Mr. Eternity Page 2

  The great house at Babylon was poorly constructed, & in grate haste, namely that some rooms were walled with grave markers, and others with a kind of white washed dung. I think this were not for want of credit or capital, but only that Mr. Galsworthy did so enjoy a sumptuous table that his only thought was for feasting, and all the rest were bagatelles and trifles. In this he was like the man who gambles his estate for a thrill, or sells the cloathes off his back for the taste and quickness of wine. To-day we dined upon stew’d mudfish, pickled crabs, roast pig, roast yam, plantanes, boil’d pudding, roast coot, water milions, and many other fuds viz. doves ducks & fishes. For my part I worked at a ham the size of a cloak-bag.

  Yet soon our revelry was interrupted by the visitation of brooding death. One of the guests, a Mr. Foster, gave a small scream and, stiff and benumb’d, though also it seemed in excruciating pain, endeavored to rise, which task being impossible he next grobled about for whatever chanced to be within his reach, snatching the wig from his companion’s head, and then, giving another scream, slipped forward dead with his face in his fud. We now all gazed about uncertain what to do, for if Mr. Foster had been poisoned, as it did appear he had been (which was not unusual in the Bahamas at that time, where the slaves did frequently season their masters fud with corrosive sublimate), then I expected our next concern would be to torment slave after slave until we had learnt the culprits. Daniel Defoe no doubt thought as I did, and not wishing to see this feast spoilt, for it was a good one, nor indeed any slaves tormented, he knelt by the dead man, & grabbed hold of his cheeks, & looked in his mouth, & lifted his hand and let it fall, & listened at his chest, and then, without canvassing the matter any further, pronounced him dead not of poyson but from a surfeit of Pig.

  Now we were at ease once more, this occurrence being nothing remarkable in such a place, where death blew through every big house like a summer breeze. Only those guests newly arriv’d from England were alarmed, and stared about, their faces masks of horror. Mr. Galsworthy for his part was delighted to discover in Daniel Defoe, called from that point Doctor Dan, a person with some knowledge of medicine, and pressed him now with questions and concerns of all sorts, asking whether a surfeit of duck mite produce a similar outcome, or of crab, and if not was there some Fatal Characteristic peculiar to the pig.

  I settl’d in to listen, drinking punch & gazing at the slaves, who moved about clearing dishes. I knew from their faces they had poisoned Mr. Foster, though I ne’er learnt the reason.

  Dr. Dan answered that a surfeit of pig sometimes produced what was called by physicians a coagluation of the Gluten or some say Animal mixt, which retarded & obstructed the circulation of the blood. A surfeit of any animal fud will produce the same outcome in any other animal, but the calamity proceeds quick or slow according to the degree of relationship between the animal consum’d to the animal which consumes it, for ex. a man must eat more duck to produce the same fatal coagluation, but a much smaller amount of monkey, and still less of Ape, Sphinx, or Satyr, which of all animals are man’s closest cousins. Cannibalism that heathen rite is known to produce an instantaneous coagluation. However, said Dr. Dan, remember that a duck is safer eating the meat of a Human than if he eats the meat of his own cousin and near relation, the goose.

  Notwithstanding he spoke with authoritie I knew him for an imposter, yet I said nothing, for I recognized him as one oozy worm recognizes another though neither have the use of reason. Here I was at table to every appearance a white man among white men, yet I was a sheep in wolf’s clothing after all. You see dear reader my father was Mr. Coleman of Elizabeth plantation in the Barbados, that is God’s truth, yet my mother was his Slave, named Liberty, which made me neither one thing nor another, but surely no gentleman. In the Bahama islands I called myself John Green, and have done ever since.

  2500

  * * *

  My father was the hereditary king and president of the Democratic Federation of Mississippi States, which was lucky for him because he loved the amenities of power and the exercise of governance. It was not so lucky for the people he ruled over, however, nor for the country at large, which ultimately disappeared away into the lavender light and sweet scented dust of history. But that is putting the car before the hearse.

