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

by R. A. Lafferty

  Lloyd Rightfoot cut to a red four-card. The bird seemed to dismiss Hector then, and keep its baleful eyes on Rightfoot and Widepicture.

  Widepicture struck a match on the big beak of the bird, but that was for bravado.

  “That proves nothing about reality,” he said unevenly. “One can strike a match on a picture of a bird, or of a beak.” His hand fluttered like a sapsucker butterfly over the cards. He cut to a black three-card, and he was low-man-dead. The bird gazed a long time at the low card to be sure.

  The bird sliced a forearm off Widepicture, as if for a sample, and munched it. Widepicture waved farewell to his two friends with the other arm. He was jittery and distraught.

  “No, no, I don't accept it,” he jabbered. “This isn't reality. This is the most unreal happening I've ever encountered.”

  The bird sliced Widepicture sheer in two, gobbled up both pieces of him, and then withdrew from the broken room with a clatter of ungainly wings like thunder run backwards.

  Sunlit reality flooded back into the room. And outside, on the brilliant sky, there was a jerky black blotch, munching bobble-headedly, flying clumsily as though strutted with wood, a thing aerodynamically impossible, incredibly awkward, and categorically unreal.

  The Emperor's Shoestrings

  Not a bad place as places go,

  But Oh the ceilings are so low!

  —Book of Jasher

  The maiden who chamber-rooms clean'th,

  The gum-shoe who evidence glean'th,

  Proclaim “Guys, it's swell!

  It's a gorgeous hotel,

  If it weren't for the tacky thirteenth.

  Limerick County Limericks, Clement Goldbeater

  Justin Saldeen was afraid to look under the table. It gave him the staccato shivers. He felt impelled, like one in a dream, to point with hand and voice to what was under the table, to call the attention of his companions to it. But, as in a dream, his voice would not work and his hand would not.

  And Justin's table companions did not seem to notice that there were any strange things going on under the table at all. Would one of them not look and see! But would they be able to see it (staccato shivering again, and consuming doubt) even if they did look under the table? Do you realize just how seldom people do look under a table? Ah flaming fudlucks, somebody look!

  “We have all received the ‘Little Vision’,” Marjory Kiljoy was saying. “It is for that that we belong to the NRBWA Peoplehood. Now we can see in the ‘little’ and in the ‘big’. We can see without and within. Do you believe that in all the world else there are as many true visionaries as at our convention here? Yauk, yauk!”

  Their table was at pool-side, and Marjory had been sunning herself all morning on the tawny sand beside the pool. And she was tanned or burned into matching pattern to that sand, tawny and grainy and rippled. Persons of sensitive skin always are sun-printed thus to the pattern of their background. Marjory was attractive and wide-eyed from her felted rabbit-fur birds'-nest hat to the lavender and chestnut speckled pinkish nuthatch egg in her navel.

  “We are the trained gazers,” said Sulky Sullivan. “We see what others cannot see. Only ourselves in all the worlds have true multiplex vision. Nuthatch-watching does that to one. Yauk, yauk!”

  Sulky had a pleasant storminess to her sleek skin. She also had been sunning herself through the bright morning, and her skin was now sun-printed with the pattern of the cork walkways on which she had been lying. Her own hat was made of leaves and grass, and the nuthatch egg in her navel was white with just a flush of pink, and it had no more than three lavender specks in it.

  “There is no vision that we do not dare!” Gladys Gamaliel challenged with her small voice. “We are the new adventurers and explorers. The true interior vision has a very small exterior aperture, and with us it is the nuthatch egg and the nuthatch world. We are surrounded by kingdoms and realms without number. We have but to open our trained and illuminated eyes to see all things large and small. Yauk, yauk!”

  Gladys had an unpainted evocation to her textured skin. She had been sunning herself that morning on the authentic wooden raft in the pool, and she was burned to the unpainted, wet-wood pattern of the raft's old boards. Her hat was made of feathers and horse-hair, and the nuthatch egg in her navel was the chestnut-spotted heavy pink of the Carolina Nuthatch. “We dare to look!” Gladys pronounced in benediction. “Yauk, yauk!”

