More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Go home to him,” Duffey told her. “It was all a misunderstanding. He hadn't abused your relationship at all, and now he is sorry that he closed out the account.”

  “Somehow I couldn't possibly face him before tomorrow,” the woman said, “and there isn't any place that I could go.”

  “There are rooms on the other end of the block,” Duffey said, “and low-cost eating places. You can make it till tomorrow easily.”

  Duffey gave her twenty dollars.

  “But I couldn't take money from a man in the street,” the woman said.

  “Be quiet, woman,” Duffey told her. “It is given to you. It is not yours to ask whether you will take it. Take it and go somewhere. And tomorrow go home. And do not wonder too much about the congruence of events.”

  Duffey knew then that Letitia was gone, or was going from their place at that very moment. He knew that she had divined much of what had happened, though she had not yet been approached by the man with the portfolio. She didn't want to see what it all was, and she wouldn't. But she had gone away for a while. She would have supplied, though, a good cover story for her going away, an account of a very necessary trip. What else would a priceless wife, who reads her husband's brain and heart, do?

  6

  About a month after this, there was a little meeting of the stockholders of the Crock. Duffey himself had a big piece of the stock of the magazine, and he had been in nice control of it all with Casey's proxy votes. But now a strange man presented a dated and signed proxy from Casey Szymansky who was still across the APO Oceans. And this proxy preempted the earlier proxy that Casey had given to Duffey before he went overseas. The money involved, the stock involved, the equipment involved were none of them very much. The Crock was capitalized for only five thousand dollars; and Duffey, even though he had lost part of his facility for making and handling money, could have covered that quite a few times. But there wouldn't be any buying out. The strange man and his group took over the Crock and they changed its orientation.

  Of course, Letitia Duffey had returned from her necessary trip before this. She still did not see the portfolio or the material in it, and she was without any interest in it. And the group had already forced Duffey out of the way on this deal. Well, there would be other deals. They would keep the portfolio of pictures, and perhaps they could find use for them some day.

  It was about a year or fourteen months after the taking over of the Crock that Casey Szymansky came home. He confirmed that the orientation of the Crock had changed, that he himself would be running it again with help and suggestions from the ‘group’, and that Duffey was severed from it forever.

  Casey said that every damned thing in the world had changed for him now. He said that he had traded souls either with the devil or with a virtual devil, and that he would maintain an entirely different way in the world thenceforth. And Duffey understood just what he was up to and how big the change in him really was.

  But it couldn't be a total break between Casey and Duffey even then. Casey was one of the Duffey creatures, and Duffey couldn't repent of having made him. But Casey had grown larger than Duffey and more contrary. The Casey moon had grown bigger and heavier than the Duffey planet, and that had set up one hell of an eccentric. The whole business of Casey Szymansky must be investigated in depth pretty soon.

  Melchisedech Duffey, in his ‘time of trial’ here, had sustenance from his quasi-brother Bascom Bagby in St. Louis. Duffey received weekly letters from Bagby. He had also received weekly letters from Bagby during his seven hidden years (there was something inexplicable about that part of it). The letters were of great intelligence and compassion. They were written in a good hand on old lined tablet paper. These letters seemed to be a part of Duffey's introspection, but they were real enough and exterior enough. And now, Bagby understood the situation without Duffey ever mentioning it to him.“It is the revolt of the Titan is it, the first of them to revolt and attempt to overturn you? And this phase of it has been successful for him. He has thrown you out of your Chicago Olympia, and now you must descend into the world or else seek another mountaintop. ‘It is probably for the best,’ as the man said when he had lost both arms and legs and been blinded in an accident, ‘it will keep me home nights and out of trouble’. You will be coming here very soon now. You will be meeting most of the rest of this titan race that you created in moments of abstraction or absentmindedness. We never will know what you were thinking when you did it. Most of them will like you though. I will see you in St. Louis in about thirteen days. Oh, you didn't know you were coming here then? You are.”

