The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “I can't help you, Hoose. I'm a psychologist, not a contingent-physicist. Only one thing to do; we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

  “Doctor, there's no hole in the street on this corner.”

  “Wasn't talking about a hole in the street. Homer, I just got back from a visit of my own that shook me up. I went to an analyst who analyzes analysts. ‘I've had a dozen people come to see me with the same sort of story,’ I told him. ‘They all come home in the evening; and everything is different, or themselves are different; or they find that they are already there when they get there. What do you do when a dozen people come in with the same nonsense story, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘I don't know, Corte,’ he said to me. ‘What do I do when one man comes in a dozen times with the same nonsense story, all within one hour, and he a doctor too?’ Dr. Diebel asked me.

  “ ‘Why, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked. ‘What doctor came to you like that?’

  “ ‘You,’ he said. ‘You've come in here twelve times in the last hour with the same dish of balderdash; you've come in each time looking a little bit different; and each time you acct as if you hadn't seen me for a month. Dammit man,’ he said, ‘you must have passed yourself going out when you came in.’

  “ ‘Yes, that was me, wasn't it?’ I said. ‘I was trying to think who he reminded me of. Well, it's a problem, Dr. Diebel,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  “ ‘I'm going to the analyst who analyzes the analysts who analyze the analysts,’ he said. ‘He's tops in the field.’ Dr. Diebel rushed out then; and I came back to my office here. You came in just after that. I'm not the one to help you. But, Homer, we got to do something about that hole on the corner!”

  “I don't understand the bit about the hole, Doctor,” Homer said. “But – has a bunch of people been here with stories like mine?”

  “Yes, every man in this block has been in with an idiot story, Homer, except— Why, everybody except old double-domed Diogenes himself! Homer, that man who knows everything has a finger in this up to the humerus. I saw him up on the power poles the other night, but I didn't think anything of it. He likes to tap the lines before they come to his meter. Saves a lot on power that way, and he uses a lot of it in his laboratory. But he was setting up the hole on the corner. That's what he was doing. Let's get him and bring him to your house and make him straighten it out.”

  “Sure, a man who knows everything ought to know about a hole on the corner, Doctor. But I sure don't see any hole anywhere on this corner.”

  The man who knew everything was named Diogenes Pontifex. He lived next door to Homer Hoose, and they found him in his back yard wrestling with his anaconda.

  “Diogenes, come over to Homer's with us,” Dr. Corte insisted. “We've got a couple of questions that might be too much even for you.”

  “You touch my pride there,” Diogenes sang out. “When psychologists start using psychology on you, it's time to give in. Wait a minute till I pin this fellow.”

  Diogenes put a chancery on the anaconda, punched the thing's face a few times, then pinned it with a double bar-arm and body lock, and left it writhing there. He followed them into the house.

  “Hi, Homer,” Diogenes said to Homer the monster when they had come into the house. “I see there's two of you here at the same time now. No doubt that's what's puzzling you.”

  “Dr. Corte, did Homer ask you if I could stop dreaming those pleasant dreams?” wife Regina asked. “I sure do get tired of them. I want to go back to the old flesh-crawlers.”

  “You should be able to do so tonight, Regina,” said Dr. Corte. “Now then, I'm trying to bait Diogenes here into telling us what's going on. I'm sure he knows. And if you would skip the first part, Diogenes, about all the other scientists in the world being like little boys alongside of you, it would speed things up. I believe that this is another of your experiments like— Oh no! Let's not even think about the last one!

  “Tell us, Diogenes, about the hole on the corner, and what falls through it. Tell us how some people come home two or three times within as many minutes, and find themselves already there when they get there. Tell us how a creature that staggers the imagination can seem so like an old acquaintance after a moment or two that one might not know which is which. I am not now sure which of these Homers it was who came to my office several moments ago, and with whom I returned to this house. They look just alike in one way, and in another they do not.”

  “My Homer always was funny looking,” Regina said.

