Mr. Eternity (11 page)

Edward Halloween was mostly incognito, but my accent betrayed me and several people tried to speak to me in Modern English. They knew I was a rich person. One man grinned and said, “If you would try to have perfect shoes, okay! Good on you!” But later an angry woman shouted, “Explain it please, why are they genius scientists, but it still have no cure from a zombie bite?”

These nighttime ventures became regular with us, at least for a few weeks, and I learned more of St. Louis on those nights than in twenty-six years of high privilege. I liked to keep silent and fantasize that this was my real life. It was only noise and torchlight and wheeling stars and nothing more, no state dinners, no engagements, no stuffed-pepper atmosphere of a president’s house and a president’s aspirations. It was the air and savor of liberty. It was men playing dice, and they kept score by clipping clothespins to their beards, and it was a woman with arbitrary letters shaved into her hair, and it was an embalmed decorative rat stuffed with
aroma berries. Sometimes there were even MDC men from across the river, where I had never been. You could identify them by the perfumed wax that they employed to shape their hair into high crests and ridges. They came to visit the brothels. There were no brothels in the MDC because, if you believed my father, their president was an enemy of private enterprise.

Edward Halloween was addicted to banana beer in addition to sweet potato wine and palm wine and date wine, and he was also addicted to millet beer. Millet beer was only for very poor people, but he relished it best of all because it smacked of his childhood, before his uncle made him a eunuch and sent him into service as a clown. Usually he was so fuckered up by the end of the night that I had to stuff his cheeks with cocaine leaves so that he would have the energy to walk home, and this was the precipitating factor in our discovery. One night he was so badly poisoned with cocaine and beer that he could not cease himself from belting out poor person songs as we returned home through the contingency tunnel. The presidential guards came hustling down and found us there. After this my father posted nighttime guards at my door.

The camel cloth factory was not a ripping success, for it transpired that camel cloth was not a new product at all. Small amounts of it were manufactured in the country hinterlands, and desert traders had been selling it in the market for years. It was already known as a poor person’s cloth, perhaps because it was the color of sand, and this contraventially meant that even poor people refused to wear it if they had the slightest means of buying cotton. My father was surprised by this but ultimately believed we could sell it in the MDC, which proved true, so he mandated a constant low-level production. Then he fixated on smaller items for a time, like new compost toilets, the distribution of irrigation water, and the allocation of slum land to rural migrants, who kept fluxing into the city. Sometimes you could mistake him for a benign and enlightened monarch.

But sometimes he succumbed to a seizure of craziness. Then, to follow Edward Halloween’s formula, chaos flowed out of him in an intractable
river. For example, one day he decided he was going to use some of the camels from the cloth factory to breed back all the ancient diversity of extinct hoofed creatures. Daniel Defoe had been theorizing that we could breed the camels into giraffes, which were their close cousins, but it seems my father wanted to use them to breed rhinoceroses, kangaroos, and olyphants as well. Then he universalized the concept. He said nothing was unattainable but that which we failed to dream of. We could use crows to breed back the whole diversity of birds, including the great auk, and we could use Christopher Smart to breed back the large land carnivores, and we could use river goldfish to breed a monster sea-fish that would devour all the jellyfish and return the oceans to their ancient condition of pristine luminous beauty. This would create a habitat for other sea-fish, which we could also breed from river goldfish. Then we could start a fisheries industry.

The breeding program was a misconceived and flawed venture that had only two consequences. The first was that we learned about a concomitant breeding program that was already afoot. It turned out that some people had succeeded in breeding a special type of dairy camel. These creatures were so fat that they could hardly walk, and they didn’t have the haughtiness and ill-temper of wild camels. They had floppy ears and they produced milk by the gallon, although this milk was of a very low quality. The breeders joked that it was only for sale. They would never think of drinking it.

However, the second consequence was that my father promulgated a law against eating shamo. This precipitated violent clashes between the presidential guard and the many people who committed themselves to transgressing the ban. Daniel Defoe encouraged him not to oppress the citizens in this way, but it was his presidential instinct, and it is from this controversy that I date the decline of good feeling in St. Louis. By this I only mean that for the first time I became aware of rattling simmering revolutionary energies.

