Mr. Eternity (21 page)

We all knew that this scheme would produce no rubber at all for many years, and probably never, so it would not answer to the current climate of disaster and famine. Even my father knew this, although he simultaneously didn’t know it, because even he could not gainsay his own decisions. Therefore we all stood silent as cockroaches in the vast echoing chamber. The only sound was the sound of Christopher Smart licking himself.

Then Edward Halloween decided to exorcise his clownish prerogative of speaking truth to power, like the clowns of ancient drama who alone of all the characters were allowed to utter true statements. From the back of the room, he shouted, “No! Listen! It is like peeing in your water jar instead of peeing all over the place! You have to understand that it’s peeing either way!”

No one had ever challenged my father in this way, and now even Christopher Smart was silent, watching and waiting. But my father was inflated with the winds of optimism, and he pressed forward without acknowledging the disruption. He said that it was almost as if the rubber trees, which would be grown from seeds, would themselves function as the seeds of a new economic prosperity. Sovereignty would simply spread outward from the Extractive State and into the surrounding lawless Mississippi jungle territory.

Now we were all dismissed, but Edward Halloween had been galvanized into an unexpected rage. I cannot say why this had angered him so much. It was just one straw too many, perhaps. He rushed to and fro on the outside patio, kicking up the aromatic dust and shouting. He was an outraged figure under the arching high empty pallor of the blue sky. Daniel Defoe and I attempted to pacify him with words and affection, but it was to no avail. I had to mix poppy juice into his wine to mute his treasonous ravings.

“They cut my balls off and dress me in costumes and force me to give silent ear to these idiocies!” he shouted. “My life goes sour like fermenting mangoes. You are all I have, dearest princess Jasmine.” And then he pointed at Daniel Defoe with two quivering fingers. “But you! You prop him up in his king’s madness. You play into his hands. You advise him! No more. Now is the time for anarchic feminism and sectarian violence. Now we give him no quarter.”

“Please drink your poppy juice,” I said. “You have to stop talking or they’ll pull your guts out by your tongue.”

Daniel Defoe agreed with me. He tried to divert our clown’s mind with stories. “I will tell you the natural history of mermaids,” he said.

“No stories!” shouted Edward Halloween. “I want to talk to Quaco.”

“I could tell you about Quaco. I could tell you how he sent me through the earth to be reborn as a rich man. I could tell you how he ruled the city-state of Kish. Would you like that?”

“No!”

Then Daniel Defoe appeared to meditate upon a new strategy. I felt a
pang of love for him, and then a concurrent pang of loneliness, and then a pall of ennui.

“You are right to be outraged,” he said quietly. “We are prisoners here.”

“And what I’m declaring now,” said Edward Halloween, “is we should do something about it!”

“Ah, but look around. Time will take care of it for you. There is nothing so ephemeral as a kingdom. But meanwhile you do have to stop talking or they will pull your guts out, like our princess says.”

Daniel Defoe was correct that time was taking care of the Reunited States. My father sent a delegation down the river to set up plantations in the Extractive State, for example, but they never achieved their goal. The whole bedraggled cohort came crawling back one day soon afterward. It was the hour of the piggybank, when petitioners came to beg my father for alms or discourse to him on investment opportunities, and the audience room was thronged with hungry dusty people. When my father saw his delegation, he had a seizure of generosity and tossed copper dollars into the crowd, but then the people began rioting amongst themselves and had to be violently subdued by the presidential guard. Then the room was cleared.

A vice-secretary named Green strode forward in the sudden quiet. This room had stain glass and a purple rug dyed with poisonous berries, and the throne was on a raised platform. Green looked all alone out there upon his private acre of poisoned rug, but he manifested a great courage. He said there was unrest and even revolt in the southern countryside.

“They held us prisoner for a little while in Camel Flats,” said Green, “where they have elected themselves an interim revolutionary president. They say this is a federation without representation. They let us go so we could come give you the message.”

My father required a few moments to understand what Green was telling him.

“They elected their own president?”

