MORE THAN MELCHISEDECH

	VOLUME TWO
	TALES OF MIDNIGHT


	Book One

	'There be two men of all mankind 
	That I'm forever thinking on: 
	They chase me everywhere I go -- 
	Melchisedech, Ukalegon.' 
	[Edwin Arlington Robinson. Two Men.] 

	1

	Well, who was Ukalegon? Skalsky says that Ukalegon was a woman and
no man at all; and that she was, in all ways, the negation of Melchisedech.
But did the poet E. A. Robinson understand that? 

	In the year 1946, Duffey started off on a week's trip from which, as
it would happen, he would never return. 
	Now it was the case that Casey Szymansky, who had moved the Crock
out of Duffey's place to more plush quarters, said that he was going on a
trip the same day. Neither told the other any more about it. They were on
tolerable terms with each other by then, but not on really good terms. There
had been quite a bit of property and money coming to Duffey out of his
partnership with Gabriel Szymansky after Gabriel's death. Duffey hadn't
taken all that he was entitled to, but he had taken more than Casey thought
he should have. And Duffey now owned that particular building, the building
on the poor street that had once housed Gabriel's pawn shop.
	"Yes, all agreements and papers are in order, Duffey, and they show
such things as belonging to you," Casey and his lawyer had said, "but we
don't beheve the faces of those papers." But they had settled it without
excess bitterness, Duffey taking a little shorter stick than he should have
had. 
	This day, they left Chicago on the same train and on the same coach,
though they had not been seeking each others' company. It wasn't really
embarrassing, but it might have been just a little stuffy. It was always a
problem how an Olympian should handle a Tinan who was in open rebellion.
	"I'm sorry about your nose, Duffey," Casey said as they sat
together. 
	"Oh, that's all right," Duffey told him. It was the first time they
had mentioned it since it had happened. Duffey had had his nose broken (it
wasn't the last time it would happen) in an altercation with goons of the
new people who were associated with Casey on the Crock. New people they
were, but with old goons. The goons had been the same old slant-faced men
out of Duffey's unrealities. Well, did they keep spares for them? Duffey had
done in one of those slant-faces as a follow-up of the altercation, and he
hadn't heard from them since. 
	And there was something else about this trip. Mary Catherine
Carruthers was on the same train. She had come to the train with Casey, but
they had gone to different coaches, apparently by agreement. Both Casey and
Mary Catherine were plainly startled at seeing Duffey taking the same train,
though Mary Catherine continued always in her total fondness for Duffey.
Casey and Mary Catherine were engaged to be married at this time, as they
had been engaged several times before. But they did not ride in the same
coach. 
	It was a daytime journey with an early leaving. Duffey and Casey as
if by silent agreement, stayed away from controversial subjects. They talked
intelligently of the mathematics of probability. 
	"I am bothered by an impossible aggregation of coincidences," Duffey
said. "There are things that are bound to come together in a fantastic
congruence, or they will make liars out of all alsrt of implicit pledges.
And yet the improbability of their coming together is so extreme that there
was not room enough on earth to write the number of that improbability." 
	"Can you put the aggregation into mathematical form, Duffey?" Casey
asked him. "You have the irritating habit of trying to express things in
words that should be expressed only in mathematical formulae. There are some
problems of contingent philosophy that cannot be phrased except in
mathematical form." 
	"Oh, I beheve that every problem can be expressed in straightforward
verbal form, Casey," Duffey said. "But this one would sound so silly in the
expressing." 
	"Many mathematical expressions are absolutely silly," Casey said.
"But I'll try not to guffaw at your straightforward verbalisms, though
sometimes it's hellish hard to refrain." 
	"Well, I made a few people, Casey," Duffey said. "That was the
beginning of it. I made them with no forethought at all. But it seems to be
a requirement that these people should come together. It was working almost
like a chemical affinity to coagulate. But it's very unlikely that a dozen
people I made, out of all the people in the world, should come together by
chance. I figure that things are being stretched unlawfully, but I don't
quite know what my responsibility is in the situation."
	"You -- made -- a -- few -- people? Was that what you said, Duffey?"

	"That's right, Casey. Wasn't that acceptable to you?"
	"Oh, I suppose so. Are these the first people that you ever made?" 
	"Yes. These, in my present life, are the only people that I have
made, so far as I remember. There are twelve of them if I count them right.
Twelve of them, and another who wasn't counted in the count, and several
more of mixed statue." 
	"You're sure that you really did it, Duffey? You're not just
dreaming it?"
	"I'm sure that I had a lot to do with their forming. Something, but
not everything. Yes, I made them, literally and really." 
	"Oh, how have they turned out, Duffey?" 
	"The results aren't all in. In twelve, there should be one Judas. I
don't know which. Oh, you're one of the people I made, Casey." 
	"Oh? That might explain a few scraps of problems. Just how did you
made me, Duffey. And don't turn it into a dirty joke." 
	"I made you by a talisman given to your father in a chance encounter
several years before your birth." 
	"Oh that thing! I have been going to throw it away several times,
but it was such a curious piece of anti-art. I'm told that I held onto it
from my birth till I was six months old and would not be separated from it
at all. I found that it's made of solid gold. It's fairly valuable or that,
but not as a piece of anti-art. Yes, it's real gold." 
	"Should I use false gold? Don't throw it away, Casey. Your soul may
be in it." 
	"If my soul was in it once, it wasn't there now, I've recently
traded souls with another person. Did you make anyone else that I know." 
	"Yes. One other certainly. Two others likely. And I've a feeling
that there are many acquaintances among members of the group that I don't
know about at all. Ah, I don't know just where you're going, Casey, but you
may meet all the others this week. I have the feeling that you creatures
have somehow decided to hold a conclave independently of your maker, me. But
how can you know where to find each other?" 
	"I don't know, Duffey. I sure don't know where to find any others of
your making, though I bet I'd recognize them as yours." 
	"Yes, you will probably all recognize each other at sight. And I
believe that I will always know my own creatures when I come on them." 
	They drifted apart and fell into conversations with different sets
of people in the coach and did not talk to each other again during the trip.
They arrived in St. Louis in the early evening. Duffey and Casey and Mary
Catherine Carruthers all seemed to be leaving the train there. 
	"Whatever are they going to be doing in St. Louis?" Duffey muttered
about the other two. "And whatever am I going to be doing here myself?" 
	A young lady at a news stand in the train station was singing some
gibberish as she opened bundles of evening papers. 

	"Kerowl, kerowl! the dogs do growl. 
	The Duffeys have come to town!" 

	"Did you say Duffeys, young lady?" Melchisedech Duffey asked her. 
	"Yah, Duffeys. There's a bunch of them in town. You should see them,
you will see them. They're everywhere. They're wilder than beggars. They're
showier than Gypseys. Oh, they are something." 
	"Just exactly where in town are these 'Duffies' to be found?" 
	"Exactly everywhere," the young lady said. "They're everywhere." 
	It puzzled Duffey who these Duffeys might be. But if they were
everywhere in town, he would see them. Well, what was he doing here? Duffey
could always find excuses to come to St. Louis. He had business interests
there. He had two partners there, Bagby and Charley Murray. He had a sister
there. He still owned part of the famous Rounders' Club there. But he hadn't
come to St. Louis for any of these reasons. He had come because he had
received a letter in Chicago, postmarked Morgan City, Louisiana, and it had
read: 
	"...be in St. Louis on or about the last Saturday in May. I will see
you there then and give you your assignment for the rest of your life. Henri
Salvatore." 
	The name Henri Salvatore was not familiar to Duffey, but something
there was familiar, This Henri or Henry was one of Duffey's own creations,
from a talisman given, many years before, to a Cajun riverman. This Cajun,
probably a maternal uncle (since his forgotten surname was definitely not
Salvatore) had surely conferred that talisman for the birthing of this
person who had written the letter. Yes, Duffey would recognize one of his
creations anywhere, even by a letter written by one of them. But why should
a creature be able to give a life assignment to his own creator? And was it
in St. Louis that the talismanic children were going to have their conclave
independently of their creator? Why then was their creator invited to town
by one of them? 
	Duffey and Casey and Mary Catherine left the station area in three
different taxi cabs, and they went down three different streets. So much for
that. Duffey took his taxi to the home of one of his partners, Charley
Murray. 
	But the cabs of Duffey and Casey arrived, from opposite directions,
in front of the Murray residence, at the same time. Once again, it was a
thing that could get a little bit stuffy. 
	"I go in here, Casey," Duffey said with just a little bit of
irritation, "An old friend and partner of mine lives here. " 
	"I go in here also," Casey said, a little bit puzzled. "This was the
address that I have. You had better check your address. Mine checks." 
	Oh, it was explained all right, after a little whthe, inasmuch as
such almost-embarrassing things are ever explained. Charley Murray greeted
Duffey as his oldest and best friend, as he was. And Charley knew who Casey
was and had been expecting him. 
	"I meant to phone you, Duffey, and tell you that this young Casey
was coming down from Chicago to St. Louis at about the same time you were,
Charley Murray said. "I thought it would be nice if there were some way you
could recognize each other in case you traveled on the same train. I was
wondering how I could describe you to each other so you could make
yourselves known, but this was a little bit difficult considering that I had
never seen Casey." 
	"You described us both marvelously, even though at a dwastance, even
though you were not conscious that you were doing it," Duffey said. "The
mind of man was a wonderful thing. Though you had never seen Casey, I
recognized him instantly from your description." 
	"You are, as always, a crooked-tongued fraud, Melchisedech," Charley
said. "You two met on the train, did yoa? Casey has come to town for the
wedding of an army friend of his, a nephew of mine. We weren't sure how much
room there would be for out-of-town guests over at the Stranahans, so Casey
was here on a possible overflow basis. And he was welcome here, and there,
and everywhere."
	Well, that was all right, that was fine, that was as good an
explanation as any. Duffey's breath ran a little short when he heard part of
it, of course, but we all have shortages of breath sometimes. Duffey knew a
man named Stranahan here in St. Louis, a Patrick Stranahan who used to come
into the Rounders' Club, a man who was very close to this Charley Murray,
and a fairly close friend of Duffey himself. And Duffey, once on an evening
of mellow exuberance, had given a gift to this Patrick Stranahan. 
	It would be fine here, but a little bit nervous and testy. Duffey
rather washed that he had gone to stay with his sister and her husband
Bagby. He was astonished now that he hadn't even thought of that, since he
almost always stayed with them when he was in St. Louis. 
	"But would the mysterious Henri Salvatore be able to find me at the
Bagbys?" Duffey asked himself now. "Well, will he be able to find me at the
Murrays? Why did I think that he would have a better shot at me here? He
didn't say where to be in St. Louis, and this was a fair-sized city." 
	About twenty minutes later, there was a car and a voice outside,
both of them calling out for Casey. But Duffey got another one of his shocks
from that. He knew that voice, and yet he knew that he had not ever heard it
before. He knew it because he had made it. It was the voice of one of his
creatures. But the voice and the car went away with Casey, and Duffey
forbare to look out. 
	Duffey phoned his sister. Then he went over to the Bagbys. Murray
said that they would all meet over at the Rounders' Club later. Duffey spent
several hours with the Bagbys. His sister had always been very close to him,
even when he didn't see her for years at a time. But how had Bagby become so
close? This was the one friend on earth who would do anything for him.
Duffey and Bagby seemed to have an infinite number of points of contact. 
	Later, Duffey and the Bagbys picked up Beth Keegan, Duffey's old St.
Louis girl, and her husband to go to the Rounders'. Beth was named Erlenbaum
now. 
	"Kerowl, kerowl! the dogs do growl. 
	The Duffeys have come to town!" Beth chanted when she saw him.
"Where has this doggerel come from, Beth?" Duffey asked her. "What Duffeys?
I have heard this chant before since I have been in town." 
	"Oh, the Duffeys, the Duffeys, the bright and shining Duffeys! They
are all over town, as lively as a dog blanket full of fleas. You aren't in
with these new Duffeys, Melchisedech. You just haven't their class or color.
You'll see them, you'll see them. There was no way of avoiding them." 
	"Whence have they their name?" Duffey asked, a little bit
bewildered. 
	"Oh, from you ultimately, I suppose," Beth said. "They're creatures
of yours, and you are their architect. But I'm afraid they got a little bit
out of hand. You used too much color when you made them, Melchisedech. You
used too much noise. You were working in an unaccustomed medium, I suppose,
but they're badly overdone. Everybody in town loves them. They'd better." 
	Duffey's sister Mary Louise looked wonderful, but even she was a
little bit overdone. But Bascom Bagby, the baroque, the flawed pearl, the
husband of Mary Louise, the brother-in-law of Duffey, though he also was a
little bit overdone, did not look wonderful. He looked too old for his
chronological age. He looked sick. But he looked more than ever like Duffey.
He had lost some of his bluffery and he seemed very glad to see Duffey,
"probably for the last time", as he said. But he was still a powerful and
humorously rough-looking man, with beetling brows and a beetling belly. 
	"He was my dark object," Duffey said as he had said before. "He was
my uncleansed stables, he was another part of myself, and I sincerely love
the low freak of a man. He was closer to me than kindred." 
	"Yes, there are odd things happening in town," sister Mary Louise
said. "The 'Duffeys' have come to town. The beggars aren't in it with the
'Duffeys'. I love you with your nose in a sling."
	"What Duffeys have come to town?" Melchisedech asked her as he had
asked Beth. "Who are they?"
	"If you don't know them, then nobody does," Mary Louise said. "There
has never been so fired-up a band of Gypseys as these Duffeys."
	Abd Beth chimed in again. "Oh, there's no question about who they
are," she said. "They're you. They're you if you were multipled ten or
eleven times, if you were better looking and smarter than you really are, if
you were more colorful, if you were wittier, if yoy wer more magnetic. They
are you exactly, with ten thousand superior things added to each of them." 
	Beth's little girls had long since become big girls. Beth was a
grandmother now, but she was still a piece of cool, ivory statuary that
laughed. "I know, Melky, every time that I see one of them (and I've been
seeing them yesterday and today everywhere) that you thought him up, or her.
If I wanted to make people, how would I start, Duffey? I bet mine wouldn't
be as sprawling or overdone as yours are. We will see some of your creatures
tonight. Wherever we go, some of them will be there. What are they doing in
St. Louis? I also love you with your nose in that sling." 
	"I believe that the creatures are holding some sort of conclave in
this town this week," Duffey said, "but I didn't authorize it." 
	"You had better authorize it, Duffey," Erlenbaum, Beth's husband,
said with a mountainous grin. Erlenbaum sometimes kneaded huge fists and
grinned loweringly at Duffey, and Duffey pushed him a ways by taking
friendly liberties upon the lap and bosom of Beth while grinning back at
him. "If you can't whip them, Duffey, and you can't, then you'd better join
them. If they were yours once, they're not now. Any of them would take you
around on a leash like a little dog." 

	Duffey and the Bagbys and the Erlenbaums arrived at Rounders' Club.
Most times, when Duffey would come into Rounders', whether he had been gone
for an hour or for three years, a band or orchestra or combo would strike up
'The Mng Shall Ride'. For Duffey was still King at the Rounders' Club. But
now he was not noticed when he came in. There were other attractions there. 
	There was the picture of the 'Severed Giant Hands' up over the
doorway that led to the Elegant Riverboat Deck. These 'Severed Giant
Hands'were an old dream of Duffey's. Now it was the case that Duffey felt
his own hands to be severed and deprived of further creative functions when
he came into the presence of several of his own creations. 
	How had he ever done them? And how had they gone so far beyond
everything that he had any knowledge of? There were several of the
Duffeys-come-to-town present. They were brilliant, bedazzled, larger than
life, overwhelming, loud, grotesquely suer-intelligent, roughing, shouting,
pleasant, pleasant, pleasant. They had very light ways for their very great
masses. It was as if they had just come from other gravities and other
worlds. Duffey might as well be invisinle, for all that anybody would give
him a look when the more flamboyant 'Duffeys'were there.
	Then the vane swung around and Duffey became visible once more. 
	"Oh, it was Duffey himself!" a female of the incredible species
cried out. She was the most gentle of the 'Duffeys' and she came to
Melchisedech Duffey in a geat sweep. The colors of these creatures! In what
store could you find pigments for such colors? 
	"Oh, you came to us like a ghost, and we hardly knew you," this
gentle one said, but the chandehers quivered a bit from the sound of her
gentle voice. "It's as though you were hidden in a cloud or in a burning
tree," she said. "And then you must remember that most of us have never seen
you before, and we have never heard your voice. 
	"Oh, bring bread and wine, people! This was the Duffey himself, the
Melchisedech. Ah, but we do love you with your nose in a sling. That shall
be one of your attributes when you are sung in epics! We wouldn't have you
any other way. We were wondering what you could do special for your
apparition." 
	Duffey had to rub his eyes with his fists. It was as it had been
when he was the Boy King back in his first childhood and he had made some
sun-squirrels. He had not been able to look at them. He had to look away and
rub his eyes. "But you made them," one of the seneschals had chided him,
"why can you not look at them?" "I didn't know they would be so bright when
the light went on inside them" young King Melchisedech had said. And these
his present animations, Duffey sure hadn't realized that they would be this
bright when the light was turned on inside them. 
	This first of them who had seen him here, this most gentle of the
ultra-people, was named Mary Virginia Schaeffer, and she was from Galveston.
Duffey knew her by this identity, just as she knew him as Duffey. 
	Some of the others came to meet him. They were overpowering, but
there was something lacking out of the middle of them. Duffey exulted in the
company of these finest of all creatures for a half hour or so, and then he
came back to his objection. 
	"My central creation was not here," Duffey said accusingly. 
	"Oh, Finnegan, he'll be here tomorrow," a big-brained, grinning,
young man of this special people swore. "No, Finnegan wasn't here yet
tonight. He was the salt of our lives, and we are saltless without him. But
not quite saltless, Duffey, when you are here." 
	But there was some oddity in what they knew Duffey by. They knew him
as the editor, now the former editor, of the Crock. It had been a cult sheet
with them. They had reveled in the intelligence of it, in the humor of it,
in the Duffiness of it. But they had only whispy and intuitive knowledge of
Melchisedech in his royal aspect. 

	The special people who were there, dining and roistering at
Rounders', were John Schultz (who was Hans) (who was the big-brained
grinning young man), and Marie Monaghan who was his wife from Australia. 
	And Dorothy Yekouris from New Orleans, and Henry Salvatore from
Morgan City Louisiana (Oh, oh, he will give you your rest-of-your-life
scenario, Duffey), and Mary Virginia Schaeffer from Galveston. And Absalom
Stein from Chicago (Duffey already knew him a little bit, but he had never
realized what a magnificent person he was, and he had never been absolutely
sure that he was one of his creations). Six of the high twelve were here
present. And Duffey had traveled from Chicago on the train with two others
of them that day, but from long acquaintanceship with them he did not always
notice just how magic-imbued they really were. Casey Szymansky and Mary
Catherine Carruthers also belonged to these special creatures, but Duffey
had seen them almost daily from their childhoods. 
	But here about him now were five of his creatures that Duffey had
never seen before, and a sixth one whom he had never seen with open eyes
before. Since when had a sixth one become Absalom Stein? Hadn't he used to
be somebody more grubby?
	Oh, there were the old 'Unreality Fringes' about all of the
magnificent animations. And yet they were real. That sort of smokey halo
that they all had, it was called the 'unreality fringe' in the lingo of
sorcerers. But these persons were real. 
	The people at the Rounders' Club had discovered that Duffey was in
their midst now. For a whthe there, this artist had been in the dark shadow
of his own animated art. He had been dwarfed by it. Now it was recognized
that these special people had all been made by Duffey, that they were among
his easy masterpieces. A little combo there played 'The King Shall Ride'.
And then it played the rousing 'Gadarene Swine Song.' Olga Sanchez of the
torchy shoulders still worked there. She came and caressed him, as others
did. Duffey was back in his legendary feifdom. 
	Duffey had a whole riot of mixed feelings about this colorful sprawl
of youngish people that he had created. Each one of them was clearly an
expression of his art at its best, but maybe they expressed him a little too
strongly. Oh, they were all brainy and brawny and brilliant, but it may be
that triey were somewhat excessive in all of it. Was this flamboyance in the
right line of real art? Maybe. These special people were arts and statuaries
of Duffey, were they not? They even conceded that they were. 
	"Duffey misunderstands his own processes," Marie Monaghan Schultz
said. "He does not make us. He collects us and gives us our settings and our
sparkle. He found our souls hidden away and forgotten in old junk stories.
He bought us all for a song. I think it was the 'Gadarene Swine Song' he
bought us for. And now he puts us on display. We were all in 'Razzle Daz'
and when you have been in Razzle Daz, you can't get any higher than that."
	Duffey gaped almost without understanding her. He had difficulty
remembering, with all this light shining in his eyes and in his ears. But
Razzle Daz had been a little comic strip he drew for the Crock. He had done
it with unused parts of his mind and with unbusy moments of his hands, but
many persons had thought that it was absolutely the best thing in the Crock,
which Duffey had never quite understood. And, yes, of course, these splendid
animations had been the models for the characters in Razzle Daz. Those
characters had even gone by the nicknames of some of the splendid
animations, 'Finnegan' for instance, and 'Hans', and 'Show Boat'. 
	"Duffey collects works of art," Marie Monaghan went on, "and we are
all of us works of art." 
	"You are wrong, Marie," Duffey inswasted. "I do make you. But I
haven't collected you, and I don't know how you have collected yourselves in
this town. I did not give you your settings and sparkle quite as you have
them now. I think you're a little overdone. You may have to be changed." 
	"You will change us at your peril, grubby sorcerer," Dotty Yekourwas
told him. "We like us just the wy we are, and we like you the way you are.
Oh, may your nose never heal!" 
	But if Duffey had made these people, and of course he had, how did
their excellence become independent of his. Their wit was too fast for him
to keep up with, and all their jokes were obsoleted by new jokes every
minute. When had Duffey's mind ever worked so fast as did the minds of these
creatures of his?
	"I knew that you would be exactly like this," Mary Virginia said,
"banging your hands together as you do! It's as though you still had a
'maker's malfet' in your hands!" 
	She kissed him with that transcendent way she would always have.
Yes, he'd made them with a 'maker's mallet'. He remembered that part of it
now. 
	But these people were all just a little bit larger than life, and
maybe they were too large. Henri Salvatore, the Fat Frenchman, was
tremendous. And Hans Schultz was at least enormous. And Absalom Stein, was
he really that big? But Duffey hadn't seen him for quite a few years. He had
never seen him since he had gone by the name of Absalom Stein. 
	Those three master-work girls who were here right now, Dotty
Yekouris, Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Marie Monaghan, they didn't look overly
large beside the men they were with. And yet each of them would have stood a
quarter of an inch over six feet, barefooted and slouching and smiling
wickedly. They were ample in all ways. 
	That estimate of their size was Duffey's subjective estimate, of
course. They may not have loomed that large to other people. But Duffey was
their maker, and what size he comprehended for them should have been the
size imposed on them. Duffey recalled that Mary Catherine Caruthers, also in
this town somewhere, was larger than she would seem to ordinary eyes. 
	Hans and Marie, Henri Salvatoree, Dotty and Mary Virginia, they were
overwhelming. Even Absalom Stein was overwhelming tonight. 
	Just when had Absalom Stein outgrown his grubby pupa form as Hugo
Stone? Or hadn't he been one of the many mouthy little Stone brothers and
cousins anyhow? Yeah, Absalom was Hugo. But what, by all the compounded
mysteries, was this Stein doing with the others of them in St. Louis. How
did he even happen to be acquaints with the other talismanic children? There
was a wealthy and lurid Jewishness to him such as has not been so powerfully
expressed since the times of the Elizabethans, and then only on-stage. In
life, there had never been such a type before. Absalom gave the impression
that he was wearing a quantity of splendid jewelry, and he wasn't wearing a
single bauble. 
	The lavish talk that these people poured out! If only it could be
recovered it could be bottled and sold. If it could be created again after
it was gone, then you would have something. But even the creator Duffey
could not create it again. As with all demiurges, angelics, cavern spirits,
pure intellects, monsters, the extraordinary conversations of these splendid
animations could never be recalled later. 
	Hans Schultz was a thunder-head out of mythology, a holy ox in the
manner of Aquinas himself. But he was such a clash of bulky colors and bulky
speed and bulky fellowship! He was too loud. 
	There was bad and overdone art in every one of them except Mary
Virginia. They weren't such things as Melchisedech would put on the market
with his reputation for taste behind them. They were such things as he would
keep for his own gusty enjoyment and cry out "Gad, what genius I had when I
did them!" 
	Henri Salvatore, the Fat Frenchman from the Swamps, was the center
of gravity of any room or building he was in. He was this by sheer weight.
Henri was a whopper in color and texture and movement and sound. But
balanced proportion was not in him at all. 
	And Absalom! "Absalom, take off that purple cape with the scarlet
lining! It's just too much!" Oh, but he wasn't wearing a purple cape with a
scarlet lining at all. He was wearing a simple unfigured sports shirt. It
was just something extravagant about him that gave Duffey the impression
that he was wearing the outlandwash get-up. 
	The twelve talismanic creations of Melchiscdech Duffey were these: 
	Finnegan, who was the salt of their lives, who was properly named
John Solli, who was (hold onto yourself) the son of Monster Giulio. He'll be
here tomorrow.
	John Schultz who was Hans. 
	Henri Salvatore, who was going to give Duffey the scenario for the
rest of his life. 
	Vincent Stranahan, the son of Patrick Stranahan and Monica Murray
Stranahan, who was going to get married Saturday. 
	Casey Szymansky, now seen for the thousand-and-first time, and seen
with new eyes. 
	Dotty Yekouris. 
	Mary Monaghan Schultz. 
	Mary Virginia Schaeffer. 
	Teresa (Show Boat) Piccone. 
	(Give more space than that and they'll run away with it.) 
	Absalom Stein. 
	Mr. X. 
	Twelve of them. There was a puzzle how Duffey could have been
spiritual and magic father to Mr. X who claimed to be a bit older than
Duffey. The answer was that Mr. X was an unrepentant liar who was actually
slightly younger than Duffey. There had been the case of Duffey, when he was
very young, giving a talisman to an Italian man who was selling some kind of
confection out of a hokey-pokey push-cart. But X must be reserved for later.


	2 

	The Animated Marvels left, suddenly, a with a great flourish. And
people smthed their 'ain't-they-something' smiies. 
	Then another of them came in with agr up. 
	Charley Murray came into the Rounders' Club with his sister Monica
Murray Strnahan and her husband Patrick Stranahan. And with them was Papa
Piccone of the old Star and Garter Theatre. And another person, quite
special.
	Charley Murray had given orders for a supper to be served in a
thrice-special room upstairs. Charley was the acting manager of Rounders'.
Duffey was only the King of the place, and the founder, angd the half-owner.

	The other person with Charley's party was a talisman-child, and her
set Duffey to quaking in a pleasant terror. This was the daughter of Papa
Piccone, the incipient daughter-in-law of Monica and Patrick Stranahan, She
was the god-daughter of Beth Keegan, Duffey's old girl. She was Teresa
(Showboat) Piccone. She was as much a central creation of the Duffey Corpus
as Duffey's creations had these two foci. 
	Aw c'mon, no one can describe her more than to say that -- well, she
was sun-burned quicksilver. She was fire and ice and holy wine. She has been
described as 'dark and lithe and probably little.' Well, in her own setting
of the dazzling and larger-than-life people, she might have been called
little. But in the world itself she might not be. She was of fair size and
greatly compromised beauty. The compromising was done by her grimaces and
pleasantly ugly facial contortions. But if one could ever get her face to
stand still, then she had a thunderous beauty. And in no setting could she
ever be called quiet. She was -- No, no, not now, maybe not ever, not in
detail! It's dangerous. 
	"If her specifications were known, then some Magus other than Duffey
might make another one of her, and one was enough," said Patrick Stranahan.
"Oh my God, how one of her was enough!" Patrick loved his future
daughter-in-law. So did Duffey love Teresa. She was a blue-moon person, not
to be encountered more than once in a lifetime. Look at the others instead.
It was dangerous to look too long at Teresa. You'll get welders' eye-burns.
There are infra-red rays and other things coming out of that blue-light
phenomenon. Look at the others. Teresa was talking constantly. Duffey did
not hear her words. He heard only the cadence of her voice. 
	Duffey knew Patrick Stranahan well. Patrick used to come into the
Rounders' Club whthe he was still quite a young man, even before Duffey had
sold a piece of the club to Charley Murray. And Duffey had known Monica
Stranaan, the wife of Patrick, the sister of Charley, for a very long time.
He used to live to kiss her for the serenity she gave. She still gave it. 
	And Duffey had known Papa Piccone (he already had the name 'Papa
Piccone' when he was twenty-two years old: he seemed older) in the old, old
days. He was and was and would forever be till its destruction the
proprietor of the Star and Garter where everyone went for the shows when
they were young. Beth Erlenbaum, the ivory statuette, had used to work at
the Star and Garter, and she was kindred of the Piccone family. But Duffey
had never seen this Teresa Piccone before. And then she was gone suddenly,
and he wasn't sure that he had seen her at all. 
	"Oh, I hardly ever get a good look at her myself," said Piccone her
father. 

	The men were talking. This might have been the same night, upstairs
after supper, when they had withdrawn to the trophy room for cigars and
brandy and Irish whisky. Or it might have been another night in the big club
room at Stranahan's house. It may even have been at Charley Murray's place. 
	Likely it was several of the nights of that week ran together, and
the men were talking about weighty subjects. Duffey and Bagby and Murray and
Stranahan were there, along with Piccone and Father McGuigan. Stein was
there part of the time, or one of the nights. And Finnegan may have been
there part of the time. 
	"We come to the crux, to the crossroads," Patrick Stranahan said.
"But the crossroad sign, and the various arms of it, point: 'To nowhere',
'To easy house', 'To crossbar hotel', 'To the charnel house'. There is blood
running down the gaunt tree-piece of the crossroads sign. Some of it was
fresh blood, some of it was old and slow-flowing, some of it was placental
blood. We had supposed that we had come to the end, for a whthe, of the
rivers of blood. The crossroads sign-post indicates otherwise."
	This Patrick Stranahan, a lawyer man who was just rich enough to
come hardly into the Kingdom of Heaven, was a very large man, bigger than
any of his four sons. He has been described in another place as "a big,
hairy man. He rumbled when he talked. He even rumbled when he didn't talk.
He had a large and busy stomach and there was always something going on in
there." 
	"As to the blood on the sign-post," Duffey proposed, "Henry
Salvatore says that the Devil was being released from his thousand-year
durance very soon, possibly this week." 
	"Henry guesses at the dates," Patrick continued, "and likely at the
year, though in all probability it was this year. Just a hundred years ago
there was a rumor that the Devil had been released. Maybe that was some
other devil, though the events in the past hundred years (1846-1946)
indicate that flagrant evil was released into the world at that time. And
now the noise was even more ominous. We have heard the big iron bolts
sliding back for some time now, but there are a lot of bolts to slide and a
lot of locks to unlock before the stout door swings open. That gaudy Stein
also has some authentic private information, I beheve, but he exaggerates.
It doesn't really matter whether the Devil was released last year or this
year or next year. The release was imminent, as we all know, and it was a
condition that none of us will be able to live with. Some of us will be
exalted and awakened by the assault of it, and some of us will be destroyed
by it. But none of us will be able to live with it. We don't know just how
much difference it will make. The Devil has carried on very effective
warfare all during his imprisonment. But now it will be worse, and of a more
immediate treachery." 
	"The Monster Giulio told me recently that a rigged council of
Teras-folks had drawn up a petition for the release of the Devil," Bagby
said, "so it wasn't just the humans of the narrow definition who have been
bespoken by false leaders to petition. Groups of half a dozen other sorts of
creatures also have joined in the foulness. Giulio was in St. Louis
recently." 
	"Giulio? He's been dead for ten years at least," Duffey said. 
	"I didn't say that the creature wasn't dead. I said that he had been
in St. Louis recently and had given me these reports," Bagby growled. Bagby
had never liked to have his accounts questioned. "My brother, I have my own
communications and meetings, and you have yours. Giulio told me something
else. He says that at the councils of the Teras, they have both the living
and the dead in attendance, and he believes this gives better balance. I
believe that the U.S. Congress should adopt a similar practice." 
	"You know that Finnegan was the son of the Monster Giulio, don't
you?" Duffey asked. 
	"No, of course I don't know it," Bagby said. "The Finnegan who got
into town today? He was here, and he left just before you got here, Duffey.
Have you ever even met him?" 
	"No." 
	"And yet you say that he was the son of Giulio the Monster who was a
Teras. You have so much, you know so much, one-aspect-brother-of-mine, for
one who knows so little." 
	"I suspect that this Finnegan was another of your talisman-children,
Duffey," Patrick Finnegan said. I myself have met this Finnegan long ago,
when he shipped on the river, long before my son Vincent, who was his best
friend, knew him. And as to Duffey's having created a brood of beautiful and
bumptious people, I don't find this unlikely at all. I myself made a few
people by the modified talismanic method before I made my sons and daughters
from my loins. The latter thing precludes and shuts off the former, forever,
always. Let us consider just what these creative conditions are. 
	"A non-creative human soul would not be possible. We all share in
each others creations. We are even partly created by persons who may not be
born for another thousand years yet. There was One who creates. And yet, on
level 1-B, creation was a group effort and some are better at it than
others. Some souls have more creativity than others. Not all souls are as
resoundingly creative than others. Not all souls are as resoundingly
creative as was Duffey. As to Duffey though: his creations are like a
multitude of old, (no no, no old, of new and brightly painted) milk cans
clattering down stone steps. They do make a noise! 
	"The mathematics of the talismanic-creation complex are fantastic.
We are dealing with multi-dimensional equations with as many as thirty
billion unknown and highly mysterious integers, in which equations every
integer was a variable function of all the others. Yes, I believe that
Duffey has conspicuously created my own son Vincent, and Piccone's daughter
Teresa, and Finnegan, the son of the Monster Giulio (I also knew this
Monster, and I once represented him against a motion to have him locked up),
and big-brained Hans, and Casey, and many of those beautiful young girls
also. But it all works both ways, or it works thirty billion ways. For I
myself conscuously created this Melchisedech Duffey, even though he was
already fifteen or sixteen years old when I first met him. There's a lot
more to him than there would have been if I hadn't muddied my creative hands
with him. These additional powers that he got from myself and several others
at that time aren't seen too clearly in him even yet, but they will be
absolutely required in his future trials." 
	Duffey remembered that he had picked up a little suavity from
Patrick Stranahan, and perhaps other pleasant things. 
	"You are speaking in false context about any person ever creating
anything," said Father McGuigan. "You are indulging in unlawful metaphor." 
	"Nah, man, nah," Duffey said. "He was only putting into metaphor
what was literal fact: that was Patrick's only offense in the present
dwascussion. There was nothing metaphorical about my creations or about my
kingship... I am a Magus... I am a sorcerer. I am a child of gold and
minister of bread and wine. I am the Boy King, and I am the King of Salem. I
command giants. I move with high royalty, and the trumpets know me by name.
I have sat in Kings' conclaves with Solomon and Saul, and with Ptolemy and
Chandragupta and Nebuchadessar, with Hsien and with Barbarossa, all the way
down to --" 
	"Were you drinking before you joined us tonight, Duffey?" Charley
Murray asked him. 
	"Oh, I've been making a day of it, Charley. There was once a
proposed -- but never used -- Anheuser-Busch ad which read: 'After all, what
else was there to do in St. Louis?' I've been to all the places and enjoyed
all the drinks. -- Um -- down to King Stephen of Hungary and Conrad the
Second of the Germanies. I believe that they were the newest ones who came
to the Kings' Conclaves whthe I still attended. What, Charley, are you
implying that I might be intoxicated by other than life itself? I thouht
that my powers had revived a bit today, and you think that it was only my
drinking? But I can still work my golden magic. I can rub my hands together
and then pour out anything you wash me to on this library table here. See, I
rub my hands together! What do you want me to pour out here?" 
	"Coined gold," Patrick Stranahan said. "Dated coined gold." 
	"Any particular date, Patrick?" 
	"No. I'll not limit you there, Duffey. I know that magic was easily
wilted by excess details." 
	"You will notice that my hands are empty and my sleeves are rolled
up," Duffey said. 
	"Get with it, Duff, get with it," Papa Piccone said. "I have a new
magician every week at the S & G. You'll do nothing I haven't seen before." 
	Duffey rubbed his hands together some more. Then he poured seven
gold pieces out on the table. And Patrick Stranahan and the others examined
them.
	"These are all United States Five Dollar Gold Pieces," Patrick said,
"and all of them were minted about ten years ago. You could easily have had
them on you, God knows why. And I recall that you used to do magic tricks." 
	"No, no, it was Charley Murray here who used to do magic tricks,"
Duffey said. "I used to do magic. I could have poured anything you asked me
out of my hands, a baby dinosaur, for instance. I'd have done that if you'd
asked me to. Now I won't." 
	"I made a man once," Papa Piccone said suddenly. Papa was named
Gaetano, but nobody ever called him anything except Papa. "I don't believe
that it was a metaphorical man. Right at the end of it, at least, before he
broke up, he was real. So I know that the thing can be done. I create a lot
of characters at my theatre the Star and Garter, at least one new one a week
for more than thirty years now. Some of these are classics and they will
live forever. Some of them are numb-bums and they do not have any validity
at all. Even a burlesque character must burlesque something that was valid,
something that was possible, something that was within the human spectrum.
It was only human thipgs that can be burlesqued. Inanimate things can't be
burlesqued, and animals can't be. Some of them, such as camels are natural
burlesques, but they cannot be burlesqued further. 
	"One of my worst failures was Oliver Oscar Omygosh. He was bad. He
stuttered 'O---O---O---'. He had a big nose and a big rump, but neither of
them was the right shape to be funny. He had fiery red eyes. He wore size
fifteen shoes, and he was continually falling on his face. I was going to
drop Oliver Oscar as no good after the third day and night of him, but I got
a phone call after the late night performance. 'This was O-O-O-Oscar
O-O-O-Oliver -O-O-Omygosh,' some clown on the phone said. 'You hold me up to
o-o-o-opprobrium when you make fun of me on your stage. You make me an
o-o-oject of ridicule. I'm o-overly sensitive and this was a t-t-terrifying
experience. I beg you to stop it.' 'Who was this?' I demanded of the
telephone. 'Which clown was in? Orlando? Pietro? Caspar?' 'This was O-Oscar
O-O-Oliver O-O-Omygosh," the telephone said. 
	"The next night (I had kept the character on) he came to see me back
stage. None of the jokers I knew would have done a character that badly,
even for a joke. Oh, his rump was big enough, but it just didn't have
burlesque shape or style. I kicked him on it and it wasn't padding. It was
him. His eyes were fire-red, but they weren't the gaudy orange-red of the
make-up crayon. They were swollen red as if he had been crying. He had. His
nose was big enough for the role, but it looked like cheap and wrong-colored
Pleistocene such as kids use, not professional quality make-up putty. 'Aw,
get that silly thing off your face,' I said. 'I do hate slovenly
workmanship. I swung at him flat-handed to slap that hopeless nose off. I
brought blood from it, but I didn't slap it off. It was real, and he was
real. He was exactly as I had envisioned him and made him, a hopeless botch,
the worst character I ever made. 
	"You can check on this," Papa said. "I'm not lying. There was such a
person. He's in the St. Louis phone book for 1939: Oscar Oliver Omygosh. Go
down to the main telephone office tomorrow and look in a 1939 directory. You
will find that Omygosh was listed." 
	"I remember him," said Bagby. "He ran a little novelty shop just --
why, it was just two doors from your own Star and Garter, Papa. It was a
novelty business with the unusual name 'The O-O-O What Fun Novelty Store'.
Old triple O had glandular conditions and dizzy spells. He suffered a lot of
pain and melancholy. He stumbled and fell down a lot, and he cried a lot.
Papa Piccone, you are a fraud. He was true. But you didn't make him." 
	"No, no, nessuno! My whole story was true," Piccone assured the
group. "If I hadn't made him for the burlesque set, then he wouldn't have
been. I made the man by accident. But I made him, so I know that persons can
be made." 