  As it had been both fashionable and expensive, during the Chicago interlude, to be analyzed, Melchisedech had been analyzed by Doctor Saul Rafelson. Duffey never was released as cured by Rafelson (or Doctor Raffles, as both Melchisedech and Letitia called him). The doctor went so far as to say that there never was any such thing as a cure in these matters. This was at variance with the stated opinions of most of the other psychoanalysts.Here are a few notes, though, that Doctor Rafelson made on the case of Melchisedech Duffey:

  “The types of Duffey's fantasies are not extraordinary. They are the ‘Child of God’, ‘Child of Gold’, ‘Master of Ebony Slaves’, ‘Master of Giants’, ‘The Riding King’, ‘The Boy King’, ‘The Miracle Worker’, ‘I am many thousands of years old’, ‘Successive Lives’, ‘Parallel Lives’, ‘The many-layered myself’, ‘The monster within’, ‘Living shadows of myself’, ‘My power to confer power’, ‘My power to make people’, ‘The company of the elites’, ‘The conferring of talismans and lives’, and the ‘But for my intervention, the world would be in deadly peril’ fantasy. Who has not had all these fantasies? They are the things that are entertained by every boy of unhealthy mind.

  “In only one way was Duffey out of the ordinary in his relationship to his own fantasies: He was able to articulate them exteriorly. Or to put it in layman's words, ‘He makes them happen!’ I have to accept this as fact. I have encountered the same thing in two other patients in past years, but not nearly so powerfully as in Duffey. Duffey believes that there are other aspects and persons of himself: and so, in consequence, there are. These may be psychic projections, or they may the real persons captured by Duffey as satellites, possibly never having seen him. Or they may be valid and living images that have split off from him for independent existence. This was the ‘Splitting Image’ of popular lore. I have examined two of these freestanding images of Duffey and had them under analysis. There was no doubt that they are flesh and blood (one of them has a citation for his faithfulness as a blood donor). They are young people far above the average in mentality and body. Duffey may have wrought better in them than he has been wrought in himself.

  “Duffey believes that he has made twelve of these young people (twelve was the most frequent ‘works and days’ number). These are not the same as Duffey's ‘shadows’. Duffey must have intended these twelve independent satellites to express twelve aspects of himself. Yes, his egomania is monumental.

  “Duffey believes that he is a magician and sorcerer. Of course he is. There are a lot of them active in the world, and the world does not seem to be too much the worse for it.

  “Duffey was one of those rare persons who might be able to impose topological inversion on the world. This was possible both mathematically and psychically. This would be bringing about the case that the world was contained in Duffey and not Duffey in the world. Many of us in this discipline have known about such possibilities, and we have even recognized several momentary happenings of it. We call it the case of the world spending three days in the belly of Jonah, though there has never been anything like a three-day period. (In the year 1848, the whole world was contained within a young goat herder in Anatolia for twelve minutes, but mostly it was only three or four seconds on even a major inversion.) The thing may even have happened, for very brief periods, in the case of Duffey.

  “Yes, Duffey believes that he molds and even creates persons. This is
part of his talisman-conferring and life-conferring fantasies, but still there is slippery fact to it. It really seems as though a group of Duffey's contingent creations were presently rushing towards congruent fulfillment. If this happens, if they get to know each other in their fullness, then these contingent creations will be living persons in life situations, and they will have been so all along. If this blows up, then they will not be, and they will not have been. If they are, then the world will have to accommodate and provide antecedents and contexts for them. This will require a terrific amount of ingenious and preternatural plot construction on the part of someone.

  “I have told Duffey that he must get rid of the unrealities that surround and infest him. But a peculiarity of his unrealities is that they are solid and bodied. Duffey may well be murdered by a group of three of his unrealities. They've tried it before.

