"Heart of Stone, Dear" (1980/1983)

But the synthetic Trislan was not a remembering metal. What did it have to remember? It had just been born. It was not a talking stone. It was not the Philosopher’s Stone, nor the Alchemist’s Stone, nor the Touchstone by which all things could be tested, not the King’s Stone that would cure almost all diseases and deficiencies. It hadn't the knack of inculcating sanity, piety, rectitude, good humor, and happiness. And the owners of the small totalities from the fractured stone didn't understand that some of these things are important to some of the people. So they didn't attempt to synthesize these extracurricular qualities of the stones. So it was that the world did pass into the Trislan Age, but it did not yet pass into the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.”

My first reading of “Heart of Stone, Dear” missed its intricacy. As one who loves The Arabian Nights and considers Sindbad: The 13th Voyage (1989) to be a great and demanding Lafferty book, I somehow switched off my mind and let this story carry me along. On rereading it, I see the ending’s sentiment masks a few things.

If the story’s overall significance did not land, the image of an esurient roc mutilating cows in the gore-covered Donnor big pasture did. So did having the great bird of the Nights barf the O'Toole diamond for a bossy, ice queen girlfriend and thereby put the kibosh on mankind’s hope for a Second Age of Benevolent Magic. It would all make a brilliant short graphic novel or, better, an animated film, one in the spirit of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), with one half drawn from Lafferty’s pastiche and the other from something like Philip K. Dick’s “The King of the Elves.” Kids would remember it.

First, there is the wonder of Trislan, the remembering stone, which would heal Flatland’s endemic amnesia. Lafferty’s language is in flight describing it. What the people settle for is depressingly of our moment: Moore’s law and faster, trendier, better electronics. In other words, the wrong kind of memory.

Then we have the memorable contrast between huge Selim Mahmud, the chemist, and slim Alfred Fleck, eleven year old rock-whisperer. It is Fleck, not Selim, who ultimately fails. They are probably now my favorite pair of characters in Lafferty, in part because Lafferty loads them with small, memorable details that shape the parallel. One the best parallel contrasts is how each approaches theft.

Something of their relationship shows up later in the relationship between the real Sindbad and John Scarlotti, the imaginative but simple kid from Chicago. Scarlotti loves seashells and Alfred loves rocks. Both are savants, both slightly out-of-focus, each I suspect more intentionally and artistically underdrawn than most of Lafferty’s young characters, those fast-mouthed kids who have distinctive voice, Lafferty’s typical way of making a young person memorable being firecracker dialogue—though sixteen year old John is five years older than Alfred. Each boy is a self-betraying idealist. Each is besotted and tied in with a Girl he wins, though Scarlotti’s Blue Moon turns out to be a mechanical doll.

Finally, there is such remarkable compression here. Lafferty dazzles with how much information he conveys and how lightly he does it, and this story exemplifies that. I think of him using over 800 sources to write The Fall of Rome. This is the World Fantasy Master doing his effortless thing. In short, it is a magical little piece of writing that will always be overlooked.

Lafferty opens with a fictional encyclopedia entry describing Trislan, a bogus or hoax metal with alchemical properties. It is said to have a specific gravity of 822 and the power to make a penny whistle sound like an entire orchestra. We then meet Selim Mahmud, a “well-rounded (at three hundred and fifty pounds) young American man” of many talents. Selim is both a theoretical chemist and a professional wrestler, and he has reasoned out that Trislan is not a hoax at all. It is, in fact, the sacred Black Stone of the Kaaba. Believing it to be a remembering stone, he travels to Mecca with twenty thousand dollars and a plan: to steal a small piece. To that end, he begins training, which sets up some of the comedy to follow.

With the help of a flint-hearted confidence man who casts a spell on the guards—who might just be pretending to be asleep—Selim pulls off the heist. This is one of my favorite moments in a Lafferty story: Selim grabs the stone and walks out. The guards, for their part, perform a ritual. They take “a single egg out of the bird’s nest that was there,” inscribe a Kabbalistic mark on it, and place it inside a hidden hollow in the larger stone.

Selim makes a madcap escape—from dromedary to car to plane—and returns to the United States with his prize. And, behold, it has all the magical properties of Trislan. He then fractures the stone into 243 smaller but complete manifestations. He has a reason for doing this. The story then introduces Alfred Fleck, “a thin little boy with red hair and with almost colorless gray eyes who collected rocks and stones.” Alfred has a gift: the special stones call to him and tell him to come and find them. He likes to trade stones by sneaking into the City Museum at night, where Selim happens to be the curator. Alfred has two motivations. First, he simply loves rocks. He’s a lithomaniac. But he is also driven by his girlfriend, the eleven-year-old Catherine, so imperious she is known as the Empress Catherine. One of her traits is that she has a heart of stone—and with it, a lust for diamonds.

