The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  The only bright spot was the golden-haired Flambeau. “I kind of liked that rolled-up dung-beetle ball,” she laughed. “When I am next the socially prominent Mrs. Gladys Glenn Gaylord I will obtain a quantity of them and serve them to my guests. So few of that set are country people, they won't know what they're getting. Now back to being the old character actress and doing the indomitable dame bit. Toodle, all.” She zoomed away in the Dusie. She was a pleasant golden blob in the far distance. Who else ever had the finesse to grow old gracefully twice?

  She had class.

  Great Day In The Morning

  This is the sea (nor shores, nor strands):

  This is the clock that has no hands.

  “Great Day coming, Mr. Duffy,” a young black boy called to him. “Great Day just got here.” “Is this the Day Itself, Mike?” Melchisedech Duffy asked him.

  “This is the Great Day. It come, it come,” the young boy insisted.

  “Why, then it has come,” Duffy told himself, “and I wouldn't even have noticed it except for the words of a youngster.”

  It was about an hour before dawn, before the dawning of the Great Day, perhaps.

  “We will have to fix your watch,” a big, suddenly appearing young man said, and he had a hammer in his hand. “Begone, man,” Melchisedech growled at him, “or it's that I will stop your clock.”

  But the big young man had two fellows with him who were even larger than himself. They all reeled and wobbled a bit, but they were more drunken in their heads than in their legs. It was still quite early, before sunup. Melchisedech had been taking a brisk, early walk through the littered streets.

  “Hold him!” the first man said sharply, and the other two fellows pinioned Duffy. He rolled them around; he didn't pinion easily. He rattled and shook them, almost shook them loose, though they were much larger and younger than himself. But the first man had Duffy's wrist in a crushing grip. He turned the hand and wrist over and exposed the watch. With curious care he smashed the glass of the watch with the hammer, gently, most gently. How does one smash a glass gently with a hammer? Then, with even more studious care, the man shook out every glass sliver and sparkle and powdery fragment.

  “Easy now, old man, very easy,” he said. “We wouldn't want to damage the watch, would we?”

  “You smash it with a hammer, and then you say ‘We wouldn't want to damage it, would we?’ ” Melchisedech fumed. “You're mad. Let me go!”

  “We are not mad,” that first and main man of them said. “Madness is of the old day, and we're of the New. Hold him tighter, men, for just an instant more.” Himself, he held the wrist and hand of Melchisedech much tighter. “You are probably hopeless, old wineskin,” he told Duffy, “but even you must realize that time is not overly particularized on the Great Day.” With absolute precision he reached in, neatly broke off and removed the minute hand from the watch, then let go of hand and wrist. “Let him go,” he said to the other two oversized young men, and they let Melchisedech go.

  “And just what was that for?” Melchisedech demanded, holding his watch to his ear and making sure that it was still running.

  “You really don't know?” the main man asked. “I was sure that a wise old man like you would understand it. I'm sorry I had to break the glass, but a crystal of a watch of this type isn't quickly removed. You can have another glass put in. The watch will still show the hours, and the minutes will not matter. This is a concession we make to some of the old ones; they do not realize immediately that time in the Great Day is not what it was before.”

  “For the first two centuries of clock (not watch) manufacture, minute hands were not used,” Melchisedech said, waiting for an opening to land one (Oh for an opening to land one!). “The makers were right, then, not to use them. An overprecision hits too close in early days. The makers would be almost, but not quite, right not to use them now.”

  “Then you do understand,” the man said, “but you are maintaining that the idea is not new with us. It has to be new. Everything has to be new today. This is the great thing happening and it has to be happening for the first time. We are original. This is the great thing.”

  “Nah,” old Melchisedech said. “Original you are not, and I doubt that this is the great thing. When it comes, it will not come with such harbingers as yourselves.”

  “Admit that we are original, or we will do something really original to your face!” the man cried, becoming very drunk in an instant.