  “I have been asked several times by professional colleagues to make a statement about the Duffey phenomena. They all know about them, but how could they have any except intuitive knowledge about them? How do they know that there are Duffey phenomena, and how could they have known that I might have entrée to this knowledge? All right, this is a statement:

  “'We cannot leave this phenomena out of account or all our psychological statements will be worthless. No study of human inter-reactions, of human relations to the exocosmos, of the variable human functions of the creator-created roles, of the overlapping of the human persons in individuals and groups, of the sharing of ‘persons’ by individuals and groups, of the gaining and losing of reality by phenomenal persons, no such investigations can be complete if they omit evidence of the prototypical Duffey matter. It will lead right to the heart of the meaning of matter itself. It will lead there, but I will not follow it there. I'm spooked.”

  Doctor Saul Rafelson

  Book 5

  ‘There be two men of all mankind

  That I'm forever thinking on:

  They chase me everywhere I go

   — Melchisedech, Ukalegon.’

  [Edwin Arlington Robinson, Two Men]

  Well, who was Ukalegon? Skalsky says that Ukalegon was a woman and no man at all; and that she was, in all ways, the negation of Melchisedech. But did the poet E. A. Robinson understand that?

  In the year 1946, Duffey started off on a week's trip from which, as it would happen, he would never return.

  Now it was the case that Casey Szymansky, who had moved the Crock out of Duffey's place to more plush quarters, said that he was going on a trip the same day. Neither told the other any more about it. They were on tolerable terms with each other by then, but not on really good terms. There had been quite a bit of property and money coming to Duffey out of his partnership with Gabriel Szymansky after Gabriel's death. Duffey hadn't taken all that he was entitled to, but he had taken more than Casey thought he should have. And Duffey now owned that particular building, the building on the poor street that had once housed Gabriel's pawn shop.

  “Yes, all agreements and papers are in order, Duffey, and they show such things as belonging to you,” Casey and his lawyer had said, “but we don't believe the faces of those papers.” But they had settled it without excess bitterness, Duffey taking a little shorter stick than he should have had.

  This day, they left Chicago on the same train and on the same coach, though they had not been seeking each others’ company. It wasn't really embarrassing, but it might have been just a little stuffy. It was always a problem how an Olympian should handle a Titan who was in open rebellion.

  “I'm sorry about your nose, Duffey,” Casey said as they sat together.

  “Oh, that's all right,” Duffey told him. It was the first time they had mentioned it since it had happened. Duffey had had his nose broken (it wasn't the last time it would happen) in an altercation with goons of the new people who were associated with Casey on the Crock. New people they were, but with old goons. The goons had been the same old slant-faced men out of Duffey's unrealities. Well, did they keep spares for them? Duffey had done in one of those slant-faces as a follow-up of the altercation, and he hadn't heard from them since.

  And there was something else about this trip. Mary Catherine Carruthers was on the same train. She had come to the train with Casey, but they had gone to different coaches, apparently by agreement. Both Casey and Mary Catherine were plainly startled at seeing Duffey taking the same train, though Mary Catherine continued always in her total fondness for Duffey. Casey and Mary Catherine were engaged to be married at this time, as they had been engaged several times before. But they did not ride in the same coach.

  It was a daytime journey with an early leaving. Duffey and Casey, as if by silent agreement, stayed away from controversial subjects. They talked intelligently of the mathematics of probability.

  “I am bothered by an impossible aggregation of coincidences,” Duffey said. “There are things that are bound to come together in a fantastic congruence, or they will make liars out of all sorts of implicit pledges. And yet the improbability of their coming together is so extreme that there was not room enough on earth to write the number of that improbability.”

  “Can you put the aggregation into mathematical form, Duffey?” Casey asked him. “You have the irritating habit of trying to express things in words that should be expressed only in mathematical formulae. There are some problems of contingent philosophy that cannot be phrased except in mathematical form.”

  “Oh, I believe that every problem can be expressed in straightforward verbal form, Casey,” Duffey said. “But this one would sound so silly in the expressing.”

