He waited for her all afternoon, listening to the neighbors above and below and on both sides of his small room. Children screamed and shrieked in play through the halls and on the stairs. Women shrilled and men cursed. Radios played out of synch, on different stations; airplanes overhead and traffic below competed with rising decibels; sirens, the blare of advertising trucks, the screech of the elevator again in service. He pressed his hands over his ears; his headache was blinding. Why didn’t she come home? The lights came on: neons, street lights, traffic lights; haze descended and haloed the lights. He fell asleep toward dawn.
That day he returned to the test center and waited along with all the others in the anterooms. Jan didn’t come through the doors from the inner rooms. On the third day he returned to work.
He was stopped at the door of the biology lab by his supervisor, who handed him an envelope and hurried away without speaking. Lorin opened it with shaking fingers, his heart thumping wildly. He was certain it was his test confirmation, and orders to report back to the test center. . . . He stared at the curt message: Report for analysis 9 A.M. Mon. Thurs. Fri., Rm. 1902 Psych Bldg.
He didn’t enter the lab. He knew his bench would be occupied by someone else. He went to the psych center and was issued his yellow coverall, and shown his iron frame cot. The other men in the ward didn’t stir as he entered, no one looked up at him. He felt his cheeks burn with shame and he sat on the edge of his cot and waited for 9 A.M. Thursday to come. He knew why Jan hadn’t returned, would never come back to him. He ground his hands into his eyes and tried to remember the test, what he had done wrong, how he had revealed insanity. When a sonic boom shook the building, he covered his ears and pushed hard against them, trying to think. He wished he could go for a walk, but the thought of walking in the center of a circle that moved with him everywhere he went, of seeing the disgust and loathing on the faces of those he approached ... He sat on the edge of the cot and waited, and tried to remember, and when night came he lay down wearily and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what he had done wrong, and he listened to the clamor of the city that never was still: traffic; voices singing, shouting, cursing, screaming; sirens; jets; foghorns; elevators; sound trucks; televisions; phonographs; buses; elevated trains . . . Nearby a jackhammer started, and an alarm went off. Lorin stuffed his fist into his mouth to keep from screaming, and lay staring at the ceiling trying to remember.
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* * * *
Entire and Perfect Chrysolite
by R. A. Lafferty
Having achieved perfection, we feel a slight unease. From our height we feel impelled to look down. We make our own place and there is nothing below us; but in our imagination there are depths and animals below us. To look down breeds cultishness.
There are the cults of the further lands and the further people. The Irish and Americans and Africans are respectable philosophical and industrial parties, but the cultishness is something beyond. Any addition to the world would mar the perfect world which is the perfect thought of the Maker. Were there an Africa indeed, were there an Ireland, were there an America or an Atlantis, were there Indies, then we would be other than we are. The tripartite unity that is the ecumene would be broken; the habitable world-island, the single eye in the head that is the world-globe would be voided.
There are those who say that our rational and perfect world should steep itself in this great unconscious geography of the under-mind, in the outré fauna and the incredible continents of the tortured imagination and of black legends. They pretend that this would give us depth.
We do not want depth. We want height. Let us seal off the under things of the under-mind, and exalt ourselves! And our unease will pass.
—Audifax O’Hanlon, Exaltation Philosophy
The True Believer was sailing offshore in an easterly direction in the latitude of fifteen degrees north and the longitude of twenty-four degrees east. To the north of the coasting ship was the beautiful Cinnamon Coast of Libya with its wonderful beaches and remarkable hotels tawny in the distance. To the east and south and west were the white-topped waves that went on forever and ever. The True Believer sailed along the southernmost edge of the ecumene, the habitable and inhabited world.
August Shackleton was drinking Roman Bomb out of a pot-bellied bottle and yelping happily as he handled the “wheel” of the True Believer.
“It’s a kids’ thing to do,” he yipped, “but there were never such beautiful waters to do it in. We try to call in outer spirits. We try to call up inner spirits and lands. It’s a children’s antic. Why do we do it, Boyle, other than for the fun of it?”
“Should there be another reason, Shackleton? Well, there is, but we go about it awkwardly and without knowing what we’re doing. The thing about humans (which nobody apparently wishes to notice) is that we’re a species which has never had an adult culture. We feel that lack more and more as we become truly adult in other ways. It grows tedious to stretch out a childhood forever. The easy enjoyments, the easy rationality, the easy governments and sciences are really childish things. We master them while we are yet children, and we look beyond. There isn’t anything beyond the childishness, Shackleton. We must find a deeper view somehow. We are looking for that something deeper here.”
“What? By going on a lark that is childish even to children, Boyle? I was ashamed before my sons when I confessed on what sort of diversion I was going. First there were the séances that we indulged in. If we raised any spirits there, they were certainly childish ones. And now we’re on this voyage on the True Believer. We’re looking for the geographical home of certain collective unconscious images! Why shouldn’t the children hoot at us? Ah well, let us not be too ashamed. It’s colorful and stimulating fun, but it isn’t adult.”
