Mr. Eternity (2 page)

In Pirahao, the truth is only what happens and time is an animal that sleeps all day. In Spanish, the truth is whatever a woman tells her gods,
a different story every day, and time is a river in which she struggles to stay afloat. When I speak Pirahao, I want to return to the city and eat inaga fruit in the central plaza, but when I speak Spanish I want to see the city burn, and it is only in Spanish that it’s proper to act. It is this difference that dooms the Pirahao.

I went out to get my breakfast just a sweet potato and coffee but it were ten years before I come home. I were down on the harbor walk under the Spanish moss groaning holding my head chewing my potato so sad for I were up all night drinking corn whiskey in Madame Caitlin’s a whorehouse. It were just another morning nothing unusual same headache same sadness same poverty but suddenly I were so tired of it all suddenly I couldn’t stand it. I had never been out of Boston I had never thought of leaving but when I seen the boats yachts ships headed God knows where to New York to Baltimore suddenly I were asking each captain was he hiring. One captain told me yes he were hiring yes and this were how it happened. Strange thought you could say I were gone ten years because one night I were drinking corn whiskey and in the morning I walked down to the water and not up the hill as I did on other days. These are what is called vicissitudes. I remember it were a cool day light breezes long shadows I wore my sweat shirt even it were so cool. It were January the year 2200 it had just begun a new century. My name it were Jam it still is it were never Jim as some think.

I were ignorant of yachts sails waves winds the sea and for many days my only concern were learning the ropes. It were truly learning the ropes not just an expression for there was ropes to pull on I were learning which ones. It had an old sailor who taught me they called him Old Dan. Good gravy said Old Dan you don’t know nothing. I admit it were the truth. In Boston I had got my money selling salvage plastic fruits whatever I could find but I had never learned no true skills. I had never learned to sail.

We was heading down the coast all the way to Florida and the seas beyond. We was sailing down into the heat and light close to the sun
where pearls grew and gold and jewels and polyester. They needed the light to grow said the captain. He were very interested in pearls he talked of pearls nonstop. Pearls they grew in the stomachs of jellyfish so he said. He thought we could be rich men if we crossed into distant waters like in old days and brought home these products and novelties. Old Dan however he cared nothing for riches he were after another kind of riches he were after a woman. She was called Anna Gloria she was his long lost love.

I thought of pearls too and rhinestones and gold jewels plastics. I were carried away by this dream of riches. I used to lie in my berth thinking of the rich men in Boston which had motored boats and drank clear water out of plastic bottles a fresh bottle every day. It had semi-trailers that delivered them boxes of fruits vegetables bread butter milk oil cream the truck were cold so this food didn’t spoil. The rich people could have whatever foods they liked any time any day they was like kings. Their houses was cold also it were called air condition it were a old very expensive technology. You run it off sun panels or you run it off electricity if you can pay the carbon tax. It were a terrible thing electricity air condition trucks and the rest it were the cause of all our ills. It were the electricity plus motor vehicles plus factories plus cows caused climate warming they said. However I did not care I wanted very much to be rich to lie in bed shivering drinking water from a plastic bottle it would taste so sweet. What did I care about climate warming I would have air condition I would have sun panels everywhere on my cars on my gazebo on my dog I would have a plastic bathtub I would pay the carbon tax without a care I would be so rich.

But I were just a poor man for now just a sad fucker with a cut above my eye where someone hit me. I were a orphan too no family at all no woman no children I were all alone in the world. Maybe I didn’t know nothing but I knew it were no life at all to be alone in Boston in the year 2200 it was all heat sweat corn whiskey sadness that is why I left. I wanted an air condition mansion.

Now I will tell more of Old Dan. He were a very old man maybe 750 years old he said. I did not believe him yet still he were very old like a piece of meat salted down for keeping. One day he talked of whales. I did not believe him once again for I did not believe in whales. There were no reason for an animal to grow so big when it were so good to be a small animal a cockroach a rat which can live on crumbs. He laughed he said the whales they lived on crumbs too only it were giant crumbs for to them a ship like ours were a crumb. Fine I said whatever you say. You don’t believe me he said. No I said. The biggest were four hundred feet long he said they could swallow our boat entire did you not ever see a picture for there was many pictures. Yes I said I had got a picture book of animals when I were young in the orphan house however I believe the pictures was faked. How could you fake a picture he said it is a picture. They could find a way I said. No he said it can’t be done.

I didn’t listen to him I thought he were a fool. You will see I had got it wrong he were no fool for example it were him taught me to write. Anyway there you have it that were how I come to leave home at the age of eighteen or nineteen years.

I have liv’d upon this
Nauseous Orb
the Earth for near seventie years, and to-day, the principal actors in my life’s Drama being dead (except I imagine Dr. Dan Defoe who will outlive us all), and accordingly unable, if I judge rightly the termes & conditions of the
Afterlife
, to bring a Suit against me, I perceive the time is ripe to tell the adventures and misventures of my life, for tho I am now Resident in Boston, city of snows and fogs, yet my memory capers among the palmy green islands of youth.

I shall tell my story from front to back – I shall pour it out scum and sediment and all – for it wants nothing, and requires nothing of the
Artificers Art
. I was born in the Barbados, and there I was inured to hardship and cruel treatment, but in the year 1750, when I was a young man of nineteen years, I fled from there to the Bahama islands and sought to raise myself by an audacious deception, as I will shortly explain.

In the Bahamas I traveled from one house to the next, the guest of all, and from one island to the next, pass’d as it were from hand to hand among the debased gentry of that piratical country, who were all of them second sons & bastard sons & spalpeens and barrowers raised to the peerage, and I received as hearty a welcome as ever I could have wished. One day I came to stop with Mr. Galsworthy of Babylon plantation, upon an island called Little Salt. As it was then after noon, and his custom to feed without stint or measure each day at two o’clock, or three, I dress’d quickly in the best of what I had and came down to meet my host at the table, including many other guests. It was here I spied for the first time Daniel Defoe, whom they call’d the Spaynard, an old man like a hat-stand with eyes, or a scarecrow totteringly put together, or a jointed insect in a wig, acclaim’d by popular belief to be near three hundred years of age.

The great house at Babylon was poorly constructed, & in grate haste, namely that some rooms were walled with grave markers, and others with a kind of white washed dung. I think this were not for want of credit or capital, but only that Mr. Galsworthy did so enjoy a sumptuous table that his only thought was for feasting, and all the rest were bagatelles and trifles. In this he was like the man who gambles his estate for a thrill, or sells the cloathes off his back for the taste and quickness of wine. To-day we dined upon stew’d mudfish, pickled crabs, roast pig, roast yam, plantanes, boil’d pudding, roast coot, water milions, and many other fuds viz. doves ducks & fishes. For my part I worked at a ham the size of a cloak-bag.

Yet soon our revelry was interrupted by the visitation of brooding death. One of the guests, a Mr. Foster, gave a small scream and, stiff and benumb’d, though also it seemed in excruciating pain, endeavored to rise, which task being impossible he next grobled about for whatever chanced to be within his reach, snatching the wig from his companion’s head, and then, giving another scream, slipped forward dead with his face in his fud. We now all gazed about uncertain what to do, for if Mr. Foster had been poisoned, as it did appear he had been (which was not unusual in the Bahamas at that time, where the slaves did frequently season their masters fud with corrosive sublimate), then I expected our next concern would be to torment slave after slave until we had learnt the culprits. Daniel Defoe no doubt thought as I did, and not wishing to see this feast spoilt, for it was a good one, nor indeed any slaves tormented, he knelt by the dead man, & grabbed hold of his cheeks, & looked in his mouth, & lifted his hand and let it fall, & listened at his chest, and then, without canvassing the matter any further, pronounced him dead not of poyson but from a surfeit of Pig.

Now we were at ease once more, this occurrence being nothing remarkable in such a place, where death blew through every big house like a
summer breeze
. Only those guests newly arriv’d from England were alarmed, and stared about, their faces
masks
of
horror
. Mr. Galsworthy for his part was delighted to discover in Daniel Defoe, called from that
point
Doctor
Dan, a person with some knowledge of medicine, and pressed him now with questions and concerns of all sorts, asking whether a surfeit of duck mite produce a similar outcome, or of crab, and if not was there some Fatal Characteristic peculiar to the pig.