	"As to the release of the Devil," Duffey said, "there was another
sense in which he may be released. Casey does not believe that the Devil
should be eternally damned. He believes that he should have his release from
damnation after a time, and he was working for that sort of release. If
fact, he had made an offer to God to trade souls with the Devil and suffer
damnation in his place." 
	"Casey has since lowered his sights and negotiated a lesser trade,"
Absalom Stein said. "He has traded souls with me. Really, it was just an old
soul of mine that I traded to him -- the soul of Hugo Stone the Chicago red.
And I believe that it was an old soul of his that he traded to me. He has
kept his later and muddled soul." 
	"Is Casey a red now?" Bagby asked. 
	"He is a red," Stein said. "And now I am white -- white as a Gary
snow after the furnaces have coughed on it for a few days." 
	"The enemy, in this century, was wearing a red stocking cap on one
of his seven heads," Bagby said. "The heads of that old enemy change names;
but the names of the seven present heads are Dialectic Materialism, Artistic
Degradation, Judas Priestism, Secular Liberalism, Panaceac Pentacostalism,
Murderous Molochism, Atheistic Communwism." 
	"Do you believe that Bill O'Shivaree will hang, Stranahan?" Father
McGuigan asked to try to divert the conversation. He was a progressive
priest and be was angry at this pointing out of so many of the things that
he supported. And Bagby could whip him in this combat. 
	"I'm defending O'Shivaree, am I not?" Patrick Stranahan asked
pompously. 
	"I know you're defending him. I asked whether he would hang." 
	"No. Not unless I lose the case," Patrick said. 

	"And just what context are your Animated Marvels to be considered
in, Duffey?" Stranahan asked a moment later to get Duffey out of a brooding
spell he bad fallen into. 
	"Oh, they are mostly in the context of the Argo Legend," Duffey
said. "And, of course, that was intersected by the Finnegan Cycle. Finnegan
was the original Finn McCool." 
	"And to just what species do these Marvels belong?" Patrick asked. 
	"Since you are the father of one of them, and Piccone here was the
father of another, I might be tempted to say 'The Human Species'. But that
was too narrow. They all have something of the Teras species in them too." 
	"I have heard that hinted of, but just what was it?" 
	"Oh, Gargoyles, Neanderthals, Boogers, Vaaries, Variants. We all
have some of that variant blood. I put more than ordinary amounts into my
creations." 
	But Duffey was still brooding. 
	"All right, I will prove it!" he cried suddenly, banging his hands
together and going back to an earlier subject. He rubbed his hands, then
they sparked blue and gold sparks. "I can produce anything on the table
here. Who wants me to produce a live baby dinosaur right now? I'll pour it
out right here on the library table, and it'll be alive." 
	"There is great danger to you at your age, Duffey," Father McGuigan
said. "Irishmen in particular are in danger of letting their genie be
imprwasoned in a bottle when they come to about your age, and the
imprisonment can well go on forever. You know what kind of bottle I'm
talking about. You had better forego it." 
	"What? Forego my last lonesome vice?" Duffey asked. "Who will
challenge me to produce a live baby dinosaur right here and now on this
table?" 
	And, for some reason, none of the men challenged him. Duffey seemed
a bit relieved that they didn't. He wasn't absolutely certain that he could
have done that thing, but he could do kindred things. 
	"A baby pterodactyl then?" he asked. "Or an emu, or a dodo bird?
What? Do none of you want to see wonders? A baby llama, a porcupine? A
new-hatched duck with pieces of the shell still on it? Dammit, how about a
living mouse?" 
	"A mouse was always nice," Papa Piccone said with a touch of
compassion, whether for Melchisedech or for the mouse none could say. 
	Duffey sighed. And he poured out his hands. 
	It was a young, live mouse that he poured out on the table, and they
all laughed a bit. Duffey, crocked or uncrocked, had always been pretty good
at these little pieces of magic. 
	"You call that a dinosaur?" Patrick Stranahan asked with typical
lawyer's illogic. 
	"No, I call it a mouse," Duffey said. "But if any of you had
challenged me to do it, then it would have been a dinosaur." 
	"You could have had the mouse already in your pocket," Stranahan
said. 
	"So? But I did not reach to my pocket. I could have had a baby
dinosaur already in my pocket; or a baby horse. I have big pockets." 
	So the men talked that evening, several evenings really, on weighty
subjects. 

	3 

	Here was an explanation of some of the happenings and some of the
people who took places in St. Louis in that last week of May in the year
1946. 
	Vincent Stranahan, the son of Patrick and Monica, and a talisman
child, was marrying Teresa Piccone that Saturday. She was a talisman child
also. Vincent didn't know anything about the talisman business. Teresa
likely knew all about it. 
	Vincent had been in the army in the same battery with John Schultz
(who was Hans), with Kasmir Szmansky (who was Casey), with Henry Salvatore
who was a Fat Frenchman from the Cajun swamps, and with John Solli who was
Finnegan. Duffey had wondered by what means his various talismanic creations
would meet each other. The U.S. Army was the answer. And the new question
was 'Would there have been a U.S. Army if it hadn't been required to bring
Duffey's creations together?' 
	The five boys had been good friends in the army, and had been known
as the Dirty Five. All of them, out of the army less than three months and
not very heavily settled into anything yet, were in town for the wedding.
And Teresa the bride had an Italian nose on her that had to be into
everyobdy's business. She found out about the girl friends or spouses of all
of them and contacted them to invite them to the wedding also. And they
came, that the scripture might be fulfilled. 
	Teresa already knew Marie Monaghan the wife of Hans. Hans and Marie
were already living in St. Louis, so of course, they would come. Mary
Catherine Carruthers, Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Dotty Yekouris were also
procured. These were all people of the Argo Legend also. It was the first
and only time that they would all be together this side of the legend. 
	Absalom Stein also knew everything and everybody. He had known all
five of the boys in the same army battery where he had been a sort of
special-services person. He hadn't been of the inner intimacy. It wasn't
sure whether he had been one of the Argo crewmen. He went under different
names sometimes. He didn't tell anyone why he had come from Chicago to St.
Louis. The truth was that Henry Salvatore had written to this Absalom, as he
had also written to Melchisedech Duffey, to tell him to come to St. Louis to
receive the assignment for the rest of his life. 
	So it was only by a coincidence of incredibly long arms that eleven
of the twelve persons whom Melchisedech Duffey had created would be together
in St. Louis Missouri that last week of May. 
	"Whomever the joke was on," Duffey said out loud in a seafood place,
"It wasn't on me. I will have the bunch of them today, even in central
creation." 
	"The joke, Duffey, was that your central creation was a hollow one,"
the big-nosed kid said, "and the joke was on me. That's the irony of all the
cryptic stuff. I have some good scrimshaw here, and some ood paintings. And
oysters." 
	"Don't say that," Duffey growled. "If my central creation were a
hollow one, that would reflect on me." 
	"And on me," the big-nosed kid said. "Oh how it does reflect on me!"
They were in the Broadway Oyster House, and the big-nosed kid had ordered
one hundred oysters. What epic hero was it who ate one hundred huge oysters?
That's right, one hundred oysters. And the one hundred oysters had been
served to him on quite a large platter. Oysterman Charleroi who commanded
the Oyster House didn't even blink at orders like that, but maybe he blinked
inside. The big-nosed kid had motioned to Duffey to join him at eating the
hundred oysters, and he had called Duffey by name. So the Duff had joined
him. And the kid sent oysters from his latter, a dozen here, a dozen yonder,
to other diners. But some of the diners refused the oysters in surly
fashion. 
	"They are the ones who will go to Hell, Duffey," the big-nosed kid
said. "This was the test, and they fail it. Mark their names out of the Book
of Life." 
	"All right. I've marked them out," Duffey said. 
	And some of the diners accepted the oysters and waved appreciation. 
	"Those have a chance, they have a chance," the kid said. "It wasn't
sure yet. There may be other tests for them. But they are, for the moment at
least, on the road to salvation." 
	These were good and well-done oysters, with plenty of butter and
sand. This kid was very lean. He pulled thick bulky packages out of hidden
pockets and remained neither more nor less lean. "Just have a look at these
Duffey. You may as well take possession of them. You can remit to me
somewhere if you ever sell any of them. I have heard that, of all
undiscerning art dealers, you are the most undwascerning. My kind of
dealer." 
	"My God!" Duffey cried as he unrolled a big four by eight foot
picture (how could the kid have had so long a roll in one of his pockets
anyhow?) "This was an original Van Ghi." 
	"Oh, I'm Van Ghi," the kid said, "but I don't know whether I'll
paint under that name again. I'm getting about good enough to use my own
name." 
	"My God, this is worth thousands," Duffey said. 
	"Yeah, it's pretty good," the kid agreed. "But these scrimshaw
pieces are at least as good and you won't be able to get more than three or
four dollars for each of them. The only ones you can sell them to are sea
men. But the sea men collectors will recognize them as carvings of Count
Finnegan. My immediate aim and aspiration was to go to St. Kitts or Basse
Terre and be a beach bum. The lack of money was all that prevents. It takes
a fortune of at least half a million dollars." 
	"When I was last a beach bum, back in the seven hidden years of my
life, it didn't take hardly any money at all," Duffey said, handling the
scrimshaw carvings with excited hands. 
	"A good beach bum has to have the air of big money about him," the
kid insisted. "Of money impounded, or of money reserved, of money abrogated
or refused perhaps, but of money that has left its aroma and green stain on
him. Unless people will whisper of a beach bum, 'He has millions whenever he
wants them', or 'He poured out millions as if they were water', unless
people spin such legends about him, then he wasn't the highest sort of bum.
There was no way it can be faked. Nobody ever attained the status of top bum
without deserving it." 
	Duffey was shaking so hard that he Could hardly eat his oysters. For
the paintings, yes (there were a dozen truly magnificent), and for the
carvings, yes, but mostly for the person here. Did not Fingal the Hero, and
in another version it was Finn McCool, once eat one hundred oysters and each
of them bigger than a wagon wheel? Was this kid, no bigger than Duffey in
appearance, an incognito hero or giant? Who was it who had lived all those
lives underground? Which high hero had been the son of a Teras? But Duffey's
shaking son turned into delighted laughter. 
	Why should he be overpowered by one of his own creations? This kid
was seven famous underground artistic geniuses in one, but he wouldn't have
been any of them if it hadn't been for Duffey. Why should he be overwhelmed
by the son of a Teras when he had been a close personal friend of that very
Teras, the Monster Giulio? Why should... ? 
	The big-nosed kid was John Solli (Finnegan), the son of the Monster
Giulio, of course, the central creation of Duffey himself. 
	"My father Giulio once said that he found only seven or eight
friends in this world, and all of them were somehow related to you,"
Finnegan said. "He didn't really love a city; he loved the swamps. He took
me down to the Cajun swamps several times, and he made 'calls' for me that I
would call with when we drifted along in a flat boat with 'ceiling three
feet' over us, of swamp fronds. Other fathers made duck calls for their
sons, or coon calls, or swamp deer calls. 
	"My father Giulio made panther calls and alligator calls, and
devil-fish calls, and swamp-boa calls, and hairy man calls, and white shark
calls. I never knew what I'd call up from the water or down from the vined
trees when I put one of those calls to my mouth. He whittled them out of the
wood of the tupelo-gum tree. There was no wood like it." 
	"What will you do now, Finnegan?" 
	"I'll break my hands and my head for a little whthe on the customed
things. Then I'll throw it ill over and wander. Wander and paint, and paint
and wander. 
	"I wandered for seven years once," Duffey said. "And now I can go
back, almost at will, and wander still more in those same years." 
	"And I will wander for seven years," Finnegan said. "Then they will
bury me on the Marianao Coast of Cuba. Whether they can keep me buried I
don't know. Someday there will come to your hands a great painting 'The
Resurrection of Count Finnegan'. The story in this painting will indicate
that they are not able to keep me buried. 
	"I will go back to New Orleans. So will you go there, by the way.
But I will stay there only a few months or weeks. Then I will wander. I
haven't any scenario to follow. Neither God nor Henri Salvatore had provided
me with one. For impediments I am given my own thorn in the flesh and my own
monsterness. But there are certain documents that I can carry in my mind.
These, and the things that I paint wherever I find a good painting surface
in the world, are the closest things to a guide or scenario I have." 
	Finnegan shook hands with Duffey in that peculiar six-fingered grip
that a Teras will use with a friend who was not a Teras. They joined in dark
and lean laughter, and they sat together for a whlie longer, Duffey looked
closely at this one of the creatures he had made. Whether it was good or
bad, he liked it. 

	4

	It was necessary to introduce a number of original documents here.
They are all essential to this account. Some of them were beloved by
Finnegan, some of them by Duffey, some of them by everybody we know. 

	'Be calm and vigilant, because your enemy the devil was prowling
like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Stand up to him...' 
	[First Peter 5,8-9] 

	'I walk in sunlight through the snarling dark 
	Defiant of that lion in the street, 
	The Noonday Devil in the noonday heat 
	That smirched the souls of Karl and Kitty Kark.' 
	[Dotty O'Toole. Sonnet.] 

	'I want you to be happy, always happy in the Lord: I repeat, what I
want was your happiness. Let your tolerance be evident to everyone: the Lord
was very near. There was no need to worry; but if there was anything you
need, pray for it, asking God for it with prayer and thanksgiving, and that
peace of God, which was so much greater than we understand, will guard our
hearts and thoughts, in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, fill your minds
with everything that was true, everything that was noble, everything that
was good and pure, everything that we love and honor, and everything that
can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise. Keep doing all the things that
you learned from me and have been taught by me and have heard or seen that I
do. Then the God of peace will be with you.' 
	[Paul, Philippians 4, 4-9] 

	'...for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against
principalities and powers, against the shapers of darkness in this world and
against the spiritual army of evil in high stations.' 
	[Paul. Ephesians. 6, 12-13] 

	'It was they who are the spiritual army of evil in high stations,
the sneering and deforing devils of the word-mills. And the high stations
that they occupy are sometimes stations inside the Church itself.' 
	[Miles O'Connel. Handbook of Treasons.] 

	'We find in it the ground for the most cheering hope of the future;
provided that the associations we have described continue to grow and
spread, and are well and wasely administered. Let the State watch over these
societies of citizens united together in the exercise of their right; but
let it not thrust itself into their peculiar concerns and their
organizations, for things move and live by the soul ithin them, and they may
be killed by the grasp of a hand from without... 
	'Prejudice, it was true, was mighty, and so was the love of money;
but if the sense of what was just and right be not destroyed by depravity of
heart, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly feeling
towards men whom they see to be so industrious and so modest, who so
unmistakably prefer honesty to lucre, and the sacredness of duty to all
other considerations.' 
	[Leo XIII. The Condition of Labor.] 

	'I have said that the prime product of the Reformation was the
isolation of the soul. That truth contains, in its development, very much
more than its mere statement might promise. 
	'The isolation of the soul means a loss of corporate sustenance; of
the sane balance produced by common experience, a public certainty, and the
general will. The isolation of the soul was the very defifition of its
unhappiness. But this solvent applied to society does very much more than
merely complete and confirm human misery. 
	'In the first place, and underlying all, the isolation of the soul
releases in a society a furious new accession of force. The break-up of any
stable system, in physics as in society, makes actual a prodigious reserve
of potential energy. It transforms the power that was keeping things
together into a power driving separately each component part, the effect of
an explosion.' 
	[H. Belloc. Europe and the Faith.] 

	'Bootless for such as these the mighty task 
	Of bottling God the Father in a flask.' 
	[H. Belloc, Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine.] 

	'Right in the middle of all these things there stands up an enormous
exception... It was nothing else than the loud assertion that this
mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person. It declares
that really and even recently, right in the middle of historic times, there
did walk into this world this original invisible being; about whom the
thinkers make theories and the mythologies hand down myths; the man who Made
the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things has
indeed been implied by the best thinkers, as well as by the most beautiful
legends. But nothing of this sort has ever been implied in any of them. It
was simply false to say that the other... heros had claimed to be the
mysterious master and maker, of whom the world has dreamed and disputed. Not
one of them had ever claimed to be anything of the sort. The most that any
religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being.
The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was
present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present... in the daily
life of the Roman Empire -- that was something utterly unlike anything else
in nature. It was the one startling statement that man has made since he
spoke his first articulate word...' 
	[G. K. Chesterton. The Everlasting Man.] 

	'These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral.
I have to carve gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to
others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the
style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church.' 
	[G. K. Chesterton. On Gargoyles.] 

	'Nevertheless, the struggle between good and evil remained in the
world as a sad legacy of the original fall. Nor has the ancient tempter ever
ceased to deceive mankind with false promises. It was on this account that
one convulsion following upon another has marked the passage of the
centuries, down to the revolution of our own days... Entire peoples find
themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which
oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the redeemer. 
	"This all too imminent danger, Venerable Brethern, as you have
already surmised, was Bolshevestic and Atheistic Communism...' 
	[Pius XI. Atheistic Communism.] 

	'Only because it was inclusive can Catholicism be exclusive; only
because it comprehends all religious truth can it be intolerant of all
error. It was because it was the Catholic Center that it cannot admit any
other center, to regard as central any portion of the circumference.' 
	[E.I. Watkin. The Catholic Center.] 

	'But there are too the day to day, or rather the moment to moment
choices of heaven and hell. Before every human heart that has ever beat out
its allotted measure, the dare of goals a high as God himself was tossed
down; to be accepted, or to be fled from in Terror.' 
	[Farrel & Healy, My Way of Life, the Summa Simplified for
Everyone.] 

	"There are certain Iron Meadows that are inhabited by Aspects, and
we cannot be sure that God knows about them. Some aspects of the Argo Legend
dwell in one of these Iron Meadows, and neither God nor Duffey knws about
them.' 
	[Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.] 

	'A Duffey there was who had views 
	On subjects diverse and diffuse. 
	But we are the stuffy 
	Inventions of Duffey, 
	And Duffey's a gruffy magus.' 
	[Dotty Yekouris. Pelican Pellets.] 

	'The boys in the street often call 'Hot Stuff' at me, and it was a
familiar and friendly name. But they do not know, except for several medical
students among them who have heard of my case, that I have a body
temperature of one hundred and eleven degrees. The doctors have told me that
I should be a bird, or that I should be dead. Well, I am not a bird. I fly
sometimes, but privately. And I am not dead. I will never die. 
	'I have asked for almost every gift that comes into my head, and I
have been given many of them. One I much prize was the gift of calmness. I
cannot command everything, but I can command tempests, alike meteorological
and society and soul tempests, and they will be silent. I can rebuke the
winds and the sea I can make hurricanes veer off and lose all their
substance in rain. 
	'I have been given other gifts, but I wonder why some such strong
gifts have been put into my hands: no hands have ever been weaker than mine.
On the 'grip machine' at the 'Fun House out on the Lake' I can grip only
thirty-seven pounds. Dotty Yekouris can grip a hundred and ninety pounds.
But it was into my hands that the care of the whole world was placed for as
much as one full hour out of every twenty-four.' 
	[Margaret Stone. Third Epistle to the Kids in St. Louis.] 

	'It was written that if they will not believe Moses and the
Prophets, neither will they believe one risen from the Dead. My God, My God,
they have got to believe the One risen from the Dead... Why should I not
affirm the doctrine of the Real Presence of Dauphin Street at midnight?
There are people on Dauphin Street at midnight to whom it has never been
preached... Don't you ever have the feeling that this night one more must be
found? Imagine the panic of the Patriarch when he could not find seventy.
And the figure was reduced, and he still could not find them. This night,
perhaps, something will happen to the world unless one more can be found. He
may destroy it falls short by that one. I fancy that thousands of times it
has just got by, and many times it has just lot by by one. And what if I
alone can find that one tonight, and the world will stop if I don't...
others who knew the urgency. Maybe one of them was worn out and not allowed
to die until I came to replace him...' 
	[Margaret Stone. In Archipelago.] 

	'We are all of us Argonauts of the Argo, but we have been
shipwrecked or stranded on this mundane shore. We are stranded with the
caution that we must not allow this shore to remain wrongly mundane. This
has become a virtual exile to us, and we come to doubt whether we will ever
sail on those sweet seas again. 
	'But we are more fortuned than most. And we have the surety, if we
do not destroy it, that we will be on that Bark again, in another world if
not in this one. We remember it and ourselves. Duffey may remember it less
than any of us, but he was custodian of the talismans which were our
recollection; his was the responsibility of activating us to new life after
we had slept. 
	'It was the Risen Chrwast who said 'Wait here on this shore until I
call you.' All who have been on the Argo understand this.' 
	[Hans Schultz] 

	'If Duffey did indeed make us, it was three thousand years ago, for
we sailed together on the Argo that far in the past. But the talismans (they
were part of the gold filagree of the Argo, laid over pieces of the 'Talking
Oak' Dordogne, and the gold that was used came from the Great Fleece that we
carried), the talismans have not the function of creating so much as the
function of Anamnesis or Recollection. They were to awake us and fill us
with remembering. It was by us having held the talismans at our birth that
we now recognize and recollect each other, now that we are once again in a
wakeful state. Our coming together and knowing each other now was a
prefiguration of the Resurrection Itself. We are under a blessing. In our
own life (our mysterious latter life now in the contemporary world) we have
some of the experiences that are Beyond Life. We are born again more
literally than are most. We have here our first resurrection in the
Resurrection of Christ. 
	'It was a sweet, sad paganism that said, 
	'And if thou wilt, remember. 
	And if thou wilt, forget.'
	And we have remembered, as yet in fragments only, but we remember
more and more as time unwraps from us. The talismans that we grasped at
birth were pieces of the Holy Argo. They re-create us and tell us who we
are.' 
	[Teresa (Showboat) Piccone.] 

	'The temptation and fascination, Melchisedech, was always to be
going somewhere. This temptation will become even stronger with the personal
release of the Adversary. But better than going somewhere was being there
already. There was a saying that 'Happiness was not a destination but a
journey'. This was wrong. Oh, our life was a journey, but it was only a
journey through time and space. It wasn't away from our foundation ever. We
are born or reborn into the state of having already arrived. We have an
inner orientation. We know where it was. The 'Quest Completed' was our basic
state. The Golden Fleece had already been found, and we were already wrapped
in it. The 'Grail Abundant', the 'Grail-Filled-to-Overflowing' has been
possessed, and we eat and drink in that possession of it. We are in
Paradise. Our task was to rebuild the world, but not yet to rebuild it in
another place. 
	'Our construction will always be 'old-fashioned', and it will be
hooted at by the hooters. It will be as old-faihioned as the first Creation:
it will be from the beginning. Oh, we will drink new wine out of new
bottles, but both the wine and the bottles were already new when the Day
Star was made. 
	'Avoid the perils of the false activists who are always bedeviling
one to be moving and doing. There was, among the urgencies which we must
find or make, paradisal laziness which we must cultivate. This was
absolutely required of us. It was not slovenliness, it was not indolence, it
was not pigritia. It was laziness in its proper form. When we examine our
consciences at night, after no matter how many hectic hours, we must ask
'Did I take sufficient time to be blessedly lazy this day?' There can be no
peace or calm without it. 
	'Was this prospect of rebuilding the world sufficiently exciting? A
spastic or jerky excitement was not consonant with grace. A stimulate was
only a goad, and most often it was a self-torture. Excitement was one of the
fleshy things that was easiest to give up and most useful in its absense. 
	'Are there, in rebuilding the world, any details too trivial to
concern ourselves with? Oh, we concern ourselves where the spirit dictates.
Right management of the muskrat population on Barataria Bay may be a detail
that we should be concerned with. The election of a president will almost
certainly be too trivial for our bothering. And do not be misled by evil
persons who say that everyone should vote. In three votings out of four, no
honest person can vote for any candidate listed, and no honest person does.
It will be given us to know what things are important and what things are
not. 
	'Duffey, whom I have not met yet, reminds us that we are all Kings
in the Kingdom, from our childhoods, and in our own right. We may be leper
kings, but the 'Leper King' was a holy man. 
	'Margaret Stone, whom I have not met, reminds us that we must always
be aflame. Why yes, that was another thing. When we examine our consciences
at night, we must also ask, 'Did I spend sufficient time in the Fiery
Furnace today?' It was so easy to forget these things. 
	'Now the times become clotted and portentous. It was the second
coming of Satan after his release from bondage. It has happened already, or
it is happening right now. Some say that, if Satan was to be released, it
seems most likely that he was released at the start of the First World War
and that he was responsible for the bloodshed then and since. No, the blood
so far was only a trickle to the blood that will come. What has gone before
was only the Devil rattling the bars of his cage. Now he was out. 
	'The millennium has already been here. The bolting of the door on
the Devil was done quietly by Otto I of the Germanies at Aachen in the year
946. Later, but in the same year, the prisoner was transferred to another
and faster prison. This was on the peninsula called the Euxine Chersonese,
and modernly known as the Crimea on the Black Sea. 
	'And you, Duffey, be in St. Louis the last week of May and I will
give you your instructions for the rest of your life. That sounds pompous of
me, does it not? It wasn't though.' 
	[Heni Salvatore. Letter to Melchisedech Duffey.] 
	(This was the longer letter, the one that was not sent.) 

	'The Argo Voyages are not merely something that we took part in many
centuries ago. They still go on. This was our rich other life that continues
in reserved places whthe we wake and sleep and wake again in this place
which I call 'The World of Record'. 
	'There was one first instruction that we remember when we wake:
"There are not any ordinary persons on the Argo; and such ordinary persons
as you may find on the Shore must be reformed out of their ordinariness."
	'Yes, we have with us King Melchisedech the Duff who was always
intrinsic to our crew. A King on Land he was, but he was never Captain of
the Crew except on a temporary acting basis when he took his regular turn of
duty. His main assignment was always to activate us from any periodic sleep.
Persons of other Holy Quests and Successes do sometimes fall into these
sleeps, and they sleep until the end of time. Not so with us. We wake, and
we wake again. 
	'God bless our Crew. God bless our Ship. God bless this shore, which
was named 'The World', until we go to sea once more.' 
	[Dotty Yekourwas.] 

	5

	Teresa Piccone was a delight. She was all kindness and clairvoyance
and charm. She was one of those sly-eyed, urchin-grinning, gray-stone-carved
Blessed Virgins who broke out all over Northern Italy in the latter part of
the Tenth Century. Whatever forgotten rooms or forgotten grounds they are
dug out of, they have a shouting freshness as well as a mossy sense of
absurdity on them. It was almost certain that there was some moss growing on
Showboat Piccone, for she was an Earth Creature. Green moss growing in the
corners of her eyes, yes. It was quite certain that there was star-spakle
growing all over her, for she was a Heavenly creature. There was no reason
for Duffey to be ashamed for his workmanship in her or for her electric
presence. This Showboat had great compassion and affection for her scenarist
in the human comedy, for her maker Melchisedech Duffey. And she was the
finest thing that the talented Duffey ever did. 
	And Vincent Stranahan -- Oh, he was the young man that this Teresa
was marrying. He was the best friend of Finnegan. He was the best friend of
almost everybody. He was brilliant, of course, since he was one of Duffey's
Animated Marvels, but he may have been the least brilliant of the bunch. It
would be close, between Vincent and Casey and Mary Catherine. And yet he was
outstanding by any other standards. He was so outstanding that Duffey could
say to his old friend, Vincent's father Patrick: 
	"They don't make them like they used to, Patrick," this to that huge
and somewhat weed-grown father. "They make them a lot better now." 
	"I know it, Duff, I know it," Patrick Stranahan said. 

	And then there was Finnegan. Finnegan had all the goodness (what an
odd, what an only word for him!), all the preternaturalness, all the
monsterness of his father Giulio. He hadn't quite the sheer and shocking
ugliness of appearance that had belonged to his father; he didn't have the
great bulk of his father; he hadn't quite the same roaring protest under
torture: he may not have suffered such abysmal tortues, though he had
suffered. Finnegan believed himself to be half Human and half Teras; but
it's only to the narrow vision that there's a difference between the Human
and the Teras. Only in a manner of speaking are they different. There are,
to one who sees with open eyes, half a dozen such nations of the one and
intermingled people of God. 
	It was hard to come onto the essence this Finnegan who was as 
quicksilverwash as Teresa. It was Finnegan who explained to Duffey (probably
at their first meeting over the one hundred oysters) the difficulty of
finding the essence of any person. 
	"We had a great and high-ranking analyst," Finnegan said. "He was of
the equivalent of demiure or archangel rank, and he was examining a contrary
and powerful person to discover the essence of him. Duffey, he dissected
that person, and stripped down the layers of him as if he were a Duffey
onion. He took the hide clear off of that fellow and threw it into a corner
where it glimmered and glowed with its electric aura pulsing and throbbing
about it. 'Why do they put so much wrapping on them?' the analyst asked. He
unstrung and removed the limbs, and he decided that they were not essential.
They looked somewhat like giant limbs and somewhat like statuary limbs as
they lay there. The analyst took out all the viscera and decided that they
spent a very long journey to go a short distance; he decided that they
weren't essential either. He removed all the organs and lights from the
person's cavity, and he could find no essence in them. He took out the
brains with their dangling cords. He discarded it all, layer after layer and
wrapping after wrapping. 'We've got to be getting close to the essence of
it,' he said, but he wasn't. When he unwrapped the very last portion, he
found that it was all wrapping with nothnig inside it. He hadn't found the
essence. The whole thing had been an empty jug wrapped in primordial straw. 
	"But, in the middle of the night, he got up and went to the
dissecting chamber where he had unwrapped the man. 'I must have left the
light on in there,' he said, but he hadn't. And yet there was a light. The
whole scattered thing glowed with light. So the analyst wrote a note to
himself 'Examine, tomnorrow, whether there was not an essence somehow
diffused through all these wrappings themselves. This light has got to come
from somewhere.' 
	"But the analyst himself died before morning, and his exploration
was not and has not been completed." 
	Yes, you could skin Finnegan and throw his pelt into the corner, and
it would still crackle with aura ad smoke with essence. But one couldn't
find all his essence bottled in one place. 
	Finnegan was an artist of transcending talent, and as such, he was
recognized by Duffey the art dealer and artist dealer. The only medium in
which Duffey was a true artist was in the manufactory or activation of
people, and in this Finnegan was his greatest masterpiece. No, no, this
wasn't a contradiction. It has been said that Teresa was the finest (but not
the greatest) thing that Duffey ever wrought. Finnegan was not fine. 
	Finnegan was a vagabond, and Duffey had been a master vagabond for
seven vears. He recognized that Finnegan's whole life so far had been a
displaced seven-year wandering through the purgatorial lands that seemed to
coincide with the world. 

	These were all of Duffey's Animated Marvels. The essence of none of
them was easily distilled out: 
	The big-brained and big-hearted Hans. What an edifice! The most open
man in the world, and who could know him? 
	Henri Salvatore (The Emperor Henry of Neustria) who had whole
empires within himself and to whom had been given the task of rebuilding the
world. Not since Archbwashop Turpin of the Charlemagne Cycle had there been
so great a prelate who was also so great a general. 
	Casey Szymansky whom Dufrey had known almost every day of that boy's
life, and had hardly known at all. But some of his mentations and notions
had already sent tremors through the whole cosmic signaling system. 
	Stein of the people! Stein had received one of Casey's old souls in
a weird trade, but the combination was older than either of them. Der
Kasmir-Stein is known mostly as a remote jewel of India, but it was a hybrid
jewel of disparate essences. It was a new appearance here, and its glitter
began to make itself felt everywhere. It was not Casey, it was not Stein; it
was an abiding spark struck off by their glancing contact. 
	Marie Monaghan, 'Our Southern Nature's Solitary Boast', the greatest
thing that Australia ever gave to the rest of the world. 
	Mary Catherine Carruthers ('But Thou, Chicago Ephrata, out of Thee
shall come --"), how many of the great ones have overlooked her to their
loss? 
	Mary Virginia Schaeffer who was the pride of both Galveston Texas
and Morgan City Louisiana. More of her, more of her forever! 
	Dotty Yerkouris who was a journalist and a member of the prestigious
'Poison Pen Society', as well as barmaid. 
	And Finnegan and Showboat Teresa Piccone and Mr. X. X will not be
given now. He plans careful entrances, and he will enter in his own time. 
	Aw c'mon, you know that there aren't people like any of these where
you come from. Some pilgrims will wander through a lifetime without meeting
even one genuine Duffey Animation. And there are eleven who were in one city
at one ime, if they had only been there. 
	Was it absoutely certain that this was the original crew of the
original Argo? Yes, it was certain. It has been checked out and proved. 
	The wedding was a fine one, done by one of the perfect couples and
by Father McGuigan in Teresa's parwash church (the Stranahan's church too;
they lived only a block apart). There were numbers of distinguwashed
Irishmen and Italians there, and smatterings of the people of barbarian
races. 
	The reception was a grand one. Duffey shined by his antics, and he
was outshined by many of his own people, especially the Finnegan who
surpassed himself. There was pleasure and grandeur (people are entitled to
that on such occasions), and also some of the scrubbiest carrying-on ever.
And there was the time when things were coming to their glorious
winding-down and Dotty Yekouris with hands on hips had looked at the magus
and laughed: 
	"Thou'rt perfect, Duffey!" 
	"Such early perfection will do the boy in," Henry Salvatore warned.
"If he would be still more perfect, let him follow me." 
	And Duffey had to speak to Henry about that for a moment: 
	"You wrote to me 'Come to St. Louis', Henri, and I came," Duffey
said. "But you have not yet given me the scanario for the rest of my life.
Give it now." 
	"Come to New Orleans," Henri said. "You have been here in Damascus
-- St. Louis, for a week, and you have been given the opportunity for
blindness and recovery, though I haven't noticed you undergoing either of
the experiences. Now you can go to New Orleans and labor there for the rest
of your life. There was a blessed place there, an asphalt garden, and you
will grow cucumbers in it for the rest of your days. You'll grow them for
the Greater Glory, and they'll be superior ones." 

	Finnegan, Henri, Duffey, Dotty, and Mary Schaeffer all got into
Mary's Ford and drove down to New Orleans. This was the last Saturday of May
of the year 1946. 
	And also, on that last Saturday of May of 1946, on the almost-island
of Crimea, out of a deep iron-doored dungeon, the Devil was released from
his thousand-year imprisonment. 
	But hadn't he been released just a hundred years before that, in
1846? We don't know. Maybe the release was a recurring thing. 
 
