Mr. Eternity

by Aaron Thier

  “It is like looking into the eye of our insignificance,” I said. “Missouri is just a remote fraction of the whole. What goes on at a place like California?”

  “Daniel Defoe says it is gone to desert,” said Edward Halloween. “But he also says he knows a sorcerer named Quaco who can transmute dreams into woolen cloth, so we can’t trust everything he says.”

  We only had good intelligence about our own territorial neighborhood. Across the river was the Mississippi Democratic Confederacy, which we called the MDC. It combined parts of Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. To the north was devastated land and then, much farther north, a bevy of small rich countries, in particular Minnesota, our former colonial overlord, against which my Roulette ancestors had fought a liberation war. To the south was hot trackless wilderness and to the west was the American desert, where there were mummified ghost towns and a few scattered roving ensembles of people. I often mused upon the desert and fancied that I had a large envy for the freedoms of that wild life. These people were few in number and they lived without formalized national coalitions. They slept in tents and gathered wild dates and sucked milk from their camels. They worshipped Jesus in the eternal blue sky and they hated us because we ate grain.

  “We should just run away to the sweeping sand hills of Nebraska,” I said. “We should just tell all these palace people they can kiss our south ends.”

  “Ah,” said Edward Halloween, “but the desert people are said to drive their women before them like camels. For anachro-feminists like us, the desert is no more congenial than the city.”

  Edward Halloween was actually a eunuch, so anachro-feminism had a different resonance for him. He was allowed to live however he preferred. Sometimes he lived as a man and wore denim and a red bandanna, like the presidential guard, and sometimes he lived as a woman and wore tight leather shorts and a strip of black cloth around his chest. But he was also barred from conventional employments, which is why he was forced to be a clown. His true vocation was that he was a poet and a genius. As an impoverished youth, he had magically and spontaneously learned to read, and later he composed an alphabetic novel, although he never wrote it down. He would recite passages when he drank too much sweet potato wine, which frequently occurred because he was addicted to sweet potato wine, as most poets were. I suspected it was a tour de force of searing intensity, but it was impossible to understand.

  “Sometimes I think I am more of an anarchic feminist,” I said. “Especially when Anthony Fucking Corvette is grunting on top of me. Sometimes I think I want to see the whole façade of state come crashing down.”

  He gazed at me with affection and sympathy, or at the least I thought he did. It was hard to determine because he’d painted his face white and he had a purple hat pulled down to his eyebrows.

  “Your father is just the hand puppet of history,” he said. “It isn’t useful to hate him because he’s hardly a human being in his own right. He is the despotism of centuries. He’s a system of patronage. He’s a scepter and a crown.”

  “But what does that make me? Anyway, I don’t hate him. I don’t know what I feel for him. All I really want is a chance to fizz. But every time I achieve a good mood, I have to take my dress off for Anthony Fucking Corvette.”

  “And I have to keep clowning,” he said, “even though I despise clowning.”

  “It would be better to have no thoughts. That way, humiliations are just humiliations and they lack theoretical underpinning.”

  “Thoughts are what save us, my friend. We are the only people in these dominions with a remodernized outlook and philosophy.”

  A slave came around with silver thimbles of poppy juice and I snuffed a little into my nostrils. The ballroom was very loud. I said, “What would I do without you, Mr. Halloween?”

  “You’d turn stamping crazy and burn this palace to its foundation, which would probably be better for everyone.”

  The biggest obstacle to remodernization was that the people of the Reunited States were extremely superstitious. They weren’t likely to embrace new, anachronistic technologies and ideas. When there was a lunar eclipse, for example, they stood in the streets shouting encouragement and throwing stones and setting big fires so that the moon would not be swallowed up by the darkness. When someone died, they filled the dead person’s mouth with sand. They believed that thunder was a magical wind unchained by a person who had communion with demons, and that any grain lost during a thunderstorm became the property of men in flying cars who came from a country called Manoa. They believed that an illness begun in the fourth quarter of the moon would always have a fatal termination.

  My father wouldn’t tolerate this hokey-pokey in his own household. “We are secular Americans,” he said. One of the only times I ever heard him shout in anger was when he heard Domingos, one of our house slaves, asking Jesus to make the cook give him cornmeal for breakfast, like a rich person. My father said that Jesus was nothing but a magician who was buried in a cabbage patch and that talking to Jesus flew in the face of his whole ideological agenda. But none of us could swear that there was no place called Manoa, and even though I told the slave girls that they should not give up hope if they became sick during the last quarter of the moon, it was true that people died more often at this time.

  My father started an information and propaganda campaign to extirpate superstition and remodernize the spirit of St. Louis, but his larger strategy was to introduce economic reforms that would extirpate poverty, since poverty stultified the wits and was ultimately the cause of ignorance. His first large initiative was a factory that made cloth from camel hair. Daniel Defoe had explained that in other arid countries, camel cloth was a principal item of manufacture, and my father wanted to produce huge quantities and sell it across the river in the places that camels abhorred. He was like a lunatic in his excitement over this idea. He now revised Daniel Defoe’s title, which became Vice-Secretary of Camel Cloth Manufacture and Remodernization Policy.