  “They appear quite different if you go by the visual index,” Diogenes explained. “But nobody goes by the visual index except momentarily. Our impression of a person or a thing is much more complex, and the visual element in our appraisal is small. Well, one of them is Homer in gestalt two, and the other is Homer in gestalt nine. But they are quite distinct. Don't ever get the idea that such are the same persons. That would be silly.”

  “And Lord spare us that!” said Homer the man. “All right, go into your act, Diogenes.”

  “First, look at me closely, all of you,” Diogenes said. “Handsome, what? But note my clothing and my complexion and my aspect.”

  “Then to the explanations: it begins with my Corollary to Phelan's Corollary on Gravity. I take the opposite alternate of it. Phelan puzzled that gravity should be so weak on all worlds but one. He said that the gravity of that one remote world was typical and that the gravity of all other worlds was atypical and the result of a mathematical error. But I, from the same data, deduce that the gravity of our own world is not too weak, but too strong. It is about a hundred times as strong as it should be.”

  “What do you compare it to when you decide it is too strong?” Dr. Corte wanted to know.

  “There's nothing I can compare it to, Doctor. The gravity of every body that I am able to examine is from eight to a hundred times too strong. There are two possible explanations: either my calculations or theories are somehow in error — unlikely — or there are, in every case, about a hundred bodies, solid and weighted, occupying the same space at the same time. Old Ice Cream Store Chairs! Tennis Shoes in October! The Smell of Slippery Elm! County-Fair Barkers with Warts on Their Noses! Horned Toads in June!”

  “I was following you pretty good up to the Ice Cream Store Chairs,” said Homer the monster.

  “Oh, I tied that part in, and the tennis shoes too,” said Homer the man. “I'm pretty good at following this cosmic theory business. What threw me was the slippery elm. I can't see how it especially illustrates a contingent theory of gravity.”

  “The last part was an incantation,” said Diogenes. “Do you remark anything different about me now?”

  “You're wearing a different suit now, of course,” said Regina, “but there's nothing remarkable about that. Lots of people change to different clothes in the evening.”

  “You're darker and stringier,” said Dr. Corte. “But I wouldn't have noticed any change if you hadn't told us to look for it. Actually, if I didn't know that you were Diogenes, there wouldn't be any sane way to identify Diogenes in you. You don't look a thing like you, but still I'd know you anywhere.”

  “I was first a gestalt two. Now I'm a gestalt three for a while,” said Diogenes. “Well, first we have the true case that a hundred or so solid and weighty bodies are occupying the same space that our earth occupies, and at the same time. This in itself does violence to conventional physics. But now let us consider the characteristics of all these cohabiting bodies. Are they occupied and peopled? Will it then mean that a hundred or so persons are occupying at all times the same space that each person occupies? Might not this idea do violence to conventional psychology? Well, I have proved that there are at least eight other persons occupying the same space occupied by each of us, and I have scarcely begun proving. Stark White Sycamore Branches! New-Harrowed Earth! (New harrow, old earth.) Cow Dung Between Your Toes in July! Pitchers'-Mound Clay in the Old Three-Eyed League! Sparrow Hawks in August!”

&nbs
p; “I fell off the harrow,” said wife Regina. “I got the sycamore branches bit, though.”

  “I got clear down to the sparrow hawks,” said Homer the monster.

  “Do you remark anything different about me this time?” Diogenes asked.

  “You have little feathers on the backs of your hands where you used to have little hairs,” said Homer the man, “and on your toes. You're barefoot now. But I wouldn't have noticed any of it if I hadn't been looking for something funny.”

  “I'm a gestalt four now,” said Diogenes. “My conduct is likely to become a little extravagant.”

  “It always was,” said Dr. Corte.

  “But not as much as if I were a gestalt five,” said Diogenes. “As a five, I might take a Pan-like leap onto the shoulders of young Fregona here, or literally walk barefoot through the hair of the beautiful Regina as she stands there. Many normal gestalt twos become gestalt fours or fives in their dreams. It seems that Regina does.

