Ignatius MacFarland (20 page)

Mr. Arthur pulled out my dad’s Shakespeare book and suddenly looked like his head was going to explode. He stared at it like it was a bag of diamonds and his mouth sort of opened and closed like a fish as he flipped slowly through its pages. His eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head and I could hear Karen’s voice in my brain saying, “Way to go, Iggy, you dope.”

“I can’t believe it,” Mr. Arthur said as he got what looked like tears in his eyes. “I’ve spent every day since I’ve been here wishing I had this. I’ve tried to remember all the plays and the dialogue but I couldn’t. The only one I could remember in any detail was
Hamlet
and even that never sounded right when we were rehearsing it. Why do you have this?”

“It’s my dad’s,” I said, thinking maybe that would make him give it back to me. “I brought it to school for a class project. It’s a really expensive book. He’ll kill me if anything happens to it.”

“Yeah, like you’re ever going to see him again,” he said with a snort as he flipped through the book again. Sensing that I was now staring at him like he had just told me he was going to kill me, which it sort of sounded like he did, he looked at me and got a worried look. “No, I don’t mean anything’s going to happen to you. I just mean, there’s no way you’re going to get back to our frequency, that’s all.”

Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better.

28

MY DINNER WITH CHESTER

Mr. Arthur’s dining room was huge.

I mean, huge like in those old black-and-white movies you see about super rich people who have a really long table and they sit at either end of it so that when somebody asks the other person to pass the salt, they have to yell, and then the butler has to get it from one person and walk it all the way down to the person at the other end. Well, this dining room made those rooms look small, and this table made those tables look like little ironing boards.

The table was as long as a basketball court and the room was as big as a gymnasium. Fortunately, Mr. Arthur didn’t make us sit at the far ends of the table, because if he had, we would have had to yell our conversation using megaphones just so we could hear each other. But the fact that we were now sitting across from each other in the center of the table sort of made it feel like we were about to eat dinner off the top of the Great Wall of China. In fact, when we came into the dining room and he gestured for me to take a seat on the other side of the table, it took me about five minutes to walk all the way around to sit at my place.

As we sat there in silence, Mr. Arthur was flipping through the Shakespeare book, completely engrossed in it and looking, as my grandma used to say, “as giddy as a schoolgirl.” Every time he’d get to a new play, he would give this little squeak of excitement, like he had forgotten that it existed. Clearly he was out of his head happy about all the new famous plays he could pass off as his own.

“Oh, they’re going to love this one,” he would say, then flip a few pages and say it again, like he hadn’t just said it a few seconds earlier.

It wasn’t until the feels who were his butlers and maids started bringing all the food out that I realized just how hungry I was. In fact, hungry’s not really the right word. I was starving. Literally. I don’t think I’d had anything to eat the entire time I’d been in this frequency because everything had been so weird and busy and nerve-racking from the second my rocket blew up, which had sort of made me forget about food for a while.

The main butler feel, as well as a bunch of other female feels dressed like French maids, brought out platters and dishes and bowls and baskets filled with stuff that all sort of looked like the food we had back home. They even brought out what looked like a Thanksgiving turkey on a big silver tray. It wasn’t until they carved into it that I could tell this was no turkey, since the meat was all purple and had stripes of yellow running through it. As hungry as I was, the minute I saw the color of that meat I sort of felt like throwing up. Except that there was nothing in my stomach to barf up.

“Dig in!” said Mr. Arthur as he started grabbing bowls and spooning tons of food onto his plate. I reached out and grabbed what looked like a bowl of corn. I scooped a big pile of it onto my plate since I really like corn. (“Yeah, because it’s mostly sugar,” my dad used to say. “Corn is the candy of the vegetable world!” was his other favorite saying, meaning that even when I thought I was eating healthy, I wasn’t eating healthy.) I took a whiff of the corn, since I always smell stuff before I eat it, a habit I got into after Frank Gutenkunitz hid a cat turd under my green beans in the cafeteria one day, and it was a good thing I did, because the corn smelled really bad. It didn’t even smell like corn, except maybe corn that had been sitting in the trash for a couple of days.