“Her name is Rosa de Piedad. We didn’t meet her.”

“That’s the most undemocratic thing I ever heard. How are we supposed to remodernize this place? Are they angry about the smelting?”

Green answered him with grave unsmiling courtesy. “They’re hungry.”

“It’s because of this pattern of disobedience that I’ve had to institute austerity policies in the first place.”

But I could not stand to listen to any more of this. I departed the audience room and went out into the parched garden.

Here in the quiet afternoon, I felt like an occupant of someone else’s dream. I joked ruefully with myself that my father should be pleased, for inevitable collapse was the destiny of his revered United States as well. They had succumbed to factional disputes about the extension of slavery into the western territories, including Missouri, and they had succumbed to demographic wizening and the explosion of population, and they had eaten too much candy corn and poisoned the sky. They had even succumbed to droughts, as we were succumbing now.

But I no longer cared about the fall of the United States. Nor did I specially lament the passing of the Reunited States either. Instead I felt mournful that my own life would be reduced into historical footnotes, just as had happened with all the once singular figures of the past. This was the sorrow of history books, which obliterated the details of life and told only the details of politics and war. I had a wish that every history were a sentimental history such as Daniel Defoe was wonted to compose, for it was the sentimental and poetic truth that I longed to know. What did snow smell like? Did gorillas have fingernails? When you lifted from the earth in a spaceship or aeroplane, was it like standing up too fast? Who made my plastic boots? Was it a woman who, like me, felt hemmed in by her milieu, and ate abortion medicine to keep herself free?

I could never know these things. The only glimpse I had of a true past was the glimpse I had in the fictions of Daniel Defoe. All the uncounted myriads of other histories, the true fictive histories of all those vanished people, were lost forever. And also, in any case, Daniel Defoe would leave someday and carry on with his true life, and then I would have nothing
at all. Time would stretch out in the sunlight of the ages like Christopher Smart on the ballroom floor, and when the historians of posterior days came to write the history of our time, it would be the same as every other history book. It would be the history of my father’s remodernization action committee, his reforms, his unilateral legislative changes. No one would know that for me the sentimental truth was a hard blue window high up on the wall, and date wine, and mornings on the roof under that incommensurate sky, and tense fornications with George Washington, and laughter with Edward Halloween, and an ache and pit of longing for Daniel Defoe, who loved another, and after and above it all, like music from another room, the feeling of life passing by.

We had not been able to steal the photograph. It was bolted to the wall. But Azar had taken a picture of it with his phone and we examined it on the walk back.

“Let’s be straight about this,” he said. “The question is not whether it’s a fake. The question is who made the fake.”

We were walking down a narrow sandy alleyway on the way back to the ancient mariner’s boat. Banana trees and passion fruit vines and ixora and hibiscus and croton. I knew all these plants. I knew this kind of thing. My mind wasn’t just a tin can full of irony and fear.

“It’s a whole additional aspect of the question,” he said. “Who has perpetrated this fiction? Daniel Defoe, a Key West institution, in whose deception unnamed persons are complicit. How much does Daniel Defoe himself know about it?”

“Maybe you would want …” I said, fighting for the proper phrase, “maybe you would want to…”

“What’s the matter with you? You’re walking so slow. You’re walking like you’ve been drugged.”

“I drugged myself, yeah.”

“I thought you were sick.”

“I’m on drugs.”

“Jeez!” He put his hands on his head and seemed momentarily at a loss for words. “Okay, listen, we should probably have a dramatic confrontation about your pills, and I don’t want you to think I’m dismissing this problem, which is a serious problem, but please can we just pause for now and talk about that photo? How does it change things? We’ve discovered a kind of conspiracy.”

“The conspiracy,” I said.

“It’s very discouraging that you’ve chosen this moment to drug yourself. Just try to concentrate. What does this new story mean?”

“It’s about what people want to believe? What they want an excuse to believe? But that’s making it about us. Our faith and our belief.”

“But that’s true,” said Azar. “It’s partly about the people who struggle with the meaning of the story.”

