More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “It may be that I am not quite prepared to face that other shore just yet,” Melchisedech said.

  “I believe that I have been on the Argo quite recently,” Hans said.

  “I know that I have,” Marie maintained. “That is why I always wake so refreshed lately.”

  “One of the latter-day prophetic books, referring to a conclave to be held in the middling near future, dismisses me as being already dead,” Cardinal Henri told them. “ ‘Daniel Jean Boule who was the double of the dead Cardinal Salvatore of New Orleans, was coming up from along the Mexican coast in a tramp steamer’ it records briefly. That is the only time that I appear in this prophetic piece, and I thought 1 would play a large part in the conclave.

  “For I do not intend to be dead. I intend to be my double's double. I will travel for a while as the double of the dead Dan Boule (he's my cousin, by the way). I will attend the conclave. And I will be a candidate.”

  “There's another passage in one of the latter-day prophetic books,” Teresa said. “And it is (pay attention please, Melchisedech and all) this:

  ‘He also predicted three cargoes that Melchisedech Duffey, in ghostly and bony form, and with a crew of wraiths, would transport on the last voyage of the ship Argo, which has had other names. One of these cargoes would be Count Finnegan whom Melchisedech would transport to an obscure place in the Indies where he would be elected and crowned. One of these cargoes would be Prince Casimir whom Duffey would transport to the coast nearest the Vale of Armageddon where this Prince Casimir would reign for a while as Anti-Christ. And the third of the cargoes would be the Parousia Himself, Christ of the Second Corning.’

  Have you knowledge of these things that you will do, Melchisedech?”

  “I have it not” , Melchisedech Duffey said.

  Everything was a bonus in those last days in St. Louis. It was superfluous in the correct old sense of the word which is ‘overflowing’. There were extra snails on the thorn, there were extra pigeons in the parks. The years that the cows had eaten were returned green and whole. There was gravy on the goose and huckleberry on the biscuits. Melchisedech had almost forgotten what good people were these several of his Blessed Animations, Teresa and Vincent, Hans and Marie, Henry: were there ever five such genuinely good persons in the world? Had they not rebuilt the world from its sorry state? Was it not better for their having been in it? Did the cranky details matter at all when these larger persons were —

  Oh, Duffey had a seizure then, on the third or fourth day of the St. Louis visitation. And he was into the last minute of his normal life. But he was happy to have such pleasant friends at his sudden leave-taking. They would bid him right.

  “Remember to ask for the Argo again,” X said to him.

  “On, don't bother his dying,” Dame Bagby said. “We will see each other again in shorter time than it has been between our visits last years, Melky.”

  “It has been fun with you,” Teresa said, “and it will be even more fun the next time.”

  6

  Melchisedech was strongly into the seventh contingency now. He had been almost here before, again and again. It had been a recurring dream and a recurring speculation of his. It had had the shape of the final expectation.

  But it had always been “thus far and no farther” . There had always been a wall between, or a mist as obscuring as a wall. Or it had always been a waking up, or a forgetting, or a complete destruction of mood with a plunging back into hopelessness. But now Melchisedech began at the high point of pleasure and excitement where before he had always broken off.

  Melchisedech was walking with the Invisible God in a Garden in the afternoon. There was quite a few thousand other people also walking in that pleasant place, but there was no possibility of crowding, and there was no possibility of any one of them being supplanted or falling out of the Attention. Every one was in special favor here. It was a high fellowship of special favor.

  There was total appeal to all fifty-and-five senses, so Melchisedech knew that the scene was genuine. And yet the old senses still held precedence over the new and unpracticed senses.

  “You are a special person, Melchisedech,” the Invisible God said, but not in words. “The Melchisedech Paradoxes are at least as wonderful as the Zeno Paradoxes. But every one of my persons is absolutely special and absolutely unique, and every one of them is wrapped in a cluster of wonderful paradoxes. There is no precedence as to particularity among my special persons.”