As for me, this talk of extinct animals filled me with a sunset longing for vanished times, and I spent interminable hours in the library
scanning for information about olyphants and the rest. There were only casual references. I tried to ask Daniel Defoe about it, but he couldn’t remember which animals were real and which were only mythological. The distinction was actually unimportant to him, which threw me into a daydream of perplexity. What is left when you cease to distinguish truths from fictions? I longed for one true unequivocal image of a moose, but there was nothing. This was the ineffable sorrow of living as an intellectual in a time of radical simplification: We had the words for things, but not the things themselves. Olyphant, mermaid, giraffe. Dead language shimmered through our minds. There were passages in Edward Halloween’s alphabetic novel that were just lists of defunct words. Toaster oven. Whack-a-Mole. Boeing 747. Asphalt. Gluon. Sometimes we could envision these things and other times, as with Gluon, we could not even grasp what category of thing it had been.

“At least we have the words,” said Edward Halloween, “even if we can’t make a Gluon anymore.”

One night, in a bid to offer encouragement and explain how we should not be too quick to lament the poverty of our times, Daniel Defoe told a confoundingly fictive story about the decline and fall of the empire.

“It wasn’t all sunshine and gravy during the United States,” he said. “The empire overextended itself and also became extremely decadent. They tried to invade Kuwait, because of the fossil oils. Then they lost a lot of money in the guano trade. They also invested heavily in Andean silver mines, but everyone knew they should have been investing in domestic industry. Then they dropped nucleotide bombs on the islands of Hiroshiva and Namasaki! It was decadence and bad decisions. And meanwhile there was so much overpopulation that you couldn’t get a word in or find a cup of noodles to eat.”

My father paced rapidly to and fro, but I myself just gazed up into the empty air of the dining room and wondered at the uses of falsity. I no longer believed that Daniel Defoe told his stories as an exclusive entertainment for my father, for he told the same kinds of stories when my father was not present.

He continued, “The symbolic eclipse of American hegemony came one morning when a group of Comanche terrorists hijacked a spaceship and flew it into the Sears Tower. They hijacked it with nothing more than an eight ounce tube of toothpaste, which is why it was subsequently illegal to bring toothpaste on interstellar flights.”

“Take a note,” my father said to Edward Halloween, who nodded and took a scrap of brown paper out of his pocket. “Start toothpaste factory. Start inquiry into use of toothpaste as a weapon of war.”

Daniel Defoe was still ensconced in the camel pen, having refused more gracious accommodations, and because we were unable to prosecute our nighttime forays into the city, we began to visit him instead. This was a break from the helter-skeeter life of the palace proper, and my father did not object. He believed we could all learn something from Daniel Defoe.

It was on one of these nights, a breezy night of late November, that we met the sorcerer Quaco, whom we had previously considered another of Daniel Defoe’s fictions. He came gusting up the river out of the wilds of the blue yonder. He was dark like a shadow, and he wore a broken plastic bucket around his neck, and no clothes except for a skirt of plastic strips hung from a ribbon at his waist. He was here to transact a mysterious business with Daniel Defoe. It seems that he was very old also, older than Daniel Defoe, and he spoke Modern English in a beautiful euphonious accent.

“I’ll tell you about Quaco,” Daniel Defoe said. “At one time I made my living in the passenger pigeon business. I sold the meat, which was tough and cheap and easy to get because there were so many birds. There were at least a hundred trillion of them. They’d blot out the sun. Their feces fell like melting snow. Then Quaco made a magic to destroy them. He had his own reasons, so I didn’t hold it against him.”

It was yet another wild story, but I wished I could believe in it. My wedding loomed closer every day and I could only hope for some variety of magical intervention. We had now entered the three week countdown: The elite cashew wine had arrived from across the river, a garden
pavilion was being erected, and the peacocks had already been corralled so that they wouldn’t alarm guests with the clamor of their irksome screaming and the obscenity of their tail feathers.

