Ignatius MacFarland (19 page)

I was suddenly standing in a huge workshop that looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. There were piles of stuff everywhere, mounded all the way up to the ceiling. There were different workstations all around, as well as weird-looking electronics equipment. In one corner, big wooden boxes and cases with lights and wires sticking out and microphones that sort of looked like tennis rackets sat in a circle around a huge collection of homemade musical instruments. Giant easels with lots of half-finished versions of famous paintings like the
Mona Lisa
stood in another corner. A huge desk with mountains of papers and manuscripts and an oversize homemade typewriter that looked like someone had glued a bunch of baby blocks to a cash register sat in the middle of the room.

Everywhere else were various projects in different stages of completeness — a car made out of big sheets of weird looking metal, a hang glider built out of branches and some kind of rough fabric, an airplane and a helicopter that looked junkier than the rocket I had made. There was even something that looked like a huge bamboo machine gun on a stand that didn’t look anywhere near being ready to do any damage other than falling over on whoever tried to shoot it. There wasn’t one foot of space that didn’t have something piled on it, and I couldn’t tell how anybody could even walk through it all to get to the various work areas.

I looked up at Mr. Arthur, who was staring at the room proudly.

“This is where all the magic happens,” he said. “This is the place where I make everyone’s lives better.”

I looked at him, surprised by what he just said. This guy really likes himself, I thought. He looked down at me for a few seconds, like he was trying see inside my head.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he finally said. “A lot of this is based on stuff from our world. But I’m not stealing the ideas. I’m trying to make them
better.
I’m fixing the things about our frequency’s accomplishments that didn’t work, that weren’t good enough. Like, here, check this out, dude.”

Mr. Arthur ran through all the junk like a little kid, leaping over piles and landing each foot in empty spaces that were only big enough for one of his shoes. It was clear that to him this whole layout made sense, just like my dad’s desk, which looked like a disaster area to my mom and me but my dad could find even the smallest piece of paper on. “It’s my own personal filing system,” he used to say whenever my mom would get down on him to clean his desk, even though if the desk in my bedroom was ever messy he would call me a slob and say I was grounded unless I “made sense of that trash heap.”

Mr. Arthur grabbed the painting of the
Mona Lisa
off its easel and ran back over.

“See, the
Mona Lisa
in our frequency has this really small smile that you can barely see. In fact, some art scholars even argue about whether or not she’s really smiling. But if you look at my version of it, well . . . check it out.”

Mr. Arthur pointed at her mouth. It was smiling really big, with huge white teeth and everything.

“Now, that’s a smile!” he said, laughing the way a person does when they’re just so happy to be themselves. “And listen to this!”

He put the painting down and bounded into the middle of the room and grabbed a guitar that was made out of some kind of green wood and started to play it. As soon as I heard the opening notes, I knew it was a song that I’d heard my dad play on his car radio a million times. He always said it was the most famous rock song ever. After Mr. Arthur plunked out the opening notes, he started to sing in a really high, terrible voice.

“There’s a lady whose nose / knows what glitters is good / and she’s climbing a stairway to Kevin.”
He stopped playing and looked at me with another one of his “Well, it’s pretty great, isn’t it?” faces.

“Uh . . .” I said, trying not to insult him, “who’s Kevin?”

“See, that’s just the thing, brother man,” he said, getting all excited and waving his hands around as he talked. “The original song’s called ‘Stairway to
Heaven.
’ But that doesn’t make any sense, you know? I mean, there’s no stairway that’s that tall. And who cares about a woman climbing up to heaven anyway, since if she is, then she’s already dead, you know?

“So I made the song more of a story about this girl who’s in love with this guy named Kevin who wears really glittery clothes because he’s, you know, like, a real cool guy in a rock band and he lives up on the second floor of her apartment building and she’s been afraid to talk to him forever. But now she’s finally decided that it’s time to tell him she loves him and so she’s climbing a . . .” He gave me a look and gestured to me to finish the sentence for him.

“Stairway to Kevin,” I said, feeling very self-conscious even though it was only the two of us in the room.

“Pretty great, huh?!” he laughed, more pleased with himself than any person has ever been in the history of the universe.

“Yeah,” was pretty much all I could say.

Are all presidents like this? I wondered.

27

INSIDE THE OVAL OFFICE

We finally got out of Mr. Arthur’s weird workshop, but only after he’d shown me pretty much everything he was working on, which was a
lot
of stuff. He was trying to invent a DVD, build a motorcycle, make hockey equipment, draw Superman comic books, shoot episodes of
The Simpsons,
genetically engineer coffee beans, design a robot — he was even trying to clone himself. The amazing thing was he was a pretty smart guy and was able to do a lot of stuff for being an English teacher. The problem was he was only a
pretty
smart guy and not a
really
smart guy and so he was only able to do stuff halfway right.

I have to admit, it was impressive that he had been able to make the materials he needed for all his projects out of stuff he found in this frequency, since there were no stores that sold electronics equipment or mechanical parts or art supplies or scientific instruments or any of the other materials that you can just buy in our world. But this also created as many problems for him as the fact that he wasn’t really smart enough to do all this stuff well. Nothing really worked the way it should have. And so everything he did and made and invented just came off as kind of terrible.

Oh, yeah, and the fact that he also thought everything he was doing was amazing didn’t help, either.

We walked down a hallway that looked a lot like the hallways I’d seen on TV programs about the inside of the White House. There was carpeting everywhere and it looked normal but when I walked on it, it sort of made a crunching noise. All I could think about was how uncomfortable it would have been to walk around this place in my bare feet.

