East of Laughter, Page 2

  Like the computer of her husband Hilary, that of Jane Chantal Ardri was also inhabited by a sprite that was kindred to a poltergeist, but less obtrusively adolescent. And the two sprites were excellent friends. The two people with their computers and with the two infestations of their computers all lived together in one happy household.

  Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri also had five children of their own flesh and blood, good, pleasant, smart children. They will be mentioned without hesitation if ever there is a reason to mention them again. The names of the children (they were named by the computers: neither Hilary nor Jane Chantal was good at naming children) were Hilary Henry, Jane Chanteclaire, Marie Rieuse, Anne Auclaire, and Urban Urchin. Urban Urchin, the squeaking wheel, got a certain amount of attention from them simply because he was the squeaking wheel. And the eldest of them, Hilary Henry, was their ‘man in New York’ and so they maintained a sort of business relationship with him.

  ‘If you ever meet a happy artist in any of the arts, fall back and regroup,’ a brilliant critic in the late twentieth century has written. ‘Fall back and regroup, or back out of it any way you can, for you will have stumbled into an unreal world.’

  But the fuzzily-beautiful and fuzzily-avid Jane Chantal Ardri was a happy artist in all the arts. This wasn’t the first or the second indication the Ardris had that they lived in an unreal world, without difficulty or complication. But it was another of those most telling indications.

  3. SOLOMON IZZERSTED. He was the only other one of the intimate Group of Twelve who lived in the middle of North America, right on the same continent with Hilary and Jane Chantal. He lived in Broken Arrow itself, only fifty miles from the Ardris on their lake. And very often he stayed with them in the Ardri house.

  “Solomon is very hard to like, but he is easy to love,” Jane Chantal said of him, and it was true. But there were really two persons involved under the legal name of Solomon Izzersted, and there was some doubt whether they occupied one or two bodies.

  John’s (and Solomon’s also, we suppose) father being dead and their mother still incarcerated in a Bedlam Hospital, John decided that he must reveal the true state of affairs to some close friend or friends. He revealed it to his friends Hilary and Jane Chantal Ardri.

  “Gentlemen,” Jane Chantal said a week later, after the shock of the disclosure had worn off her a little, “I just believe that I will be able to dehorn this dilemma and improve the circumstances for all of us. Tune us out now, John, and I will speak privately with Solomon for a while.”

  “All right,” said the ventriloquist and world-class mathematician whose stage name was John Barkley Towntower. “But watch him, Jane Chantal. He’s tricky.”

  “Solomon,” Jane Chantal said to that ugly and obnoxious and stridently-voiced growth on John Barkley Towntower’s belly. “I realize intuitively that you are a greater mathematician than even world-class John Barkley your primero ego. Why are you modestly hiding this light of yours under a bushel when you are not modestly hiding much else? And how did you learn the mathematics when John never sets the texts where you can read them nor even performs the calculations where you can see them?”

  “The fact is, Jane Chantal, that John has many juvenile traits,” Solomon spoke. “Really, he’s still just a big kid. When he is intent in study, he accompanies even his silent reading (and not all his reading is silent; sometimes he shouts and becomes quite excited when he is into something that is thought-provoking), he accompanies even his silent reading with perturbations of his throat and belly muscles, which is to say that he verbalizes silently but tellingly. And so I have learned to interpret everything important that he reads, that he writes, and that he reckons out in his unorthodox equations. So I know all the mathematics that he knows, and all further mathematics that I have developed in the privacy of my own world. I’m the only one I know to whom the phrase ‘he’s all head’ would really apply, but would it be a compliment in my case? So in all truth it is myself and not he who is the world-class mathematician. And yet there are things in his massive and quirky head that I will need if I am to become the most consummate mathematician in the world.”

  “What if you two should become working associates, without infringing on the areas of your mutual hatreds, of course? What would be the result?”

  “I’d, we’d be the best in the world, Jane Chantal,” said weird Solomon Izzersted. “Oh sure, Jane, we’ll do it. We’ll do it if you can get that stubborn dolt to agree.”

  They did it. They became the greatest advocacy mathematician in the world. And they did become working associates. They even became almost-friends. And Solomon, that ugly and miserable bump or growth, revealed himself as a rather big-minded personality. All that had been needed, perhaps, had been for somebody to show Solomon a spot of love. And Jane Chantal Ardri had done that.

  No, no that couldn’t possibly have been the way it was! Not with Solomon, not with any of them that’s entirely too sticky to be the way it was. All that bump Solomon Izzersted had really needed was for two more numina to form a tri-numinal equation with him. One of those additional numina was his own personality fragment who was stage-named John Barkley Towntower. And the other of the numina was Jane Chantal Ardri, the all-arts artist and the all-preys hunter.

  There are persons who say that mathematics is an abstract affair and as such is independent of circumstance and environment. These persons go so far as to say that if a truly mathematical equation or statement is true at sea-level it will also be true on the mountain-top. And they are wrong to say this. That is like saying that a syllogism in logic is as true on the mountain-top as on the seashore. But if an equation is true at the seashore, then it is either slightly less true or slightly more true on the mountain top.

  The ultimate mathematics that Solomon Izzersted worked out with his bulkier personality fragment John Barkley Towntower could not be true in a particular environment. It could only be true in a generalized environment. And every generalized environment would be one in which the World of Record was unreal.

  “Oh how many more nails are we going to hammer into that tired old lid to the coffin of a real world!” Jane Chantal Ardri cried out once.

  The main or alpha body had been born and baptized as John Barkley Towntower, and this was still his stage name. He was a ventriloquist, though he now performed less often than he once had. But he had had his name legally changed to Solomon Izzersted, this at the insistence of the Solomon Izzersted fragment of him. But Solomon Izzersted was also the name, both the real and the stage name, of the ventriloquist’s figure that John Barkley Towntower operated.

  It was, in fact, the ventriloquist’s figure Solomon Izzersted (the stronger-willed of the two persons in the association) who compelled John Barkley Towntower legally to change his name to Solomon Izzersted, though permitting him to keep John Barkley Towntower as his stage name, but not for his name in any non-proscenial context either public or private. Should the John Barkley Towntower name ever be used in any non-theatrical way, the belly voice (Solomon was the belly voice and person) would immediately begin that horrible screaming “My name is Solomon Izzersted! My name is Solomon Izzersted!”

  It was as a cover for the Solomon Other-Person that John Barkley Towntower had learned the ventriloquists’ art while still in grammar school, and he had continued it through high school and his brilliant college days, and into his dual professions: for Solomon Izzersted, besides being one of the great stage ventriloquists of North America and the world, was also one of the great (two of the great?) advocacy mathematicians of the world.

  Lector Delectus, if you are standing up, sit down for a moment. If you are alone, call somebody to be with you until a strange thing has been narrated to you. People do sometimes faint in the presence of sheer horror, and in doing so they often injure themselves. And people do sometimes come unhinged if they face diabolism uncompanioned.

  John Barkley Towntower was born with a dark and sullen growth on his belly. When John was very small
, this growth was very, very small, but already it looked like a miniature human head and face. And soon it became clear that the growth was more precocious than was John himself. It learned to talk before John did. At first, for a long time, the only words that it said were “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, and it spoke this always in a horrible, screaming, rasping voice. This puzzled Mr. and Mrs. Towntower for they had no Solomon and no Izzersted in any of their antecedents.

  Mrs. Towntower the mother of little John Barkley Towntower (and apparently of the shocking growth that called itself Solomon Izzersted also) tried to kill the growth with a hatchet, but she came closer to killing John Barkley than Solomon. Mrs. Towntower was then incarcerated in Eastern Oklahoma Hospital, and she is still there thirty-eight years later. John Barkley, soon after he learned to talk with his own voice, also learned to do the Solomon Izzersted voice with his own mouth and throat. And he made, when he was four years old and just starting to grade school, the first of the little Solomon Izzersted mannequins which he wore and manipulated on his hand like a glove. And John Barkley and Solomon Izzersted became an established ventriloquists’ act by the time that John was six years old. They played not only in their own school but also children’s hospital wards about town, and for all sorts of parties. And they were good. People, they were good! And they got better. And whenever, in the midst of an act or at another time and place, the furious and ugly little head of Solomon Izzersted himself would pop out through John’s shirt-front and the furious voice would shout “My name is Solomon Izzersted, my name is Solomon Izzersted”, why, it was thought to be only a part of the act, the best part of it. And the other kids, completely enraptured by the display, would cry out to John “How do you do it, how do you do it?” And John would say self-depreciatingly “Oh, it’s just a little trick that I worked up.”

  (Dismiss your companion now if you wish, Lector. If you have survived, then you have survived the most horrible part of the symbiotic account.)

  John and Solomon made a sort of truce with each other, though they never felt real fraternal love each for each. John became, by choice, a fat boy (do you remember those early Milky Way candy bars?) and then a fat man; and he kept Solomon pretty well smothered in his rolls of belly fat. But Solomon was a ham, and he loved to act. It was always his live voice now that was central to the act. When John was through college and was established (to the small but intense circle of people who matter) as one of the great mathematicians of the world, Solomon still compelled the arrangement that they should spend six months of each year touring with their fabulous ventriloquist act. People who didn’t understand said that it was a shame that one of the greatest mathematicians in history should have to put on a variety stage act to eke out a living. But that wasn’t the case at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Camel’s Nose

  ‘The trouble with giants is not their stealing and eating whole herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and leaving the people destitute. Worse than this is their wanton destruction. They come with their long elephant ears and hear everything. They come with their long moist camel noses that can smell every detail and they learn every private thing about the people of a place. In the time of my grandfather a giant came to a deme in Lydia and spied on all the people with his long ears and nose. Then he wrote all the details about all the people on a piece of clay. After he had dried the clay in the sun, he laughed and then broke the piece of clay into very small pieces with a hammer. And all the people in that place were thereby broken into small pieces, and thus he killed them wantonly.’

   — OF WANTON GIANTS, Erasthenos of Patmos.

