I honestly did not think you would go this far, Wilbur,” she said. “I knew you were crazy, and that your sister was crazy, too. But I did not believe you would go this far.”
Sophie did not have to look up at me. I, too, was on the floor – prone, with my chin resting on a pillow. I was reading a fascinating report of a thing that had happened in Urbana, Illinois.
I did not give her my undivided attention, so she said, “What is it you’re reading that is so much more interesting than me?”
“Well – ” I said, “for many years, I was the last American to have spoken to a Chinese. That’s not true any more. A delegation of Chinese paid a call to the widow of a physicist in Urbana – about three weeks ago.”
Hi ho.
“I certainly don’t want to waste your valuable time,” she said. “You’re certainly closer to Chinamen than you ever were to me.”
I had given her a wheelchair for Christmas – to use around the White House on days of heavy gravity. I asked her why she didn’t use it “It makes me very sad,” I said, “to have you go around on all-fours.”
“I’m a Peanut now,” she said. “Peanuts live very close to the ground. Peanuts are famous for being low. They are the cheapest of the cheap, and the lowest of the low.”
That early in the game, I thought it was crucial the people not be allowed to change their Government-issue middle names. I was wrong to be so rigid about mat. All sorts of name-changing goes on now – here on the Island of Death and everywhere. I can’t see that any harm is done.
But I was severe with Sophie. “You want to be an Eagle or a Diamond, I suppose,” I said.
“I want to be a Rothschild,” she said.
Then perhaps you should go to Machu Picchu,” I said. That was where most of her blood relatives had gone.
“Are you really so sadistic,” she said, “that you will make me prove my love by befriending strangers who are now crawling out from damp rocks like earwigs? Like centipedes? Like slugs? Like worms?”
“Now, now,” I said.
“When was the last time you took a look at the freak show outside the fence?” she said.
The perimeter of the White House grounds, just outside the fence, was infested daily with persons claiming to be artificial relatives of Sophie or me.
There were twin male midgets out there, I remember, holding a banner that said “Flower Power.”
There was a woman, I remember, who wore an Army field jacket over a purple evening dress. On her head was an old-fashioned leather aviator’s helmet, goggles and all. She had a placard on the end of a stick. “Peanut Butter,” it said.
“Sophie – ” I said, “that is not the general American population out mere. And you are not mistaken when you say that they have crawled out from under damp rocks – like centipedes and earwigs and worms. They have never had a friend or a relative. They have had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do.”
“I hate them,” she said.
“Go ahead,” I said. “There’s very little harm in that, as far as I know.”
“I did not think you would go this far, Wilbur,” she said. “I thought you would be satisfied with being President I did not think you would go this far.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad I did. And I am glad we have those people outside the fence to think about, Sophie. They are frightened hermits who have been tempted out from under their damp rocks by humane new laws. They are dazedly seeking brothers and sisters and cousins which their President has suddenly given to them from their nation’s social treasure, which was until now untapped.”
“You are insane,” she said.
“Very likely,” I replied. “But it will not be an hallucination when I see those people outside the fence find each other, if no one else.”
“They deserve each other,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said. “And they deserve something else which is going to happen to them, now that they have the courage to speak to strangers. You watch, Sophie. The simple experience of companionship is going to allow them to climb the evolutionary ladder in a matter of hours or days, or weeks at most.
“It will not be an hallucination, Sophie,” I said, “when I see them become human beings, after having been for so many years, as you say, Sophie – centipedes and slugs and earwigs and worms.”
Hi ho.
Chapter 37
SOPHIE divorced me, of course, and
skeedaddled with her jewelry and furs and paintings and gold bricks, and so on, to a condominium in Machu Picchu, Peru.
Almost the last thing I said to her, I think, was this: “Can’t you at least wait until we compile the family directories? You’re sure to find out that you’re related to many distinguished women and men.”
“I already am related to many distinguished women and men,” she replied. “Goodbye.”
In order to compile and publish the family directories, we had to haul more papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse. I selected files from the Presidencies of Ulysses Simpson Grant and Warren Gamaliel Harding this time.
We could not provide every citizen with directories of his or her own. It was all we could do to ship a complete set to every State House, town and City Kail, police department, and public library in the land.
One greedy thing I did: Before Sophie left me, I asked that we be sent Daffodil and Peanut directories all our own. And I have a Daffodil Directory right here in the Empire State Building right now. Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa gave it to me for my birthday last year. It is a first edition – the only edition ever published.
And I learn from it again that among my new relatives at that time were Clarence Daffodil-11 Johnson, the Chief of Police of Batavia, New York, and Muhammad Daffodil-11 X, the former Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, and Maria Daffodil-11 Tcherkassky, the Prima Ballerina of the Chicago Opera Ballet.
I am glad, in a way, incidentally, that Sophie never saw her family directory. The Peanuts really did seem to be a ground-hugging bunch.
The most famous Peanut I can now recall was a minor Roller Derby star.
Hi ho.
Yes, and after the Government provided the directories, Free Enterprise produced family newspapers. Mine was The Daffy-nition. Sophie’s, which continued to arrive at the White House long after she had left me, was The Goober Gossip. Vera told me the other day that the Chipmunk paper used to be The Woodpile.
Relatives asked for work or investment capital, or offered things for sale in the classified ads. The news columns told of triumphs by various relatives, and warned against others who were child molesters or swindlers and so on. There were lists of relatives who could be visited in various hospitals and jails.
There were editorials calling for family health insurance programs and sports teams and so on. There was one interesting essay, I remember, either in The Daffy-nition or The Goober Gossip, which said that families with high moral standards were the best maintainers of law and order, and that police departments could be expected to fade away.
“If you know of a relative who is engaged in criminal acts,” it concluded, “don’t call the police. Call ten more relatives.”
And so on.
Vera told me that the motto of The Woodpile used to be this: “A Good Citizen is a Good Family Woman or a Good Family Man.”
As the new families began to investigate themselves, tome statistical freaks were found. Almost all Pachysandras, for example, could play a musical instrument, or at least sing in tune. Three of them were conductors of major symphony orchestras. The widow in Urbana who had been visited by Chinese was a Pachysandra. She supported herself and her son by giving piano lessons out there.
Watermelons, on the average, were a kilogram heavier than members of any other family.
Three-quarters of all Sulfurs were female.
And on and on.
As for my own family: There was an extraordinary concentration of Daffodils in and around Indianapolis. My family paper was published out there, and its masthead boasted, “Printed in Daffodil City, U.SA.”
Hi ho.
Family clubhouses appeared. I personally cut the ribbon at the opening of the Daffodil Club here in Manhattan – on Forty-third Street, right off Fifth Avenue.
This was a thought-provoking experience for me, even though I was sedated by tri-benzo-Deportamil. I had once belonged to another club, and to another sort of artificial extended family, too, on the very same premises. So had my father, and both my grandfathers, and all four of my great grandfathers.