  Originally, our dominions comprised St. Louis, where we lived, and most of the land west to Kansas City and south to the first wild reaches of the Mississippi jungle, which in truth made it not Mississippi states, as the country’s name boldly stated, but only the one individual old state of Missouri with some drips and drops of Arkansas. As for ourselves, we remained in St. Louis at all times. I recollect it as a city of almost twenty-five thousand souls, a city of date palms and mud houses and banana beer, and it was hot enough to fry an ape most of the time, except January and February. It was my family’s home for centuries.

  Our name is Roulette, but I am Jasmine St. Roulette, the St. part having been added for a hint of style. I was the only issue of my father’s union with a mystery mother whom I never knew, and therefore our presidential family consisted of only two members, although the household was augmented tenfold by servants and slaves, and days might pass when I did not see my father at all, or saw him only at official occasions. We lived extravagantly in our hereditary palace, which had once been the city library of imperial St. Louis. We had an oven big enough to bake fifty cassava rounds at one time. We had baths as big as a farmer’s whole house. We had a hundred peacocks, acrylic clothing, real carpets, paraffin lanterns, plastic bins and jugs, and exotic commodities like cashew wine, which we obtained from neighboring countries on an economy of exchange. We had water tanks and strategic grain reserves, and the whole edifice was encapsulated from the poor people within an enormous concrete wall.

  For me, however, life was corrupted by frustrations, because I was a woman in a place and time where men hoarded up all the power. I could never participate in the larger sphere of activity. My father used me like a bartering chip. He affianced me to a sequence of men, the last of whom was the piggish senator Anthony Fucking Corvette, whom I had to visit each week to solidify family alliances. We would sit together at an antique plastic table and he would say things like, “It is better to drink muddy water and eat dirt.” Better than what? Then I had to let him do it to me. He did it by rote and political requirement and then he bollocked off to his hookers and his poppy juice and I went home to lie in my hammock and dream of another life. This is what it was to be a president’s daughter in the final years of the twenty-fifth century. It was an endless liturgy of palace tedium and an injustice of diminished freedoms. I called myself an anachro-feminist, a term of my own proud coinage, but it was only a phrase. I had no recourse.

  My father did not care a sesame seed for my troubles, but we did share one fascination in common, which was the transformations and legacies of history. We had only a limited selection of books in the palace, but we knew which side the world was buttered on. We knew that we were opulent people in an impoverished time. We knew that our country was just a subsistence nation of millet and goats and camels. The ruins of great days fringed and ringed the city in a huge periphery and we knew that our own St. Louis was only a tiny particle of the St. Louis that had existed in ancient bygone imperial days. The difference was that while I sat in the library striving to learn all I could about the true and established facts of the world, my father hardly read anything anymore, and instead he preoccupied himself with thoughts of his own place in history. His great ambition was to unite all the nations of North America under one flag, as they’d been united in freedom and democracy under the empire of the United States. He also wanted to revitalize culture and learning. I often heard him say things like, “It is time we remodernized this ragbag old country.”

  He had mandated that we speak only Modern English at home, the language of American scholars, and I wasn’t allowed to speak Mississippi Spanish at all until I was ten years old, but other than this he did nothing, for he didn’t know how to comme
nce the effort of remodernization. Maybe, in an alternative reality, he would never have been catalyzed into action at all, but it happened that one night, when I myself was already twenty-six and my father had long since begun to feel the pinch of years, he bought an old slave named Daniel Defoe from some people who came in off the desert. It was a night of shining rain and cicadas, which I know because I chanced to be there. I was just returning from dinner and fornications with Anthony Fucking Corvette, and my father was out by the front gate, and when he saw me he said, “Oh, it’s you,” as if he had just recollected my existence. “Then come along and I’ll show you something.”

