“Margaret, what sort of convention was going on in town last night?”
“Oh, just three or four very ordinary ones. No, this is the straight dope, Mary V. I wasn't cordial on the stuff last night. And the courtyards and parks and nooks aren't new, except for not being there before. They're quite old and weathered, and they're full of almost the biggest trees in town. They're very ingrown and curious. New things aren't usually that ingrown and pleasant. And the thing that chokes me is that nobody remembers what was in those places yesterday. ‘I live there,’ one man said (you know him, he's that Russian Sarkis Popotov), ‘and now there's a place next door to me named Artaguette Park. It looks unfamiliar to me, but some of those horsey tourists who are in town say that it'll look familiar by tomorrow. I've lived there for forty years, and I know that there were some kind of buildings next to me, but I sure can't remember what they were.’ That's what old Sarkis said. And there are other places like that. The town's full of them this morning.”
“What were the people in the Quarter drinking last night, Margaret?”
“Green Ladies mostly,” Margaret Stone said. “You know, like Peppermint Schnapps, except with absinthe instead of the schnapps. That's what everybody has been drinking all week. Why don't you go with me to the Pop History meetings today, Mary Virginia?”
‘Margaret was small and intense, with a large voice that was saved from stridence only by a certain music in it. But it broke at least once a week, and it wasn't nearly as large. She was Italian and Jew, with possibly a little bit of the Greek and the Pre-Adamite in her. She would have been beautiful in repose, but no one had ever seen her so.’ So, at least, an old describer has described her. But he didn't mention the terrible tragedy and passion that was sometimes in her face. It was because people so seldom listened to what her musical voice said that there were such stark things in her face. The passion and tragedy in her face had increased lately. So had a certain threat that refused to give its name.
And Mary Virginia, her associate at the Pelican, had everything. Her kindness was extreme, but lately it had acquired a vacant quality, as though she could no longer remember just whom or what to be kind to. Her beauty alone would knock you off your stool forever. That had happened to a number of fellows. It wasn't true that her beauty had begun to fail in the last several decades. It had become deeper and fuller.
“As you know, I seldom get out of this place, Margaret,” Mary V. said. “And the Pop Historians don't sound all as attractive as that. There are very many things going on this week, if I should go out. Horny Henderson is on the Trumpet at the Imperial John. They have a new singer at Red Neck's. Justin says that the Jazz Museum has so much new stuff over there that it'd take a week to see and hear it all. The Presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House this week will transcend everything. We have to go there tonight. There's a big bunch of new painters in the galleries and around Pirates' Alley, and Duffey says that one of the new ones could almost be the ghost of Finnegan, the way he uses his oranges. There's a couple of Dominicans giving a mission at Ste. Katherine's. It's full of hell-fire, just like when we were kids. They say that our world will end, right here this week. The ‘Nostalgia Club’ should get hold of them. ‘As American as hell-fire and apple-pie,’ as Mencken used to write. And you want me to go to a Pop History Banger? And you don't even know where they're having it?”
The scene changes to just around the corner, over on Chartres Street or whatever street it was that Duffey now had his establishment on. Yes, there had been a new breeze blowing during the night. Well, it was a retrospective breeze. You remembered it now, hearing it, but you didn't notice it at the time when it had been happening. But now it was blowing for real, blowing down the façades, and some of the whole buildings, with a rattling and crashing. Duffey had been out very early, and had turned his ankle in a pothole. Then wild things began to happen, and they began to have happened for quite a few hours before. You wouldn't think that stepping into a pothole would make that much difference.
The scenery, the façades, the false fronts (but they hadn't been false till right at the time of their destruction) were toppling and breaking up in the streets outside, and there was the sound of tearing canvas and scorching rubber and stuttering styrofoam. It wasn't a joke. It was all straight impression. There really was something noisy and airish going on outside in the streets. It was like a strong experience of anthropomorphic colts, a great clatter of them.
“A Strong Experience of Anthropomorphic Colts!” Duffey howled at his own half-conscious word train that had been going through his head. “I've roused up with a mouthful of pretty crocky phrases before, but these anthropomorphic colts outrace them all.”
Duffey never locked his doors, but sometimes (late at night) he did close them. He had inventories worth many thousands of dollars. These solid money items formed the heart of Melchisedech Duffey's Walk-In Art Bijou. And the bijou, the pawn shop, the various other enterprises, his living quarters, his very body were all members of this one establishment. He would not lock up any of them.
Yes, the door was still wide open, as he had left it when he hobbled in with his slightly twisted ankle. And he had heard a slight noise at that door, that came to him over the thumping and clattering noises in the streets. The door opened inward, as did Duffey himself. And there was a notice nailed to it that hadn't been there when he had re-entered an hour before. It was on some sort of old, yellowed poster cardboard, and it was nailed to the door with a long and ancient nail.
Duffey read the notice or message. It was in the new style of writing, so it was a non-verbatim message. The words ‘Pop History’ leapt out at him. Then other and more fearsome words came and ate up those first words, and established themselves with an easy arrogance. Slogans like ‘We said to get rid of that stuff’, and ‘It doesn't matter — they're only human’ took their places on the scroll, and then other phrases came forward and these withdrew to less emphatic levels. The whole thing was a proclamation, but it was a very tricky one.