  “I found the shadow, but not the substance, of the whole situation in the psychology of Jung. Jung served me as the second element in this, for it was the errors of Phelan and Jung in widely different fields that set me on the trail of the truth. What Jung really says is that each of us is a number of persons in depth. This I consider silly. There is something about such far-out theories that repels me. The truth is that our counterparts enter into our unconsciousness and dreams only by accident, as being most of the time in the same space that we occupy. But we are all separate and independent persons. And we may, two or more of us, be present in the same frame at the same time, and then in a near, but not the same, place. Witness the gestalt two and the gestalt nine Homers here present.

  “I've been experimenting to see how far I can go with it, and the gestalt nine is the furthest I have brought it so far. I do not number the gestalten in the order of their strangeness to our own norm, but in the order in which I have discovered them. I'm convinced that the concentric and congravitic worlds and people complexes number near a hundred, however.”

  “Well, there is a hole on the corner, isn't there?” Dr. Corte asked.

  “Yes, I set it up by the bus stop as a convenient evening point of entry for the people of this block,” said Diogenes. “I've had lots of opportunity to study the results these last two days.”

  “Well, just how do you set up a hole on the corner?” Dr. Corte persisted.

  “Believe me, Corte, it took a lot of imagination,” Diogenes said. “I mean it literally. I drew so deeply on my own psychic store to construct the thing that it left me shaken, and I have the most manifold supply of psychic images of any person I know. I've also set up magnetic amplifiers on both sides of the street, but it is my original imagery that they amplify. I see a never-ending field of study in this.”

  “Just what is the incantation stuff that takes you from one gestalt to another?” Homer the monster asked.

  “It is only one of dozens of possible modes of entry, but I sometimes find it the easiest,” said Diogenes. “It is Immediacy Remembered, or the Verbal Ramble. It is the Evocation — an intuitive or charismatic entry. I often use it in the Bradmont Motif — named by me from two as-aff writers in the twentieth century.”

  “You speak of it as if… well, isn't this the twentieth century?” Regina asked.

  “This the twentieth? Why, you're right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes I get my times mixed. All of you, I believe, do sometimes have moments of peculiar immediacy and vividness. It seems then as if the world were somehow fresher in that moment, as though it were a new world. And the explanation is that, to you, it is a new world. You have moved, for a moment, into a different gestalt. There are many accidental holes or modes of entry, but mine is the only contrived one I know.”

  “There's a discrepancy here,” said Dr. Corte. “If the persons are separate, how can you change from one to another?”

  “I do not change from one person to another,” said Diogenes. “There have been three different Diogenes lecturing you here in series. Fortunately, my colleagues and I, being of like scientific mind, work together in close concert. We have made a successful experiment in substitution acceptance on you here this evening. Oh, the ramifications of this thing! The aspects to be studied. I will take you out of your narrow gestalt-two world and show you worlds upon worlds.”

  “You talk about the gestalt-two complex that we normally belong to,” said wife Regina, “and about others up to gestalt nine and maybe a hundred. Isn't there a gestalt one? Lots of people start counting at one.”

  “There is a number one, Regina,” said Diogenes. “I discovered it first and named it, before I realized that the common world of most of you was of a similar category. But I do not intend to visit gestalt one again. It is turgid and dreary beyond tolerating. One instance of its mediocrity will serve. The people of gestalt one refer to their world as the ‘everyday world.’ Retch quietly, please. May the lowest of us never fall so low! Persimmons After First Frost! Old Barbershop Chairs! Pink Dogwood Blossoms in the Third Week of November! Murad Cigarette Advertisements!!”

  Diogenes cried out the last in mild panic, and he seemed disturbed. He changed into another fellow a little bit different, but the new Diogenes didn't like what he saw either.

  “Smell of Wet Sweet Clover!” he cried out. “St. Mary's Street in San Antonio! Model Airplane Glue! Moon Crabs in March! It won't work! The rats have run out on me! Homer and Homer, grab that other Homer there! I believe he's a gestalt six, and they sure are mean.”

  Homer Hoose wasn't particularly mean. He had just come home a few minutes late and had found two other fellows who looked like him jazzing his wife Regina. And those two mouth men, Dr. Corte and Diogenes Pontifex, didn't have any business in his house when he was gone either.

  He started to swing. You'd have done it too.