We got to a set of double doors and he stopped in front of them.

“You ever been to the White House and visited the President, Iggy Mac?” he said like he could barely contain his excitement.

“No, sir. I’ve just seen the place on TV.”

“Well, you’ll never be able to say
that
again!” And with that, he pushed open the doors and revealed the Oval Office, which looked pretty much exactly the way it looked whenever I’d seen it in movies and on TV and in my government book. It had the couches and desk and chairs and tables and windows and curtains that were just like the real place. I have to admit that, of all the stuff I’d seen that Mr. Arthur had done, this was the only one that looked exactly right.

He even had a Presidential Seal in the middle of the carpet that looked just like the one in the real White House, except that it said E Pluribus Chester, which I think in Latin means “Out of many, Chester.” That doesn’t make any sense at all, unless he was trying to say that if you added up all the creatures in this frequency you would get one of him.

“Pretty great, huh?” he said, looking prouder than I’d ever seen anybody look in the twelve and a half years I’d been on the planet Earth.

“Yeah,” I said, truly impressed with the place. “It’s really cool.”

He showed me in and then he sat behind the desk that I’d always seen the President sit at and I sat in one of the two chairs across from it. Mr. Arthur put his feet up on the desk, leaned back, and put his hands behind his head like he was king of the planet. He stared at me for a few seconds, then smiled again and said, “So, Ignatius MacFarland. Welcome to my world.”

I didn’t know what to say to the guy. He kept acting really normal and friendly toward me and yet the only reason I was there was that he had ordered his army to go and find me and destroy anything that got in their way as they did. So to have a normal conversation with him like we were just sitting around in someone’s backyard on a cool summer evening drinking pop and eating potato chips was like trying to calmly eat a sandwich while the car you’re riding in is plummeting off the side of a cliff. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could do it.

“So, um . . .” I said, looking around the room for some sort of conversation starter, “how long have you been the President?”

“A few years now, I guess. It’s sort of hard to remember, to be honest. I’ve been so busy that I tend to lose track of time. I didn’t really invent a calendar or anything because I’d sort of like to forget that time is passing. It’s something that happens to you as you start to get older. It’s weird. When you’re young, like the age you are, time seems like it goes really slowly. But the older you get, the faster it goes. Sometimes it feels like I just got up in the morning and then suddenly it’s nighttime and I’m getting back in bed. You have that happen every day for weeks and months and years and then suddenly you look in the mirror and you’re an old man because your whole life has passed you by.

“That was how I felt when I was back in our frequency,” he continued. “And I hated it. I mean, if you’re busy or successful as it’s happening, then you don’t mind it so much because you feel like you’re doing something with your life. But when you’re just trying to do things and you keep getting rejected or told that it’s not good or you’re made to feel like you’re just wasting your life chasing some dream that’s not attainable, then it’s the worst thing in the world.”

Mr. Arthur looked at me and thought for a second. Then he got this really serious look on his face and I wondered if it was time for him to tell me I was going to be thrown in the dungeon.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Iggy. Karen told me everybody back home thought I tried to kill myself when my house blew up. Well, it’s true. I did. I hated my life back then. Nobody understood what I was doing. They didn’t get what I was trying to do with my writing and with the plays I put on and the music I wrote. They all thought they knew what was good and that I didn’t. And so just because they didn’t understand how unique my creations were they acted like I was a joke.

“They laughed at me behind my back. And I didn’t have enough money to quit my job and move to a place where I would be appreciated. So I decided that I would just get out of that place. And for some reason I ended up here. Now look at me. I’m the freakin’ President!”

He held his arms out as a way of saying “Ta da!” I didn’t quite know how to react to his story.

“Uh . . . so, you’re happy now?” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

“No, I’m not happy,” he said, suddenly acting all sad. Then he laughed and jumped up out of his chair. “I’m ECSTATIC! All the cool stuff I get to do! And everybody here loves it. They love
everything
I do. You should see their faces when I open a new store or put on a new play or release a new song or write a new book. You’d think I was some sort of god or something.”

“It’s a good thing they speak English.” I knew I was opening up a can of worms with that one but figured I might as well try to get inside Mr. Arthur’s head as best I could, since I was either going to be spending a lot of time with the guy or living in his dungeon.

“Well, they didn’t used to,” he said with a chuckle. “When I first arrived here I couldn’t understand a thing anybody said. They all spoke different languages and, quite frankly, I don’t think any of them understood what the others were saying. It all sounded like a bunch of gibberish, anyway. So I took it upon myself to teach them English.”

“How did you do that?” I asked, overwhelmed at the thought of what a huge task that would be.

“I’m an English teacher!” he said with a laugh. “That’s what I do! Hey, what do you have in your backpack? Anything fun?”

He jumped up out of his chair and headed over to me. I had taken my backpack off when I sat down and it was sitting next to my chair. I reached out to grab it but before I could, Mr. Arthur took it, unzipped it, and reached inside. The first thing he pulled out was my math book.

“
Introduction to Geometry, Twelfth Edition?
Man, they’re still using that? What a bunch of cheapskates. You’d be better off if you had been born one township over, Iggy. The Warner school system is way better than ours.” He flipped through the book for a second. “Okay if I hang onto this? There’s a few things I need to brush up on for my airplane.”

I sort of shrugged my shoulders, not knowing what to say, since a big part of me just wanted to yell at him to get his hands out of my bag. I mean, he didn’t know if I had anything embarrassing in there or not. For all he knew, I could have had a bunch of old underwear and a girl’s coloring book hidden inside. Unfortunately, I knew I had something in there that was probably going to be much more valuable to him.