Mr. Eternity (30 page)

There were people in the valley of the Mississippi, but even though my father held nominal suzerainty over them, they were subject only in the schemes of theory. They had made themselves free, as Green the vice-secretary had intimated, but it was less the violent fracture of revolution than the parting of two canoes in the river. It seems that our dominions had shrunk and withered naturally, like fruits on a parched vine. It must have been long ago, during the reign of my hated grandfather, that they achieved their peak of ripeness. So we had no fear of these valley people, who had no way of knowing who we were, and we said, “Hello, friends. How’s it swinging?”

I could appreciate that Daniel Defoe had begun to think of his Anna Gloria now that he was once again set at liberty. I could appreciate as well that Edward Halloween was discombobulated by our great change of state, for he had now ceased to be a clown and regressed to the poverty of his origins. As for me, however, I seemed to see it all through a long vista of time. Nothing was surprising to me. The collapse of the Reunited States was like a play I had seen before. I knew how it would proceed. A new king would rise in St. Louis from the cadre of revolutionary leaders, just as my ancestors had risen in their own days, and in time a fresh revolution would come spinning up out of the city to depose him, and then a new king would rise once again, and a fresh revolution, and on and on it would go. Once more and once again, a new Jasmine St. Roulette would slip from the city in the company of a decommissioned clown and an old cat and the man she loved. It would happen forever and always until the syllables of time died away on an empty earth. It was beautiful to
think of this. It was a way of thinking that I would not be lost to history after all.

Night after night and day after hot day, the air grew heavier, as it had been heavy once in the old St. Louis of my juvenescence, and the hills began to redound with green fecundity, and vines and creepers, and trees that came ratcheting out of the ground. We perceived small green birds and rotund clouds, which threw splendid shadows on the earth. There were reaches of sickness too, where only one kind of tree thrived and the forest floor was empty of undergrowth, but these poisoned places gave way again to robust growth. In the course of time we had to sell our camels and wagon, which were impractical in the trackless wilderness. We sold them to a one-eyed man named Aveyaneda, who abided alone in the husk of an aeroplane.

The next day we reached the town of Babylon, which Daniel Defoe had vaunted and advertised as our preliminary destination. There were pigs in wallows, and naked people stricken with dog malaria, and the houses lacked walls. It was a poor place indeed for a princess in flight, and this suited me right down into the muddy ground.

And then, to our greatest surprise, Daniel Defoe held up a hand and peered with good humor into a fist of cassava and melon plants, and he said, “Hello, Quaco. There you are. You were hiding from me.”

So this was how we came to meet Quaco again, whom we had met before in another world and another time and another context. He was sitting upon a log braiding old plastic fibers to manufacture a rope, and he said with modest inflections, “Oh hello.” Then he saw Christopher Smart and said, “Hello, Christopher.”

I had some questions for this dark enigma of a sorcerer. I wanted to ask had he really poisoned Anthony Fucking Corvette, and if so, why should such a person as him have felt sympathies for such a person as me? But I quailed in my heart from this brazen inquiry, nor did it matter now, so instead I asked was it true, as Daniel Defoe said, that he had killed the passenger pigeons.

He nodded.

“Tell them the story,” said Daniel Defoe.

“I destroyed the pigeons to starve the white man out of America.”

“Was it effectual?”

“Many people starved, yes.”

“Tell them how you contrived a magic to change the weather,” said Daniel Defoe.

“I wanted to make it too hot to grow wheat, because I didn’t think the white people would be able to subsist on cassava alone.”

“I enjoy cassava,” I said.

“But you, dear princess, are not white,” said Daniel Defoe.

“Of course I’m white.”

“You’re toffee-colored. You’re beautiful. It stands to raisins you would like cassava.”

“Changes in the weather precipitated economic calamities as well,” said Quaco. “You will appreciate that I wanted to destroy the material basis of their prosperity.”

During the meantime, Edward Halloween was crumpled into himself on a log. I had trouble guessing what he was thinking. There were small children watching us from the bushes and he clapped and shouted and endeavored to put the scare in them.

“Will anyone recognize us?” he said. “Will anyone come to steal us back to the city?”

“These people don’t know anything,” said Quaco.

“How can we be sure?”