Then Duffey again read what he could of it, with unbelief and near alarm. There was a difficulty about the words. Duffey still had some trouble with the new style of writing, even though words were one of his trades. But there didn't seem to be much doubt about the first meaning. Duffey was sociable: he was hospitable: but the message mentioned numbers that were overwhelming. It stated that he was favored and selected to lodge two hundred or more royal persons at his establishment. It stated that these were serious persons of a scientific sort, persons of blazing beauty and towering mentality and perfumed perversion and breath-catching art: all this in the intensity and scope of the thunder dimension. That sounded like pretty vaunting stuff. It stated that such splendid persons were used to the best in accommodations. And it said that Duffey was selected for this honor because of his great age and erudition. It gave the name of the convening society. But something was missing from the name and message, something that can only be called verbatimness. There were very tricky things about the words of the message refusing to stand fast and be accounted for.
This Duffey has been called ‘a patriarch without seed, a prophet without honor, and a high-sounding brawler’. He was a man of uncertain age (this fact about him had assumed importance lately): and he was a willful man who was held on peculiar checkrein by forces unknown. But he was a spacious man and he could be forgiven many inconsistencies.
Duffey rocked on his feet and lowered at the writing and thought about it in an effort to make up his mind. It was a ritual sort of thing that was nailed to his door, and it deserved a ritual answer. Duffey got a pen and bowl, and he wrote an answer in his hieratic hand at the bottom of the scroll. It was not old poster cardboard that the scroll was made out of. It was now seen to be old parchment. Duffey wrote:
“Royal Pop People, I am honored. And you are welcome. But my facilities are quite limited, as is my credit. I will be host to as many of you as I can be. No man can do more. Somehow you will all be taken care of
.
Signed, Melchisedech Duffey.”
He paused for a while, and he stirred the ink in the bowl. Then he wrote a bit more:
“If this is a hoax, then it's a howling hoax.”
Out of affectation, Duffey wrote all official things with this squid ink that he kept in a bowl. This was the finest ink ever. It will not coagulate. Write anything at all in squid ink. Then write something else beside it in ordinary ink. Come back in three thousand years, or even in ten years, and notice the difference. The squid ink will have remained true and unfaded; the other will have paled. But squid ink had gone out of fashion. The prime message on the parchment, however, was also written in squid ink, and there weren't many people who used it these last few centuries.
Duffey examined the parchment, and later he would examine it again and again. “We will come back to you, skin of a horny goat,” he said. “Oh, how we will come back to you!” He turned his attention then to the nail that held it. It was large, and it appeared very sharp. It was not, as Duffey had at first thought, either brass or bronze. It was a copper-iron nail, and it was of old Macedonian workmanship. Odd, but not very.
For there were in that city many members of the “Society of Creative Anachronisms” , a social and historical and dramatic society. These people were all friendly to Duffey, and Duffey suspected them of a hoax. They put great effort in some of their hoaxes.
Duffey, a widow-man of loose and informal establishment, now made himself ready for the day and its apparent adventure. He caught again the whiff of the new breeze blowing, and part of that whiff was made up of putridity, that emanation of changes a-working. He dressed, daubed whiting on his beard and hair (they had both been turning disquietingly black lately), and went out into the streets to find comradeship and adventure and breakfast. Yes, there was indeed a new breeze blowing. It wasn't a great air-mover of a breeze; but it brought a rumbling freshness, a bracing and reminiscent aroma, a rakish sense of rot, and an altogether vivid accord with things as they are and as they were becoming.
And it brought a sudden and happy discord with things as they had not been before. Certainly there had always been several buildings right next to Duffey's place, on the left when one comes out. And just as certainly those structures of whatever kind were not standing there now.
Just what was there was a little harder to say. One couldn't get a clear view of the area, or one wouldn't have believed his eyes if he had gotten a clearer view. The powers shouldn't spring these things on a man so early in the morning. Something was in the act of being born in that area. There were bales of greenery. There were bales of shadow. There were other bright things already there, or arriving. But this pleasant confusion hadn't quite put itself together yet.
The streets were trashy, though trash trucks were everywhere working on the clean-up. Here and there, the sidewalks were slippery with blood, but it was blood of no great validity. There was a lot of synthetic fiber lying around, and very little of authentic flesh.
And there were a few newly homeless cur dogs, and vacant oddity people, and evil spirits skulking about the sites. They had been dislocated from their places and from their forms. And their new and unpleasant confusion was another thing that hadn't been able to put itself together yet.
“It is you who have destroyed my house and my body,” one of the uncreations hissed at Duffey. Duffey could not determine whether it was a cur dog or a snake or a spirit or a person. “It is you who have done it with that rectitude of yours,” the thing said. Duffey did have his rectitude, but these uncreations did not seem to have much of anything.
“I cannot anyway remember who lived next door to me here,” Duffey mumbled into his beard, not to the uncreations but to himself, “or who it was who transacted business in this place so near to my own. This is a puzzle. And yet I've lived and worked here for several decades, and various persons have lived here beside me; I now suspect that they were nothing-people all this time, and that they have descended to their perdition or oblivion.”
