East of Laughter, Page 4

  Gorgonius always said that the whole world might be seen from his high house in the German Alps. He was working on that also, to make his vaunt true. He was a great man in glass-grinding and glass-casting, and he was the foremost man in the world in curved light. He could already see the whole world from his high house, but not yet in good resolution or detail.

  Though a vigorous and capricious and even boyish man of always youthful appearance, Gorgonius Pantera had already lived in three different centuries and soon would live in his fourth. He had already buried six wives under the floor-stones of his ornate Wife Room in his big house, and six of his daughters had already returned to the earth in foreign lands of the world. Monika Pantera was his seventh wife, and Perpetua Parisi was his seventh daughter, and both of them were special. To the Two-of-Them he had dedicated his ongoing Seventh Woman Suite for Three Hundred and Five Pianos. This, after his Archangel Suite and his Making the World Suite and his presently emerging Giant Suite was his favorite.

  Gorgonius was a strong member of the Group of Twelve which had no weak members. And as for his wife:

  8. MONIKA PANTERA. She commonly had charge of one thousand and one keys to the one thousand and one rooms of Klavierschloss or Piano Castle in which they lived. The keys were not usually needed, for Monika’s husband Gorgonius was in love with open doors banging in the wind. He thought that their big house should be fully open to the Alpine winds on all eight sides of it and that those winds should be permitted to sweep all the way through the house by whatever ways they could find. But Monika had found that it sometimes became very cold in the big house especially in the high winter months (Gorgonius would never have noticed a thing like that), so she kept a few hundred of the rooms closed and locked for her own comfort.

  There were several more rooms than the canonical one-thousand-and-one in Piano Castle, however, and these did not have conventional keys. When Monika wished to open one in particular of these special rooms (she didn’t open it often), she would first have to catch an Alpenadler (an Alpine Eagle) and then tear from its corpus its sinistral wing-bone. She would then go to the Wife Room, remove several of the stones from the floor, wake Wife Number Three from her death: and this old wife would fashion a key from the wing-bone to open the special room. But the key could be used only once.

  Whenever, in three or four years, Monika wished to go into the special room again, she must kill and unbone another Eagle, wake Wife Number Three from death again, and request a key be made of the sinistral wing-bone.

  There was still another room that could be opened only by reciting a rimed verse. Monika could relearn this verse only by waking from death Wife Number One, the first and only previous Monika, and hearing it again from her dead lips. The verse was —

  ‘Allerdings, allerdings, allerdings, all!

  Machen die Pforte auf immer fur mich!

  Weil sie aufmachen nicht, breche ich mal,

  Breche das Zimmer und breche ich dich!’

  But care must be taken in using this verse at any other door except that one door to that one room. Persons who try to open other stubborn doors with that key-verse will usually sicken and die soon afterwards. For your own health, put it out of your mind at once!

  Monika knew many things that her all-knowing husband did not know. Especially did she know the room in which Atrox Fabulinus the Old Giant sat and wrote his ever-new chapters. Oh, he had other rooms in other places where he wrote his chapters, but he did use this one room in Piano Castle also.

  Monika Pantera was remarkable in so many ways that it would take more than seven hundred pianos playing all at one time to describe all of them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Strange Cargo

  ‘In the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews are the words ‘Forget not to entertain strangers, for some have thus entertained angels unaware’. But I have an early Greek text in which the wording was ‘Forget not to entertain strangers whether men or giants or waifs or even dogs or wilder beasts — ’ but the words ‘or even dogs or wilder beasts’ are stricken out as though the idea that a dog or wilder beast might be an angel unaware was repugnant to some redactor. And yet I believe that the dogs or wilder beasts text is the original one. Angels coming in their own forms are invisible to us. But if they came in human form why could they not also come in the form of lion or bear or wolf or dog? For we owe compassion to all the beasts who are in pain and need as well as to all humans.

