ran away and accepted a position with some jewel thieves in Karachi. He would fly into the shops very quietly. He would fly out of the shops still more quietly, and richer by the weight of the gems that he could carry.

  “Ordinarily, fancy birds had been used for this work: golden pheasants and peacocks and lyre birds. These were conspicuous, and for a long time they had been watched closely. Nobody suspected a red-winged blackbird. Also Amoy was smarter than the fancy birds. This is something that is not largely known, but the Bird of Paradise and also the Golden Pheasant are low-grade morons. They can hardly tell an obvious fake from a real gem, and they will pick up a flawed stone as readily as a perfect one.

  “But Amoy never made a mistake. He prospered and so did his masters. But it happened that the next spring he fell in love with a common magpie.”

  “Hindi bastos. Pinakamabuti,” Amoy said angrily.

  “He says that she was not common,” Ti translated. “She was an uncommon magpie of the common species. They were married, and soon she was buntis. It was then that Amoy decided that he must give her a beautiful gift.

  “On the very next haul he found what he wanted. It was a blue diamond as big as an almond. He swallowed it first. Then he swallowed the rest: star sapphires, lesser opals, things like that; many of the gems he knows only by their Arabic or Hindi names which I am unable to translate. With the loot, Amoy flew back to his master, Ali ben Taife, also known as Lord Peter Petrof, and as County von Vinger, and in Rio as Sinhor Dedos (which is to say, also, Mr. Fingers). And as always, when he arrived before his master, Amoy began to resurrect the gems.

  “He regurgitated the star sapphires, he regurgitated the lesser opals, and the other gems which he knows only by Arabic and Hindi names. But he would not bring up the blue diamond. It had become attached to him.

  “I leave it to the analysts who run in and out of here like mice whether this attachment was of a physical sort or was something mental due to a trauma caused by the uncommon magpie. Secretly he wanted it for his wife. He refused to bring it up for Ali ben. He was threatened. He was put to the torture.

  “However, to save his life (and it was precisely a case of that) he could not bring it up. Then Lord Peter (Ali ben) cut his throat and had it anyhow.

  “He died after that (Amoy), (Lord Peter died twelve months later), and turned into a fish (Amoy). Lord Peter turned into a donkey and is today pulling rocks on a little cart in the same mine whence the blue diamond came.

  “I have to go to work now, but Amoy will tell you the story of the time he was a fish. If there is any part of it that you cannot understand, I will explain it when I am here again.”

  “ISDA,” said Amoy after Ignatius Ti was gone, and that was the entire story of the time he was a fish. If it could be translated out of Tagalog-Parakeet, it would be an interesting story.

  Amoy did not like his name, which means stink. But it had now become an apt part of him, as Amoy had a high old odor and was a sick and dying bird.

  His sickness had been caused by a sadistic medico who had given him a caustic poison to see him writhe. Amoy suffered horribly; they said that when he belched, he belched fire. But he was tenacious of life though his insides were eaten away. He was also under exterior sentence of death and an official order had gone out to kill that stink bird. But he took to the trees when danger came and only entered the ward late at night to talk to his friends.

  Amoy was not really a psycho. He was possibly the best-balanced one in the ward. His delusions of persecution were not delusions; he was persecuted. His unpopularity was not imagined; he was unpopular. Even among his friends he was unpopular, but he tried to be cheerful.

  5.

  The Captain was unhappy. Private Gregory was his worst problem. He said that Gregory's fantasies were due to too little sexual experience. “Captain, I've had a lot of that,” Gregory said, “though most of it not very recent. The other night I counted up thirty wives and only went back about five hundred years. My experience has never been intensive, but it has been very extensive. Except for possibly other long-lived individuals like myself, I've probably had more experience than anyone in the world.”

  This always made the Captain very angry. He did not like to be contradicted. The basic thing about Gregory he believed to be a fallacy, and Gregory knew it to be fact. They would never be able to get together.

  After he left Gregory in an angry mood, the Captain always started on Howell. This was unfortunate, for the Captain and Howell were a little alike (both had the talking disease), and they might have got along if the Captain hadn't always been angry at the start. But then Howell had a theory about doctors that might have precluded any sympathy from the Captain. (It won't be given here: it's true of no more than half of the doctors.)

  The only thing wrong with Howell was that he had developed an odd twitching and quivering in his left hand which had been spotted in his final physical examination. As no physical reason could be found for it, it was assumed that it was mental. And as he tried with gentle humor to soothe the fury of the myopic analysts, they decided that the man was completely over the hill, humor being beyond the brotherhood.

  The Captain said that Howell's twitching was due to too little sexual experience.

  “Hell, Captain, I used to be a rake,” Howell said, “and after that I had the liveliest wife in the world. If Gregory's experiences have been extensive, mine have been intensive.”

  “Repression somewhere, that's sure. The main thing is to do away with all repression, at least as far as your left hand is concerned. Do not deny your left hand anything.”

