In the Wake of Man

by Roger Elwood (ed)

  “How long has he been established in this position?” Duffey asked from the floor.

  “About three weeks,” the easy speaker said.

  “I’d certainly challenge one who went back no further than that in his power,” Duffey maintained stubbornly, “even if his power included the mastery of historical evidence and of simultaneousness.”

  “Oh, he is being challenged,” the speaker said. “There are at least three main challengers. Back to our subject, for simultaneity remains a deep mystery that is beyond many of us. Stones of the countryside are not our most important records, as there isn’t very much going on in the country. Transparencies and live tracings may also be lifted from city stones, whether they are natural or artificial. Several of our members are, at this very moment, busy at lifting transparencies from certain strategic stones that are built into the Decatur Street Opera House of this very city. Sometimes one hears the expression, ‘If these stones could only talk!’ People, we initiates know that these stones can talk!

  “There are several special stones in and around the old opera house which is our demonstration for today. Know you all that there is a private corner in every inspired builder; and this private corner of the person knows about special stones. It may know about them only while the man is asleep, but it knows. And the man, while the construction of the building is going on, will convey the command (he may convey it without knowing he does it, or he may know that he does it and still wonder at himself) that several special stones are to be built into and around the building. And the building will then become memorable; it will become resonant and in accord with its town and its times; it will accumulate living legends and memories and ghosts. The old opera house in this city is such a building.

  “Two dozen cheap gemstones or gimcracks on the inside of that building do hold the total record of the short but tumultuous two-hundred-year history of the building. They not only have the all-sense recording of every performance that has been played on those boards, but they have the record of every person who has attended each performance; they have the record of every gesture of every person—of every accent and sigh and word and whisper of every person; and also, by highly scientific extrapolation of every contingent datum, they have the probable content of even the most improbable thoughts of every person who has ever been there. Minor miracles of intrapolating gestures and expressions into thought have been wrought. Major miracles in extracting fine transparencies from stony patinas have been achieved.

  “The gimcrack stones have the glow of every wax candle or rush light that ever lighted the performing house; they have the hot-wax smell, the rush-fat smell, the evocative rag-wick stench. They have the glittering and guttering of the bear oil, the whale oil, the lard lamps. They have the whispering sound and flicker of old illuminating gas flames, the garishness of the limelights and the carbide lights, the later and stronger shine of the electrical chandeliers and of the mercury spotlights. Ah, do any of you remember the unearthly whiteness of the old sodium lights? The stones will remember it.”

  The speaker had a stone that was apparently set in his turban, but closer examination would show that it was set into his head. The stone was one of the best, and it had recorded many scenes in many years.

  “And there are some quaint stones set in the outside of the building, and also in the surface of Decatur Street itself,” the speaker went on. “There is one old dalle or flagstone that would be recognized as distinguished by any investigator. It was set in the midst of the random rocks when the road was first laid out. This stone developed a will of its own, and it has survived a dozen changes. By accident (but there are no accidents), it was not discarded when the first random stones were thrown out and the slates and mudshales were brought in for a better finish; and the special flagstone survived when those old slates and mudshales were replaced by ironstone cobbles. It maintained its place even when the cobbles were replaced by bricks. It prevailed again when it was buried clear up to its eyes in asphalt. What things it could tell if it had tongue! Well, we will give it tongue now. It remembers the underbellies of thousands of horses and carriages that stomped and rumbled over it. Ah, what great horse vehicles those were! Who now living, except possibly our host Duffey, remembers them all? The Acme Royal Top and the Acme Open, the Southern Beauty, the Fulton Road Cart, the Livery Special, the Farmers’ Canopy Top Surrey, Johnson’s Jump-Seat Buggy, the Imperial Carriage, Dempster’s Three-Spring Handy Wagon, Drexel’s Eight-Horse Dray, Pontiac’s Special Milk Wagon, Hal-lock’s Grocery Cart, the Sears Famous, the Road Runner. Ah, I see brimming eyes at the mention of these things. The fragrance of road apples will always be a primary part of nostalgia.”

  “What is the purpose of these rhapsodies, Countess?” Duffey asked the girl.

  “Actually, we don’t have much detailed history of our own,” she said, “and we sure don’t want to borrow any history of second-rate humans. But we can steal some of their things and their memories, and we can claim them for our own. I’m on the nostalgia kick myself. Ah, the fragrance of road apples! I wonder what they were like?”

  “That stone in Decatur Street remembers the quickening snap and bang of whips,” the speaker said, “and their airy swishing. Ah, the Cowles Buggy Whip: we shan’t see its like again! The Jacksonville Drover, the S. R. and Co.’s Australian, the Western Mule Skinner, the Milford Quirt, Hodson’s Superior Horse Whip, the San Antonia, the Fancy, the Never-Break Dog Whip, the Elko. What days do these not bring back! The cursing of wagoners, the rattling of whiffle trees, the jangle of even-chains! Some of these things still live in the blessed place, and others have been cut down by the weed-hacker.