  No, this was not the finality. This was only the anteroom of it. That last second of life still had some while to go. This was dying vision, but not death yet. Here and there, one might see gaps in the green-mantled earth on which they walked, and there was open sky below them, through the gaps. But there was no uneasiness of footing nor fear of falling. Anyone who can walk on water can walk on either caving green earth or on sky with short practice. It was as easy to walk on the flowing sky as on the flowering earth.

  Duffey had for mentor Patrick Plunket, that great Irish saint and magician and medical doctor.

  “This is mostly Adam Scanlon sod that we are walking over now,” Melchisedech told Plunket to show his erudition. “Nobody else could do the muscular greens of sedge grass and fern flower as well as Scanlon, not even Finnegan. I didn't know that he had gone in for landscape animations. For a fact, I didn't know that there was such a field.”

  “No, Duffey, this is real,” Plunket said.

  “And I never saw such textured symbolism,” Melchisedech Duffey mumbled happily. “There's a very old Arcadian motif here. Then there is glorious sixteenth century Spanish stuff, Teresa, and John of the Cross. And there is twentieth century Jungian influence, transfigured and outdoing itself. The audio components of this mystical symbolism are to be found in the music of — ”

  “Easy, easy. It's real, Duffey man, it's real,” Plunket insisted. “You've a weakness to correct here. You're in love with the contrived. It is for that reason that you have animated various clays, that you have wakened certain quick-earths. You put a lot of symbolism in your marvels, and you're good at it. But in spite of yourself, they turned real on you. And that is over with for you now. Look up from it, man! You're in the Presence of the Real Thing.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, and it's hard for me to comprehend it all, Pat,” Duffey said. “Now it's as though we were ascending a mountain, pleasantly and without great effort. But there is no particular elevation to be seen in this place. But I can feel the elevation, Patrick, and I can taste it.”

  “It's the invisible Mountain, Melky. It's the interior mountain. We ascend in intensity. We are in the Presence.”

  “I know we are in the Presence. I have walked in grace three days out of four of my life. Do you think me a stranger to the Presence? But this is a blooming richness that increases in every way. There's a hundred people here that I know and love. And then there are a hundred thousand of them with no lessening of the knowing and loving, and certainly no lessening of the personal acquaintance. How long can it grow better and better?”

  “Forever, Duffey. It grows exponentially better forever.”

  “There's no danger of our losing it, or of it going wrong, is there, Pat?”

  “So slight a danger, Duffey, that we will put it out of mind.”

  “You don't know my mind. There are still uncleansed corners of it, and disoriented curiosities. Ah, here's a pitch of perfect clay, Plunket. I believe that I will just try to make a model of — to try to catch a fraction of this dazzling animation — to imprison a piece of this transitory loveliness in a more permanent”¦”

  “Duffey, thou clod! This is the Permanence Itself that we walk with! There's no need to mould idols.”

  “You're right, Patrick, you're right. It's an old habit that I find hard to break. A little while ago, I made a dozen splendid animations…”

  “No, no, you woke them up only, Duffey. You did not make them. There has been criticism of your attempts to make these things. You did goo
d work, but you thought it other than it was. There is a place for persistent and unrepentant makers. It's a dankish and mud-colored place where the addicted persons form things, and form them, and form them again and again. It's about the shoddiest section of Purgatory.”

  “It doesn't sound bad to me at all, Pat. It is far from here? Could we go there now?”

  “Duffey, you're walking in the Delectable Place Itself, and our Delectation walks with us! The Potter's Place is on a low and broken way, and it's full of lamentations.”

  “I suppose so. That's the test of good work. I lament quite a bit myself when I'm in the labor and passion of making. Ah, let's just cut through these thorn hedges!”

  “The thorn hedges are out of the direct way, Duffey. They are an obstacle that has to be sought out. They are the only rough going here, and they make us go the long way around to go through them.”

