Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

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  Saith Drava Crone was born in 1827, in Chantiesor, a small suburb of Newtown (or rather an even smaller suburb of Llanllwchaearn, which was itself a suburb of Newtown, until it was absorbed by Chantiesor in the 1870s), the fourth of five children to a well-known cricket player and the wife of a well-known cricket player. Young Saith’s dreams of following in his father’s footsteps were shattered, along with his hip, when he was only eleven, pushed from a tree by his sister while picking apples on the family orchard. While recuperating, his mother taught him to sew and knit, and at thirteen, he apprenticed for a short time with the village draper. At eighteen, his parents provided him with enough money to buy his own shop, but instead he spent it all on the most luxurious cloths and fabrics he could find, had them sent to gentry across the country, and then handled his growing clientele by mail from his childhood bedroom. Eventually he bought his own house, and then a separate work loft, then a warehouse, and then a factory.

  Then he invented his ill-fated sleeping bag. He had plans to change his business model, from the sale of raw materials to the fabrication of fine clothing. But a lot of his revenue still relied on his knowledge of materials. The Russians, for example, were keeping him afloat with an order for sixty thousand brown blankets to outfit their soldiers against the Ottomans, and he’d been supplying St. Petersburg with two to three thousand of them a week for months. But then Great Britain decided it was fashionable to join the French in the Crimean War and all trade with Russia was ceased by order of the Prime Minister. Also fashionable at the time were high-end breeches for men, and Crone had shipments of velvet coming in from Lucca and Genoa, the finest sarcenet from Bhagalpur, and antique silks from the Chinese Jiangxi province, so had no room for this lightly quilted overstock. In fact, his accountant urged him to cut the stock loose, dumping as many as he could into the Severn, or the Cardigan, or down off St. Ann’s Head, where there would surely be no one to see it, to make room for items that, through process, presented more profitable margins. But Crone believed he could add value to the blankets as well, and had his tailors fold the long rugs in thirds, stuffing the interiors with feathers and straw, then marketed them to the poor as a combination bed/pillow/blanket. They were a miserable failure, and eventually Crone packed the first wagon to dispose of them himself.

  If it had all ended there, in the initial failure, things would likely have turned out much differently. For Crone and the rest of Europe. But just as he and his accountant were set to launch the cursed sleeping bags into the drink, they were approached by two men in uniform. Back then, it was understandably not yet a crime to clog the waterways with waste. The disposal of textiles, however, had been brought under British legislation a few years earlier, in 1854, after wig merchants in London dumped barrels of rotting hair into a well in the Soho district, and the resultant fly congregation caused an outbreak of cholera and salmonella that left thousands gasping for their lives in makeshift hospitals, killing over six hundred and twenty-one people. Crone and his accountant were sure the jig was up, and quickly made as if they were simple salesmen with bad timing, stacking two of their packages into a makeshift table and unrolling a selection of the sleeping bags under the waning moonlight. Fortunately, the men they had mistaken for police officers in the darkness were just foreign soldiers on leave, drunk and barely coherent, poorly begging for a place to stay for the night. Crone gave them two of the bags for free, tossed the rest of them back in the wagon, and headed back to Newtown. Three days later an emissary from the Prussian Chief of the General Staff arrived at his factory to sample one, purchasing the remainder of Crone’s stock to test them with the Prussian Second Army. After they arrived well-rested at the Battle of Könnigrätz to rescue a swift victory from Austria in the Seven Weeks War, and once reparations were made to them, Prussia sent an order to Crone for four hundred and fifty thousand more. This was the transaction that made him one of the wealthiest men in England. He was invited to Prussia by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck himself to see an army at rest, fêted by the King of Prussia, gave a speech to sleep scientists at Frederick William University. He even set up another factory in Berlin to handle growing orders from the public sector, catering to journeymen and seasonal workers, shepherds and amateur astronomers, and practically invented the outdoor enthusiast in Europe, the idea of sleeping outside for fun rather than destitution. To the Prussians, he was a minor celebrity. He returned to Wales with an honorary title and more stories for the boys at the pub than you could imagine.

