Mr. Eternity (10 page)

Did I fear discovery, dear Reader? I must have done, though perhaps I was not sensible there was another way to live, for I had liv’d all my life with such discomfiture, knowing from earliest youth that my father did
Hate
in me that which he must also
Love
, which was, namely, the dusky echo of my mother. Thus did I know already, if I knew nothing more, that our life’s turn is trulie an opposition of appalling contradictions.

True also that my task was not a difficult one, for I had only to act a gentleman and I was utterly ignored. For Dr. Dan the labor of imposture was more arduous. He called himself a physician, or was called a physician, yet he had also to work as a physician in order to sustain this fiction. But he was aided in his task by one Quaco, a slave physician who had communion with the devils and sprits of darkest Africa, and whose knowledge was very great, though not greater than his tyrannick peevishness. Dr. Dan said he had known him before, on the fever coast of Africa, and though I did not believe this at the time, all these years later I am persuaded it might have been true.

I made the acquaintance of the slave physician after taking ill myself, which happened one day sudden as a thunderclap. I remember it as if it were yesterday (which was in truth March the 4th, 1800, and how I marvel at the time gone by!). Having given already many hours of thought to the question of
Air Flow
– for my house in the morass was hot beyond all imagining – I succumbed all at once to a
hectic ebullition in the sweet-breads
, and was seized with an inclination to open windows in the east wall of my house. Thinking of this with my eyes red, and the sweat pouring from my brow, and my mind stupefied with the opium, and the heat, and the terrific strain of feasting each night with Mr. Galsworthy, I quickly lost all decorum, taking up an ax which was happily to hand and beating holes in the walls for some quarter of an hour. Dr. Dan explained later that heat, like wine, does cause the blood to boil, this effervescence and frothy rarefaction often terminating in a delirium.

When next I was sensible what was come of me, I lay upon the floor in Dr. Dan’s house, wrapt up tight in a sheet which was wet, and cooling. Attending me was Quaco, dark as a shadow on the wall. He had placed beside me a bonano sucker, also rubbing some powder in my hair, both treatments being intended to draw out the demon that was in me. In this they soon manifested their utility, whether it was a demon indeed or whether the demon of Quaco’s medicine was the same as a disorderly transport of the humors in ours.

Hello, friends, said I.

Hello, said Quaco.

By my grandfather’s whiskers, said Dr. Dan, you were down a long time.

Quaco said little more, and ate his breakfast (which was plantain mash) out of an ancient porringer. He wore a
necklace of teeth
, most of them shark or dog, but some human too, which he said were monkie teeth. In all that was to come he was the Ringmaker, and did on this occasion instantly recognize me for what I was, a colored man, though Dr. Dan I think ne’er knew a thing about it, and still does not.

It was Quaco who practiced such physic as was practiced on Babylon plantation. It was he mixed the powders & cremes & liniments, and it was he set broken bones. He was a Professor of Obeah and much respected among the slaves, who came to him not onlie with complaints of the body and sprit, but also with concerns of other kinds, for ex., a problem between man and wife. Nor did he administer to the slaves alone, but even to Mr. Galsworthy and his wife, the lovely and genteel Mrs. Galsworthy (of whom I shall have much more to say), though in this case powder & creme & medicine must be applied by Dr. Dan with all pretense he was the physician. Another thing is that Quaco did always mix some
Superfluous Irritant
into the medicine which he gave to the white people, so that the medicine would cure them and yet also cause them pain, which was compensation for Quaco, who received no wages.

Quaco had already become the
Lawful Propertie
of Dr. Dan, the latter having acquired him at a game of cards from Mr. Galsworthy. I wondered at this, for Dr. Dan was having a century of ill luck at cards, and could no more get the better of his employer than a rabbet could write his name in a bowl of cornmeal porridge. But Mr. Galsworthy had grown weary of Quaco, who several times escaped, and had upon his capture to be lodged in the work-house at Mr. Galsworthy’s expense. Quaco had done other sins and crimes besides, viz. he had set fire to his own cloathing, & perpetrated an un-nameable mischief in the cow pen, & had placed a
Magic Egg
outside the previous bookkeeper’s door, and also above all he had manifest’d an indifference to whipping. For these reasons I believe that Mr. Galsworthy lost Quaco deliberately, to rid himself of a nuisance.

