Mr. Eternity

by Aaron Thier

  He was yet unable to move so much as the least of his toes, and there was this problem too, that we had driven the end of a nail into his cheek when closing the coffin lid. I regretted this very much, for I felt I had so much else to regret without I should also drive nails into my friends’ faces.

  Now Quaco produs’d a packet of bonano leaf, which contained his special medicine, and he spread it upon the doctor’s gums with two fingers, working this electuary into his mouth with great vigor. Then we lifted him out and stood him up, and Quaco began chanting, & calling down such demons and sprits as he requir’d, & even then to my surprise beating the doctor with a sisal whip. Later Dr. Dan spoke of this moment – recalling the night breeze, & the tossing crowns of the palm trees, & the bite of the whip – & saying this was when he perceived how lovelie it was to be alive again, after being dead.

  We had made a narrow trench beneath the arbor and now we layed our friend within, for he still could not move of his own accord. We cover’d him with a sheet, and Quaco placed beside him the skulls of small jungle creatures, and a bonano sucker, and all manner of other things improvised in the moment viz. a stone, a calabash, and a broken candle. Then he broke a water jar over the doctor’s head, and crushed wax into his hare, and kicked dirt and sang, and spoke the Lord’s Prayer. Lastly he passed a dove over Dr. Dan, which he did in order to absorb the death sprit. It was not well with the dove after this, true enough, and only today do I wonder from where had he produced that dove? (There was more to Quaco than ever I knew, and today I have the sensation that I was but an actor in a story that was properly his own.)

  Now Dr. Dan was cured, for when Quaco urg’d him to stand, so he did, a man returned from that undiscovered country, death.

  We must now, Quaco said, remove all the coins and set you on your way. Dr. Dan nodd’d. What are these coins you speak of? said he. When he perceived they were Spanish coins he began telling a story, namely that he had once been a sailor on the Flying Dutchman, that lost cruiser from which no one can free himself without he persuades some passing ship to carry a letter for him, and so Dr. Dan had done, by placing his letter in a sack and filling the sack with Spanish coins. We could not make him understand the importance of haste. He returned again and again to this story of the Flying Dutchman, and meanwhile we picked coins off his skin, & removed them from the coffin, & set all to rights again in the grave yard.

  Now Dr. Dan said he must be going, for he would be late to an appointment he had made with a fellow to buy some Flanders laces, which he could get at an advantage, & also his shippe would not wait for ever, the Captain General Chris Colombo being an impatient man, and eager to return to Spain and claim his riches, & further, said he, as if the foregoing were not enough, he had also to do one thing more, which was to buy some fish from a young woman he had seen, and this tho he needed no fish, and abhorr’d it if the truth be told. It was only that he wanted very much to speak to this woman, and if he did not, he would regret it all his life.

  Now we three friends, met for the last time in a grave yard, were parted at last. Dr. Dan and I took the long road to town, for I knew I must escort him to Kings Harbor, & in any event I desired to escape as well, for I thought I had made a mess of this, my first essay into the world, and required to start again in a new place. I gave Quaco my letter for Mrs. Galsworthy (of whom, however, I shall have one thing more to say) and then we bid him fare-well, I myself knowing I would never see him again until the morning which wakes us to eternal doom.

  2500

  * * *

  One night George Washington and his father, the eminent Senator Washington, came to the palace and partook with us of the evening meal. They brought actors with them, or maybe they were eunuchs, or maybe they were sexual workers. George Washington spoke for many minutes about lizards, and meanwhile his father gazed about with the green face of failure. He had lost his poppy crop to a disease, and his best river lands were rimed with salt, and the MDC had stolen his water. But he vowed that he was going to make an atonement in order to appease the universal forces of providence. He was no longer going to bathe, for example. He would eat twelve date kernels a day and he would eat bread made from sesame husks and ashes. He wasn’t going to form any friendships with women or children or poor people. These were traditional abstentions, although I knew my father abhorred them as the superstitions of a primitive mind.

  In the midst of the senator’s speech, sounds of hurrying footsteps came to us from the hallway, and also a great tumult of banging doors. Then two vice-secretaries of intelligence came running into the room and spoke desperate whispered phrases to my father. Soon the air was chocked full with rumors. It was the MDC sneak-attacking us. It was terrorists from the desert. It was the long-ago overlords of Minnesota. But no, it was only the anticipated shattering of our own social contract. A troupe of the presidential guard had been killed to a man by rioters, and then the rioters had begun to sow flames and mayhem throughout the city.

  My father placed his knife and fork on his plate and proceeded across the room and into an office. He comported himself, for all his confusions and his impoverished grasp of realities, in an extremely presidential fashion. But now that we were here, poised at the tipping point, he hardly seemed to exist. He was only another despot in the long march of historical despots, each one so much like all the others, each one the open door through which the angels of chaos came humming on bent wings. I had the strong conviction that history had dreamed of him before he dreamed of himself. And what did that make me? I was a dream engendered by a dream.

  My own safety was considered paramount, for I was the essential hope of dynastic continuity, and Daniel Defoe had contrived an escape plan on this basis. Across the street, in the storehouse where our contingency tunnel opened up, there was a wagon and camels and provisions and jars of water. Vice-secretaries would issue from the front gates in their implausible disguises, and the terrorists would mistake them for me, and meanwhile I would steal away unseen in the company of Edward Halloween and Daniel Defoe. It was important, argued Daniel Defoe, that our escape party be minutely inconspicuous. We were supposed to rendezvous with my father in the north, at a place called Winfield.

  So now, without a sigh or a waver, we left the room and descended into the tunnel. Christopher Smart walked along behind us, although he looked many times over his shoulder because he didn’t want us to think he was following us. He wanted it to look like he only happened to be going in the same direction. It was all an unceremonious and almost unremarked occurrence, and you would never have known that the last hope of the Roulette dynasty had just walked out the back door.

  And I never said farewell and good luck to my father, nor in all that confusion of voices and torches and clanking weaponry did I think of doing so, which speaks volumes to the real tenor of our relationship. Instead I thought, Goodbye, George Washington.

  We did not go north. We went south. At an unknown moment in the depth of the night, we passed the final ruins at the far southern periphery of St. Louis, and when morning came blushing into the sky, it dawned upon the sweet whistling quiet of an uninhabited world. Here in this suburb, the few abandoned cane huts were creaking away like locusts in the deep shadows. The trees were leafless petitioners who waited now for the spark that would set them spinning away from the earth in flame and ash. I fancied the land was probably choked with salt. It was a vista of final things and final reckonings.

  Edward Halloween gazed about and said, “It is funny to me that my first idea is to wonder where I will get my hair barbered in this wasteland. I have softened in the palace.”

  “I’ll barber it myself,” said Daniel Defoe. “I was once court barber to the king of Coca-Cola. You’ll see now that I am truly in my aliment. If I am a failure in policy and government, I am God’s own traveler. I could travel forever.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the pitch and roll of the wagon on this old road, which was little more than memories of yet older and older roads
. While I pretended to sleep, Daniel Defoe asked if Edward Halloween had ever had occasion to visit Arkansas, but he said no. He had grown up in country poverty outside St. Louis. He had never seen anything.

  “Then I will tell you about Arkansas. The capital was a city called Manoa and the governor lived in a mud hut with a beautiful Indian woman named Maria. Is that right? I don’t know much about Arkansas. Have I ever told you about Texas? It was a contested Mexican province right across the border from Arkansas, and there was constant strife between the illegal American immigrants and the native Mexicans. The Americans were eight feet tall and they were so fat that they couldn’t make love to one another, so they died out in the end and the immigration problem was solved. The Mexicans were only three feet tall, but they were much more cunning and hardworking. It was just another strange border story.”

  Without opening my eyes, I said, “I know this story. The American immigrants had grown fat from drinking oil, which they pumped out of the ground and carried around in their hats. At the end, when they were dying of this addiction, they had another problem, which is that their cities kept exploding. There was a place called Houston, but it blew up.”

  “That’s correct,” said Daniel Defoe. And it was, at least partly. The explosion of Houston was a famous event.

  “Right,” said Edward Halloween. “And there was a city called Akkad, which was raptured up to heaven. And a city called Venice, which was just underwater tubes and chambers. I can play this game too.” But then, with his finger raised in a mocking gesture, he started to laugh, for he had spoken himself into the spirit of it all. “But an underwater city is natural, because humans were originally aquatic animals. We are the primordial creature from which all others evolved, as is evidenced by our not having claws or teeth or hair. Our heads previously served us as floats, which is why they’re large and round, like river buoys. They kept us afloat in ancient seas.”

  “But that’s true also,” said Daniel Defoe. “All of this is true. And you think you’re only joking.”

  For many days we climbed over the rough lands of the plateau, which was a vast reach of loneliness and crags and rocky mounts that walled off our city from the barbarous jungle regions of the south. Ancient chemicals had rendered it uncultivable and no soul stirred in this drought-struck realm of ripped cloth and traumatized earth and thorn trees and salt palms. I lay in the wagon and felt the palace ennui bleach away like the stripes on Edward Halloween’s cotton gown. The night was peopled by thousands of myriads of stars, and the days by broken concrete and colored plastic and the other deserted vestiges of man. We slept packed together in the wagon like sardinia and we ate salted shamo and dried fruits and miracle leaf powder. I repeated to myself, Goodbye, George Washington, like these were the words of a prayer. I also philosophized in detached moments upon the fate of my father, President Roulette of the Reunited States, whom even then I seemed to know as you know the incoherent people in dreams, who look like themselves but are known by the dream consciousness to be someone else.

  Then, after ceaseless travels, when the groats for the camels were all exhausted and we ourselves had drunk away the warm and repellent dregs of our water jars, we began to slide down into the slot of the Mississippi, and soon we perceived spreading vegetation once more, and we rejoiced in the tang and savor of living dirt. The rubble of old days, so visible upon the plateau, was here overcovered with bushes and sediments, and the world seemed new. At a dark pool the camels drank themselves bloated and sloshing, like wine bags, and we all rested together, and Christopher Smart devoured a lizard, although he disdained the tail.