The other four members of the party, Sebastian Linter and the three wives, Justina Shackleton, Luna Boyle, and Mintgreen Linter, were swimming in the blue ocean. The True Believer was coasting very slowly and the four swimmers were clipped to outrigger towlines.
“There’s something wrong with the water!” Justina Shackleton suddenly called up to her husband. “There’s weeds in it, and there shouldn’t be. There’s reeds in it, and swamp grasses. There’s mud. And there’s green slime!”
“You’re out of your lovely head, lovely,” Shackleton called back. “It’s all clear blue water off a sand coast. I can see fish twenty meters down. It’s clear.”
“I tell you it’s full of green slime!” Justina called back. “It’s so thick and heavy that it almost tears me away from the line. And the insects are so fierce that I have to stay submerged.”
But they were off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. They could smell the warm sand and the watered gardens ashore. There was no mud, there was no slime, there were no insects off the Cinnamon Coast ever. It was all clear and bright as living, moving glass.
Sebastian Linter had been swimming on the seaward side of the ship. Now he came up ropes to the open deck of the ship, and he was bleeding.
“It is thick, Shackleton,” he panted. “It’s full of snags and it’s dangerous. And that fanged hog could have killed me. Get the rest of them out of the water!”
“Linter, you can see for yourself that it is clear everywhere. Clear, and of sufficient depth, and serene.”
“Sure, I see that it is, Shackleton. Only it isn’t. What we are looking for has already begun. The illusion has already happened to all senses except sight. Stuff it, Shackleton! Get them out of the water! The snakes or the crocs will get them; the animals threshing around in the mud will get them; and if they try to climb up onto the shore, the beasts there will break them up and tear them to pieces.”
“Linter, we’re two thousand meters offshore and everything is clear. But you are disturbed. So am I. The ship just grounded, and it’s fifty meters deep here. All right, everyone! I order everybody except my wife to come out of the water! I request that she come out. I am unable to order her to do anything.”
The
other two women, Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter, came out of the water. And Justina Shackleton did not.
“In a while, August, in a while I’ll come,” Justina called up to the ship. “I’m in the middle of a puzzle here and I want to study it some more. August, can a hallucination snap you in two? He sure is making the motions.”
“I don’t know, lovely,” August Shackleton called back to her doubtfully.
Luna Boyle and Mintgreen Linter had come out of the ocean up the ropes. Luna was covered with green slime and was bleeding variously. Mintgreen was covered with weeds and mud, and her feet and hands were torn. And she hobbled with pain.
“Is your foot broken, darling?” Sebastian Linter asked her with almost concern. “But of course it is all illusion.”
“I have the illusion that my foot is broken,” Mintgreen sniffled, “and I have the illusion that I am in very great pain. Bleeding blubberfish, I wish it were real! It couldn’t really hurt this much.”
“Oh elephant hokey!” Boyle stormed. “These illusions are nonsense. There can’t be such an ambient creeping around us. We’re not experiencing anything.”
“Yes, we are, Boyle,” Shackleton said nervously. “And your expression is an odd one at this moment. For the elephant was historical in the India that is, was fantastic in the further India that is fantastic, and is still more fanciful in its African contingency. In a moment we will try to conjure up the African elephant which is twice the mass of the historical Indian elephant. The ship is dragging badly now and might even break up if this continues, but the faro shows no physical contact. All right, the five of us on deck will put our heads together for this. You lend us a head too, Justina!”
“Take it, take my head. I’m about to let that jawful snapper have my body anyhow. August, this stuff is real! Don’t tell me I imagine that smell.”
“We will all try to imagine that smell, and other things,” August Shackleton stated as he uncorked another bottle of Roman Bomb. In the visible world there was still the Cinnamon Coast of Libya, and the blue oceans going on forever. But in another visible world, completely unrelated to the first and occupying absolutely different space (but both occupying total space), were the green swamps of Africa, the sedgy shores going sometimes back into rain forests and sometimes into savannas, the moon mountains rising behind them, the air sometimes heavy with mist and sometimes clear with scalding light, the fifty levels of noises, the hundred levels of colors.
“The ambient is forming nicely even before we start,” Shackleton purred. Some of them drank Roman Bomb and some of them Green Canary as they readied themselves for the psychic adventure.
“We begin the conjure,” Shackleton said, “and the conjure begins with words. Our little group has been involved with several sorts of investigations, foolish ones perhaps, to discover whether there are (or more importantly, to be sure that there are not) physical areas and creatures beyond those of the closed ecumene. We have gone on knobknockers, we have held séances. The séances in particular were grotesque, and I believe we were all uneasy and guilty about them. Our Faith forbids us to evoke spirits. But where does it forbid us to evoke geographies?”
