Elephant Bangs Train

by William Kotzwinkle

  'O.K., Jeff,' said Annette, calling through the doorway. 'Time for bed.'

  He climbed off the throne and went into the bedroom, where his pyjamas were laid out. They had a story on them, about a boy and a girl going up the hill to a well.

  'Now I lay me down to sleep,' he whispered on his knees. A horse-shaped nightlight burned on a table between the twin beds. Moonlight came through the window. Far away, a dog barked. He heard footsteps coming down the alley. A man in a hat walked by the window.

  He listened to the footsteps fade away, then blessed himself and crawled into bed.

  The front door opened. He heard the girls saying goodbye. He played with his red-hatted soldier under the blanket.

  Annette looked into the room. He dropped the soldier and pretended to be sleeping.

  She came in quietly. He watched her from under half-closed lids. She switched off the horse-lamp. He could see her in the moonlight.

  She unbuttoned her dress and stepped out of it. He saw her underwear. She pulled on a nightgown, like Wendy Darling in Peter Pan.

  She passed out of the moonlight, into the darkness by the beds. She raised the covers and slipped in beside him. His soldier rolled over.

  She was a stranger in this bed. Did she know about the various positions? Where her arm lay, he could place riflemen. On her legs he might station his flanks.

  'Jeffrey?' she asked in a whisper.

  He lay soundless in the blanket, as dreams began to peek up out of the darkness.

  'Jeffrey,' she whispered. 'I'm afraid of the dark.'

  She pressed against him, down in the valley where his soldier was hiding. His heart was pounding. He wanted to tell her the true significance of Hi Diddle Diddle.

  'Play with me, Jeffrey,' she whispered, taking his hand and laying it on her body. He walked his fingers like troops over her mountains. O.K., boys up this way.

  The Great Liar

  WHATEVER Professor Doctor St. John Noonday said, there was not even one-hundredth part of the truth. He was master of the small lie of little consequence; was proficient in the long convoluted lie in which vast systems of falsehood spiralled, minutely detailed, leading nowhere. St. John Noonday lied to men, women, animals, inanimate objects, and St. John Noonday was not even his name.

  For the sake of efficient narrative, it is stated that Doctor Noonday was born George Moltoch in the coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania, though nothing in Moltoch/Noonday's so-called life can be fastened on with any degree of certainty. The careful biographer investigates thoroughly, but the birth story may have a false bottom, beneath which what abyss lies, none but Noonday knows.

  However, the inhabitants of Coalhole, Pennsylvania will tell you that a George Moltoch once lived there, and that even as a child he showed signs of genius. He was usually found with the coal miners, those advanced liars noted for extravagant tales of odd creatures seen beneath the earth—ghostly cries, fleeting lights, secret passages and so forth—and little Moltoch went among them and held them spellbound, for he was a born liar.

  'He had every liar I ever knew beat a mile, recalls Mr. Ben Shimbers, in his rocking chair on the porch of the Coalhole Old Miner's Home, 'and I knew some of the great ones—Bull Kennedy, Black-tongue Dingo, Jimmy the Shovel, we get a lot of them around here—but that boy could cover you in it. I remember a story he told about some cockroaches ten foot long flyin' down the highway in Argentina, a laboratory mutation see what I mean, he had all the little detail, the most natural liar I ever saw. I always looked for his name in local government, but he didn't take it up, just sort of disappeared. Seems like a shame, don't it?'

  In high school, Moltoch apprenticed for his First Degree of Mastery in the Dark Art of the Lie, convincing his teachers and classmates that he was going to enter the clergy.

  This, of course, was merely a four-year exercise on his part, his first elaborate simulacrum. A model of piety, each morning he read some small quote from the Bible out over the loudspeaker of the school, and gave the blessing at all ball games, for he knew that if a Lie was to be successful, it had to be flawlessly lived, to the hilt. Thus, the caption under his Coalhole High School graduation picture:

  George Moltoch—a classmate hears the Higher Calling.

  Immediately upon leaving high school, Moltoch dropped his clerical mask. He had now mastered the First Degree, could tell a lie without the slightest contraction of will, and to give greater reign to his power of distortion became a salesman for the Great World Book Encyclopedia.