I settl’d in to listen, drinking punch & gazing at the slaves, who moved about clearing dishes. I knew from their faces they had poisoned Mr. Foster, though I ne’er learnt the reason.

Dr. Dan answered that a surfeit of pig sometimes produced what was called by physicians a coagluation of the
Gluten
or some say
Animal mixt
, which retarded & obstructed the circulation of the blood. A surfeit of any animal fud will produce the same outcome in any other animal, but the calamity proceeds quick or slow according to the degree of relationship between the animal consum’d to the animal which consumes it, for ex. a man must eat more duck to produce the same fatal coagluation, but a much smaller amount of monkey, and still less of Ape, Sphinx, or Satyr, which of all animals are man’s closest cousins. Cannibalism that heathen rite is known to produce an
instantaneous
coagluation. However, said Dr. Dan, remember that a duck is safer eating the meat of a Human than if he eats the meat of his own cousin and near relation, the goose.

Notwithstanding he spoke with authoritie I knew him for an imposter, yet I said nothing, for I recognized him
as one oozy worm recognizes another
though neither have the use of reason. Here I was at table to every appearance a white man among white men, yet I was a sheep in wolf’s clothing after all. You see dear reader my father was Mr. Coleman of Elizabeth plantation in the Barbados, that is God’s truth, yet my mother was his
Slave
, named Liberty, which made me neither one thing nor another, but surely no gentleman. In the Bahama islands I called myself John Green, and have done ever since.

My father was the hereditary king and president of the Democratic Federation of Mississippi States, which was lucky for him because he loved the amenities of power and the exercise of governance. It was not so lucky for the people he ruled over, however, nor for the country at large, which ultimately disappeared away into the lavender light and sweet scented dust of history. But that is putting the car before the hearse.

Originally, our dominions comprised St. Louis, where we lived, and most of the land west to Kansas City and south to the first wild reaches of the Mississippi jungle, which in truth made it not Mississippi states, as the country’s name boldly stated, but only the one individual old state of Missouri with some drips and drops of Arkansas. As for ourselves, we remained in St. Louis at all times. I recollect it as a city of almost twenty-five thousand souls, a city of date palms and mud houses and banana beer, and it was hot enough to fry an ape most of the time, except January and February. It was my family’s home for centuries.

Our name is Roulette, but I am Jasmine St. Roulette, the St. part having been added for a hint of style. I was the only issue of my father’s union with a mystery mother whom I never knew, and therefore our presidential family consisted of only two members, although the household was augmented tenfold by servants and slaves, and days might pass when I did not see my father at all, or saw him only at official occasions. We lived extravagantly in our hereditary palace, which had once been the city library of imperial St. Louis. We had an oven big enough to bake fifty cassava rounds at one time. We had baths as big as a farmer’s whole house. We had a hundred peacocks, acrylic clothing, real carpets, paraffin lanterns, plastic bins and jugs, and exotic commodities like cashew wine, which we obtained from neighboring countries on an economy
of exchange. We had water tanks and strategic grain reserves, and the whole edifice was encapsulated from the poor people within an enormous concrete wall.

For me, however, life was corrupted by frustrations, because I was a woman in a place and time where men hoarded up all the power. I could never participate in the larger sphere of activity. My father used me like a bartering chip. He affianced me to a sequence of men, the last of whom was the piggish senator Anthony Fucking Corvette, whom I had to visit each week to solidify family alliances. We would sit together at an antique plastic table and he would say things like, “It is better to drink muddy water and eat dirt.” Better than what? Then I had to let him do it to me. He did it by rote and political requirement and then he bollocked off to his hookers and his poppy juice and I went home to lie in my hammock and dream of another life. This is what it was to be a president’s daughter in the final years of the twenty-fifth century. It was an endless liturgy of palace tedium and an injustice of diminished freedoms. I called myself an anachro-feminist, a term of my own proud coinage, but it was only a phrase. I had no recourse.