	Book Two

	'For this Melchisedech was King of Salem, priest of the most high
God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed
him to whom Abraham divided the tithes of all. First, as his name shows, he
was King of Justice, and then he was also King of Salem, that was, King of
Peace. Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither
beginning of days nor end of life, but likened to the Son of God, he
continued a priest forever... But he whose genealogy was not recorded among
them received titfies of Abraham and blessed him who had the promwase. 
	[Paul. Hebrews.] 

	1
 
	Several other primary documents are here. They are necessary for an
understanding of the recent history and present condition of the world.
Primary documents are always like treasures of gold and gems spread out to
daylight. Or they are like gold and gems would be if they were many times
more rare than they now are. 
	'With buck-swords in Neustria during the millennium! Duffey died
there, durin the seven hidden years of his life, and somebody saved his
ashes in a cigar box or humidor or urn. It wasn't an ordinary cigar box or
whatever. It was an extraordinary sixteenth receptacle, and it had belonged
to the King of Spain. Mr. X. later brought this receptacle with its ashes to
Duffey. There are very few men who keep their own ashes in a cigar can on
their desks. 
	'The 'Devil in His Dungeon' was both historical fact and valid
element of the folk unconscious during the one-thousand-year period from the
years 946 to 1946. We will miss 'The Devil in His Dungeon'. He almost
guaranteed that things were well in the upper part of the house. Nostalgia
was born with the loosening of the Devil from his Crimean dungeon in 1946.
The word 'nostalgia' was used before that, but not in the same meaning. The
world had lived trough a thousand-year-long 'good old days' without knowing
it. Now there will not be such good days, and there will not be much
nostalgia for the trashy evil that we now live and breathe. 'Neustria' or
'Latter Neustria' are unhandy names for the real empire of the one thousand
years. 'Christendom' was a handy and true name for the era and extent, but
use of such words will not very long be permitted now. We enter a new era of
slavery where only incoherence and evil will be permitted. 
	'Tne 'Waves of the Future', of which we have heard for near a
lifetime now, are backward phenomena breaking onto the past. Hitler was
indeed a man of the future, or from the future, but he was raiding backwards
into history. He correctly appraised that the province he was raiding
backwards into, 'Greater Neustria', had a thousand year extent, but he was a
man without direction in several ways. But surely he knew that he was
traveling out of the future and impinging on a present and past from the
wrong direction than himself. These are still with us, and they are
achieving popular adoration. They show that the future will be so evil, but
at the same time so cheap and contemptible a thing, that we need not fear to
attack it.' 
	[Absalom Stein. Notes on the Finnegan Cycle.] 

	'The infectors or kindlers are themselves now stunned by the
violence of the infection. They had gone in small groups for not much more
than one hundred years. Since the metaphorical earlier release, they defiled
mildly and they infected mildly, and they set their fires with small and
flickering torches. Their doings seemed to be no more than token things,
curious incursions of the several generations of the Sons of the Devil. But
now there was effect. Believe me, they themselves are amazed by the present
scope of the conflagration that has developed in the decade and a half since
the deaths of the Papadiaboloi. It was almost as if the kindlers did not
intend it. 
	'I knew many of these infestors, and I have data on all of them in
my fthes. They were all incomplete and ineffectual persons, going about
their dark business in almost somnambulistic fashion. They were dull and
isolated botches of paint, carrying no message and understanding none; but
they have accidentally come together to form a clear and fearsome picture
whose initial design was too deep to come from themselves. Perhaps, as has
been said, their Father Himself really has been released this time. But the
infestors were jagged little shards of base metal, brittle and soft and
worthless, and with no conception of pattern. Together, though, they formed
the strong brazen key which unlocks the iron door and released him who was
confined for the day of the great thousand.' 
	[Melchisedech Duffey. Letter to John Schultz.] 

	'Jesus Christ was the total opposite of the revolutionary. He was
the strong partisan of every jot and tittle of the law. After all, he made
the law. the only way He could be a revolutionary was against Himself. But
Jesus Barabbas (we now know that this was the correct name of the
instigator) was a revolutionary all the way. Barabbas was a cheap-shot
artist and a cheap-effect artist, as are his followers even till this day.
It was Jesus Barabbas whom the 'Jesus People' follow, but they pretend that
there was only one Jesus. This brings us to the question of 'Dark Followers'
or 'Dark Companions' or 'Dark Correspondences', to groups and institutions,
as well as to persons.
	'The Argo sathed westward again and again from Illyria, but the
Hadriaticus sometimes proved to be a sea without any far shore, and
sometimes it was a sea whose Western shore was not Italy. Oh certainly, I
sailed on the Argo again and again and again. Do you not remember? I was
Orpheus. We came to a wide variety of shores, named and nameless, but we did
not come to any imaginary shores. All were real, and almost all of them were
dark shadows of other shores and voyages. Don Juan made a good thing out of
this: he pulled a frame-up and arranged that a shoddy double of him should
go to hell in his place. And it happened so. But Don Juan was himself the
shoddy double of a most eleant and most depraved sinner, and he was
entrapped into serving an eternity in a most elegant and most painful hell
for a man of sins too refined for himself ever to find pleasure in. 
	'Casey Szymansky, out of compassion, traded souls with Stein and
agreed to go to hell in his place. It was a successful deal from Stein's
standpoint, and nothng succeeds like success. Stein came into Casey's brains
and his talents as side effects of the same deal, and he grows grander and
brighter whthe Casey shrivels. Stein had all the good things now, and they
shall not be taken away from him. 
	'I am tired, and I go into incoherence. I see true connections that
I cannot see in moments of clarity, but I am not able to express them. The
enemy has designed this obstacle for us. But the enemy may not know that I
have a wife who was able to make clarity out of my incoherent expressions.
Please do so, dear.' 
	[John Schultz. Letter to his wife Marie.] 

	'Finnegan seeks death and does not find it. That was the main point
of his puzzling quest. His own fleece was named thanatos and not mallion.
Finnegan did not die in the ward in the hospital in the Philippines. But
somebody died there in his name, and an army-doctor-friend of mine wrote me
that Finnegan did die there in his presence, which letter I received the
same day that Finnegan arrived in St. Louis. This amazed me, but it didn't
seem to amaze Finnegan when I showed the letter to him. 
	'Finnegan did not, apparently, die on the landing at Naxos, though X
swears that one of the bodies was Finnegan's. But X himself spent the latter
part of that same week in Finnegan's company. A thing like that would not
bother X, but it bothers me. 
	'Finnegan did not die in the cabin of the Brunhilde, but someone
died there at the hands of Papadiabolous. He did not die at Tangier with Don
Lewas, and yet there were two dead bodies at the bottom of the tell. He did
not die at the hands of Saxon X. Seaworthy on Galveston Island, though Doll
Delaney found a body she was sure was Finnegan's, and Miss Delaney knew
Finnegan well. And possibly Finnegan did not die on the Marinanao Coast near
Havana. I believe, in spite of all the reports, that he is still alive. I
also believe that I have run athwart of several tall-story artists, not the
least of whom are the army doctor-friend of mine, Doll Delaney, and Finnegan
himself. But the death quest has always been there. 
	'Finnegan was a double phougaro or funnel, the link between two
different worlds. Yet there are characters (X, Biloxi Brannagan, Doll
Delaney, Melchisedech Duffey) who have verifiable existence in both of the
worlds. Finnegan himself believed that he was subject to topological
inversion, that one of thee worlds was always interior to him and the other
world exterior to him, and that they sometimes exchange places. But where
does that leave us who live in either of the two worlds? Are we not
sometimes reduced to being no more than items in the mind of Finnegan? 
	'This topological inversion also occurs in the case of Melchisedech
Duffey. In one form of the inversion, Melchisedech was the 'creator' of a
dozen or so of us. Well, so he was then. I have felt it of myself and known
it. But that was only in the least plausible of his contingent worlds. 
	'As to the voyages, there was the question of ships. Was the
Brunhilde the first ship, or was it the third? Was it the original Argo? Or
was it a later and unsanctified appearance of that ship, following the Bark
in time? We have also the question of superimposed levels of experience in
the Cruise of the Brunhilde. X says that not all of the events of that
voyage happened to Finnegan in the first decade of the second antebellum
period: he says that a strong substratum of them happened to Giulio Solli,
the Monster Forgotten, the Father of Finnegan, in the decade before World
War I, and that Finnegan has filial memory of them. The atmosphere of that
earlier period does sometimes break in strongly on the voyage. But so much
of this information depends on X who was not to be depended on. 
	'Finnegan was out of the Yellow Book of Lecan (the Tain Bo
Cuailinge). This pre-supposed that Finnegan was identical with Fingal and
also with Cu Chulainn. Well, Finnegan was capable of being all of them. To
those interested in this line, I recommend Thurneysen's Die Irwische
Helden-une-Konigsage. There was repetition of some of the incidents of the
Seven Hidden Years of the life of Melchisedech Duffey and of some of the
Brunhilde-Finnegan incidents. It was not even certain that Duffey (whose
Seven Hidden Years were all before the birth of Finnegan or in his earliest
childhood) has first claim on the anecdotes. Duffey knew Giulio Solli the
father of Finnegan, and Duffey pirated and ransacked the mind of Giulio as
he did so many others. 
	'I myself was present at several of the Brunhilde-Finnegan episodes
(whether in the flesh or out of the flesh, I do not know: God knows); I was
present at one meeting of Don Lewis and Manuel of which Finnegan knew
nothing, so I could not have lifted this from Finnegan's mind. And I was
present and watched them dine in death-like glitter on the Grand Canary.
John Schultz also experienced a rapport with one of the Brunhilde incidents.

	'The loves of Finnegan are as puzzling as his deaths. Most of them
did not happen in the flesh or in time, though several puzzled women
believed that they happened. 
	'We are all of us in legend. It was absolutely impossible that
anyone should be in life who has not first been in Legend. But no one of us
understands his own legend. Mary Schaeffer says that I am the Wandering Jew,
particularly in my writing style. I have not at all determined the exact
relationship of the Argo Legend to the Finnegan Cycle.'
	[Absalom Stein. Notes on the Argo Legend and Further Notes on the
Finnegan Cycle.] 

	'Finnegan is a ghost, of course. Which of us was not? But he has the
peculiar habit of coming and and inhabiting people. All the Fivers
understand this, and they are not spooked by the spook, except Casey a
little bit. Have pity on all poor people who never had a ghost of their own!
Vincent says that Finnegan was the third person in our marriage, sometimes
inhabiting him, and more often me; that Finnegan was both Anima and Animus
to us. Vincent has been reading Jung, and oh my poor husband, you have not
the brains for him! 
	'It scared Stein the first time he experienced a Finnegan
Visitation. He believed that it was a death visitation, and he made note of
the time and date. It was the afternoon of Passion Sunday of the year 1948.
Well, why shouldn't Finnegan be both a person and a ghost at the same time
if he have a talent for it? I have that talent myself.
	'I played a part in one of the episodes. I was the Oread
Anemotrephes in the sequence on the Mountain. I was clearly conscious of it
all: I played it like a comic skit at the old Star and Garter. I was
displeased at the way the other two Oreads handled their parts. It's the
ethnicity of them, I think. We get quite a few Greek girls at the Star and
Garter in one act or another. They're kind of pretty, they're kind of sexy,
but they can't act. Simplistic as hell they are, and kind of wooden. I don't
care if they did invent acting: they're no good at it. 
	'I told Oriebates that if she couldn't do better than that, why
hell, I'd get Mary Newshee out of the popcorn booth to play it. The Star and
Garter had already been sold when this happened, and Mary Newsbee was
married and living on Walnut Street downtown; but that didn't seem to be the
case in the episode. It was not a dream though. It was a detached
experience. 
	'What puzzles me was that Duffey knows so little about such things
at first hand. But he catches on fast. He pirates minds and gets the stuff
out of them and pretends that he knew it all the time, That Maker Man, he
just doesn't have it.' 
	[Teresa Piccone Stranahan. Private Letter.] 

	'Showboat wrote that? How did she know that Finnegan was a ghost? He
was, though. But Finnegan and Showboat were not lovers ever. Their intimacy
was of another sort. Finnegan was likely not a real lover of anyone ever,
unless he could find another Teras to carry on with. With me, he was a
ghost-lover. Well, am I a fornicator thereby? Not I. Ours was not a thing
that can be put into flesh, nor into words. 
	'Of the adventures, oh, I was on all the original adventures myself!
I was one of the Argo Company, yes, but the 'Adventures' were variants. I
know what Finnegan told me, what X told me, what Melchisedech told me. There
are some of the identities that haven't properly been unraveled though. One
of the Papadiabouloi was the same person as the Private Gregory in that
hospital ward in the Philippines. How many persons in the world can be
expected to have such great purple pumpkins for heads? 
	'Teresa was an analog to Anastasia Demetriades, but she resented
Anastasia. She rejoiced privately when Anastasia died. I am the same person
as Doll Delancy, according to the account of X, but Doll wasn't too much
according to other accounts. She was like myself, but with the brains
knocked out. 
	'As to Melchisedech Duffey, at rare times he becomes identical with
every one of his creations. I have felt him in myself as myself. It wasn't
simply that he's a robber of minds, for he's a bit more. Whether or not he
was our maker, he was our awakener and our mentor. 
	!How odd of God 
	To puff the Duff! 
	'We are a mutually creative group of about thirteen people. God sets
such groups according to whim, and to prevent elitism from creeping in.
That's why there's a Duffey-type at the head of every group -- to teach
humility. We are all about one-thirteenth Duffey. We think about that
whenever we are inclined to be thunderstruck by our own genius. In any
random company of a dozen or so persons, one or two of them will be already
dead, but with no real division between. Do the dead know that they are dead
and in purgatory? Or rather, do we know whether we are dead or not? Whether
we are in the flesh or not? Whether we are in the world or not? 
	'We were given Finnegan because he was part Teras, so all of us will
be part Teras through him. This keeps us from being overly proud of being
human. All who have dealt with Finnegan have acquired a rich intellectual
stratum that rests somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious. This
stratum can't be brought out, It can't be displayed. It can't be examined on
any terms except its own. It melts away, and sometimes one fears that it was
lost. Finnegan expresses part of this west-of-the-moon intellect in his
paintings. But all his paintings fly away to obscure collections, since we
cannot afford to own them for long. He expresses part of it in his words,
but his words can never be recalled when he wasn't present. Finn says that
this inaccessibility comes from his having Teras brains and we having people
brains. All of them, Casey and Henry and Hans and Absalom, pass themselves
off as being smart by cashing in a lttle bit of the hoard that Finnegan
bestows on us. Finnegan was the most talented and intelligent man anywhere
in spite of his ape-brained vagaries and antics. He was my beloved forever,
and he was Duffey's Central Creation. Well, back to rebuilding the world. 
	[Dotty Yekourwas. Unmailed Letter, no addressee given.] 

	'It was a continuing mystery how a very small group, usually less
than a dozen persons, has been able to save the world from destruction for
several decades now. We have been doing exactly that, but the margin becomes
closer and closer. 
	[Mary Virginia Schaeffer] 

	2

	Now it was into the New Orleans Scene, in the time-defying stasis of
Duffey, which moves back and forth through the years. But, in those first
two weeks or so, before Finnegan flew the coop that first time, the scene
wasn't quite in stasis yet. 
	Duffey and Finnegan and a man named Zabotski who owned the building
were working one morning very early. It was the fourth or fifth morning
dating from the fonding of the Pelican Press in New Orleans. Early morning,
yes, it had just struck midnight on the little wooden clock that Zabotski
himself had made. The instituting of the Pelican Press was for the
publishing of a journal called 'The Bark' for the renewal of the world, and
for the publishing of other things also. 
	Zabotski was a gross and sometimes even an unpleasant man, but he
was a fine artist. This combination was frequent. Zabotski was an ethnic
artist. The art of the Philistines was the most enduring and the most
underrated of all the ethnic arts. And Zabotski liked to busy himself at all
hours, and he was a very sociable man. Such hyperactive and socializing
inclinations are often found in completely useless people. But Zabotski
owned the building, and he considered that he had certain rights of entry. 
	Duffey and Finnegan and Zabotski were rebuilding and reappointing a
large room there: it would be the press room, and it would be the everything
room. And, at the same time that Duffey was doing this, he was also making a
recorder flute. And Finnegan, whthe working on the rebuilding of the room,
was also painting a large picture. Actually, in their own ways, they were
about the business of rebuilding the world. 
	Duffey would also have his 'Walk-In Art Bijou' as well as his pawn
shop in this building. 
	The recorder, a musical instrument, an old type of flute such as had
been made and played back in mid-millennium, was being put together out of
walnut wood and Philippine mahogany. The stop-keys and filagree were being
made out of bright brass. Since he had made his first banjo, Duffey had held
in contempt all persons who play on instruments that they haven't made
themselves. And the newest of Duffey's tall dreams was for a flute band to
give an occasional alternative to the string band that he had found already
thriving there in the neighborhood and had joined. 
	"There was a report on the radio, on the 'Late, Late, Late News That
Was Different', about a prisoner being released in the Crimea last
Saturday," Duffey said. "It got comic treatment. What else could it get? But
it confirms some of the things that Henry and Absalom and others (myself,
for instance) have been saying." 
	The picture that Finnegan was painting was a horizontal eight feet
by four feet piece, and it was in the Finnegan 'Yellow Period' style. There
was a leaping sophistication in its handling, but it handled primitive
materials, ice-age animals and cave-man settings. 	"I get my own
reports from the Old Country," Zabotski said. "This wasn't entirely comic,
though there has always been a folk-comic element in tales of the Chort.
This story was a simple one. The Devil was released from the underground
dungeon which many people did not know underlay the peninsula. He came out
of there light-blinded but in possession of most of his faculties. He
stretched himself to a great height. He got ten kilos of balm from a
pharmacy and rubbed it on the galls that had been made by the irons on his
neck and wrists and ankles. He gave cryptic answers to reporters. 'What
would you say would be the most important effect of your release?' a
reporter asked. 'They shall know it, now that I have returned,' the Devil
quoted. 'Wasn't it Achilles who said that first?' the reporter inquired.
'No, I said it first, a long time ago', the Devil said. 'He may have had it
from me. I have the lever and the hammer boys. You will give me a good
press, or you will run into the worst difficulties that you ever thought of.
'Whenever did you not get a good press, since there has been a press?' one
of the reporters said. 'That's true', the Devil admitted. Let's keep it that
way.' I should have quite a few more details of it soon. A cousin of mine
was present and witnessed it all." 
	"Ah, I'm afraid that we will know it, now that he was back." 
	"Where do you have your reports from?" Duffey asked. 
	"Oh, from my own radio. But it's a wireless that was literally
without wires, and that speaks only to Slavic ears, and not to all of them.
Cut me one more stud to the length of those others, Finnegan." 
	Finnegan sawed another stud of seven feet and one and one quarter
inches. Finnegan did not measure and he did not square, but he cut to
perfect fit. This was because he was an artist. For the first of the studs,
he had measured the distance with his eye, and he had got it right. For the
others, as Zabotski called for them, he cut them without looking. Why not?
He had already looked. Does an artist have to look twice? 
	"Finnegan, I will hate you for that forever," Duffey said, "and I
will hate you for accepting it without blinking, Zabotski. You are working
rule-free and not by jot and tittle. I was once the best carpenter in St.
Louis, and I am still one of the nine great carpenters in the world, but I
always measure carefully. My wife was starting down from Chicago this
morning, with a surplus army four-by-four truck with all our possessions not
otherise stored. My wife has never seen either of you, except through my
mind and at a distance of hundreds of mthes, but she has you both sized up
perfectly. 'Tell that Zabotski that he had better lose fifty pounds,' she
writes 'between the eyes'." 
	"I exercise up there constantly," Zabotski said. "There's a little
fat there, I suppose, but oh the great extent and depth of fine and lean
brains too! What does that second reindeer say, Finnegan? Oh, yes, I get it
now." 
	Sometimes Zabotski stuck his huge hands into Duffey's flutemaking,
but it was hard to fault him there. He was good with both wood and brass. He
had brought some of his own equipment from next door, a small furnace (they
would need it anyhow for making and repairing many parts for the press), a
lathe, a mortising machine, a wood-turners' outfit, a brass-smelting
arrangement with small drop-hammers. 
	And sometimes Zabotski stuck his big hands into the picture that
Finnegan was painting, spreading globs of impossible pigment with a palette
knife, and making possible some effects that even Finnegan had hesitated
over. 
	But should people whose purpose was the rebuilding of the world be
taking time out for picture-painting and flute-making? They should, yes.
You'll never build a world right without such things. 
	"Here it will make a difference in the color," Zabotski said. "The
purpose will make a difference. Why are you painting the picture, Finnegan?"

	"This one was for money. It will go to a fraternity house where they
should be smart enough to catch the lines. Dotty says that we will need
quite a bit of money to get things rolling." 
	"Oh, for money. Then it is this way." And Zabotski caused an effect
that would enhance the money value. Zabotski knew all about the enhancing of
money. It was no wonder that Zabotski was an artist, or that Finnegan was.
Almost everybody in that block was an artist. There are not three brocks in
all of New Orleans with more artists living in them. Zabotski wouldn't have
rented that building to Dotty and Duffey and their bunch if there hadn't
been an artist, Finnegan, among them. And Zabotski, as one of the foremost
Philistine artists in the world, had high standing in the art colonies. 
	"Why are there so many ungainly butterlies and birds hovering about
the mouths of the animals and people in your painting, Finnegan?" Duffey
asked. "And what was the complicated figuration of the fur and hair of the
animals?" 
	"Oh poor rotten Duffey!" Finnegan cried in amazement. "That's talk,
Duffey, talk. Don't you know talk, don't you know words and statements when
you see them? Do you know that leptidopterists have discerned a whole branch
of Pleistocene lepidoptera rock paintings of Chamonix and St. Zermatto and
Guebwiller? But the leptidopterists are mistaken in their own specialty.
Those supposed butterflies around the mouths of people and animals in the
rock paintings aren't butterlies at all." 
	"What are they then, Neanderthal Artist Finnegan?" Duffey wanted to
know. 
	"Balloons," Finnegan said. "They are cartoonist-style,
speech-and-song balloons. They are the words and the statements coming out
of the mouths of the people and beasts. They are all in the original and
complex language." 
	"You lie, Finnegan," Duffey said recklessly, and he left his
flute-making for a while to put up a cranky little shelf in the rebuilding
structure of the room. "I know that the cave and wall paintings at St.
Zermatto and Chaminix and Guebwiller were all done by Neanderthal men. And
the Neanderthals had neither speech nor writing." 
	"Oh Holozoic Hell, Duffey! Of course we had them, and we have them
yet!" Finnegan exploded. "These birds and butterlies, on the cave paintings
and the wall paintings, and on my painting on canvas here, are message
blurbs being spoken by the creatures. They look more ornate than do
contemporary cartoonists' balloons because we used to write on both the
inside and the outside of the balloon. No, they aren't butterlies, and they
aren't birds. They are words and sentences of written commentary. And you,
Duffey, are left on the outside. You don't even know what the second
reindeer answered the first. Even Zabotski caught that one finally. This was
rich language that we use in our paintings. Language began in complexity and
perfection, and then it degenerated into our present simplicity and
poverty." 
	"You don't even know the meaning of poverty," Duffey said. "Not in
this, not in anything. The lack of comprehension of poverty was at the root
of so many of our trouble. Certain degenerate and evil persons have begun a
'war on poverty'. They are the same persons who relentlessly wage the 'war
on obedience' and the 'war on chastity'. Waging a war on poverty was like
waging a war on life or on goodness. Pay attention. This was a Duffey
Lecture. It will not be repeated." 
	"Of course it will be repeated, many times," Finnegan said. 
	"There was something wrong with an economic and social system that
cannot generate real poverty," Duffey stated, "when poverty is unblessed and
no longer to be found, then the whole world comes unblessed. We will pray
for holy poverty, and we will hardly find it. This lack of poverty imperils
the Great Pot itself." 
	"Maybe the Devil will bring back poverty, now that he was released,"
Finn said. 
	"The Devil? What should he have to do with Holy Poverty other than
to defame it?" Duffey asked, "and that was what he will do. In the years to
come, you will hear endless defamations of poverty. You will hear it
maligned and cursed; you will hear it slandered and classed as an evil. You
will even hear 'cures' proposed for it. Some of these cures will be proposed
by persons really wanting to find cures for various degradations which they
miscall poverty. But also, there will be absolute and violent attacks on
poverty itself. Look closely at the people who mount these attacks. They may
be the most distinguished of senators and bishops and mouth-brokers and
enterprising and diligent self-servers. They may be the fashionable Judas
Priests and accommodations-persons. These things they may be on the surface,
but underneath they are devils, every one of them." 	"Duffey, I've known
poverty," Zabotski said. "It has rough edges." 
	"It's just that you're not holy enough to see it clearly, Zabotski,
and you may be calling other things by its holy name. The Devil, more than
ever now, wil be bringig in things to be called 'poverty' by the ignorant:
sordidness, trashiness, degradation, debasement, deprivation, animality,
certain of the deliriums, squalidness, shabbiness of spirit, debauchery,
barrenness, hopelessness. But there was no way that the Devil can bring back
Holy Poverty to us. 
	"There remains one solution to all economic and social and personal
ills, to all the traumas caused by sin and false poverty: 'Ask and you shall
receive'. That takes care of everything. There was no case of persons asking
in good faith and not receiving, and the Lord promises that there will not
be. There are so many persons who would like to find blessing in true
giving, and so few who are available for the receiving. What if the Pot
stands full forever, and nobody will ask for its Holy Slumgullion? 
	"Oh, you win, guys," Duffey said then, turning to the Finnegan
picture. "Some days I really am dim. I caught it finally." 
	"Caught what, old Duff?" Finnegan asked him. 
	"What the second reindeer answered to the first reindeer in your
painting. It's pretty good."
	The Great Pot Itself was an intimate part of 'Project Rebuilding the
World'. This project began with that fat-to-overflowing, young,
Louisiana-swamp Frenchman, Henri or Henry Salvatore. (Where his name was
given 'Henri' it was pronounced 'Onree' in the Cajun fashion; where it was
given 'Henry' it was pronounced 'Henry'.) Salvatore had once had a maritime
vision and heard a salt-spray voice telling him that his was the
responsibility of rebuilding the world. Henri didn't know how to do it, but
he did have a talent for delegating assignments. He delegated the Rebuilding
of the World to Finnegan, to Duffey, to Stein, to Mary Virginia, to Dotty,
to those first and and mainly. Then he went off to a place where they were
supposed to teach the rebuilding-of-the-world trade. (He then became to all
of them 'Henry the Merry Monk" though he intended to become a secular
priest.) Those to whom he gave the assignments, to work until he should come
back, didn't know how to rebuild the world either. But each of them had
several little catch-notions of it that might serve until a better idea came
along. Among the notions were 'A Journal', 'An Institute', and 'A Pot'. 
	The Pot belonged to Zabotski. Zeb had once been a chemist or
experimenter of some sort, and he had used this big, glass-lined,
one-thousand-gallon capacity pot or crock for some distillation experiments.
Duffey asked for it, and Zabowaski knocked out a section of the wall and
brought it into the big room. 
	Here was part of the canonical account of the affair: "Duffey rigged
gas burners under it and filled it with water. He announced tnat he would
keep the Big Pot boiling forever. He got a priest from St. Katherine's to
bless it." Such was the basis and founding of it. That had been the day
before this. The idea was that people could put vegetables or meat or fish
into the pot to boil, or that God would put these things into it secretly.
And the resulting slumgullion in the pot would be available to poor people
forever. But, in a full day, only six persons had taken fich soup out of the
spiggots of the pot, and all of these had been impelled by curiosity and not
by poverty. None of them had been poor enough to be members of Holy Poverty.
There had to be poor people somewhere in that city and that world. Where
were they, where, where? 
	"There has got to be a turning point for the pot," Duffey said. "Ah,
that bird there in your painting, Finn, with what looks like a smaller bird
in front of its mouth, is that --?"
	"What you take for a smaller bird is, of course, a bird-cry in its
balloon," Finnegan said. "It's a specialized bird, so it's saying a
specialized message." 
	"All right, what was it saying, Finn?" 
	"It was saying, 'When the horse gets here, we will eat. And when the
man gets here, then we will really eat'. That's the kind of bird it was, you
see." This, like everything else that Finnegan ever said, was prophetic. 
	The Widow Waldo came by then. 
	"I saw your light on and came in," she said. The Widow Waldo never
slept. She looked constantly for persons to visit with. In the middle of the
night it was always this, 'I saw your light on and came in'. In the day time
it was 'Your curtains were up so I was pretty sure you were awake, so I came
in.' The Widow was a wonderful and fair person. She brought a little jar of
a new kind of coffee and made coffee for them all in the percolator. She had
little cakes for them, cakes that she had just made. She talked in cadenced
sharing for a while. Then she put three pounds of good hamburger meat into
the pot and left. The Widow Waldo was moderately rich. 
	But it was about a month after this until the Pot managed to give
itself its peculiar character and signature and flavor that meant thaf it
would be a going concern. The first large animal to go into the Pot had been
a horse, an ancient buggy-pulling horse that had hauled people around the
French Quarter. It had died, and its owner had given it to the Pot. He had
also given its old straw hat with its two ear holes in it to go in the Pot.
This old straw hat had not finished living its life yet. It floated on the
slumgullion of the Pot for weeks and even months and gave a character to it.
People liked to look in to see if it was still floating there. This was the
beginning of character and signature and flavor, but it wasn't the
outstanding thing yet. 
	The Pot weighed a thousand pounds empty and nine thousand pounds
full. It was ordained that it would never be empty again, once water and
slum were put into it. A hundred bushels of barley had been put into it very
early, and that gave the slum long-lasting bulk and a pleasant flavor.
Later, rice would be used more than barley. Salt and onions, rough fish,
country herbs and weeds were added constantly. But slum doesn't become
slumgullion until a 'big meat' goes into it, and the horse was the first of
that. Then there was a cow or two. (The six persons a day had increased to
about six hundred after the first week or so, and quite soon went to several
thousand.) Alligators went into the Pot then, and the famous Alligator Tail
Soup was served on the side for several days. Quite a few rabbits and birds
went in, and sometimes a sheep or goat or cow. Potatoes and turnips went in,
and whatever the green grocers had of wilted or spoiled remnant. 
	There were a few razzers and jazzers around who would make brash
comments about the Big Pot. And the jazzers were the pivot of the turning
point when it came. Several of the jazzers fished three large bones out of
the ot one day, and one  large bone. They made a big noise about what they
had fished out, and anyone who was familiar with humans could see that these
were conspicuously human bones. What would this do to the fame of the Pot? 
	Things like that can go either way. They may be taken in good humor
or in bad. But in this case, there was strong suspicion, and grounds for it
had been seen, that those jazzers who had fished the bones out of the Pot
were the same persons who had put them in. These persons, in fact, were
three medical students. And when they struck next, with the garish sign
painted on the Pot, and painted tightly so that it would remain bright
almost forever, "Cannibal Duffey's Irish Restaurant", it was taken in good
humor by almost everybody. 
	And something did improve both the actual taste and the reputation
of the stew right about then. It may have been the human parts in it; it may
have been something else. The stew acquired character and individuality, and
it would retain these things forever. 
	And, as Dotty Yekouris said, what if an unfortunate cadaver did (now
and then) find its way into the Pot? You've got to expect things like that
in a large city. Everybody contributes what he can to the general weal, but
some persons can contribute only themselves. 
	Duffey and Finnegan and Zabotski didn't finish rebuilding the room
that early morning. That project, like the larger project of which it was a
part, would go on for decades at least. They all had their distractions, for
one thing. Zabotski, for instance, was courting the Widow Waldo. 

	Henry Salvatore had entered a seminary to learn how to rebuild the
world. But he had put other people at the task in the meanwhile. Duffey and
Dotty Yekouris began to publish a little paper named 'The Bark' (in the
sense of a boat or a ship). The first organ to take notice of 'The Bark'
(except for a one-shot burlesque of it named 'The Bite', and that was done
by Absalom Stein with vinegar and kindness) was Casey's 'The Crock' in
Chicago. These two journals joined battle over the issue of how the world
should be rebuilt. Duffey went about the project in various ways, and he
picked up some allies. Stein had come down to New Orleans just at launching
time, and Finnegan flew the coop and left. The two events were related.
Dotty Yekouris was desolate when Finnegan left. Well, he would be leaving a
lot, and she had a lot of desolation in store for her. 
	Letitia Duffey had arrived with the cream of the Duffeys' worldly
possessions and with enough cash to carry things on for a while. 
	Mary Virginia Schaeffer belonged to the Schaeffer family that owned
the Red Dog Motor Freight which ran from Galveston and Houston to Morgan
City and New Orleans. It also covered Baton Rouge and Shreveport and Port
Arthur and Orange and Beaumont. Mary Virginia transferred herself to the New
Orleans terminal and worked with Dotty on 'The Bark' and on other things, as
well as for the Red Dog Motor Freight. 
	Soon, Margaret Stone would come down from Chicago to set them on
fire. 
	And, one of these months or years, Salvation Sally would come from
Australia to aid in the Salvation. But rebuilding the world was a difficult
task even for a crew that contains a Fat Frenchman and a
Magician-Sorcerer-Magus, and a Dotty Yekouris, and a sometimes Finnegan. 
	Duffey also formed associations with other persons who were building
or inventing worlds or moments or situations or scenes. There was Joe Smith
the vagabond painter who had begun, in Galveston, the famous triptych of
Dotty O'Toole that Finnegan would finally finish. Joe Smith did not ever
finish anything, but he had a disturbing excellence to everything that he
did, and it was a necessary condition that every piece he did should be
incomplete. He had left more than a dozen unfinished masterpieces with art
dealer Duffey. 
	There was Adam Scanlon of New York and Groben of Chicago. There were
Rita Tinder, Gilbert Brisbane, Crystal O'Boyle (the untraditional glass
goblet lady), Neil Holway, Dorcas Whiteduck, Wesley Neosha, Pedro San Carlo,
Jessica Shrike (that princess of porcelain), Mary Ann Goldbrook, Hugh
Thatcher (the Yellow Kid), Humphrey Speckle, Peggy Munster, Elroy Redheart
(wrought-iron work was not dead but only sleeping, and Elroy was waking it
up with his hammering on its white-hot iron), Timothy McMasters, Alvin
Huckster, John Bently Oatmeal (the Renaissance of Pottery had begun with
him), Kester Coogan. Oh, those are some of the artists of the neighborhood
and the world (regione et orbe) whose work Duffey had for sale very early,
and whose creative ideas contributed mightily to the Rebuilding Thesis of
Duffey and his company. 
	These were the most talented artists to be found. At least five of
them were among the hundred greatest American artists, and two of them (Adam
Scanlon and the fly-the-coop Finnegan) were among the two greatest. 
	Duffey knew from the first that his part in rebuilding the world
would be carried out largely within his own vocation as Art Dealer, yes, and
Pawn Broker. He could influence the world uncommonly from the first of these
vantages. There are flaming moments and scenes in every job, and the world
can turn either way at every flame-point. Duffey may have realized sooner
than anyone, except the Adversary Himself, the rabid and overwhelming attack
that would soon be launched against all the arts. His Walk-In Art Bijou
would be a flexible fortress against all such assaults. 
	Duffey didn't acquire all these clients immediately, but he had them
all quickly, and he added and added and added to his list, Heloise Tantrum a
really good sculptor, John Claxton who painted on slabs of slate, people
like that. It must be understood that, whthe other characters and groups
were following out their lives in normal sequence of the years, Duffey was
in a creative stasis that disregarded the years. So he moved back and forth
through them henceforth. 
	Duffey was continually struck by the fact that there was so much
good stuff in the world. On the surface, Duffey had seemed more of a
pessimist than the young people he was associated with. But, in the creative
interior of him, that wasn't so. In rebuilding the world there were plenty
of good stones available for reuse. It might be necessary to make only token
acquirements from quarries. Or there might be enough stone so that none at
all need to be quarried. 

