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

by R. A. Lafferty

  But this night it was all gala stuff: the preprandial consorting; the dinner-feast itself which was refined gluttony by candlelight; and witchy wining; the wit and the walnuts afterwards; and later the quality cigars and the romantic rum; and the sly flesh.

  “I knew that it would be all well for us,” Norah said, “that it would be well for us now again, and forever. I knew it at noon today.”

  “What happened at noon?” Simon asked her, understanding hardly more than the rhythm of her words. Here was unhurried passion in every object and in every sound. Here was deep and solid understanding, with all the quick and happy misunderstandings afloat on it where there was no harm in them. “What happened at noon, Norah?” he asked.

  “Fun came back to our house, Simon. That's what happened at noon. It was never really gone, I guess, but we had forgotten a part of it for a while. You have been very busy and all. But now we won't forget it ever again.”

  Simon was so fond of this sly woman that there was intruded a tuneful override to his heartbeat that told all about it. It is good to have the big thing so secure that one doesn't have to understand all the details.

  “But what in particular happened at noontime, Norah?” he asked. “Was it just part of a good feeling that came to you?”

  “No, it was just part of a good man who came to me. A very good man—you. I'd forgotten that you could be so good like that. It would be wonderful if you could come home at noon every day as you did today. Could you?”

  There was a large and full and pleasant silence. And after a while it wasn't quite as full and as pleasant as it had been. Something big had gone out of it, and something small and doubtful had crept in.

  “You don't mean today, do you, Norah?” Simon asked. “You don't mean this noon, do you? I didn't come home this noon, Norah.”

  That was like a stone dropped into a smooth, deep water. It went in softly with a vertical sort of sound. The eddy rings spread out from it. One eddy of it reached Norah, reached her hand and then her throat.

  “You slapped me in the face when you said that,” she mumbled. She was listless now and not caring very much. She was used to such blind obstacles rising between them, blameless and faultless barriers. “Even if you said it in fun, the fun's all gone out of it now, Simon. We've lost it again.”

  “I didn't say it in fun, Norah. And I didn't come here at noon.”

  “Has my mind gone? Or yours?”

  “I don't know. Maybe neither one.”

  “Who was it here then? Who else wears your body?”

  “I don't know. I'll try to find out.”

  Had the sly mind of Norah really failed? It was too resilient to crack from a simple, direct jolt. That mind was as tough as it was tricky. It was always full of gentle wit and overdone patience, yes, but it had always been a fine instrument and it had come with a lifetime guarantee. Simon Radert was level-sure that nothing had failed in his wife's mind; that there hadn't been any new failure there. And what of his own? Oh, it was sharper than most minds, but had it come to have a base that was too thin? There is such a thing as myopia of the mind, and it takes rare glasses to correct it. Surely Simon had been out of his mind to drift away from Norah of whom he was so fond, to drift so nearly clear away from her so often. Out of his mind as to such rift things, maybe, but he had not been home that noontime.

  Simon may have been a little sick. He had certainly felt queer on his noontime walk that day, not quite himself for a while there. But, sick or not, queer-feeling or not, he had not come home that noontime.

  He sat in his study and shuffled his thoughts. But he shuffled them without profit. Laughter could be heard from the Swag's house next door, loud laughter even coming through the tight walls. They had a lot of fun at that house, Norah had said. Why do the creeps have all the fun? “I could have a certain kind of low fun with that Buxom Jean myself,” Simon said. And just what was it that Swag did anyhow that he could afford to move into a neighborhood that hadn't fallen apart yet?

  “Didn't Swag give me a card? Oh, hell yes, he gave me five cards, all different.” Simon fished the five cards out of his pocket and spread them out on that paper-shuffling table that he had in his study. Each of the cards was headed “Henry H. Swag,” and each of them was tailed “Highly Scientific Methods. By Appointment Only.” And these were the messages on the cards:

  On the first, “Mind-Changer. Let Me Change Your Mind.” On the second, “Personalized Voyages. Go In Person; Fine Trips For All Of You.” On the third, “Whose Place Do You Want To Take? Not Hypnotism. Not Illusion. This Is The Real Thing.” On the fourth, “Change Places With Anyone At All, For Fun And Profit.” And on the fifth was printed “The Perfect Disguise. The Perfect Set-Up. You'll Never Know About It If You Don't Investigate.”

  “Utterly unfascinating,” Simon Radert said. “But I'm glad that this hokey observes highly scientific methods.” Simon shuffled fiscal papers for a couple of hours. Then he went to bed alone.

  And the following day had a background of nagging worry that could not quite be buried in work. Simon had lost (it was at least one dozen times that he had lost it) the thing that he most cared about, the mystical concord with his sly wife. He held for her, as he had always, puzzlement and fondness; and working at the thing that he cared about second most of all would not distract or occupy him today. The morning went badly. Simon decided that he would not go out from the business building that noontime. He had been bothered on the previous day by either an illness or an anomaly, and he feared running into the same thing again. But he became unaccountably nervous as the twelve o'clock time came around. He sat, in queasy context, and gazed at the walls of his office, as small, brass notes from his timer counted up to twelve. Then the walls changed.

  That was fact. It wasn't any trick of the eye. The walls changed; a different place had come to Simon, and he was in that different place. And at the same moment he had the under-feeling that he himself had also changed in several ways.

  Now this was weird, and there was no accepting it without revolt. Simon's body seemed to have become thicker and shorter. He felt himself acquire a pair of jolly jowls. He became fat-headed. His paunch developed into a more spacious thing, and his clothes tightened on him. His hands weren't his own. The hairs on the backs of them were coarser and darker. The hands themselves were shorter and thicker than they had been, and probably they were more powerful. There was a warm clamminess about his hands. Yes, and there were erupting appetites of several sorts in his body. He had become uncomfortably sensual.

  Simon knew that he now looked out at the world through black or brown eyes rather than through his old gray eyes. The whole spectrum shifts a notch when filtered through dark eyes instead of light. Well, he couldn't see what he looked like; and he didn't want, just yet, to go to a glass. But he could see what the room looked like. It was a racier office than his own: at least it had racier pictures on the walls. It was flashy, yes, but with luxurious flash.

  His picture of Norah was gone from the desk at which he sat. There were other things there, loud and disturbing things. In particular, there was a figurine; an obscene figurine it was. It was not at all the nudity of the mostly (not entirely) female figure that made it obscene: indeed the thing did have a few odd scraps and traps of clothes on it. But it was obscene in every limb and line of it. It had a face of comic, evil impudence, of a comic that wasn't funny. It was a lurid and garish thing. Simon wasn't sure that it wasn't alive; he wasn't sure that it didn't move. And the eyes, the sly eyes of it! Simon went clammy at the look of them, and to go clammy in the body he had acquired was a raunchy and darkly exciting experience. The thing had Norah's own sly eyes, her eyes as they would have been (her eyes as they damned sight were) if she'd suddenly chosen hell and its ways and gone there in a quick passion of deformity.

  Damnation, what was Simon into? He would not admit that his mind had slipped, but his case and his world and his person had surely slipped fundamentally. Ah, well, there were papers of ever
y sort on the desk, and there were files full of papers. And Simon Radert was a paper-shuffler of exceptional ability. He could extract the substance of papers rapidly and accurately. He knew about things like this, and the papers he usually shuffled were mostly gilt-edged ones. So were these.

  There was money-stuff here. There was a rich setup in all this. It would be the most outlandish fraud ever, unless it delivered on its promises. There was a hooked clientele of moneyed persons, and the operator of all this was operating on a very deep take. Yes, journeys were promised, journeys clear out of the ordinary. And there were jarringly crooked methods spelled out on how the clients might recoup their journey's expense a dozen times in the peculiar scenery to be encountered on the journeys. Simon knew many of the clients, and he knew about many others. This was as big a con-game as had ever been devised. But how did it get its repeat business? It sure did have the smell of something that gave results, yes, pungent results.