“I feel strongly that it shouldn’t be about us. We’re peripheral.”

“Maybe we don’t have to force it. How do you make a story a story? It’s just that I actually want to make the movie. I think there’s something here.”

I didn’t think I counted as a drug addict because I was addicted to a class of drugs that was lawfully prescribed to me, but I often found myself doing things a drug addict might do. For instance, now I was calling my doctor and telling her that the airline had lost my bag. Could she please send a new prescription to the CVS here on Key West?

We were in the ancient mariner’s backyard, but nothing was happening. The man himself was asleep in his hammock, wretched and becalmed after his ordeal, and Quaco was studying the
New Yorker
. He would not answer any questions and he still wouldn’t consent to be interviewed, so we were on our own for a while longer. Azar seemed wary of me and sat down to look over the footage we’d shot so far. He had some software that made all of this very easy. I was suspicious. Shouldn’t it be hard to make a movie? And when had he learned to do all of this? It was evidence of an initiative that I assumed neither of us possessed.

I took another green pill. I had what must have looked like an enormous number of pills, green and blue and white all together in an outsized Tylenol bottle, but the axiomatic truth of the drug person’s life is that for every number
x
, where
x
is the number of pills, there exists another number,
y
, which is the correct and sufficient number of pills, such that
y
is always greater than
x
. There is never a time when it’s not advisable to seek more pills. There’s no arguing with math.

So I went out to the CVS to retrieve a fresh bottle. The flamboyant
trees were blooming. The ocean was a distant ribbon of blue at the end of the street. There were many bums, ten or more, in the parking lot. They shouted slogans at me as I went by.

“Obey your thirst!” shouted one.

“Swerve,” shouted another, “to avoid stopped emergency vehicles!” He ran beside me for a moment, cheering and pumping his fists. “No trucks in the left lane! Enhanced penalty zone!”

There was a long line at the pharmacy counter. The man in front of me was wearing a T-shirt that read
You’ll Be the First on My List When I Snap
, but his mood was buoyant. He grinned from the vast frothy depth of his beard. There was tinfoil poking out from beneath his hat. I was calm and none of this bothered me. He wanted to talk about methamphetamine.

“What’ll they, snort it?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“Abuse anythang these days. Gasoline. Kerosene.”

“Kerosene?”

He was picking up a prescription for his mother, but he didn’t have any documentation. He had to call her up and ask her some questions.

“Ma!” he shouted. “Ma! Remember give Carlos his heartworm chew!” He nodded. The pharmacist waited patiently, with a guarded expression. “Yeah yeah yeah,” the man said. He rolled his eyes and gave me a conspiratorial look. “Yeah yeah good. Ma! What’s your driver’s license number?” He nodded for a while longer and then he covered the phone and whispered to the pharmacist, “She’s letting Pansy use her license. Pansy’s my sister in case you get any ideas.”

At the other register, a slow-moving black woman was being denied the posted discounts on a bottle of Coke and some Band-Aids. She kept retreating to check the prices on these items. Her own T-shirt said
Gator Dad
and she had compression socks and big clunky black shoes. She never got her Coke, and instead of Band-Aids she settled on a travel-size tube of Crest. I wanted to buy her whatever she wanted, but I didn’t have the
courage to offer. She needed history to have happened differently. She needed Quaco to poison someone for her.

Later I stood outside in the warm wind and tried to reorient myself. It was good to think about those less privileged than myself. It was not good to think exclusively of pain and suffering and hardship. In this as in all things it was good to strike a balance. I took another green pill. The sun had come out again and there were small white clouds dashing across the sky. Climate change would sweep all of this away. I was exhilarated by the largeness and strangeness of this thought.

While I was standing there looking at my shadow and trying to remember who I was and what I cared about, I saw Lena coming toward me. I smiled, but it didn’t feel natural or persuasive. She walked right by and then stopped and turned around.

“I got addicted to these green anxiety pills,” I said. I held up my CVS bag. “The blues and whites are good too but the greens are the best. It’s the pills themselves that make me admit it.”