  “The stone remembers the underside of old streetcars. It even remembers the round punchings of old streetcar transfers wafting down on the easy breeze, and the odor of trolley ozone. It remembers the underside of every automobile that ever went down Decatur Street, and we dare not roll their names off our tongue lest nostalgic riots ensue. The stone recalls faithfully every two-legged and four-legged walker of the street. And it remembers, from the underside also, the jeweled sky of eighty thousand nights. It’s a very talkative old stone, and it is talking to our experts and their instruments at this moment.”

  The speaker had two large and complex shining blue eyes. They may have had special small remembering stones set into their irises.

  “What about stones that look to the other direction?” asked a person who was not a full member of the Royal Pop Historians and Flesh Weeders. “Are there any stones whose patinas have recorded future events?”

  “There are stones whose living surfaces and depths reveal events in every direction,” the speaker said. “There are no ’future’ events. Future is only the name of a putative direction so designated by those who have really lost their directions. Oh, certainly, it is quite easy to lift transparencies and tracings and reproductions of what are commonly called future events. All common stones will serve for all purposes, but exceptional stones are needed to give fine and minute service. Those that record best from all directions are the half gem-or gimcrack stones—the spars, the garnets, the imperfect crystals. But those which focus more aptly in the direction misnamed ’future’ are the hard, prismatic crystals. The small and resonant crystals of the early radio days had part of this directional secret. The quartzes and natural rock crystals, the sphere-formed crystals, all real crystals can see quite clearly into the future direction. These sphere-formed rock crystals that are tuned to the historical future direction are known commercially as ‘crystal balls.’”

  “Can patinas be peeled from anything except stones?” a non-Pop asked.

  “Yes, certainly,” the speaker said. “Wood, as a shortterm storehouse of historical treasures (for no more than four or five centuries), is often superior to stone. Finished and furnitured woods in particular will store memories and scenes and will become haunted with them. They will project these recalls at unexpected moments. These are the ghosts of the last seven centuri
es, the ghosts of old houses. And the term ’table talk’ sometimes has the special meaning of talking tables. Planchette and ouija are dull forgeries of such talking tables, but they are made of the genuine remembering wood. And old tables become accepted members of old families. What child, playing under an old wooden table, has not heard old family secrets whispered by the familiar (which is to say, ‘long in the family’) wood?

  “But still better and more recording than either stone or wood, for very short periods (a couple of decades), is undisturbed leaf mold.”

  “Hey, Duff, let’s slip off for a while,” a small group of young and shimmering and sidling folks propositioned Melchisedech Duffey. “They’ll not miss you for the host for the while, and they’ll not miss us.”

  The most dedicated rationalist, if he is honest, must admit that there are intervals that go against the grain, that go against reason. There are happenings, usually of quite short duration, that simply are not acceptable in the rationalist framework. I myself have experienced several such unaccountable or unbelievable intervals. Two were of such very short duration that they did not take up any discernible time. And one was of three minutes; another was of five minutes;

  And one was of twenty four hours.

  Notes on the Argo Legend. Absalom Stein.

  Quick thunder wounds the fatted town

  That copiously bleeds:

  And fruitless growths come tumbling down

  And even human weeds.

  Road Songs. Finnegan.

  “Done,” said Duffey. “I always said that if I could find a better place than mine or better company than my own, I would join it for as long as I was accepted. You look just like the young people who could show me wonders in my own town.”

  They were out of the buildings and into the street. And right next to Duffey’s was Bayougoula Park, and it hadn’t been there yesterday. Hell, it hadn’t been there an hour ago. There had previously been some buildings there, but they couldn’t now be called to mind. Zabotski half-believed that the missing buildings had belonged to him, but he couldn’t say for sure. Well, there was a new park there now. It was like a blessing.

  “But it isn’t a new park, Duffey,” said Absalom Stein, who had been pacing there in edgy thought. “I’ve just been checking the records, and it’s been here for over a hundred years. That’s what the people at the park department tell me. There’s something nervous about those people. They act like zombies, and they say things as though someone were making them say them. And there’s something contrived about the park itself.”

  “Don’t look a gift colt in the mouth, Absalom,” the hoyden told him.

  “Or, it’ll crop you like a weed,” the child-hero said. “The Thunder Colts can crop the weeds that are too tough for the weed-hackers to cut. Are you a tough one, Duffey?”

  There couldn’t ever have been more than two or three narrow buildings in that place, but the park was not narrow in any sense. It remembered all the things that a park should have, and it made room for them.

  There were graceful benches made of fruitwood. There were tables and standing sideboards. There were the big trees, live oaks, gum tupelos, royal walnuts, red cedar. There were several dead and dying animals there, their flesh turning into rubber or plastic or styrofoam as they expired. There were several dead and dying people there also, but they lacked conviction and reality.

  “Are the broken-up animals and the broken-up people the same?” Duffey asked the hoyden who had come out with them.

  “Oh, yes, the broken-up human people often collapse into their own interiors when they die. But often they collapse into their animal totem forms. You will notice that neither of them has real flesh, except for a hunk here and there. Most such people were never real. They are the first ones the weed-choppers chop down. We wonder that your city has kept so many of them for so long. Every place else in the world has gotten rid of all of them several weeks ago.”