  We issued into the camel pen and there was Daniel Defoe. It was the first time I cast eyes on him. He had a superannuated cat named Christopher Smart, who was like a gray carpet with teeth, and he was handsome and there were lights in his eyes, but his chief appeal and the reason for my father’s interest in him was that he was said to be one thousand years old. This was not impossible if you considered that he came from the desert. In very dry air, with abundant sun, meat will cure before it spoils, and therefore a human being, which is made of meat, could theoretically live forever. The marked contrast was that in St. Louis, which was frequently ravaged by pestilences like Nevada fever, even rich people lived only fifty or sixty years. Poor people were lucky to survive into their thirties.

  “If he’s as old as he says,” my father instructed, “he would have known the glory of the United States.”

  He was speaking Modern English, and it was an astonishment when Daniel Defoe responded in the same language. His accent was untraceable. He said, “Don’t talk to me about glory. Those people were out of their minds. They only cared about whale oil. They lived in tents called wigwams. Their method of gardening was to explode chemical bombs, which killed everything.”

  My father said, “We know about oil. We have books and prospectuses in the palace.” But I knew he had not read a prospectus in years.

  “It wasn’t only whale oil. It was fossilized oil too. They pumped it out of the earth and drank it like it was banana beer. They pumped so much out of the ground that the land began to sink, and that’s why it seemed like the seas were rising. They also made a special train oil from the fat of a seabird called the great auk, which was the national bird of the United States. Train oil made the economy boom, but it also caused global warming because it released all the heat that would otherwise have stayed inside the auks, which were arctic birds, and very warm inside, and anyway extremely numerous.”

  This was not true. It was a feast of lies. However, my father devoured it, and I think this marked the sea change for him. He had lacked an adviser to ratify and affirm his ideas. Now he had one.

  “We’ve got to find some of these great auks,” he said quietly. “We won’t burn so many to cause global warming. Only enough to make our economy boom.”

  2016

  * * *

  Azar was up, or rather he had crawled out of his tent. He was on all fours, breathing heavily, disoriented by shocking dreams. I told him there was no coffee yet and no food and our host was involved in pagan rituals on deck, and he lifted his head and groaned, a soft and mournful sound.

  “We have to figure out what we’re doing here,” I said.

  “We’re making a documentary. Remember we have to be firm about this.”

  “But we don’t know anything about it. What’s our approach? Do we do it self-conscious and formal, like Errol Morris, or do we follow him around, candid moments, regular life, et cetera?”

  “These aren’t the things you have to decide at first. For now we shoot lots of stuff and then we cut it together later. We’ve only been here half a day. First we find some coffee.”

  “It’s a movie about a very old person,” I said, “but it’s also about today, our society, in which here we are, two privileged young men without any skills applicable beyond the framework of that society.”

  “It’s not about us, that’s one thing. No one gives a shit about us. I certainly don’t.”

  “I don’t mean us as in us, I mean us as in now, our world, Generation Credit Debt, the Age of Irony and climate disaster. And the ancient mariner belongs to a different time. The last survivor.”

  We pondered this, or we pretended to. Really I was too tired from a night in the sand to do much pondering. Azar stared into space like he’d been hypnotized.

  “But five hundred and sixty years old?” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s no reason to proceed skeptically. The movie is better if we take him at his word. Otherwise we’re cynics. I’m tired of being a cynic.”

  “Maybe the movie is about trying to substantiate his claim,” I said, “and then gradually we show that it doesn’t matter what the truth is. He’s ancient in other ways. In outlook and orientation. A metaphor develops. Something about the boat. I don’t know what the metaphor is but it develops and that’s the movie.”

  “Fine, good. As long as you understand that in essence the whole thing for me is that I don’t want to be a cynic.”

  “Why are you talking about cynicism?”

  “I had an epiphany about this because I finally tried kombucha. It’s delicious! I’ve been making fun of everyone for drinking it, but if I’d been less cynical I could have been enjoying it this whole time.”

  He rolled onto his back and stared into the sky. The yard was filling up with light. Palm trees stirred in the soft breeze, a sound like rain, and it was very peaceful, very peaceful.

