Mr. Eternity (25 page)

The house slaves being occupy’d with serving, and the ladies all removed to speak of such things as pleased them in the safety of the withdrawing room, I now crept up the back stares & with the greatest expedition possible unlocked the cabinet & placed the gold and silver in as many pillow slips as I could find, tying them up with string and dropping them from the window, where Quaco stood waiting. This being done, I locked the cabinet and listen’d a moment, but heard only the sounds of revelry, as before, the clock having struck that particular hour at which quarrels and havock ride triumph through the house.

I replaced the key after that, and went down to bed, but I slept not a wink and in the morning was startled by Samson beating upon the door to tell me Dr. Dan was now dead, as he had seen himself with his own eyes. Mr. Galsworthy was in a state of terrible grief over this loss, having apparently come to love his physician very much, and Mrs. Galsworthy too was up-set, so that it grieved me I could not assure her all was well.

In such a climate the burial must take place immediately upon confirmation of death, and therefore Dr. Bankcroft was summon’d from Green Gardens not far away, and pronounc’d Dr. Dan
dead on sight
, and went away directly so he might return home in time for dinner, leaving only Quaco to wash and dress the body. This he now did, affixing such coins as would fit to Dr. Dan’s skin (the doctor lying now upon the table with his stomach swole, and his lips blue, circumstances by which I was badly affrighted), and fixing the rest to the floor of the coffin such that none
could be seen after we had lifted our friend inside. I grew fearful as we nailed shut the coffin lid, yet Quaco did assure me there was no cause for apprehension. All of this being done we executed the rites of sepulture with all appropriate solemnity, Mr. Galsworthy weeping meanwhile though I had ne’er seen him give concern to any death that had occurr’d.

My next task was to ensure the discoverie of the theft, it being necessary to bring this crime into the air, & allow accusations and volleys of interrogatories to fly freely, so that all suspicion might have time to dissipate like a foul odor before such time as it would be necessary to rouse Dr. Dan from his false death. This gave us a period of not more than three days, or so Quaco judg’d, from the instant the
Zombi Powder
had been rubb’d beneath the doctor’s hare.

Reader, in my youth I did many rash and incautious things, yet perhaps none were so rash and incautious as the following, which I did without reason. It might have been the great Erratum of my worldly existence, except that it was not. It proved the happiest of all my rash choices, which is why I am inclined to wonder if it were not some ancient spirit of love or fate that drove me to that appalling recourse.

What I did was this, namely that I met Mrs. Galsworthy in the kitchen garden and discovered the whole thing to her. I told her of our plan, and confess’d, & begged her to keep silent. I told her of my debts (of which she had known) and of my unseasonable youth (though she was not but one year older than I), which disposed me to bad actions, and I told her I did not know why I risked it all in confessing to her. Then I asked her could she do me the great favor of my life, and cause Mr. Galsworthy to discover his coins were missing, for if she did so it would be a great favor to Dr. Dan. I now dared to take her hand, and in a voice mild as goose-milk, with hardly a thought for what I said, I told her I loved her. Only when I pronounced it did I know to a certainty it was the truth.

In the year 2370, during another epochal drought, my great-grandfather had triumphed in a water war against the MDC, but now, when the MDC began to divert so much water that the river was only a pestilential trickle by the time it reached St. Louis, my father cowered from such conflicts. Instead, as the months totted away and drought chewed apart the peripheries of the city, he simply enacted one fruitless reform after another. He founded a bank. He declared himself the godfather of everyone in the country. He printed national currency on cheap husk paper because he thought it would be a psychological inducement to prosperity if people could hold large piles of money in their hands. Later he tried to extend the grope of the governmental hand by establishing new agencies, for example a Department of Motor Vehicles, which was truncated to DMV. The name was just euphemistic. As Daniel Defoe explained, a DMV was a place to hang out and tell stories. It was a place for poor, sick people to congregate. It had nothing to do with motor vehicles.

