Q. 1383. Are the souls in Purgatory sure of their salvation? A.  The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God . . . Q. 1384. Do we know what souls are in Purgatory, and how long they have to remain there? A.  We do not know what souls are in Purgatory nor how long they have to remain there; — Baltimore Catechism , 1885   “But there has never been a day like this before, has there, Ahmad?” called Stuff.      “I am not sure. It may be that such a day comes to everyone, and that each of your ancestors has known one. Or it may be that this is the only day like it that has ever been. To me also it has been an especially vivid day.”     They did not understand what he said, for he spoke in deep Malay, not the pidgin that only strings a few of the words in. Yet they knew what he said well enough. Advanced Lafferty today. “Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half” is early but ambitious. Like “The Ugly Sea,” "The Wagons," and a few other stories from the first years of Lafferty’s return to writing, it shows him working on the literary side of the market. As far as I know, it has been written about twice. Heywood Reynolds wrote a brief appreciation piece in the second volume of Feast of Laughter , speculating about Lafferty’s experience in the Pacific Theater and how it relates to details in the story. Ironically, the piece appears in the “You’re On the Right Track, Kid” section. The irony bubbles because Reynolds writes that Lafferty “refers to ‘Elias the Syrian from Oklahoma,’” and then glosses Syrian  as “Phoenicians were seafarers,” adding “Later he [Lafferty] describes himself: ‘One was an apostate seminarian.’” Apostate has a meaning, and Lafferty was not that. That failed seminarian is not Lafferty but Joseph Stalin, just as the “stone-mason, son of a blacksmith” is Benito Mussolini; and the “poster-painter, son of a customs official” is Adolf Hitler; and the “dilettante, son of a dilettante” is Hirohito, who was an amateur marine biologist interested in small marine predators. This whole great-man fantasy, with the Axis leaders playing the role of great men in one character's imagination, needs to be caught to understand the story. The other interpretation is by Andrew Ferguson, who is, of course, good on the hard biographical and bibliographical details. After the summary, I will focus on where my reading diverges from his and relate those divergences to the Argo Legend , an interpretive choice Ferguson also makes. This time, Lafferty gives us a story set in the final days of WWII. On July 4, 1945, four soldiers, Joe “Stuff” Stoffel, George Elias, Phil Plunkett, and Calzatoio (nicknamed Shoe-Horn), are on liberty. They take a rubber boat, jokingly named Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half , to the island of Ita Pulau in the Moluccas. During the journey, the young men discuss big topics, including their desire to control their own fates. Stuff talks about his specific ambition to have “the world by the tail.” Lafferty’s narrator then gives a brief, brilliant lesson in Malay vocabulary, defining terms like ba-goose (good) and tiddy ba-goose (bad). Once one knows this, one has mastered most of what one needs to know, but Lafferty pushes the joke further, teaching the reader how to count in Malay. This lesson is both out of order and incomplete. From the start, we are told that communication matters, a point that will return in a speech given in Malay. The introduction ends with the four men rowing through waters that appear increasingly deep and concave, almost mystically green. The story contains some of Lafferty’s most poetically intense mythogenic writing, delivered comparatively straight. Then the men arrive at the island to meet a local man named Ahmad. Lafferty suggests that Ita Pulau is a paradise. The group shares a meal of fish and taro with Ahmad. They drink a large quantity of a beverage called coconut wine. Under its influence, which takes on the nimbus of myth, the soldiers enter a state of mental clarity and heightened sensory perception. They feel as though they have awakened from a lifelong dream into total wakefulness. A philosophical discussion follows about luck, religion, and the nature of success. The legend of Faust comes up, as does the question of what it means to be graced enough to hold the entire world in one’s hands. Then an important moment arrives, as Ahmad warns them that they have had enough to drink. He urges them to row back to their base before the tide becomes too strong. Off go the four men in the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half , rowing back to their stations. At first, they feel like giants. They possess immense power. Then something unexpected happens. As they approach the shore, they experience a kind of collective failure that points to their deep flaws. One is incapacitated. Shoe-Horn throws the oars into the sea and starts a fistfight with Elias. Stuff falls into a spiritual paralysis. Lafferty says they died. Then Lafferty says they did not, because he gives us a second ending. The men wake up in a muddy swamp, where a local boy they disliked says he rescued them by hauling them ashore and kicking the water out of their stomachs. This is likened to waking up in purgatory. The story ends with the group walking back to their unit along a rough jeep road called the “World Famous Dixie Highway,” followed by the narrator’s observation that the world has been in decline since that perfect afternoon. There is a lot to say about this story. Ferguson’s reading is provocative, so I am going to build on it by marking points of disagreement, not because anyone cares about disagreement in itself, but because I think it matters for a richer reading of Lafferty. He interprets “Task Force Fifty-Eight and a Half” as a philosophical microcosm of the world and the Church, using a mundane World War II raft trip to prototype Lafferty’s techniques, many of which are already apparent here, and his theological themes. So far, so good. He argues that the characters’ drinking of local coconut wine grants them a fleeting, omniscient “writer’s perspective” and a perfect “high afternoon,” and he points out that this absolute clarity carries the cost of realizing their impending end. The “writer’s perspective” point looks to me like Ferguson’s hobbyhorse of reducing the metaphysical to the metafictional. He does not see, or he chooses not to address, the sacramental aspect of the wine. He notes that the story presents two outcomes: a literal death by drowning, and a purgatorial survival in a “shadow-world.” Ferguson writes: "But the loss of what they had is unbearable: a death more devastating than drowning could be: 'the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again.'" There are also minor but important errors. Ferguson writes that Plunkett and Elias fight until the raft capsizes. In fact, Shoe-Horn and Elias are the ones fighting. Plunkett sings slobberingly, and Stuff does manage to paddle weakly (he isn't incapacitated in the water; his spiritual incapitation precedes this). If I am right that the story is a character study in spiritual failure, this confusion matters because we need to map what happens in the raft onto the speeches. There are three main areas where I disagree, and each works at a different interpretive level. First is the question of pessimism and hope in Lafferty’s long arc of development, a disagreement at the level of macro-reading. Second is the allegorical and religious dimension, which I think is elided, missed, or misunderstood. This seems to me a recurring weakness in Ferguson’s view of Lafferty, and it requires close reading and attention to particulars. Third is the story’s relation to the Argo Legend, a question shaped by both the macro-reading and the close reading. When the close reading is flawed, and when the macro-reading is sweetened and secularized, the result is misleading. Ferguson writes: And yet it’s these same tics that mark this as an early Lafferty, despite the late publication date: the sentiment that “the world has been going downhill since [those] ancient days” has little place in his most mature work, when despite his own personal pains and bouts of despair, his faith remained firm that the world would be reborn, would exist again, and that it would not be downhill—or worse, unendingly flat—forever. While it’s true that the world changed, it need not always be a shadow-world; there will again be high afternoons, and some boats will eventually make it safe to shore. I’ll show my cards. I hate this putting pantyhose, nylon, Saran Wrap, hairspray, or Vaseline on a camera lens to get a dreamy effect. I see two propositions: This passage shows “early Lafferty” traits (notably the “everything’s been going downhill since ancient days” sentiment), and that pessimistic note doesn’t fit his most mature work, where his faith stayed firm despite suffering. The world’s decline/change isn’t final: even if it has become a “shadow-world,” it won’t remain that way forever—the world will be reborn, “high afternoons” will return, and “some boats” will make it safely to shore. There is a great deal here that I agree with, so I am going to try to be careful. What I dislike is how summative it is. I will say I also find it presumptuous to assume that Lafferty's faith wasn't firm in his middle age (he said he only broke a little in his twenties), but that his faith was somehow stronger later. His faith no doubt deepened, but this looks to me like biographical simplification and literary journalism or bad literary criticism. By the end of this post, you should understand why, even if you disagree. In reverse order, starting with 2. This statement gets the story wrong because it doesn't recognize Purgatory's tropological role in it. It is certainly correct that Lafferty never gives up grace and eschatology, but it reads both in a way that makes the shape of the story ungraspable. I will come to this in a moment. More important for understanding Lafferty as a whole is the first proposition, so a few words about it. I do not believe that Lafferty becomes more hopeful and less pessimistic as he goes along. My view is that Lafferty was culturally pessimistic about the state of the West from the beginning, but he always paired that pessimism with a deep love of fun and eschatological hope. He was, in this sense, a Catholic accelerationist who threw himself into apocalypse and rejected utopianism. Throughout, one finds Lafferty being both pessimistic and optimistic in ways that interlock with his sense that the world has gone to hell and with his desire for apocalypse. For instance, late works such as Serpent’s Egg , Sindbad: The 13th Voyage , and East of Laughter  have black strains of pessimism, alongside the spaces that keep eschatological promise open. That is obviously a major difference in how one reads Lafferty. It is connected to Ferguson’s view that Lafferty becomes someone who encourages us to make our own worlds, a claim he gives a utopian inflection. I read Lafferty as saying that utopia is a disaster, and that the utopian impulse is dangerous, but when you are stuck in no-place, what are you to do? Oddly, I probably also see the story as more hopeful than Ferguson does, because I take the Purgatory coda seriously and read it as being about suffering and hope. After all, the two endings of the story are underlined: either men die and go to hell, which is the hopeless first ending, or that the men undergo some other kind of death, real or spiritual, and pass through a purgatory. Lafferty writes, “There are two ways of looking at it, but one doesn’t amount to much.” In the first ending, they are done as persons. In the second, they wash up on shore, a very long and painful path ahead of them, the Dixie Road being a serious joke in the story. Second, I think if one wants to understand the story, one needs to see that the actions on the raft that get the men killed are tightly tied to their speeches, with each action serving as a metacommentary on the men's personal characters. They are young men, which lends the story its tragic coloring, though it is hard to ever read Lafferty as writing tragedy, since his view of the world is metaphysically comic. What does that mean in regard to the four men? Let’s take a look at each one in turn, stepping back to consider how the story allegorizes human choice and character. Joe “Stuff” Stoffel’s failure is spiritual pride at an extreme pitch. Throughout, he is a portrait of superbia  pushed to parodic heights. He assumes a kind of immanent salvation for himself, because he thinks he is a great man who will be lifted by fate. Either God chose him, or he will make a deal with the Devil. If the experience on Ita Pulau is anything, it is an experience of the sacramentality of creation, the full presence of the world in its shining wonder. It is as if the men, for one afternoon, see creation in all its graced goodness. Stuff looks at that perfect afternoon as a commodity to bottle and control. He says he will package and sell the coconut wine: “I will bottle the stuff,” said Stuff, “and then I’ll really have the world by the tail. It doesn’t make you drunk, it just hones you to a fine edge, and it brings all the rest of the world up to your high level. It is the greatest thing ever.” To make the point unmistakable, Lafferty frames Stoffel as someone who would seize Faustian temptation. The men and Ahmad talk about Faust and the Faust tradition: "They didn't do what they had the opportunity to do in the years that they had. But give me twenty years of the power and I will make such connections in all three of the worlds that they can't put me in hell.” Now take George Elias whose character-defining moment is the following: "‘I'll gamble it,’ I said. ‘You've all made me mad now.’ I told God and all the rest of them that they had done wrong to try and panic me, and that I wouldn't go back to the sacraments till I was back from the war and away from those dangers . . . ‘But after this is over we will figure it out unemotionally,’ I said. ‘We will see.’" Although Elias possesses some of the virtues of self-honesty and prudence (he at least knows it is time to leave the island), his reliance on grace on his own scheduled terms is the stuff of damnation. His descent into a violent, empty-eyed fistfight on the raft illustrates the theological warning that pride is no substitute for formed virtue. If he goes to hell at the end of section one, it is a classic case of delayed contrition. We now come to a part of Ferguson's interpretation that, to me, looks like he is so interested in the biographical and bibliographic elements that he lost track of what is on the page. He calls Calzatoio “Shoe-Horn” a “genial Italian.” What is genial about Shoe-Horn? He mockingly butchers the host's name and ignores Ahmad's fable of eggs to aggressively demand women. The fable is about hiding the girls of the island from men such as Shoe-Horn: “Where are the girls?” asked Shoe-Horn. “One day a cuscus (the coconut possum) came to visit the turtle,” said Ahmad. “‘Where are your eggs?’ asked the cuscus. ‘I love to look at turtle eggs, so round and soft to the touch.’ ‘Up on the hill,’ said the turtle. But they were not up on the hill; the cuscus could not find them, and he came back. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘I have an affection for them. I always did like children in whatever form.’ ‘Up in the top of the kapok tree,’ said the turtle, but the cuscus could not find them there. ‘Where are your eggs?’ he asked again. ‘They are so leathery and smooth that I like to pet them.’ ‘Perhaps their mother has taken them to the other side of the island on the rocks,’ said the turtle. The cuscus went to look, but he didn't find them there either. This was because the turtle had lied, and the eggs were buried in the sand all the time. He knew in what way the cuscus liked turtle eggs.” “Oh, I never heard that story before,” said Shoe-Horn. “But where are the girls?” Shoe-Horn cruelly taunts Phil, saying that Phil’s fiancée is probably shacked up and cheating on him. He becomes the fatalistic jinx for the group (the allusion to the molasses jar in Uncle Remus is to a child named Babe who tips the jar over just out of sheer high spirits). He is a man who won’t listen to Ahmad’s wisdom about knowing when to say enough is enough. He almost has to be forced to leave the island, and then dooms the other men by giggling and throwing their oars into the ocean. He picks the bloody fistfight with Elias through his molasses-jar action with the oars, and their raft drifts into the dangerous dark of the ocean. He whines that he would rather lie in the mud and drown than make the arduous walk back to base in the second ending, which means that even then, he does not see that the characters have been spared and graced to suffer in Purgatory. He is a colossal failure of intemperance and an unformed will. Congenial he is not. Finally, there is the pathetic Australian Phil Plunkett. His failure illustrates the limits of natural virtue. In the end, he just checks out mentally, becoming a slobbering, singing idiot at the bottom of the raft. On the one hand, Plunkett seems to have a genuine humility, and he seems to have a deep, anchoring love for his fiancée, Aileen; but that is also his limitation. His mental image of Aileen is his primary moral orientation toward goodness. Note how he talks about her as being the meaning of everything. He is a shallow fool of a man, and Lafferty goes to great lengths to make it easy for the reader to see this. Plunkett does not resort to active malice, but in the end, he does not have perseverance. At this point, it should be clear that the four men are deeply flawed, unlikable, sad characters, but they are also young, and perhaps their callowness can be redeemed. One way to read the story is that one has one perfect day, and all of life afterward is a letdown. This is where Ferguson’s reading ends. Another, stronger reading is that the men who had the perfect afternoon were unworthy of it, full of ingratitude, and not oriented to the experience. One of the most interesting ways of misreading the story, as a result of the first kind of reading, is failing to recognize the boy at the end, hated by everyone, as an early instance of counterfiguration. For a Roman Catholic, to wake up in Purgatory is welcome news: one has been saved, even though one will suffer. The boy is like an angel giving the men that news. They will be saved, but they will have to take a very long road before they can appreciate what the afternoon meant, something like the gift of experiencing the sacramental order. As the story notes of this shadow-world: "It wasn't just the terrible pain and nausea of entry into it; that would disappear in two or three days . . . It was the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again." If you read the second ending as depressing, I think you have fallen into a literary trap. You have read the story from the viewpoint of the men of  Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half  in hell or at the beginning of their pugatorial journey, still unappreciative of how close they came to damnation. It would be as if one sees the afternoon as an ungrateful man sees it, bitter because he once received