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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “No, this man is not in on it,” the young lady said to Duffey, “though I now invite him to join us. Oh, we never know how long these things will last. We will be in session till we get certain points settled and certain remnants rooted out. Your friend here, the Stein, is worried because a few people have gone away and he can't remember who they were. I say that if one can't remember them, then it's a good thing they're gone. If they were superb, then they would be remembered. Let them pass out of all memory and be no more.”

  This young lady had “Royal Pop People” written all over her. She was the Countess, a teenage archetype among the splendids.

  “But I have a peculiar passion for unmemorable persons,” Absalom Stein said carefully. “I feel that I'm responsible for some few of them whom nobody else would bestow a thought on. I suspect that it's just that they are swallowed by oblivion if nobody remembers them at all, and it then would become the case of their never having existed at all. I can feel a dozen or so of them now, hanging on by the very nails of their fingers to the rim of oblivion, bawling against extinction, but almost certainly doomed to drop into that pit or cauldron and be extinguished. So it will be with them if somebody will not give them a thought. Of all people left in the world, I come closest to remembering them; I know that; but I cannot come close enough. I could bring them back from nothingness if I could form their faces in my mind. I can't. But I'll still try it.”

  “You are playing with very sticky fire, the Absalom,” the young Countess said. “It may be that you go with them where they have gone if you show such unhealthy interest.”

  “What is it that you call your society, lady?” Duffey asked. Duffey couldn't remember just when this lady had sat down with them at table. He couldn't remember whether he knew who she really was. He seemed very slow at waking up this morning.

  “Sometimes we call ourselves the Thunder Harps,” the lady said, “and sometimes we call ourselves other things. How is it that you have to ask me the name of our group? You are a man of very great age and honor, and you are an affiliate of ours.”

  “What? Am I a Thunder Harp?” Duffey cried with breakfast heartiness. He was dislocated and confused by this new air of change or mutation, but he would never admit his confusion to the world.

  “Oh, of course,” the young lady said. “You've been one of us almost forever. You're one of the perennial bushes. I suspect you're thousands of years old. You have those little green moss marks at the corners of your eyes, and there are many other signs. Why does it scare you, Duffey, when people spot you as one of the very old ones? Don't you want to be old and honored? And whyever should it startle you when you feel the green seasons returning to you and you know that you'll be appearing younger and younger for a few decades? You've surely been through these happenings often enough. How old are you anyhow?”

  Well, how old did this lady think she was? She seemed about seventeen years old. She wore a scent named “Timeless,” and who could be sure of her? She was just one of the new Royal Pop People who had taken over the directorship of everything. And how did she happen to be eating breakfast with them?

  “Duffey, you've been using whiting on your beard and hair again,” Stein accused. “Why do you do it? Why not let them turn black again? If you're supposed to be young for a few decades, then be young. Really, you'd look better young, and I can't think of anyone else of whom that's the case. You were always very boyish. But just what is behind this ‘green seasons’ affair that the lady is talking about? And just how old are you anyhow, Duffey?”

  “I don't know quite what all the young lady is talking about,” Duffey said. “But I'd wondered for a long time why you all hadn't noticed that I've been growing younger.”

  “What is to notice?” Stein asked. “When I was a boy in Chicago, you were an old man. Quite old, Duffey. When I met you again this last time, thirty or so years ago, you still seemed several decades older than the rest of us, but not nearly so old as you had been earlier. Now you seem several decades younger than the rest of us. That's all there is to it. It's sort of a silly way that you have of getting attention, Duffey, and to notice it would only be to humor you.”

  “It isn't as though it hadn't happened to you before, Duffey,” the lady said. The young lady had an impudent and archaic grin. She was bright and fundamental, as though several of the duller outer layers had been lifted from her. Duffey had terra cotta figurines in his bijou that very much resembled this young lady and her grin, and some of them were fakes. The terra cotta process and its finish are easily faked; the archaic grin is more difficult. But who was to say that this mysterious young lady was not a fake? She seemed disquietingly genuine though. Duffey had felt a real chill at the mention of the anomaly of his own unaging. It had never been mentioned aloud before. And the new breeze a-blowing today was not really new. It was an old, old breeze with its green seasons returning.