  ‘Atrox Fabulinus, the Roman Rabelais, once broke off the account of his hero Raphaelus in the act of opening a giant goose egg to fry it in an iron skillet of six yards’ span. Fabulinus interrupted the action with these words: “Here it becomes necessary to recount to you the history of the world up to this point.”

  ‘After Fabulinus had given the history of the world up to that point, he took up the action of Raphaelus once more. It happened that the giant goose egg contained a nubile young girl. This revelation would have been startling to a reader who had not just read the history of the world up to that point: which history, being Fabulinian in its treatment, prepared him for the event.’

   — THE FALL OF ROME, Auctore.

  It is plain by now that Atrox Fabulinus has intruded his slurpy wet Camel’s nose into the tent of this account and soon will own the place.

  And now we come to one more person of the Group of Twelve:

  4. LAUGHTER-LYNN CASEMENT. Laughter-Lynn has close ties with this episode of the Roman Rabelais Atrox Fabulinus, because she remembers emerging from a giant goose egg. She remembers emerging from it as a nubile young girl, as a nubile young girl who, however, never married.

  Laughter-Lynn was a North Sea person. She was born (her birth was sixteen years before her emerging from the giant goose egg, a thing which will be explained by-and-by) in Dublin in the Gaire Castle of her mother. But after there had been trouble and division in her family, she lived half of every year in Gaire Castle in Ireland and half of every year with her father on the Dutch-Friesian Island of Terschelling in the Town of Oosterend which was within the sound of both the Inner Wadden Sea and the Outer Wadden Sea, for Terschelling Island was only a mile and a quarter wide at their place. Her father was Fernand Kabouter Casement, and the Casement family motto was: The Best of Both Worlds.

  Laughter-Lynn was given that name because of the infectious laugh that she evinced before she was twelve hours old. And yet Laughter was an old family name in her mother’s line.

  The mother of Laughter-Lynn was the Countess Maude Grogley who was born in Dublin, Ireland in the inner suburb of Lastoir de Gaire which might be Englished as East Laughter but more correctly as East of Laughter. This settlement Lastoir de Gaire, according to the daughter Laughter-Lynn Casement, was much older than Dublin which had engulfed it a few centuries ago. The people of this inner suburb were the original Irish who are older than the Irish.

  As to the Island-Friesians, according to Laughter-Lynn again and also her father Fernand Kabouter Casement, they had been (ever since the drying of the flood) sea-farers and fishers over all the shores, reefs, and banks of the North Sea. But to them the North Sea had a wider meaning than it has to most people today. To them it was all the North Atlantic from the Equator to the North Pole. These old North Sea People had founded small colonies and fisherman-villages in the Low Countries and the Germanies and Scandinavias of Europe, in England and in Lowland Scotland and Ireland, in the Amorica which is the Brittany of France, and in the America which is the North American Continent and pieces of the South. (The two places Amorica and America were sometimes confused in Ancient documents.) They founded especially in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, in the Floridas and the Mexicos and the Antilles, and in Hi Brasil. And everywhere that they set up settlements and fishermen’s villages they found that a Kabouter was already there running a store.

  “But how shall I explain my emerging from the giant goose egg sixteen years after I was born?” Laughter-Lynn Casement asked once over a video-world-conference involving the Group of Twelve. “Ah, the fact that my father’s middle name was Kabouter was part of the explanation, of course, for I am partly of the Kabouter blood. And let me also read certain outré documents into the video-world-conference record:

  “‘The Puka, the Sioga, the Goblins, the Kabouter, the Little People, the Fairies, the Lamiae, they all had their own version of the Eden Legend. A present-day Lamia of Italy (they are quite hard to interview, believe me) has told me that the founding and ornamentation of their own Eden (its name was Gaire) and their being driven out from it, all happened eleven years before the establishment and the exiling from the human Eden. And a Genesis sentence: And Cain went out from the Presence of the Lord and dwelt in the Land of Nod to the East of Eden had its echo in advance of the fact. Eden in Hebrew meant delight and it also meant
a cry of delight. And Gaire in Shelta, the language of the Tinkers as well as of the Little People, meant Laughter so they are surely aspects of the same place. On a dingy street corner in Dublin there is a bronze statuette of the Angel with the Flaming Sword which turned every way, but the every-way sword was more like a ring or a hoop; and men, not knowing what the statuette was, used to use it for a hitching post for their horses. And now, after the Automobile Century has come and gone, it is still there. And there is a tram in Dublin that bears the destination sign of Gaire or Laughter. But the only place now owning that name at the tram turn-around is a pub.’

  OBSERVATIONS OF THINGS BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD, Countess Maude Grogley Laughter-Liffey.

  “She was my mother, a very intelligent woman,” Laughter-Lynn explained. “Before she was married, she wrote for the Dublin newspapers and was a foreign correspondent in Italy and Palestine as well as in the Low Countries and the United States. Her word, as they say in Ireland, is as good as clay pennies. And here is another document:

  “‘Shog, plural Shoga. Old forms Siog and Sioga. The Shoga themselves were not crackpots. But wherever they appeared they were immediately surrounded by hostile crackpots who, in contrast, made the Shoga seem a little bit better and more intelligent than they really were. The crackpots made such assessments as these: