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

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Oh, the Jews were in Babylon. They still are. Even today, you can dig down into the ruins of old Babylon and you will find the ruins of the old Jews. But the real fact is that there were these three cities or cruxes that we had to get rid of. They stood in our way. Really, we're quite new, in spite of our power over simultaneity and revision. We have to create and rectify history in a hurry, or we will stand historyless and naked. And these three things had a too-human smell to them, and it won't wash out.”

  “What ethnics do we pick on now?” Margaret Stone asked. “You've run through all the pieces of me.”

  “Why are we destroying these persons and things whose only fault is that they are unimportant?” Mary Virginia asked as she destroyed a half-grown lout or boy of the pseudopeople.

  “Why? Oh, because we are important, and we must be intolerant of anything that is not. We destroy them because they seem to exist, and by seeming, they dilute the whole worth of the world.”

  “Come, quickly, quickly!” the Countess was crying as she swooped down on them from an iron ladder out of the sky. “There are great numbers of pseudopeople, of human remnants, of morphic dragons, of papier-mâché fire lizards, who have barricaded themselves in that building there. They say they will resist forever. I never heard people making such a fuss about dying. Bring thunder axes, bring lightning rams. We'll rout them out!”

  Many meetings and conventions do not provide such interesting safaris for their folks as do the Royal Pop Historians.

  And back in Stein's apartment: “Whatever we do must accord with scientific methods and processes,” Stein said.

  “Always, some of us (you and I, Stein, for example) have known that we were of the elite,” Duffey was saying, “that we were special, that we were, well, splendid. And always others (Zabotski here, for instance) have known they were not these things. But now it is presented to us, both inwardly and outwardly, that we have become two different species. Almost none of this presentation has been on a conscious level, but it comes to a point where we must face it consciously.”

  “I don't understand you, Duffey. I said scientific methods and processes,” Stein repeated, “but not scientific-accepted content. That would be to bow too deeply to science. Much has been made about scientific content or subject matter, but it's all nonsense. ‘Scientific’ means simply ‘knowing’; and one must knowingly handle the unknown as well as the known. We go into the unknown—which is to say the unscientific—waters here.”

  “What you're saying, Absalom, is that you don't know what to think about these tacky things any more than anyone else does,” Zabotski interrupted.

  “No, I, we don't know what to think about them, not yet. But perhaps we can know how to think about them. Let us see if we can make a working sketch of that ‘how.’ ”

  “Balderdash,” said Zabotski. “I could set you straight, but I won't.”

  “It's true that we've changed,” Duffey was saying. “We are not the same sort of people our fathers were. But have we changed so completely as to become a new species? Or were some of us always of a separate species? Yes, let us investigate this in the tradition of the great, freewheeling, non-traditional scientists—from the viewpoint of an O'Connell or Field or Watson or Spraggett.”

  “We have first to state our problem,” Stein said. “What is our problem or question?”

  “Our question, our eternal question,” said Duffey, “is ‘How does the world get along so amazingly well with so many things always gathered to go wrong with it?’ A puzzler.”

  “You think the world goes well?” Zabotski asked with a hang-jawed expression.

  “It goes beautifully, man, beautifully,” Duffey beamed. “It avoids being choked in its own trash and fatuity. Let us consider whether the strange things that have been happening in town today are a part of what keeps the world running so well. Or does it run so amazingly well because of us amazing people in it? Let us ask this fairly, as great scientists like Churchward and Pauwels and Sendy and Allegro would ask it.”

  “Why not ask whether the strange happenings are happening at all?” Zabotski rasped. “I could probably tell the answer if someone would ask me the question.”

  “Zabotski is right,” Stein asserted. “Let's find out whether these things are really happening. I don't believe they are. They're not plausible. How's about a large dragon turning into papier-mâché as he dies and still able to eat crackers with his dying head? That's what the kid said was happening, the kid who just ducked in here for a minute, the kid who looks like Finnegan. These happenings are in the balance, but they're not fixed yet.

  “I believe that all historical happenings must be chemically fixed like memory fixes. If they are not, then they haven't happened. Encountered phenomena are first recorded as electrical impulses in the brain. Then, after a few seconds or even minutes, they receive a chemical fix and become permanently accessible memories. But if the recording does not receive this chemical fix, then it is forgotten; it will not be subject to any kind of recall at all. In such case, it is more than metaphor to say that the event never happened at all.

  “So it may be with certain events that have been 'happening' in our city today. So it is with contingent events in every place everyday. If the events turn out to be transitory, then they will escape instrumental notice as well as mental recording. There have been, for me, some very hazy unhappenings today. They fade; they weaken; they unhappen; soon, possibly, they will be gone.”

  “They will not be gone before tonight's presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House,” Zabotski stated. “Let them count the dead after that is over with. Then we may be able to say whether the things happened or not.”

