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

by R. A. Lafferty

  The holy figure of the demiurge Teilhard had come down on the altar. With him appeared McLuhan on his right hand and McGonigal on his left. They were transfigured with light. “Lord, it is good that we be here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

  “Peduncle, peduncle, Point Edhead, cosmogenization, valorization, obfuscation. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed them.

  “Lord, let us build three tents here,” the Unfaithful Assembled intoned. “Great Day.”

  “Peduncle, neo-anthropocentrism, corpusculization, nookonos, peduncle. Great Day,” the holy demiurge blessed again.

  “Kind of gets you, doesn't it, Duff?” Michael said. “What am I saying? Well, it would kind of get me if I weren't Michael. Ah, I wish there was some way to put a good double edge on a stone sword. If you run onto a good blade man, send him by. I'll have me a cutting and flaming sword yet. Who's going to know that I'm an archangel when I'm here with the toes broken off me and one eye gouged out and only a dull stone sword in my hand?” “If I run onto a good blade man I'll send him by,” Melchisedech said. He left Michael there crying stone tears.

  “Well, I bet I know an oasis that is wet if nothing else,” Melchisedech said. He left St. Michael's and headed for the Stumble-Bum Royal Rendezvous and Oyster Bar. Young fellows tried to pull his beard off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull out some bloody gouts of it. He noticed that most of the beards had been shed, both of the teenagers and of the few grown men who had sported them. They were shed by acts of faith. If one has faith, what does he need with a beard? The beards of most of the folks had come off easily. An easy breeze was now blowing remaining beard-patches off various faces. Soon it would be a barefaced world.

  Young ladies tried to pull his clothes off as he walked through the streets, and they did pull some ripped strips of them off. “Be free, be unenclosed, be emancipated, be unstructured,” they all insisted to him. “Is there anything dirtier than a dirty old man with clothes on?”

  “A sazarac,” Melchisedech ordered as he entered the Stumble-Bum. He felt the looks at him like those manifold whips with little tearing hooks at the end of the lashes. The barkeep shook his head. “A salty dog, then,” Melchisedech said, and he felt the hatred rising against him. “An old fashioned,” Melchisedech said. He should never have said that.

  “Get this nut,” the barkeep said, hooking a sneering thumb toward Melchisedech, and the grumbling hatred rose against this nonconformist who refused to be free. “We haven't had any of those drinks since yesterday.”

  “What do you have to drink, then?” Melchisedech asked humbly.

  “The New Day Dawner. That's what everyone drinks. Who would want anything else?”

  Melchisedech left the Stumble-Bum. There were no wet oases, no green oases, no unfailing fountains anywhere.

  This is the drink that nothing slakes:

  This is the dream whence none awakes.

  Melchisedech experimented a bit. He had noticed people, here and there, walking through visible walls as easily as if they were not there.

  “Why, then they are not there,” Melchisedech said. “The people have removed them by faith, and they are visible only to my faithless eyes. Let me see whether I can walk through those walls also.”

  But he could not. He bruised and bloodied himself, but he could not go through this sort of walls as other people could.

  “Then part of this wall-demolishing is a subjective thing,” he said. “But I am outnumbered. Many persons pass through, and I do not. It must be my own subjective that is awry.”

  The sun was still in the process of dawning, but it had not moved at all since it was last viewed. There was not a lot of movement of any sort on the Great Day. The real action was hidden, and yet almost everything had all the wraps off it. But the people were all interiorizing themselves. Some skinless, some only part so, they looked blank, blank in every part of them. And they were merging. They were coming together witlessly, blankly, spherically. Dozens of them had now formed into great balls all together. These rolled, and they merged with other great balls of people-substance. Soon all the people in the whole city would be coalesced into one big fleshy sphere, communicating and interiorizing like anything.

  Then the peoples of all the world would somehow roll together and become one thing, although the mechanics of this were far from clear.

  “Everybody will have joined it except myself,” Melchisedech said, “and I invented it in a time of cranky humor. Should I stand proud apart then? But how can one stand proud with no one to stand before?”

  Subjectively, quite a while went by, but the sun did not move. Melchisedech walked himself weary, and then sat on a bench in Jackson Square. Most of the buildings of the city had disappeared now. That business of them standing after their walls and supports had been removed was only a transition thing.

  “This is only a nightmare,” Melchisedech said. “I am sleeping, and this is not one of my better dreams. Now I must make a great effort to wake up.”

  “You can't,” Morpheus said. “You will have to change your whole idea about sleeping. More important, you will have to change your whole idea about waking up. Both are illusions.”

  “Anyone can be a showboat in his own field of study,” Melchisedech said. “You are the god of sleep, so you have the advantage over me in the discussion.”

  “Everyone is the god of something,” Morpheus said. “You did not know that? But I have broader interests than most. ‘Morpheus’ ('sleep') and ‘Morphē’ ('shape') are really the same word, and shape is known only in sleep. A waking world would be a shapeless and formless monstrosity.”

  “I'll take that chance. Help me to wake up.”

  “Absolutely not. There is no longer any such thing as waking up.”

