Following his avocation of drinking and brooding and waiting, Clem frequented various little places, and one day he was in the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. This was owned and operated by Two-Face Terrel, a double-dealer and gentleman, even something of a dandy. A man had just seated himself at a dim table with Clem, had been served by Two-Face, and now the man began to talk.
“Why did Matthew have two donkeys?” the man asked.
“Matthew who?” Clem asked. “I don't know what you're talking about.”
“I'm talking about 21:1-9, of course,” the man said. “The other Gospels have only one donkey. Did you ever think about that?”
“No, I'd never given it a thought,” Clem said.
“Well, tell me then, why does Matthew have two demoniacs?”
“What?”
“8:28-34. The other evangelists have only one crazy man.”
“Maybe there was only one loony at first, and he drove the guy drinking next to him crazy.”
“That's possible. Oh, you're kidding. But why does Matthew have two blind men?”
“Number of a number, where does this happen?” Clem asked.
“9:27-31, and again 20:29-34. In each case the other gospelers have only one blind man. Why does Matthew double so many things? There are other instances of it.”
“Maybe he needed glasses,” Clem said.
“No,” the man whispered, “I think he was one of us.”
“What ‘us’ are you talking about?” Clem asked. But already he had begun to suspect that his case was not unique. Suppose that it happened one time out of a million? There would still be several hundred such sundered persons in the country, and they would tend to congregate in such places as the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. And there was something deprived or riven about almost every person who came into the place.
“And remember,” the man was continuing, “the name or cognomen of one of the other Apostles was ‘The Twin.’ But of whom was he twin? I think there was the beginning of a group of them there already.”
“He wants to see you,” Joe Zabotsky told Clem when they met several months later. “So does she.” “When did he begin to suspect that there was another one of me?”
“He knew something was wrong from the first. A man doesn't lose a hundred pounds in an instant without there being something wrong. And he knew something was very wrong when all his accounts were cleaned out. These were not forgeries, and he knew it. They were not as good as good forgeries, for they were hurried and all different and very nervous. But they were all genuine signatures, he admitted that. Damn, you are a curious fellow, Clem!”
“How much does Veronica know, and how? What does she want? What does he?”
“He says that she also began to guess from the first. ‘You act like you're only half a man, Clem,’ she would say to him, to you, that is. She wants to see more of her husband, she says, the other half. And he wants to trade places with you, at least from time to time on a trial basis.”
“I won't do it! Let him stew in it!” Then Clem called Clem a name so vile that it will not be given here.
“Take it easy, Clem,” Joe remonstrated. “It's yourself you are calling that.”
There was a quizzical young-old man who came sometimes into the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. They caught each other's eye this day, and the young-old began to talk.
“Is not consciousness the thing that divides man from the animals?” he asked. “But consciousness is a double thing, a seeing one's self; not only a knowing, but a knowing that one knows. So the human person is of its essence double. How this is commonly worked out in practice, I don't understand. Our present states are surely not the common thing.”
“My own consciousness isn't intensified since my person is doubled,” Clem said. “It's all the other way. My consciousness is weakened. I've become a creature of my own unconscious. There's something about you that I don't like, man.”
“The animal is simple and single,” the young-old man said. “It lacks true reflexive consciousness. But man is dual (though I don't understand the full meaning of it here) and he has at least intimations of true consciousness. And what is the next step?”
“I fathom you now,” Clem said. “My father would have called you a Judas Priest.”
“I don't quite call myself that. But what follows the singularity of the animal and duality of man? You recall the startling line of Chesterton? — ‘we trinitarians have known it is not good for God to be alone.’ But was His case the same as ours? Did He do a violent double take, or triple take, when He discovered one day that there were Three of Him? Has He ever adjusted to it? Is it possible that He can?”
“Aye, you're a Judas Priest. I hate the species.”
“But I am not, Mr. Clendenning. I don't understand this sundering any more than you do. It happens only one time in a million, but it has happened to us. Perhaps it would happen to God but one time in a billion billion, but it has happened. The God who is may be much rarer than any you can imagine.
“Let me explain: my other person is a very good man, much better than when we were conjoined. He's a dean already, and he'll be a bishop within five years. Whatever of doubt and skepticism that was in me originally is still in the me here present, and it is somehow intensified. I do not want to be dour or doubting. I do not want to speak mockingly of the great things. But the bothering things are all in the me here. The other me is freed of them.
“Do you think that there might have a been a sundered-off Napoleon who was a bumbler at strategy and who was a nervous little coward? Did there remain in backwoods Kentucky for many years a sundered-off Lincoln who gave full rein to his inborn delight in the dirty story, the dirty deal, the barefoot life, the loutishness ever growing? Was there a sundered-off Augustine who turned ever more Manichean, who refined more and more his arts of false logic and fornication, who howled against reason, who joined the cultishness of the crowd? Is there an anti-Christ — the man who fled naked from the garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the garment at the moment of sundering.”
“Damned if I know, Judas Priest. Your own father-name abomination, was there another of him? Was he better or worse? I leave you.”
“She is in town and is going to meet you tonight,” Joe Zabotsky told Clem at their next monthly meeting. “We've got it all set up.” “No, no, not Veronica!” Clem was startled. “I'm not ready for it.”
“She is. She's a strong-minded woman, and she knows what she wants.”
“No she doesn't, Joe. I'm afraid of it. I haven't touched a woman since Veronica.”
“Damn it, Clem, this is Veronica that we're talking about. It isn't as though you weren't still married to her.”
“I'm still afraid of it, Joe. I've become something unnatural now. Where am I supposed to meet her? Oh, oh you son of a snake! I can feel her presence. She was already in the place when I came in. No, no, Veronica, I'm not the proper one. It's all a case of mistaken identity.”
“It sure is, Clem Clam,” said the strong-minded Veronica as she came to their table. “Come along now. You're going to have more explaining to do than any man I ever heard of.”
“But I can't explain it, Veronica. I can't explain any of it.”
“You will try real hard, Clem. We both will. Thank you, Mr. Zabotsky, for your discretion in an odd situation.”
Well, it went pretty well, so well in fact there had to be a catch to it. Veronica was an unusual and desirable woman, and Clem had missed her. They did the town mildly. They used to do it once a year, but they had been apart in their present persons for several years. And yet Veronica would want to revisit “that little place we were last year, oh, but that wasn't you, was it, Clem? — that was Clem,” and that kind of talk was confusing.
They dined grandly, and they talked intimately but nervously. There was real love between them, or among them, or around them somehow. They didn't understand how it had turned grotesque.
“He never quite forgave you
for clearing out the accounts,” Veronica said.
“But it was my money, Veronica,” Clem insisted. “I earned it by the sweat of my tongue and my brain. He had nothing to do with it.”
“But you're wrong, dear Clem. You worked equally for it when you were one. You should have taken only half of it.”
They came back to Veronica's hotel, and one of the clerks looked at Clem suspiciously.
“Didn't you just go up, and then come down, and then go up again?” he asked.
“I have my ups and downs, but you may mean some thing else,” Clem said.
“Now don't be nervous, dear,” Veronica said. They were up in Veronica's room now, and Clem was looking around very nervously. He had jumped at a mirror, not being sure that it was.
“I am still your wife,” Veronica said, “and nothing has changed, except everything. I don't know how, but I'm going to put things together again. You have to have missed me! Give now!” And she swept him off his feet as though he were a child. Clem had always loved her for her sudden strength. If you haven't been up in Veronica's arms, then you haven't been anywhere.
“Get your pumpkin-picking hands off my wife, you filthy oaf!” a voice cracked out like a bullwhip, and Veronica dropped Clem thuddingly from the surprise of it.
“Oh, Clem!” she said with exasperation, “you shouldn't have come here when I was with Clem. Now you've spoiled everything. You can't be jealous of each other. You're the same man. Let's all pack up and go home and make the best of it. Let people talk if they want to.”
“Well, I don't know what to do,” Clem said. “This isn't the way. There isn't any way at all. Nothing can ever be right with us when we are three.”
“There is a way,” Veronica said with sudden steel in her voice. “You boys will just have to get together again. I am laying down the law now. For a starter each of you lose a hundred pounds. I give you a month for it. You're both on bread and water from now on. No, come to think of it, no bread! No water either; that may be fattening, too. You're both on nothing for a month.”
“We won't do it,” both Clems said. “It'd kill us.”
“Let it kill you then,” Veronica said. “You're no good to me the way you are. You'll lose the weight. I think that will be the trigger action. Then we will all go back to Rock Island or whatever town that was and get the same hotel room where one of you rose in a daze and left the other one unconscious on the bed. We will recreate those circumstances and see if you two can't get together again.”
“Veronica,” Clem said, “it is physically and biologically impossible.”
“Also topologically absurd.”
“You should have thought of that when you came apart. All you have to do now is get together again. Do it! I'm laying down an ultimatum. There's no other way. You two will just have to get together again.”
“There is another way,” Clem said in a voice so sharp that it scared both Veronica and Clem.
“What? What is it?” they asked him.
“Veronica, you've got to divide,” Clem said. “You've got to come apart.”
“Oh, no. No!”
“Now you put on a hundred pounds just as fast as you can, Veronica. Clem,” Clem said, “go get a dozen steaks up here for her to start on. And about thirty pounds of bone meal, whatever that is. It sounds like it might help.”
“I'll do it, I'll do it,” Clem cried, “and a couple of gallons of blood-pudding. Hey, I wonder where I can get that much blood-pudding this time of night?”
“Boys, are you serious? Do you think it'll work?” Veronica gasped. “I'll try anything. How do I start?”
“Think divisive thoughts,” Clem shouted as he started out for the steaks and bone meal and blood-pudding.
“I don't know any,” Veronica said. “Oh, yes I do! I'll think them. We'll do everything! We'll make it work.”
“You have a lot going for you, Veronica,” Clem said. “You've always been a double-dealer. And your own mother always said that you were two-faced.”
“Oh, I know it, I know it! We'll do everything. We'll make it work. We'll leave no stone unthrown.”
“You've got to become a pair, Veronica,” Clem said at one of their sessions. “Think of pairs.”
“Crocodiles and alligators, Clem,” she said, “frogs and toads. Eels and lampreys.”
“Horses and asses, Veronica,” Clem said, “elk and moose. Rabbits and hares.”
“Mushrooms and toadstools, Veronica,” Clem said. “Mosses and lichens. Butterflies and moths.”
“Camels and dromedaries, Clem,” Veronica said. “Salamanders and newts, dragonfly and damselfly.”
Say, they thought about pairs by the long ton. They thought every kind of sundering and divisive thought. They plumbed the depths of psychology and biology, and called in some of the most respected quacks of the city for advice.
No people ever tried anything harder. Veronica and Clem and Clem did everything they could think of. They gave it a month. “I'll do it or bust,” Veronica said.
And they came close, so close that you could feel it. Veronica weighed up a hundred pounds well within the month, and then coasted in on double brandies. It was done all but the final thing.
Pay homage to her, people! She was a valiant woman!
They both said that about her after it was over with. They would admire her as long as they lived. She had given it everything.
“I'll do it or bust,” she had said.
And after they had gathered her remains together and buried her, it left a gap in their lives, in Clem's more than in Clem's, since Clem had already been deprived of her for these last several years.
And a special honor they paid her.
They set two headstones on her grave. One of them said ‘Veronica.’ And the other one said ‘Veronica.’
She'd have liked that.
The Man Underneath
Stories out of the “Ocean” called modernly the Subconscious, on the Theme of Fun in Fiction.
Charles Chartel was not the most pleasant man in the world, and as the Great Zambesi he was not the greatest magician. But he was a smart man and a good magician. He had the magnetism of a faith healer, the spirit and appearance of a rooster and a deadly seriousness. He had the patter and the poise and he had learned all that was learnable. Nor was he a mere pigeon-passer and card-caller. He had inherited, built up, bought and assembled as full a repertoire as any Magic Man in the business.
And, as each must have, he had his specialty: a simple and sound disappearing act. It was nothing really startling; he seemed to underplay it. But it was puzzling and it remained a puzzle even to those in the trade. This one prime trick equated him with the Real Masters who in general technique were a little out of his class. Actually, in the ultimate variation of it, it was the greatest trick.
He put Veronica into a box. And when he opened the box again she was gone. That is all there was to it. The same thing had been performed by dozens of others in many variations.
But Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel did not use any of those variations; not, certainly, the trap door — for he had once performed the trick in a wire mesh twenty feet in the air. Besides, he was a cut above the trap-door men.
After showing the empty box he would always take it apart board by board, and pass the boards around for all to handle. He would then assemble it once more into a box, clamp down the cover, unclamp it again, open it, and Veronica would get out of the box.
The Great Boffo swore that the girl never stepped into the box at all.
The Great Boffo, however, could not duplicate the trick. Nor could the Great Thaumaturgos, nor the Great Zebdo.
All of them could make girls disappear from boxes, of course, and could do it in more showy fashion. But, though it was the same thing to the audiences, it was not the same thing to themselves. Their tricks were known to each other and were obvious to any magic man. The special trick of Zambesi-Chartel was not understood and this gave him stature. The only men in the world
who do not secretly believe in magic are the magicians, but there was something about the doings of the Great Zambesi that sowed doubt in them. The Great Vespo, indeed, claimed that he knew how it was done. But Vespo, though brilliant, was an old man and was given to extravagant claims.
The explanation that Charles (the Great Zambesi) Chartel gave to his audiences will not be given here. Should we repeat it, we would not be believed; we would be laughed at — and we are sensitive. We have not the magnetism of Zambesi to carry off such an outlandish claim as his even though it should be true — and it was. (Actually he said that he sent Veronica down into the Ocean and that he called her back again from that Ocean.)
However, this isn't about the disappearance of Veronica; it is about a matter quite the opposite. And the opposite of the disappearance of Veronica was the appearance of someone who differed from her as much as possible.
This came about at the Tri-State Fair when the New Arena was quite new. The crowd was spirited and the Great Zambesi was in full form. The lighting was perfect and Veronica shone like a jewel set in gold as she stepped into the box that was set up on blocks, clear of the stage. Zambesi closed the box and the crowd had the true feeling of magic about to happen. And then, with perfect timing, Zambesi-Chartel threw back the front cover as to reveal the box — empty.
We will be hornswitched if that box was empty!
But what rolled out of the box was not Veronica. It was the most woebegone scarecrow of a clown ever seen, the saddest looking man who ever stumbled over his own two feet.
“Holy hamadryads, cramoise, where did you come from?” Zambesi-Chartel breathed without understanding his own words.
The man out of the box was a hobo from a hundred years ago. He wept and wiped his nose with his hand. He had trouble with falling pants and broken shoes and a coat whose sleeve avoided arm. The little clown was good and there was real pathos in his silent humor.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 82
