Zabotski was a quarrelsome man of the ‘Who, me?’ variety. He simply refused to believe some of the stories that he heard about himself as a starter of quarrels.
“I know better,” he'd say. “I'm not like that at all. I am gentleness incognate. Anyone who says that I am quarrelsome had ought to be stomped into a slough and left to drown in his own lies. I wouldn't hurt a fly, surely not a fly caught in molasses. There is no way that I could demean or harm any other being, or even think of harming one.”
So then, Zabotski was not a quarrelsome man. But he got on peoples' nerves for his constant swift pace in everything, but sometimes he was gone for a day or two and gave people a rest from him. At such times, he said that he went to the Pristine World to attend to his affairs there.
And yet his neighbors, by total consensus, found him quarrelsome and offensive. Could every one those neighbors be absolutely mistaken on a matter of fact like that?
Yes, they could be and they were. Those neighbors could all be mistaken about almost everything. Possibly the people in your own neighborhood could not all be mistaken on so many things, but those in Zabotski's neighborhood could be.
So there had seemed to be a quarrel, or at least a skirr of sharp words, between Zabotski and his neighbor Bryan Blackstone who lived on the other side of Homer Hoose, properly two doors from Zabotski; but due to the natural curvature of that block, the properties of Zabotski and Blackstone abutted in back.
“Do not raise the edge of your immortal voice against me, Bryan,” Zabotski had warned during one of those lulls in what seemed to be a quarrel, “I'll build whatever I want to build. But you are mortal, as is your edged voice; and you will wither and die. The wither will be apparent on you tomorrow and you will be dead within five days.” Zabotski was a heavy kidder and this was all kidding, but Blackstone had never understood him.
“Oh Witch-Doctor Zabotski, I defy you,” Bryan had exploded. “You cannot cause my death. I'm stronger than you are.”
“Why should anyone call me a Witch-Doctor?” Zabotski asked in puzzlement, “And whyever or however should I cause a death? It is time that will eat you up and cause your death, Bryan.”
“Not in five days it won't,” Blackstone barked. “I will live to tromp on your grave, Zabotski. “ And Blackstone tromped into his house.
“I wonder why all my neighbors are so touchy,” Zabotski mused out loud. “In the Pristine World, they are free and easy and not touchy at all.”
Blackstone stuck his head out of his door again.
“And get rid of that monstrosity you're building,” be howled, “or I'll have the law on you.”
“I'll build whatever I want to build on my own place,” Zabotski maintained. “And if it does intrude a few meters onto the lots of my neighbors, why that is all fair give and take.”
“Do you fancy yourself a Christ, Zabotski?” myself Melchisedech Duffey asked this sometimes associate of mine in exasperation. “Do you believe that you can curse that man-tree of a Bryan Blackstone and that he will wither and die within five days? Blackstone is no fig tree, and you are no Christ.”
“Blackstone is more like the American Fig, the Sycamore Tree,” Zabotski said. “It's a tall and mottled tree, but it has grubby and trashy fruit. Ah, I'll just send that sycamore tree of Blackstone's ahead of him to wait for his arrival. When he comes to the blessed shore, he will be bewildered if there is not something grubby and trashy to greet him. He will believe that he came unforgiven into an alien place if there is not some second-rate thing there that he can relate to. Mottled Tree, wither and die! By tomorrow let the life be gone out of you and you hang dead on your own branches!”
It may be that the sycamore tree wilted in that very instant. One couldn't see it do it though.
“Do you really believe that you can command a tree and that it will die?” I, Melchisedech Duffey asked him. “And do you really believe that you can command a man to die and he will die?”
“Of course I can command a tree to die and it will die,” Zabotski said. “The meanest man is lord over the tallest tree. This lordship is given to all of us, but not all know how to exercise it. And of course I can not command a man to die. That would be against nature itself and also against my own nature. And even if it were possible for me to command a man to die, that would be of no effect. Duffey, you ask silly questions sometimes.”
