More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “But the analyst himself died before morning, and his exploration was not and has not been completed.”

  Yes, you could skin Finnegan and throw his pelt into the corner, and it would still crackle with aura and smoke with essence. But one couldn't find all his essence bottled in one place.

  Finnegan was an artist of transcending talent, and as such, he was recognized by Duffey the art dealer and artist dealer. The only medium in which Duffey was a true artist was in the manufactory or activation of people, and in this Finnegan was his greatest masterpiece. No, no, this wasn't a contradiction. It has been said that Teresa was the finest (but not the greatest) thing that Duffey ever wrought. Finnegan was not fine.

  Finnegan was a vagabond, and Duffey had been a master vagabond for seven years. He recognized that Finnegan's whole life so far had been a displaced seven-year wandering through the purgatorial lands that seemed to coincide with the world.

  These were all of Duffey's Animated Marvels. The essence of none of them was easily distilled out:

  The big-brained and big-hearted Hans. What an edifice! The most open man in the world, and who could know him?

  Henri Salvatore (The Emperor Henry of Neustria) who had whole empires within himself and to whom had been given the task of rebuilding the world. Not since Archbishop Turpin of the Charlemagne Cycle had there been so great a prelate who was also so great a general.

  Casey Szymansky whom Duffey had known almost every day of that boy's life, and had hardly known at all. But some of his mentations and notions had already sent tremors through the whole cosmic signaling system.

  Stein of the people! Stein had received one of Casey's old souls in a weird trade, but the combination was older than either of them. Der Kasmir-Stein is known mostly as a remote jewel of India, but it is a hybrid jewel of disparate essences. It was a new appearance here, and its glitter began to make itself felt everywhere. It was not Casey, it was not Stein; it was an abiding spark struck off by their glancing contact.

  Marie Monaghan, ‘Our Southern Nature's Solitary Boast’, the greatest thing that Australia ever gave to the rest of the world.

  Mary Catherine Carruthers (‘But Thou, Chicago Ephrata, out of Thee shall come — ” ), how many of the great ones have overlooked her to their loss?

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer who was the pride of both Galveston Texas and Morgan City Louisiana. More of her, more of her forever!

  Dotty Yekouris who was a journalist and a member of the prestigious ‘Poison Pen Society’, as well as barmaid.

  And Finnegan and Showboat Teresa Piccone and Mr. X. X will not be given now. He plans careful entrances, and he will enter in his own time.

  Aw c'mon, you know that there aren't people like any of these where you come from. Some pilgrims will wander through a lifetime without meeting even one genuine Duffey Animation. And there are eleven who were in one city at one time, if they had only been there.

  Was it absolutely certain that this was the original crew of the original Argo? Yes, it was certain. It has been checked out and proved.

  The wedding was a fine one, done by one of the perfect couples and by Father McGuigan in Teresa's parish church (the Stranahan's church too; they lived only a block apart). There were numbers of distinguished Irishmen and Italians there, and smatterings of the people of barbarian races.

  The reception was a grand one. Duffey shined by his antics, and he was outshined by many of his own people, especially the Finnegan who surpassed himself. There was pleasure and grandeur (people are entitled to that on such occasions), and also some of the scrubbiest carrying-on ever. And there was the time when things were coming to their glorious winding-down and Dotty Yekouris with hands on hips had looked at the magus and laughed:

  “Thou’rt perfect, Duffey!”

  “Such early perfection will do the boy in,” Henri Salvatore warned. “If he would be still more perfect, let him follow me.”

  And Duffey had to speak to Henri about that for a moment:

  “You wrote to me ‘Come to St. Louis’, Henri, and I came,” Duffey said. “But you have not yet given me the scenario for the rest of my life. Give it now.”

  “Come to New Orleans,” Henri said. “You have been here in Damascus — St. Louis, for a week, and you have been given the opportunity for blindness and recovery, though I haven't noticed you undergoing either of the experiences. Now you can go to New Orleans and labor there for the rest of your life. There was a blessed place there, an asphalt garden, and you will grow cucumbers in it for the rest of your days. You'll grow them for the Greater Glory, and they'll be superior ones.”

