“Clothed and in my right mind I'll remain,” Melchisedech said.
“Now, what were you jabbering, Zabotski?”
“A Great Day first: a fellow over on O'Dwyer Street has already shed his skin completely. That makes him the most emancipated man in town, possibly in the world.”
“Oh, we'll all be doing it before the day is over with,” Mary Virginia said.
“Except me,” Melchisedech challenged.
“Oh, I forgot, this Day isn't ever over with,” Mary Virginia corrected herself. “It is now Great Day forever, and yet we'll all be doing it soon. And when we are all skin-shed, then we'll be well on the way to true liberation. We'll be able to get so close to each other after we're skinless. Rubbing eyeballs with each other isn't in it for closeness anymore.”
“Some of the fellows are making their diaphragms disappear,” Stein said, “for greater visceral freedom.”
“That's nice,” Salvation Sally said.
This Zabotski, though bluff, was a good man. He had put up a big pot and a lot of money to keep the soup kitchen going through the years. And, providentially, he still had a big pot and a lot of money left. His appearance brought a question out of Melchisedech's gorge:
“The soup kitchen, is it still operating today? Is the big pot still boiling, the pot that never ceases to boil?” The soup kitchen and the flophouse for the poor were adjacent to the Pelican Press.
“The big pot is still boiling,” Margaret Stone said. “It is boiling with faith-soup now. There's no need to put anything physical into it.”
“Is this thing worldwide?” Melchisedech asked them. He had invented the Day, and he knew less about it than any of them.
“Of course it is worldwide,” Stein said. “From the East even unto the West and all that. And, of course, we have no old-style communication with the rest of the world on the subject. Electronic and mechanical communications aren't being used. Why should they be? Faith and Freedom and Sense of Community have arrived, and nothing else is needed.”
“Ah me,” Melchisedech said. “I had always regarded the Pelican as a refuge, as an anchor to hold fast in the great storms of the world.”
“Both the sea ships and the river boats are cutting loose their anchors and letting them sink forever,” Zabotski said. “With faith, who needs anchors?”
“You have failed me, all of you,” Melchisedech said. “You are the lump and not the leaven. You are as the world, worldly, but with none of the redeeming quality of solid black earth. But I know a greener oasis and a more unfailing fountain. I leave you.”
“Good-by, Duff, I mean good-by, person,” Mary Virginia said.
“And do take your clothes off, please,” Salvation Sally said.
“Why do you always want to be conspicuous?”
Melchisedech Duffy left the Pelican. If this was indeed the Great Day, then he left it forever.
This is the Michael making moan
With stony tears and a sword of stone.
Melchisedech walked over to St. Michael's. A bare yellow sliver of sun was showing at the end of one street.
“Ah, you crooked, cranky thing,” Melchisedech told it, “I'll trap you now. Move once and I'll have you.”
But the sun did not move. It would not move while anyone was watching. If it could be seen to move, then time was still running; and that would be a contradiction on the Great Day. The Great Day, if this was it, must remain forever dawning.
Melchisedech looked away a bit to test it. When he looked back, the sun had moved, but only to make itself more comfortable, to get a better hold on its dawning. Now it would move no more.
St. Michael's was being unstructured by various people. They were using faith rather than hammers and rams, but they had brought most of the building down. The building had contained something, so it was said, and that was disapproved. Melchisedech stopped to talk to the stone statue of St. Michael in what had been the entry.
“It's a sad day, Mike,” he said. “If an oasis cannot be found here, then it can be found nowhere.”
“It's a sad day,” Michael agreed. “And the living water has gone out from this place. You'll find no oasis here.” Michael had had an eye gouged out, by hammer and chisel it seemed, perhaps faith-hammer and chisel, perhaps real.
“Look, mama,” a little girl was saying somewhere. “There's the crazy old man who talks to statues.”
“Shh, don't look at him,” the mother said. “It isn't nice to look. He's wearing clothes.”
“Will there be mass this morning, Mike?” Melchisedech asked.
“There won't even be any this morning,” the statue said sadly. “This Great-Day business has bitten the whole world. Ah, Duff, if there were only some way to put a good edge on a marble sword, then I'd have at them. They are unstructuring the church and they have put up the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun and the moon in place of the stations of the cross. But the Unfaithful Assembled will not notice any difference at all in the services, they have gone so weird for such a long while.”
The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light. “Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”
“Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them.
“Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”
“Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again.
“Kind of gets you, doesn't it, Duff?” Michael said. “What am I saying? Well, it would kind of get me if I weren't Michael. Ah, I wish there was some way to put a good double edge on a stone sword. If you run onto a good blade man, send him by. I'll have me a cutting and flaming sword yet. Who's going to know that I'm an archangel when I'm here with the toes broken off me and one eye gouged out and only a dull stone sword in my hand?” “If I run onto a good blade man I'll send him by,” Melchisedech said. He left Michael there crying stone tears.
“Well, I bet I know an oasis that is wet if nothing else,” Melchisedech said. He left St. Michael's and headed for the Stumble-Bum Royal Rendezvous and Oyster Bar. Young fellows tried to pull his beard off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull out some bloody gouts of it. He noticed that most of the beards had been shed, both of the teenagers and of the few grown men who had sported them. They were shed by acts of faith. If one has faith, what does he need with a beard? The beards of most of the folks had come off easily. An easy breeze was now blowing remaining beard-patches off various faces. Soon it would be a barefaced world.
Young ladies tried to pull his clothes off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull some ripped strips of them off. “Be free, be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured,” they all insisted to him. “Is there anything dirtier than a dirty old man with clothes on?”
“A sazarac,” Melchisedech ordered as he entered the Stumble-Bum. He felt the looks at him like those manifold whips with little tearing hooks at the end of the lashes. The barkeep shook his head. “A salty dog, then,” Melchisedech said, and he felt the hatred rising against him. “An old fashioned,” Melchisedech said. He should never have said that.
“Get this nut,” the barkeep said, hooking a sneering thumb toward Melchisedech, and the grumbling hatred rose against this nonconformist who refused to be free. “We haven't had any of those drinks since yesterday.”
“What do you have to drink, then?” Melchisedech asked humbly.
“The New Day Dawner. That's what everyone drinks. Who would want anything else?”
Melchisedech left the Stumble-Bum. There were no wet oases, no green oases, no unfailing fountains anywhere.
This is the drink that nothing slakes:
This is the dream whence none awakes.
Melchisedech e
xperimented a bit. He had noticed people, here and there, walking through visible walls as easily as if they were not there.
“Why, then they are not there,” Melchisedech said. “The people have removed them by faith, and they are visible only to my faithless eyes. Let me see whether I can walk through those walls also.”
But he could not. He bruised and bloodied himself, but he could not go through this sort of walls as other people could.
“Then part of this wall-demolishing is a subjective thing,” he said. “But I am outnumbered. Many persons pass through, and I do not. It must be my own subjective that is awry.”
The sun was still in the process of dawning, but it had not moved at all since it was last viewed. There was not a lot of movement of any sort on the Great Day. The real action was hidden, and yet almost everything had all the wraps off it. But the people were all interiorizing themselves. Some skinless, some only part so, they looked blank, blank in every part of them. And they were merging. They were coming together witlessly, blankly, spherically. Dozens of them had now formed into great balls all together. These rolled, and they merged with other great balls of people-substance. Soon all the people in the whole city would be coalesced into one big fleshy sphere, communicating and interiorizing like anything.
Then the peoples of all the world would somehow roll together and become one thing, although the mechanics of this were far from clear.
“Everybody will have joined it except myself,” Melchisedech said, “and I invented it in a time of cranky humor. Should I stand proud apart then? But how can one stand proud with no one to stand before?”
Subjectively, quite a while went by, but the sun did not move. Melchisedech walked himself weary, and then sat on a bench in Jackson Square. Most of the buildings of the city had disappeared now. That business of them standing after their walls and supports had been removed was only a transition thing.
“This is only a nightmare,” Melchisedech said. “I am sleeping, and this is not one of my better dreams. Now I must make a great effort to wake up.”
“You can't,” Morpheus said. “You will have to change your whole idea about sleeping. More important, you will have to change your whole idea about waking up. Both are illusions.”
“Anyone can be a showboat in his own field of study,” Melchisedech said. “You are the god of sleep, so you have the advantage over me in the discussion.”
“Everyone is the god of something,” Morpheus said. “You did not know that? But I have broader interests than most. ‘Morpheus’ ('sleep') and ‘MorphÄ“’ ('shape') are really the same word, and shape is known only in sleep. A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.”
“I'll take that chance. Help me to wake up.”
“Absolutely not. There is no longer any such thing as waking up.”
“Where did I go wrong?” Melchisedech asked the empty ears of misty Morpheus. “Why am I alone unamalgamated in this thing?”
“Where did you go wrong, where did you go right? It was in being too stiff to change. You allowed yourself to become an old wineskin,” Morpheus said.
(“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles,” Matthew said. “If they do, the skins burst and the wine runs out. See me, 9:17.”
“No man, having drunk old wine, straightway desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better,’ ” Luke said. “See me, 5:39.”
“You evangelists go settle it among yourself,” Melchisedech told them, “with eight-ounce gloves.” The evangelists went away.)
“Now tell me true, Morph, am I awake or not?” Melchisedech asked the sleep god. “No, you are not awake and you are not. You can never wake up, for waking up is one of the options that have now disappeared from the world. And you cannot really sleep. You can only dream a diminishing dream in a state of half-sleep. It all closes up on itself. It goes out of business.”
“Is the whole world only my dream, Morph?” Melchisedech asked.
“Yours or mine, Duff. We seem to be the only two left. We'll end as two submicroscopic snakes, the only remaining things in the worlds, and then one of us must swallow the other.”
“I'll not like that. There must be more than that.”
“No. The whole thousand-times-mega cosmos began as one single-celled creature. Then he had the notion that there were two of him, and this notion was the beginning of his dreaming. He dreamed the whole multiplex thing that has seemed to be the worlds. The dream grew for long eons, but now it shrinks back again to its beginning. There is still one single cell left, dreaming a diminishing dream.”