  He was a dynamic seller, travelling the state, and it was his custom after work to relax in some local gin mill, where he continued to refine his art. Typical was the night in a Carbonville barroom, where Moltoch spun a web of deceit in which he emerged as the Eastern League's leading third baseman in assists, runs-batted-in, and stolen bases. A local authority, who knew the size of every player's bat in the League, past, present, and to come, spoke up, claiming he could not remember Moltoch's name in any boxscores.

  The fellow was courting disaster. Moltoch rose to unparalleled heights of distortion, with innumerable statistics and atmospheric phenomena—as he spoke one could hear the turning of the wheels of the old Phoebe Snow as it carried his ball-club over the rails for a nightgame with the Scranton Redsox, while from his body there seemed to rise the very essence of the locker room, a vague aroma of liniment.

  After several years of studying from A to Z the fifty volumes of the Great World Book Encyclopedia, Moltoch, with his vast irrelevant erudition, gained the Second Degree of the Lie by permanently metamorphosing into Professor Doctor St. John Noonday, Cross of Weimar, DBS, former head of the Second Dunterdunstaff Expedition to the Pyramid of Sunten. He began a lecture series, visiting small Pennsylvania towns addressing such groups as the Moosic Women’s Historical Claque.

  Wearing a beard and eye-patch, Doctor Noonday spoke to the ladies about the opening of the tomb:

  '. . . as we wedged our picks into the ancient portcullis, defying the curse, I heard a groan from the camels . . .'

  The room in the back of the American Legion Post was quiet as a desert, except for the sound of the bowling alley next door, while around Doctor Noonday's head the lost secrets of the dead seemed to swirl in a mist. On through the evening he spoke, wrapping his audience in great lengths of gauze, until they were totally embalmed.

  After the meeting was over, Doctor Noonday took a breath of air in the back lot of the Post accompanied by the recording secretary of the Claque, Miss Edwina Bender. Noonday's modest car was parked in the lot, and as he bent Miss Bender over the fender, talking softly of the Nile he unwrapped her mummy, finally wedging his pick in her portcullis. Her groans, so like the hump-loaded camel, were covered by the sound of bowling balls.

  Professor Noonday's lecture series won him wide acclaim and a chair of merit in the History Department of Pennsylvania State University. His examination was brief; so powerful was his his encyclopedic exposition of ancient civilization, his colleagues never dreamed of questioning him. His transcript, forged, his degrees, clever copies, seemed perfectly in order to the professoriat, and he was welcomed enthusiastically. Especially enjoyed was his dissertation on Gammon Philodon, the Gnostic philosopher who had never lived.

  Noonday's books, Planes of Historical Intersection and the Immortal Riddle of Philodon, as well as a brief monograph on Mayan highways, were out of print at the moment, though new plates were being struck in England. The Chairman of the History Department remarked while tipsy that he had seen a few pages of the original manuscripts and they were 'of the first magnitude'.

  Once established in the easy pace of University life, Noonday was able to devote more time to his personal meditations. These exercises were unspeakably complex, containing exquisite patterns of suggestio falsi, removed from truth and removed again. During one such meditation, by superb economy of truth and the ladder of false logic, Noonday proved beyond his own rational doubt that he was not only the opener
of the tomb Sunten, but was, in fact, Sunten himself, dreaming of a twentieth century which had not yet dawned.

  A bird tweeted on the window sill; a student demonstration bomb went off in the street below—an ordinary day, yet in one room of University Park, Pa., sat a Pharaoh, laughing with the thunderous laughter that is said to come during the first moments of mastering the Planes of Historical Intersection, the Third Degree of the Lie.

  Noonday saw that he was all men, that he had invented the wheel, walked with Plato, performed experimental surgery at Buchenwald. It was an immense delusion and he was perfectly comfortable in it.

  Some critics may say Noonday was mad. He was not. Toweringly weird, yes—mad, no. He saw that in five years he would attain the Presidency of the University. From there he could embark on a career leading straight to the White House, that High Seat of the Lie, open only to holders of the Third Degree of Falsehood.

  Note: Mastery of the Third Degree of the Lie comes, as it did with Noonday, when the candidate convinces himself he is a Universal Man. Sustained by this imposture, his rise to world power is generally quite rapid. (Though such technical exposition is admittedly of questionable literary taste, your careful biographer includes it for the sake of the serious student.)

