The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  Pleasant for manifold minions and hinds of it!

  Stuff them with plankton and choppings and chub!

  Simple the City and simple the minds of it.

  —20th Street Ballad

  The world’s resources are consumed disproportionately by the intelligent classes. Therefore we will keep our own numbers drastically reduced. The wan-wits have not strong reproductive or consuming urge so long as they are kept in reasonable comfort and sustenance. They are happy, they are entertained; and when they are convinced that there is no more for them to see, they become the ancients and go willingly to the choppers. But the 2 percent or so of us superior ones are necessary to run the world.

  Why then do we keep the others, the simple-minded billions? We keep them for the same reason that our ancestors kept blooms or lands or animals or great houses or trees or artifacts. We keep them because we want to, and because there is no effort involved.

  But a great effort was made once. There was an incredible surge of will. Mountains were moved and leveled. The sky itself was pulled down, as it were. The Will of the World was made manifest. It was a new act of creation. And what is the step following creation when it is discovered that the Commonality is not worthy of the City created? When it is discovered also that they are the logical cattle to fill such great pens? The next step is hierarchies. The Angels themselves have hierarchies, and we are not less. It is those who are intelligent but not quite intelligent enough to join the Club who are imperiled and destroyed as a necessity to the operation of the City. At the Summit is always the Club. It is the Club in the sense of a bludgeon and also of an organization.

  Will of the World Annals—Classified Abstract

  In the morning, Kandy Kalosh wanted to return to her home even though it was nearly twenty blocks to the eastward. William watched her go without sorrow. He would get a westering girl to go with him on the lifelong exploration of the endlessly varied City. He might get a girl who was a talkie or even a readie, or bookie.

  And he did. She was named Fairhair Farquhar, though she was actually dark of hair and of surface patina. But they started out in the early morning to attain (whether in a day or a lifetime) the Wood Beyond the World.

  “But it is not far at all,” Fairhair said (she was a talkie). “We can reach it this very evening. We can sleep in the Wood in the very night shadow of the famous Muggers. Oh, is the morning not wonderful! A blue patch was seen only last week, a real hole in the sky. Maybe we can see another.”

  They did not see another. It is very seldom that a blue (or even a starry) hole can be seen in the greenhouse glass–gray color that is the sky. The Will of the World had provided sustenance for everyone, but it was a muggy and sticky World City that provided almost equally warm from pole to pole, cloyingly fertile in both the land strips and the water strips, and now just a little bit queasy.

  “Run, William, run in the morning!” Fairhair cried, and she ran while he shuffled after her. Fairhair did not suffer morning sickness but most of the world did: it had not yet been bred out of the races. After all, it was a very tidy world.

  There was a great membrane or firmament built somewhere below, and old ocean was prisoned between this firmament and the fundamental rock of Gehenna-earth. But the ocean-monster tossed and pitched and was not entirely tamed: he was still old Leviathan.

  Along and behind all the streets of the World City were the narrow (their width not five times the length of a man) strips, strips of very nervous and incredibly fertile land, of salt water jumping with fish and eels and dark with tortoise and so thick with blue-green plankton that one could almost walk on it, of fresh water teeming with other fish and loggy with snapping turtles and snakes, of other fresh water almost solid with nourishing algae, of mixed water filled with purged shrimp and all old estuary life; land strips again, and strips of rich chemical water where people voided themselves and their used things and from which so many valuable essences could be extracted; other strips, and then the houses and buildings of another block, for the blocks were not long. Kaleidoscope of nervous water and land, everywhere basic and everywhere different, boated with boats on the strange overpass canals, crossed by an infinity of bridges.

  “And no two alike!” William sang, his morning sickness having left him. “Every one different, everything different in a world that cannot be traversed in a lifetime. We’ll not run out of wonders!”

  “William, William, there is something I have been meaning to tell you,” Fairhair tried to interpose.

  “Tell me, Fairhair, what is beyond the Wood Beyond the World, since the world is a globe without bounds?”

  “The World Beyond the Wood is beyond the Wood Beyond the World,” Fairhair said simply. “If you want the Wood, you will come to it, but do not be cast down if it falls short for you.”

  “How could it fall short for me? I am a William Morris. My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood.”

  “Your name-game ancestor had to do with the designing of another thing also,” Fairhair said. Why, that was almost the same thing as the monitor man had said the day before. What did they mean by it?

  William and Fairhair came to the great Chopper House at 20th Street. The two of them went in and worked for an hour in the Chopper House.

  “You do not understand this, do you, little William?” Fairhair asked.

  “Oh, I understand enough for me. I understand that it is everywhere different.”

  “Yes, I suppose you understand enough for you,” Fairhair said with a touch of near sadness. (What they chopped up in the Chopper House was the ancients.) They went on and on along the strips and streets of the ever-changing city. They came to 21st Street and 22nd and 23rd. Even a writie could not write down all the marvels that were to be found at every street. It is sheer wonder to be a world traveler.

