Archipelago

by R. A. Lafferty

  He was in the city that is built like a wheel, the city where he had been born. But the great city went around like that wheel itself, and he was unable to control his wanderings or to find his friends or cronies. He was never sure whether he was dreaming or whether these things were happening now, or at some other time.

  Sometimes he thought: “This isn't all happening now. This is a rhapsody. Part of it happened somewhere else and part of it hasn't happened yet. It is a compression. It is cubist, and I am not. Some of these bars are really in Chicago and some of them are in Cincinnati. There are Frisco bars here, and Chinatown. Some of these places I used to be in in Galveston, and some of them are places I haven't been in yet in Havana. This is a futuristic nightmare. There are weirdies all over the place. There used to be only a few dives like that. It isn't right that everybody should have funny-shaped heads; only a few of the people should have funny shaped heads.”

  It was a fevered dream full of spinning lights and bar-room gin, and the streets had caricatures of their former names. Some of the people seemed to be part animal, and Finnegan was lost in the quarter of his own town that he knew like the back of his hand.

  It went around like a wheel for many hours, a day and a night at least. Never before had he known a whole town to spin like that. It flung him away and outward till he was walking down a road one bright noon, two hundred miles away, and with no idea how he had gotten there.

  And as often as he turned back towards home, so did eventualities carry him away from it. Every day in his confusion he found new friends and drank with them, and every day he drifted further from his destination. It is very hard to make port when both the wind and the waves are against you. It is sometimes better to hove to in a nearer haven and wait for another season to brave it.

  And, as he was swept too near the next big town, gravity caught him and pulled him into its vortex. He was in another complex of streets, newer, but in some respects more shabby; where they gave you serpents (they tasted like serpents) when you asked for fish, and barbecue on a bun when you asked for bread.

  Finnegan was in Texas, the dread land of the Cyclops: a race of one-eyed or squint-eyed tall men. And he despaired of ever seeing home or friends again.

  6.

  At the same time that some of this was happening, Finnegan was spending twelve years in happy marriage to Teresa Piccone. But there is no room for those twelve years in this framework. All the time is taken up elsewhere. And all the days of Teresa's life are otherwise accounted for, and never did she leave her husband in St. Louis.

  All the days of Finnegan's life are not accounted for. There are several times a week, three weeks, even several months missing. But never twelve years.

  There has to be some explanation for this, unless both Finnegan and Teresa had the power (not too unusual) of being two places at once. Several of the Saints had this power, and some of the Ecstatics. But nobody had it for twelve years, only for a half-dozen minutes in a lifetime.

  Part of, not the answer, but the habitat of the answer, may be found in an interval of one hundred and five hours, or from about sundown of a Tuesday till early the next Sunday morning, which interval Finnegan spent in the chaparral in either Medina or Frio County, and probably northeast of the Frio branch. For Finnegan did not remember crossing the branch and, as it had water in it that summer, he would probably remember if he had crossed it.

  This interval is only one point of contact with the problem. It is by no means the whole site of it.

  Monday Finnegan had been in Uvalde, and Tuesday in Sabinal and D’Hannis and Hondo; and then in D’Hannis again looking for his outfit. But everyone told him that the old Moonlight Cavalry had not been there for seven or eight years, and that none of the boys had ever been back. Only a few of the people there remembered him. But some of the boys still lived in San Antonio, they told him, and he should go there and find them and be taken care of.

  Finnegan had been on maneuvers in this neighborhood years before, in his early army days.

  So, when they would no longer serve him in the bars, he set out on foot with a shoulder-bag that had in it some Southern Comfort, some Old Crow, a little Hiram Walker, some of his richer brother Johnny, a bottle of Ron Rico and one of Don Q, and three of four each of Virginia Dare White and Red. It was a heavy bag and he clanked when he walked.

  But he did not go East to catch a ride to San Antonio. Instead, he went South on a little road that he remembered. Nobody came along, and he walked the eight miles till the road turned off and left him. Then he continued on for two miles to a sort of clearing in the brush, and lay down on the ground with a stone for a pillow, and comforted himself with Southern Comfort. For now it was evening, the Tuesday evening when the sequence begins.

  The next one hundred and five hours, until Ramires and Elena Musquiz (who oddly remembered him after seven years) picked him up in their cart on the way to Mass in D’Hannis, these one hundred and five hours cannot now be reconstructed. For they include dream-sequences and noon-day devils, and parts of twelve years from another life.

  Finnegan knew the street and the block and the number of the house, but he never went there in later years, or ever. It would have been too weird. It would have frightened him senseless if he had found it as he knew it must be. It would have frightened him still more if he had not so found it. And, though he was several times in that town, he would not go to that quarter.

  And yet he lived in that house with Teresa his wife for twelve years, which was until death. And whichever of them died so early he did not know, nor if it was both of them. For this was all of what might have been, of what was in the other life (the perhaps valid life) that it was ever given him to see.