“Quaco will make a magic to wipe their minds clean,” said Daniel Defoe. “Won’t you, Quaco?”

Quaco sighed. He would do this, yes, but he gave the impression it was tedious for him.

We stayed here in Babylon to recruit our strength. We ate bee maggots and mashed pounded plantain, which Quaco denominated by the term fufu. We anointed ourselves with tarbush resin to keep off the stinging insects and we drew our zest from cassava beer in squash gourds, inaga fruits,
avocado, mango, and miniature red breakfast bananas. There was a seasonal rainfall disruption here as well, much lamented by the people of Babylon, but it was not grievous and one soft morning a shower of rain fell. It was all the rain we had seen in two years. I walked around with my legs black with mud, all the way up to the regions that men exalt, and I was happy. It was as Daniel Defoe sometimes said: Comfort was an artifact of the mind’s creation. The only genuine comfort was positive thinking.

The truth is we had no fear of capture and torment at the hands of terrorists and revolutionaries. We had passed unnoticed from the realm of the Reunited States, and my father was just an indefinite and unspecified force. The people of Babylon knew no law but the ancient law of human concordance. They ate squirrels and trembled for the fear of superstitions. They believed that leeches were the dead man’s revenge against the living and they believed you could be carried to heaven on a bolt of lightning. They believed Jesus and Mary were always watching them. They believed you were required to hunt meat in this life in order to provide yourself with food in the next.

It was an easy primeval life and I might have been happy here, except that Daniel Defoe would not leave off speculating about Anna Gloria. It was a thorn in my mind. He thought she might have been a goddess he knew in the jungle, and he became certain and convinced that she was waiting for him in El Dorado, Arkansas. He said we had to go there and meet her. And this is why I confided my heart once again in Quaco, who had heeded my griefs once before. I asked him had he ever seen this Anna Gloria? Was she real, or was she only allegorical?

“That depends,” he said. “What is the difference?”

I waited for a breath and a heartbeat, but he said no more.

“No riddles,” I begged him. “I have walked out the back door of my kingdom. I have eaten bee maggots. I feel cold with dog malaria. I only want to know the truth.”

His eyes seemed to soften a microscopic amount. He pointed to a puddle at his feet and said, “Look here. What do you see?”

I could envision only my own face waggling in the muck. Then I saw Edward Halloween peep over my shoulder. We were both slimmed away from our weeks of dried shamo and travel.

“That’s her,” said Edward Halloween, grinning and champing on a banana. He pointed a filthy finger at the puddle. “She’s you.”

I blinked at my watery visage and suddenly the truth came home to make its roost. “Color me with crayons,” I said. “I should have known.”

Leave it to Edward Halloween: genius, eunuch, clown, poet. “It’s her,” he said again, and Quaco smiled.

When we got back to Key West, the ancient mariner said he intended to start packing. It was time to go, he said. Time to leave the island. Time to resume his endless fruitless search for Anna Gloria. There was no time to lose.

“Where are my keys?” he said. He patted his pockets and then spotted them on the table. They were enormous, two pounds apiece, three inches long, like keys in a museum exhibit about ancient keys. They were green with oxidation.

“Are you going to tell us what this stuff is?” I said, handling one of the figurines we’d dug up.

“It’s probably just ancient junk.”

But I couldn’t concentrate on the problem of the treasure. Like John Baxter’s photograph, it was a mystery with which I felt unable to engage. I could not stop thinking about my green pills, my blue pills, my white pills. It was a genteel way of being a drug addict, but that didn’t matter.

“You’re so old and you’re in such good spirits,” I asked him. “What’s the secret?”

The ancient mariner said, “Take cinnamon for tonsillitis and remember that you can drink seawater in small quantities if you’re extremely dehydrated. When a poison wind like the simoom starts to blow, just go inside and splash water on your face.”

“That’s not what I mean. I just mean how do you stand it, year after year?”

“All you young people,” he said, laughing and fitting one of his keys into an old trunk. “You dudes have got to learn to be less hard on yourselves.”

“I’ve gotta not be a shithead.”

“This is what I mean.”

“But how do you learn?”

“You get older.”

He opened the trunk and pulled out a weathered art object, a wooden panel with an image of Mary and a skinny, hideous baby Jesus.