  “Then in the name of the Devil Downhead Nuthatch himself, look under the table!” Justin shrilled, rising suddenly to his feet, toppling his chair, dropping the nuthatch egg from his left nostril. “Dare to look!”

  They looked, but they looked at him, in amazement. And he shriveled under their look.

  “Oh, pardon my vehemence,” he apologized, “but do look under the table.” He replaced the nuthatch egg (fortunately unbroken) in his nostril with the prayer that his awkwardness might be overlooked. “Yauk, yauk!” he finished dutifully and ritually.

  “Oh sit down, Justin,” Rolf Mesange said crossly. “Sometimes I feel that your conduct and bearing are not quite those of a NRBWA Peoplehood member. Sit down. They're bringing the drinks now. Yauk, yauk!”

  Justin Saldeen, with a certain nervousness of eye and rump, sat down at the table once more. His five table-mates had glanced briefly under the table and they seemed not to have seen anything unusual there. Why, with their daring vision, had they not seen anything unusual, or anything at all? To Justin's now trepidatious vision, there was something unusual under the table.

  There were six people under the table, that's what. They were small people, yes or they wouldn't have fit so easily under the table. They were sitting at a small table of their own down there; and they didn't appear (except for their small scale) much different from the other people at the convention.

  A girl brought the drinks to Justin and his table-mates. That was all right. In the brightness of the noon-time, in the super-clarity of the vision, a drink will come in mighty handy sometimes. But a disturbing thing was that (You don't have to look down, you don't have to look under the table if you don't want to) a smaller girl was bringing smaller drinks to those six undersized people at their own undersized table under Justin's table. Once more Justin felt impelled, like one in a dream, to point with hand and voice: and once more his hand and voice failed him.

  This was at the NRBWA (Nuthatches and Related Birds Watchers of America) Convention, probably the greatest yearly gathering of the truly open-eyed people. Justin Saldeen, Rolf Mesange, Berthold Chairmender, Marjory Kiljoy, Sulky Sullivan, and Gladys Gamaliel had been sitting together at the table at poolside on the fourteenth floor. The men wore nuthatch eggs in their left nostrils, and the ladies wore them in their navels. All of them must end every speech with the nasal ‘yauk, yauk’ that is the note of the Common Nuthatch. These six outstanding and intelligent young people, and the entire six thousand at the convention, shared nuthatchery, and the ‘Little Vision’ as the key to the ‘Great Vision’ as a way of life.

  Justin was a square and spare young man with a robust healthiness that left him nothing to blame his new nervousness on. Rolf was a proud and suspicious man who preached ‘Pride in Vision’ and the ‘Little-See as Portal to the Big-See’. Berthold was an integrating man who spread peace like vegetable oil on the warring waters. He preached the ‘Nuthatch Door to Dynamic Peace’.

  In some ways, Marjory Kiljoy, in fulfilling her own name, fell below the nuthatch ethic. She sometimes showed strong carnal inclinations. And what quicker than carnal notions and behaviors will kill the joy of an illuminated and intellectual congress?

  (Conversations, small-stature conversations, under-the-table conversations that used a different soundtrack from regular conversations, Oh, they were uncanny! It was even more startling to hear the under-the-table things than to see them. Really, the talk sparkled more below than above, and there was some pretty good ankle-high wisdom and wit.)

  Sulky Sullivan was more serious than sulky. She preached the �
�Cosmic Egg’ and the ‘Ultimate Consciousness’, and she did not doubt that the cosmic egg was a nuthatch egg. Gladys Gamaliel, she was the sly and shy one. Like the totem nuthatch, she was small and noticed only by the elite. But she had inner qualities. Everyone said so, and she said so herself.

  These were six among six thousand persons of common and incandescent interest (the ‘Little Vision of the Nuthatches’ as key to the ‘Great Vision that encompasses the Worlds’) who were met here in convention, in congress, in constellation of personalities for the furtherance of their only-thing-that-matters. So their talk had to be the powerful and rich vehicle of their views.

  Then why was the chatter of the six little people under the table (whom only Justin seemed able to hear) so much more interesting than that of the big people at the big tables? They were having fun down under.

