“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.
Archipelago. Patrick Stranahan.
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.
Notes on the Argo Legend. Absalom Stein.
It’s woe to tender fishes all
Who cannot stand the gaff;
And helpless folks who fail and fall,
Not splendid by a half.
Road Songs. Finnegan.
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 anywhere formal once a year, but what was going to be shown happened only 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.”
They went in their grand getups through the streets. Trashmen were loading their scoop trucks again and again with the debris. It was mostly broken effigies of people and animals that were loaded into the trucks: polyvinyl bits, styrofoam bits, clay bits, plastic bits, paperboard bits. Oh, sometimes there was a bloody member mixed in with it: a leg, a head, a dripping loin that seemed to be of real flesh and vein and blood. The animal pieces had also come from the destroyed people. Many of them pass through the animal on their way back to clay and trash.
Duffey, Zabotski, Finnegan-not-Finnegan (the younger painter), Mary Virginia, Margaret Stone, the child-hero, Salvation Sally, the Urchin, the Countess, the Royal Pop Historian named Cyrus Roundhead, maybe some others— they were all together at
that big plush oaken table at Girardeau’s. They were splendid and supreme and superb; they were escharotic and noetic; they were mutated and metamorphosed and specified (is that the verb meaning to change into a new species?); they were euphoric and willful and wonderful and transcendent.
“Only not all.”
There was somebody who said “only not all” because at least one of them would fail of splendor and would betray all the new and splendid things. Well, whoever it was, he would be done away with this night.
“Just what is it that you Royal Pop Historians are doing in our town, Roundhead?” Stein asked him. Things were beginning to clarify themselves.
“Oh, we’re making selective recordings of the last remnants of humankind,” Roundhead told them. “The last pocket of humankind is here in your city. I say selective recordings, for this is very tricky. The records will not be as things originally were. They will be as we say that things originally were. Objectivity in these things is fine when it is properly directed by ourselves.”
Mary Virginia still had the broken body of the child with her, the last child that she had killed on safari. She wasn’t making quite such a big thing of it now, but she wasn’t quite ready to throw it away.
“It’s one of the old kind, Mary Virginia,” the Countess told her. “It wouldn’t be good for anything even if it were still alive. You know what it is, don’t you?”
“I know that it’s human,” she said. After a while she let one of the waitresses take it and dispose of it. No, that’s inaccurate. Margaret Stone took it from her and said that she would give it to one of the waitresses to dispose of.
But Margaret lied.
“I just remembered that there isn’t any Decatur Street Opera House in this town,” Duffey said with a puzzled grin. You’re not supposed to puzzle too much when you’re possessed by euphoria.
“I just remembered that there isn’t even any Decatur Street in this town,” Mary Virginia said.
But they were both wrong.
“Are we being elegant enough?” Margaret Stone asked. She asked it with a certain duplicity or irony or bitterness, some such thing as the humans used to have in their speech, as would soon be gone out of all speech forever.
“Oh, yes. You’re in the clear. You’ll pass easily,” the hoyden said.
Horse carriages were waiting in the streets outside. They had really elegant horses. They were Thunder Colts who are part artifice, part legend, and part horse.
But, inside, Girardeau’s Irish Restaurant had become a work of living art. Transcendent persons are themselves works of art; their transcendence flows from themselves to their groups and from both to their surroundings. Any resulting arrangement must of necessity be perfect. Every person in the great dining hall was so seated as to contribute to the most striking composition of appearance and voice and aura. Every order served became a part of an olfactory and gustatory orchestration. Each gesture and nuance of the thousand diners (Girardeau’s didn’t used to be so large; it used to seat only forty-eight) was part of a living panorama and pandemonium. There was nothing accidental about the deeply textured and strong, musky scene. There would never be anything “accidental” again. It was all a perfectly fitted and balanced contrivance, ruthlessly beautiful, or horrible, depending on the sensibilities. The only ineptly clashing notes to be met with there were provided by the several persons present who had no sensibilities. They were Zabotski and a very few others. Bloody death be upon them!
But even the human remnants and preservations might be arranged and toyed with and enjoyed. They were interesting bric-a-brac in the now all-ways interesting world. But they were much more handily arranged and enjoyed after they were dead.
“We are unable to account for the Human Interval,” the man Roundhead was saying. “I do not believe that any of us splendid people were ever human, and yet our bodies appear very similar. But the body is related to the person and the species only as the brain is related to the mind: to furnish a temporary haven, that is all. It may be that both the humans and ourselves moved into bodies that had been developed by a still more primitive species. Myself, I can live in a house of almost any shape; the body isn’t important to me. The body and the brain cannot live without their hosts, the person and the mind; but the converse may not be true. I believe that a species may travel, like flame, through many bodies of various sorts— through that of the totem animal, through that of the contrived effigy, even through that burlesque thing that is called human.”
