“Duffey, you've been using whiting on your beard and hair again,” Stein accused. “Why do you do it? Why not let them turn black again if you're on that cycle? If you're supposed to be young for a few decades, then be young. Really, you'd look better young, and I can't think of anyone else of whom that's the case. You were always very boyish. But just what is this ‘green seasons’ affair that the lady is talking about? And, yes, just how old are you anyhow, Duffey?”
Stein had always been splendid. And he had always been noetic. He had sure, in his youth at least, been a ‘Royal Pop Person’, in that he had even been a little bit before his time. But would even he be at his total ease in this new ambient?
“I don't know what the young lady is talking about?” Duffey said. “But I'd wondered for a long time why all of you in our bunch hadn't noticed that I've been growing younger.”
“What is to notice?” Stein asked. “When I was a boy in Chicago, you were an old man. Quite old, Duffey. When I met you this last time, thirty or more years ago, you still seemed several decades older than the rest of us, but not nearly so old as you had been earlier. Now you seem several decades younger than the rest of us. That's all there is to it. It's sort of a silly way you have of getting attention, Duffey, turning younger. And to notice it would only be to humor you.”
“It isn't as though this hadn't happened to you before, Melchisedech” , the young pop lady said. This lady had an impudent and archaic grin. She was bright and fundamental, as though several of the duller outer layers had been lifted off of her. Duffey had terra cotta figurines in his bijou that were of the same period as this young lady and that very much resembled her and her grin. Some of them were ancestral to the Etruscan, and some of them were splendid fakes. The terra cotta process and its finish are easily faked. The archaic grin is more difficult. But who was to say that this mysterious young lady was not a fake? She seemed disquietingly genuine though, on the new terms. Duffey had felt a real chill at the mention of the anomaly of his own unaging. It had never been mentioned out loud before. And the new breeze blowing today was not really new. It was an old, old breeze with its green seasons returning. But was there not (Duffey was trying to remember how it had been on this point, and he was not remembering well), was there not something illicit and tainted about that old cyclic thing?
“What had barnacle-removing to do with history?” Absalom Stein suddenly asked the young pop lady. He must have seen the prospectus on the subjects of discussion at the historical meeting: ‘The Holy Barnacle, and the Pearl Beyond Price,’ and he must have sensed the irony of calling the barnacle holy. Duffey recalled that the non-verbatim notice that had been nailed to his door had mentioned barnacles or barnacle-removing somewhere.
The young pop countess did not answer. She had the air or supposing that it would be a little bit infra for her to answer so obvious a question as Stein had posed.
“Duffey, you'd better get back to your place,” Mary Virginia Schaeffer said as she came into Girardeau's Irish Restaurant. “Oh, you do have it splendid here, Girardeau! How could you have changed it so much since yesterday? Maybe your place won't have to be destroyed at all. Duffey, those people are crowding around your place, and they look like the lively sort that doesn't like being crowded or kept waiting either. If any of us can help you out, just let us know. What was going on in town during the night anyhow? Margaret Stone is being very noetic about something, and the town does have a different look to it this morning. I mean it's so splendid! Besides the trash, that is. I just don't know what to make of some of that trash. It wrings my heart the way some of it looks like old friends with forgotten names, and they try to speak to me. It's as though blinders had been put on my eyes and on my mind as regards some of those smashed things. People say that everything that isn't really splendid has got to go. Why does it have to go? Why?”
“Do not be asking such unsplendid questions, the Mary Virginia,” the young pop countess said. “That is dangerous for you. It may be that you will be found unsplendid and will be trashed also.”
Mary Virginia bought a sack of Girardeau's special greaseless doughnuts (They aren't doughnuts: they are ‘Pop Tortuses’ now,’ Girardeau told her), and some tabouli wheat. Then she went out again. She had a scattering of gray hairs in that witching halo that framed her face. Duffey hadn't known that about her before, and he'd known her for more than thirty years. Perhaps she was acquiring the gray that he was losing. And it was natural that she should turn from a beautiful young lady to a beautiful middle-aged lady with the attrition of the years. Those things happen to everybody.
To everybody except Duffey. Duffey would need a change of blood if he kept getting those chilling thoughts. He knew now that he was very old, and that this business of him getting younger for a few decades was a very old business indeed.
“Yes, I'd better get back to my place,” he said. “I hadn't expected guests to arrive so early in the morning. I wonder why they chose me.”
“There is no need for you to hurry, Duffey,” the pop countess said. “We are all perfectly able to make ourselves at home anywhere. I'm sure that my associates have already taken possession of your things and put them to use. We aren't at all backward about affairs like that. And we chose you because we like you, because you were a ‘pop person’ anciently, because you are already one of us, and because you are the oldest and most honored person in this town.”
“Ah, just how many of you pop people are there in town?” Duffey asked. “I forget.”
“And what did you say was the name of your society and principality?” Stein asked. “I also forget.”
“Legion,” the Pop Countess said. “That is the answer to both of your questions.”
