The Best of R. A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  “And in much less than a second, that pseudopod is withdrawn back into the sphere of the sphairikoi. So it is with our lives. Nothing dies. It is only a ripple on the surface of the oneness. Can you entertain so droll an idea as that the pseudopod should remember, or wish to remember?”

  “Yes. I’ll remember it a billion years for the billion who forget.”

  * * *

  The Dookh-Doctor was running uphill in the dark. He crashed into trees and boles as though he wished to remember the crashing forever. “I’ll burn before I forget, but I must have something that says it’s me who burns!”

  Up, up by the spherical hills of the sphairikoi, bawling and stumbling in the dark. Up to a hut that had a certain fame he could never place, to the hut that had its own identity, that sparkled with identity.

  “Open, open, help me!” the Dookh-Doctor cried out at the last hut on the hill.

  “Go away, man!” the last voice protested. “All my clients are gone, and the night is almost over with. What has this person to do with a human man anyhow?”

  It was a round twinkling voice out of the roweled dark. But there was enduring identity there. The twinkling, enduring-identity colors, coming from the chinks of the hut, had not reached the level of vision. There was even the flicker of the I-will-know-me-if-I-meet-me-again color.

  “Torchy Twelve, help me. I am told that you have the special salve that solves the last problem, and makes it know that it is always itself that is solved.”

  “Why, it is the Dookh-Doc! Why have you come to Torchy?”

  “I want something to send me into kind and everlasting slumber,” he moaned. “But I want it to be me who slumbers. Cannot you help me in any way?”

  “Come you in, the Dookh-Doc. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. I help you—”

  The World as Will and Wallpaper

  Introduction by Samuel R. Delany

  Along with “The Primary Education of the Camiroi,” this was one of the first tales by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914–2002) I read.

  Where it appeared, however, I have no notion. Possibly that’s because today I know so much more about the intellectual context that informs his story than I did when I first read it, and it is easy to let the context overwhelm the tale. One suspects that is part of the story’s project. But in whose anthology—Judith Merril’s? Terry Carr’s?—I first read this piece, I have no notion at all.

  I once taught a Clarion workshop at Tulane (where the students included George R. R. Martin), and I wondered if somehow Lafferty himself might be in evidence. He wasn’t. And the class was in some confusion because the young man who had set up the whole thing had also pulled out at the last minute. It’s interesting that even at that time Lafferty as a myth was so in evidence.

  But what of the tale to hand?

  William Morris (1834–1896) was intelligent, rich, and multitalented. He was a committed socialist, and the author of a number of fantasies, including News from Nowhere and The World Beyond the Wood. He supported a number of other artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, and he designed ornate wallpapers still used today; as well, he printed sumptuous illustrated editions of books such as the Kelmscott Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is one of the most written-about men of his times, and he is the avatar of the hero of Lafferty’s futuristic tale of a trip through the City of the World.

  As much or more than any famous Victorian figure, it’s easy to see how the nature of Morris’s fame is entirely an accident of a social position.

  Lafferty’s title riffs on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) two-volume philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer is known for the extreme pessimism of his philosophy and the beauty of his writing.

  Like a Wallace Shawn play, Lafferty’s tale takes place in a stressed future and moves from there to its distressing end.

  The story begins from a seeming common-sense challenge to the classical description of a city, straight out of Jane Jacobs (“a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained…”) and sets it at the limit of its growth: “The World City is economically self-contained.”

  By the story’s end, Lafferty’s own pessimism is running neck and neck with Schopenhauer’s. Lafferty’s Catholicism was a topic often referred to by fans and critics: the other writer who sits in my mind as a (severely lapsed) Catholic is Thomas Disch. And I wonder to what extent that can be read as part of the cultural context that informs both writers.

  Lafferty’s is a story of bookies and talkies and readies, where the World City is a tidy place because it tips and tilts with the tides it floats on, and Willy, whose “name game” is based on William Morris, goes to explore with Kandy Kalosh and later Fairhair Farquhar, the World City which is, of course, much too large for them to see more than a fraction of—though what of it that’s revealed, with each narrative move, is more and more distressing.

  In all, “The World as Will and Wallpaper” offers a grim view of what a world as it approaches its end times requires to be self-sustaining.

  The World as Will and Wallpaper

  A template, a stencil, a plan.

  Corniest, orniest damsel and man,

  Orderly, emptily passion and pity,

  All-the-World, All-the-World, All-the-World City.

  —13th Street Ballad

  There is an old dictionary-encyclopedia that defines a City as “… a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained.” The dictionary-encyclopedia being an old one, however (and there is no other kind), is mistaken. The World City is economically self-contained.

  It was William Morris who read this definition in the old book. William was a bookie, or readie, and he had read parts of several books. But now he had a thought: if all the books are old, then things may no longer be as the books indicate. I will go out and see what things are like today in the City. I will traverse as much of the City as my life allows me. I may even come to the Wood Beyond the World that my name-game ancestor described.

