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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “How do you know when to cross the street?” he asked a young lady there. Mighty funny business. Duffy was usually the one to come up with an answer: why did he have to ask this strange young lady?

  “It is the Emancipation,” the young lady said with some heat, “and old goatskin here wants to know when to cross the street!”

  “Don't people cross streets after the Emancipation?” Duffy asked.

  “Only emancipated people. Don't you relate at all?” the lady asked crossly.

  “No, I don't seem to relate to this,” Duffy said. Funnier and funnier. Melchisedech Duffy had almost always related to things, even before they happened.

  “People who don't relate are simply not allowed to cross the streets,” the young lady laid down the law.

  “What do they do if they're not allowed to cross the streets?”

  “Oh, I suppose they walk around them,” the young lady said.

  This is the world that bans the heels;

  These are the cars that don't have wheels.

  The buses, Melchisedech Duffy now saw, no longer had wheels. Many of the trucks had none, and some of the cars had not.

  “What happened to all the wheels?” Melchisedech asked a workman.

  “You really have to ask that on the Day of total change?” the workman challenged. “If there's one thing worse than a square it's a round. Get out of here, you roundskin, you roundheel.” But what did they have in place of wheels?

  There was a fog before the eyes as to this, and yet it was a quite clear morning and the sun was nearly up. The vehicles had something else instead of wheels, and they moved along almost as well on this something else. The change seemed to have been a simple one. Even now, workmen as well as owners were taking the wheels off cars and putting on something else, something that came out of a kit.

  “Are you sure that that, whatever it is that comes out of the kits, is better than wheels?” Duffy asked a young car owner who was making the changeover himself.

  “No, of course not,” the man said. “How would it be better? The thought for today is that nothing is any better than anything else. Don't you even know the thought for the day?”

  “I am having some second thoughts for this day,” Duffy said. He was amazed. People were dismantling and taking off the walls of all the buildings. The buildings, without the support of the walls, didn't seem to collapse one floor upon another, though some of them sagged a little.

  “Faith maintains better than walls,” a pious and bearded teenager said. “Walls were the enemy of freedom.” Then he began to pull out his beard in big hunks.

  People were dismantling and taking off their clothes. The people, without the support, didn't seem to collapse one section upon another, though some of them sagged a little.

  “I know a green oasis,” Melchisedech Duffy said. “I know a green oasis in this world of dusty insanity. I will go there.”

  In turbulent world, one thing to bless:

  Salvation as found at the Pelican Press.

  Melchisedech Duffy went over to the Pelican Press. It was only three blocks. In the Quarter, everything is only three blocks. It was still in the same old ratty building where he had started it so many years ago, with Finnegan and Dotty Yekouris.

  And the publishing schedule had never changed. On Monday the seamen's paper came out, on Tuesday the union sheet, on Wednesday the Sporting News, on Friday the jazz paper. The Bark was special; it was printed on Thursday or whenever. Sometimes it didn't even come out every week.

  Today they should be printing The Bark, for it was Thursday. But was it? Was it indeed Thursday? Or was it the Great Day that breaks the sequence? This is the Hero void of fame: This is the Day without a Name, as the Great Day Rime had it: and the Great Day Rime was everywhere, tongueless, soundless, but hanging in the air.

  Well, if it wasn't Thursday, then it was (Great Day or not) whenever; and The Bark still should be printing. Melchisedech went into the Pelican Press Building.

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer was there, and Salvation Sally, and Margaret Stone. There was something quite revealing about them all.

  “Oh, Duff,” Mary Virginia cried. “Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't learned to get along without using names yet. You were right. You were right in every detail. I believe that you are the smartest man I know.”

  “Very likely, girl, very likely,” Melchisedech said. “Perhaps you should broaden your acquaintance with us more intelligent types.”

  “Have some coffee, Duff. Isn't it, ah, interesting the way this day is turning out, and it hardly started yet?”

  “Interesting, yes. Are you using cups?”

  “I'm afraid so. We're old-fashioned. I imagine we'll get used to it by sunup. Margaret made an act of faith and we all had it going a while ago, drank it without cups. Then we got to laughing and we broke it. You can't laugh at the things of the Great Day. I burned myself when my coffee collapsed. I see that you did too. But Salvation Sally is drinking tea without a cup. That filthy Aussie says that it's all right to laugh at coffee, but we must never laugh at tea.”

  Yes, Salvation Sally was drinking tea without a cup. She winked at Duffy, and when she winked she winked all the way down to her navel. How come he could see her navel anyhow? Had these fine ladies at the Pelican joined the commoners in this newness? Little Margaret Stone, with a big mallet, was breaking out all the walls of the building. It just didn't seem right to Melchisedech.

  “You have to have walls,” he protested. “You have to have walls to hang things on, if for nothing else.”

  “No, you don't,” Margaret said, swinging energetically (she had always been strong as a little burro). “You are the one who explained how it would be in the first place. Don't you remember?”

  “I was kidding when I wrote that.”

  “I'm not. If one has faith, then one doesn't need walls or any of such things. Oops! Lack of faith myself.”

  A large picture had fallen to the floor only a short while after the wall to which it had been fastened was demolished. It was one of those old, little-known masterpieces of Finnegan, his orange period. Margaret picked the picture up again, nailed it up on the empty air, and it stayed there. The nail going into the empty air sounded like a nail going into white pine.

  But, yes, Margaret also had joined the commoners in one new fashion. However, she was at the moment pretty well clothed in dust, plaster, and sweat, from her hammering down the walls. She took out the studs violently with an axe. And now there was nothing at all supporting the room above them. It rocked like a boat, but it didn't fall down on them yet.