  “Sometimes I like the rough going and the long way around, Patrick. Just so long as there's no danger of things going wrong, I love the wrong way. You said there was so slight a danger of things going wrong, Patrick, that we could put it out of our minds, but I've not been able to do that. Just how great are the odds against things going wrong?”

  “Not nearly as great as they were a while ago, Melchisedech. But come into the green way again, and the odds will increase once more.”

  “What a curious deformity that branch in the middle of the thorn thicket is! I must…”

  “No, you must not, man! Leave it alone. It was put in the middle of the thorn thicket so that it would be left alone. There's a billion better and more formly branches in the holy boscage around us. Oh why was I ever assigned to be mentor and guide to a snake-bit Irishman?”

  “Look, Pat, it's a mechanical lever of some sort. And the handle of it…”

  “No, Duffey, no! Don't touch it!”

  “I'll touch what I please, good friend. It sets one a-tingle, it does, just to grip it like this. And now I look at it all, at the fine detail of it. It's seductive, it's beautiful, it's soul-satisfying, and it's symbolically enriching. But is it real?”

  “It is Melchisedech, and it will continue to be. And you were real, till you touched that handle. Untouch it, man, and be real again.”

  “Ah, there's a curious deformity about the handle of this lever. However is that gnarled effect achieved? Fine carving that. It's made of fruit wood, you see. I wonder what the handle activates if I just…”

  “Man, don't try to find out! There were a billion billion chances to one against anyone going through those tearing thorn hedges and discovering that handle, and you did it. Let it alone now.”

  “Well, I have to find out whether all of this is real.”

  “Turn that handle, you lame-brained Irishman, and you'll find out all too late what's real.”

  “Too soon or too late, I want to find out. Can even the Presence Itself be a form of temptation to trick me away from the wonderful hewing and moulding place. Tell me, Pat Plunket, what does happen if I turn this handle?”

  “The whole bottom falls out from under you!”

  Melchisedech Duffey turned the handle, and the whole bottom fell out of things.

  “Pat, I'm falling forever!” Melchisedech wailed, and he fell like a scorched rock through the afternoon sky.

  “I'll miss you, Melky, but some like it one place and some like it another,” Pat Plunkett said.

  (No, the last moment of life wasn't over. The last moment of life was hardly begun, barely dinted yet. There might have been as much as fifty seconds of it left.) Melchisedech Duffey was sitting in a dung heap, pretty deep in it. His legs and hips had been smashed by the fall, and likely many more bones had been broken. He was in a fetid and half liquid place of miasmas and mists, and storms were beginning to bumble out of the putrid sky above it. And Melchisedech found himself assaulted interiorly and exteriorly and medially (on and in the covering hide of him) by angry small creatures.

  Blister beetles were afflicting him, and horse leeches, and latrine snakes. He was stung by scorpions and infested by midges and crab cooties. Moreover, he suffered from the body flux.

  “It's a big change from the beautiful and green sky meadows,” he said, “and the end of the fall was a real shocker. Well, well, let's see what can be done about it right now.”

  Melchisedech banged his hands together, and he groaned in pain. One of his hands was shattered worse than the other, but the best one was not good. A storm churned around him, and whirlwinds were the inhabited fingers of that storm. The sky was garish, gaunt, gray-orange, Gothic.

  “It's a Finnegan sky,” Duffey said. “I always wondered where he'd gotten it. He's been here, that's what.”

  Duffey's skin was that of sick and leprous snakes. It wailed and itched wretchedly, and burned like thermite. “I will have to get out of this skin,” he said. He took pieces of broken bottles, shards they were, and tore his skin and flesh to rake out the devouring and itching worms.

  From far away, a voice was calling “The Argo. Remember The Argo. You can go to it if you remember that you can go.”

  “What is The Argo?” Melchisedech asked out loud. And then he called more loudly. “What? What? What is it that you're saying?”

  Dung rats took savage slices from Duffey, and buzzards plundered him with their knifie beaks. Blood snakes came like arrows to the scent of his blood.