I didn’t want to insult Mr. Arthur and so just figured that maybe this one dish was a mistake. I grabbed another bowl that was filled with mashed potatoes. I smacked a glob of it onto my plate and then secretly put my nose down over it. The potatoes also smelled bad, sort of like dirty socks.

“You’re not going to like anything if you keep smelling it first,” said Mr. Arthur, which almost made me jump out of my skin because I thought he wasn’t watching me. “Everything’s different here and, even though I’ve been working on an additive to make their food taste like ours, it still isn’t perfected. But I did get them to make the food
look
like our food back home. So even though it looks familiar, none of it is going to taste the way you’re used to it tasting, which is probably throwing you. But it’s good. Try it with an open mind.”

It was pretty embarrassing getting caught smelling all my food. And, since I was hungrier than I was grossed out at that moment, I figured I’d better get something in my stomach, no matter how stinky it was.

I took a few kernels of “corn” on my fork and put them in my mouth. Since I didn’t really know what it was supposed to taste like but since I was also expecting it to taste terrible, it actually wasn’t bad at all. It kinda tasted like cheddar cheese. I had to figure that the reason it smelled so bad when I took my first whiff was because I was expecting it to smell exactly like corn. It was like the time I asked my mom to pour me a Coke but she didn’t want me to have a Coke and so she filled my tumbler with milk and since the tumbler was made out of plastic that you couldn’t see through and since I was looking at the TV instead of what I was about to drink, I took a huge gulp of it and spit it out all over the table because it tasted so bad. I mean, I liked milk a lot and the milk in the tumbler wasn’t sour or anything, but my taste buds and I were expecting Coke. When your mouth is ready for one taste and it gets the complete opposite, then even something like chocolate cake can taste bad if you were expecting it to be spaghetti.

“See? I told you so,” said Mr. Arthur with a laugh. “Just keep an open mind and you’re really going to enjoy this meal.”

I ate some potatoes and they tasted like chicken and I ate some grapes and they tasted like onions and I had some French fries and they tasted like oranges. It was almost like some kind of game, trying to guess what each food item would taste like, sort of like when you grab a chocolate out of one of those assortment boxes and you have no idea what’s inside it. But with those, you know that at least you’ll have the taste of chocolate to save you if what’s inside is sort of gross.

The food was doing its job. I was getting full and was also feeling a lot better. You never really know how bad you feel when you’re hungry until you finally eat. Then you suddenly realize that if you were in a bad mood or were feeling jumpy or grouchy or dizzy, it’s because your stomach was empty. Well, as my stomach was filling up, I was starting to feel a bit more like my old self. The only difference was my old self was still living in a new and strange world run by a dictator who used to be an English teacher.

“So, Iggy,” Mr. Arthur said as he chewed on a mouthful of the purple and yellow “turkey” meat. “How much stuff do you know?”

“Excuse me?” I said, confused and with my mouth full of peas that tasted like Salisbury steak.

“What things do you know by heart? What songs? Movies? Books? Anything you can write down that we can put out?” He was staring at me as he tried to cut a particularly tough piece of the purple turkey meat on his plate.

“Um . . . I don’t know. Not much. I’ve never really been good at memorizing things.” Man, that meat looked weird.

“Well,” he said as he struggled with his knife, “I’m sure you’ll start to remember lots of stuff once you settle in here.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said as my mind tried to figure out what he meant by the phrase “settle in here.”

“I’m telling you, man, I’m so happy about that Shakespeare book. I think I might even close down my
Hamlet
just so that I can fix the things I forgot. Did you get to see my production of it?”

I looked at him, surprised, to see if he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.

“Uh . . . no. I was too busy trying not to get killed by your army.” I didn’t say it in a mean way. It just sort of came out of my mouth because it was true.

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that,” he said as he put the tough piece of purple meat into his mouth. “They weren’t really trying to kill you, though. They were just trying to get Karen.”