	3

	Another ally or counter-ally who came to help them or to harm them
(to affect them anyhow) was Mr. X, that running rumor of a man. We have now
arrived at the time of his first coming to the in New Orleans. Bagby had
written from St. Louis that X was coming. Letitia had asked several times
when he would arrive. And Duffey had never heard of him. No, he hadn't heard
of him, but he remembered something about a hokey-pokey, Italian, push-cart
confection man from when Duffey was about three years old. The first of the
talismans had been given out by Duffey then, but what had that earliest of
the talismans fruited in? 
	Duffey had been working late one night. Dotty had said 'Put him on
the sofa when he comes; everything else was full.' 'Put whom on the sofa,
dear?' Duff had asked. 'You are the most exasperating man I ever knew,'
Dotty said, and she went off to bed. And half an hour later, the sleepy
Letitia arose. 
	"Aren't you going to let him in?" she asked Duffey inconsequently. 
	"Let whom in, butterfly?" he asked her. 
	"The X quantity at the door." 
	"Oh, I didn't hear anybody knock." 
	"What? You really don't understand that he would be too shy to
knock?" 
	Letitia threw the door open. She threw her arms wide in the famous
Koch gesture, and they remained wide and empty. But they couldn't be allowed
to remain so. 
	"Dammit, X, I'm one of you," she cried. She reached out and captured
and enfolded the little man and gave him the famous biggest kiss in town.
Oh, but then he melted out of her arms like tacky vapor, and re-formed at a
safer place with a table between him and the danger. 
	"Oh, X, X," Letitia laughed. "I thought it was only your wife that
you were so terrified of. Was it all women?" 
	"No, no, that was not terror, gracious lady," X said. "That was
something else." 
	X was at the same time a happy-looking and a wistful-looking clown.
He seemed to be about the age of Duffey, probably a couple of years younger
than the century. He was a mid-nineteenth-century, north Italian type
though, a small nobleman come onto small days, wrapped in tattered elegance,
and full of secret information. 
	"I am X," he said. "Need I say more? I know everyone. I saw your
Finnegan (he was in Chicago then) and others there. I saw the Pope in Rome
and he asked to be remembered to you. He worries about your soul, you having
so many feet in so many different worlds. I saw Levi van Wei in Paris and he
said that he could take a couple more Finnegan pieces. I saw your sister,
gracious lady Letitia, and she said 'Don't tell her anything; make her
guess'. I could not get to see the president. I don't trust him anyhow; why
should I? I saw Fat Henri. I saw Teresa when I was in St. Louis with Bagby.
But, my time being so limited, I can see only the most important people. I
saw Sebastian Hilton and the Countess in Carpathia. I hope they will be able
to do something about the situation there. I do not want to travel under
false colors. I name you the fine and important people whom we both know,
but I do not state that any of them would recommend me for anything. Really,
I don't know who would ever recommend me." 
	"I would," said Letitia. 
	"I would," said Dotty Yekouris who could always wake from the
deepest sleep on the arrival of any real personage. "You have come to the
right place, X. For about four days, that is, you have come to the right
place here. Have I missed anything important, little person?" 
	X talked for about four hours then. And he talked pretty steadily
for the four days that he was with them that first time. 
	"Doofey, I have two things here of the most utter importance," he
said after a while. When he had first come in, he had put a black box on the
table there. And he had also set a canister or urn beside the box. They
looked like art objects carefully wrapped. 
	"Both of these contain some things that you have seen before,
Doofey," X said. "Both of them contain things that are part of you, both in
your past and in your future." In this black box there was a gray box, and
in the gray box there was a brown box. And he removed the gray box from the
black and the brown box from the gray. 
	"Now we're really getting somewhere," said Letitia. "But I know that
box." 
	"Where's the red box?" Duffey asked. 
	"Oh, you mean as in the magic act," X rose to the allusion. "Yes,
the red box is the one that appears and disappears. You can put it in any of
the larger boxes, and close and then open the cover again, and the red box
will be gone. But then it will be in one of the other boxes when you open
that. I hadn't seen or thought of the red box for years, but I believe I can
still do the trick. The brown box was full of other things too important to
play tricks with." 
	"The brown box is quite red enough," Letitia said. 
	"Doofey, was the red box in the black box or in the gray box?" X
asked. 
	"In the black box," said Duffey. 
	"No, you are wrong," said X. "It is in the gray box. And X opened
both of them. But it was X who was wrong and Duffey had been right. The red
box was in the black box. 
	"I was known as the Great X-Capo when I was in Vaudeville," X said.
"I did magic tricks as well as escapes, but what you did was not a trick." 
	"No, it was real," Duffey said with some pride in his powers. 
	"Doofey, you more than anyone in the world should know what was in
the brown box," X said. "I have brought it from Chicago to you. Oh!" 
	The red box was gone suddenly, but in its place there were three red
roses. A flamboyant car drove up outside at the same moment. 
	"It does not matter," X said. "Tbe red box was an intrusion by you,
Doofey. It has gone back to whence it came, to nowhere. But the roses are
nice." 
	X took the three red roses in his hands. He gave one of them to
Letitia and one of them to Dotty Yekouris. The flamboyant man from the car
came in, and X gave him the third red rose. 
	"You are Hugo Stone the infamous communist from Chicago," X said. 
	"A Red Rose for the Red," said Absalom Stein, for it was he. "Was
there a card on me in the Brown Box that you bring to Duffey?" 	"Certainly,
certainly, you are well documented there in all detail." 
	"What's the last entry on my card?" Stein asked. 
	"A question mark, put there by myself," X said. "For some reason,
you haven't been acting like the infamous Communist lately." 
	"Oh, Casey Szymansky and I have traded souls," Stein said. "Sort of
traded. Sort of souls. It's done more than you would imagine." 
	"Then Casey was now the infamous Communist in Chicago?" X asked. 
	"Exactly. And I'm the good guy," Absalom said. 
	"I thought that Casey had been building up a history of funniness
lately," X mused, "Oh well, that was easily explained. Now in this brown box
--" 
	"It doesn't belong to me, X," Duffey said. "It belongs to 'The
Crock', and 'The Crock' belongs to Casey and his friends. Did you steal it?"

	"Certainly I stole it. They were not properly using the information
that was in it. As to the other item, it was a pottery cigar box or urn with
ashes in it." 
	"Ashes?" 
	"Utter ashes. They belong to you, Doofey. I said that they belonged
to you. Do you know in what sense it was that they belong to you?" 
	"Oh, those ashes! Yes, I know in what sense they're mine. I don't
take up much room when I'm cremated and canned, do I? Did you steal them
too?" 
	"I took them furtively, but it was not really stealing, since they
belong to you in every possible sense. I knew that I would someday become a
buddy, even an agent of yours. And, as there are so few of us who travel
from that country to this, I thought I'd better bring them to you. But it
was tricky, I tell you, Doofey, bringing them out of there." 
	"Was it too gauche for me to inquire how these could be your ashes,
and you still alive and functional?" Dotty Yekouris asked. 
	"An anachronism, that's what it is," Duffey said. 
	"An anachronism, that's what you are, Duffey," Dotty said. 
	The brown box contained index cards scribbled full of information.
Most of the cards had been filled up by Duffey himself. Others of them had
been filled in by other persons, including X. 
	"It was information on the plotters, on the infiltrates," X said. 
	"I know what it was," Duffey told him, "but I'm not as interested in
it as I once was."
	"Then get interested in it once more," X lectured him. "It was a
sort of game before. Now it becomes serious. It was in only a sketchy manner
that you know what it was, even though you made many of the notes. This was
the hard information on the diabolists who infiltrate the People and the
State and the Church You will notice one new card of of fluorescent or
phosphorescent or diabolical orange-red that was not in the file whthe you
had it. And you will notice that this card, while apparently three times the
other cards in all dimensions, yet fits in neatly with the others in this
small box. It was an illusion that was more than optical." 
	"I understand the illusion. I could probably do it myself," Duffey
said. "But why add such a card at this time?" 
	"Because he is loose and working at this time. If the Lady Letitia
will pour coffee for me and brandy for the rest of you, I will tell you
about the recent release of this person or entity. I was an eye witness." 
	"I have heard of several hundred eye witnesses to it, and they do
not agree," Absalom Stein said. 
	"That's possible," X agreed. "There were quite several hundred
persons present at the release, and not one of them was the sort of person
who would keep quiet about things. As to the accounts not agreeing, well it
was mostly a disagreeable business. Did you field that one, Miss Dotty? It
was in the nature of a joke." 
	"It was a lovely joke, X, and you are a lovely person," Dotty said.
"Tell us about the great moment when history was unmade and the Devil was
released from his prison." 
	So X quickly went into his account of the incident. 
	"The peninsula with its oblast was known to the Greeks as the Tauric
Chersonese and to the Romans as the Euxine Chersonese. The Goths called it
simply Cherson. At the time of the imprisonment, the peninsula was owned
partly by the Kingdom of Kiev and partly by the Principality of Tmutarakan,
an advance host of the Khanate of the Golden Horde. So the Prisoner, though
brought from Aachen by Christians, was delivered first to Mohammedans on the
peninsula, and was then given over to Devil worshipper allies for the actual
prisoning. This was in the year 946 or 947. The Devil always had a small
group of Devil worshippers as his guards. The peninsula was called Krym by
the Russians and Crimea by ourselves. But it was also known as The Prison
(Phylake, Carcer) for more than a thousand years before the actual
imprisonment. 
	"The Crimean Mountains rise to an altitude of over a thousand feet
near the south coast of the peninsula, and the prison itself was dug down a
thousand feet below sea level and below the roots of the mountains. 
	"Notables had been coming to the vicinity for several years, to
check on the time of the release and to consult with the imprisoned Devil.
The Yalta Conference was based on such daily, in fact hourly, consultations
with the Devil by all the principals of the conference. Very much was
promised at that conference. It might seem to a disinterested observer, of
whom there can be none, that all the promises were very one-sided. They were
pledged to further the Devil's work if only the Devil would come out of his
prison ater his release was obtained. 
	"In the imprisonment bit, the Devil, an evil king, was playing a
part mostly played by good kings or leaders, the part of the imprisoned or
enchanted or trance-sleeping leader. Barbarossa, Alaric, Brian Boru, The
Cid, Arthur, all sleep in enchantment or prisonment somewhere, with their
loyal subjects waiting and hoping for their awakening or release. But the
Devil, they say, did not sleep very much during his imprisonment. 
	"This past spring was not a pleasant one on the Crimea, as it
attempted to return to being a pleasure resort after the war years. It was
chilly right up to that fateful last Saturday of May, and yet there was a
flocking of notables there such as has not been seen for many lifetimes.
They all just wanted to go to the Crimea to enjoy the beaches, now that
peace had returned, they said. People with futures were there. They obtained
and confirmed their futures by being there. Here were the architects of all
the new realms. They came to adore, and to receive their patents in the
nobility. There were disproportionate numbers of Catholic Cardinals and
lesser Clergy among them. There were disproportionate large numbers of
leaders of Jewery. And the Liberal Consensus was especially well
represented, and most overly represented of all was the floating world of
the intelligentsia, or the cognoscenti, or the gnostics. There were many of
the venerable and long-lasting advisors to premiers and presidents and prime
ministers and kings. They had waited so long to see their real King! Now the
older of them would be able to look on him and expire. 
	"Representatives of all the decadent and goatish arts were there.
Decadence would be in now, and centrality (except for the dark centrality)
would be out. And there would be deformed counterparts of every one of the
bright arts. 
	"Only one thousand persons had permits to be present, and my own
permit was number nine hundred and eighty-two. I have masqueraded as many
different men, and my permit was made out to one of my old masquerade
persons. It was only because of the large complement of fraud that has
always been in me that I could be there undetected. 
	"The Devil came out, and I knew him. I had seen him before and
talked to him. But I hadn't talked to him, apparently, in his real flesh
that was imprisoned there, but in a sort of effigy flesh. This brings us to
the question: What will the Devil be able to do in his real flesh that he
was not able to do in his effigy flesh? The next few decades may devote
themselves to answering this question.
	"He came out. He was of a puzzling size. One moment he seemed
giant-sized and the next moment he was merely man-sized. Several of the
Cardinals prostrated themselves and adored him. They sang 'Te Satanum'. 
	"The Devil was misshapen. By that he may always be known. It was
hard to describe, but everything about him was out of proportion. He is the
enemy of proportion and shape. He is slant-faced and everywhere slanted. 
	"The Devil signed out in the release book. The Devil cannot write in
script. He prints in deformed and scatter-set characters: one letter large,
one small, one up, one down, one in one color, one in another. Whenever you
see proclamations or posters or models for the young to draw by in such
deformed letters and words, you will know that they are really in the hand
of the Devil. 
	"People began to speak in squalid tongues, in a reverse
pentacostalism. The Devil stretched and scratched. His servitors began to
rub balm on his shackle-sores. 
	"He spoke about his plans. He said that he would hold about ten
thousand meetings a year with select groups, and that every one of the
meetings would be a key meeting of utmost importance. He would preach and
teach defamation. He would preach the scenic and crooked way. Of all things
that stand, he would say, 'Pull them down!'. Of all things alive, he would
say, 'Kill them!'. 
	"I have the names of all one thousand persons who were present at
the release of the Devil. There are a few more of their names than that in
the cross-index, as many of the devious persons travel under a variety of
names. I will have this most secret list and index brought here if you will
publish it in 'The Bark'." 
	"I don't know," said Melchisedech Duffey. 
	"No. I'm sorry, X, but we will not publish it," said Dotty Yekouris.


	Ah, but during the next several days, they did have a good time
playing "Who was There?" Some of X's attested names and answers would
dumbfound you. X stayed with them for four days that first time. Then, like
morning dew, he was gone. 

	4

	But X had been correct in one of his sayings. There did appear the
deformed counterparts of every one of the bright arts. Almost at once, they
came flying on bat wings out of the old pit that had been closed all during
the prisoning of the Devil. Duffey, in his New Orleans time stasis, felt
some things as immediate happenings that were, to others, spread out over a
decade or more. And yet, even to an objective observer, many of the
appearances came overnight, or out of the night. It was no good saying that
there had always been such deforming counterparts, such a trashing of the
arts. Yes, there had been, but there hadn't been such a massiveness about it
before. This wasn't bad art done by accident. It was putrid art done on
purpose. 

	Besides the major arts of painting and sculpture and drama and
literature-and-letters and classic jazz and long hair music and
architecture, there was the massive trashing of every one of the lively arts
of daily and nightly life. The style went out of them, the class was gone.
Consider only such popular arts as: string bands, horn bands, flute bands,
bicycle riding, soap-box spieling, country and ballad music, rag, Dixieland,
barbershop quartette singing, opera, operetta, burlesque, little theatre,
road show theatre, repertoire theatre, musical comedy, night club comedy,
dirt track racing, horse racing, harness racing, radio listening, radio
building, frogging, fly fishing, live bait fishing, shrimping, crabbing,
oystering, deep sea fishing, wine making, possum hunting, beer making,
automobile making and styling, baseball, boxing, sail boating, coffee
making, journalistic reporting, two-reel comedy making, foreign travel,
bird-dogging, bread baking, tramp teaming, civil litigation, romantic
courtship, restaurant dining, home dining, train travel, carnivals,
circuses, county fairs, pub-crawling, bridge building, poker playing,
highway construction, rodeo riding, football, six-man football, soft ball,
pecan raising, cattle breeding, deer hunting, coon hunting, concert singing,
park strolling, hay riding, kite flying, hoe-down dancing, cotillion
dancing, quarter-horse breeding, handicrafting, hell-fire retreats,
political cartooning, domino playing, comic strip drawing, widow wooing,
organ grinding, horseback riding, airplane piloting, auctioneering, parish
bazaaring, editorial writing, sharivaries, play-going, small talk, big talk,
honey tree raiding, wolf hunting, picnicking, telescope making and lens
grinding, political debating, flower growing, rabbit raising, sourkraut
making, sports page writing, lecturing, newspaper columning, monocycle
riding, soda fountaining, juggling, sermon preaching, tent shows, verse
writing, verse reciting, park rides, raft racing, wild onion hunting,
neighborhood barbecue dinners, sauntering, science fiction, masquerade
partying, the everyday art of wearing clothes (and allied, minor arts, such
as wearing spats), letter writing, visiting, dead waking, rink skating,
rifle shooting, duck hunting, street dancing, electioneering, corn-dog
making, flap-jacking. Anyone can list a hundred such minor arts. But some of
them were endangered even then. 
	Many of these minor arts actually disappeared, or ceased to be arts,
in those days. And all of them were trashed. They lost class, they lost
style. And how had this come about? 
	"An enemy has done this." 

	"Forget the Siege Mentality" was the title of a leading article by a
'Leading Theologian' in a diocese paper, an article that was widely
reprinted in other diocese papers. On seeing the name on the article, it was
the second time that Duffey had come onto the name of this 'Leading
Theologian'. It seemed a curious title, and a curious attitude to take,
right at the beginning of the siege itself. It had all the planned
dishonesty of an 'all clear' call when sudden danger had just made
appearance. 
	Duffey reviewed all the theology writing for 'The Bark,' and at the
drop of an indult he could have named the hundred leading theologians, but
this one wouldn't belong to the hundred. The first time that he had
encountered that name was on a list of the one thousand persons who had been
present for the release of the Devil near Yalta on the Crimea. Yes, Duffey
had seen the list and the index, during the third visitation of X, and he
had most of it by heart. He was even able to enter into the minds of many of
those on the list, and to prowl in those minds with his old power. 
	"Ah, what bat wings are coming out of that cavery!" Duffey moaned.
"The Company of One Thousand came there only out of sordidness and
mean-mindedness, and a greed for success, and with a passion for the sight
of their own father. And they came away from it with -- ah, it's as if they
had been created a-old by the Devil there. Did he use instant talismans for
his creations? I can feel a cheap-jack trickery, a cheap-shot artistry
running through it all. They have trashed the things, they have trashed the
world, they have trashed the people. 
	"Oh how they have trashed dirt track racing and boxing, and pub
crawling and soda fountaining, and train travel and comic strip drawing and
juggling and duck hunting! How they have trashed Dixieland and burlesque and
kite flying. How they have trashed wild onion hunting and night club comedy.
Of the minor arts, they have left hardly a joy upon a joy!" 
	Book Three

	'And even Levi, the receiver of the tithes, was also, so to speak,
through Abraham made subject to tithes, for he was still in the loins of his
father when Melchisedech met him.' 
	[Hebrews. 7,9-10] 

	In New Orleans, the season and feel of later summer prevailed for
the greater part of the year. Melchisedech Duffey was in a late summer state
of mind around the calendar and year after year. Things seemed to be going
well. There were all sorts of prospects for large and heavy harvests. The
nightmare that they might prove to be poisonous harvests was kept in a
secure stockade where all nightmares are supposed to be kept, And, really,
there was a sharp and exciting taste to poisonous fruit and grain when it
comes in less than critical quantities. 
	For Melchisedech Duffey, in those noontime years of his life, there
were delights by the acre. He was in the enduring middle of his golden age.
He was bound before God to be joyous (all members of the Argo were so bound:
that was in the ship's articles). His was a life sanguine, a life beseiged,
a life militant, and there were drops and gollups of joy all along the blade
of it. It was a stasis-present and a kinesis-present, double-time, anomalous
years at their best. There were assassins around every corner, but they
killed not yet. It was all one delectable noontime of a highlighted late
summer. 
	A large part (about a hundred and thirty-seven per cent of it by
measure) of Duffey's delectable noontime was made out of spacious and carnal
adventures with Letitia. If there had ever been any misunderstanding between
these two, there was none now. Melchisedech and Letitia fit together like
the continents of Old Pangea, which they both now remembered more and more
clearly. There was no cloud at all in their sky, but how they did generate
lightning out of that blue! It was a world beleaguered by the most insane
leaguerers ever, but those things couldn't get you as long as the perpetual
light shined upon you. 
	"It was wonderful to be alive in such a bright noontime as this!"
Duffey cried out one couple-of-hours-after-midnight between choruses on his
recorder flute. "By the great Sun-Drake, it would be wonderful even to be
dead in such a bright noontime!" 
	"Be you alive or be you dead/Come find a rime for me with bed," said
the Letitia. "Nah, man, nah, I'm not insatiable. Just greedy." It was more
than just coincidence that these two happiest people should have lived in
that continuing happiest time ever. 
	Oh well, suppose that the world was crumbling between their feet,
and the great arts of sidewalk and pavement repair had been trashed. There
was underground sunshine in New Orleans even at midnight, and it burst up
through every hole that was made in the paved world, burst up like exploding
flowers. These were hot, red and yellow and purple flowers named Philos and
Eros and Agape. Hot purple Agape, that was the real theme flower for that
one-hundred-and-twenty month long, late summertime.
	That chubby girl Letitia had long since been transfigured into a
person of proto-legendary beauty. 
	"You are even more beautiful than your daughters." And how is that
possible a person had admired her. "Yes, and younger too." 
	That person had thought that Letitia was the mother of Dotty and
Mary Virginia and Margaret Stone. How could anybody be more beautiful than
they? Come around and Letitia will show you how. 
	Letitia kissed lots of people, folks who came into the Walk-In Art
Bijou and the book store and the pawn shop, people who came into the press
room or the institute or the soup kitchen. She greeted all persons with open
arms. She kissed Zabotski on his big nose and Stein on his pearly ears. But
the thousand other people she kissed on their mouths and made their day for
them. People lit up like candles when they heard her voice. 
	"Can we come in?" people often asked at their door. 
	"Of course you can come in," Letitia would say. 
	"Was this some kind of show?" they'd ask. "We didn't see any signs,
but we had a feeling of anticipation when we went by here, like there was
some kind of show or entertainment goin on."
	"Come in and see," Letiia would say. "We will try to have an
entertainment show, an enjoyment." 
	Beyond themselves, and the Lord who made them, and the world He had
ten to them for their house, everything else was bonus for Melchisedech and
Letitia. The hot and happy person named Margaret Stone was one such bonus,
as she was to everyone who was touched by her life. This Margaret was all
ethnics in one, and she was a dago type even beyond the urchinness of Teresa
Piccone of the Stranahans (they were the closest of friends, and one of
these years they might even meet). You could call Margaret a Street Arab,
and she was that too. Ishmael himself was her Lebanese uncle. And she was
blood cousin of Absalom Stein ("Oh that damned Jew! Can't he do anything
right?" she would sometimes rail at his doings), and she was a niece of that
dealer in dwastressed merchandwase in Chicago, Askandanakandrian, the
ancient and comic Armenian. She was also a Galilean and a close kinswoman of
Jesus Christ. She was a midnight street preacher. She was the one person in
the world who made the big difference during the difficult years. 
	And there was Dotty Yekouris, a beautiful bonus forever. Where Dotty
was, there did the eagles gather. Dotty had suitors, and they were swift,
high-flying, and fast-swooping suitors. Dotty would love no one but Finnegan
in her life, but he was almost always gone, and she very much liked all the
fine fellows. She had her pick, and they were the best. They made the bright
place even brighter. 
	Well, some of the suitors, the best and the brightest of them, were
connected with those papers, other than 'The Bark', that Dotty and Duffey
brought out on the Pelican Press. The Seaman's Paper came out on Monday, the
Union Sheet on Tuesday, and the Sporting News on Wednesday, and the Jazz
Magazine on Friday. There were usually two others, but they varied during
the years. A print shop has to do a lot of printing to come out,
particularly if it has to go in the hole for a paper like 'The Bark'. 
	There was Gabrielovitch who worked for all the sheets and even for
'The Bark'. And he also worked for the Slavic language press, a thing that
was going to get him killed. There was a succession of suitors connected
with the Jazz magazine, and Dotty named them successively Benny B. Flat. So
if you find Benny B. Flat described as one sort of person one time and as
another sort of person at another time, it was because they are not the same
people. All of them were nice and swinging young men, though all of them
were a trifle deaf. Jazz people really don't know that they play as loud as
they do. 
	There was Bello Belonki of the Sporting News. He was the Prince of
the Cauliflowers. There were half a dozen of the fellows who were involved
in the Union sheet, whole committees of them. Nobody had ever seen one of
them alone. Take them out of committee and they will die the death. 
	And there were the seamen. They brought news of the world, almost
the only accurate news of the world; and many incredible bits that they
brought turned out to be true. Terry Cork, one of the forty scribbling
seamen, did a column 'The Plimsoll Line' for 'The Bark'. And he did about
half of the Seaman's paper when he was around town for a few months. Then
another Terry (Terry Anderson, Terry Jamil, Terry Renier, Terry Bannon)
would take over the task. All of the 'Forty Scribbling Seamen' (that was the
name of a song that Dotty had composed) were named Terry. 
	All of these persons loved Dotty, and many of them wanted to marry
her. Dotty herself was a journalist of immense talent. Stein was a
professional in the field, but he bowed to her superiority. Duffey was a
reckless amateur in the field, and he admitted that she was the best
journalist he had ever made. 'The Bark' under Dotty's editorship could whip
those rival sheets put out by the Devil and his cohorts because it was
livelier, was more intelligent, was better printed, had better writers, had
finer and more far-ranging features, offered more intricate and more
interesting battle, and was right where the rivals were wrong. 
	And Dotty herself was ("Dotty, go to your advertising writers and
borrow adjectives from them." "No, no, they need all of theirs. We will have
to borrow them some place else.") (Ah, here's some adjectives for the thing)
-- Dotty was --
	Graceful, ever-blooming, magic, dazzling, attractive, miracle-new,
floriferous, gorgeous, velvety, popular, fragrant, glossy, handsome,
exquisite, luscious, thrilling, superb, exotic, bell-like, sweet, tropical,
juicy, showy, unsurpassed, delicious, enchanting, flashy, stunning,
succulent, hardy and disease-resistant. 
	Certainly those adjectives are out of a Nursery Plant catalog. Where
do you get better adjectives? But even they will not adequately describe
Dotty. Nor are the poets able to do it, though Finnegan rimed her once as --

	"More beautiful than birds that fly, 
	More deeper than a doe-ses eyes." 

And the scribbling seaman Terry Cork did her with: 

	"Was this the face that launched a dozen tugs, 
	Nine tramps, a brig, a coracle, The Bark? 
	Was this the form that drove all Frenchtown bugs 
	And blew the lights and left the Quarter dark?" 

	And Dotty, like Finnegan, was a native of New Orleans so she didn't
have to learn the New Orleans trade or talk. In the words of Absalom Stein
she was "The most gracious French lady in New Orleans, and she turns out to
be a Lithuanian." 
	Mary Virginia Schaeffer was a bonus beyond price. Many of the
fellows who said they wanted to marry Dotty really wanted to marry Mary
Virginia. Even in the 'sweet blackberry ads' of the Nursery Plant catalogs
there were not the right adjectives to describe her. Dotty called her the
Saccarine Kid, partly in affection and partly in jealousy. Mary V. had been
the affianced lady of Henry Salvatore and the Emperor Henry always had the
best of everything in the world. He had given her up only for God, and he
said that he wasn't sure that God was good enough for her. Well, she was an
ornament and a joy. She was a very valuable working ornament. 
	Salvation Sally was a bonus too. Just barely though, as it seemed
sometimes. Even her guitar had a Australian accent. There were a lot of poor
sinners who saw the light just to stop her from playing that damned thing.
"Sure I'll be saved, yes, right now. Just stop that twanging racket." Well,
what does it matter what brings them to the light? 
	Actually, the Seven Pillars of Righteousness, the true bonifacients,
were Henri Salvatore, Melchisedech Duffey, Absalom Stein, Dotty Yekouris,
Hans Schultz, Draja Gabrielovitch, and John Solli (Finnegan). These were the
trustees of 'The Bark' and the members of the board of directors. There
would be some replacements as these died or were killed, but they were the
founding originals. But Hans had gone into the construction business in St.
Louis. Finnegan was almost always on the other side of the world somewhere.
Henry the Merry Monk was in the seminary for some years, and then he was
assigned to a church so deep in the swamps that he numbered the musk rats
among his parishioners. 
	Well Dotty and Duffey and Stein, and Mary Virginia Schaeffer (who
was not a designated pillar of Righteousness) ran 'The Bark'. And 'The Bark'
was quite cardinal to the power struggle going on in the world. 
	But the members and associates in willing exile sometimes came on
pilgrimage. Some of these were from Chicago and St. Louis, but others from
all parts of the world. Most of the visitors, of course, had been to New
Orleans before. But showing the City to close friends was a pleasant ritual
that must not be abridged because of any previous aquaintance with it. And
it wasn't a thing to be hurried through in just a few days. It should take
weeks and weeks. In one case, it took more than twenty years. 
	"These ten blocks square of the old town," said Lily Koch who had
come down with Sebastian Hilton and the Countess Margaret, "I believe that I
could sell it all in one lot. Other art dealers have handled larger and more
mixed lots. It would all be trash if split up, but together the hundred
square blocks have an arty sort of coherence. It was poor-boy Esplanade
Spanish mixed with poor-boy Place de Grace French. It's not really antique,
but it would make a good period set. I will finger a buyer and see what can
be done with it." 
	"Oh, I guess that I could buy it," the Countess Margaret said. "It
would be more to throw you a commission than anything. It would have to be
moved to Transylvania, but I don't see any real difficulty there. There are
about thirty shabby properties to each square block, and they shouldn't be
worth more than about thirty thousand dollars each. Say a million dollars a
square, and a hundred squares of it. Yes, see if you can get it for me,
Lily." 
	"You couldn't get it for twice that," Duffey said. 
	"And some of us simply wouldn't want to move out of the Quarter,"
Dotty stated. 
	"Move out of it? Who said anything about moving out of it?" Lily
asked. "If the moving is done well, you'd hardly have any sense of motion.
Oh, naturally I intended to buy it complete with people. It wouldn't be any
good to us otherwise. It wouldn't even be a work of art without the people."

	It was nice to have them all here. Sebastian and the Countess and
Lily all knew about the talismanic children, Duffey's Animated Marvels, and
they found them and others really marvelous. After all, the Countess was an
Animation of someone. It was never quite clear of whom she was an animation,
but there were quite a few sorcerers in that field. 
	There was a lot of fun had and a lot of old songs sung while those
three visitors were in town. They sang 'The Gadarene Swine Song'. And
Finnegan, who was in town that week, knew that the song had been inspired by
his father. 

	"This is the last time, Melchisedech," Sebastian said as it came up
to departure time, "that we meet in the unsanctified flesh. Next time, in
the Kingdom!" 
	"Oh him and his not-long-for-this-world-look," The Countess jibed.
"He has had that look and that talk for forty years that I know of. I'll not
let him die till he marries me first. He owes me that much." 
	"Oh, you two had better hurry then," Letitia said. "You have so very
little time left. I'm not sure that we will get up to Chicago for it, having
had you here now. Will it be next month?" 
	"Yes, it will be next month," Sebastian said. The Countess opened
her mouth to say something, and then closed it again. 
	One month after they went back to Chicago, Sebastian and the
Countess Margaret married. 
	And one month after that, Sebastian died. Really, he was killed. 
	Charlotte Garfield came to town. She came to attend "The Royal
Rogues' And Graceful Swindlers' Ninth Annual Convention and Conidence-Men's
Congress", which was held at the Royal Orleans Hotel and had about five
hundred confidence people and thieves in attendance. It was supposed to be a
fun thing, but there were seminars by experts for experts in recondite
fields. Charlotte visited the Duffey Nation in cowgirls' boots and
seven-and-a-half gallon hat, and not much between. And she still looked like
a nine year old girl. 
	Now wait a minute. Charlotte had said that she was thirty-eight
years old when she had met Duffey on the train in 1925. So she was about
thirteen years older than the century, and the century was now a little more
than half gone. This was getting out of hand. 
	"You had better repent, little girl," Salvation Sally worried over
her. "There is something the matter with you. I think you have been
consorting with the Devil. And it isn't nice for little girls to smoke
cigars. I will just --" 
	"Watch it, Sister Sal," Charlotte cautioned in a very snappish
voice. "The last lady who tried to take a cigar from this little girl is now
called 'Lefty'." 
	"Oh, Charlotte, you little monkey-faced monster!" Margaret Stone
railed at her. "Your jokes are old and tired, and so are you. You've got
your toes curled over the brink itself, and you're too dumb to know it.
There is something somewhere that shows just how old you really are." 
	"Oh, my 'Mendacious Midget Doll', is that what you mean, Maggie? How
did you know I had it? It works better than that picture of Dorian Gray of
which Duffey has the original in his Walk-In Art Bijou and doesn't know what
it is. Maggie, that doll looks two hundred years old now. And that's really
about what I am. Oh, I lied to Duffey that first time I met him about how
old I was. I was a lot older than that. I haven't actually consorted with
the Devil though. I've turned him down again and again. He made an
appearance at our Convention in Baltimore two years ago. He isn't really an
expert on the details of the trade; he'll put money into almost any spiel
just like the veriest Rube would. I never saw a fellow who could be taken so
easy. But he does have a lot of 'overthought' as he calls it. He believes in
fraud for the sake of fraud, and for the character formation that it brings
about. And he suggests that we give up this pretense about going easy on
widows and orphans and those who can't afford to be fleeced. He says that
what we really have in us is the lust to pillage those who are clear down
and out of their last coin and credit. It is easier to grind the faces in
the mud, he says if they are already brought pretty low. And he's right. It
makes me uneasy to have somebody like that in the 'Royal Rogues and Graceful
Swindlers'. He isn't graceful, but he is royal. Ah, Maggy, yes, I do know
what my toes are curled over. Do you think I'll beat the rap in the end?" 
	"No. No chance at all of that," said Margaret Stone who disliked
being called Maggie by that damned runt. "It's like playing 'Nine Dollar
Dog'. There really win the game or lose it nine plays before the end. There
isn't any way you can change it after you're into the last nine plays." 
	"That's not fair. There should be a two-minute warning called before
the end."
	"There isn't, Midge. But you chose the game, Baby Face." 
	"But I won't know when I'm into the nine last plays." 
	"No. You sure won't. But you chose the game." 

	Bagby and Mary Louise came down from St. Louis. At the moment they
walked in, about eight o'clock in the morning, Duffey had just got his
weekly letter from Bagby. "Wait a while, folks," he said. "This is more
important. It's the high point of my week." Duffey got these letters early
every Monday morning, before the postman came "whereat there is some small
mystery" Duffey said out loud this day. But he disregarded his two cherished
visitors and set about opening and reading the letter of one of them. 
	"Melky, aren't you going to greet us?" Mary Louise sulked in a
strong voice. "My brother and my passion, we are here ourselves."
	"I'm not sure that you are," Duffey mumbled as he began to read.
"This is equally yourselves that I hold in my hand, and it's in a more
efficient form. Why should I see you when I can read about you from you? I
always preferred books to the movies made out of them. And I've come to
distrust Animations, even my own. Make yourself at home, good people, and I
will be with that version of you as soon as I finish with this one."  
	Letitia was there then, and she embraced the Bagbys with her hot
sincerity. And the whole bunch of dazzlers was soon there, Transcendent
Dotty and Sugar Cane Schaeffer and Glorious Stein and Midnight Margaret and
Salvation Sally with her aggressive bony face and her pewter heart. 
	But Duffey ("He always looks like a bear who's just learning to read
whenever he has something to pour over," Letitia said of him) was still busy
with the Bagby letter when they were all starting out for Breakfast at
Brennan's. 
	"One should always leave good reading for good company," Salvation
Sally quoted. "The Lord of Chesterfield said that." Bagby kissed Sally in
delight, He already knew her a little. Marie Monaghan had known Sally in
Australia and had sent her fare to come to America. Then she had shipped her
to New Orleans as a unique contribution to the enterprise. 
	"Come along, Duff, right now," Letitia insisted. "Stop running into
things. We're going to breakfast." 
	"Yes, yes, Oh Bloody Heart, we will do that thing right now," Duffey
said. But he banged only one hand together, and he continued with the letter
in his other hand while they walked to Brennan's. (It was only two blocks.
In the Quarter, if you belong to the Blessed, everything is always only two
blocks.) 
	"Duffey simply cannot begin a week without reading your letter,
Bascom," Letitia said. "You are the most faithful correspondent in the
world." 
	"Bagby is?" Mary Louise asked bewildered. "He never writes a letter.
This whole thing is as fishy as the Gascinade River." 
	"These are letters of another context, Mary Louise," Bagby said,
"and they are outside of the daily time. Should I not have a time stasis as
well as Duffey? No, of course I never write letters, Mary Louise. This is a
separate thing." 
	So they passed it off for then, but could it be passed off forever?
Really there was something of an exterior state about those letters from
Bagby. It was as if they were written by Bagby's unconscious to Duffey's
unconscious. And they didn't come by any regular delivery. They simply
appeared on Duffey's table every Monday morning. 
	("What does he say this time?" Margaret Stone later reported that
Bagby had asked Duffey in a very low voice. Nobody else heard this, but
Margaret Stone had the sharpest ears of anyone around there, regular
lynx-ears. Possibly she misunderstood the words. If she did, it was the
first time that she ever misunderstood anything. But she had to have
misunderstood, or this would open up a whole new area of mystification.) 
	The stamps on the letters were curious also. They looked very much
like United States Stamps unless one looked at them from a very close range,
five inches or less. But then one had to remember that Bagby was engraver
and spoofer for two of his trades, for those were 'otherwhere' stamps, the
rarest aberations that collectors ever come upon. But they were good enough
to fool the U.S. Post Office Department, for all of them were post-marked
correctly. No, they weren't either. For this, one must look at them even
closer, from a distance of three inches or less. It wouldn't be fair to say
that they werre post-marked wrongly, but they were marked with 'otherwhere'
post-marks that were very like a valid St. Louis post-mark. 
	Maybe Duffey should have taken them to a stamp and post-mark expert.
But he did. Duffey was a stamp and post-mark expert. He was a dealer in such
things. Maybe he should have asked Bagby what it was all about. Well, he
did, in a way. And Bagby answered in a way. Duffey may have been satisfied.
Others of the curious people would always remain curious. 
	There was one blessed thing about New Orleans on the River. It was
not a slave to the small hours of the night. A party could go directly from
Breakfast at Brennan's to a barrel house or a night club and find something
going on. Why should the hours after the sun has come up be slighted? 
	"But there will not be anything here like the Rounders' Club in St.
Louis," Mary Louise bragged, just as if the New Orleans-proud Duffey hadn't
invented the Rounders' Club in St. Louis. 
	"Not quite like," Duffey said, "but on the same high order. Let's go
to 'Good Guy's'." 
	They went to 'Good Guy's', and a band was playing Monumental Jazz.
It was playing it loudly and solidly and with a good foundation. 
	"How would Lord Chesterfield decide between good jazz and good
conversation, Sally?" Bagby asked Salvation Sally. "How would Solomon
decide?" 
	"I don't know," she said. "I don't think they had very good jazz
then." 
	"Well, have they now?" Bagby asked. "Have they, Duffey? Has this
thing become less than holy even in the city of its birth?" 
	"I suppose it's still holy," Melchisedech said, "and it hasn't been
trashed as much as most of the arts. But Monumental Jazz has lost its green
youth and is already playing at its own long, long funeral. Jazz at wakes
and funerals is more common in New Orleans than in other places. And it's no
odd thing for a jazz man, especially a horn man, to sit up in his coffin and
add his own note to his obsequies. This is what several styles of classical
jazz are doing now, giving their last licks to their own funerals. 
	"The classical jazz has grown old raucously. I don't believe that it
was ever intended to become one of the ancient arts. A hundred years for it,
maybe, and half of that is already gone. It is too little creative now, and
too much reminiscent, and it builds monuments to itself. But, man, man,
listen to those three horns build monuments! 
	"It hasn't been trashed as much as many other things, but it is hard
to talk with it going on." 
	When there was a lull in the morning and mourning, Bascom Bagby went
up and took one of the horns and began to blow down the gusty corridors of
the 'Gadarene Swine Song'. And then the Monumental Jazz men took it up. It
was really a sea-shanty tune, but the monumental jazz men worked it in. 