“We will see whether the Sycamore tree is dead tomorrow,” I said.
“What could there be to see?” Zabotski asked. “Of course it will be dead, and possibly it will have disappeared.”
“Whatever it is that you're building, Zabotski, it's an eye-sore so far,” I told him. “And it does intrude onto other peoples' land.”
“Ah, not too much,” Zabotski said. “Blackstone is the only one who gets really mad about it. Homer Hoose hasn't looked out of his back window for a long time and he doesn't even know that my contraption is being built there. You surely don't care that it intrudes over your land, do? And the people at the ‘Golden Children's Home and Haven Orphanage’ behind me there don't care about it. The youngest of those people like it. They like to play in it.”
A grubby and trashy fruit of Bryan Blackstone sidled up to Zabotski and to myself Melchisedech Duffey. It was Bryan's little son Baxter. He was nicknamed ‘Bandicoot’ by the other little boys in the block.
“Please don't kill my father, Mr. Zabotski,” little Bandicoot Blackstone begged. “He doesn't mean to be a blow-top any more than you mean to be one. But he is good to us at home and we can't get along without him. Maybe I won't even get to start to school next year if you kill my father. Maybe I'll have to go to work in the mines.”
“Why, Bandicoot,” Zabotski said, “there is no way that I could ever kill your father or any other person. I simply am not made that way. And they don't hire five year old boys to work in the mines nowadays.”
“Then we'll starve,” Bandicoot moaned. “But you said that the wither would be on my father by tomorrow and that he would be dead within five days.”
“Yes, that's true enough, Bandicoot. Then you'll be the man of the family. That should be a proud and happy time for you.”
“Please don't kill my father, Mr. Zabotski,” Bandicoot begged again. Then he went away crying.
“I wonder why that little boy is crying?” Zabotski asked in real puzzlement. Zabotski is a little bit insensate sometimes.
This Zabotski was an odd one in that he sometimes went away for a day or two. No, that's not the way to explain his tricky case. Sometimes he went away for a year or more, but he was always back in a day or two. There, that is the best way the case can be put into words. I have private knowledge on this case, but I cannot explain it more fully than that.
Zabotski believed that, just as the great stars bend the light that shines past them, so he bent the Time that flowed past him. He had no doubt that he was a great star among men. Zabotski and his associate myself Melchisedech Duffey studied the problem of Time a lot, though I discounted the influence that Zabotski might have on objective time.
“Looking back on it, we see all history through a distorting medium,” I said to Zabotski that evening as we worked on a sort of project that we had been busy on. “Someone has placed this opaque and hampering medium as an impediment about us so that seeing we might not understand and hearing we might not hear. It is as if we see everything through a most mysterious time-speed-distortion medium, and as if we ourselves were immersed in that medium. Really, there should be some way of analyzing that substance that we are imbedded in. What is it?”
“It's molasses,” Zabotski said.
“Our past is all so close to us, and it all seems so artificially very far away,” I continued. “I can reach out and grasp a firm hand and find that it is only slightly more hairy than my own. But I lift up my eyes and see that it is a million years away. Are my hand and my mind mistaken, or are my eyes and the evidence mistaken? What is that rock-drawing that you have there Zabotski, and what is the w
riting on it?”
“Your eyes and the evidence are mistaken, Duffey,” Zabotski stated. “This rock-drawing and its writing may be the oldest ‘how-to-build-it’ instruction booklet in the world. This is the clearest copy I've ever had of it, and I've been able to obtain several. I believe that it is the instruction booklet on how to build either a big barn or a big castle. In any case, there will be something very special and ordained about it. Well, I will have to build it to see what it is supposed to be. There's no other way. It's the same thing that I've been working on in my back yard for some time. I believe that the language of the instruction booklet is Hazh-Khazh.”
“But Hazh-Khazh has never been deciphered, Zabotski,” I reminded him.