a great gift and did not receive two great gifts. That is the point of Ahmad’s speech to the men, delivered in his own language, and it is why Lafferty opens the story with the lesson in Malay. In other words, you must learn to speak this language of grace if you want to understand what matters. The opening is not just a cute scene about (good) “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose” (bad) and counting. This should be obvious when the disliked boy at the end says “Tiddy Ba-Goose” to the men: One sees one's three friends similarly dead and beslimed, and standing above to torture and mock is a particularly disliked Malay boy. “Tiddy ba-goose,” he says with all the contempt and disapprobation that can possibly be expressed. He is the worst one of the lot. They shouldn't allow him even in hell. He is a thief and has been kicked out of every battery area on the island. “Just where in hell are we?” asked Stuff, “or have I answered my own question?” “Even a lizard can find his own hole,” said the boy. “Maybe you a little bit lower.” “How did we get to this shore?” “Oh, I haul you in. Might not have been a very good idea.” We are hearing Lafferty, or something axiologically identical with him. Have you learned enough Malay to get by? Can you correctly say “Ba-Goose” and “Tiddy Ba-Goose”? Something like that question is being posed to the reader. The third point I will keep brief. It reaches into the larger story Ferguson tells about Lafferty, and into his sense of a utopian potential in Lafferty’s invitation to create new worlds, as if one could do so while cleaving off the intensity of Lafferty’s religious views. It is a bit like wanting the Jefferson Bible instead of the actual New Testament. My view is that you do not get to keep Lafferty without the “craziness” of St. John, and that you end up with a much less interesting Lafferty if you try. Spiritual war, not just culture-making, is at the center of Lafferty’s project, and that is why he should make us uncomfortable. For this reason, Ferguson hears too much of “the DMV is purgatory,” and not enough of the prayer for the dead in Purgatory: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen,” which Lafferty would have prayed many, many times. Because Ferguson does not look for the story’s built-in Catholic meaning and instead makes it psychological, he misses Lafferty’s irony. The partially damned are the entirely saved, and this is preferable to the entirely damned. In the story, the entirely damned are those who drown and are damned, and that fate follows from a failure to cooperate with the gift of graced vision, that "sparkle" from the cononut wine that even made better (perfected) Shoe-Horn ("he was changed for the better as they all were, and he had a new sparkle to him"). Ferguson writes, And what seems as though it happened was, they got rescued by a contemptuous Malay boy, and had to trudge back to base battling screaming hangovers and still coughing seawater out of their lungs. But the loss of what they had is unbearable: a death more devastating than drowning could be : “the loss, the ineffable sense of loss that comes to the souls of the partially damned; to those who had lived in the real world for a high afternoon, and know that they can never have it again.” No, damnation after having participated in sacramentality is worse. It is far more devastating, and drowning in the story is not about drowning being biological death. That is why Lafferty gives us the second happy ending: Catholicism holds that suffering is hard, that only through it can one move toward the Cross, which means those who end up in Purgatory do so through partial sanctification. A full reading would need to weigh this against waking up in a Purgatorial condition, with the metaphysical being balanced against the psychological. Finally, Ferguson reads the Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half raft as a version of the Argo, the figure of the Catholic Church as a pilgrim church in Lafferty's Argo Legend. The Argo does take many forms, and we know from Archipelago  that it can be as small as a canoe. Even so, I am persuaded only in a narrow sense: the Church is the channel of extravagant grace, and there is a boat in this story. Part of the Church is the Church Suffering in Purgatory. But to be fully convinced, I would need a much stronger reading of the story’s particulars. Ferguson sees the Task Force as “every inch an Argo .” I do not. To me, the Task Force sits in the Argo ’s shadow. The figure of the Church in the story is the disapproving Malay boy. The raft is what you get when you try to ride it out on liberty while not being aboard the Argo . You might as well throw your oars into the sea, not bother to fire your flare gun, and wait for the killing waves. Count yourself lucky, Lafferty seems to say, if someone hauls your ass back to shore and stomps the water out of your lungs.

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather suspect that our own contingent present will not be firmly inscribed in the records.” “You mean that we may not be recorded as real?” Drakos asked. “Possibly not,” Barnaby said. Let’s begin with the obvious. Lafferty wrote many stories and novels in which amnesia is a central problem. For him, amnesia cuts across human and animal ontologies, across history and culture, and, in its widest circle, across salvation history, thus preparing his kaleidoscopic range of possible apocalypses and eschatologies. What Lafferty does not often do is give the reader a centered vantage point on anamnesis. It happens, but rarely. What is shown when amnesia lifts? Here, Lafferty gives it a name: the Flesh Between. That take on anamnesis must be qualified at once, because almost everything in Lafferty involves backing into anamnesis and exposing the Flesh Between. It is merely that, as a writer who creates machines to trigger anamnesis, he usually writes indirectly, through anti-secrets. People often miss the anamnesis. Anamnesis sneaks up. Or it comes in from the flank. It does not explode into view. Only in a handful of moments is it unapologetically joyful, which is how Lafferty saw it in its naked form. For the most part, anamnesis takes a back seat to apocalypse in Lafferty. Yet anamnesis is the rem desideratum . It had to be clothed: out of propriety, to sell in a market, to make artistic form, and because this was the most effective way to get people to shed the amnestic burden. A real exception is “Read the Flesh Between the Lines,” one of his great stories, though it will probably never be recognized for how central and great it is. In his E. I. Watkin sequence, it takes the place of Indigo, the color between the constraints of materiality, Violet, and the wonder of metaphysical vision, Blue. It is the site of history and ethics. No surprise then that Lafferty gives the reader of “Read the Flesh Between the Lines” a lesson in historiography. It is also a lesson in reading generally, and in reading Lafferty in particular. This would be a bad place to start with the Austro stories. We are now several steps into The Men Who Knew Everything Sequence, and, unlike the Institute sequence, TMWKE should be read in order for maximum understanding and enjoyment. It begins with the one-off “ The All At-One-Man,” makes the full turn into thinking with E. I. Watkin in “Mud Violet” (hylicon) and “Barnaby’s Clock” (violet). The latter introduces Austro. In “Read the Flesh,” the second Austro story, Austro learns to speak more than one word. Readers learn more about the strangeness of the TMWKE universe, along with the fact that Austro was created and not created by the dead John Penandrew. In its final explosive scene, there is a callback to “The All-At-Once Man,” with the blast moving the doomed, weird Penandrew house. It is easy to miss this if one does not remember that the Penandrew home is at Harrow. There are many funny, fine, and small things here. I’ll mention one and then summarize the story. Pluto Water. At one point, Lafferty asks the reader a question about forgetting, and the answer, I think, must be yes. It’s a joke question, because here is a story about compaction that ends with an explosion, the question is about a laxative, and Pluto Water was common knowledge in the U.S. and now is utterly forgotten. In the story, George Drakos, as a boy, uses empty Pluto Water bottles to store his specimens. They contain memories, and Lafferty embeds his question directly into the physical description of the room: There was the taxidermy of George Drakos: stuffed owls, snakes, barn swallows, water puppies, mountain boomers, flying squirrels, even foxes and wildcats. And there were the dissections (also of Drakos) of frogs, of cat brains, of fish, of cow eyes, and many other specimens. The best of these (those still maintaining themselves in good state) were preserved in formaldehyde in Pluto Water bottles. Pluto Water bottles, with their bevel-fitted glass corks and wireclamp holders, will contain formaldehyde forever: this is a fact too little known. (Is Pluto Water still in proper history, or has it been relegated out?) It’s a symbol for what the story wants to bring to the reader’s attention. And Drakos experience of anamnesis will be where the story ends. Some background. Pluto Water was a bottled mineral water from French Lick, Indiana. An American staple, it was sold in the United States as a strong laxative in the early 1900s. Its mineral salts, especially sodium and magnesium sulfate, made it really potent stuff, and it was marketed with the line “When Nature Won’t, PLUTO Will.” It was discontinued in 1971, shortly before Lafferty’s story was written, because lithium in the water became a controlled substance. Pluto Water is one of the story's master images because it rumbles like an irritated gut, then explodes, voiding the content of history. That is a very low and comic image for something very serious, but Lafferty knows what he is doing when he gives history a laxative in "Read the Flesh Between the Lines," as we see in his long digression on Rabelais, whose earthy humor is here. We are on a thin, sweating brane of consensus history. What happens at this time is that the four Men Who Know Everything and Laff meet at the home of Barnaby Sheen, whose old room over the garage is emitting that weird rumble. Dr. George Drakos, Harry O'Donovan, Cris Benedetti, and Laff have had a long shared history in the space, going back to their boyhoods, when this was their clubroom. The room has vast accumulations from different eras, for it belonged to Barnaby’s grandfather, and used to be a barn. This is Lafferty reminding the reader of the history of how garages became garages in America (the first garages were converted carriage houses because those were the people who could first purchase cars): In the time of Barnaby Sheen's grandfather, who came out here from Pennsylvania at the first rumor of oil and who bought an anomalous “mansion”, this was not a room over the garages, but over the stables and carriage-house. It was a hayloft, that's what it was; an oatloft, a fodderloft. And a little corner of it had been a harness room with brads and hammers and knives and needles as big as sailmaker's needles, and cobbler's bench... There are hayloft remnants, early automobile parts, taxidermy specimens, and thousands of old comic books and Sunday funnies. We quickly see that all these pieces are indices of the several mutually exclusive boyhoods the men lived through. Barnaby asks his friends to investigate the space and warns them. At this point in the sequence, Austro, the Australopithecus houseboy, has become essential to the series. As I mentioned, at the beginning of the story he can say only one word: “Carrock.” We also have Loretta, Barnaby’s daughter, the sawdust-filled doll, and the schizo-gash ghost Mary Mondo. Barnaby tells his friends that human history is artificially compressed, and that unrecorded or suppressed events, people, and entire centuries build up explosive pressure over time. Lafferty gives us wonderfully inventive detail and alternative history. We learn that the Library of Alexandria did not burn, but exploded, when centuries of excluded historical record forced its way back into space. There is a discussion about Austro and the nature of cousinship, a figure for how we are related to all the past we repress and forget. The friends finally begin to see him as a forgotten cousin, and Austro begins drawing primordial cartoons on concrete patio blocks with a bone stylus and ocher paint. The rumbling builds. Then the garage violently explodes, knocking out walls and filling the air with a localized storm of suppressed history. The men see howling, animate clouds, forgotten political parades, strange dog breeds, and past versions of themselves flying through the wreckage. It's all done in Lafferty’s listing of brilliant proper nouns that never were: All the air was filled with reek and smoke and howling animate clouds. These clouds at first seemed like flying masses of biblical grasshoppers and locusts, plague creatures, but they had faces on them, and remembered parts. And they were upbeat and strong and not at all overwhelmed by the destruction. There were the blown-apart pieces of boys flying through the air, and some of them looked a lot like ourselves. There were flying effigies by the thousands. Why, there was one whole parade or convention with banners flying. “Re-elect President Parkinson” was the message on the banners. He had been the leader of the Cow-Moose Party when he was elected president. How had he been forgotten, when weak echoes of him had been remembered? After the blast, Austro comes out singed but laughing and says his first complete English sentence: "Carrock, carrock, we bust the crock." The men then have a moment of anamnesis: they know the caveman comic strip character named Rocky McCrocky, whom their dead friend John Penandrew drew as a boy, as he happily continues drawing his million-year-long saga on the salvaged stones in front of them. This is a fantasy, but let’s take it seriously, as if it were a philosophy of history. It begins from a premise that, of course, violates our standard modern assumption, the one shared by positivists, progressivists, and most working historians: the historical record, however incomplete, is a reasonable approximation of what happened. What we don't know is just what we haven't yet discovered or what was never recorded. Barnaby has a counterproposal. The record is a compression of something orders of magnitude larger, and the compression is not passive (we forgot) but active (it was made not to have happened). Lafferty is often conspiratorial, but he has a side that bucks against that hard, and this is anti-conspiracy theory. Barnaby is not saying that some cabal hid the real history. He is saying that the act of narrating violates reality and has cumulative consequences. Every history written leaves things out. That is just the problem of space. But the things left out do not vanish after having been left out. The Pluto Water is still there, putting pressure on the intestines of history. Lafferty’s big image for this is in the story, an involuted number series. Between any two integers on the calendar, there are "very, very many" real numbers, real years, real events, real people. They are compressed into the gap. As Barnaby explains, compression is dangerous: "But when you try to compress a hundred thousand years of history into six thousand years, something has to give. When you try to compress a million years, it becomes dangerous. An involuted number series, particularly when applied to the spate of years, becomes a tightly coiled spring of primordial spring-steel. When it recoils, look out! There comes the revenge of things left out." Now the theological dimension. Lafferty takes the claims of salvation history and brilliantly scrambles them. The Millennium of Revelation 20 happened, he says. The Devil was bound for a thousand years. The traditional image of that is one of calm and bliss, but it was not what anyone expected: "It was the Millennium itself, and the Devil was bound for a thousand years. But he surely was not quiet about his binding. He clanked and howled; he shook the whole world, and he caused land tides and sea tides. He caused mountains to collapse and people to go fearful and even to die literally petrified. And then the people discovered a cloud-capping and roaring humor in their fearfulness. A giantism appeared, a real awareness, a ridiculousness which has always been the authentic rib-rock of the world." It was a chaotic, wonderful period. Then it was dropped from the record because history could not bear the weight of it. This is a view of the Middle Ages that one finds through Lafferty that he shares with G. K. Chesterton. One finds it in stories such as “Among the Hairy Earthmen.” Lafferty fills out this, and he tells us about another lost period. Barnaby knows about it through the work of Atrox Fabulinus. It is the history of the three Roman Kingdoms, the three Republics, and the three Empires, each lasting more than a thousand years. Then Lafferty gives us what I take to be a real version of how he sees history: something that brutalizes and simplifies into ideal types. He tosses out the idea that the eight kings named Henry in England were once eighty. At some point, there will be one. He imagines that there was a President John Braintree Adams between the two we remember. Barnaby says speaking literally, and the story gives us no reason to doubt him. I’ve written about Lafferty’s sliding scale of allegory, but this does not seem to me like simple allegory. Lafferty is, in his one-of-a-kind way, depicting the historical process. The apocalypse at the end of the story is one of Lafferty's literal ones, an unveiling. Harry O'Donovan recognizes that "one of me sailing through the air with my head half severed off" was a version of himself from a lost boyhood, and says, "you have given me back the lost two-thirds of my boyhood." The members of the household are larger and fuller after undergoing anamnesis. They remember things they did not know they had forgotten, including what kindred Austro is to them. "We remembered now. John Penandrew used to draw Rocky McCrocky when we were boys. But Austro was Rocky McCrocky. No wonder he had always looked familiar." At the same time, the recovery does not give anyone the original million years back. Instead, they get Austro's cartoons on patio blocks, Loretta dribbling sawdust, after-images like a fire in a fireplace, and Austro’s crooked wink. The extended passages on the counsinship in the story are a lesson on history. In the exclusion zone that blocks off so much of our history are forgotten cousins, rumbling facts, the difficult-to-read flesh-between-the-lines of Loretta, Mary Mondo, and Austro: “Austro is such a trace,” Barnaby insisted. “He is a Flesh Between. I am believing that no creatures have ever stopped happening, but some of them have stopped being apparent. This calls into question the whole nature of reality.” A million years go by; Rocky McCrocky comes out. It looks like another joke, but Lafferty is making a serious claim when he writes, "There is a lot of good information to be found in the weekly Rocky McCrocky documents."

And there was a small bureau set up for that smallgroup of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in theircharacters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it.This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-timecrowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold. My favorite work by Jonathan Swift is his 1704 A Tale of a Tub , a work about which readers disagree in fundamental ways and about which there will never be agreement. That readers arrive at different interpretations of texts is a platitude. “Maybe Jones and the City,” and Lafferty’s ironies more broadly, have me thinking about this. As Lafferty readers know, he is about as ironic a writer as one will find, far more ironic than genre fiction usually tolerates. The SFE  entry on him has a line that neatly indexes those ironies. Clute writes that Lafferty “has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist.” The irony is that Lafferty is both, and because his ironies are so demanding, most readers find it hard to keep both aspects in view at once. If you read this blog, you know that I think Lafferty developed strategies that allow readers to engage those ironies, and one of the most important is counterfiguration. “Maybe Jones and the City” is a more traditionally satirical story than most of what Lafferty writes, and it is puzzling that it has not been recognized as such. I will summarize it and then go through some of how I think it works, though it may be that, as with Swift’s A Tale of a Tub , what looks to me like a plainly satirical strategy and a series of ironic moves may look to you like something else, perhaps something more ambivalent. “Maybe Jones” was written in 1964 but published in 1968, the same year as Space Chantey , and no half-knowledgeable Lafferty reader is going to miss the association. But I would suggest reading the story as if it belonged to one of Lafferty’s parallel tracks of fictional reality rather than to the Space Chantey  universe, because much of it does not match up. In “Maybe Jones,” humanity has cured mortality and achieved physical immortality, so society begins organizing itself into bureaucratic committees to design and construct customized versions of the afterlife. After all, the afterlife is now here among us. Lafferty had played earlier with solving the death problem in a science-fiction setting, though not quite successfully, as in “Panic Flight.” Here, however, most of the population plans peaceful, pastoral eternities through agencies such as the Bureau of Wonderful Islands and the Bureau of Wonderful Fields. There is, however, a wrinkle. A smaller faction of hedonistic nonconformists forms the Bureau of Wonderful Cities. Lafferty writes, "And there was a small bureau set up for that small group of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in their characters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it. This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-time crowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold." Among this group is Maybe Jones, the man who once discovered the Perfect Place. The Perfect Place is like Cockaigne: a consequence-free place of endless revelry. Unfortunately, Maybe Jones doesn’t know how to get back. After seeing the place, he went to New Shanghai, was hit on the head, and lost the coordinates. Now he has spent two decades following false directions across the galaxy to find it again. Meet the planners at the Bureau of Wonderful Cities. To help Jones recover his lost memories so they can build a new version of his paradise, they use "total recall" technology to digitally resurrect the Seven Sin Cities of Earth's history. Jones visits simulations of Sodom, Pompeii, Lisbon, Port Royal, Chicago, San Francisco, and Galveston. He samples each location just before it was historically destroyed by a catastrophe. As he tours these pleasure centers, Jones judges their offerings and largely finds them lacking, dismissing them as too crude, adolescent, antiquated, and so forth, to serve as a sustainable environment for immortal revelers. The final simulation is of pre-hurricane Galveston. It is closer. Maybe Jones can get back to the Perfect Place through a substitute. Returning from the simulation, Jones reveals exactly what kind of morbid inspiration makes this town the perfect foundation for his eternal paradise: “It's put me in the mood,” he cried. “I'm ready to go to work. Hey, that place has a touch of the eternal! I found a way to tune it and visited Galveston in earlier and later years. I picked up an interesting piece of history too. You know, they never did bury any of the dead people after the hurricanes and tidal waves. They just ground them up and sold them for crab-meat sandwiches. Well, let's go to work.” Armed with this recovered, grotesque knowledge, he enthusiastically begins drafting the blueprints for a new, engineered pleasure-city titled "The Empyrean According to Maybe Jones.” There won’t be hangovers. There will be mile-long bars and girls built like clepsydras. The story ends with a call to action for the reader. The first thing I’d note about this story is the characters breaking the fourth wall. Usually, it’s Lafferty’s narrator, using his pragmatic marker trick. This time, though, it’s a collective. Lafferty writes: Listen, you high-old-time people, make your wants known now. They're building the place, and they'll put in anything you suggest. Funds are available. Lots of those peace-and-benevolence folks have made perpetual donations for those persons less fortunate than themselves in their aspirations. Less fortunate than—from where we stand, that's a joke, isn't it? There is time, but barely. Tell them what you want them to put in. Act now! If one wants to understand this story, I think one has to put some pressure on the “Less fortunate than—from where we stand, that’s a joke, isn’t it?” This is what readers of the story seem to miss. In my reading, this is a joke because the voice comes from some very unfortunate place. Lafferty is going to keep it ambiguous, but this voice that is talking to itself, that in fact breaks its pitch and accidentally lets us overhear it, is one of Lafferty’s sets of devils. There are many reasons to suspect this, not least of which is how judgment has been conspicuously removed from the four final things in the story, which becomes the three final things of immortality, heaven, and hell, with hell just being the other people’s versions of heaven. High-Life Higgins explicitly outlines this blasphemous theological restructuring: “The pitch is this,” said High-Life Higgins, after they had eaten and drunk and made cheer to excess. “We have now arrived at the three ultimates: Immortality, Heaven, Hell. We have just achieved the first of them. We are now setting up projects to construct the other two, on the premise that one man's Heaven is another man's Hell. We must build final enclaves for people of every choice. We cannot sit idly by and ask what we would do with the after-life. This is the after-life.” Let’s consider two of these clues: the nature of the cities and the story’s most important use of counterfiguration. The seven cities in the story are versions of the notorious cities of the plain. What were they? Most people can rattle off two of them, but there were five cities named in Genesis 14:2: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela (that is, Zoar). They were in the Jordan Plain/Valley, as described in Genesis 13:10–12. In the story, Lot chooses the well-watered Jordan region and lives among those cities. Their destruction is narrated in Genesis 19:24–25, where the Lord destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and overturns the cities of the valley/plain. Zoar is the exception: Lot asks to flee there, so it was spared for him in Genesis 19:20–23 (see also Genesis 19:30). The four-city pattern of judgment—Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim—is repeated later in Deuteronomy 29:23. Jones has what we might call a Lot problem. He can’t help but look back. In the story, he visits each of the seven cities just before they are destroyed. One of Lafferty’s tricks is to just brush past the nature of the destruction as natural events rather than acts of divine judgment. Good-Time Charley Wu explains their methodology this way: “By our total recall methods we are able to reconstruct the Seven Sin Cities of History, Jones. They are the folk dreams that have also been raucous facts . . . But they were such a hopping bunch of towns that (under the old recension) they had to be destroyed: by blast-from-Heaven, lava-flow, earthquake, sinking-in-the-sea, cow-fire, earthquake again and fire, hurricane and tidal wave. They were too hot to last.” He fills our attention with the high life of prostitutes and high times. Just to be clear, I am not saying that places such as Galveston, Texas, experienced divine judgment. What I am saying is that Lafferty knows he is using the tropology of the cities of the plain in this story, and writing it as if there could be no consequences, that judgment is not a problem. But, of course, it is. All of the cities that Jones visited were destroyed. Why will the city that Jones builds not also be destroyed? The answer Lafferty invites is that it will absolutely be destroyed. The invitation to rebuild Sodom is about as smart as investing in the Tower of Babel Construction Company. I think all this is enough to make one recognize the story’s satirical norm and to grow suspicious of the voice urging one to Act Now, but what seals it for me is the counterfiguration of fire. This is not a story about heaven or the earthly paradise. The Empyrean, the highest heaven in Dante’s Paradiso , the sphere of pure divine fire where the soul rests in God, is identified by the Bureau of Wonderful Cities with places like Sodom. There is no way Lafferty is not being highly ironic. High-Life Higgins says they hold “the Empyrean, the eternal fire-stuff,” and Maybe Jones, as I said, calls his blueprint “The Empyrean According to Maybe Jones.” The counterfiguration turns on fire’s double valence in Christian theology: the same fire is divine love or hellish torment, depending on one’s ordered relation to God. Every one of the Seven Sin Cities was destroyed by fire or one of its cognates: blast from Heaven, lava, earthquake, sinking, cow fire, hurricane. What is razed by the divine fire of God’s love as angry is celebrated. Sodom becomes a pleasure destination, not a toponym for what God hates. As if all this were not clear enough, there is the golden flaw. All idolatry, of course, is a worship of the created rather than the Creator, and the great instance of this in the tradition is the Golden Calf of Exodus. And for whom is the bureau established? For people with the golden flaw, “the good-time crowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold.” There, Lafferty is plainly punning on sanctioned  and sanctified . This golden flaw is also why Maybe's real name is Midas.

The setting of "One at a Time," Galveston, TX (c. 1950s) It has been bedlam around here. One of my great enthusiasms is cooking, so I usually handle most of the Thanksgiving preparation. Then, this morning, my son had surgery, which is always tricky. He is non-verbal and profoundly autistic, so even a routine visit to the doctor comes with its own set of challenges, and there are many such visits. Still, I found a little time to update the blog, experiment with some code, and create a few programs that have been helpful for working with Lafferty. The best of these I can’t share. It builds on Chris Merrick’s remarkable work and, I think, finally gets it right, allowing one to search across Lafferty’s thousands of characters using dates of composition and plots, which surfaces interesting patterns. Merrick did the exhaustive mapping over the years, and his work should be published. It is the best Lafferty resource. Perhaps because of the holiday, I have also been thinking about Lafferty the American: the teller of tall tales, so often mentioned when people want to explain what he does so well. Unfortunately, the secondary literature on tall tales is a wasteland. That may be my Southern and American bias, since the tall tale is something like mother’s milk. I have mentioned here before that I grew up on a farm with my great-grandfather, who was raised by a blind aunt who had lived through the Civil War and had her own thoughts about the Late Unpleasantness. The center of our town had a monument that still boasts that the county sent more boys to the Civil War than it had voters, and that victory does not mean the right. My great-grandfather, like  most Southerners of his  generation, remembered seeing his first car, bought by his uncle home from WWI with a facial injury, had an astonishing memory for local history. And like many bookish men without much formal schooling, he devoured history and poetry, memorized it, and could recite for hours. When I first became interested in Lafferty, I conducted a reasonably thorough survey of the secondary literature on American folklore and the tall-tale tradition. It didn’t teach me much beyond ephemeral details now lost to popular culture. Once one has a grasp of Brother Jonathan ., his offspring, the art of exaggeration, Jack tales , and platitudes about American frontier character, the material gets thin—at least intellectually. The best of what I read came down to two books. One is by a brilliant man who never quite produced a masterpiece but created some extraordinary work with help from F.D.R.’s work programs. The other is by the truly brilliant Constance Rourke (1885-1941), who died far too young after slipping on ice. Her seminal work American Humor  (1931) is a book anyone interested in Lafferty ought to read. Not only is it a lock with his sensibility, but every sentence is well crafted, sentences that clearly required the reading of twenty books to land the predicate, and they ride high one after another. Over the past year, it is her approach to the broarder category of American humor, not the tall tale tradition itself (though the two are inseparable) that has made Lafferty’s style more intelligible to me as a reader. After the summary, I’ll share a few principles from Rourke that I think are especially useful in understanding how Lafferty works his magic. Andrew Ferguson has done exceptionally strong archival work on Lafferty’s “One at a Time.” There is little hidden or obscure in the story, which places it alongside a handful of other Lafferty pieces, such as the unpublished "Thousand Dollar Melon" (1959), that do slow high talk and are particularly well-suited for thinking about how the tall-tale voice functions when stripped of the highbrow games and genre elements that typically transmogrify Lafferty’s use of the form. Our familiar friend, John Sourwine, appears here as a man with “the hairy ears . . . and the adder’s eyes of a true gentleman.” He is summoned to Barnaby’s Barn to witness a spectacle. The attraction is McSkee, the antithesis of the Yankee peddler from whom so many American tall-tale figures descend. Lafferty describes him as a “clear coon-dog crazy” stranger. He appears to be forty years old, but eats with the hunger of centuries. A self-proclaimed “bedamned show-off,” McSkee delights in excess and wants nothing more than to be in the roaring middle of it all. As he devours steaks by the pile and beer by the gallon, he begins to hint at an impossible longevity. He claims to have survived drowning by waiting underwater for a century, and to have outlasted a hanging by sleeping until the rope rotted. None of this, he says, is due to rare magic. It is because he is “the commonest man you ever saw,” made of the clay and the salt of the earth. Sourwine spends a night carousing with McSkee, which soon devolves into a “pentastomic orgy” of drinking, brawling, and singing as the two men paint the town red. Between jailbreaks and fleeing the police, McSkee lets slip that behind the simple maxim “Live your life one day at a time” lies the thunder of a hundred unspoken words. It turns out that McSkee quite literally lives a single day and then skips decades—a trick he claims savants are incapable of performing because they lack the necessary juice. It is a parody of what the Germans call Scheintod , the death trance, or apparent death. The fear of being buried alive became a minor obsession in the Romantic imagination, with some Germans even proposing waiting cemeteries , where bodies would be laid out until the signs of putrefaction were unmistakable. It was Poe in " The Premature Burial " (1844) who created a subgenre. McSkee’s ability to “shine,” as the story calls it, is the other side of McSkee social excess—his parody of the odor of sanctity. Alongside proposals to create waiting cemeteries came new coffin inventions, complete with air tunnels and bell systems. Safety coffins , they were called. Better safe than sorry. Of course, being buried is one of Lafferty's always themes, from The Devil is Dead to " Postier Analytics ," " Pine Castle ," and so forth. One of the funniest moments in Lafferty, in my estimation, comes straight from McSkee and, for surprise, is worthy of a  W. C. Fields film. Sourwine and McSkee are hauled into a police station, and Sourwine dutifully vouches for his companion. Seconds after their release, McSkee hurls a bottle through the police station window to cap off the night. The timing is perfect, and Lafferty delivers it with a master’s touch. The two men are forced to flee again, which eventually leads them to a dark beach, where they must confront the mob of “forces of righteousness.” At the height of the brawl, McSkee reaches his top glory and pleasure. He decides to quit, to really shine. He gives a wild whoop of joy, holds his breath, and dies standing up, allowing the angry mob to stomp him into the sand. He instantly has the corpse stench on him. Sourwine runs away not because he is a coward, we are told, but on his own decision, and when he later returns, he finds McSkee dead, sporting a pungent shine. So John buries McSkee in a sand cliff, but he leaves a twenty-dollar bill in the corpse's pocket because the thought of being “both dead and broke at the same time is an ignominy almost past enduring." We skip forward. Twelve years later, Sourwine finds himself destitute and in the same town. He recalls the "juicy cove" he buried and returns to the cliff to retrieve the money. When exhumed, McSkee briefly wakes—better preserved than his clothes—and lets John take the cash, but refuses to get up. He says that he has just barely died and needs another fifty years to work up a "really good appetite." Insisting that his method is not suspended animation but actual death, McSkee claims he has "no dull days.” Then he puts himself back to death, leaving John to bury the "Son of Slumber" once again. And that brings us back to Constance Rourke, because "One at a Time" vividly embodies the principles she identified as central to traditional American humor. At the heart of her argument is the idea that American humor uses talk as a structural tool for forging social bonds out of isolation. In the disunited, often transient frontier landscapes where Lafferty’s father and uncle lived, the same places where Lafferty said he learned the art of the tall tale, speech was a fashioning instrument, a way to bind strangers into temporary communities. "One at a Time" pitches itself into precisely that kind of void. It begins with a storied place, Barnaby’s Barn, a transitory space filled with “strangers and traveling men and seamen unknown to John.” In this space, McSkee does not simply exist; he performs his existence in the Rourkean mode, using verbal extravagance to bridge the distance between himself and Sour John. One of the more telling features of the story is how much narrative attention Lafferty devotes to Sourwine as listener—something that may well be a self-portrait, given Lafferty’s legendary reticence in one-on-one conversation. When McSkee says, “We will talk while I eat,” he lays down the terms of a fundamental American ritual: the construction of shared reality through verbal will. He transforms a room of disconnected drifters into an audience for his incandescent high time, with the story’s other use of the word “shine” brought to the fore. When one looks closely at the dialogue in the story, one finds something deeply Rourkean—what she identified as a dialectic between the “Western Roarer” (a principle of inflation) and the Yankee (a principle of deflation). McSkee is an American archetype, despite his origin in the distant, the Ring-Tailed Roarer. He draws on what Rourke called comic mythology and mock-pompous language to magnify and mythologize his own nature. His gluttony is a “pentastomic orgy,” and he is quick to claim a mythic lineage from “the clay and the salt of the Earth, and the humus from decayed behemoths.” In contrast, Sour John is our Yankee counterweight, a seaman. He speaks with dry restraint, using the evasive understatement Rourke calls the masquerade of logic within the tall tale tradition. When McSkee claims to have drowned and rotted for a century, John’s response is quintessentially deflationary: “Rather a droll end to the story, or was it the end?” It is a collision between the expansive, juicy voice of the Roarer and the slow, skeptical cadence of the Yankee, and the comedic sparks fly where the two speech types strike stone. I’ll end with one final point. One of Rourke’s most incisive observations is that the American character is fundamentally theatrical. It wears language like a costume—consciously assumed, never quite permanent. McSkee understands that verbal persona is performance. As he says, “I’m a bedamned show-off! I like everything in excess.” For him, language is not a fixed inheritance but a disposable tool suited to the immediate moment—the one-day-at-a-time joke of the story: “I can get up on a lingo in a day . . . I get contemporary real fast.” This is as clear an instance as one could want of Rourke’s theory of the generic monologue, in which the tall-tale figure is less a character with interiority than a mythic outline drawn with genius. McSkee’s central tick, living one day at a time and then dying, is a sideshow offered to Sourwine, who is, of course, one of Lafferty’s great recurring characters. When the performance of the roaring middle is finished, the ham actor steps off stage. He refuses to continue walking in the mundane continuity that, as Rourke argued, American humor seeks to escape, precisely because of the loneliness at the heart of American frontier isolation. With all that in mind, here is my model for identifying tall-tale moments in Lafferty that extend beyond Jack stories and mere exaggeration:

The main character in “Snake in His Bosom” is Emil Fuerst, who owns a world-renowned security firm (“Safety Fuerst”). Lafferty’s story has three characters. It can be enjoyed literally as a story about a life-or-death game with betrayal: so, first, the plot, told straight. On the day of the story, Fuerst is playing what he calls a Hunter-and-the-Hunted game with a master burglar known as Gatto. It is a duel meant to test his security system and Gatto’s cunning. The setting is Emil’s personal fortress-house, the most secure building in the world. The agreed-upon stakes are the lives of either Emil or Gatto; Emil’s wife, Sarpa, goes to the winner. Throughout the evening, Emil experiences growing anxiety. He hears phantom footsteps and sees Gatto’s image on his security monitors. Sarpa assures him that his screens are clear and the house is silent. As the break-in continues, we learn that Emil is in contact, via a radio-telephone, with his junior partner, Benedict Kingfisher, who is supposedly homesick with the flu. Benedict reassures Emil that the electronic security net has not been penetrated. Lafferty builds tension, and then Gatto suddenly appears after seeming to have broken through nonexistent wooden doors and ascended nonexistent stairs. Benedict then reveals himself on the video viewer. He admits that he is Gatto and that he has been hiding inside the house for two days. Using an intimate knowledge of Emil’s security systems, he has manipulated the sensory data and the electronic receptors. Then it gets worse. Sarpa betrays Emil by triggering a trapdoor, which drops her and Emil into a reinforced iron-fencing room in the basement. Benedict joins them. It turns out that Benedict has been manipulating Emil in their fencing games for some time, inflating Emil’s confidence. The two then duel using short épées, a specialized weapon Benedict has mastered in secret. Benedict wounds Emil. We learn that the plan was orchestrated by Sarpa. Bleeding out, Emil hears the sh-klaup footsteps, and Benedict tells him they are death's footsteps. “Snake in His Bosom” is not a very well-known Lafferty story, having appeared in Chris Drumm’s Snake in His Bosom and Other Stories  (1983), a small cluster of idiosyncratic Lafferty, even by Lafferty standards. As I said, the story can be enjoyed straight, as if it were only about the duel between Emil and Benedict, with Sarpa betraying Emil. Somewhat interestingly, the story also relies on the kind of betrayal one finds in Lafferty’s unpublished short story “Goldfish,” and there may even be an Easter egg hinting as much. Emil says that not even a goldfish could get into his fortress, and goldfish have tried. I think the story is also two other things, both allegorical. On one level, it belongs to the genre of psychomachia, in which aspects of a soul battle with one another. That could be unpacked, but what makes the psychomachia especially interesting here is that it’s being played out through a body betraying itself. Lafferty suffered a heart attack at the beginning of the 1970s, and it would be a debilitating stroke in 1994 that largely incapacitated him until his death in 2002. His health was troubled in other ways during those years. Setting aside the psychomachia, “Snake in His Bosom” does a few things to make the body-betrayal allegory hard to miss. The fortress-house is a stand-in for an invulnerable body. This is the hubris of good health, or the confidence that comes from the silence of the organs. The betrayal comes from within, and it shows up first as a corrupted sensation. In the story’s sequence, Emil’s hands shake, the signals go fuzzy, he hears humming, and footsteps that he is told are not coming from outside. His own security systems feed him false certainty and false alarms at the same time: “Emil, don’t be so jumpy. The detector has not gone on ‘third signal.’ Nothing at all is happening, except maybe to you internally.” “Oh? I was sure for a moment that the detector had gone on ‘third signal.’ I guess that it hadn't, but the whole detector is pretty fuzzy now . . . they’ve all developed a humming sound that is very close to the alarm signal.” “No, Emil, they haven’t. They’re absolutely silent.” Throughout, the security system parallels a body becoming unreliable in its most basic functions of perception and control. Right from Lafferty’s poetic epigraph, “Eats Hinges and Doors,” the story suggests the danger comes from within. Sarpa reads Emil’s body before any intruder can be proven. He is symptomatic: “jittery and jumpy,” with “hands . . . . shaking.” Then he says the approaching footstep he hears is a “slurred step,” the step of a stroke-victim, foot-dragging in half-death: “That's the sound of heavy footsteps on old wooden passageways,” Emil said with his glance darting all around in a sort of amused apprehension. “It's the classical ‘slurred step.’ Both ghosts and zombies make this slurred sound, as do also persons who have had strokes. This is the foot-dragging sound of those who are dead in at least some detail. It is caused by the destruction of the tendon—” The story moves from outside in, and soon it treats the house as if it were Emil’s nervous system, beginning to turn on its owner. Emil picks up signals, but Sarpa says nothing is happening except maybe “internally.” Emil’s detector feels “fuzzy,” and he hears a near-alarm hum. Sarpa says it is “absolutely silent.” When Emil says nonexistent monitors are showing impossible images, she says he's losing his grip. Lafferty moves slowly through a body betraying itself. At the beginning of the story, he describes Emil as a mastiff-like figure, physically strong. This sets up being undermined. As the story overlays Emil’s body and the fortress, Sarpa says that not even God could enter without the night’s code. Emil clings to the idea that he can’t be cut off; he relies on a monitored lifeline to his partner even while that partner is supposedly ill, yet he feels the connection tighten as his reality contradicts itself: spaces that “aren’t there,” stairs he knows shouldn’t exist, a door handle that shouldn’t exist but turns anyway. Sarpa herself says that what seems imagined suddenly feels solid. Even when Benedict says that the perimeter hasn’t been penetrated and that the “intruder” is only an image Emil can see through, the story snaps the theme into focus when Sarpa says that no one entered, but someone was “already here,” followed by Benedict’s admission that he has been sabotaging the receptors that feed Emil his world: Emil was in fencing togs of his own design, purple and red, skin-tight, shimmering with small, light speckles or scales or point-turning armor. But everybody looks a little jittery in fencing togs, always. Emil's purple-and-red fencing suit is the musculature of an anatomy textbook, which is why it fits so snugly. Benedict confirms the origin of the final sounds: “Believe me, Emil, they are none of mine, none of my doing. You are fey, man! Haven't you known that about yourself? They are the footsteps of death that worry you so, and you are the only one who can hear them.” For those who love Lafferty and his work, it should be a terrifying story, like “Rang Dang Kaloof” and “Thieving Bear Planet.” I find it a little hard to reread.

“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chaldee’ that the three had independently reinvented. The message was ‘If there is anybody up above that sky, let him give us a sign.’ And the sign came at once, quick lightning and a water shower on the top side of the sky. The Three were pleased to see that their message was not washed away by the rain shower. There was someone else out there, someone more important than the overly silent caretakers who sometimes came into the area to make major or minor adjustments, trying to look invisible when they came.” — Serpent's Egg What would the perfect Lafferty atlas look like? Some exhilarating combo of historical atlas and dictionary of imaginary places, most likely. Somewhere on its maps, you would find your own life, The Bank and Shoal of Time, and it would not be a bad idea to place near it another of Lafferty’s quasi- oceanic metaphysical hazards, that depressing thing he called The Great Doldrum Reef. The Reef can be found in “The End of Outward,” one of Lafferty’s metaphysical black comedies. Its name is informal shorthand. In the story’s science, it is our current era of stagnation—our “end-of-outward” period, as it were—when great human projects stall before breakthrough and nothing fructifies. The connection between The Bank and Shoal and The Great Doldrum Reef may seem tenuous, but Lafferty wrote the stories that mention them in the same year of 1979, about five months apart, and I like to imagine that the five time-attempters of “Bank and Shoal” appear here in spirit. In the Arpad Arutinov headnote that opens Section 2 of “The End of Outward,” we find the following: “ Five others were compelled to other sorts of symbolism to express the reverse flow of history.” Why should these five not be Kemp, Roaring, MacBean, Farquharson, and Charteris? Is that an unwarranted inference? It must be a frustrating short story for some readers. Its architecture is self-denyingly frugal: dialogue followed by speechifying, two locations, with an in-between arrival and withdrawal of horse-drawn carriages with names from the Age of Gasoline. Beyond that, it is all theater of ideas. Can you rise to enjoying it? It starts with Ike Casad and Fausto Barra, two scientists, shooting arrows straight into the air as they discuss progress and decline. “An arrow should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back,” Ike says, setting up the story’s central metaphor. Fausto agrees, and he gives the idea a name. An arrow shot straight up has flop-over time. And the world itself, he says, now lives in cosmic “flop-over time.” To prove a point about a returning Age of Trickery in the current flop-over, Ike performs an illusion. He makes the arrow he shoots hang impossibly at its apex in the sky. But the trick effect doesn't last. A weird duality is created when Fausto shifts his footing and accidentally breaks the arrow. “You’ve broke it!” Ike cries, and for a moment the illusory arrow is suspended above them while the real, broken one lies at their feet (“the broken arrow on the grass was the real arrow”). With that, the two men walk toward Ike’s ornate gazebo, a hybrid of “bandstand, summer-house, gazebo, and belvedere,” to join a meeting of scientists. Not just scientists, but fringe scientists. They are men of “high style, elite exuberance, and magnetic personalities.” They arrive in magnificent, custom-built vehicles, and Lafferty has fun with their names. One by one, the figures give updates on projects that have been stalled for over a decade in the Great Doldrum Reef. Charles Cogsworth talks about the manned Mars landing; Diogenes Pontifex discusses the creation of artificial life. At the meeting, the unstylish Jordan “Dinosaur Droppings” Dorner shows up. Dorner will argue that all the science projects are failing because the time for them has passed. “We cannot go onward,” he insists. “We cannot even stay where we are. We go backwards.” The universe has reached the end of outward; it has stopped expanding and begun to contract. Just look at the small indicators: domestic animals like Hereford cattle are “becoming tall and lean and wild-looking,” and cultural trends are regressing. In fact, Dorner says, the moon landing thirty years earlier was the end of outward, the peak of their civilization, “the turning of the tide.” Most of the scientists dismiss Dorner’s ideas, but Fausto Barra says that he intends to outflank the slide. “I'm not going to take the return trip,” he says. With tightrope mathematics (Matthew 7:14), he and a select few can calculate the quantum interval exquisitely and remain in the present, even if it renders them transparent to the rest of the world. After a final round of booze, the meeting breaks up. The scientists climb into what are horse-drawn buggies and carriages and ride away, full of “high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress.” Then Lafferty gives an afternote as the ending. An elite, it is rumored, does exist in a place called "The End of Outward." It is separated from the rest of humanity by a mini-event horizon. This group, which belongs to "a race that once flew to the moon," has preserved the pinnacle of achievement. He adds that "they are as far out as anybody ever went, and nobody can ever take that away from them." “The End of Outward” is pretty deep-end Lafferty. It piggybacks on many of his more idiosyncratic techniques. In what follows, I want to focus on two aspects of the story. One is how it fits into his recurring rejection of natural selection and evolution. The other is its use of the Vernier scale as the story’s conceptual master idea, with what it means for works such as Fourth Mansions . La fferty made much of the idea that the world began minutes ago and that deep time is a hoax. It appears in novels and forms the basis of one short story. As far as I know, the first person to formulate this idea systematically was Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century English naturalist and Christian. In his 1857 boo k Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot , Gosse seems to have come up with the idea that God created the world with the appearance of age, complete with fossils, tree rings, and geology, the appearance of a prehistory that never occurred. He wrote: “Admit for a moment, as a hypothesis, that the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole life-history of the globe, commencing with any point which the geologist may imagine to have been a fit commencing point, and ending with some unimaginable acme in the indefinitely distant future. He determines to call this idea into actual existence, not at the supposed commencing point, but at some stage or other of its course. It is clear, then, that at the selected stage it appears exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real.” That Lafferty sometimes entertains this idea shows he saw deep time as a genuine philosophical problem, though. But one can always dissolve a philosophical problem by accepting a few auxiliary premises. In “The End of Outward,” he uses a changing rate of cosmic expansion to suggest that our estimates of the universe’s age are flawed, his version of the Cosmic Age Problem. He imagines that, because of the delay in light reaching us, we have not yet observed the violet shift that would prove the contraction that has already taken place. Within this cosmological picture, Lafferty offers a second, oblique critique of evolution. The story makes its case that human progress has stalled. At the same time, Lafferty makes it clear that evolution is not real progress, or even true evolution at all. Of course, those who believe in non-theistic evolution are careful to say that, biologically, evolution is not progressive; it concerns change, not ascent. Lafferty turns that inside out: his universe no longer evolves in any way but retracts, undoing its own elaboration, perhaps a better word than evolution to characterize its expansion. He emphasizes that new species leaps will not occur (and presumably never have) while giving the reader images of what appears to be devolution, animals coming unbred, and outwardly expressive forms moving back toward their origins. In this way, the story separates ideas of progress from questions of creation and speciation, showing how its skepticism toward evolutionary theory parallels doubts about cosmic chronology. The story’s major symbol of human progress (the moon landing) measures the culmination of the outward age on the instrument: a gesture made “at the turning of the tide.” It is revered as a permanent achievement precisely because it marks an apex. By contrast, the scientists’ current attempts at “species leaps,” such as creating new animals, are doomed, since they try to move forward after the turn. Dorner can therefore assert that the time for such efforts “has gone by,” attributing their failure to a change in natural law, a “tightening and not a loosening of the bonds of species.” The most interesting part of "The End of Outward" to me is the Vernier scale image. It's not quite, but almost a microcosm and a macrocosm. No hermeticism needed, not of the kind we get in Serpent's Egg . When I think of a Vernier scale, I picture welder calipers: a smaller, more finely marked ruler (the microcosm analogue) sliding along a coarser main scale (the macrocosm analogue) to register shifts the large scale alone cannot show. The analogy isn’t exact, which is what makes it so interesting. The microcosm isn’t measuring anything on its own. But it is registering something in the story: the end of outward. Lafferty makes human culture the sliding ruler on the cosmic dial. Dorner explains this clearly, saying, “our lives and our civilization and society form a very small vernier scale . . . counterpart of the cosmic scale,” meaning we can read the universe’s great turn by first noticing small misalignments in ourselves. No doubt that Lafferty knew that Pierre Vernier (1580–1637) was a French mathematician and engineer who, in 1631, invented the vernier scale to enhance the precision of scientific instruments. Vernier was driven by the needs of astronomy and surveying—fields that required exceptionally accurate angular measurements for charting the heavens and mapping the Earth. Before his innovation, instruments such as quadrants and astrolabes provided only coarse readings. Vernier’s scale refined these tools, enabling users to read minute divisions beyond the limits of the main scale. In Lafferty’s story, Vernier is restored to its original context of precision and discovery. In effect, the story acts a bit like a Vernier scale. The scientists’ discourse is like a vernier reading of the misalignment between potential progress and actual regression, picking up on the shift long before astronomy can detect the larger fact. The narrative models the cosmic cycle—rise, apex, fall—while our world is the vernier’s minute offset: the arrow’s flop. This gets spelled out in Ike’s claim of an apex “lasting thirty thousand years.” Because cosmic confirmation has to lag behind astronomical evidence (“no first-class evidence yet; violet shifts would take millions of years”), Dorner names human culture the small weather vane that turns first. This is where all the strange theories and phenomena come in. They are fine-grained indicators: breeds become unbred, reversing what Darwin called artificial selection; fashions and technologies slide backward. Etc. One imagines God’s hand on the universe like an irritated welder’s on a set of Vernier calipers, with the Moon landing recast as the furthest outward tick before the dial begins to slide back. The small scale (our biology, taste, tools, and milestones) shows that the main scale, the universe itself, has already reached maximum outward. Judgment has been passed. There is something sad about this, especially in how it touches Fourth Mansions  and Lafferty’s many other works about the leap forward. Kevin Cheek has said he loves Fourth Mansions  (1969) because it is so hopeful. “The End of Outward” stands about as far from being hopeful as one can get in Lafferty. I myself find Fourth Mansions less clear. Freddy must have failed for Carmody to return again in Fair Hills . Not that the Overlarks share same fictional universe, but that some part of Lafferty was not as hopeful as Cheek. Instead of the returnees, at the end of outward, we are given the Great Cosmic Verger, an incredibly memorable image of Lafferty’s creative imagination in a sour mood. Of him (Him, I think), Lafferty writes: “Who is the verger who with his verge-staff allows some things to pass and denies others? It is a cosmic verger nowadays, and he moves us back from the verge.” A verger, from the word for “staff,” is a church official who assists the clergy during services, organizes processions, and tends to the building and its furnishings. It is as if the  Argo,  the ship of the Church, was told the waters end here. You blew it. The communion of the saints (the Elite) exists, but you’re going to need more grace than had those lucky pre-July 16, 1969 folks before the flop of time’s arrow. There are more than a few shades of this in Serpent’s Egg . Lastly, the boundary-setting figure with the staff appears elsewhere in Lafferty, most vividly in the following passage: “In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.” The difference seems to be that the wicked children in “Hairy Earthmen” are now us. If so, then in “The End of Outward,” the message is even more eristic. There will be no fourth mansion for us: “It recedes from you. The time for it has pulled away and left the project stranded, as it has left so many others. Shelve it, shelve it!”

Unlike some other unpublished Lafferty stories, “Whittle Come Back” does not work. Not because it is not a traditional murder mystery, but because it is an incompletely conceived screwball comedy. Lafferty does not seem to know what he wanted to write here. After the story, I will say more about what may have happened. The story centers on Wilton Whittle, the wealthy inventor of Plasto. Whittle is an unemotive man, and he has a habit of leaving his affairs unfinished. Suspecting that his wife, Cornelia, and her lover, Doctor Geiger, are poisoning him for his fortune, Whittle confides his fears to Snowball. She is the tough young leader of a local delinquent gang called the Snowbirds. During a conversation at a local bar, The Fiddler’s Green, Whittle and Snowball make a pact: if either were to die with unsettled business, they simply do not go. Then he goes home and dies in his chair. Doctor Geiger arrives to certify the death and has the body sent to the Mobley Funeral Parlor. Post-death, Whittle seems to go out of his way to finish his bucket list: he calls on a local widow, and he goes to view a famous crystal collection. The story is told so that the reader does not learn until near the end that Snowball is behind all the ghostly appearances, but it is Snowball who fulfills their pact. She and the Snowbirds burke Whittle from the funeral home and take his body on a tour around the city. They prop him up and parade him through the streets, carrying out Whittle’s final wishes. This includes taking him to the widow’s house, where the widow delicately faints, and taking him to view the wealthy man’s crystal collection. The gang also brings the corpse to Whittle’s tavern and tips it forward to simulate his trademark stiff nod when passing acquaintances on the street. Whittle was so rigid and expressionless while alive that several townspeople, including a police officer, greeted the corpse without realizing that he was dead. At the end of the story, the group brings Whittle’s body back to his own front door. Doctor Geiger answers. Terrified by the sight of the back-from-the-grave Whittle, Geiger, and Cornelia panic. They think he has somehow survived, leading them to blurt out an exposition-heavy confession: "Cyrus! Cyrus! He isn't dead! We didn't kill him after all! Cyrus! Cyrus!" Cornelia cawed. Cyrus was Doctor Geiger. "W — we did too kill him. I know we killed him. He was d — d — dead. Wh — Whittle, go away. You're dead." A nearby recorder captures their exact words, thanks to Snowball and the Snowbirds. Good job, kids. The police arrest Cornelia and the doctor for the poisoning, while also detaining the gang. At the police station, Snowball is reprimanded for what she has done. She does not care in the slightest and demands to be told what law she broke: "Law! What law? There's a law says you can't take a corpse for a walk? You show me that law! You know there isn't any law says that. You get down that big book and show me where it says you can't take a corpse for a walk." Andrew Ferguson has speculated that “Whittle Come Back” is the result of two story ideas being bolted together. That looks right, and the internal evidence supports it. I think Ferguson's best criticism of Lafferty is his short piece on "Hands of the Man," where he teaches readers how to think about Lafferty's revision process. He has a good nose for this kind of thing. Writing about "Whittle Come Back," Ferguson points to the large chunk of material dealing with Snowball’s backstory and the Snowbirds, which seems exogenous to the story’s setup. The narrative takes a significant detour into the gang's history, as seen in this passage: There had been a time, barely gone by, when Snowball and her Snowbirds had cut a hair-raising swath through an ethnic group known as juveniles. You have heard of ball players' ball players and actors' actors. They were delinquents' delinquents. There is a whole group of young people complexed for life out of fear of that bunch. The Snow Trauma will not disappear till the last of them are dead, sixty or seventy years from now. You can see how the rest of the story, with the haunting and the confession, comes from rubbing that Whittle stick against the other Snowball stick. In the story as we have it, the Snowball material provides the background for the hijinks at the end that trigger the confession, but it is stitched in without much smoothing. It raw composition. As lopsided as the story is, with its patched-in middle, the strongest internal argument I see for Ferguson's mashed-together-but-not-completed theory comes from the beginning. We are told that the best thing Whittle ever did was marry Cornelia. Cornelia is, of course, a name associated with being an excellent wife. However, the first pages of the story give the reader a version of the character that reads as disconnected from her eventual role as a murderer: “Wilton, are you daydreaming again?” Cornelia demanded of him. This was while he was still alive. “I do wish you would stop daydreaming and do something positive.” Cornelia was his wife, and marrying her was one of the few positive things he had ever done. It hadn't sold him on the idea. At the end of the story, we learn that Cornelia has plotted Whittle’s murder all along! That suggests Lafferty had not yet fully conceived the plot when he wrote the first pages about Whittle. Unless Whittle wanted to end up in the funeral home, it was not a good idea to marry her. When one weighs the probability of verbal irony against compositional process, process wins out. My additional speculation is that, in an earlier version, Whittle was a ghost. The story reads that way until we know the facts, at which point Whittle becomes a rationalized ghost. That happens because the murder plot is pasted in to make room for Snowball. There is amusing writing here, as there always is with Lafferty, and I enjoy the story’s screwball quality. For whatever reason, Lafferty muscled through with Snowball. One wishes Lafferty had brought it to a more finished state.