  “What has barnacle removing to do with history?” Stein suddenly asked the lady. He must have seen the prospectus of the subject, “The Holy Barnacle and the Pearl Beyond Price,” and he must have sensed the irony of calling the barnacle holy. Duffey recalled that the non-verbatim notice on his door had mentioned barnacle removing somewhere.

  The young Countess did not answer. She had the air of supposing that it would be a little bit infra to answer so obvious a question as Stein had posed.

  “Duffey, you'd better get back to your place,” Mary Virginia Schaeffer said as she came into Girardeau's Irish Restaurant. “There's quite a crowd of people over there, and they look like the lively sort who don't appreciate being crowded. If any of us can help you out, just let us know. What was going on in town during the night, anyhow? Margaret Stone was being very noetic about something, and the streets do have a different look to them this morning. I just don't know what to make of some of that trash. It wrings my heart the way some of it looks like old friends of forgotten names. It's as though blinders had been put on my eyes and on my mind as regards some of these smashed things. People say that everything that isn't really splendid has got to go. Why does it have to go? Why?” “Do you not be asking such unsplendid questions, the Mary Virginia,” the young Countess said. “It may be that you will have to go also.”

  Mary Virginia bought a sack of Girardeau's special greaseless doughnuts and some tabouli wheat. Then she went out again. She had a scattering of gray hairs in the bewitching halo that framed her face. Duffey hadn't noticed that about her before, and he'd known her for about thirty years. Perhaps she was acquiring the gray that he was losing. And it was natural that she should turn from a beautiful young lady to a beautiful middle-aged lady with the attrition of the years. Those things happen to everybody.

  To everybody except Duffey. Duffey would need a change of blood if he kept getting those chilling thoughts. He knew now that he was very old, and that this business of his getting younger for a few decades was a very old business indeed.

  “Yes, I'd better get back to my place,” he said. “I hadn't expected guests to arrive so early in the morning. I wonder why they chose me.”

  “There is no need for you to hurry, Duffey,” the young Countess said. “We are all perfectly able to make ourselves at home everywhere. I'm sure my associates have taken possession of your things. We aren't at all backward about affairs like that. And we chose you because we like you, because you are already one of us, and because you are the oldest person in this town.”

  “Ah, just how many of you are there in town?” Duffey asked. “I forget.”

  “And what did you say was the name of your society?” Stein asked. “I also forget.”

  “Legion,” the Countess said. That was the answer to both their questions.

  “I am going to check some courthouse records and tax rolls,” Stein said when they were out in the street. “These disappeared and unremembered buildings and properties must have left records behind them. I will worry till I find the answers.” “Oh, ancient Stein, you'll not find them that way,” the Cou
ntess chided him. “Those were nothing buildings and properties, and they were inhabited by nothing people. Get that into your head, or you may be reclassified as a nothing person yourself. And, no, they will not have left any traces or records.”

  “I must find out,” Stein said. “What? Am I an ancient one, too?”

  “Old, yes, old,” said the young Countess with the archaic grin. “But not so old as the Duffey.”

  Stein went off to check courthouse records and tax rolls. He returned and went again several times. He was nervous about getting to the bottom of this business.

  “Be along and get your own little piece of the neighborhood straightened out,” Zabotski called to Duffey a little later as Duffey was hurrying home. “Your place is clear out of order, Duff. Straighten it out or I'll have the pack of you assailed for Unlawful Assembly or with Unseemly Crowding in Countervention of the Fire Laws. Man, what is it over at your place, a mob scene from Hades? First they overflowed your place, and now they're impinging on mine. I have the feeling that these are the latter days of the world, for me maybe, not necessarily for everyone. Say, Duffey, didn't I used to own some buildings that were just next door to you on the right as you go in? It seems like I did, but I forget.” “So do I forget it, Zabotski,” Duffey said sadly. “But the things that are disappeared and forgotten were probably owned by some such an easily forgotten person as yourself.”

  “Will you forget me, Duffey, if I perish this night?” crude Zabotski asked.

  “Aye, I'll forget you,” Duffey said. “It would be easy to say I'll remember you, but I'll recall not the least lump of you.”

  “Duffey, thou cladhaire, I'll split thy head!” Zabotski sputtered in stylized fury.

  “Have a care, Eabhraioch,” Duffey bantered him. “Your tongue will turn black and fall out if you misuse the holy language so. Quiet, Zabotski, quiet!”

  And Duffey hurried along home. It was just around the corner from where they talked. But the irritation drained away from him as he neared his home and got a look at the throng that had taken it over. A mob? Yes. Unseemly crowding? Perhaps. Unlawful assembly? Oh no, you can't cite folks of such high quality for unlawful assembly. The mob—oh, the essential thing about this mob was that it was a mob with class. Even the mobbish sound of it was a vivid orchestration. It was a finely done instrumentation of happy thunder and mountain echoes, with a strong underlay of the “roaring river” timbre. Every mob has its own tone. Well, this mob had a pleasant, though challenging, tone to it, and it rang like thousands of large gold coins.

  And look at the confabulating people who made up that noisy bunch! Duffey was reminded of a phrase used by the Lord Himself for an earlier mob “In the Brightness of Saints.” He was reminded of the phrase “the Splendid People” that they used for themselves. And Duffey was delighted with them, even though it was his own place they were near to bursting the walls out of.

  There is much to be said for elegant shouting and brimming banter when it is used by such really elegant folks with their silver tongues and bronze lungs. These were people with a stunning style and with a rippling and dazzling color and costume. But how could there be so many of them here? The very presence of such folks had effected a growth and change in Duffey's buildings. This was the new sort of calculation that was called the Geometry of the Shining Spaces.

  His house was much larger than he himself remembered it. He went through the back rooms and through those rooms that were still farther behind them. There were constructions in Duffey's own intrepid and inexact carpentry everywhere. As a carpenter, Duffey was one of the great originals. He himself had built all the rooms of these buildings except the front two tiers, which had already been there when he came. But had he built as many rooms as these? He was like a man encountering strange things in his own handwriting. “It's my own writing, but when did I write such things?” he might say. “It's my carpentry, but whenever did I carpenter such rooms as these?” he did say. Many of the back rooms had to intrude onto a piece of property that belonged to Zabotski. There was no calculation whatever that would allow them to be on Duffey's own land.

  “Ah, I can't think of any overbearing neighbor I'd rather intrude on,” Duffey thought with laughter. But the building couldn't have extended so deeply before today, or Zabotski would have made the howling trespass known to the whole town.

  Duffey explored through the bright crowds in his own art bijou, through those in his secondhand book store, through those in his pawnshop, through those in his auditorium, through those in his soup kitchen, and through those in his flophouse. Never had the place been so full except for the few times when he had staged those Original-Masterpieces-for-Eighty-five-Cents-Frame-and-All Saturday sales. But these crowds today were made out of extraordinary people, exuberant as colts, touchy as velours, bright as primary-color-baked terra cotta, superior in their scoundrelry and saintliness, big-bellied with fresh life and invention, incredibly urbane and sophisticated, adolescent and arty and archaic, all at the same time.

  Oh, Duffey knew some of them, of course. There was the child-hero; there was the hoyden; there was the Countess (how had she got there before him when he had started sooner?); there was the Sanctimonious Sam. But are these not types? No, they are people; they are everlasting and omnipresent people; and, though it seems as if there were more, there is only one of each. Who would ever make types of such as these?

  And there were more local and less generalized folks. There was Danny Degas, who was history professor at Luno College there in town; Hugh de Turenne, who was deep in the humanities at Xavier; Sister Mary Susanna of Ursuline Academy; Robert Darnley, who was historian-in-residence at Dillard. And there were the dozen of those tome-toting eccentrics from the deep Quarter, who had each been working for thirty years on a thirty-volume history of the world.

  There were the fine experts in the special fields of history: Berny Cacciatore, who was the finest historian in the world on boxing and other sports; Bulo Belonki, who was the nonpareil historian of jazz. There were high historians from all over the world—some known to Duffey, some known only to God. There were the flash-wits who were not thought of as orthodox historians. These were all nimble people. History had just made a fundamental change in itself with the defeat and obliteration of its old subject matter and the triumph of the new, just as the art of geometry and the art of words had made deep changes in themselves to accommodate new conditions.

  There were also present many eminent persons in the field of hard science. There were physicists and exophysicists, chemists, nuclear nabobs. There were biologists and brain stylers and mathematicians. And here also were the psychologists and the cultural Gestalten and transcendental philosophers. There were music folks, artist folks, and both grid and linear narrators. Since history included everything, Duffey supposed that all these folks belonged. After all, there were such things as pop biology and pop veterinary medicine and pop theology and pop open-heart surgery. There was pop astronomy and pop aerodynamics. They all had to be nimble persons, since all their sciences were now to be employed by the new and fearlessly nimble brains. Everyone here was clearly highly qualified, of the veriest elite. But even that many highly qualified persons will take up a lot of room. There must have been a thousand unassorted persons crowded into Duffey's buildings, and there was not a doused light or an emptyhead among them.

  A ram's horn blew a towering blast. And it was time for the first sessions to begin. The first speaker had a smiling and unhurried incandescence about him; he spoke with a high and singing voice that can only be described as bridled thunder laughing down into valleys that weren't there yesterday, and as hoofs pounding through flame-green grass. But why put it so fancy? He spoke like a thunder colt. “We are all pleased to see one another,” he began. “We return to our continuing and never really interrupted sessions now. We ask again (it should be the oldest one of us present who asks it, but Duffey's tongue hasn't been taught nimbleness yet) the ritual question: ‘What is History?’ And
the answer comes: ‘History is everything that has happened up till now.’ And then we ask (it should be the youngest one of us here present who asks it): ‘What is now?’ And so we move into our pleasant discussions and difficulties. Now is the all-embracing moment, so our answer really is ‘History is everything in the now.’ Or simply ‘History is Everything.’

  “Our fun and our fascination will always be to track the kits of the wild history cat to their lair: it is to winnow the golden dust that we call historical evidence and to discover that it is really the green dust of life. And we can track the kits; we can winnow the dusts to a final arrival and solution every time. There is nothing that can hide from history, or from ourselves, who are the shapers and pruners of history. Where would anything hide? Everything is in the momentous now, and we are the lords of this now.” The speaker wore a rakish and gaudy turban, and a gaudy and exuberant gem, or eye, sparkled and winked from the middle of it.

  “These are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right. Really, there are no ghosts. There are only some persons and things that are wasted more than others. And there is no ‘past.’ There are certain times and incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them, buried in barrows or trapped under the cement of barnacles, and we can free them from their incrustations. But even we adepts are in danger of thinking in terms of the inimical incrustations and surrogates, in treating some events as though they were not still happening. If a thing is not still happening, then how will it be revised? It is for the ordering and revision and clarification that we come together for these continuing meetings. That, and to reassure ourselves, and to enjoy one another's company.

  “As we as a people arrive at our full splendor, then we create a splendid history for ourselves, and we devise noetic and sophisticated and splendid techniques. Ah, the tracking down, the digging up, the freeing, with the finest weapons and tools ever, that's where the fun is. It is the rich ritual of historical evidence, the forming in our hands of what was, and is, and what shall be. We shall keep it all in our hands. A line by an always contemporary poet reads ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ as though that name might become difficult to read after the water had grown old and forgetful. The reading would never be difficult, of course—not to initiates like ourselves. Even the writing of it on rapidly running water would make its reading just about difficult enough to be interesting. It's always easy to develop transparencies from living water.