  “I've always liked these little jogs to the ingenuity,” Duffey said. “A man is hard put to do his best work without them.” And the livid sky spun and spoke.

  “Ah, the whirlwinds, the whirlwinds!” Duffey cried. “That is my kind of talk. And the lightning!”

  The whirlwinds were sky-high cyclones. And the lightning split the sky, relentlessly, shriekingly, destroyingly, totally. The thunder was sky-explosive, divinely clattering, rolling, rocking blasts of…

  ”¦laughter. No, not maniac laughter, total-sanity laughter.

  “Why, I'm not out of favor at all,” Duffey cried. “God in the whirlwind and tempest is not less present than God in the afternoon breeze. I am still in the Presence. I have the best of all worlds.”

  “The Argo, remember The Argo,” the voice was crying. Not the great voice, a small and mortal voice. “You can go to it if you remember that you can go.”

  “Why? Will things be better if I go to this Argo?” Duffey cried the question.

  The broken Melchisedech hands were moving and working now. “It reminds me a lot of that Finnegan picture ‘Potting Shed in a Storm’!” the happy magician said.

  (Those who believe that this is only adjunct to the seventh congruency and is not reality are the same people who believed that Melchisedech could not really create. Abjure them.)

  “He remembered that I am a magus and that making is what I am best at,” Melchisedech gloated. “Why, I have everything here that I need to work with. And worldly distractions are blotted out. Gloria in Tempestis Deo!”

  There were pieces of broken bottles and jagged metal on this trashy dung heap. The most shapely of them would serve as talismans, and Duffey selected them with his creator's eye. These would work. And the lightning —

  “Ah, a million volts should be about right for the infusing,” Duffey cried in his joyful labor. “Here's the Muck of Animation. Here's good blood, my own. Here are shapes and forms of all of it dancing in the sky, if I should forget. Bless this lightning! Bless this dungheap! This is the world that I love.”

  Well, what do you think is maintaining the world on even its wobbly ways if it is not the extraordinary work and workmanship of such prodigious and special and creative people?

  “Remember The Argo!” the voice was calling again. “You can go to it now. And you can leave it for any destination you prefer, if only you remember that you can leave it.”

  “Yes, I remember The Argo now,” Melchisedech said. “I love it, and I love this work here also. Is there not some way I can have both?”

  (No, the last minute of his life wasn't over. The last minut
e of his life had but a very small hunk taken out of it as yet. There might be as many as forty-nine seconds of it left.)

  Melchisedech was reaching out and moulding the rich dung in which he was half-buried. He was moulding it into forms, into marvels (soon they would be Animated Marvels), with his own blood as integument, burning to make, and making  —  “another dozen even better than the first…”

  And the million-volted lightning came down like giant hands to help in the happy making.

  Yes, all this was happening. And Melchisedech wouldn't have had it unhappen for anything. But what if he should go around to another thing and then come back to this.

  “This happy work will still be here,” he said, “and I suspect that it will be even happier and better when the irritations are removed after I have been tested. This is here forever, but The Argo has only one more voyage. I can have both of my delight. I can sail. I can have my intervals of delight on sea and on shore. And I can return to this for my final delight.

  “Lord, I am enraptured with this work. Lord I will do this work forever. But not yet.”

  Book Thirteen

  Argo

  “Sine Patre, neque Finem,

  Tu Melchisedech ordinum,

  Panem proferens et Vinum.”

  [Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.]

  He, whoever he was, stirred out of a sick sleep into a frozen and fitful fear of falling. He supposed that he was a man of the human sort, as he usually was when he woke up in such a turmoil. It seemed as if he had always had these horrifying awakenings, and now as usual there was a horrifying reason for it.

  His stirring had caused him to slip another notch and to dislodge something else of whatever was holding him up. And what had woke him up was the sound of substance falling, through the frozen air, to a very great distance down. He felt insecure, and he realized that most of what he had been lying on had now vanished into space.