  “So he comes from the fifteenth century,” he said. “In actual fact or in spirit. It’s a compelling thought. He must think he remembers the discovery of America. He must think he remembers the invention of chewing gum.”

  He closed his eyes. There were banana plants growing against the fence, quail grass and okra and Indian lettuce and callaloo, squash and beans, a sapodilla tree and a mango tree and other trees I didn’t recognize. There were strange mushrooms growing under an ixora bush, where the ancient mariner told me he’d planted Tylenol capsules. The yard was stuffed with plants. It was good for the spirit to grow food, he told us, even though he didn’t eat much any longer. He could make do with one thimble of honey each week, a teaspoon of tamarind pulp, a sniff of lemon blossom.

  I noticed that there was a column of red ants on Azar’s chest. I wondered if I should warn him. But if they were biting ants, they would bite him whether I warned him or not, and if they were harmless it was better not to frighten him. Then he screamed and leapt to his feet and I ran forward to brush them off. He stood there with his arms raised and his face twisted in pain. There were already welts on his soft belly.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “that if somehow we could prove he’s telling the truth, it would be more than a world-historical medical discovery. It would also make a difference for me on a personal level.”

  We learned that the oldest person with documents to substantiate her claim was Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who lived to the age of 122. She drank port and ate two pounds of chocolate a week. She’d quit smoking when she was 117.

  But there were other claims. Old Tom Parr was supposed to have lived to the age of 152 on a diet of rancid cheese and milk, hard coarse bread, a little booze, a little whey. Henry Jenkins, a destitute Yorkshireman, lived to be 169. Li Ching-Yuen was either 197 or 256 at his death in 1933. There’s a tradition that for the first forty years of his life he lived on rice wine, goji berries, and herbs. He was seven feet tall, long fingernails, a ruddy complexion. When he was 130 he met a 500-year-old hermit who taught him to breathe. He outlived twenty-three wives and died in the arms of a twenty-fourth.

  Trailanga Swami, the walking Shiva of Varanasi, lived to be 280 or 358. He could levitate and he could breathe underwater. He fasted for months and broke his fasts with buckets of clabbered milk. He never wore clothes.

  At the upper end, wild hearsay shades into mythology. Methuselah and Jared and Noah and Adam and the rest. The Persian shah Zahhak lived
1,000 years, and the kings of ancient Sumer lived for millennia. En-men-lu-na is supposed to have reigned for 43,200 years.

  What’s the secret? Li Ching-Yuen had four rules: Tranquil mind, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, sleep like a dog. I learned that some people have success with long-lasting substances like jade, hematite, gold, and cinnabar. The logic is that if you ingest these things, you acquire some of their own properties. Everything has its vogue. Predigested protein, calorie restriction, raw food, brain exercises, the Okinawa diet, a positive attitude, an extract made from deer antler velvet. There’s no wrong way to live forever. The ancient mariner had known a man in Lisbon who drank potable gold from the body of a clock, and it might have worked, who knows, but he was hauled before the Inquisition and burned alive.

  And there was the ancient mariner himself, salted by the sea air and dried in the tropic sun, and now, for all I knew, he was incorruptible. He was like a strip of rawhide.

  What would it mean to live five hundred and sixty years? If I myself lived so long, what would I live to see? Would there be responsible land management and 2.1 children per woman? Would gas stations be replaced by solar charging stations? I had been a man with a clipboard, ostensibly a believer in collective enterprise, but the experience of wandering around New York encouraging people to unplug their chargers and meditate on the inundation of their city had not filled me with optimism. There would be no solar charging stations. Instead there would be extreme weather and high heat. There would be avocado trees in Washington, D.C., Spanish moss in Boston, wineries in Greenland. Key West would be underwater, and New Orleans and Miami and Lower Manhattan as well. There would be no more plastic bags. No more social media. No more lightbulbs or cheap underwear or reliable weather forecasting. No one would remember how to make asphalt or super glue or sunblock or cortisone cream. We would no longer be able to fly. The world would be like it used to be, years and years ago, except that it would be entirely different.