“I am going down to check some courthouse records and tax rolls,” Stein said as they were out in the street again. “These disappearing and unremembered buildings and properties must have left records behind them. And I will check old city directories also. These disappeared people must have left records also. I will worry until I find the answers.”
“Oh ancient Stein (hey, that's the same as saying ‘Oh, old pot!’), you'll not find them that way,” the Countess chided him. “Those were nothing buildings and no-count properties, and they were inhabited by nothing-people. Get that into your whopper-sized head, or you may be reclassified as a nothing-person yourself. And, no, they will not have left any traces or records. You are wasting your time, and that is an illicit luxury now.”
“I must find out,” Stein said. “What, am I an ancient one too?”
“Yes, ancient, archeo, time-soaked, and you were one of the crewmen on the ship which now must become splendid or be scuttled,” the young countess said out of her archaic grin. “Old, old, but not so old as the Melchisedech here.”
Stein went off to check courthouse records and tax rolls and old directories. He returned and went again several times. He was nervous to get to the bottom of this business.
“Be along and get your own piece of this neighborhood straightened out,” Zabotski called to Duffey a little later as Duffey was hurrying home. “Your place is clear out of order, Duff. Straighten it out, or I'll have the pack of you assailed for Unlawful Assembly or with Unseemly Crowding in Countervention of the Fire Laws. Man, what is it over at your place anyhow, a mob scene from Hades? First, they overflowed your place, and now they're impinging on mine. I have the feeling that these are the latter days of the world, for me maybe, not necessarily for everybody. Say, they keep asking for a shanty ship that they think I have here. ‘Where have you hidden it?’ one of them asks. ‘It's too big for him to have hidden,’ another says. ‘Maybe he hasn't built it yet.’ Do you know what they're talking about, Duffey?”
“Yes, I think I do. I remember it a little bit.”
“Wife Waldo thinks that she remembers it a little bit too, but I sure don't. Whatever it is, they'll destroy it if they find it. Say, Duffey, didn't I used to own some buildings that were just next door to you on the right as I go
in? It seems like I did, but I forget.”
“So do I forget it, Zabotski,” Duffey said sadly. “But the things that are disappeared and forgotten were probably owned by some such an easily forgotten person as yourself.”
“Will you forget me, Duffey, if I perish this night?” crude Zabotski asked.
“Aye, I'll forget you,” Duffey said. “It would be easy to say that I'll remember you, but I'll not recall the least lump of you.”
“Duffey, thou cladhaire, I'll split thy head!” Zabotsky sputtered in stylized fury.
“Have a care, Eabhraioch,” Duffey bantered him. “Your tongue will turn black and fall out if you misuse the holy language so. Quiet, Zabotski, quiet!”
“That tongue is not holy,” a pop person said sharply. “It is not splendid.”
And Duffey hurried along home. It was just around the corner from where they talked. But the irritation drained away from him as he neared his home and got a look at that throng that had taken it over. A mob? Yes. Unseemly crowding? Perhaps. Unlawful assembly? Oh no, you can't cite folks of such high quality for unlawful assembly. The mob, oh the essential thing about this mob was that it was a mob with class. Even the mobbish sound of it was a vivid orchestration. It was a finely done instrumentation of happy thunder and mountain echoes, with a strong underlay of ‘roaring river’ timbre. Every mob has its own tone. Well, this mob had a pleasant though challenging tone to it, and it rang like thousands of large gold coins.
And look at the confabulating people who made up that noisy bunch! Duffey was reminded of a phrase used by the Lord himself for an earlier mob, “In the brightness of the saints.” He was reminded of the phrase ‘The Splendid People’ that these pops used for themselves. And Duffey was delighted with them even though it was his own place that they were near to bursting the walls out of.
There is much to be said for elegant shooting and brimming banter when it is used by such really classy folks with their silver tongues and their bronze lungs. There were something like the sort of people that Melchisedech had attempted in his own ‘Splendid Animations’, though he did not go quite so far in one or two treacherous directions. These were people with a stunning style and with a rippling and dazzling color and costume. But how could there be so many of them here? The very presence of such folks had effected a growth and change in Duffey's buildings. This was a new sort of calculation that was called ‘The Geometry of Shining Space.’
Duffey's house was now very much larger than he himself remembered it. He went through the back rooms of it, and through those rooms that were still farther behind them. There were constructions in Duffey's own intrepid and inexact carpentry everywhere. As a carpenter, Duffey was one of the great originals. He himself had built all the rooms of these buildings except for the front two tiers which had already been there when he came. But had he built as many rooms as these? He was like a man encountering strange things in his own handwriting. “It's my own writing, but when did I write such things,” he might say. “It's my own carpentry, but whenever did I carpenter such rooms as these,” he did say. Many of the back rooms had to intrude onto a piece of property that belonged to Zabotski. There was no calculation whatever that would allow them to be on Duffey's own land.
“Ah, I can't think of any overbearing neighbor that I'd rather intrude on,” Duffey thought with laughter. But the building couldn't have extended so deeply before today, or Zabotski would have made the howling trespass known to the whole town.
Duffey explored through the bright crowds in his own Art Bijou, through those in his own bookstore, through those in his pawn shop, through those in his auditorium, through his soup kitchen, and through those in his flop house. Never had the places been so full except for the few times when he had staged those ‘Original-Masterpiece-For-Eighty-Five-Cents-Frame-And-All’ Saturday sales. But these crowds today were made out of extraordinary people, exuberant as colts, touchy as velours, bright as primary-color-baked terra cotta, superior in their scoundrelry and their saintliness, big-bellied with fresh life and invention, incredibly urbane and sophisticated, adolescent and arty and archaic all at the same time.
Oh, Duffey knew some of them, of course. There was the ‘Child-Hero’, there was the ‘Hoyden’, there was the ‘Countess’ (how had she got there before him when he had started soonest?), there was the ‘Sanctimonious Sam’. But are these not types? No, they are people. They are the everlasting and omnipresent people. And, though it seemed as if there were more, there was only one of each sort of them. Who would ever turn these great originals into types?
But beyond these pop people who seemed to have come to town from everywhere, there were the more local and less typical folks. There was Danny Degas who was history professor at Lsuno College there in town, Hugh de Turenne who was deep in the humanities at Xavier, Sister Mary Susanna of Ursuline Academy, Robert Darnley who was historical in residence at Dillard. And there was the dozen of those tome-toting eccentrics from the deep Quarter who had each been working for thirty years on a thirty volume history of the world.
And there were the fine experts in the special fields of history: Berny Cacciatore who was the finest historian in the world on boxing and other sports; Bulo Belonki who was the non-pareil historian of jazz. There were high historians from all over the world, some known to Duffey, some known only to God. There were the flash-wits who were not thought of as orthodox historians.
These were all nimble people. History had just made a fundamental change in itself, with the defeat and obliteration of its old subject matter and the triumph of the new. Similarly, the art of geometry and the art of words had just made deep changes in themselves to accommodate the new conditions.
There were also present many eminent persons in the field of hard science. There were physicists and exophysicists, chemists, and nuclear nabobs. There were biologists and brainstylers and mathematicians. And there were also the psychologists and the cultural gestalters and the transcendental philosophers. There were music folks, artist folks, and both grid and linear narrators. Since history included everything, Duffey supposed that all these folks belonged to the conclave. And he had found that there were many other conclaves of other sorts going on all over town. After all, there are such things as pop biology and pop veterinary medicine and pop theology and pop open heart surgery. There was pop astronomy and pop aerodynamics. They all of them had to be nimble folks who were involved, since all of their sciences were now of the new and fearlessly nimble sort. Everyone here was clearly highly qualified, of the veriest elite. But even that many highly qualified persons will take up a lot of room. There must have been a thousand unassorted persons crowded into Duffey's buildings, and there was not a doused light or an empty head among them.
A ram's horn blew a lowering blast. And it was time for the first sessions to begin. The first speaker had a smiling and unhurried incandescence about him, and he spoke in a high and singing voice that can only be described as brindled thunder laughing down the valleys that weren't there yesterday, and as hooves pounding through flame-green grass. But why put it so fancy? He spoke like a thunder colt. “We are all pleased to see each other,” he began. “We return to our continuing and never really interrupted sessions now. We ask again (it should be the oldest one of us present who asks it, but Duffey's tongue hasn't been taught nimbleness yet) the ritual question: ‘What is History?’ And the answer comes: ‘History is everything that has happened up till now’. And then we ask (it should be the youngest one of us here present who asks it, but the ‘Child Hero’ has let his attention travel elsewhere): ‘What is now?’ And so we move into our pleasant discussions and difficulties. Now is the all-embracing moment, so our composite answer really is ‘History is everything in the Now. Or it should simply be: ‘History is everything.’
“Our fun and our fascination will always be to track the cubs of the wild history cat to their lair. It is to winnow the golden dust that we call historical evidence and to discover that it is really the green dust
of life. And we can track the cubs. We can winnow the dusts to a final arrival and solution every time. There is nothing that can hide from history, or from ourselves who are the shapers and pruners of history. Where would anything hide? Everything is in the moment now, and we are the lords of this now.”
The speaker wore a rakish and gaudy turban, and a gaudy and exuberant gem or eye sparkled and winked from the middle of it. This gave the impression that the real face was up inside the turban, and that it was a false face that the speaker was talking from. He went on.
“We now have techniques of research and reconstruction that allow us to answer any historical question. More, they allow us to say ‘We were there’. A primitive deity once asked a number of questions of a man who was not able to answer them. We pose as challenge here and now. Ask those questions of us! Here are some of them, and our answers.
‘Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place?’
“Yes we have. We did it this morning, only two hours ago. And the local scene is still a little bit upset about it.”
‘Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in the depths of the abyss?’
“Sure we have. Depth Oceanography has made these things commonplace.”
‘Have you entered into the storehouse of the snow, and seen the treasury of the hail?’
“Sure we have. Every weather reconnaissance pilot has done it.”
‘Is it by your discernment that the hawk soars, that he spreads his wings towards the South? Does the eagle fly up at your command to pass the night at his lofty nest?’
More Than Melchisedech Page 40