“Please, Quaco,” I said. “Could you make a magic for me too? Could you extract me from my engagement to Anthony Fucking Corvette?”

Edward Halloween laughed. Daniel Defoe laughed. Quaco closed his eyes in the breeze and quiet and hay-fever darkness of the camel pen, and I didn’t expect he was listening, but then he said, “Anthony Fucking Corvette.”

“He is a monster of atavism. He parades his hookers in front of me. He allowed his friends to beat one of them bloody for an amusement. I also think he raped his cook.”

Daniel Defoe said, “I’m sure Quaco can poison him, if worst comes to worse.”

“But it’s not only Senator Corvette,” said Edward Halloween. “It is the whole system and edifice of our paternalist government. Quaco would have to poison the whole country.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” said Daniel Defoe, laughing and riffling through the cupboard where he kept his few possessions. Now he fished forth a small purse full of coins and he said, “Okay, Quaco, I’ve owed you these for a long time. It took a while but I found them after all.”

Quaco weighed the purse in his hand.

“You keep them,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

Quaco nodded. “What will I do with them now?”

Daniel Defoe looked doubtfully at the purse. “They’re no good to me either.”

“You could pay your way across the river,” said Edward Halloween. “You could escape the sinking ship of state. What do you mean they’re no good to you?”

“I have only just arrived,” he said, making a gesture of dismissiveness but also, simultaneously, casting me a glance of unknown significance. “I think I would like to stay a while longer.”

It was the cool season, and in the early dark the clouds were picked out against the hard moon. Soon we were inspired by this lyrical vision to descend to the river and stare into the black water. Daniel Defoe took my arm. Quaco sang a melancholic tune. I had a camel cloth sweatshirt to keep me warm, for it was far superior to cotton and I didn’t give a date pit for the worry that it was a poor person’s cloth. I reflected how we were almost like four standard people out for a stroll, but of course we were not, for one of us was the president’s daughter, and another was a eunuch and clown and poet, and the others were millennial wanderers of the earth.

Down below, in the turbid waters of this ancient grand river, we saw torn tattered nylon and other plastic waste. This was a frequent sight. We had lost the ability to create plastic, so we understood that this garbage was very old, unless they’d discovered plastic again in the north. We watched it as it waved in the current, and it was a spur to wondering and contemplation. In the light of dockside torches, with the breeze turning over the little waves, there was even something beautiful in this emblem of a ruined magnificence.

“All this old trash,” said Edward Halloween. “It is like being shit on by history.”

Daniel Defoe laughed like a hyeno, and I laughed, and even Quaco smiled, although not very much, and not for long.

The ancient mariner wanted to take a nap. He told us to wake him up at five o’clock, and then, to remind us, he pinned a note to his pants:
WAKE ME AT 5 PM
. His handwriting was astonishing. Large capital letters with heavy serifs.

It was just after two o’clock, so we went down to Smathers Beach. On the way there we saw a man selling coconuts out of his truck. I bought one because I wanted to see him shave it open with a machete, the way I’d seen it done in movies. Instead he drilled two holes in the husk with a dirty quarter-inch bit and handed me a straw. It was delicious.

Azar was trying to cheer me up. “We can do whatever you like,” he said. “Is there something else you want to do?”

“The beach is good.”

“You know that I don’t ever mean to trivialize your worries.”

“I know. You’re a good guy. I should tell you sometime how much you mean to me.”

“You should. But anyway, I was proud of you when you were one of those clipboard guys! I was proud you forced yourself to do it, even though you were so poorly suited to the job.”

I laughed. He laughed. I felt very tired.

“And, of course, it was absolutely the right choice to quit. Otherwise you’d have gone bananas.”

The beach was beautiful, but for now I could only enjoy it in principle. I sat underneath a palm tree because I was afraid of the life-giving sun and I didn’t have reef-safe sunblock and anyway, anyway, I was convinced that sunblock was carcinogenic. I was trying not to take my anxiety pills, but it had been a few days already and I could feel the creeping strangeness of withdrawal.