More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Whatever we do must accord with scientific methods and processes,” Stein said.

  “Always some of us (you and I, Stein, for example) have known that we were of the elite,” Melchisedech Duffey was saying, “that we were special, that we were  —  well  —  splendid. And always others of us (Zabotski here, for instance) have known that they were not these things. But now it is presented to us, both inwardly and outwardly, that we have become two different species. Almost none of this presentation has been on a conscious level, but now it comes to a point where we must face it consciously.”

  “I don't understand you, Duffey. I said scientific methods and processes,” Stein protested, “But not scientific-accepted content. That would be to bow too deeply to science. Much has been made about scientific content of subject matter, but it's all nonsense. ‘Scientific’ means simply ‘knowing’. And one must knowingly handle the unknown as well as the known. We go into the unknown, which is to say, the unscientific, waters now.”

  “What you're saying, Absalom, is that you don't know what to think about these tacky things any more than anyone else does,” Zabotski interrupted.

  “No. I, we, don't know what to think about them, not yet. But perhaps we can know how to think about them. Let us see if we can make a working sketch of that ‘how’.”

  “Balderdash!” Zabotski shouted. “I could set you straight, but I won't.”

  “It's true that we've changed,” Duffey was saying. “We are not the same sort of people that our fathers (of which I had none) were. But have we changed so completely as to become a new species? Or were some of us always of a separate species? Yes, let us investigate this in the tradition of the great, free-wheeling, nontraditional scientists, from the viewpoint of an O'Connell or a Field or a Watson or a Spraggett.”

  “We have first to state our problem,” Stein said. “What is our problem or question?”

  “Our question, our eternal question,” said Duffey, “is ‘how does the world get along so well with so many things always going wrong with it?’ A puzzler.”

  “You think that the world goes well?” Zabotski asked with a hang-jawed expression.

  “It goes beautifully, man, beautifully!” Duffey beamed. “It somehow avoids being choked in its own trash and fatuity. Let us consider whether the strange things that have been happening in town today are part of what keeps the world running so well. Or does it run so amazingly well because there are so many of us amazing people in it? Let us ask this fairly, as great scientists like Churchward and Pauwels and Senday and Allegro would ask it.”

  “Why not ask whether the strange happenings are happening at all,” Zabotski asked. “Why not ask whether you are amazing at all, or whether you are overtaken by an attack of bilious euphoria. I could probably tell the answer if someone would ask me the question.”

  “Zabotski is right,” Stein asserted. “Let's find out whether these things are really happening. I don't believe that they are. They're not plausible. How's about a large dragon turning into papier-mâché as he dies, and still able to eat crackers with his dying head? That's what the kid said was happening, the kid that just ducked in here for a minute, the kid that looks like Finnegan. These happenings are in the balance, but they're not fixed yet.”

  “I believe that all historical happenings must be chemically fixed like memory fixes. If they are not, then they haven't happened. Encountered phenomena are first recorded as electrical impulses in the brain. Then, after a few seconds or even minutes, they receive a chemical fix and they become permanently accessible memories. But if the recording does not receive the chemical fix, then it is forgotten. It will not be subject to any kind of recall at all. In such cases, it is more than metaphor to say that the event did not happen.

  “So it may be with certain events that have been ‘happening’ in our city today. So it is with contingent events in every place every day. If the events turn out to be transitory, then they will escape instrumental notice as well as mental recording. There have been, for me, some very hazy unhappenings today. They fade, they weaken, they unhappen. Soon, possibly, they will be gone.”

  “They will not be gone before tonight's presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House,” Zabotski stated. “Let them count the dead after that is over with. Then we may be able to say whether the things happened or not.”

  “It's like the poltergeist stuff, like the saucer-riding stuff, like the hairy-giant stuff,” Duffey said. “A dozen times as many of such things are first observed as will go into permanent report or permanent memory. With many of them, it is the case that while they are happening at one end they are unhappening at the other. And if they finally come unhappened, then they become unremembered also. They are like daytime dreams, like skylarks, like walkabouts. It is only by accident that a person remembers one out of many such dreams when he is jarred back into awareness. But with the walking and talking daytime dreams, our imaginations are outside of our heads; just as they are all inside of our heads with the nighttime dream. If by accident we happen to remember one of our daytime dreams after we are jarred back to comparative awareness, then that thing will really have happened. And here is the point: it will have happened for everyone as well as for ourself.

  “But if we do not remember it, then it did not happen, not for ourself, not for anybody. What then is the result when one person remembers it clearly, and all others forget it completely? Or when one person forgets it clearly and all other persons remember it completely?”

  “The result is group paranoia,” Stein said. “It's common. And such splitting may be a common cause of it.”

  “But I will remember these things just out of orneriness,” Zabotski said. “No one can persuade me to forget any part of them. I will drive the whole town bugs either way. If other people remember them, then the things have to have happened: and they will be enough to drive anybody bugs. If the other people do not remember them, I still will remember. This brings on the paranoia, and that is another name for bugs. I have you all either way. I do this because I am an ornery man.”

  “I wonder how many of these potential happenings are weighed in the happening balance every day?” Stein asked. “There may be dozens.”

  “There may be millions,” Duffey said. “Any daytime dream of any person could become real and of actual occurrence, if it were sufficiently insisted upon. I believe that there are unbodied syndromes of possible events roaming the world like packs of dogs, looking for places to feed and live. And I believe that a particularly grotesque nexus of such unhappenings is trying to take up residence in our city today. Ah, how would all those great and swinging scientists think about this thing? How would Braden? How would Cayce? How would Velikovsky? How would Otto?

  “The syndrome has survived for some hours already. People at this moment are murdering other people by the hundreds in our town, and it is only because those other people are not splendid enough. It's like an euphoric dream in which one says ‘I'm dreaming, it doesn't count, they're not real bodies, it isn't real blood’. But what if it is real? The new species, if we have become a new species in significant numbers, is essentially euphoric. I know that I've become euphoric beyond all reason. But is this horrifying stuff that is lurking behind the euphoric veil really happening? No, not yet. But, at this very moment, it's in the balance whether it will have happened or not.”

  “Easy, Duffey, easy!” Stein said. “You'll not give in, Zabotski?”

  “I'll not give in. I'll remember it and I'll make it happen. I'll teach them to push things like that. And I'll be killed for it, and all of my sort will be killed. That's all right. What effect will it have on you when we are gone? A cramping knot in the middle of you that you can't untie, that's what will happen. Oh, you'll remember us all right. I always wanted to drive a whole town and a whole world bugs.”

  “Zabotski, if what we're thinking is correct, then some one person in this town, some deformed dreamer, did happen to have this obstreperous dream first.
And he also had the obstreperous desire to make this dream come true, out of, out of plain — ”

  “Out of plain orneriness, Absalom, that's the word,” Zabotski said.

  “Zabotski couldn't have done it,” Duffey insisted. “He hasn't enough imagination. He's a wan-wit. He's an old-remnant human.”

  “Zabotski could have done it!” Zabotski swore.

  “Was that one person you?” Stein asked with spitting harshness. “Are you the deformed dreamer?”

  “I'm the one,” Zabotski maintained, “or I'm one of them. I have fun with it. The world-changers have been gnawing on the edges of the world like rats. I am helping to set out in bright daylight what has been lurking in their heads and intents. I kill a couple thousand people I don't like maybe. But no, the ones who will get killed are the ones I do like. No matter. It has to be done. The business has to be clarified. I draw a picture of the world and I ask ‘Is this the way you want it?’ All right, I'll fight against the vile thing, and I won't let it go and hide.”

  “There's a man up on Common Street who claims that he started it all,” Finnegan said.

  “Oh then, I suppose he did,” Zabotski admitted. “But I got onto the idea pretty quick, and I joined it with quite a few others who wanted to see it dragged out into the open.”

  So that was that.

  “I wonder why such a thing never happened before,” Stein muttered.

  “Take a look back through history,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “Consider the hundreds and hundreds of things that couldn't possibly have happened, and yet they did happen. Even after the history has been edited and cleaned up and most carefully phrased, it remains that many of the unlikely things did happen. There have been deformed dreamers all over the place. Oh, how would all those tall and talented scientists think their way out of this one? How would Ouspensky think? How would Patten? How would Van Daniker or Ostrander? How would great Fort think about all of this?”

  “Duffey, now that we are on strange things, just how old are you?” Stein asked. “(The question has come up several times lately.) The Thunder Colts recognize you as somebody very old. What is the answer? Is Zabotski here part of the answer?”

  5

  ‘…It is more of a hope than a promise. For four hundred years we have gone to the theatre in the hope of a worthy play, and it has not appeared: and we have gone without even an authoritative promise that it will come, as we have promises for the larger things like redemption and salvation. And yet no person can watch a curtain rise without the hope of great things. There is no art from which so much is expected after so many disappointments.’

  [Patrick Stranahan. Archipelago.]

  ‘And that twenty-four hour long, not-rationally-acceptable presentation comprised the last twenty-four hours that I spent in the old human context. How quickly we have forgotten that context! How quickly we have forgotten those who refused to forget it!’

  [Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Legend.]

  It's woe to tender fishes all

  Who cannot stand the gaff,

  And helpless folks who fail and fall,

  Not splendid by a half.

  [Finnegan. Road Songs.]

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer was caught up in a horror and revulsion. She had killed a medium-sized child during the skylarking safari. Then came the abysmal doubt: ‘What if this child was real’?’ It looked real. It bled scarlet stuff with the smell of blood. It did not turn into a poltergeist or an animal or a puppet as it died. It did not break down into piles of ashes or trash-barrel trash that would indicate (to a euphoric observer or effector) that it had been worthless or invalid from the beginning. The child still had warmth to it, and then it turned cold under her hand.

  “It's as though one should play a hand of ‘Lizzie Borden’ with the playing cards,” she allocated, “and then go home and find one's parents killed with an axe. It's is though I should jump rope to a child's chant:

  ‘Boil my mother in a pot!