“I could sell this thing for about a trillion dollars,” he said.

He looked around the interior of his boat. There were some silver spoons, an old leather-bound copy of
David Copperfield
, a ginger root that had started to sprout. There was a low wooden table and two orange plastic school chairs. A hammock. There was nothing he seemed to care very much about.

“Are you going right away?” said Azar.

“Soon.”

“Will you miss Key West?”

“I expect I’ll be back someday.”

“Not if it’s underwater.”

But he wasn’t listening. “I’ll go to the East Indies. I’ve always wanted to go back to Goa. For some reason I’ve always been fixated on the East Indies. It’s like I have some unfinished business out there.”

“It might be dangerous out there now.”

“Do you think I lived this long by getting myself killed all the time? I know how to survive.”

Quaco said he wasn’t going to leave until the water was at his door. It was surprising to hear him say he had a door.

“By then it’ll be too late, though,” I said.

“Too late for what?”

“Too late in general. Climate change will destroy everything. It will destroy the material foundation of our prosperity.”

Quaco grinned. There was an energy in the air. I hadn’t seen him smile before.

“The material foundation of
your
prosperity,” he said.

Eventually, the ancient mariner went to sleep and Quaco wandered
away. We were too worked up to go to sleep ourselves, so I called Lena and asked if she and Bee wanted to meet us somewhere. Bee was working, she said, but she would come herself. She hoped it was okay if she brought her brother along. He was going to rehab in the morning and she had to look after him until then. She had to make sure he didn’t get away. She permitted herself this candor because I’d been so straightforward about my green pills.

We went to a place called the Blue Macaw. We waited for Lena and watched a basketball game. We didn’t know what to say.

“Was the treasure hunt a success or a failure?” Azar said.

“I think it was both.”

“What is that stuff? What’s happening here? What if this man is five hundred and sixty years old?”

“I don’t know. Somehow it’s hard to think about.”

He ate some peanuts and frowned and looked around. “Here we are,” he said, “in the United States of America.”

“But we can’t lose focus on account of that.”

“It’s almost like a letdown. Is that crazy? I was really hoping they’d find those coins.”

There were tourists buzzing all around us. There was a man smoking a cigarette and breathing oxygen through a tube. There were strangler figs and old mahogany trees. There were palm trees clattering in the breeze, like always. We were tourists ourselves. We were in the United States of America, and the world was getting hotter and hotter and more and more crowded.

“Can you carbon-date a person?” said Azar.

“You can’t carbon-date a living thing.”

“I guess that would be the cynic’s way out anyway.” He ate some more peanuts. “I meant to tell you, I remembered a thing from Kierkegaard about irony and sincerity.”

“You’re going to quote Kierkegaard? That doesn’t seem fair.”

“I can’t quote it, but the gist of it is that irony and sincerity aren’t incompatible. He’s kind of down on pure sincerity, as I remember.”

We were quiet again for a little while.

“I think what I’m struggling with is the everydayness of it,” I said. “You know what I mean? The everydayness of the ancient mariner. But this is how these things go. Think about cell phones, for instance.”

“I think about them all the time.”

“A cell phone is a piece of glowing glass in which you can see all the information in the world. It should be a magical thing, but instead I hate my cell phone.”

“Yes. Because it’s a part of life. It’s not magic.”

“It’s a part of life and it’s implicated in life’s troubles. It’s a portal through which bad news might come. The only magical things are the things that don’t exist.”

“The ancient mariner exists,” said Azar, “so it becomes impossible to say that some aspect of him is magical. Nothing that exists can be magic. Cell phones are magic right up until the moment you can buy one in a store.”

This was why we could not persist in being amazed by the things we’d seen. John Baxter’s photograph, the treasure map on the wall, the treasure itself. Life was still just life. Peanuts and warm air and a pill hangover. And it occurred to me that even if the ancient mariner were as old as he said he was, even if he really had done such miraculous things, still his life would have been just like this, just like our lives, cluttered with the trash of daily experience. Even on all those big historic expeditions, his main concerns would have been how cold his hands were and what he was going to eat when his watch rotated below. He’d worry about a dream he’d had and he’d tell himself he had to patch his pants. There would be no magic in any of it. The magic was what he invented, and it didn’t matter if he was seventy or seven hundred.