  “It's like the poltergeist stuff, like the saucer-riding stuff, like the hairy giant stuff,” Duffey said. “A dozen times as many such things are first observed as will go into permanent report or permanent memory. With many of them, it is the case that, while they are happening at one end, they are unhappening at the other. And if they finally come unhappened, then they become unremembered also. They are like daytime dreams, like skylarks, like walkabouts. It is only by accident that a person remembers one out of many such dreams when he is jarred back into awareness. But with the walking and talking daytime dreams, our imaginations are outside of our heads, just as they are all inside of our own heads with the nighttime dreams. If, by accident, we happen to remember one of our daytime dreams after we are jarred back to comparative awareness, then that thing will really have happened. And here is the point: It will have happened for everyone as well as for ourself.

  “But if we do not remember it, then it did not happen, not for ourself, not for anybody. What then is the result when one person remembers it clearly and all others forget it completely, or when one person forgets it clearly and all other persons remember it completely?”

  “The result is group paranoia,” Stein said. “It's common, and this splitting may be a common cause of it.”

  “But I will remember these things just out of orneriness,” Zabotski said. “No one can persuade me to forget any part of them. I will drive the whole town bugs either way. If other people remember them, then the things have to have happened, and that will be enough to drive anybody bugs. If the other people do not remember them, I still will remember. That brings on the paranoia, and that is another name for bugs. I have you either way. I do this because I am an ornery man.”

  “I wonder how many of these potential happenings are weighed in the happening balance every day?” Stein asked. “There may be dozens.”

  “There may be millions,” Duffey said. “Any daytime dream of any person could become real and of actual occurrence, if it were sufficiently insisted upon. I believe there are unbodied syndromes of possible events roaming the world like packs of dogs, looking for places to feed and live. And I believe that a particularly grotesque nexus of such unhappenings is trying to take up residence in our city today. Ah, how would all those great and swinging scientists think about this
thing? How would Braden? How would Cayce? How would Velikovsky? How would Otto?

  “The syndrome has survived for some hours already. People at this moment are murdering other people by the hundreds in our town, and it is only because those other people are not splendid enough. It's like an euphoric dream in which one says, ‘I'm dreaming, it doesn't count, they're not real bodies, it isn't real blood’; but what if it is real? The new species, if we have become a new species in significant numbers, is essentially euphoric. I know that I've become euphoric beyond all reason. But is this horrifying stuff behind the pleasant euphoric veil really happening? No, not yet. But, at this very moment, it's really in the balance whether it will have happened or not.”

  “Easy, Duffey, easy,” Stein said. “You'll not give in, Zabotski?”

  “I'll not give in. I'll remember it all, and I'll make it happen. And I'll be killed for it, and all my sort. That's all right. What effect will we have on you when we're gone? A cramping knot in the middle of you that you can't untie, that's what. Oh, you'll remember us all right. I always wanted to drive a whole town and a whole world bugs.”

  “Zabotski, if what we're thinking is correct, then some one person in this town, some deformed dreamer, did happen to have this obstreperous dream first; he also had the obstreperous desire to make that dream come true, out of—out of—plain—”

  “Out of plain orneriness, that's the word, Absalom,” Zabotski said.

  “Zabotski couldn't have done it,” Duffey insisted. “He's a wanwit; he's an old remnant human.”

  “Zabotski could have done it!” Zabotski swore.

  “Was that one person you?” Stein asked with spitting harshness. “Are you the deformed dreamer?”

  “I'm the one,” Zabotski maintained. “I have fun with it. I kill a couple thousand people I don't like. No, what I do is that I make it that they never lived, the couple thousand people I don't like.”

  “There's a man up on Common Street who claims he started it all,” Finnegan said.

  “No. I started it,” Zabotski insisted. “Then he came in on it. I felt him come in.”

  So that was that.

  “I wonder why such a thing never happened before,” Stein muttered.

  “Take a look back through history,” Melchisedech Duffey said. “Consider the hundreds and hundreds of things that couldn't possibly have happened; and yet, they did happen. Even after the history has been edited and cleaned up and most carefully phrased, it remains that the unlikely things did happen. There have been deformed dreamers all over the place. Oh, how would all those tall and talented scientists think their way out of this one? How would Ouspensky think? How would Patten? How would Von Däniken or Ostrander? How would great Fort think about all of this?”

  “Duffey, now that we are on strange things, just how old are you?” Stein asked. “The question has come up several times lately; and the Thunder Colts recognize you as somebody very old. What is the answer? Is Zabotski here a part of the answer?”

  … It is more of a hope than a promise. For four hundred years we have gone to the theatre in the hope of a worthy play, and it has not appeared; and this without even an authoritative promise that it will come, as we have for the larger things like redemption and salvation. And yet no person can watch a curtain rise without the hope of great things. There is no art from which so much is expected after so many disappointments.

  —Patrick Stranahan, Archipelago

  And that twenty-four-hour-long, not rationally acceptable presentation comprised the last twenty-four hours that I spent in the old human context. How quickly we have forgotten that context! How quickly we have forgotten those who refused to forget it.