  Turn the fire up, hot, hot, hot!’

   — and then go home and find that my mother was indeed boiled to death. What devil's cards do I play with? Whose rope do I jump to anyhow?”

  She carried the bloody child in her bosom as if it were it doll. She cried runny tears. But they were archaic tears from the old time when both the ocean and the human lacrimae were only half as salty as they later became. But had a newer and more saltless time come over the world quite recently?

  “Whatever was the name of that hilarious delusion that we were just now caught up in so delightfully?” she asked blindly.

  “The name of it was Hell,” said somebody who was passing by. Why should she be shocked on hearing that? It was one of the older sort of people who said that, and they are likely to say anything.

  “Stein, I have no idea how old I am,” Duffey said. “And I don't see how Zabotski can be part of the answer. He belongs to some other groups. I used to know how old I was, on two different counts. I used to be well ordered in my sequences and my lives. That's all gone now. I used to remember my childhood and my early manhood clearly. Now once again, as it used to happen in my uncertain moments, I remember half a dozen childhoods for myself, and they all have the marks of my own fictions all over them. Now I remember half a dozen different young manhoods for myself. Am I really named ‘Melchisedech, without father, without mother, having neither beginning of days nor end of life’, as Paul writes about me in Hebrews? My name used to be Michael, once, in one of my versions. What is the advantage of being Melchisedech?”

  “To be Melchisedech is to be a king,” Stein said. “I don't know about your childhood, Duffey, but when I was a young boy, you were a grown man, and I considered you to be old. That was in Chicago, and it's likely the valid version. You remember me there. You remember others there.”

  “Yes, but Hans remembers me in the Northland in the same years,” Duffey said, “and I remember him there. Vincent and Teresa remember me in St. Louis in those years, though it took a while for their memories to work. And I remember them. Henry and I mutually remember scenes in rural Louisiana, he a fat young boy, I a fat man. You eat the fat way in that Cajun Country. Mary Virginia Schaeffer remembers me in Galveston. And I remember her and her parents.”

  “I remember Duffey here in New Orleans,” Finnegan said. “Dotty remembers him here too.” There was something peculiar about Finnegan being there with them it this time.

  “These are things that the different persons told me separately without telling the others,” Duffey said, “and my own recollections come separately and disturbingly. Could I have lived so many lives at the same time?”

  “Well, where do you remember Duffey from, Zabotski?” Stein sensed a rat.

  “Wherever I want to remember him at, that's where I make him to have been,” Zabotski said.

  “How many pots do you have fingers in, Zabotski?” Stein asked.

  “Yah. How many fingers do I got?” Zabotski held up his two big, Polish hands. But he dazzled his fingers, so there was no way that anyone could count them.

  “Zabotski could have nothing to do with my simultaneous lives,” Duffey said. “He is nothing. He is just a poor old-human person, non-noetic, non-splendid.”

  There were many gruesome happenings into the afternoon and through the day. There were battles and massacres. But it always ended up with more disintegrating trash in the streets and lots and shops. Then it was evening. It was near time to dress for dinner and for the presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House. That would be quite special. Of course they would have to go formal. It was that kind of thing. These men didn't go formal more than once a year. But what was going to be shown happened only once a world.

  Duffey, of course, had every sort of evening clothes for rent over at his establishments. His ‘Imperial Tuxedo Rentals and Gentlemanly Appointments’ had always been a money maker. But the Royal Pop Historians (“Is there really such a group as the Royal Pop Historians?” Duffey had asked awhile before, “a
nd of what royaume are they royal?” ) were still holding forth there, and Duffey didn't want, just now, to run athwart them.

  Finnegan said that he would go and get the evening clothes for Duffey and Zabotski and himself (Stein, of course, had his own at hand), and he left to get them.

  He was gone. Then the others looked at each other with clammy unease. They discovered that they couldn't remember how long Finnegan had been with them in Stein's apartment. And they didn't know why they hadn't remembered, until just now when he had walked out of the apartment, that Finnegan was supposed to be dead. So that couldn't have been Finnegan, however much like him he seemed.

  “Zabotski!” Stein cried with a real threat in his voice. What could Zab have to do with this?

  “Yes, I always liked Finnegan more than I liked you others,” Zabotski said. “I keep dreaming all today that it will be good to have his company back. Then he is with us and I hardly notice that there's something oblique about it. I dream a lot of real stubborn dreams today.”

  When the man returned with the clothes, however, it was clear that he wasn't Finnegan. He was the young man whom Stein had dubbed ‘Deutero-Finnegan’. He was the young painter around town, the young painter who sometimes left paintings on consignment at Duffey's place to see if they might not be sold. He was the young man who resembled Finnegan slightly, and whose best paintings were more than a little bit like Finnegan paintings from his orange period.

  But he had spoken somehow as if he were Finnegan. And he had mentioned Dotty. Dotty had disappeared some years before this young man had been around there. There was surely something of Finnegan clinging to him. Finnegan haunted many people with his pervading presence. Could this be Finnegan's son? No. Finnegan had no sons in the flesh.