  A quick-eyed man prowling through this conniving paper could have many a public question answered. He could discover where the bodies were buried: and there were bodies, undeniably dead bodies, running all through this elegant contrivance.

  And the mastermind behind this all, the man who operated it, was Henry H. Swag.

  However had Simon Radert got into this office? However had he got into a wrong body? He was ready to look in a glass now. He found one and looked. Yes, he was Henry H. Swag. Why shouldn't he be there?

  “And now I will just discover where I go at noons,” said the inner voice of Simon (for the inner voice still belonged to him). He went out of there fast. He took a taxi, for he realized that someone else had a jump of a few minutes on him. He got out of the taxi at the corner of his own block. He started for his own home, and he saw that he was even then being anticipated. A man was just then going into Simon Radert's house. The man was Simon Radert, in clothes that were too loose for him and too short for him.

  “He's holding my own body for hostage,” said the inner Simon. “I cannot well throttle to death a body that I hope to inhabit again. Somehow I can't even hate that thing going into my house. It's the non-essential me, but it's myself nevertheless. It's rather the case that I can't look on the reflection of the face that I'm wearing without abomination. I am a temple divided against myself. What will I do now, and where will I go?

  “I see. I will go where my borrowed, heel-bouncing feet take me,” And he went straightaway into the house of Henry H. Swag, which was next door to his own, if only things were properly sorted out. And talk about a funny feeling when he came in! Here was all the entrail-churning, double-acting queasiness with attraction that had bothered him for these last several days.

  “Oh, Henry! I can hardly wait,” Buxom Jean cried. “And I won't wait. Let's see how fast we can get started! Who are you this time? Don't tell me. Make me guess. Oh, I have the most wonderful husband in the world. What other man would be so thoughtful as to come to me in a different trick every day! Oh, we'll never run out of them as long as there are men in the world. Whatever woman ever had such variety in her enjoyments? And there'll be several tonight, besides. Oh, but you don't care about them, do you? They won't be you.”

  The inner Simon Radert told himself that it didn't matter. He was a man of rectitude, but he had learned the paradox of flexible rectitude in late years. After all, it would be only the body that possessed Buxom Jean, and that body was already Buxom Jean's lawful husband. The inner Simon told himself a variety of things, and some of them were lies. “I could have a certain kind of low fun with Buxom Jean myself,” Simon had said just the night before. Well, he'd set it too low. This was high fun. Even Norah (oh my God, Norah!) had said that the way Buxom Jean was stacked, there weren't any wrong places. Anyhow, it was a very bouncy and strenuous encounter.

  “I have compromised myself inextricably,” the inner Simon said a little later when he was in the street again. “I am caught up in a witchery which may not be as scientific as it claims. Indeed, I will have to check on the scientific aspects of the whole thing. I have transacted devil's business with a devil without even signing on as a formal client of his. Oh, it may be that he hooks them all with the informal hook first: and that he then compels them to be his clients till they are fleeced and flayed completely. Well, if I've been a client of his in this encounter, at least he's not had any money out of me.

  “No money, maybe. But I feel that I've been bled of something that prices pretty high. And now I am lost in my bearings, and I'm divided in mind and body, and—

  “No, I'm not, either. It happens fast when it happens.” It happened so fast that it is hardly noticed, for Simon Radert was back in his own proper body and could at least think of putting himself in control of the situation.

  “He has still compromised me in a sordid fashion, and I have still behaved like a creep,” the reintegrated Simon said. “Well, if I am compromised again, I bet I make it pay me well. I don't know just how scientific his con is, but I've always had a little bit of my own science held in reserve. There are a lot of unknowns to me in this, and it will take some juggling. I'll bet I'm a better juggler than that creep is, even if he owns the balls.”

  The afternoon was taut. Simon had contrary feelings. His own case and house were in the middle of the tawdry mystery. There had developed something very shaky about his sly wife Norah, of whom he was fonder than anything else in the world. But for his second fondness: the shuffling and juggling of papers and circumstances with object of thumping profit and elegant triumph, yes, the prospects were very live there.

