Of course it wasn't the same. Then why had he been so alarmed and disappointed?
“Will you travel westward with me, Candy?” he asked.
“I suppose so, a little way, if we don't have to talk,” she said.
So William Morris and Candy Calabash began to traverse the City that was the world. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words “Beginning of Stencil 35,353,” and thereat William went into a sort of panic. By why should he? It was not the same stencil number at all. The World City might still be everywhere different.
But William began to run erratically. Candy stayed with him. She was not a readie or a talkie, but she was faithful to a companion for many blocks. The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen.
They arrived at the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. It was almost, but not quite, the same as another 14th Street Water Ballet that William had seen once. They came to the algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 15th Street and to the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 16th Street. Ah, a hopeful eye could still pick out little differences in the huge sameness. The World City had to be everywhere different.
They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 17th Street. There was an artificial antelope there now. William didn't remember it from the other time. There was hope, there was hope.
And soon William saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an arm band with the word “Monitor” on it. He was not the same man, but he had to be a close brother of another man that William had seen two days before.
“Does it all repeat itself again and again and again?” William asked this man in great anguish. “Are the sections of it the same over and over again?”
“Not quite,” the man said. “The grease marks on it are sometimes a little different.”
“My name is William Morris,” William began once more bravely.
“Oh, sure. A William Morris is the easiest type of all to spot,” the man said.
“You said—No, another man said that my name-game ancestor had to do with designing of another thing besides the Wood Beyond the World,” William stammered. “What was it?”
“Wallpaper,” the man said. And William fell down in a frothy faint.
Oh, Candy didn't leave him there. She was faithful. She took him up on her shoulders and plodded along with him, on past the West Side Show Square on 18th Street, past the Mingle-Mangle and the Pad Palace, where she (no, another girl very like her) had turned back before, on and on. “It's the same thing over and over and over again,” William whimpered as she toted him along.
“Be quiet talkie,” she said, but she said it with some affection.
They came to the great Chopper House on 20th Street. Candy carried William in and dumped him on a block there.
“He's become ancient,” Candy told an attendant. “Boy, how he's become ancient!” It was more than she usually talked.
Then, as she was a fair-minded girl and as she had not worked any stint that day, she turned to and worked an hour in the Chopper House. (What they chopped up in the Chopper House was the ancients.) Why, there was William's head coming down the line! Candy smiled at it. She chopped it up with loving care, much more care than she usually took.
She'd have said something memorable and kind if she'd been a talkie.
And Read The Flesh Between The Lines
A Cave, a Cove, a Hub, a Club,
A crowded, jumbled flame:
The Magic Tree, the Future Shrub,
Nostalgia is its name.
—Old Scribble on the Wall of That Room
by John Penandrew
There had been a sort of rumbling going on in that old unused room over the garages at Barnaby Sheen's place. Nobody paid much attention to it. After all, there were queerer things than a little rumble at Barnaby's.
There were spooks, there were experiments, there was a houseboy and bartender who should have been dead for a million years. There were jokers and geniuses who came there. Who notices a little rumble in an unused room? There were rumbles of many sorts going on at Barnaby's.
“The rumble in the old room is menacing and dangerous,” Barnaby told us one evening. “No, really, fellows, it isn't one of my tricks. I don't know what it is.”
“It sounds like a friendly rumble to me,” Harry O'Donovan said. “I like it.”
“I didn't say that it was malevolent,” Barnaby gruffed with that odd affectation which he sometimes put into his voice. “I like it too. We all like it. It likes us. But it is dangerous, very dangerous, without meaning to be. I have been over everything there: I can't find the source of the rumble or the danger. I ask you four, as a special favor to me, to examine the room carefully. You all know the place since years long gone by.”
The four of us, Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, Cris Benedetti, who were three smart ones, and me, who wasn't, went down and examined the old room. But just how thoroughly did we examine it?
We examined it, at least, in more ways and times than the present. For that reason it is possible that we neglected it a little bit in its present state. The past times of it were so strong that it may have intended its present state to be neglected, or it may have insisted that its whole duration was compressed in its casual present state.
Let's hear a little bit about this room, then.
In the time of Barnaby Sheen's grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion”, this was not a room over the garages, but over the stables and carriage-house.
It was a hayloft, that's what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft. And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmaker's needles, and cobbler's bench; and spokeshaves (for forming and trimming singletrees) and neat's-foot oil and all such. The room, even in its later decades, had not lost any of its old smells. There would always be the perfume of timothy hay, of sweet clover, of little bluestem grass and of prairie grass, of alfalfa, of sudan grass, of sorghum cane, of hammered oats and of ground oats, of rock salt, of apples. Yes, there was an old barrel there that would remember its apples for a hundred years. Why had it been there? Do not horses love apples for a treat?
There was the smell of shorts and of bran, the smell of old field tobacco (it must have been cured up there in the jungle of the rafters), the smell of seventy-five year old sparks (and the grindstone that had produced them was there, operable yet), the smell of buffalo robes (they used them for lap robes in wagons and buggies). There was a forge there and other farrier's tools (but they had been brought up from downstairs no more than sixty years ago, so their smell was not really ancient there).
Then there were a few tokens of the automobile era; heavily built parts cabinets, tools, old plugs, old oil smell. There were back seats of very old cars to serve as sofas and benches, horns and spotlights and old battery cases, even very old carbide and kerosene headlights. But these were in the minority: there is not so much use for a room over the garages as for a room over the stables.
There was another and later odor that was yet very evocative: it could only be called the smell of almost-ape.
And then there were our own remnants somewhat before this latter thing. This had been a sort of clubroom for us when we were schoolboys and when we were summer-boys. There were trunks full of old funny papers. They were from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe, the Kansas City Star, the Chicago Tribune — those were the big-city papers that were hawked in our town, and our own World and Tribune. There were a few New York and Boston and Philadelphia funny papers also. And the funnies of the different papers were not nearly so uniform then as they later became.
There were the comparatively more recent comic books. We had been older then, almost too old for such things. Yet there were a few thousand of them, mostly the original property of Cris Benedetti and John Penandrew.
There was the taxidermy of George Drakos: stuffed o
wls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats. And there were the dissections (also of Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens. The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles. Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wireclamp holders, will contain formaldehyde forever: this is a fact too little known. (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?)
There were the lepidoptera (the butterfly and night-moth collections) of Harry O'Donovan, and my own aggregations of rocks and rock fossils. And there were all the homemade radios, gamma-ray machines, electrical gadgets generally, coils, magnet wire, resistors, tubes—of Barnaby Sheen.
There were also—hold it, hold it! If everything in that room were listed, there would not be books enough in the world to contain it all (there were even quite a few books there). There would be no limit to the remnants, not even to the remnants of a single day.
But we had all of us lived several mutually exclusive boyhoods that hinged on that room. Within the framework of history as now constituted, these variants could not all have happened. But they did.
The room had developed a benevolent rumble that might be dangerous. Barnaby Sheen couldn't find what it was; and we could not. It was a soundly built room, oak and hickory and black locust wood; it had been there a long time. It was older than the fine house that had replaced the anomalous old “mansion” there. If it was dangerous (and Barnaby said that it was), we could not discover that danger.
The world itself had a deeper and more worrisome series of rumbles. We leave the room over the garages now and go to the world. We are sorry to have spent so much time on such a little thing as that room. It is just that it has stuck in our minds somehow.
2
Young Austro said “carrock, carrock.”
O'Donovan said “grumble.”
Loretta gave a spirit knock.
The room said “rumble, rumble.”
—Rocky McCrocky (in cartoon balloon)
We were together for the first time in eighteen months. Barnaby Sheen was back in the country, Cris Benedetti was back in the country, Harry O'Donovan was back in the state, George Drakos was back out of his seclusion. I was there; I hadn't been anywhere.
Really, Barnaby was back for the second time. He'd been home two weeks before this, and that after more than a year's absence. Then, after he'd unpacked most of his things, he snapped his fingers and said, as though dreaming some lively dream, “I forgot something over there. I'll just go back and see about it. I'll be back again in a couple of weeks.”
But “over there” was halfway around the globe, in Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala on the Guna slopes. Barnaby had mineral concessions there. There also he had found a concentration of most interesting fossils, some of them still living and walking. Barnaby used a cover story of doing seismograph petroleum survey work, but he was into many things.
But now he was back for the second time and we were together.
Austro had just brought us our drinks, though listlessly. Austro was houseboy and bartender and was of an old and doubted species. But he worked distractedly now, not with his old sharpness. Since he had learned to read he always had some crude sheet or sheaf of gaudy and juvenile literature under his arm or in his hand.
“Well Barney, you went halfway around the world again,” Drakos said. “Did you bring back what you went after?”
“Oh no. It wasn't such a thing as one can bring or carry. At least I don't believe that it was.”
“But you said that you had forgotten something over there and that you were going to go back and see about it.”
“Yes, I said that, but I wasn't too lucky in seeing about the matter. I couldn't remember what it was; that's the trouble. I still can't quite.”
“You went halfway around the world to get something you had left behind? And when you got there you had forgotten what it was? Barney!” This was Harry O'Donovan chiding him.
“Not quite right, Harry,” Barnaby said. “I didn't forget it when I went back there. I went back there because I had already forgotten it: because I had always forgotten it, I guess. I went back there to try to remember it. I consulted with some of Austro's elder kinsmen (he's only a boy, you know). I meditated a bit in those mountains. I'm good at that: I should have been a hermit (why, I suppose that I am!) or a prophet. But I remembered only part.”
These were really the men who knew everything? Sometimes it didn't quite seem like it.
“How does Austro handle things when you are gone?” George Drakos asked. “Being able to speak only one word might be a disadvantage, and beyond that he isn't very bright. How is he accepted?”
“Austro is quite bright, George,” Barnaby told him. “He is accepted within the house, and he doesn't go out much. Here there are several persons who accept and understand him perfectly, in spite of his seeming to speak only one word.”
“Which several persons, Barney?”
“Oh, my daughter Loretta. And Mary Mondo.”
“Barney, they don't count!” Drakos shouted in near anger.
“They do with me. They do with Austro. They do with all of you a little.”
“Barney, what George means, or at least what I mean is, is Austro accepted as human?” Cris asked.
“Oh well, yes, he's accepted as of the kindred. It's hard to put into words. There's a missing kindred word, you know. Besides mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew, cousin, female cousin, in-laws, there is yet another. Delineate it, name it: then we may know what Austro is.”
“Whatever are you talking about, Barney?” Cris asked, puzzled.
“Kinship, apposition, parallelism, the riddle of flesh and of election. Austro was found in Ethiopia, on the Guna slopes, northwest of Magdala. But there is another Magdala, more blessed by its circumstance and location; it is near Tiberias on the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Its first name (the first name of both of them, I suspect) is Migdal, the Watch-Tower. Tell me the kinship between the two cities (there are very many analogs and references to the Two Cities) and then perhaps I can tell you the kinship between Austro and ourselves.”
(Austro, the houseboy and bartender, was one of the species called Australopithecus, which is either ape or ape-man or man: we don't really know. So far, he could speak only one word “carrock”, but he could speak it in a hundred different ways. And he had now learned to read and write very hairy English.)
(Loretta Sheen was a life-sized sawdust-filled doll: Barnaby always insisted that this object was the body of his real daughter Loretta. We all knew Barnaby very well from boyhood, but there was a cloud here. We couldn't remember for sure whether he had ever had a real daughter or not.)
(Mary Mondo was a ghost. Actually, she was the schizo-personality of the ghost of a girl named Violet Lonsdale who was long dead.)
(Few households have three such unusual persons.)
“I believe that Austro is a qualified col to us,” Harry O'Donovan tried to explain in his rather high voice. “In Irish, col means first a prohibition, a sin, a wickedness; and only after that does it mean a cousin. So first cousin (col ceathar) really means first impediment or first wickedness, and second cousin (col seisear) really means second impediment or second wickedness. But there is (yes, you are right, Barney) another relationship whose very name is forgotten. Perhaps it is the col carraig or rock cousin. Whyever did I think of a thing like that? 'Tis flesh which is the opposite of rock. But this outside thing is at the same time a holy and forbidden relationship. It is the Flesh Between.”
“Has anyone ever sounded the real meaning of Dutch Uncle?” Cris asked. “Frisia (which is Dutch) was the latest home in Europe of some of the almost-men or early-men.”
“In Greek, cousin is exadelphus,” George Drakos contributed as he st
udied the thing, “the out-brother or outer-brother. But it isn't an old word. The old word for cousin is unwritten and forgotten. And yet there is, or there was, another kindred name (as Barnaby says) that is not father or mother, not son or daughter, not brother, sister, niece or nephew, not uncle or aunt or maternal grandfather. There is another and expunged relationship name, I agree: and it does represent an expunged flesh. But all expunged things leave traces.”
“Austro is such a trace,” Barnaby insisted. “He is a Flesh Between. I am believing that no creatures have ever stopped happening, but some of them have stopped being apparent. This calls into question the whole nature of reality.”
“What doesn't?” Harry O'Donovan said.
“Austro is not entirely expunged, though,” Barnaby went on. “And let us not forget that we also have angelic and diabolic kindred. We're a big family.”
“Ishmael was a more moral and upstanding man than Isaac,” Cris Benedetti said suddenly. “Why was Isaac more blessed? Why are we more blessed than Austro?”
These were the four men who knew everything? They may have been. Do you know other men who talk like that?
“Carrock, carrock,” said Austro, coming in and filling Barnaby's drink: spilling it too, for he was reading an old funny paper (Elmer Tuggle, it was) at the same time, and he wasn't good at doing two things at once.
“Rumble, rumble,” said that old unused room a few yards distant.
3
The past it is a big balloon,
I blow it all I can.
We all are ghost and all buffoon,
A close, explosive clan.
—Lines expressed by Mary Mondo
(medium unknown)
Several evenings later it was, in the same place, and the talk had turned to ancient libraries. I don't know how it had. I came late.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 153
