by Aaron Thier
“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 an
d 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.”
I had contracted a dislike for this person, though I exhorted myself to generosity because he was just a slim and dirty fellow in a shirt made from a sugar bag, and furthermore he was doomed. I gave him a sad smile and thereafter I was quiet, as prescribed, like a stone listening to the wind, and all this time I held Daniel Defoe’s hand.
Edward Halloween did not notice these intimacies because he had made himself drunk in the evening’s protracted course. On the way back to the palace he outlined his own philosophical troubles and he was impervious to the thoughts and speeches of others. He said he was having a crisis. He said he wanted to choose whether he was a man or a woman and then cleave to his choice. It was hard to be neither or both, for that meant he was always only himself, which was an insuperable burden for anyone, and most especially for a poet. It did indeed seem like a problem, although he later forgot about it.
When we were safely returned to the arcades and pergolas of our palace, Edward Halloween vanished and I was alone with Daniel Defoe. I wanted to ask him to come up with me to my rooms, but then I thought it would demean his oath to Anna Gloria, which I honored. I was feeling melancholic to an extreme.
“Time keeps passing,” I said. “Life passes by whether I pay attention to it or not, and then it turns into history and it’s like a desert mummy and no one knows what it was truly like.”
He was quiet and stared off across the dark wasteland of our dehydrated garden.
I said, “What is it like to see the world swallow up so much time?”
“To me it seemed like the sixteenth century lasted forever, but the seventeenth century was like a feast day, which is hot and clamorous and rapidly concluded, and then the eighteenth century was like a turn around the garden before dinner. The nineteenth century was a cup of cutgrass tea. Everything since then has been wind under the door.”
“Is it really modern medicine that keeps you alive? You seem almost to be retrogressing and becoming younger. What is the secret formula?”
“It’s no secret. Take nutmeg for insomnia and Ceylon cinnamon for tonsillitis. Try to eat some fat from a camel’s hunch. Eat roc’s liver, if you can get it. Eat as many vaccines as you can find. It must be that the thought of Anna Gloria keeps me animated as well. But now, my princess, I have to say good night.”
So I walked with him to the yawning dark mouth of the camel pen, and he kissed my hand and issued inside. Out in the dry crisp darkness with all the stars above watching me in my loneliness, I had only Christopher Smart to talk to, for this cat now emerged from the shadows. I petted him and he vibrated with purring sounds.
2016
* * *
The next morning we were down at the marina, where the ancient mariner knew a man who’d let us use his boat. It was a small fishing trawler that could be steered from the covered pilothouse or from up above, in what was called the tuna tower. Azar had made a printout of the treasure map.
“I’ll explain how to provision an expedition of this kind,” said the ancient mariner. “First we need cassava bread, which keeps better than any other bread in the heat and the damp. Cassava beer would be even better. Then we need some salt pork or ham. We also need a few horses, if we can get them. In Mexico I had a horse named Little Richard. What a horse! The thing about a horse is it makes the fighting safer, because usually the Indians will simply surrender rather than face such a terrifying beast. They trick themselves into believing that man and horse are one creature, like a centaur.”
“It’s just a day trip, isn’t it?” said Azar.
“Now, as for drinking water, we have one thermos of water, but we also have these bottles of low-calorie water drink.”
He’d purchased a case of something called “FreshWater.” The package identified it as an “all natural artisanal functional beverage.” It was just scented water in plastic bottles. He had raspberry, strawberry-basil, tarragon-blueberry, and plain.
“Plain?” I said.
“Water-flavored.”
“You like this stuff?”
“I love it. Quaco does too.”
“I do not,” said Quaco.
“You do.”
Quaco thought about this. “I like the strawberry-basil,” he said.
The ancient mariner had mostly recovered from last night’s ordeal, but he wasn’t yet so steady on his pins and just after we cast off he seemed to slip into a trance. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Have I been making any sense?”
“You haven’t been saying anything,” said Azar.
“But if I had been, would I have been making any sense?”
I wasn’t doing much better. I’d slept like a tailor’s dummy in my hot sweaty tent, but because of the green pills I hadn’t been able to wake all the way up again. I had three cups of po but it was no good. Squinting red eyes, matted hair, dead man’s cheeks. If I sat still for too long my mind seemed to shut off, like a Prius.
We motored slowly out of the marina and headed north, into a maze of mangrove islands. They weren’t real islands. They were just groves or stands of mangrove trees growing out of the water, and there was no soil and no rocky foundation. Apparently they often shifted their positions or blew away entirely, and no map could represent their locations, certainly not one drawn on the wall in a fit of delirium. We were looking, however, for a true island, a dome of coral rock covered in dirt and trees and a small Calusa shell mound. I did not trust the ancient mariner to find it, but I trusted Quaco, with what possible justification who can say. He was standing in the bow, scanning the horizon, keyboard swinging around his neck, bracelets of human teeth, but even so, even so, he had an air of real competence.
Meanwhile, Azar and the ancient mariner were having a cheery conversation in the stern. Azar was filming this, hardworking documentarian that he’d become. My own role in the project seemed to have diminished, which was fine with me.
“Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about,” the ancient mariner said. “Have you seen that there are cacao beans for sale in the supermarket?”
“They’re an Aztec superfood,” said Azar.
“Of course they are! Now think about this. You can buy some, maybe a hundred beans let’s say, for ten dollars. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“But in Mexico you can purchase a beautiful embroidered cloak for a hundred cacao beans. So think about it. You can sell the embroidered cloak here for a lot of money, maybe a hundred dollars. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You can exploit this disparity.”
“Ten dollars for a hundred cacao beans. A hundred cacao beans for a cloak. Sell the cloak for a hundred dollars. Buy ten bags of cacao beans, for a total of a thousand beans. Buy ten cloaks. Sell the ten cloaks for a thousand dollars. Buy ten thousand cacao beans with that same thousand dollars. Exchange the beans for a hundred cloaks. Sell the cloaks for ten thousand dollars. And so on.”
“Only two more cycles and you’re a millionaire.”
“What is it?” I said. “Cloaks?”
“Cloaks.”
“It’s the cloak and bean scam,” said Azar.
“You’re talking about the economy of old Mexico,” said Quaco, unexpectedly the voice of reason, “which you yourself
helped to destroy.”
The ancient mariner reflected on this and then shook his head dismissively. “You’d need some initial money for the transportation costs, flights to and from Mexico, etc., but after a few rounds the scam would pay for itself. Maybe this is how I’ll use my share of the treasure.”
Deep in the bay, after about an hour, we saw three middle-aged men fishing from a little boat. I was thinking that they looked very peaceful, but the ancient mariner grew tense.
“Give me your shirt,” he said.
“My shirt?”
“Am I supposed to use Azar’s? Azar’s is white! I suppose you want to surrender?”
My shirt was red. I gave it to him.
“Actually don’t give it to me. Just get up in the crow’s nest and start waving it.”
While I was doing this, the ancient mariner began a chilling recitation: “On the part of the King,” he said, “Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana the mad, his daughter, Queen of Castille and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, all the men of the world, were and are descendants. But on account of the multitude which has sprung from this man and woman in the five thousand years since the world was created, it was necessary that some men should go one way and some another, and that they should be divided into many kingdoms and provinces, for in one alone they could not be sustained.”