  Leaving his rooms, Noonday walked to the Campus Diner for some dinner. He ate codfish cakes, left a kingly tip. As he stepped on to the sidewalk outside the diner, his eye fell upon a large member of the roach family, a waterbug scurrying along. The shadowy creature slipped into the cellar of the diner and Noonday stood transfixed by a sudden dark illumination of the Fourth Degree of the Lie:

  Insects are fish.

  The night seemed made of plastic. Staggering, he held to a tree.

  Trees are roast beef.

  He was caught, he realized with sudden alarm, in the Immortal Riddle of Philodon, by which the gods are confounded. Feeler and fin had crossed in the night, been united, and Noonday had realized, through the powerful insight of the Fourth Degree, the mutual penetration of all lies.

  In a night of revelation, in which he walked till dawn around the lonely campus, he gained the atomic vision of the Adept Liar, seeing in every tree, in every doorway, in every face, the same empty dance of electrons—lovely whirling motion, like the tongue of a good liar from which spin galaxies of humbuggery. Between cockroach and codfish there were only structural differences—their substance was the same and this substance itself was a lie.

  He saw the entire Universe wheeling, made of a fine shimmering pattern, a Lie of such grand and incredible artistry his own vain dream of political empire collapsed—the White House was a doll house played in by childish fibbers. He left the University that morning, disappearing without forwarding address, becoming a homeless wanderer.

  Down the highway he went, headed for New York. He rode in trucks, slept in fields, wandered in the swamps of New Jersey, his spirit moving back and forth from blissful joy to dismal depression.

  Note: Students of the Dark Art have always commented on the stormy nature of the Fourth Degree. The Adept has in one moment the certain knowledge he is a Prince of Falsehood, adorned in the cloak of rarest illusion, while in the next he is filled with bitter emptiness. This emptiness, of course, is the unconscious hungering for the Fifth Degree.

  On arriving in New York, he joined the ranks of forgotten men. While walking on the Bowery one morning, Noonday felt a sudden surge within himself, and being familiar now with the changing of the bands, he knew a new Degree of the Lie was dawning. Looking around, he was struck by the act of a devastated hobo, who was doing a ruined little dance at a stoplight, threatening to wipe the windshields of halted cars with a grease rag if not given a nickel or a dime. Noonday watched, transfixed. The light changed. The cars started up. The bum waltzed through the moving traffic, heedless of danger, waving his rag. Then, almost in slow motion he was lifted by the fender of a taxi cab and hurled through the air, landing in a fetal position in the gutter, his leg terribly twisted.

  'Are you all right?' asked Doctor Noonday, bending over the derelict.

  'Three months in hospital, Johnny,' said the old fellow, smiling. 'Soup and hot towels.'

  With the siren of the approaching ambulance in his ears, Noonday walked up the street. He knew the time for the Supreme Test had come. At the stoplight, he stepped off the kerb into the stream of yellow cabs and roaring trucks. A large fruit truck was upon him. He made no attempt to avoid it, merely steeled himself into the most powerful Lie of his long and variegated career.

  At the moment of impact, instead of being struck and tossed into the air, he passed directly into the cold slow pulse of the truck body. His own body density dropped into the realm of densely packed iron, and suddenly he was the hood ornament, a frozen Mercury with winged helmet, then the whirling fan belt, pumping pistons, sighing cylinders. His humanity was swallowed in the thunder-song of the engine and he thrilled on the fiery altar, incandescent terrible.

  He proceeded along the drive shaft, stopping only for a brief interlude with the cargo of tropical fruit, where he hung for a moment in sweet dream of the Caribbean; then finally exhausted, he found himself in the street, somewhat dizzy, though perfectly intact, as the fruit truck bounced away down the block.

  'You got to use a rag, Johnny!'

  Noonday turned back to the kerb, where the ambulance crew was lifting the broken bum on to a stretcher. The bum waved his grease-cloth at Noonday. 'A rag helps—careful, John, that leg is hollow—helps you balance . . .' He disappeared into the ambulance, and with wailing siren rolled away.

  Noonday walked along. He had faced the Great Death, as the Fifth Degree of the Lie is called, had offered himself to the powers of destruction only to find they didn't apply, for Death was a Lie.

