In the Wake of Man

by Roger Elwood (ed)

  “Now to answer the question that Mr. John the Greek has asked,” Cryrus Roundhead stated conversationally as he flung three bodies from a high building and then swung onto an iron ladder to go even higher.

  “This is illusion,” Mary Virginia said to Margaret Stone and Salvation Sally. “Just keep saying to yourself ’This is illusion.’” If it hadn’t been illusion, none of them would have been able to climb so wildly.

  “Ancient Greece was made up of a blasted inner core named Hellas and five concentric rings around it named Aetolia, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. The southern sectors of these concentric rings had disappeared into the sea, or anyhow disappeared, in prehistoric times,” Roundhead was saying. He was extinguishing several elderly female persons with a thunder ax, but they did not seem to be valid persons. “This may also have been the case of the inner core called Hellas, for we can find no later sound evidence to locate it in actual geography. But, as in the case of the planet Saturn, all of the action was to be found in the rings anyhow.

  “The most important of these outer rings, Macedonia, was made up of strong and warlike men who, in consequence of their being strong and warlike, also became rich. Then, being not quite complete in their capabilities, they took one step backward and became nouveau riche. Ah, we’re finished with clearing this building of its nothings, are we not?”

  “Child-hero and myself cleaned out the third floor,” Salvation Sally announced. “The rest should already have been taken care of.”

  “Then we remove it by deflation,” Roundhead said. “We let the air out of the building and we deflate it down to nothing. Do not be surprised, you who are on your first safari of this sort. There wasn’t really any building here; there was only the illusion of a building. There wasn’t real iron in it, you know. And there wasn’t real stone.”

  The building was quickly deflated down to absolute trash, old cardboards and old papers. Then the wind blew the papers away, and it blew away all memory of the building with them. By and by, in a couple of hours, a park would begin to grow here.

  “Such is the origin of every city park in the world,” Roundhead said. “Well, the newly rich Macedonians decided to give themselves a culture, a portfolio of growth arts, and a history. They had to make a past for themselves, and they had nothing to use but imagination. So these prideful Macedonians created the legend of an old and heroic Greece.

  “At the arts, those Macedonians were strong and eager, but impatient, men. One of them would be hammering away at freeing a statue of its marble. He would have a good thing going and he would become too eager. Crunch, he knocks an arm off of his statue. Whang, there is a foot broken loose. Crack, there is a nose shattered completely. Then there is no way out of it except to create a fiction that the statue had been carved by old, heroic Greeks long ages before, that the broken-off members had been broken by the hammers of time and of the burying earth.”

  Breaking up the faces and bodies of the pseudopersons in the buildings was a queasy business. A little blood usually came out of them, but always more trash and fragments of plaster than blood. Some of the quasi-persons wore those new “Are You Splendid Enough?” badges. No, they weren’t, or they wouldn’t have been in line to be obliterated.

  “Those Macedonians created a number of fiction forms,” Roundhead was saying. “They created an Art Fiction, a Culture Fiction, a Commonwealth or Political Fiction, a Science Fiction, and a History Fiction. All of these fictions were rough-wrought things, but they were done so energetically and enthusiastically that even today they are sometimes mistaken for facts instead of fictions.

  “The most unlikely and perhaps the most excellent of their fiction forms was the Athenian Romance or the Athenian Novel. Though the work of a hundred diverse hands, it was one of the most convincing creations of all literature. It was written barely on the pulp level, yet it had authenticity and power. There are millions of people today who believe that this old and heroic Athens of the novels and romances really existed, and that it was the epitome of an old and heroic Greece.”

  “What about Plato and Aristotle?” the olive-colored lady asked. “Was it not in Athens that they flourished?”

  “No, no,” Roundhead denied her. “Aristotle was the tutor of the son of the king of Macedonia where he flourished. And Plato was a character in several of Aristotle’s Athenian Novels. The Athenian Legend has been, so far, harmless. But if it ever festers or becomes infected (and there are some slight signs that it is on its way to doing just that), then we will have to remove it surgically.”

  “Some of them don’t want to go,” Mary Virginia cried from a crumbling building where she was deflating false people. “Some of them protest, and they fight. Yes, and they bite like hell. If they never existed at all, where do they get the will to protest so violently when we put an end to their fictions?”

  “You must insist that they go,” said Roundhead, “or we will insist that you go in their places. It’s fair that the person having the least reality should go.”

  Yes, some few of the persons and creatures and effects that were being obliterated by the thunder axes and other weapons did not accept their obliteration willingly. They fought, though they had little to fight with. They hissed their hatred. From looking like people, they came to looking like cur dogs and evil spirits. They were being dislocated from their places and forms. “It’s you who are destroying our houses and bodies,” some of these uncreations spat at Mary Virginia, and she could not tell whether they were cur dogs or snakes or persons.

  “How about Jerusalem?” asked an unsatisfied customer to Roundhead.

  “Oh, it actually dates only from the present century,” Roundhead stated. “It was built as a promotional venture by the Turks on or near the site of various ruined cities: the Jewish city Jebus; the Greek city Solyma; the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma or Holy Solyma; the Roman city Aelia Capitolina; the Syrian city Uris Lem; the Arabian city El Quds. An Assyrian name, Ur Salim, comes nearest to the modern form, but it doesn’t come very near to the modern location. It was down the dusty road to the Idumaean city Hiero-Solyma in the rocky southern wilderness that Christ went to be killed. His prototype, Samson, had gone down most of the same dusty road to the nearby city of Gaza in the same rocky southern wilderness to be killed.

  “But Christ was out of bright and flourishing Galilee (The Land of the Gaels), out of that civilization so startling and vivid that it could have happened only once. Ah, the grand cities of Galilee, the Seven Stars; Capernaum, known for its goldsmithery and for its great paintings; Tabigha, known for its tambour music, for its singing, and for its astronomy; Tiberias, known for its fish and its shellfish, and for its comic drama; Magdala, known for its great cuisine, for its wealth, and. for its story tellers’ guild; Cana, known for its wine and for its country music; Nazareth, known for its wooden carriages and chariots, for its wooden statuary, and for its woodworkers’ guild; Sepphoris, known for its stone sculpture and for its dazzling night life. To be a Galilean was to be civilized and cultured to a degree that has not been known since that time.”

  “But where were the Jews?” the doubly unsatisfied customer still pursued. “Were the Jews not in the Jerusalem which you say didn’t exist?”

  “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 pseudop
eople.

  “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-mache 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-mache 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 Daniken or Ostrander? How would great Fort think about all of this?”