They wrote the story on a column, And on the Great Church Window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away; And there it stands to this very day . . . So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers: And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise. — Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842)      “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.” Is Peter Piper Peter Poper now To change the rules and banished things allow? Advanced Laffety. I have written before about how grateful I am to own the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty’s stories, but here is some real ingratitude for you. Get a load of that jerk. Titling the volumes the Man . . .  was dumb. I understand the gimmick. Who wouldn’t? Lafferty wrote a bunch of stories in the “The Man Who . . .” formula, and on that level, the choice has a superficial warrant. But like several other decisions in those beautiful volumes, it makes little sense. It was an ad hoc organizational principle, one designed to disguise a critical failure to perceive order and to move too quickly into an unguided scooping up of Lafferty stories. Why so dumb? Dumb because most of the "Man . . ." stories are minor. Dumb because no one understands Lafferty better for having the stories in the Centipede arrangement. Dumb because one could devise any number of half-clever ways to unify the presentation of his collected stories had one been so inclined, and dumb because Lafferty readers would have benefited from someone being half-clever. Dumb because the order does not prepare one for the novels, a bridge that needs to be crossed. It pales in comparison to the truly foolish decisions in those volumes, most notably ones like the decision to break apart the four Green/Life stories in  The Men Who Knew Everything  sequence, thereby creating a hermeneutic difficulty that need never have existed, as well as the truly lazy decision to include no apparatus for story variants preserved in different published versions. Even so, three stories in the Man . . . pattern are major expressions of Lafferty’s deepest poetics, so it is not all bad in the realm of dumb editing. Get a grip on two “Man Who” stories, and one has a leg up. Those are "The Man Underneath," "The Man Who Lost His Magic," and "The Man Who Walked Through Cracks." The last, in particular, offers an especially interesting variation on Lafferty’s appropriation of Valentinian Gnostic ideas and is propaedeutic to some of the hardest climbing in his work. With that monstrous act of bitchy ingratitude over, thank you, Centipede, for doing something. “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” is Lafferty’s version of the Pied Piper legend. At Hamelin College, we meet a group of faculty members who secretly serve as wardens of consensus reality, charged with preventing humanity from escaping the narrow, mundane, spiritually deadening confines of the reality-scripted world. Their order is disrupted by the eccentric Professor Thomas Cromwell, who begins teaching his students about the vast, unapproved spaces—or “cracks”—that lie between the narrow frequencies of ordinary human perception. Called the “crooked man” and the “Rat-catcher” by the Hamelin faculty, Cromwell teaches what any good teacher does teach: how to perceive and enter hidden dimensions. The wardens move to stop him before he can lead a mass exodus out of accepted reality. Because Cromwell threatens controlled reality, Dean John Michael Anwalt and six other professors convene a secret nighttime “kangaroo court” to erase him from existence, the kangaroo being one of Lafferty's images of Gnostic imprisonment. It is nice that Anwalt is a dean. Deans usually are the enemy. But these sorry academic faculty are on the dean’s team. During the hearing, the faculty speak of their elite duty to keep humanity confined, and we are introduced to two weird glass hemispheres in the room: one contains vast, empty green meadows; the other holds tormented miniature people trapped like genii in a bottle. Yet despite the wardens’ magical barriers and alchemical potions, Cromwell and his wife, Catherine, at one point slip easily through the physical restrictions of their cell while Cromwell plays a soundless alto flute that alters the room’s reality. Alters is wrong. He discloses it, apocalyptically. This is a Lafferty story with a great climax. In a better world, it would be loved. It explodes from a massive sonic and spatial breach: Cromwell’s flute-playing summons a pageant of opulent manifestations and escape vehicles, including a flaming train called the Crack-jack Express. A crowd of students and others then use these vehicles to enter the unapproved dimensions. The Nudnik faculty thinks it has trapped the escapees inside the second glass Hemisphere, but Cromwell is not finished. In another of my favorite moments in Lafferty, Professor Cromwell summons a chorus of legendary horn-blowers whose blast shatters the trap and opens the way to the boundless green meadows that are so often in Lafferty a figure of the realized eschaton. In the aftermath, the seven wardens find that they themselves are the tormented figures imprisoned in the first glass Hemisphere; as punishment for failing the rules of Hamelin College, they must teach by day and shrink back into their glass prison every night. As I said, this is wonderful stuff, with many familiar elements arranged in a fascinating way. It is fun to have Cromwell and Diller back, far from their origin. One of my working assumptions is that Lafferty’s story-worlds have an open spin or a closed spin, and the closed-spin stories are usually the ones that most reward thinking through his variations on Gnosticism. “Snuffles” and “Continued on Next Rock” are examples of closed spin. “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” is the exception that proves the rule. It is radioactively Gnostic and yet, unlike the usual Lafferty pattern, it has open spin. The rest of this post will try to explain what that means. Because the subject is complex and this is a blog post, I am going to move quickly and offload some thoughts on tools at the end. Expect this to be overclocked. Let’s start at the beginning. The story opens with a denial worth keeping in mind because it is about people who want to control us through information management. The denial of Big Reality, the true Prime, is so blatant that it effectively confesses what it negates. “The events weren’t real,” says Professor Dorothy Mandel. Mandel is the Hamelin faculty member who can only understand events through the pseudo-discipline in her experimental psychology class. She embodies what Lafferty most disliked about psychological reductionism. She is an Edmund Weakfish type. Then we hear it again, a rabbit punch: “The events weren’t real.” This time it comes from Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown. She, too, is a Hamelin faculty member determined to exhaust the meaning of the events. Her method may be even worse, since she teaches analytical mythology and speaks of recurring myth-person events. Lafferty detested this. As he told Sheryl Smith in 1978: “What does that girl say in the letter that came before the card? That Christ was a fertility deity and that there were earlier stories about fertility deities and that therefore none of them can be true? . . . The notion that a story can't be true because something like it was told previously reminds me of my own short story ‘Rainy Day in Halicarnassus.’” The joke was he hadn’t written that story yet. Smith’s provocation inspired it. So that is our opening. Two faculty members of Hamelin College deliver identical disclaimers in consecutive sentences, each claiming professional jurisdiction over the events in order to contain meaning and significance. That is, in short, Hamelin College’s role in the story. It closes off reality through intellectual self-congratulation and epistemic arrogance. What is being denied is a cosmological claim: that the reality human beings inhabit amounts to roughly one-thousandth of what exists; that the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths lie hidden in the cracks between approved frequencies of sound, light, taste, and experience; that attending to this fact is spiritually important; and that a conspiracy of institutional powers maintains reality impoverishment as the only permissible condition of existence. This is conspiratorial Lafferty . One can imagine a surface reading of the story as merely an academic comedy about an absent-minded professor who wanders into the wrong classrooms and blows a flute nobody can hear. That would not be wrong. But on the story’s own terms, it would amount to approximately one-thousandth of what is there. To see what else is going on, I think one ought to place the story within Lafferty’s interest in Gnosticism, because the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths are theological and Gnostically inflected. More precisely, they belong to the strain of Gnosticism that seems to have most interested Lafferty, a point that Gene Wolfe seems to have intuited. Valentinianism, with its signature elements, is present. I have written at length elsewhere about these signature elements, so I will not do so here; the relevant pieces include the Pleroma, the Kenoma, the Demiurge, the Archons, Sophia, the descending Redeemer, and so forth. What makes “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” so strange is that its intensely Gnostic architecture does not lead to a Gnostic nightmare of the kind one finds in well-known Lafferty stories, such as “Snuffles.” Instead, the story arrives at something orthodox and parousia-like while keeping Gnostic elements in play fictionally. That is both weird and brilliant. Put another way, Lafferty is going to mount a Catholic critique of Gnosticism from within Gnostic imagery to affirm the soteriological. At the same time, that claim needs some careful qualification. Writing in the mid-1970s, Lafferty’s available sources for Valentinianism were primarily Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses  and Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion . It was an understanding of Valentinianism as preserved and refuted by the current tradition of interpretation, or by what has been recovered by modern scholarship. That fact makes Lafferty more difficult than he otherwise would be, because readers really need to see how his own dated understanding of Gnosticism informs the fiction. Needless to say, that is unlikely to happen. In “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks,” the Catholic corrections are responses from within the defunct tradition of understanding Gnosticism that shaped Lafferty’s intellectual formation, not impositions upon a system encountered through modern scholarship. A quick review of the Gnostic background helpful for reading Lafferty. In Valentinian cosmology, the Pleroma—divine Fullness, the totality of Aeons in perfect mutual repose—is opposed to the Kenoma, the Deficiency produced when Sophia, seeking to know the Father apart from her consort, Christ, falls into error. From that deficiency comes the Demiurge, who fashions the material world as an unintended prison for the divine sparks that descended with Sophia into matter. Lafferty gives the story this same three-tiered structure. At the top are the green meadows: “all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation.” In the middle is the narrow world of approved frequencies, the one-thousandth of reality that institutional humanity inhabits and mistakes for the whole. At the bottom are the Hemisphere as refractions. Once a single sphere, they are now divided, a concrete image of the fall as the sundering of wholeness. Lafferty writes: One of them was crammed with creatures, rats, rat-faced people, proper people; but their faces were bigger than their bodies and the eyes were bigger than the faces. They seemed alive and avid to burst out. Most of the bodies and faces and eyes were cracked and shattered (you know that it was done by an eye-cracking sound), broken like glass and the pieces falling out of them. Yet they seemed alive and flexible, not rigid . . . The other spherical hemisphere was all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation. As Lafferty notes, they only look like spheres; what matters is that they were once one. In classic Valentinian fashion, the pneumatic spark survives imprisonment intact, though distorted by the conditions of its confinement. Lafferty gives us that image in the first, distorting Hemisphere. For me, the confirmation of this reading comes from Thumbsdown, the smartest of the Archons. She states the condition of the Kenoma outright: “We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that.” This shows that, first, she knows that the narrow world is not Prime; and, second, that she treats that knowledge as the privilege of an elite charged not with transcendence within Prime but with reality management. She knows the prisoners are in a sub-Prime prison. She knows Hamelin College is a Gnostic prison house. To her, that knowledge is a privilege. This is gnosis as control. It is the kind of thing Irenaeus accuses the Valentinian teachers of doing to their followers: And committing many other abominations and impieties, they run us down (who from the fear of God guard against sinning even in thought or word) as utterly contemptible and ignorant persons, while they highly exalt themselves, and claim to be perfect, and the elect seed. For they declare that we simply receive grace for use, wherefore also it will again be taken away from us; but that they themselves have grace as their own special possession, which has descended from above by means of an unspeakable and indescribable conjunction . . . On this account, they tell us that it is necessary for us whom they call animal  men [rats], and describe as being of  the world, to practise continence and good works, that by this means we may attain at length to the intermediate habitation, but that to them who are called "the spiritual and perfect" such a course of conduct is not at all necessary. For it is not conduct of any kind which leads into the Pleroma, but the seed sent forth thence in a feeble, immature state, and here brought to perfection. (I.6.4, Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses) Moreover, it is what the Special Studies faculty does to every student who arrives at Hamelin College: "We cover the wide spectra in everything, but we pick out samples at approximately every thousandth interval. We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that." It is how they see us, the readers, the rats. It would not be a Valentinian cosmos without a Demiurge, and unsurprisingly, Lafferty gives us one in Dean John Michael Anwalt. Yet Anwalt departs from the Valentinian Demiurge in the form Lafferty would have known in a theologically significant way. Irenaeus’s Valentinian Demiurge does not know that a Pleroma exists above him. He is like Snuffles: his malevolence is somehow inseparable from his ignorance, and his blindness makes him tragic rather than simply villainous. Lafferty often modulates this from tragedy to tragicomedy; Snuffles may be his finest image of the tragicomic Demiurge. Anwalt is different. Anwalt knows what Snuffles does not know. Lafferty writes: “Then Cromwell is right?” asked Professor Diller. “The cracks that we ignore are a thousand times as wide as the world that we inhabit? . . . Well, why wouldn't it be better to venture into those cracks and enjoy the real spaciousness of the world itself?” “Because our nature tells us to be wary of that,” Dean Anwalt said. “Our fallen nature tells us that we don't want the wideness, that the narrowness is a superior thing. And our exult-in-its-fallenness nature tells us that the wide ways are the extreme danger: It tells us to ban or interdict them when we cannot imprison them.” That passage shows that Anwalt has developed a theology of fallenness that turns the Kenoma into a principle and the interdiction of the wide ways into a sacred duty. At that point, he ceases to resemble the ignorant Demiurge and begins to resemble a Catholic fallen angel: an intelligence that has knowingly chosen the wrong side. Lest that seem overstated, consider his explicitly Luciferian panic: “It’s Gabriel’s horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become a prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.” The moral stakes, therefore, differ from the Valentinian mold. We are dealing not with tragic inevitability but with culpability; not with blindness but with chosen evil. And that culpability carries with it a possibility unavailable to the Demiurge in a closed Valentinian world. At this point, it is worth pausing over the gunky stuff of the Kenoma. The vials of Hyena Scruff and Entrail Gore that Anwalt opens at the kangaroo court are not, contra Valentinian logic, the cause of the Archons’ evil. The Hamelin faculty is not evil because it has fallen into matter. It is evil because it chooses to manipulate others into full commitment to the narrow world. Professor Diller makes this especially clear. Before the vials reach him, he says, “I like Tom-Crom, he is harmless”; afterward, he says, “I say get rid of the spacious devil.” Professor Sanger feels the amnesia “snapping at my heels like a long-toothed fog” and still retreats into procedural questions while the walls come down. These are not beings trapped against their will. They are beings who refuse to return. With all that in place, we can turn to some obvious points. Hamelin College takes its name from the town in the Pied Piper legend that defaults on its payment, and Lafferty twists the legend in a way that can be reconstructed. The most theologically significant change concerns that payment. In Browning’s version—the one most of us know—the mayor refuses the agreed thousand guilders and offers fifty instead. That is a conscious act of bad faith. In Lafferty’s version, the payment is forgotten. Lustlife can barely remember “that each of us was assessed one seventh of his pay to go to this Rat-catcher,” one-seventh from each of seven faculty members, the debt distributed so that no one escapes implication. The forgetting is maintained by the same mist that prevents Anwalt from reading the date of Cromwell’s arrival in the college record. It is an Archonic operation: the kind of amnesia that preserves the narrow world by suppressing the unapproved. Here, it suppresses the institution’s own transaction with its Redeemer, Tom Cromwell. The faculty cannot really acknowledge the debt because doing so would require acknowledging everything the debt authorized. The rats of the original legend are vermin to be drowned. In Lafferty’s version, they are what the first Hemisphere contains: souls imprisoned in the narrow world, their proportions distorted, pressing against the glass. They are people like us, living inside our consensus realities. The Rat-catcher’s role is therefore liberation, not extermination or kidnapping. The second epigraph makes this especially clear. It names the faculty as “Garden Guards.” They want to deny admittance to the green meadows forever, which identifies the Piper’s hidden realm as unfallen creation rather than as an underground kingdom. From that point, it becomes hard to miss the soteriological force of Lafferty’s Piper figure. I will come back to that, but first I want to talk about Catherine Cromwell, Tom Cromwell’s wife. Catherine is the story’s most theologically complex figure, and her prayer deserves quotation because of the role she plays. Her petition: “Wide meadows of my heart's desire, how I pray that it will work!” she said. “It will all be so much more spacious when we have gone through, and then I may get the things that I have always wanted... A roomy townhouse (oh, fifty or a hundred rooms, we might have company), clothes enough to cover me modestly and elegantly . . . And dependable servants and aides, and my personal publisher and producer and senator and cardinal. And let us have game-parks as wide as realms . . . Oh, by the Prized Hemispheres, defend us from them! Be good to the Rat-catcher: so many are bad to him. These things I pray for.” Yes, this is comic, but the categories—castles, game-parks, a personal cardinal—are the narrow world’s vocabulary for abundance, the Kenoma speaking as if it were the Pleroma. What makes Catherine a Sophia figure is precisely that inadequacy. She is not being satirized for wanting too much. She is reaching toward the fullness of creation through the only vocabulary the Kenoma has given her. The poverty of that vocabulary is evidence for the legitimacy of the desire, not for its corruption. Because this is such a deep Lafferty story, one more distinction is helpful. Identifying Catherine with Sophia needs a caveat. She is not a one-to-one allegorical rendering of the Valentinian Aeon whose desire precipitates the cosmological fall. Nothing in the story suggests that she generates the Demiurge or the deficient world. The correspondence is role functional rather than one-to-one allegorical. She is, instead, one more of Lafferty’s Sophia figures. She is Wisdom as bride to Godhead. Catherine occupies the Sophia-placement in the story’s cosmological drama: blinkered desire for plenitude, a position at the hinge between Kenoma and Pleroma, the Redeemer-consort dynamic, and the Archonic misreading of her desire as mere materialism desire would be catastrophic. Set Catherine’s desire against Thumbsdown’s response to real plenitude: “It is not the cornucopia, not the Horn of Plenty. It is the cornucalamitatis , the horn of calamity or trouble.” Thumbsdown has the Greek, she has the mythology, she can name the kerakibotion . She only sees an analytically recurring mythperson, a Pandora. And she is wrong. We know she is wrong because the story immediately refutes her judgment. Catherine says, “Oh, let’s some of us go by boat,” and “there was a boat then, quickly filled with intrepid people, and there was a waterway for it to run on.” Now, this would not be much of a retelling of the Pied Piper legend without a pipe, and what Lafferty does with it is wonderful. The horn, of course, is one of his major symbols (for example, think of the trumpet in "Gray Ghost: a Reminisce" ). Here it appears as Cromwell’s alto flute, blown “with a happy puffing of cheeks and mugging of mug.” It produces no audible sound, only “an uneasy sensation” in those nearby, because, we are told, it sounds at the unapproved frequencies. It cannot be heard because hearing is calibrated to the approved band of consensus reality; it cannot be unfelt because the pneumatic soul beneath institutional conditioning responds to those frequencies, whether the approved consciousness registers them or not. This is not just horn imagery but wind and Holy Spirit imagery. We are in the territory of pneumatology. “Stop blowing on that damned flute, Cromwell!” Anwalt orders. “The sound of it, no, not the sound, the something of it is driving us all crazy.” “Can you hear my flute?” Cromwell asks. “No, of course we can’t,” Anwalt replies. “But whatever is coming out of it is driving us crazy.” In terms of Valentinianism, this marks a crucial difference between Lafferty’s soteriology and Valentinian gnosis: salvation comes through concrete participation in a shared act rather than through the pneumatic’s private intellectual illumination. The Crack-jack Express—a locomotive and a hundred howling, flaming, material cars—carries everyone willing to board, regardless of pneumatic certification. In Lafferty’s private symbol system, Carackjack is one of the figurations of Christ, though explaining this would take us too far afield; for some background, see “Hands of the Potter.” Notice what happens when the horn reaches full power in the faculty lounge. Each Archon identifies it differently. Lafferty writes: “It's Josue's horn!” Professor Diller moaned, “and all the walls are going down.” “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.” “It's Triton's horn,” Lustlife warned, “and it roils the deepest waters. If it wakes up some of those things, then we are dead.” “It's Peter Piper's horn-pipe,” Under-professor Quickshanks jittered. “Are Gabriel and Duke Josue and Cromwell and Peter Piper all the same? Is Peter Piper Peter?” “It's the Horn of Plenty,” said Catherine Cromwell simply. “Even smart people should be able to see that.” The parenthetical that soon follows—“no, none of these were the same, they were all different fellows”—is typological in the Catholic sense. Each figure is a historical or mythological type whose horn action foreshadows and partially instantiates the horn’s pleromic fulfilment, which only the antitype fulfills. Typology preserves the distinctness of the type, with the connection to the antitype being one of foreshadowing rather than mere resemblance. Their convergence at the Rat-catcher Ramble, planted in the opening scene when the ruddy young man “whistled a few bars of Rat-catcher Ramble soundlessly” before Cromwell has even spoken, shows these earlier manifestations gathering toward fulfillment at the moment of climax when all the horns sound. Anwalt’s breakdown is narratively significant. When he hears the horn, he identifies it with the horn of Gabriel. That is the cluster of images that draws on the Lord descending from heaven with the trumpet of God from 1 Thessalonians 4:16, the angels blowing trumpets in Revelation, and Gabriel's association with end-time messages, grounded in the Book of Daniel. In short, Anwalt recognizes that the entire basis of the commission is in danger. Hamelin College’s authority was always derivative and provisional. It was part of the Powers and Principalities that exercised over a Kenoma and was always both temporal and temporary. The eschatological moment makes that provisionality obvious. Catherine, by contrast, hears the Horn of Plenty, and she does so with zero theological sophistication. She is Sophia restored. She is just happy with the in-rushing fullness of the Pleroma. Her response is available to anyone not invested in the narrow world’s categories: the horn of judgment is the horn of abundance, is the horn of the piper calling one to salvation, is the horn of battle, and so forth. So, a big question. Who is Cromwell? Impossible to say for certain, but part of the answer, I think, can be assembled from Anwalt’s attempt to diminish him. “Crom means crooked in all the old tongues, so Cromwell is the well-crooked man. He blows the crooked horn, the cromie horn, the crumbled horn of child-scripture. His journey into the infinite is no more than a crooked mile.” In the Celtic languages, crom means bent, stooped, crooked. It appears in Crom Cruach, the pre-Christian Irish idol, and in place names across Ireland, wherever the land curves. Cromwell is the crooked well: it reaches water by an unapproved route. A well is a crack in the earth’s surface, driven down to the aquifer below. The name, therefore, describes what he is: the crack through which what lies beneath the narrow world rises. Those cracks lead to the waters of salvation. There is room for debate about whether Cromwell is a firguation of Christ (I think he is on one level), but I more strongly incline to the view that he is a version of St. Peter. Quickshanks’s question—“Is Peter Piper Peter?”—is never answered. The he that Anwalt fears (“end of things”) is an amphiboly: it is Gabe blowing the trumpet, but it is also Christ come to judge. We aren’t there yet. But if the apostle entrusted with the keys of the kingdom becomes the horn-blower who pipes people through the cracks, then the institution whose proper role is liberation is the Church. Hamelin College is a counter-Church, a corruption: the Garden Guard commission co-opting the Church’s institutional role in time, the arrogation of Truth, something like the church of the world, what the story calls Guardianship, connected to the Powers and Principalities. Anwalt sees himself as its prince, with the full implications of that. There is much more to say about this intricate story, but this post is probably already testing your patience, so I will close by saying where I think it leaves a reader. By the story’s end, the pseudo-Archons (pseudo because this story is open spin) are living with the consequence of what they chose, fitted to the shape of that choice: they bottled others, and now they are bottled. Lafferty writes: There are seven persons who instruct in the Special Studies School of Hamelin College. They instruct all day, and they try to do it well, they have so much to make up for (they proved to be inept guards on one assignment). But when the day is over, they do not go to their proper homes and families. Instead, they must shrink themselves and go into the narrow glass prison of the first Hemisphere, and they must stay there ‘til morning light. They do not have happy home lives. It is an ironic ending for those who do not escape the Gnostic prison house. They remain in the institution, still teaching, still trying to do it well. This is adjacent to the tidy Valentinian ending in which the pneumatics ascend, the Kenoma is sublimed, and the Demiurge is abandoned to the deficiency he made, though there is some of that. What we get is monitory. The Archons can still make us think the world is smaller than it is, even if they are punished like fallen angels, frozen into what they are by what they chose.

Drumm Booklet 19 Lafferty’s “Slippery” is a good example of how Lafferty can be both light-hearted and subtly moralizing. The moralizing here is lightly applied. Roy Mega and Austro develop a friction-destroying mist called “Slippery-Gip,” which unleashes chaos. Austro delights in the way everything slides about uncontrollably, and he plans to blackmail the world by targeting people and their possessions with this hyper-slick substance, derived from super-glycerine. General Gamaliel and his team arrive to stop him, and the general unveils a counterplot that endangers Austro’s kindred on the Guna Slopes of Africa. Faced with the threat to the Australopithecines , of whom there are exactly ninety-nine, Austro backs down and abandons the plan, though he still tries to profit from it. Where is the moral dimension? Slippery-Gip unsticks. It “gyps” people out of having what should be theirs. When it does this, all the unspoken social, moral, and physical rules that hold culture together are put at risk. In the story, Lafferty gives us an astonishing catalogue of goods that slide free, making their ordinary moral affordances impossible. Here, unlike in most Men Who Knew Everything  stories, Austro is a moral primitive. Only empathy brings him back into the space of moral reasons, and even then, he tries to cash in on the failure of his blackmail scheme by creating stock options. That, of course, is itself a moral critique.

Rock Candy Patent Drawing, 1881 There are quite a few reasons for thinking about Lafferty not as a science fiction writer but as a writer who wrote science fiction, from the way he got started in the field to the ideas that interested him and how he approached them. But one of the strongest is exposition. He was ingenious with it. He also seemed frustrated by how it typically plays out in the genre with the dreaded infodump, which is why he writes dialogue that is so often counter to what we take to be naturalistic dialogue in fiction. Perhaps the purest example of Lafferty’s attitude toward exposition is found in "Seven-Day Terror" ( If , March 1962). The story follows nine-year-old Clarence Willoughby and his little sister, Clarissa. Clarence invents a homemade “disappearer” that makes neighborhood objects vanish for seven days, though the seven-day part is withheld from the reader until the end of the story. At first, his mother, Myra, and his siblings watch with curiosity, but when Clarence keeps making fireplugs disappear, flooding the streets, things spiral out of control. City officials, scientists, and law enforcement are powerless to intervene. Then the focus shifts to eight-year-old Clarissa, who knows how to restore everything. It’s sometimes listed among Lafferty’s best stories, but it stands apart in its tidiness. To me, it reads more like slick fantasy than typical Lafferty—except for one line: "I was going to make a thirteen-year one, but for that you have to color the ends with the blood from a little boy’s heart, and Cyril cried every time I tried to make a good cut.” The story’s simplicity and comedy are framed by two moments of deliberately subversive exposition, Lafferty’s commentary on exposition itself. The first belongs to Clarence at the beginning of the story, the second to Clarissa at its conclusion. The siblings are, of course, etymological doublets. The story begins with the following lines: “Is there anything you want to make disappear?” Clarence Willoughby asked his mother. “A sink full of dishes is all I can think of. How will you do it “I just built a disappearer. All you do is cut the other end out of a beer can. Then you take two pieces of red cardboard with peepholes in the middle and fit them in the ends. You look through the peepholes and blink. Whatever you look at will disappear.” When Clarence’s mom, Myra Willoughby, asks how the device works, Clarence replies, “Yes. You take a beer can with both ends cut out and put in two pieces of cardboard. Then you blink.” Is this how Lafferty sees exposition in science fiction? The answer is likely yes: Lafferty takes a mid-story potshot at clumsy genre work through a trio of eminent scientists. “This transcends the metaphysical. It impinges on the quantum continuum. In some way it obsoletes Boff,” said Dr. Velikof Vonk. But Lafferty’s buildup to a fantastic inversion of conventional exposition comes at the end. Instead of a structured infodump, Clarissa asks for a gold watch, a hammer, a list of chemicals, a yard of black velvet, and a pound of rock candy. Readers are led to believe that these items will somehow be used to restore what has disappeared. The typical narrative strategy would have Clarissa use them and then explain it to a character like the Mayor, who stands in for the reader receiving the infodump. Instead, Lafferty gives us this exchange: “I shudder, too, Clarissa. But tell me, why did you want the chemicals?” “For my chemistry set.” “And the black velvet?” “For doll dresses.” “And the pound of rock candy “How did you ever get to be mayor of this town if you have to ask questions like that? What do you think I wanted the rock candy for “One last question,” said the mayor. “Why did you smash my gold watch with the hammer?” “Oh,” said Clarissa, “that was for dramatic effect.” As fun as this is, Lafferty rejects such straightforward tricks to subvert exposition in his novels. Perhaps the most rewarding example is Epiktistes in Arrive at Easterwine (1971), a novel largely written in the expository mode, yet narrated by a protagonist whose exposition is frustrated by our failures as human readers. In effect, Epikt positions us as the counterpart to the imbecilic Mayor in "Seven-Day Terror": "Should these journals ever fall into the hands of human persons, they will encounter great difficulties in much of them. For other intelligent machines, there should be no difficulties here." ". . . there are no tokens in human imagery (and few in our own) to express these fiercer things, even though they are human things." "People might not be able to understand the shattering bit about the night of assault and torture...Human persons...do not understand pattern; and they do not understand that its deformity is more than screw and rack and torture machine." ". . . humans are not instantaneous as we are; that they are always putting one thing after another." "People, human persons, you are not hopeless . . . Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all . . . You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of." ". . . it is hard for an intense-speed realizing-machine like myself to explain things to human persons." "So there are whole episodes in these High Journals which the humans concerned will swear did not happen at all." ". . . how frustrating it is to serve such inconsequent Middle Folk." Where this differs most from "Seven-Day Terror" is in the nature of the imbecility. Hence the impatience. It is no longer about gold watches and rock candy but about the soul. And Lafferty pushes this to exhilarating heights: "People, human persons, you are not hopeless, you are not really the nothing things that you have appeared to each other this long time. Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all. You set me up, out of your blind need, to show yourselves to you. Then look! You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of. Understand these wild creatures that are yourselves. Never has there been offered to your vision such fascinating things as are you, and you have not seen them. See them now. See them right. Tigers and giants and kings; witches and primordials, snakes and loaded prey; incandescent fellahin in their true Cogsworthian and Shiplapian forms, and the bush named Brusca, the love-wood, the Burning Bush; insufferable elegants who take it as high as it will humanly go, Corn oil from a dead man and the Audifaxian premise, aye, and the Diogenestic conclusion; and the earlier and more elegant bush with the fuller name, Labrusca, the wild-wine." For Lafferty, genre-based exposition usually is caught up in staging rhetorical battles that stretch genre and pit comprehension against mystery. Epistemic failure in receiving exposition is often his point.

“But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”— St. Augustine, Confessions Hark, hark! The dogs do bark. The beggars are coming to town. Some in rags, and some in jags, and some in velvet gowns. “And Some In Velvet Gowns” is exospheric, as high-concept as Lafferty gets. But its height comes from somewhere. That can be misleading, though, because its most obvious bloodline runs through Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), and Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938)—all part of the Capgras-syndrome branch of science fiction and fantasy. That’s undoubtedly the generic line of consanguinity, but it won’t make the story easier to digest. So let’s try something bigger, a wider family that includes changelings, gods in disguise, and all of Lafferty’s own fetches. This approach gets us closer because the story has ancient roots in spiritual infestation. Yes, this is one of Lafferty’s Gadarene swine songs, closer to St. Anthony in the desert than to The Thing 's research station in Antarctica. Why? It’s pretty simple. This is an allegory about sin, specifically about how venial sins, left unrecognized, dull the soul’s capacity for charity and leave it open to graver ones. What remains is a hollowed person ( ST I–II, q.88). Not that the story preaches. Not at all. Perhaps the closest analogue I know—one that shows how personhood can be erased yet leave behind a terrifying trace—is didactic too. It comes from a writer utterly unlike Lafferty, though born the same year: William S. Burroughs. It’s his “The Man Who Taught His Asshole To Talk,” also about identity invasion. That classic Burroughs routine ends with the lines, "For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk." I find Lafferty's Elmer to be even more sinister: “I will take you over, Fulgence,” the alien Elmer Fairfoot said. “You are the closest thing to an intelligent one in your group, and I in mine. We will be in accord. And I'll listen to you, down under there where you'll be, quite often. Maybe as much as a half minute a day.” Oh, get off it, you go too far , someone might say. This is a light alien invasion story about aliens with space paint . That won't wash. The story makes little sense unless it is read as a severe allegory about sin, just as Burroughs’s routine makes little sense unless it is read as a savage allegory about how the unthought in language can ruin us. That’s also why I think "And Some In Velvet Gowns" would probably leave genre readers confused or cold if they aren’t attuned to Lafferty's approach to religious allegory. Perhaps it is worth pointing out that Lafferty has his own version of Burroughs’s routine. It appears in Past Master (1968), where even there it is bound up with sin and privation. “No. I am winning easily on Astrobe,” Ouden said. “I have my own creatures going for me. Your own mind and its imagery weakens; it is myself putting out the flame. Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me. Every lie you tell, I win. But it is in the tired lies you tell that I win most toweringly.” Note that the diminution of self in each Lafferty case is connected to the nature of being and goodness. Ens et bonum convertuntur. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists, and goodness and being are thus inseparable, though conceptually distinct. Of course, goodness isn’t on the William S. Burroughs menu, and I read his allegory as perhaps saying something unintentional about his own artistic narcissism. Why does this matter? Because Lafferty’s horror does not reduce the human subject to a physical trace, as body-snatcher plots and grotesque satires do, but exposes the terror of spiritual displacement—a science-fictional figure for a theological reality. The story transpires in a courtroom. Judge Daniel Doomdaily presides over the hearing of six aliens, shackled and accused of plotting a takeover of the town. The aliens are masters of illusion, disrupting the proceedings with tricks and slippery claims. They appear chained; their number changes but doesn't seem to change because of their paint. They themselves have no substance. As Doomdaily prosecutes them (with the help of six attesting citizens and two aides), members of the human side are summoned one by one to a vesting room. Each returns altered, and the line between human and alien is reconfigured. In the final scene, the judge himself is transformed. The takeover is complete. The hearing, it turns out, is only a formality, a public ritual for the victors. I’m tempted to extrapolate more than I will, but I'll stay close to the more approachable allegorical elements. First, the story squares with Catholic teachings on the nature of sin. Initially, the aliens are thought to be “nice folks.” They’re admired; as one citizen, Sam Joplin, admits, “They look like humans until you really look at them. And they’re such nice folks!” On closer look, their “gaudy clothes” are revealed to cover an “abomination.” Lafferty isn’t being subtle. The judge himself points out their deception: “All they have is gaudy clothes to cover their abomination.” This could not be more traditional: sin appears attractive on the surface; that is its disguise. “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). Or, as Shakespeare put it, “a goodly apple rotten at the heart.” Lafferty takes the body-snatcher plot and makes it theological: evil gets invited not because of its horror but because of its meretricious charm. As Thelma Brightbrass admits, when her husband was replaced, he became wittier. She “never had so much fun in my life, for about a week.” This is also a story about bodies, and a second central theme is the contrast between false embodiment and incarnation. The aliens themselves admit that their physical forms are illusory. Their lack of substance becomes a refrain. They use paint to simulate everything from chains to clothing. Elmer Fairfoot says, “I’m not wearing shoes . . . I just have my feet painted to look like it.” A digression on the name Elmer Fairfoot before returning to the matter of bodies. A common device in Lafferty's fiction is the etymological name game, in which one part of a character's name holds a crucial clue while the other serves as flavorful misdirection. Here, Elmer is the flavor element, Fairfoot informational, an allusion to one of the best-known New Testament quotations of the Old. Isaiah 52:7 gives the image of a messenger racing across the mountains, his feet called beautiful because they carry the news of God’s deliverance, peace, and reign to a weary people. St. Paul takes this and, in Romans 10:15, applies it to the gospel, saying that the true good news is Christ’s victory over sin and death, now proclaimed to all nations: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, Who bring glad tidings of good things!” For both Isaiah and Paul, the attention is on the joy and necessity of the messenger: without someone sent to announce God’s salvation, the people cannot hear or believe. But when the message comes, it remakes despair into hope and exile into restoration. Lafferty has Elmer Fairfoot travesty just this: “Why should you want to avoid it?” Elmer asked. “Why do you object? These migrations are common. You’ve taken over yourself. That little deformity inside each of you, that person whom you sometimes call your subconscious, is what is left of a person who was supplanted by you. He is the one who, looking at it one way, had title to your body before you did.” Just as Elmer voices the parasite’s logic of displacement, Augustine articulates from within what it feels like when the enemy claims the will itself. “The enemy held my will, and of it he had made a chain and bound me. For out of a perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity. By these links, as it were, forged together (which is why I called it a chain) a harsh slavery held me fast. But that new will which had begun in me, freely to worship you and to enjoy you, O God, my only certain joy, was not yet able to overcome my former ingrained willfulness. Thus my two wills—the old and the new, the carnal and the spiritual—were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration.” ( Conf. VIII.5.10) Both Lafferty and Augustine depict an intensely spiritual claustrophobia. Returning to bodies, Bridget Upjones sits on a fairground scale and weighs “nothing, not anything at all.” When directly confronted about their bodies, the alien Delphina explains the alienating nature and the alien need for human hosts: “Bodies.” “Aren't those bodies that you have there?” “Not good ones. They haven't any substance. We had to leave substance behind the way we traveled.” It seems almost silly to point out something as obvious as the weight Christianity places on the mystery of the Incarnation, in which Christ took on flesh, uniting body and soul perfectly and substantially. But some readers will miss this dimension of the story. The aliens invert Incarnation. They are spirit-like beings that seem to incarnate but actually create subtractions of humanity. Lafferty sets up a situation in which the counterfeit embodiment of the aliens cannot help but draw a contrast, in the Catholic mind, with sacramental anthropology, which affirms the body as real, meaningful, and good. We also have a ton of judgment imagery, particularly through the character of Judge Doomdaily, who presides over a courtroom filled with thunderous condemnation. Even his name is a parody of the Dies Irae. He thinks he is going to expose false appearances, calling witnesses and naming the corruption before him. He confidently bellows, “Look at them! Look at them!” Then he himself gets absorbed by the evil he tries to condemn. He is easily deceived, becoming confused by the very illusions he seeks to condemn: “In chains? I never ordered any chains . . . Where did they come from?” This is just traditional Christian allegory: human judgment, without the aid of divine grace, is inadequate. When Doomdaily is summoned to the “vesting room,” and when he comes back, he is one of them, saying, “But now we can function again.” The reader knows his faculties of judgment have been destroyed. Human authority cannot defeat evil on this level; only one Judge has that power. Finally, "And Some In Velvet Gowns" is an apocalypse, an event that affects every town, but it’s not one of Lafferty’s explosive apocalypses. It's a sleeping sickness. It arrives through complacency and lapses of vigilance. It’s like the alien Delphina’s voice, which to an “analytical ear, would have sounded horribly unhuman,” but to a “sleepy and inattentive ear . . . sounded delightfully young-woman human.” Some readers will see this as just a story about aliens who use alien paint. But it is, pretty clearly, an allegory. Does it work? I'm not sure. I’ve emphasized its treatment of sin. It’s a little more than that. If it works, it works best as an allegory about Catholic anxieties regarding sin. These include worries about discernment in seeing through its glamour; the challenges of understanding human embodiment, which rejects false flesh in favor of the sarx of the Incarnation; the fallibility of human judgment when it acts without grace; and the apocalyptic danger of surrendering to evil when vigilance fails. I do wonder whether this one throws off many non-Christian Lafferty fans.

“Old Foot Forgot” is, like much of Lafferty’s work, a funny, strange, and poignant philosophical tale disguised as science fiction. Unlike yesterday’s “The Rod and the Ring,” however, it is highly approachable. It wrestles with a longing for personal identity after death, and with those who insist that the longing is misguided. In the West, this is Heraclitus instructing us that we dissolve into the cosmic Logos; Parmenides insisting that distinctions are illusions and only Being-as-One is real; Plotinus teaching that our highest destiny is absorption into the One, individuality transcended. It is Meister Eckhart’s call for the “little self” to die, the fana ’ of the Sufi mystics, the system of Spinoza, and the half-mystical pessimism of Schopenhauer. Here, Lafferty takes aim at the fashionable spiritual syntheses of his time, filtered through writers like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, and given fresh cultural currency by the Beatles’ 1967 journey to India . There are memorable characters in the story. The first is Dookh-Doctor Drague himself, our clinic-weaving protagonist. He receives his first "genuine spherical alien patient," a sphairikos named Krug Sixteen who suffers from an impossible ailment. Though the sphairikoi are "total and indiscriminate entities" who are "never ill," Krug is different. He is tormented by a phantom limb., a single pseudopod from his youth that, despite being long absorbed, now "screams and moans constantly." Is this just an exacerbated case of phantom limb syndrome? This case distracts the Dookh-Doctor from his own "happy news": he is dying, a fate his culture celebrates as a joyful return to the "oneness that is greater than self." As Krug describes the pain of a forgotten part crying out for its identity, the Dookh-Doctor begins to see an analogy to his own impending dissolution.   As his death approaches, the Dookh-Doctor finds he lacks the proper attitude for his "great synthesis." Lay Priest Migma urges him to welcome becoming an indistinguishable part of the "great stuffiness," but Drague rebels against the blessed obliteration. He develops a "sneaky feeling that he would rather live than die," defiantly stating, "I want me to be me. I will refuse forever to surrender myself." The priest’s final argument, that a brief life is like a temporary pseudopod that shouldn't wish to be remembered, is what settles it. Seeing himself in Krug's lost foot, Drague flees, vowing, "I'll remember it a billion years for the billion who forget."   On his last night, after ritually burning his home, Drague runs through the dark to find the one hope Krug had mentioned: a specialist named Torchy Twelve, who possesses a "special form of the twinkling salve." He finds the hut and cries out his desire not for oblivion, but for a slumber that preserves his sense of self. He wants something to send him into a "kind and everlasting slumber," but with one crucial condition: "But I want it to be me who slumbers." The story concludes as the expert Torchy invites him in, promising, "This person, though promiscuous, is expert. I help you—" The word promiscuous  is an astonishing lexical choice on which to end this story, which begins with Luke 4:23—“Physician, heal thyself”—and ends with Matthew 11:28–30: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”   Term Language of Origin Original Meaning Significance Text Dookh Sanskrit/Pali ( duḥkha/dukkha ) "Suffering," "pain," "unsatisfactoriness." Drague is a "Dookh-Doctor," healer of spiritual suffering, directly linking the story’s conflict to the First Noble Truth. “It is good for a Dookh-Doctor to have a different patient sometimes.” Sphairikos Greek ( sphaira / sphairikos ) Sphaira  = "sphere"; sphairikos = "spherical." The aliens are spheres, symbolizing wholeness and cosmic unity. “The sphairikos rolled or pushed itself in… a large translucent rubbery ball of fleeting colors.” Nostos Greek ( nostos ) "Homecoming," "return." Repurposed as a ritual of burning/renewal, signifying metaphysical return to oneness. “This was all symbol of the great nostos, the returning.” Pseudopod Greek ( pseudo-pous ) "False foot." Becomes metaphor for the individual self, transient yet suffering. “It is one of my pseudopods… It protests, it cries, it wants to come back.” Moira Greek ( moira ) "Fate," "destiny." Archetypal name of the lay sister who sets events into motion. “Dookh-Doctor, it is a sphairikos patient,” Lay Sister Moira… Migma Greek ( migma ) "A mixture." The lay priest’s name reflects doctrinal syncretism or blending into unity. “So Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. tried to inculcate the right attitude in him.” Drague English (Allusion) Hints at "drag" or "dragoon." Suggests the burden of mortality and coerced acceptance of death. “The happy news about himself was that he was a dying man…” Arktos Greek ( arktos ) "Bear." Name of alien “jokers” and disease Drague suffers from. “He was dying of an arktos disease, one never fatal to the arktos themselves.” Speir-sky Irish Gaelic ( spéir ) + Greek/Latin ( sphaera ) Spéir  = sky; sound suggests “sphere.” Circularity and cosmic oneness. “He slept that renewal night under the speir-sky.” Quasi-Gaelic Terms  ( ull , piorra , innuin ) Irish Gaelic Ull  = apple; piorra  = pear; innuin ~ onion. Ground human culture in archaic, earthy language. “He ate innuin or ull or piorra when they were in season.” Anātman / Anattā Sanskrit/Pali "No-self," "no permanent soul." The sphairikoi doctrine: “There is no identity.” “There is no identity. But this one cries to come back…” Samsāra Sanskrit/Pali "Cyclic existence," rebirth. Mirrored in the endless pseudopod cycle. “We push them out and we draw them back… millions of times.” Nirvāṇa Sanskrit/Pali "Extinguishing," "liberation." Echoed in the ideal of “blessed obliteration,” which Drague rejects. “Pray for blessed obliteration. I will not pray that I be happily lost forever.” Tanhā Sanskrit/Pali "Craving," "thirst," "attachment." Forgotten foot’s bhava-tanhā drives its suffering. “It protests, it cries… Oh, the shrieking!” Karuṇā Sanskrit/Pali "Compassion." Embodied in Torchy Twelve’s solution, absent in dogma. “I believe it will reach my forgotten foot… and send it into kind and everlasting slumber.” Upāya Sanskrit/Pali "Skillful means." Torchy Twelve’s salve functions as compassionate expediency that eases fear—also resonant with a sacramental anointing  that consoles the dying. “Torchy Twelve… exudes the special stuff in abundance… solves and dissolves everything.” Torchy Twelve English (symbolic: “torch” + apostolic “twelve”) Torch  = light/fire; twelve  evokes apostolic fullness. Catholic element: Torchy acts like a minister of mercy at the hour of death—her “special salve” parallels the Anointing of the Sick/Last Rites: an oil that consoles and confirms personal identity  (against dissolving monism). The “torch” (light) and “twelve” (apostolicity) amplify Catholic resonance. “Torchy Twelve, help me… the special salve that solves the last problem, and makes it know that it is always itself that is solved.” / “It will know that it is itself that slumbers, and that will be bearable.” Salve  (wordplay) Latin/English Latin salve  = “hail”; English salve  = healing ointment. Lafferty’s running “salve” motif carries Catholic overtones—think chrism/oil of the sick and even a punny echo of Salve Regina . Torchy’s special salve isn’t the sphairikoi’s dissolving goo; it’s a merciful anointing that steadies the self for death. “We are covered with the twinkling salve; it is one-third of our bulk.” / “It is the old old salve, and it’s lost its twinkle.”