  “Many mathematical expressions are absolutely silly,” Casey said. “But I'll try not to guffaw at your straightforward verbalisms, though sometimes it's hellish hard to refrain.”

  “Well, I made a few people, Casey,” Duffey said. “That was the beginning of it. I made them with no forethought at all. But it seems to be a requirement that these people should come together. It is working almost like a chemical affinity to coagulate. But it's very unlikely that a dozen people I made, out of all the people in the world, should come together by chance. I figure that things are being stretched unlawfully, but I don't quite know what my responsibility is in the situation.”

  “You  —  made  —  a  —  few  —  people? Was that what you said, Duffey?”

  “That's right, Casey. Wasn't that acceptable to you?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. Are these the first people that you ever made?”

  “Yes. These, in my present life, are the only people that I have made, so far as I remember. There are twelve of them if I count them right. Twelve of them, and another who isn't counted in the count, and several more of mixed statue.”

  “You're sure that you really did it, Duffey? You're not just dreaming it?”

  “I'm sure that I had a lot to do with their forming. Something, but not everything. Yes, I made them, literally and really.”

  “Oh, how have they turned out, Duffey?”

  “The results aren't all in. In twelve, there should be one Judas. I don't know which. Oh, you're one of the people I made, Casey.”

  “Oh? That might explain a few scraps of problems. Just how did you make me, Duffey. And don't turn it into a dirty joke.”

  “I made you by a talisman given to your father in a chance encounter several years before your birth.”

  “Oh that thing! I have been going to throw it away several times, but it was such a curious piece of anti-art. I'm told that I held onto it from my birth till I was six months old and would not be separated from it at all. I found that it's made of solid gold. It's fairly valuable for that, but not as a piece of anti-art. Yes, it's real gold.”

  “Should I use false gold? Don't throw it away, Casey. Your soul may be in it.”

  “If my soul was in it once, it isn't there now. I've recently traded souls with another person. Did you make anyone else that I know?”

  “Yes. One other certainly. Two others likely. An
d I've a feeling that there are many acquaintances among members of the group that I don't know about at all. Ah, I don't know just where you're going, Casey, but you may meet all the others this week. I have the feeling that you creatures have somehow decided to hold a conclave independently of your maker, me. But how can you know where to find each other?”

  “I don't know, Duffey. I sure don't know where to find any others of your making, though I bet I'd recognize them as yours.”

  “Yes, you will probably all recognize each other at sight. And I believe that I will always know my own creatures when I come on them.”

  They drifted apart and fell into conversations with different sets of people in the coach and did not talk to each other again during the trip. They arrived in St. Louis in the early evening. Duffey and Casey and Mary Catherine Carruthers all seemed to be leaving the train there.

  “Whatever are they going to be doing in St. Louis?” Duffey muttered about the other two. “And whatever am I going to be doing here myself?”

  A young lady at a newsstand in the train station was singing some gibberish as she opened bundles of evening papers.

  “Kerowl, kerowl! the dogs do growl.

  The Duffeys have come to town!”

  “Did you say Duffeys, young lady?” Melchisedech Duffey asked her.

  “Yah, Duffeys. There's a bunch of them in town. You should see them, you will see them. They're everywhere. They're wilder than beggars. They're showier than Gypsies. Oh, they are something.”

  “Just exactly where in town are these ‘Duffeys’ to be found?”

  “Exactly everywhere,” the young lady said. “They're everywhere.”

  It puzzled Duffey who these Duffeys might be. But if they were everywhere in town, he would see them. Well, what was he doing here? Duffey could always find excuses to come to St. Louis. He had business interests there. He had two partners there, Bagby and Charley Murray. He had a sister there. He still owned part of the famous Rounders' Club there. But he hadn't come to St. Louis for any of these reasons. He had come because he had received a letter in Chicago, postmarked Morgan City, Louisiana, and it had read: