18 Misc Laff: The Audifaxes (1989-1990/2018)

The Audifaxes (2018) is a slim collected edition of Lafferty's letters written under the persona of "Major Audifax O'Hanlon (Unretired)" to Son of GPIC, the newsletter of the Tulsa branch of the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers (OSFW). Its full subtitle is Unworldly Philosophies: Field Dispatches of Major Audifax O'Hanlon (Unretired), and it bills itself as letters to "the second most obscure publication in the world." Putting it together was an obvious labor of love, and I’m happy to own a physical copy. You can find a PDF of it online.

The collection gathers twenty-four pieces dated November 1989 through November 1991, along with a November 1992 reprint of the June 1990 poem "Hope Springs Eternal." An introduction by Warren Brown, one of Lafferty’s chief advocates and a rotating editor of Son of GPIC during its run, prefaces the edition. Brown notes the newsletter existed in print and later PDFs into the early 2000s. He also explains the conceit: Audifax was Lafferty's doppelganger-by-mail, a separate persona who arrived on onionskin in unsteady typing and never appeared in person.

There are many fun, small things in it, including Susie Kalusy, but it’s most memorable to me for the material in it about the Moth. Audifax, writing from Soviet Armenia in May 1990, sets out as a triple agent against a quadruple agent rumored to have a vulnerable spot no one has ever found. He tells the editor to keep his ashes if a sandalwood box arrives. June arrives, and he reports a victory carrying an asterisk. It turns out the quadruple agent (code-named Moth, for Master of the Heliotropium) had been dead for a century, operating as a ghost. Now the Moth haunts Audifax. It takes any shape at will, impersonating Audifax's wealthier brother Bawdyfax. It tells him the time until his own death may be quite short, that he knows the precise second, though Audifax may not, and that the buzzing overhead at that moment will be the Death Moth himself having fun, after which Audifax will spend at least fifty years learning the ghost trade under exacting taskmasters, because what's time to a ghost?

I found myself thinking about it again this week after reading something Lafferty wrote in a late letter from 1993, shortly before he went silent: “No, no, no, I don't want to die on January 1, 2000. That was only a passing fancy. I'm not going to be nearly ready to die on January 1, 2000. I want more time, I want more time." Lafferty wrote constantly about death, and never stopped thinking about it. As I’ve said before, I think the dead center of Lafferty is time. Lafferty said that alcoholics drink to escape time. That is a real ligature between his alcoholism and the fiction, Lafferty, the strongly a metaphysical writer whose entire output is a Death’s Jest Book. One even sees his preoccupation with death early in Antonino Vescovo, which has a brilliant set piece toward the end about the death of the old monk Nicolo. Lafferty wrote it about five and a half decades before he composed the Audifaxes ephemera. He probably wrote it before he was twenty. That is a half decade and change before he faced death in the Pacific War.