  “Can I let it know what my right hand is doing?”

  “That is an odd question and I don't quite understand it. Do you personify your left hand in that manner as though it had a separate intelligence? Interesting. You are farther gone than I thought. But do not deny your left hand anything.”

  Howell reached out with his left hand and jerked three hairs from the Captain's little moustache, which exactly decimated it. The Captain was displeased, and the twenty-seven remaining hairs of the moustache twitched and bristled. He was in danger of getting a complex himself.

  After this he started on the Sergeant. He did the same things in the same order every day, coming to Howell when he was angry with Gregory, coming to the Sergeant when he was still angrier with Howell.

  “What is your name today?” he always demanded. “Well, speak up, quick, quick, is it Salvatore, Schultz, Solli, , Stranahan, Szymansky?” Every day he threw names at the Sergeant, but mostly they were the same five or six.

  “Do I have to choose one of those?” the Sergeant asked. “Can't I be someone else?”

  “Those are what you call the Dirty Five. Did you not say that you were one of the Dirty Five?”

  “I'm not sure that I did and I'm not sure that I am. If I have to start all over why can't I be someone new? You asked me once if I identified myself with any of them, and I seemed to identify myself with all of them.”

  “Don't play games with me. You have to learn your name.
This name forgetting comes from insufficient sexual experience.”

  “Then I can't be Salvatore, can I?”

  “Salvatore, was he much of a one? Tell me about him. How was Salvatore?”

  “Oh, put your little hot eyes back in your head, Captain. I just don't want to pick a name today.”

  The Captain could get no cooperation. He went back to his tent to add to his notes on the three cases. And the three cases compared their notes on him.

  Private Gregory was a large handsome man with a skull the size and shape of a big pumpkin, and of a purplish hue. This is not at all contradictory. On him the thing looked good. He was a man who would always be noticed and it is understandable that he would have trouble being obscure. But his solid size and his purple dome were places to start. They were real.

  “If I am Henry,” thought the Sergeant, “then Gregory is very large, for he is larger than I am. And if I am not Henry but some one of the others, then Gregory is still large, but not so large as if I were Henry.”

  The boys had been telling ghost stories in the ward, and Private Gregory told diabolical stories for he said that ghosts were the same as devils.

  “The perfect ghost story is the story of Possession,” he said, “and that is hypnotism from beyond the grave. This is possible since hypnotism is by the will, and the will is immortal. A number of notable men have been possessed, and all of their lives seem to fit a pattern: the inconsequential early years, the hiatus when they stood where Faust stood, and the decision. And then the rise to power and influence and almost universal honor after they have made the deal. But it is not themselves, it is the devils within them that gain these things. They are the possessed men who do much of the running of the world, and theirs is the most frightening story that can be imagined. But those who watch the great men do not know that they are shells inhabited by ghosts.”

  “The ghost story is simply the horror story,” Howell said, “one that raises the human hackles. Now, what are the horrible things? The devils, as you say; the darkness itself; a dead man. And the most grisly of all is the dead man, for that is the familiar gone horrible. A dead man come back to life, a corpse sitting up — that is the cream of a ghost story. It is so horrible that it must be blended with humor to be bearable, and as such it is the essence of a thousand Irish wake stories.

  “Why should a dead man returned to life be more terrible than a simple live man? He should be doubly the object of affection and reverence, clothed with the mystery of the other world, a joy returned to take the place of the grief of parting. That is not the case, however. Most people are afraid of a dead man returned to life.”

  “The horror of the ghost goes back to the early anti-Christians,” Gregory interrupted. “I can remember in the Roman days when those anti-Christ stories were made to scare us. This was the stumbling-block of the new religion, and its enemies made much of it.

  “Consider this to a contemporary who had not the Grace. Here was a man murdered and mangled, wrapped and buried, and the tomb sealed on a Friday night. And on Sunday morning he rises from the dead and walks the earth as a two-day old corpse and tells people he has been in Hell.

  “This was the bogey man of the small Roman children of the Empire: the dead man who breaks out of the grave and comes through closed doors in the middle of the night.”

  Gregory himself was like a purple ghost in the dim light, and he gave a creepy feeling when he talked like that.

  “You boys have talked long enough,” said Ignatius Ti the ward-boy. “I was sent to tell you to shut up, but first I will tell you a story. I will tell it at once as I must go on duty at midnight and there is barely time. First I will tell you why midnight is the spook hour.

  “I come from an island south of here and this was the practice: when a man is sick and has to die it is made known to him, so he decides to die at midnight, and he does die then. This is so he will not be alone when he goes, as several others in the world will die at the same time and keep him company. When it is midnight and the souls pass over, there is a hole in the veil for a moment. Then, if one of the old dead is nimble, he can pass back to the world by the same hole. At midnight I always notice a restlessness even here among you cuckoos, although there are not so many die here now as earlier. You do not like to be left alone in the dark as you all have half a ghost inside you.