  William went to the Permit Office of the City. Since there was only one City, there might be only one Permit Office, though it was not large.

  “I want a permit to traverse as much of the City as my life allows me,” William told the permit man. “I even want a permit to go to the Wood Beyond the World. Is that possible?”

  The permit man did a little skittish dance around William, “like a one-eyed gander around a rattlesnake.” The metaphor was an old and honored one, one of the fifty-four common metaphors. They both understood it: it didn’t have to be voiced. William was the first customer the permit man had had in many days, though, so the visit startled him.

  “Since everything is permitted, you will need no permit,” the permit man said. “Go, man, go.”

  “Why are you here then?” William asked him. “If there are no permits, why is there a Permit Office?”

  “This is my niche and my notch,” the permit man said. “Do away with me and my office and you begin to do away with the City itself. It is the custom to take a companion when you traverse the City.”

  Outside, William found a companion named Kandy Kalosh and they began to traverse the City that was the World. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words “Beginning of Stencil 35,352.” The City tipped and tilted a bit, and they were on their way. Now this is what the City was like:

  It was named Will of the World City, for it had been constructed by a great and worldwide surge of creative will. Afterward, something had happened to that surge, but it did not matter; the City was already created then.

  The City was varied, it was joyful, it was free, and it covered the entire world. The mountains and heights had all been removed, and the City, with its various strips of earth and sweet water and salt water, floated on the ocean on its interlocking floaters. As to money values, everything was free; and everything was free as to personal movement and personal choice. It was not really crow
ded except in the places where the people wanted it crowded, for people do love to congregate. It was sufficient as to foodstuff and shelter and entertainment. These things have always been free, really; it was their packaging and traffic that cost, and now the packaging and traffic were virtually eliminated.

  “Work is joy” flashed the subliminal signs. Of course it is. It is a joy to stop and turn into an area and work for an hour, even an hour and a half, at some occupation never or seldom attempted before. William and Kandy entered an area where persons made cloth out of clamshells, softening them in one solution, then drawing them out to filaments on a machine, then forming (not weaving) them into cloth on still another machine. The cloth was not needed for clothing or for curtains, though sometimes it was used for one or the other. It was for ornamentation. Temperature did not require cloth (the temperature was everywhere equitable) and modesty did not require it, but there was something that still required a little cloth as ornament.

  William and Kandy worked for nearly an hour with other happy people on the project. It is true that their own production was all stamped “Rejected” when they were finished, but that did not mean that it went all the way back to the clamshells, only back to the filament stage.

  “Honest labor is never lost,” William said as solemnly as a one-horned owl with the pip.

  “I knew you were a readie, but I didn’t know you were a talkie,” Kandy said. People didn’t talk much then. Happy people have no need to talk. And of course honest labor is never lost, and small bits of it are pleasurable.

  This portion of the City (perhaps all portions of the City) floated on an old ocean itself. It had, therefore, a slight heave to it all the time. “The City is a tidy place” was an old and honored saying. It referred to the fact that the City moved a little with the tides. It was a sort of joke.

  The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen. For much of this traverse the City had been familiar to William but not to Kandy. They had been going west, and William had always been a westing lad. Kandy, however, had always wandered east from her homes, and she was the farthest west that she had ever been when she met William.

  They came to the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. These swimmers were very good, and great numbers of curiously shaped fish frolicked with them in the green salt-fresh pools. Anyone who wished to could, of course, swim in the Water Ballet, but most of the swimmers seemed to be regulars. They were part of the landscape, of the waterscape.

  William and Kandy stopped to eat at an algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 15th Street. Indeed, Kandy worked there for half an hour, pressing the plankton and adding squirts of special protein as the people ordered it. Kandy had worked in quick-lunch places before.

  The two of them stopped at the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 16th Street. They wrote their names with a stylus in wax when they went in, or rather William wrote the names of both of them for Kandy could not write. And because he bore the mystic name of William, he received a card out of the slot with a genuine Will of the World verse on it:

  This City of the World is wills

  Of Willful folk, and nothing daunts it.

  With daring hearts we hewed the hills

  To make the World as Willy wants it.

  Really, had it taken such great will and heart to build the City of the World? It must have or there would not have been a Will of the World Exhibit Hall to commend it. There were some folks, however, who said that the building of the World City had been an automatic response.

  Kandy, being illiterate (as the slot knew), received a picture card.

  They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 17th Street. This part of the City was new to William as well as to Kandy.

  The cliffs and caves were fabricated and not natural cliff dwellings, but they looked very much as old cliff dwellings must have looked. There were little ladders going up from one level to the next. There were people sitting on the little terraces with the small-windowed apartments behind them. Due to the circular arrangement of the cliff dwellings, very many of the people were always visible to one another. The central courtyard was like an amphitheater. Young people played stickball and Indian ball in this area. They made music on drums and whistles. There were artificial rattlesnakes in coils, artificial rib-skinny dogs, artificial coyotes, artificial women in the act of grinding corn with hand querns. And also, in little shelters or pavilions, there were real people grinding simulacrum corn on apparatus.