Concomitantly with these reforms, he enacted a propaganda campaign to exalt the pillars of the Roulette dictatorship. He wanted to start a cult of personality, which would galvanize the public spirit and persuade everyone to take up the task of remodernization with renewed comradely zeal. We were amazed at the resiliency of his self-belief, which flowered and flourished even though we lived now within a penumbra of doom. It was almost wondrous to behold. First he had inspirational woodcuts of himself printed and distributed to all of our famished citizens. He thought it would be harder to do unlawful actions or foment revolution if the benevolent gaze of the patriarch was always in sight. Then he sent vice-secretaries into the city to disseminate glorious rumors about him. Edward Halloween was charged with writing the rumors.

“The president contrives fresh torments for me,” he said. “He lies awake thinking, ‘How will I outrage my clown tomorrow?’”

But he could think of ten rumors a minute. He spouted them off in fluent paragraphs. “The president single-handedly beat the MDC at volleyballs. The president can stand on his head for three hours without losing consciousness. The president is able to expel dog malaria from any sufferer by the force of his voice alone. Knives melt before they touch him. He has a videoscopic mind with which he can see everything that happens in the Reunited States.”

Meanwhile, my father bustled around the palace, a hive of industry and craziness, muttering to himself things like, “Light bowls. Toothpaste. Radiant consolidation. A DMV on every corner.” I watched him and it was like looking at him through the wrong end of a telescope. It was like watching an ant struggling in a jar of water.

And all throughout this time, while I was sitting with poor George Washington or eating my cornmeal porridge, the citizens of the Reunited States perished of famine. They fled north and perished heat-struck in the wilds. They drowned trying to swim to the MDC because there was no buoyancy left in their spirits. Then Nevada fever broke out again and they died of this malady also.

But my father saw empty shops, empty fields, empty carts, empty piers, empty streets, and he said to his vice-secretaries, “It would seem that Nevada fever creates jobs as well, doesn’t it?”

One night I submitted a bribe of copper dollars and corncakes to the guards tasked with keeping us confined in the palace. They were so hungry that they forgot their duty at once, and now, after a full year of supervision in the presidential compound, I walked down into the city once again. I wanted to harvest some intelligence and see the disaster with my own eyes. I brought Edward Halloween and Daniel Defoe with me, and we compelled Mina the dwarf to accompany us in the expectation that she could introduce us to authentic people and not simply the drunken nightlife characters we had known long ago in Fat Tuesday’s. She was one of the
palace hookers, but before this comfortable appointment she had been a creature of the street. She mandated that we cover ourselves in the unimpeachable disguise of soot and grime.

We went down into City of the Sun, a shanty neighborhood of uneven streets and trash houses. Here our impression was of a wasted locale abandoned by gods and men, where even the fabric of the universe seemed dusty and frayed. The hibiscus bushes were all picked clean and denuded from people employing the sticks to clean their teeth. The banana plants were gone, and the people had cut down most of the trees, even though it was illegal, and the camels were vanished as surely as all our yesterdays. There were ubiquitous signs about my father, however. They said, “For Best Results, Support Your President!!” and “He Is Hereditary Lifetime President for a Reason!”

We consumed millet beer at a corner tavern, but there was no riotous gaiety, as in previous eras. It was just people getting fuckered up by necessity, because for them the millet beer was their only nourishment. We discovered by inquiry and interrogation that it came as a charity provision from the MDC. My father must have been ignorant of this international aid mission, because he would never have permitted it.

Edward Halloween accosted a pair of silent old men and said in his mocking clown’s voice, “Why so downhearted? Don’t you know the president loves you?”

One of them said, “The president can wither crops by speaking the name of the farmer backwards.”

The other said, “The president is a spirit from the mists of the Mississippi.”

“These things are true,” said Edward Halloween.

Now the first man was roused in a fog of millet beer and anger and he said, “May he sleep on the doorsteps of the city! May he drink what flows along the alleys!”

It was a traditional curse, and Edward Halloween took it up himself in a solemn melancholic voice: “May there be signs of vomit on his clothes.”