  “Where did I go wrong?” Melchisedech asked the empty ears of misty Morpheus. “Why am I alone unamalgamated in this thing?”

  “Where did you go wrong, where did you go right? It was in being too stiff to change. You allowed yourself to become an old wineskin,” Morpheus said.

  (“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles,” Matthew said. “If they do, the skins burst and the wine runs out. See me, 9:17.”

  “No man, having drunk old wine, straightway desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better,’ ” Luke said. “See me, 5:39.”

  “You evangelists go settle it among yourself,” Melchisedech told them, “with eight-ounce gloves.” The evangelists went away.)

  “Now tell me true, Morph, am I awake or not?” Melchisedech asked the sleep god. “No, you are not awake and you are not. You can never wake up, for waking up is one of the options that have now disappeared from the world. And you cannot really sleep. You can only dream a diminishing dream in a state of half-sleep. It all closes up on itself. It goes out of business.”

  “Is the whole world only my dream, Morph?” Melchisedech asked.

  “Yours or mine, Duff. We seem to be the only two left. We'll end as two submicroscopic snakes, the only remaining things in the worlds, and then one of us must swallow the other.”

  “I'll not like that. There must be more than that.”

  “No. The whole thousand-times-mega cosmos began as one single-celled creature. Then he had the notion that there were two of him, and this notion was the beginning of his dreaming. He dreamed the whole multiplex thing that has seemed to be the worlds. The dream grew for long eons, but now it shrinks back again to its beginning. There is still one single cell left, dreaming a diminishing dream.”

  “So let it be,” Melchisedech said, “so long as I am that single cell.”

  “Or I,” said Morpheus, “but there is still only one. I'll wrestle you for the illusion.”

  They wrestled. But Morpheus was one of those timeless, ever-young Greek gods, and cosmic wrestling is their game. Moreover, they smear themselves completely with a numenous grease that makes them very hard to get hold of.

  There came over Melchisedech the panic of extincti
on. The old-fashioned fear of damnation isn't even in the same league with it. The lungs pop like toy balloons, the kidneys melt like wax, the heart bursts like a cherry bomb. Melchisedech collapsed on himself and became smaller by a million orders, and Morpheus followed him down. They were a single-celled creature swallowing itself. Melchisedech screamed as loudly as a single-celled creature can scream in a void, after he's swallowed himself.

  “It's the end,” he gasped.

  “No, it's the beginning,” Morpheus gurgled in his swallowed state. “We've been here before.”

  A hint as to a possible alternate outcome had been given in an article in the magazine-journal The Bark one year before. But how is a single-celled creature that has just swallowed itself going to have access to back issues of obscure magazines? There are a few Great Day verses left over, and the world affair cannot be concluded until they are disposed of. There are also, unaccountably, about the same number of persons left over, and they must also be disposed of.

  If each person will come forward and proclaim loudly one of the verses, then both that person and that verse can be forever obliterated. Try it. Lose yourself in it.

  This is the meadow that has no grass.

  This is the wine without a glass.

  This is the building lacking walls.

  This is the murder that none appalls.

  This is the hero void of fame.

  This is the Day without a name.

  This is the move without a mean.

  This is the sun less shine and sheen.

  This is the wineskin Matthew told.

  This is the old skin-bottle, old.

  Here is the crowd that lurks alone.

  Here is the grave without a stone.

  There, it worked, didn't it? Got rid of everything.

  By The Seashore

  The most important event in the life of Oliver Murex was his finding of a seashell when he was four years old. It was a bright and shining shell that the dull little boy found. It was bigger than his own head (and little Oliver had an unusually large head), and had two eyes peering out of its mantle cavity that were brighter and more intelligent-seeming than Oliver's own. Both Oliver and the shell had these deep, black, shiny eyes that were either mockingly lively or completely dead — with such shiny, black things it was hard to say which. That big shell was surely the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach and no one could have missed it. But George, Hector, August, Mary, Catherine and Helen had all of them missed it and they were older and sharper-eyed than was Oliver. They had been looking for bright shells, going in a close skirmish line over that sand and little Oliver had been trailing them with absent mind and absent eyes. “Why do you pick up all the dumb little ones and leave the good big one?” he yipped from their rear. They turned and saw the shell and they were stunned. It actually was stunning in appearance — why hadn't they seen it? (It had first to have been seen by one in total sympathy with it. Then it could be seen by any superior person.)

  “I wouldn't have seen it either if it hadn't whistled at me,” Oliver said.

  “It's a Hebrew Volute,” George cried out, “and they're not even found in this part of the world.”

  “It isn't. It's a Music Volute,” Mary contradicted.

  “I think it's a Neptune Volute,” Hector hazarded.

  “I wish I could say it's a Helen Volute,” Helen said, “but it isn't. It's not a Volute at all. It's a Cone, an Alphabet Cone.” Now these were the shelliest kids along the seashore that summer and they should all have known a Volute from a Cone, all except little Oliver. How could there be such wide differences among them?

  “Helen is right about its being a Cone,” August said. “But it isn't an Alphabet Cone. It's a Barthelemy Cone, a big one.”