  “You'll not manhandle me!” Duffy shouted. Great Day or not, here was the great opening that he had been waiting for. He landed one on the man coming in, he clouted him in the mouth and dropped him to a stunned and sitting position on the sidewalk. Then Melchisedech upset the other two men somehow (they had become much more wobbly) with pushing, blows, and shouting. He left the three of them there in a heap. There is honest satisfaction in such doings.

  “You'll spoil it, old flintskin, old muleskin, old camelskin,” the main man blubbered from the sidewalk. “All old muleskins should be cast away. They'll burst otherwise, and it'll all run out and that portion will be lost.”

  There had to be something irrelevant here, like a picture without a frame, like a sea without a shore. Melchisedech Duffy left the three downed men and continued on his thoughtful way. He often had such encounters on his early-morning walks. That was half the fun of walking before the sun was up. But there was the nagging feeling that the sun wouldn't come up on an ordinary day.

  On the Great Delta Insurance Company Building, high up there in the tower, three other young men were doing something dogged and dangerous. They had swung open the front of the big tower clock. They attacked the hands with hacksaws. They cut them both off to stubs, the hour hand as well as the minute hand. They swung shut the front of the big clock then, and began to climb down from the tower. And one of the young men fell to the street and was killed.

  “It's the clock without hands that was foretold in such murky manner by Nostradamus,” Melchisedech said. “It's another name for the turning-over, for the change that isn't a change. There cannot be change when time is not running. But, no, I will not accept this as the turning, as the thing, as the Great Thing. Yet there was another prophecy: that the metanoia, when it came, would come grotesque and not completely holy.”

  Melchisedech continued his walk, thoughtful as ever. Had anyone else noticed that so many things had been changing these last few whiles? Melchisedech Duffy must have noticed it, but he was not yet willing to admit it to himself. He believed in a substantial universe made out of substantial people and things. Take substance away from the universe and what do you have left?

  If anything happened, Melchisedech said, he should be the first to know about it. Night people, who might be first on the spot, are drowsy or drunken, and they are inattentive. And Duffy was always first of the morning people.

  He went into a coffee shop.

  This is the ewe that has no tup;

  This is the coffee without a cup.

  The coffee had a good aroma and a jolting, fair taste. It was coffee to wake up by. But the cup felt funny, and Duffy supposed (looking at it out of the edge of his eye) that it looked funny. Well, coffee people are entitled to get new cups when they will.

  The coffee lady was an unmarried young lady, a very much unmarried lady, an intense and relentless young lady. She hovered over Duffy, as she often did. She was waiting for a reaction, or she was intent on drawing a reaction.

  “Don't you spoil it,” she said irrationally. “Everyone else has accepted it just the way it is without even looking at it. It's the Great Day, so I know that I can do it. I know I can do it, if you and two or three others like you don't spoil it. What I have is a lot of faith. You can't create something new like this without faith. A lady has to have a lot of faith if she doesn't have a husband.”

  “True, Charlotte, quite true,” Melchisedech said. He saw now what was funny about the coffee cups: there weren't any coffee cups. There were five other men in the
place, listless, rather sleepy men, and all were drinking coffee without cups.

  Duffy had always known that new things, when they came, never came by way of elite folks. They came by way of scramble-brained, intense, humorless, and unilluminated people like—well, like Charlotte here.

  Duffy was trying to read his morning paper, and he found it somehow unsatisfactory. He was trying not to notice that he was drinking coffee without a cup; he wasn't quite ready for that yet. He was trying not to put any meaning to the words of the stringy waitress Charlotte. And yet there were the words:

  “I hate cups,” she was saying. “I hate glasses. I hate clothes, I hate walls. I hate containers. It isn't right that anything should be contained by anything else. I hate sacks, I hate boxes. If we have faith we can make them all go away. It has to start with somebody. I believe that it has already started with me. I had a feeling that this would be a special morning.”

