"Red Headed Future" (1959)

A man out of a job is a species distinct from a working man. There are similarities. And there is a wide difference. The man out has a seedier appearance and longer whiskers. And he feels himself looked at queerly in the street. He is more hurried, though he has less to hurry for. He sits alone in public places such as terminals and depots and hotel lobbies and does figures on the back of envelopes, long division problems of minimal outlay into accumulated savings to give days still starvation. He walks in parks and looks angrily at concrete horses and bronze fishes. And he remembers as though dimly and from a long time ago the friends of his previous existence, those of twenty-four hours ago when he had not yet been committed to this walking solitude. There was one who turned a phrase and ate of life with a careful carelessness as though eating around a worm hole in a pretty good apple. There was one who did things with a flair, and did them over again quickly when they were rejected; who combined a duck's back with a tinker's hand and a gambler's eye. There was one with the brindled fur of a kitten and the sharp claws of a cat, a red-headed minx who had been a part of the unresolved future, and now belonged to the irrevocable past.

Like Lafferty’s New York School exercise “Other Kind of Animal,” “Red Headed Future” was not a story in which Lafferty seems to have had much faith. His index-card note tells the story: “RED HEADED FUTURE 5000. 2-18-59 N.Y. SCHOOL.” Then dead. Had he circulated the story, the card would have included other submissions, other dates. There are none, so the index card is an obit. He finished it, filed it, buried it. This verdict tempts the reader to nod, since the story at first looks like a boilerplate late-1950s office story: a put-upon middle manager, a volatile boss, a sharp office girl, and a slow erosion of civility under tinpot authority. That impression is justified but somewhat misleading, however. Beneath the quasi-realist surface lie several very odd Laffertian moments: Didgeon’s diagnosis of the boss as an adrenaline addict, a taxonomy of three kinds of drunks, Ravel’s late monologue, which reveals the crisis it has already preemptively resolved, and a title that suggests something always just out of reach or something ominous.

The main character is Jimmy Allyn, who works in a stressful office environment. The experience is overwhelmingly colored by his overbearing and verbally abusive boss, Mr. King. Jimmy manages two difficult subordinates: Didgeon, who justifies petty theft by citing pet ideas, and Hoadley, who uses deceptive pricing tactics in contractor bids. Amid the daily workplace tension, Jimmy has romantic feelings for the cute, almost redheaded office secretary, Junie Jodelle. As Jimmy tries to imagine life beyond his furnished room, his imagination takes on a sensory texture, self-soothing thoughts:

And the more basic and enduring thing had lately began to grow in his mind as a tangled complex of slim ankles and nearly-red hair, and a sort of sweet talk that was not a cloying sweetness. Something like burned sugar or toasted cinnamon.

Despite these daydreams, their exchanges are filled with sharp banter and not a little frustration about the office atmosphere. Jimmy is a good worker. He gets his job done, but he is ruthlessly subjected to King's public insults, contradictory instructions, and unreasonable demands.

The office reaches a breaking point when King accuses Jimmy of lying about project quotes and mocks his competence. That evening, Jimmy's suppressed frustrations finally boil over into a resignation letter. Unaware that his own rhetoric has begun to mirror King's venom, he drafts the document:

He wrote with the snappish anger of a coward at bay, and he tore King to bloody ribbons in his mind. ‘A man who continuously talks without knowing what he is talking about is as dishonest as any other kind of liar. A man who baits for pleasure is as vicious as any other kind of sneak; a man who misuses and fouls the talents of others is as dirty as any other sort of thief.

The next morning, King glances at the letter, assumes it's a routine customer complaint, and tells Jimmy to take care of it. Jimmy refuses to let this go. He won't be robbed of his confrontation. He calls out King to his face as a "fat-faced fool" and "floundering fink." As a result, Jimmy is fired, bids a brief farewell to his colleagues—receiving a quick kiss from Junie—and spends his first day of unemployment wandering the city in aimless depression.

On his second day without a job, Jimmy is approached by Richard Ravel, a representative of the firm's upper management. Ravel tells Jimmy that King is scheduled to be retired the following month. Management wanted to hire an outside candidate to replace him. By quitting, Jimmy technically made himself a "freelance" outsider, so Ravel can now circumvent the mandate and offer Jimmy the managerial position that belonged to King. Ravel takes a distinctly bureaucratic delight in this technicality:

“By quitting your job you have again established yourself as a freelance. And as such I can hire you for the position I have in mind. We arrive at this by a tortuous reasoning it is true, but I am much given to tortuous reasoning. Still, it was quite intelligent for you to foresee the possibility and gamble on it.”

And the story exercise ends here, leaving Jimmy with professional advancement and a renewed chance at a relationship with Junie

“Red Head Future” is the definition of a minor Lafferty story. It is unpublished. It would most likely interest only the Lafferty completist. The central ambiguity in the story is the title: will Jimmy go on to have a romance with Junie? Is this the red-headed future? Or is the red-headed future that becomes just like the hot-headed Mr. King, the new boss, just like the old boss? With that in mind, I think the odder story moments fall into place. Each of them works to deepen the title's ambiguity. Didgeon's adrenaline speech is the first and most important, proposing that King is essentially a rate junky who manufactures office quarrels to dose himself:

“His flask is the medulla. When you get mad you lush the stuff from the gland into your blood stream, and it excites you. It's kind of fun to get mad, Allyn. But he's a drunkard on it. He has to have the excitement of that shot all the time, to keep blowing his top.”

At this point, the story has planted a question it never quite asks aloud: is workplace rage of King’s kind a contagion one catches? The taxonomy of the three kinds of drunks is among the best-written parts of the story. It is Jimmy’s reversal of Walter Mittyism, as he imagines what it is like to be a man without a job. His unemployment taxonomy holds that there are men who go out in the legs, men who go out in the head, and men like Jimmy who go out in the stomach. Each is, in its own way, a way of metabolizing crisis, and each traps Jimmy in a sober, inescapable misery:

But Allyn was of the race that goes out in the stomach first. For them no oblivion, only malaise; no kind drifting, no induced dreams, only queasiness and undistinguished suffering. It is a misfortune that strikes cruelly. It has kept man a poor devil, sad and sober.

Taken together, these details make it hard to read Jimmy’s cold, furious resignation letter—the one in which, without quite realizing it, he becomes King-like—as the moral repudiation Jimmy takes it to be. He has caught something. Jimmy relishes unloading on Mr. King. When Ravel comes to him, Lafferty lays it all out: Jimmy’s bottoming-out experience was, from a vantage Jimmy could not see, an office coup, and it hands him King’s job. Jimmy is rewarded for his fury, which in the fantasy space of the story looks like nothing more than efficiency.

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