“I know, that's what slows me down. I have to decipher it as I go along. It sure is going to be a big contraption when I get it finished.”
“Have you considered that you may have the scale wrong and that you may be building it either ten times or a hundred times too large in every dimension?” I asked him.
“Sure I've considered that,” he said. “But I've already started on this scale and I can't very well be mixing scales. There is nothing that says that a model must be smaller than the thing it represents. Mine may be a hundred times bigger in every measurement.”
(Editor's Note: This might seem like strange and rambling stuff to appear in ‘House and Home Happening Magazine’ which is mostly a pop-architectural publication. But there is not any other way to obtain the history of this most interesting structure, the Zabotsky House. Back to Melchisedech Duffey.)
Zabotski and I got along pretty well. And Zabotski disappeared at frequent intervals, and thus he did not become really unbearable.
“In all things we have been going forward rapidly and still more rapidly,” I said to Zabotski once as I studied his charts and schematics. “I know in my heart and in my intuition that we have covered a very great distance in a very short time. But when I look back, I see that I am deceived either at first or at last. I see that we have been moving at such a very slow pace that yesterday is a million years ago. It's as if the whole continuum was made out of — ”
“It's molasses,” said Zabotski. “It's all made out of molasses.”
I pored over various charts and projections and schemata as the sun went down and the stars came out at their observatory window. And Zabotski was building a model of a model of something out of sycamore wood. He did not know yet what it would be that he was building. He measured and calculated and sawed and whittled and fitted and assembled. This model of a model, as described in the old stone pictures and writings, had begun to take shape both here indoors in small and outdoors in large. But the meaning and purpose and name of the construction had not yet leapt out at Zabotski, nor at myself.
“Molasses is a lot like amber,” Zabotski said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead. The name of the thing that is bothering you is the fly-in-the-amber, Melchisedech. But it has been determined that amber does flow very, very slowly. And I believe that anything imprisoned in it lives very slowly also, but still lives.”
“Yes, the fly-in-the-amber, and also the unfilled-bathtub-paradox, Zabotski,” I said. “I calculate that if the water has been running at the rate it is supposed to be running, and for the time that it is supposed to have been running, then the bathtub should have been filled sixteen thousand times. But it hasn't been filled even once. The bottom of the tub has just barely been covered now. Things can not have been going on at the orthodox pace for the orthodox time.”
“No, they have been going on at a much faster pace,” Zabotski said, “but they have been going on for hardly any time at all. Literally it all began yesterday, late yesterday.”
“Tomorrow, as you know, we are to be visited by a group of fundamentalers,” I told him. “I wonder how those ancient fossils of people have survived for so long. What an ignoble senility they show!”
“But no, they aren't old, Duffey,” Zabotski said. “They are always the youngest people in the world. They are younger than we are. No, that's wrong. They are not younger than I am. But they are younger than you and the rest of the people are, even if they have hold of the right idea backwards. Try this on your intuitions, Duffey: the Fundamentalers are not flies in molasses or amber as you are; they are flies in free air. Believe that they should be swatted like flies if you wish, but recognize that they move in the free air and you do not. I grant you that they are tedious people, but we must admit that they are half correct in their ideas. Fair's fair.”
“You are saying that the Fundamentalers may be correct on their time scale, Zabotski? You are a curly-tongued needler, friend.”
“That too, Duffey. But yes, of course they are correct in their time scale, when it is adjusted to the concept of the Pristine World. Ah, here is my life and my love, the Widow Waldo! Fly with me to a better place, Widow Waldo!”
“I had a letter and a call from the State Inspector of Eleemosynary Institutions today,” the Widow Waldo said. “You have got to get that big shack of yours off of the grounds of the ‘Golden Childrens Home and Haven Orphanage’. Maybe the state can't make you remove the part that is on your own lot. So far, they are leaving that to the pressure or the indignation of your neighbors and fellow citizens, and that pressure is rising. But you have got to get rid of that part that intrudes on the Orphanage grounds.”