  In the other life, the one that is sometimes called the mundane life, the life outside the hundred and five hours and outside of the twelve years (it cannot be called the real life: it cannot be known for sure which was real), in the other life, Teresa also was aware of the sequence.

  For Chiara and for Rafaello and for Teresa Anna she had masses said, and this puzzled her husband Vincent. “Are you having masses said for yourself before you are dead?” he asked. “And who are the other two?”

  “I have always answered you everything, and I do not know how to answer this,” she said. “Maybe I am a little dead. But this Teresa Anna is not myself but is a daughter to me, and these others also are my children. And if this is a dream I do not know, or if it is a dream that we are in now. And you are my husband and can always ask me anything, but of this I do not know the answer.”

  Teresa asked Father McGuigan if she could have masses said for the three children who perhaps had never lived at all, who might be a dream. And yet, if one were not afraid to go and look, she knew the parish church where she had had them baptized, and she could see the register before her.

  Father let her have the masses said though he didn't know what she meant, and he had known her every day of her life.

  These were the children of Teresa and Finnegan.

  At this time Teresa already had children by her husband Vincent, but they were not Chiara or Rafaello or Teresa Anna.

  This was as near a perfect love as can be imagined on earth. Every day was as though they had just met. And even if death did end it, it seemed in a way a happy death. There had been an intensity of living in literally millions of details and an affection that held a place for every one of them. There had been grace and pleasure and fun.

  Even the old oil cloth on the kitchen table in the house where he lived with Teresa? Even the rotted back step. Gesu Maria! The homework of the kids from school! Evening and night and morning in the house! The broken davenport that they made down into a bed when the cousins came. Santo Spirito! — the way Teresa made bread with her hands. The smell of the bedroom, and the little chipped holy water font on the wall. Who else ever came home to such a house at night?

  The twelve years had been all of richness and beauty (though perhaps of material poverty, for it was a
poor street and a poor house), and God could be thanked for them, wherever and whatever they were.

  The hundred and five hours, however, were not a happy time. Finnegan was sick and delirious. He suffered much in the daytimes, though he always found some low shade.

  There were the rattlesnakes that came whenever he walked, and perhaps he saw more of them than there really were. At times they had him circled in great numbers. He may have come on the old ancestral city of the rattlesnakes, for he had been told of such.

  And the noon-day devils were often there in the heat, and this was mostly after the Southern Comfort and the Old Crow were all gone.

  And one of them said: ‘Dic ut lapides isti panes fiant.’

  And then one said: ‘Tauta pan ta soi doso,’ for the devils have a little Latin and much Greek. But Finnegan was never fooled by them, for he knew that these stones were only stones and that he could not make them break; and that all the kingdom they were offering him was a cactus kingdom which he already possessed for as long as he wished.

  It was not that full clarity came to Finnegan. He knew that he was the only person in the world; he knew that he had always been the only person. This certainty and centrality was never to leave Finnegan in all his life, or after. It is good to have it solved.

  On the day after Finnegan had been in the ancestral city of the rattlesnakes he was in the ancestral city of the buffalo. This, it is believed, was over the line in Frio County, within and just above the fork of the two creeks, for there is no record of any ancestral city of the buffalo in Medina County.

  The smell of buffalo differs from that of cattle; though Finnegan had never encountered it before, he would always remember it. There was fresh dung and it was real. A man is a fool if he cannot tell whether that is real. He should never be too far gone to tell.

  The buffalo did not seem aware of his presence. They looked right through him, and he could also look through them. A peculiarity of vision had now developed from his drinking and from the stage of his life-travel. He could look right through many objects and at the daylight behind.

  The buffalo has many aspects, and seems wedge-shaped and hulking and slanted from any point of view. From the front it looks a little like a giant barn owl.

  “I mean,” said Finnegan carefully, “the Strix Pythaules. Not, of course, the Strix Maximus.” Then he had to chuckle to himself for his exactitude. There was nobody there that he had to explain to what kind of an owl the buffalo reminded him of from the front.

  Mostly these were old bulls. For it was high summer, and the rest of the herd had drifted hundreds of miles to the North, leaving only these sore-footed old codgers behind to guard their Capital.

  The next day was Saturday, and there was nothing left but a little rum and the wine. Bandits had stolen one bottle of rum while Finnegan slept. At least there was no other explanation, unless one were to believe that the buffalo had stolen it.

  And he slept within the circle of the buffalo that night, and possibly he is the only man ever to have done so. Finnegan was in accord with these buffalo, who are vestige, and who are older than any cattle of the earth. It was just as Finnegan himself was of a strain that is older than the proper people of the earth. He was in accord with them, but he very nearly died in that state of accord.

  Very early on Sunday morning, Elena Musquiz saw him in the scrub brush and picked him up and carried him to the car. He would have been dead after another day in that rough country there. She and her husband took him into D’Hannis with them.

  The sequence had ended. And time resumed its normal rounds.