Duffey walked a block and noticed a handful of other disappearances and changes, as well as several pleasant new arrivals. Some of the broken-up puppets or dummies in the streets reminded him of persons whom he had known. Some of them opened effigy months and croaked at him in voices that he had known. The discarded little abominations were almost in bad taste.
But not everything had changed. Duffey entered one of the old and gracious places that had remained (considerably changed, though, it seemed, from the day before), and he sat down with a happy sigh. And a friend of his was sitting with him instantly. In that place, that always happens.
“I hear that you are playing host to some sort of historical group, Duffey,” Absalom Stein was saying as they sat together and planned a breakfast at Giraredeau's Irish Restaurant. Absalom was an Israelite in whom there was much guile, but he averaged out to a good man, and sometimes he wrote for the Investigator (that was Duffey's newest journal) as well as for the Bark. “How long is this convention going to last, Duffey?”
“I don't know at all,” Duffey said. “All I remember are the words ‘Pop History’. Then other words came out and gobbled them up and began to make demands for two hundred or more people. You seem to know something about it, so I suspect that you're in on the hoax.”
“No I'm not, Duff, but I may get in on it. Why shouldn't I know about it? We have all become intuitive since (Oh, I guess it's just this morning), since we began to realize that we belonged to the new pleasant people. But there's a lot of loose stuff floating around town this morning, and I suspect that your ‘Royal Pop History’ bunch may be the handle to take hold of it by. I'm afraid that they're going to make us give up a lot of our old items as not being splendid enough to keep.”
“No, this man is not in on it,” the young lady said to Duffey, “though I now invite him to join us. Oh, we never know how long these things will last. We will be in session until we get certain points settled and certain remnants rooted out. Your friend here, the Stein, is worried because a few people have gone away and he can't remember who they were. I say that if one can't remember them, then it's a good thing that they're gone. If they were superb and splendid enough, then they would be remembered. Let them pass out of all memory and be no more.”
This young lady, she had ‘Royal Pop People’ written all over her. She was excessively one of them. She was ‘The Countess’, a teenage archetype among the Splendid People.
“But I have a peculiar affection and passion for unmemorable persons,” Absalom Stein said carefully. “I feel that I'm responsible for some few of them that nobody else would bestow a thought on. I suspect that it's just that they are swallowed by oblivion if nobody remembers them at all, and then it would become the case that they had never existed at all. I can feel a dozen or so of them now, hanging on by the very nails of their fingers on the rim of oblivion, bawling against extinction, but almost certainly doomed to that pit or cauldron and be extinguished. So it will be with them if someone will not give them a thought. I come closest to remembering them of all the people left in the world; I know that. But I cannot come close enough. I could bring them back from nothingness if I could form their faces in my mind. I can't. But I'll still try it.”
“You are playing with very sticky fire, Oh Absalom,” the young countess said. “It may be that you will go with them to the nothingness where they have gone if you show such an unhealthy interest in them.”
“What is it that you call your society, lady?” Duffey asked. Duffey couldn't remember just when this young lady had sat down at the table with them. He couldn't remember whether he knew who she really was. He seemed very slow at catching onto things this morning.
“Sometimes we call Ourselves the Thunder Harps,” the countess lady said, “and sometimes we call ourselves other things. How is it that you have to ask me the nature of our group? You are a man of very great age and honor, and you are an affiliate of ours.”
“What? Am I a Thunder Harp?” Duff
ey cried with breakfast heartiness. He was dislocated and confused by this new air of change or mutation, but he would never admit his confusion to the world.
“Oh, of course,” the young lady said. “You've been one of us almost forever. You're one of the perennial bushes. I suspect that you're thousands of years old. You have those little green moss marks at the corners of your eyes, and there are many other signs. Why does it scare you, Duffey, when people spot you as one of the very old ones? Don't you want to be old and honored? And why ever should it startle you when you feel the green seasons returning to you and you know that you'll be appearing younger and younger for a few decades? You've surely been through these happenings often enough. How old are you anyhow?”
A waitress was pouring coffee powder into the urn. The name of the coffee was ‘New Splendor’. Duffey had honestly never heard of the brand before, and he wasn't sure that he liked it, if that was what he had been drinking. Oh, it had a lot of new tastes in it, and many of them were pleasant. And what about the eggs he was eating? What about the sausage? Did that come from a pleasant hog? But this was one of the new ‘with-it’ places, though barely. There was still some of the old showing through, in spite of signs that read ‘Be Splendid’, ‘Are You Splendid Enough?’, ‘Be Splendid, or Perish’, ‘Be Splendid, and If You Can, Be Noetic’.
“How old am I?” Duffey mumbled. This young lady had asked the unsettling question that Duffey had never been able to answer. Well, how old did that lady think that she was? She looked to be about seventeen years old. She wore the scent named ‘Timeless’, but who could be sure of her? She was just one of the ‘New Royal Pop People’ who had taken over the directorship of everything. And how did she happen to be eating breakfast with them?
More Than Melchisedech Page 39