“Are they trying to kill Karen?” I asked, sounding a bit more freaked out than I intended.

“No,” he said with a laugh as he chewed. “They’re just trying to catch her to bring her back here.”

“Really? ’Cause they sort of seemed like they were trying to kill her, since they were swinging swords and axes and throwing knives at her.” I suddenly couldn’t stop saying things that I knew might possibly make him mad. Fortunately, he just kept chewing and acting like we were having a really normal conversation.

“They know she’s a fighter and so they were trying not to get killed themselves, probably. She’s one scary girl.”

I nodded, since it was sort of hard to argue with that statement. I ate another spoonful of the cheddar cheese–tasting corn and tried to figure out if I should say what I knew I was about to say.

“Why are you so worried about Karen being out there?”

“I’m not,” he said with a laugh.

“Then why are you trying to catch her?”

He stared at me for a few seconds as he chewed, then he set down his fork and knife on his plate.

Click
.

“Look,” he said seriously, “Karen says a lot of bad things about me. And it’s not that my ego can’t take it. I’m fine with criticism. But I’m the
President.
And I can’t have her out there spreading lies about me.”

“Lies?”

“Yeah, you know. You hung with her. She says stupid things like I’m dangerous and that I’m oppressing everybody and that I’m a dictator and all. Look, you’re hanging with me,” he said, leaning forward and pointing at himself like he was trying to prove a point. “I’m not a dictator. I’m a nice guy, right?”

I didn’t know what to say. Insecure or not, the guy
was
a dictator. I just knew that if I made him mad and he locked me in prison then there would be nothing I could do to help myself get out of here and back to Karen. Assuming she was still okay.

“Uh . . . yeah,” was what I finally stammered out, feeling like I had just betrayed Foo and all her people. Fortunately, I guess he was so certain that I was going to agree with him that apparently my unenthusiastic affirmation of his niceness sounded like a ringing endorsement to him.

“Yeah!” he said with a happy laugh. “I’m a nice guy! Let’s have some dessert.”

After we ate what looked like Ding Dongs but which were ill-advisedly called Art Dongs and which tasted more like broccoli than chocolate, Mr. Arthur said he had something else he wanted to show me. We left the dining room and went up a long staircase that led to a door. Mr. Arthur opened the door and we stepped out onto the roof of the White House. There were a couple of gorilla guards up there and they immediately bowed when they saw their president.

“You can leave us,” Mr. Arthur said to them politely.

They both bowed again and then again and then backed out through the doorway, never turning away from Mr. Arthur. Boom! Crash! Thump thump thump! One of them fell backward down the stairs as the other one kept bowing and quickly closed the door. This army needs some backing-up lessons, I thought to myself.

Mr. Arthur shook his head and chuckled, then led me over to the edge of the roof.

“Check this out,” he said with a smile that showed he was sure I was about to be impressed.

We got to the edge and I saw the bizarre city of Lesterville stretching out before me. I looked up at Mr. Arthur and saw him staring at it like it he was a proud father staring at his newborn baby.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked me with what looked like the beginning of tears in his eyes.

I stared at it. It was a city, all right. And it was filled with lots of stuff that he had made, even though it was all based on stuff from our frequency. But as for the adjective “beautiful,” well, that was sort of, as they say, in the eye of the beholder. His eye beheld beauty. My eye beheld something that looked like it was about to fall apart if someone sneezed on it.

“I worked so hard to make that,” he said as if he were talking to himself more than to me. “When I found this place it was so primitive. All the creatures who lived here seemed so unhappy. They were just going about their business, living their lives, not having anything to wear, not living in buildings that looked nice, not having any entertainment, not enjoying all the things we take for granted back in our frequency.

“They couldn’t even communicate with each other. It was all just a lot of grunts and chirps and howls and squeaks and none of it made any sense. I could tell they were just miserable. And I ought to know, because
I
was miserable. I knew I was stuck in this place and I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying and so I knew I had to make it better for everyone. And I did.”

“How did you do it all?” I asked, truly curious since I had no idea how one person could have changed so much stuff.