Selim and Alfred have an origin story. It goes back to a night at the museum when Selim catches Alfred in the act. He tells him, “I can eviscerate you and stuff you and trade you off for a stuffed monkey”—but he lets him go. When Selim asks about the catch, Alfred replies, “The catch is that you can’t catch me again.” The two become friends, and Alfred, being a rock whisperer, becomes aware of the Black Stone and of Selim’s theft. The stone calls to him and tells him everything.

Now return to the egg placed inside the Black Stone of the Kaaba. It was a roc’s egg. The magical roc that hatches from it is set to recover 239 fragments—an alchemical number—but no more. That’s the key to Selim’s plan. He distributes 239 of the stone’s manifestations to scientists and other interested parties, but keeps four for himself. The new owners succeed in synthesizing the physical substance of Trislan, which ushers in a new technological age. But they ignore its magical properties. This becomes the story’s cultural counterpart to the final turn: a betrayal of the deeper potential of the stone.

Meanwhile, the egg in Mecca hatches a giant bird. It eats three hundred sheep and nineteen camels to build its strength before flying to America. So large it seems like an optical illusion, the roc hunts down the scattered manifestations, swallowing them one by one. Along the way, it also swallows the Great O'Toole Diamond.

In parallel, Alfred trades a large crystal-ball stone for one of the manifestations of the Black Stone at the museum. Then disaster. The giant bird finds and eats Selim’s remaining three pieces, eating his arm as well. Selim phones Alfred. He warns him to protect the last remaining piece. He begs him. Think of the Second Age of Benevolent Magic.  

But it is not to be. The stoney-hearted Empress Catherine demands Alfred get her the diamond now. She says “I must have the Great O’Toole Diamond!” and she tells Alfred to trade the last manifestation of the Black stone to get the diamond. 

Alfred finds the bird in a pasture "soggy with the blood and offal of cattle" and makes trade: “The last manifestation of the stone, the very last of them, for the O’Toole Diamond.” The roc accepts. It throws up the O’Toole diamond and swallows the final manifestation of trislan. Alfred leaves with the diamond. His heart is cold as ice. He has blown the whole Second Age of Benevolent Magic. Lafferty writes that the last stone Alfred collected was the heart of stone of the eleven-year-old Empress Catherine.

I want to close with two aspects of the story. I point them up for two reasons. First, Lafferty uses Kabbalah both decoratively and structurally. He uses it decoratively here, as he does in other places, such as in the story “Configuration of the North Shore.” He also uses it structurally, as he does in “In the Turpentine Trees.” His use of Kabbalah in this story is closer to his usual technique.

The second point. Because “Heart of Stone, Dear” is one of Lafferty’s Arabian Nights-style stories, one might assume that the Second Age of Benevolent Magic is simply a return to the magical world of the Arabian Nights. Surely that would be the First Age of Magic? The ambient of Richard Burton. But any reader of Sindbad could tell you there is nothing benevolent about Arabian Nights magic. Sindbad is darker than Not to Mention Camels (1976), although no one seems to agree with me on that point. So what, then, was the First Benevolent Age of Magic? Lafferty ties it to the Black Stone of the Kaaba. There we will find the answer.

A well-known story within Islamic tradition says that the Black Stone was given to Adam by God, or through the Angel Gabriel, when Adam was cast to earth after the Fall. One finds this in early exegetical and historical sources such as al-Azraqī’s Akhbār Makkah (9th century) and al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh al-Rusul wa-l-Mulūk. Adam is guided to the site of the first sanctuary on earth, which is where he built a primitive Kaaba. The Black Stone is a celestial token, a cornerstone from Paradise.

Later, when the Kaaba was lost in the Flood, the stone was preserved on the sacred mount Abū Qubays until Abraham and his son Ishmael rebuilt the Kaaba. At that time, Gabriel returned the stone to them for installation in its current position.

In Islam, the story of Adam’s descent from Paradise to earth appears in the Qur’an. Satan deceives Adam and his wife into eating from the forbidden tree, and God then commands them to descend to earth.

This contrasts with the Catholic doctrine of original sin, for the Qur’an does not portray Adam’s descent as a fall into sin or a loss of divine grace transmitted to humanity. It is a change of realm, from the Garden to earthly world, where human beings are to live, labor, and be tested. In Islam, this descent is disciplinary and purposeful. Adam repents, God forgives him (Qur’an 2:37), and he is sent to earth as the first prophet. He is not a fallen man in the sense later articulated by the doctors of the Catholic Church, the sense of man that Lafferty obsessively returns to. In Islamic cosmology, Adam’s descent stakes the beginning of human history and prophetic guidance: a transition, not a tragic corruption of human nature or loss of preternatural graces.

Lafferty (I think) has this on his mind. The First Benevolent Age of Magic is Paradise itself, Eden. This connects with his recurring theme of postlapsarian amnesia. The Black Stone, as a remembering stone, loses the remembering quality when it is synthesized and becomes a Claude Shannon-like technological innovation. By linking this to the story’s motif of forgetting, Lafferty deepens his ongoing exploration of memory, loss, and spiritual continuity in modernity. This is Lafferty saying, once again, that the Fall is both a moral and mnemonic problem. 

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