  Finnegan, Henri, Duffey, Dotty, and Mary Schaeffer all got into Mary's Ford and drove down to New Orleans. This was the last Saturday of May of the year 1946.

  And also, on that last Saturday of May of 1946, on the almost-island of Crimea, out of a deep iron-doored dungeon, the Devil was released from his thousand-year imprisonment.

  But hadn't he been released just a hundred years before that, in 1846? We don't know. Maybe the release was a recurring thing.

  Book Six

  ‘For this Melchisedech was King of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him to whom Abraham divided the tithes of all. First, as his name shows, he was King of Justice, and then he was also King of Salem, that was, King of Peace. Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but likened to the Son of God, he continued a priest forever”¦ But he whose genealogy is not recorded among them received titles of Abraham and blessed him who had the promwase.

  [Paul. Hebrews.]

  Several other primary documents are here. They are necessary for an understanding of the recent history and present condition of the world. Primary documents are always like treasures of gold and gems spread out to daylight. Or they are like gold and gems would be if they were many times more rare than they now are.

  ‘With buck-swords in Neustria during the millennium! Duffey died there, during the seven hidden years of his life, and somebody saved his ashes in a cigar box or humidor or urn. It wasn't an ordinary cigar box or whatever. It was an extraordinary sixteenth receptacle, and it had belonged to the King of Spain. Mr. X. later brought this receptacle with its ashes to Duffey. There are very few men who keep their own ashes in a cigar can on their desks.

  ‘The ‘Devil in His Dungeon’ was both historical fact and valid element of the folk unconscious during the one-thousand-year period from the years 946 to 1946. We will miss ‘The Devil in His Dungeon’. He almost guaranteed that things were well in the upper part of the house. Nostalgia was born with the loosening of the Devil from his Crimean dungeon in 1946.

  The word ‘nostalgia’ was used before that, but not in the same meaning. The world had lived through a thousand-year-long ‘good old days’ without knowing it. Now there will not be such good days, and there will not be much nostalgia for the trashy evil that we now live and breathe. ‘Neustria’ or ‘Latter Neustria’ are unhandy names for the real empire of the one thousand years. ‘Christendom’ was a handy and true name for the era and extent, but use of such words will not very long be permitted now. We enter a new era of slavery where only incoherence and evil will be permitted.

  ‘The ‘Waves of the Future’, of which we have heard for near a lifetime now, are backward phenomena breaking onto the past. Hitler was indeed a man of the future, or from the future, but he was raiding backwards into history. He correctly appraised that the province he was raiding backwards into, ‘Greater Neustria’, had a thousand year extent, but he was a man without direction in several ways. But surely he knew that he was traveling out of the future and impinging on a present and past from the wrong direction than himself. These are still with us, and they are achieving popular adoration. They show that the future will be so evil, but at the same time so cheap and contemptible a thing, that we need not fear to attack it.’

  [Absalom Stein.
Notes on the Finnegan Cycle.]

  ‘The infectors or kindlers are themselves now stunned by the violence of the infection. They had gone in small groups for not much more than one hundred years. Since the metaphorical earlier release, they defiled mildly and they infected mildly, and they set their fires with small and flickering torches. Their doings seemed to be no more than token things, curious incursions of the several generations of the Sons of the Devil. But now there was effect. Believe me, they themselves are amazed by the present scope of the conflagration that has developed in the decade and a half since the deaths of the Papadiaboloi. It was almost as if the kindlers did not intend it.

  ‘I knew many of these infestors, and I have data on all of them in my files. They were all incomplete and ineffectual persons, going about their dark business in almost somnambulistic fashion. They were dull and isolated blotches of paint, carrying no message and understanding none; but they have accidentally come together to form a clear and fearsome picture whose initial design was too deep to come from themselves. Perhaps, as has been said, their Father Himself really has been released this time. But the infestors were jagged little shards of base metal, brittle and soft and worthless, and with no conception of pattern. Together, though, they formed the strong brazen key which unlocks the iron door and released him who was confined for the day of the great thousand.’

  [Melchisedech Duffey. Letter to John Schultz.]

  ‘Jesus Christ was the total opposite of the revolutionary. He was the strong partisan of every jot and tittle of the law. After all, he made the law. The only way He could be a revolutionary was against Himself. But Jesus Barabbas (we now know that this was the correct name of the instigator) was a revolutionary all the way. Barabbas was a cheap-shot artist and a cheap-effect artist, as are his followers even till this day. It was Jesus Barabbas whom the ‘Jesus People’ follow, but they pretend that there was only one Jesus. This brings us to the question of ‘Dark Followers’ or ‘Dark Companions’ or ‘Dark Correspondences’, to groups and institutions, as well as to persons.

  ‘The Argo sailed westward again and again from Illyria, but the Hadriaticus sometimes proved to be a sea without any far shore, and sometimes it was a sea whose Western shore was not Italy. Oh certainly, I sailed on the Argo again and again and again. Do you not remember? I was Orpheus. We came to a wide variety of shores, named and nameless, but we did not come to any imaginary shores. All were real, and almost all of them were dark shadows of other shores and voyages. Don Juan made a good thing out of this: he pulled a frame-up and arranged that a shoddy double of him should go to hell in his place. And it happened so. But Don Juan was himself the shoddy double of a most elegant and most depraved sinner, and he was entrapped into serving an eternity in a most elegant and most painful hell for a man of sins too refined for himself ever to find pleasure in.

  ‘Casey Szymansky, out of compassion, traded souls with Stein and agreed to go to hell in his place. It was a successful deal from Stein's standpoint, and nothing succeeds like success. Stein came into Casey's brains and his talents as side effects of the same deal, and he grows grander and brighter while Casey shrivels. Stein had all the good things now, and they shall not be taken away from him.

  ‘I am tired, and I go into incoherence. I see true connections that I cannot see in moments of clarity, but I am not able to express them. The enemy has designed this obstacle for us. But the enemy may not know that I have a wife who was able to make clarity out of my incoherent expressions. Please do so, dear.’

  [John Schultz. Letter to his wife Marie.]

  ‘Finnegan seeks death and does not find it. That is the main point of his puzzling quest. His own fleece was named thanatos and not mallion. Finnegan did not die in the ward in the hospital in the Philippines. But somebody died there in his name, and an army-doctor-friend of mine wrote me that Finnegan did die there in his presence, which letter I received the same day that Finnegan arrived in St. Louis. This amazed me, but it didn't seem to amaze Finnegan when I showed the letter to him.

  ‘Finnegan did not, apparently, die on the landing at Naxos, though X swears that one of the bodies was Finnegan's. But X himself spent the latter part of that same week in Finnegan's company. A thing like that would not bother X, but it bothers me.

  ‘Finnegan did not die in the cabin of the Brunhilde, but someone died there at the hands of Papadiabolous. He did not die at Tangier with Don Lewis, and yet there were two dead bodies at the bottom of the tell. He did not die at the hands of Saxon X. Seaworthy on Galveston Island, though Doll Delancy found a body she was sure was Finnegan's, and Miss Delaney knew Finnegan well. And possibly Finnegan did not die on the Marianao Coast near Havana. I believe, in spite of all the reports, that he is still alive. I also believe that I have run athwart of several tall-story artists, not the least of whom are the army doctor-friend of mine, Doll Delancy, and Finnegan himself. But the death quest has always been there.

  ‘Finnegan is a double phougaro or funnel, the link between two different worlds. Yet there are characters (X, Biloxi Brannagan, Doll Delancy, Melchisedech Duffey) who have verifiable existence in both of the worlds. Finnegan himself believed that he was subject to topological inversion, that one of thee worlds was always interior to him and the other world exterior to him, and that they sometimes exchange places. But where does that leave us who live in either of the two worlds? Are we not sometimes reduced to being no more than items in the mind of Finnegan?

