More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

Some persons found that the more fully they knew other people the more they liked them.

  There was something suspect to me about the Moment. I did not suspect its power or scope. I suspected its permanence. Oh yes, the moment would last forever, as every true Moment must. But we would not stand in the Moment forever. We would probably stand out of it, and in it, and out of it again several times. I had the feeling that we would stand out of it again, for a while, in the very near future.

  I saw the fiery message in the bush. I saw the sign in the sky.

  I saw the handwriting on the wall, in rather archaic Babylonian or Chaldee.

  So I took two precautions against the coming time when we would stand out of the moment again.

  I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding.

  And I had a ‘Remember It’ memory jog capsule inset into my own brain. The capsule was tuned to retain the whole idea of the Casey Machine. But why did I believe that was necessary? Who could possibly forget the Casey Machine?

  Oh, I'd made a study of this business of forgetting eleven-day wonders. I can recognize the accumulations of forgotten fossils of such fads, but I can seldom interpret those fossils. A minority of the vanished eleven-day wonders is still in popular memory with a nostalgic or humorous handle on them; but even these which are so enshrined in toy shrines are mostly misremembered and misunderstood. And others of the chronic occurrences, and among them there may be some of the most massive and influential, are forgotten completely. A few of the deeply forgotten ones we can pick up with the Casey Machine or the Casey Condition, but we must have at least some slight whisper of an idea of what we want to pick up.

  I wanted to remember the Casey Machine and the Casey Condition. I had no reason to believe that they would be forgotten, but I had an intuition and apprehension that they might be.

  So I went to see about Continuous-Flow Federal Funding, about Compensatory Counter-Flow Payments, about Impacted Entertainment Area Federal Funding. The argument was that the Casey Machine, since payment was required for its use, was more available to the rich than to the poor. This situation should be corrected by Counterpart Funds of both the Current and the Future Contingency sort. I also got the concession that the site of every Casey Machine should be declared a shrine, with Perpetual Care to be provided by means of Perpetual Guardian Payments to be made to a responsible group  —  our own.

  And we got the guarantees, in several sorts of payments, to be in perpetuity. And several of them were real whoppers. It's all in knowing how to ask for things, and in striking while the Casey Machine is hot.

  And I had the ‘Remember It’ memory jog installed in my brain. In the extreme case of specific and directed amnesia, I might forget the Casey Machine along with every one else. But I'd still come closer to remembering it than anyone else would.

  “I want to know when it was last on the house.

  I want to know which has the heart of a louse.

  I want to know who has been milking my cowse.

   — Promontory Goats

  The Wiper comes by and wipes out part of the memories. Then he comes by again and wipes out more of them. And who is the Wiper?

  He is a cloud-high giant. He comes with a rag and wipes out part of a cloud. And when he does that, he wipes out part of a thing in people's heads too. A little boy told me that today, and I'm sure he had a good intuitive understanding of the Wiper-Person.

  And since the boy told me that, I have seen several good pictures of the Wiper drawn on walls and sidewalks.

  Oh sure, it worked. Only to the superficial is it irrational that we should know much more after we are dead than we do while we are alive; or that we should know much more when we are in a moment than when we are not in it. I will only say that every Casey Machine had somehow the essence of a dead person in it. In this great increase of knowledge, a lifetime of preparation is translated and traded for a moment of intense possession; and, by the technicality of it being on the far side of time, that moment of possession is forever. But we set it up on the near side of time. We set up the links, and it worked.

  What possibilities that does open out, if only they were explored!

  Oh, they were explored all right. And now those possibilities and explorations are on the boneyard with other obsolete eleven day wonders.

  Oh sure, it busted. What busted?

  The strained case of an achronological device applied to working chronicity. That busted. It's been gone for a while now. No use crying over spilled temporalities.

  I fail to see how even the worst storms on Venus can be held responsible for it. Sunspots could have done it, of course. But if you blame everything on sunspots, that's like one person playing a four handed game by himself.

  The mania hadn't taken up much real time. That is why it was so easily erased and forgotten. It moved into the abiding moment. Then it moved out of it again, and it was gathered to its fathers. Its fathers were the earth forces, magnetism and isostases and geothermal accretions that make up the matrix into which all eleven day wonders are subsumed.

  The earth-forces are made up of very many such-gatherings-in or subsumptions, and of very little other basic flux. I believe that worlds that have not subsumed such emotional content or happening will have very little magnetism or corona or foinse.

  The Casey Machine, being an achronological device, may indeed have happened. Only not yet.

  The what machine being a what?

  There is a feeling that things had been rather underdone for a while. Death had become (or may become) so minor an event that no one paid much attention to it. And then the condition moved. It did not move to take the place and importance that it had held before the bothering. It moved to another and different place and importance.

  Something was subsumed into the earth forces. That is like one more limey and crunchy marine skeleton being subsumed into the floor of the ocean.

  Item: I bet I went to that well longer than anyone else did. I bet I still go sometimes.