  Of course, this was also when he unknowingly crossed the Napoleonic Dynasty. Following the overthrow of Queen Isabella of Spain, the Prussian Chancellor suggested Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Wilhelm’s nephew, as a replacement. Emperor Louis Napoleon III of France, nephew to the original Napoleon (while also the grandson to the original’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais), feared encirclement by a Prussian-led alliance. He was also advised that a war with Prussia, which they would assuredly win with their superior breech-loading Chassepot rifle (so successful in the recent American Civil War) and mitrailleuse (an early form of the machine gun), could help dam his declining popularity and distract the French population from their cries for democratic reform. So he sent an emissary to the King of Prussia demanding that they retract the Prince’s candidacy. And when they weren’t nearly so polite about doing it, Louis Napoleon left Paris for Metz to assume personal control of the Army of the Rhine. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Crone’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Prussians eventually trapped half of Louis Nap’s exhausted soldiers at Metz and forced the French Emperor’s surrender at the nearby Battle of Sedan. Parisians rebelled and selected an interim minister for their second republic, September 11, 1870. When the news reached Newtown several days later in the form of an order for nine hundred thousand more bags, Saith Crone crossed himself and put out the light.

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  It is quite impossible to say whether Crone would have remained mentally stable after the fall of The Second French Empire (and quite simply have continued to amass more wealth than anyone could ever need or want) had that empire’s deposed leader not selected Great Britain as his new home of exile, and had the British Parliament not welcomed him with open arms; because it is quite simply a fact that he did, and they did. Sure that the Frenchman would seek his revenge, Crone used his considerable wealth to petition against the immigration. But since Louis had already lived in England during his first exile as a young bachelor in the late thirties and early forties, there was not much the Welsh entrepreneur could do. Napoleon had already purchased an estate in Chislehurst in Kent where, according to an interview with Daily Telegraph and Courier, he planned to live the rest of his days in peace and quiet with his wife, Eugenie, and young son, Jérôme. He was glad, he said, to finally have time to himself, without having to worry about “helping people catch trains” or “making Paris look pretty for tourists.”

  Then: nothing. Crone had men watching from the street, from the trees, from afar, and anear. He was able, through his relationship with the British Postmaster General, to have Louis’s mail appropriated, steamed, perused for any mention of himself and resealed before being sent on its way. And: nothing. If anything, Napoleon was a model citizen – a boring model citizen. Mostly, he spent his time working on puzzles, riddles, children’s games, which he received in the mail from all over the world: crosswords from the Americas; tangrams from China; a French translation of The Charades written by Pope Leo XIII; a Russian Minus Cube; some ancient Greek assembly puzzles; a form of disentanglement puzzle from Northern Korea, mixed with an impossible object, called the Acorn Heist; Iranian puzzle locks; a Sri Lankan magic box, with a gorgeous roach inset; lateral thinking one-minute mysteries, most of these homegrown in Britain, in which a pile of sawdust beside a bed indicated mind games with a circus midget leading to his suicide, or a nude man in the desert was obviously on a doomed balloon trip with some friends and drew the short match to save them all, or some
equally ridiculous twist; and many, many others. There was certainly nothing that, through whatever means of coincidental logic, could link him to any plot on the Welsh inventor’s life. Similarly, Crone’s team of private investigators came back with nothing but the old emperor’s grocery lists, half-eaten mustard-and-brie sandwiches, cigar bands, gardening tools, and the first ten rows of what was assumed to become a sock, although it might have also been a mitten, a sweater sleeve or a stuffed animal of some sort for young Jérôme, who had become sick shortly after they came to England, diagnosed with a rare yet hereditary disease. Louis didn’t even appear to know anything about the sleeping bag’s role in the war, let alone Crone’s part in it, as evidenced by an incomplete crossword on October 1, 1872, with the five-letter clue: 11 DOWN Put the Prussians to sleep, beside which, in the page’s margin, he’d scribbled the name of the German poet Gleim, along with the word booze, and even death. The investigators suggested Crone was safe to live his life, but he interpreted the omission of his name as a poorly contained fury, in which Louis Nap could not even bare to speak or write it. Crone sold the company he had built from the ground up, liquidated all other assets he had, and started work on his steel fortress. The only person allowed in his direct presence was his chief contractor, Ian Rotches, who single-handedly welded the final walls into place. On January 9 of the following year, Louis died of kidney failure. But Crone was already locked up in an impenetrable fortress, so presumably lived out the rest of his days in Caernrhyl alone and afraid. In 1917, forty-five years after he closed himself off from the world for good, one of the fortress’s walls was accidentally breached by German bombers. At that point, the gardens had become completely overrun, and most of the exotic fruits had completely disappeared. The only evidence that Crone’s notebooks were not just the writings of a mad man were traces of seeds in the stool of the monstrous flock of macaws that had taken up roost in the bell tower. Crone himself was discovered in the innermost recesses of Caernrhyl, apparently suffocated by one of his own sleeping bags, then shot several times, in a room locked from the inside containing nothing more than his body, a piano wiped clean of fingerprints save for each F key, a bat, a mirror and a table sawed in two symmetrical pieces.

