Mr. Eternity (16 page)

But sometimes he spoke of Anna Gloria, his lost love. He had met her across the broad heaving seas, in Spain, and he had encountered her again in the Orinoco jungle, and also in Australia, and in the Bahamas, and in Java and Old Maui. He said that interlapping circumstances always conspired to separate them. I tried to affirm my conviction that he would find her again, but the truth was that these love stories cast me down in sadness. I was increasingly pierced by an attraction for him myself, and I knew that this feeling was just a piped dream that flowed ceaselessly into the sewer of my presidential ennui. I knew he was just in transit through our world. I knew I was just a parochial princess with whom he whiled away a miniature fraction of his time.

It was during one of these conversations that I experienced a revolution in my own thinking, however, and it was this: I was asking myself whether Anna Gloria could possibly be a true historical figure, and suddenly I understood how it didn’t matter. These love stories were evocations of sentimental truths which existed beyond the orbit of factuality. She was real because she existed for him. Why had I never realized? And I also understood that an equivalent logic extended to his accounts of history. I had the revelation that history was only the rabble-house of facts and details from which human beings confabulated a sentimental truth. At the best-case scenario, at its truest and most illustrative, history was an effort of imagination, mostly fictive, mostly allegorical, like a story of unrecanted love. Why should Daniel Defoe not conceive his own fictive discourse for discussing it?

These philosophical upheavals occurred in the foreground of my life. In the background, the remodernization plan moved forward with the jerking sidewise motions of a river crab. For example, my father now
decreed a private and frivolous reform of serving only United States food in the palace. Such a reform was unpardonable in a time of drought, for there were those who struggled to locate any morsel of food at all, let alone a United States themed morsel, and when knowledge of this practice seeped into the city there was a riot in Hi-Pointe. However, I am also driven to admit that I enjoyed this reform very much. It was like the culinary reflection of my new perceptions about history. It was history come to poetic life, or else refigured as food and made ingestible.

My father got his recipes from the
Jennie June’s American Cookery Book
, which he selected for its emphasis on modern science, and we had authentic traditional food preparations like imitation crab, water soodjee, Trenton Falls fry, and macaroni. The cook usually had to make some substitutions. She made venison puffs with shamo and she used Jamaica cherries in her compote of green gooseberries. Our porpoise pepper steak was just goat.

“It definitely takes me back,” said Daniel Defoe, who didn’t eat anything. He sniffed a shamo puff and said, “It definitely reminds me of the United States. Once, I ate venison puffs at MacDonall’s every night for a whole year. I don’t remember why.”

“You were a hobo,” I said, trying my own hand at speaking in his allegorical language. “Don’t tell me. You played knucklebones with some Shoshone women at an all-night bowling alley.”

“That sounds right, yes.”

“It was wild America, home of the braves.”

“Exactly true.” He laughed. “You’re the most clever of princesses.”

But the United States Food Program was only a small and private ingredient in the stew of remodernization, which was now spiced by a new and potentially groundbreaking reform. This was my father’s proposed reintroduction of electrification and incandescent light, which would fill our nights with luminous rainbows and also enable people to keep working after dark. This was intended as a circuitous drought-relief initiative, because people could sell their increased output of goods to the
MDC in exchange for food, which would free them from the natural caprices of agricultural production. Camel cloth, for example, was enjoying a boutique appeal in the MDC, just as my father had hypothesized, and he wanted to run the cloth factory night and day.

We knew that lightning was just atmospheric electricity, and Daniel Defoe thought that it would be easy to harness it. Bert Franklin had done it with only a soda can and some string. The truly big job was reinventing the light bulb. I actually chanced to be present when my father and Daniel Defoe attempted this. It was because they commenced their labor in the dining area, where Edward Halloween and I were eating a traditional vol-au-vent of peacock. We tried to escape, but Daniel Defoe cast us a glance of entreaty and supplicated with us to stay. He did not relish another afternoon alone with my father. And actually it was no trauma to stay, because we yearned away for the wonder of light as much as anyone. All the sources attested that the cities of the United States were illuminated from dusk till dawn by magical electric glass tubes and bulbs. It was marvelous to envision.

They had three technical guides on electricity, but two of them were so complicated as to be unsusceptible to comprehension. Luckily they also had
Electricity for Boys: A Working Guide
, by James Slough Zerbe. My father began reading aloud. He did not seem to notice that I was present in the room.

“The cores, or armatures, will be magnetized. The result is that the electrode, connected with the armature of the magnet, is drawn away from the other electrode, and the arc is formed, between the separated ends.”

But then he slapped the book closed and frowned. “I feel I understand this,” he said. At that point, sad to say, it was manifest that the project would have the same conclusion as every other technological reform. The defect was philosophical. It was that my father, as president, assumed and affirmed that everything he said was correct, which codified his malapropisms into law and made him impervious to fresh knowledge. He could never learn anything because no book could contravent the established convictions of his heart.

“Just read a little more,” said Daniel Defoe, who was the only person who had seen the things described by Mr. Zerbe. “Just to set the mood.”

My father continued, “As the current also passes through a resistance coil, the moment the ends of the electrodes are separated too great a distance…”

Then he closed the book again.

“Well,” said Daniel Defoe, looking at me with doubt in his eyes, “I do not have such a deep background in electricity, but this is pretty simple. An electrode is anything that has a potential. I seem to remember you could even use a potato. By potato I actually mean Incan earth truffle, which is different from our potatoes, which are sweet potatoes. But you could probably use a sweet potato too. It’s the same word after all. Please get me two sweet potatoes, peeled at each end.”

Domingos, our most attentive slave, went running off to get the potatoes.

“And have you got a magnet and an armature? An armature is a housing so that the magnet can spin. Twist some wire around the magnet and let the twists stick out so you can set it over a bowl. It has to be a metal bowl.”

I was impressed by the fluency of his inventions. “You’re an expert after all,” I said.

He winked and gave me the antique gesture of a thumbs-up, which he had just taught me. It is a closed fist with the thumb extended heavenward.

Before long, he had made what he called the innards of the light bulb. These consisted of a horseshoe-shaped magnet wound up in wire, and each end of the wire stuck into a sweet potato. The ends of each sweet potato were almost touching, and that was where the incandescence would be produced. He balanced this over a copper serving dish. For cosmetic reasons, he enclosed the whole thing in a glass bowl. Christopher Smart leapt onto the table and tried to disrupt this work, so I had to hold him down.

“This is much bigger than it needs to be,” said Daniel Defoe. “This is really a light bowl instead of a light bulb. But to make it smaller all you
need is to use small potatoes, a small magnet, and a little metal cup instead of a serving dish. Easy.”

“Easy?” said Edward Halloween.

“Easy,” said my father.

They couldn’t test their light bowl because they still had to figure out how to put a harness on the lightning, but my father was thunderously excited and began establishing his light bowl factory anyway. This was when theory encountered the trials of practicality, for nobody wanted to sit in a barn wiring up these sweet potatoes. My father had to conscript legions of the desperate poor from the scorching inland region of City of the Sun, where they lived in houses made from bamboo poles and cement sacks. A lot of them were mothers with tiny babies in arms, and in a time of drought their unimpeachable maternal instinct was to thieve the potatoes for their own consumption. Sweet potatoes, which I think must have come from the MDC, had become a rich person’s luxury.

It seems the drought was worse than we had conceived, or else we lacked the appropriate grain reserves. Our own royal land was situated on the river and yielded a scanty harvest of corn, but deeper inland the crops were stressed or even failing, except the poppies and mama beans and sesame. It seems the poor people were living on dust and sunshine, like camels, and also on poppy juice, which eliminated scruples against crime even in the midst of good circumstances. There was no hope for the light bowl factory in such a situation, and it burned down before too long. Some people thought this too was the work of Carlos Pedigree.

“Oh well,” my father said, “you learn a little something from each failure. Each failure is an ingredient in your future success.”

But no one who was sensible of the course of things and who had an inkling of what was happening in the city could be confident in any future success. Conditions were deteriorating in the Reunited States. Even my father seemed cogniscent of this. Sometimes he was on top of the whirlwind, laughing and shouting at his vice-secretaries, and one day he even succumbed to the vanity of erecting a statue of himself in Federation Park, but more often he was overcome by the ideological
pathology of gloom. One morning I was on the roof eating my yoga cream when I saw him coming out of the family tomb, which was a marble structure in the garden where three generations of my royal family reposed for all eternity. He had been sleeping in there! The day was warm and dusty, with a smell of wildfire, and his director of spying was sitting on the dry grass waiting for him.

I retired to my sleeping bag in a mood of relative contentment, but I slept badly in the riot heat and woke up feeling like I’d spent the night in my own grave, and this despite the beautiful sunrise, the tropic breeze, the interest and novelty of our project. I had been chewing on my teeth in the night and there was blood in my mouth. I thought this was justification enough for a breakfast of tranquilizers, although I decided to forgo my usual ration of two green pills, which provided the most agreeable lift, in favor of a broad-spectrum, slate-cleaning combination of one green, one white, and one blue. These were not recreational drugs, after all. One could even argue that they were a kind of medicine.

Never did I feel so generous and cheerful as when I’d decided to enjoy a few pills. Never was I so hungry for human interaction. I woke Azar up and tried to shock him into a discussion.

“I was thinking just now about how much of happiness is expectation,” I said. “I think maybe this is a way to console myself about global warming. The people of the future won’t know how easy our lives were! They’ll be born to hardship and they’ll expect less in the way of material comforts. They’ll be less unhappy than we’d be if we had to live in their world.”

“Dogs must get bit by mosquitoes all the time,” Azar said, “but they just seem to take it.”

“Exactly. It’s all they know. We imagine how terrible it would be to live without everything we have, but the people of the future won’t know what it was like to have it.”

But this wasn’t right. This was not cheerful at all. This was the very opposite of cheer. I sat down on a stump to regroup. It would be twenty
minutes before I felt tranquility pooling behind my eyes. Dust stirred menacingly in a shaft of light.

“Everything is just expectations,” I said. I could feel my eyes bugging out in panic and excitement. “If you grow up in a world without good mirrors, like the ancient mariner claims to have done, then probably no one expects you to be so well groomed, right? If you’ve got mirrors, it changes the expectations. It solves one problem but creates another. It creates new and higher expectations vis-à-vis grooming.”

Azar seemed not to hear me. He said, “I dreamed my elementary school gymnasium was full of electric eels. I had to shave but I couldn’t get my shoes off. I was married but my wife was in a jail in the Everglades.”

“Did you get a look at her? It would be good to know what she looks like so you recognize her when you see her in the real world. Otherwise she’s just a figment, like Anna Gloria.”

The ancient mariner had been up on deck praying. When he came down a few minutes later, we saw that he wasn’t alone. Descending the ladder behind him was an ancient black man with a computer keyboard around his neck.

“Young men,” said the ancient mariner, “this is Sancho.”

“Sancho?” I said, alarmed by the implications.

“I mean Quaco,” he said. “This is Quaco. Quaco, here are two more young people.”

“They never stop coming,” said Quaco.

“One after another after another. These fellows have agreed to do the digging.”

“Hello, Quaco,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “Hello.”

His voice was melodic and professorial, truly an elegant voice, but in addition to the keyboard he was wearing a pink ladies’ windbreaker and a set of bracelets made from teeth and worn-out glo-sticks. This in combination with his red eyes and his hair, which was black and gray and wild,
like an old dog curled up on his head, produced a startling effect. He wore a pair of mesh shorts with the logos rubbed off, and he had no shoes. Later I learned that people called him the mayor of Key West.

“Quaco is here to help me divine the location of the buried treasure,” said the ancient mariner.