Stories by R. A. Lafferty Vol 2 Part 1

STORIES BY R.A. LAFFERTY.

PART 2.

CAMELS AND DROMEDARIES, CLEM.

"Greeks and Armenians, Clem. Condors and buzzards."

"Samoyeds and Malemutes, Clem. Galena and molybdenite."

Oh here, here! What kind of talk is that?

That is definitive talk. That is fundamental talk. There is no other kind of talk that will bring us to the core of this thing.

Clem Clendenning was a traveling salesman, a good one. He had cleared $35,000 the previous year. Lie worked for a factory in a midwestern town. The plant produced a unique product, and Clem sold it over one-third of the nation.

Things were going well with him. Then a little thing happened, and it changed his life completely.

Salesmen have devices by which they check and double-check. One thing they do when stopping at hotels in distant towns; they make sure they're registered. This sounds silly, but it isn't. A salesman will get calls from his home office and it is important that the office be able to locate him. Whenever Clem registered at a hotel he would check back after several hours to be sure that they had him entered correctly. He would call in from somewhere, and he would ask for himself. And it sometimes did happen that he was told he was not registered. At this Clem would always raise a great noise to he sure that they had him straight thereafter.

Arriving in a town this critical day, Clem had found himself ravenously hungry and tired to his depths. Both states were unusual to him.

He went to a grill and ate gluttonously for an hour, so much so that people stared at him. He ate almost to the point of apoplexy. Then he taxied to the hotel, registered, and went up to his room at once. Later, not remembering whether he had even undressed or not (it was early afternoon), he threw himself onto the bed and slept, as it seemed, for hours.

But he noted that it was only a half hour later that he woke, feeling somehow deprived, as though having a great loss. He was floundering around altogether in a daze, and was once more possessed of an irrational hunger. He unpacked a little, put on a suit, and was surprised to find that it hung on him quite loosely.

He went out with the feeling that he had left something on the bed that was not quite right, and yet he had been afraid to look. He found ahearty place and had another great meal. And then (at a different place so that people would not be puzzled at him) he had still another one. He was feeling better now, but mighty queer, mighty queer.

Fearing that he might be taken seriously ill, he decided to check his bearings. He used his old trick. He found a phone and called his hotel and asked for himself.

"We will check," said the phone girl, and a little bit later she said, "Just a minute, he will be on the line in a minute."

"Oh, great green goat," he growled, "I wonder how they have me mixed up this time."

And Clem was about to raise his voice unpleasantly to be sure that they got him straight, when a voice came onto the phone.

This is the critical point.

It was his own voice.

The calling Clen Denning laughed first. And then he froze. It was no trick. It was no freak. There was no doubt that it was his own voice. Clem used the dictaphone a lot and he knew the sound of his own voice.

And now he heard his own voice raised higher in all its unmistakable aspects, a great noise about open idiots who call on the phone and then stand silent without answering.

"It's me all right," Clem grumbled silently to himself. "I sure do talk rough when I'm irritated."

There was a law against hara.s.sment by telephone, the voice on the phone said. By G.o.d, the voice on the phone said, he just noticed that his room had been rifled. He was having the call monitored right now, the voice on the phone swore. Clem knew that this was a lie, but he also recognized it as his own particular style of lying. The voice got really wooly and profane.

Then there was a change in the tone.

"Who are you?" the voice asked hollowly. "I hear you breathing scared. I know your sound. Gaaah -- it's me!" And the voice on the phone was also breathing scared.

"There has to be an answer," he told himself. "I'll just go to my room and take a hot bath and try to sleep it off."

Then he roared back: "Go to my room! Am I crazy? I have just called my room. I am already there. I would not go to my room for one million one hundred and five thousand dollars."

He was trembling as though his bones were too loose for his flesh.

It was funny that he had never before noticed how bony he was. But he wasn't too scared to think straight on one subject, however crooked other things might be.

"No, I wouldn't go back to that room for any sum. But I wil1 do something for another sum, and I'll do it d.a.m.ned quick."

He ran, and he hasn't stopped running yet. That he should have another self-made flesh terrified him. He ran, hut he knew where he was running for the first stage of it. He took the night plane back to his hometown, leaving bag and baggage behind.

He was at the bank when it opened in the morning. He closed out all his accounts. He turned everything into cash. This took several hours. He walked out of there with $83,000. He didn't feel like a thief; it was his own; it couldn't have belonged to his other self, could it? If there were two of them, then let there be two sets of accounts.

Now to get going fast.

He continued to feel odd. He weighed himself. In spite of his great eating lately, he had lost a hundred pounds. That's enough to make anyone feel odd. He went to New York City to lose himself in the crowd and to think about the matter.

And what was the reaction at his firm and at his home when he turned up missing? That's the second point. He didn't turn up missing. As the months went by he followed the doings of his other self. He saw his picturesin the trade papers; he was still with the same firm he was still top salesman. He always got the hometown paper, and he sometimes found himself therein. He saw his own picture with his wife Veronica. She looked wonderful and so, he had to admit, did he. They were still on the edge of the social stuff.

"If he's me, I wonder who I am?" Clem continued to ask himself.

There didn't seem to be any answer to this. There wasn't any handle to take the thing by.

Clem went to an a.n.a.lyst and told his story. The a.n.a.lyst said that Clem had wanted to escape his job, or his wife Veronica, or both. Clem insisted that this was not so; he loved his job and his wife; he got deep and fulfilling satisfaction out of both.

"You don't know Veronica or you wouldn't suggest it," he told the a.n.a.lyst. "She is -- ah -- well, if you don't know her, then h.e.l.l, you don't know anything."

The a.n.a.lyst told him that it had been his own id talking to him on the telephone.

"How is it that my id is doing a top selling job out of a town five hundred miles from here, and I am here?" Clem wanted to know. "Other men's ids aren't so talented."

The a.n.a.lyst said that Clem was suffering from a tmema or diairetikos of an oddly named part of his psychic apparatus.

"Oh h.e.l.l, I'm an extrovert. Things like that don't happen to people like me," Clem said.

Thereafter Clem tried to make the best of his compromised life. He was quickly well and back to normal weight. But he never talked on the telephone again in his life. He'd have died most literally if he ever heard his own voice like that again. He had no phone in any room where he lived.

He wore a hearing aid which he did not need; he told people that he could not hear over the phone, and that any unlikely call that came for him would have to be taken down and relayed to him.

He had to keep an eye on his other self, so he did renew one old contact. With one firm in New York there was a man he had called on regularly; this man had a cheerful and open mind that would not he spooked by the unusual. Clem began to meet this man (Why should we lie about it? His name was Joe Zabotsky.) not at the firm; but at an after-hours place which he knew Joe frequented.

Joe heard Clem's story and believed it -- after he had phoned (in Clem's presence) the other Clem, located him a thousand miles away, and ordered an additional month's supply of the unique product which they didn't really need, things being a little slow in all lines right then.

After that, Clem would get around to see Joe Zabotsky an average of once a month, about the time he figured the other Clem had just completed his monthly New York call.

"He's changing a little bit, and so are you," Joe told Clem one evening. "Yeah, it was with him just about like with you. He did lose a lot of weight a while back, what you call the critical day, and he gained it back pretty quick just like you did. It bugs me, Clem, which of you I used to know. There are some old things between us that he recalls and you don't; there are some that you recall and he doesn't; and dammit there are some you both recall, and they happened between myself and one man only, not between myself and two men.

"But these last few months your face seems to be getting a little fuller, and his a little thinner. You still look just alike, but not quite as just-alike as you did at first."

"I know it," Clem said. "I study the a.n.a.lysts now since they don't do any good at studying me, and I've learned an old a.n.a.lyst's trick. I take an old face-on photo of myself, divide it down the center, and then complete each half with its mirror image. It gives two faces just a little bit different. n.o.body has the two sides of his face quite alike. These twodifferent faces are supposed to indicate two different aspects of the personality. I study myself, now, and I see that I am becoming more like one of the constructions; so he must be becoming more like the other construction. He mentions that there are disturbances between Veronica and himself, does he? And neither of them quite understands what is the matter?

Neither do I."

Clem lived modestly, but he began to drink more than he had. He watched, through his intermediary Joe and by other means, the doings of his other self. And he waited. This was the most peculiar deal he had ever met, but he hadn't been foxed on very many deals.

"He's no smarter than I am," Clem insisted. "But, by cracky, if he's me, he's pretty smart at that. What would he do if he were in my place? And I guess, in a way, he is."

Following his avocation of drinking and brooding and waiting, Clem frequented various little places, and one day he was in the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. This was owned and operated by Two-Face Terrel, a doubledealer and gentleman, even something of a dandy. A man had just seated himself at a dim table with Clem, had been served by Two-Face, and now the man began to talk.

"Why did Matthew have two donkeys?" the man asked.

"Matthew who?" Clem asked. "I don't know what you're talking about."

I'm talking about 21:1-9, of course," the man said. The other Gospels have only one donkey. Did you ever think about that?"

"No, I'd never given it a thought," Clem said.

"Well, tell me then, why does Matthew have two demoniacs?"

"What?"

"8:28-34. The other evangelists have only one crazy man."

"Maybe there was only one loony at first, and he drove the guy drinking next to him crazy."

"That's possible. Oh, you're kidding. But why does Matthew have two blind men?"

"Number of a number, where does this happen?" Clem asked.

"9:27-31, and again 20:29-34. In each case the other gospelers have only one blind man. Why does Matthew double so many things? There are other instances of it."

"Maybe he needed gla.s.ses," Clem said.

"No," the man whispered, "I think he was one of us."

"What 'us' are you talking about?" Clem asked But already he had begun to suspect that his case was not unique. Suppose that it happened one time out of a million? There would still be several hundred such sundered persons in the country, and they would tend to congregate-in such places as the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. And there was something deprived or riven about almost every person who came into the place.

And remember," the man was continuing, "the name or cognomen of one of the other Apostles was 'The Twin.' But of whom was he twin? I think there was the beginning of a group of them there already."

"He wants to see you," Joe Zabotsky told Clem when they met several months later. "So does she."

"When did he begin to suspect that there was another one of me?"

"He knew something was wrong from the first. A man doesn't lose a hundred pounds in an instant without there being something wrong. And he knew something was very wrong when all his accounts were cleaned out. These were not forgeries, and he knew it. They were not as good as good forgeries, for they were hurried and all different and very nervous. But they were all genuine signatures, he admitted that. d.a.m.n, you are a curious fellow, Clem!"

"How much does Veronica know, and how? What does she want? What does he?"

"He says that she also began to guess from the first. 'You act likeyou're only half a man, Clem,' she would say to him, to you, that is. She wants to see more of her husband, she says, the other half. And he wants to trade places with you, at least from time to time on a trial basis."

"I won't do it! Let him stew in it!" Then Clem called Clem a name so vile that it will not be given here.

"Take it easy, Clem," Joe remonstrated. "It's yourself you are calling that."

There was a quizzical young-old man who came sometimes into the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. They caught each other's eye this day, and the young-old began to talk.

"Is not consciousness the thing that divides man from the animals?"

he asked. "But consciousness is a double thing, a seeing one's self; not only a knowing, but a knowing that one knows. So the human person is of its essence double. How this is commonly worked out in practice, I don't understand. Our present states are surely not the common thing."

"My own consciousness isn't intensified since my person is doubled,"

Clem said. "It's all the other way. My consciousness is weakened. I've become a creature of my own unconscious. There's something about you that I don't like, man."

"The animal is simple and single," the young-old man said "It lacks true reflexive consciousness. But man is dual (though I don't understand the full meaning of it here) and he has at least intimations of true consciousness And what is the next step?"

I fathom you now," Clem said. "My father would have called you a Judas Priest."

I don't quite call myself that. But what follows the singularity of the animal and duality of man? You recall the startling line of Chesterton?

-- 'we trinitarians have known it is not good for G.o.d to be alone.' But was His case the same as ours? Did He do a violent double take, or triple take, when He discovered one day that there were Three of Him? Has He ever adjusted to it? Is it possible that He can?"

"Aye, you're a Judas Priest. I hate the species."

But I am not, Mr. Clendenning. I don't understand this sundering any more than you do. It happens only one time in a million, but it has happened to us. Perhaps it would happen to G.o.d but one time in a billion billion, hut it has happened. The G.o.d who is may be much rarer than any you can imagine.

"Let me explain: my other person is a very good man, much better than when we were conjoined. He's a dean already, and he'll be a bishop within five years. Whatever of doubt and skepticism that was in me originally is still in the me here present, and it is somehow intensified. I do not want to be dour or doubting. I do not want to speak mockingly of the great things. But the bothering things are all in the me here. The other me is freed of them.

"Do you think that there might have a been a sundered-off Napoleon who was a b.u.mbler at strategy and who was a nervous little coward? Did there remain in backwoods Kentucky for many years a sundered-off Lincoln who gave full rein to his inborn delight in the dirty story, the dirty deal, the barefoot life, the loutishness growing? Was there a sundered-off Augustine who turned ever more Manichean, who refined more and more his arts of false logic and fornication, who howled against reason, who joined the cultishness of the crowd? Is there an anti-Christ -- the man who fled naked from the garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the garment at the moment of sundering."

"d.a.m.ned if I know, Judas Priest. Your own father-name abomination, was there another of him? Was he better or worse? I leave you."

"She is in town and is going to meet you tonight," Joe Zabotsky told Clem at their next monthly meeting. "We've got it all set up."

"No, no, not Veronica!" Clem was startled. "I'm not ready for it."

"She is. She's a strong-minded woman, and she knows what she wants.""No she doesn't, Joe. I'm afraid of it. I haven't touched a woman since Veronica."

"d.a.m.n it, Clem, this is Veronica that we're talking about. It isn't as though you weren't still married to her."

"I'm still afraid of it, Joe. I've become something unnatural now.