  After following the clues to various dead ends, the case was eventually dropped.

  Her fellow students, if you could even call them that, students, were infinitely more interested in screwing and drinking than learning. The professors were also jokes, several of them barely older than she was, as unconfident as her high school classmates, just as desperate for acceptance, or establishing some semblance of authority, perhaps to mask the not-so-secret lusts they harboured for the prettier bimbettes in her classes, the ones with the pert little bums, button noses and that vague, sexy librarian look to them, the bookish ones that would be less likely to make a big deal out of something, or tell anyone. Fuckwits. Most unfortunately, their inner securities spilled out into their marking schemes, convincing themselves it was ethically repugnant to give any paper a grade over eighty, and the only way to keep her grade point average high enough to retain her scholarships was to sign up for courses in Finite Mathematics and Intro to Calculus.

  Math led to Statistics, which led to Sociology, and by the end of her four years, she was somehow emerging with a degree in Psychology, under the guidance of the one brilliant professor in the entire establishment, Dr. Isac Thorne, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the field of Early Childhood Education with a concentration on special needs and terminally ill children. Thorne, unlike the others, was able to see past her looks to her real potential, her real self, unlocking a passion in psychology that might otherwise never have emerged. She spent hours and days beyond what was required of her, helping Thorne in his research, conducting experiments on test groups of sick university students, as well as infants at the medical centre in nearby Bangor, and pregnant women in the company of midwives, remaining with those women from inception to a year following the birth. With her help, Thorne’s papers on The Effects of Propinquity on Childhood Convalescence (1979), The Presents of Presence: The Gift of Just Being There (1981) and The Singing Paraclete: Deep Comfort in Propinquity for Minors (1984; in which Chris Eaton is thanked directly for her contributions), were largely considered to have changed the hospital system in the late eighties, allowing parents to stay with their children in their rooms while under medical care, even when that child’s situation was considered hopeless. In a speech at The Third International Conference on Health Promotion in Sundsvall, Sweden, in 1991, Thorne laid out the importance of what he was calling holistic therapeutic propinquity, not because of any direct link to concrete, medical benefits (which was non-existent) but to the less palpable benefits he and his assistants observed when placed directly in the iatric environment. Propinquity, he said, is crucial to all living things, because it enables us to see ourselves through the eyes and heart of others, thereby validating our inner suspicions of self. It is the proof, in some sense, that we exist, and enables us, through others, to see who we really are. He went further, claiming that it is in the first moment that a fetus gains awareness that it exists inside its mother, that it is a product of its mother, that contractions begin, and that the retention of that sense of identity is what keeps a person’s heart beating, until death, when confusion returns like a signal, like his metaphoric parakeet, that the end is coming. Just as Descartes said: I think, therefore I am. But with a twist. More like, I think this is who I am, therefore I am. It was the key to elderly patients seeming to develop senility, failing to recognize the loved ones they had around them, or dogs that went off alone to die. And Thorne had made the same link to children. Without self-identity, there is no hope. Without hope, there is no chance of survival. Love and compassion, they had discovered, was at the core of this personal health. Even simulated love and compassion.

