by Aaron Thier
And I, dear Reader, even in this atmosphere of Horror, even as I schemed with Quaco and felt my time on Little Salt drawing near its ignominious close, I was assailed with the midges of Love, and prosecuted an illegal courtship of Mrs. Galsworthy, the recklessness of which it is today a wonder to contemplate. At first this sensitive woman was not inclined to repeat our drunken game of hunt the slipper, yet I promised it would be more enjoyable for her this time, and I gave her many tenders of my affection, repeating to her ludicrous and diverting tales I had heard from Dr. Dan. I said that I possessed a coat woven from salamander wool, and she could have it if she wished. I told her of mermaids, those beauteous scaly poissardes. I spoke in rhapsodic tones of a monster called the kraken, which ate for one year, & voided itself for one year more, & its excrement was a delicious exhalation that attracted all the fish in the sea. I told her I would make myself rich selling kraken faeces for bait and then buy her an island all her own. She laughed a sweet laugh at all my tales, and one day finally relented, saying enough talk meat me in my chamber when the Lord is fallen down the stares. So I did, and so I did once and twice more, each time this prettie woman growing more fond of me, and I of her if truth be told, so that now I was loath to flee, and knew I should miss her more than all the neats’ tongues and Westphalian hams of the planter’s life. And yet flee I must, not only from my debt but from this very love, for my fear that Mr. Galsworthy would discover us only increased in proportion with the affection I bore his wife.
I still believ’d that Dr. Dan shared my urgency, though he had not spoken of Anna Gloria for some time, and I felt confirmed in this belief by a peculiar conversation we had at this time. One day I found him sleeping in a hammock, idly pendant beneath the sweet-scented tamarind tree, and when he woke he fixed me with a meaningful look and said, Ah, there you are, I have been waiting.
You have been waiting for me? said I.
There is a Portuguese ship lying at anchor in the lee of the island, all undiscovered I think, and we shall hasten thither and persuade them to carry us away. It is our best method to escape this city.
There is no city here, said I. None that I see.
Is there not? said he, looking about. I mistook this place for another.
I allowed these things were easily mistaken, and we seemed to understand each other, yet now he frowned and said, How came we to escape the Turks, in that case?
Seeing that his mind was turned, and believing him deranged by grief (though he seemed well enough afterward, and laughed at his foolishness), I told him I could wait no longer and I believed we should move forward with Quaco’s plan. He seemed less than perfectly eager to do so, suggesting that he had the more difficult part, for this plan required of him his death. Is there not another way? said he. He proposed that we might bring down the whole house in a great conflagration, which would destroy the timber frame and yet spare the metals within. I reminded him it was not a timber-framed house, but coquina, and I felt there were other problems with such a plan, though I could think of no better one myself.
You must be right, said he. In any case it would not do to affront our friend Quaco, for none is more dangerous when affronted than he.
2500
* * *
After the demise of Anthony Fucking Corvette, I had a vacation of six months from obligatory political fornications, but the following summer I was pledged and affianced to the next wealthiest eligible bachelor, a senator’s son named George Washington. He was crazy as peaches, and very ugly, and so stricken by jitters and worries that he never looked anyone in the eye and could only burble incoherencies. The first time I had to do it with him, he was trembling like a camel foal and I felt an overweening sympathy, although I was also repulsed by his soft thighs and hands. I had to drink poppy juice until I was too smackered to know who was doing it with who.
“The president moves you around like a pawn,” said Edward Halloween.
“I don’t care anymore.”
“You don’t care? You don’t care?” He shook his delicate eunuch’s fists. “You are not a hooker to be traded around! Time to espouse anarchy! Time to draw angry faces on the chess pawns of our souls!”
He was garbed in a suit made of yellow feathers. It had a variety of beak, which was made of heavy paper. It swung up over his head and his huge black eyes peeped out from underneath. It was poignant to see that he was so furious on my behalf, but I did not share his feelings. George Washington was not a vicious chimerical monster, like Anthony Fucking Corvette, and I intended to resign myself to the dispensations of providence. I was already becoming old, after all. Edward Halloween had even located two aberrant gray hairs on my head. And I had no faith of persuading Daniel Defoe to abandon his quest for Anna Gloria, which had occupied him already for a thousand years. I was only a passing shadow in the grand narrative of his love story.
Also, and more important, I considered it improvident to fixate on my own misfortunes when the river fell farther every month and our grain reserves dwindled away. I was not starving, nor famishing for want of water, nor forced to live on poppy juice, which stopped you up back and front, and this minimum comfort was all a person could ask for in such times. These months burned away one after another and time brought only increased suffering. The river lands were stressed by salt, and farther inland the banana trees were all dead, and the millet was tiny, and the sorghum became poisonous. Then November came again, and again the skies were clear and bright. It had transitioned from a familiar periodic routine drought to an emergency of agricultural famine, and the city was rife with periodical grain riots, long water queues, and righteous fury. My father had to increase the guards around the strategic dikes and waterworks. His singular fear was that a well-regulated militia would rise up and break the social contract.
“What thrives in a drought?” said Edward Halloween. “Poppies, mama beans, and revolution.”
Since we were forbidden from leaving the palace, the calamity was mostly just a distant murmur on the dry wind. In the mornings, when I slipped out to the roof with my hot caffeine, all I could truly see of it was a featureless blue sky without depth or blemish. There should have been mist and rain and roistering clouds, but there was only a feverish sun, which at its low declension cast all the world in deep golden sunset shadows, and the enigma was that it was very beautiful, even though it was the drought, even though it was the end of the world.
My father said the answer was more intensive farming, and he decreed that no land could lie fallow, not even steep hillsides. But how could a more intensive agricultural scheme produce a plenteous crop if we didn’t have enough water for the previous level of agriculture? Then he instituted a variety of strategically repressive measures. He arrogated to the government the whole sum of our meager harvest and placed the city on a ration system, as he had already done with sesame oil. He preached austerity in food consumption. He required brigades of children to haul water from the river in buckets. But he also decreed that citizens had to smelt iron in their yards and deliver a certain quota each month, and no one could grasp his intention in this. Then he decreed that it was unlawful to speak of his decrees. All of these decrees were enforced with coercive violence.
“Drought or no drought,” he said to his senatorial friends, “we are making a great leap forward into the modern past. We are a western industrial democracy and burgeoning economic superpower, not a pre-capitalist pastoral farming community.”
I think he did not understand what was happening, or else his big picture visionary agenda had crowded out the quotidian realities of governance. He had once again ceased reading books, for example, but he started to write one of his own. It was called A Boys’ Guide to Remodernization and Development Economics. Often it seemed that he had gone around the bend and come back with fireflies in his hair. He slept in the tomb every night.
One day he was illuminated by the sunlight of genius, or so he said, and gathered us all together, including the servants and slaves and vice-s
ecretaries, to announce an original scheme for irrigating the unirrigible lands far from the river. We would use an infrastructure of rubber hoses! He passed around an ancient piece of paper which showed a man spraying water from a coiled tube. This picture was profoundly melancholic, for it depicted a vanished world of consumer choice. The words “XHose Pro Expandable” were legible in fading red ink, but only a low percentage of the gathered crowd knew how to read.
President Roulette stood up on his throne and shouted that we would create hoses that were ten miles long. We would connect them to wind pumps and run them to the arid desiccated devastated farmlands, and our country would once again be fruitful and teem with corn and cassava and even bananas. We would grow the rubber ourselves, in the south, and sell the excess to the MDC.
“We’ll gouge them on prices!” he shouted. “They deserve nothing better. They make love to their goats and drape themselves in red cloth.”
Now he called upon Daniel Defoe to help him decide where the rubber plantations should go. Together they scrutinized some maps and charts. Then Daniel Defoe said, “Here’s the city of El Dorado. Was it always in Arkansas?”
“If the map says so, then that’s the truth,” said my father.
“I didn’t remember it was in Arkansas. I thought it was up the Orinoco. I must be all turned around.”
He said that was the place where rubber originated, so that was the proper place for our own trees. It was also good because El Dorado was on the Delta Bay, so the rubber could be floated to the river and then poled all the way up to St. Louis. The only problem was that these lands were said to have reverted to barbarity, but my father had a solution for that. He would decree a special type of colony, which would be called the Extractive Rubber State of El Dorado. He would send an expedition down the river to forcibly nationalize some cropland, and when the trees were planted he would have guards enforce Reunited States law exclusively within the rubber groves. That meant he would only have to project power into one small enclosed area. He said it was a limited liability. It was like filling up a jar of water instead of pouring that same volume of water over a large flat expanse of dirt. Would you rather drink from the jar or lick the earth?
We all knew that this scheme would produce no rubber at all for many years, and probably never, so it would not answer to the current climate of disaster and famine. Even my father knew this, although he simultaneously didn’t know it, because even he could not gainsay his own decisions. Therefore we all stood silent as cockroaches in the vast echoing chamber. The only sound was the sound of Christopher Smart licking himself.
Then Edward Halloween decided to exorcise his clownish prerogative of speaking truth to power, like the clowns of ancient drama who alone of all the characters were allowed to utter true statements. From the back of the room, he shouted, “No! Listen! It is like peeing in your water jar instead of peeing all over the place! You have to understand that it’s peeing either way!”
No one had ever challenged my father in this way, and now even Christopher Smart was silent, watching and waiting. But my father was inflated with the winds of optimism, and he pressed forward without acknowledging the disruption. He said that it was almost as if the rubber trees, which would be grown from seeds, would themselves function as the seeds of a new economic prosperity. Sovereignty would simply spread outward from the Extractive State and into the surrounding lawless Mississippi jungle territory.
Now we were all dismissed, but Edward Halloween had been galvanized into an unexpected rage. I cannot say why this had angered him so much. It was just one straw too many, perhaps. He rushed to and fro on the outside patio, kicking up the aromatic dust and shouting. He was an outraged figure under the arching high empty pallor of the blue sky. Daniel Defoe and I attempted to pacify him with words and affection, but it was to no avail. I had to mix poppy juice into his wine to mute his treasonous ravings.
“They cut my balls off and dress me in costumes and force me to give silent ear to these idiocies!” he shouted. “My life goes sour like fermenting mangoes. You are all I have, dearest princess Jasmine.” And then he pointed at Daniel Defoe with two quivering fingers. “But you! You prop him up in his king’s madness. You play into his hands. You advise him! No more. Now is the time for anarchic feminism and sectarian violence. Now we give him no quarter.”
“Please drink your poppy juice,” I said. “You have to stop talking or they’ll pull your guts out by your tongue.”
Daniel Defoe agreed with me. He tried to divert our clown’s mind with stories. “I will tell you the natural history of mermaids,” he said.
“No stories!” shouted Edward Halloween. “I want to talk to Quaco.”
“I could tell you about Quaco. I could tell you how he sent me through the earth to be reborn as a rich man. I could tell you how he ruled the city-state of Kish. Would you like that?”
“No!”
Then Daniel Defoe appeared to meditate upon a new strategy. I felt a pang of love for him, and then a concurrent pang of loneliness, and then a pall of ennui.
“You are right to be outraged,” he said quietly. “We are prisoners here.”
“And what I’m declaring now,” said Edward Halloween, “is we should do something about it!”
“Ah, but look around. Time will take care of it for you. There is nothing so ephemeral as a kingdom. But meanwhile you do have to stop talking or they will pull your guts out, like our princess says.”
Daniel Defoe was correct that time was taking care of the Reunited States. My father sent a delegation down the river to set up plantations in the Extractive State, for example, but they never achieved their goal. The whole bedraggled cohort came crawling back one day soon afterward. It was the hour of the piggybank, when petitioners came to beg my father for alms or discourse to him on investment opportunities, and the audience room was thronged with hungry dusty people. When my father saw his delegation, he had a seizure of generosity and tossed copper dollars into the crowd, but then the people began rioting amongst themselves and had to be violently subdued by the presidential guard. Then the room was cleared.
A vice-secretary named Green strode forward in the sudden quiet. This room had stain glass and a purple rug dyed with poisonous berries, and the throne was on a raised platform. Green looked all alone out there upon his private acre of poisoned rug, but he manifested a great courage. He said there was unrest and even revolt in the southern countryside.
“They held us prisoner for a little while in Camel Flats,” said Green, “where they have elected themselves an interim revolutionary president. They say this is a federation without representation. They let us go so we could come give you the message.”
My father required a few moments to understand what Green was telling him.
“They elected their own president?”
“Her name is Rosa de Piedad. We didn’t meet her.”
“That’s the most undemocratic thing I ever heard. How are we supposed to remodernize this place? Are they angry about the smelting?”
Green answered him with grave unsmiling courtesy. “They’re hungry.”
“It’s because of this pattern of disobedience that I’ve had to institute austerity policies in the first place.”
But I could not stand to listen to any more of this. I departed the audience room and went out into the parched garden.
Here in the quiet afternoon, I felt like an occupant of someone else’s dream. I joked ruefully with myself that my father should be pleased, for inevitable collapse was the destiny of his revered United States as well. They had succumbed to factional disputes about the extension of slavery into the western territories, including Missouri, and they had succumbed to demographic wizening and the explosion of population, and they had eaten too much candy corn and poisoned the sky. They had even succumbed to droughts, as we were succumbing now.
But I no longer cared about the fall of the United States. Nor did I specially lament the passing of the Reunited States ei
ther. Instead I felt mournful that my own life would be reduced into historical footnotes, just as had happened with all the once singular figures of the past. This was the sorrow of history books, which obliterated the details of life and told only the details of politics and war. I had a wish that every history were a sentimental history such as Daniel Defoe was wonted to compose, for it was the sentimental and poetic truth that I longed to know. What did snow smell like? Did gorillas have fingernails? When you lifted from the earth in a spaceship or aeroplane, was it like standing up too fast? Who made my plastic boots? Was it a woman who, like me, felt hemmed in by her milieu, and ate abortion medicine to keep herself free?
I could never know these things. The only glimpse I had of a true past was the glimpse I had in the fictions of Daniel Defoe. All the uncounted myriads of other histories, the true fictive histories of all those vanished people, were lost forever. And also, in any case, Daniel Defoe would leave someday and carry on with his true life, and then I would have nothing at all. Time would stretch out in the sunlight of the ages like Christopher Smart on the ballroom floor, and when the historians of posterior days came to write the history of our time, it would be the same as every other history book. It would be the history of my father’s remodernization action committee, his reforms, his unilateral legislative changes. No one would know that for me the sentimental truth was a hard blue window high up on the wall, and date wine, and mornings on the roof under that incommensurate sky, and tense fornications with George Washington, and laughter with Edward Halloween, and an ache and pit of longing for Daniel Defoe, who loved another, and after and above it all, like music from another room, the feeling of life passing by.