  “It bothers me myself who am ordinarily so fearless. Corpses must sometimes be kept here overnight, and usually they are wheeled into one of the supply rooms. Always it is dark there, and when I am sent in to get supplies I have qualms. What if the dead man should sit up indeed. I lift the sheet sometimes and look under. I cover him casually, then rapidly rip it away again to see if I can catch him with his eyes open.

  “Another thing I would like to tell you if you are around dead men much: never turn your back on them. Should a casual bottle of pills drop from one of the shelves and shatter on the rocks, you will always thing that the dead man did it. Should a bedpan fall on your head, you will think that the dead man threw it at you. If a gecko or other lizard drop on your shoulder, you will think that it is the hand of the dead man himself.

  “There is another hazard, the jokers. There is never a new ward-boy who does not have jokes played on him. He will be sent into a room at night where there is a presumed corpse, sent there for something trivial. But it will not be a real corpse there. It will be a medico full of stolen alcohol and in the mood to play a trick. Then, when your back is turned, he will rise from the dead and pinion you. The heart turns to ice when this happens. This passes for humor among the medicos.

  “There is a cure for it which a friend of mine practiced. He was my predecessor on this job. When this happened he was cool. ‘I always said that the doctors should make sure of their dead,’ he'd remark. ‘Even a pig you cut the throat of it.’ Then he'd deliver a terrific chop to the esophagus of the medico joker, and at the same time he'd flip open his flip-knife. The medico would think that his throat was already cut, for a blow to the esophagus is the same as having the throat cut for a moment. My friend had a cast in one eye and had a sinister look when he blazed at one in the darkness. Medicos also can be frightened.

  “However, to my story. Our friend Howell has said that the most horrible things are corpses that sit up. If this were so, then there would be much horror with my people, for all the corpses sit up. They are propped up at the wake and are buried sitting up. The horror is not in corpses that sit up but in corpses that go to bed.

  “But this is the story: There was a young wife, and her husband came to her one night and went to bed. ‘Why, what is the matter with your side?’ she asked. ‘There is a big hole in it. It is as if a knife had gone in,” she said. ‘No. I just scratched it on a rock when I was diving,’ the husband said. ‘It is quite a small hole. You know everything seems bigger in the dark.’

  “She thought no more of it, and in the morning he was gone. It was then that friends told her that robbers had killed her husband the day before with a knife in his side and had left him under the trees in a far place. It had been his ghost that she slept with and she had not known it. It frightened her when she thought of it. That is the story.”

  “Is that all?” Green asked.

  “Sure that is all. It's a good story. Anybody can have a story of a ghost that sits up. I've got the only story of a ghost that goes to bed. It has build-up and suspense, then a quiet climax. And the after-effect hits you — Whammo I believe is the word.”

  Ignatius Ti had to leave to get his bedpans and go to work. It was midnight, and a few loose ghosts came through the hole in the veil and wandered into the psycho yard. They were at home here, and they sat on the feet of the cots and mingled in with the thoughts of the boys.

  6.

  Martin Benning had left the ward after a few weeks, and Green had gone, and George Buckram and Howell. Amoy had died, despairing and alone and in horrible agony. Now there were not many of the old ones left. And the new ones were sullen and
sickly and had no fire in them. One day a Malayan boy came in and called the Sergeant by name and told him that it was time for him to go home.

  “It's an odd thing that you know my name,” said the Sergeant, “when I don't know it.”

  “You have been in the Green Islands long enough, Sergeant. It's time you grow up.”

  “I had thought that I might stay here. To me they are like the Garden. If I leave them, there is nothing left but the World.”

  “Maybe you can some again someday, and maybe they will be nearly the same. But they are not the garden. Now we will have a high old time of it once more, and then you will have to go home.”

  They were drinking jungle juice out of a gourd which was not ordinarily done in the ward. But they were not now in that ward, nor even on that island.

  They had left another and earlier island and now they were on the continent. They were walking down a street of Sydney and they came to the Plaza Hotel. “I cannot go in here with you,” the boy said, “but you go in and see your old friends, and I will go to the Indonesian Club for a few snorts. Then we will go in a canoe to another place.

  The Sergeant went into the Plaza and had gin drinks with Tom Shire and Freddy Castle. Tom was small and dark where before he had been large and fair; but there was no other change in either of them, and they remembered him well.

  They met three red-headed girls named Moira Monroney, Rosemary Riorden, and Minnie McGinty. They swizzled drinks and became friendly. They all made remarkable jokes, and the Sergeant sat on Rosemary's lap for a long while.

  “You and your friends are in legend,” Rosemary said, “and you yourself are from the first Illyria. You are the son of Aeson a demiurge, though you believe his name to have been Giulio and himself a slob. Your companions are Orpheus, Peleus, Euphemus, and Meleager. At a later time you will companion with the Dioscuri. You will plant a field with dragons' teeth against your will. You will be loved by the daughter of Aeetes in her various forms (and I am one of those forms). And you will find the fleece and not know that you have found it.