  ‘Philip the Arab who was the first Christian Roman Emperor had a lion at his court that was famous for its discourses and its rectitude and judgement. Philip himself believed that the lion was an angel unaware, and its manner of going from him gives some evidence of this. For it happened that, after one year at the court of Philip, the lion romped up a little hill and thence leaped into the air and disappeared and was seen no more. I myself believe that Philip’s lion was an angel; and I believe that angels can and often do come among us in the forms of giants and waifs and bears and wolves and dogs. So entertain them and feed them if they come to you, but do not entertain them uncritically. I believe that angels come to us under these forms, but I believe that devils come to us under these forms much more often.’

  Atrox Fabulinus, from NEW CHAPTERS FOUND AT SORA.

  It is in the light of this new passage from Atrox that we might ponder Caesar Oceano and his strange companion and partner. For the next member of the Group of Twelve (the Group of Twelve had recently been notified by a strange Concerned Circus that it had been selected to provide extraordinary and onerous service to the world without thought of personal comfort) that will be introduced is:

  9. CAESAR OCEANO. Caesar himself had an elegant beast, a seagoing Golden Panther with a black bar on his brow, which Panther he believed was an angel come to visit him for a while. The animal was delivered to Caesar’s doorstep one morning in a large crate. And the tag on the crate said: To Caesar Oceano, on his name day, from Gorgonius and Monika Pantera. Caesar immediately called Gorgonius and Monika to thank them for the gift, but Gorgonius denied having sent it, and Monika could be heard giggling in the background. “Oh, Oh,” Caesar cried. “What kind of birthday gift have they given me? It is not always an advantage to have friends to whom money is no object.” He looked into the crate, and the big golden cat looked back at him.

  “Big Golden Cat, I wonder where you do come from?” Caesar asked doubtfully. “By what carrier and for what purpose? And how will I get you out without losing life or limb?”

  “I come from the Exterior Darkness,” the Golden Panther spoke in a pleasant voice, “and the carrier was the Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers. It may be providential that I come by them, for they are in financial straits and they could be taken over by a strong-willed man (you) who had an astute advisor (me). Oh, the big crate is no trouble. Stand back a moment.” Caesar Oceano stood back, and the Golden Panther caused the crate to collapse from about himself. Thereupon the Golden Panther (“For this particular manifestation of mine, Caesar, I am to be called by the name Leonardo the Great”) became a sort of partner of Caesar Oceano, a very astute partner. And together they took over the Strange Cargoes Worldwide Shippers Limited. That had been six months ago, and together they had made a good thing out of the shipping company. Especially did the new success and independence delight Caesar Oceano. His computerized ships (sky-ships, ocean-ships, every kind of ships) arrived with their computerized cargoes: but where did they arrive from? Caesar Oceano did not understand his own business very well, but he understood almost everyone else’s business. Success worked well in him, and he became cosmopolitan, gracious, big-minded, and outgoing. Caesar was at peace with himself, more than most men are. But his new partner, Leonardo the Great, the strangely indwelt Golden Panther, became moody and unsettled. “I want to do something for mankind,” Leonardo said, “but there is so little time.” Leonardo set up the Green Pasture Counselling Service. He arranged it so that he would be a soothing voice speaking out of the soft darkness to the sound of
gently falling waters. And he did ease many tired and troubled souls, but he seemed not to ease his own.

  Leonardo the Great denied that he was a Golden Panther. “I am a Black Panther who happens to have a golden mark on me everywhere except this one bar on my forehead,” he said. “The distinction is important, for I am the titular ruler of all the Black Panthers in the world.”

  Caesar Oceano and his partner Leonardo the Great were a double question-mark in the Group of Twelve. Caesar had formerly been a merchandizer who advertised himself as Caesar Oceano, Pirate, the Price-Cut-Throat of the Seven Seas. I will not be undersold on any item in the world.

  But now he was rich and leisurely and he had time to speculate on the ultimate things. (And his partner already knew the ultimate things and found them wanting.) What? Should an indwelling angel (as Caesar believed Leonardo to be) be ill at peace and jumpy and unsatisfied?

