Mr. Eternity (6 page)

Thus was the whole mission and purpose of our enterprise changed in an instant, and thus began the massacre of ratts, or rather it continued, with the difference that now the slaves were occupied in the curing and tanning of the skins. I owned it was a clever scheme, for if we could not vanquish these bewhiskered bandittoes, which had greatly the advantage over us by their superior faculty of multiplication, we could take the benefit of their numbers, and turn this multiplicative faculty to our own profit. Also, this labor of making leather – which did produce, as everyone knows, such a smell that there was no place upon Little Salt island where a man could not get a smack of it – was not one quarter so injurious to the slaves as making sugar, which fact especially endeared it to Mr. Galsworthy, who pronounced that he had whipt his last slave, and would from thence act midwife to a kind of
Golden Age
upon Babylon plantation, when slave and master would pull together in this labor of making ratt leather, and all would live as brothers. It would be a heaven on earth, said he, a heaven of ratts.

I had no part of all this, and simply enjoyed myself upon my veranda, sometimes in company of Dr. Dan and sometimes alone. I slept well, for the fatigues of an industrious life are as nothing compared with the fatigues of roguery. I drank tea and burned foetid material of all descriptions to drive off the moskitos and black flies. I chew’d crude opium, which I found among my predecessors effects. I sweated & ate & sweated, no one ever asking how my work went, and therefore I felt proud, as if I were working hard, and getting ahead at last. Plantation life, dear Reader. Shaded verandas, rum in punch, moskitos & cotton trees & long afternoons of the rainy season, shuddering fevers & a prospect of blue water, the shade of the plantane walk on a March evening clear as glass. I own it is not a bad life at all, as long as you are a white man.

Not long after he purchased Daniel Defoe, my father announced a five-year remodernization plan for St. Louis. He promulgated an edict to this effect, and then, in an example of aspirational governance, he declared by presidential decree that our country would henceforth be known as the Reunited States of America. He said that we had been wandering in an exodus of poverty, but now he would usher forth a golden age. He levied fresh taxes, reimposed the ancient system of weights, and seized the sesame presses so he could distribute the oil on a ration system. In order to infuse all of this with credence, he also manumitted Daniel Defoe and made him Vice-Secretary of Remodernization, for he was persuaded that Daniel Defoe carried in his mind the whole accumulated knowledge of history. He himself, of course, was Preeminent Secretary of every government office.

For some time he was awash with invigorated curiosities, and he even did some studying again, although he only read his economics book. He would invite his rich hereditary friends to the palace and discourse to them about economic opportunity, fiscal growth dynamics, capital gains, and free trade laissez-faire global market liberalization. “We will reconquer the whole continent,” he would say. “But we will do it economically.” One night he hung an expansive map of the United States on the ballroom wall and he said, “That is our goal.” But it was only an approximate goal, because the shape of the continent was much altered from what it had been. Instead of the old state of Louisiana, there was a shallow bay called the Delta Bay, and Florida was lost beneath the sighing seas, and the Bahamas as well, and also the cities of the Atlantic littoral. This at least was what we gleaned from travelers.

As for me, I repudiated the whole idea. I repudiated the patriarchal
state itself. But I didn’t bother saying so to my father, who never listened to me. The only person in whom I confided my true heart was Edward Halloween, who was our palace clown and my own principal friend. We stood together in the clamorous rabble-house of a ballroom, full of shouting bureaucrats and vice-secretaries, and we looked at this ancient map, which sang a song of nostalgia but told us nothing about our current political and territorial realities. Cartography was a vanquished art.

“It is like looking into the eye of our insignificance,” I said. “Missouri is just a remote fraction of the whole. What goes on at a place like California?”

“Daniel Defoe says it is gone to desert,” said Edward Halloween. “But he also says he knows a sorcerer named Quaco who can transmute dreams into woolen cloth, so we can’t trust everything he says.”

We only had good intelligence about our own territorial neighborhood. Across the river was the Mississippi Democratic Confederacy, which we called the MDC. It combined parts of Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. To the north was devastated land and then, much farther north, a bevy of small rich countries, in particular Minnesota, our former colonial overlord, against which my Roulette ancestors had fought a liberation war. To the south was hot trackless wilderness and to the west was the American desert, where there were mummified ghost towns and a few scattered roving ensembles of people. I often mused upon the desert and fancied that I had a large envy for the freedoms of that wild life. These people were few in number and they lived without formalized national coalitions. They slept in tents and gathered wild dates and sucked milk from their camels. They worshipped Jesus in the eternal blue sky and they hated us because we ate grain.

“We should just run away to the sweeping sand hills of Nebraska,” I said. “We should just tell all these palace people they can kiss our south ends.”

“Ah,” said Edward Halloween, “but the desert people are said to drive their women before them like camels. For anachro-feminists like us, the desert is no more congenial than the city.”

Edward Halloween was actually a eunuch, so anachro-feminism had a different resonance for him. He was allowed to live however he preferred. Sometimes he lived as a man and wore denim and a red bandanna, like the presidential guard, and sometimes he lived as a woman and wore tight leather shorts and a strip of black cloth around his chest. But he was also barred from conventional employments, which is why he was forced to be a clown. His true vocation was that he was a poet and a genius. As an impoverished youth, he had magically and spontaneously learned to read, and later he composed an alphabetic novel, although he never wrote it down. He would recite passages when he drank too much sweet potato wine, which frequently occurred because he was addicted to sweet potato wine, as most poets were. I suspected it was a tour de force of searing intensity, but it was impossible to understand.

“Sometimes I think I am more of an anarchic feminist,” I said. “Especially when Anthony Fucking Corvette is grunting on top of me. Sometimes I think I want to see the whole façade of state come crashing down.”

He gazed at me with affection and sympathy, or at the least I thought he did. It was hard to determine because he’d painted his face white and he had a purple hat pulled down to his eyebrows.

“Your father is just the hand puppet of history,” he said. “It isn’t useful to hate him because he’s hardly a human being in his own right. He is the despotism of centuries. He’s a system of patronage. He’s a scepter and a crown.”

“But what does that make me? Anyway, I don’t hate him. I don’t know what I feel for him. All I really want is a chance to fizz. But every time I achieve a good mood, I have to take my dress off for Anthony Fucking Corvette.”

“And I have to keep clowning,” he said, “even though I despise clowning.”

“It would be better to have no thoughts. That way, humiliations are just humiliations and they lack theoretical underpinning.”

“Thoughts are what save us, my friend. We are the only people in these dominions with a remodernized outlook and philosophy.”

A slave came around with silver thimbles of poppy juice and I snuffed a little into my nostrils. The ballroom was very loud. I said, “What would I do without you, Mr. Halloween?”

“You’d turn stamping crazy and burn this palace to its foundation, which would probably be better for everyone.”

The biggest obstacle to remodernization was that the people of the Reunited States were extremely superstitious. They weren’t likely to embrace new, anachronistic technologies and ideas. When there was a lunar eclipse, for example, they stood in the streets shouting encouragement and throwing stones and setting big fires so that the moon would not be swallowed up by the darkness. When someone died, they filled the dead person’s mouth with sand. They believed that thunder was a magical wind unchained by a person who had communion with demons, and that any grain lost during a thunderstorm became the property of men in flying cars who came from a country called Manoa. They believed that an illness begun in the fourth quarter of the moon would always have a fatal termination.

My father wouldn’t tolerate this hokey-pokey in his own household. “We are secular Americans,” he said. One of the only times I ever heard him shout in anger was when he heard Domingos, one of our house slaves, asking Jesus to make the cook give him cornmeal for breakfast, like a rich person. My father said that Jesus was nothing but a magician who was buried in a cabbage patch and that talking to Jesus flew in the face of his whole ideological agenda. But none of us could swear that there was no place called Manoa, and even though I told the slave girls that they should not give up hope if they became sick during the last quarter of the moon, it was true that people died more often at this time.

My father started an information and propaganda campaign to extirpate superstition and remodernize the spirit of St. Louis, but his larger strategy was to introduce economic reforms that would extirpate poverty, since poverty stultified the wits and was ultimately the cause of ignorance.
His first large initiative was a factory that made cloth from camel hair. Daniel Defoe had explained that in other arid countries, camel cloth was a principal item of manufacture, and my father wanted to produce huge quantities and sell it across the river in the places that camels abhorred. He was like a lunatic in his excitement over this idea. He now revised Daniel Defoe’s title, which became Vice-Secretary of Camel Cloth Manufacture and Remodernization Policy.

It’s true that the cotton crop often failed because of droughts, so initially I thought camel cloth was a clever alternative. Camels were the animal equivalence of poppies and mama beans. They thrived in droughts. They could drink sunlight and breathe sand. They could also see through their eyelids. All day they absorbed heat and in the night they cooled, emanating warmth like coals. They were also very familiar to everyone in St. Louis, so it was reasonable to think the cloth-makers would be comfortable working with them. Everyone drank camel milk, and whenever poor people were celebrating they also ate camel meat. They called it shamo, after the French chameau, a convention which delighted my father because it dated from the time of the United States.

“But the problem is labor,” said Edward Halloween. “He says that camel cloth will create jobs, but who is the only person who has no job? It is you, my feminist friend.”

“It’s true. The poor people have so many jobs they can hardly do anything. Instead of jobs, it will create chaos.”

“Ah, but that reminds me. I’ve thought of a new theory. Ask me about it.”

“Ask you about what?”

“My theory!”

“Oh yes, of course. Tell me, Doctor Halloween, what is your new theory?”

“My theory is about chaos and craziness,” he said. He lifted his chin and gripped his hands behind his back, like a child reciting a poem. “Both are types of disorder, but craziness is an affliction of the mind and chaos is an affliction of the world. You might say, ‘Hello, I am a human.
It is my job to impose order on chaos.’ But this is not true. Chaos is born in men and women and it is our fate to disseminate it in an orderly world. That is the purpose of a human. Chaos is the outcome and craziness is the force or the process. Those of us who are craziest are those through whom chaos shines like a torch.”

This speech had a firm allegorical rigor that appealed to me very much. It was his way of saying that the great remodernization campaign of President Roulette could be figured as a process of disseminating chaos, which did in fact turn out to be true.

At this time I didn’t know Daniel Defoe yet. I logically assumed that he was crazy also, and this was because of the unimpeachable reason that he said many crazy things. Chaotic messages came pouring out of him in a ceaseless unbridled torrent. But I soon learned that he was only trying to stay upright and gain an advantage if he could. I discovered this one evening during a feast with officials and dignitaries. As usual during such affairs, the conversation just simpered along, rife with banalities. My father couldn’t stand it and called upon Daniel Defoe to tell us a story.

“Then I will tell you about the Lewis and Clark expedition,” he said. “The relevance of this topic is that the expedition began right here in St. Louis. Back then, St. Louis was truly the last settled place on the wild frontier. There were herds of wild camels as far as the eye could see. There were stands of cashew trees where the central square is now. There were also large earthen mounds, and these were the mounds of Cahokia. I traveled with the expedition as far as the mountains, where General Clark was killed by Indians in a kind of ambuscade, and then I went south. It rained so much that I had to fold myself in long sheets of plastic when I wanted to sleep.”

I knew that imperial St. Louis contained no camels, so I cast a look at Edward Halloween and raised my eyebrows. He was sweating copiously from the heavy and delectable food. It was his favorite meal of spicy ginger beef with cornbread and jute leaves, mashed green banana with pig, and trembling custard. He grinned at me.

But then I perceived that Daniel Defoe was looking at me with a smile of his own. In fact, I had an impression he would have winked, except all eyes were riveted upon him. What did this mean? His own plate was empty because, as we had been interested to learn, he never ate anything. Much later I learned that he never voided anything either.