  Towards the end of her final year, in spite of her best efforts, she dated a boy from her Honours Class named Julian, who stalked her briefly in the library’s basement, where she preferred to study because people like him usually avoided it, before walking over one day and asking her to an evening of performance art, without even a hello or warm up, as if he’d been working his way up to it for weeks, and she said yes out of pity, then got too drunk and sat on his lap in a pub and then avoided him for the next few weeks until Thorne’s legendary graduate party, the night after their final papers were due, with the most exotic cheeses one could hunt down in all of Penobscot County, and mixed drinks they would never have imagined, like red and white vermouth with a wedge of lemon and lime, and they smoked pot and listened to records they had brought to impress him, and discussed television shows, the recession, and their futures, and smoked more pot, which was her first time, by the way, so she barely even inhaled anything directly, but just being in the room with so much of it started to make her feel like she were drifting to the ceiling, looking down on the rest of them while she floated there, watching herself, and them, and herself with them, as if she weren’t really herself, the way she scratched her own face whenever she finished a point, and tried to talk over everyone, hating every single one of them until her teeth hurt, and everyone else seemingly watching her, too, as she listed to one side and then the other, reaching for her drink on the coffee table like she were operating mechanical arms at a nuclear facility, two of her classmates – one who could barely read and the other with an understanding of Bentham and Festinger that bordered on facile and of Gilroy and Nesmith that more than broached laughable – disappearing out the back door to fuck in the garden, another excusing herself to the bathroom so she could take a peek under Thorne’s bed, and in his closet and drawers, searching for God only knew what, with Dr. Thorne, back downstairs, finally succumbing to their/her pleas to break out his guitar and play some Cat Stevens, some James Taylor, one of his own (which they/she all agreed was beautiful and profound), Julian pretending he had better options with that slut, Carol, over by Thorne’s collection of
rocks he and his wife, who was away that weekend visiting her sister who’d just given birth in Chicago, had collected from beaches around the world, as well as places like the Stone Chair of Cairo, The Great Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, various other walls, Julian no doubt trying to sell Carol on the same pathetic story about his ex-girlfriend in New York he’d used on her, the aspiring model who’d stolen his heart with a promise to stay faithful and fallen for a republican POLI-SCI major that she later claimed to have a small penis, cradling Carol’s elbow and leaning in to whisper everything in her ear, with Chris still floating up near the wrought iron light fixture, full of dead flies, watching herself on the couch with Dr. Thorne, the outside of their thighs were touching, talking about her plans for the next year, and where she might go for her post-graduate studies, because she should, you know, he believed in her and what she might accomplish, he could even put in a good word for her, he said, he knew people, but she heard so little, concentrating instead on the way his words sounded, nodding her head so he would just keep talking, until people realized the garden couple weren’t coming back, and the snooper had actually crawled under Thorne’s pile of dirty laundry and passed out, and even Julian and Carol went home, separately and celibately, leaving her alone with Dr. Thorne, on the couch, and on the ceiling watching herself on the couch, leaning in with all the seductive prowess her horribly intoxicated body could muster and, well, fuck Julian, asked him if he wanted to spread her out and eat her whole.

  He dropped out. He’d elected to come out to his friends right before the end of classes, and then decided the headaches of campus gossip just weren’t worth the effort. All their compassionate bullshit about already knowing (what the fuck did they know?), or their complaints about exam stress, or the ones who were saying he’d jumped out of his dorm window when actually he’d just lost control while bouncing on his bed. Miraculously, despite falling four floors, he connected with the only patch of grass you could find for miles, and emerged practically unscratched except for a cast on his left arm. It was all too much. He rose to even greater fame during the exam period by writing DEAL WITH IT in bold letters across his regulation booklet and then storming out of his Spanish final waving it over his head. He claimed to be considering a lawsuit against the university, for faulty window screens that hadn’t prevented his fall, and for designing rooms with the beds so close to the windows. But ultimately, what would be the point? It wasn’t going to change the fact that some people just can’t deal with having a confident fag around.