Next we went to Mina’s sister’s house. This woman was called Pilaf, and her husband had the noteworthy ethnic name of Instant George. Mina told them that Edward Halloween and I were both whores from the palace and that Daniel Defoe was the supervisor of the honey harvest and guardian of the fruit. She wanted to be supremely careful with our anonymity, so she had insisted that I was not allowed to speak. My accent would give us away. But Edward Halloween could speak freely because his own accent in Mississippi Spanish was devoid of refinements, and Daniel Defoe merely sounded like a foreigner, which he was.

It seems that these people earned their income from selling jungle products in the market, but I expect that Mina sent them food and money also, for they were more prosperous than their neighbors. For example, they were excessively proud to show us their chicken, which had as yet gone uneaten. They kept it in their house so it would eat the scorpions. The other chief fact was that they were devotees of the illegal cult of Jesus and Mary, and this was why they slept in two stages, from sunset to midnight and from two until dawn. During the two-hour break, they watched for the coming of Jesus.

“Tell us about the palace,” said Instant George. “Is it true that the president is building a marble boat, and that’s where all the wealth goes?”

“It’s true,” said Daniel Defoe.

Instant George said this was an insult to all those who suffered from hunger and thirst, and he acclaimed the deeds of Carlos Pedigree, revolutionary crusader for liberty, who was said to have effected the recent explosion of a senatorial house.

This inspired Daniel Defoe to tell one of this stories. He said, “I knew a revolutionary named Thomason Jeffers. He built a radio from a dog’s ear bone. I’ve been meaning to tell you about this. Using this instrument he broadcast his Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which made New England independent from the tyranny of the British Queen. Did I ever tell you about New England? The coffee plantations of Pennsylvania. The marshmallow plants of Cape Coral. The aspirin trees of Massachusetts.”

“Let’s talk about this later,” said Edward Halloween.

Then we had some sweet potato wine, which was fermenting in a crock by the window. This was another sign of their prosperity and they were terrifically proud to share it with us. Edward Halloween accepted it eagerly, and even Daniel Defoe drank a tiny measure, just a spoonful, after which he was dizzy and fuckered up, but I was bashful about taking from their meager stores. Surely they could not spare this nutriment. I was also thinking of Thomas Jefferson, who was a real person, a historical revolutionary terrorist from the time of the jihad against Great Britian. I had read something about him, though as a matter of principle I now preferred Daniel Defoe’s lyrical revisions. The interesting circumstance was that my own distant Roulette ancestors, who were buried in the family tomb and whose stories were told on Independence Day, could be considered revolutionary terrorists themselves, on the order of Carlos Pedigree and Thomas Jefferson. They had freed us from the yoke of our colonial rulers in Minnesota. But now my family was at the other end of the yardstick, beating the revolutionaries from the door. It seems that history comes in circles.

“Are you able to find food?” Edward Halloween was saying. “Don’t you dream of a glorious revolution? Doesn’t it outrage you to know the president eats cornbread and shamo? He even has wheatcake!”

Pilaf explained how their life was hard, but life for poor people was always the same and that was their lot in life. She said that it was a great blessing that Mina was born a dwarf, since this anomaly had enabled her to rise up in the world, but for the ordinary multitudes there was no way to get out of City of the Sun.

The high creaking sadness of their bedeviled existence came home to me in a rush. Here was their life, I thought. They were ensconced in this crowded enclosure with a chicken to eat the scorpions and sweet potato wine as their only indulgence. Soon, one fatally beautiful drought morning, they would consume the chicken and the scorpions would multiply in geometric profusion and drive them into the street.

Suddenly I was seized by a longing and I said to Daniel Defoe, without reason or warning, “Marry me, won’t you? What does anything matter?”

I spoke this proposal in Modern English, so our hosts would not grasp the meaning, and Instant George said, “Sorry we apologizes. We doesn’t speak it.” But meanwhile Daniel Defoe only laughed and said, “If only I could, my friend. If only.” Then he sang a bar of music and placed a warm hand on my leg. I saw he was increasingly fuckered up from his wine, so I shimmied close to him. He said, “I’ll sing you a song off Mr. Jeffers’s magical radio. I’ll sing you the greatest hits of sea chanteys.”

“Look at this proper palace gentleman,” said Instant George, who hadn’t understood any of this. “He knows we’re all going to starve. He wants to get it while the getting’s good.”