  There were people in the valley of the Mississippi, but even though my father held nominal suzerainty over them, they were subject only in the schemes of theory. They had made themselves free, as Green the vice-secretary had intimated, but it was less the violent fracture of revolution than the parting of two canoes in the river. It seems that our dominions had shrunk and withered naturally, like fruits on a parched vine. It must have been long ago, during the reign of my hated grandfather, that they achieved their peak of ripeness. So we had no fear of these valley people, who had no way of knowing who we were, and we said, “Hello, friends. How’s it swinging?”

  I could appreciate that Daniel Defoe had begun to think of his Anna Gloria now that he was once again set at liberty. I could appreciate as well that Edward Halloween was discombobulated by our great change of state, for he had now ceased to be a clown and regressed to the poverty of his origins. As for me, however, I seemed to see it all through a long vista of time. Nothing was surprising to me. The collapse of the Reunited States was like a play I had seen before. I knew how it would proceed. A new king would rise in St. Louis from the cadre of revolutionary leaders, just as my ancestors had risen in their own days, and in time a fresh revolution would come spinning up out of the city to depose him, and then a new king would rise once again, and a fresh revolution, and on and on it would go. Once more and once again, a new Jasmine St. Roulette would slip from the city in the company of a decommissioned clown and an old cat and the man she loved. It would happen forever and always until the syllables of time died away on an empty earth. It was beautiful to think of this. It was a way of thinking that I would not be lost to history after all.

  Night after night and day after hot day, the air grew heavier, as it had been heavy once in the old St. Louis of my juvenescence, and the hills began to redound with green fecundity, and vines and creepers, and trees that came ratcheting out of the ground. We perceived small green birds and rotund clouds, which threw splendid shadows on the earth. There were reaches of sickness too, where only one kind of tree thrived and the forest floor was empty of undergrowth, but these poisoned places gave way again to robust growth. In the course of time we had to sell our camels and wagon, which were impractical in the trackless wilderness. We sold them to a one-eyed man named Aveyaneda, who abided alone in the husk of an aeroplane.

  The next day we reached the town of Babylon, which Daniel Defoe had vaunted and advertised as our preliminary destination. There were pigs in wallows, and naked people stricken with dog malaria, and the houses lacked walls. It was a poor place indeed for a princess in flight, and this suited me right down into the muddy ground.

  And then, to our greatest surprise, Daniel Defoe held up a hand and peered with good humor into a fist of cassava and melon plants, and he said, “Hello, Quaco. There you are. You were hiding from me.”

  So this was how we came to meet Quaco again, whom we had met before in another world and another time and another context. He was sitting upon a log braiding old plastic fibers to manufacture a rope, and he said with modest inflections, “Oh hello.” Then he saw Christopher Smart and said, “Hello, Christopher.”

  I had some questions for this dark enigma of a sorcerer. I wanted to ask had he really poisoned Anthony Fucking Corvette, and if so, why should such a person as him have felt sympathies for such a person as me? But I quailed in my heart from this brazen inquiry, nor did it matter now, so instead I asked was it true, as Daniel Defoe said, that he had killed the passenger pigeons.

  He nodded.

  “Tell them the story,” said Daniel Defoe.

  “I destroyed the pigeons to starve the white man out of America.”

  “Was it effectual?”

  “Many people starved, yes.”

  “Tell them how you contrived a magic to change the weather,” said Daniel Defoe.

  “I wanted to make it too hot to grow wheat, because I didn’t think the white people would be able to subsist on cassava alone.”

  “I enjoy cassava,” I said.

  “But you, dear princess, are not white,” said Daniel Defoe.

  “Of course I’m white.”

  “You’re toffee-colored. You’re beautiful. It stands to raisins you would like cassava.”

  “Changes in the weather precipitated economic calamities as well,” said Quaco. “You will appreciate that I wanted to destroy the material ba
sis of their prosperity.”

  During the meantime, Edward Halloween was crumpled into himself on a log. I had trouble guessing what he was thinking. There were small children watching us from the bushes and he clapped and shouted and endeavored to put the scare in them.

  “Will anyone recognize us?” he said. “Will anyone come to steal us back to the city?”

  “These people don’t know anything,” said Quaco.

  “How can we be sure?”

  “Quaco will make a magic to wipe their minds clean,” said Daniel Defoe. “Won’t you, Quaco?”

  Quaco sighed. He would do this, yes, but he gave the impression it was tedious for him.

  We stayed here in Babylon to recruit our strength. We ate bee maggots and mashed pounded plantain, which Quaco denominated by the term fufu. We anointed ourselves with tarbush resin to keep off the stinging insects and we drew our zest from cassava beer in squash gourds, inaga fruits, avocado, mango, and miniature red breakfast bananas. There was a seasonal rainfall disruption here as well, much lamented by the people of Babylon, but it was not grievous and one soft morning a shower of rain fell. It was all the rain we had seen in two years. I walked around with my legs black with mud, all the way up to the regions that men exalt, and I was happy. It was as Daniel Defoe sometimes said: Comfort was an artifact of the mind’s creation. The only genuine comfort was positive thinking.