  No, no, that is wrong! It was reality that had ended. And the token world intruded once more.

  Chapter Nine

  Hans, Who Is Also Orpheus

  1.

  Hans would seem to be the most open man in the world, and he was. Yet there was hardly anyone who really knew anything about him. Marie should have; after all, she married him. But Marie lived oddly in the present and in the future. She had no curiosity at all about the past. Finnegan spent a week with Hans in a shack on a construction job, probably in the summer of 1950. Hans, in his occupation as a building contractor, was the only one of the Five who ever changed the face of the world literally. He altered quite a few acres that summer.

  In the off hours of that week he talked a lot with Finnegan; his early life is here mostly built out of pieces of those talks. But nothing that Hans said ever had to be taken with a grain of salt. Many of the things here are of more moment than he made them.

  John Gottfriend Schultz was born on January 2, 1915 at St. Gallen, Wisconsin, the only child of John William Schultz and Mary Irene Hayden.

  This was in the Northern Wilderness, in the lake country beyond Rhinelander and not far from Eagle River. But it was not in the dark north. The memories of John (who was not Hans at home or anywhere till he was half-grown) were always of a town and country of splendid sunlight. John was born warm. And when he later remembered St. Gallen, it was always as the land of the larger summer.

  The father of John had him educated intensively in the Three Parts of Man. German and Latin were all that the father could give him; and of science only horticulture (John William was a nursery-man).

  John William was the strongest man in St. Gallen, so it was necessary that John be so also. This was attained through the teaching of the mail-order muscle builders, most of whom were German: the dynamic tension method of one, the cable exercisers of another, the bar bells and kettle drums. Then the turning pole and the flying rings for agility, and twice a day around the one mile track laid out around and through the Nursery.

  This mile meander during the long summer was the kaleidoscopic habitation of all small creatures, rabbits and coneys, ground squirrels and bull snakes. They ran out from Hans as though he were an earthquake. There were owls by the treeful, and whole ghettos of grackle; clouds of scissortails and crows; thrush from the ground, catbirds and redwings from the low bushes, waxwings from the branches, flickers from the insides of trees, finches from the crowns.

  There were coons and weasels, and fishers and martens in the ponds. There were grouse and wild turkey. John ran the meander every morning and again in the evening. It was the part of his physical education that he most enjoyed.

  The third part of the man was cultivated in him in the way that only a German father knows. In some sons it breeds revolt, but in Hans it didn't. He was taught to be highly moral. He was always moral, but he was less fiercely moral than his father.

  He went to school at St. Joseph's in St. Gallen. He rode a pony in, or sometimes he walked or ran. But John Williams quarreled with the nuns about the teaching of his son, and he quarreled with Father Baumgartner.

  “This that you teach, it is little stuff. It is for children,” John William said.

  “Well, John is only nine years old.”

  “They should know these things already. Some of them they should know before they are born.”

  “What would you have us teach them?”

  “Why don't you teach them Greek?”

  “In the fourth grade?”

  “Yes, they learn faster then. They are younger then than they will be later.”

  “If you were your wife talking, I would put that down for an Irish bull.”

  “How would I be my wife talking? A priest should make sense.”

  “Not always, William, not always. Besides, I don't know Greek. I think they should learn to read and write English first.”

  ”They can do that any time. There's many opportunities to learn English in America, but where can my John learn Greek? And religion, they're still on the Catechism. That's ridiculous.”

  “The Catechism is ridiculous?”

  “Not to know it in the fourth grade is ridiculous. Why don't you teach them Aquinas and Albert? All that you have taught them in four years you could teach them in the evenings of a week.”

  “How would you do it, William?”

  “Start anywhere,
but get it done. One night you could make them memorize the Catechism. On the next night they read through American History. On the next you teach them to add and subtract and multiply and divide. Make them learn this thoroughly even if it takes an extra hour. You could leave algebra and geometry till later; it isn't necessary that very small children know them thoroughly.

  “On the fourth evening teach them to read rapidly; this is a valuable gift. On the fifth evening teach them to compose; show them how to write clearly and briefly and always with a framework laid out and an end in view; teach them to express themselves on every subject in the world. It will be useful to them later.

  “There, you have it in five evenings, not in four years. And on Saturday morning you could give special aid to the backward students (there will be some). Then, with these little things out of the way, you can begin to educate the children.

  “This which you have been doing for four years is not educating. It is only the sharpening of the pencil before you begin. And if you spend four or eight or twelve years in just sharpening the pencil, what time is left for the actual task?”

  But it wasn't that simple. Children have their limitations.

  2.

  Bright is my Aerie.

  Aloft and alone.

  Others have other Homes,

  This is my own.

  Tumult and Rioting

  Rises and grows.

  Here is a Hideaway

  Nobody knows.

  Schlürfen Sie Wieder

  Die Waldungen ein.

  Grünknallenden Lieder

  Sind immerdar mein

  Golden-touched Greenery,

  Russet and dun;