  ‘This topological inversion also occurs in the case of Melchisedech Duffey. In one form of the inversion, Melchisedech was the ‘creator’ of a dozen or so of us. Well, so he was then. I have felt it of myself and known it. But that was only in the least plausible of his contingent worlds.

  ‘As to the voyages, there is the question of ships. Is the Brunhilde the first ship, or was it the third? Was it the original Argo? Or was it a later and unsanctified appearance of that ship, following the Bark in time? We have also the question of superimposed levels of experience in the Cruise of the Brunhilde. X says that not all of the events of that voyage happened to Finnegan in the first decade of the second antebellum period: he says that a strong substratum of them happened to Giulio Solli, the Monster Forgotten, the Father of Finnegan, in the decade before World War I, and that Finnegan has filial memory of them. The atmosphere of that earlier period does sometimes break in strongly on the voyage. But so much of this information depends on X who is not to be depended on.

  ‘Finnegan is out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Táin Bó Cúailinge). This pre-supposed that Finnegan was identical with Fingal and also with Cú Chulainn. Well, Finnegan was capable of being all of them. To those interested in this line, I recommend Thurneysen's Die Irische Helden-und-Königsage. There was repetition of some of the incidents of the Seven Hidden Years of the life of Melchisedech Duffey and of some of the Brunhilde-Finnegan incidents. It is not even certain that Duffey (whose Seven Hidden Years were all before the birth of Finnegan or in his earliest childhood) has first claim on the anecdotes. Duffey knew Giulio Solli the father of Finnegan, and Duffey pirated and ransacked the mind of Giulio as he did so many others.

  ‘I myself was present at several of the Brunhilde-Finnegan episodes (whether in the flesh or out of the flesh, I do not know: God knows); I was present at one meeting of Don Lewis and Manuel of which Finnegan knew nothing, so I could not have lifted this from Finnegan's mind. And I was present and watched them dine in death-like glitter on the Grand Canary. John Schultz also experienced a rapport with one of the Brunhilde incidents.

  ‘The loves of Finnegan are as puzzling as his deaths. Most of them did not happen in the flesh or in time, though several puzzled women believed that they happened.

  ‘We are all of us in legend. It was absolutely impossible that anyone should be in life who has not first been in Legend. But no one of us understands his own legend. Mary Schaeffer says that I am the Wandering Jew, particularly in my writing style. I have not at all determined the exact relationship of
the Argo Legend to the Finnegan Cycle.’

  [Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Legend and Further Notes on the Finnegan Cycle.]

  ‘Finnegan is a ghost, of course. Which of us is not? But he has the peculiar habit of coming and and inhabiting people. All the Fivers understand this, and they are not spooked by the spook, except Casey a little bit. Have pity on all poor people who never had a ghost of their own! Vincent says that Finnegan is the third person in our marriage, sometimes inhabiting him, and more often me; that Finnegan was both Anima and Animus to us. Vincent has been reading Jung, and oh my poor husband, you have not the brains for him!

  ‘It scared Stein the first time he experienced a Finnegan Visitation. He believed that it was a death visitation, and he made note of the time and date. It was the afternoon of Passion Sunday of the year 1948. Well, why shouldn't Finnegan be both a person and a ghost at the same time if he have a talent for it? I have that talent myself.

  ‘I played a part in one of the episodes. I was the Oread Anemotrephes in the sequence on the Mountain. I was clearly conscious of it all: I played it like a comic skit at the old Star and Garter. I was displeased at the way the other two Oreads handled their parts. It's the ethnicity of them, I think. We get quite a few Greek girls at the Star and Garter in one act or another. They're kind of pretty, they're kind of sexy, but they can't act. Simplistic as hell they are, and kind of wooden. I don't care if they did invent acting: they're no good at it.