	2

	A little bit later, the Duffey and the Bagby Nations went out of
'Good Guy's' and around and into an art shop on Royal Street. And Bagby,
like Duffey, always strode into a new art shop as if he meant to conquer it
forthwith. 
	"What piece is that?" Bagby asked as he stood before a
four-chambered red heart. The heart was made of porcelain or ceramic, and
each of its four chambers was as big as a dog house. The four chambers were
shelved and filled with pictures and small statues and artifacts. 
	"It is by Elroy Redheart, of course," Duffey said, "and it is an
autobiographical work. It changes, but not very much." 
	"Why don't you have it in your own shop?" Bagby asked.
	"I've had it in my own shop several times," Duffey says, "but now
Hennessy has it in his." 
	The first of the dog-house-sized red rooms was filled up with blue
sky and red clay and green pasture scenes. It was rural Louisiana or
Mississippi or Alabama. There were peanut and cotton patches, and rice
fields. There were tractors and come-along plows. There were hundreds of
figurines of children and younglings and men and women, working people and
negros and travelers, dudes and high-binders. There was a school house with
a sign on it 'School's Out'. There were dancers, with fiddlers to the left
of them and a blare-box to the right of them. There was young fun stuff all
over the place. 
	There was a young girl dead on a sofa in a room with a wall cut away
to show the scene. Beside her on a little table was an opened box of candy,
and several favors and souvenirs and a party hat scattered about. In the
midst of it, and a dozen times as large as the other candy pieces, was her
own red chocolate heart. It bad been taken out of her opened breast. And her
'card' was daggered to a wall there beside her. It was the Jill of Hearts. 
	"I will have to own that collection or combination," Bagby said. 
	"I have some pieces for it in my own shop," Duffey said. "They are
the better pieces, really, but they stand out too much and detract from the
balance. Elroy Redheart sells some of the miniature statuettes and paintings
out of it when he gets hungry. Then he makes others." 
	"We haven't any room for it at home, Bag, and we really haven't any
money for it," Mary Louise objected mildly. 
	"Then I will sell you for money, Mary Louise," Bagby said. "And with
you sold and gone, there will be room for it in the house and there will be
money to pay for it also. I must have this red-heart cosmos." 
	"I'm a red-heart cosmos myself," Mary Louise told him, "with rooms
that you've hardly ever been in. Time is getting short for it, Bag. You had
better make up for your neglect." Then Mary Louise was examining and later
buying a French-Lady Purse-Pistol, very small, very old. It used wad powder
and round shot. 
	Tle second of the four red rooms was, in one half of it, of richer
interiors and of richer carryings-on. There were brash and opulent people in
its crassly figured scenes, some of whom had been in the earlier bucolicity
and some of whom hadn't. There was a free-swinging success in the stylized
sets here. There were chrome babes and chrome cars and chrome domiciles.
This was all a high-toned summertime shuffle with words and music, brag
words and brag music. 
	In the other half of this second of the red rooms, there was
artificial lightning and thunder, very well done, though the thunder was
produced by the crackling of a bright sort of parchment paper, and the
lightning by the fracturing glitter of it whenever one leaned close to took
and breathed on it. This was a totally outdoor scene with some men of the
same brash and opulent types as before. Now they were running a shoot-um
under green skies and bluish jungle fronds, with great activity coming out
of mint-green seas and sidling up on to coral beaches. There were combat
buffalos and combat alligators in the show, and other such amphibious armed
vehicles coming out of the mouths of landing crafts. The scenes were of
war-invasion and its bangy action. 
	Then, in an offset scene, there was a bone-thin, after-the-fact man
sitting on a stump with his head lolling on his folded arms on another
stump. And set out there, on a second and larger stump, were one hand, one
foot, one eye, and a flutter-valve out of a heart, almost enough stuff to
start to make a new man. All of these things on the stump had somehow come
out of the after-the-fact man who was slumped there. A card daggered to the
stump identified him. He was the Jack of Hearts. 
	"Hennessy, a thousand dollars is too much money for this," Bagby
said. "I am a poor man from up the river, and you are a rich city blood
dealer taking advantage of my love for peculiar art." 
	"Bagby, man, this certainly is not too much money for it," Hennessy
protested honestly. "Why do you think that your half-brother Duffey is no
longer showing it in his shop? It is because the maker of this, Elroy
Redheart, has put a the price of one thousand dollars on it. He says he is
selling himself in this, but he wants somebody else to have this essence of
him. He says he will not profiteer in his own flesh and soul, and that is
why he has put this ridiculously low figure on it. But you haven't seen it
all. Nobody could see it all in an hour or a day. We have here more than two
thousand separate exquisite miniatures in round and in low round and in
painted flat." 
	"You could make one like it yourself, Bagby," Mary Louise said. "You
know how to work in porcelain and bronze and walnut wood and tin and oil
paint. And you really make things better than this Elroy Redheart does." 
	"I could make it better, yes, but I would have to pull my own heart
out of me," Bagby said, "and I'm not through with it yet. But here's a big
red heart already pulled out of a body and put up for sale with more than
two thousand miniatures. I will buy it." 
	The third of the four red rooms was filled with scenes of more
hurried and more feverish opulence. There was the bone-thin man again, and
he had a black tch over one eye now, but he had become a hectic dude. There
was a beathtakingly beautiful young woman romping through episodes and
adventures. The cars in the scenes were more chromed, and lower and longer
than the pre-war cars had been. There was hurry, high-priced hurry about
everything. There were so many things to be done that in one scene the man
was using three hands to do them all. There was one little room that was
wallpapered with green money, and there were piles of the green stuff
everywhere. 
	The artist Elroy Redheart had made deft use of new, hot, artificial
colors to indicate new, hot, artificial sins. There was an artistic
cheapening here, not that the artist was trying to skimp things, but that he
was trying to show that cheap quality. Most of the figurines here were
plastic-cast little pieces that were made in Hong Kong. They were not made
by the artist at all. They were like the little things that are put in
cracker-jack boxes for prizes, and they were a dime a dozen on the trifle
market. But they were set in with prismatic reflecting things that gave a
fractured light to all of the scenes of this group. 
	Small and glinty hints told that here were drinks of a more
sophisticated sort and that they would give more sophisticated bang-heads. 
	Overpowering sound was there. It was portrayed by deforming the
scenes to make it seem as though they were filtered through a vision cracked
by 'hard rock'. And the ghostly powders were somehow indicated the dip and
the deep-sleep, the glow and the snow. A real touch of the o@or of them was
set there. The beautiful and romping young woman, wherever she had been
dancing, now had her feet bloody up to the ankles. But she was not lying
dead, not she. She had her own heart out in her hands, and she was sticking
pins into it and giggling. Certainly an artist can indicate a giggling
figure. There's nothing to it. 
	The beautiful woman took a pin larger than the others, a pin with a
Moloch face on the head of it, and stabbed her own 'Queen of Hearts' card to
her own heart in her hands. 

	The fourth red room was vacant. There was a noose dan@ling from the
ceiling, and there was a stool standing under the noose on which a person
might stand to hang himself. There was a sign there: 
	"This room for rent. Will decorate to suit tenant. The noose is an
optional feature." 
	"Oh yes, one thousand dollars, Mr. Bagby," Hennessy said as he
counted it out. Baggy always carried his money in ten dollar bills though
the rest of the world had gone to twenties. "Shall I send it over to
Duffey's shop?" Hennessy asked. "Then you could enjoy it for the remainder
of your stay in town, and Duffey could ship it for you to St. Louis." 
	"No. Duffey would steal some of the pieces," Bagby said. "You ship
it to St. Louis from here, Hennessy." 
	"You paid too much for it, Bagby Wrongheart," Dotty Yekouris said.
"It's only a novel, you know." 
	"I paid some of that just for the beauty of Hennessy's spiel about
the artist putting a ceiling on the price. I will have to add that one to my
own repertoire. A novel, Dot?" 
	"Sure. It's one of the Open Heart Novels that are big in paperbacks
now. There's a hundred novels wiih names and plots almost like that, 'Queen
Card High', 'Game of Hearts', 'High Hand Loses', 'Death of Hearts', 'Great
Red Heart'. You can get them at any paperback stand for forty cents and read
it in forty minutes. A thousand dollars is too much." 
	"He is like a kid in a China Shop," Mary Louise said. "He'll buy
anything." 

	"Have you noticed," Bagby said to Duffey one day, "how our old
stalkers, the SFM, have been appearing more and more in the stories and
continuities in the rag-pulp magazines?" 
	"Why would a man of my class and style be reading anything less
smooth than himself?" Duffey asked. "And I don't even know what the SFM is."

	"The Slant-Faced Men who travel in threes," Bagby said. "You killed
one of them, and I killed one of them, but there must be spares. There are
still three of them, or many threes of them. They are given a humor
treatment in the letter departments of the pulps, comic monsters like BEMs
and HLPS." 
	"They have turned up in three of the comic strips." Dotty Yekouris
said, "In 'Flame Man', in the 'White Avenger', and in 'Captain Justice'. I'd
find them comic myself if I didn't know that they were real." 
	"Comic strips?" Bagby asked. "Why would a man of my class and style
be reading anything less comic than myself?" 
	"They are the ones who bug me the most," Margaret Stone said,
"because I know that they really do kill so many people. I can get along
with all the others. The assassins of the Jebel Shammar sect flash knives at
me and tell me that they will murder me if I don't cease preaching the
doctrine of the Real Presence at night. They say that their Djinn is the
only Real Presence at night and that he is a jealous Djinn. But I just give
them a little Arabian sweet talk and tell them that New Orleans is a truce
city like Khamis Mushait. Besides, I'm not sure that there is any Jebel
Shammar sect. Those three are all the Arabs there are around here, and they
go to Tulane University. They may be wrap-head kidders. And the Red Fisters
from Sardinia say that they will wear my guts for scarves. But when I have
dawn coffee at Messina's or Anthony Ghost's, they are always there. I tell
them a shaggy duck joke every morning, and they say they let me live through
the night just to hear the next one even if I am a Whore of Rome. But I'm
afraid of the Slant-Faced Men. I tell them that they're zombies with winders
between their shoulder blades and that they're getting run down. They do
have little humps on their backs under their coats, and they may be winders.
But the Three Slant Faces won't talk and they won't joke. They scare me more
than any of the people who intend to kill me." 
	"Yes, I think the Slant Faces do have winders," Duffe said. "But is
it a 'self-destruct' or a 'disappearing record' that they are wound up to
act? I saw the death of Sebastian Hilton in a transport or a detached
experience. The Three Slant-Faced Men killed him, and they cut the Devil's
tetragrammaton design on his chest. But the official report was that
Sebastian died of an infectious fever. I flew up there and I demanded to see
everything at once, and I did see everything. He had died of an infectious
fever (actually, it was the old plague itself), and the plague sores on his
chest did form the design of the Devil's tetragrammaton just as I had seen
them. But they were fever sores. They were not knife cuts. Whatever winders
the Slant-Faced Men have stuck between their shoulder blades, they wind up
some pretty tricky records for them to play." 
	"I'll be killed by them myself," Bagby said, "and yet my death will
be attributed to my liver, a gentle organ that never harmed anybody." 
	"How is your liver really, Bag?" Duffey asked him. 
	"Oh tell us how's your liver, Mr. B.," Dotty sang. 
	"I believe that, with a little help from some of my creations, we
could make a song out of that," Duffy proposed. Mary Virginia Schaeffer went
to the piano (this was in 'Trashman's Girl-a-Rama', and several of them
hammered out the song then. More songs have been born in Trashman's than in
any place in the block. Duffey accompanied them on a house banjo (he hadn't
his own banjo with him) and all of the unofficial members of the Pelican
Glee Club sang thus: 

	"Is it true you have abused it? 
	Have you battered it and boozed it? 
	Are you sorry you misused it 
	Horribly? 
	Does it need the Great Forgiver? 
	Is it feeling sensitiver? 
	Is it shrunken to a sliver? 
	Oh tell us how's your liver, 
	Mr. B." 

	Why, they were untrashing one of the minor arts there! 
	"I certainly prefer Duffey's flute to his banjo," Letitia said. "He
can't sing when he's playing the flute, and the rest of us all sing so
well!" 
	But Duffey sang with the rest of them as they went on with it: 
	"Is it silted like a river? 
	Does it rattle like a flivver? 
	Does it quake a lot and quiver 
	Tenderly?" 

	Bascom Bagby added in verses to the Pelican Song to himself, and all
the silver tongued people sang the grand finale: 

	"Is it mighty coy and clivver? 
	Comes it down to now or nivver? 
	Oh tell us how's your liver, 
	Mr. B."

	And Bagby did look rather bad. 
	"It's the last time you'll see me in this life, of course, Duffey,"
he said. "I'll just go home and create a few more loose ends, and then I'll
die. But I've enjoyed it all." 
	The Bagbys were around there for a couple of weeks and they had a
mildly festive time of it. Bascom discovered heresies in many of the
parishes of the city and he reported them to the Archbishop as well as to
Duffey. Then they went back to St. Louis. 
	But that wasn't the last time that Duffey saw Bagby in this life.
Bagby lived for at least two more years, and Duffey saw him at least twice
more, once in St. Louis, once down in New Orleans again. And the Bagby
letters were still received every Monday morning. 

	Duffey discovered, quite by accident, the names of the Three
Slant-Faced Men. These were given one day, almost in throw-away fashion, in
the comic strip 'Flame Man'. The names were Amraphel, Arioch, and Thadal.
The slant-faces were depicted as no more than three stooges in 'Flame Man',
and yet here were their revelatory names. Out of the mouth of babes and
sucklings, out of the pens of comic strip writers, comes wisdom. 
	These were three crooked kings. Amraphel was the King of Shinar or
upper Babylonia. Arioch was King of Ellasar or Pontus or Lower Babylonia.
Thadal was King of the Nations, or of the Goyim. These were the opposite
kings, the anti-magi, who had no magic at all. It is unnatural, or at least
it is inhuman, for a person to have no magic at all. To be human is to have
at least a handful of magic, and these three didn t. 
	All three of them were followers (though this was not given in the
'Flame Man' comic strip) of Chodorlahomor who was King of Elam or Susiana, a
Devildom east of the Tigris. 
	"I always thought that Abraham was biting off some big chunks there,
tackling four kings of such realms as those with only three hundred and
eighteen men, and they naught but sheep and camel herders," Melchisedech
said. "Well, so do I think so now, so did I think so then. I don't believe
they liked me blessing the man." 

	Duffey had begun to create a great number of small statues and
groups. He made several large sets or mansions on the order of the chambered
heart display of Elroy Redheart that Bagby had bought. He made displays of
his primordial lives and kingships, and also of his twentieth century
childhoods and lives. 
	One huge, surrealistic assembly was, according to Absalom Stein,
intended to indicate the seven hidden vears of the Life of Melchisedech
Duffey. It was not divided into seven chambers though. It may have followed
some other time. 
	Duffey became adept at moulding figures out of clay and baking and
painting them. He also made figures out of bread dough, wheat flour and corn
meal mixed and with pigments added when he mixed them; then he baked them
hard and varnished them. He probably made ten thousand of these figurines to
fill in his thematic displays and collections and provinces and mansions.
And some of them he just made for personal need. 

	3

	'Three things are necessary for the preservation of the world: the
Law, Worship of God, Deeds of Kindness and Charity.' 
	That seemed clear enough and easy enough. Get enough people to
comply with these things and the world will be preserved. And preserving the
world is really the same things as rebuilding the world. It is the
everlasting raising up of pieces of it as often as they fall down. 
	Duffey himself had a great respect for The Law, and a working
respect for laws-lower-case. He ostentatiously worshipped God. But does not
ostentation take much of the grace out of worship? Sure it does. It takes
some of it out, but not all of it. And some people are made with the
ostentatious character in them. Duffey could be kind. He could be
charitable. It was just that he had trouble being both of them at the same
time. And do not try to tell him that the meaning of the two words are the
same. The chances are that Duffey knows more about the meaning of words than
you do. 
	It is the first two things that are really the same under different
names: The Law, and the Worship of God. The comprehensive name for the
congruence of these two things is 'The Faith'. 
	Faith and works it must be then. And faith and works had come under
deadly and devious siege. Duffey valiantly defended a sector against this
siege. No, that wasn't safer than other sectors, and it wasn't bloodless.
There were skulls to be split here, and enemies to be eviscerated. There
were sub-segments to be defended, and some of them had become slippery with
blood. 
	Art as Law. Art as Worship. Art as Kindness. Art as Charity. Art as
Creation. A synthesis of all these things must be built. The synthesis was
already present in the articulate body to which we belong. But could it not
also be made on a clay-human and daily basis? Possibly. It already had been,
almost certainly. 
	Duffey was haunted by the feeling that he had already built this
synthesis somewhere. If he had built it, why couldn't he remember it?

	Vincent and Teresa came down to New Orleans from St. Louis for a
visit about that time. Then Duffey remembered. This Teresa was the synthesis
of all these arts, and Duffey had already built her. 
	She came with Vincent and a couple of their children. The wanderer
Finnegan was also in town, and Teresa sent Vincent and Finnegan off to
carouse together. She sent the children out to play. 
	"And stay out," she told the children, "for a week at least. I don't
know where the custom ever developed of letting children and dogs come into
the house. Oh, at home I let them come in two or three days a year, in very
cold weather. But here there's no need for that." 
	Showboat Teresa put out an issue of 'The Bark' by herself, writing
every word and line of it, and setting it up too. "Yes, it's botchy
looking," she acknowledged, "but it's got soul. None of that correct and
professional appearance of a Dotty edition. I meant it to look correct and
professional though, but the main thing is excellence of content. Dotty, did
you fully appreciated my article on --" 
	"We fully appreciate you, Teresa," Dotty said. "The issue is truly a
Special, and the essence of a Special is that it should happen only once."
	Teresa also put out an edition of 'Show-Bill" by herself. This was a
little show business sheet that they had been doing on the Pelican Press
every Friday morning. They had always used to send it to Teresa in St.
Louis. In fact, the Star and Garter in St. Louis always carried an ad in
'Show-Bill' until the S and G was forced out of business. The issue that
Show-Boat put out now had a large advertisement for the Decatur Street Opera
House. 
	"There isn't any Decatur Street Opera House, you dumb Guinea," Dotty
told her. "What's the matter with you anyhow? How do we get money for ads
from imaginary aces?" 
	"There is a Decatur Street Opera House, now," Showboat said. "This
is just the first appearance of it. Oh Duffey, there's no reason for you to
shake like that just because one of your premonitions comes home to roost.
Yeah, here's a hundred dollars for the ad, Dotty. They'll pay you a hundred
dollars a week to run the same ad." Showboat gave the hundred dollars to
Dotty. 
	"They are very futuristic people who are behind the opera house,"
the Showboat said. "It's one of the places that had to happen. There wasn't
any good place in town to present eschatalogical dramas." 
	Teresa Showboat Piccone Stanahan put a hundred pounds of Italian
vegetables into the Giant Pot that was simmering forever. Sure Italian
vegetables are different from other vegetables. They aren't grown, not
anywhere. They are imported by Importers into all the major ports of the
world, but no one knows where they originate. Even in Italy they are
imported from elsewhere. They are received on open-ended manifests. 
	"It is a test, it is a test," Showboat said. 
	"Yes, people will have to be really hungry to eat out of the Pot for
a few days," Mary Virginia told her. 
	Teresa Cooked all-Italian meals for everybody, three times a day for
three days. Ah, they weren't like those you get in O'Conner's Italian
Restaurant or even in Peterson's Italian Restaurant. One had to love Teresa
to eat them. They were works of art, yes, and they were fine to look at.
There should have been a way to make them edible, Margaret Stone said. 
	Showboat went out street-preaching with Margaret Stone one midnight.
"That's the time to get the really unsavory ones, between midnight and six
in the morning," Margaret said. Showboat had been addressing herself to
every sort of audience since she was three years old, and she wasn't bashful
about things like this. She knew all there was to know about showmanship and
presentation. She had been making lots of political talks as well as
rebuild-the-world talks in St. Louis. She had a voice that would carry to
every corner of a theatre and to every recess of a city block. Her spiels,
like everything else about her, were works of art. 
	What went wrong then? Over-confidence probably. Her talks didn't go
over not in the night-time Quarter. Never in her life had she come up
against so complete a bad-show as this. 
	"Aw stuff it, Dago!" the rough guys would holler at her. They booed
her and made dirty noises. Showboat could always handle hecklers, but this
was massive and contrived heckling. But Margaret Stone always began to talk
after Showboat had been shouted down, and she hooked every one of those
ruffians. She broke them down. She shook them up. She poured out love and
tongue-lashing. She enchanted the damned fools off their feet. She made them
sob, some of them, and repent of their sins. 
	They tried it on another corner. Once more, Showboat busted all over
the place. And then Margaret would sweep whole blocks of people clear out of
themselves. Margaret Stone didn't know anything about showmanship or
presentation. She hadn't the voice to fill a theatre or a block. Sometimes
her voice failed her so completely that she cried in frustration, and the
fellows would refer to her as Whispering Maggy. The people often had to
crowd in very close to catch all that she was saying. But when they came in
close, they were changed forever. 
	But Showboat saw something out of the corner of her eye, and then
something else, and then a third something. She knew about the 'three-spot
device' for instigating or corrupting a crowd, the device that the
red-brains use so successfully. It's a minimum of three points for
manipulating a mob. Three hyenas were working three corners of every
gathering crowd, three hyenas with disguised faces and disguised voices. And
they had been getting in part of their dirty work even before Showboat and
Margaret arrived. One or more of them knew Margaret Stone's routes. 
	One of the hyenas was Finnegan, Damn him! Another of them was
Showboat's own husband, Vincent Stranahan. Damn him twice! And the third one
of them was Absalom Stein. Treasons such as this pass for humor with some
people. Oh what a vile trio of entrail-eating, presentation-shredding hyenas
they were! 
	Ah well, Showboat fingered them to the crowd then. (This wouldn't
have happened to begin with except that Showboat was so short-sighted that
she couldn't distinguish people at twenty feet.) The crowd had already been
conned and subverted by the hyenas, but it could be turned around And Teresa
turned those hooters around. People quickly pinioned those false three and
ripped off their false noses and Mardi Gras masks and held them there
secure. Teresa railed at those three sick perverts and had the street folks
ready to perform an Old Testament stoning execution of them within five
minutes. And Margaret Stone got some of her old faithful friends to force
those three jokers to their knees and to pour dust and ashes over their
heads. "That the Grace may enter into their unwilling souls and they will
may be saved by the miracle of interposition!" Margaret croaked out in her
cracked-laughter voice. People didn't bad-show Showboat very long after she
caught onto a thing, and they didn't bad-show Margaret at all. 
	This rebuilding of the world on street corners can be a lot of fun. 

	Teresa said one day that she wanted everybody assembled. The
Showboat was going to explain the fundamentals to all the special people and
lay bare the roots of creation and substance. They had wakened imperfectly
from a long sleep, she said, and it was time that they remembered their own
earlier episodes. She phoned Father Henri Salvatore at his parish in
Boondocks Louisiana and told him that she wanted him to come to town. 
	"Be quiet, woman," Henry told her. "Go home and be subject to your
husband. Oh, I forgot, your h@sband is my old buddy Vincent, isn't he'? Well
then, take him home and make him be subject to you. No, Showboat, I really
can't come. And I do know how it is. Was'l Euphemus for nothing? But explain
it to those with heads and memories less open than mine." 
	Teresa got her husband Vincent, and Finnegan, Duffey, Stein, Dotty,
Mary Virginia, X (who had just got to town on his third or fourth
visitation), Letitia, Margaret Stone, Salvation Sally, Gabrielovitch,
Zabotski, maybe several other folks, all together.
	"Quite a few of us are special people, very old people," this
Showboat Teresa said. "We extend very far into the past and also into the
future. Give me your ashes there, Duffey. We are too much in the daily
world, and we tend to forget just what substance we are made of." 
	"Not for tricks, Showboat," Duffey said. "My ashes are holy." 
	"So am I," Teresa said. She took the ashes in their urn that artful
cigar canister that had once belonged to the King of Spain, and opened it.
She washed her hands in the ashes, and they were so fine as to be almost
liquid. Then she was washing her hands in flame. 
	"It isn't everybody's ashes that will flame like this," she said.
"Melchisedech has a lot to him." She washed her face and hair with flame
also. There was only the slightest smell of burning hair and of burning
flesh. Teresa seemed to be in passion or pain, but not from the
ashes-turned-to-fire. She gathered up the flame again. 	"There is another
one in your hair," Margaret said. "No, on the other side." 
	Teresa gathered that flame in also. She put all the flames back into
the urn, and they crawled back under their ashes. 
	"We are all flame-persons," Teresa said. "Well, most of us are. Even
under the appearance of death and reduction we can still flame. We had been
active a long time ago, and then we had rested and slept. Then one of us
came and woke the rest of us up again. He woke us up in blundering fashion,
for he was still half asleep himself. And he still is. 
	"Melchisedech, you haven't even understood your own role. You didn't
make us. That's only a way of speaking. You can't make people, but maybe you
can assemble them. You aren't a creator, Melchisedech the Magus! You are an
awakener. No, really, that's all you had to do, just wake us up. And now
you've done that. Don't try to do too much else. You're not capable of a
very great lot. 
	"Yes, you woke us up. And you made us to go into other bodies and
bellies to be born again. That was no great thing. But why were we waked? It
was because we were among the few folks who were around before the Devil was
imprisoned. Now he is loosed. So we are loosed also and set to action to be
able to combat him. We knew his on-the-loose tactics from of old. Gah, won't
they ever change! 
	"Casey in Chicago, Mary Catherine in Chicago also, Hans and Marie in
St. Louis, Henry in Boondocks Louisiana, listen, I want to talk to you! Of
course you can hear me! We were not the first crew nor the first pilots, nor
did we go on the first voyage. But we did sail on that first ship The Argo
which is the actual as well as the phonetic equivalent of the Ark. We put
the first sails on it and the first rudder. It had neither before, since it
was going nowhere except afloat. 
	"We'elleh shemoth. And these are our names. Duffey is the real and
original Melchisedech, though his argonaut name was something other. All of
our names have many depths and versions to them. Finnegan is Iason himself,
but the later Romans called him Jason. Hans is Orpheus, and at a later time
he was manifest as Faust. Henry is Euphemus (his ocean-father taught him to
walk on water, but he seldom does it now). Vincent is Meleager. Casey is
Peleus. Dotty is Medea the vile sorceress (but it is all a mistake about her
having a vile name and reputation). Marie is Eurydice. But did not Eurydice
die and go to the underworld? No, she pretended to misunderstand, and she
pulled a trick. She went to the down-under world of Australia instead, and
she is the mother of all Australians and South Island people. Mary Virginia
is Laonome. I am Atalanta, and that's only a small part of whom I am. Mary
Catherine is Antigone. Stein is Ab-Salom, the Father of Peace. He was a
ship's chandler and provisioner on the Euxine, and he decided to go along on
the Argo to look after his investments. I don't know what dynasty you others
belong to, but you would hardly be in this company now if you weren't
special. I don't know what company Gabrielovitch and Zabotski and Salvation
Sally belong to. It may be one even more ancient than ours. I do know what
company Margaret Stone belongs to, but I'm not telling. And I sure don't
know about X." 
	"You are talking about people in a Greek myth." Zabotski asked.
"Why?" 
	"No, no, not in Greek myth. In ancient fact before that. We are
older than the Greeks. Even Homer referred to us as unaccountably ancient.
And our quest was the prototype of all quests. We went to Colchis on the
Black Sea on the best known of our voyages. We went past the Devil's
preordained prison on the Chersonese on that same voyage. We found the
shining garment, the Golden Fleece, at the end of our famous voyage, and we
have it yet. The Devil would give his thousand-year molars to know where we
have it hidden. As long as we have it inviolate, the Devil is not completely
loose. 
	"We went over rock beaches and rock wastes that were sown with
Dragons' Teeth; we went over them to get the Fleece. We got it without
triggering the Dragons' Teeth to spring into armed-warrior life. They were
the guards and the threat. We buried them very much deeper under rocks, and
now the Devil wants them and he can't wake them up. He blows on that
Dog's-Horn Bugle of his, but he can't wake them." 
	"He is cashing in quite a few dragons' teeth lately," Stein said,
"and they are devilishly well-armed warriors." 
	"Those are from lesser dragons' teeth," Teresa said. "He has not
been able to use those in the main caches. The obliteration of the Black Sea
in the Thunder-Colt aspect of History (we're within a couple of decades of
that, one way or the other), is only an attempt by the Devil to obliterate
all traces of his prison on the Black Sea. There was always the chance that
he might be locked up there again. But the shore is obliterated along with
the sea, and part of it is dragons'-tooth shore Are they destroyed there,
or can he save them? Can he have it both ways? 
	"What's the matter. Don't you people remember these things even
yet?" 
	"I remember only snatches of them," Mary Virginia said, "but now you
bring other parts of it back to me. I hated my name of Laonone then and I
hate it now."
	"It seems to me that there were several voyages we took," Dotty
said. "There were others besides the one to Colchus." 
	"There were nine voyages, I think," Teresa Showboat said. 
	"There were thirteen," said Absalom Stein. "But I forget where the
Argo is now." 
	"That's a thing the Devil would give his five-hundred-year molars to
know," Melchisedech said. "But I'm assured that the Argo is still seaworthy.
You'll not demean me with your words, Showboat. It was the Argo herself that
was called the Show Boat. Oh what a castled masterpiece she was when we got
all that superstructure on her! The Show Boat was not the lady love of the
third officer. But people, I did make you, though it's hardly worth arguing
about. I evoked your clay, yes. That's the same thing as to make you." 
	"Was it the thirteenth voyage on which you were reduced to ashes,
Duffey?" Margaret Stone asked him. 
	"Nay, it was the fourteenth. Some of the others don't remember it
yet. It's technically in the future, but the ashes here are proof that some
parts of the future have already happened." 

	They had quite a few such talks together during the few days that
Vincent and Teresa were in town. It isn't every gang that has such sort of
talks. It isn't every gang that holds the shining fleece in a place that the
Devil would give his thousand-year molars to know. 
	It isn't every gang that was around before the Devil was imprisoned
a thousand years ago, who knew him when he was loose before, and who
therefore know how to combat and obstruct this loosened Devil. 

	There were meteorological trash-falls over the whole world for years
and years. They are still going on. The accounts of these partly immaterial
trashings have not been allowed in the papers.or journals, and they may not
be referred to on radio or TV. So they are ignored. 
	But still it falls, trash, trash, trash, into every cranny of soul
and person in the world. 
	"There are still a few bright spots left in the world," Dotty said
one day. "And mostly they are ourselves." 
	"Yes. The world can't be all bad with so many very good people in
it," Duffey agreed. 
	Then several of the very good people began to fall out of the world.
Bagby in St. Louis was the first of the very good people (during the last
few years, he had become a very good person) who died and fell out of it. 
	Book Four

	'It was originally built by a prince of the Canaanites 	called in
the vernacular 'Righteous King' (Melchizedech), for he was indeed righteous.
Wherefore he was the first to officiate as priest of God, and being first to
build a temple, gave this city, till then called Salem, the name of
Jerusalem.' 
	[Josephus. Jerusalem and Rome.] 

	1 

	After Duffey got back from Bagby's funeral in St. Louis, he found on
his table one of those weekly letters from Bagby. The funeral had been on
Saturday. Duffey and Letitia arrived back in New Orleans on the following
Monday morning. Bagby's weekly letters always came on Monday. 
	"I will miss him," Duffey said, "He had become, though he wasn't
always so, a faithful man as well as a faithful correspondent. He must have
written and mailed this last of his letters Thursday before he was
stricken." 
	But the following Monday, there was another letter from Bagby. And
on the Monday after that there was still another one. 
	"Even in death he is a joker," Duffey said. "He wrote some of these
ahead of time. There was never anything timely in his letters anyhow, no
'news' in a literal sense. He always despised the 'timely' in letters and in
everything. And he gave these to somebody to mail, once a week, after @is
death. I wonder how long they will continue?" 
	At last report, very many years later, they were still continuing.
Bagby must have written more than a thousand of those undated weekly letters
before he died. That's carrying a joke a long ways. Could they have been
written by somebody else? By an even more outlandish joker? No, they
couldn't have been. They were from Bagby's hand and from his mind and
person. Nobody else, except Duffey, was at all near Bagby in any of these
things. And Duffey wasn't writing the letters to himself. 

	Dotty Yekouris had gone away, to meet Finnegan somewhere, possibly
in Cuba, and she hadn't come back. Finnegan hadn't written to her directly.
A lawyer named Ignacio had written to Dotty. And a girl named Elena had
written to her. They told her that Finnegan was coming apart, and that she
might wish to come down there if she cared. It was mysterious. Dotty went
down there, and she didn't come back. 
	The folks around the Pelican Press always expected her to return
within days or weeks or months, or years anyhow, and she didn't. And there
was no solid news from her or from Finnegan again. There was a little bit of
quakey news from X and such people. That sort of news is always as easy to
come by as it is difficult to build upon. 
	X said that both Finnegan and Dotty had been slain in a futuristic
episode on the Marianao Coast of Cuba near Havana. As to just how final
their deaths had been, he would not swear. X said that he still felt
presences of both Finnegan and Dotty. Well everybody who had known them
still felt their presences. They had both been permeating people whose
presences would prevade for a long while. 
	"Tell me X, were they killed by three slant-faced men?" Duffey
demanded once. 
	"I am sorry to disappoint you, Duffey, but I don't believe that they
were," X said. "I know those three. They haunt a lot but they don't kill
much. Often they take the credit for killing persons who were already dead
or who were otherwise killed. No, this killer was the shabby and heavy
stalker, the heavy man who follows forever so slowly, and who is there and
waiting when his victims arrive at a new place." 
	"Ah, I know him. But you really don't know much more about this than
I do, do you, X?" 
	"Not much more. But I intend to find it all out. The one behind it
all I know. He is a Cheap-Shot Artist who is the father of all cheap-shot
artists." 
	"Ah, I know him too, and his agents." 
	Well, Duffey and others had returned from futuristic deaths, Could
not Finnegan and Dotty do it also? They were special people, and it was
unlikely that their deaths were completely final. But would they have to be
waked up all over again? And by whom? 