  “I have a great fear that it is, Charlotte,” Melchisedech said. There was something more than wrong about the morning paper; there was something rotten about it. And there was something that would have to be acknowledged about the cups, that would have to be acknowledged absently.

  “You're the one I worry about more than any of my early-morning customers,” Charlotte was saying. “If I blow it in the early morning, I've blown it for all day. And you're just the one to make me blow it. I bet you have clothes on under your clothes and skin on under your skin. You're an old skinsack, that's what you are, an old container. And you are the most contained man I know.”

  “Self-contained, Charlotte?”

  “That's right. Ugh! It isn't decent for anything to be contained. It isn't right for there to be any containers. I have it started now. Don't spoil it.”

  The newspaper was intolerable; and the diminished coffee in the cup (whup, no cup!) was cold. Melchisedech raised his remnant coffee to Charlotte, and by coincidence the five other customers had all raised their coffee to their mouths at once.

  “A little of the hot, Charlotte,” Melchisedech said.

  “Don't spoil it,” she warned as she started to pour. “If you don't have faith, then don't look at it so close. I'm telling you, don't spoil it.”

  Melchisedech spoiled it. The cold remnant burst and ran down his hand and wrist. And the scalding hot coffee poured by Charlotte cascaded over his hand and down his arm to set him howling with pain. After all, what does happen when someone pours boiling hot coffee in your bare hand?

  And the other five customers had coffee suddenly loosed into their hands. Whoosh! They all rose and shook themselves in stammering and soggy bewilderment to discover that they had been drinking coffee without cups, and that now even the non-cups had collapsed and vanished.

  “You spoiled it!” Charlotte shrilled at Melchisedech. “If I had a husband I'd have him shoot you if he had a gun. You ought to be skinned alive, you old crate, you old bagworm, you old wineskin. All the faith in the world can be sucked into one old skin like you, and then nothing works. You get out of here!”

  This is the paper: no date is in sight,

  Nor numbers on pages, nor anything right.

  “Is it possible that I, who have always been so far ahead of the times, have now fallen behind the peasants and the peckerwoods?” Melchisedech Duffy asked himself in a loud and truculent voice. His hand was badly burned and he was flustered generally. “Is it possible that this is really the Great Day dawning, and that I alone lack the grace to comprehend it? Oh well, two things at a time. I'll just go around to that newspaper office, to complain, to cajole, perhaps to correct. But I suspect that the cupless coffee has burned me deeper than my hand.”

  The morning paper had been as defective as the morning coffee, and in much the same way. It had no date on any of the pages, and the pages were not numbered. It must have been put together by drunken Cajuns working through the night. All the headlines were gathered together on the first two pages (Melchisedech supposed they were the first two pages; they weren't numbered either, and there were no headings at all on any of the stories or articles in the body of the paper).

  The whole journal had an odd flavor, fishy or at least amphibian, as though an unmoored thought process were behind it all. The stories just weren't as newspaper stories should be. They didn't tell one anything. They made a person want to shout “What did you say?” at the newspaper. Melchisedech was himself a sometime journalist, and this all seemed like sloppy journalism to him. He twitched his whitish beard in annoyance. It had been the first beard of the late Pleistocene, and (the way things were going) it would likely be the last.

  But he was uneasy as he went through the streets toward the newspaper building. It just seemed to him that there was something a little bit different about everything this morning. There was something different about the cars and the buses in the streets, a great but subtle difference; and Duffy could not find a name for it immediately.

  He several times narrowly missed death on that three-block walk. One reason for the frightful danger that was abroad was the behavior of the frightful traffic signals. They will be considered in a few minutes: who has the nerve to consider them right now?

  And there was something very wrong about the newspaper building itself. It was not exactly that there was any new thing added to it. It was more as if some main thing had been forgotten or removed from it. But Melchisedech Duffy boldly entered the somehow wrong newspaper building, and he entered his outraged protest as he usually did.