  Those three Homers were all powerful and quick-moving fellows, and they had a lot of blood in them. It was soon flowing, amid the crashing and breaking-up of furniture and people — ocher-colored blood, pearl-gray blood, one of the Homers even had blood of a sort of red color. Those boys threw a real riot!

  “Give me that package of coriander seed, Homer,” wife Regina said to the latest Homer as she took it from his pocket. “It won't hurt to have three of them. Homer! Homer! Homer! All three of you! Stop bleeding on the rug!”

  Homer was always a battler. So was Homer. And Homer.

  “Stethoscopes and Moonlight and Memory—ah—in Late March,” Dr. Corte chanted. “Didn't work, did it? I'll get out of here a regular way. Homers, boys, come up to my place, one at a time, and get patched up when you're finished. I have to do a little regular medicine on the side nowadays.”

  Dr. Corte went out the door with the loopy run of a man not in very good condition.

  “Old Hairbreadth Harry Comic Strips! Congress Street in Houston! Light Street in Baltimore! Elizabeth Street in Sydney! Varnish on Old Bar-Room Pianos! B-Girls Named Dotty! I believe it's easier to just make a dash for my house next door,” Diogenes rattled off. And he did dash out with the easy run of a man who is in good condition.

  “I've had it!” boomed one of the Homers — and we don't know which one — as he was flung free from the donnybrook and smashed into a wall. “Peace and quiet is what a man wants when he comes home in the evening, not this. Folks, I'm going out and up to the corner again. Then I'm going to come home all over again. I'm going to wipe my mind clear of all this. When I turn back from the corner I'll be whistling “Dixie” and I'll be the most peaceful man in the world. But when I get home, I bet neither of you guys had better have happened at all.”

  And Homer dashed up to the corner.

  Homer Hoose came home that evening to the g.c. — everything as it should be. He found his house in order and his wife Regina alone.

  “Did you remember to bring the coriander seed, Homer, little gossamer of my fusus?” Regina asked him.

  “Ah, I
remembered to get it, Regina, but I don't seem to have it in my pocket now. I'd rather you didn't ask me where I lost it. There's something I'm trying to forget. Regina, I didn't come home this evening before this, did I?”

  “Not that I remember, little dolomedes sexpunctatus.”

  “And there weren't a couple other guys here who looked just like me only different?”

  “No, no, little cobby. I love you and all that, but nothing else could look like you. Nobody has been here but you. Kids! Get ready for supper! Papa's home!”

  “Then it's all right,” Homer said. “I was just daydreaming on my way home, and all that stuff never happened. Here I am in the perfect house with my wife Regina, and the kids'll be underfoot in just a second. I never realized how wonderful it was. AHHHHNNN!!! YOU'RE NOT REGINA!!”

  “But of course I am, Homer. Lycosa Regina is my species name. Well, come, come, you know how I enjoy our evenings together.”

  She picked him up, lovingly broke his arms and legs for easier handling, spread him out on the floor, and began to devour him.

  “No, no, you're not Regina,” Homer sobbed. “You look just like her, but you also look like a giant monstrous arachnid. Dr. Corte was right, we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

  “That Dr. Corte doesn't know what he's talking about,” Regina munched. “He says I'm a compulsive eater.”

  “What's you eating Papa again for, Mama?” daughter Fregona asked as she came in. “You know what the doctor said.”

  “It's the spider in me,” said Mama Regina. “I wish you'd brought the coriander with you, Homer. It goes so good with you.”

  “But the doctor says you got to show a little restraint, Mama,” daughter Fregona cut back in. “He says it becomes harder and harder for Papa to grow back new limbs so often at his age. He says it's going to end up making him nervous.”

  “Help, help!” Homer screamed. “My wife is a giant spider and is eating me up. My legs and arms are already gone. If only I could change back to the first nightmare! Night-Charleys under the Beds at Grandpa's House on the Farm! Rosined Cord to Make Bull-Roarers on Hallowe'en! Pig Mush in February! Cobwebs on Fruit Jars in the Cellar! No, no, not that! Things never work when you need them. That Diogenes fools around with too much funny stuff.”