	Well, not very long after these disappearances, Duffey had an
encounter with the Cheap-Shot Artist and Father of all cheap-shot artists. 
	Letitia Duffey had become the new editor of 'The Bark'. She paid
less attention to the Jazz sheet and the Union sheet and the Sporting news
and such things that the Pelican Press had been publishing for money, and
several of those accounts were lost to the Pelican. Letitia kept 'The Bark'
going out of private funds, which Dotty would never have done. 
	Duffey and Letitia and Mary Virginia went to a meeting put on by the
New Catholic Press Guild, a somewhat suspect (but already powerful)
organization. Well, what was this New Guild? It was very new. Possibly it
was born just for such occasions as this. It was not the same as the old
Catholic Press Association. Two-thirds of the members of the New Guild also
belonged to the old Association, and the other one-third of the members of
the New Guild had come out from under the rocks. 
	This was a highly secret and at the same time a very heavily
advertised meeting. It was stated in the advertisements ("Classified, not to
be given to unauthorized persons") that the Guest Speaker of the meeting
would be "The Most Important Person in the World, The Most Important Person
Who Has Ever Been in the World". That was a tall claim. And it was stated
that this Guest Speaker was also the busiest person in the world, and that
he attended ten thousand meetings a year with select groups. 
	Duffey caught a whiff of the situation when he came into the meeting
room. 
	"Who do we know who holds ten thousand meetings a year with select
groups?" he asked. "What, ladies, what? Well then, who do we know who is the
Cheap-Shot Artist and the Father of all Cheap-Shot Artists? You really don't
know? I bet you will be hearing that phrase 'You really don't know?' a lot
this evening." 
	"Oh, stuffy Duffey, that's what the several groups of giggle-nuns
who are here keep saying," Letitia protested. "'You really don't know who he
is?' they ask each other. And then they go into their giggle act." 
	"Who do we know who sets off the giggle-nuns?" Duffey asked. "I will
bet nineteen to one that it is Old Clootie Himself." 
	The guest speaker ("Possibly, ever certainly, the best-known person
ever, anywhere," the introductory speaker was introducing him) was standing
in a bit of shadow, and yet it seemed that he was being picked out by
low-resolution, purple spotlights. The introductory speaker was on that list
of the one thousand persons who had been present at the releasing of the
Devil near Yalta, according to X. Duffey hadn't believed it of the man, a
churchman little known but of high station. Now he three-quarters believed
it. 
	And the meeting itself, it was scheduled to begin at three o'clock
in the morning. No, that wasn't such an hour as would bother Duffey or
Letitia or Mary Virginia. And it didn't seem to bother the little groups of
giggle-nuns and giggle-priests ("You really don't -- giggle -- know who he
is?"), but it stood out as a possibly convenient hour for a person who held
ten thousand meetings a year with select groups, and who did not sleep.
That's a bit more than twenty-eight meetings every twenty-four hours.
Meetings, meetings, is there no end of meetings? 
	"The real name of this person is the only four-letter word that may
not be spoken by us always and everywhere," the introductory speaker was
saying. "There is no proper pronoun to refer to this person who is an
androgyne and beyond grammar. The person is always to be referred to simply
as 'The Majesty'. The accepted method of adoration of 'The Majesty' is the
snicker." 
	"You here, Duff?" asked George Koran who reported for the Picayune.
"I came in here a bit ago and got a whiff of it. 'Judas Priest!' I hollered
out I was so startled by it. 'Yes, yes, you want an interview?' eight of the
Judas Priests snickered, and they crowded up with their tongues lolling and
their noses twitching. Hey, this is one fruity place! I got to keep moving,
Duff, in one door and out another. Those three edge-heads keep trying to
kill me. They can run me out, but they can't keep me out." 
	"Don't you have your press card?" Duffey asked him. 
	"Sure, and I showed it," Koran said. "'That's no good. That's a dead
man's card,' one of the edge-headed guards told me, and he was switching
that switch-blade knife. 'You're wrong,' I said. 'It's my own card, and I'm
not a dead man'. 'You will be, you will be,' another of the edgies told me.
'In five minutes you will be."' 	"Oh, I didn't know that the slants
had any humor," Duffey remarked. 
	'The Majesty' was a built-in optical illusion. Duffey had
encountered such illusions before, and he could ess the size pretty well.
'The Majesty' was a giant disguised. There is nothing uncommon about that.
But he had the apparent size of a man. Well, let's see. Where will his head
really come to? Duffey climbed up into the jungle of hidden cables and
struts above the little stage of the hall. Duffey had been a rigger. He
could climb, and he knew about the above-stage apparatus in that jungle. 
	Ah, a swinging boom that sometimes carried spotlights. It was at
just the right height, maybe eighteen feet above the stage. Duffey swung the
boom out and fetched 'The Majesty' an echoing 'klunk' in the back of his
head. This was a dazzle of humor that not everyone caught. The boom klukked
staggering into the real head of 'The Majesty'! But it was the illusion head
and form, twelve feet below it, that reacted so spastically and grotesquely.
Oh, only the blessed understood what had happened, and the ringing silver
laughter of Letitia filled the hall. 
	"It's a laugh all too rich for humans sometimes," Duffey had once
said, "but God enjoys it." 
	Consternation soon calmed, however, and the magnetic personality of
'The Majesty' surmounted the happening. There was so much spastic and
grotesque going on there anyhow that most of the people took it for normal. 
	"An enemy is here," 'The Majesty' said: "and will be disposed of." 
	"One does not laugh at 'The Majesty',"  a coven of giggle-nuns gave
sincere warning to Letitia. 
	"Oh the hell one does not!" she said. 

	"Ladies, pay attention to just what 'The Majesty' says," Duffey told
Letitia and Mary Virginia. "Yes, you have a recorder, Mary Virginia. Use it,
but it may not prove accurate. This is a special case. We will see what you
remember 'The Majesty' as saying. We will see what the recorder says that he
says. And I will see what I find him saying interiority in his mind. With
the three versions we may be able to triangulate it on him. I have been a
pirate and ransacker of minds, and I won't be intimidated just because his
mind is that of an evil giant."
	Duffey climbed into that mina then, and 'The Majesty' that the mind
belonged to began to talk. It's a good thing that Duffey had been a rigger
and climber, or he'd never have made it in that steep jungle. 
	There was lots of wreckage, and high piles of bones in that mind. It
was a wasteland. Duffey recognized many of the landscapes in it, those that
had been done by Dali and Dore and Hieronymous Bosch, those that had been
done by Peggy Munster and Adam Scanlon and Count Finnegan. Duffey climbed
and clambered in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., through surrealistic
clutters and mountainous and evil trash. Sure, Duffey was the Thief of
Baghdad. An ordinary thief doesn't break in here and steal these secrets. 
	These are secrets? Can trash-giantized be anything but more trash?
This speeching was real speeching of the kind to unhinge and destroy the
world? How? How? 
	"Why don't they laugh?" Duffey asked himself. "Why doesn't everybody
laugh? 
	"I have got my physical and temporal release, which is to say my
token release," the mountainous mind of the Devil began to grind out mice,
"Now I strive as I have ever strove for my eternal release. I can never win
this release in the existing case of things. I can win it only in the case
of Creation being negated and withdrawn. I work always for that negation and
cancelling out, whatever I may call my work. 'That it may not have been, any
of it, ever!' that is what I ultimately work for. 
	"I will inculcate a hatred of mankind in mankind. I will have it
that no person will ever speak of mankind without a sneer. Mankind must
destroy itself, but first it must deride itself until it earns its derision
and destruction. 
	"My best game is to convince the commonality of people that I don't
exist. The best game for you, my conspiring followers, is to convince the
commonality of people that conspiracies don't exist. Yet I say to you,
Conspire Always! And Again Conspire!" 
	("Out, out, you intrusion," the ungainly mind was saying to
Melchisedech, still not knowing who he was nor how he had got in.) 
	"I have been called a Cheap-Shot Artist," the huge mind went on.
"Yes, I am, and I glory in it. Let you all be cheap-shot artists! It is the
easy way to fame and glory, and it short-cuts the enemy. But that is the
tactic. The fuel is hatred. Hatred is both the cake and the frosting on the
cake. It is the meat and the drink. It is the bodies ransacked and raped. It
is the whole catalog of carnalities. It is the ultimate lust and the perfect
perversion. It is the uncreation, the reversal of everything, it is the
murder by torture and the murder by defamation. 
	"But never let me hear defamation defamed by any minion of mine. It
is the very hinges on which we swing. Slander, which is defamation, is
always the servant of hatred. We will work for red murder and red revolt.
There is an obligation to disobey. Teach that obligation! We will work for
the trashing and toppling of everything. And then we work for absolute
nullity. 
	"Do not use a straight line where a crooked line will do. Do not say
anything in two words that can be said in three. Order is our enemy. We
cannot allow order in anything. Law is our enemy. Attack these things
forever, and attack them crookedly. Remember that a crooked tongue can
penetrate into recesses where a straight tongue cannot." 
	("Out, out, outsider!" 'The Majesty' was angrily ordering
Melchisedech. "Easy, Clootie, easy," Melchisedech was saying. "Do not buck
like that.") 
	"Do as I say," the trashy mind was grinding out, "and for your
reward, I will give to you certain persons to dismember and destroy for your
pleasure. Oh, some of them are high persons! Howl and be weird! Ours are the
gibberish tongues. The Paul said that God was not the God of gibberish. I
say to you that I am the god of gibberish, and by this gibberish we shall
know each other. You will carry out the tasks assigned to you by myself and
in return, you will be given all riches and final oblivion. 
	"The richest reward is the Devouring of Entrails in the Holy Places.
There is no more rampant pleasure than this. But for the present, before we
are able to blow out all ihe lights, we will refer to our Devouring of the
Entrails in the Holy Places as 'Holding More Meaningful Liturgal Services'."


	That was really about all that the evil giant was able to formulate
in cluttered mind. Oh, it went on for fifteen minutes more, but it was all
repetition. 'The Hell about Hell is its repetition,' one dissatisfied
citizen of that realm said recently. 'Over and over, the same things in the
same words and acts. It is damnation by the suffocating staleness.' 
	"Bad show, Clootie, bad show," Melchisedech said as he came out of
that surrealistic wasteland. So he came back more solidly into the assembly.
The tiresome and illusory giant was still talking, but no matter. He was
only talking with wobble-mouth words. 
	Duffey checked with Letitia and Mary Virginia. Yes, the speech that
the Devil had given with his mouth was about the same as he had given with
his mind. The mouth speech was garnished with such terms and words as
'involvement' and 'relevancy' and 'faith-life' and 'life-style' and
'charisma', but it was the same speech. It had words like 'socialization'
and 'noosphere', and it attacked Pharisees and Legalists and Rigidists, and
Reactionary Members of the Curia, and Insensate Hierarchies, but it was the
same speech. The Devil has only one. 
	"He gives several more talks in the city tonight," the reporter
George Koran said, "to an economic group, to a group of media masters, to a
donkey's dozen of politicians, to a clutch of labor masters, to a coven of
historians. And he will make a talk to the Student Repudiation Congress." 
	"When is his next Epistle to the Romans?" Mary Virginia asked.
"It's a very early communion breakfast in Oklahoma City if he catches the
Braniff flight. A bishopric board of directors there is trying to re-orient
a diocesan publication so that it will be more in accord with the thinking
of 'The Majesty'. They need catch words and double words for it, and they
want to pledge their allegiance. He can't very well refuse to be there. Then
it's double back to catch a Baptist bunch in Waco ("Even those hard-shells I
can crack"); then to Dallas to fleece the sheepy rich (five talks there).
He'll make Cow Town and San Antonio and Houston later in the day. It's a
busy life, but I guess that his Majesty enjoys it." 	This reporter George
Koran led a busy life also, and he seemed to enjoy it. 
	Margaret Stone and some of her rowdies from the Quarter came in and
disrupted things by singing the Gadarene Swine Song. She had learned it from
Duffey and Letitia. The Slant-Faced Men moved towards the disrupting singers
with switch-blades twitching. But rowdies from the Quarter pinnioned all
three of them, jerked down their zootie coats, and jerked out the winders
that were between their shoulder blades. And, with their winders removed,
the edge-heads collapsed with a racing of gears and a stuttering of
sprockets. 
	An old priest with crying eyes came up to Melchisedech Duffey. 	"Oh,
believe in him, Duffey!" the old priest cried. "Believe, believe. He's all
we have left. First they took God away from us. Now some of you want to take
the Devil away also. No, no, no, let us keep him! We've got to believe in
something!" 
	There were ovations for a 'The Majesty' who had wound down his
speech and was starting to depart. Several of the persons present took off
all their clothes out of sheer ecstasy. It was all pretty meaningful.
Giggle-nuns and androgynous priests were still clutching each other with
claws and snickering "You know -- giggle -- who he really is, don't you?" 
	"The bare account it is unfair. 
	Hi! Ho! 
	The bare account it is unfair. 
	It leave out half the hide and hair, 
	Hi! Ho! The Golli Wol!" 
	Oh, get back to the Quarter with that stuff, Margaret. They should
never have taught you the Gadarene Swine Song. Drink Coffee, Save Souls, Get
out of here with your gang! 

	Yes, the bare account is unfair. The canonical ratio would still
hold: only one priest out of twelve would be a Judas Priest. And only one
nun out of twelve would be a giggler for the Devil. But, during those
'tedious years' there, it sure seemed as though there were more of them. And
only one out of twelve of the laymen joined the abomination of desolation,
but they made much more than one twelfth of the noise. 

	Why has history been made difficult? The 'never use two words when
three will do' people have controlled it for too long. But the real history
of the last few decades, as given here and in other places, is straight and
simple. 

	2

	This is the whole framework of recent history and the forces that
matter. 
	The Devil was released from his imprisonment. 
	Then, by a sort of center-trap play, the Emperor Henry (Henri
Salvatore) was sprung loose to score upon him. Melchisedech Duffey had first
been released to be ready to oppose the Devil. Then, for his pride,
Melchisedech was forced to serve as a satellite to one of his own
satellites. This was Henri Salvatore (The Keeper of the Enclosure of the
Savior). Henry had once been Euphemus. Later he had been The Emperor Henry
of Neustria. Now he was Emperor of the Invisible Neustria, He was a balanced
and powerful and intellectual man, though he had been a sinner in his youth.

	To common eyes, it seemed that Henry didn't rule to great effect.
After his first enthusiasm he became a little bit dreamy about it all. But
he had set several one-person and several-person fiefdoms into intense
action, enough so that the destruction of the world was averted or at least
postponed for decade after decade. 
	(Quick out to Salvation Sally doing 'This World Was Destroyed
Before' with that voice and that guitar that both had Australian accents.) 
	The struggle was joined between the Devil and the fiefdoms of
Invisible Neustria. The details of the struggle make up the 'History of
Modern Times'. The Devil lost credit for his tiresome and premature
predictions of his total victory. The Fiefdoms had only to produce a minimum
for the world, and there was some possibility that it could be done. 
	"It's really no great trick to find seven just men in the world, if
you count women," Margaret Stone said. "But the number Seven is symbolical,
and it may mean seventy times seven. That makes it very, very hard. I'm
surprised that we get by every day." But this minimum was maintained
(whatever it was), for every day year after year, though some days it was
very close and it really seemed that not enough just persons could be found
in the entire world. Close, close. But they were saving the world from
destruction. 
	The trashing of the world on a massive scale was undertaken by the
massive enemy of the world. The Law was subverted to anti-law or license.
Tle custodians of form were preverted into accepting deformity. Morals
disappeared completely: that was said again and again, and louder every
time. It was one of the lies of the father of lies. It was a cheap-shot
statement by the father of cheap-shotters. Morals never quite disappeared
from the world: they fought their way back against every natural and
unnatural assault. 
	Structure had been perverted to un-structure, so the unstructured
crowd crowed like red roosters. Watch out there! We will see how enduring
real structure can be. 
	Patterns and customs of treason were imposed by the ravening enemy,
and the commonwealth of cowardice was instituted by the
anti-institutionists. Brittle variety was brought into the areas where it
becomes a blatant stultification and cloying, and rigidity was forced onto
all free fields. Art, which is another name for life-well-handled, was
trashed almost beyond belief. 
	This was a war that was not always seen as war. A war may be between
grass growing in one place, and erosion taking over a neighboring plot. And
the Fiefdoms maintained a spotty loyalty very much of the time, so the thing
was never lost. 
	Absalom Stein made elegant war by system of interlocking promotions
in fields both familiar and scarcely known. Absalom had big hands. He had
big brains. He had a huge heart. He had more gall than is given to ordinary
humans. And he was absolutely loyal to the ordered and structured arts. He
reintroduced shape and order into places so abandoned of them that they came
now as something new. "Oh, that Absalom has pulled another one!" one of his
rival impresarios railed. "Decency! Imagine someone introducing that as an
art concept. Imagine anybody pulling that one again and getting away with
it. Some things are out for so long that they are in again. It's a
permeating form of structure, I believe. Ah, let's see what we have of
decency. We'd better stake out a few plots in the decency field. A going
thing deserves company." Absalom did well at everything, even at this. Ah,
he was an expansive and expensive fellow!
	Teresa Piccone Stranahan made her own war against the stifling
confinement of the un-structureds. She was the St. Louis housewife who made
noises that were heard around the world. 
	Hans Schultz got rich accidentally in his businesses, and he
couldn't keep himself divested of that sticky green stuff. He was like a boy
who got a new boomerang for his birthday and went crazy trying to throw the
old one away. But he created a consensus of conscience in one field of
business where conscience had almost disappeared. 
	Vincent Stranahan counted coups somehow, in spite of a great measure
of incompetence that was his. Finnegan fumbled it all away for twenty-three
out of every twenty-four hours, and then tried to make it up on that hectic
last hour. There weren't any final results in on Finnegan. 
	"We don't even know whether he's dead," Salvation Sally said. "With
Finnegan, how can you tell?" 
	Letitia, Mary Virginia, Dotty -- 
	"Be she alive or be she dead, 
	Hi! Ho! 
	Be she alive or be she dead, 
	She'll serve baked brains from the Devil's head. 
	Hi! Ho! The Goli Wol!" 
	(Why did they ever teach Margaret Stone that damned Gadarene Swine
Song?), yes, Margaret Stone, Sally, Mary Catherine, Casey in Exile,
Zabotski, X, they fought a war against the big smokiness. 
	Duffey did it in art and in stubbornness. With Fire and Finesse he
did it. Oh what smokey and sputtering fire and what clumsy finesse, Duff! 
	There were several other Empires doing battle against the
Principality, but we do not have full data on them. 
	This is a world history of modern times into the present. Clip it
and save it. 

	"My dear brother," Bagby wrote in one of those 'Letters After I Am
Dead', "we have it pleasant here. We are freed from the tyrannies of hours
and places. We provide for ourselves and for others. It requires hard but
not torturous work, and we are given plenty of leisure. We do not sleep.
What would we have to sleep about? 
	"We still have our passions, and they are immeasurably strengthened
and heated. But we break them to bridle again and again, like breaking
horses. There are no evil passions, and there are few evil horses. But a
passion unbroken or a horse unbroken is in evil case for a while. 
	"We work in very complex personal relationships. That is what
refines us and improves us. We enter into relationships with creatures
militant and triumphant, with our own kindred, with species whose reality we
had once doubted, with aliens, with angelics, with damned. (Not all the
damned are irrevocably damned: it is not known whether any of them are.) Our
own characters grow in complexity. These are very fruitful interchanges. 
	"We do have particularity. And our pariularity is not accompanied by
all the phenomena that philosophers have thought should accompany the
possession of particularity. Really, it isn't a new gift. It is only an
enhancement of a general human gift. We know things and relationships in
their billion-aspected and-billion-detailed particulars. We know all about
you. We know all about everything. 
	"There is no analogy to our difficulty in explaining to you what our
state of being outside of time is. A waggy-tongued man might be able to
explain colors and minute differences in colors to a man born blind. He
might be able to explain, in salivary detail, the taste of a persimmon to a
person who had never known that fruit. He might be able to explain the
direct reception of radio waves to humans who know them only in their audio
translation. 
	"But he could not explain the -- (the correct word here,
extemporaneous, has taken on a different meaning so we may not use it in its
real meaning), he could not explain the out-of-time case to one who had
never been outside of time. There isn't duration. There is only moment. I
always come back to that. The moment cannot end, for endings are within
time. 
	"We have our Earth-hours, though they are not inside time as are the
hours of Earth. Our Earth Hours are appointments from which we contemplate
Earth. We review your happenings there, with growing maturity and with wide
particularity. I can see now, as I could not see when I was in the middle of
it, that we neglected certain crucial fields and left them to the enemy.
Theoretical mathematics is one of the fields that we neglected in the world.
We allowed false theory to move into this field, which is also a tool.
Especialy did we abandon the field of mathematical philosophy to the enemy,
and yet we had superior qualifications in that field. 
	"Economic philosophy is another area that we left to the enemy. We
still combat him in economic theory, but that is not quite so fundamental a
thing. We barely contest him in theology. We assume all too quickly that all
the theologians have gone over to the party of the Devil. The enemy does
have all the theoreticians of knowledge processing, but such theoreticians
can be made out of almost anything. 
	"We still have beach-heads in art, which is another name for the
schematic ordering of life. Beware of those who promulgate false schemas or
no schemas at all. We live in pleasant thatched huts in the first circle. We
thence (not in the future, but in intensity) move into other circles. The
hierarchies of circles are not inner and outer; they are only more intense
and more transfigured. 
	"Am I content here? Of course I'm not content. I'm not at all sure
that contentment is one of the things we're supposed to be learning. But I
am happy, with a growing kinetic happiness (kinetics outside of time and
motion? That's right, brother, that's right), and I am happy with the
mustard-seed happiness that expands exponentially until whole worlds can
nest in its branches."
	There was more. There was always much more. Duffey would get a full
week's enjoyment out of each of Bagby's letters, rereading parts of one of
them in his mind several times a day, following out the branching
implications of some of the phrases, sampling beforehand personal
relationships more complex than he was used to, experiencing patches of
particularity. Duffey, in his person of Melchisedech, had often experienced
brief moments of near total particularity, but he hadn't encountered the
particularity that is beyond moments. 
	Then, before the last letter had been near exhausted, there would
come another Monday morning and another letter. 

	"There is an art dealer in New Orleans who is more than four 
thousand years old. The name of this man is Melchisedech Duffey. Let the
reader smile if he will, but there is proof of this statement of izreat age.
This proof would have to be accepted, as based @pon scientific sources, if
it showed the man to be of more likely or less extreme age. But valid
scientific proof must be accepted even when it gives unacceptable answers. 
	"What began as a routine physical examination eventually showed that
this man was actually more than four thousand years old, on the basis of his
birefringence flow index, thrombocyes-shaped remnants, Howship's lacunar
frequency, linkage patterns of Volkman canals, wall thickness of the
splanchinic capillaries, lateral line remainder of the post-auditory
placodes, Kreb's cycle consonance, Gompertz function analogies, collagen
contractility, secretion of Golgi bodies around the lipid vesicure, diatomic
diffusion, lobation of Metanephrio, Pentose phosphate pathway data, peptide
linkage characteristics, and every other standard test that is used to
determine age of body. Over four thousand years old was the answer in every
case. Stereogram studies of the glomer-ules gave the same answer, and a
general archaism of characteristics was in accord with it. These things
cannot be challenged. 
	"But at the same time, there are general indications that the
unessential body material is that of a fifty-five year old man. The
characteristics thus are much older than the body itself: and the unseemly
conclusions of medical experts are that the man is older than his body. Mr.
Duffey's own conclusions concur with this to an extent. 
	"'From the inside, one body looks pretty much like another,' Mr.
Duffey has said. 'I am sure that I have passed through several bodies. I am
equally sure that I have brought my essence and pattern and individual
substance (my signature cytogens) with me into whatever body has served as a
temporary vehicle. Or possibly it is the same body, renovated and given back
to me each time. I will not contradict the theology of the case. But I
believe that a man can be older than his body, just as a body can be older
than a car it rides in.' 
	"'Do you consider your history to be a form of reincarnation?'
Duffey was asked. 'Incarnation? No, only an utter fool would believe in
reincarnation,' he said. 'Then how would you explain your case?' we asked
him. 'It's simply that I have lived a little longer a life than the average
person has,' Mr. Duffey said. Mr. Duffey also brought in several of his
acquaintances, who however do not wish their names given, who tested more
than three thousand years old in their essential make-up. The evidence is
convincing in all of these cases. Do you know any people of proven greater
age than these?" 
	[The Eighteenth Book of Strange Encounters, by the Editors of the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Books of Strange Encounters.] 

	3

	Quite a few years slipped by one way or another. The battle lines
were never finely drawn. The people of the world weren't greatly concerned
about the battle that was being fought over them. If told that the battle
concerned their degradation and extinction, they answered "That's as good a
way to go as any." The battle wasn't in sight on any decision, but the Devil
was ahead on points. 	One afternoon, Duffey was reading through a bunch of
clippings that Letitia had saved in a scrapbook. The words "Oh Murder!" were
lettered on the cover of it, And smaller letters on that cover, in the
perfect and orderly inking of Letitia, gave the information "All Murders and
Mayhems and Excerpts here are exactly as indicated. Nothing faked, nothing
uncontexted. Everything is in its original tedium." Well, the words on the
cover were better than anything inside it, but Duffey was going through it
because it had recently been pasted up by the loving hands of Letitia. Her
silver laughter echoed out of it, that laughter! "God loves it, and I kind
of like it myself," Duffey had said of it. 
	But Duffey was having a slow go in leafing through the scrapbook. He
sobbed and snuffled ,and his eyes were brimming with tears, which made the
reading difficult: 

	"I believe in the total education of the young person," Father
Blevins told your reporter. "In particular I believe in education in the
most important things in life, which are the leasures of life. It curdles me
that we have college girls here without any first-hand experience in
Fornicational Intercourse. This has been a gross neglect on the part of
everyone. I give them that first-hand experience myself Frankly, I am good
at it, and it is best for them to learn from an expert. I had previously
given this instructional experience to high school girls and to grade school
girls. So what is all the fuss now when I am giving it to college girls?
What is the matter with everyone anyhow? The yuks and cretins have had their
say long enough. No, technically it isn't compulsory yet, but for my part I
am making it as compulsory as I can. No, I don't see anything 'wrong' with a
chaplain at a student center holding intercourse with students as part of an
organized program. But I do see something wrong with the whole concept of
'wrong'. Let's throw that out." 
	"What are the views of your bishop on this?" your reporter asked. 
	"The bishop is a clerical-fascist, and as such is not entitled to
have any views," Father Blevins said." 

	"We'll not deny a slippage of ten years in attainment levels, so
that now the sixteen and seventeen-year-olds are reading at the level of
material that the six and seven-year-olds formerly read. This was planned
so, and rightly planned. It is part of our leveling process to reauce
tensions. When all are of equal attainment, what will there be to be tense
about? It is essential that the rising curve of intelligence be reversed. We
are reversing it. We are pioneers in this. Certainly we are introducing
pornography into the texts, but it is pornography geared to the level of
six-year-old and seven-year-old reading ability." 

	"The difference between just wars and unjust wars? Any war waged by
Amerika or any other fascist country is unjust. Any war waged by a
peoples-Marxist country is just. No, I don't believe that is too simplistic.
It is merely clear-cut and incisive. And we have the teaching of the Church
that one may support a just war but not an injust war. The trouble is that
people now accept the teaching of the Church only when they want to. They do
not accept ft in fields such as this." 

	"The kicking to death of an effigy is a legitimate procedure. And
all members of the crypto-fascist establishment are effigies. Kicking one of
them to death is no more than kicking a sack of potatoes to death. Yes, we
do it in the press and on the air and by posters and slogans. No, we are not
surprised when gangs of young people do it literally. Popular solidarity
demands that we be furnished with such effigies to kick to death. And it
demands that the effigies be in human form, however repellent to all
progressive people they should be. They are not human, of course, in the
charismatic sense that we are human. Yes, I believe that the literal act is
the new dimension of it that we have been seeking. This is both bread and
circuses to us and we will not be denied it." 

	"I long ago gave up the belief in the Historical Christ. I can see
Christ in the dope addict, in the thief, in the hooker, in the pimp, in the
poor man masturbating openly beside a public wall, in the cheat, in the
rapist. These are my neighbors, and I see the a-Historical Christ in them.
But I do not see him in the man next door. The man next door is always the
stereotype of a fascist fink and is no neighbor of mine." 

	"My door is always open, always. Anyone can come to see me. I am the
president of the Popular Revolutionary Priests' Senate, not to be confused
with the Social Revolutionary Priests' Senate. By my position I am the
highest ranking dignitary in the diocese. But I am charitable to defeated
opponents. If the bishop should come here he would be omitted. He'd be
kicked out pretty quick, but he'd be admitted first. If the president of the
nation should come he'd be admitted. He would immediately be placed under
citizens arrest, but he would be admitted first. if the	Pope of Rome came to
this door, he would be allowed to come in. Yeah, if he crawled, he would." 

	"Sister Mary Merhione the topless nun, was interviewed today in the
topless bar where she works. Sister spoke without bitterness of the
phariseeism of those who have spoken against her mission. 'I say that anyone
who ob'jects to it is prurient as hell," she said in her gentle and
forgiving voice. 'I say, if they have them, they ought to show them too.
'nis is the most rewarding place I've ever worked in. I can actually feel
the human heart here sometimes. This is my dedication and my service. The
reprint articles are fifty cents a copy. Buy a dozen and pass them out to ur
friends. It's a reprint of my article 'Topless Before God' from the
'Paralplegic Church Today'." 

	The scraps in the scrapbook were really kind of funny. All of them
were genuine, and most of them were dated, representing a naive phase that
was about finished, being replaced by a more frightening movement. But if
they were funny, why then was Melchisedech Duffey crying and snuffling as he
turned through them, fumbling and almost unseeing? 
	Letitia Duffey had iust died. They had taken ffer away not a quarter
of an hour ago. The funeral parlor men had told Duffey not to come around
down there for at least an hour. He couldn't be with her. He was lost. He
handled distractedly this last thing that she had handled as she was
stricken there, and it happened to be the old scrapbook. 
	There had been a bitter moment right after her death. 
	"I do not accept this," Melchisedech had said heavily. "This must be
explained immediately, immediately." 
	There was a large plant or bush called "The Elephant Ear" growing
right outside the opened window there, and its huge leaves came in through
that window. The bush flamed with light and heat. It burned. Duffey talked
with the bush for a while and listened io it. Nobody else could understand
the words either, of Melchisedech or of the bush. They respected it as a
private agony and communication. 
	"Fiat voluntas tuas," Duffey said after a bit, grudgingly, and yet
accepting the explanation. Then the flame went out of the bush and left only
a permeating odor, something like holly. 
	Somewhere in the building, Margaret Stone was singing in her
whisper-toned voice, 'Viena la sera', 'Evening is falling', from one of the
dumber operas. It was not evening: it was about eleven o'clock in the
morning. Somewhere, in another room, Absalom Stein was blowing that big,
elegant nose of his, but he blew it with sincerity and compassion and a
muted orchestration of deep feelings. In the press room, Mary Virginia was
saying the Glorious Mysteries of the rosary with neighbors and with people
from the Seaman's paper and the Jazz sheet and the Sporting News. Zabotski
came in. 
	"I've got a good coffin," he said. "I took it in for down payment on
a lot once. Letitia would look good in it. Shall I take it around to the
funeral house?" 
	"It doesn't matter, Zabotski," Duffey said, "Just so it doesn't
cause trouble there or here or anywhere." 
	"It's never been used," Zabotski said. "I'll just take it over there
and tell them to use it. Letitia saw it at my place once and patted it.
'Hey, that's class,' she said. 'It'd be fun to go in something like that.'
She liked class." 
	"Yes, she did," Dufrey said. "Let her go in it in class then, if
you're willing." 
	Bagby's yesterday's letter had talked about it. "I am sure that you
have made appointment to meet later," he had written. "Such appointments
have legal standing in the further context. They are honored." Bagby had
known about it, of course. They had all known about it for several years,
that she would be going soon, and suddenly. But Melchisedech hadn't been
disposed for it to be quite so sudden when it came. 
	"You leave her eyes open," Margaret Stone had told those men who
came to take her. "She likes to have her eyes open. They always follow one,
her eyes. Every person in a room always thinks that her eyes are following
him." So Letitia had gone with her eyes open and seeming to look at
everybody with individual recognition. 
	The doctor had something for Duffey to sign. So, apparently, had the
priest. And also an insurance man who came there. There was a rough hour or
so, and Duffey played on his flute to pass it. 
	It was all right after he got to see her at the funeral home; and
later in the afternoon they brought her back home for her wake. Lily came in
on the afternoon plane from Chicago, though Duffey had forgotten to phone
her. Mary Louise flew in from St. Louis, though she hadn't been notified
either, unless Bagby had notified her. 
	They had a good, old fashioned wake. Letitia's smiling eyes were
open and sparkling and seemed to follow every person in the room with love
and amusement. That had been a likeable quality about Letitia, her
individual concern for each person. 

	4

	"What you need is a long summer in Transylvania," the Countess
Margaret told Duffey three days after the burial of Letitia. "There are so
many of the Dracula-slept-here castles in Transylvania, and I own several of
them. We could have his and Hers castles on facing crags, and a pleasure
pavilion in the valley between them. All this I will give you, Duffey, and
it's only a slight and token falling-down act you'll have to show for them."

	"Countess, the Greeks have a saying 'Beware the Transylvanians
bearing gifts.'" 
	"I know they do, and they're right. But everything that's good in
the Greeks is better in us. People have supposed that we're an eastern
version of the Latin peoples, that we are analogues of the French and
Italians and Spanish and Portuguese. Oh, I suppose that a Transylvanian wolf
is the analogue to a Mexican Hairless Dog, but it isn't a close analogue.
It's said that we're related to the Slavs and the Greeks and the Albanians
and the Armenians, and even that we are a piece that fell off the moving
Gothic Nation. No, we aren't those things really. We are people on a
land-locked or mountain-locked island who escaped most of the permutations
that other people suffered. We have remained what other people should be and
aren't." 
	"Nah, Countess, nah," Duffey said. "I read a book of Transylvanian
Witch-and-Fairy Tales recently. You are toying with some of their themes." 
	"Come and see. I am some of those themes. Do you know why our
estates are not to be found on The maps or the tax rolls? The Reds sent in
Estate-Hunters to locate our estates and those of ten thousand other
families. But the Estate-Hunters cannot find them, and the country is not
that rough. It is a gently rolling country for a thousand leagues or more." 
	"Nah, Countess, nah. There are no such distances in Transylvania." 
	"Are there not? Come and see. And the Reds have sent out
castle-hunters to locate the castles and get them on the tax rolls. But
there are thirty thousand castles that they cannot find." 
	"Countess Margaret, ou make it all up. There should be a tome,
'Tales of the Skinny Countess' to be set on the book shelves with that true
and incredible tome, 'Tales of Sebastian'. An expert has told me about the
Sebastian Tales, 'If it isn't printed on human skin, it sure is a good
imitation'. No wonder it's so expensive. Thirty thousand is a lot of
castles, Countess Margaret." 
	"Come and see. Do you know, Melchisedech, that there are nineteen
generations of my family still living in Transylvania? And they are long
generations, Melky." 
	"Nineteen generations still living would reach back a ways,
Margaret." 
	"And I said that they were long generations, Duff. You have one way
of reaching back, apparently. We have another. Do you know that we never
reach puberty till we are more than fifty years old? And we --" 
	"These are tall old tales, Countess." 
	"Are they not? Don't you just love them? Come with me to
Transylvania. You may have wondered why Sebastian and I did not marry until
the end. He understood my case. Oh, and I understood his! I loved him, and
he is dead. There is another piece to the tale. We are not ready to marry
until after our mid-century, but we can love no one new that we did not love
when we were quite young. I had mind encounters with you when I was very
young. I loved Sebastian. I loved several others. I loved you. The others
are all gone, but you still endure. Come with me to Transylvania, Duff. It
extends all the way to Colchis." 
	"No, it does not, Countess. Meg, I wonder what you will look like in
a hundred years?" 
	"Come and see. Your own 'creatures' will hardly last another
lifetime. They are pitchers who have been to the spring no more than three
or four times, and already their clay begins to crack. Who will you look to
for companionship when they are all dead and gone? You'll be as mopey as one
of those last-of-the-line dragons who have no kindred left in the world. But
you and I could make genetic music together for a long time." 
	"You are a witch who would suck my blood." 
	"Of course I would, and you mine. It's one of our most amorous
delights. What do you think it is that keeps me so skinny? Do you know what
'sanguine' really means? Do you know what 'bloodcousin' really means? Do you
know what the Dracula legend really means? Come with me? Is it the Devil
that you're worried about these last few years? Melky, there are certain
wolves who have served my family for many generations. These wolves are
larger than horses, and the Devil is afraid of them. He'll not come around
to bother us. Could we not have a fine life in the centuries ahead? Marry
me, Duffey, and come to Transylvania with me." 
	"Ah, not right now, Countess. Ask me again in fifty years." 
	"You think that's a joke. I will." 
	The Countess Margaret went back to Chicago that day. She had come
down to New Orleans with the elder Kochs to Letitia's funeral, those parents
really being elderly now, and Lily having gone down a day earlier than they
had, and staying several weeks later; and the Countess being very close to
all the family. 
	So Duffey did not marry and go to Transylvania with the Countess,
not at that particular time anyhow, not in that particular context.