  There was a carnival at 23rd Street. There were barkies, sharkies, sparkies, darkies, parkies, and markies; the visitors were the markies, but it was not really bad for them. There was the very loud music even though it was supposed to be period tingle-tangle or rinky-dink. There was a steam calliope with real live steam. There were the hamburger stands with the wonderful smell of a touch of garlic in the open air, no matter that it was ancient chopper meat and crinoid-root bun from which the burgers were made. There were games of chance, smooch houses and cooch houses, whirly rides and turning wheels, wino and steino bars and bordellos, and Monster and Misbegotten displays in clamshell-cloth tents.

  Really, is anyone too old to enjoy a carnival? Then let that one declare himself an ancient and turn himself in to a Chopper House.

  But on and on; one does not tarry when there is the whole World City to see and it not be covered in one lifetime. On 24th (or was it 25th?) Street were the Flesh Pots; and a little beyond them was the Cat Center. One ate and drank beyond reason in the Flesh Pots region and also became enmeshed in the Flesh Mesh booths. And one catted beyond reason in the honeycomb-like cubicles of the Cat Center. Fairhair went and worked for an hour at the Cat Center; she seemed to be known and popular there.

  But on and on! Everywhere it is different and everywhere it is better.

  Along about 27th and 28th Streets were the Top of the Town and Night-Life Knoll, those great cabaret concentrations. It was gin-dizzy here; it was yesterday and tomorrow entangled with its great expectations and its overpowering nostalgia; it was loud as the West Side Show Square; it was as direct as the Mingle-Mangle or the Pad Palace. It was as fleshy as the Flesh Pots and more catty than the Cat-Center. Oh, it was the jumpingest bunch of places that William had yet seen in the City.

  Something a little sad there, though; something of passion and pity that was too empty and too pat. It was as though this were the climax of it all, and one didn’t want it to be the climax yet. It was as if the Top of the Town and Night-Life Knoll (and not the Wood Beyond the World) were the central things of the World City.

  Perhaps William slept there awhile in the sadness
that follows the surfeit of flesh and appetite. There were other doings and sayings about him, but mostly his eyes were closed and his head was heavy.

  But then Fairhair had him up again and rushing toward the Wood in the still early night.

  “It is only a block, William, it is only a block,” she sang, “and it is the place you have wanted more than any other.” (The Wood began at 29th Street and went on, it was said, for the space of two full blocks.) But William ran badly and he even walked badly. He was woozy and confused, not happy, not sad, just full of the great bulk of life in the City. He’d hardly have made it to his high goal that night except for the help of Fairhair. But she dragged and lifted and carried him along in her fine arms and on her dusky back and shoulders. He toppled off sometimes and cracked his crown, but there was never real damage done. One sometimes enters the Wood Beyond in a sort of rhythmic dream, grotesque and comic and jolting with the sway of a strong friend and of the tidy world itself. And William came in with his arms around the neck and shoulders of the girl named Fairhair, with his face buried in her hair itself, with his feet touching no ground.

  But he knew it as soon as they were in the Wood. He was afoot again and strong again in the middle of the fabled place itself. He was sober? No, there can be no sobriety in the Wood; it has its own intoxication.

  But it had real grass and weeds, real trees (though most of them were bushes), real beasts as well as artificial, real spruce cones on the turf, real birds (no matter that they were clattering crows) coming in to roost.

  There was the carven oak figure of old Robin Hood and the tall spar-wood form of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan. There was the Red Indian named White Deer who was carved from cedarwood. There was maple syrup dripping from the trees (is that the way they used to get it?), and there was the aroma of slippery elm with the night dampness on it.

  There were the famous Muggers from the mugger decades. They were of papier-mâché, it is true, and yet they were the most fearsome. There were other dangerous beasts in the Wood, but none like the Muggers. And William and Fairhair lay down and wept in the very night shadow of the famous Muggers for the remainder of the enchanted night.

  3.

  “Wander-bird, wander-bird, where do you fly?”

  “All over the City, all under the sky.”

  “Wandr’ing through wonders of strippies and streets,

  Changing and challenging, bitters and sweets.”

  “Wander-bird, squander-bird, should not have budged:

  City is sicko and sky is a smudge.”

  —1st Street Ballad

  “Run, William, run in the morning!” Fairhair cried, and she ran while William (confused from the night) shuffled after her.

  “We must leave the Wood?” he asked.

  “Of course you must leave the Wood. You want to see the whole world, so you cannot stay in one place. You go on, I go back. No, no, don’t you look back or you’ll be turned into a salt-wood tree.”

  “Stay with me, Fairhair.”

  “No, no, you want variety. I have been with you long enough. I have been guide and companion and pony to you. Now we part.”

  Fairhair went back. William was afraid to look after her. He was in the world beyond the Wood Beyond the World. He noticed though that the street was 1st Street and not 31st Street as he had expected.

  It was still wonderful to be a world traveler, of course, but not quite as wonderful as it had been one other time. The number of the street shouldn’t have mattered to him. William had not been on any 1st Street before. Or 2nd.

  But he had been on a 3rd Street before on his farthest trip east.