  “Ditch these big guys when the session starts and go to the thirteenth floor with us,” one of the under-the-table ladies gave the pleasant invitation to Justin.

  “Justin, why do you fidget and look under the table?” Rolf Mesange demanded suspiciously. “Truly illuminated people don't fidget.”

  “I keep seeing and hearing things that aren't there,” Justin mumbled nervously.

  “Nuthatches?” Rolf asked sharply.

  “No, not nuthatches,” Justin said. “Just things, people, comings and goings on the wrong scale, situations. I keep seeing things that just can't be there and nobody else sees them.”

  “Just so it isn't nuthatches,” said Rolf. “There's an unpleasant word for people who see nuthatches that aren't there. Faking is an offence against the ‘Little Vision’ itself. False reporting is always reprehensible, and proof of it can cost one his credentials.”

  “Justin, ditch that guy especially,” said the friendly small lady under the table, “and c'mon join us on the thirteenth floor.”

  “Has this hotel a thirteenth floor?” Justin asked his table-mates.

  “Of course it hasn't!” Rolf sputtered. “Thirteenth floors are something out of the superstitious dark ages. How would there be thirteenth floors in a rational area?”

  Sudden and loud over the speaker system came the ‘yauk, yauk’ sound. This was a greatly amplified recording of the genuine nuthatch call, and it was used as a signal at the convention. It meant that the first session of the day was due to begin. So the six at the table, and many others from pool-side, left the fourteenth floor roof garden to go down the quick stairways to the twelfth floor sessions theaters.

  Between the floors there were little soffit cubicles or cubby-holes about a foot high. “I wonder what those are for?” Justin asked. Nobody else had wondered what they were for. “Yauk, yauk!” Justin added. He'd nearly forgotten it.

  “I don't know,” said Marjory Kiljoy. “Come along. Yauk, yauk!”

  Sessions never begin quite on time. On the twelfth floor, the illuminated people sat and waited.

  “Those little cubicles with the little doors on them, that space between the floors where we come down the stairways, it reminded me of other little cubicles on a train when I was a little boy,” Justin said.

  “Illuminated persons are never reminded of trivial or meaningless things from the past,” Rolf Mesange cautioned.

  “Well, I was riding on a train with my mother very late at night,” Justin stumbled on regardless. “She was tired. There were little cubicles with doors on them along the walls of our railway coach. ‘What's in that little room?’ I asked, and I tried to open one of the doors. ‘Oh, that's where the trainman keeps his lantern,’ my mother said, but she hadn't even looked. ‘What's this place for?’ I asked about another one of them. ‘Oh, that's where they keep the extra lantern,’ my mother said. And to every one of those little places, my mother said that it was where the trainman kept his lantern. I felt then and I felt now that there was something more wonderful than lanterns (if there is anything more wonderful than lanterns) inside those little places. But my mother was tired and so was I, and a four year old doesn't pursue things out to the ultimate. I was never on another coach that had such little cubicles. They were about the size of the little cubby-holes between the twelfth and fourteenth floors here.”

  “Well?” Rolf Mesange asked with rising suspicion.

  “Nothing,” said Justin. “That's all of it. It's just something that I remembered.”

  “Illuminated persons never remember such trivial and meaningless things,” Rolf said severely. But the first speaker of the session now began to talk, so Justin did not have (at that time) to give further account of his childhood memory.

  “Just as in re-entrant space (that type of space in which we live) any point may be taken as the exact center of the universe,” the speaker was saying, “so in re-entrant society (that type of society in which we all live) every valid interest may be taken as a center or pivot for the total meaningful involvement or envelopment of the world. Our own interest in the nuthatch bird, ‘the bird of the little way’, has proved central to a very important movement, the only important movement really, in the world. Yauk, yauk!”

  There were eight scheduled speakers seated at the sessions table or podium table, and the present speaker was a striking medium of their type. As a fact, any of them would have been a good medium type, for they were a re-entrant group, each one a central, and all very similar. And under the speakers' table was another and smaller table with ten (Justin had already divined that there was not a rigid numerical correspondence between the large and the small people) smaller speakers or possible speakers. One of these was now holding forth in an interesting but rowdydow sort of talk. None of the big people seemed to hear this smaller speaker at all. None of them seemed to notice any of the little people.

  “Our movement is quite simply the rejuvenation of our tired world,” the convention speaker was saying. “The world, for lack of the ‘big vision’, is threatened with a too-early senility. We'll cure that. This present Forty-Fourth NRBWA Convention is a mighty kilometer-stone in the rejuvenation of the world. Yauk, yauk!”

  Something was pulling on Justin's trousers cuff. It was a little lady, possibly the same little lady who had talked so friendly to him before. She had her arms folded and was leaning on his cuff as though it were a back fence, and she was looking up at him.

  “Ditch these guys, Justin,” she said. “They don't know anything at all about the ‘little ways’ that lead to the ‘big way’. Hey, things are starting to open up upstairs now. C'mon, let's go up to the thirteenth floor.”

  “Justin, why do you keep looking down at the floor?” Gladys Gamaliel asked him. “What's down there anyhow? Yauk, yauk!”

  “Look and see for yourself,” Justin mumbled dubiously.

  “My aren't you snippy today,” Gladys said. “Illuminated people are never snippy to other illuminated people. Yauk, yauk!”

  “Our great movement began with the nuthatch bird, and with the high hobby of nuthatch-watching,” the big speaker was continuing. “The nuthatch is a small, blue-gray-black bird that is almost invisible in the mixed blue-gray-black woodlands and sedgelands and meadowlands. Our own eyes, the opening eyes of the rejuvenated world, learned their minute vision in spotting the small nuthatch on its spotted background. The faint, nasal ‘yauk, yauk’ note of the nuthatch is almost inaudible against the animated clatter of the woodlands and the canebrakes. Our own fine ears, the opened ears of the rejuvenated world, learned their minute hearing in picking up the nuthatch notes out of the larger noise. We learned to hear the sounds of all the small worlds, of the gateway worlds, by mastering this one crucial small sound. Yauk, yauk!”

  “By my grandfather's ears, your own ears are closed,” Justin Saldeen interrupted in a loud voice. “You can not hear the sound of the small worlds. You would not recognize a gateway world if it were under your very feet. Tell me, can you hear the minute rowdydow from the small world under your own table right now? Let your ears repent! Let them learn to listen!”

  The small people at the little
speakers' table under the big speakers' table cheered Justin as their new advocate. But the big speaker at the big table over their heads did not hear their cheering. He did not hear the sounds of the small world at all.

  “Who is this person's gauleiter? Yauk, yauk!” the big speaker asked gently.

  “I am. Yauk, yauk,” Rolf Mesange admitted in a frustrated voice.

  “Your subject is perhaps not fully illuminated,” the big speaker said. “Very likely he is here in error, as lacking in qualifications. Well, do what you can with him, and be gentle with him. Yauk, yauk!”

  “I'd like to be gentle to you with a meat-cleaver, Justin,” Rolf whispered furiously. “Sit down and be quiet, dammit. Yauk, yauk.”

  “C'mon, Justin. Forget the big guys. They're weird,” the ankle-high girl-friend was saying. “Let's go up to the thirteenth. C'mon.”

  “Do you know what was in those little cubicles on that railway car when I was a little boy?” Justin asked softly.

  “Maybe it was a made-over club car,” the shoestring-high lady said. “We used always to have a few clubs going in the club cars. Let's go up to the thirteenth. C'mon.”

  “Our vision is a generating function,” the big speaker was saying again. “Things are seen in such a way; and then they become that way. You know, of course, that the Emperor really was wearing adequate and even splendid clothes until a hostile psychology was brought to bear on him. A child saw through him. And then everybody saw through him. Wherever he is now, he is probably still wearing adequate clothes: but I would guess that he is still being seen through also. The essential emperor could not be seen while his clothes were a barrier. A child broke through the barrier, as we ourselves break through so many barriers. As we see a thing, so that thing becomes. As we see the Emperor, so shall the Emperor be. Yauk, yauk!”