  Item: I still have more money flowing in than any one else has. And I partly remember what it's for.

  I have had a small electro-mechanical device removed from my brain. I don't know how it got there or what it was for.

  This is a strange journal that I have started to write in again as part of my therapy. But the words in most of it are utterly incomprehensible to me.

  I have a feeling of many strangers whom I once knew very well, and who once knew me very well. And sometimes they approach me. “I miss you and Regina so much,” a dumpy lady said to me only this morning. “I enjoyed it a lot, the way I had the feel of you and everything you'd do. I'd catch you sometimes just before I got up in the morning.” Strange!

  And a man said to me, just last week, or just this week: “There was never a mind I enjoyed so much as yours. At night sometimes I used to light my pipe and take off my shoes and just listen to the things you were thinking. It was a pleasure.” Strange, most strange!

  Certain standing moments of realization are interposed through history. And then they are forgotten by fiat. But the buried memory of them sustains us and fills us with promise. I like as much as I can remember of it. And something similar will move into the moment again in another aeon or so.

  I still go to that well a lot. But the bucket I dip with is different from the one I used to use. And there are still the Federal Funds forever.

  Addenda

  I'm grisly ghost with orange gloves.

  I'm other things around the edges.

  I seek for valid lives and loves.

  I teeter on ungodly ledges.

   — Electronic Elegies

  Newton Prescott

  Who am I try to kid? I'm trying to kid myself, Newton Prescott. But to the best of belief, there is no such person as Newton Prescott. He is (I am) only a minor aspect of Casey Szymansky. I watched as my orange gloved hand wrote the above verses; but it wrote them in Casey's handwriting, not in my own. Yes, sometimes I'm permitted a
handwriting of my own. The morning paper hasn't arrived yet, so I don't know what year this is. So I don't know whether Casey is supposed to be alive or dead.

  It was all reasonably simple when it began. I (whether or not I was an independent person or an aspect of Casey) devised the Casey Machine. It was simply a wireless audio-machine (with video variations) that transmitted unspeakably vile stuff for unspeakably vile subscribers. We selected unspeakably wealthy subscribers (Chicago was then full of them), shot a highly sophisticated dart into the head of each of them, and so hooked most of them. We collected. And when they objected to paying, we cut them off or threatened to cut them off. Most of them couldn't abide being cut off from the hellish thing so they caved in. But somehow very high federal investigators confronted Casey with their evidence and their suspicions. But Casey rises to great heights when confronted with anything. People and institutions confront Casey at their peril. The Federals set up a giant foundation to fund the Casey Machine forever, whether or not it was in physical existence. The Federals were lucky to get out of it so easy. They were hooked by Hell, but Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish.

  The morning paper has arrived. With trepidation I look at the year of its date. The year may vary as much as three decades in one week, back to before I ever heard of Casey, to a fearfully late year as on today's paper. This means that Casey has been dead for several years, and that I am a ghost, or may be something less.

  “Oh, you were always a ghost,” Casey told me brutally once. “I had one splinter of my personality that I decided to give a ghostly body and an inane name to. And the most inane name I could think of was Newton Prescott. You will move back and forth through time as I will, Newton, and you will still be ghost here after I am gone from this world. You will be eyes and ears for me here.”

  “You are hellish, Casey. I want out.”

  “You are only a minor quirk of me, Newton,” he said, “and there is no ‘out’ for a minor quirk.”

  But Casey always swore that he had nothing to do with anything hellish. Once, before a dozen or so of us, two or three of us being only aspects of Casey, but others valid persons, Casey brought out a brim-full basin and washed his hands dramatically.

  “God over my head,” he swore, “I am guiltless of anything hellish. By the brightness of this water, I wash my hands from any evil or any traffic with ungodly devices.” And he washed his hands, and they were unaccountably clean.

  “But it isn't bright water. The basin is full of blood!” I protested, but nobody seemed to hear me. Often, people do not seem to hear me.

  Well, Casey's hands were clean. But mine (My God, how was that?) were slippery with dark visceral blood that would never come off me. Oh, it was simple enough. He transferred his hellishness from his main person to a minor splinter of his personality, me. He fooled everybody with the trick. Did he fool God also? So far as I can tell, he did.

  I got me a dozen expensive pair of beautiful suede white gloves. I wear them always. But they are not white when I wear them. They are always a tolerable orange color. Well, I can live (live?) with that. I have to.

  The rental lady just came in with a medium young couple and began to show them my apartment. They did not seem to see me. It is a very nice apartment, and she offered it to them at a foolishly low price.

  “It's wonderful, it's wonderful,” the looking lady said, “and the price is also wonderful. But there is an odor so faint that it could almost be my imagination. It's the odor of old dried blood. No, it isn't. It's the odor of old still-wet blood. Whatever can it be?”

  “There's something flitting around in here,” the looking man said. “I just miss it with the corner of my eye. Oh, oh, it's the ghost hands, the ‘Orange Ghost Hands’. This is the ‘Haunted Hands’ apartment isn't it? Can't you show us something else?”