Thus were we situated, Dr. Dan & Quaco & myself, all together and acquainted, Quaco mixing powders, and I upon my veranda in the light chewing opium & eating every day with Mr. Galsworthy, so that I felt always
one feast from the Grave
, and Dr. Dan in his house with the equipment he had inherited from his benighted predecessor, which man had suffered the ill-fortune to be murder’d in the seek house by the slaves. This included amputation saws & scalp lifters, rectal scrapers, tongue depressants, a lovely little brass mold for making suppositories,
sharp-tooth’d trepanation instruments, & a beautiful new enema kit. He knew not the use of this fine equipment, yet he was not troubled, and made light of it all, as for example by holding up a shaving basin and saying, Oh what is this, oh I know, it is the enchanted helmet of Diego Sotelo, and placing it thereafter upon his head.

All might have continued easy and comfortable had not Dr. Dan been seized by a remarkable fancy. This happened one day when he was called to Melanie plantation, upon an adjacent island, in order to attend the planter’s wife, their own physician having been poisoned, I think, or else having simply wasted away, as happened so often with Europeans in that climate. I accompanied Dr. Dan on this journey, yet we could not bring Quaco with us, for he had to attend to the burns and ratt bites that afflicted our own slaves. Thus I was witness to my friend’s confoundment before his task. Simply guessing and playing at his role as an actor might, he caused this poor woman’s cloathing to be burned, saying it was necessary to destroy the
animal contagion
. After this he fumigated her bed chamber with tabacco, oakum, sulphur, & aromatic wood. Covering his bets, so to say, for he was a prodigious gambler, he now also gave her volatile salts and Jesuit’s bark, and he gave her to hold one cocomber, which would draw out the fever by its chill. Lastly he instructed the lady’s maid, one Virginia, to anoint her mistress’s fundament with tabacco oil and balsam of saltpeter.

It was now that Dr. Dan succumbed to his own imagination, as it were, for having knock’d the mistress unconscious with all this medisin, our next concern was to go to the kitchens for some food, and here, in the heat and sweat of the ovens, where a grate feast was being prepared, Dr. Dan spied a woman whom, as he insisted later, he had pursued through all the ages of the world. This was his beloved Anna Gloria, whom he had seen first in Sevil, where she stood selling Fish even as he wayed anchor upon the voyage of Discoverie undertaken that year by the Genoese Christopheros Colombo, and he had seen her again in the jungles of the Oroonoque, and once again in London, and now they were met in the islands of the Bahamas.

He said later that she had grown older (she would have been more than two centuries of age herself), & her hair it was darker, & her skin also, the effect of servitude, yet he knew very well it was the same woman. Never had he spoken of her before, but he said that not a day had passed without it should happen that he thought of her. He said that even on that first occasion so many years ago, gazing across the water in Sevil, he had pledged to himself that he would make her his wife, and he remembered his promise now.

Reader, what could I make of this? What can I make of it even now, as an old man, gazing back at the landscape of youth, which shimmers and jerks in the golden haze of memory?

He walk’d up to her and took her hand, which she snatched away, and he said, It’s you. She frown’d, and said, Of course, why, you are Lord Herforshire, & he said Why no my dear not a Lord, & she said Forgive me now I realize you’re the magistrate I did not recognize you with your trousers on, & he said No no no, now in some pain. He said, I saw you in Sevil, I called to you, what were you doing, were you selling fishe?

Now this prettie woman looked upon him as if upon a clam that would not open. Was I selling fish? she said. Fish?

And in London, said Dr. Dan, was it you? What were you doing in London?

If it was I, said she, daring a slight look at the other women in the room, let us not speak of what I was doing. Suffice it to say you left me there to do it.

Now Dr. Dan was very embarrassed, and nearly heartbroke I think, saying he had not had any monie, for he had just gotten out of Newgate, & before that he had been a Pyrate, & was luckie they had not hanged him till he was dead.

This woman did not know him, as I saw very plainly, but she was resolv’d to pretend. Said she, Very well, Sailor, very well, but what will you do to-day? Will you make all haste to my rescue? Will you take me away from this place?

For we now learned she was serving an indenture, which is to say she
was no better than a slave (though according to Law she was no slave), and if Dr. Dan wanted to free her from this Contract he had to buy her, which is what he now resolv’d to do.

It is she, he said later, his fist in the air. I have been mistaken before, but this time I know it to a certainty, and will devote my life toward securing her freedom.

In the early stages of the remodernization campaign, before everything dried up and blew away in bundles of tinder and chaff, there was an idyll of repose. It was the winding of a watch. My own routine continued unimpeded, with few palpable changes. I got up early, when the heat started to rise, and breakfasted on the roof in the cool morning air. I had cold cornmeal porridge as well as mango, a little yoga cream, and a cup of hot caffeine. Then I persecuted my education. First, while my brain was still soft, I read my Modern English history books, and later I had tutors in mathematical logic and other topics. This was all my own anachro-feminist initiative. However, my education served chiefly to enlarge my feelings of grievance, for our library was riven with gaps and lacunae. It was actually only nine hundred books, and even though we housed them on the top floor with titanic barrels of dehumidifier salts, they were continuously succumbing to disintegration. Therefore I shouted in frustration, “But what is a Hittite!?” and “What is a kipper!?” and “They used to have illuminated books!” I could never achieve a comprehensive knowledge.

By noon I was fatigued. Sometimes I tried to refresh myself with fizzy camel milk and fruit, and sometimes I went unconscious for an hour, but it mattered little because after that I had nothing to do. I was trapped like a scorpion in a jar. This was the time of day when I usually succumbed to a staring madness. I would tell myself I should take a walk, but then I couldn’t decide what shoes and clothes to wear. I would tell myself to continue reading, but I could not make the words resolve into ideas. My thoughts scattered like marbles. Sometimes I just sat naked on the floor with one boot on. Sometimes I drank poppy juice to console myself. I had no true public existence. I had no trajectory
except as a wife and mother, although I secretly kept my womb untenanted by eating a monthly abortion medicine that Edward Halloween bought from a slave magician. This medicine was exceptionally illegal, but I didn’t care. It was another small exercise of my anachro-feminist prerogative.

At night we would have date wine in the garden, which was nice, but then we had state dinners with hereditary senators or visiting dignitaries from the MDC. These dinners were an agony of repeated courtesies, although they were much better than my nights with Anthony Fucking Corvette. He was a coarse frolicker who didn’t give a good damn about anything. He ate sorghum paste and peanut soup, he drank muddy water, he drowned his faculties in wine, and then he heaved himself on top of me. Our wedding was scheduled for December, which was a traditional time. Daniel Defoe had come to us in late summer.

Originally, the only thing that remodernization changed was that Edward Halloween found himself less occupied. In former days he had been ceaselessly busy with his job of singing, dancing, telling jokes, and playing the flute at orgies, but now my father decided that consorting with clowns was an indulgence unbefitting a serious monarch and president. He spent all his time with Daniel Defoe, though you could have argued that he had only exchanged one clown for another. In any case, Edward Halloween and I were left alone more often, which was nice for me but surprising for him, for he was dismayed to see how I passed my days.

“How do you stand it?” he said. “A person must have some occupation. How do you while away sad afternoons? Just a few days of this boredom and already I want to espouse anarchy and bring down the state in a crashing fiery cataclysm.”

He decreed a private clown’s decree that we were no longer allowed to do nothing. Each day we had to do at least one activity. And that was how we came to make our first exploratory nighttime venture into the city. I wasn’t supposed to leave our compound because there was a danger of catching dog malaria or being murdered, and previously I had only seen the poor sections of St. Louis from the window of a horse-drawn
automobile, but Edward Halloween was right. Sometimes you have to throw caution to the hounds.

First we disguised ourselves. I removed my silver armlets, put on a pink cotton dress, and circled my eyes with greasepaint. He wore rough cloth pants and no shirt, like a river boy. Then we crept away through the contingency escape tunnel and walked all the way across the city to a place called Fat Tuesday’s, which was next to the national lottery shack in the Tokyo neighborhood. For several hours we drank banana beer with the hookers and rat catchers and denture servants. It was an outstanding location. They served banana beer in earthenware cups, and you could pulverize the cups afterward because they were disposable. The ground was carpeted in red dust and pieces of cups. There was also a charcoal pit where they char-roasted barbeque shamo and goat, and all the tables were assembled from palm trunks split down the middle and fastened together with the flat side up. This was said to be the fad in the Mississippi jungle, for people in St. Louis had an enduring fascination with the Mississippi jungle. This is why they drank banana beer, for example, which was expensive and didn’t have the smoothest finish.