  It’s true that the cotton crop often failed because of droughts, so initially I thought camel cloth was a clever alternative. Camels were the animal equivalence of poppies and mama beans. They thrived in droughts. They could drink sunlight and breathe sand. They could also see through their eyelids. All day they absorbed heat and in the night they cooled, emanating warmth like coals. They were also very familiar to everyone in St. Louis, so it was reasonable to think the cloth-makers would be comfortable working with them. Everyone drank camel milk, and whenever poor people were celebrating they also ate camel meat. They called it shamo, after the French chameau, a convention which delighted my father because it dated from the time of the United States.

  “But the problem is labor,” said Edward Halloween. “He says that camel cloth will create jobs, but who is the only person who has no job? It is you, my feminist friend.”

  “It’s true. The poor people have so many jobs they can hardly do anything. Instead of jobs, it will create chaos.”

  “Ah, but that reminds me. I’ve thought of a new theory. Ask me about it.”

  “Ask you about what?”

  “My theory!”

  “Oh yes, of course. Tell me, Doctor Halloween, what is your new theory?”

  “My theory is about chaos and craziness,” he said. He lifted his chin and gripped his hands behind his back, like a child reciting a poem. “Both are types of disorder, but craziness is an affliction of the mind and chaos is an affliction of the world. You might say, ‘Hello, I am a human. It is my job to impose order on chaos.’ But this is not true. Chaos is born in men and women and it is our fate to disseminate it in an orderly world. That is the purpose of a human. Chaos is the outcome and craziness is the force or the process. Those of us who are craziest are those through whom chaos shines like a torch.”

  This speech had a firm allegorical rigor that appealed to me very much. It was his way of saying that the great remodernization campaign of President Roulette could be figured as a process of disseminating chaos, which di
d in fact turn out to be true.

  At this time I didn’t know Daniel Defoe yet. I logically assumed that he was crazy also, and this was because of the unimpeachable reason that he said many crazy things. Chaotic messages came pouring out of him in a ceaseless unbridled torrent. But I soon learned that he was only trying to stay upright and gain an advantage if he could. I discovered this one evening during a feast with officials and dignitaries. As usual during such affairs, the conversation just simpered along, rife with banalities. My father couldn’t stand it and called upon Daniel Defoe to tell us a story.

  “Then I will tell you about the Lewis and Clark expedition,” he said. “The relevance of this topic is that the expedition began right here in St. Louis. Back then, St. Louis was truly the last settled place on the wild frontier. There were herds of wild camels as far as the eye could see. There were stands of cashew trees where the central square is now. There were also large earthen mounds, and these were the mounds of Cahokia. I traveled with the expedition as far as the mountains, where General Clark was killed by Indians in a kind of ambuscade, and then I went south. It rained so much that I had to fold myself in long sheets of plastic when I wanted to sleep.”

  I knew that imperial St. Louis contained no camels, so I cast a look at Edward Halloween and raised my eyebrows. He was sweating copiously from the heavy and delectable food. It was his favorite meal of spicy ginger beef with cornbread and jute leaves, mashed green banana with pig, and trembling custard. He grinned at me.

  But then I perceived that Daniel Defoe was looking at me with a smile of his own. In fact, I had an impression he would have winked, except all eyes were riveted upon him. What did this mean? His own plate was empty because, as we had been interested to learn, he never ate anything. Much later I learned that he never voided anything either.

  “Later I was in a place where hot water erupted from the ground and everything smelled like sulfur,” he continued. “It was my private hell. After that I was in Las Vegas, which was a Mexican city built in a beaver meadow. It had many brothels and casinos. Eventually I found my way back to the river, which the Indians called the Pirahao, and I paddled down the whole length in an old bathtub and reached the city of New Orleans just in time for election day, where I got drunk with a writer named Edward Ellen Poe.”

  This was the end of his story, but I could not banish that smile from my mind. After dinner I seized a chance to confront him. I said, “Do you really believe the stories you tell?”

  “Well, I exaggerate them a little bit to entertain your father.”

  “I thought just as much. But why? You’re not a slave anymore.”

  “And yet I’m forbidden from leaving the city. I have to ingratiate myself and make myself indispensable, so he doesn’t oppress me or enslave me again. But it’s okay. I have some experience in this zone of endeavor.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “This is not so different from how I live. A slavish way of being free. But tell me the truth, in that case. Where did you emerge from and why were you wandering the desert?”

  “I will tell you. A long time ago I was ejected from Europeland because it was illegal to be a Jew, which is what I was and am. The woman I loved stayed behind. Later I learned that she’d been sold as a whore by her own people. Ever since then I’ve been looking for her. That is my whole story. It’s a story of unrecanted love.”

  I considered this with grave thoughtfulness. Christopher Smart pushed his head against my leg. I said, “But this happened to me also. My father sold me as a whore. Did you know? I have to marry Anthony Fucking Corvette in four months.”

  “I heard something about it, yes. It’s like you say. It is a slavish way of being free.”

  “It makes me extremely furious. I think I’ll never forgive my father.”

  “But you never know. Life is very long.”