  “Your paper this morning is weird beyond comprehension,” he said to an editorial assistant. Duffy knew the young man slightly, but he could not now remember his name. It was as though the young man's name had been removed on purpose. In any case, the young man had not taken any notice of Melchisedech's sputtering statement. Try again, then.

  “Your paper this morning is the worst I have ever seen,” Duffy said in an elegant but tight way, and he banged the paper down in front of the young man.

  “Why do you say that it is our paper?” the young man said. “Everything is everybody's now. You will notice that the paper hasn't any name on it anywhere. Neither do we, the building, I mean.”

  “That's so,” Duffy admitted. “It hasn't and you haven't. I wondered what main thing had been removed from this building. It is that big, gawky sign from your roof that is gone.”

  “It's the newest thing not to have a name for anything,” the young man said, “or for anybody. Names are enslaving. But why do you say that it's this morning's paper? Being undated, it cannot be identified positively as this morning's paper. We believe that this is the Great Day Coming itself, and the Great Day is one that doesn't need a name or a number. Why do you even say that it's a morning paper? It may be an afternoon or an evening or a graveyard-shift paper.”

  “Aw, jay-walking Judas Priest!” Duffy exploded. “Let me talk to the editor. You can't run a paper like that.”

  “We are all equally editors here now,” the young man said. “We are all equally everything, but we will not use that title or any title. We will do just what work we feel like doing, and the days when we are nothing-minded we will do nothing. We call this job enrichment.

  “But I don't believe there will be any paper printed here today. When everything in the world is new, then there can be no such thing as ‘news.’ We may put out a comic book instead. Reruns of old comics, probably. What do you think?”

  “I feel like the rerun of an old comic myself,” Melchisedech said. “And you do put me out a bit. How did all these changes happen?”

  “All these rectifications, rather. Oh, we noticed that there wasn't anyone of any importance around the paper last night. So a couple of us persons of no importance put it into effect. That's the way major things always happen. The paper really should have been brought out blank, but we're not perfected in the new ways yet.”

  “Couldn't your paper even have said that your Great Day a-Coming had come? Any explanation is better than none at all.”

  �
��It does say so on page—oh, I forgot that pages aren't numbered anymore. It's on one of the back pages. It's a little filler at the bottom.”

  “I see that there is no sanity here,” Melchisedech said. He left the newspaper building, unsatisfied. He noticed that the big, gawky sign hadn't really been removed from the roof of the newspaper building. But it had been felled. It lay in broken pieces, and some of the pieces had fallen into the street. There was a steady sputtering and sparking where the electrical feeders to the big sign had been ruptured. Wires dangled and hissed above the street. “Someone will touch one of those and be killed,” Duffy said. Then he noticed that it had already happened. There was a scorched and charred child on the sidewalk, dead and unnoticed by the passersby. But you can't make changes without breaking up old patterns of life.

  Melchisedech Duffy, pawnbroker, art dealer, bookseller, part-time personage, stood undecided. He wasn't sure that this was the Great Day, and he wasn't sure that he liked it if it was.

  These are the signals that harry one hence:

  These are the beacons that don't make sense.

  Oh, oh, those life-endangering traffic signals once more! There had been a time, no longer ago than last night, when lights were red or green, or they were amber; when the signals said “Go” or they said “Stop”; when they flashed “Walk” or “Don't walk” when they indicated turns and such things.

  But this morning those signals lit up in a hundred different colors or blends of colors; perhaps some of them were subjective, but they could not all be. And the signals flashed such words as “When you feel like it, go,” “People's Intersection,” “To stop is to die, to stop growing is to die a little,” “Shout Liberty before crossing,” “If you're not part of the confluence you're part of the collision,” “Capricorns should not cross any streets today,” “Leos should not cross any streets ever.” These weren't the traffic signals that Melchisedech was used to.