“Ease up a little on the evoking!” Justina shrilled up to them. “The snapper just took me off at the left ankle. I pray he doesn’t like my taste.”
“It has been a mystery for centuries,” said August (somewhat disturbed by his wife’s vulgar outburst from the ocean), “that out of the folk unconscious there should well ideas of continents that are not in the world, continents with a highly imaginary flora and fauna, continents with highly imaginary people. It is a further mystery that these psychic continents and islands should be given bearings, and that apparently sane persons have claimed to visit them. The deepest mystery of all is Africa. Africa, in Roman days, was a subdivision of Mauritania, which was a subdivision of Libya, one of the three parts of the world. And yet the entire coast of Libya has been mapped correctly for three thousand years, and there is no Africa beyond, either appended or separate. We prove the nonsense of it by sailing in clear ocean through the middle of that pretended continent.”
“We prove the nonsense further by getting our ship mired in a swamp in the middle of that imaginary continent and seeing that continent begin to form about it,” said Boyle. And his Green Canary tasted funny to him. There was a squalling pungency in the air and something hair-raisingly foreign in the taste of the drink.
“This is all like something out of Carlo Forte,” Linter laughed unsteadily.
“The continental ambient forms about us,” said Shackleton. “Now we will evoke the creatures. First let us conjure the great animals, the rhinoceros, the lion, the leopard, the elephant, which all have Asian counterparts; but these of the contingent Africa are to be half again or twice the size, and incomparably fierce.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted, and the conjured creatures appeared mistily.
“We conjure the hippopotamus, the water behemoth, with its great comical bulk, its muzzle like a scoop-shovel, and its eyes standing up like big balls—”
“Stop it, August!” Justina Shackleton shrieked from the water. “I don’t know whether hippo is playful or not, but he’s going to crush me in a minute.”
“Come out of the water, Justina!” August ordered sternly.
“I will not. There isn’t any ship left to come out to. You’re all sitting on a big slippery broken tree out over the water, and the snappers and boas are coming very near your legs and necks.”
“Yes, I suppose so, one way of looking at it,” August said. “Now everybody conjure the animals that are compounded out of grisly humor—the giraffe with a neck alone that is longer than a horse, and the zebra which is a horse in a clown suit.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted. “The zebra isn’t as funny as I thought it would be,” Boyle complained. “Nothing is as funny as I thought it would be.”
“Conjure the great snake that is a thousand times heavier than other snakes, that can swallow a wild ass,” Shackleton gave them the lead.
“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they all chanted.
“August, it’s over your head, reaching down out of the giant mimosa tree,” Justina screamed warning from the swamp. “There’s ten meters of it reaching down for you.”
“Conjure the crocodile,” Shackleton intoned. “Not the little crocodile of the River of Egypt, but the big crocodile of deeper Africa that is able to swallow a cow.”
“We conjure it, we imagine it, we evoke it, and the swamps and estuaries in which it lives,” they all chanted.
“Easy on that one,” Justina shrilled. “He’s been taking me by little pieces. Now he’s taking me by big pieces.”
“Conjure the ostrich,” Shackleton intoned, “the bird that is a thousand times as heavy as other birds, that stands a meter taller than man, that kicks like a mule, the bird that is too heavy to fly. I wonder what delirium first invented such a wildlife as Africa’s anyhow?”
“We conjure it, we conjure it,” they chanted.
“Conjure the great walking monkey that is three times as heavy as a man,” August intoned. “Conjure a somewhat smaller one, two thirds the size of man, that grins and gibbers and understands speech, that could speak if he wished.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them.”
“Conjure the third of the large monkeys that is dog-faced and purple of arse.”
“We conjure it, we conjure it, but it belongs in a comic strip.”
“Conjure the gentle monster, the okapi, that is made out of pieces of the antelope and camel and contingent giraffe and which likewise wears a striped clown suit.”
“We conjure it, we conjure it.”
“Conjure the multitudinous antelopes, koodoo, nyala, hartebeest, oryx, bongo, klipspringer, gemsbok, all so out of keeping with a warm country, all such grotesque takeoffs of the little alpine antelope.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them.”
“Conjure the buffalo that is greater than all other buffalo or cattle, that has horns as wide as a shield. Conjure the quagga. I forget its pretended appearance, but it cannot be ordinary.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them.”
“We come to the top of it all! Conjure the most anthropomorphic group in the entire unconscious: men indeed, who are black as midnight in a hazel grove, who are long of ankle and metatarsus and lower limb so they can run and leap uncommonly, who have crumpled hair and are massive of feature. Conjure another variety that are only half as tall as men. Conjure a third sort that are short of stature and prodigious of hips.”
“We conjure them, we conjure them,” they all chanted. “They are the caricatures from the beginning.”
“But can all these animals appear at one time?” Boyle protested. “Even on a contingent continent dredged out of the folk unconscious there would be varieties of climates and land-forms. All would not be together.”
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