	And then there was the gilded Lily herself. 
	"You can have it both ways, Duff my luff," Lily told Melchisedech.
"Marry me for fifty years or so, and we will set up our own Transylvania
just anywhere you want to. Then, 'when I am dead, my love, and all the world
is green', you can marry the Countess and go to Transylvania and live on
wolf stew and blood. Yes, they're nubile at fifty, but they're not into it
right till after they're a hundred. 
	"And I will tell you something else, Duff. That million dollar
dowery that has been on my head so long, it's tripled now. It's the cost of
living adjustment and all, you know. Besides, Letitia had phoned me not too
long ago and made me promise that I would see that you hid everything that
you ever needed. Do you need me, dear?" 
	"I need you, yes, Lily. It seems that I need everyone, everyone in
this whole wobbly world." 
	"Oh well then, I'll get them all for you if you really need them. I
do love you, dear, and I will do anything for you. Let me know. Come up
several times a year, and I'll come down here more often. Civilized people
do travel one week out of every month, you know. Oh, why do people never
realize how much I love them!" 
	Lily decided, by what calculation she did not say, that it was
Melchisedech Duffey's four thousandth birthday just about then. Zabotski
took her to a baker who did cakes for every sort of birthday. She told the
baker what she wanted." 
	"It will have to be big enough to hold four thousand candles," she
said. 
	"No problem," the baker told her. "If I make the cake sixty-four by
sixty-three inches, it will hold four thousand and thirty-two candles,
figuring one per square inch. I had better make it sixty-four by sixty-four
inches, That would give room for forty-one hundred and ninety-six candles,
but there is always some caveage along the edge of a cake. I'll make the
cake about three feet high. That'll be about nine hundred pounds of cake.
Serve half pound servings, that's two times nine hundred -- hum, I wish I
had a pencil -- that's eighteen hundred servings. Does he have eighteen
hundred friends?" 
	"Yes." 
	So the cake was made and the birthday party was held. Four persons
at once had to light the candles with tapers, one thousand for each of them,
and they had to hurry so that the first candles would not burn out before
the last ones were lit. Then, could Melchisedech Duffey blow them all out in
one breath? He could and he did. He had not been' blowing the flute all
those years to run short of breath now. Besides, there may have been
big-mouthed and big-lunged giants adding their blowing to him. There was,
for a moment there, a certain gustiness in the place that was almost
unnatural.
	Zabotski had two heavy steers barbecued whole for the party. It was
a good birthday party. People around there still talk about it sometimes. 
	"Are we out from under the shadow of Chicago yet?" Margaret Stone
asked their little world the day after Lily had gone back North. 
	"No, not yet," Mary Virginia said. "The barometer is falling, and so
is the hygrometer and other instruments. I feel another wind coming from the
north." 
	"I hope it won't be a cold one." 
	"No. It won't be." 

	Charlotte Garfield came down from Chicago again. No, she didn't look
any older. Just meaner and prettier. She looked like the rottenest damned
nine year old kid in the world, and the most expensively gowned delinquent
in any of the worlds. 
	"This stole I am wearing cost me thirty thousand dollars," she told
Mary Virginia. Charlotte was in New Orleans in June, and wearing a fur stole
that Would set anvbody's eyes wobbling. Nah, it wasn't hot wearing it, not
for Charlotte. 
	"Oh Midget, it couldn't have," Mary Virginia protested. "Oh, it's
elegant beyond anything, but it's small, I know something about prices and
makr-ups. I know something about you: I know that you wouldn't pay such a
steep mark-up on anything. There isn't any way that could have cost thirty
thousand dollars." 
	"I'd have bet that there wasn't any way either," Charlotte said.
"But they caught me so cold that they had me there with mink hair growing
out of the palms of my hands. I was using, in my act, a mother who was a
personal dazzler and was also a knowledgeable faker of fur talk. She seemed
to be a discerning hot-money customer, and that nine year old girl of hers
was always skipping around the shop. I got a few fine small pieces out of
the doors of a few of those emporia. But then I was caught by the
hardest-eyed fur man in Chicago. He brought me to one of those
everything-proof vaults to deal with me after he had caught me fur-lifting. 
	"'This is the pay-off, midget,'" he said. "'I am going to kill you.
And there isn't much of you to take a lot of disposing of.'" 
	"'I have wrong use of words, Angelo,'" I told him. "'If you kill me
outright like that, where is the pay-off? All right, how much is the tab?
I've only tagged three of your shops.'
	"'That's all, midget? I can never be sure who does the tagging. I
kind of had my heart set on killing you, but business comes first. Thirty
thousand dollars within thirty minutes, midge, or it's sixty-one pounds of
cat meat you will be.'
	"'What are you, a man or a peanut-pusher?' I asked to make him feel
cheap. 'All right, I'll get it!' I got it and paid him off. Then as he was
getting a little bit sweet on me by that time, he gave me this little stole
to remove all enmity from the transaction. And it is fun to be able to say
truthfully 'This little stole that I am wearing, it cost me thirty thousand
dollars." 
	Charlotte was looking for a new family and a new situation. She
thought that she might possibly go southern for a while. She was now
operating under the name of Carrollton rather than Garfield, but names are
made to be changed. She put an ad in the Picayune, and also the same ad in
'The Bark': 
	"Charlotte wishes new family and new connections. Mother must be
dazzler about thirty-nine years old. Son-father-husband to be about nineteen
years old but look older. Professionalism in 'The Profession' is required.
Must be willing to assume the name of Darnley. If you don't know who
Charlotte is, then forget it!" 
	Both the street number and the box number of the Pelican Press were
given for answering, and several pairs of the better confidence people came
around to talk to Charlotte. But Charlotte didn't seem to be too anxious to
make a new tie-up just yet. 
	"Duffey, I know that you've always wanted sons," she said, "and not
just your Splendid Animations. Listen, I can have sons any time, nineteen
year old and full-grown sons, as many as I want, as often as I want." 
	"But you let one of them walk out of here an hour ago, Charlotte,
and he seemed to fill all the requirements," Duffey said. 
	"I don't mean like that, Duff," Charlotte answered. "I latch onto
them like that only when I'm in too tedious a mood to go for the real thing.
But sons of my body I can have, and sometimes I do. They could be your sons,
Duff." 
	"Small as you are, Charlotte, how could you birth grown sons?" 	"The
way is too weird to explain, Duff, but I can do it." 
	"You're too old for me, Charlotte. "I seem to remember when we first
met on the train, that I was twenty-five years old and you, I believe, were
thirty-eight. And now I'm possibly sixty, and you are --" 
	"We both of us belong to branches of the 'old people', Duff, of
closely related branches of them. Age doesn't gnaw on me much. And I see
that you are using whiting on your hair to disguise the fact that you're
into one of your youthful cycles and getting your hair color back. Take me,
Duffey. We are both prodigious people, and we could have a prodigious time
of it." 
	"Strange words coming from a little nine year old girl, Charlotte.
How did it happen that so many of us prodigious people became acquainted
with each other? It's in defiance of the odds that we should have done it." 
	"I suspect that we were lonesome, and we sent out signals, as your
moth once did. There aren't really so many of us in the world, and we might
as well be acquainted." 
	"Isn't the Devil a prodigious or variant person, Charlotte?" 
	"Certainly, and we both know him personally. In a world this size,
he would naturally have heard of us, and we would naturally have heard of
him. But we don't make him too welcome in our Prodigious Peoples' Club. At
least I don't. But he's not unique in his trade. 
	"Duffey, there are at least two other Prodigious Devils who are
passing themselves off as 'The Devil Himself'. And the 'Devil Released from
Prison', by the way, is one of the oldest of all con tricks. It's really
only a version of the 'Spanish Prisoner Trick', grossly magnified. I am told
that his take, that last time around, in 1946, was huge: it ran into the
billions. And yet this Devil, in the few brief conversations I had with him,
didn't impress much. 
	"Well, make up your mind, Duffey. I change families every three or
four years, and I think that my next manifestation should be in the
'Patriarch and Angelic Child'. The world is getting hungrier and hungrier
for prodigies, and we should be able to ride that con for several centuries.
I'll be back in about four months and we can talk more on it then. I bought
a nice little business in town today, and I get control of it in just four
months." 
	"All right, Charlotte. May you have sons like clusters of green
grapes around the old arbor." 
	Charlotte did tie into another 'family', and she called them the
Darnleys. They were real professionals in the 'profession', a dazzler of a
mother, a son-husband-father who should have been anything that the
mendaceous midget desired. The two Darnleys were so good at their parts that
it almost looked as if Charlotte had overreached herself. Did these people
intend to use her instead of she using them? Never mind. They'd go sweet on
her soon enough, and then she'd have them, the blasted runt tyrant. 

	"Anything else from the North, Mary Virginia?" Margaret Stone asked
the day after Charlotte Darnley had gone back to Chicago with her family. 
	"One more, I believe, Maggy," Mary Virginia said. 

	Mary Catherine Carruthers came down from Chicago. Mary Catherine had
always seemed to be the least of Duffey's Splendid Animations, and yet she
and Duffey bad been very close. Remember when Duffey had used to wrestle her
on that old black leather sofa in the back of his bookstore in Chicago, from
the time she was nine or ten years old. He should have been horse-whipped
for such things. Instead, he was blackmailed for them, for the pictures that
that damned kid Hugo Stone took of them. But remember how Mary Catherine,
from the very first, would scatter Duffey's worries. It almost seemed as if
she were older than he was, the way she rationalized the worry out of him. 
	"There is not anything to be bothered about, Mr. Duffey," she would
say when she was no more than ten years old. "You are not being the funny
uncle with me. This is all right. It isn't somebody else carrying on with
some little child. It is you. And it is me. And what is between us is all
right." 
	And a year or two after that, she had said "I love you, Duffey, and
of course I love Aunt Letitia. But if she dies, and she might (you two think
you are the mentalists and can sneak-preview the future, but maybe I am a
mentalist too), if she does die, then I will want you to marry me. Promise
me that you will." 
	"This I will not promise to a little girl," Duffey had said. 
	"When it comes about, I might be an old girl," Mary Catherine had
said. Now it had come about that Mary Catherine was an old girl. She never
had married Casey Szymansky, though they had been engaged to marry quite a
few times. 
	Mary Catherine was about twenty years younger than Duffey, so she
was about forty or fifty, depending on whether Duffey was about sixty or
seventy by now. Duffey was looking much younger now though, younger than he
had looked twenty years before. The Patriarchs have these peculiar tides in
them that ebb and flow. 
	Mary Catherine stayed around town for a couple of weeks. She had
leisure, as much as she wished to take. She had been a hard-working business
girl for many years and had made good money. Then she had gone to work for
Hilary Hilton and had made fantastic money. Now she was on leave. 
	She spent quite a bit of time wandering around the town. She spent a
lot of time talking to Duffey. For some reason, Mary Catherine seemed
entangled in his future, more so than the Countess Margaret, or Lily, or
Charlotte, more so than the New Orleans ladies. 
	But the clotted future sometimes seems to be coming out of its jug
not at all. And then, it comes out with resounding glugs, all mixed, and not
as it was supposed to be. Well, whether she went back to Chicago only
briefly, or whether she went back there permanently, Mary Catherine went
back then. 

	"Any more blowing in from the North, Mary Virginia? Margaret Stone
had asked. 
	"No, I think that's all of them for right now," Mary V. said. 
	So Margaret sang the bristly song to the halting of the flood of
them: 

	"The harpies came from Illinois. 
	Hi! Ho! 
	They'd give a Gadarene a pause. 
	Hi! Ho! 
	They rend the Duff with loving claws. 
	They eat him up with eager jaws. 
	(They really have such pretty maws.) 
	Hi! Ho! 
	I'm telling it just like it waws. 
	There ought to be some penal laws. 
	Perhaps they all will die of yaws. 
	Hi! Ho! The gollie wol!" 

	Why had anybody ever taught Margaret Stone that Gadarene Swine Song?

	Yes, there was a little bit of action on the New Orleans front even.

	Mary Virginia. Salvation Sally. Margaret Stone. Well, what about
Mary V. and Salvation and Margaret? Oh, nothing, it was just that they were
such pleasant and wonderful ladies. One would have to think of them
intensely and often. And Patriarchs usually come to wifely harbors several
times in their long lives. 
	What was this? Seven women, some of them less reluctant than others.
Does that mean there is a pick of seven different futures? 
	You try to get this clotted future to come out of the jug, and it
will not budge at all. And then maybe it will break loose with a cascade of
stuff you never even guessed about. 
	Book Five

	"You, Melchisedech the odd-ski, 
	Stand not fearful like a clod-ski, 
	Follow Noah and Zabodski." 
	[Bascom Bagby. Letters After I Am Dead.] 

	1
 
	Duffey came on a painted sign one morning. It read "The Future
Begins Right Here. Follow the Arrows." But there were seven arrows pointing
in seven diigerent directions. And there was a landscape or townscape, very
well done, ainted beneath each arrow. Deeply mystified, Duffey examined the
sign. It had a beautiful and dampish look to it, and he touched it. 
	"Oh, it's still wet. You got some on you. I'm sorry," said an
adolescent girl. "I was supposed to watch, but I didn't notice you." 
	Then there were several nice girls there. They said that they had
painted the sign for both an advertisement and a prop in a school play and
had set it there to dry. Tley said that the sign was a sort of 'in'-play or
'in'-people reference and did not have any profound implications. 
	"I painted the scenes under the arrows," one of the girls said. "I'm
a painter." 'nese were very pretty girls and they attended Ursuline Academy.

	But Duffey knew that they were wrong. He knew that the sign did have
very profound implications. The future really did begin here, for him, for
the world. Most of his life he had lived in the present, and now there would
be no more present for him. The future, parting and branching off in the
different directions, would be tricky. 
	"There is something obdurate and absolute about this sign of yours,"
Melchisedech told the girls. "It means either the end of myself in this
mortal coil, or it means the end of time itself." 
	"Yes it does," one of the girls said. "That's what the play is all
about. It's about this old man who comes to the end of his skein, and
somehow the fate of the world is tied to his fate, or he believes that it
is. Say, do you want to play the part of the old man. His name is
Melchisedech. That's a name from the Bible. We've been wondering who would
be good to play it." 
	"I will play it," said Melchisedech Duffey. "I am Melchisedech." 
	"You will be perfect," said a girl. "I am Therese Doucet the casting
director." 
	"I have here a copy of the script that you may take," said another
girl. "I am Cleo Mahoney the playwright. Do you suppose that you could learn
your part within a week?" 
	"I can learn any part within thirty seconds," Melchisedech said and
he took the script. He read it for more than thirty seconds, maybe for five
minutes, and he seemed sometimes amused and sometimes terrified. 
	"Tbis is written with rare prophetic gift," he said. "It is
prescient, it is almost omniscient. All right, I have it all learned. When
is the performance." 
	"Nobody could learn it that fast," Cleo said. "You are joshing us.
Let us hear you give the great speech at the beginning of act three." 
	"All right," Melchisedech said, and he gave it in a fine ringing
voice: 
	"I tell you that I'm sort of split in two. 
	My friend, Za-bot, Oh tell me what to do. 
	What, gone away and left me in my stew? 
	A sinkless craft is very well for you, 
	But I'm the man who cannot have an end, 
	So Scripture says, that will not break or bend. 
	And yet it's sure that I have lost my way, 
	And seven roads do beckon me this day. 
	How may I follow all? How may I stay? 
	I cannot have an end though time shall end. 
	Oh Kephos of the blooming nose on you, 
	Advise me where I ought to turn or trend. 
	You turn away and make a joke or two. 
	Oh hack me up in seven pieces, friend, 
	And seven roads I'll follow to their end, 
	But these are riddle roads that do extend 
	Beyond. Ah, welladay and welladoo." 

	People in the street had stopped to listen, and now some of them
applauded. New Orleans people will applaud anything. 
	"This is about Melchisedech of the Old Testament," Cleo Mahoney
explained then. "He is the one man who cannot have an ending. 'Sine Patre,
neque Finem', 'Without Father and without End', the Bible says about him.
But what will happen to him when it is time for him to end, or when it is
time for the world to end? That is the plot. I picture him hesitating before
seven different roads, and then I give a sort of vision of each of those
seven roads. Have you any talents? Can you do anything between the acts."
"I can play my banjo," said Melchisedech. 
	"But would a banjo be fitting for a Patriarch?" 
	"Well, I could play my flute then. It is a medieval recorder-flute
and it would not be at all out of the way for a Patriarch to play it. And I
have been fooling around with Hebrew melodies lately. Hebrew melodies are
'in', as you must know." 
	"That will be wonderful," the, girls said, "and you will be
wonderful in the part. It is one week from tonight in our auditorium. We
will keep you apprised of the details." 

	Knowing the play to be prescient of his own condition, Duffey went
to see Kephos of the blooming nose. Kephos is stone, of course, which is
Stein. And he explained the whole situation, and the fortuitous little play
that was an echo of that situation, to spacious Absalom Stein. 
	"I know about the play, of course," Stein said. "I've had to
subscribe to twelve tickets to it. My daughter Rebeka is in it, you know.
She goes to Ursuline. And what is a litte Jew girl going there for? 'To get
a more narrow education,' my wife said (it was her idea). Her education has
been getting entirely too broad and I've been worried about that.' It is
easy to say that an ultra-broad education never hurt anybody, but it has
hurt me here and there, I believe. Oh, the play bites you to the quick, does
it Melky? You do have a problem. The worst of your problems is that people
who can never end may end by being tedious." 
	"You turn away and make a joke or two," the great speech in the play
had said about this Kephos, and so it was. 
	Duffey went to see Zabotski who was likely the Za-bot in the play. 
	"Zabotski, I have a problem!" Duffey roared as he went into
Zabotski's always open place. But his roar echoed back to him from the empty
vastness of Zabotski's old quarters. Zabotski came there very infrequently
now. 
	Oh yes he lives in that unsinkable house on the lake," Duffey
reminded himself. "Should I follow him there in his folly, as Bagby suggests
in his latest letter?" 
	What had Zabotski been up to. Or what had Somebody been up to
through him? 
	"Of all the good and illuminated persons who were in the world at
that time, it was only to Zabotski that God spoke a particular message." 
	Probably the best account of the Zabotski Folly or the Zabotski
Happening is to be found in 'House and Home Happenings Magazine'. 

	2

	The following is an article in 'House and Home Happenings Magazine'.


	House and Home Happening has for a long time intended to do a piece
on the fabulous and outrageous house of Zabotski (he says that his first
name is none of our business) and his wife Waldo, which house is located on
Pristine Cove of Lake Borgne. This house has been much talked about for its
mysterious history, for the many children and strange animals that are
there, for its great size and its flabbergasiing design, for its ambient of
rapidity ('top speed without hurry'), and for the graciousness of its host
and hostess. 
	But several reporters who have gone on this assignment have failed
to fulfill it properly. Even the pictures that they have brought back (of
one six-hundredth of a second exposure and even faster) have been blurred on
what were supposed to be still lifes, as though there were some sort of
movement there that was too fast for the cameras. But that is nothing to the
way the reporters themselves were blurred when they came back. One of them,
gone for only three hours from the magazine office, grew a forty-seven inch
lodg beard in the interval. His only explanation was that the time seemed
like much more than three hours to him. 
	Stymied for a while, we have now decided to make this a two-part
feature on the Zabotski house which is a house that has a 'myth of origin'.
This 'myth of origin' falls into the context of what is called a 'shaggy
people Yale'. We have prevailed upon a sometimes associate of Zabotski, one
Melchisedech Duffey, to put the rather slippery facts of origin into a sort
of sequence. We publish it herewith, and we hope to have the actual
description of the house in our next issue. We do not designate the Zabotski
house, as we have designated so many others, as our 'House of the Month'.
Rather we designate it as our 'House of the Uncertain Interval'. 

	There were a few smart flies (this is Melchisedech Duffey writing)
who knew it when the molasses they were caught in solidified into amber. But
most of the flies, though they knew that something was wrong, didn't have
any idea what was happening. 
	Zabotski went away and came back a lot. There is no doubt that we
missed him during those intervals when he was gone. This account is about
the time that he went away in an outlandish, giant contraption that he had
built in his own back yard. 
	This was the time, continuing now apparently unbroken into the
future, when Zabotski went to live in a large and ungainly house on Lake
Borgne, when he lived there with his wife The Widow Waldo, and with many
ungainly children and animals. 
	And before that, he had lived on Dumaine Street in a building
between those of myself Melchisedech Duffey and that of Homer Hoose. 
	If we are to study origins, we will just study the origin of that
huge house, and its movement from one location to another. 

	The 'Better Life League' had recognized Zabotski to be an 'Entrance
Person'. But Zabotski hadn't recognized the 'Better Life League' to be very
much of anything. There were many of these non-mutual arrangements between
Zabotski and the exocosmos. The 'League' was correct in his though: Zabotski
was an 'Entrance Person', a strong and peculiar one. 
	Zabotski was a quarrelsome man of the 'Who, me?' variety. He simply
refused to believe some of the stories that he heard about himself as a
starter of quarrels. 
	"I know better," he'd say. "I'm not like that at all. I am
gentleness incognate. Anyone who says that I am quarrelsome had ought to be
stomped into a slough and left to drown in his own lies. I wouldn't hurt a
fly, surely not a fly caught in molasses. There is no way that I could
demean or harm any other being, or even think of harming one." 
	So then, Zabotski was not a quarrelsome man. But he got on peoples'
nerves for his constant swift pace in everything, but sometimes he was gone
for a day or two and gave people a rest from him. At such times, he said
that he went to the Pristine World to attend to his affairs there. 
	And yet his neighbors, by total consensus, found him quarrelsome and
offensive. Could every one those neighbors be absolutely mistaken on a
matter of fact like that? 
	Yes, they could be and they were. Those neighbors could all be
mistaken about almost everything. Possibly the people in your own
neighborhood could not all be mistaken on so many things, but those in
Zabotski's neighborhood could be. 
	So there had seemed to be a quarrel, or at least a skirr of sharp
words, between Zabotski and his neighbor Bryan Blackstone who lived on the
other side of Homer Hoose, properly two doors from Zabotski; but due to the
natural curvature of that block, the properties of Zabotski and Blackstone
abutted in back. 
	"Do not raise the edge of your immortal voice against me, Bryan,"
Zabotski had warned during one of those lulls in what seemed to be a
quarrel, "I'll build whatever I want to build. But you are mortal, as is
your edged voice; and you will wither and die. The wither will be apparent
on you tomorrow and you will be dead within five days." Zabotski was a heavy
kidder and this was all kidding, but Blackstone had never understood him. 
	"Oh Witch-Doctor Zabotski, I defy you," Bryan had exploded. "You
cannot cause my death. I'm stronger than you are." 
	"Why should anyone call me a Witch-Doctor?" Zabotski asked in
puzzlement, "And whyever or however should I cause a death? It is time, that
will eat you up and cause your death, Bryan." 
	"Not in five days it won't," Blackstone barked. "I will live to
tromp on your grave, Zabotski. " And Blackstone tromped into his house. 
	"I wonder why all my neighbors are so touchy," Zabotski mused out
loud. "In the Pristine World, they are free and easy and not touchy at all."

	Blackstone stuck his head out of his door again. 
	"And get rid of that monstrosity you're building," be howled, "or
I'll have the law on you." 
	"I'll build whatever I want to build on my own place," Zabotski
maintained. "And if it does intrude a few meters onto the lots of my
neighbors, why that is all fair give and take." 

	"Do you fancy yourself a Christ, Zabotski?" myself Melchisedech
Duffey asked this sometimes associate of mine in exasperation. "Do you
believe that you can curse that man-tree of a Bryan Blackstone and that he
will wither and die within five days? Blackstone is no fig tree, and you are
no Christ." 
	"Blackstone is more like the American Fig, the Sycamore Tree,"
Zabotski said. "It's a tall and mottled tree, but it has grubby and trashy
fruit. Ah, I'll just send that Sycamore tree of Blackstone's ahead of him to
wait for his arrival. When he comes to the blessed shore, he will be
bewildered if there is not something grubby and trashy to greet him. He will
believe that he came unforgiven into an aiien place if there is not some
second-rate thing there that he can relate to. Mottled Tree, wither and die!
By tomorrow let the life be gone out of you and you hang dead on your own
branches!"
	It may be that the Sycamore tree wilted in hat very instant. One
couldn't see it do though. 
	"Do you really believe that you can command a tree and that it will
die?" I, Melchisedech Duffey asked him. "And do you really believe that you
can command a man to die and he will die?" 
	"Of course I can command a tree to die and it will die," Zabotski
said. "The meanest man is lord over the tallest tree. This lordship is given
to all of us, but not all know how to exercise it. And of course I can not
command a man to die. That would be against nature itself and also against
my own nature. And even if it were possible for me to command a man to die,
that would be of no effect. Duffey, you ask silly questions sometimes." 
	"We will see whether the Sycamore tree is dead tomorrow," I said. 
	"What could there be to see?" Zabotski asked. "Of course it will be
dead, and possibly it will have disappeared." 
	"Whatever it is that you're building, Zabotski, it's an eye-sore so
far," I told him. "And it does intrude onto other peoples' land." 
	"Ah, not too much," Zabotski said. "Blackstone is the only one who
gets really mad about it. Homer Hoose hasn't looked out of his back window
for a long time and he doesn't even know that my contraption is being built
there. You surely don't care that it intrudes over your land, do? And the
people at the 'Golden Children's Home and Haven Orphanage' behind me there
don't care about it. The youngest of those people like it. They like to play
in it." 
	A grubby and trashy fruit of Bryan Blackstone sidled up to Zabotski
and to myself Melchisedech Duffey. It was Bryan's little son Baxter. He was
nicknamed 'Bandicoot' by the other little boys in the block. 
	"Please don't kill my father, Mr. Zabotski," little Bandicoot
Blackstone begged. "He doesn't mean to be a blow-top any more than you mean
to be one. But he is good to us at home and we can't get along without him.
Maybe I won't even get to start to school next year if you kill my father.
Maybe I'll have to go to work in the mines." 
	"Why, Bandicoot," Zabotski said, "there is no way that I could ever
kill your father or any other person. I simply am not made that way. And
they don't hire five year old boys to work in the mines nowadays." 
	"Then we'll starve," Bandicoot moaned. "But you said that the wither
would be on my father by tomorrow and that he would be dead within five
days." 
	"Yes, that's true enough, Bandicoot. Then you'll be the man of the
family. That should be a proud and happy time for you." 
	"Please don't kill my father, Mr. Zabotski," Bandicoot begged again.
Then he went away crying. 
	"I wonder why that little boy is crying?" Zabotski asked in real
puzzlement. Zabotski is a little bit insensate sometimes. 

	This Zabotski was an odd one in that he sometimes went away for a
day or two. No, that's not the way to explain his tricky case. Sometimes he
went away for a year or more, but he was always back in a day or two. There,
that is the best way the case can be put into words. I have private
knowledge on this case, but I cannot explain it more fully than that. 
	Zabotski believed that, just as the great stars bend the light that
shines past them, so he bent the Time that flowed past him. He had no doubt
that he was a great star among men. Zabotski and his associate myself
Melchisedech Duffey studied the problem of Time a lot, though I discounted
the influence that Zabotski might have on objective time. 
	"Looking back on it, we see all history through a distorting
medium," I said to Zabotski that evening as we worked on a sort of project
that we had been busy on. "Someone has placed this opaque and hamperng
medium as an impediment about us so that seeing we might not understand and
hearing we might not hear. It is as if we see everything through a most
mysterious time-speed-distortion medium, and as if we ourselves were
immersed in that medium. Really, there should be some way of analyzing that
substance that we are imbedded in, What is it?" 
	"It's molasses," Zabotski said. 
	"Our past is all so close to us, and it all seems so artificially
very far away," I continued. "I can reach out and grasp a firm hand and find
that it is only slightly more hairy than my own. But I lift up my eyes and
see that it is a million years away. Are my hand and my mind mistaken, or
are my eyes and the evidence mistaken? What is that rock-drawing that you
have there Zabotski, and what is the writing on it?" 
	"Your eyes and the evidence are mistaken, Duffey," Zabotski stated.
"This rock-drawing and its writing may be the oldest 'how-to-build-it'
instruction booklet in the world. This is the clearest copy I've ever had of
it, and I've been able to obtain several. I believe that it is the
instruction booklet on how to build either a big barn or a big castle. In
any case, there will be something very special and ordained about it. Well,
I will have to build it to see what it is supposed to be. There's no other
way. It's the same thing that I've been working on in my back yard for some
time. I believe that the language of the instruction booklet is Hazh-Khazh."

	"But Hazh-Khazh has never been deciphered, Zabotski," I reminded
him. 
	"I know, that's what slows me down. I have to decipher it as I go
along. It sure is going to be a big contraption when I get it finished." 
	"Have you considered that you may have the scale wrong and that you
may be building it either ten times or a hundred times too large in every
dimension?" I asked him. 
	"Sure I've considered that," he said. "But I've already started on
this scale and I can't very well be mixing scales. There is nothing that
says that a model must be smaller than the thing it represents. Mine may be
a hundred times bigger in every measurement." 
	(Editor's Note: This might seem like strange and rambling stuff to
appear in 'House and Home Happening Magazine' which is mostly a
pop-architectural publication. But there is not any other way to obtain the
history of this most interesting structure, the Zabotsky House. Back to
Melchisedech Duffey.)
	Zabotski and I got along pretty well. And Zabotski disappeared at
frequent intervals, and thus he did not become really unbearable. 
	"In all things we have been going forward rapidly and still more
rapidly," I said to Zabotski once as I studied his charts and schematics. "I
know in my heart and in my intuition that we have covered a very great
distance in a very short time. But when I look back, I see that I am
deceived either at first or at last. I see that we have been moving at such
a very slow pace that yesterday is a million years ago. It's as if the whole
continuum was made out of --" 
	"It's molasses," said Zabotski. "It's all made out of molasses." 
	I poured over various charts and projections and schemata as the sun
went down and the stars came out at their observatory window. And Zabotski
was building a model of a model of something out of sycamore wood. He did
not know yet what it would be that he was building. He measured and
calculated and sawed and whittled and fitted and assembled. This model of a
model, as described in the old stone pictures and writings, had begun to
take shape both here indoors in small and outdoors in large. But the meaning
and purpose and name of the construction had not yet lept out at Zabotski,
nor at myself. 
	"Molasses is a lot like amber," Zabotski said. "It flows so slowly
that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and
apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to
their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be
dead. The name of the thing that is bothering you is the fly-in-the-amber,
Melchisedech. But it has been determined that amber does flow very, very
slowly. And I believe that anything imprisoned in it lives very slowly also,
but still lives." 
	"Yes, the fly-in-the-amber, and also the unfilled-bathtub-paradox,
Zabotski," I said. "I calculate that if the water has been running at the
rate it is supposed to be running, and for the time that it is supposed to
have been running, then the bathtub should have been filled sixteen thousand
times. But it hasn't been filled even once. The bottom of the tub has iust
barely been covered now. Things can not have been going on at the orthodox
pace for the orthodox time." 
	"No, they have been going on at a much faster pace," Zabotski said,
"but they have been going on for hardly any time at all. Literally it all
began yesterday, late yesterday." 
	"Tomorrow, as you know, we are to be visited by a group of
fundamentalers," I told him. "I wonder how those ancient fossils of people
have survived for so long. What an ignoble senility they show!" 
	"But no, they aren't old, Ddffey," Zabotski said. "They are always
the youngest people in the world. They are younger than we are. No, that's
wrong. They are not younger than I am. But they are younger than you and the
rest of the people are, even if they have hold of the right idea backwards.
Try this on your intuitions, Duffey: the Fundamentalers are not flies in
molasses or amber as you are; they are flies in free air. Believe that they
should be swatted like flies if you wish, but recognize that they move in
the free air and you do not. I grant you that they are tedious people, but
we must admit that they are half correct in their ideas. Fair's fair."
	"You are saying that the Fundamentalers may be correct on their time
scale, Zabotski? You are a curly-tongued needier, friend." 
	"That too, Duffey. But yes, of course they are correct in their time
scale, when it is adjusted to the concept of the Pristine World. Ah, here is
my life and my love, the Widow Waldo! Fly with me to a better place, Widow
Waldo!" 
	"I had a letter and a call from the State Inspector of Eleemosynary
Insitutions today," the Widow Waldo said. "You have got to get that big
shack of yours off of the grounds of the 'Golden Childrens Home and Haven
Orphanage'. Maybe the state can't make you remove the part that is on your
own lot. So far, they are leaving that to the pressure or the indignation of
your neighbors and fellow citizens, and that pressure is rising. But you
have got to get rid of that part that intrudes on the Orphanage grounds." 
	"Don't give it another thought Widow Waldo," Zabotski said
cheerfully. "It will not be taken care of." 
	"You are saying that it will not be taken care of?" 
	"It will not be, Widow: it will not be removed until it is
completed, whatever it is and whenever that will be. So don't give it
another thought. Fly with me to a better place, Widow Waldo." 
	"I told you that I would not go unless some of the children go
also," the Widow said. She was stuck on Zabotski in spite of him being an
ugly and loud-mouthed old man. 
	"Six of them then," Zabotski said. "That's how many went in the
suggested scenario that accompanied the how-to-build-it kit. And they were
somewhat older than yours; they were three married couples. There is
something messy about whole bunches of small children on a water trip all
cooped up." 
	"Messy or not, there will be whole bunches of them," thewiddw Waldo
insisted. "You haven't understood all the prototypes of your contraption.
Sure it's a ship, sure it's a castle, sure it's an anti-time machine. But
it's also a shoe." 
	"You mean like the one the old woman lived in?" 
	"Yes, Zabotski, yes," the Widow Waldo said. "You catch on slow." 
	"W.W., what are all those funny looking animals I've been seeing on
the orphanage grounds today?" I, Melchisedech Duffey asked her. 
	"Oh, they're just green-clay animals, but some of them are a little
too much in a hurry. The children got them ready a way early, but a lot of
them fall apart after they run around for a little while. They're starting
to assemble better ones now though." 	Widow Waldo cooked us supper
sometimes when we worked at night on the plans and the constructions. Widow
Waldo had once been a famous beauty, She had even been Miss America. Then
she had married, really it was a sort of stunt that the promoters dreamed
up, Waldo Waldorf who was Mr. Body Beautiful of the West North Central
States, including Illinois. But this husband Waldo was killed by a jealous
rival. After that, Widow Waldo devoted herself to the service of orphans.
She was still beautiful, but her beauty was now more subdued than it had
been several decades ago when she was Miss America. 

	Well, it's next morning. And there's something that we can check
out. Is the Sycamore tree dead? Zabotski had said "Mottled tree, wither and
die! By tomorrow the life will be gone out of you and you will hang dead on
your own branches." Well, had it happened or not? It should be easy enough
to tell whether the Sycamore tree was dead or not. What was the difficulty? 
	The difficulty was that the sycamore tree wasn't there. 
	"Bandicoot!" 1, Melchisedech Duffey called to that little Blackstone
boy. "Didn't there used to be a sycamore tree right about there? What
happened to it?" 
	"How did you happen to remember about that sycamore tree, Mr.
Duffey?" Bandicoot Blackstone asked. "Yes, it died. And we cut it down so it
wouldn't fall on someone. How did you remember it? That was a long time ago,
when I was a little boy." 
	"Oh yes. And how is your father today, Bandicoot?"
	"I think he feels seedy. He says he's got the withers. It's the
middle age eating him up, he says." 
	"Oh yes. And where are you going now, Bandicoot?" I asked. 
	"Oh, to school." 
	"Ah then, you are starting to school." 
	"Yes, I'm starting to high school today," Bandicoot said. "It's
almost as if the best part of my life were behind me." 
	Well, a few years had slipped by there. That happens to me
sometimes, to Zabotski also. The morning sun cast a shadow of Zabotski's
contraption. It was larger, much, much larger than it used to be. It was
giant. 
	Some people from the 'Moral Sanctions Committee for the Removal of
Eye-Sores and Abominations' came up to Zabotski as he stood adoring the
morning sun with his eyes and with his extended arms. 
	"Mr. Zabotski," said an embattled lady of that committee, "that
eye-sore of yours is still there and you have built it even bigger. It is
eight years since we reminded you that it was an abomination, and you
solemnly swore that you would do something about it on the morrow." 
	"No, ma'am," Zabotski said. "I solemnly swore that I would not do
anything about it on the morrow. I believe that people misunderstand me
because they do not listen to me closely. And it has now been eight years.
It was only yesterday that you reminded me that it was an abomination. Do
you not remember that it was only yesterday that we talked on this?" 
	This simple answer seemed to throw the Moral Sanction Committee into
some sort of confusion. Yes, they did remember that it was only yesterday
that they had talked to Zabotski about the distasteful subject. But they
also remembered that it had been eight years. Could it have been both? 
	"Of course it could have been both," Zabotski assured them. "In the
context of Pristine History it was only yesterday. In some trashier context
that you may have been dabbling with it may have been eight years. I do wash
that people would not indulge in such contexts as have become common. They
waste time. They waste it a thouandfold." 
	"It is still an eye-sore and an abomination," one of the Moral
Sanction men said. "What do you intend to do with the monstrosity?"
"Until I fugure out what it is that I'm building, I simply haven't any idea
what I will do with it," Zabotski said. "If it had wheels, I might roll it
to Pristine World, but I can find no wheels on the plans." 

	"If Pristine World is so swift and so superior, why do you come back
here every time?" I, Melchisedech asked my associate Zabotski. 
	"Ah, I believe that I'm imperfectly accelerated for Pristine World
as yet," the Zab said. "I have to come back to catch my breath. And
sometimes I just come back to this stuck-in-molasses world to rest and to
see my friends. I believe that, ever since I was a child, I have had this
present dream of living on a grubby and slow-moving and molasses-filled
world. Myself, I seem to fall between the two worlds. Old Molasses here is
much more fascinating as a dream than as a reality though." 

