Mr. Eternity Read online

  Feeling greatly satisfied upon our return, Mr. Galsworthy next volunteer’d to show us his collection of Spanish coins. He kept them in his study, which was beside his bed chamber with its own door to the back hall. For myself I instantly thought of stealing these coins, and I believed Dr. Dan must have done as well, though I cannot know the truth. In any case, by the time Mr. Galsworthy had replaced the coins, and lock’d the cabinet with a key which he kept to a chain about his neck, and we had all gone down to the kitchens for meat, I felt it had become inevitable that we would steal his coins. Thus I went directly to Quaco (for he was the most clever of us all) and asked him could he not study and ruminate upon the question, and think of some plan of abstracting them.

  Perhaps the sight of these coins did inspire a greater sense of urgency in our lovelorn friend the doctor, for though he had been quite patient such a short time before, now he was possessed of the idea that he might earn what he needed by gambling. His idea was this, that if he did not gamble his monie quickly, why then, so he said, he would only gamble it slowly, and lose it all. He did not perceive the difficulties with this line of thought, and when I challenged him said only that there were two kinds of gambling, viz. thoughtless gambling of wages, which is what he had been doing now many months & to the grate detriment of his future prospects, and so-called Productive Gambling, which was gambling of borrowed monie, this money then growing by a principle of increase as ashes grow even as wood burns, leaving you not with nothing, no, but with some Thing, namely ash. Or he explained it another way also, which was that if he borrowed what he could, and increased the amount of monie he was able to wager, then inevitably by the principle of long-term increase his gambling Profits would exceed his gambling losses, which losses he held to be fix’d, like a tax, the profits being the only part in the equation which was elastic.

  Though I felt strongly there was something wrong with this plan, I could not think how to defeat it by mathematical logic, and came to feel it must be a very good plan after all. Further, seeing that Dr. Dan was slow to act upon his own ideas (for in this he was like many a philosopher), I had the gallant notion that I would do it myself, and assume the risk, and earn for my friend the money he required.

  I now borrowed money from Mr. Galsworthy, and drank killdevil by the hour, and wager’d all I could, thinking that I must keep up the pace. I soon fell into a kind of phrensy, dear Reader, with the result that very soon I was in a desperate condition. For example, one day about mid-afternoon I came to myself in a cane piece at the edge of the plantation. My lips were bloody, and my arm was bruised black as tar, and though upon waking I assum’d I had been enjoying a species of Siesta, it was soon plain that I had been fighting. Indeed here was Mr. Galsworthy some yards distant (that man being still unconscious), bruised and bloodied as well. He was dress’d, as he was habitually at that stage, in his long shirt, which hung like a lady’s gown, and no trousers to his legs, so that these legs were now fairly quilted with sores and boils and suppurating Ulcers from the biting of the outraged and innumerable ratts. He gave no sign of life, except if it be that at prodigious intervals he farted, and this being the only evidence of suspiration I guessed there was some exchange of ayre going on in this way.

  I roused him, but we two unhappy men could not recall what had befallen us, and at first thought the field slaves had beaten us. It was Quaco who explained later that we had gone out walking together after many drunken and rambunctious hours at the gaming table, and we had shortly quarrel’d. Such a circulation of blows ensued that we had beaten each other bloody inside a minute (tho after this we had wept and reconciled, said Quaco), & then we had both fallen asleep in the full violence of the sun. Only then had the field slaves dared to beat us.

  This event disposed me to an unwonted depression of mind, and even to feelings of Dread and Gloom. I sat upon the veranda and chewed my opium, which now stopped me up sure as a gutter choked with leaves, and I drank spirituous liquors in grate quantities, bucket upon pail upon hogshead, and feasted as usual with Mr. Galsworthy, yet I began to fear the effects of so many indulgences more than I had previously. Among these vices it was always feasting I expected would kill me & now I went so far as to swear off this practice for the all in all, yet at the same time I worried my absence at table would give Mr. Galsworthy food, as it were, for suspicion, even if he did pledge himself to see only the finest qualities in each of us. Thus I felt myself poised and rocked between two evils, namely, on the one hand, the evil of death by feasting, and on the other that of being found out as a colored man, & either kill’d for my deception or else, still worse, forc’d to live as a slave, and to work in the new-founded ratt leather industry.

  For several days, I kept myself aloof from my friends. This was no great matter, for Dr. Dan was occupied in longing, and in telling wild stories to the slaves, and Quaco was very busy also, saying one day he had swome all the way to Africa in the night, and had swome back again. Yet it seems I could not honor my resolution after all. There was a little voice in my head, which sang to me in the most querulous monotone, viz. that I had nothing whatever to do, and why not have a rack of lamb, or a dish of chopped milion, or a sweet custard, nothing more, oh nothing more, it need not be a feast in all truth. And so one day, forgetting my fears, for no young man is long burdened by the fear that his organism will misgive him, I went up to the great house and sought out Mr. Galsworthy. I found him in the back piazza, where he sat fanning himself, and drinking soursop juice, and reading The London Magazine. Seeing me, he called for Quamina that she should bring rum in punch, and soon we were joined by Dr. Dan himself, who had a ragged chop-fallen look, and was hopeful of drowning his sorrows in the salutiferous balsam of wine. Of this potation he swallow’d no more than a teacup, but it broke my heart to see my friend so sad, and I gazed at him with a kind of wild sympathy as Mr. Galsworthy began to discourse upon ratt skins.

  Here follow’d a night like all other nights, with the difference that later, Mr. Galsworthy having fallen down the cellar stares, and beat himself unconscious upon the stones, I was accosted by his wife, Mrs. Galsworthy. I had known this woman a little, with a daily growing familiarity, and had long admired her, for she was a woman whose looks and subtle graces did haunt my nights. How then could I answer when, from a motive of loneliness and saddening melancholy, she now invited me to her chambers, there to work my amours upon her if I wish’d? Reader, here was a thing more dangerous than any feast, for I could well imagine how my employer would react if ever he learned of my betrayal. Yet though I was so stuffed with food I thought I would be of little use to her, even perhaps disgorging my feast upon her white bosom, I was powerless to refuse.

  2500

  * * *

  To my huge astonishment, Quaco poisoned Anthony Fucking Corvette two weeks before our wedding. This at least is what I conjecture must have happened. Officially the cause of demise was an explosion of the heart. It had happened that one night, hunched over his sorghum paste in the din of dancing hookers and cavorting revelous friends, he had tipped forward dead with his face in his food. I have no proof that it was Quaco who did it, for he evaporated away the next morning like river mist in fresh sunlight, but what alternative explanation could there be?

  I sighed an enormous breath of relief, but in the strangeness of that solstice season no one else seemed to pay this death any heed. That year the south wind ceased to blow and the western sky blushed a winsome pink and the rains, which should have come in November, did not come at all. Sometimes round white clouds appeared, but a mysterious heavenly artifice prevented them from rising into the higher strata. It was strange to see them there, piled up in the middle sky like trash behind a dike.

  So my relief was tinted and troubled by the apprehension of an emergency. We did have grain reserves, and we could also trade sesame oil to the MDC in exchange for millet and cassava, but immediately there were pressures and protests on the subject of irrigation water. My father had followed ancient protocol a
nd tightened the strictures, allocating water to the presidential and senatorial bottomlands but depriving some marginal farmers wholehandedly, and this caused a torrent of outrage. In January an outlaw saboteur named Carlos Pedigree exploded some earthworks and diverted untold quantities of illegal water to the scrub farmland above the city. He could not be located afterward, but his collaborators were executed in a bloodthirsty spectacle.

  I reflected upon this event in my echoing presidential rooms. Actually I could not banish it from my mind and it would be better to say it haunted me and hung about in the air and waited for me under the bed while I slept my uneasy sleep. These water thieves had only desired to improve their qualities of life. They had desired water for millet and sorghum. Was this a crime? In the cool morning I devoured cornmeal and fruit, a quintessential rich person’s breakfast, and considered how I was born to that daily luxury as camels are born to the sunshine, but at the same time my food seemed to have no taste. It was just the sensation of prickle pear seeds between my teeth.

  So Anthony Fucking Corvette was dead and gone, correct, but this was the other aspect of it: Nothing was altered. I remained a wealthy person, complicit by ancient tradition in the repressions that my father practiced, and yet also a victim of those repressions, for I was a woman with no capacity to effect good change, a lonely anachro-feminist to be passed around by men drinking wine. In summation, I was still unhappy, and now I lacked even an Anthony Fucking Corvette upon whom to fasten the blame.

  Daniel Defoe had known many presidents and kings and rulers, and it was a gracious relief at this time to sit with him in the camel pen and listen to old fictive stories. Only here did I feel I could escape the pigeon hole of presidential categories. Only here did I cease to be a distinguished person of high renown, perched atop a pyramid of subjection, and become a simple reader of old books and inquirer of exotic questions.

  “Once I knew a space captain named Robinson Caruso,” Daniel Defoe said one morning. “He figured out how to grow corn and potatoes on Mars, which was also a drought-stricken place. He discovered how to build cities there. I’ll admit I don’t remember how this grand scheme finally unraveled.”

  “Did you ever go there?” I asked. “To Mars?”

  “I’m afraid not. I was already too old for such a long voyage. But I did walk on the moon once. There were trees with pink feathers instead of leaves. Am I thinking of somewhere else?”

  “I’ve only read about the earliest days of moon travel.”

  “Ah. Well, it became commercialized, like everything. They mostly just had recreational activities. It wasn’t somewhere you wanted to live. There were casinos built to look like Roman palaces. I also seem to remember a golf course. You could go surfboarding or get a laser vasectomy if you wanted. All the construction was extremely provisional.”

  But sometimes he spoke of Anna Gloria, his lost love. He had met her across the broad heaving seas, in Spain, and he had encountered her again in the Orinoco jungle, and also in Australia, and in the Bahamas, and in Java and Old Maui. He said that interlapping circumstances always conspired to separate them. I tried to affirm my conviction that he would find her again, but the truth was that these love stories cast me down in sadness. I was increasingly pierced by an attraction for him myself, and I knew that this feeling was just a piped dream that flowed ceaselessly into the sewer of my presidential ennui. I knew he was just in transit through our world. I knew I was just a parochial princess with whom he whiled away a miniature fraction of his time.