  —Absalom Stein, Notes on the Argo Legend

  It's woe to tender fishes all

  Who cannot stand the gaff;

  And helpless folks who fail and fall,

  Not splendid by a half

  —Finnegan, Road Songs

  Mary Virginia Schaeffer was caught up in a horror and revulsion. She had killed a medium-sized child during the skylarking safari. Then came the abysmal doubt; “What if this child be real?” It looked real. It bled scarlet stuff with the smell of blood. It did not turn into a poltergeist or an animal or a puppet as it died. It did not break down into piles of ashes or trash-barrel trash that would indicate (to an euphoric observer or effector) that it had been worthless and invalid from the beginning. The child still had warmth to it; and then, it turned cold under her hands.

  “It's as though one should play a hand of Lizzie Borden with the playing cards,” she moaned, “and then go home and find one's own parents killed with an ax. It's as though I should jump rope to a child's chant:

  Boil my mother in a pot!

  Turn the fire up, hot, hot, hot!

  and then go home and find that my mother was indeed boiled to death. What devil's cards do I play with? Whose rope do I jump to, anyhow?”

  She carried the bloody child on her bosom as if it were a doll. She cried runny tears. But they were archaic tears from the old time when both the ocean and human lacrimae were only half as salty as they later became. But had a newer and more saltless time come over the world quite recently?

  “Whatever was the name of that hilarious delusion that we were just now caught up in so delightfully?” she asked blindly.

  “The name of it was Hell,” said someone who was passing by. Why should she be shocked by that? It was one of the older sort of persons who said that, and they are likely to say anything.

  “Stein, I have no idea how old I am,” Duffey said. “And I don't see how Zabotski can be a part of the answer. I used to know how old I was. I used to be well ordered in my sequence and my life. That's all gone now. I used to remember my childhood and my early manhood clearly. Now I remember half a dozen childhoods for myself, and they all have the marks of my own fictions all over them. Now I remember half a dozen different young manhoods for myself. Am I really named Melchisedech, ‘without father, without mother, having neither beginning of days nor end of life,’ as Paul writes about me in Hebrews? My name used to be Michael, once, in some of the versions. What is the advantage of being Melchisedech?” “To be Melchisedech is to be a king,” Stein said. “I don't know about your childhood, Duffey, but when I was a young boy you were an old man. That was in Chicago, and it's likely the valid version. You remember me there. You remember others there.”

  “Yes, but Hans remembers me in the Northland in the same years,” Duffey said, “and I remember him there. Vincent and Teresa remember me in St. Louis in those years, though it took a while for their memories to work; and I remember them. Henry and I mutually remember scenes in rural Louisiana — he a fat young boy, I a fat old man. Mary Virginia Schaeffer remembers me in Galveston in the same years; and I remember her and her parents.”

  “I remember Duffey here in New Orleans,” Finnegan said. “Dotty remembered him, too.”

  “These are things that the different persons told me separately without telling the others,” Duffey said, “and my own recollections come separately and disturbingly. Could I have lived so many lives at the same time?”

  “Well, where do you remember Duffey from, Zabotski?” Stein sensed a rat.

  “Wherever I want to remember him at, that's where I make him to have been,” Zabotski said.

  “How many pots do you have fingers in, Zabotski?” Stein asked.

  “Yah. How many fingers do I got?” Zabotski held up his two big Polish hands. But he dazzled his fingers, so there was no way that any of them could count them.

  “Zabotski could have nothing to do with my multitudinous lives,” Duffey said. “He is nothing. He is just a poor old human person.”

  There were many gruesome unhappenings through the day and the afternoon. Then it was evening. It was near time to dress for dinner and for the presentation at the Decatur Street Opera House. That would be quite special. These men didn't go formal more than once a year, but what was going to be shown happened onl
y once a world. Duffey, of course, had every sort of evening clothes for rent over at his establishment. But the Royal Pop Historians (“Is there really such a group as the Royal Pop Historians,” Duffey had asked a while before, “and of what royaume are they royal?”) were still holding forth there, and Duffey didn't want (just now) to run athwart them.

  Finnegan said that he would go and get the evening clothes for Duffey and Zabotski and himself (Stein, of course, had his own), and he left to get them.

  He was gone. Then the others looked at each other with clammy unease. They discovered that they couldn't remember how long Finnegan had been there with them in Stein's apartment. And they didn't know why they hadn't remembered, until just now after he had walked out of the apartment, that Finnegan was supposed to be dead.

  “Zabotski!” Stein cried with real threat in his voice.

  “Yes, I always liked Finnegan more than I liked you others,” Zabotski said. “I keep dreaming today that it will be good to have his company back. I dream a lot of real stubborn dreams today.”

  When he returned with the clothes, however, it was clear that he wasn't Finnegan. He was a young painter-around-town, the young painter who sometimes left paintings on consignment at Duffey's place to see if they might not be sold. He was the young man who resembled Finnegan slightly and whose best paintings were more than a little bit like Finnegan paintings from the orange period.

  “We will have dinner before the opera,” Duffey said. “Some of us won't be alive afterward. It's billed as an Eschatological Drama. It will be the end of an affair, probably the end of the human affair.

  “Have we any friends to go with us to a fine dinner at Girardeau's Irish Restaurant? Nobody does things so fine as does Girardeau lately, though he didn't used to be so grand. Have you noticed how grand all of us have become lately, except Zabotski, of course? I mean it. Never have there been so many really grand people in the world before.”