  “Longer for some than others. Why do they say you’re a thousand years old?”

  “It isn’t so miraculous. It’s only because I reaped the benefits of modern medicine.”

  There came a crash and a shout of jubilance, and when we turned around we saw my father laughing amongst broken glass. He was wearing a yellow acrylic cardigan and also his crown, which was made from obsidian and gold. He was drinking sweet potato wine from an agateware pitcher. He was very happy. If a man must be a cracked window through which chaos escapes into the world, it is nice for him if he is a king and president.

  2016

  * * *

  After breakfast, the ancient mariner hung upside down from a scaffold behind the kitchen shed. He’d put on some boots that could be fastened into the wooden frame. The idea was to stretch his spine so that his rib cage and pelvis didn’t become locked together. Azar was taking a shower in the tidy little bathroom shed a few yards from the back door of the boat.

  “In your letter you said you needed help with some digging,” I said.

  “Never mind that.” He pointed to the bathroom shed. “Your friend. How well do you know him?”

  “Azar? I know him very well. I’ve known him since we were eighteen. I should tell him sometime how much he means to me.”

  “But what kind of name is Azar?”

  “Persian. Iranian? Persian?”

  “Persian,” he said, his voice stifled and his face red.

  “Iranian? He’s a Persian Jew.”

  “A Jew! I myself am a Jew. Then never mind. I thought he was a Turk.”

  “He’s not a Turk. Or maybe he is. I’m not sure what you mean by Turk.”

  “Turk doesn’t mean anything. Our enemies were the Turks, therefore anyone who was our enemy was a Turk, but they might have been Saracens and Malabars too. Truly I had no idea where they came from. They were Mohammedans. They must still be out there somewhere.”

  “I don’t know if the Turkish Turks are our enemies now or not. I’m not so knowledgeable about politics. Are you talking about the Ottomans?”

  “I’ll tell you sometime about when I was a slave in the Arab world,” he said. “It was all camels and camel milk. And the Turks! I will say one thing for them. They had a delicious pastry called a croissant. You will know it today as a French butter crescent. But I can’t tell you about these things while I’m upside down.”

  Out in the street it was the twenty-first century. I drank espresso out of a Styrofoam cup, which made me feel very guilty, and then I checked my email, which I’d sworn not to do, and then I checked my weather app for new information about climate change, which I’d especially sworn not to do. There was indeed new information. In a Warming World, Where to Grow Wine? And less trivially, Melting Arctic Permafrost Looms as Major Factor in Warming.

  But even though the world was ending, I got my shoes out of the car and went for a run. Tight narrow streets, reckless driving, outlandish tropical plants, pastel houses with idyllic shady verandas, frigate birds stuck like decals in the hot blue sky. Soon I felt much better. Sharp and clearheaded and cheerful. It came to me that the movie would be a success. It would make us famous. Surely this would mitigate, at least for us, the sorrow of environmental devastation?

  The island had come alive by the time I got back. Groups of stunned tourists were drifting down the street. The bars were open. There were street vendors who’d write your name on a shell, but the only people interested were Korean tourists. The shell people were working hard to produce transliterations.

  Out in the street in front of the ancient mariner’s boat, a stumpy little man with a plastic toupee was having a telephone conversation and drinking from a red Solo cup.

  “Baby,” he said, “there’s not a thing I can do. I’ll have to stay here in Cleveland another day.”

  He was wearing a lavender sport coat and a bathing suit and his hair had slipped down over his right ear. He adjusted it fastidiously and put his phone away.

  “I guess you want to know who was that on the phone,” he said.

  “No.”

  “It was my wife.”

  “Of course i
t was your wife.”

  He was silent for a moment. He drank from his cup and looked around with some satisfaction, savoring his deception. Then he pulled a crumpled McDonald’s bag from his pocket and held it out for me to inspect.

  “I’ll bet you I can throw this thing into the trash can,” he said. He pointed to the trash can, which was close, not more than ten feet.

  “I’ll bet you a hundred and fifty dollars you can’t.”

  He was unnerved by this response, which had surprised me as well. “Let’s say twenty.”

  “Deal.”

  He missed, but then he fished out his wallet and paid me the money.

  “Try again,” I said, touched by his honesty. “Double or nothing.”

  “I can’t. I have a gambling problem.”

  “Then I’ll bet you this twenty that I can do it.”

  “Deal.”

  The trash can seemed so close that I could almost reach out and drop the bag in. He called me a ringer. Again he paid what was owed.

  “The name’s Tom Rath,” he said.

  “Is it? I think that’s a name out of literature somewhere. Isn’t it the man in the gray flannel suit?”

  “It’s my alias that I use for traveling.”

  “It sounds made-up. What do you do for a living, Tom Rath?”

  “I own an advertising agency in St. Petersburg.”

  “In Russia!”

  “In Florida. Pinellas County. I also have a boat. The Tampa Bay area is home to many attractions and destinations.”

  Azar asked the ancient mariner if he had known Christopher Columbus. I thought he was baiting him a little. It was like asking a tourist in D.C. if he’d met the president, and either he says no, in which case fine, or he says yes, in which case you know he’s a madman.