  It was during one of these conversations that I experienced a revolution in my own thinking, however, and it was this: I was asking myself whether Anna Gloria could possibly be a true historical figure, and suddenly I understood how it didn’t matter. These love stories were evocations of sentimental truths which existed beyond the orbit of factuality. She was real because she existed for him. Why had I never realized? And I also understood that an equivalent logic extended to his accounts of history. I had the revelation that history was only the rabble-house of facts and details from which human beings confabulated a sentimental truth. At the best-case scenario, at its truest and most illustrative, history was an effort of imagination, mostly fictive, mostly allegorical, like a story of unrecanted love. Why should Daniel Defoe not conceive his own fictive discourse for discussing it?

  These philosophical upheavals occurred in the foreground of my life. In the background, the remodernization plan moved forward with the jerking sidewise motions of a river crab. For example, my father now decreed a private and frivolous reform of serving only United States food in the palace. Such a reform was unpardonable in a time of drought, for there were those who struggled to locate any morsel of food at all, let alone a United States themed morsel, and when knowledge of this practice seeped into the city there was a riot in Hi-Pointe. However, I am also driven to admit that I enjoyed this reform very much. It was like the culinary reflection of my new perceptions about history. It was history come to poetic life, or else refigured as food and made ingestible.

  My father got his recipes from the Jennie June’s American Cookery Book, which he selected for its emphasis on modern science, and we had authentic traditional food preparations like imitation crab, water soodjee, Trenton Falls fry, and macaroni. The cook usually had to make some substitutions. She made venison puffs with shamo and she used Jamaica cherries in her compote of green gooseberries. Our porpoise pepper steak was just goat.

  “It definitely takes me back,” said Daniel Defoe, who didn’t eat anything. He sniffed a shamo puff and said, “It definitely reminds me of the United States. Once, I ate venison puffs at MacDonall’s every night for a whole year. I don’t remember why.”

  “You were a hobo,” I said, trying my own hand at speaking in his allegorical language. “Don’t tell me. You played knucklebones with some Shoshone women at an all-night bowling alley.”

  “That sounds right, yes.”

  “It was wild America, home of the braves.”

  “Exactly true.” He laughed. “You’re the most clever of princesses.”

  But the United States Food Program was only a small and private ingredient in the stew of remodernization, which was now spiced by a new and potentially groundbreaking reform. This was my father’s proposed reintroduction of electrification and incandescent light, which would fill our nights with luminous rainbows and also enable people to keep working after dark. This was intended as a circuitous drought-relief initiative, because people could sell their increased output of goods to the MDC in exchange for food, which would free them from the natural caprices of agricultural production. Camel cloth, for example, was enjoying a boutique appeal in the MDC, just as my father had hypothesized, and he wanted to run the cloth factory night and day.

  We knew that lightning was just atmospheric electricity, and Daniel Defoe thought that it would be easy to harness it. Bert Franklin had done it with only a soda can and some string. The truly big job was reinventing the light bulb. I actually chanced to be present when my father and Daniel Defoe attempted this. It was because they commenced their labor in the dining area, where Edward Halloween and I were eating a traditional vol-au-vent of peacock. We tried to escape, but Daniel Defoe cast us a glance of entreaty and supplicated with us to stay. He did not relish another afternoon alone with my father. And actually it was no trauma to stay, because we yearned away for the wonder of light as much as anyone. All the sources attested that the cities of the United States were illuminated from dusk till dawn by magical electric glass tubes and bulbs. It was marvelous to envision.

  They had three technical guides on electricity, but two of them were so complicated as to be unsusceptible to comprehension. Luckily they also had Electricity for Boys: A Working Guide, by James Slough Zerbe. My father began reading aloud. He did not seem to notice that I was present in the room.

  “The cores, or armatures, will be magnetized. The result is that the electrode, connected with the armature of the magnet, is drawn away fro
m the other electrode, and the arc is formed, between the separated ends.”

  But then he slapped the book closed and frowned. “I feel I understand this,” he said. At that point, sad to say, it was manifest that the project would have the same conclusion as every other technological reform. The defect was philosophical. It was that my father, as president, assumed and affirmed that everything he said was correct, which codified his malapropisms into law and made him impervious to fresh knowledge. He could never learn anything because no book could contravent the established convictions of his heart.

  “Just read a little more,” said Daniel Defoe, who was the only person who had seen the things described by Mr. Zerbe. “Just to set the mood.”

  My father continued, “As the current also passes through a resistance coil, the moment the ends of the electrodes are separated too great a distance…”

  Then he closed the book again.

  “Well,” said Daniel Defoe, looking at me with doubt in his eyes, “I do not have such a deep background in electricity, but this is pretty simple. An electrode is anything that has a potential. I seem to remember you could even use a potato. By potato I actually mean Incan earth truffle, which is different from our potatoes, which are sweet potatoes. But you could probably use a sweet potato too. It’s the same word after all. Please get me two sweet potatoes, peeled at each end.”