Mr. Eternity

by Aaron Thier

  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.

  2016

  * * *

  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.

  “Aha,” said Azar, frowning in concentration. He already had the camera out.

  “Because of the rising seas.”

  “Right,” said Azar. “But maybe you could just elaborate on that?”

  The ancient mariner held up his hands. “Everyone tells me that the seas are rising. You told me this yourselves. Isn’t that correct?”

  “It’s correct,” I said. “Do you want to see the data?”

  “You are two smart fellows, armed with all the best facts, and I believe you. I’ve heard it from other people too. So now Quaco and I have to dig up our treasure before the sea drowns these islands and it
’s lost forever. This is the favor I have to ask you. Quaco and I are not young anymore, as you can see.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Azar.

  “But first I have to remember which island I buried it on, so Quaco has just given me a medicine to help me remember.”

  “Uh oh,” said Azar.

  Quaco was strolling around the yard, hands clasped behind his back. He stooped and coughed and muttered in the raw sunlight. He didn’t pay any attention to us.

  “Quaco is a sorcerer,” the ancient mariner explained. “Once he turned me into a pig so I could escape from my creditors.”

  Azar looked anxious. “I feel like something big is going to happen, but I’m so hungry I can’t concentrate.”

  “You want to talk about hunger! Many years ago, for a period of about two weeks, I ate only cardamom pods. I hardly eat anything now, but that’s only because I’m not hungry. If you ask me what I drank, I’m not afraid to say I drank camel urine. We were crossing the desert. It was a place called Azawad. We were going to sell the cardamom pods somewhere on the coast, but yes, you guessed it, everyone died and I was alone with the camels. That was how I was freed from slavery, at least on that occasion.”

  Then the color seemed to drain from his face.

  “Is everything okay?” said Azar.

  “I think I’ll just pop inside for a minute. Quaco tells me this is not going to be pleasant.”

  He began to walk back to his boat. At the door he stopped and turned around.

  “Camel urine is very thick,” he said. “These are impressive creatures. Their excrement is so dry you can burn it as soon as it falls.”

  He closed his eyes and stood still for a moment, breathing slowly.

  “And one more thing. Have you ever wondered why Spanish food has so much ham and bacon in it? It’s because the inquisitors always came at lunch, and if they saw you eating ham you were safe.”

  Then he went inside and shut the door. We were left watching Quaco move slowly along the fence, stooping every few feet to examine a leaf or a flower.

  “Here’s something new,” I said.

  “I’ll say. Who is this Quaco?”

  “Apparently he’s a bum off the street.”

  “Yes. But we don’t say so just because he’s an old black man.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s not about race.”

  “Why should it be about race?”

  “I’m a swarthy fellow myself,” said Azar. “But the reason I ask is the computer keyboard. Also the bracelets of human teeth.”

  “Bingo.”

  We ate some trail mix, and after a while Quaco was done with whatever he was doing and he came to sit with us at the picnic table. He was instantly and profoundly absorbed by the cartoons in Azar’s New Yorker.

  “Is it that they’re cavemen?” he said, studying one of them. “Is that the joke?”

  “You’ve got it exactly.”

  “The cavemen have invented language,” he said. “Now their troubles begin.”

  But the ancient mariner was not the only one who’d taken medicine, and now I was suddenly conscious of not being conscious of my aching teeth. My shoulders felt loose. There was a singing in my chest. It had been four days, a kind of threshold, and my relief was profound. At this stage it seemed only proper to have another green pill. I had transferred five of them to my pocket, each one wrapped in little twists of receipt paper, and I took one while pretending to cough. My throat was so dry that it was like stuffing a bowling ball up an exhaust pipe.

  “Quaco,” I said, “you’re about a million years old too, aren’t you? Is it your perception that everyone in every era thinks they’re living in the era when the world will end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means that everyone’s been wrong so far.”

  “Incorrect.”

  “Incorrect?”

  “It always does end. Over and over again. Have you heard of Anaquitos? Or Achem?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you haven’t.”

  Azar found the bottle of po in the kitchen shed and poured us both a cup. It had a sweet, rubbery flavor. I swallowed it with difficulty and then it seemed to rise into my face and settle in my cheeks. I felt smart and collected.

  “Quaco,” I said, “did you poison Daniel Defoe?”

  “Ask him yourself.”

  “Are there human teeth on those bracelets?”

  “Is there a more effective kind of tooth?”