“So let it be,” Melchisedech said, “so long as I am that single cell.”
“Or I,” said Morpheus, “but there is still only one. I'll wrestle you for the illusion.”
They wrestled. But Morpheus was one of those timeless, ever-young Greek gods, and cosmic wrestling is their game. Moreover, they smear themselves completely with a numenous grease that makes them very hard to get hold of.
There came over Melchisedech the panic of extinction. The old-fashioned fear of damnation isn't even in the same league with it. The lungs pop like toy balloons, the kidneys melt like wax, the heart bursts like a cherry bomb. Melchisedech collapsed on himself and became smaller by a million orders, and Morpheus followed him down. They were a single-celled creature swallowing itself. Melchisedech screamed as loudly as a single-celled creature can scream in a void, after he's swallowed himself.
“It's the end,” he gasped.
“No, it's the beginning,” Morpheus gurgled in his swallowed state. “We've been here before.”
A hint as to a possible alternate outcome had been given in an article in the magazine-journal The Bark one year before. But how is a single-celled creature that has just swallowed itself going to have access to back issues of obscure magazines? There are a few Great Day verses left over, and the world affair cannot be concluded until they are disposed of. There are also, unaccountably, about the same number of persons left over, and they must also be disposed of.
If each person will come forward and proclaim loudly one of the verses, then both that person and that verse can be forever obliterated. Try it. Lose yourself in it.
This is the meadow that has no grass.
This is the wine without a glass.
This is the building lacking walls.
This is the murder that none appalls.
This is the hero void of fame.
This is the Day without a name.
This is the move without a mean.
This is the sun less shine and sheen.
This is the wineskin Matthew told.
This is the old skin-bottle, old.
Here is the crowd that lurks alone.
Here is the grave without a stone.
There, it worked, didn't it? Got rid of everything.
The Casey Machine
There's a way, my companion, my bacon my bean,
No matter at bottom it isn't too clean:
The way is the way of the Casey Machine.
— Promontory Goats
A top electronics repairman and designer like myself, Newton Prescott, has the opportunity of knowing more of what is going on in the world than any other person. He not only has his finger on the world's pulse: he designs that pulse, and he redesigns it every day. And ninety-eight percent of that pulse is subliminal and deep-flowing.
I am writing this journal as therapy. I have a compulsion to forget some things (neither I nor my doctor understands this compulsion) and at the same time something jogs my memory back to them. I am advised to write them out in this journal and then burn the journal. If that doesn't work, I will have to have brain surgery. Something is bugging me in a small area of my brain.
A while back, every coin parlor on Kasmir Street had at least one of the Casey Machines. That was an electronic device of such scope as you don't see every day. Most of the Tea Rooms on Hubbard Street had them; and the more modish and vital bars on North Durkheim Street. The Casey
Machines were Achronological Eaves-Dropping Machines. “They were unspeakably vile,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “I don't want either of you to have anything more to do with them even if they come back.”
“They were gold mines,” Mr. Duckhunter said, “and you, Prescott,” (he said to me) “were as good a shovel-and-crib man as was ever around a primitive gold mine. There was a million dollars here, or ten million, for the right hook-up. Sure it was vile, at first. But if you can't stop a thing from being vile, you can at least make money out of it. It's an idea whose time was overdue. The need was there. I don't remember it very well now, but we did make money out of it, and we're still doing it, beneath the surface. None of it is as clear as it was, but we're still making millions and millions and millions out of something.”
“I wish we weren't,” Mrs. Duckhunter said. “We aren't bad people. We aren't really vile. Why isn't there some way we can shut off the money and be poor and honest again?”
“We weren't ever poor, Crissie,” her husband George Duckhunter said, “and we weren't ever honest, for that matter. And I don't know any way to shut off the money. We're being paid as high priced guardians, or some such. I just don't remember the circumstances as well as I might. I don't believe that either you or Prescott does either. We can't exactly keep our memories of those wonderful and event-filled days when we were so rich. We have to settle for remaining so rich.”
There had been quite a bit of discussion about that strange device, the Casey Machine, that so many persons (including its purported inventor) insisted did not exist at all. And much of the discussion was on the theological level.
“Will everybody know everything, or will only the people who are ‘saved’ know everything?” a soggy sinner asked his pastor. “After the Judgment, whether the General or the Particular, will all of us know everything that ever happened? Will all of us know all the dirt, all the thoughts and acts of every person who ever lived? Will we be roomy enough for all this knowledge? Will we have the scope to possess it in vivid detail? Will we be able to revel in all the acts of our neighbors forever?” “All persons will know everything, yes,” the pastor said. “Whether it is after the Particular or the General Judgment that we receive full knowledge is uncertain: but that may not matter, and there may not be any great interval between the two. When we die we enter eternity, and there is no time differential there. The ‘Saved’ will have edification and joy from their total knowledge, and the damned will have fiery regret and deepest suffering. But as to the reveling in the shameful thoughts and actions of other persons, no, the ‘Saved’ would never do that.”
More Than Melchisedech Page 64