  Kandy Kalosh went into one of the pavilions and ground corn for fifteen minutes. She had a healthy love for work. William Morris made corndogs out of simulacrum corn and seaweeds. It was pleasant there. Sometimes the people sang simulacrum Indian songs. There were patterned blankets, brightly colored, and woven out of bindweed. There were buffoons in masks and buffoon suits who enacted in-jokes and in-situations that were understood by the cliff-dwelling people only, but they could be enjoyed by everyone.

  “All different, all different, every block different,” William murmured in rapture. It had come on evening, but evening is a vague thing. It was never very bright in the daytime or very dark at night. The World City hadn’t a clear sky but it had always a sort of diffused light. William and Kandy traveled still farther west.

  “It is wonderful to be a world traveler and to go on forever,” William exulted. “The City is so huge that we cannot see it all in our whole lives and every bit of it is different.”

  “A talkie you are,” Kandy said. “However did I get a talkie? If I were a talkie too I could tell you something about that every-part-of-it-is-different bit.”

  “This is the greatest thing about the whole World City,” William sang, “to travel the City itself for all our lives, and the climax of it will be to see the Wood Beyond the World. But what happens then, Kandy? The City goes on forever, covering the whole sphere. It cannot be bounded. What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?”

  “If I were a talkie I could tell you,” Kandy said.

  But the urge to talk was on William Morris. He saw an older and somehow more erect man who wore an armband with the lettering “Monitor” on it. Of course only a readie, or bookie, like William would have been able to read the word.

  “My name-game ancestor had to do with the naming as well as the designing of the Wood Beyond the World,” William told the erect and smiling man, “for I also am a William Morris. I am avid to see this ultimate wood. It is as though I have lived for the moment.”

  “If you will it strongly enough, then you may see it, Willy,” the man said.

  “But I am puzzled,” William worried out the words, and his brow was furrowed. “What is beyond the Wood Beyond the World?”

  “A riddle, but an easy one.” The man smiled. “How is it that you are a readie and do not know such simple things?”

  “Cannot you give me a clue to the easy riddle?” William begged.

  “Yes,” the man said. “Your name-game ancestor had to do with the designing of one other particular thing besides the Wood Beyond the World.”

  “Come along, readie, come along,” Kandy said.

  They went to the West Side Show Square on 18th Street. Neither of them had ever been to such a place, but they had heard rumors of it for there is nothing at all like the West Side Show Square on 18th Street.

  There were the great amplifiers with plug-ins everywhere. Not only were the instruments plugged in, but most of the people were themselves plugged in. And ah! The wonderful setting was like the backside of old tenements all together in a rough circuit. There were period fire escapes that may even have been accurate. They looked as though persons might actually climb up and down on them. Indeed, light persons had actually done this in the past, but it was forbidden now as some of the folks had fallen to death or maiming. But the atmosphere was valid.

  Listen, there was period washing on period clotheslines! It was flapped by little wind machines just as though there were a real wind blowing. No wonder they called this the show squ
are. It was a glum-slum, a jetto-ghetto, authentic past time.

  The performing people (and all the people on that part of 18th Street seemed to be performing people) were dressed in tight jeans and scalloped or ragged shirts, and even in broken shoes full of holes. It must have been very hot for them, but art is worth it. It was a memento of the time when the weather was not everywhere equitable.

  There were in-dramas and in-jokes and in-situations acted out. The essence of the little dramas was very intense hatred for a group or class not clearly defined. There were many of those old-period enemy groups in the various drama locations of the City.

  The lights were without pattern but they were bright. The music was without tune or melody or song or chord but it was very loud and very passionate. The shouting that took the place of singing was absolutely livid. Some of the performers fell to the ground and writhed there and foamed at their mouths.

  It was a thing to be seen and heard—once. William and Kandy finally took their leave with bleeding ears and matter-encrusted eyes. They went along to 19th Street where there was a Mingle-Mangle.

  It was now as dark as it ever got in the City but the Mangle was well lighted. Certain persons at the Mangle laughingly took hold of William and Kandy and married them to each other. They had bride and groom crowns made of paper and they put them on their heads.

  Then they wined and dined them, an old phrase. Really, they were given fine cognac made of fish serum and braised meat made of algae but also mixed with the real chopped flesh of ancients.

  Then William and Kandy padded down in the great Pad Palace that was next to the Mangle. Every night there were great numbers of people along that part of 19th Street, at the Mingle-Mangle and at the Pad Palace, and most of these folks were friendly, with their glazed eyes and their dampish grins.

  2.

  Pleasant most special to folks of the club!