	The Fundamentalers came about noon that day. Zabotski and myself
Melchisedech Duffey met with them at a big table under the trees. It was not
known why the Fundamentalers wanted to exchange views with Zabotski and
myself. Both ofus were students of history and paradox, that's true. And the
Fundamentalers were avid about history. But there may not have been much
resemblance between the several sorts of history that now came under
discussion. 
	"Mr. Zabotski and Mr. Duffey," said a member of the Pattenite
faction of the Fundamentalers, "we have here publications by both of you in
the realm of history, but (slippery, slippery!) we are not sure that you are
dealing straight in your history. Are you?" 
	"I never pretended to deal history straight"' Zabotski said. "I am
an artist and a prophet before I am an historian. I believe that history is
an involuted epicycloid and not a straight line at all. But I do deal with
history as honestly as I am able to do it." 	"And so do I,
Fundamentalers," I, Melchisedech said. "But I am not so sure about
yourselves. I believe that you often supply arbitrary answers when there are
no real answers available." 
	"We would not have any answers if they were not given to us from
above," the Pattenite man said. "I have here, Mr. Zabotski, a copy of your
'Pristine History of the World'. I find that its chronology is almost
identical with our own: the probably instantaneous creation of first life
between 20,000 and 10,000 B.C.; the 'sixth-day' creation of land, animals
and man between 10,000 and 2,800 B.C.; the Floodtide Catastrophies, the
instantaneous rising of the Alpine-Himalayan System, and the flotation of
Noah's barge (which you do not quite call by that name) all about 2,800
B.C.; the re-population of the planet and the development of new zoological
variations from 2,800 to 1,450 B.C.; then the times of the Ancient Empires,
of Exodus, and then the Redemption followed by the Diaspora, of Rome's Fall
and of the Medieval Period, of the Modern and Western Interludes, right up
to our present year of 2,000 A.D." 
	"Why not up to our present year of 200,000 A.D.?" Zabotski asked. "I
believe that is as likely a number for our present time as is 2,000 A.D. The
multitudinous happenings, they have been happening quite a lot lately. Yes,
there is some agreement between our chronologies, but it is probably
accidental." 
	"There are no accidents," said a Fundamentaler of the Hatch school.
All is foreordained." 
	"I believe that nothing is foreordained," Zabotski said, "but I
believe that accidents are the closest of all phenomena to being
preordained." 
	"Widow Waldo, why are you hanging lace curtains in my contraption?"
Zabotski called this latter quest on loudly and across a good space to his
monstrous and unnamed and unmanned and unfinished contraption. 
	"Because it needs them, that's why," Widow Waldo called back. "It's
drab otherwase. Lace curtains are always meshes of sunshine, until they
become very dirty." 
	"But my contraption hasn't any windows, so far anyhow," Zabotski
called. "And I'm not even sure it's the type of construction that could have
windows. Widow, it isn't a house. It's a machine of some kind." 
	"It will have lace curtains whether it has any windows or not," the
Widow answered. "I will paint windows on the inside walls if it comes to
that. I like things nice and homey." 
	"My good people, this is the way it is:" Zabotski spoke again to the
Fundamentalers. "I have written my Pristine History of the World to fill a
gap. I travel much in the Pristine World, and I know it a little bit. I may
even have come from there originally. I'm a little bit vague on my own
origin. There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no
non-valid persons or situations. So I eliminated all duplicated or non-valid
persons or situations from my thinking and from my history, and by that
trick, I came up with my Pristine History. This makes it very much shorter
than conventional histories which do sometimes list duplicate and non-valid
things. The two worlds, the Pristine World, and the Everyday-or-Molasses
World occupy the same space, but they do not occupy it in the same way. It
is consequently difficult to explain one of them to the other. 
	"For analogy, let us consider a football game which generally uses
three hours of clock time to cover one hour of whistle time. Let us take the
films of that one hour of whistle time and select the time (about twelve
minutes) when the ball is actually in play. Let us then omit the time when
nothing much is happening even though the ball is in play, and let us also
omit a few worthless and completely repetitious plays. We can then get it
down to about three minutes of hectic action. Please note that this would
not merely be the highlights of the game; it could be the complete essence
of the game. Well, the Pristine World is like that: it is the real and
essential world. It does exist. Nothing is left out of it except the
duplicated and the non-valid but very much is added to it. The Pristine
World, in fact, is so intuitively imbued and indwelt that I can live
overflowing years of it in the same space that is taken up by a day or two
in the Molasses World. The Pristine World can travel in a thousand years
where it took the Molassas World a million. We have got to throw in our lot
with that faster and more valid world. 
	"That the chromology of the Pristine World somewhat resembles your
own chronologies is no more than a humble coincidence. Possibly we do have
the same time scale, but we do not arrive at it by the same way." 
	"We don't know how you arrived at it," said one of the
Fundamentalers of the Rev. Patrick O'ConneFl following. "We came in through
the front door." 
	"And I came in through the walls," Zabotski said. 

	The Widow Waldo carried loaded pots and hampers over and served good
dinners to the Fundamentalers and to Zabotski and to myself Melchisedech. 
	"No, no, it's no trouble at all," she protested to the protesting
Fundamentalers. "There is plenty of everything, All I have to do is take it
out of the mouths of the poor orphans. We have so many poor orphans that
there is almost no limit to the amount of food that I can take out of their
mouths."
	(The golden roof of the 'Golden Childrens Home and Haven Orphanage'
gleamed in the sun. It had been built and endowed several decades before by
a bloated plutocrat named Harry Goldchild.) 
	"Do you believe that the true ark is still to be found in the high
mountains of Armenia, half buried in the snow and ice, and guarded by
angers?" A Cummings-clan member of the Fundamentalers asked Zabotski and
myself Melchisedech Duffey. "To us, this is a test of faith." 
	"So that's what those things are!" Zabotski explained. "I've gazed
at the things without even being able to guess what they are. Yes, now that
you turn my mind to consider the subject, I believe that the ark is to be
found there in the original and in at least twenty copies. It must have been
the most popular build-it-yourself kit of that era. And yes, of course I
believe that it is guarded by angels. When things get too inaccessible to be
guarded by humans any longer, then angelic guards always take over. Yes, it
is there, in High Armenia, but we don't know for sure where High Armenia is
to be found." 
	"But of course we know," said the Cummings-clan member. "We have
three expeditions there now." 
	"But of course you do not know where it is," Zabotski explained to
them. "The divided country that is now known as Armenia, the mountain that
is now known as Ararat, they were neither of them known by those names
before the fourth century of our era. A king of that country then decided to
call his country, which had been named Haik, by the biblical name of
Armenia. Armenia merely means a mountainous place. Like Montana, which means
exactly the same thing, the name was then applied to a definite area: but it
was not so originally. And that king decided to call the mountain which had
been named Aghri Dagh by the biblical name of Ararat (which means simply
'Mountain'. But there is nothing to indicate that the king was making
correct identification. Or that he was not making them. Likely, he was
merely trying to establish a bright history for his poor mountain country." 
	"We know these things," said the Cummings-clan member, "but there is
something to indicate that he was making correct identifications. The Hand
of God stood in the sky above him and a large assembly of the King's
followers and pointed down on the mountain and land to identify them. This
is to be found in the King's own words." 
	"By your own chronology mountains weren't there before the flood,"
Zabotski said. "They would have to have risen up under the ark. I have
evidence that this is exactly what did happen." 
	"As to the Ark or arks that have been sticking out of the snow on
some of the peaks of this Ararat," said myself Melchisedech, "they are
remnants of great wooden structures, but it is unlikely that they were
water-craft of any kind. I believe that they were great wooden castles.
There is a genuine tradition of a dozen or more great wooden castles
existing on those crags before the cyclic climate turned colder and buried
them in quasi-perpetual snow." 
	"And would angels be guarding old wooden castles that were not the
Ark?" a person asked.
	"Yes they would," Zabotski stated. "When anything becomes remote
from the eyss of men, then angels take over. I don't know why there was ever
any confusion on that point." 
	"Mr. Zabotskl," asked a Hatch follower of the Fundamentalers, "what
did you mean a while ago when you said 'Why not up to the present year of
200,000 AD?' Was that a joke?"  
	"It was a riddle, which is a form of a joke, yes. Why do you say
that this is 2,000 A.D.? Why not say that it is 1,000 A.D.? By any count, we
very plainly do not know where we are right now. This might very well be 500
A.D. or 600 A.D. We haven't clear evidence for a larger number of valid
years than that. I think of one possible exclusion, one period of one
thousand years that might have been written into history by a young boy in
the year 1348, at the depth of the 'Black Death' plague. About the only
people left alive then were children and very young people, and some of them
continued the chronicles. There is an even chance that the whole notion of a
thousand-year-long 'dark ages' was no more than the delirious dream of a
vivid boy in that dismal crisis time of sickness. There isn't any very
strong independent evidence of any such period of 'dark ages'. 
	"You find it strange that a young and sick boy might have been
writing our history then. Tell me, can you find out who is writing our
history now?"
	"Mr. Zabotski," one of them said, "there are dark rumors that you
sometimes go away for two or five or a dozen or even more years at one time.
Do you?" 
	"Yes I do, friend," Zabotski said. "What is amiss with that? Many
persons travel for various lengths of time." 
	"And there are further dark rumors that you always come back from
your years-long journeys in a day or two or possibly three. Do you?" 
	"Yes I do, friend. What is wrong that? Many persons return again and
again to a place that is familiar to them." 
	"And you are really gone such a number of years? And you are really
back in such a number of days? And you do not find anything strange about
that?" 
	"Oh but I do!" Zabotski howled. "I find it all strange and
wonderful! I wouldn't trade places with anyone in this respect. Hardly
anyone else has this sort of mobility."
 
	"Mr. Duffey," another Pattenite said to me, "you in your own works
sometimes seem to doubt part of the evidence that has been dragged out of
the Olduvai Gorge of Africa, evidence that puts human existence into terms
of millions of years. You seem to doubt some of this evidence a little bit.
But you don't doubt it nearly enough." 
	"How do you doubt it? What is enough?" I, Melchisedech asked him. 
	"Have you not noticed that all the evidence for the extreme
antiquity of man has been taken from one long rift fault in the earth, and
most of it from that tumbled portion of the fault named the Olduvai Gorge of
Africa?" 
	"I have noticed this, yes," I said. 
	"Do you not know that the sequence of strata is nullified by a rift
fault? Do you not know that the whole idea of in situ evidence is
meaningless in such a formation where the situs, the location, is jumbled?" 
	"That is a little bit extreme, but not much?" I said.
	"And have you not noticed that all the significant 'discoveries'
have been made by persons of just four families, the Brooms, the Darts, the
Oakleys, and the Leakys, a benighted and ingrown feudal group? Have you not
noticed that they are all vouched for by each other, but not really by
anyone else ever?"
	"From my childhood I have noticed all this, yes," I said. 
	"Do you not know that all South African science is justly held in
contempt by all thinking persons as being trivial and provincial and inept? 
	"Sure, except -- " 
	"Except in this one case," the Pattenite pursued, "the 'evidence'
for the extreme antiquity of man. And all of this 'evidence' is found where
normal evidence will not apply, and all of it is found by a group of
mind-already-made-up duffers. This 'evidence' is used by the infidelity
crowd to prove what they want to be proved. But they do know better than to
put that 'evidence' to a test. It is too distant for them to test, they
excuse. But it is really 'behind God's back' stuff. It is 'bottom of the
world' stuff." 
	"We call it 'behind the barn' evidence," I, Melchisedech told him,
"and we know that it is grotesque. These things are giddy frauds.
Nevertheless, there is, in other places and discovered by other people,
fairly reasonable evidence for an antiquity of man beyond what you will
allow, though far short of the African-Extravaganza claims. Actually the
African Extravaganza is a sort of pop-rock hymn (rock hymn, fossil rock, get
it?) sung to the real antiquity of man. Hymns are not expected to contain
accurate evidence." 

	"Of the many great wooden structures sticking out of the Ararat
snow, one is valid," an Ark-advocate said. "Some of us have been inside the
structure." 
	"So have I," Zabotski said, "but I didn't tumble to what I was
inside when I was there." 
	"Things have been brought back out of that Ark to prove its
authenticity," the Ark-advocate said. 
	"I know it," said Zabotski. "I brought this back from there." It was
the rock drawings and writings that Zabotski had been using as a guide to
building his own contraption.
	"Whatis it, Mr. Zabotski?" one of the Fundamentalers asked. 
	"Oh, it's the instruction and maintenance manual," Zabotski said.
"Every vehicle of every sort comes with an instruction manual. I took this
one from your Ark." 
	"But you two are not with us in our teachings and beliefs," one of
the Fundamentalers said after a while. "Whoever is not with us is against
us." 
	"And whoever gathereth not with us splatterith," Zabotski said. The
Fundamentalers left Zabotski and myself Melchisedech then. 
	"I don't know whether anything at all is to be gotten from them?" I
doubted. 
	"Sure it is," Zabotski said. "I learned what it was that I was
building. That's something that I learned from them. Duffey, you need a
change to a faster pace and a look at real reality. Go to Pristine World. I
will show you how to go. I will give you letters of introduction to it. You
can go there for three or five years, and you can be back in two days.
You're a scabby-necked chicken if you don't go."
	"All right, I'll go," I said. I went to the Pristine World for three
or five years. An I was back in two days. 

	Tle night before my return, the Orthodoxers burned a 'Clear Bright
Flame of Science' on that tiny little front lawn of Zabotski. When the
Orthodoxers burn a 'Flame', one can almost expect anything from a routine
horse-whipping or tar-and-feathering to a genuine hanging and drawing and
quartering. 

	Some of the children from the Golden Childrens Home and Haven
Orphanage were carrying clumsily-made green clay animals into the Zabotski
contraption when I, Melchisedch got back. The animals were kicking and
moving weakly.
	"If you would bake the green clay animals, it would toughen them and
make them hold together better," I, Melchisedech called to them. "You're
losing the legs and heads off half of them while you carry them." 
	"It would kill them to bake them," one of the children called back
to me. "What's the matter with you anyhow?" 
	"Are they alive now?" I asked. 
	"They're green clay now," the children said. "We get them out of
green clay eggs. And they can be breathed into. Whoever heard of breathing
anything into a backe clay animal? What's the matter with you anyhow?" 
	After that, things happened rapidly, almost as rapidly as they do in
the Pristine World. 
	"Fly with me to a better place, Widow Waldo!" Zabotski called as he
often did.
	"What do you think I'm fixing to do?" she asked. "I suppose we will
be ready whenever you are." 
	"Dammit, Zabotski, are you finished with your part yet?" Widow Waldo
called. 
	"All except bolting the boat whistle onto the boat and getting
myself a pair of water goggles." 
	"I'll bolt the whistle on. And I'll get the goggles for you," the
Widow Waldo said. 
	There had been a rhapsody of animals the night before Zabotski and
the Widow Waldo (she was now Wife Waldo Zabotski, but Zab still called her
Widow Waldo), and quite a few of the children, and an amazement (that is the
only collective word that will do for it) of animals, left in the giant
contraption. 
	Green clay animals you say they were? Do green clay animals hoot and
bellow like that? But I suppose that all of them were reen clay animals up
to the time of their hatching: Oh, the rhapsodic noises of many animals,
roaring, runting, nikkering, neighing, whinneying, snorting, whickering,
trumpeting, blaring, bawling, yowling, barking, growling, yapping, rumbling,
bleating, lowing, gibbering, hissing, giggling, yammering, mewing,
caterwauling, crunching, gnawing, wheening, oinking, hammering, squealing,
tumping, hooting, stomping, baying, bugling, shouting, yodeling, gruffing,
snorting, and making a noise 'chok-chok-chok-kachoom'. There had been a
great orchestration of animal noises, and of animal aromas also. But now, in
the new dayling, the animals had settled down, except for a few still
loading on. The contraption had the air of being animal-full and just about
kid-full. 

	"We have a list of incredible charges against you, Zabotski," one of
the Orthodoxers was saying as a bunch of them came up to Zab with dangerous
faces and dangerous-looking weapons. "It is said that you refuse to accept
the Orthodoxer time scale. It is said that you have been in the company of
Fundamentalers, and that you have listened to fun being poked at the four
reatest names in paleontology." The man making these serious charges wore a
tadge that said 'Darwin or Death'. 
	"I'd hardly do that," Zabotski said. "I'm pretty touchy, and my own
name would surely head the list of the four greatest. I don't like fun being
poked at me."
	"It is said that you have substituted false history for the
established thing," another of them attacked. He wore a badge that read
'Herbert Spencer Forever'. "It is also said that you 'leave' this place
every now and then by mysterious conveyance, that you take off down the
road, and that you just disappear. We would like to see you do that. Take
off down the street now if you wash. I bet I can put a rifle bullet into
your head before you can do your disappearing trick. If not, nothing much
lost If you come back again, we'll grab you again. " 
	"Mr. Zabotski," said a reasoning member of the Vigilante
Orthodoxers, you don't really believe that the Orthodoxer account of origins
is rot, do you? You are reported as saying that it is." 
	"Sure it is," Zabotski itill maintained. "Almost everything about
the orthodoxers is rot. They average out lower than the Fundamentalers." 
	"You fink, you Fortean, you Fundamentaler," barked one of those
guardians of pure science. He wore a badge that said "Huxley the Bulldog
forever!" "Start walking! Yah, walk about three steps and we'll start
shooting." 
	Zabotski started walking, but he threw darkness or clouds upon the
Orthodoxers so that they couldn't see him or anything else for a little
while. He went to his giant contraption and climbed to the top of it. 

	"Zabotski, you fool, there won't be a flood like the original
flood," I, Melchisedech called up to him. I was in a mixture of frustration
and laughter at him. 
	"Melchisedech, you fool, this will be the original flood," Zabotski
called down. "The others were only for practice. And those big structures on
Ararat are all discarded models. Mine is the thing itself. This is the
original. Don't you know that legends always preceed the real happenings?" 
	"There's a cloudburst on ihe way," Bandicoot Blackstone hollored at
us as he stuck his head out of his door. "Wow! What am I saying. It's not on
the way. It's here! Look at that rain! Did you ever see it start so fast and
so hard. All person in designated lower areas are supposed to go to higher
ground. This is a designated lower area. Where's Zabotski going,
Melchisedech?" 
	"Oh, he's going away for a couple of thousand years this time." 
	"That means that he might not be back for a couple of months."
"What happens if the water does rise and carry you away in your
contraption?" I, Melchisedech called up to Zabotski. 
	"I'll float, that's what will happen," Zab called down through the
downpour. "It sure is good to know that you'll float." 
	Zabotski pulled the water goggles down over his eyes, and he jerked
on the boat whistle chain to sound the hooter. The Widow Waldo and the
boatful of children and animals cheered. The contraption was afloat and into
the swift stream.
	"Zabotski, you fool, it'll never go under the Shoal Street Viaduct,"
I cried to him suddenly. "It's too big to go under it." 
	"Under or over it, or through it we'll go," Zabotski yowled, and he
hooted the boat whistle again. "We can travel on water or air or space. 
	Zabotski came to his lot on Lake Borgne, and he is still afloat
there, drifting on a little kedge anchor. He says he'll be ready when the
real flood is ready, and that he and his are unsinkable. I wash that I,
Melchisedech were unsinkable. These sure are rainy days for all this week
now, since he floated out of here. 	(Editor's Note: That is the end of
the 'myth of origin' part of the account of the fantastic Zabotski house.
And that is the end of Melchisedech Duffey as far as H and H H Magazine is
concerned. That is the end of the 'shaggy people tale'. In an upcoming issue
we will have a clear description of this interesting and charming and
unsinkable and gigantic house on the coast of Lake Borgne where it opens
into the Gulf of Mexico. We will have an account of the very many odd
children and the many horribly strange animals that are there, and of the
great size and flabbergasting design of the grotesque structure. We will
have an account of the architecture that is at the same time primordial and
futuristic. We will have an account of that incredible but gracious couple,
Zabotski and Wife Waldo. We will have this if the rains let up a little bit
and the barges can bring in paper again.) 
	"How many of the children are coming along?" Zabotski asked. 
	"As many as want to come, I suppose," the Widow said. There was
still a lot of beauty in her even though it was several decades since she
had been Miss America. 
	There was news that nineteen unarmed Fundamentalers had been killed
in a shootout with Orthodoxer police. Such things were happening all the
time. 

	"How is your father, Bandicoot?" Zabotski asked the president of the
Bandicoot Enterprises Limited. 
	"Oh, he's dying," Bandicoot said. "He won't last the day. But he's
had a long and full life. I always liked that fellow." 
	"Who has taken over his businesses?" Zabotski asked. 
	"I will remain as chairman of the various boards," Bandicoot said,
"but my son John, as 'First Executive' will be pretty much running the
shows."
	"Five days, that's really all he lasted," Zabotski mumbled in
wonder. 
	"Some of the green clay animals that the children are carrying into
your contraption are pretty misshapen, Zabotski," I, Melchisedech said to
him. 
	"Some of the animals presently in Molasses World are pretty
misshapen too, Duffey," he said, "as if they weie made by kids. They are at
least as bad as these that are going into my contraption. These will
enough." 

	"Is it true that you have bought a lake frontage on Pristine Cove on
Lake Borgne?" a newspaper reporter asked Zabotski. 
	"True enough," Zabotski said. "I got in on a 'First Introductory'
offer that was only tendered to outstanding citizens. It cost a little more
than I was led to believe though." 
	"And is it true that the mysterious giant contraption that you are
building in your back yard is intended to be your palatial home on the
lake?" the reporter asked further. 
	"How would I ever get it there?" Zabotski wondered. 
	"Is it true that you complained to the City Commission that it
floods so badly here that a good rain would wash an ocean-goin ship right
down the channel in front of your house, the channel that is humorously
called Dumaine Street?" 
	"That sounds about like something I might have said," Zabotski
admitted. "The river is getting higher all the time, or the land lower. And
it does rain more, in these last years, and months, and weeks, and days
particularity."
	"Well, will it do it?" the reporter persisted. "Will a good rain
(there's a gusher supposed to be on the way) float your giant contraption
and carry it all the way to Lake Borgne?" 
	"With a good rain, that's possible," Zabotski said. "And Lake Borgne
is an open-mouthed lake. It goes right into the Gulf." But just where is the
line of questioning leading?" 
 
	Book Six

	You, Melchisedech, replevin. 
	Be you either lump or leaven. 
	Choose a road from one to seven. 
	Melchisedech, Ukalegon.' 
	[Cleo Mahoney. Seven Roads.] 

	1 

	Duffey had visited Zabotski and his wife Waldo several times in
their great, floating boat palace (The Big Red Barn on Pristine Cove, as
their watery neighbors called it.) After all, it was less than a dozen miles
away from Duffey. But Duffey knew that he would not have time to build such
a castled boat himself, nor should he share that great contraption on
Pristine Cove with Zabotski and wife Waldo. They were already sharing it
with very many children and animals. One patriarch to a castle was enough. 
	But it was consoling to know that a boatful of children would live
into the imminent future, whether the rest of the world lived into it or
not. Besides, Duffey already knew how he would die, and it wasn't by
drowning. 
	Was the world really coming to its end? Probably it wasn't yet, but
for Melchisedech Duffey it was. Duffey had already seen the end of time for
himself. The symbol of it had been the seven-arrowed sign put there to dry
by the girls from Ursuline Academy. But he wouldn't have needed the symbol
to know that his ending was at hand. His ending, but he would not have any
end. Scripture states so. 
	Well, he had seen the barrier blocking him off from a valid future
in this world, and he had backed off from it. He could go into the future
only on another trick, in the context of the Seven Lost Years. He could not
go into the future on the normal track. And the seven alternate futures that
were offered him. Dammit, there was something suspect about every one of
them. 
	"Is there anything at all I can do about this?" Duffey asked
himself. "Of course there is. I can worry about it. That's what one is
supposed to do with problems." 
	And it happened that others were worrying about Melchisedech
Duffey's problem also. 

	"Melchisedech has come to the end of his stick. This probably will
not be his death. He has already seen his own ashes as momento of it. This
may be that much worse thing, his disintegration. And if he loses his
integrity, what boots him other things? He seems to be coming apart, to be
unraveling into several strands. But Melchisedech is the man who does not
have an ending. That must be meant of him in a special case, since none of
us really ends, which is to say thit we are all immortal in soul. But
Melchisedech is splitting and flaking off. He can not go down seven
simultaneious roads without that. The riddle of the Several futures may be
too much for him. If he were younger, he could take them all in succession,
one by one. But now I think he's stuck. I'd help him and advise him	if I
knew how. Otherwise, all I can do is pray for him.
	"What is this about Melchisedech being of a very great age, about
all of us in our group being of a very great age. Some days, I believe that.
Today I don't. 
	"Melchisedech Duffey is not the Melchisedech, though sometimes he
believes that he is, and sometimes he lives and remembers episodes out of
the life of the real Melchisedech. I believe that the case of it is that
Melchisedech Duffey is merely in unusual accord with his patron saint
Melchisedech the King of Salem, and so he shares some of the memories and
experiences of that old king. 
	"Such is the case as I believe it today. But on many other days I
believe that Melchisedech Duffey is indeed Melchisedech the King of Salem. 
	"The Devil-Released-From-Prison, who has made something of a stir in
esoteric circles for these last several decades, is not the Devil himself.
He is only one of the minor devils, a goof devil. I believe that he is a
sort of decoy. It will seem, by those who mistake this decoy for the Royal
Black Duck, that this vile lout is a parrot-brained inanity and is no real
danger. And then the Devil Himself, put out of notice and out of mind,
pursues his murderous and quiet work in all its clandestine horror. 
	"Such is the else of it as I believe it today. But on many other
days I believe that the Devil-Released-From-Prison is the Devil Himself,
that the great danger from him lies in his sinister silliness and his
incomparable oafishness, in the strongest of all finite powers running amok
in resolute lucidness and dedicated destruction. 
	[Absalom Stein. Notes in a Motley Notebook.] 

	"Duffey has gone to the very edge of time, for him, and then he his
somehow drawn back. But we are in the same time-context with him. Though
this is not necessarily the edge of time for the rest of us, yet we continue
in the same time-fabric with Melchisedech Duffey. Has he unwittingly drawn
us back from the edge with himself? This last year or so does seem very
familiar to me, as though I had been through it several times before.
Salvation Sally says that she has the same feeling about it." 
	[Margaret Stone. Lines Written in Margin of Perrone's Praelectiones
Theologicae.] 

	"I have this fancy that Melchiscdech Duffey is of an older recension
than the 'current human'. There is not any authority Scripture or
Revelations for the idea that God made many false starts in his creation.
But there are legends about it. There are legends of the nine discarded
worlds that God mide before he made this world, the tenth. He discarded the
nine because of their unacceptable defects. How they must have been when
this world is the one finally accepted! 
	"But who says that it is? It may likewise be discarded, and an
eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth world may still follow it.
	"The nine discarded worlds are still animate and populated. What
anthologies of errors and btists, or outright errors and of
less-than-perfections they must be! What paradoxes they must contain that
will not quite jibe, what giant ideas and titanic jokes, what brilliant
conceptions that failed their promises! 
	"Sometimes people from one of the nine worlds blunder into this
world. There is always a monsterness about these people. They may be
overflowing with flawed genius. I believe that one of these persons who has
blundered into this world is Melchiscdech Duffey. Sure he was a Boy King and
a Boy Magician, but in another world, not in this one. Sure he is without
father or mother. They didn't use them on his world. Sure he is without end.
The continuity there was a circle, returning, returning, and never ending at
all. 
	"Melchisedech, Melchisedech, what discarded zoo-world have you come
from? You do know that the Melchisedech paradox is now on collision course
with this world, don't you? Who will pick up your pieces? You will be
shattered into pieces, you know. Who will log all your voyages? You will
voyage on the seven different winds, you know. If you weren't so damned
indomitable about it all, one could almost feel sorry for you." 
	[Mary Virginia Schaeffer. Lines in Her Duffey Book.] 

	2

	There are so nany ghosts in that part of New Orleans that they have
their own coffee shop, a place that is open for just an hour before dawn and
an hour after. The ghosts come there to swap ghost anecdotes and also to try
to purge themselves from the absolute horror of their trade. They do this by
talking out those horrors with their fellow spirits. 
	You can see them slipping along in the very early morning, down Ste.
Ann Street and Dumaine Street and St. Philip Street and Ursulines Avenue, up
along Decatur Street where the French Market will not serve ghosts, up
Chartres and Bourbon, out of Frenchman Street and Elysian Field Avenue,
gosts who have just finished their night's haunting. 
	In the Ghost Bar there is a large painting, done by Count Finnegan
(did hee paint it before or after he became a ghost?) showing, well the
plain ghostliness of these customers. This is done in ghost violets and
ghost grays, and it is really a convincing and moving picture. 
	That is a lie. All of it is a lie except the part about the Count
Finnegan picture of the gathering ghosts. It really does hang in the ghost
bar. Let the truth about that place now be told: 
	In New Orleans there was a little coffee shop that was run by a man
named Anthony Ghost whose father had come over from the Netherlands. This
establishment was called 'The Ghost Coffee Shop'. Dock workers and seamen
used to come in here in the morning, people out of the Quarter, people just
wandering around, night people who were very like ghosts. School kids also
used to come in there on their way to school. Some of the day students at
Ursuline Academy used to go to early mass at the Cathedral instead of at
their own chapel, and them come into the Ghost Coffee Shop for breakfast. 
	Among these, for several days now, had been Crissie Cristofero the
famous painter, Therese Doucet the famous casting director, and Cleo Mahoney
the famous playwright. And sometimes Rebeka Stein, who did not go to mass
(she was a Jew) joined them there. Melchiscdech Duffey had been coming into
the Ghost Coffee Shop for thirty years, so one morning he talked witll the
girls about the play 'Seven Roads' that was to be presented the following
evening at Ursulines Auditorium. 
	"The seven roads are really seven cruces of happenings, seven
scenarios, or seven variant futures," Cleo Mahoney the playwright of 'Seven
Roads' was saying. "There is not enough room in the play than to do other
than to suggest them with short and trenchant flashes. Crissie Cristofero,
our great artist here, caught them superbly in that advertising sign "The
Future Begins Right Here', with its seven scenes, and the verses written
athwart each of them. Unfortunately she used a water soluble paint, and the
constant heavy rains this past week have almost destroyed it. Crissie is
trying to reconstruct it in oils now, but it chides her." 
	"I saw the original when it was still wet," Melchisedech reminded
her. 
	"So you did," Cleo said. "Now the case is that the patriarch
Melchisedech cannot end, but neither can he continue on here in this world
in the way that he has been doing. There are seven contingent futures
waiting for him. Which ones he chooses, and the order he chooses them in,
will be accidental. And I give you a million guesses as to what are the
determinants to the futures he chooses."
	"No, I cannot guess it, not in  million guesses," Melchisedech said.
"What are the determinants?" 
	"Pot holes," Cleo said, "pot holes in the streets and the sidewalks.
Caught you flat-footed, didn't it, Mr. Duffey? There are seven special pot
holes in the streets and sidewalks of this town. No two of them are in the
same block or even in the same street. Each of them has a little valve or
activator or switch in it. The Patriarch Melchisedech will stumble or turn
his ankle in one of the pot holes. He will activate the valve or switch by
that; and (in sone cases, without even realizing the transition) he will be
into one of the seven alternate scenes or futures." 
	"But what if I don't step in a pot hole?" Duffey asked. 
	"If there's a pot hole around, you'll step in it, Duff," Anthony
Ghost the proprietor said. 
	"The fetish transformation activator, in dream context or in
detached experience, is almost always a ridiculous and incongruous thing,"
Rebeka Stein said. "I believe that Cleo's unconscious is to be complamented
for dredging up the pot holes as symbols. They are just randy enough to be
fitting. Watch where you're walking these days, Duff, or you might stumble
into the wrong hole." 
	This Rebeka Stein had known Melchisedech Duffey for all the fifteen
years of her life. 
	"I have trouble naming the seven variant scenarios," Cleo Mahoney
said. "They are really seven aspects of another world, not of this one. But
essentially they are these: 
	"One". Perhaps this is best expressed by the verse that Crissie
Cristofero here printed on the scene of that contingency: 
	'This is a else to crack your heart. 
	This is the day it falls apart.' 
	"It is a contingent world in which everything changes and is on the
verge of collapsing. Rooms do not have walls, whisky does not have bttles,
and people do not have skulls. There are no boundaries at all left in that
world, no marks where one thing ends and another thing begins. It doesn't
run together yet, but it is really to do so at any time. The Democles Sword,
which now has no surface to separate its steel from the non-steel of its
ambient, hangs directly over everything 
	"Two. And this is expressed by Crissie's verse: 
	'Here is compassion hoked and hammed. 
	A K.C. swap is a swip bedamned.' 
	"We do not know what this verse means, or what a K.C. swap is, and
neither does Crissie. The essence of this contingency is a very bad trade,
the dealing away of something of very high value for something that is
worthless. It is the compulsive trading off of the worthy for the unworthy,
and it diminishes the world by every such swap that is made. 
	"Three. This is the Crissie verse to it: 
	"This is The Count who meets countdown. 
	And a dead man wears the triple crown.' 
	"A man is elected to a very high office. He says that he will not
serve in it. 'I am dead, that's the reason that I won't serve,' he says.
"That is no reason at all,: a powerful voice answers him. So the dead man is
ordered out of his crypt and put into action. Then it is a helter-skelter
runaround combined with a spy story. It is really "The World as Spy Story'.
But the high office is as high as the World, and the World must be drawn
into the involvement. 
	"Four. The Crissie verse has this one this way: 
	"Here is the fleece, and the golden gloat. 
	The 'Endless' ends, and the world's a boat.'"
	"I believe that Crissie Cristofero is a silbyl or a pythoness,"
Rebeka Stein interrupted. "She comes up with these prophetic couplets.
They're good, but she doesn't have any idea at all what they mean. Is there
any market for good prophetesses these days, Duff?" 
	"There is always a market for good prophetesses," Melchisedech said.

	"I believe that this is the 'Ongoing Quest Adventure'," Cleo Mahoney
said. "The Quest succeeds, and then it becomes addictive. It succeeds again
and again, and the high persons become avid for that continuing golden
success. Oh, it strews goodness all along its route, but still there is
something a little bit poisonous about success going on and on and on. A
revenge must be taken against such successful questers. Some of them die
then, or they are killed. That is at least part of the revenge. But they
have such momentum that they don't realize or admit that they're dead. Even
when they are shown their bones and ashes they don't believe it. They
withdraw a bit into the past from that point, and they are alive again, but
the problem is still unsolved. This is about a world and a high group in it
who are driven to shining excellence, excellence, excellence, and a broken
record of it." 
	"I say 'On with it and on with it,"' Rebeka interposed. "There can't
be too much of it. It isn't a broken record at all." 
	"Five," said Cleo, "and the Crissie verse here is: 
	'A shattered world, and an end of fuss. 
	A new folk comes, and it isn't us.' 
	"The world is turned inside out, and the world and its people are
seen to be made out of a grotesque stiffing, trash and old paper and pieces
of wood. This stuffing is weighed in the scales and found wanting. 'Wait,
wait!'someone calls "you are only weighing the stuffing that leaked out of
it. You're not weighing the thing itself.' 'What I have weighed, I have
weighed,' the weigher says, 'and it weighs short'. Then the people are
replaccd by finer non-people. We don't like it, but we are no longer there,
so it doesn't matter. There is a slaughter scene in this one somewhere. 
	"Six. It happens that the Patriarch and his adversary are the only
persons left in the world. All of the other people are held in abeyance
somewhere. The Adversary presses the Patriarch to sign an agreement. They
battle grotesquely somewhere, or maybe they Indian-wrestle. 
	"The Crissie verse has it like this: 
	'This is the duel, and the bill of cost. 
	Oh sign it not, or it all is lost.' 
	"There is something very, very wrong about that covenant that the
Adversary is pressing the Patriarch to sign. If it is accepted, then we are
all undone. Undone literally, destroyed, iinmade, negated, nullified
forever. 
	"Seven. The Crissie verse gives this: 
	"The Melk is a bust, and a crown, and toff. 
	He had it all there, and he booted it off.' 
	"Everything is going right in this one, everything. In this one, we
will all come iito our glory, immeasurable and eternal. The people of the
Golden Fleece have won for us, and we have won for ourselves with our own
high qualities. There is not one chance of our missing the beatific vision.
Well, yes, there is one chance of our missing, but it's one chance in a
hundred billion. We'll play with odds like that all day. There is not a
cloud in the holy blue sky. Not a cloud, but there is something else. It is
a rowdy looking bird coming in on loutish wings. And the rowdy bird trails,
in its beak, a pennant on which are the words 'Whatever can go wrong will go
wrong'. But it's only one chance in a hundred billion that we will miss.
Then why do we suddenly go all clammy like this? That is the seventh and the
last contingency. 
	"The only thing after this seventh scrappy vision and a short
counter-ode by the chorus is your rousing curtain speech, Mr. Duffey. Oh,
don't let it frustrate us! I hope it will be a success." 
	"Or a successful frustration," Melchisedech said. 
	"If Crissie only knew what her verses meant we would have an easier
time of it," Rebeka Stein commented. 
	"Yes, it is like working with priceless but unset and odd-shaped
stones," Cleo Mahoney complained. "It is a frustration. But the play itself
is a study of frustrations. Oh, I hope it will be good." 
	The play was presented the following evening. It was pretty good.