  A dilapidated bum shuffled past Noonday dragging his wretched body over the sidewalk. Noonday followed slowly behind him, amazed at the bum's endurance. His feet were coming out of his shoes, his pants were ripped from ankle to tincrack, revealing the ugly sores on his legs. And yet, thought Noonday, he lives on, afraid of death.

  But death is a Lie!

  Noonday's heart erupted. He swelled out with strange new feeling, out and out, along the sidewalk until he enveloped the bum like a cloud, until he held in himself the sorrow of the bum's Lie, and then he passed on, along the Bowery, over all the sad sons of bitches of the morning, drinking in their bitter cups, gagging on their stinking gall.

  Bums invaded his head, their dizziness was his, their muttering, their hopelessness, their thirst. Suffocating in their pickle brine, he walked the street, wrapped in the Bowery's filthy mantle.

  He walked uptown, where he was engulfed by men hustling along with brief cases, pushing hot dog carts, peeping in girlie-book windows, riding in limousines, drilling in the ground.

  You are caught in lies! screamed Noonday at the skyline, his heart turning over, sobbing for the coffee man and his mobile urn.

  'Lies!' cried Noonday, waving his fist at the swarming crowd, for it was lunch hour and secretaries and executives were out walking and shopping. No one paid him any attention, of course, just another crackpot on Sixth Avenue, yesterday a man demonstrated against miniskirts.

  Noonday crossed 50th Street, sat down on the edge of the Time and Life Building fountain, and listened. Like frantic ants, people made their way along all around him. He heard the great daily grindstone turning, the cruel wheel of Lies men call position, wearing down the day.

  A small spot of pain began in his left temple and moved slowly across his forehead to the other temple, where it locked a vice grip on his brow. Then from the base of his skull all along his crown came a rolling agony, grinding the cells his brain.

  Holding his head in his hands, Noonday rocked back and forth like a child, on the edge of the fountain, his coattails hanging in the water.

  The whole programme of Lies was his now. He had tuned in on the mad music of earth, screeching, beeping, scratching lunacy. From around
the city and around the globe, Noonday was receiving. He heard the children of the Lie moaning low and he wanted to save them, but he didn't know what to do. His brain exploding with overload, his heart bumping wildly, Noonday jumped in the fountain.

  The Sixth Degree of the Lie dawned.

  Sweetly as a bird lifting its song in morning, rose up in him.

  'What's going on here?'

  'I don't know, Officer, this guy thinks he's fish.'

  In the midst of nylons rushing down 50th Street, in the babble of guided tours, in the sound of the policeman's voice, Noonday heard the silence—a thundering silence, and he passed into profound emptiness.

  'Come on, Mac, go home and sleep it off.' . He was nothing. There was nothing. Behind the lies, giving birth to beautiful thighs and gleaming badges, there was a pure quiet spotless state, and that, thought Noonday, stepping from the fountain, that, laughed Noonday stumbling dripping wet up the avenue, that, that, that!

  Elephant's Graveyard

  THE BATTLE ELEPHANTS of King Sudarma of Daspur were dining in the royal courtyard. The chief elephant, mistaking a stained window of the palace for a large green leaf, drove his trunk, through the coloured glass, lacerating his long nose. The blood did not trouble him, for he was used to spears in his hide, but his pride was deeply wounded, and when his trunk was wrapped in a large white bandage he was humiliated.

  In the days that followed, similar incidents occurred. The bull elder bumped into the palace walls, shaking the court ladies in their chamber, and crushed by accident, with his foot, a royal hay wagon.

  'He is losing his sight, my Lord,' said the mahout, a hawk-nosed, grey-bearded old man, for fifty years the trainer of King Sudarma's battle elephants.

  'Our army has grown old,' said the King, as the two men descended from the balcony to the courtyard, where the royal guard had so often assembled with bright flags and gold harness and marched out of the palace gates to battle. But the royal saddle with silver warrior bells no longer tempted King Sudarma, for parades now gave him a backache, and he was content to let his kingdom slumber in peace. The King and his mahout crossed the sandy courtyard to the side of the wounded bull elder, who stood munching some leftover hay in the sunlight. In the past the younger bulls had waited until he was finished before they ate, but now it was he who was last to dine. Once he had led them all in battle, waving an uprooted tree, with the King on his back in a gold canopy. Now he was tired and the hot day passed slowly.