After our divorce, he and his mother bought a condominium in the same building with Eliza, down in Machu Picchu, Peru. I never heard from them again – even when I became President of the United States.
And the time flew.
I woke up one morning to find that I was almost fifty years old! Mother had moved in with me in Vermont. She sold her house in Turtle Bay. She was feeble and afraid.
She talked a good deal about Heaven to me.
I knew nothing at all about the subject then. I assumed that when people were dead they were dead.
“I know your father is waiting for me with open arms,” she said, “and my Mommy and Daddy, too.”
She was right about that, it turned out. Waiting around for more people is just about all there is for people in Heaven to do.
The way Mother described Heaven, it sounded like a golf course in Hawaii, with manicured fairways and greens running down to a lukewarm ocean.
I twitted her only lightly about wanting that sort of Paradise. “It sounds like a place where people would drink a lot of lemonade,” I said.
“I love lemonade,” she replied.
Chapter 29
MOTHER talked toward the end, too, about
how much she hated unnatural things – synthetic flavors and fibers and plastics and so on. She loved silk and cotton and linen and wool and leather, she said, and clay and glass and stone. She loved horses and sailboats, too, she said.
“They’re all coming back, Mother,” I said, which was true.
My hospital itself had twenty horses by then – and wagons and carts and carriages and sleighs. I had a horse of my own, a great Clydesdale. Golden feathers hid her hooves. “Budweiser” was her name.
Yes, and the harbors of New York and Boston and San Francisco were forests of masts again, I’d heard. It had been quite some time since I’d seen them.
Yes, and I found the hospitality of my mind to fantasy pleasantly increased as machinery died and communications from the outside world became more and more vague.
So I was unsurprised one night, after having tucked Mother in bed, to enter my own bedroom with a lighted candle, and to find a Chinese man the size of my thumb sitting on my mantelpiece. He was wearing a quilted blue jacket and trousers and cap.
As far as I was able to determine afterwards, he was the first official emissary from the People’s Republic of China to the United States of America in more than twenty-five years.
During the same period, not a single foreigner who got inside China, so far as I know, ever returned from there.
So “going to China” became a widespread euphemism for committing suicide.
Hi ho.
My little visitor motioned for me to come closer, so he would not have to shout. I presented one ear to him. It must have been a horrible sight – the tunnel with all the hair and bits of wax inside.
He told me that he was a roving ambassador, and had been chosen for the job because of his visibility to foreigners. He was much, much larger, he said, than an average Chinese.
“I thought you people had no interest in us any more,” I said.
He smiled. “That was a foolish thing for us to say, Dr. Swain,” he said. “We apologize.”
“You mean that we know things that you don’t know?” I said.
“Not quite,” he said. “I mean that you used to know things that we don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine what those things would be,” I said.
“Naturally not,” he said. “I will give you a hint: I bring you greetings from your twin sister in Machu Picchu, Dr. Swain.”
“That’s not much of a hint,” I said.
“I wish very much to see the papers you and your sister put so many years ago into the funeral urn in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain,” he said.
It turned out that the Chinese had sent an expedition to Machu Picchu – to recover, if they could, certain lost secrets of the Incas. Like my visitor, they were oversize for Chinese.
Yes, and Eliza approached them with a proposition. She said she knew where there were secrets which were as good or better than anything the Incas had had.
“If what I say turns out to be true,” she told them, “I want you to reward me – with a trip to your colony on Mars.”
He said that his name was Fu Manchu.
I asked him how he had got to my mantelpiece. “The same way we get to Mars,” he replied.
Chapter 30
SO I agreed to take Fu Manchu out to the
mausoleum. I put him in my breast pocket.
I felt very inferior to him. I was sure he had the power of life and death over me, as small as he was. Yes, and he knew so much more than I did – even about medicine, even about myself, perhaps. He made me feel immoral, too. It was greedy for me to be so big. My supper that night could have fed a thousand men his size.
The exterior doors to the mausoleum had been welded shut So Fu Manchu and I had to enter the secret passageways, the alternative universe of my childhood, and come up through the mausoleum’s floor.
As I made our way through cobwebs, I asked him about the Chinese use of gongs in the treatment of cancer.
“We are way beyond that now,” he said.
“Maybe it is something we could still use here,” I said.
“I’m sorry – ” he said from my pocket, “but your civilization, so-called, is much too primitive. You could never understand.”
“Urn,” I said.
He answered all my questions that way – saying, in effect, that I was too dumb to understand anything.
When we got to the underside of the stone trapdoor to the mausoleum, I had trouble heaving it open.
“Put your shoulder into it,” he said, and, ‘Tap it with a brick,” and so on.
His advice was so simple-minded, that I concluded that the Chinese knew little more about dealing with gravity than I did at the time.
Hi ho.
The door finally opened, and we ascended into the mausoleum. I must have been even more frightful than usual to look at. I was swaddled in cobwebs from head to toe.
I removed Fu Manchu from my pocket, and, at his request, I placed him on top of the lead casket of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
I had only one candle for illumination. But Fu Manchu now produced from his attache case a tiny box. It filled the chamber with a light as brilliant as the flare that had lit Eliza’s and my reunion in Boston – so long ago.
He asked me to take the papers from the urn, which I did. They were perfectly preserved.
“This is bound to be trash,” I said.
“To you, perhaps,” he said. He asked me to flatten out the papers and spread them over the casket, which I did.
“How could we know when we were children something not known even today to the Chinese?” I said.
“Luck,” he said. He began to stroll across the papers, in his tiny black and white basketball shoes, pausing here and there to take pictures of something he had read. He seemed especially interested in our essay on gravity – or so it seems to me now, with the benefit of hindsight.
He was satisfied at last. He thanked me for my cooperation, and told me that he would now dematerialize and return to China.
“Did you find anything at all valuable?” I asked him.
He smiled. “A ticket to Mars for a rather large Caucasian lady in Peru,” he replied.
Hi ho.
Chapter 31
THREE weeks later, on the morning of my
fiftieth birthday, I rode my horse Budweiser down into the hamlet – to pick up the mail.
There was a note from Eliza. It said only this: “Happy birthday to us! Going to China!”
That message was two weeks old, according to the postmark. There was fresher news in the same mail. “Regret to inform you that your sister died on Mars in an avalanche.” It was signed, “Fu Manchu.”
I read those tragic notes while standing on the old wooden porch of the post office, in the shadow of the little church next door.
An extraordinary feeling came over me, which I first thought to be psychological in origin, the first rush of grief. I seemed to have taken root on the porch. I could not pick up my feet My features, moreover, were being dragged downward like melting wax.
The truth was that the force of gravity had increased tremendously.
There was a great crash in the church. The steeple had dropped its bell.
Then I went right through the porch, and was slammed to the earth beneath it.