  There was a tumbling and noisy fountain in the middle of the park. It was full of green turtles and bullfrogs, whistling bluefish, and carp. There were conches and oysters. There were alligators that would snap up alive any child or dog that came too near and had reactions too slow. The park policed its own. There were horned cattle there. And there were the crazy and splendid thunder colts.

  But natural beauties are not enough for a park. It must have the amenities also. Three persons who were themselves amenities came. Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally came to see what park had grown up around the corner from them. These were the girls from the Pelican Press. And also there were the inanimate or only partly animate amenities.

  There were arcades there—gazebos and kiboshes and kiosks, taverns and tabernacles, and all sorts of other tents and pavilions. There were shops there—newsstands and confectioners’ stands, open-air cafes, bars, and a little bandstand where some fellows drummed and tootled and tinkled.

  “This is a sort of show staged here,” Mary Virginia said. “It is all contrived and set up. It has a bright and flimsy face. I don’t understand it, but it isn’t real.”

  “Yes, it’s real,” the child-hero said. Really, it was time for the child-hero to leave off being a child. He was old enough to be a man. “But many things that you thought were real, Mary Virginia, they aren’t. You’re wide open yourself; it is so easy to change your apperceptions. But your town itself, here in its old and historic part, it isn’t quite real. Haven’t you ever seen the gaps in its reality?” “Not very many gaps, not very big ones,” Mary Virginia said. “It’s all real except for these new morning parks, and you new morning people. Are you real?”

  “We are. You’re still on trial,” the hoyden said.

  “What do you think of these new-old parks and people, Duffey?” Mary Virginia asked.

  “Oh, they represent the bright and shining obverse side of the Fortean coin or universe,” he said. “I’ve always known that the coin had two sides. The reverse, the best-known side of the Fortean medallion, has always been dingy and dim, aye, and stupid. But these new things are fine and exciting. The parks are misplaced, of course. They do not belong here at all. But let us enjoy them.” “Forget about the morning parks,” the child-hero said. “We’ve told you they’re real. Think about this part of your town that is several hundred years old. Is it real, or has it always been a fraud? Will it stand the test of historical evidence? Have you never wondered where the people got all that iron for all the wrought-iron work here? They were very prodigal with it. But this was a pretty primitive Louisiana at the time ascribed for the constructions. And the workmanship of the old iron balconies is in no way primitive. It’s decadent rather. But there was no iron available here. It isn’t real iron.”

  “Oh, bedamned with this jabber!” Mary Virginia exploded. “It’s real enough.”

  “Have you ever wondered where they got all the stones?” the Countess asked. The Countess was pert, with many generations of pertness in her. She was quite young; she was still a teenager. She had the easy cruelty of a member of a very old and very civilized family. “Really, there was no such stone on these mudflats, and there was not a quarry within sixteen hundred miles. The stones of these old buildings around us, they aren’t real stones.” Mary Virginia and the others had to laugh at the line of nonsense these Royal Pop people were pushing on them. All of them were drinking Shining Mountain Beer now. The brewery was right across the street from the park, but it hadn’t been there yesterday. Or, if it had been, it had been passing itself off as some other kind of building.

  “They’ve kept the taste,” Margaret Stone said. “I recognize the taste. But maybe they’ve changed the name of it. Does anybody remember what the name of it was yesterday? Not Shining Mountain, no.”

  “There are two further proofs that your town is mostly unreal,” the hoyden was saying.

  Zabotski joined them about then. He had a puzzled look, but he still felt that he was supposed to own the land that Bayougoula Park was built upon. �
��Have you heard about the Black Sea disasters?” he asked. Zabotski was wearing one of those new badges that said: “It’s a Question of Your Survival. Are You Splendid Enough?” “It has no mountains, and it almost hasn’t any thunder,” the hoyden was continuing despite the Zabotski interruption, “and these are two of the things by which the validity of locale or history can be checked.”

  “Certain tropic lands have no thunder at all,” Stein said in his learned manner.

  “Those same tropic lands have no history at all, either,” the hoyden said.

  “Who is that very young man who looks like Finnegan?” Salvation Sally asked them as she pointed to a bugle-nosed young man who was coming dangerously close to the alligators in the fountain. “I’m spooked, I tell you. I thought that it was Finnegan indeed. I thought it was his ghost.”

  “That’s the young painter who paints very like Finnegan in his orange period,” Duffey said. “Yes, he could almost be a younger ghost or fetch of Finnegan.”

  “Finnegan always did have a lot of fetches,” Margaret Stone remembered.

  “Mountains and thunder, they are the test,” the hoyden was insisting. “Oh, the newness of mountains! Mountains are the most astonishing happenings in recent history. There weren’t any mountains at all until quite recently. And we hadn’t full dimensions on this world until they were raised up.”

  “What are you new young pop girls talking about?” Melchisedech Duffey demanded. “There were always mountains. How would there not be mountains?”

  “Duffey, you are so old that you have to remember when there weren’t any mountains,” the hoyden challenged. “Or, maybe there was just one; but it wasn’t a very high mountain, whatever you have heard to the contrary. That’s why there wasn’t really very much water required for the water epic. It was all a flatlander world then.”