  There was no sign of life from the boat, but Quaco told us to leave the ancient mariner alone, so we enjoyed a quiet interval. We drank our po and helped Quaco with the cartoons. The breeze rose. The sun climbed higher. I imagined a warm future in which all of America was just like this, a landscape of tumbledown tropical disorder, palm trees on the national mall, shaggy grass, the perfect quiet of a world without cars or leaf blowers. It was a beautiful vision. It was like a hallucination. I said to myself, Here I am in Baltimore in the year 2200.

  Twenty minutes later we heard singing coming from the ancient mariner’s boat. Then the ancient mariner himself came tumbling out the door.

  “I saw a boy with an ape on his shirt,” he said. “He was eating a cone of blue ice. He was the vision and the ape was the vision. The ape winked at me. The ape was wearing the boy.”

  “Is he saying ape?” said Azar. “Like a gorilla?”

  “Apes,” said the ancient mariner. “Apes, apes. I know about apes. They jeer at you from the trees. You ask them for fruit and they show you their asses. No help at all to a shipwrecked sailor or a man on the run.”

  He paused in order to gesture more forcefully. Azar was filming everything.

  “I looked up and I saw an enormous bird. It was a roc. It carried off a fat man in a leather vest. He waved to me. He was still trying to drink from his red cup. In a sky gone purple like a bruise. On a morning like every other morning.”

  He pitched forward onto his face and then struggled to rise. Quaco stepped forward to help him up.

  “Should we do something?” said Azar. “Should we call 911?”

  “Apes,” I said. “Amazing. This is an incredible situation we’ve involved ourselves in.”

  “Should we call 911?” he said again.

  “It’s already so much like a movie. All we have to do is aim the camera.”

  Azar gave up and turned to Quaco. “What do we do, Quaco? Do we trust you?”

  “It would be a mistake for you to trust me. How could you begin to understand my intentions? But in this case, there’s no danger. We’re recovering ancient memories by magical practice, that’s all. I wouldn’t harm this man. He helped me cure myself of slavery.”

  The crisis, such as it was, did not last long. Soon the ancient mariner calmed down and went back inside, there to sweat and dream, and Quaco went with him to begin chanting or praying or whatever he was going to do. We wanted to get this on film, but he wouldn’t let us. He was very firm on the subject. We weren’t allowed inside at all, and in fact he encouraged us to leave the property for a few hours. This is when I remembered the John Baxter Maritime Museum.

  I was out in the street waiting for Azar to brush his teeth when Tom Rath appeared on the veranda of the Pelican Court. He was having Diet Coke for breakfast.

  “What have you got going on out here, Tom Rath?”

  “I’m just enjoying the sunshine.”

  It had clouded over. It might have been dusk.

  “How’d a man like you ever make it in the advertising business, huh?”

  “Well,” he said, “the insurance business is like any other.”

  “The advertising business.”

  “The advertising business, correct. It’s like any other.”

  But now I’d had enough. I wanted to have it out with him.

  “What’s going on, Tom? What’s your business here?”

  “I’m in the advertising business, like you said.”

&nbs
p; “I mean what’s your role in this story? Why do you keep popping up?”

  “What’s my role? I’m the main character. You’re the one playing a role.”

  “I’m playing a role,” I said.

  “You’re an extra in the story that is the story of Tom Rath’s exciting deceptions and stratagems.”

  “I’m a minor character,” I said.

  “You’re a minor character. You’re just a guy I talk to. You don’t have anything to do with my larger strategy. Even this whole Key West weekend is just a minor scene, and you’d better believe there’s lots of exciting stuff in store for Tom Rath. Involving people you don’t know. In places you’ve never been.”

  “I’m a minor character,” I said again. I felt the truth of this statement. I felt its force. I was profoundly relieved. “So I can just do what I like. I’m offstage.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “No pressure.”

  “It’s me who feels the pressure, being the main character.”

  The John Baxter Maritime Museum was not a museum at all. It was a private residence. We stood out on the sidewalk looking up at its battered façade. It looked like a haunted house. The yard was bare and parched. There were coconut husks piled up outside the gate.

  I leaned over and hissed, “So what’s our plan here?”

  “What do you mean, what’s our plan?” said Azar. “We’re going to look at this picture.”

  I shook my head. I had taken a few more green pills and now I was experiencing a wild unraveling of the spirit. When Azar looked away I ducked my head and chewed up another one. It made me happy to imagine that I appeared furtive and corrupt.

  “I’ll make the distraction,” I said, “you grab the photo. But you haven’t even got a coat or something to hide it in!”