  Should he reach it again on his farthest trip west? The world, he knew (being a readie who had read parts of several books), was larger than that. He could not have gone around it in thirty blocks. Still, he came to 3rd Street in great trepidation.

  Ah, it was not the same 3rd Street he had once visited before; almost the same but not exactly. An ounce of reassurance was intruded into the tons of alarm in his heavy head. But he was alive, he was well, he was still traveling west in the boundless City that is everywhere different.

  “The City is varied and joyful and free,” William Morris said boldly, “and it is everywhere different.” Then he saw Kandy Kalosh and he literally staggered with the shock. Only it did not quite seem to be she.

  “Is your name Kandy Kalosh?” he asked as quakingly as a one-legged kangaroo with the willies.

  “The last thing I needed was a talkie,” she said. “Of course it isn’t. My name, which I have from my name-game ancestor, is Candy Calabash, not at all the same.”

  Of course it wasn’t the same. Then why had he been so alarmed and disappointed?

  “Will you travel westward with me, Candy?” he asked.

  “I suppose so, a little way, if we don’t have to talk,” she said.

  So William Morris and Candy Calabash began to traverse the City that was the world. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words “Beginning of Stencil 35,353,” and thereat William went into a sort of panic. But why should he? It was not the same stencil number at all. The World City might still be everywhere different.

  But William began to run erratically. Candy stayed with him. She was not a readie or a talkie, but she was faithful to a companion for many blocks. The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen.

  They arrived at the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. It was almost, but not quite, the same as another 14th Street Water Ballet that William had seen once. They came to the algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 15th Street and to the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 16th Street. Ah, a hopeful eye could still pick out little differences in the huge sameness. The World City had to be everywhere different.

  They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 17th Street. There was an artificial antelope there now. William didn’t remember it from the other time. There was hope, there was hope.

  And soon William saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an armband with the word “Monitor” on it. He was not the same man, but he had to be a close brother of another man that William had seen two days before.

  “Does it all repeat itself again and again and again?” William asked this man in great anguish. “Are the sections of it the same over and over again?”

  “Not quite,” the man said. “The grease marks on it are sometimes a little different.”

  “My name is William Morris,” William began once more bravely.

  “Oh, sure. A William Morris is the easiest type of all to spot,” the man said.

  “You said—no, another man said that my name-game ancestor had to do with designing of another thing besides the Wood Beyond the World,” William stammered. “What was it?”

  “Wallpaper,” the man said. And William fell down in a frothy faint.

  * * *

  Oh, Candy didn’t leave him there. She was faithful. She took him up on her shoulders and plodded along with him, on past the West Side Show Square on 18th Street, past the Mingle-Mangle and the Pad Palace, where she (no, another girl very like her) had turned back before, on and on.

  “It’s the same thing over and over and over again,” William whimpered as she toted him along.

  “Be quiet, talkie,” she said, but she said it with some affection.

  They came to the great Chopper House on 20th Street. Candy carried William in and dumped him on a block there.

  “He’s become ancient,” Candy told an attendant. “Boy, how he’s become ancient!” It was more than she usually talked.

  Then, as she was a fair-minded girl and as she had not worked any stint that day, she turned to and worked an hour in the Chopper House. (What they chopped up in the Chopper House was the ancients.) Why, there was William’s head coming down the line! Candy smiled at it. She chopped it up with loving care, much more care than she usually took.

  She’d have said something memorable and kind if
she’d been a talkie.

  Funnyfingers

  Introduction by Andrew Ferguson

  Ask a few readers of Lafferty what they treasure him for, and you’ll get a lot of the same answers. He will make you laugh, uproariously. He will show you new possibilities inherent in language—not just in English, but many others as well. He will provide you a vantage point on this world (and other worlds, to boot) that flips you inside out, inverting everything you thought you knew about the workings of fiction.

  What they won’t mention as often—partly because he doesn’t do it that much, and partly because it hurts so much when he does—is that he will break your heart wide open.

  “Funnyfingers” is, at its most basic level, a tale of doomed love. It isn’t spoiling anything to say that in an introduction, either, because as he often does, Lafferty tells us what’s going to happen right from the start. Here it’s in an epigram alluding to Orpheus, something you don’t do unless a Eurydice is about to be lost. With admirable narrative economy, the main character immediately thereafter poses the central question that will lead to her romantic impasse—who, or what, am I?—and then the reader is given several valid answers: she is a somewhat exasperating and precocious little girl, and she is also a young Dactyl, a creature of myth, one of a number who gave humankind ironworking, arithmetic, and the alphabet and who (in their adult years) remain responsible for manufacturing letters and numbers and pieces for the entire world.

  The story plays out from there, though the narrative beats and resolution are hardly formulaic. However, Lafferty is as usual concerned with much more than just the central relationship of his unhappy couple: he’s exploring humanity’s relationship with its stories, as well as his own particular relation as a channel for those myths. While Lafferty’s personal relationship experience was limited to what he could glean from others, he nonetheless understood that much of what we love about another is the stories we construct around them, myths that are deeply personal even as they partake of the universal. But when what you love is a story—or you yourself are a story—the deck is stacked against you from the start.