“Don't give it another thought Widow Waldo,” Zabotski said cheerfully. “It will not be taken care of.”
“You are saying that it will not be taken care of?”
“It will not be, Widow: it will not be removed until it is completed, whatever it is and whenever that will be. So don't give it another thought. Fly with me to a better place, Widow Waldo.”
“I told you that I would not go unless some of the children go also,” the Widow said. She was stuck on Zabotski in spite of him being an ugly and loud-mouthed old man.
“Six of them then,” Zabotski said. “That's how many went in the suggested scenario that accompanied the how-to-build-it kit. And they were somewhat older than yours; they were three married couples. There is something messy about whole bunches of small children on a water trip all cooped up.”
“Messy or not, there will be whole bunches of them,” the Widow Waldo insisted. “You haven't understood all the prototypes of your contraption. Sure it's a ship, sure it's a castle, sure it's an anti-time machine. But it's also a shoe.”
“You mean like the one the old woman lived in?”
“Yes, Zabotski, yes,” the Widow Waldo said. “You catch on slow.”
“W.W., what are all those funny looking animals I've been seeing on the orphanage grounds today?” I, Melchisedech Duffey asked her.
“Oh, they're just green-clay animals, but some of them are a little too much in a hurry. The children got them ready a way early, but a lot of them fall apart after they run around for a little while. They're starting to assemble better ones now though.” Widow Waldo cooked us supper sometimes when we worked at night on the plans and the constructions. Widow Waldo had once been a famous beauty. She had even been Miss America. Then she had married, really it was a sort of stunt that the promoters dreamed up, Waldo Waldorf who was Mr. Body Beautiful of the West North Central States, including Illinois. But this husband Waldo was killed by a jealous rival. After that, Widow Waldo devoted herself to the service of orphans. She was still beautiful, but her beauty was now more subdued than it had been several decades ago when she was Miss America.
Well, it's next morning. And there's something that we can check out. Is the sycamore tree dead? Zabotski had said “Mottled tree, wither and die! By tomorrow the life will be gone out of you and you will hang dead on your own branches.” Well, had it happened or not? It should be easy enough to tell whether the sycamore tree was dead or
not. What was the difficulty?
The difficulty was that the sycamore tree wasn't there.
“Bandicoot!” I, Melchisedech Duffey called to that little Blackstone boy. “Didn't there used to be a sycamore tree right about there? What happened to it?”
“How did you happen to remember about that sycamore tree, Mr. Duffey?” Bandicoot Blackstone asked. “Yes, it died. And we cut it down so it wouldn't fall on someone. How did you remember it? That was a long time ago, when I was a little boy.”
“Oh yes. And how is your father today, Bandicoot?”
“I think he feels seedy. He says he's got the withers. It's the middle age eating him up, he says.”
“Oh yes. And where are you going now, Bandicoot?” I asked.
“Oh, to school.”
“Ah then, you are starting to school.”
“Yes, I'm starting to high school today,” Bandicoot said. “It's almost as if the best part of my life were behind me.”
Well, a few years had slipped by there. That happens to me sometimes, to Zabotski also. The morning sun cast a shadow of Zabotski's contraption. It was larger, much, much larger than it used to be. It was giant.
Some people from the ‘Moral Sanctions Committee for the Removal of Eye-Sores and Abominations’ came up to Zabotski as he stood adoring the morning sun with his eyes and with his extended arms.
“Mr. Zabotski,” said an embattled lady of that committee, “that eye-sore of yours is still there and you have built it even bigger. It is eight years since we reminded you that it was an abomination, and you solemnly swore that you would do something about it on the morrow.”
“No, ma'am,” Zabotski said. “I solemnly swore that I would not do anything about it on the morrow. I believe that people misunderstand me because they do not listen to me closely. And it has now been eight years. It was only yesterday that you reminded me that it was an abomination. Do you not remember that it was only yesterday that we talked on this?”
More Than Melchisedech Page 34