  “Oh yes, I have a wonderful place just around the corner,” the rental lady said. “Not as wonderful as this, and not as wonderfully cheap, but it isn't haunted. We'll go see it now.”

  But the rental lady came up to me before she left. “Ghosty,” she said, “why do you do this to me? And why can I see you and talk to you when the others can't?”

  “It's that hellish machine you're hooked on,” I said.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” she said. “How can I get unhooked from it?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “I wish I knew.”

  Promontory Goats

  You with shelly horns, rams!

  And promontory goats!

   —  Meredith

  I am surely the unlikely choice to write the introduction and correlation of this assessment-collection of the surviving works and personalities of Kasmir Szymansky.

  Well, who wouldn't be an unlikely choice for it?

  But I never liked Casey.

  Well, who did?

  This brings us up against a cliff right at the start. Casey Szymansky had a lot of assets that would seem to compel his being liked. He was handsome. He was talented. He was friendly, in a sometimes stumbling sort of way; and real friendliness often has this stumbling quality. He was not arrogant. He was not mean. He did not steal. He did not slander. He did not lie. He often offered a helping hand, most especially to those who needed it the most. He was rich in a pleasantly moderate way. He was iceberg-generous, as they say, meaning that he managed to conceal at least seven eighths of his generosities. He was entertaining. He was hard-working. He had taste. He had kindness. He had intelligence of a high grade. He was neither drunken nor profligate. He was presentable. He was well-connected, and he kept no skeletons. No real scandal ever touched him. He had a good sense of the grotesque and a good sense of humor. He was his own worst enemy. But he was not, except on rare and short occasions, the enemy of anyone else. He was never jealous of the success of others. He was the master of many subjects, and he could match the interests of almost anyone. He gave some of the finest small parties in town. He had a fine fund of unoffending and undirty jokes and stories. He went out of his way to do favors that no one else would think to do at all.

  How did we manage not to like him?

  Well, it wasn't easy, but we all managed it. There wasn't any collusion among his acquaintances on this. Each of us refused to like him by an individual effort.

  There is very little of his work left in any field, and this is all the more amazing because he produced such mountains of work. In drawing and painting, in music, in verse and in prose, he cranked out a very lot of it. He destroyed most of it. The chimney of his house was called the Black Chimney of Hubbard Street because he burned so much of his stuff in the fireplace of his old house there. He sometimes recited his pieces to small groups, said that he would publish the things in the next issue of the Crock, and then destroyed the material. It is for this reason that even the scanty amount printed here is at least half reconstructed from the memories of those who heard it from him. Others of his things have been found in single surviving copies of some issues of the Crock. He often tried to corner and destroy entire issues, and my own collection has several holes in it. In each case, he said that he had no copy, that he wanted to run the sheets through a copy machine, and that he would return them the next day. And in each case he later confessed that he had burned them.

  We all wish that we had more of his work today, but we don't particularly wish we had more of him today.

  I suppose that his faults and his failures lay in his Elective Affinities. He didn't elect the same affinities that most of us did. I speak of his surviving works and his surviving personalities, but it is the most shoddy of each category that has survived. He was, I suppose, slightly insane. He certainly saw some things as exterior and material objects that the rest of us did not see at all. His ideas of ransom and compensation and soul-trading were hardly orthodox. But he did not preach these ideas. They had to be dragged out of him, often by very unfair badgering.

  Casey was not an extremist in politics or philosophy or theology or common outlook. The only thing
he was extreme in, besides his pursuit of excellence, was his compassion. Is it then a sin to be compassionate in the extreme? In Casey's case, yes; I suspect that it was a serious sin. The special case by which Casey was so pursued and ridden was the old scholastic question of the Final Redemption of the Devil.

  I was at boarding school with him in our high school days, and he was ridden by this obsession even then. We told him that it was, after all, a private matter between God and the Devil. He said that the put down had not been a private matter, and that the redemption should not be either. Our head-master, an old Benedictine priest, asked him why he made it his business.

  “I have appointed myself advocate,” Casey said (he was about thirteen years old then) “and that is what advocates are for.”

  “Kasmir, we do not have any revelation on this point,” the old priest said. “You are free to believe what you will on it.”

  “I insist on revelation on this point,” Casey said. “If anyone is denied a second chance, then we are all entitled to know about it.”

  As Melchisedech Duffey once said, a person should select his monomania early in life and stick with it. Casey surely stuck with his.

  The form of this attempt to find and assemble the essence of some fifty years of Casey's works and days, from the time he was about fourteen years old, will be shaped by the container that was Casey himself. The surviving essence, which should obey the laws of all gasses, ought to conform to the shape of the empty container that Casey left by his going. I suppose that it does, but there are anomalies here and there. The container even now, is not as empty as it looks. There are still invisible configurations and promontories in that emptied crock, and the essence will shape itself to them even when we are not aware of them. So it is a very peculiar shape that this assessment-collection takes.