  “Look, Duff,” Mary Virginia said. “Oh, damn, there I go using names again. It's as though I didn't realize yet that there's no point where one person ends and another begins. But look at this old copy.” She handed Melchisedech an old copy of that wonderful magazine-journal named The Bark that was printed on these same premises. “It's amazing the way you predicted it all,” she said, “how we would become uncontained, how we would live by faith and not by substance, how we would be completely emancipated, how we would merge with each other, how all walls and clothes and skins would be dismantled, how our minds would disappear (with faith, who needs minds?); you set it down in every detail, just a year ago. I feel that the people of the world are fulfilling the remainder of your details now.”

  She had handed him The Bark opened at the article “Great Day in the Morning” by Melchisedech Duffy. And Duffy's hands shook as he held it.

  “But, Mary Virginia,” he said, “this was a comic article, a bitterly comic article.”

  “Oh yes, that's the tragedy of it, from the old viewpoint. You put it so well in the final lines, ‘If ever the world forgets to laugh, these things and others will come to pass.’ How could you have known that it would forget? It's wonderful, isn't it? But when you're just coming into the thing, it sure is hard not to laugh at the way it's coming out. But to laugh is disastrous.”

  “Then let there be disaster!” Melchisedech th
undered in not very convincing tones. “A disaster is surely better than what this day is turning into. Let the laughter of the Pelican People be the salvation of the world.”

  “No, no, never,” Salvation Sally protested. “The only salvation here is myself. Salvation is in time, and we are beyond that. And laughter is simply not allowed. How lacking in faith would one have to be to laugh ever! Oh, take your clothes off, Duff, and at least one layer of skin. Join the thing. You invented the Day; and will you be the only one in the world too rigid to live in it?”

  “Laughter was useful only in the transition period,” Mary Virginia said. “Now that the Great Day is here, laughter would surely be a handicap, a blasphemy.”

  Melchisedech decided that things were going badly. The green oasis in the world of dusty insanity now proved to be of a very peculiar, almost sickly green.

  “Are you printing The Bark today?” he asked. Could he somehow slip another article into it and undo the frightful good that he had done?

  Whoosh! Margaret Stone pushed down another section of the outside wall, killing a little kid on the sidewalk. “Freedom, freedom!” she cried. And the Great-Day Freedom rushed in on them, and rushed out from them, and mingled.

  “What do you mean, are we printing The Bark today?” Mary Virginia demanded. “You're not making sense, Duff—I mean you're not making sense, temporary and contingent person. There isn't any today. You wrote yourself that the Great Day can never be referred to as ‘today,’ since ‘today’ implies a sequence and—”

  “Shut your Great Mouth this Great Day!” Melchisedech shouted with pinkish anger. It is hard to take serious a man who turns pink instead of purple with anger, but all things must be taken serious on the Great Day. The situation had certainly become serious with Melchisedech.

  “Great Day to you, you filthy Irishman,” Absalom Stein bellowed with a flourishing entrance. He could make a flourishing entrance even when there were no longer doors or walls to enter past. “Small day to you, you filthy Jew,” Melchisedech gave it back to him. Ah, this was one relationship as beautiful as it had ever been. Here, surely, was one friend remaining as an integral person, one acquaintance of kindred (if not quite equal) intelligence, one—

  But Absalom was clothed only in billowing smoke and a reeking cigar. (He had left written orders that he be finally buried in a plain pine box and with a lighted cigar in his mouth. “How will you keep it lit, Absie?” Margaret Stone had asked him. “Never mind, I'll keep it lit,” Stein had said, “I'll never be too dead for that.”) And the cigar, though lacking its outer wrapper leaf, held together and fumed prodigiously.

  “Freedom, Faith, Great Day,” Absalom said, and there was something uncontained about his eyes and manner. Melchisedech made one of Stein's own contempt-carrying gestures back at him, the one that said, without words, “Above the ears, nothing!” And Stein understood it not at all.

  Why, Stein's brains were shot, gone completely! Stein had always had a lot of brains, but they had been of a volatile nature, quite near the surface, and now they had evaporated.

  “I wonder whether you'll miss them, Absalom,” Melchisedech said. “Your brains, I mean.”

  “No, I don't think so. Brains were useful only during the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here, they would probably prove a handicap. I've divested myself of mine, yes. I've divested myself of everything except the stogie. It will become my token and it will take the place of my name. Do you notice anything special about it?”

  “That the longer you smoke it the longer it gets? Yes. You are all full of tricks this morning.”

  “Faith and Freedom, those are the things,” Stein said. “This is the cigar made from faith-tobacco, not from physical tobacco. It is of the celestial tobacco foretold in scripture.”

  Stein had, in these latter years, become an obese man. When uncovered and uncontained, he became very much so. And he had always been a straight-faced kidder. But was he now? Could he be trusted? What is more noxious than a kidder gone serious? But he remained the distant possibility of hope.

  “I suppose that we won't print any of the papers or magazines anymore,” Mary Virginia was saying. (Of all of them she was the only one formly enough to go divested.) “Papers and magazines were useful only for the transition period. Now that the Great Day is here we should be doing Great-Day stuff instead.”

  “What would that be?” Melchisedech asked. “Oh, sing songs without words, I guess. Finger-paint with faith-paint, not with physical paint. Be very close to each other. These are all forms of Great Day communication.”

  Zabotski, well known in that neighborhood, probably stuck his head into the building. Probably, for it was hard to say just when a head was stuck into a building now that there were no walls or doors left.

  “There's a fellow over on O'Dwyer Street who's already shed his skin completely,” he said. “Duff, why aren't you in the buff?”

  “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.”