  “It's a Prince Cone,” Catherine said simply. But they were all wrong. It was a deadly Geography Cone, even though it was three times too big to be one. How could such sharp-eyed children not recognize such an almost legendary prize?

  Oliver kept this cone shell with him all the years of his growing up. He listened often to the distant sounding in it, as people have always listened to seashells. No cone, however, is a real ocean-roarer of a shell. They haven't the far crash; they haven't the boom. They just are not shaped for it, not like a Conch, not like a Vase Shell, not like a Scallop, not even like the common Cowries or Clam Shells or Helmet Shells. Cones make rather intermittent, sharp sounds, not really distant. They tick rather than roar. “Other shells roar their messages from way off,” Helen said once. “Cones telegraph theirs.” And the clicking, ticking of Cones does sound somewhat like the chatter of a telegraph.

  Some small boys have toy pandas or bears. But Oliver Murex had this big seashell for his friend and toy and security. He slept with it — he carried it with him always. He depended on it. If he was asked a question he would first hold the big cone shell to his ear and listen — then he would answer the question intelligently. But if for any reason he did not have his shell near at hand he seemed incapable of an intelligent answer on any subject.

  There would sometimes be a splatter of small blotches or dusty motes on the floor or table near the shell.

  “Oh, let me clean those whatever-they-ares away,” mother Murex said once when she was nozzling around with the cleaner.

  “No, no — leave them alone — they'll go back in,” Oliver protested. “They just came out to get a little sunlight.” And the little blotches, dust motes, fuzz, stains, whatever retreated into the shell of the big cone.

  “Why, they're alive!” the mother exclaimed.

  “Isn't everybody?” Oliver asked.

  “It is an Alphabet Cone just as I always said it was,” Helen declared. “And those little skittering things are the letters of the different alphabets that fall off the outside of the shell. The cone has to swallow them again each time, and then it has digested them they will come through to the outside again where they can be seen in their patterns.”

  Helen still believed this was an Alphabet Cone. It wasn't. It was a deadly Geography Cone. The little blotches that seemed to fall off it or to come out of it and run around — and that then had to be swallowed again — may have been little continents or seas coming from the Geography Cone; they may have been quite a number of different things. But if they were alphabets (well, they were those, among other things), then they were more highly complex alphabets than Helen suspected.

  It isn't necessary that all children in a family be smart. Six smart ones out of seven isn't bad. The family could afford big-headed, queer-eyed Oliver, even if he seemed a bit retarded. He could get by most of the time. If he had his shell with him, he could get by all the time. One year in grade school, though, they forbade him the company of his shell. And he failed every course abysmally. “I see Oliver's problem as a lack of intelligence,” his teacher told father Murex. “And lack of intelligence is usually found in the mind.”

  “I didn't expect it to be found in his feet,” Oliver's father said. But he did get a psychologist in to go over his slow son from head to foot.

  “He's a bit different from a schizo,” the psychologist said when he had finished the examination. “What he has is two concentric personalities. We call them the core personality and the mantle personality — and there is a separation between them. The mantle or outer personality is dull in Oliver's case. The core personality is bright enough, but it is able to contact the outer world only by means of some separate object. I believe that the unconscious of Oliver is now located in this object and his intelligence is tied to it. That seashell there, now, is quite well balanced mentally. It's too bad that it isn't a boy. Do you have any idea what object it is that Oliver is so attached to?”

  “It's that seashell there. He's had it quite a while. Should I get rid of it?”

  “That's up to you. Many fathers would say yes in such a case; almost as many would say no. If you get rid of the shell the boy will die. But then the problem will be solved — you'll no longer have a problem child
.”

  Mr. Murex sighed, and he thought about it. He had decisions to make all day long and he disliked having to make them in the evening, too.

  “I guess the answer is no,” he finally said. “I'll keep the seashell and I'll also keep the boy. They're both good conversation pieces. Nobody else has anything that looks like either of them.”

  Really they had come to look alike, Oliver and his shell, both big-headed and bug-eyed and both of them had a quiet and listening air about them.

  Oliver did quite well in school after they let him have the big seashell with him in class again.

  A man was visiting the Murex house one evening. This man was by hobby a conchologist or student of seashells. He talked about shells. He set out some little shells that he had carried wrapped in his pocket and explained them. Then he noticed Oliver's big seashell and he almost ruptured a posterior adductor muscle. “It's a Geography Cone!” he shrieked. “A giant one! And it's alive!”

  “I think it's an Alphabet Cone,” Helen said.

  “I think it's a Prince Cone,” Catherine said.

  “No, no, it's a Geography Cone and it's alive!”

  “Oh, I've suspected for a long time that it was alive,” Papa Murex said.

  “But don't you understand? It's a giant specimen of the deadly Geography Cone.”

  “Yes, I think so. Nobody else has one,” father Murex said.

  “What do you keep it in?” the conchologist chattered. “What do you feed it?”

  “Oh, it has total freedom here, but it doesn't move around very much. We don't feed it anything at all. It belongs to my son Oliver. He puts it to his ear and listens to it often.”

  “Great galloping gastropods, man! It's likely to take an ear clear off the boy.”