“What is wrong with the human thing?” Zabotski flared up.
“Human mental processes are subject to error, and they are almost wholly lacking in true kinetic intuition,” Roundhead explained. “Humans have the sicknesses of introspection and guilt. They have the sickness of depth, but sanity is always a surface phenomenon. They have the sickness of awkwardness, and this is the most incurable sickness of them all. Thunder is the specific against most of these sicknesses; but who was it that prescribed it for us? Humans are crude and tedious and full of malodorous trash. Humans, Zabotski, are like you.”
“What is special about Duffey here?” Stein asked.
“Not much,” Roundhead said, “except that he is one of the oldest of us bright ones.”
“And what is—ah—unspecial about Zabotski?”
“Oddly enough, Zabotski has been invaluable to us since we have been in this town,” Roundhead said. “He spots the humans for us, dozens and dozens of them. He is old human, but it is a multitude of other old humans that he hates. He leads us right to them. Ah, as soon as we clear them out in this town, then they will all be gone forever, except for the very few that we miss. But we will track them all down and sink them. The human ship will be the one that left no wake.”
“Nothing at all to be left?” Stein asked. “Not even the echo of an empty vat?”
“Nothing at all left?” Margaret asked. “Not even ’The Perfume of an Empty Vase’?” Margaret herself, who seldom wore such deceptions, was wearing the perfume named “The Last Night of Her Life.” She also wore a sullenness that was unusual for her.
“No wake, no remnant, no impact, no influence from the human thing,” Roundhead stated resolutely. “We eradicate the thing completely!”
“How chorasmian of us!” the Countess exclaimed.
“I think there will be a legacy,” Zabotski said sullenly, “and that I will be part of it.”
“So will I be,” said Deutero-Finnegan.
“Was humanity really a species apart from us?” Roundhead talked to the tableful and to himself. “Or was it a disease that afflicted us for a little while? Possibly it was both—a double, donkey-headed monstrosity. But it will not be either. When we arrange the human things, in their histories, even in their possible influence on ourselves, we will arrange them in our own ways. We will arrange that they drop into a bottomless void whence there is no echo.”
Time was running apace. The people began to enter the horse carriages to travel to the opera.
There was a Decatur Street in that town, though there hadn’t been before. It was fed into by the Grand Concourse through which a thousand horse carriages came without crowding. There was a Decatur Street Opera House, one of the great opera houses of the world. It had a great fagade of laughing stone, of memorable incandescence. The special stones recorded the flood tide of arrivals at the Opera in its stylized splendor under the jeweled sky. And the splendid people dismounted and went grandly in.
“Only not all.”
For there were ultimate tests set at the doorways, and it was known by kinetic intuition who must be tested. A dozen out of a thousand were taken. They were made to wash their hands in ashes, and they washed their hands in flame. And several persons came there without being compelled by the kinetic intuition. They failed the test, every one of them who came to it. They failed it in dirty flame and curling smoke.
Zabotski, of course. He was flagged out by everyone’s intuition. He was a stubborn and unregenerate human— devoi
d of euphoria, devoid of intuition, empty of transcendence. The ashes were in large bronze basins. They were the aromatic ashes of newly burned and very stubborn flesh, or flesh that had not broken down into trash and trifles as it died. These test ashes were really a little bit special, if anything of the unrelieved human can be called special. Zabotski rolled his big hands in the dead ashes. And the ashes burst into stifling and reeking flames.
Zabotski gave out with a horrible, wrenching sound that was both a moan and a laugh.
There was a blood roar from the bright people entering the opera. It was known that Zabotski was unrepentingly human, but the pleasure was not dulled by its being expected. Zabotski was big and wild and loud and silly, and there was a lot of blood and fun to be got out of him. Powerful men put a halter over his head, a bit in his mouth, and a rope around his neck. They began to lead him away and into the opera house by the animal entrance.
“I’ll leave me a wake, you!” Zabotski roared (it was a half-animal roar, for the mouth bit had a tongue spike to it). “I will strew me a path in this world and out of the door of this world! I will make me remembered!” He did strew a pretty wide path of a half-dozen strong men, but he was only living back in his youth for a furious moment. He was too old and fat, and he was overpowered and dragged away. But he left a stenchy wake from the smell of his burned and burst-open hands—human-stenchy.
Well, what was there in human ashes that would still kindle fire at the touch of kindred flesh? There was something that remembered.
In the Wake of Man Page 7