  But the Golden Panther Leonardo the Great had his own shadow now, as had all the members of the Group of Twelve, as have all really important people. Skulking shadows follow them and report on their activities to the father of skulkers. Leonardo’s shadow was a scraggly black panther, a rough and slightly runty beast, a hard-luck cat. This shadow was always in trouble with the authorities. There would be news flashes: Black Panther Seen, apparently escaped from zoo, and that black one would have to fight for his life and freedom from posse and police. Nevertheless it was an astute and deadly shadow. Deadly, deadly, deadly! Be careful, Leonardo.

  Then, in the tour of the Group of Twelve (which began to have a certain fame now and its name just beyond the tip of every one’s tongue) we now come to:

  10. DRUSILLA EVENROOD. “There is too much posturing in the Group of Twelve,” Drusilla said several times. “We are a bunch of posturing pea-fowl. Well, this pea-hen has come to the end of her strutting. I am really only a shrill-voiced guinea-hen, the only fowl of all of them with a voice worse than that of the pea-fowl. But we may not all of us be show-birds. Some of us must really do the spectacular work of the world, and do it without gain or spectacle. This work can only be done by our laborious plain toil.” Drusilla did have a shrill and carrying voice, yes, but it was not to be compared with the abominable voice of the guinea-hen. Her voice always had enough edge to it to cut through other voices, even those of other members of the voicey Group of Twelve. And yet it was pleasant and rather juicy, with a sharp-fruit flavor. And she herself was pleasant and at least a little bit juicy. She was a British person. She was a biologist in a wider sense than were several of the Group of Twelve. “In its widest sense, biology is everything that has life, or has either the hope of the memory of life.”

  “What if,” another member of the Group of Twelve asked her just today, “there is no life at all, but only a dream of life? What if (and the evidence for it becomes more and more overwhelming as this day goes on), what if we are all dreaming in accord with the one-hundred-and-one tests of Atrox for it, and there is nothing at all beyond the dreaming, no wakeful state, no reality yet discerned or invented?”

  “Oh then, in its widest sense, we will call it para-biology instead of biology,” Drusilla Evenrood said. “No other change or adjustment is needed. We will put a ‘para’ in front of everything and then go ahead just as well as if the world were real …”

  Drusilla had grey-green eyes. And every day she looked out over the grey-green, South-of-England Ocean. She had red-and-russet-colored hair, and she walked every day over the red-and-russet-colored hills of East Sussex in England. And in the season when there was green mixed in with the red-and-russet hills (and it was that mix-of-green season now), she also had green mixed in with her red-and-russet hair, an artifice that was somewhere between the charming and the para-charming.

  “Hilary,” Jane Chantal called out when the hour was noon (mid-America time). “It’s closing in on us. It’s becoming horribly verified. Ninety-eight of the one-hundred-and-one tests of Atrox Fabulinus have been completed by one-or-another member of our Group. We’re trapped, we’re nullified, we really are dreaming. We are living totally in a dream. What will we do?”

  “We’ll dream up some response to it, I suppose, Jane Chantal.”

  “But we don’t even know whether there is anything for us to wake up to.”

  “No, we don’t. And Solomon Izzersted (both of his persons being of one mind, for a change, in this case) calculate the odds against there being anything for us to wake up to (if indeed all of us in the world are dreaming) as the number of persons in the world against one. And the Izzersted-Towntower combination is the greatest advocacy mathematician in the world.”

  “I know,” Jane Chantal said. “It’s glum. But how can we give up if there is no one out there awake for us to give up to?”

  “There’s a ray of light at the bottom of the well, Jane Chantal. The fourteen or fifteen entities that are shadowing our Group of Twelve are alien to us and are surely organized. So there is organization out there. And there is alienism outside of our dream.”

  “That’s all very illogical, Hilary, and yet it encourages me. But we will never give up to our shadows. We’ll fight them. And maybe we’ll wake to fight another day.”

  And now we’re coming near the bottom of the barrel. No, no, this barrel doesn’t become worse near its bottom. It becomes better.

  11. DENIS LOLLARDY is named the eleventh member of the Group of Twelve. Laughter-Lynn Casement, the greatest genealogist of the group of twelve, said that the surname of Denis should be Lombardy instead of Lollardy. It is the Lombardy Poplar that he has on his coat-of-arms, and it’s the Lombardy motto: Awaken to Laughter.

  And indeed Denis did live in Lombardy in Italy, in the town of Lecco where the river Adda flows out of Lake Como. Lollardy was an all-purpose forger. And besides meaning a mumbler, the word Lollard had once meant a forger. But the work of Denis Lollardy was neither mumbled nor generally in the cheap-jack manner of a forger. All of his work was illuminating and surpassing, masterful, be-geniused, shining stuff. He was a master even if a besmirched master.

  Denis Lollardy was a forger of old manuscripts in Latin, Low Latin, Tuscan, Old French, Old Italian, Spanish, Cataline, Old High Dutch, Icelandic, Demotic Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Ladino (the tongue of the Jews of Constantinople), Ghees, Amharic, Middle Armenian. It was he who forged (without original) the Armenian Gospel of the Childhood of Jesus Christ. He also forged in marble, bronze, terra cotta, mosaic, gold, and chased silver. He forged tombs and monuments, and he forged the very bones to go in them. He forged etchings and oil paintings and water-color paintings. He forged astonishing works to fit every niche and century. He forged music masterworks and operas of all the great Germans and Italians. And the cut-glass and Waterbury Crystal that he forged! And the Elizabethan Dramas and Dostoyevsky Novels. Aye, and the forged checks, big ones, resounding ones. He understood a principle that many forgers never learn, that when a check is large enough the borderline between the genuine and the forged disappears. All seven figure checks are good. They are beyond challenge, so they are never challenged.

  “I just believe that Denis is forging some of the new Atrox Fabulinus chapters,” Jane Chantal Ardri said to her husband Hilary. “Oh, the vellum could pass for fifteen-hundred years old and so could the ink. But they are too good to be from the hand of Atrox himself.”

  “That is the fault of Denis in all of his forgeries,” Hilary said. “He’s too good. When a Raphael Sancho painting is discovered and presented to the arty world for verification, if it is something just a little bit beyond the genius of Old Raphael, then I suspect that it’s from the hand of young Denis Lollardy. When a new symphony is discovered in the flawless and sustained Beethoven manner, then I know that the fine hand and ear of Denis is involved. Beethoven himself could never sustain the flawless Beethoven manner for more than a dozen bars. When Mandrake the Magician, purported to be by William Shakespeare, appears, then I know that it has to be Denis. Old Shakes could never have attained such competence. The Mandrake, which
is probably the greatest drama ever written could only have been crafted by Denis Lollardy, the greatest playwright who ever lived, as he is the greatest-who-ever-lived at so many of the arts. Did you hear the Pope’s quip at Denis yesterday? ‘Denis, my friend,’ he said, ‘this new Second Book of Leviticus, though the archeo-Hebrew and the camel-kid vellum are flawless, just has to be done by you. God just does not have the ability to author anything that good. If you ever forge an encyclical of mine, I may just hand you the tiara and call it quits.’”

  “Denis may have forged encyclicals of the current Pope. What do you make of such writings as In Illo Tempore or Vir Autem Quidem or Et Compelle ut Intrare? Everybody thinks that the Pope wrote them. I think that Denis wrote them.”

  “Since we live in a Forgers’ World, maybe we should make a King of that master forger Denis.”

  “Why do you say that we live in a Forgers’ World, Denis?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Jane Chantal. It was as if somebody else said those words out of my mouth.”

  And what sort of shadow did the master forger Denis Lollardy have?

  Oh, it was his brother who was no brother of his and yet looked remarkably like him. It was the Forger of the Forger. His brother forger used to hawk forgeries on the streets of Lecco at night. How different from his primary Denis Lollardy who always hawked his remarkable forgeries on the streets of Lecco in broad daylight.