“This Boding Itch” (1979/1982)
- Jon Nelson
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
“No, no, our heads don't itch at all,” Horace Rand protested. “The Pruritus-meters are running and they say that your heads do itch,” the chief of the WHEW crew said.
“This Boding Itch” is not be widely read, but the in-story appearance of Arpad Arutinov makes it a treat. Lafferty readers know that Arutinov is one of the great paratextual reservoirs of Lafferty’s conceits, a scholar-character who usually appears only in headnotes or passing references. Here, he steps out of his paratextual apparatus and into the narrative. We learn that Arutinov is “an imposing man except for his shocking weasel-like face,” and we see in-story characters read his work, in the same way Lafferty positions us to read Arutinov. It creates a parallax.
So what happens in “This Boding Itch?” For such a short story, quite a lot. The narrative tracks a “glocal” phenomenon, the Itchy Palm Syndrome. The Itch is a maddening irritation in the left hands of the population. Arutinov shows up on news programs to explain, via his book The Back Door of History, that this pruritus is in fact a “mutational advance” heralding a new evolutionary epoch. We are in familiar Lafferty territory.
What causes the itchiness? The eruption of a seventh palm line, a “handy road map” meant to chart the future of the species. As the line appears on millions of hands, it produces a pandemic of itching. Enter the Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens (WHEW), a multinational agency operating under the slogan “Good health and good attitude compulsory for everyone!” WHEW deploys a Deep-Bite Acid Treatment to burn out the itch to its roots, efficiently destroying the developing biological promise. It also destroys the person’s palm print.
Because they embrace the mutational gift, a group of self-styled natural leaders, including Fritz Der Grosse and Vera Vanguard, decides to lop off their own left hands before the wardens of WHEW can cure them. These dismembered hands, kept under telekinetic control, evade WHEW’s specially trained dogs by scurrying onto high window ledges. What follows is a magnificent and grotesque set piece:
Then the crewman, Eustace, came in with nine fierce,newly-trained dogs. The dogs threw themselves against thewindows of the room, broke them out, and tumbled through. "After them!" the chief of the WHEW crew cried; and allof those crewmen followed the dogs through the windowsand into a thirty-story fall to shattering death.
Then from the severed hands themselves via code:
“We sure did snooker those dogs and fellows, didn’t we? Did you ever see dogs trying to follow a trail straight up into the air when they’re falling straight down? They can’t get any traction.”
Next, the mutation enters its second phase, the Itchy Pate Syndrome centered on the the fontanel. Linked to the seventh palm line, it heralds the opening of the third eye, or what Arutinov calls the arrival of the “illuminating summer of the intellect.”
Like the itchy hand, the itchy head phenomenon spills over into other species as a form of evolutionary insurance.
"A report from India says that the elephants are looking into the ends of their trunks and cooing with delight,” the commentator on the 8:16 news spot was saying. “And they are scratching the tops of their heads on the boles of trees with obvious pleasure.”
As in much of Lafferty’s work, the procession of the creatures appears more attuned to providence than does humanity. This theme echoes his darker animal eschatologies, including Serpent’s Egg.
WHEW acts decisively. It unleashes genetically engineered leaping leopards. Even those willing to decapitate themselves to save the third eye cannot escape WHEW’s efficiency. This leads to the story’s darkest comic moment. During a raid on the leaders’ gathering, Buford Cracksworthy (a great Lafferty name) attempts to save his third eye by removing his own head. It does not succeed:
“Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” the severed head moaned in severe unease . . . One of the leaping leopards came, smashed the head, and then chewed it up and swallowed it. It sounded as if the beast were chewing a head of cabbage.
The remaining leaders are subjected to the acid treatment while being fed Happy Ox Hodgepodge, a comfort food advertised as great disposition-and-attitude food. As the chemical burns out the mutation, Vera Vanguard narrates the rapid extinguishing of her heightened intelligence. “It’s darker in here than it was,” she says, as the human capacity for illumination is quietly snuffed out.
There is quite a bit going on here, including a sharp attack on the World Health Organization, satirized as WHEW. Along the way, Lafferty also has fun with chiromancy, hanging the plot on the appearance of a seventh palm line. One small puzzle is that Lafferty seems to transpose Jupiter and Saturn, associating the Ring of Saturn with the index finger, which traditionally belongs to Jupiter, not that I'm an expert. Since Lafferty invented the concept of the “seventh line” entirely, which erupts “out of the Node of Futurity, which, in turn, is located in the Mount of the Moon (all made up but the Mount of the Moon), it is possible that he simply fabricated this anatomical detail as well. I wish I had an idea about what might be going on here with the Jupiter/Saturn switch. Could it be because Saturn ruled over a golden age? This is probably best known because of how the medievals read Virgil as a prophet: iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna / iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto (The Virgin and the reign of Saturn come again / Now a new child is sent from heaven above).
Lafferty makes the Saturn-Jupiter switch in the following passage:
“The seventh line, when it appears, will be the line of the Future, and it will be the chart of things to come. It will erupt out of the Node of Futurity which is located in the Mount of the Moon, and it will move across the palm to the Ring of Saturn which is at the base of the index finger"
But who knows? It is the sort of curious detail one often finds in Lafferty, and it makes little sense if he were working from an image or a secondhand description while writing. So, we are left with a choice: mistake, indifference, or intention. I have included at the end of this post a PDF of a vintage work on palmistry, Cheiro’s Language of the Hand, which assigns just as much symbolic weight to the number seven as Lafferty does. On the Saturn switch, it looks thematically relevant to me; it accords with Lafferty’s deeper games; but, again, who knows?
Two other aspects of the story stand out to me as being important: what it does with the Book of Revelation and its biopolitics.
Let’s consider Revelation first. Lafferty uses his technique of counterfiguration to tell the story of the Mark of the Beast in reverse. It is striking how rarely he employs this specific trope in his religious eschatologies, which makes “This Boding Itch” a notable exception. He creates a deliberate travesty by inverting the meaning of the “Mark.” In Revelation, the mark on the hand and forehead signifies submission to worldly power. In Lafferty’s story, the physical signs appearing on the palms and on the fontanel of the head are instead heralds of a “glorious new mutational-advance.” The Beast is not the mutation itself, but the Worldwide Health Enforcement Wardens, who use the Deep-Bite Acid Treatment to impose smooth, unlined palms on the population.
Lafferty does something chiral in this story about chiromancy. The right hand of Revelation becomes the itchy left hand, and the forehead becomes the fontanel. The result, however, is the same. By destroying the “Line of the Future,” the state condemns the mass of complacent humanity to a flattened, thoroughly mundane existence.
The second aspect is theoretical, and for the first time, a few words about COVID on this blog. After decades in which the academy obsessively obsessed over Michel Foucault (discipline, governmenality, biopower, and so forth), it was gob-smacking to me how quickly Foucauldians I know folded under real biopower when it coughed. I should not have been surprised, but the situation was black comedy itself: people who could lecture for hours on governmentality and Agamben rushed to comply with mandates without a second thought and called the rubes who resorted to being governed by biopower idiots. Lafferty’s depiction of WHEW, to me, looks like a preemptive satire of the technocratic structures the modern academy is often inclined to defend. “Good health and good attitude compulsory for everyone!” is, in effect, the Hallmark-card version of biopower.
Something brief on conspiracy. I suspect Lafferty would have been deeply skeptical of the events of the last few years, far more skeptical than I am. I have long thought the lab-leak theory the most plausible, but in hindsight it seems clear that we will live for a long time under the shadow of how government and media managed information during those years. Lafferty’s critique of the state’s reliance on data over lived experience is withering. It appears most clearly in the WHEW crew chief’s retort to the protesters: “The pruritus-meters are running and they say that your heads do itch.” Here, the dispositif of sensors and specialists overrides individual bodily testimony, enforcing a cure that is biologically coercive. On that note, one of Lafferty’s best lines pretty much captures the spectacle of the would-be Solons and Solomons of our recent past: the “specializations [of the crewmen] have crowded out their common sense.”