  He'd bring that heel-bouncing creep Swag to heel. He'd move in on the con and suck it dry. Then he'd make a break for greener grass, with everything falling rich and ripe for him. And there might be a way to have Norah always at her best, and also to have Buxom Jean (what a bouncy widow she'd be then!) at her never-failing finest, and a dozen others besides, or a hundred, or a thousand. Really there was no limit to this sort of science when properly applied.

  Down, man, down! Let there be no compromise, no strange venery, no deviation from rectitude, no devil's business (except on the most careful terms and with a dear aim always in sight), no sordidness, no shady stuff, nothing of that sort until a triumphant solution had been attained.

  “There will be plenty of time for compromise and deviation and strange venery after this business is regularized,” there came the voice of an intermediate Simon. What? Were those his words and his thought? There must be a little piece of Henry H. Swag still stuck in him from their last exchange.

  Then Simon had the oddest thought of all his disturbed period.

  “I can't be hurt mortally if I set my most important thing out of reach, if I accept that I most enjoy it when it is out of reach,” he told himself. “Suppose that I do lose Norah? What if I do lose her either for a little while or forever? Well, that would be the end of this world for me, of course. But it could be the beginning of further worlds. I suspect that I will have to pull down my present world in any case; it's grown too close and narrow around me. And I've noticed for a long while (though I've never admitted it and will only half admit it now) that I'm fonder of Norah in her absence than in her presence. There are some paintings that merge beautifully at a fair distance but become blotches at close range (not that Norah is such a blotch). There is really an elegant pleasure in being separated from her: she makes so grand an appearance at a distance.

  “Or do I justify myself overmuch here? Sure I do. I get half a look behind the curtain. I have a half-vision of what is going to happen, of the best trade that I can make. Oh, this is going to be a touchy business! I'd wish it never to end. Complete triumph and vindication (doubly fine when it pays its own way a dozen times over) is nowhere near as sweet as the conflict when one is still behind but sees a chance for coming up even; for coming up more than even, with luck, with craft, with prophecy, with highly scientific methods.

  “I don't want the tension eased; I only want it shifted a bit. I don't want to wi
n easily. I may not even want to win. But I do want to keep the winning within sight and to come almost up to it. Let all the world be frozen forever then, with my winning just on the tips of my reaching fingers.

  “This is a funny game, but it's the one I want. It will be my own game and I will be good at it. And I'll trick the world into playing this game of mine.”

  That evening when Simon came home, Norah shifted the tension just enough. Then Simon knew for sure that it was his game and that nobody could rob him of the pleasure of it. Peace was not what he wanted, and relaxation was not. “Will we be strangers, then?” Norah asked him in her soft, sly way. “Sure we will be, Simon, why not? Strangers and fish stink after three days, they say; but neither does so long as it keeps its strangeness. Did you ever consider just what a strange thing a fish really is, Simon? Or what a strange fish you really are? But you were wonderful at noon, and I understand now why you want to preserve this dissemblance. Last night I didn't understand it. Fate would have to be jealous of us for the intensity of our enjoyment, and to be jealous for blind fate is to destroy. But we hide in the bright noontime where nobody can see us, and we'll not be destroyed. We can swear to every fate and god and judge that we were strangers doing this thing, and that we do not even remember the names or persons of each other.

  “But I will say it again as I said it last night, Simon: you have been so nice to me; now I will try to be just as nice to you. We can have the fun and the mystery both, I think, Simon.”

  Just how sly was Norah, anyhow? Oh, her slyness was bottomless. Was it possible that she didn't know that it wasn't Simon in Simon's body at noontime? Oh, she could always refuse to know anything that she didn't want to know. And now she gave Simon one of the finest evenings and nights in his life.

  Fate was jealous of them, and fate did know their names and persons at night, however much it might have been hoodwinked at noontime. And fate moved one pawn against them in a careful destructive game. Wait a while. Three or more can play that game.